BlogAllAlong

Google, the company which started 10 years ago as a Phd project, moved into a garage for a while, and then 6 years later went on public offering, turning half of it’s employees into millionaires over night. The company which was chosen as the strongest brand in the US, and best place to work for last year. That same company for the first time is not living it’s glory days from the start of this year, following several events:

• Two executives and several other employees moving from Google to Facebook, just as Google did to Microsoft in the past.
• Their stock price have gone down below the $450, after it was $700 3 months back. (This could be a right time to buy if you strongly believe in them. Most Analyst still do)
• For the first 3 months in a raw, according to comScore, the number of Google sponsored Ads clicks is declining. This ofcourse is Google’s main stream of revenue, that is feeding everything else. So if that goes down, well, Good bye Gmail, Google Reader, and all other great Google services.
• Decline of search volume on Google last month. Even though February was shorter than Jan by two days, and all other search engine volumes went down, in fact Google was the least declining from top search engines, analysts still think there is a decline in the amount of search done on the web. Why is that? Social networks? Blogs? Feeds? No answer yet.
• Rise of new search engines. Now I know not every new search engine is a threat, in fact most aren’t. And the reason is that, it’s difficult to convince Googlers why your search algorithm is better. You need to find another way to draw their attention. Two new comers actually did and have been turning some heads on the web. One of them is Mahalo, the human-powered search engine. It’s still new, has lots of missing content. I mean, they don’t have pages for Arsenal F.C. nor Monkey Island (turns out they do now :). Where are you Arsenal and Monkey Island geeks! Well, Arsenal might have enough problems right now, but MI fans, quit playing S&M and do some stuff :). Anyways, I was impressed by the spam-free form of it, and the rich content you can find there for items that do have some content filled up. You can go the their main page and browse from their to the hot topics and results on the web. The other search engine that will draw some market-share I guess if they keep going straight is Searchme. The engine is still in private beta, invitation only (except this very moment, they have limited instant accounts, currently 970 left). What’s unique about this engine is the way you browse the results. Instead of getting text based results, clicking a link, waiting for the page to load only to realize it’s spam or useless page, here you browse images of the page instead of text only. So before clicking on any link, you have an idea about how the site looks like and what you could find there. It’s actually pretty similar in nature to browsing file thumbnails on Apple Finder. The engine is flash based and I assume people with low resources and connection will not find it most useful. I was personally very impressed however from how it works, and am looking forward to more from it.

So what now. Is Google going to die? I don’t really think so, but their growth I presume is not going to be the same as last year. I personally don’t agree with what ex-Google employee said after joining Facebook, that social networks are “Google of yesterday, and Microsoft of the past”. You will always need a search engine (or alternative) to reach your information, and a social-network is not the one ofcourse. Also, social-networks are more like bubbles than any other. People follow the hype, join their friends, want to have fun in new ways. Then suddenly, a new social-network comes with new fancy way of doing stuff. People will start jumping there, and the net-worth of the company will run fast down. Especially when their current social-network is controlling too much sensitive information and keeps abusing it. The other point is what some analyst said. People in social-networks are mostly after entertainment and socializing with their friends, and they are less likely to be interested in some ad on the side. On the other side, people are more likely to click on related ads when they are actually searching for that specific topic. After all, it could be what they need. But it all depends on the quality of the link, which Google’s been trying to push for real hard.

Popularity: 34% [?]

(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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Google Reader for many is without any doubt the best feed aggregator and reader out there. Giving you the ability to read all your favorite feeds online, from any place, at any time. Using the shortcuts (J, K & S), you can easily browse next, previous, and star your item. This makes it extremely easy to go through the 1000+ items I have queued for me to read forever. The ability to merge all the feeds and browse them together is a feature not available in many other readers, where you usually have to browse every feed separately. Recently also, and finally, they allowed searching through all those feeds, turning your feed reader into a rich bookmark for all items you may want in the future. There is also the newly added ability to share items with your friends and blog readers. Simply mark the item as shared, and all your Gmail friends will be able to read it. So now, and instead of posting about any good article I find without adding any value to it, you can go through my shared items on the side menu, where I will be sharing lots of the useful articles I find.

Popularity: 28% [?]

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More and more community sites come and go. Each has it’s own APIs to develop for. Developers want to reach the widest audience, but for each community site they have to learn and implement according to their own specific API. Any change could happen at any time at any site, the developer has to adjust to those changes as well. Now, Google is trying to come up with an answer to all of this by releasing a set of three common APIs that cover basic community functions of:

1. User Profile
2. Friends Information
3. Activities, like news that are happening

Big names have joined in the launch press including Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Hi5 and others. We should be seeing more of this stuff. Adjusting to each platform by it self just to cover the basics really isn’t practical at all. Ofcourse for specific tasks, you will still have to go back to that specific platform API, but only if you need those specifics.  A similar problem I face is when I want to develop widgets. For which platform do I developer? Which one is the best? How many should I support? Universal Widgets API hopefully is the solution here.

Popularity: 26% [?]

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Usually, Google are faster and smarter in closing up deals with new comers, and this is for several reasons. 1) Google are the giants of the web. 2) Microsoft have failed or on purpose buried down many companies they have acquired over the years. I am not saying Google is completely the opposite here. Some bad notes have been taken on them. Nevertheless, the Facebook founder and guru have decided to go with Microsoft this time surprisingly, giving Ballmer for once the upper hand over Schmidt. The deal gave 1.5% of Facebook shares to Microsoft in exchange of $240 million dollar. I heard reasons behind the choice was that Microsoft have stronger global marketing than Google does, which is something true obviously.

The joke made by CNet people was that there are still shares left, and Google could get some of it and set near to Ballmer on the same table. non-sense however, we all know it. Microsoft wouldn’t allow it to happen, and neither does Google want. The war already seems to have erupted as a reported video leak from inside Google have revealed plans by the web giants to build a massive giant social community called Maka-Maka, what kind of name is that?, over it’s broad of services, and mainly the online RSS Reader as it seems. If the news is true, and the execution is done properly, then Microsoft’s worst nightmare was a true prophecy. Microsoft have enjoyed the privilege of dominating the OS for home use, and thus manipulating everything that goes on top of it. They didn’t take good care however of the risk of the net. They underestimated how far it can go, and that in a way, it would be something that replaces desktop apps. Google started with their search engine, best so far, and then kept taking on new grounds. Google Groups, Google Reader, Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Desktop which made Windows search a complete joke, Gmail which quickly became something like default for many, online Google Docs, which feature editing, sharing, collaboration, rich graphs. All that was faced by simple view only Live Office so far. Google also controls big chunk of hte blogosphere with their Blogger. The list goes on and on . If you take a look at the Top Ranked sites at Alexa, you would see they are mainly search engines, or community sites. Almost nothing else. Google has the search engine world firmly in its hands, you can see their stock price stroke $600 and now is less than $2 from $700!. And now, Google wants a share of the community world. Serious one. The possibilities with what they have right now are endless, which is why Microsoft wants to stop Google from taking up new companies like DoubleClick. I am again wondering, shall Google really take bandwidth license and get into telecom, release GPhone, and probably Google OS as well. How much flexibility and on the go services they can give, all bundled under one sign-in. It will be The One Account for all.

I still wonder though how did the video find it’s way to the public. I double checked it’s not April 1st.

Source: Search Engine Journal

Popularity: 36% [?]

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According to this article Facebook will be allowing Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com to start indexing the facebook registered users profile, so if you don’t like it, your privacy might be exposed to public. To disable this feature you will have to login to your facebook account an adjust the privacy settings there. I tend to find this awkward though. If facebook wants to change their policy and expose my profile to the search engines, shouldn’t there be an email notification of this? Or perhaps they thought that an email warning would alert too many people to disable the feature, thus killing the purpose of it.

Popularity: 44% [?]

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As I have promised one of my friends, here I list the WordPress plugins I am using and what I think of them:

• AdSense-Deluxe: If you are an AdSense user and frequently want to insert Google Ads within your post, WordPress editor by it self can get annoying in the way it manipulates certain scripts within the post. This plugin helps you organize the library of Ads you use and include them in your post with simple <!–keyword–> way.
• Anarchy Media Player: To allow easy embedding of videos inside your post. I still find problem with it however. I tried many solutions and figured the best way with my current WordPress release is to copy/paste embedded code from say YouTube and save at once. Any edit will require I remodify the code to be on a single line again. This problem does not seem to exist with WordPress 2.2 which is used to power my Daily Gizmos blog. However the list of not-supported plugins there is huge so the migration is not a walk in the park.
• Challenge: The protector of the universe.. Arr I mean my blog. It does not completely stop spam though, spammers still find their way through, but without it I get like 50 spam comments per hour.
• DoFollow: This is controversy. Google is completely against it. DoFollow removes the NoFollow from your commenter’s backlink. Meaning that the link will be counted by Google as a weighted link. The idea is that you did not chose to actually link to people who comment on your blog, i.e., it doesn’t actually reflect you were referring to them. It’s them posting, and many times just for the sake of backlink, that is true. So Google believes those links should not interfere with the site ranking weight. Others like Yahoo however don’t believe in this method and count all links, disregarding NoFollow attribute. I am having a second thought about it, but this is the issue of another article I will discuss it in detail later.
• FeedBurner Feed Replacement (Now called FeedSmith): This is a wonderful plugin. FeedBurner first of all is a site that will help you monitor and optimize your blog feeds. To do so however you have to map your feeds to them. This plugin does it in one click. Unfortunately this plugin is not WP 2.2 supported yet.
• Feed Footer: I am just trying out this plugin, and if you are reading my post through Feed Reader you should see a small Sponsored Ad at the end of the post. Many people (like me) like to read posts through RSS Reader as it’s much more practical. This however forbids blog owner privilege of delivering ads, unless they post incomplete RSS Feeds, which I hate to do. This plugin lets you make your readers happy while still get a chance to make some income.
• Google (XML) Sitemap: Sitemaps are easy way for webmasters to tell search engines about pages on their site that are available for crawling. For a normal site, this is possible manually. However with a blog, every day you are supposed to add a new page. So keeping up the Sitemap.xml file updated all the time is a tedious job. This plugin does it for you. On every new post, edit, or delete, this plugin builds the new XML Sitemap. You can also adjust the pages priority from a user interface. All you have to do then is tell Search Engines about your sitemap for better indexing. Use Google Webmasters for starter.
• Popularity Contest: This you can see at the footer of my posts. The popularity rank of each post based on number of views from main page, singe post view, feed view, comments etc. You get to decide how each factor weights in the equation. Ofcourse old posts will not have their history reflected here, but on the long run it’s good to have. Note to make however some posts have somehow strange results, like one that had %100 popularity, I don’t know how. Nothing special about it, and it’s like saying you got %100 votes in election. Not possible if you’re not alone.
• Sphere Related Content Widget: I recently disabled it to go easy on my blog response time. It got loaded with stuff it needs serious attention now. This plugin gives the user list of related articles to your post. The links are shown in new sliding window on click only, making it user friendly
• Show Top Commentors: Reward top commenting people on your blog by listing them on your side menu. Also, this most probably means that they are eligible to have the NoFollow removed, which the plugin does by default.
• Subscribe To Comments: Keep your users tied to the post. Alert them of new post comments by email. Pretty straight forward and useful. I was surprised how often people use it.
• WordPress Database Backup: For the bad days! Mostly you can do that through your host console as well.
• WP-Amazon: This is the strongest AJAX plugin I came across. It allows you through side menu in editor mode to include Images and links to Amazon with your affiliate id in it. This thing should be sponsored by Amazon it’s much easier and faster than using Amazon Affiliate site it self. You search for your item and is fetched on the fly with you affiliate Id added to it. last time I checked, it was not WP 2.2 supported as well :(.
• Wp-Cache: Some people have spoken great deal of this plugin, others and I have not see performance improvement of post caching. Either way, Do no come near this if you have Challenge plugin activated. I did so and ofcourse, the question got cached and displayed everytime, but the real answer is different. People couldn’t post anymore. Trying to remove did not seem so simple at all as well. Read my older post if you want more information on this.

If anyone’s got some comments on those, or further plugins to add, do share them please.

Popularity: 33% [?]

(No Ratings Yet)

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The concept of Wiki, though suspicious, keeps amusing me with it’s success. When I first came to Wikipedia, and I noticed the word Edit hyperlinked, I asked my self what do they mean? I clicked as most people would, and the big question mark float over my head. I can actually edit the site that way without even signing in? Reading about, and digging further into it, I knew how the world’s free contribution has led to a free huge encyclopedia, up-to-date and comparable to Britannica as reports say. There are many projects based on the Wiki idea, like the WikiTravel and WikiCars for example. Today however, I came across AboutUs.org. It does not have the word Wiki in it, so that’s odd. But it’s basically as it says, a website about websites, that you can edit. Upon searching for URL, if it’s not already indexed, AboutUs automatically tries to fetch the site About Us info, displays some snippets from the site, and gives you the option to edit it. There is also the nominated featured wiki pages, based on users recommendations.

A service like this, though is wonderful, at the same time is very tempting for abuse. The larger it gets, the more people would try to manipulate results for their own good, and it will become a marketing battlefield rather than site info. I mean, who wouldn’t want his site nominated now on the list? And as we saw before, even big companies like Microsoft find it worth to buy public opinion on such open community sites. Let’s just hope this site can survive the flood. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write about your site there, just be fair. Give it a shot and see how your site is reflected there, or see how mine looks right now here. Since I don’t have an About Us section I assume, my last indexed blog post has been added as site description.

Popularity: 15% [?]

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