John Battelle's Searchblog

I like to do this exercise from time to time - asking how my predictions for the year are holding up given six months have passed since I posted them.  

Well, let's see, shall we?

1. We'll see an end to the recession, taken literally, by Q4 09.

I think most folks agree this will happen. I'm not saying it has, just that the consensus is we're on the way there.

2. The online media space will be hit hard by the economic downturn in the first half, but by year's end, will have chalked up moderate gains over last year in terms of gross spend.

Jury's out, hard to call this one, but my own experience indicates this has a good chance of happening.

3. Google will see search share decline significantly for the first time ever. It will also struggle to find an answer to the question of how it diversifies its revenue in 2009.

Ok, so is this significant?! Well, yes - it's the first share slip Google's had, and it happened this year, but it's tiny. Hey, it's a start. As for the answer to how it diversifies revenue? Well, the jury is out, but it's still all AdWords, all the time, so far. YouTube is struggling with a model, Google admits. Meanwhile, Facebook seems to have found one (in self service)...

4. Despite #3 above, Google stock will soar in by Q3-4 of 2009, mainly because demand will pick up, and when demand picks up, it's like rain on a field of newly sown wheat.

This is already starting to happen - GOOG has moved from below 300 in March to well over 400 now. But we'll see if it continues. Several analysts are predicting a return to 600 or 650, in fact.

5. Tied to #3 above, Microsoft will gain at least five points of search share in 2009, perhaps as much as 10.

I know, I'm crazy, right? But the company did release Bing just last month, already won two or so points of share, and has a 100mm marketing war chest, and its major distribution deals have yet to hit Comscore. Wait and see....

6. Yahoo and AOL will merge.

This one I may be wrong on, because first, AOL has to spin out. Or maybe it almost does but then combines with Yahoo this year....

7. ... in the second half of the year, Microsoft will buy its search monetization from the combined company.

Well...again, this takes longer to develop that this year, I'm guessing. I probably have egg on my face here.

8. Apple will see a significant reversal of recent fortunes.

Wow, I am so wrong on this so far. Even with Job's health issues, which are not what I meant when I wrote this. There is always the second half of the year.

9. Major brands will continue to struggle with the best way to interact with "social media."

True so far, but wow, what a great, great opportunity for folks who run companies in this space. Cough.

10. Agencies will increasingly see their role as that of publishers. Publishers will increasingly see their role as that of agencies.

I think this one has become obvious. I'll hope to prove it when I do my annual round up at the end of the year.

11. Twitter will continue its meteoric rise.

Remember, I said this back in January. Twitter was at 5.9mm uniques according to Compete. It's now broken 20mm there, and we all know it's way bigger than that. It took a pause last month, and we're all waiting to see what June's numbers look like....

12. Facebook will do something entirely shocking and unpredictable....As I think about it, it might be as simple as making Facebook Connect truly open, and changing its policies to make it drop dead easy to get data out of the service. Also, Facebook will build a Twitter competitor, but it will never leave beta and will ultimately be abandoned as not worth the time. Instead, Facebook will "friend" Twitter and the two companies will become strong partners.

Wow. They did it. At least the first part of it. We'll see about the second part.

13. Lucky #13 is reserved for my eternal mobile prediction: 2009 will see the year mobility becomes presumptive in every aspect of the web.

I think finally, this one will be true.

14. Lastly, I promise, I will have sold my book and will be hard at work on it.

Well, we'll see....

Thanks for keeping me honest!

I've been complaining that nearly no search engines surface real time data (for now, that's Twitter, but Facebook is coming soon enough, and there will be tons more). In fact, I complained to Microsoft about this well before the launch of Bing, and then complained some more when Twitter results were not surfaced in initial beta versions of the service. Man, I'm grumpy lately, eh?

Well, that's changing. Sort of. From a Bing blog post today:

There has been much discussion of real-time search and the premium on immediacy of data that has been created primarily by Twitter. We’ve been watching this phenomenon with great interest, and listening carefully to what consumers really want in this space. Today we’re unveiling an initial foray into integrating more real time data into our search results, starting with some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres. This includes Tweets from folks from our own search technology and business sphere like Danny Sullivan or Kara Swisher as well as those from spheres of more general consumer appeal like Al Gore or Ryan Seacrest. Starting later today, when you search for these folks names in association with Twitter, you’ll see their latest Tweets come up in real time on Bing’s search results.

Oh boy! I wonder if maybe...I'm one of those folks? Sigh. No such luck. Although, to be honest, I can't seem to make it work for anyone, including Danny and Kara. Maybe it's not working yet in my area.

In any case, what DOES come up is my and everyone else I tested's Twitter account, at least when I add "Twitter" to the query. That's a major step forward from where Bing was even at launch. That said, there is NO reason to make folks put the word "Twitter" into the query. None. That is a failed use case. Commit, or don't commit, but don't ask users to specify Twitter to know what someone might be saying in real time. Better to indicate that the query has real time results, and offer them if a searcher wants them. Or figure out some other clever UI solution. Real time is here to stay, may as well design to it, and not ask users to do it for you.

After all, with the whole Websquared thing, we'll soon be leaving real time trails all over the globe, and we may well want them surfaced by our favorite search engine, no?

But good on ya, Microsoft, for dipping your toe into the water. Google, your ball.

UPDATE: It works now. I'm one of the chosen ones! Oh joy!

Seen in my feedreader just now.

I dunno, it just struck me, Google can't do a helluva lot to help you, Newspaper Industry.

There's quite a wonderful authorial kerfuffle happening between Chris Anderson, whose recent book "Free" has been the target both of plagiarism charges (from Wikipedia, of all places, oh the wonderful irony, one might think Chris actually planted the whole damn thing...) and Malcolm Gladwell, who never met a clever anecdote he couldn't convert into a well turned (and dammingly entertaining) book of his own.  

I won't go into the whole thing, because, honestly, I just don't have the, er, free time.

However, I do find it noteworthy that Chris's much-linked to riposte to Malcolm's initial evisceration comes on Wired.com, where, shock of all shocks, advertising is prominently featured. Free, of course, doesn't come without a business model.

..which I've been talking about for some time...from the piece:

Having humans, not software, supply the advice is important. Max Ventilla, who formerly was at Google and is now Aardvark’s chief executive, said, “Often the most useful answers don’t answer the original question. Example: ‘You don’t want to go to the Caribbean now — it’s the rainy season — you want to go to Hawaii.’ ” ONCE you try Aardvark’s service, you can’t look at Yahoo Answers, the current leader in questions-and-answers, without feeling pity for its now-manifest limitations.

...in the NYT today.

Google has begun this public-relations offensive because it is in the midst of a treacherous rite of passage for powerful technology companies — regulators are intensely scrutinizing its every move, as they once did with AT&T, I.B.M., Intel and Microsoft. Some analysts say that government opposition, here or in Europe, could pose the biggest threat to Google’s continued success.

Facebook's opening up even more, as CNet reports. Facebook has posted an update to its "Publisher" settings - basically, the instrumentation to your status updates - that makes it possible to broadcast the value you create in the social web through composition - of a status update, a blog post, or any other action that you might wish to declare. You can instrument it to be seen only by your network, or your network's network, or everyone - and it's that everyone part that makes Facebook a lot more like Twitter in terms of the ability for developers to create interesting executions based on that firehose. Think about what Microsoft did with ExecTweets, but with Facebook scale. Of course, that's just the tip o' the iceberg. Exciting stuff.

Last week I wrote a post in which I opined a bit about Facebook search. In it I wrote:

Facebook is way more than its newsfeed, and its search play is key to proving that value, and extending it....No doubt building Facebook search today is akin to building Google ten years ago - bigger, most likely, in terms of data, algorithmic, and platform challenges.

If only I had waited a few days, I could have pointed to Fred's piece in Wired, out this week. He profiles the ongoing feud between the King of Search, Google, and the upstart, Facebook. In his piece, he writes:

For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google's algorithms—rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg's vision, users will query this "social graph" to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire—rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search. It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where Google is now.

I agree that of all the contenders out there right now (including Twitter), Facebook has the most data, position, and potential to upset Google's dominance of the web. But I disagree with one premise of the piece, which is that Facebook's proprietary approach to the data it stores presents a blind spot to Google that gives Facebook a competitive edge. Fred writes:

Together, this data comprises a mammoth amount of activity, almost a second Internet. By Facebook's estimates, every month users share 4 billion pieces of information—news stories, status updates, birthday wishes, and so on. They also upload 850 million photos and 8 million videos. But anyone wanting to access that stuff must go through Facebook; the social network treats it all as proprietary data, largely shielding it from Google's crawlers. Except for the mostly cursory information that users choose to make public, what happens on Facebook's servers stays on Facebook's servers. That represents a massive and fast-growing blind spot for Google, whose long-stated goal is to "organize the world's information."

I think it's a major strategic mistake to not offer this information to Google (and anyone else that wants to crawl it.) In fact, I'd argue that the right thing to do is to make just about everything possible available to Google to crawl, then sit back and watch while Google struggles with whether or not to "organize it and make it universally available." A regular damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario, that....

For an example of what I mean, look no further than Twitter. That service makes every single tweet available as a crawlable resource. And Google certainly is crawling Twitter pages, but the key thing to watch is whether the service is surfacing "superfresh" results when the query merits it. So far, the answer is a definitive NO.

Why?

Well, perhaps I'm being cynical, but I think it's because Google doesn't want to push massive value and traffic to Twitter without a business deal in place where it gets to monetize those real time results.

Is that "organizing the world's information and making it universally available?" Well, no. At least, not yet.

By making all its information available to Google's crawlers (and fixing its terrible URL structure in the process), Facebook could shine an awfully bright light on this interesting conflict in interest.

Many folks have asked me when CM Summit videos would be posted, several are up now. They include the opener, above, in which I give a short overview of the state of online marketing from my perspective - start at about 6 mins in if you want to miss the throat clearing of setting up the show and thanking folks I've worked with. Perhaps the key thoughts: People Don't Join Ad Networks, and Publishers Are Communities of Mind.

It's taken a while, but I finally have time to rewrite the post I wrote this morning about Facebook search. For some reason my blog editor ate the post, something that has never happened to me and really threw me off.

In any case, this morning I noticed a post on Mashable about Facebook's new "superfresh" search plans - in essence, a plan to make the Facebook newsfeed searchable, and most impressively, to filter that through your social graph. In short, this is a Twitter search competitor with a Facebook twist, and while I think it's a fine move, it's nowhere near where Facebook needs to be in terms of search, and it seems a bit myopic: Facebook is way more than its newsfeed, and its search play is key to proving that value, and extending it.

First, a minor rant. Facebook search circa 2009 is akin to Alta Vista search circa 1994, or Ebay search circa 2004: very dumb and entirely lacking in structured, intelligently parsed data. In fact, it's worse that those two examples. It's clear that there are almost no intelligent signals in the way Facebook does its internal search, and I can't imagine anyone is happy with it. A few examples:

Here's a search for "john battelle status" as of today. There are no results. How on earth can that be? Not even a referral to my status updates? The engine clearly doesn't understand the concept of "status" which on Facebook, seems a crime.

Here's another one:

This is a search for "graffiti application". It does not find the popular application, Grafitti, which has more than 10 million installs and over 2 million active users. Whaaaa?

I could go on and on, but that's not the point. The point is, Facebook search could get a lot better. And I am *sure* the company is deep in planning on how to take its search to a new level - no small feat, given the size and scope of its service. No doubt building Facebook search today is akin to building Google ten years ago - bigger, most likely, in terms of data, algorithmic, and platform challenges.

So given the company is working on it, let's give them some input. What do we want it to be? Here are a few ideas I have, I'd love to hear yours:

- Leverage the social graph in search. When people search for other people (most likely the highest percentage use case on Facebook), show me that person's friends. Linked In does a very good job of search features like this, and is only getting better at it.

- Rethink how results are presented. Currently, it's all about pages on Facebook. Why? Why not think about search results in a similar manner to how we all understand search - multiple results, easily scanned, with short descriptors of what the link will bring us? There's a lot of room to innovate on top of this interface, but it's table stakes at least.

- Make search social. Show me what others are searching for, trending searches on the service, popular "found" items. Search is a signal, use it!

- Make search results linkable. When I do a search on Google, I can link to it. Here's a link to a Google search for "graffiti application," for example. And yes, the first result is the right one...

- Give me image search. I want to see pictures related to the results - Facebook is a highly visual service, so surface that!

These are off the top of my head (for the second time - I had others that I cannot recall...), but you get the picture. What do you want to see in Facebook search?

This is another step in what I've been calling the conversational interface...

I have not yet grokked Hunch, the decision engine from flickr co-founder Caterina Fake and co., but from the coverage, the launch is a hit. Here's Caterina's post announcing it...

It's been a while since I've seen click fraud in the news, but this Times story caught my eye, in particular because it was Microsoft. Google usually gets all the headlines around this issue, but it's interesting to see Microsoft leading the charge in this arena. The story is worth reading, it sheds some light on the darker underpinnings of the search economy. From it:

Microsoft’s theory is that Mr. Lam was running or working for low-ranking sites that took potential client information for auto insurers. The complaint said that he directed traffic to competitors’ Web sites so they would pay for those clicks and exhaust their advertising budgets quickly, which let the lower-ranking sites that he sponsored move up in the paid-search results.

When people clicked through to his site, it asked them to supply contact information, which he then resold to auto insurance companies, according to Microsoft’s complaint, which estimated his profit at $250,000. In the complaint, it also said it had to credit back $1.5 million to advertisers because of the Lams’ alleged fake clicks. Microsoft is seeking $750,000 in damages from the defendants.

Although small advertisers have sued search firms, complaining the firms did not do enough to prevent fraudulent clicks, this is among the first cases where a search provider has gone after a suspected perpetrator.

I'm finding Mashable, an FM site, on a tear lately. These headlines over the past two days caught my attention:

Google vs. Bing Battle Heating Up: Is Google Scared?

Google to Launch a Twitter Search Engine?

Social Media Goo: Cadbury Campaign Going Viral

Apparently I am not alone in noticing Mashable's ascendance.

Much buzz over the past few days about Facebook's plans to let folks (and, ahem, brands) claim their namespaces on Facebook. IE, Starting this weekend, I should be able to claim www.facebook.com/johnbattelle, just like I already "own" www.twitter.com/johnbattelle (sort of).

Anil Dash has a very funny send up of all this in a future forward timeline satire here. His point is - why is everyone falling all over themeselves to get their vanity URL on Facebook - or Twitter, or anywhere else for that matter - when the web is an open place and anyone can get their own URL, after all.

Well, yes and no. I've been complaining about Facebook's terrible link structure for a long time. We all spend time there, and create and share value there, but up till this weekend, it's been very difficult to point folks to places *inside* Facebook from places *outside* Facebook. The future of the web is ecosystemic - it's not about being in one place - this blog, that Twitter feed, or that Facebook page, it's about the ability to be anywhere, depending on the context and the moment. Sewing it all together is critical, and this move should make Facebook that much easier to incorporate into an ongoing, web wide conversation. I hope.

This video, of a lone guy starting a flash dance mob at a festival, is bouncing all over the web this week. I love it. Then I wondered, is this really spontaneous? It's too perfect! But it's really compelling either way. It plays on how we humans are wired. One guy alone dancing alone is weird. But when the tipping point happens, everyone wants to join. I wonder what happened when the music stopped.

It had to happen, and it has. Twitter's unbelievable growth numbers have flatlined, or even gone down, if you look at Quantcast (the site is not Quantified).  

This was predictable, given all the media hype and new folks, and the very real newbie problem I outlined in this post last month.

I predict Twitter will address this issue, and growth will resume, but at a more moderate and sustainable pace. But this is a very clear sign that Twitter, which made the cover of Time magazine last week, is on the other, less happy side of a traditional hype cycle.

As a reminder, here's what I said in a post just a month ago, noting the incredible growth of Twitter:

I think this is both Twitter's most important and dangerous phase of its young life. The retention problem must be addressed, and quickly. In my previous post about Twitter adding value to new users, I suggested Twitter incorporate some structure around its suggested users feature.

But with an inflection like this, I think it's time to swallow hard and embrace some serious social media jujitsu. In short, Twitter should integrate Facebook Connect in its signup process, and offer it as a feature for current users.

For the past few days I've been focused on a final draft of an essay, co-authored with Tim O'Reilly, focusing on the theme of this year's Web 2.0 Summit. It's rewarding work, reminiscent of the early days of Wired, when I'd regularly edit or write long form pieces focusing on big ideas and the future, but grounded in real world examples from today.  

But writing and editing this kind of stuff is also challenging work, and I often procrastinate, as I am right now, by writing a blog post or skimming the web for interesting tidbits. And boy, did I find a funny one today. According to CNN, the term "Web 2.0" is not only now an "official word" in the English language, it's also the millionth one, of all things. (This according to the Global Language Monitor, a website that uses algorithms to determine when words enter the language.)

Too funny!

The theme for this year's conference is "Web Squared," a very real nod to the idea that "Web 2.0," five years in, needs to be refreshed. From the draft Tim and I are working on:

The Web is evolving so quickly, it’s clear the “versioning” terminology that we borrowed from the software industry – Version 1.0, 2.0, etc. – no longer captures the pace and impact of the Web’s true nature. The web opportunity is no longer growing arithmetically, it’s growing exponentially. Hence our theme for this year: Web Squared.

We plan to post a draft of this paper soon, and will be asking for all your input in making it better. Meanwhile, it's kind of cool that a term Tim and his partner Dale Dougherty coined way back in 2003 has made it into the history books. I wonder if and when "Web Squared" might make it in?! I guess we'll know in five or so years...

Just for the record, noting this article from the NYT on Google's continued skirmishes with the DOJ, this time on the book settlement front.

Seth has a funny interpretation of what "Bing" stands for: But It's Not Google. This is a week old post, but I was just catching up on my reading. The rest of his post, however, strikes me as not quite right. In it he says:

The problem, as far as I can tell, is that it is trying to be the next Google. And the challenge for Microsoft is that there already is a next Google. It's called Google.

I actually don't think Microsoft is trying to out-Google Google with Bing. I think it's trying to build a different kind of search application, one that sits on top of commodity search and helps people make decisions in a new way. Done right, this totally breaks the AdWords model that has driven search so far. To me, that is a very big step in a new direction, and one that Google cannot afford to make.