I only recently found out about this so it may have been around for a while now so you might have already heard about it, but I thought it was worth mentioning. Amongst the criticism that Google is receiving about privacy it appears that they have started making in-roads by releasing the dashboard where you can find privacy settings for each google service that you use. It also has links next to each service that take you directly to the privacy settings for that service. It’s interesting to see an overview of everything that you have on Google and it just makes you think about how much of your life they must have stored away. Anyway I recommend you take a look.

It would appear that Twitter might be considering giving away their crown jewels to Google for what I gather to be nothing. By crown jewels I mean their full stream of live tweets. Google would most definitely pay for this I have no doubt (which is why it may seem like a good option to twitter’s investors to claw back some cash) but in the long run its worth every penny to Google. Instead of people going to twitter.com to search for current stuff, they can (and will) just head to Google for everything. During this time Google could pull their finger out and replace it with a system of their own (fairly easily), further relegating twitter into the dustbin of yesteryear.

Twitter has the opportunity to find a nice solution of placing ads within streams. Damn, this could be killer for advertisers – the ability to get a presence within what is happening right now. Nothing has really offered this to advertisers before (well nothing that comes to mind anyway). Twitter’s problem is that they have left the gates wide open to competitors like facebook who have managed to put their entire service around a twittified “live feed” and will no doubt find a way pretty quickly to cash in on it. What has twitter been doing? They could have been experimenting more with monetisation ideas trying to find one that works really well – plus they could (and should) be pushing the boat out and taking a few risks of finding a great solution. You don’t get anywhere by copying the other guy (although I am sure that there are times where it works well). They could come up with something neat, unobtrusive, engaging and most of all lucrative. At the end of the day no one yet has found the perfect solution for this kind of “real time” search and there will no doubt be a better solution than keyword advertising in traditional search.

Google managed to dominate their arena – is everyone else going to let them do the same to theirs? Don’t let yourself just twitter away!

The Time Has Come To Regulate Search Engine Marketing And SEO

If your work or business depends on Search (which is almost everyone) then have a read of the above article. It just goes to show that there may be something in what he says and it backs up what I have been saying about Google for a while now. Google are not bad (no worse than any other company out there to make money) its just that they have too much of a hold on commerce on the internet. Microsoft did (and does) hold a monopoly on OS’s etc but we don’t actually need their software to conduct business (in the strictess sense). You can get other software that does the same job. Google though is the gateway of the internet for the majority of users and through their dominance of search and paid listings they basically have the power to do what they want and guide users in whichever way they see fit. They also have the power to punish those players that do not play by their rules – I am not saying that they do this but they are certainly in a position to be able to. Anyway, read it and see what you think.

As you must know by now Google have announced that they are going to release an OS aimed at the netbook market built around their Chrome browser. It’s a good move because netbook’s are one of the fastest growing segments of the computer industry at the moment. The thing is though I don’t see how Google would hope to beat Microsoft at their own game. If you remember, netbook’s were meant to be Linux machines and at first they were. Cheap and cheerful is what people wanted they said. Figures now say that ~94% of netbook’s have Microsoft Windows. Microsoft managed to completely grab this market from what is a free OS. How did they do this? Because users are more familiar with Windows. People will obviously pay a premium to use an OS that they recognize and can run their apps on. So if they managed to do this how will Google manage to grab those users back with what is afterall just another interface on top of Linux? So this leads me on to what I think is Google’s actual plans.

Google dominate the web. Microsoft dominate the desktop. But Microsoft also have a pretty strong foothold on the web as well and their newly rebranded Bing search engine is gaining more users – no where near Googles but it has still been gaining and is receiving a majority of good reviews. But what happens if Microsoft manage to gain a large enough percentage of the web? What do Google have then? They dont have a major dominance in any other software area, which is another reason why I think they created Android when they did. I believe they are just trying to distract and pee off Microsoft, just enough for them to take their concentration away from the web for a while. Just remember that while you may have all the market the only way forward is to loose users, when you have no market share the only way forward is to gain users. All the while this is chipping away at Google and they need time to sort something out properly. It’s a clever move because it may distract Microsoft’s attention and/or it may work out and they get a foothold on the desktop. The same applies to Android. Microsoft certainly are not dumb and I guess they are fuming at the news, so I am interested in what they can and will do about it.

Also remember that if Google has a cash cow, then Microsoft has cattle.

Update: Google announces hardware and Software Partners

I have just read on el’ Reg that Google has announced who they are going to work with for the hardware to run their new OS. It appears that they have all the big names on the list including Acer, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba. Strangely Dell are missing from that List. They have also announced that Adobe will be a software partner.

I have been taking a look at Google Wave and it looks very interesting. I am interested in taking a look but will most likely never get the time to. I bet some really cool things will be done with it. It’s not such a leap forward as they would like you to think but it is very cool and cleverly well done. I might get around to writing a bot because they can’t be that hard compared to writing your own wave system. The cool thing is that the client was all written using Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and they doubted that they would have been able to do it using anything else. It just goes to show the actual power of using GWT. People seem to be getting confused about it though having read other reviews and twitter traffic. It is not a service but a protocol and it is open source. The system they were showing was their implementation of the protocol.

It makes me laugh that the crowd has been shouting out that Google should buy Twitter over the last months, but I can see now why they havn’t been bothered. They had this under wrap for some time now and it has the capability of being pretty big. It is a very good collaboration, wiki, communication and loads of other stuff system because it is extensible and an open protocol. It will be interesting when multiple implementations are connected to each other and data is shared between multiple systems. You are also able to write services for it from the App Engine so it will be interesting to see the power of apps that you will be able to create using just their tools and infrastructure.

I have started to create some content sites with the aim of providing decent content which is optimised to enable maximum return from ad placements. The purpose of this is not to make a huge sum of money (although it would be nice ) and it is probably impossible anyway. The purpose is to cover the costs of my hosting and domain fees. As any will know these add up. I spend a lot of time doing work on the internet and not getting paid so I thought I might as well spend some time getting and creating useful content with the aim of making some money to cover my costs.

Anyway my point is that I have been browsing the forums regarding Google adsense for some tips and have been amazed by some of the things that I read. It would appear that there are quite a few people who are out there just finding ways to con the system and then moaning when they find their accounts have been terminated – Doh!. It would appear that quite a few also have no clue about how intelligent the Google fraud detection system is and probably don’t intend to actually commit fraud, but don’t realise that they actually are.

There seems to be lots of questions about zero value clicks. Zero value clicks can happen for a multitude of reasons. None more likely than a click being determined to be invalid by Google’s fraud detection system. This is also the primary reason accounts get banned. This has a lot to do with what I was going on above. People also seem to forget that public service adverts will be displayed when you first open an account. This is just until the Google bot can get to your site to work out the best ads to serve. Just remember that you will not get paid for these and they tend to be charity ads. All this is very clear when signing up for an Adsense account as all the information is provided for you to read. Another thing that may not be that clear but you can find out by reading the forums is that some ads are charged for by CPM (Cost/Thousand) and these seem to be juggled by Google depending on your overall traffic and the success of your clicks I suppose.

The AdSense system is meant to and I am sure does show the most beneficial ads at the time they are actually shown. This makes not just them but you the most possible money so it is in both of your interests. The system works, but none the less, people still constantly question it. There are problems, Google is hopefully addressing them as they have the resources. Just because a single click gave you nothing, don’t freak out, if you are watching click by click, or even can watch click by click, either you have very little traffic, or a lot of time on your hands.

AdSense has over the last couple of days added a couple of good posts to their blog to help publisher diagnose low earnings, or earnings decreases by explaining how to read an analyze reports to help find out what is happening. Just remember that if you use it properly you will make money and if you don’t it can be because of many reasons, but most likely that your site is no good. Take all this information using any and all of the tools you can get your hands on (such as Google’s analytics funny enough) and find out what your visitors are doing, what content they seem to like, what they don’t like, how long they are staying and then optimise the hell out of it accordingly.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is part of it of course but it is all part of the long term success. You may need to think about spending some money on advertising to get some customers to your site in the first place. It might take a while to get your site in any of the search engine rankings where it will bring in enough traffic on its own. Also remember that there are free tools that you can use to your advantage such as twitter, facebook, myspace, wordpress and many others. If you leverage these tools right you may be able to get plenty of traffic without spending too much money at all.

Remember that a degree of success comes down to how much work you put in. How big a success it is depends on how good the idea is.

I was reading through HackerNews when I came across an article (from ElReg) explaining Hadoop. Althought I wouldnt have expected so the article is pretty funny and worth a read. In case you were wondering, Hadoop is a high level Apache project for an open source MapReduce (Google) cluster system written in Java. It was designed by the same guy that brought us the amazingly good Lucene indexing system.

I have to quote a part that I found particularly funny when he was comparing Hadoop (when adults do open source) to Starling (Twitter’s messaging system).

Twitter decided they would be cute and trendy. They wrote their code in Ruby: the official state language of the hipster-developer nation. Doug Cutting, on the other hand, decided he would get shit done, and wrote Hadoop in Java. Starling was hidden away in some corner and forgotten (it’s hosted at RubyForge…what the fuck is that?). Hadoop lives prominently at the Apache Software Foundation. Starling is a re-hash of an existing Java Enterprise API called JMS that has several open source implementations. Hadoop is an implementation of Google’s MapReduce, a system that publicly only existed on paper. Hadoop has the added benefit of actually working.

Perhaps this is a feast of apples and oranges. Starling is a messaging system, Hadoop is a distributed data processing system. Don’t worry. There’s plenty of failure to be had elsewhere in the open source world. Let’s take, for example, a project called Starfish), which is a pure-Ruby implementation of MapReduce. Eh, well that’s not entirely accurate. Starfish is a MapReduce-inspired framework that’s simple enough for even Ruby developers to understand. That means there’s no actual “reduce” phase in the MapReduce, and it works on MySQL database records. In other words, this project is virtually useless in every way, aside from getting the author a quick beatoff from the blogosphere. It’s a half-baked implementation of an algorithm from Google, it’s written in Ruby and it integrates with Rails. That’s so warm and fuzzy it could turn Clint Eastwood gay.

Well you cant get more honest and plain talking than that . The guy who wrote it is Ted Dziuba who is a co-founder and the CTO of pressflip.com which happens to be a search engine that will keep on searching for results even after you have finished (if you ask it to) in the hope that it will learn more about your search habits to fine tune the results and It would appear that they are using Hadoop for their application. I must admit that I have (and do) hope that someone can actually produce a new search engine that could compete with Google, but unfortunately there is nothing (in my opinion) that really seperates them any of them apart, especially in the browser space. I still think that there is a good possibility of getting somewhere in other search spaces such as mobile phone/mobile internet device areas. The results that you want in your phone are usually very different to those that you would want to get in a normal web browser and I think that excellent usability is something that could win in these areas. Take a look at Taptu which I think is a great mobile search engine.

Basically though, why cant more internet companies use their talent to try and solve some problems that people actually have. There are a million problems out there that must need solving but most of the startups tend to be in the same space with the idea of selling out to Google in a couple of years (or months) with no clear idea of how to make money now. Wouldn’t it be a crazy idea eh, that companies might start to create things that people actually want and are willing to pay for? Businesses that actually make money, now that’s something new