Perry

Hewitt

Tag: google+

What Google knows to show you

Google has come a long way from the user experience of “ten blue links.” Today, Google pulls in a vast amount of the information it searches, has a keener understanding of what you are looking for — and serves it up to you directly.

Google’s organization of the world’s data, called ‘The Knowledge Graph,’ affects about 25% of all search queries. Google serves more and more rich data to minimize the need for users to click a second time. Search for the term “weather” or the title of a movie, and Google will serve up relevant, local data above any linked results.

When I recently searched for the correct spelling of the name of a director at Harvard, Google surprised me with a Wikipedia entry above a link to the site.

What does this mean for web content publishers?

This scraping and delivery of content is convenient for users eager to save a click. It also has practical ramifications for the originating content publishers. Today, a search engine optimization (SEO) must go far beyond meta tags and content keywords. Publishers need to closely watch and respond to web traffic analytics (for example, understanding dark social and developing a robust Wikipedia strategy) as well as technical features offered by search engines (for example, rich snippets and structured data).

February 9, 2015
Friday 5 — 10.10.2014
1. Google has enhanced its search results with an “In the News” box. These results include blogs and other content sites that are not traditionally indexed as news. This would explain the travesty above, where a Chelsea blog is listed related to a search for Arsenal F.C.
2. Here’s a thoughtful recap and lessons learned from the NYTNow and soon-to-be-shuttered NYT Opinion apps. Being smart about mobile can draw in new and younger audiences, but it’s still a challenge to figure out what users will pay for, and to avoid cannibalizing existing channels with lower priced offerings.
3. Did you ever wonder what the advertisers know about you based on your web habits? Data researcher Jer Thorp paid 10 users $5 each to profile him based on the ads he’d been shown, and shares the results. If you are curious about the data online advertisers are gathering about you, download this Chrome extension, Floodwatch.
4. Creative types proficient in Photoshop or InDesign can make anything look good. For the rest of us looking for ways to improve our graphics, here are 23 useful tools to create images for social media.
5. Diehard location check-in fans may like the new Swarm widget for iOS 8, which lets users check in with a single tap. Foursquare is taking another run at serendipitous in-person socializing with a “nearby friends” feature.
Weekend fun: Jimmy Fallon runs down the pros and cons of Ello, the new ad-free social network.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
October 10, 2014
Friday 5 — 4.4.2014
1. A Pew report on older adults and technology use finds that more seniors are online. Today, 59% of 65+ adults are connected, compared with 53% in 2012 and only 35% back in 2008. And they’re more social: more than half of women 65+ use social networking sites, validating my theory that grandchildren photos are a critical driver for Facebook adoption. Seniors still lag notably in smartphone adoption, with only 18% penetration compared to 55% of the general population.
2. On-demand car service Lyft raised 250 M, putting them in a fundraising league with Uber as the two compete for marketshare. How big will these “collaborative economy” or sharing services grow as a generation less invested in owning enters its prime earning years?
3. Hard to believe that Gmail is already 10 years old. The service launched on April 1, 2004, via a mere 1,000 initial invitations. Gmail changed the way we think about searchable email, and turned up the pressure for ease-of-use and storage for IT departments struggling to keep up with heightened employee expectations. Fun fact: Gmail was a skunkworks project, and launched in beta on 300 old Pentium III computers nobody else at Google wanted.
4. Amazon, Google, and now Microsoft are engaging in price wars over their cloud offerings. Thankfully, gone are the days when the first thing you did when you build a website was, “First, write a million dollar check to Sun for some servers…”
5. Lots of people have great ideas for social products and services — but many of those products depends on critical mass of users. How do you grow enough to get the metrics to understand where to improve and scale? Andrew Chen lists some solid approaches to solving for the dreaded cold start problem.
Weekend fun: Lots of people are already sick of watching this video of an ecstatic two-legged puppy romping on the beach. I am not one of those people.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
April 4, 2014
Friday 5 — 3.28.2014
1. This week, Facebook acquired virtual reality purveyor Oculus Rift for $2B in cash and stock. This purchase gives the social networking company, which was only two years ago struggling to get its arms around mobile, a leg up in virtual reality hardware. What will they use it for? Gaming’s an obvious first use case, but there’s a big vision opportunity. Semil Shah penned a terrific, if pun-laden piece on Facebook’s strategy and direction.
2. In an effort to boost Google Wallet, Google enables friction-free money transfer for Gmail users. The simple user interface — as easy as adding an attachment — is sure to attract entice more people into signing up for Google Wallet.
3. What’s content marketing, again? This piece breaks down this generic term, and explains why companies like NewsCred and Percolate are closing significant financing rounds.
4. From the Something Useful Now department, the Starbucks app has added a couple of handy features. The app now enables shake-to-pay, which uses your mobile’s native accelerometer to pull up the scannable barcode, and a feature than enables tipping for up to two hours after your visit.
5. Nieman Lab runs an extensive review of NY Times Now, a mobile product launching in the app stores on April 2. The launch is a step forward into current digital news best practices (mobile-first approach, briefs, curation of third party content). But will it lure more subscribers with this new app, or introduce product confusion with too many similar offerings?
Weekend fun: Are you still immersed in March Madness this weekend? Then check out @NailbiterBot, which will tweet to you when games are close in the second half. Follow the account now, so you can quietly excuse yourself from your in-laws and tune in.

IOWAST (3) v. UNC (6) is 74-76 with 2:59 left. Watch on CBS. http://t.co/zwra5bpZ3T

— Nailbiter Bot (@NailbiterBot) March 23, 2014

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
March 28, 2014
Friday 5 — 3.14.2014
1. Comscore data show that users coming directly to a news site stay longer and view more pages than those coming from search and social. Users arriving via search and social drive up views, but are more difficult to convert into loyal readers. Two caveats to the study: mobile traffic is not included, and email is often improperly tagged, which causes some users to be improperly counted as “direct.”
2. Tony Haile, CEO of realtime analytics product Chartbeat, will convince you: what you think you know about the web is wrong. Saddled with a web measured by the click, we’re now trying to better understand user behavior while interacting with a site. Among the more compelling observations: if a site can hold visitors’ attention for three minutes, they are twice as likely to return than if you hold them for only one minute.
3. The Web turned 25 this week, kicking off a flurry of pieces reflecting on the internet era. Here’s a brief timeline from Fast Company. Fun fact: When web creator Tim Berners-Lee was asked to name one thing he never envisioned the web being used for, his reply was “kittens.”
4. It’s astonishing to think that a gigabyte of hard drive would have cost you about $190,000 dollars back in 1980. In a move designed to compete with rival Dropbox, Google Drive is now offering 100GB storage for only $1.99/month.
5. Sadly, the money you just saved on storage will now be spent on Amazon Prime membership, which just rose from $79 to $99/year. Prime was a genius feature — the ultimate gateway drug for online impulse buying. I guess those drones aren’t going to pay for themselves.
Weekend fun: According to a recent report on millennials, 55% of them say they’ve shot and shared a selfie, versus 24% of Gen X, and of 9% of boomers. Bucking the trend, this former Secretary of State beats Ellen’s product placement hands down.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
March 14, 2014
Friday 5 — 2.28.2014
1. Pew released a report on the Web at 25 — and how Americans have adopted and are affected by the internet usage. A full 87% of us now use the internet, 90% have cell phones, and 58% have smartphones. And as you can see from the chart above, many report it would be very hard to give some of these behaviors up. Interesting to see that while 71% of Americans online report using Facebook, and 40% do so several times a day, only 11% reported social media would be hard to give up. Hmmm.
2. Here’s an unscientific yet thoroughly enjoyable analysis of what people have on their homescreens, as self-reported on Twitter. Lots of texting, news, and social apps win top spots on homescreens, compared to gaming and payment apps.
3. Self-confessed map geeks might enjoy browsing Google Maps’ new gallery. Google partners like National Geographic have provided maps and geospatial information which the gallery aims to make more visible and usable. Google sorts them into handy categories, like Historical and Infrastructure and Space.
4. Many who shake their heads at Google+ have a soft spot for Hangouts. Today Google released a redesign of Hangouts for iOS, with the ability to attach a map, add animated stickers, and record a short clip. It makes sense that Google would invest more in the product given Facebook’s aggressive move into social messaging with WhatsApp purchase.
5. If you think people smile a lots less in Moscow than Sao Paulo, you’d be right — at least according to their selfies. Selfiecity analyzed over 120,000 images from Instagram and found that only about 3-5% of pictures posted were selfies, and that women take far more than men. See the site for more interesting findings, and visualizations by city.
Weekend fun: Getting ready for your Oscar party on Sunday? Challenge your guests to identify every single Best Picture winner from these gorgeous and clever icons designed by Beutler Ink.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
February 28, 2014
On jazz hands and ad networks

Everybody is very enamored by Google’s self-driving cars, you know, Google making glasses. That’s all jazz hands. It’s a big, huge distraction. They’re an advertising network. They’re putting a 25 to 50 percent advertising tax on everything created in the world. That’s all their doing. It’s a huge ad network. They’re going to subsume all advertising into their network.

And that’s what Facebook is building. That’s why Sheryl Sandberg, who was at Google and helped build that advertising business, was brought into Facebook by Zuckerberg. It’s to re-create that playbook. They’re all huge advertising marketing firms. All they’re doing is collecting data and then selling it, and they have an interface that’s wildly efficient, wildly efficient — unprecedented in its efficientness. …

— Insightful interview with Jason Calicanis on the digital landscape for brands touches on content marketing, advertising networks, the role of data, and the importance of social media profiles. Read the whole interview on PBS Frontline.

February 20, 2014
Grokking Google+

It’s hard to grok Google+. On the one hand, since January 2013 Google+ user numbers have made it the undisputed second largest social network. In a similar vein, Mashable just published a breathless Google+ for beginners how-to that calls it “an intriguing network for all users.”

On the other hand, web traffic referrals from Google+ are down. Way down, if this recent Shareaholic report is anywhere near accurate. And web traffic sent is a good indicator of the volume of content that users are actively sharing on Google+. Image-rich social sites like Facebook and Pinterest are leading the pack.

The Google+ user experience make it seem more like a loosely-tied set of features than a cohesive network or service. Sometimes this lack of clarity evokes privacy concerns. The Google+ personalization of www.google.com on your birthday is one relatively benign example. The brand you’ve come to think of as your private search tool is surfacing your own information in a way that it’s easy to mistake as public to all.

More disconcertingly, Google+ seems to automatically display birthdays of Google+ “friends” through the Android browser. The experience below led a colleague to ask, “How did you buy screen space on my phone?”

Perhaps it’s more useful to think of Google+ not as a Facebook or Twitter competitor, but as something entirely different. Charles Arthur in the Guardian described Google+ as the Matrix, “an invisible overlay between you and the web, which watches what you’re doing and logs it and stores that away for future reference.” Sure, there are some compelling social network features, like Hangouts. But in the end, you’re serving up your data in return for getting a suite of services like email and search, and only an occasional, visible glitch will remind you of the Matrix. Given the deep embedding of Google service in many of our lives, it’s a tough tradeoff to walk away from.

October 29, 2013
Friday 5 — 10.18.2013
1. Google Ngram Viewer allows you to search and plot words appearing in books from 1800-2008 — and has just rolled out some new features. The new wildcard feature allows you to find which words appear alongside others. Above, I’ve plotted which noun appears most frequently after “social network.” From about 1990 on, the answer is “analysis” as mapping social connections becomes more an established internet-era discipline.
2. Facebook announced that teens 13-17 will have the ability to share posts publicly, as they do on platforms like Twitter. Unlike Twitter, Facebook has a real names policy that may result in more real world consequences for teens.
3. Lots of high stakes digital project failures in the media this week, from the heavily covered healthcare.gov to the buggy first release of the college admissions Common App. These projects are complex, with data and system integration challenges, multiple stakeholders, and large, public constituencies.
4. When do Americans use mobile apps? News app usage peaks around 7am, while entertainment and games get big at 9 pm. And it turns out we’re surprisingly heavy consumers of mobile apps throughout the weekend.
5. As the world goes mobile, so does YouTube. Mobile on Youtube is now 40% of all video views from 25% in 2012 and 6% in 2011. Starting in November, an upcoming YouTube mobile release will allow users to save and watch videos offline.
Weekend fun: Conquer your acrophobia and bring Peg Man down to Earth by playing Map Dive.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
October 18, 2013
Friday 5 — 08.09.2013
Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.
1. Anyone who has ever clicked on a search result only to land on an article stub generated by a content farm will be glad to see this latest Google tweak. This update highlights up to three in-depth articles in the right column, pointing users toward deeper content (and perhaps directing their eyes toward the ads). Big opportunity for publishers of high-value, evergreen content.
2. 72% of U.S. online adults now use social networks, according to Pew. Breakdowns include slightly more women than men, and Hispanics represented more than African-Americans more than white, non-Hispanic. Retailers take note: adoption rates for adults 65 and older have tripled over the past four years.
3. A good example of how great content strategy combined with optimizing an existing technology can yield significant returns: Zach Seward on Quartz’s email strategy just as their daily brief expands to weekends.
4. Boston’s Here and Now covered Silicon Valley-funded Watsi, a startup crowdfunding medical care. This approach raises ethical questions, as well as potential positive implications for nonprofits looking to put a face on unrestricted giving.
5. In yet another take on mobile, visual storytelling, YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen launched the Mixbit video app for iOS. There’s a collaborative element to the storytelling and some solid UX to make recording and editing less daunting.
August 9, 2013