April 5, 2007

Get Social With Your Browser

This week, Mozilla Labs announced a new project to develop social functionality within the Firefox browser. The Coop aims to “create a fun and easy way to share links with your friends, and to browse the set of links that friends have shared with you. We also want to make it easy to ‘subscribe' to a friend.”

Firefox could become the place where you keep up with everything online. The main interface consists of boxes representing friends whom you select. Their faces are supposed to light up when they have something to share. More practically, you're able to sort by friends, their content, or content type. There are more specs in the The Coop's wiki.

What's Appealing:

At first glance, this social browser should appeal to users who already spend their days actively tagging and sharing. There are many who use tagging tools like del.icio.us and furl.net, and are accustomed to using their browsers already. For them, the transition seems natural.

The Coop also might attract people who actively participate on social sites. It's a slightly different mindset, since you make your primary social connections on the browser first rather than the domain-based social site. However once you select your friends, it's a convenient option.

For just about anyone, having ready access and links to all forms of media is a nice feature. You could start to consider browsers as mini-portals, if set up according to your specific interests. Take a quick look at this video mock, where the latest video finds among friends are easily shared.

What's Not Appealing:

First, the social browser is "set" to the same channels of friends and content. When your interests change, that means you'll want to re-tune to other people. Otherwise, you'll see things that aren't interesting -- literally every time you open your browser.

Also, the Coop doesn't fully consider the vast amount of people you reach occasionally online. You might have some interests in common, but aren't going to sign up to see everything these people want to share. It makes me wonder where social search fits in this picture.

The most basic pitfall? Browsers aren't portable and many people have separate work and home computers. While both can be set up, it may not be desirable and synchronization could be a hassle. Not everyone is tethered to their own machines either, so they lose access to their social connections.

The Bigger Picture:

From a traffic perspective, patterns would obviously shift because the social browser creates a noisier environment surrounding websites. What people visit online is disconnected from what's shared in the browser. I'm not sure who comes out ahead, but there should be new traffic driven by the browser-based links shared by friends.

Also, there isn't any monetization path. On social sites, there are active CPM and CPC advertising efforts, but The Coop spec stays ad-free. However this browser will expose ads attached to external feeds, which is how some feed providers make money. Any incremental revenue opportunities on Firefox aren't likely.

The Coop is freshly hatched, and defined as a communication and sharing mechanism, which depends on the interests of active users and their crowds. It follows the paths set by other social sites, only without the site. When it develops in coming months, let's see what happens with adoption rates and business opportunities.

Posted by at 9:14 PM | Permalink

April 3, 2007

E-consultancy publishes online PR briefing

E-consultancy has just published an Online PR Briefing. You can download the 12-page report for free. It includes a summary of a recent roundtable discussion on this topic, plus other information about market trends, search statistics and useful resources.

Katy Howell of immediate future, who spoke at Search Engine Strategies in London back in February, provides a useful overview of where Online PR is in 2007. There is also a debate about the similarities and differences between Online PR and Search Engine Optimization. If you are interested in the crossover between these marketing disciplines, you should also read the blog post by Ken McGaffin of Wordtracker.com.

It is clear from the roundtable discussion that there are still plenty of organizations struggling to grasp how Online PR fits into the bigger picture. One of the reasons for this is that is hard to know which department or agency should own it. Is it part of online marketing or is it something which traditional PR agencies should be doing as part of their job? Part of the issue seems to be that Online PR covers a range of areas from "defensive" reputation monitoring to proactive attempts to drive website traffic which can deliver a clear ROI.

There is plenty more about this in the briefing, including some new statistics about corporate blogs. According to the E-Consultancy Customer Engagement Report, published in November 2006, 35% of companies are planning to use corporate blogs in the next 12 months, and 17% are using them already.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 8:36 AM | Permalink

February 26, 2007

Niched Portals and Vertical Search: The Catch Phrases of 2007

Seems 2007 is going to be the year of niched portals and vertical search.

Microsoft is buying Medstory, a health information search engine, and furthering their move into niched portals and vertical search. In China they have started development on a job search engine.

Yahoo is doing the same thing: business search in China, community portals covering specific audiences like Pontiac owners, investors and health sites.

Yahoo seems to be using the portal, community model with search ads as part of the monetization. Though they are trying to develop a business search engine as their primary perspective for the Chinese market.

Yahoo has created entertainment community pages for the Oscars; car fan sites using the manufacturers as support and advertiser.

This seems to be a repeating theme in the two months so far of 2007. Let's see where this all ends up.

Posted by Frank Watson at 4:56 PM | Permalink

February 22, 2007

More Ads for MySpace

Fox Interactive Media today announced that it has acquired Strategic Data Corporation (SDC) an interactive advertising technology company. This ad-serving technology will enable Fox to deliver highly-targeted graphical performance-based advertising to its network which includes MySpace. Pete Cashmore notes that this acquisition means that more graphical ads will appear on MySpace pages. Currently MySpace has an advertising deal with Google for text-based ads.

Posted by Amanda Watlington at 6:05 PM | Permalink

February 7, 2007

Will Splinter Communities Work?

Web publishers are scrambling to provide their own outlets for user-generated content.

This could be interesting to search marketers, especially if we're able to reach bloggers or amateur video makers within more defined and splintered communities.

So far, larger branders have taken the plunge. MTV invested in a company called TagWorld. Now it can produce social networking sites a la My Space, complete with audio/video sharing and chatting too.

You know the world is changing when even the Gray Lady says she'll start accepting user-generated video because it's cheaper that way. NY Times executive Nicholas Ascheim said there would be an announcement in March, as reported in Red Herring.

Whether well-known brands or not, online publishers always seek other reasons to grow their destination traffic. Sites where there's plenty of dynamic content and sharing should do best with new user-generated sources.

If sites already attract visitors for specific purposes, like passions or repetitive tasks, then there's an even better chance these visitors might stay a while longer and use other features too.

We don't think splintered communities are a sure thing, but might present an efficient buying opportunity if they do survive.

Posted by at 1:48 AM | Permalink

February 6, 2007

What's Serendipity?

When you find a “story you wouldn't have normally read,” that's called serendipity in the newspaper world. Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal's Jason Fry explained that serendipity is alive and well at online newspapers too.

Fry points to most popular or most emailed stories as inspirational sources. In the Wall Street Journal, he admires how everyone votes for these listings. (See Fry's WSJ column, subscription required.)

Popularity features are interesting, but reflect where articles appear in the first place. When an article is placed on the homepage, for example, there's a higher likelihood this exposure influences clicks and results.

Most viewed-type lists are democratic, since they reflect the "votes" from everyone visiting the site. However visitors aren't literally part of a single community or interest group.

Wouldn't it be nicer to have visitors share interests, rather than simply contribute to overall popularity contests? Then everyone could browse, search and find things related to their own interests.

It seems to me that serendipity should be different for everyone -- almost as varied as snowflakes.

Posted by at 1:10 PM | Permalink

January 5, 2007

NewsTrust: A Social Networking News Review

Loren Baker over at Search Engine Journal (who awarded us first place for Search News Blog of 2006) outlines how NewsTrust plans to use a social networking approach to promote online journalism.

The method will be a little more structured than Digg or the other social networking systems that are used at the moment.

They plan to use a 10 category system, according to Search Engine Journal: * trust * fairness * importance * recommendations * balance * context * evidence * information * sources * style

This should be one to watch in the coming year. It is always interesting to watch different verticals employ methods that have proven successful for others.

Posted by Frank Watson at 2:33 PM | Permalink

December 14, 2006

Wikia to Offer Free Web Hosting

Wikia, the for-profit company set up in 2004 by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has announced that Wikia will be launching a free application hosting service through Openserving. Wikia is an advertising-supported platform for developing and hosting community-based wikis. Wikia enables groups to share information, news, stories, media and opinions that fall outside the scope of an encyclopedia. Through Openserving, the intent is to extend its open source offering to include hosting services and bandwidth. It remains to be seen how this will be monetized since users are to keep the advertising revenues generated by their sites.

Posted by Amanda Watlington at 4:36 PM | Permalink

October 6, 2006

MySpace: Not Just For The Under 30 Crowd

As a kind of twist on that old 60's mantra, social networking's slogan might have been: not for anyone over 30 -- or so we thought. As is being widely covered, comScore reported and MySpace apparently confirmed that the average age of its users is going up. More than 50% of its users in August were over 35. This represents a kind of mainstreaming of social networking in one way of looking at it. MySpace, as you remember, has a deal with Google in which the latter will pay a guaranteed $900 million over a three-year period to be the search and paid search provider on the site.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 11:42 AM | Permalink

April 4, 2005

Yahoo 360 Invites for Sale on eBay; Washington Post Calls Service "Confusing"

Even though Yahoo's new 360 service took a lashing in a Washington Post review yesterday, several people are selling invites to the limited beta release of 360 on eBay. Invitations cost anywhere from $.50 to $9.99. One seller is even tossing in a free Gmail account.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:12 PM | Permalink

March 29, 2005

Yahoo 360 Community Site Opens, Sort Of

We've mentioned the Yahoo 360 social networking-blogging-photo sharing service before. Now the Yahoo Search Blog is telling the world about it officially: Yahoo! 360° - A New Model for Online Sharing.

Want to try it? In annoyingly-Googleesque fashion, like Google's Orkut social networking service or its Gmail email service, Yahoo 360 remains invitation-only right now. If that's Yahoo getting its mojo back, it was annoying to have Google play the "invite-only" card for its services last year, and it's no less so to have Yahoo doing the same this year. Note to all search engines: if you're going to tell the public you have a new service, then let the public in.

You can sign-up for the waiting list if you want to be part of the broader beta test that's planned, though no ETA has been posted. Otherwise, if you don't get an invite, here are some preview options:

What Is Yahoo 360 is a nice rundown on the blogging features, text messaging, photo sharing and other options that will be offered.
Randy Farmer who is involved with the 360 project points to his own community page via the Yahoo Search Blog. It gives you an idea on how the service might be used by others.
Jeremy Zawodny, Yahoo's blogvangelist, has pointed to his own page as another example of what you can do.
Charlene Li has posted a rundown on features from a briefing she received from Yahoo .

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:14 AM | Permalink

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