And for now, this is correct. Currently the only keyword referral data being replaced with ‘(not provided)’ is that generated by users who:

• Search through Google.com,
• While signed into Google accounts, and
• Click on an organic listing (AdWords keyword referrals are still passed).

Internationally the volume of organic search traffic that meets these criteria is very small, and does not account for much USA traffic either. There is very little available data at this point, and most of these assumptions are based on what people are seeing on their own sites (now that it is it is possible to start to measure the impact) and Matt Cutts’ informal estimate of the percentage of searches performed by signed-in users.

Important, not Urgent

Pay for traffic and get the data for free

The issue is not how much organic search traffic is ‘(not provided)’ now, but what this number might be in the future. SSL Search isn’t an urgent issue, just an important one. Google builds systems for scale, and has stated their intention to take this further:

As part of our commitment to provide a more secure online experience, today we announced that SSL Search on https://www.google.com will become the default experience for signed in users on google.com.

Making SSL Search the default for signed in users won’t be confined to just Google.com forever, and the number of users who remain logged in while using the internet won’t remain the same either. Most of Google’s popular services like Gmail, Google Docs and, optimistically, Google+ work better when you are signed in. Over time there will be more people searching while logged in, not fewer, and SSL Search is certain to be rolled out across more Google TLDs.

Won’t Someone Think of the Users?

It should not be a surprise that Google is working on making a more secure search experience more widely available. Google pays attention to Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and takes the user experience of search seriously. This culture is often reflected by the employees; for example, when SSL search was first introduced by Google in May, 2010, before being moved to https://encrypted.google.com/ in June, Matt Cutts posted A few thoughts on SSL Search on his personal blog on its introduction:

I believe encrypted search is an important option for Google searchers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has asked for secure search in the past (see this post from 2009), and I credit them for helping to put this on Google’s radar. Another inspiration that helped to spark this project was Cory Doctorow’s book “Little Brother.” It was one of my favorite books of 2008 and while I won’t go into the book’s plot here, it’s a quick, fun read. “Little Brother” also makes a compelling case for encrypting HTTP traffic on the web.

Recently, a few ISPs in the USA demonstrated the value of encrypting search referrals for users by redirecting their customers’ search traffic based on the keywords they used to content the ISP selected. In fact, it is the value that SSL Search has for the user that means that Google is providing organisations such as schools a NoSSLSearch option.

Google’s commitment to their users’ privacy and HTTPS Everywhere means that their latest rollout of SSL Search for logged in users is a logical progression, securing their users’ search queries and protecting their privacy. Unless they click on an AdWords listing. If you are paying for clicks, those keyword referrals are still passed through to the advertiser.

Organic Versus Paid Traffic and Data

Despite the Internet’s tendency towards paranoia when reading the motives of large companies, there is actually a good reason why referrals don’t get passed from HTTPS to HTTP sites. As Thomas P from the Webmaster Central Help Forums pointed out:

Clients SHOULD NOT include a Referrer header field in a (non-secure) HTTP request if the referring page was transferred with a secure protocol. (Source: Hypertext Transfer Protocol — HTTP/1.1)

Following these standards means that sites behind HTTPS would still see keyword referrals. But this is not the case with SSL Search; what Google is doing is a little different. In a comment by Eric Wu on Google+, he suggested that Google is not using HTTPS as you would expect (follow the link, his explanation is well worth reading). Searching via https://google.com/ differs from the standards (unlike https://encrypted.google.com/, which still follows them) in two important ways:

• Organic referrals won’t be passed to sites entirely behind HTTPS
• AdWords referrals are passed to sites on HTTP

Both of these are odd behaviours, and seem at odds with the aim of protecting users’ privacy. Passing AdWords keyword referrer information to advertisers is not all that surprising once you think of Google as a business. Danny Sullivan pointed out on Search Engine Land in his Google Puts A Price On Privacy post that provoking a negative response from the people who made Google nearly $10 billion last quarter would not be good for business.

Information is valuable

As long as Google does not increase their number of users...

It is the loss of data due to SSL Search that concerns most online marketing professionals. Search referrals often indicate changes in how queries are structured, shifts in brand awareness and use, the effectiveness in offline campaigns based on certain phrases or words and give important insights into how language is used to describe products or ideas. Keyword referrer information is important for conversion optimisation and can inform ongoing IA development. As limited as the scope of Google’s initial implementation of SSL Search is, the fear that it will account for a greater share of search as time goes by is legitimate, and has real business implications.

In a number of blog posts Google has suggested that Webmaster Tools data can replace the information lost in Google Analytics, with Webmaster tools query data currently available in Google Analytics. However the information provided by Webmaster Tools is substantially different to the keyword data in Google Analytics. It is restricted to only 1,000 queries, and is reported in general terms. It is useless for assessing search queries of more than two words for any site that receives a decent amount of search traffic. Google Webmaster Tools gives an overview of what is happening within Google, but in its current form, it can not replace Keyword referral information.

This might not actually be a bad thing for Google. Information, especially information on user behaviour, is valuable. Google will still be collecting search data from those using SSL Search; the change simply means that they won’t be sharing anymore. At least not without being paid first.

Balancing Privacy and Business

Google has taken a compromise position on user privacy with this implementation of SSL Search. Even as they recognise the value of HTTPS Everywhere for users, Google has acknowledged that referral data has value for their customers (their advertisers, that is – those that don’t pay money are not customers). The result is a feature that does not really protect users’ privacy or encourage more websites receiving both free and paid Google traffic to implement HTTPS.

It is interesting that Google’s other SSL Search URL, https://encrypted.google.com/, handles referrers differently to https://google.com/. With clicks on HTTP URLs, https://google.com passes a HTTP referrer, stripped of keywords, but https://encrypted.google.com does not. When the destination is a HTTPS URL, https://encrypted.google.com passes referrer information as you would expect, but https://google.com does not, unless it is an AdWords link. There is a more complete post, with a chart, at Google Modifies SSL Behavior — and the Results Are Troubling.

To a cynical outsider, it would seem that the only objective Google has actually achieved with SSL Search is protecting their advertisers’ keyword referrals while earning favourable press for defending the privacy of innocent Google users from those nasty, evil, SEO scammers.

Webmaster Tools in your Google Analytics

Update: Google has now officially announced the roll out.

Recently Google has announced a number of changes to Google Analytics. They have announced a new look interface, real time reporting, and a premium pricing model for Google Analytics aimed at servicing the needs of large sites with high traffic volumes and the abilities to analyse huge datasets.

Viewing Webmaster Tools query data in Google Analytics is another change that has started to appear. The pilot was opened in June and is currently becoming more widely available. I only just saw these reports recently, but after asking around online, two SEO’s I know, Joe (Joe O’Brien SEO) and David (The Lost Agency), confirmed that these features have been appearing across a number of accounts.

What Matters?

Search Engine Optimisation Dimensions

At this point it is not possible to build advanced segments to use with Search Engine Optimisation, but it does support a range of dimensions: Queries, Landing Pages and Geographical Summary, which also included both countries and Google Properties such as web, images, video, mobile and mobile (smartphone). At this time there are no widgets available that can be added to a dashboard either.

While providing data over a longer period of time than Webmaster Tools, the search engine optimisation reports do not appear to provide as much historic data as other reports availabe in Google Analytics. However the search engine optimisation reports do support ‘compare to past’.

Google’s Webmaster Tools already provide a lot of tools for segmenting and exporting data. Linking a site’s Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools accounts does not add much more functionality in this regard. However there are still a few benefits that make this worthwhile.

Filters and Meaningful Information

Google Analytics Table Advanced Filters

The filters available for reports in Google Analytics are far more customisable than those available in Webmaster Tools. Access to Analytics views such as Performance, Percentage and Tag Cloud will be very useful for generating reports.

Performance of multi-word queries on the first page

There is also value in the ability to use regular expressions to filter query reports for number of words, or known clusters, such as brand or product terms and their known variant spellings or alternative names and descriptions.

The example above filters for search queries of between two and three words, appearing in Google’s web search with an average position better than 10 with more than 100 impressions. This was based on the Query report, and unfortunately there was no option to further filter the data by location.

Your Mileage May Vary

Google Analytics makes it possible to do things with Webmaster Tools data that was not possible without downloading and analysing the data elsewhere. The limitations on available dimensions, such as seen in the example above, do limit its ability to create a genuine representation of what is actually happening in the search engine results pages.

Working with Google Webmaster Tools data in Analytics is a blunt instrument. It is great for generating reports quickly and easily, but its ability to provide deep and meaningful analysis is limited and the phrase “your mileage may vary” probably best describes it.

Generic versus Brand Searches

Creating a Generic versus Brand Search Rule

Brand search term rules are so important that Google Analytics uses ‘Generic Keywords vs Brand Keywords’ as an example name during the custom Multi-Channel Funnel grouping creation process. It is a very powerful tool, assessing the general performance of a search related campaign, paid or otherwise. Further segmenting search by paid and unpaid and adding both direct and referral traffic makes it even more useful.

Search, Direct and Referral Paths

Search marketing is a great opportunity to reach people without much awareness of your brand and change their behaviour. Online search is more or less a de facto collection of bookmarks, where people enter queries based on URLs, brand or product for sites they have already visited. Tracking queries by the presence of brand terms through Multi-Channel Funnels can reveal how often non-branded search leads to branded queries, direct or referral sales. This can be a great tool for selling the value of SEO internally by demonstrating its value in the customer’s product research behaviour.

Regular Expressions for the rules

Regular expressions are a great way to keep your sanity when you are building the rules for any group of keywords. For example, brand traffic is not just going to be attributed to the correct, proper name of the brand. Variations in spelling and construction have to be accounted for. As an example, for tracking queries on the brand ‘Greyhound Australia’, the regular expression would include the brand and its most common misspellings:

greyhound|grey hound|grayhound|gray hound

The same kind of regular expressions can be used in other rules, like product terms or search terms targeted in a focused SEO project.

Product Terms with or without Brand

Whether or not a search contains a brand term only really speaks to awareness. Brand terms alone don’t distinguish between navigational, informational or transactional queries. A search for just ‘Greyhound Australia’ is clearly navigational. The search lacks any other qualifying term and Google’s recent change to how sitelinks are displayed for some queries seems to indicate even they regard such searches as purely navigational.

Brand rules with and without product terms

Creating rules that label traffic using qualifying terms and traffic that doesn’t can make the difference between navigational and informational searches in the funnel clear. Differentiating between a search for ‘Greyhound Sydney to Canberra’ and ‘Greyhound Australia’ is the difference between seeing a funnel with two brand searches, and a funnel with a search for a product including a brand term and a navigational brand search.

Campaign Source Attribution

There are more online customer acquisition channels than search. Directories, display networks, guest posts, links and advertorial are all tools that can reach new customers or initiate research and purchase behaviour. Multi-Channel Funnels and custom groupings make it easy to see how they feed into other traffic sources.

Tracking more than search traffic

Adding rules for campaign URLs used in advertising or branded content and source URLs such as social media touchpoints make it possible to see how these activities drive customer behaviour. The ability to identify campaigns that drive sales both directly and through other channels make informed decisions regarding future activity easier.

Custom Groupings: Just Start Using Them

Multi-Channel Funnels make it easier to see what works, what doesn’t and how certain activities can lead to sales. The ability to differentiate between broad information searches and brand focused queries and identify how they are linked across different search mediums is valuable. Tracking conversions across campaigns and channels makes it easier to make informed decisions about social media activity, guest posts and display advertising or directory lists as well.

Plan how to integrate Multi-Channel Funnels with your current online activities. The process to get started can be as simple as:

• Create custom Channel groupings focusing on sources that matter:
  • To you
  • To the people you report to
• Create new Channel groupings from existing ones to monitor new campaigns and sources
• See what works, see what doesn’t, see what can be improved

What are your Must Have Multi-Channel Funnels?

The single most important thing I think Multi-Channel Funnels can give you is the ability to see what broad research behaviours lead to direct navigational activity, either as direct visits or navigational brand searches.

How are you going to use these new tools in Google Analytics?

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.

Clickthroughs by Average Position on the first page

Google’s first pageview looks very crowded. In seeking to answer the searcher’s query as best they can, search engines are creating richer, more nuanced search result pages, with video, images, news and other kinds of information displayed along with links to the ranking sites. All this extra content has to go somewhere, and thus increases the competition for screen real estate.

The first spot for an organic result has always been the best, and the click through rate (CTR) certainly justifies this. The interesting question is where does this trend leave spots two through to ten? Is third still worth something? Can you be happy with being fourth on a competitive query, as the costs associated with ranking higher begin to scale upwards at an alarming rate? Just how bad is it once you fall below the fold, and where is this even happening?

The Personalised Search Nightmare

There is no single search engine result page (SERP) for any term. Assuming one person’s search experience is going to be the same as another’s is not a sustainable position. Previous behaviour on the part of the user as an individual, and users as a group defined by data-centre or location, all potentially affect what is shown. Recent news and updates need to be considered too in the fast updating post-caffeine world. You could build a model for an average SERP within a given audience, given access to enough information from a decent sample. This might give an indication of what is included in the SERP, and which results would be seen in the first pageview.

The Best Best Guess

There is an alternative to attempting to identify the most likely combination of organic sites, videos, news, places, snippets, images and paid ad units to appear to a given user for assessing the value of a position. Projected search volumes compared to visits can potentially shed light on the relative worth of a position between queries. For sites you personally manage, Google’s Webmaster Tools is a great source for this kind of data. Google is far from transparent with most published numbers relating to organic search, and the figures presented are by no means precise. But for a site with significant search visibility, there should be enough data to begin to make reasonable assumptions.

The graph at the start of this blog post was created for just this purpose. The data was taken from Google Webmaster Tools for a site that gets a reasonable amount of organic traffic. The actual data set used is for searches of over 100 reported impressions for terms with an average position of ten or less within a single geographic region (country is the most specific location available). The data at a glance indicates that once the average position is greater than two, CTR is rarely better than 25%. (The graph is available here via Impure.)

What to Ask Next?

The terms used in building this data set include brand queries, product queries and general searches. They cover transactional, navigational and informational behaviours and numerous specific geographic terms. There is a lot more that can be done from here to find interesting, actionable insights.

The search terms themselves are an important part of the data set, and so far under-utilised. The next step in examining the data could be to:

• Examine geographic queries:
  • As one data set
  • As individual locations
• Remove branded queries
• Examine product queries
• Examine news/information queries

Splitting the data by query potentially accounts for the effect of maps in the SERPs, visibility by Place listing, the effect of the query matching the brand or product on CTR, and CTR for informational searches.

The options for examining the effects of ranking, CTR and search type is dependent on the nature of the site in question and what its actual search visibility is. Looking closer at what content gets clicked in search versus position across different kinds of queries can give great insights into what content works. It will also reveal where a few well performing search types are hiding the gaps in a poorly performing SEO strategy.

There is a site in there somewhere

Search engine result pages are made up of more than 10 blue links. As search engines like Google display more kinds of information and content and space within the first pageview is at a premium, how information is used in support of search marketing must evolve too.

Google’s search results page has come a long way from the original plain ten blue links. Over the years these ten links have been joined by a wide range of other kinds of information. Google has stated that their goal is to answer searchers’ questions faster and with more relevance, so the results page has become more informative and the content displayed more diverse.

Read the full post on MarketingMag.com.au

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?

Schema.org and Google's +1 Strawman Deathmatch

Button versus Standards for Blogger Attention

On launch, the +1 button got the larger share of attention, while the Schema.org project kicked off in relative obscurity. Which is a shame, because it isn’t often that the two major search engines (and Yahoo!) agree on something, sitemaps being the last time. That they have all agreed on a standard for organising information that they will all follow is significant in itself. It is also interesting that their markup has been promoted ahead of WC3′s microdata standards.

Historically each search engine has developed their own markups to create a more semantic search experience, such as Yahoo!’s now defunct Searchmonkey and Google’s microformats. Other services like Google Base and their Maps product also produced the same user experience, by making it easier to organise information in a meaningful way in the results page.

Richer Content in the Search Results

Google is now:

…able to show rich snippets in search results more than ten times as often as when we started two years ago.

Google Flights

And Bing is talking about how:

Consumers benefit from this effort by experiencing much richer search experiences (see example below) across a much broader set of publishers.

Bing Film Times

The Search Engine as a Portal

As well as making the content on a site easier to categorise, microformat projects like Schema.org will probably also continue the trend towards a more portal-like search experience. With publishers providing more content to be displayed within the search results themselves and search engines facilitating this trend through supporting it in both organic and paid listings, mobile and otherwise, the Search Engine Results Page is as much a destination as content discovery aid.

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.