Who Facebook Thinks Your Friends Are
A programmer has created a simple bookmarklet that reveals which users Facebook expects you to be searching for. This is notable in two respects: first, it’s a look into your Facebook preferences—not just who you’re looking for, but who you’d decide to be looking for given an ambiguous query. It’s also one more sign of Facebook’s relentless drive to make everyday site actions happen microseconds faster.
Levy: Google Will Keep the Handset Business
According to Steven Levy, Google scribe responsible for In the Plex, Google will keep their handset business. This presents all sorts of problems. Between culture clashes and channel conflict, it’s hard to see this working.
Levy, however, is better at getting the facts and telling stories than he is at analyzing decisions.
The NYT hails this as the beginning of a bull market in patents.
Android Suddenly Dominant in South Korea
In a little over a year, Android has gone from 48% market share to 95% market share in Korea. This is startling, and important: South Korea is one of the few markets where Google is not the dominant search engine. If Google owns mobile there, it’s only a matter of time before they fix this.
Private Equity Sniffing Around Aol
It’s the perfect private equity story: easily-modeled cash flows, plus a misunderstood model, and a CEO who owns enough of the stock (2.7%) to contribute a material piece of the equity for a leveraged buyout. That’s the Aol story, according to Bloomberg.
This is roughly the same story from back when Aol was at $28/share. It’s just a little more plausible this time.
Alternative Dispute Resolution: Trial by Combat
Indie gamer Notch is being sued by Bethesda. He’s offering to settle their disagreement through trial by combat (using the game Quake 3). This is more reasonable than it looks: the point of dispute resolution isn’t to perfectly determine who’s right and who’s not: it’s to give both parties a process that they trust to determine arguments that could, in theory, be settled by a coin flip. A 20-minute game session is far cheaper than even the cheapest attorneys, so it’s optimal if both sides suspect that the total gain from lawyering up will exceed the cost of both sides’ lawyers.
A Bing/Firefox Deal?
Bing pays the going rate for market share. Firefox has market share for sale. Will they partner up? This is more likely than it used to be, but still not very. Google used to use the Mozilla Foundation as its de facto browser partner, far overpaying for prominent placement in order to create a viable alternative to IE. This is much less strategically pressing, but Firefox has been fighting Microsoft for a very long time. Nonprofits are disproportionately likely to have at least one ideologue with veto power, and a Bing deal would likely get that veto.
Google is Testing Infinite Scroll
In a move that will slightly impact second-tier SEO players, Google is testing infinite scroll rather than the page-one, page-two paradigm. If they make this permanent, it will make click-through rates decline a little more slowly and a little more smoothly.
Chrome Plugin Inserts Affiliate Links into Search Results
Here’s a smart business model: a screenshot plugin alters search results for terms that imply purchase intent, in order to prominently display Amazon products (and reviews). That particular feature does look pretty useful, though probably not useful enough to be worth the affiliate cut the company is taking.
Testing “Filter Bubbles”
Search Engine Journal puts filter bubbles to the test, and finds the theory wanting. Google is just one facet, though: Twitter and (especially) the Facebook news feed are more pervasive filter bubbles, because they’re more geared towards content that elicits an emotional reaction. Nobody is constructing a filter bubble around giving a different source for a different set of objective facts.
M&A in SEO: RKG Acquires AudetteMedia
RKG (often cited in Digital DD for their excellent PPC studies) has acquired SEO agency AudetteMedia. It’s hard to build an agency that does both SEO and PPC (the easiest way to sell one of them is to knock the other), but now that both agencies are established, this looks like a great move.
Analytics as Collateral?
Working capital provider Kabbage has raised another round. The company is in the (large, poorly-understood) business of providing short-term, high-interest working capital to small businesses, with a focus on online companies. It’s surprising that Kabbage is raising money from VCs; the path of least resistance would be to raise money from companies whose platform they support. eBay, for example, would have a bigger business if Kabbage had more money to lend to top eBay merchants. This raise might be a sign that Kabbage has broader ambitions—or a sign that platform owners could get into the same game.
The Broken AdGives Experiment
AdGives is a startup ad network that intends to donate all of its profits to charity. Which is fine, until they realize that the non-charitable networks are always going to have an easier time raising capital and expanding. The right way to run this model is to set it up as a standard for-profit company (perhaps with some kind of advertiser whitelist and blacklist), and then give a big piece of the stock to a foundation. The net present value (to the founders and the charities they support) is far higher.
Also, it’s a recipe for bad clicks. If people click on these ads as a charitable contribution, it selects for high bounces and more worthless clicks. And since ads can’t be recognized as AdGives ads until the user looks at them, the AdGives branding won’t have an effect on engagement. The best-case scenario for them is that readers on their publishers’ sites learn that the ads they’re looking at are for socially-responsible products that they’d be interested in buying. (In other words, AdGives would work best as a classic demographically-targeted ad network).
The site looks very nice, though.
Rumors Versus Ideas in Tech Journalism
Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb has an excellent essay on the transience of most tech news stories. At Digital DD, we’ve explicitly tried to balance this: one big story that would be worth reading at least a month later (and ideally years later), and lots of smaller stories that put things in context. The problem with big-idea journalism is that big ideas are hard to find, and even harder to find reliably. You can blog often enough to get readers, or selectively enough to be uniformly profound. Unless you’re Paul Graham, you have to pick.
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