Avi Joseph

Google tests a new search interface that brings back the icons for specialized search engines, but displays them in a horizontal list, below the search box. The icons are redundant right now, but they might replace the list from the sidebar, just like in the experimental interface for tablets.

Over time, nearly every major tech news publisher has asked us a variant of "Why do you always post them and not us?" or "Why did you pick them over us for that story when we posted first?" So it's probably time to address this issue in a general way. If you don't write tech news for a living, be thankful that you can skip the following post. For the rest of you, my apologies, now please get comfortable and read on.

Understanding why Techmeme does what it does starts with understanding our mission. Which is: to highlight the essential tech news and commentary of the moment on a single page. The must-reads for anyone who needs to know where the industry is heading, whether they're an investor, engineer, entrepreneur, executive, or enthusiast. We aim broader than most tech news sites, covering both hardware and software, both people and products, and beyond: events, trends, ideas, companies, policy, and culture. But not too broad: "tech" for us doesn't include biotech or cleantech, and we usually steer clear of content only developers would understand or hardcore gamers would appreciate. We also avoid evergreen how-tos or advice pieces, instead focusing on what's changed, or shifting, or different, i.e. "news". We try to be comprehensive: it irks us when we miss a major story. We also aim to be fast: the big stories need to appear in minutes, not hours. We also try to be highly scannable, which requires lucid, detail-rich headlines. Finally, we want the stories we link to be satisfying for our busy readers, and therefore clear, well-written, correct in any factual claims, succinct where possible, and supported by links where appropriate.

What does this mean for publishers? To start, common routes to landing a headline on Techmeme, include:

1. The huge exclusive story, well-conveyed: A story of obviously major import, reported before everyone else, presented succinctly yet with no major omissions, open for all readers, and capped with a clear and detail-rich headline. These stories almost always hit Techmeme, and nobody's surprised when they do.
2. The huge non-exclusive story, exceptionally conveyed: Sometimes big stories quickly appear on multiple news sites, for instance when companies blast out a press release, or orchestrate a news "embargo". Techmeme will usually feature only one take, so that take needs to be the best. Offering the clearest headline and the most complete exposition are key. Useful context, analysis, figures, and images are helpful too. Being early or first is important: we want to quickly post important stories, so if you wait too long, you'll miss out. But firstness is not an overriding consideration. As it turns out, we take a lot of heat from people who post early but inferior posts. Please don't be one of those people.
3. The interesting, yet not so (obviously) huge story: Even if your story isn't undeniably amazing, if it's interesting enough, it may hit Techmeme. If it fits our mission (see above), and it's discoverable by our automation and/or our editors, the odds improve greatly. How can you improve discoverability? First, encourage tech blogs to link to your post, particularly the tech blogs Techmeme frequently links to. Second, send a tip to Techmeme by including "Tip @Techmeme" when linking to your post on Twitter. Both tactics can help Techmeme discover a blog or site it has never linked to or even crawled before. Links and Twitter tips also help in the obviously huge story cases (1. and 2. above), but have a greater impact here.

With all of that now said, it's time to fire off some quick "dos and don'ts":

To appear on Techmeme, do this:

- Break a major story.
- Report/summarize/write up a big, developing story. Be early, or better: first (mindful that this doesn't trump other considerations).
- Got a press release or non-exclusive briefing? Write the very best take. Highlight what's important, what's fascinating. Be lucid and critical.
- Make sure your headline is clear and contains all major details (proper names, dollar amounts, dates, etc.) If you're posting on Google+, make sure the first line of your post functions as a headline.
- Link generously to stories on other sites to establish context and cite sources. Sometimes including a Techmeme permalink is the best way to do this. (Self-serving but true!)
- Articulate something lots of people are thinking, but not putting into words.
- Write the kind of story an Apple or Google exec would share with their fellow execs.
- Write the kind of story people will talk about at an industry cocktail party.
- Write the killer analysis piece that tech pundits can't help but to link to. Yes, be a "thought leader". If your post is linked enough, the automation behind Techmeme will notice and attempt to surface it.
- Tip Techmeme on Twitter. (Include "Tip @Techmeme" when you tweet your link.)
- Summarize a major story that's behind a paywall. Techmeme rarely features paywalled stories, but may link to you. Link prominently to the source story, of course.
- Say what you're going to say early in your post. The reader wants to know soon whether there's a payoff to reading, not 8 paragraphs in.
- Include relevant images, videos, or figures in your post.
- Time some analytical pieces for weekends and other slow times when they're easier for Techmeme to discover.

To not appear on Techmeme, do this:

- Write enigmatic headlines. Omit key details in your headline.
- Bury the most important part of your story near the end of the piece.
- Paywall your story.
- Omit links to stories previously appearing on other news sites that you're clearly referencing or using as source material.
- Fail to update your story if the facts are rapidly developing.
- Write a 10% more thoughtful post on a story, but 8 hours later than everyone else.
- Post something crappier than everyone else's take 90 seconds before everyone else.
- Intelligently and exhaustively report on something that's entirely old news and well-understood to Techmeme readers.
- Write about something arcane without illuminating its greater significance.
- Have factual errors, egregious spelling or grammar mistakes.

Sorry, these (alone) won't help your post get on Techmeme:

- Being first to a story. Yes, being first or early helps, but we will go with a post that better fits Techmeme's mission if we need to.
- How hard you worked on your latest post.
- How long it's been since you were last on Techmeme.
- How terribly neglected the company you reported on has been to date (maybe there's a reason for that).
- How expensive your editorial operations are.
- How many people write for your site.

I should conclude by noting that many of the best writers in tech have figured all of this out already. Over time, they've watched Techmeme enough to have essentially reversed-engineered it, inferring and applying the above lessons with much success. Their success extends beyond Techmeme of course; the very same practices can lead to more retweets and more pickup beyond the world attuned to Techmeme. With this post, I'm hoping the remaining talents can better understand the way Techmeme thinks, which will ultimately benefit both Techmeme's readers and the readers of the many publications we depend on.

Posted by Alan Green, Software Engineer

Today we're rolling out the new Reader design, and the Google+ features that we mentioned just over a week ago. Before the day's over, all Reader users will be able to enjoy the following improvements:

• A new look and feel that's cleaner, faster, and nicer to look at.

On July 24, 2010, thousands of people around the world recorded videos of their lives to take part in Life in a Day, a cinematic experiment to document a single day on earth. From more than 4,500 hours of footage recorded and uploaded to YouTube, Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald and executive producer Ridley Scott created a 90-minute feature film that offers an entertaining, surprising and moving view of life on earth.

After a theatrical release in countries around the world including appearances at the Sundance, Berlin, SXSW and Sydney film festivals, Life in a Day is finally coming home to YouTube—in its entirety, for free.

Starting today you can watch Life in a Day on YouTube, available with subtitles in 25 languages. So if you haven’t seen it yet or want to relive the experience that The Times of London considers “a thrilling piece of cinema” and the Washington Post called “a profound achievement,” now’s your chance.



If you’d like to own Life in a Day, a DVD is also available. You can find more details about this, and the whole project, on the film’s official YouTube channel.

Posted by Tim Partridge, YouTube Marketing Manager


(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)

With the upcoming transition of social features in Google Reader to Google+, I thought this would be a good time to look back at the notable social-related events in Reader's history. For those of you who are new here, I was Reader's tech lead from 2006 to 2010.

Late 2004 to early 2005: Chris Wetherell starts work on "Fusion", one of the 20% projects that serve as prototypes for Google Reader. Among other neat features, it has a "People" tab that shows you what other people on the system are subscribed to and reading. There's no concept of a managed friends list, after all when the users are just a few dozen co-workers, we're all friends, right?

September 2005: Ben Darnell and Laurence Gonsalves add the concept of "public tags" to the nascent Reader backend and frontend. There are no complex ACLs, just a single boolean that controls whether a tag is world-readable.

October 2005: A remnant of the "People" tab is present in the HTML of the launched version of Google Reader, and an eagle-eyed Google Blogoscoped forum member notices it and speculates as to its intended use.

March 2006: Tag sharing launches, along with the ability to embed a shared tag as a widget in the sidebar of your blog or other sites. On one hand, tag sharing is quite flexible: you can share both individual items by applying a tag to them, and whole feeds (creating spliced streams) if you share folders. On the other hand, having to create a tag, share it and manually apply it each time is rather tedious. A lot of users end up sharing their starred items instead, since that enables one-click sharing.

Summer of 2006: As part of Brad Hawkes's summer internship, he looks into what can be done to make shared tags more discoverable (right now users have to email each other URLs with 20-digit long URLs). He whips up a prototype that iterates over a user's Gmail contacts and lists shared tags that each contact might have. This is neat, but is shelved for both performance (there's a lot of contacts to scan) and privacy (who exactly is in a user's address book?) concerns.

September 2006: Along with a revamped user interface, Reader re-launches with one-click sharing, allowing users to stop overloading starred items.

May 2007: Brad graduates and comes back work on Reader full-time. His starter project is to beef up Reader's support for that old school social network, email.

Fall of 2007: There is growing momentum within Google to have a global (cross-product) friend list, and it looks like the Google Talk buddy list will serve as the seed. Chris and I start to experiment with showing shared items from Talk contacts. We want to use this feature with our personal accounts (i.e. real friends), but at the same time we don't want to leak its existence. I decide to (temporarily) call the combined stream of friends' shared items "amigos". Thankfully, we remember to undo this before launch.

December 2007: After user testing, revamps, and endless discussions about opt-in/out, shared items from Google Talk buddies launches. Sharing is up by 25% overnight, validating that sharing to an audience is better than doing it into the void. On the other hand, the limitations of Google Talk buddies (symmetric relationships only, contact management has to happen within Gmail or Talk, not Reader) and communication issues around who could see your shared items lead to some user stress too.

Spring of 2008: With sharing in Reader picking up steam, a few aggregators and leaderboards of shared items start to spring up. Louis Gray comes to the attention of the Reader team (and its users) by discovering the existence of ReadBurner before its creator is ready to announce it.

May 2008: Up until this point sharing has been without commentary; it was up to the reader of the shared item to decide if it had been shared earnestly, ironically, or to disagree with it. "Share with note" gives users an opportunity to attach a (hopefully pithy) commentary to their share. Also in this launch is the "Note in Reader" bookmarklet (internally called "Tag Anything") that allows users to share arbitrary pages through Reader.

August 2008: Incorporating the lessons learned from Reader's initial friends feature, the preferred Google social model is revamped. Instead of a symmetric friend list based on Google Talk buddies, there is a separate, asymmetric list that can be managed directly within Reader. The asymmetry is "push"-style: users decide to share items with some of their contacts, but it's up those contacts to actually subscribe if they wish (think "Incoming" stream on Google+, where people are added to a "See my Reader shared items" circle). This feature is brought to life by Dolapo Falola, who injects some much-needed humor into the Reader code: the unit tests use the Menudo band members to model relationships and friends acquire a (hidden) "ex-girlfriend" bit.

March 2009: After repeated user requests, (and enabled by more powerful ACL supported added by Susan Shepard) comments on shared items are launched. Once again Dolapo is on point for the frontend side, while Derek Snyder does all the backend work and makes sure that Reader won't melt down when checking whether to display that "you have new comments" icon. The ability of the backend and user interface to handle multiple conversations about an item is stress-tested with a particularly popular Battlestar Galactica item.

May 2009: Bundles are launched, extended sharing from just individual tags to collections of feeds.

July 2009: Continuing the social learning process, the team (and Google) revamps the friends model once again, switching to a asymmetric "pull"-style (i.e. following) model. This is meant to be "pre-consistent" with the upcoming Google Buzz launch. Also included in this launch are better ties to Google Profiles and the ability to "like" items. In general there are so many moving parts that it's amazing that Jenna's head doesn't explode trying to design them all.

Also as part of this launch, intern Devin Kennedy's trigonometry skills are put to good use in creating an easter egg animation triggered when liking or un-liking an item after activating the Konami code.

August 2009: Up until this point, one-click sharing had mainly been for intra-Reader use only (though there were a few third-party uses, some hackier than others). With the launch of Send to (also Devin's work), Reader can now "feed" almost any other service.

February 2010: The launch of Google Buzz posed some interesting questions for the Reader team. Should items shared in Reader show up in Buzz? (yes!) Should we allow separate conversations on an item in Buzz versus Reader? (no!) With a lot of behind the scenes work, sharing and comments in Reader are re-worked to have close ties to Buzz, such that even non-Reader-using friends can finally get in on the commenting action.

March 2010: Partly as a tongue-in-cheek reaction to social developments within Google, and partly to help out some Buzz power users who were complaining that all the social features in Reader were slowing it down, I add a secret (though not for long) anti-social mode.

May 2010: Up until this point, it was possible to have publicly-shared items but only allow certain friends to comment on them. Though powerful, this amount of flexibility was leading to complexity and user confusion and workarounds. To simplify, we switch to offering just two choices for shared items, and in either case if you can see the shared item, you can comment on it.

As you can see, it's been a long trip, and with the switch to Google+ sharing features, Reader is on its fourth social model. This much experimentation in public led to some friction, but I think this incremental approach is still the best way to operate. Whether you're a sharebro, a Reader partier, a Gooder fan, the number 1 sharer or someone who "like"-d someone else, I am are very grateful that you were part of this experiment (and I'm guessing the rest of the past and present team is grateful too). And if you're looking to toast Reader for all its social stumbles accomplishments, the preferred team drink is scotch.

• New York: Oct. 17 - Nov. 13
• Chicago: Oct. 17 - Nov. 13
• Washington, DC: Nov. 15 - Dec. 12
• San Francisco: Nov. 15 - Dec. 12
• Los Angeles: Dec. 14 - Jan. 12

Apple and Google have ushered in a new era of mobile computing whose consumer adoption is rivaled only by the PC revolution of the 1980s and the Internet boom of the 1990s.  Since 2007, more than 440 million iOS and Android devices have been activated, with 1 million additional devices across both platforms now activated each day.

On top of this massive and rapidly expanding platform, a software battle is raging.  With very low barriers to entry, and friction-free digital distribution, companies have been feverishly building, shipping and updating applications, intent on capturing and monetizing consumer audiences.  To illustrate this growth, let’s look at the number of available apps in the App Store vs. the Android Market.

This chart is comprised of publicly available data.  Where data wasn’t available for the same month in both markets, we estimated the number of available apps based on interpolation (e.g., approximating a point between two existing data points), or by looking at the growth rate leading up to a specific month.  The number of apps is growing significantly in both markets.  And while the App Store has attracted more apps to date, the Android Market is closing the gap.  Now, let’s turn our attention to total app downloads.

The chart above sums Android Market and App Store downloads per month.  Starting on the left, with January 2010, we show downloads per month every three months, until we reach October 2011.  In October 2011, we estimate over 2.6 billion apps were downloaded.  The number of apps now downloaded is four times greater than this time last year, in October 2010.  With the holiday season under two months away, the 3 billion-mark download per month mark surely will be shattered this December.  Month-over-month, app downloads have been growing at an astounding rate 11.4%.  With app downloads growing swiftly, even faster than the number of apps being made available, let’s now look at app retention.

This chart shows the percent of consumers that continue using an app, since their first use, over 12 months.  At the far left, marked as month “0,” 100% of a consumer cohort begins using an app.  After three months, 24% of them continue using.  After 6 months, this percent shrinks to 14%, and, by 12 months, only 4% are left.   For this analysis, we compiled data from 25 apps downloaded a cumulative 550 million times.

With app downloads increasing month-over-month and app usage not only climbing, but also surpassing web usage, we know that consumers are both discovering and using apps more than ever. And while the industry often talks about discovery as a problem, we think the real problem is traffic acquisition. To understand this, we turn to the web.

Online, website marketers don’t stop marketing after they get a consumer to visit the site only for the first time.  They can get in front of the consumer in various ways again, and spur a return visit by having the consumer click on a link.  Typically, online, a visit starts from an organic search result, but search doesn’t exist for apps the same way, and consumers seem to browse more, especially given touch interfaces.  The closest thing to search in the app world is a consumer browsing the top ranking lists, which represents “popularity” in a similar way to top ranking organic search results.  However, in the app world, top rank lists are more like “paid search” since heavy advertising is what typically launches an app to rank high, at least for a while. 

Further, always trying to rank high, as a tactic, is not only untargeted and expensive, but also suffers from diminishing returns.   First, the bar required to make the top 25 keeps rising, as the installed base of consumers grows and more apps compete for a fixed number of top spots.  Regarding diminishing returns, an app can only appeal to first-time-users each time it ranks.  It’s a pure first-time acquisition tool.  App users don’t re-launch apps when seeing them in the top rankings.  They need to go to their app icon and launch from there.  So as an app’s installed based grows over months, even years, the relative number of incremental users that can be added from ranking in the charts continues becomes relatively smaller.  In other words, over time, an app is better off targeting its much larger installed base of users to increase usage.  This is the equivalent of traffic acquisition. 

The key challenge is that developers lack the tools to bring traffic back to their app, post-download.  And, therefore, the industry has a traffic acquisition problem, not a discovery problem.  Only when compelling ways of connecting with existing app users are established, that allow the easy re-launch of an app, can app makers address retention through marketing, and fully control their own traffic acquisition.

Genevieve Bell, director of interaction and experience research at Intel Corporation, says when she approaches technology she is "less interested in thinking about the piece of technology itself and more interested in the kind of work that technology is trying to do and the larger context in which it finds itself."

In the following interview, Bell discusses her experience as a "Thinker in Residence" and how anthropology concepts can be used to make tech more consumer centric.

You were an Adelaide "Thinker in Residence" for South Australia. What does that involve?

Genevieve Bell: The South Australian government over the last seven years has invested in a program to bring preeminent thinkers from around the world to tackle the problems of the future of the state. I was the first Australian, which was very odd. But over the years, they've brought people to Australia to think about things like water security, supply chain management, juvenile justice, homelessness, urban planning, public transportation systems, and early childhood development. The government has implemented recommendations from those thinkers that have ranged from changing how they do supply chain management to introducing childhood development learning centers in schools.

My task was to help think about what was going to be the role of information and communication and entertainment technologies in the future of South Australia and, indeed, Australia more broadly. It ended up happening that this project took place against the backdrop of a much larger national debate about the role of broadband. The project had an interesting focus on looking at what the barriers to adoption and the drivers to high-speed broadband were going to be in South Australia.

In order to come up with some sort of solid recommendations in that space, I chose to do something quite unusual for this project and in this program — I went and did fieldwork. I spent about two months traveling in South Australia. I think I logged about 12,500 kilometers by the time I was done — I went through two state fleet vehicles; they'll never forgive me for that. I talked to people in about 45 different communities that ran the gamut from remote aboriginal communities to urban centers. It gave me a sense of what made South Australians tick, and it helped me find out what they care about. I also did a piece of ethnographic research with the government itself to work out how the government functions and how it thinks about things.

For me, it was really about trying to think through this question: If you were in government, what would you do — what would you need to do — to make the state a good place for broadband to happen? It wasn't just about getting households connected. It was about capacity building, both in the citizenry and in the state. I asked people to participate in our website with me — send me pictures of the technological stuff in their lives, tell me about it and I would respond to that. We also did a massive postcard drive — I knew I couldn't ask everyone to get online and talk to me, so we distributed free postcards and asked people to mail them back. We generated a whole lot of postcards as a result of that.

The report is available online for download from the SA Stories site and from the Thinker's website. The government is in the process of inducting — and has already inducted — some of the recommendations and it's debating the others. It was actually a really inspiring, exciting process. I was incredibly fortunate that one of the things that Intel lets you do after working there for seven years is to take a sabbatical. Most people, sensibly I would say in retrospect, choose to spend that as down time. I seem pathologically incapable of having downtime, so I decided I'd go to work for someone else in that period. Intel actually was very kind about letting me go and do that and giving me the space to have a different moment of intellectual work. And I did, in fact, come back to Intel very differently energized as a result of it.

What parts of your anthropology background do you find particularly applicable to technology issues and solutions?

Genevieve Bell: As an anthropologist, one of the things that's really useful is that we're trained to think at a systems level. We're trained to think about things holistically. When it comes to me approaching technology, that means I'm less interested in thinking about the piece of technology itself and more interested in the kind of work that technology is trying to do and the larger context in which it finds itself. And for me, it's always about being able to ask this larger set of questions.

I'm really interested in getting at the critical distinction between what people say they're doing and what they're actually doing. A lot of technology development is really focused on what we think people should do or what we imagine they're doing or what they tell us they're doing. The reality is often something completely different.

What techniques do you use to get at that reality?

Genevieve Bell: The first principle is fieldwork. I'm a big believer in actually going to the places where technology is being produced and consumed, and spending time with people in their lives to get a sense of what they care about. For me, that means you have to be able to ask bigger questions about what people value. I'm really interested in seeing what life is actually like, not what we hope it looks like.

How has your team made Intel a more consumer-centric company?

Genevieve Bell: Out of sheer force of will and being stubborn. That's never a good answer, but it is, in fact, one of the answers. I think we've done it partly out of persistence and out of a vision that said we knew that what people wanted could change the way Intel made things.

Before my current job, which I've been in for about a year, I spent five years working in our consumer electronics business. Part of my role there was to transform what had been a quite traditional Intel business into something that was much more consumer centric.

Part of how we drove that kind of different thinking was literally going and spending time with people all over the world in their homes.

We made different decisions about what we built and what we didn't based on the feedback we were getting from consumers, not just customers but consumers. I'm really proud of that work because we actually transformed the way the company — and that piece of the company — thought about itself and what it was doing. When anthropology is done right in business, it can change the way a company thinks about itself and what it values. That's the stuff that endures.

Genevieve Bell discussed the intersection of technology, data, and real-world uses at Web 2.0 Summit 2011. Her full presentation is available in the following video:

This interview was edited and condensed.

Related:

• "Context is Everything," Genevieve Bell's presentation at Where 2.0 2011
• A Critical Choice Regarding Innovation

  Posted by Avi Joseph

++ Click Image to Enlarge ++

Source: The 2011 Google Web Analytics Review Infographic

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While browsing Hotmail Calendar today, something caught our sharp eyes as we noticed some very subtle changes to the Windows Live header. But having seen this before in internal Windows Live testing sites, we immediately realised that the service had recently underwent an upgrade to Wave 5 M2 version (Build 16.2.2907.1020), up from the previous Wave 5 M0 version (Build 16.0.XXXX) we noticed back in June. To see the difference, here’s a comparison of the Wave 5 M0 and M2 headers:

But the important thing here is not about the header change, but more about what this signifies. Based on our experience with previous Windows Live updates, we noticed that before any major upgrade begins across the Windows Live web properties, it usually starts with Hotmail Calendar. Back in June, we first noticed the new Wave 5 M0 header change in Hotmail Calendar on June 7, and only a week later major updates to both Hotmail and SkyDrive began rolling out on June 16 and June 20 respectively. The same held true back in September last year for the Wave 4 web services refresh. This time, we believe it is no coincidence that we’re seeing the new Wave 5 M2 header change to Hotmail Calendar first as a precursor to roll outs of the new Hotmail and SkyDrive too. In fact, we have heard reports from LiveSide readers that the new Hotmail has already started rolling out to selected few accounts, with a bigger rollout scheduled in the “coming weeks”.

To give you a recap of what’s coming next in the Windows Live world, the Wave 5 M2 update is expected to bring us the following new features and improvements:

• Hotmail – custom categories, one-click unsubscribe, schedule sweep, instant actions, flagged email improvements, nested folders with drag and drop, mini-calendar on left pane, and new right-click menu for folders
• SkyDrive – multiple files selection, new right-click options, simplified file share, ability to access the entire hard-drive of Windows Live-connected devices, storage manager, and many new features and improvements
• Messenger – web-based video chat across all Windows Live web properties

Please note that the list of new features above is not exhaustive, as there are certainly new upcoming features that we do not yet know about. But at the same time we cannot guarantee that they will all come as part of the upcoming update, or if they’re coming this year at all. Either way, it is good to see that Microsoft is finally moving away from the large “wave” updates that happens every one-and-a-half years and moving towards a tighter update schedule that brings “a little bit of innovation” every few months. Make sure you stay tuned at LiveSide as we bring you the latest news on Windows Live!

In the past, some search industry observers have suggested that Google has increasingly favored brands in its SERPs.

Supporting the arguments that Google has a brand bias were quotes like those made by Eric Schmidt, Google's now-former CEO, who once stated that the internet was becoming a "cesspool" and that "brands are how you sort out the cesspool".

To be sure, there are logical reasons brands would do well in the SERPs. After all, if you're searching for common products or services, established brands who provide those products and services may be more likely to have websites that deliver what you're looking for.

Assuming that there is a brand bias in search (to some extent or another), should brands be treated favorably in the realm of social media?

According to an analysis of data provided by Facebook analytics firm EdgeRank Checker, it may be happening.

It collected data around impressions, likes and comments following Facebook's implementation of the hybrid news feed, and an analysis of this data by Inside Facebook found that Facebook Pages with high numbers of fans (above 10,000), which are typically owned by larger brands, benefited the most:

...the changes have aided popular Pages but hindered unpopular Pages. For Pages of different sizes, here is the average change in the volume of Likes and comments per post:

• Over 100,000 Fans – Up 27.8%
• 10,000 – 100,000 Fans – Up 8.76%
• 5,000 – 10,000 Fans – Up 3.96%
• 1,000 – 5,000 Fans – Up 1.73%
• Less than 1,000 Fans – Down 11.64%

Smaller, local businesses are logically more likely to have fewer fans, so the net-net is that

Fledgling brands and local businesses that only appeal to a limited audience may find they’re receiving fewer impressions and engagement. This reduces return on their Facebook marketing investment and make their posts less likely to be reshared, a core way of organically growing their fan counts.

These conclusions are, of course, all theory at this point. But the data does hint that going forward the social mediaverse may more closely mirror the mediaverse in general, where it's far easier to get attention when you already have lots of it.

That doesn't mean that smaller brands can't compete or build engagement, but small and local businesses may find that going 'viral' on Facebook isn't much easier than making the front page of the Wall Street Journal, contrary to what some of them have been led to believe.

We love living digital. We love being online. We love taking our mobiles with us. Anywhere, anytime, any place. However, sometimes people might make fools of us, out of our new digital reality.

In the summer the English National Opera picked up the social networking habits of Twitter and Facebook and created a great commercial that promoted their latest act, transfering our online attitudes to offline. As we all tend to pretend to be friends these days, we sometimes might loose our focus and just make our world seem to be “friendly” and “social”.

And friendly does not mean to make shopping online be easy. Many customer where I have been speaking and doing some consulting business, forget to find out and regularly double-check where their customers are “checking out”. A trend that with Google Analytics picked up with a lovely commercial that illustrates how difficult online shopping might be in the real world. Just think about the annoying digital experiences you have had in the last years, and then transfer them into our offline world. That’s what Google has done.

And it was only a loaf of bread he wanted to buy. It made me smile… And you?

©2011 The Strategy Web™. All Rights Reserved.

• Webstrategie 2009 – Budgetierung und Social Media
• UK: Internet users love browsing social media – less shopping
• Top-Banken nähern sich Social Web langsam
• Top IT Consultants: What is your Twitter strategy?
• The way to the real-time future of marketing mix

  Posted by Avi Joseph

Analyzing the application stores: users, apps, growth, and more

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As the uprising in Syria, one of the last and most brutal of the Arab Spring movement, continues unabated, a US firm specialising in internet censorship equipment has confirmed that web censorship tools sold to Iraq have now been traced to the Syrian regime. Any sale of such equipment to the oppressive Syrian regime is [...]

3 key points you need to know about Facebook Timeline, gleaned from two previous "lifestreaming" products: FriendFeed and Memolane.

Facebook's new Timeline, currently in a limited developer release but set to be unveiled to its hundreds of millions of users any day now, is going to shake up the social networking landscape. It's going to bring lifestreaming - formally a geeky activity based around RSS feeds - to the mainstream. In my view, Timeline is the smartest and most significant thing Facebook has done since launching a developer platform in May 2007. I think it's that important.

So where did the inspiration for Timeline come from and why is it going to be such a big deal? We can see the future just by looking at two earlier lifestreaming products: FriendFeed and scrappy start Memolane.

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Steve Jobs once famously said, quoting Picasso, that "good artists copy, great artists steal." Sure enough, as with most game-changing things on the Web, Timeline is not an original invention by Facebook. Although Timeline wasn't directly stolen from anyone, it was clearly influenced by FriendFeed and Memolane.

One of the strongest inspirations for Timeline came from within Facebook itself, in the form of a startup it acquired in August 2009: FriendFeed. Co-founded by Bret Taylor, who is now Facebook's Chief Technology Officer, FriendFeed was a social media aggregator that was much beloved by Web geeks.

FriendFeed was always far too geeky for mainstream users, however to his great credit Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spotted its potential. At the time Zuckerberg called FriendFeed "a simple and elegant service for people to share information." (emphasis ours) Well, two years later and it just so happens that sharing information is a key reason why Facebook is introducing Timeline.

Yes, Facebook's Timeline is ostensibly focused on an individual's personal history - kind of like an online diary. But that's really just a front for the real purpose of Timeline: to expose your entire content history to your friends and public subscribers.

It's not just the sharing that's key, it's making that content more social. ReadWriteWeb did one of the earliest interviews with FriendFeed's founders, Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit, in February 2008. Something that Buchheit (who in the past had created Gmail for Google) said back then is more relevant than ever today, with Facebook's Timeline. Buchheit said that FriendFeed was "trying to go beyond simply aggregating to actually creating a pleasant social experience around the content." (emphasis ours)

So that's key point number 2 about Timeline: Facebook expects to make that content more social. That goal is supported by other Facebook initiatives this year, such as the real-time updates ticker and automated sharing from apps like Spotify and Washington Post.

Let's move now to a startup that wasn't acquired by Facebook, but which earlier this year launched a timeline service that is very close to what Facebook introduced later in the year. That startup's name is Memolane and we gave it a favorable review in January.

After Facebook announced its Timeline, Memolane CEO Eric Lagier tried to differentiate his service as a "Timeline of Your Life (more than just your Facebook posts)." Regardless of how Memolane is different from Facebook Timeline, he hit the nail on the head with his point that "time is the perfect tool to organize social media."

That's key point number 3 about Facebook Timeline: it organizes a lot of your social media activity, at least that which occurs on Facebook or on its third party partners like Spotify.

Incidentally, you have to feel for Memolane. An 800-pound gorilla just sat squarely on its little niche of the Web. Memoland is rather ominously "down for maintenance" as I write this, although its Twitter account reassures us that it is "preparing for some exciting things coming your way" this Tuesday. Here's hoping Memolane innovates itself into an exciting new direction with the timeline concept, because of course we love scrappy startups here at RWW.

Lifestreaming is Going Mainstream

There were many other products that Facebook probably took inspiration from for Timeline. Nokia Lifeblog and Six Apart's Vox are two that come to mind (to see how times have changed, read our mid-2006 analysis comparing Vox with Facebook). But the key points are clear from FriendFeed and Memolane:

1. Timeline is all about sharing personal content.
2. Timeline is also about making that personal content much more social than it is on your old Facebook profiles.
3. That's because a timeline is a highly effective way to organize social media content (making it easier to like, comment on and re-share).

The over-riding lesson from Facebook Timeline is that lifestreaming is going mainstream. At the beginning of this year, digital design consultancy Fjord predicted this would happen: "in 2011 we will see increasing numbers of people uploading aspects of their life to the cloud. They'll be able to combine this across multiple online services, generating meaning from data already online."

Of course Fjord wasn't to know that Facebook would implement Timeline and effectively position itself as the center of a huge trend. Which is what Facebook Timeline has done and why Facebook - and lifestreaming - is going to be very big.