wheresitworking?

Happy Holidays: from Google, but for Facebook

Happy Holidays everyone. I just wanted to extend a quick holiday greeting.  I’m going to borrow the holiday greeting image from Google Analytics, because I like it so much. It is from Google Analytics’ Happy Holidays post to everyone.

Biggest takeaway from the 2009 holiday season? For me it is the fact that according to Hitwise, Facebook was the number one most visited site on the web on Christmas day. Phenomenal when you take into account the incident in Detroit, which presumably drove loads of traffic to Google and the major news sites.

What does Facebook’s dominance mean? Well, nothing that we didn’t know already, but perhaps a slap in the face for some media providers, that rather than focusing on your own sites, maybe looking for creative ways to integrate into your audience member’s Facebook visits is where the focus should be.

Just some food for thought; I’d gladly write a longer post but we’re scrambling to finish up year-end activities at SwellPath before the first monthly reporting session of the new year hits. Enjoy the rest of 2009 everyone and best wishes for a wonderfully successful 2010.

Tags: Christmas web traffic, Facebook, Google Analytics

Geolocation Coming to Facebook?

It’s funny to look back on this post I wrote just 8 months ago, about location based social networks and Google’s launch of Latitude. I didn’t even mention Loopt in the post, though at one point during late spring through summer Loopt looked poised to be a leader in the space.

But a fickle bunch we social networkers are. During summer, foursquare became the hottest way to tell your friends that you were having lunch somewhere. At least among the more geeky, or trendy, or connected, people I follow and communicate with. Meanwhile, Twitter has just rolled out geolocation through their API.

Jason Kincaid wrote a great post yesterday on how Facebook is poised to rollout and dominate geolocation. While I agree with him for the most part, it is hard to consider what will become of Loopt, foursquare, Gowalla (another up-and-comer with seemingly significant momentum), Brightkite (relative old-timer in the space), or the other networks that have sprung up and have some traction. Will their users abandon them for the major networks, or will they be acquired by the bigger players for their customer user bases and individually unique features? Obviously it will be a combination of these things, but I’m guessing a lot more of the former than the latter.

One final thought: what is Google doing with Latitude? Definitely not sitting still; just recently geohistory and some other new Latitude features were pushed out. Seems like with Google’s massive penetration in the mobile phone space, and their recent push of Google Profiles and various other networking components, they are an impending giant in this space.

Tags: brightkite, foursquare, geohistory, Google Latitude, Loopt

Mash Twitter Search with Google to See the Real Value

Having trouble seeing the value in Twitter search? Seems like many people are. Many people being those who don’t use Twitter, yet. Twitter comes up in conversations with everyone lately, and often the subject turns to how Twitter will monetize. I keep up on this topic (seemingly through osmosis), so I generally will throw out the rumored monetization strategies that have been blogged about. That’s when many people will ask me to explain the value in Twitter search. I tell them to mash it up with Google using the awesome Greasemonkey script from MT Hacks, and see for themselves.

When this script was released, I installed it immediately and kind of forgot about it. All that day, I’d run a Google search, and be surprised when I saw the Twitter results pop up.

Then it happened: I started viewing those results and clicking through to Tweets, shortened URLs, and peoples’ Twitter profiles – instead of clicking on the Google results.

The “ah-ha” moment had happened for me: there really is value in real-time search. Or so I thought.

I will admit that the results have become a bit, “different” for many types of searches in the last few months. There is plenty of spam, or whatever you want to call it, for certain keywords. And there is plenty of garbage for some high-profile terms, but I still use it several times during the day.

Check it out, and if you still don’t see the value in the real-time data that Twitter has “aggregated” for us to search, please let me know why?

Tags: Google, Grease Monkey scripts, real-time search, Twitter search

Diigo Bookmarks Better

Recently we had to find a bookmarking application for everyone to collaboratively use at SwellPath.  We wanted a “mind share” for all of us to be able to put bookmarked articles and whatnot into.  We wanted to be able to keep some bookmarks private, but most public so our clients, partners and friends could benefit from them also.  I use delicious so I wasn’t really into using it for this, because switching back and forth between identities is not really feasible.  I would have had to give up being logged into my wheresitworking account to switch to this new identity for SwellPath.  If ma.gnolia still functioned, it probably would have been the solution, but it isn’t functioning.

I hunted around a bit, and played around with many of the bookmarking apps I’ve tried out in the past.  Nothing really seemed to work for what we wanted, until I revisted Furl.  Furl had a message about how it had been bought and was being rolled into Diigo.  Obviously this gave me some confidence in Diigo’s ability to survive in this somewhat crowded space, so I decided to give it a serious try.  I was very satisfied.

Diigo allows you to do everything you can basically do on delicious: bookmark, tag, friend others, search, etc.  However, there are some additional features that I feel make Diigo really nice to use.  Here are my thoughts after a few days of use:

• You can organize your bookmarks into lists.  Seems redundant with tags right?  But it really isn’t: lists allow you to group your bookmarks into larger buckets that can be quickly glanced at.
• Diigo has groups.  Not necessarily a feature we were looking for, but it shows an intent to organize the social aspect of bookmarking a little more than most other bookmarking sites do.
• Highlighting, commenting, and “sticky notes” as you add a bookmark.  Added content that you customize and associate with your bookmark.  User-generated content beyond just the bookmark and basic info.
• The interface is clean, yet incorporates the lists, groups, and other additional features.  It feels easier to navigate and work with than delicious; most of this sentiment is valid, but some of it may be because I’m so used to delicious, and Diigo is something different.

Overall, I’d definitely suggest checking out Diigo, even if you’re a hardcore delicious (or other bookmarking app) user.  If you do, friend SwellPath.

Tags: applications, communities, social networks

Google Finds Location Based Social Networking (LBS)

About 6 weeks ago Google launched Latitude, a location based social networking (LBS, though apparently that can stand for “location based service” also) application (even if Google refers to it as something else).  I’ve been paying close attention to this space, even though I’m not the most active participant, for several reasons.  One being the growth of local Portland startup Shizzow.  The space is filling up with a variety of competitors, so it was interesting and a bit disappointing to see Google jump into the fray.   No one wants to see Google jump in and knock out a bunch of these companies just because of their available resources and massive user base.  Nonetheless, companies like Shizzow still have a chance to thrive, if they choose their partners wisely and keep their users happy.

Location based social networking applications generally all work the same: I am somewhere, and I either decide to let others in the network know where I am, or they can automatically see where I am on a map.  This is generally done from a smartphone, but not exclusively.  I won’t waste a lot of time discussing privacy concerns; obviously some of us don’t want people to know where we are at all times, so there are generally “opt-out” or “turn off” options with the applications that just show all your connections where you are on a map (like Latitude does).  Shizzow doesn’t have this type of mapping capability; and it may or may not be in development, but it seems to be a necessity for survival in this space.

It probably goes without saying that many of these applications integrate with your Twitter account, so that you don’t need to double your efforts to announce to your Tweeps where you’re at.  Likewise, photographs are integrated into some apps.  Brightkite may be the biggest player in the space, and functions like a Twitter, with location, and the ability to put a picture in your update.

I have few hunches about who is going to end up the dominate player in this space.  One of them being: whoever partners with Yelp is going to have a significant advantage.  Another being: whoever Facebook buys will probably have a bigger advantage.  Now, I realize there are a lot of assumptions there, but it seems like Shizzow and Yelp are a natural fit, and it seems like Facebook could pick someone up and have a much easier path to critical mass. Regardless, this will be an interesting space to watch in the next year or so.

Tags: brightkite, Facebook, mobile phones, shizzow, Twitter, yelp