According to Google, the three big features will be:

1. Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
2. Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
3. People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.

Google has not provided a single universal search experience for a while, so the first of these three features is not as significant as it would seem. The second and third however are a different story.

Profiles in Search

This is probably going to the most significant feature in terms of actual user adoption, and it is also in line with the steps that Google has been taking towards becoming a key identity provider online. Search is as much a destination in itself as it is a directory, and Google is close to filling the same role as portal sites like Yahoo! used to in the 1990′s.

Adding the profiles to which the user is connected and those they might want to add to their Circles is an important piece of social functionality for Google+. On sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, the people search tools have been one of the tools driving the growth of their users’ networks.

Making Google+ profiles more visible in the results and autocomplete also creates social proof for uncommitted users that Google+ is used, and I suspect will encourage people to use it more.

People and Pages

The third feature being introduced with Google+’s closer integration with Google’s search results is the inclusion of personal profiles as  results in search, outranking older, more active and ostensibly more linked-to web properties. The importance of personal Google+ profiles in search was hinted at earlier with Google’s replacing ‘+’ with quotations for marking a word as exact match.

Google+ on a logged out vanity search

Considering how Google has used YouTube, Google Places and a number of other services within their search results, this should not have taken anyone by surprise.

How well Google+ profiles are performing in search compared to other web properties has certainly drawn criticism, although not much astonishment, from the more cynical commentators online.

There is a positive side to the performance of Google+ content in search, and that is in reputation management. It is another way to get content ranking for a brand or name that could outrank less than favourable results and bury them.

With More Social Content comes Greater Transparency

As well as the new social features, Google also announced a number of changes to their interface to give the user greater control over their search experience and to create more transparency in how the social content is used in search. The search engine also made it easy for users to remove personalised results, which feature is accessible through a toggle button:

That means no results from your friends, no private information and no personalization of results based on your Web History. This toggle button works for an individual search session, but you can also make this the default in your Search Settings. We provide separate control in Search Settings over other contextual signals we use, including location and language.

Crowding the Social Bandwagon

The most interesting reaction to Google’s Search, plus Your World came from Twitter, who seemed understandably annoyed. Even though the two companies parted ways, Search, plus Your World became an opportunity for Twitter to state their concerns on how as a “result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone” to find the breaking news and event information that Twitter has become known for.

Google+ could become a competitor for Twitter as a realtime news provider and aggregator by displaying breaking information inline with organic search results, and it is interesting to see Twitter publicly take a shot at Google over this. However, it has been a while since their content agreement expired without renewal, leaving Google’s realtime search tools dead just as Google+ was being launched.

With Search, plus Your World, it seems that Twitter is concerned that Google might be able to revive the functionality of realtime search, without having to enter another deal with their own social network.

Social without the Site

For Google+ to pay off for Google, it does not need to replace Facebook or Twitter. To succeed as an identity provider it just needs profiles, and for its users to remain logged in while using other Google products.

The search results themselves are shaping up to be the most important part of Google+, with the addition of everything from friends, personal photos and shared content, to potentially realtime updates on subjects of interest (Remember Sparks? Maybe they will come into this at some point). Google+ is not about being a destination in itself, and frankly, it does not need to be.

Whenever a brand throws out the old in favour of something topical it gets attention. It is bold, and both the professional and amateur media love it. In the end the numbers will either vindicate or invalidate the experiment, assuming they measure the ROI in a way that reflects reality. Everything else is speculation, informed or otherwise.

Facebook has got to be better than email...

As interesting as the lively debate between the social media exponents and eDM professionals was at the time, it just begged the question: ‘Why not just do both?’ After all, I am sure you won’t get tarred and feathered at your favourite morning coffee do if you dabble in the black arts of using stuff that works.

Social Media and Email: With, not Instead Of

How you can use a social media platform, such as Facebook, Twitter, et al, is different from the tools available with email, from users’ expectations regarding content and frequency to how the user can interact with the material, and the platform’s restrictions on what can be delivered in what form to whom.

To borrow from Mitch Joel, it is ‘With’ not ‘Instead Of’. Using both social media and email gives you more options, and increases the size of your potential audience. Connecting with customers across multiple platforms facilitates different interactions, and gives the customer the choice of how they want to connect with the brand. Maybe a Facebook fan that finds no value in your updates would actually love the email newsletter, or perhaps the Twitter account amuses them during their work day while they find eDM invasive. Giving the customer the choice can mean that when they opt out of one channel, they might still connect through another.

Building Audiences on Other People’s Platforms

Building eDM and Social Media Audiences

Facebook fans are not really yours; neither are Twitter followers. Without the accounts they are connected to, these audiences don’t exist. Unlike email. There is also little point in building different engagement strategies for multiple channels without cross-promoting them.

Competitions, surveys and other data collection or content driven special events can accomplish both of these goals:

• Making the brand’s audience aware of other touch points and
• Collecting contact details and other information through either a microsite or the brand’s main web presence.

The nature of eDM as a one way communication channel without the ability to demonstrate social proof makes it better suited to direct customers to a range of appropriate social media touch points, where most of the content would be published during the campaign. Cross promotion of the brand’s social media touch points and a call to action that would lead to further entries in the brand’s email database and CRM will generate better connection with and a better picture of the audience.

Promoting campaigns such as these should not be restricted to just eDM and social media. Getting the most out of it requires that other media is added to the mix, be it print, broadcast, SMS, MMS, PR, online display and promotional activity on the brand’s site. However it is executed, there should be two returns to the business:

• More information on the brand’s customers
• More points of contact with the brand’s customers.

Do Everything You Can Do Well

Limited access to resources and avoiding uneconomic channels are the only reasons that should affect what tools are and are not used online. There is no reason to abandon one kind of promotional activity online in favour of another. With so many ways to go online and consume information, arbitrarily limiting a brand’s options in how it can reach and be reached by its customers is not a winning strategy.

Diaspora's Kickstarter t-shirt

Diaspora’s privacy management is based on Aspects. The user groups their connections by a set of personal criteria, and can choose who gets to see which updates, and which stream of content they consume. Grouping people in this way isn’t really new; Google’s other social network, Orkut, employs a similar system, as does their new social project, Google+, with its Circles. Diaspora’s big point of difference is as a federated network. Anyone can take the software, install it on a server, and connect it to other installations, called pods. Now after almost a year and with Google+ live to a limited audience, how has Diaspora gone?

The View from Diaspora

The view from Diaspora

Since launch the development of Diaspora has not stopped. The interface has been improved, Diaspora supports mentions and hashtags in status updates and searches on public posts. Users can post from Diaspora to Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook, and anyone’s public stream is available as an RSS feed.

Diaspora has a few more tools than it had at launch that make it easier to share sites and images while not on the site. A bookmarklet and an awesome photo sharing tool called cubbi.es (It saves an image on shift+left click, posts it to your cubbi.es account, into your stream on Diaspora, and can back it up to your Dropbox account as well). But there is one part of Diaspora’s user experience that has been stagnant for a while, and that’s mobile.

Personally Diaspora never really took off within my own social circles. No-one I know in real life, or through other social networks, is currently active within Diaspora. All the people with whom I currently interact on Diaspora, I met there, and they all sit in a ‘People from Diaspora’ Aspect.

Adding Google to the mix

A Google+ Perspective

And now there is Google+. The project has had an awesome take-up rate and already has over 10 million users. A lot of my acquaintances who were on Diaspora but never really used it are now very active on Google+. Whether this is the result of a solid product on Google’s part, or simply of the initial hype, remains to be seen.

Google+ does a lot of things differently to Diaspora (and Orkut) even if there is some overlap of the core mechanics of Circles vs Aspects. Notifications for activity on Google+ are visible while on other Google products, like Gmail and Google Reader, and can be acted upon without returning to Google+.

Eric Schmitt’s “Put your best people on mobile” is obvious on Google+. The project’s mobile experience is awesome on both mobile web and the Android app (which I love). Google+ has a number of other features, the most talked about being their desktop video feature called Hangouts, and mobile group messaging feature called Huddle.

Google+ probably won’t ‘kill’ Facebook. The size of the networks most users have built on Facebook represents a massive switching cost should they wish to migrate to another platform. Google+ will, at least for now, be a second social network, similar to how many people have active LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and other social media profiles as well as their Facebook accounts.

Where Google+ can clearly replace Facebook is on mobile. For ages the Facebook mobile experience has been bad, bordering on malicious. The only reason that Google+ isn’t actually replacing Facebook on mobile for me is because I stopped using Facebook on my phone ages ago. Facebook’s app and mobile website are horribly slow and unstable, and do not offer me enough as a user to make it worth the aggravation to use. Google+’s Android app is the opposite. It is fast, easy to navigate and use, and lets me see public posts by people near me and tag posts with my location.

Why Google+ will expand and Diaspora will remain niche

Diaspora is a solid, open platform that gives the user as much control as they want to take on, and judging from the work the team has put into it so far, will continue to improve. Google+ has a lot of awesome features on launch and has the benefit of the Google brand and integration with their other products. Both platforms have good reasons to use them and both cover areas that Facebook does not. Diaspora is more sensitive regarding user privacy and Google+ offers features that Facebook either doesn’t have, or does badly.

The biggest difference between Google+ and Diaspora is that while both do things that Facebook does not, most people don’t care about the needs that Diaspora meets, whereas those Google+ cover are obvious from the start. There are a few small differences, like how Diaspora sorts posts either by the date of the post, or the latest comment, which Google+ does not do. There are also other similarities, in that both let the user export their data easily and fully, unlike Facebook.

Diaspora does have a future, but it won’t be as large as Google+. Facebook will probably start to fill the gaps that Google+ seems aimed at, and this can already been seen in the rumours surrounding Project Spartan. For now though, Google+ will continue to gain users at a greater rate than Diaspora, and for all its flaws, Facebook isn’t going anywhere.

Post frequency over time

It was only a matter of time, but with the post Click Throughs in the Search Results, this blog finally turned 100. Specifically, 100 posts published since the 2nd November, 2008. Topics have varied from football clubs, fans and crowds, to mobile, search, search engine marketing and social media, with a few more esoteric subjects covered occasionally. Ultimately though, this blog has been about marketing and the Internet and how information is communicated.

Reaching an arbitrary large post number is an ideal opportunity to look back on the blog, and what happened to date. Information such as what tags were used, what posts were popular, what spread and what the return is on doing it in the first place are all interesting questions to answer.

Common Content by Common Tags?

A network of tags and posts

• Online
• Internet
• Search
• Social
• Advertising

Search related tags certainly dominate among the first hundred posts, with other online terms such as brands and tools appearing almost as frequently. Outside of these topics, the tags used to classify the blog posts were diverse and covered a lot of subject material. In the active version of the graph you can explore the posts within the network of tags.  But as diverse as the tags used were, the top five listed above were far and away the most common ones used to describe what I wrote.

What Worked?

The most viewed post to date was Bing Powering Facebook’s Search. This was the result of ranking well for the query ‘facebook search’ on google.com.au. That month also saw some interesting use of the blog’s site search.

The two posts that generated the most social activity were written about the Queensland floods at the beginning of this year. Their success was the result of good timing, engaging topics that were highly relevant to the people I could easily reach in my social network and a relative lack of competition.

• Floods, Brisbane and What Worked Online
• Floods, Tourism and Search in Queensland

My favourite blog post to date was The Narrowcast Internet, though it isn’t one of the successes. Both the text and the overly elaborate graph that accompanied it took the most time to produce, with very little payoff. It was also on a topic I find very interesting, regarding what structures our online experiences and what mediators can influence it. These are ideas I keep on returning to in my other posts.

What Was The Return?

There is a cost, if only in time, in writing a blog. But what is the return? With no publication schedule, no consistent format or word count and a wide range of topics covered that were usually discussed by other, more established and competitive blogs or aggregators, this blog has broken almost every best practice.

However there are benefits – creating and maintaining the blog has improved my writing, made me develop my ideas before exposing them to the world and given me another site full of content to experiment with. This blog has been worth the time that has gone into it, and I look forward to doing another of these posts when this blog turns 200.

Explore the graphs from this post here generated using Impure.com.

Apparently Google Does Search Too

What do you love? The obvious answer.

This week Google also announced a cool search tool called ‘What do you love?’ and the inclusion of author attribution in the search results. Google’s core strength is information retrieval. Becoming the Internet’s content curation tool of choice and consequently becoming a major source of attention and traffic is why the company is where it is today.

One of this week’s releases was a cool new search tool with an engaging interface. ‘What do you love?’ runs a query against a number of Google services and products, including search, books, images, 3D objects and maps. The result is more of a subject orientated page than a search result, and it links off to each Google service listed. The tool is very new, and there is a small box at the bottom of the page promising ‘More coming soon’.

Finding the Authors or the Publishers?

Earlier in June a blog post titled Authorship markup and web search was published on the Google Webmaster Central blog. Only two weeks later another blog post called Highlighting content creators in search results stated that author attribution would be added to the search results pages.

This feature is powered by the authorship markup which we announced two weeks ago. We hope as more authors link to their content, it will improve your search experience and the quality of content being created on the web.

Authors, Attribution and Snippets

People develop preferences for certain content creators. There is no need to look further than traditional media like books and movies for examples of this behaviour. Selecting content by author is about trust and choosing a style and view you prefer. On the Internet most methods of content discovery, from search to social media, draw more attention to the publisher of a piece or the platform than the author.

Trust in exploration and selection of information is skewed heavily towards the source, be it a link from a friend or a listing in an aggregator or a search tool, and the publisher who provided the space for it online. Most of the time the author is invisible at the point where the user decides what to click on.

Google seems to think that authorship and attribution are important. Solid attribution is a real issue online in an environment where it is increasingly separated from its origin. Tying individual identity to work has potential for authors developing their personal brand or apps collating an individual’s work for easy consumption. It will be interesting to see how author attribution and the tools to make it happen in search will affect other personal aggregators as online content consumption becomes even more separate from the sites that host it.

Google+ Project

Reading through the features list, nothing stands out as revolutionary, but that’s OK, because this does not actually matter. Google+ seems to be aimed at refining tools and features that already exist in other networks. +Circles appear to mirror Diaspora’s Aspects (you add people by dragging and dropping on both too), topic-focused groups will be called +Sparks, and +Hangouts look interesting, almost like a video IRC channel. +Mobile and +Huddle look like the real point of difference for Google+ in a market dominated by Facebook. A better mobile experience and well-executed group messaging are both areas in which Google+ can sidestep their competition.

Google’s “mobile first” approach is potentially Google+’s best chance of success, and their love affair with web-based applications will probably be seen in a polished browser-based product. However Google+’s biggest problem in gaining engaged users is other networks. The more connected a user is in an existing social network, the higher the cost of switching to a new platform.

Jumping on the Social Bandwagon

Joining the Social Bandwagon

This does not mean that Google+ and its range of services can’t become someone’s ‘as well as’ rather than ‘instead of’. Facebook’s galleries didn’t stop people from using Instagram, and Twitter seems to be doing OK even though Facebook has the Wall. A solid mobile experience providing services Facebook either doesn’t offer or doesn’t do very well, like mobile sharing and group messaging, is Google+’s biggest opportunity.

Google+ isn’t likely to become 750 million people’s primary social network anytime soon, but there is a good chance that if it delivers something genuinely useful it’ll become one of the many other social tools we use. Google+ won’t replace Facebook, but this doesn’t automatically mean it will fail either. After all, how many people use just one social network?

Living in a Fishbowl

When certain Queensland Association for Healthy Communities (QAHC) ads were pulled from bus stops around Brisbane this week, my Facebook and Twitter feeds filled with protests, jokes, demands that the ads be put back and a…

Read the full post on MarketingMag.com.au

In this case Microsoft means more than just Messenger, and will also allow the user to access Facebook chat through the same system. I imagine Skype will be added as well at some point. The phone will also select the service based on the activity:

For example, if we’re both online in Messenger, it will use Messenger IM so that we can share rich photos and more, but if we’re Facebook friends or just have each other’s phone numbers, it will automatically select the right service for our conversation.

Adding SMS and IM to the same conversation thread makes a lot of sense for Microsoft, especially considering how they are building their social networks, including their recent, widely publicised acquisition of Skype (I do not think they will restrict Skype to Windows, that would just be silly). Messenger is also able to connect with Yahoo! and Facebook, and in November last year, their Messenger app was the second most popular on Facebook, after Farmville.

The High Cost of Microsoft's Evil Skype Plan

Networks of Social Networks

When the Windows Live blog published their Preview of the new Windows Live Messenger in April 2010, they made a number of interesting points in line with some of their most recent published studies on user behaviour:

• People use multiple devices
• People use multiple platforms
• Publishing the same message to all platforms is not good User Experience
• People want to see more from some more than others in their own networks

Through building a network with partners and acquisitions, Microsoft is expanding Messenger’s reach beyond their install base. Both Facebook and Google seem to be trying to achieve the same with their social graph, and suite of content and social tools respectively.

In addition to access to a larger network of individuals, Messenger’s network of partners, and the integration of SMS through the Windows Phone 7 update, creates a unified communication experience. The user can follow a conversation they are having with another across multiple platforms in a single coherent thread. Other platforms appear to be implementing the same ideas, for example, Facebook Connect’s new Comment Box plugin is another example of effectively expanding the activity of a social network site beyond its own domain, creating a more unified social experience for its users.

With huge growth expected for mobile, providing better tools that offer a seamless experience across computers, tablets and phones is more important than ever. The growth for smartphones and numbers of users using multiple devices for 2010 show how big this can be:

Global Internet Use by Device Type for 2010

• 2 billion Internet users in 2010
• 400 million Internet users only use a personal computer
• 975 million Internet users use both a personal computer and a mobile phone
• 625 million Internet users only use a mobile phone

• 1.38 billion new mobile phone handsets sold 2010 (almost all with a browser and a colour screen)
  • 22% of all new phones sold 2010 (298 million) were smartphones
  • 1.2 billion personal computers in use globally 2010

(Source: All the Numbers, All the Facts on Mobile the Trillion-Dollar Industry. Why is Google saying: Put your Best People on Mobile?, Communities Dominate Brands, Ahonen, T)

What Are They Doing, not What Are They Using

Integrating SMS and IM on mobile makes sense: both are predominantly text based (posting images, video and MMS aside), both tend to use short messages, and both use similar interfaces. Their differences are more a result of the associated technology than user behaviour. SMS, voice calls, IM and voice over IP (VoIP) were separate because they had to be. As devices become more powerful and able to perform a greater range of tasks and support more functions, the differences between them and other computers diminished.

The popularity of applications like Tweetdeck, and others that support conversations held across multiple platforms, indicate that there is a desire for this kind of integration. Ultimately, the user cares about what they want to achieve, such as following the news, catching up with friends or organising to meet for coffee. The platform doesn’t matter, only the interaction.

Music in the cloud, and buying Skype

A Distributed Microsoft Social Network

Microsoft has a successful email service, a popular gaming platform with an online social network and a messaging client with a large install base. Also at the end of last year, Microsoft released a Facebook app for Live Messenger and began to incorporate social feeds into their own mobile and desktop chat clients. Microsoft already has a network covering multiple platforms and devices. Skype is an expansion of this network, and with Qik, it certainly shows some potential for mobile.

A more social Live

Reaching the Multi-Screen, Multi-Device, Multi-Platform User

There is more than one way to reach a new destination on the Internet. There is also more than one kind of software to use, device to operate and method to find new things. An Internet where banners and search advertising displayed in a browser are the only means of advertising no longer exists.

Mobile, gaming and social platforms are as important for building awareness as online advertising targeting desktop computer usage. The Microsoft Advertising blog has published a lot of content on reaching the multiscreen consumers, and advertising across multiple devices.

Buying An Audience

A number of interesting stats on Skype users were shared after the announcement. The most impressive was Skype’s current 170 million users and 40% year over year growth.

Buying Skype (with Qik in tow) gives Microsoft more users, much in the same way that their deal with Nokia will increase their Windows Phone 7 install base from 1.4% in Q4 2010. Even if Nokia loses an expected market of 50 million smartphones in 2011, the market share left by the time a Windows Phone 7 handset arrives will still be more than Microsoft has now.

Attention is all online

With information as easy to create and publish as it is now, it is curation that matters. Curation is more than a directory and a search engine now. Microsoft’s range of services, software and devices position them for a post-PC world, with its fragmented user experience. Microsoft’s own published reports say that we now:

…start our sessions in what I would call our intimate zones seeking personal information and contact through email, social networks, blogs etc.

Microsoft is building a distributed social network, covering computers, gaming, mobiles and tablets. They are creating a platform that can include Hotmail users, Xbox Live users, Facebook users, Windows Live users and now, Skype and Qik users. It reaches consoles, computers and mobiles and is accessible from different devices and platforms. It just isn’t limited to a single domain.

The types of content don’t really change from one device to the next, but how I experience, find or explore content, which software, applications, platforms I use, and where and how I connect do. The people I am connected to, how and where I search, the connection stability and speed and the specifics of the device I use all affect how and what I consume online.

There is more than one way to find or do things online. Publication is easier than ever and the Internet has an almost unlimited capacity for content. TV and radio only ever had 24 hours per day to fill, newspapers have a set number of pages, and the market could only sustain a limited number of these entities. Online, these limitations don’t exist; there is always space to publish just about anything. If the content created is good enough for the user, it is attention that matters, not the platform.

Some of the best business models online involve providing a platform (Facebook, Apple App Store), a search engine (Google, YouTube) or some form of aggregator (Flipbook, Netflix). Companies like DemandMedia are the exceptions that prove the rule. Their content production model works, both before and after Google’s Panda Update (an algorithm change targeting ‘low quality’ content, which may or may not be ‘content farms’), because it is integral to their attention and audience building strategy.

What shapes the user's experience of the Internet

Many of the things that influence a user’s online experience, how they search and explore, and the information they consume fit into one of these broad categories:

• Infrastructure
• Connection Speeds and Stability
• ISP
• Application & Address Layer
• Devices
• Software
• Navigation & Discovery

A user’s experience of the Internet is shaped as much by these as by many other factors: how they find new content, the software they use, the device used, how it connects to the internet, the ISP. There are also many other services running in the background, just out of sight, such as the DNS provider, application layer and physical hardware, which also affect the end user experience. Their impact can be as dramatic as an Armenian woman cutting two optic-fibre cables or as subtle as connection speed and stability.

Sites and Portals, Clients and Servers

There is a brillant image on Doc Searls Weblog, from the post A sense of bewronging. It is a photo of a cow and a suckling calf. Doc Searls used it in a slide deck to illustrate the relationship between users and sites on the commercial web:

It’s a calf-cow model. As calves, we request pages and other files from servers, usually getting cookie ingredients mixed in, so the cow can remember where we were the last time we suckled, and also give us better services.

Online search, commercial websites and social and advertising networks now track user behaviour and information better than ever and adjust their content to suit. This trend is neither new nor limited to Google and Bing’s forays into personalised search.

Arguably this is not in the best interest of the users, especially in search. Social signals might be handy for finding a restaurant, but their value declines as the information falls further and further outside of the social network’s aggregated sphere of competence. For example, the sites a creationist might like would be utterly pointless for a query on evolutionary biology, even if the text includes the same terms.

These one-sided relationships are not just limited to the commercial web, but extend to hardware, software, the ISPs we use and ultimately to the digital and physical infrastructure of the Internet. Individual users are being moved away from an objective Internet. Tools like Google, Bing, Twitter, News.me, Facebook, and any other platform or service that serves content person by person are creating a siloed, Narrowcast Internet.

The Why and How

Search is credited with being THE way people find information online. Algorithmically generated lists of links, paid or otherwise, account for a significant amount of traffic on the Internet. Despite indexes full of optimised commercial content and with declining search literacy (Trust Online: Young Adults’ Evaluation of Web Content), arguably no motive for the search engines to provide more than An Adequate Search Result, search is still seen as the best way to find new information.

Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) are not the only place people spend their time or discover new stuff. Hitwise’s ‘Top 20 Sites & Engines’ report for the US datacentre indicates a more nuanced picture of online behaviour. The top five most visited sites for the week ending 23rd April 2010 were:

1. Facebook
2. Google
3. Youtube
4. Yahoo! Mail
5. Yahoo!

The top five for Hitwise’s ‘Top 20 Sites & Engines’ (week ending 23rd April 2010) report from their Australia datacentre was not all that different:

1. Google
2. Facebook
3. Youtube
4. Windows Live Mail
5. ninemsn

Portals, social media and email sites matter as well as search, either web or video. Other discovery modes such as link sharing via social media, email and outbound links on articles are as important for generating attention and an audience as a listing on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). The post, New Microsoft Advertising Study on “Living with the Internet”: What’s driving web behaviour? on the Microsoft Advertising Blog makes the point based on their research that users:

…start our sessions in what I would call our intimate zones seeking personal information and contact through email, social networks, blogs etc.

Curation matters, especially online, and curating requires choice. Linking, displaying, referring to content inadvertently prejudices the user against what they don’t see. The link a friend would tweet or email you to answer a question might not be the first one you would find on a Google results page. The product description you see in a company’s iPhone app can vary from the one on their Facebook page. Site content and ads can change depending on the device being used too. What a user finds to answer a question or complete a task does change depending on how they find it.

Search and curation

There are a number of different ways a user can navigate from one place to another online. Non-digital media directs users to new information, so do kinds of feeds delivered through single or multiple source applications like News.me, last.fm and The Australian’s app. Most navigation modes fall into one of the following groups:

• Search Algorithmic Link
• Search Paid Link
• Shared Link/Bookmark Link
• Non-Search Paid Link
• Unpaid Link
• Personally Bookmarked
• Direct Feed API
• User Entered Destination

Motives, Devices and Further Fragmentation

User intent plays a huge role in determining which tools they use and how. Microsoft’s ‘Living with the Internet’ report identified six different motives for the majority of online activity:

• Communication
• Information
• Entertainment
• Surfing
• Transaction
• Creation

The report explored the different motives behind Internet use by PC, laptop and netbook compared to smartphone and tablet devices. The smartphone and tablet users from the report focused on fewer motives per session than those using laptops and desktops. Mobile and tablet users were also less likely to cite entertainment and transaction motives for their time spent online.

Differences in the device’s interface, screen size and the user’s concurrent activities all probably contributed to this pattern, at least in the population studied. Ease of managing multiple browser tabs and applications probably plays a role in differentiating behaviour from one device to another. Keyboard versus touch or phone keypad input is another factor.

Mobile Matters

A post called ‘Some Milestones We Will See This Year in Mobile Statistics’ on the Communities Dominate Brands blog bought up some interesting figures on the 4.6 billion actual mobile phone handsets in use last year, along with a few interesting predictions for the coming year.

Last year, of the 4.6 billion mobile phones in use:

• 96% of all phones in use worldwide have at least a basic browser
• 71% of all phones in use had a ‘real’ web browser that was HTML compatible
• 59% can do basic apps via Java or Brew

Mobile devices are becoming an even more significant part of the user’s experience of the Internet. If all you have to use the internet with is a phone, you can’t play EVE online, WOW or run Steam. If you only use a desktop, you don’t get to use augmented reality. Use a dumb phone, and chances are you are restricted to WAP or a seriously impaired experience on non-mobile optimised sites. However, if you are using a smart or feature phone, you can access a different application ecosystem, and use location and augmented reality tools.

Cows all the way down

Our virtual world is a network of inter-dependent nodes hostage to Armenian women cutting cords, governments building walls or flicking switches, unreliable networks, hosting companies cutting cords, domain names taken down, and so much more.

A user’s experience and the information they find is the result of a large number of factors. Online services are diversifying and use more signals and cues for sorting and curating information, creating billions of different user experiences. Each of these experiences is a result of the many layers of dependencies and gatekeepers between the user and the rest of the Internet, from the hardware they use to how the information is placed in front of them.

To borrow that mental image from Doc Searls, it’s cows all the way down.