Twitter to SXSW: You’re Using Our Product Too Much.

On March 11, 2010, In New, By Tac Anderson

I’m at the Dachis Social Business Summit here in Austin right before SXSW kicks off. Like all conferences they’ve established a hashtag #sbs2010. While trying to follow along with the rest of my attendees, to see who’s here and what’s resonating with them and I got this message

Possibly the most disruptive technology in social media was when Twitter acquired Summize which later became Twitter search and they’re limiting it at probably the biggest geek event of the year, SXSW, the very even that launched  Twitter several years ago. And the SXSW Interactive hasn’t even started yet.

Could you imagine if Bing limited search right now as they’re trying to compete with Google? Twitter is the little train that could and is competing/with partnering against/with, Google, Bing and Facebook.

I couldn’t think of a worse move. AT&T knows SXSW is going to be huge and they’re beefing up coverage just for the event.

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3 Reasons Why Social Media is Killing Search

On January 21, 2010, In New, By Tac Anderson

The two main drivers of search are, news and finding something you already know exists.

I recently wrote about how in an apples to oranges comparison bitly was challenging Google. One commenter thought I was a loon or a complete idiot for trying to compare the two. In all fairness I may not have explained why the two are worthy of being compared. bitly and Google both have the same purpose: deliver you to a useful website. That’s it. The difference is that one is performed by search queries the other is initiated by a recommendation.

Read/Write Web reports on some coverage from HitWise

Social networking climbed fast this year, and Hitwise says it just peaked over search for a few days during the communication frenzy of Christmas. Take that, Larry and Sergey – Mark and Ev are right behind you.

Social Recommendations

When news breaks we are turning to search engines less and less. We are turning to each other and the real time results of social networks more and more. For breaking news I know that I’ll find a relevant link on Twitter and an outdated news story on Google. I only see one reason this trend will stop (which I’ll get to in my last point).

Better Curating

With so much data out there, curating is going to be a huge trend this year and good curators will be in high demand. The tools we have now for bookmarking (delicious & diigo), favoriting (Google reader and Twitter), listing (Twitter and Listorous), and storing offline (Instapaper and Evernote) are constantly getting better making the need to go to a search engine irrelevant.

Lack of Search Innovation

This is the biggest problem and the thing that Google, Bing and every startup in search is trying to fix. The reason that Bing and Google are tripping over each other to integrate real time data is they are trying to get us all to come to them first when we here of breaking news. And I think that over time it will pay off. With all the noise and rising levels of spam in social media search has an advantage. If they can bring you immediate, real time results, they have a chance since they already have a pretty good handle on filtering spam.

Of course they’ll also get there by making some key acquisitions this year. Who are your bets on the first real time search starups to be acquired?

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Is Bitly Bigger than Google?

On January 20, 2010, In New, By Tac Anderson

That’s the question I had to ask after seeing this post by John Borthwick with this chart.

I recently wrote a post on Bitly’s new search feature. It turns out that’s a bigger deal I thought initially.

The chart is about impossible to read but if you look in the upper right hand corner you’ll see where a yellow line intersects a dashed line. That’s Bitly’s decodes (clicks) and traffic data John gave for Google. By the looks of this chart you could get the impression that Bitly is bigger than Google.

That obviously didn’t seem right so I did a little digging. What I present bellow is a series of apples to oranges comparisons and really bad math.

The number for Google must be the traffic for Google.com. I got these numbers which are similar from Compete. (Click for larger image.)146 unique visitor a month.

But we all know that unique visits to Google.com don’t equate to number of searches on all of Google’s properties, which is the real number that matters.

But this number is really interesting:

bit.ly: last week was the largest week ever for clicks on bit.ly links. 564m were clicked on in total. On the Jan 6th there were a record of 98m decodes.    1100 clicks every second.

That was the week of January 11th, the same week that Twitter had it’s highest usage day. So knowing that this was a peak usage number but assuming that Bit.ly will continue to grow we’ll use that number: 98 million decodes (clicks) in one day. That’s 3 billion clicks in one month (again Bit.ly’s not there yet but humor me).

What about Google? The most recent data I could find was from Search Engine Watch from the summer of 2009 (I’m sure there’s better data but again, humor me). This claims that in Aug of 2009 Google had 6.9 Billion searches. Way more than Bit.ly clicks.

But wait. How big is Bit.ly? About 6 people and they’ve only been around a few years. How big is Google? ~20,000 employees and they have about a 12 year head start on Bitly.

Yeah big deal, I know. Let’s get really funny with the math.

That 6.9 Billion number is for all of Google’s properties. What if you separate the second largest search engine? (which Google also owns), YouTube.

Over a year ago YouTube was generating 2.7 Billion searches a month and with YouTube’s explosive growth this last year we’ll conservatively round up to 3 Billion. Subtracting those number you end up with

  • Google – 3.9 Billion
  • YouTube – 3 Billion
  • Bitly – 3 Billion

Not so funny anymore is it? So in one way (yes this is non-statistically accurate and apples to oranges but it’s fun) Bitly is as big as YouTube and almost as big as the rest of Google. This also explains why Bitly launched Bitly.tv and Google and YouTube both launched their own URL shorteners.

But wait, there’s more Bitly only has about 55% market share. That means the total market of clicks from URL shorteners could be nearing 5.5 Billion a month. But then we’d have to compare that to the total search market which is double that.

So no Bitly isn’t bigger than Google and even stretching the number as much as I did, it’s still not even as big but I think it’s a sign of things to come.

All funny number aside I only have one question? Why the hell hasn’t Google or Microsoft bought Bitly yet? Besides the clicks all that data is a gold mine.

Twitter and Facebook aren’t the threat to Google, we are. We would rather share links than search. Social networks are just the pipes we use to share but this puts a lot of power in the hands of the URL shorteners as they are the carriers of that information.

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Social Media Makes Search More Wicked [Bitly vs Feedly]

On January 17, 2010, In New, By Tac Anderson

I love wicked problems. No, not that type of wicked. A wicked problem is a problem where the more you learn about it the harder it gets. Search is a wicked problem. Scaling social networks is a wicked problem. Searching real time social data is a very, very wicked problem.

I use url shortener Bit.ly and it’s sister service J.mp, a lot. I love these services because of the great real time analytics they show you.  I am even willing to sign up for their Pro tools but they’re still invite only.

Today I noticed Bit.ly Search. You can search through all of Bit.ly’s real time data and compare data on links being shared. Below you’ll see a screen shot of a search for Haiti. You can see the article title, the URL of the article and the last tweet that posted the article.

I think it’s interesting that they don’t show you who the first person to post the link was. I think that would be far more interesting then the last person to RT the link. You can however click the info button to see all the info they have on that link including the first person to post the link.

bitly and feedly search

bitly and feedly search

They are obviously using click through and time as the measures for relevance.

Another interesting feature is the ability to see more links posted by the user. This really gets into people discovery. The result when you click the info button is that it takes you to a search for that user name.. So even if someone isn’t signed up with Bitly, assuming they use Bitly and not one of the other URL shorteners you can see all of a users shared links. This feature alone has pushed me over the tipping point to quit sharing links from Google Reader through FriendFeed, which uses the ff.in, and start using Reader to Twitter, which uses Bit.ly so that I can track all of my shared links here.

One thing that you will note is in the bottom right corner there is a small blue box with some other results. This is Feedly and it’s feature Feedly mini. Every time I search on any page, Feedly gives me a small list of results which it pulls from my Google Reader. But the real power of Feedly is when you search from your account within Feedly.

I have included several screen grabs and you can click on them to see larger versions.

Feedly gives you several options for your search and here I chose to just search withing my own resources. You see the news and then results just from withing my Google Reader sources.

You also see here the sources being pulled from and I can click on anyone of those to narrow down my search just to that source.

Feedly then does something fun, and it’s part of their revenue model I’m sure, is they go and search Amazon using recommendations from my account to show me recommended books on Haiti. I like this far better than AdWords.

Bellow that you see search results pulled from Twitter. I have my setting adjusted a little further so that I only see tweets containing links or hashtags. Where Bitly leveraged it’s size (it’s the #1 URL shortener and the default on Twitter) so I could search across most of the links being shared on Twitter about Haiti, Feedly allows me to see only the links my network is sharing on Haiti. Two different approaches but both very powerful in their own right.

The last results on the page are searches on YouTube and Flickr on Haiti. These are not from my network but in this case that’s a good thing since I don’t have very large networks on either of those sites.

Like I mentioned earlier thought Feedly get’s the extra advantage of being a browser pluggin and is with me where ever I go. It becomes ubiquitous. This is alos only one feature of Feedly. It’s not actually a search product, although it does it quite well. Even better than that, Feedly is also an amazing work flow tool. But I’ll save that for another post.

While both of these services take two different approaches they both have their obvious advantages. By building it’s own rich pool of data Bitly is proving to be a serious player in semantic search.

Prediction: I’m willing to bet Bit.ly gets acquired before the summer’s over.

Feedly has taken the opposite approach. They are aggregating all of my personally relevant data from Google, Twitter, Amazon and YouTube and Flickr. There site is the interface, so it’s not even like going to their site to search. It really feels like I’m going to a page I own that just happens to overlay a bunch of my own content. Feedly doesn’t own any of the data but they don’t have to.

On this note I will make the only fair comparison between the two services. It’s irrelevant to compare their approach or their results but it is fair to compare their interfaces.

Bitly is young and still developing but come on, it’s search result page has to be the ugliest interface out there. With the tweet, links, url’s and very little descriptive text I find it hard to read.  My only advice to Bitly is to fix that. It makes a huge difference in how often and how long users will use the site. Bitly has always felt sparse and not in a good way. It feels raw like I’m looking at the back end of an unfinished site.

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Googles Real Time Twitter Search Stream

On December 13, 2009, In New, By Tac Anderson

On my phone I noticed a comment from David Armano about him heading over to Edelman. I flipped open my laptop and did a quick search when what do I see? Real time Twitter results scrolling by on Google.

Wow, that’s new. So I asked on Twitter if others were seeing this. I got a few replies mentioning that some started to see this feature Friday, others yesterday. Google may have pushed this out Friday or it may be rolling out little by little.

I of course tried to replicate this with other searches. The only way I got this feature was when I searched for people by there Twitter handle. I searched for my Twitter handle and didn’t get a stream but just a few results. I only received standard results when searching for my name. This just added new importance to your Twitter handle.

Then I tried a trending topic: Tiger Woods. That did it. It wasn’t the first result but ended up right above the images results. Also interesting to note is that it’s not just Twitter results but recent blog posts as well.

Right now the results seem to based chronologically, not by any weighting (although I may just not being seeing that). But based on what I saw in Google’s results there was no spam. This is obviously a huge a deal as it’s Google’s response to the perceived threat of Twitter and it shows that Google can do a better job at returning results (if it really is able to weed out the spam and still keep the good stuff).

As this is still an early version, I’m sure we’ll be saying major improvements over time.

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No surprise BackType’s new site focuses on search

On August 21, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

One of my favorite things about social media is the revolution shaping up around search. The thing I love about BackType is they only focus on comments, where ever those may be. You’ll see evidence of this in my comments brought in through Discuss.

Not the blogs just the comments. And they’re turning that into a search business. And as a blogger we find that incredibly useful.

BackType — Blog Archive » The New BackType

BackType is a real-time, conversational search engine. We index and connect online conversations from across the web in real-time, so you can see what people are saying about topics that interest you.

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Social Media is a Wicked Problem

On July 28, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

I know this is a ‘no duh’ for most people but I had an epiphany about the way I think about content “consumption”.

We don’t consume content. In fact every interaction with every piece of online content only serves to create more content.

Every click, every rating, share, new link, comment, new blog post, etc, just creates more content. More 0’s & 1’s on a database more records.

This is why data is expanding exponentially. And as the data expands exponentially that creates more interactions resulting in more content resulting in more……you get the idea.

There’s actually a scientific term for this and it’s called a Wicked problem. Search is a Wicked problem. Social media is a Wicked(er) problem.

I imagine that social media measurement and search provide a level of complexity that made search in the late 90’s look like child’s play.

Photo cred to me

This blog was originally posted at New Comm Biz

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Either Wikipedians are Wicked Fast or Google News is Getting Slower

On June 10, 2009, In New, By Tac Anderson

News is supposed to be fresh and current. An encyclopedia is a reference for archived information not news. Right? Read\Write Web is reporting that Google News alerts are now turning up Wikipedia entries.
Google News May Add Wikipedia as a Source

When was the last time you used Google News?

Either those Wikipedian’s are wicked fast or Google News keeps getting slower. I remember when Google News used to bring you (what seemed like at the time) near real-time news results. Now thanks to Twitter, FriendFeed and other real-time social sites I don’t even remember the last time I used Google News.

Seems to me that integrating Twitter into Google News as well as Wikipedia would really provide some value. You’d combine traditional news with crowd sourced reference and real-time context. I’m sure there’s a Grease-Monkey script for that.

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Excuse me, News Industry. Why did you matter? I forgot.

On June 4, 2009, In Biz, By Tac Anderson
Printing press from 1811, photographed in Muni...
Image via Wikipedia

I want you to think back over the last decade. First mainstream media had to take part of their sites online to keep up with these crazy portal pages. Then Google came along and scattered their content to the wind. Bringing them more online readers than they knew how to monitize. That’s because they couldn’t figure out how to sell banner ads and most refused to open their sites for free.

Now think back 5 years ago. Most newspapers have torn down their walls. Google’s “stealing” their content (while sending them hundreds of thousands of visitors.  And they still haven’t figure out how to monitize all that content. But guess who did? Those crazy, angry geeks siting around in their underwear typing HTML into their Web logs. Those geeks were no threat to the journalism industry, even if they were making a few dollars on AdSense (stupid Google).

Fast forward to the start of 2009. The media has now added commenting, sharing widgets and write Digg bait articles. Yet the media industry still can’t monitize that stupid Web traffic and blogs are raising venture capital while newspapers are closing their doors.

Well the newspapers will show them. Tired of playing the bloggers game, they’re taking their content and going home. Rupert is trying to lead a Quixotian quest to rebuild those walls they tore down several years ago.

What do the bloggers do? Up until now they’ve always stayed one step ahead of the traditional media. Not much. They still offer megabytes of great content each day for free. Oh yea and they’re also:

And, uh, wait, I’m forgetting something. Someone is doing something else….

Oh, yeah. Making freaking sweet looking computers! CrunchPad: The Launch Prototype (Screw Google and Garter, watch out Apple.)

crunchpad-4

But hey media, news guys, good luck putting up those walls. Why did we want to see what’s on the other side again? I forgot why you mattered.

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Google and Microsoft Role Reversal

On May 29, 2009, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

What a day for tech news yesterday. If you didn’t hear all about Microsoft announcing their new search decision engine, Bing and Google trying to steal their thunder by announcing Wave, welcome back from your coma.

I think both products look amazing and think that both could be game changers but does anyone think its interesting that people are excited about Microsoft search and Google’s office productivity tools? What planet did I just wake up on?

Granted neither of them have made money on their new efforts but both of them are obviously willing to spend a lot of money to steal market share from the others core business.

Whatever the outcome, things just got even more interesting. Imagine 10 years from now if Bing becomes a huge success and is the dominant search engine and Wave does the same. hmmm……

(Disclosure: Microsoft is a client and our team has been working on the launch of Bing but other than knowing some stuff before you guys I don’t know any more than you do now, since most of the work was done before I came on board.)

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