MetaMuse

"Social Graph" Mixed in with Search? Naaah

Interesting and long post by Danny Sullivan, in reponse to the recent Scoble linkbait that Google will be killed by Facebook,  their social graph, Mahalo, etc.  The post covers a ton of thoughts, most of which I agree with.

There's a better way than Mahalo. A "people-powered search engine" like Mahalo will have a tough go, because it will be tough to keep up with the maintenance and link rot.

Kevin Burton thinks that it's about the social graph augmenting the web graph, and Google can index both. Yes, that's true, but I think there's more to it still.

Today's social search revolves around too much damn effort -- friending, voting, bookmarking, etc.  As Danny points out "people don't want to build search results -- they just want to search". This is why I believe social search can't be derived from explicit votes/gestures, and I don't think it will be limited to people within your social network.

There's a new graph coming, called the "implicit graph". No effort involved to contribute, and social groups (formed implicitly) filter the web graph for us.

Banner Blindness and What Works

Jakob Nielsen wrote an interesting post yesterday on the effectiveness of traditional display advertising and advertising networks. His summary was:

Users rarely look at display advertisements on websites. Of the four design elements that do attract a few ad fixations, one is unethical and reduces the value of advertising networks.

Now this comes as no surprise to all us Web users -- we all ignore the ads and focus on the content. But he includes some heat maps (eye-tracking studies) that really backs up his conclusion. Yet I was most interested in the four design elements that do attract eyes, according to his study:

1. Plain text -- like text ads on search engine results
2. Faces -- like the Others Online widget
3. Cleavage and other "private" body parts -- well, duhh!
4. Ads that look like native site content

He views #4 as unethical, given the traditional publishing principle of separating content from advertising. However, I'm not so sure this principle is so sound anymore. Look at the way ads are placed within search results, how domain aggregators use ads as content, advertiorial content in magazines, product placement in movies, and how paid blogging is blossoming. Perhaps the takeaway is this: what he sees as unethical, I see as innovative.

That said, his perspective on ad networks is spot on:

Ultimately, the fact that online ads get viewed more when they match surrounding content is a strike against the tendency to build advertising networks. If advertising spots are simply auctioned off, then you can't design an optimized ad for each placement. When you advertise through an advertising network, your ads will get fewer fixations than if you contract directly with the publisher for a specific placement and design your creative to fit that spot.

Net net, I'm excited about reading his research findings. The Others Online widget employs TWO of the effective design elements (#2 and #4) and also possibly #3, though that one is not really up to us.

Spock Launches; Makes Noise

Spock has launched and is making a bit of noise (testament to how good Renee is, I suppose). I've had a few people ask my opinion on Spock. Here it is:

Spock is focusing on actual names ("Jordan Mitchell") and the related explicit metadata. They're inserting themselves into the search value chain by offering aggregation, tagging, profile ownership/editing, and I think some social networking. But the primary use case revolves around telling me "Ok, who the hell is Jordan Mitchell", which is already the mission of ZoomInfo, Wink, LinkedIn, etc. I also use Google for that purpose (which incidently still works quite a bit better than spock, for me anyway).

Searching FOR specific people is of course much different than searching THROUGH people.

It will be interesting to see whether they can get users to take ownership over their profiles and engage. There's a huge difference between crawled and user-generated, and I'm not aware of a web site which started with crawled as the source then leveraged that to user-generated. Consider ZoomInfo (crawled) vs LinkedIn (100% user generated) -- LinkedIn has a far deeper engagement level with users. Once crawled, always crawled?

Others Online is Hiring

<recruiting_speak>
If you get excited about taking a hands-on role leading the architecture, design and development of Web applications and services in the area of social search and contextual profiling then Others Online wants to talk to you! We are looking for a software engineers to take ownership within different areas of our people discovery service and its technically challenging areas of personalization, contextual and semantic relevance, profile quality and effectively matching people with people. See our jobs page.
</recruiting_speak>

<blog_speak>
Ok, we're funded for a while, and we need to hire a couple solid solid devs that know how to kick serious ass. If you're smart and feel like now would be a good time to make your mark and roll the dice with a startup in the area of social discovery and search, you really ought to talk to us. Look, startups can be harsh and you're not going to be paid 100% of what you're worth. But unlike most other companies, you'd actually have direct influence on how much your stock is worth -- if you can stomach that sort of pressure!
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TechCrunch20 Finalist!

We're stoked ... Others Online has been selected as a finalist for the TechCrunch20 conference in September! Over 700 applications from 26 different countries. After a demo and interview next week, they select the final 20 companies from the short list.

Only One Blog With Pop-Up Ads

I know of only one blog that I've ever been to that uses pop-up advertising, and that is John Cook's blog.

John, even though I have a pop-up blocker I find it very annoying and out-of-place. Given your readership, certainly you have enough influence at the Seattle P-I to change this? Maybe this post on my tiny little corner of the Web will help you ...