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Recovering From The Weaponization of Social Media

November 13 2022 // Rant + Social Media + Technology // 2 Comments

Earlier this year Jon Henshaw gushed over federated social. I didn’t quite get it but I managed to create a Mastodon account, which I summarily abandoned until Elon Musk purchased Twitter.

The purchase pushed me to figure out Mastodon (not as hard as you might think) and led me to realize what I’d been missing and just how corrosive current social networks had become. I’ve concluded that today’s social media is a bad batch of Soma made from Soylent Green.

Social Media

Disappointed Basketball Fan Meme

I’d usually start out with a definition to help ground the discussion. But there isn’t a canonical definition of social media from what I can tell.

There’s this definition of social media from dictionary.com.

websites and other online means of communication that are used by large groups of people to share information and to develop social and professional contacts

Then there’s Wikipedia’s definition.

interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks.

Mind you, they’re not that dissimilar. But the first doesn’t include creation of content and the second doesn’t mention the development of contacts. In the end, I find Wikipedia’s definition to be more descriptive of today’s social media environment.

I see more and more people creating content on Twitter and LinkedIn. Twitter incentivizes this by enforcing a character limit. Yeah, yeah, you can create threads but that’s an outlier. And all of the platforms work very hard to keep the conversation about any content on their platform.

Did we just acquiesce to the idea of digital sharecropping? Do we even think about this anymore? Bueller. Bueller. Bueller.

I also don’t see most of these platforms as helping to develop contacts. They help develop a following or a fan base. You are not developing Hank Green as a contact when you follow him on Twitter. You are really not connecting with him either.

Sure, LinkedIn still pushes folks to develop contacts. But I can’t be the only one who’s had a conversation go as follows:

Them: I see you’re connected to so-and-so, how do you know them?

Me: Who?

Them: so-and-so

Me: *typing name into LinkedIn search and seeing we are, indeed, connected*

Also Me: *I have no recollection of this person*

Both of these definitions make social media seem like a utopian exchange of ideas. The vaunted town square! Does this jibe with what you encounter everyday? Or are you instead served up influencer content with a side helping of targeted ads based on your behavior?

Algorithms and Influencers

I'm Special

I still believe that Dunbar had it right, and that the number of social relationships one can maintain is not that high. Technology might be able to extend the number past 150. But it certainly doesn’t reach 1.4 million.

Follower and following numbers are meaningful only to the algorithm, allowing it to understand who might provoke a reaction and, thereby, create monetary value. This is why we have influencers. Because social media isn’t really about being social anymore. It’s about people.

Sure they needed content to get there but more and more of these platforms want you to create that content on the platform – whether that’s Twitter, Instagram or TikTok. From there the only way to profit from that system is to amass a large enough following.

Algorithms create a competitive incentive to produce content so users can appear in topics that produce monetizable engagement. It’s a lot like going to the casino. Most people lose. A few (influencers) win. But the house (platform) always benefits.

This still wouldn’t be a problem if the content that produced engagement wasn’t, for lack of a better word, toxic.

Twitter

This is Fine Meme but with Twitter Bird instead of Dog

Let me say up front that Twitter was very good to me when I was building my brand. But it was a different time and if I were to build a brand today I think I’d lean on LinkedIn more so than Twitter.

I started to use Twitter a lot less three to four years ago. Even during the pandemic my usage stayed about the same. Part of this was because of the way I used Twitter in the first place. I used it for business because I always found Twitter to be more akin to a megaphone. It didn’t really encourage conversation. But it sure helped to get your brand out to more people!

So I cultivated a presence that was about sharing the best of what I saw in my industry. I may not have made a lot of friends during that time. I frequently ignored requests to Tweet posts from colleagues. I was a content snob. But I think that made what I did share that much more valuable.

I found less and less to share over time. Granted, I had less time to read, but what I did read was, to put it nicely, not inspiring. So my Tweets ground down to a trickle. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t lurking.

I didn’t lurk in my industry. I find SEO squabbles to be unimaginative and dull. Instead I’d look in at the trends, particularly during these tumultuous times. Man is that bad for your health.

I’d see Scott Baio trending and I’d click to see what the fuss was all about. Of course he’d said something stupid. And I’d see few zingers confirming my viewpoint. But then I’d see others defending him and, in today’s parlance, I was triggered.

Someone is wrong on the Internet

Comic from XKCD

This statement is essentially the raison d’etre of Twitter. They create a feedback loop of tribalism.

Twitter became a place to be performative. What witticism or burn could rack up the most Retweets? Twitter became social for sport.

All social media companies are piggybacking on the human desire to connect. Star Trek: Discovery explores this theme endlessly and poorly. (I mean, honestly, you’d be in the hospital with alcohol poisoning if you drank every time they mentioned ‘connection’.) But being on Mastodon, I realize that I forgot how satisfying it is to forge those new connections.

Facebook is no angel either. You can clearly go down the same rabbit hole there than you can on Twitter. But for me Facebook is rather tame because I use it largely to keep up with family, old classmates and to see heartwarming The Dodo videos. But again, that’s only because I’ve been aggressive in not engaging elsewhere in that ecosystem.

I may post an update about the current state of things or comment on a political thread now and then. But I generously block people. In fact, it’s gotten to the point where I don’t engage in those posts anymore but simply go and block the people arguing in them instead.

There are other, more subtle dangers surrounding Facebook. I believe that maintaining these connections from the past often hold us back from moving forward. I am not the same person I was in high school. I’m not the same person I was in college. Not the same person I was even a year ago. Yet Facebook encourages us to continue to interact with the cohort of people we knew in these eras.

I’m not saying you might not have lifelong friends that you keep up with. I’m an introvert so I likely have fewer of them than some of you. But how many different careers have you had? I’ve been in advertising, fundraising and marketing. Should I still be trying to engage and keep up with colleagues in each of these careers?

I wonder whether Facebook has stunted the growth of people by having them continuously looking backward instead of forging ahead.

Mastodon

This is Fine Mastodon

I won’t go into the details of federated social and how Mastodon is structured. Instead, I want to talk about what it feels like and what it inspires. Using Mastodon is like going back to the early days of social.

I was a big fan of FriendFeed, a social platform that most of you probably didn’t use or have even heard of before now. It was similar to Mastodon in that it had a diverse set of people from all walks of life. And from what I recall it didn’t really have an algorithm to present content. Instead it was up to you to follow the people who would help bring good stuff into your feed.

I liked FriendFeed so much that I ventured out to meet the team on the Peninsula during one of their events. That was a huge step for this introvert. I felt super-awkward at that event but it was interesting to meet and chat (or witness them chatting) with Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor.

But here’s the thing. FriendFeed went the way of the Dodo bird and it’s not lost on me that Bret Taylor wound up at Facebook and, ultimately, on Twitter’s board.

The only other social platform that felt similar was Google+. Once again, that platform worked primarily based on the quality of those you followed. I didn’t need to follow everyone in the SEO community. I just needed to follow those that would share the important posts they found.

What both of those platforms had in common, in my view, was that users were in charge of configuring their own ‘algorithm’. Who you followed shaped your feed. So following became less about being nice and doling out a pellet of ego to others than to simply enhance your own feed.

Who you followed was a very selfish endeavor. It was about me, and what I saw because of them.

Configuration and Ego

Configuration can be confusing

Two things spring from this different dynamic. First is that adding configuration to any platform is going to make it more difficult. I’ll call it like I see it, Mastodon is more difficult. It’s easier to let an algorithm learn what you like and return relevant content based on your explicit and implicit tastes.

The second is that without an algorithm surfacing content, the number of people you follow will likely, and should, shrink. Mastodon is more about the content people share rather than the people who share it.

Lately I’ve seen the idea that the ‘users are the product’ on social media platforms. And that works when they’re all competing to be the chosen one to be featured by the algorithm. But I see great content on Mastodon by following a user who has, at the time of writing, 114 followers. It is meaningless how many people follow them. I follow them because they put interesting content into my feed. If they stop doing so I’ll probably unfollow them.

Will enough people be willing to configure their feed without an ego based algorithm fueling competition? The only platform that comes close is Reddit. In many ways you can think of subreddits as an analog to a Mastodon server/instance with the home feed aggregating those instances.

Reddit is still working to monetize their ecosystem. Oddly, there’s a cottage industry out there that takes Reddit threads and turns them into articles that can be monetized. It’s annoying for Reddit at the corporate level but potentially a solid signal for the community.

I say this because it means that the discussions on Reddit are happening not because it will produce monetizable engagement but despite it.

The bigger problem with Mastodon is the lack of ego. Don’t get me wrong, some of it will always exist in one form or another. We’re only human. But it is a content first universe with no real rewards for popularity.

In fact, to get geeky, popularity could produce some problems given the way Mastodon and federated social works. A person with a large following could tax smaller servers since both sides need to retrieve that content. For that reason, there’s already an admonishment to not upload video.

But I digress. We’ve become inured to social media that rewards tribal content from influencers. We celebrate when we pass a milestone for number of followers or subscribers. I’m not saying I’m immune to those things. It feels good to be … validated. But I’m always on guard to be sure I don’t produce or share content to reach those metrics.

But it might be harder for others to let go of those vanity metrics. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy. I’m saying it’s going to be worth it.

Serendipity

One Thing Leads to Another by The Fixx

If you can, I think you’ll find that Mastodon is more positive, more diverse and produces more real interaction. I won’t say it’s the best place to have a full-blown conversation yet. It might never be.

Instead it’s like having an interesting talk with a stranger you meet on an airplane. You might not keep in touch but you walk away feeling positive and amazed by the world we live in and how different but alike we all are at the same time.

Instead of being force fed content about Kanye, Kate Middleton or Kyrsten Sinema I find information about CRISPR advances, a fascinating story about the Battle of Midway and an amazing painting of an octopus on the underside of a hotel table.

These things make me happy and also help me make disparate connections with other things in my life and work. Serendipity is a feature and not a bug.

TL;DR

Social Media doesn’t have to be dictated by algorithms that reward influencers who produce divisive and monetizable content. But alternatives like Mastodon that are more about the content people share than the people who share it will require more work by users both technically and personally.

Rich Results Test Bookmarklets

July 12 2020 // SEO + Technology // 6 Comments

Last week Google announced that it was going to deprecate the Structured Data Testing Tool in lieu of the newer Rich Results Test.

Structured Data Testing Tool Shut Down Notice

I use the Structured Data Testing Tool daily to validate structured data on client sites and frequently play with a blob of JSON-LD until I get just the right nesting.

Because of that I long ago developed a Structured Data Testing Tool bookmarklet. I mean, who has time to copy a URL, go to another tab and paste that URL into the tool and hit enter?

No Time For That

With the bookmarklet all I have to do is click the bookmark and it launches the tool in a separate tab for the page I’m currently viewing. I know it seems like a small thing. But in my experience, small things add up quickly. Or you can just listen to Martin Gore.

Rich Results Test Bookmarklets

So the other day I dusted off my limited JavaScript skills and created two new bookmarklets that do the same thing but for the Rich Results Test for Googlebot Smartphone and Googlebot Desktop.

Rich Results Test – Mobile

Rich Results Test – Desktop

Drag the highlighted links above to your bookmarks bar. Then click the bookmark whenever you want to test a specific page. It will create a new tab with the Rich Results Test … results.

So if I’m on this page and I click the Rich Results Test – Mobile bookmark it opens a tab and performs the Rich Results Test for that page.

Rich Results Test Results Example

I’m guessing there are a number of these bookmarklets floating around out there. But if you don’t have one yet, these can help streamline your structured data validation work.

I hope you find this helpful. Please report any incompatibility issues or bugs you might find with my bookmarklet code.

The Future of Mobile Search

August 29 2016 // SEO + Technology + Web Design // 17 Comments

What if I told you that the future of mobile search was swiping.

Google Mobile Search Tinderized

I don’t mean that there will be a few carousels of content. Instead I mean that all of the content will be displayed in a horizontal swiping interface. You wouldn’t click on a search result, you’d simply swipe from one result to the next.

This might sound farfetched but there’s growing evidence this might be Google’s end game. The Tinderization of mobile search could be right around the corner.

Horizontal Interface

Google has been playing with horizontal interfaces on mobile search for some time now. You can find it under certain Twitter profiles.

Google Twitter Carousel

There’s one for videos.

Google Video Carousel

And another for recipes.

Google Recipe Carousel

There are plenty of other examples. But the most important one is the one for AMP.

Google AMP Carousel

The reason the AMP example is so important is that AMP is no longer going to be served just in a carousel but will be available to any organic search result.

But you have to wonder how Google will deliver this type of AMP carousel interface with AMP content sprinkled throughout the results. (They already reference the interface as the ‘AMP viewer’.)

What if you could simply swipe between AMP results? The current interface lets you do this already.

Google AMP Swipe Interface

Once AMP is sprinkled all through the results wouldn’t it be easier to swipe between AMP results once you were in that environment? They already have the dots navigation element to indicate where you are in the order of results.

I know, I know, you’re thinking about how bad this could be for non-AMP content but let me tell you a secret. Users won’t care and neither will Google.

User experience trumps publisher whining every single time.

In the end, instead of creating a carousel for the links, Google can create a carousel for the content itself.

AMP

Accelerated Mobile Pages Project

For those of you who aren’t hip to acronyms, AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. It’s an initiative by Google to create near instantaneous availability of content on mobile.

The way they accomplish this is by having publishers create very lightweight pages and then cacheing them on Google servers. So when you click on one of those AMP results you’re essentially getting the cached version of the page direct from Google.

The AMP initiative is all about speed. If the mobile web is faster it helps with Google’s (not so) evil plan. It also has an interesting … side effect.

Google could host the mobile Internet.

That’s both amazing and a bit terrifying. When every piece of content in a search result is an AMP page Google can essentially host that mobile result in its entirety.

At first AMP was just for news content but as of today Google is looking to create AMP content for everything including e-commerce. So the idea of an all AMP interface doesn’t seem out of the question.

Swipes Not Clicks

 

Swipes Not Clicks

Why make users click if every search result is an AMP page? Seriously. Think about it.

Google is obsessed with reducing the time to long click, the amount of time it takes to get users to a satisfactory result. What better way to do this than to remove the friction of clicking back and forth to each site.

No more blue links.

Why make users click when you can display that content immediately? Google has it! Then users can simply swipe to the next result, and the next, and the next and the next. They can even go back and forth in this way until they find a result they wish to delve into further.

Swiping through content would be a radical departure from the traditional search interface but it would be vastly faster and more convenient.

This would work with the numerous other elements that bubble information up further in the search process such as Knowledge Panels and Oneboxes. Dr. Pete Meyers showed how some of these ‘cards’ could fit together. But the cards would work equally as well in a swiping environment.

How much better would it be to search for a product and swipe through the offerings of those appearing in search results?

New Metrics of Success

Turn It On Its Head

If this is where the mobile web is headed then the game will completely change. Success won’t be tied nearly as much to rank. When you remove the friction of clicking the number of ‘views’ each result gets will be much higher.

The normal top heavy click distribution will disappear to be replaced with a more even ‘view’ distribution of the top 3-5 results. I’m assuming most users will swipe at least three times if not more but that there will be a severe drop off after that.

When a user swipes to your result you’ll still get credit for a visit by implementing Google Analytics or another analytics package correctly. But users aren’t really on your site at that point. It’s only when they click through on that AMP result that they wind up in your mobile web environment.

So the new metric for mobile search success might be getting users to stop on your result and, optimally, click-through to your site. That’s right, engagement could be the most important metric. Doesn’t that essentially create alignment between users, Google and publishers?

Funny thing is, Google just launched the ability to do A/B testing for AMP pages. They’re already thinking about how important it’s going to be to help publishers optimize for engagement.

Hype or Reality?

Is this real or is this fantasy?

Google, as a mobile first company, is pushing hard to reduce the distance between search and information. I don’t think this is a controversial statement. The question is how far Google is willing to go to shorten that distance.

I’m putting a bunch of pieces together here, from horizontal interfaces, to AMP to Google’s obsession with speed to come up with this forward looking vision of mobile search.

I think it’s in the realm of possibility, particularly since the growth areas for Google are in countries outside of the US where mobile is vastly more dominant and where speed can sometimes be a challenge.

TL;DR

When every search result is an AMP page there’s little reason for users to click on a result to see that content. Should Google’s AMP project succeed, the future of mobile search could very well be swiping through content and the death of the blue link.

The Preference Bubble

December 11 2014 // Advertising + Marketing + Social Media + Technology // 19 Comments

A couple of mornings each week I drive down to my local Peet’s for some coffee. There’s a barista there named Courtney who is referred to by her co-workers as the Michael Jordan of baristas. Why? She can remember the names and orders for a vast number of customers.

“Both today AJ?” she asks me as I walk over to the counter.

“Yes, thank you,” I reply and with that I’ve ordered a extra hot 2% medium latte and a non-fat flat large latte.

This is a comforting experience. It’s a bit like the TV show Cheers.

Yet online we seem to think of this experience as something akin to having your foot eaten by a marmot. The person knows my name and what I usually buy? Something must be done! Courtney shouldn’t know any of that. Where’s my Men In Black pen so I can zap away any memory that this event ever occurred.

Men In Black Memory Erasing Pen

Courtney actually knows quite a bit about me. From that drink order she knows I’m ordering for another person. In rare instances she’s seen this other person – my wife. Courtney used to work at another Peet’s years ago that we frequented before we bought our house. So she knows we have a daughter.

The reason Courtney asks whether I want both is because about one out of every ten times or so I’m just getting something for myself. I’m driving off somewhere for a client meeting and not ferrying caffeine goodness back home.

Online some might suggest that it’s dangerous that I’m being presented with the same thing I usually get. I’m in a filter bubble that might perpetuate and reinforce my current life patterns and create a type of stunted stasis where I don’t experience new things. But here’s how this works.

“No, I’m going off the board today Courtney,” I reply. “I’ll take a medium cappuccino today.”

Just like that the supposedly dangerous filter bubble is popped. Of course it’s a bit more nuanced when we talk about it online but as our online and offline experiences become more similar this is an important reference point.

The Filter Bubble

The Filter Bubble

What is the Filter Bubble exactly? Eli Pariser coined the phrase to describe the way personalization and other online filters create a bubble of homogenous content that can have unforeseen and dire consequences in his book, aptly called The Filter Bubble.

The zenith of this personalization phobia was revealed in a remark by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.

I tend to think Mark is right but that’s not what I’m supposed to say. That’s not the ‘right’ thing to say. Yet human behavior just doesn’t work that way.

Similarly, I didn’t want to like The Filter Bubble. And while I disagree with some aspects, and many of the conclusions, I find the book compelling in a lot of ways. Not only that but I genuinely like Eli from an observer point of view. He’s been an activist of causes for which I support and created a framework (twice!) to help get the message out to people about important issues. #badass

My problem is that the filter bubble is increasingly used as a retort of fear, uncertainty and doubt when discussing personalization, marketing and privacy. It’s become a proxy to end discussions about how our personal data can, will and should be used as technology advances. Because despite the dire warnings about the dangers of the filter bubble, I believe there’s potentially more to gain than to lose.

What it requires us to do is to step outside of the echo chamber (see what I did there?) and instead rename this process the preference bubble.

Where Is Information Diversity?

US Geographic Mobility Graphic

Where do we get information from? The Filter Bubble covers the changing way in which information has been delivered to us via newspapers and other mediums. It documents how the Internet was supposed to allow for a flourish of different voices but hasn’t seemed to match that in reality. One can quibble about that outcome but I’d like to back up even further.

Instead of thinking about where we get information from lets consider where we consume that information. How many people in the US live where they were born? According to the 2010 US Census 59% remain in the state in which they were born (pdf) and there is similar evidence from Pew as well.

Not only that but there’s a host of evidence that Americans don’t often travel overseas and that many may never even leave the confines of their own state. The data here is a bit fuzzy but in combination it seems clear that we’re a nation that is largely stuck and rooted.

Most people will reference family and general comfort with surroundings as reasons to stay near where they were born or vacation. But what we’re really talking about is fear and xenophobia in many ways. It’s uncomfortable to experience something new and to challenge yourself with different experiences.

I was fiercely against this for some reason and made it a mission to break out from my northeastern seaboard culture. I moved from Philadelphia to Washington D.C. to San Diego to San Francisco. I also traveled to South America, the South Pacific, numerous countries in Europe and a bevy of different states in the US. I am a different and better person for all of those experiences. Travel and moving opens your eyes to a lot of things.

So when we talk about information diversity I tend to think it may not make much difference what you’re consuming if you’re consuming it in the same location. The same patterns and biases emerge, shepherding you to the common mores of your peers.

Your community shapes how you think about information and what information is important. One only has to take a trip into the central valley of California to hear chatter about water redistribution. I have some sense of the debate but because it’s not in my backyard it barely registers.

Notre Dame Football

Taken to another level, your family is a huge filter for your information consumption. We know that bigotry and other forms of hate are often passed down through family. On a trivial level I’ve passed down my distaste for Notre Dame football to my daughter. She actively roots against them now, just as I do. It’s an odd, somewhat ugly, feeling and I’m perversely glad for it because it makes me mindful of more important biases that could be passed on.

Yet taken to a ridiculous extreme, the filter bubble would tell us that we should forcibly remove people from their families. We should rotate through different families, a crazy version of TV’s Wife Swap, where we get a different perspective on our information as seen through the family filter.

I’d argue that the Internet and even TV has helped reduce geographic bias. Our knowledge of the world now must be bigger then the days around the campfire or those of the town crier or when we only had the town newspaper, one source of radio news and idle chatter at the local diner.

How we analyze and digest information may have changed less (potentially far less) because of geographic filters but even the presence of additional stimuli is bound to have made a difference.

Social Entropy

Social Entropy Revealed

One of the places where The Filter Bubble falls apart is the idea that our preferences will largely remain static because of constant reinforcement.

Instead, we know our preferences change as we grow and evolve. It’s something I refer to as social entropy. You are close to your college friends upon graduating and your interests have been formed largely from what you did during that time. Maybe you were totally into Frisbee Golf.

But you get that first job and then another and it’s in a slightly different vertical and now you’re interested in the slow food movement instead. You’ve connected with new people and have new interests. The old ones fade away and no amount of marketing will change that. Might it extend it? Sure. But only for a defined amount of time. Prior nostalgia can’t compete against current interest. I’ve got a shelf full of baseball cards I never look at to prove it.

The issue here is that there are external forces that will change your preferences despite all efforts to personalize your experience through search and social platforms. Who knew I’d be so interested in Lymphoma until I was diagnosed in October? The idea that we’ll simply continue to consume what we always consume is … specious.

You might love pizza, but you’re going to stop wanting it if you eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day for a month. I know, that’s pure hyperbole. Instead lets talk about babies. (Got to keep you on your toes!) You have one and then suddenly you’re part of a mother’s group, women (and some men) thrown together by the happenstance of conception. For a while these relationships are strong but as your children grow these relationships largely dissolve.

Not only that but you aren’t continuing to watch the dreaded and whiny Caillou when your child is now 8 years old. The filter bubble fails to take into account social entropy.

Serendipity

Balsamic Vinegar and Strawberries! Who knew?

From social entropy we can segue nicely into serendipity. At some point, people crave and want something different. Serendipity is the unexpected appearance of something, often in relation to something else, that creates an epiphany or breakthrough. Balsamic vinegar and strawberries? Oh my god, it’s delicious!

Search Engines (pdf) and information retrieval in general has been interested in serendipity (pdf) for quite some time. Not only in the capacity to encourage creativity but to ensure that a balanced view of a topic is delivered to users. The latter is what raises the hackles of Pariser and others when it comes to search results. The left-leaning political user will get different search results than the right-leaning political user.

This seems to be the cardinal sin since we all aren’t seeing the same thing on the same topic. Now, never mind that seeing the same thing doesn’t mean you’re going to change your behavior or view on that topic. We perceive things very differently. Think about eyewitness statements and how the car the bank robbers drove away in was both a red sports car and a dark SUV. Even when we’re seeing the same thing we’re seeing something different.

But I digress.

Google believes in personalization but they aren’t just trying to tell you what you want to know. Search engines work hard to ensure there is a base level of variety. Amit Singhal has spoken about it numerous times in relation to the filter bubble accusation.

At a 2012 SMX London Keynote Singhal was noted to say the following:

Amit agreed, however, that there should be serendipity. Personalization should not overtake the SERPs, but it should be present.

At a Churchill Club event in 2011 I noted how Ben Gomes spoke about search relevance.

Two humans will agree on relevance only 80% of the time. If you looked at that same result a year later, you may not agree with yourself, let alone someone else. The implication (one I happen to agree with) is that relevance is a moving target.

At the same event AllThingsD reported the following quote from Amit Singhal.

Our algorithms are tremendously balanced to give a mix of what you want and what the world says you should at least know.

Then there’s an April 2012 interview with Amit Singhal on State of Search.

Regarding personalization, our users value serendipity in search as well, so we actually have algorithms in place designed specifically to limit personalization and promote variety in the results page.

There’s a constant evaluation taking place ensuring relevance and delivering what people want. And what they want is personalization but also serendipity or a diverse set of results. Just as we wouldn’t want pizza every day we don’t want the same stuff coming up in search results or our social feeds time and time again.

We burn out and crave something new and if these platforms don’t deliver that they’ll fail. So in some ways the success of search and social should indicate that some level of serendipity is taking place and that wholesale social or interest entropy (perhaps that’s a better term) isn’t causing them to implode.

Human Nature

Human Nature LOLcat

One of the things that Pariser touches on is whether humans aim for more noble endeavors or if we seek out the lowest common denominator. This seems to be what pains Pariser in many ways. That as much as it would be nice if people actively sought out differing opinions and engaged in debate about important topics that they’re more likely to click on the latest headline about Kim Kardashian.

So we’ll be more apt to click on all the crap that comes up in our Facebook feed instead of paying attention to the important stuff. The stuff that matters and can make a difference in the world. The funny thing is he figured out a way to hack that dynamic in many ways with the launch of Upworthy, which leverages that click-bait viral nature but for an agent of good.

To be fair, I worry about this too. I don’t quite understand why people gravitate toward the trivial Why “who wore it better” is at all important. I could care less what Shia LeBeouf is doing with his life. I watch The Soup to keep up with reality TV because I could never actually watch it. And I fail to see why stupid slasher movies that appeal to the base parts of ourselves remain so damn popular. It’s … depressing.

But it’s also human nature.

I guess you could argue, as was argued in A Beautiful Mind, that a “diet of the mind” can make a difference. I think there is truth to that. It’s, oddly, why I continue to read a lot of fiction. But I’m unsure that can be forced on people. Or if it can be, it has to be done in a way that creates a habit.

Simply putting something else in front of a person more often isn’t going to change their mind.

One More Facebook Post Makes A Difference?

That’s not how it works. In fact there’s a lot of evidence that it might do more harm than good. A good deal of my time in the last year has been dedicated to exploring attention and memory. Because getting someone to pay attention and remember is incredibly powerful.

What I’ve realized is that attention and memory all gets tied up in the idea of persuasion. The traditional ways we think about breaking the filter bubble do nothing to help persuade people.

Persuasion

Persuasion?

The fact is that being exposed to other points of view, particularly online, doesn’t aide in persuasion. There’s more and more research that shows that the opposite might be true. Simply putting those opposing views in front of someone doesn’t change human behavior. We still select the opinion that resonates with our personal belief system.

There’s a myriad of academic research as well as huckster like advice on persuasion. So I’m not going to provide tips on persuasion or delve into neuromarketing or behavioral economics. These are, though, all interesting topics. Instead I want to address how popping the filter bubble doesn’t lead to desired results.

One of the major areas of contention is the exposure to opposing political viewpoints on a variety of issues. The theory here is that if I only see the Fox News content I won’t ever have an opportunity to get the opposing point of view and come to a more reasoned decision. The problem? When we engage on these charged topics we don’t reach consensus but instead radicalize our own opinion.

From research referenced in this Mother Jones piece on comment trolls we get this interesting nugget.

The researchers were trying to find out what effect exposure to such rudeness had on public perceptions of nanotech risks. They found that it wasn’t a good one. Rather, it polarized the audience: Those who already thought nanorisks were low tended to become more sure of themselves when exposed to name-calling, while those who thought nanorisks are high were more likely to move in their own favored direction. In other words, it appeared that pushing people’s emotional buttons, through derogatory comments, made them double down on their preexisting beliefs.

Exposure didn’t move people toward the middle, it polarized them instead. This dovetails with additional research that shows that people often don’t want to be right.

Not all false information goes on to become a false belief—that is, a more lasting state of incorrect knowledge—and not all false beliefs are difficult to correct. Take astronomy. If someone asked you to explain the relationship between the Earth and the sun, you might say something wrong: perhaps that the sun rotates around the Earth, rising in the east and setting in the west. A friend who understands astronomy may correct you. It’s no big deal; you simply change your belief.

But imagine living in the time of Galileo, when understandings of the Earth-sun relationship were completely different, and when that view was tied closely to ideas of the nature of the world, the self, and religion. What would happen if Galileo tried to correct your belief? The process isn’t nearly as simple. The crucial difference between then and now, of course, is the importance of the misperception. When there’s no immediate threat to our understanding of the world, we change our beliefs. It’s when that change contradicts something we’ve long held as important that problems occur.

The piece (which is just brilliant) goes on to underscore the problem.

In those scenarios, attempts at correction can indeed be tricky. In a study from 2013, Kelly Garrett and Brian Weeks looked to see if political misinformation—specifically, details about who is and is not allowed to access your electronic health records—that was corrected immediately would be any less resilient than information that was allowed to go uncontested for a while. At first, it appeared as though the correction did cause some people to change their false beliefs. But, when the researchers took a closer look, they found that the only people who had changed their views were those who were ideologically predisposed to disbelieve the fact in question. If someone held a contrary attitude, the correction not only didn’t work—it made the subject more distrustful of the source. A climate-change study from 2012 found a similar effect. Strong partisanship affected how a story about climate change was processed, even if the story was apolitical in nature, such as an article about possible health ramifications from a disease like the West Nile Virus, a potential side effect of change. If information doesn’t square with someone’s prior beliefs, he discards the beliefs if they’re weak and discards the information if the beliefs are strong.

The emphasis is mine but it is vital to understanding that the areas where Pariser and others show such concern for the application of the filter bubble – in those areas where the issues are going to matter to our society – that popping that bubble might actually be detrimental.

If you’ve chosen to make the fact that vaccinations cause autism a part of your belief system and have responded by not having your children vaccinated it won’t be easy to change that viewpoint. #dummies

Another post on Facebook from a friend telling you how the vaccination link to autism has been completely debunked won’t have any impact. The numerous results on Google that point to this fact won’t help either. Instead, you’ll wind up distrusting those sources and falling back on others that conform to your beliefs.

Popping the filter bubble will not persuade people to think differently.

Oddly enough the one thing that seems to open the door to change is feeling good about yourself.

Normally, self-affirmation is reserved for instances in which identity is threatened in direct ways: race, gender, age, weight, and the like. Here, Nyhan decided to apply it in an unrelated context: Could recalling a time when you felt good about yourself make you more broad-minded about highly politicized issues, like the Iraq surge or global warming? As it turns out, it would. On all issues, attitudes became more accurate with self-affirmation, and remained just as inaccurate without. That effect held even when no additional information was presented—that is, when people were simply asked the same questions twice, before and after the self-affirmation.
Still, as Nyhan is the first to admit, it’s hardly a solution that can be applied easily outside the lab. “People don’t just go around writing essays about a time they felt good about themselves,” he said. And who knows how long the effect lasts—it’s not as though we often think good thoughts and then go on to debate climate change.

Another study detailed in a NiemanLab post shows that people feel more positive when an article proposes a solution instead of just presenting a problem.

After reading one of these six possible articles, respondents answered a survey about what they’d read. Did the article seem different from typical news articles? Do you feel more interested in the issue, or better informed? Have you gained knowledge from reading the article? Was your opinion influenced? Were you inspired? Do you feel there’s a way that you could contribute to a solution?
The results were somewhat surprising. Across all 16 measures, those who had read the solutions journalism article felt more satisfied, Curry found. “Often, doing research, you don’t get results where something works so well,” he said.

Not only that but those people were more willing to share those stories.
Solutions Journalism Leads To Sharing

“We are intrigued by the finding that people seem to want to share these stories more, and want to create conversation around them,” Hammonds says. “So we may build on that in the way we strategize with our papers.”

People are most open to change when they feel good about themselves and are more positive. In addition, those reading solutions journalism feel better and are more likely to share those stories – perhaps as a way to extend that good feeling and to feel like they’re doing something.

It makes Upworthy seem devilishly smart doesn’t it? #kudoseli

Soylent Green is Filters

Gay Pride Colors

Obviously real life experiences can transform our interests and beliefs.

I once had the idea for a story where a gay pride group would recruit a large number of homosexuals (10,000 or so) from urban environments and have them move to traditionally conservative areas where they’d pass themselves off as heterosexuals. Over the course of two years they’d join the community in all ways possible. They’d be churchgoers, friends, barbers, cube mates, insurance agents, softball players, you name it.

Then on the same day, after two years, they’d all ‘come out of the closet’ in these conservative communities. The idea being that knowing someone who is gay might be the best way to transform beliefs about homosexuality. Suddenly it’s not those ‘sodomites in San Francisco’ but Larry who helped get you a replacement car when you were in that bad accident.

Of course the idea is flawed because a movement that large would be noticed and then everyone would feel fleeced and duped. No one likes to feel that way and it retards our ability to change our opinion. But the idea here is that people and interaction is what transforms the filter bubble.

So how does this work online? Because some argue that the people you ‘friend’ online are too like you to bring new ideas into your orbit. If you were just relying on those friends you might be right. But more and more social graphs bring content liked by your friends. In other words, it’s a friend of a friend that might bring new ideas and perspectives. This is something referred to often as FOAF.

The idea here is that I might have a friend who shares certain things but if she likes something that she hasn’t shared explicitly then that content might still get passed along to me as well. I wrote about how I consciously friended people because I knew they were interested in a certain subject and would likely bring content I wouldn’t see otherwise into my universe. But even if you’re not doing this consciously, a FOAF implementation can help introduce serendipity.

Astronautalis

Instead of all this theory I’d like to present a real life example. I recently discovered Astronautalis, a really excellent songwriter/storyteller/rapper. Here’s how I wound up finding him.

I follow Wil Wheaton in large part because of his science-fiction leaning (both Star Trek TNG and Eureka) and then Table Top (which is why I play a lot of Ticket To Ride). Wil shared some content from April O’Neil, a porn star (for lack of a better term) who is also a huge science-fiction fan. I followed April’s Tumblr and she wound up sharing some of her music tastes, one of which included, you guessed it, Astronautalis.

Wrap your head around the chain of events that connects a digital marketer and father from suburban San Fransisco with Astronautalis!

So am I an atypical user? Perhaps. But even if my information diverse diet isn’t the norm this type of discovery happens naturally. You go out with your friends to a new restaurant and it’s there that you run into someone one of your friends knows who says they’re just back from an awwwwwwesome trip to Hungary.

Hearing about this gets you interested in learning more and suddenly you’re searching for information and your next vacation is to Budapest where you happen to meet another traveler from England who designs wool sweaters for a living on some green moor, which is where you wind up living as husband and wife two years later.

There’s a fear that our online activity translates into isolation, or that the only vector for information discovery is through that medium. But that’s just not the reality.

As our online and offline experiences converge and the world gets smaller we’re going to slam into the new with greater frequency, producing sharp sparks that are sure to puncture the filter bubble.

The Preference Bubble

Ham Sandwich

So for the moment lets agree that the filter bubble might not be a bad thing and that trying to eliminate it through traditional means is Sisyphean due to human nature and life experience. Instead lets talk about what it really is – a preference bubble. This is a bubble that represents what you currently prefer and will change (as I’ve noted) over time through a variety of ways.

For good or for bad there are people who are mining the preference bubble. Those people are marketers and advertisers. As in every field there are some that will exploit the preference bubble and take things too far. But that doesn’t mean we should reject it outright.

My dad told me a story once about how you don’t stop liking a ham sandwich because Richard Nixon loves ham sandwiches. The idea being that you can still enjoy something even if there are tangential parts of it that are distasteful.

From my perspective there’s a small anti-marketing bias throughout The Filter Bubble. But perhaps, as a marketer, I’m just a bit too sensitive and on the watch for this attitude. Don’t get me wrong. I have a severe distaste for many (if not most) fellow marketers who seem more than happy to spit out a few buzzwords and feel good when they make a vendor decision on their latest RFP. #CYAmuch

Yet, there are other marketers who combine creativity and data and are passionate about both the fundamentals and the details of their craft – and it is a craft. In the very general sense marketing is about finding a need and filling it. The preference bubble gives marketers the ability to find those needs far quicker and with more accuracy.

Marketers want to save you time and effort, read and buy things you desire as quickly as possible. Do we want to make a buck doing it? Absolutely. But the good ones aren’t out to use the preference bubble to sell you stuff you don’t want. Sure we might make some assumptions that your penchant for kayaking might also indicate that you’d want some rugged outdoor wear. But would we be wrong?

There’s been numerous instances where people can show when these models do go awry. Even now at Amazon if you buy something as a gift for someone but don’t mark it as such, that can have some pretty interesting consequences on your recommended products. Marketers are not perfect and the data models we’re using are still evolving. But they’re getting better every day. And that’s important.

Privacy?

Elbow Fetish and Privacy

As marketers get better at mining the preference bubble we have an opportunity to engage instead of obfuscate.

Chris Messina wrote about this recently where he discussed the very real trade off that takes place with the preference bubble.

Ultimately I do want companies to know more about me and to use more data about me in exchange for better, faster, easier, and cheaper experiences. 

That’s what the preference bubble is all about. We want this! If you’re a vegetarian and you’re looking for a place to eat out wouldn’t it be nice if the results presented didn’t include steak houses? But we need to understand what and when we’re giving our preferences to marketers. We need to know the personal ROI for providing that information.

I often tell people that privacy is far more bark than bite. How quickly do we provide name, address and phone number on a little comment card and slip it into the window of a Ford Mustang sitting at the local mall, hoping that we’ll be the lucky winner of said car. Pretty quick.

How often do we mindlessly hand over our driver’s license to cashiers to verify our credit cards when there is no such law saying we need to do so. Every damn time right? It’s just easier to go along with it, even if you’re grumbling under your breath about it being bunk.

But here we’re making conscious decisions about how we want to share our private information. It may not always be the most noble exchange but it is the exchange that we are willingly making.

The change that Chris Messina rightly asks for is a data-positive culture. One were our ‘data capital’ is something we marshall and can measure out in relation to our wants and needs. We might not want our elbow fetish to be part of our public preference bubble. That should be your right and you shouldn’t be bombarded with tweed elbow patch and skin cracking ointment ads as a result.

It would be nice if the things we feel so self-conscious about didn’t come under such scrutiny. You shouldn’t be ashamed of your elbow fetish. That would be really data-positive. Many have written that a transparent society might be a healthier society. But there are many ways in which transparency can go wrong and we’re clearly (perhaps sadly) not at the point where this is a viable option.

Instead we should be talking about how we engage with privacy. The consternation around personalization is that people don’t know what type of private information they’re giving up to deliver that experience. But lets be clear, based on the advertising they receive users do know that they’re giving up some personal information. You don’t get that retargeted ad for the site you visited yesterday unless you’ve been tracked.

Speed Boat Wake

People know, on some level, that they’re providing this personal information as they surf. Fewer people understand that they leave behind a large digital wake, waves of data that mark their path through the Internet. What is missing is exactly what is tracked and how they might limit the amount of information being used.

The problem here is that Messina and others are asking people to participate and take what amounts to proactive action on shaping their public preference bubble. In the realm of user experience we call that friction. And friction is a death knell for a product.

It makes any opt-in only program, where nothing is tracked unless I specifically say so, a non-starter. We know that defaults are rarely changed so the vast majority wouldn’t opt-in and nearly all of us would be surfing the Internet looking at the ‘one trick to get rid of belly fab’ ad.

Not only that but your online experiences would be less fulfilling. It would be harder for you to find the things you wanted. That increased friction could lead to frustration and abandonment. And the added time taken to navigate is time taken away from other endeavors. Life gets less happy.

Point of Purchase Privacy

Shut Up And Take My Money

Is there a solution? (Because you clearly want one so you feel better about this piece and wind up sharing it with your colleagues.) One of the ideas I’ve mulled over is to deliver the data-positive message at the time of purchase. What if when you clicked on that retargeted ad and wound up buying that product that during the transaction the data transacted would also be revealed.

I’m not talking about whether you’re agreeing to opt-in to that site’s email newsletter. I’m talking about a message that would state that your purchase was made by tracking your behavior on two other sites, interacting with a Facebook ad and through a prior visit to the site in question.

It’s during that time when you’re most satisfied (you’ve just made a purchase) that you are most likely to engage in a positive way with your data capital. There’s an educational aspect, where you’re told, almost Sesame Street style that today’s purchase was brought to you by pixel tracking, search history and remarketing. But there’s also a configuration aspect, an option to access your data capital and make changes as appropriate.

If my personal data tracking led to this purchase, do I feel okay with that and do I want to double-check what other personal data might be out there or not? So it would be my time to say that my tastes have changed from a latte to a cappuccino and that while I love Astronautlis I’m not a Macklemore fan. #notthesame

So maybe I do want to zap away any memory of how that transaction occurred. That would be your right. (A bad choice I think but your right nonetheless.)

I doubt you could leave this up to each site so it would likely have to be something delivered via the browser, perhaps even a add-on/extension that would be cross-browser compliant.

I’m not an engineer but I sense there’s an opportunity here to have sites provide markup that would indicate that a page or purchase was made based on personalization and that the specific set of preferences and tracking that led to that can then be displayed in a pleasing way to the user as a result. I’m not saying it would be easy. It would need to avoid the annoying ‘this site uses cookies’ message that buzzes like a gnat across UK websites.

But I think it could be done and you could even think of it as a type of customer satisfaction and feedback mechanism if you were a smart marketer.

Are We Ourselves

Our lives are increasingly reflected by our digital wake. We are what we do online and that’s only going to grow not decline. Why not embrace that rather than deny it? I’m a perfect example of why embracing it would make sense. As a digital marketer I work with a number of clients and often visit sites that I have no personal interest in whatsoever.

Being able to quickly adjust my preference bubble appropriately would make sure my experience online was optimized. In a far flung future the cost of goods could even be reduced because the advertising and marketing spend would drop through preference bubble optimization (PBO). The maxim that advertisers are wasting half their spend, they just don’t know which half would be a thing of the past.

Beyond the crass commercialization I’m amped up about as a marketer are the societal aspects of the preference bubble. And while I share Pariser’s concerns about how people can receive and digest information I think the answer is to go through it instead of avoid it.

I remember playing Space Invaders for days on end, my thumb burning with a soon to be callus. But at some point I got bored of it and went out to count wooly caterpillars under the Japanese Maple in our front yard. This is who we are.

Our preferences are influenced by more than just what flows through our social feeds and what’s returned in search results. And while I wish we could force a ‘diet of the mind’ on people the fact is that people are going to consume what they want to consume until they decide not to.

I’d prefer to make it easier to show who we are when they’re most open to seeing it. We need to point them to their own Japanese Maple.

TL;DR

The filter bubble is not something terrible but is a product of human nature and geographic bias. It has been around before the Internet and will be there long after because it simply reflects our preferences.

Our preferences are a product of more than our digital diet and trying to change that digital diet externally may actually backfire. So as we express and conduct more of our life online we should embrace the preference bubble and the privacy issues that come with it so we can gain better, faster experiences.

Google Now Topics

November 26 2013 // SEO + Technology // 16 Comments

Have you visited your Google Now Topics page? You should if you want to get a peek at how Google is translating queries into topics, which is at the core of the Hummingbird Update.

Google Now Topics

If you are in the United States and have Google Web History turned on you can go to your Google Now Topics page and see your query and click behavior turned into specific topics.

Google Now Topics Example

This is what my Google Now Topics page looked like a few weeks back. It shows specific topics that I’ve researched in the last day, week and month. If you’re unfamiliar with this page this alone might be eye opening. But it gets even more interesting when you look at the options under each topic.

Topic Intent

The types of content offered under each topic is different.

Why is this exciting? To me it shows that Google understands the intent behind each topic. So the topic of New York City brings up ‘attractions and photos’ while the topic of Googlebot just brings up ‘articles’. Google clearly understands that Back to the Future is a movie and that I’d want reviews for the Toyota Prius Plug-in Hybrid.

In essence, words map to a topic which in turn tells Google what type of content should most likely be returned. You can see how these topics were likely generated by looking back at Web History.

Search of Google Web History for Moto X

This part of my web history likely triggered a Moto X topic. I used the specific term ‘Moto X’ a number of times in a query which made it very easy to identify. (I did wind up getting the Moto X and love it.)

Tripping Google Now Topics

When I first saw this page  back in March and then again in June I wanted to start playing around with what combination of queries would produce a Google Now Topic. However, I’ve been so busy with client work that I never got a chance to do that until now.

Here’s what I did. Logged into my Google account and using Chrome I tried the following series of queries (without clicking through on any results) at 1:30pm on November 13th.

the stranger
allentown
downeaster alexa
big shot
pressure
uptown girl
piano man

But nothing ever showed up in Google Now Topics. So I took a similar set of terms but this time engaged with the results at 8:35am on November 16th.

piano man (clicked through on Wikipedia)
uptown girl (clicked through on YouTube)
pressure (no click)
big shot (clicked through on YouTube)
the stranger lyrics (clicked through on atozlyrics, then YouTube)
scenes from an italian restaurant (no click)

Then at 9:20am a new Google Now Topic shows up!

Google Now Topic for Billy Joel Songs

Interestingly it understands that this is about music but it hasn’t made a direct connection to Billy Joel. I had purposefully not used his name in the queries to see if Google Now Topics would return him as the topic instead of just songs. Maybe Google knows but I had sort of hoped to get a Billy Joel topic to render and think that might be the better result.

YouTube Categories

Engagement certainly seems to count based on my limited tests. But I couldn’t help but notice the every one of the songs in that Google Now Topic was also a YouTube click. Could I get a Google Now Topic to render without a YouTube click.

The next morning I tried again with a series of queries at 7:04am.

shake it up (no click)
my best friend’s girl (lyricsfreak click)
let the good times roll (click on Wikipeida, click to disambiguated song)
hello again (no click)
just what i needed (lastfm click)
tonight she comes (songmeanings click)
shake it up lyrics (azlyrics click)

At 10:04 nothing showed up so I decided to try another search.

let the good times roll (clicked on YouTube)

At 10:59 nothing showed up and I was getting antsy, which was probably not smart. I should have waited! But instead I performed another query.

the cars (clicked on knowledge graph result for Ric Ocasek)

And at 12:04 I get a new Google Now Topic.

Let The Good Times Roll Google Now Topic

I’m guessing that if I’d waited a bit longer after my YouTube click that this would have appeared, regardless of the click on the knowledge graph result. It seems that YouTube is a pretty important part of the equation. It’s not the only way to generate a Google Now Topic but it’s one of the faster ways to do so right now.

Perhaps it’s easier to identify the topic because of the more rigid categorization on YouTube?

The Cars on YouTube

I didn’t have time to do more research here but am hoping others might begin to compile a larger corpus of tests so we can tease out some conclusions.

Topic Stickiness

I got busy again and by the time I was ready to write this piece I found that my topics had changed.

New Google Now Topics

It was fairly easy to deduce why each had been produced, though the Ice Bath result could have been simply from a series of queries. But what was even more interesting was what my Google Now Topics looked like this morning.

My Google Now Topics Today

Some of my previous topics are gone! Both Ice Bath and Let The Good Times Roll are nowhere to be found. This seems to indicate that there’s a depth of interaction and distance from event (time) factor involved in identifying relevant topics.

It would make sense for Google to identify intent that was more consistent from intent that was more ephemeral. I was interested in ice baths because my daughter has some plantar fascia issues. But I’ve never researched it before and likely (fingers crossed) won’t again. So it would make sense to drop it.

There are a number of ways that Google could determine which topics are more important to a user, including frequency of searching, query chains, depth of interaction as well as type and variety of content.

Google Now Topics and Hummingbird

OMG It's Full of Stars Cat

My analysis of the Hummingbird Update focused largely on the ability to improve topic modeling through a combination of traditional text analysis natural and entity detection.

Google Now Topics looks like a Hummingbird learning lab.

Watching how queries and click behavior turn into topics (there’s that word again) and what types of content are displayed for each topic is a window into Google’s evolving abilities and application of entities into search results.

It may not be the full picture of what’s going on but there’s enough here to put a lot of paint on the canvass.

TL;DR

Google Now Topics provide a glimpse into the Hummingbird Update by showing how Google takes words, queries and behavior and turns them into topics with defined intent.

What Does The Hummingbird Say?

November 07 2013 // SEO + Technology // 32 Comments

What Does The Fox Say Video Screencap

Dog goes woof
Cat goes meow
Bird goes tweet
and mouse goes squeak

Cow goes moo
Frog goes croak
and the elephant goes toot

Ducks say quack
and fish go blub
and the seal goes ow ow ow ow ow

But theres one sound
That no one knows
What does the hummingbird say?

What Does The Hummingbird Say?

For the last month or so the search industry has been trying to figure out Google’s new Hummingbird update. What is it? How does it work? How should you react.

There’s been a handful of good posts on Hummingbird including those by Danny SullivanBill Slawski, Gianluca Fiorelli, Eric Enge (featuring Danny Sullivan), Ammon Johns and Aaron Bradley. I suggest you read all of these given the chance.

I share many of the views expressed in the referenced posts but with some variations and additions, which is the genesis of this post.

Entities, Entities, Entities

Are you sick of hearing about entities yet? You probably are but you should get used to it because they’re here to stay in a big way. Entities are at the heart of Hummingbird if you parse statements from Amit Singhal.

We now get that the words in the search box are real world people, places and things, and not just strings to be managed on a web page.

Long story short, Google is beginning to understand the meaning behind words and not just the words themselves. And in August 2013 Google published something specifically on this topic in relation to an open source toolkit called word2vec, which is short for word to vector.

Word2vec uses distributed representations of text to capture similarities among concepts. For example, it understands that Paris and France are related the same way Berlin and Germany are (capital and country), and not the same way Madrid and Italy are. This chart shows how well it can learn the concept of capital cities, just by reading lots of news articles — with no human supervision:

Example of Getting Meaning Behind Words

So that’s pretty cool isn’t it? It gets even cooler when you think about how these words are actually places that have a tremendous amount of metadata surrounding them.

Topic Modeling

It’s my belief that the place where Hummingbird has had the most impact is in the topic modeling of sites and documents. We already know that Google is aggressively parsing documents and extracting entities.

When you type in a search query — perhaps Plato — are you interested in the string of letters you typed? Or the concept or entity represented by that string? But knowing that the string represents something real and meaningful only gets you so far in computational linguistics or information retrieval — you have to know what the string actually refers to. The Knowledge Graph and Freebase are databases of things, not strings, and references to them let you operate in the realm of concepts and entities rather than strings and n-grams.

Reading this I think it becomes clear that once those entities are extracted Google is then performing a lookup on an entity database(s) and learning about what that entity means. In particular Google wants to know what topic/concept/subject to which that entity is connected.

Google seems to be pretty focused on that if you look at the Freebase home page today.

Freebase Topic Count

Tamar Yehoshua, VP of Search, also said as much during the Google Search Turns 15 event.

So the Knowledge Graph is great at letting you explore topics and sets of topics.

One of the examples she used was the search for impressionistic artists. Google returned a list of artists and allowed you to navigate to different genres like cubists. It’s clear that Google is relating specific entities, artists in this case, to a concept or topic like impressionist artists, and further up to a parent topic of art.

Do you think that having those entities on a page might then help Google better understand what the topic of that page is about? You better believe it.

Based on client data I think that the May 2013 Phantom Update was the first application of a combined topic model (aka Hummingbird). Two weeks later it was rolled back and then later reapplied with some adjustments.

Hummingbird refined the topic modeling of sites and pages that are essential to delivering relevant results.

Strings AND Things

Hybrid Car

This doesn’t mean that text based analysis has gone the way of the do-do bird. First off, Google still needs text to identify entities. Anyone who thinks that keywords (or perhaps it’s easier to call them subjects) in text isn’t meaningful is missing the boat.

In almost all cases you don’t have as much labeled data as you’d really like.

That’s a quote from a great interview with Jeff Dean and while I’m taking the meaning of labeled data out of context I think it makes sense here. Writing properly (using nouns and subjects) will help Google to assign labels to your documents. In other words, make it easy for Google to know what you’re talking about.

Google can still infer a lot about what that page is about and return it for appropriate queries by using natural language processing and machine learning techniques. But now they’ve been able to extract entities, understand the topics to which they refer and then feed that back into the topic model. So in some ways I think Hummingbird allows for a type of recursive topic modeling effort to take place.

If we use the engine metaphor favored by Amit and Danny, Hummingbird is a hybrid engine instead of a combustion or electric only engine.

From Caffeine to Hummingbird

Electrical Outlet with USB and Normal Sockets

One of the head scratching parts of the announcement was the comparison of Hummingbird to Caffeine. The latter was a huge change in the way that Google crawled and indexed data. In large part Caffeine was about the implementation of Percolator (incremental processing), Dremel (ad-hoc query analysis) and Pregel (graph analysis). It was about infrastructure.

So we should be thinking about Hummingbird in the same way. If we believe that Google now wants to use both text and entity based signals to determine quality and relevance they’d need a way to plug both sources of data into the algorithm.

Imagine a hybrid car that didn’t have a way to recharge the battery. You might get some initial value out of that hybrid engine but it would be limited. Because once out of juice you’d have to take the battery out and replace it with a new one. That would suck.

Instead, what you need is a way to continuously recharge the battery so the hybrid engine keeps humming along. So you can think of Hummingbird as the way to deliver new sources of data (fuel!) to the search engine.

Right now that new source of data is entities but, as Danny Sullivan points out, it could also be used to bring social data into the engine. I still don’t think that’s happening right now, but the infrastructure may now be in place to do so.

The algorithms aren’t really changing but the the amount of data Google can now process allows for greater precision and insight.

Deep Learning

Mr. Fusion Home Reactor

What we’re really talking about is a field that is being referred to as deep learning, which you can think of as machine learning on steroids.

This is a really fascinating (and often dense) area that looks at the use of labeled and unlabeled data and the use of supervised and unsupervised learning models. These concepts are somewhat related and I’ll try to quickly explain them, though I may mangle the precise definitions. (Scholarly types are encouraged to jump in an provide correction or guidance.)

The vast majority of data is unlabeled, which is a fancy way of saying that it hasn’t been classified or doesn’t have any context. Labeled data has some sort of classification or identification to it from the start.

Unlabeled data would be the tub of old photographs while labeled data might be the same tub of photographs but with ‘Christmas 1982’, ‘Birthday 1983’, ‘Joe and Kelly’ etc. scrawled in black felt tip on the back of each one. (Here’s another good answer to the difference between labeled and unlabeled data.)

Why is this important? Let’s return to Jeff Dean (who is a very important figure in my view) to tell us.

You’re always going to have 100x, 1000x as much unlabeled data as labeled data, so being able to use that is going to be really important.

The difference between supervised learning and unsupervised learning is similar. Supervised learning means that the model is looking to fit things into a pre-conceived classification. Look at these photos and tell me which of them are cats. You already know what you want it to find. Unsupervised learning on the other hand lets the model find it’s own classifications.

If I have it right, supervised learning has a training set of labeled data where a unsupervised learning has no initial training set. All of this is wrapped up in the fascinating idea of neural networks.

The different models for learning via neural nets, and their variations and refinements, are myriad. Moreover, researchers do not always clearly understand why certain techniques work better than others. Still, the models share at least one thing: the more data available for training, the better the methods work.

The emphasis here is mine because I think it’s extremely relevant. Caffeine and Hummingbird allow Google to both use more data and to process that data quickly. Maybe Hummingbird is the ability to deploy additional layers of unsupervised learning across a massive corpus of documents?

And that cat reference isn’t just because I like LOLcats. A team at Google (including Jeff Dean) was able to use unlabeled, unsupervised learning to identify cats (among other things) in YouTube thumbnails (PDF).

So what does this all have to do with Hummingbird? Quite a bit if I’m connecting the dots the right way. Once again I’ll refer back the Jeff Dean interview (which I seem to get something new out of each time I read it).

We’re also collaborating with a bunch of different groups within Google to see how we can solve their problems, both in the short and medium term, and then also thinking about where we want to be four years, five years down the road. It’s nice to have short-term to medium-term things that we can apply and see real change in our products, but also have longer-term, five to 10 year goals that we’re working toward.

Remember at the end of Back to The Future when Doc shows up and implores Marty to come to the future with him? The flux capacitor used to need plutonium to reach critical mass but this time all it takes is some banana peels and the dregs from some Miller Beer in a Mr. Fusion home reactor.

So not only is Hummingbird a hybrid engine but it’s hooked up to something that can turn relatively little into a whole lot.

Quantum Computing

So lets take this a little bit further and look at Google’s interest in quantum computing. Back in 2009 Hartmut Neven was talking about the use of quantum algorithms in machine learning.

Over the past three years a team at Google has studied how problems such as recognizing an object in an image or learning to make an optimal decision based on example data can be made amenable to solution by quantum algorithms. The algorithms we employ are the quantum adiabatic algorithms discovered by Edward Farhi and collaborators at MIT. These algorithms promise to find higher quality solutions for optimization problems than obtainable with classical solvers.

This seems to have yielded positive results because in May 2013 Google upped the ante and entered into a quantum computer partnership with NASA. As part of that announcement we got some insight into Google’s use of quantum algorithms.

We’ve already developed some quantum machine learning algorithms. One produces very compact, efficient recognizers — very useful when you’re short on power, as on a mobile device. Another can handle highly polluted training data, where a high percentage of the examples are mislabeled, as they often are in the real world. And we’ve learned some useful principles: e.g., you get the best results not with pure quantum computing, but by mixing quantum and classical computing.

A highly polluted set of training data where many examples are mislabeled? Makes you wonder what that might be doesn’t it? Link graph analysis perhaps?

Are quantum algorithms part of Hummingbird? I can’t be certain. But I believe that Hummingbird lays the groundwork for these types of leaps in optimization.

What About Conversational Search?

Dog Answering The Phone

There’s also a lot of talk about conversational search (pun intended). I think many are conflating Hummingbird with the gains in conversational search. Mind you, the basis of voice and conversational search is still machine learning. But Google’s focus on conversational search is largely a nod to the future.

We believe that voice will be fundamental to building future interactions with the new devices that we are seeing.

And the first area where they’ve made advances is the ability to resolve pronouns in query chains.

Google understood my context. It understood what I was talking about. Just as if I was having a conversation with you and talking about the Eiffel Tower, I wouldn’t have to keep repeating it over and over again.

Does this mean that Google can resolve pronouns within documents? They’re getting better at that (there a huge corpus of research actually) but I doubt it’s to the level we see in this distinct search microcosm.

Conversational search has a different syntax and demands a slightly different language model to better return results. So Google’s betting that conversational search will be the dominant method of searching and is adapting as necessary.

What Does Hummingbird Do?

What's That Mean Far Field Productions

This seems to be the real conundrum when people look at Hummingbird. If it affects 90% of searches worldwide why didn’t we notice the change?

Hummingbird makes results even more useful and relevant, especially when you ask Google long, complex questions.

That’s what Amit says of Hummingbird and I think this makes sense and can map back to the idea of synonyms (which are still quite powerful). But now, instead of looking at a long query and looking at word synonyms Google could also be applying entity synonyms.

Understanding the meaning of the query might be more important than the specific words used in the query. It reminds me a bit of Aardvark which was purchased by Google in February 2010.

Aardvark analyzes questions to determine what they’re about and then matches each question to people with relevant knowledge and interests to give you an answer quickly.

I remember using the service and seeing how it would interpret messy questions and then deliver a ‘scrubbed’ question to potential candidates for answering. There was a good deal of technology at work in the background and I feel like I’m seeing it magnified with Hummingbird.

And it resonates with what Jeff Dean has to say about analyzing sentences.

I think we will have a much better handle on text understanding, as well. You see the very slightest glimmer of that in word vectors, and what we’d like to get to where we have higher level understanding than just words. If we could get to the point where we understand sentences, that will really be quite powerful. So if two sentences mean the same thing but are written very differently, and we are able to tell that, that would be really powerful. Because then you do sort of understand the text at some level because you can paraphrase it.

My take is that 90% of the searches were affected because documents that appear in those results were re-scored or refined through the addition of entity data and the application of machine learning across a larger data set.

It’s not that those results have changed but that they have the potential to change based on the new infrastructure in place.

Hummingbird Response

Le homard et le chat

How should you respond to Hummingbird? Honestly, there’s not a whole lot to do in many ways if you’ve been practicing a certain type of SEO.

Despite the advice to simply write like no one’s watching, you should make sure you’re writing is tight and is using subjects that can be identified by people and search engines. “It is a beautiful thing” won’t do as well as “Picasso’s Lobster and Cat is a beautiful painting”.

You’ll want to make your content easy to read and remember, link out to relevant and respected sources, build your authority by demonstrating your subject expertise, engage in the type of social outreach that produces true fans and conduct more traditional marketing and brand building efforts.

TL;DR

Hummingbird is an infrastructure change that allows Google to take advantage of additional sources of data, such as entities, as well as leverage new deep learning models that increase the precision of current algorithms. The first application of Hummingbird was the refinement of Google’s document topic modeling, which is vital to delivering relevant search results.

Closing Google Reader Is Dangerous

March 14 2013 // Social Media + Technology // 39 Comments

I’m a dedicated Google Reader user, spending hours each day using it to keep up on any number of topics. So my knee-jerk reaction to the news that Google will close the service as of July 1, 2013 was one of shock and anger.

I immediately Tweeted #savegooglereader and posted on Google+ in hopes of getting it to trend or go hot. These things are silly in the scheme of things. But what else is there to do?

I’ve written previously that the problem with RSS readers is marketing. I still believe that (it’s TiVo for web content people!) but in the end that’s not why closing Google Reader is so dangerous. And it is dangerous.

Google Reader Fuels Social

Google Reader Is The Snowpack of Social

Photo via double-h

The announcement indicates that, while having a loyal following, usage has declined. That’s a rather nebulous statement, though I don’t truly expect Google to provide the exact statistics. But it’s who is still using Google Reader that is important, is it not?

Participation inequality, often called the 90-9-1 principle, should be an important factor in analyzing Google Reader usage. Even if you believe that the inequality isn’t as pronounced today, those that are contributing are still a small bunch.

Studies on participation on Twitter have shown this to be true, both from what content is shared and who is sharing it. That means that the majority of the content shared is still from major publications and that we get that information through influencers. But where do they get it?

Google Reader.

RSS readers are the snowpack of social networks.

Organizing Information

Jigsaw Puzzle Pieces

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. By extension that is what Google Reader lets power-users do. Make no mistake, Google Reader is not a mainstream product. Google (and many others) have screwed up how to market time-shifted online reading.

The result is that those using Google Reader are different. They’re the information consumers. They’re the ones sifting through the content (organizing) and sharing it with their community (accessible) on platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ (useful).

Google Reader allows a specific set of people to help Google fulfill their mission.

Losing Identity

AJ Kohn Cheltenham High School ID

There are replacements to Google Reader such as Feedly. So you can expect that the people who fuel social networks will find other ways to obtain and digest information so they can filter it for their followers. Problem solved, right? Wrong.

Why exactly does Google want to hand over this important part of the ecosystem to someone else? With Google Reader they know who I am, what feeds I subscribe to, which ones I read and then which ones I wind up sharing on Google+.

Wouldn’t knowing that dynamic, of understanding how people evaluate content and determine what is worthy of sharing, be of interest to Google? It should be. It’s sort of what they want to excel at.

Not only that but because Google Reader has product market fit (see how I got that buzzword in there) with influencers or experts, you’re losing an important piece of the puzzle if you’re thinking about using social sharing and Authorship as search signals.

Data Blind

Data Blind

In the end, I’m surprised because it makes Google data blind. As I look at Unicorn, Facebook’s new inverted-index system, I can’t help but think that Facebook would love to have this information. Mining the connections and activity between these nodes seems messy but important.

What feeds do I subscribe to? That social gesture could be called a Like in some ways. What feeds do I read? That’s a different level of engagement and could even be measured by dwell time. What feeds and specific content do I share? These are the things that I am endorsing and promoting.

By having Google Reader integrated into the Google+ ecosystem, they can tell when I consumed that information and when I then shared it, not just on Google+ but on other platforms if Google is following the public social graph (which we all know they are.)

Without Google Reader, Google loses all of that data and only sees what is ultimately shared publicly. Never mind the idea that Google Reader might be powering dark social which could connect and inform influencers. Gone is that bit of insight too.

Multi-Channel Social

Daft Punk Discovery

As a marketer I’m consumed with attribution and Google Analytics clearly understands the importance of multi-channel modeling. We even see the view-through metric in Google Adwords display campaigns.

The original source and exposure of content is of huge importance. Google might have Ripples but that only tells them how the content finally entered Google+ not how that content was discovered.

I’m certain that users will find alternatives because there is a need for this service. Google just won’t know what new sites influencers might be reading more of or which sites might be waning with subject matter experts. Google will only see the trailing indicators, not the leading ones.

TL;DR

Google Reader allows information consumers – influencers and subject matter experts – to fuel social networks and help fulfill Google’s core mission. Closing Google Reader will put that assistance in the hands of another company or companies and blinds Google to human evaluation data for an important set of users.

Google’s Evil Plan

January 27 2013 // Technology // 85 Comments

Google’s evil plan is simple and not so evil.

Don’t Be Evil

Soon LOLcat

Any successful company is going to draw criticism. Google probably gets more of it than others because of their ‘Don’t Be Evil’ motto. Algorithm changes shuffle branded sites higher and people shout ‘evil!’ Google begins to disintermediate certain verticals and people shout ‘evil!’

Most of the posts about Google’s evil ways focus around these two themes. So much time and energy is spent raging against changes that are simply a reflection of us – the user. When we collectively stop shopping at branded stores over smaller boutiques then we’ll see that reflected in our search results.

And the last time I checked no one was mourning the demise of the milk man or shedding tears over Tower Records or Blockbuster. It sucks if you’re the business getting disintermediated but do you really want to go to another website to get the current weather?

Evil? It’s not Google, it’s you.

Google’s Evil Plan

Instead of talking about all of these natural business moves and conjuring up some nefarious plot, I want to talk about Google’s real strategy. Here’s the truth. Here’s Google’s plan.

Get people to use the Internet more.

That’s it. The more time people spend on the Internet the more time they’ll engage in revenue generating activities such as viewing and clicking display ads and performing searches.

The way Google executes on this strategy is to improve speed and accessibility to the Internet. Google wants to shorten the distance between any activity and the Internet. Lets look at some of Google’s initiatives with this in mind.

Chrome

Speed Racer Car #5

Firefox was doing a bang up job of breaking Internet Explorer’s browser monopoly. Chrome certainly hastened IE’s decline and helped secure more search volume. Yet Chrome developers have long said that their goal isn’t market share but to make the browsing experience faster.

In a very nearsighted way, making browsers faster is the goal. Yet, the faster the web experience, the more page views people rack up and the more searches they’ll perform.

Chrome is about reducing the friction of browsing the Internet.

SPDY

60s Spiderman Flying Car

Google can only do so much with Chrome to speed up the web. Enter SPDY, an open networking protocol, which looks to be the basis for HTTP 2.0.

Its goal is to reduce the latency of web pages.

That’s technical speak for making the web faster. This is what users want. This is what makes users happy. Milliseconds matter when it comes to user satisfaction. And satisfying the user is great for business.

Android

Android Robot

Similar to Chrome, Google saw that users would increasingly access the Internet via phones. They learned from their web browser experience and decided to jump into the vertical early and it’s paid off. Google now commands nearly 54% of the smartphone market.

Android doesn’t have to make money directly. It provides unfettered access to revenue generating activities and allows Google to push the industry forward in terms of speed.

Motorola Mobility

Motorola Mobility

Not content to simply push the envelope with software, Google decided to grab Motorola Mobility and improve on hardware too. The rumors around the Google X phone are increasing.

Long battery life and wireless charging are two of the more tantalizing possibilities  These are clearly features that would greatly benefit users but … they also ensure that you’ll nearly always be able to connect to the Internet. See how that works?

Google Now

Psychic Search?

Not using the Internet enough? Google Now can help change that by automagically serving up useful cards based on your search history and behavior. Don’t get me wrong. I like Google Now and find it to be more and more valuable as they add more functionality.

But it’s no mystery that predictive search is also about stimulating more Internet activity.

Google Fiber

Google Fiber

Many seem to think Google is crazy to pursue fiber. It’s massive. It’s expensive. But it’s also exactly in line with their goal of increasing Internet usage. In fact, they’re pretty clear in the messaging on the Google Fiber page.

Google Fiber starts with a connection speed 100 times faster than today’s broadband. Instant downloads. Crystal clear high definition TV. And endless possibilities. It’s not cable. And it’s not just Internet. It’s Google Fiber.

It’s not that Google would control the transmission (though that’s a nice side benefit), it’s that the friction to using the Internet would be nearly zero.

Google WiFi

 

WiFi Logo

Google already provides free WiFi in Mountain View, wanted to do it in San Francisco as far back as 2005 until it was torpedoed by politics and paranoia. Now Google provides free WiFi in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York. In addition, Google has been futzing with white space and a super-dense LTE network.

Can it be any more clear? Google wants ubiquitous Internet access.

Google Drive

cloud

I often see people argue that the cloud is Google’s big picture strategy. I think that’s still missing the point. The cloud is a means to an end.

Giving people the ability to access files from anywhere simply keeps them online longer. You don’t have the browser off working on your document, instead your online editing and saving your document. You’re searching for those documents.

You’re just a browser tab away from areas of the Internet where Google makes money. In short, Google Drive shortens the distance between work and activities that produce revenue for Google.

Chromebook

Chromebook

Taken to the extreme, Chromebook is essentially a computer that runs off the Internet and cloud. Everything is done online.

A new type of computer designed to help you get things done faster and easier.

Faster. There’s that word again. And easier is just a friendly way of saying ‘reduce friction’. At $199 and $249 Google is hoping that this new type of computer will start to find a market. This strikes me as the ultimate lock-in.

Google+

Aldous Huxley

So what about Google+? At first blush, it doesn’t seem to fit.

I still believe a substantial reason for building Google+ was to develop better social signals and increase search personalization. However, I think the time spent in places where Google couldn’t reach (aka Facebook) was troubling.

Google needed to break the stranglehold Facebook had on social attention. They’ve certainly made inroads there and that’s really all they needed to do to ensure attention didn’t pool and persist in a Google dead zone.

Self Driving Cars

Google Self Driving Car

I’m shocked that people don’t see the brilliance of a self-driving car. The average commute time in the US is 25 minutes (pdf). So that’s nearly an hour each day that people can’t be actively on the Internet. Yet, they obviously want to be.

If you play Ingress (like I do) you can see where XM (roughly phone usage) is highest. It’s super high in parks and doctor’s offices and movie theaters. But it’s also concentrated at intersections. A red light and we’re diving for our phones.

Now imagine a self-driving car and how much more time you’d have to … be on the Internet. I’m just talking about commuting which is less than 20% of the driving done in this country!

A self driving car unlocks a vast amount of time that could be spent on the Internet.

Google Glass

Google Glass Skydive

I know the latest big thing is Sergey on the Subway but to me his skydive was more transformative. The message? Even if you’re falling out of the sky you can still use the Internet.

Google Glass could be the ultimate way to keep you connected to the Internet.

Perhaps we’ll reach a point where much of our consciousness is actually online. Why waste your time remembering useless things when you can simply retrieve them from your personal cloud? Sometimes the future in Charles Stross’ Accelerando seems almost inevitable.

Mind you, at times I feel the urge to live in a cabin in the woods but it’s usually quickly followed with a caveat of ‘with good satellite coverage or Internet access.’

Google TV

Google TV Logo

I think YouTube was initially thought to be the future of TV. The problem is that we’re very entrenched in traditional TV and inertia (and a lack of proper execution by Google TV) has allowed traditional TV to catch up.

This is the one place where Google is behind. Maybe Google TV picks up steam, or Google Fiber is the wedge into homes or Google acquires someone big like TiVo or Netflix.

Twitter is also both a major rival and potential acquisition target because of their position as the glue between screens.

Share of Time

Salvador Dali Dripping Clocks

I’m surprised that no one has compared Google’s strategy to Coke’s now abandoned ‘share of stomach‘ strategy. Google wants people to spend more of their time on the Internet. Think about that.

Once again it comes down to the ‘Don’t Be Evil’ motto. Coke didn’t care if they were creating a health epidemic as they rang up profits. Google, on the other hand, believes their services can improve our lives.

That kind of belief is what the tin foil hat conspiracy folks should really be worried about. It’s not any small tactical gaffe that could be chalked up in the evil column. It’s that Google believes they’re doing good. I sort of think so too.

TL;DR

Google’s strategy is to get people to use the Internet more. The more time people spend on the Internet the more time they’ll engage in revenue generating activities. As such, nearly every Google effort is focused on increasing Internet speed and access with the goal to shorten the distance between any activity and the Internet.

2013 Internet, SEO and Technology Predictions

December 31 2012 // Advertising + Marketing + SEO + Social Media + Technology // 15 Comments

I’ve made predictions for the past four years (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012) and think I’ve done pretty well as a prognosticator.

I’m sometimes off by a year or two and many of my predictions are wrong where my predictions were more like personal wishes. But it’s interesting to put a stake in the ground so you can look back later.

2013 Predictions

2013 Predictions Crystal Ball

Mobile Payment Adoption Soars

If you follow my Marketing Biz column you know I’m following the mobile payments space closely. Research seems to indicate that adoption of mobile payments will take some time in the US based on current attitudes.

I believe smartphone penetration and the acceptance of other similar payments such as app store purchases and Amazon Video on Demand will smooth the way for accelerated mobile payment adoption. Who wins in this space? I’m still betting on Google Wallet.

Infographics Jump The Shark

Frankly, I think this has already happened but perhaps it’s just me. So I’m going to say I’m the canary in the coal mine and in 2013 everyone else will get sick and tired of the glut of bad Infographics.

Foursquare Goes Big

The quirky gamification location startup that was all about badges and mayorships is growing up into a mature local search portal. I expect to see Foursquare connect more dots in 2013, making Yelp very nervous and pissing off Facebook who will break their partnership when they figure out that Foursquare is eating their local lunch.

Predictive Search Arrives

Google Now is a monster. The ability to access your location and search history, combined with personal preferences allows Google to predict your information needs. Anyone thinking about local optimization should be watching this very closely.

Meme Comments

A new form of comments and micro-blogging will emerge where the entire conversation is meme based. Similar to BuzzFeed’s reactions, users will be able to access a database of meme images, perhaps powered by Know Your Meme, to respond and converse.

Search Personalization Skyrockets

Despite the clamor from filter bubble and privacy hawks, Google will continue to increase search personalization in 2013. They’ll do this through context, search history, connected accounts (Gmail field trial) and Google+.

The end result will be an ever decreasing uniformity in search results and potential false positives in many rank tracking products.

Curation Marketing

Not content with the seemingly endless debate of SEO versus Inbound Marketing versus Content Marketing versus Growth Hacking we’ll soon have another buzzword entering the fray.

Curation marketing will become increasingly popular as a way to establish expertise and authority. Like all things, only a few will do it the right way and the rest will be akin to scraped content.

Twitter Rakes It In 

I’ve been hard on Twitter in the past and for good reason. But in 2013 Twitter will finally become a massive money maker as it becomes the connection in our new multi-screen world. As I wrote recently, Twitter will win the fight for social brand advertising dollars.

De-pagination

After spending years and literally hundreds of blog posts about the proper way to paginate we’ll see a trend toward de-paginating in the SEO community. The change will be brought on by the advent of new interfaces and capabilities. (Blog post forthcoming.)

Analytics 3.0 Emerges

Pulling information out of big data will be a trend in 2013. But I’m even more intrigued by Google’s Universal Analytics and location analytics services like Placed. Marketers are soon going to have a far more complete picture of user behavior, Minority Report be damned!

Ingress Becomes Important

I’m a bit addicted to Ingress. At first you think this is just a clever way for Google to further increase their advantage on local mapping. And it is.

But XM is essentially a map Android usage. You see a some in houses, large clusters at transit stops, movie theaters and doctor’s offices, essentially anywhere there are lines. You also see it congregate at intersections and a smattering of it on highways.

Ingress shows our current usage patterns and gives Google more evidence that self-driving cars could increase Internet usage, which is Google’s primary goal these days.

Digital Content Monetization

For years we’ve been producing more and more digital content. Yet, we still only have a few scant ways to monetize all of it and they’re rather inefficient when you think about it. Someone (perhaps even me) will launch a new way to monetize digital content.

I Will Interview Matt Cutts

No, I don’t have this lined up. No, I’m not sure I’ll be able to swing it. No, I’m not sure the Google PR folks would even allow it. But … I have an idea. So stay tuned.

Ripples Bookmarklet

July 20 2012 // SEO + Social Media + Technology // 30 Comments

Who shared your post and how did it spread on Google+? That’s what Ripples can tell you, allowing you to find influencers and evangelists.

Google+ Ripples

You can find Ripples in the drop down menu on public posts.

Google Plus Ripples Drop Down

But I noticed that there was also a small URL entry field on the Ripples page.

Google Ripples URL Field

Sure enough you can drop in a URL and see Ripples for any page.

Google Ripples Example

(Interesting how each of my shares of this post are shown separately.)

Ripples Bookmarklet

I didn’t want to go traipsing back and forth to enter URLs, so I created a bookmarklet.

Find Ripples

Drag the link above to your bookmarks bar. Then click the bookmark whenever you want to see Ripples for the page you’re on. [Clarification] This is for non-Google+ URLs only. Ripples for Google+ URLs are only available via the drop-down menu.

So stop wondering and find out who’s sharing your content (or any content) on Google+.

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