More Apple updates, Facebook’s privacy overhaul, and how to measure Karma

Facebook Pages and SEO

According to PageLever, Facebook pages get about a third of their referring traffic from search. This could be a good reason to focus on SEO for those pages, but there are some caveats:

• Many of these searches are likely to be navigational.
• Big brand advertisers often direct people to their brands’ Facebook pages.

There aren’t many Facebook fan pages that rank for high-traffic, high-monetization, non-branded terms.

In other Facebook news, they’ve conceded check-ins to Foursquare. Facebook still allows checkins, but includes them in message text rather than as a special feature. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve given up: it’s easier to dominate checkins when they’re just one category of message, which is what Facebook is angling for here.

Apple Updates

iPads are getting more common at the workplace: United Airlines is buying 11,000, and large retailers are replacing cash registers with iPads. This could be the first time in decades that Apple has had disproportionate success in offices instead of homes, which could have a dramatic effect on Apple’s developer ecosystem. The rather impressionistic business case for the iPad is that it roughly doubles the productivity of anyone who would use a clipboard instead.

And they’re also launching a cheaper iPhone 4. The iPhone 4 experience is qualitatively different from the previous phones: apps feel far more “native” than in earlier models.

And China is now the world’s biggest PC market. China is in some ways the world’s least interesting market, since by far the best strategy for most Chinese companies is to carefully imitate American and Western European postwar successes.

The Future of Web M&A…

… is M&A without the M&A. The AP and Corbis have a distribution deal that could have been structured as an acquisition. It wasn’t, because as transaction costs drop online, it’s easier than ever to get all the benefits of that kind of deal, without having to make a traditional high-ticket deal.

McDonald’s as a Software Company

This Fortune article on McDonald’s mostly portrays it as a software company that happens to execute code that produces burgers. It’s basically the same program, slightly adapted to different cultures (platforms), and constantly tweaked for performance and revenue.

Measuring Karma with the Sharpe Ratio

This post on using the Sharpe ratio to measure karma (i.e. taking into account both how popular a user is and how consistently popular they are) is thought-provoking, but incorrect. A few issues:

• It’s better for a site to have unevenly popular users. Those users are more likely to get a critical mass of attention through social network-based amplifiers. Craigslist, for example, has very uneven contributors, but their “Bets Of” section brings the site vast amounts of traffic and new users.
• Measuring how much users claim to like something isn’t necessarily the best measurement, either. Measuring pageviews or new signups generated is more accurate.
• Modern social networks show that a user’s karma is less important than the content of their message. Karma is only helpful in determining some baseline of importance for a given data point.

One thing this does imply is that we’re not testing nearly enough sorting and ranking mechanisms.

Another Google+ User Acquisition Channel

Youtube now allows viewers to create an instant hangout around any video. Expect more of this over time: Google’s big head start with Google+ is that as long as their users are using at least one Google product, they can’t forget it exists.

Brad Horowitz at Google has reviewed some of the changes Google+ still needs to make.

Facebook’s Privacy Overhaul

Facebook has aligned their privacy settings more closely with Google+. This still looks more like PR than like a feature change: at best, it’s an indication that people didn’t need that kind of feature until they’d been told to think hard about it.