Wireless & Mobile
The Year in Search and Social Media: Predictions 2009
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Written By Noah Mallin | December 31, 2008 | Share This
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After a tumultuous and fascinating 2008, what might be in store for 2009? We interrogated our best sources using enhanced techniques (bright lights, bamboo and the music of John Mayer were all deployed) before turning to the entrails of a goat (the vegans on our staff settled for an artichoke) to bring you our predictions for the world of search and social media in 2009. We make no guarantee of actuality. Void where prohibited.
In the Year 2009…
Horizontal is the New Vertical - The first wave of vertical search engines such as Business.com or Shopping.com was launched with the intention of starting search businesses from the get go. What’s interesting about the new breed of search engines is that they weren’t originally intended to be search engines at all. Instead, they were born out of the need to sift through the mass volume of content being produced on social media sites.
The need to retrieve and categorize user created content is already leading many social media platforms to become alternative and relevant search indices for specific needs beyond the general search engine results page. For example, Twitter search gives you visibility into “now”, Facebook search scours people (while LinkedIn offers more professionally oriented info), Flickr search delivers a better, more diverse image result set than Google images while YouTube features superior video search results.
Marketers will take notice of this trend to the horizontal in 2009 and these platforms will respond with more compelling SEM offerings to help lure them in.
The World of Online Ad Networks will Finally Consolidate – with many companies merging in an effort to survive, while others disappear altogether. This gives Google AdSense the opportunity to suck up even more of this market, resulting in:
1. Higher overall revenues for Google, but…
2. Lower revenue shares for smaller online publishers as Google takes a bigger cut of the pie and it becomes harder for them to monetize.
3. The collapse of online companies with no clear monetization plans.
Analytics becomes the Chocolate to Social Media’s Peanut Butter – Spending on social media marketing will rise despite the recession as more marketers discover useful analytics tools to measure success across the distributed web. Clients will be impressed by YouTube visitor counts, bit.ly’s url tracking and Omniture’s ability to track behavior in iPhone apps. This improved capability to test social media campaigns and see results before committing to major spends, helps open the floodgates and deliver real meaningful value - and revenue – for the first time.
Social Media Will Help Make Us Better Citizens - Phase one of online activism was powered by applications that allowed people to spread the word about their causes (e.g. Facebook “Causes”), phase two will be powered by microgiving services (e.g. Tipjoy and Microgiving) that allow people to put their money where their mouth is. As a result, funds given to charity through social networks will finally get more in line with the number of people who profess to be interested in them. The integration of Paypal into these services will help facilitate these transactions.
Furthermore, as the recession drags on and access to credit becomes increasingly difficult, Paypal will play a larger role in many online transactions including peer-to-peer lending, replacing some traditional banking services.
Is the Domain Friendfilter.com Taken? - As “friending” continues to gain momentum (and dilute its real life meaning), context becomes more important than ever. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed will need to empower users with more parametric filters so that they can publish – and parse - information to and from different groups of people. For example, a person may have various interests ranging from social software to hockey to comic books – giving that individual more control of the distribution and consumption process will eliminate noise from the social graph and provide more meaningful connections. The web is filled with nooks and crannies of niche content, so there’s no reason the social networks, or the ecosystem born of out of them (for instance, services like Stocktwits) shouldn’t better enable those subject specific communities.
Mobile Voice Search Increases its Long Tail – People don’t speak the same way they type – we tend to be fluid and wordy instead of terse and structured. When you mosey down to the car dealer to look for a new ride (or a “whip” as the kids call them), the tendency is to ask something like “What do you have that gets good mileage but can haul a kid’s bedroom set and won’t make me look like a total tool?” rather than to use Search-ese like “SUV, fuel efficient?” Therefore, it stands to reason that as voice recognition software creeps into mobile search apps, the searches we conduct on our cell phones are going to start to look a lot less like those from traditional search engines. Spoken questions are longer and phrased differently than online search. Advertisers who hope to simply use their existing search keyword lists to reach mobile users are going to be in for a surprise.
Then again, we might be getting ahead of ourselves – 2009 will not be the year that advertising for voice search takes off. The user experience still needs too much work for mainstream adoption.
Yahoo is Broken Up – No year-end list is complete without a gratuitous Yahoo swipe – here’s ours: Microsoft reunites many Yahoo search refugees’ posteriors with their former chairs by acquiring Yahoo’s search business at a fire sale price.
The Phrase “Google Killer” Will Become the New “Munson” – The term becomes synonymous in hip-hop to describe a hyped young rapper who steps to the big guns only to come up short and be forgotten. When was the last time you used Cuil?
Mobile Gets More Social - Time spent logging into social networks from a mobile device will approach 50% of total time spent on social networks in ‘09. In a related event, incidences of hit and run accidents and people walking into open manhole covers will rise dramatically in ‘09 as they use their fancy new iPhones and G1 Android phones to throw snowballs at each other on Facebook.
Google TV Ties Together Recessionary Threads – The two most resilient places for advertising in a recession turn out to be search and TV. How convenient for Google’s fledging offline ad biz as the search model of targeting, accountability, and responsiveness continues to migrate to offline platforms in ‘09. The timing is now.
Fame is Measured in 140 Characters Instead of 15 Minutes – Twitter celebs (plane crash guy, Egyptian jail guy) find fame far more fleeting in ‘09 – it lasts as long as it takes to refresh your screen.
Facebook Connect Takes Off – Brands and marketers embrace the ability to use Facebook Connect as a way to socialize websites cheaply. In fact, it’s already starting to.
Twitter Will Surprise Their Critics With Their Ability to Monetize – We’d explain what that monetization plan will look like in more detail, but unfortunately, we only have 140 characters.
The Year in Search and Social: How Did We Do? Rating Last Year’s Predictions
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Written By Noah Mallin | December 22, 2008 | Share This
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This is the time of year when we at SearchViews like to gather our best minds together to prognosticate on what the next year will bring us in the world of search engines and social media. Before we whip out the Ouija Board to contact Dionne Warwick, celebrity psychic Sylvia Browne, Ms. Cleo, and TV’s Patricia Arquette from Medium, we wanted to look back and see how accurate our last round of predictions were. Or, “Were our predicts totally redic?”, as the kids might say.
So here are our top 3 bullseyes and top 3 fails from last year:
Social Media: Twitter as Training Wheels - Can All the Goodness of Social Media Be Packed Into One Tool?
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Written By Noah Mallin | October 27, 2008 | Share This
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Today I eavesdropped on a conversation between Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Wesley Crusher, I mean Wil Wheaton, and MSNBC’s next generation newscaster Rachel Maddow about podcasts. Apparently they share more than just a hairstyle (see pic). Normally this kind of experience would be bought to me by late night pizza and my overactive dream-state synapses. In this case though I was perfectly awake as it floated down my Twitter stream in between my middle school friend and entertainment PR specialist Ariel’s insights on the music scene in Iceland and former colleague Tom linking to an interview with New York Times ad columnist Stuart Elliot.
So wow, the future huh?
FireBall: Twitter Your Location, Mobile
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Written By Drupad Sil | April 22, 2008 | Share This
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Some news on a cool app that isn’t getting much coverage yet. FireBall is a mobile geo-location service that integrates Twitter and Upcoming with Fire Eagle, a Yahoo!-run platform for controlling people’s location information. TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld with a quick bit on how it works:
“When you want to find out where your friends are who have also signed up for FireBall, you send a message to a FireBall account on Twitter. You get back a text message with a tiny URL link. When you click on the link, it opens up a KML file that launches Google Maps on your cell phone and shows you all your Twitter friends as pinpoints on the map. So your Twitter contacts serve as your mobile social network. You can also Twitter in your location. Simply mention a room at a conference, for instance, and it can pinpoint exactly where you are through integration with Upcoming.org.”
FireBall is definitely looking like a smart and hip mashup of popular and useful services. For now, it’s in private testing and only works in
Also, while Twitter and Upcoming need no introduction, Yahoo’s Fire Eagle platform merits a paragraph as a standalone service. Originally described as “twitter for location”, Fire Eagle had its private beta launch earlier this month, allowing a select group of users to stream their location information to each other. But, as Michael Arrington at TechCrunch explains, it’s much more than that:
“FireEagle has (well, will have) open APIs to send data and get data out. That will make a variety of other web services much more useful, since they’ll be able to figure out where you are without asking. Flickr images, for example, can be auto-tagged with location by comparing the time the photo was taken to your location at that time in FireEagle.”
Other sample features include a MySpace “I was pinpointed” badge that shows off your location, a Facebook app that displays a map with your friends pinpointed, and SMS update functionality on-the-go. The Fire Eagle team has announced that there are at least 50 third-party sites that have developed apps with the locator’s API, letting us imagine a social media suite that instantly updates based on location, adding tailored local search and news results. We can’t wait.
Four Questions with Nasser Manesh, Frucall CTO
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | April 9, 2008 | Share This
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Nasser Manesh is an entrepreneur and the co-founder and CTO of Frucall, a mobile comparison-shopping site. Manesh also writes a blog at Unixica, where he comments on startup news. Searchviews asked him for his insights on mobile development and advertising. Here’s what he had to say.
Searchviews: On your blog Unixica, you recently referenced an article about the decline of mobile development. As CTO of Frucall, a mobile shopping search engine, what do you think about this report that discourages developing products just for mobile, and how has it changed the way you approach your business?
Nasser Manesh: Mobile applications have caused a lot of hype over the past decade and a lot of companies were built around making mobile applications mainstream. Unfortunately most of these companies are not around any more, and the others, for the most part, have shifted their focus in order to be able to survive. For a number of years now industry analysts have been predicting the mobile application space to be the next revolution, similar to what happened when the PC was introduced to the market and when the Web was put to mainstream, commercial use.
But this revolution has not happened in the US market, and that’s what this report is talking about. Personally I agree with most of the writer, Michael Mace, has written. He has had very high positions within Palm and PalmSource, front runners of the mobile application space, and what he says comes from first-hand experience. There are a number of reasons for where we are today, mostly inter-related, and I think US mobile carriers are at the heart of these issues.
Carriers have tried to prevent what made the Web successful from happening in the mobile space: An open and free paradigm of delivering content and applications. Access to the handset is highly guarded and the carrier wants to have a share – usually the lion’s share – of whatever a content or application owner wants to deliver to a handset.
Mobile data plans have been a source of revenue to carriers rather than a means to an end, i.e., monetizing content and applications. As a result, consumers have been reluctant to adopt and use data plans. Those who have been more curious to pay have not found enough useful applications that would justify the cost, because mobile carriers have failed to create the right ecosystem to attract third-party application developers.
All of this has resulted in a psychology of “it’s just a phone” in the US consumer market. There is a reason for hearing the term “cell phone” from the average US consumer while average European or Asian users carry “mobile devices.” What we did at Frucall was to leverage this psychology. Instead of building a fancy mobile application, we built a voice application, which users can call to get information. In the back-end, Frucall is all web API calls and integration with Internet retail services, but to the caller it’s just a phone call. People in the US are used to touch-tone applications, as pretty much all banks and large organizations operate with touch-tone services. So why not use the same for a mobile application to make it familiar? Later, we added text (SMS) services and finally mobile web. We avoided downloadable mobile applications. You can see the reasons clearly verbalized by Elia in Mace’s article. The economics of supporting a vast number of devices for such a small percentage of users simply does not make sense for a startup.
SV: You’ve also noted on your blog that monetization is very difficult in mobile. How do you think the mobile space needs to change to spur more advertising dollars and opportunities for monetization?
NM: I have to admit I’m not a big fan of advertising on mobile phones. The mobile user experience is very different from the PC – there’s less screen space and the device is constantly with the user, making the nature of mobile advertising more intrusive. Add to that the fact that the mobile device “knows” more about the user – the incoming and outgoing calls, the location of the user, and other things we usually consider private. Just how companies like Yahoo! and Google analyze the content of your hosted email to show you relevant ads on the side bar, a mobile application can analyze these more private pieces of information to serve a more targeted ad. Location-aware advertising is on the radar of many companies. Think of Tom Cruise walking in the mall in “Minority Report” and how the voices were trying to sell him things. It will become real much sooner than we think, thanks to the mobile phones we carry with us.
There are a few companies though, such as AdMob, that have adopted the same ad-brokerage model used on the Web and are serving ads for mobile web pages. Unfortunately, iPhone aside, the user experience for mobile web browsing is unpleasant and usually slow, so users keep it to the absolute minimum.
I think one aspect that is less explored is tying mobile into the web. A lot of applications have natural mobile extensions and components. We do not have to port the whole application to the mobile device just because we can; we should study the usage and see which parts of the application can be “mobilized” to add value to the end user. Obviously one monetization strategy is to charge more for those mobile components, the other is to collect data from such components that would help serving more targeted ads later on when the user is browsing the web on a PC.
For example, in the case of Frucall as a mobile comparison shopping, if the user calls Frucall to search for a Nike shoe, next time they visit the Frucall web site we can show them a sports-related ad, or an ad from Nike or a competing brand. Companies are doing a lot for behavioral targeting these days. I would like to think of the mobile components of applications as extensions that can collect more behavioral data related to a certain application. All of that, of course, is still limited by the way carriers are controlling the applications.
SV: With the overwhelming popularity of the iPhone and increasing ubiquity of more sophisticated handheld devices for US consumers, how should companies be approaching the mobile market in the United States now?
This is a tough question and what I say here is my personal view, but I think the iPhone is going to have a big impact and at this point it might make sense for some companies to only focus on the iPhone and forget about the other platforms. This is not because of Apple being behind iPhone, but because of the user experience which has made it easy – for the first time – for users to use applications on a phone. Statistics, for example, show that Google searches are 50 times more prevalent on iPhones than other phones. That’s because there is less friction in using search on an iPhone. I am not particularly a fan of Apple’s model of controlling application distribution, bit still it’s much better than the traditional carrier model, and the fact that AT&T has agreed to Apple’s way of application distribution is a huge leap forward. There are some limitations within the iPhone SDK but I’m sure they will be resolved over time. It’s Unix underneath, after all, so capabilities such as multiprocessing are built in. It’ll just take some time.
There are two other platforms currently showing traction or at least hype – Google Android and LiMo. Personally, I expected more from Android. Creating the Open Handset Alliance was a very good move by Google and the promise of an open source mobile operating system is a good - and only a company with high levels of influence such as Google can pull it off. But in retrospect it looks like they were not ready for the prime time. Things are moving very slowly.
LiMo, on the other hand, is backed by a number of phone manufacturers and has actual handsets. The problem there is that LiMo supporters don’t come from an application software background – they are phone manufacturers. So LiMo seems to lack the developer ecosystem to add value to it. Look at how many people are trying to do things around Android, even though there is no phone out there. That’s what Google can do. Limo is ahead of Android in terms of availability, but the development support is practically non-existent, which in the long run can kill it.
Note that most of the things I’m covering is consumer-oriented. There’s a whole different mobile market out there for enterprise users, and Blackberry has done a great job there. Apple is aggressively targeting that market through their integration projects with Microsoft and Cisco and there will be application opportunities there, but as usual, enterprise sales in general is much tougher so I think small companies and startups have a smaller chance of making money in that market.
SV: Your company, Frucall, has a social network element, with users able to create profiles and connect to friends, as well as presence on Facebook via an application that allows users to share product lists with their friends. What were your considerations in creating your Facebook app? Do you think it’s more valuable for new companies to build in social network capabilities or for them to leverage existing user bases on highly-trafficked sites?
NM: I certainly think social networks are a viable marketing strategy. Obviously one has to find the right angle and come up with something that fits naturally within both their application and a social network’s expected behavior, otherwise it will fail. But if there are aspects in an application where sharing make sense, leveraging the social networks will reduce both the user acquisition cost and time. In older days the ACPU (Average Cost Per User) which is an indication of how much money one should set aside to get users, was in $10-$20 range. A good, useful web application with clear messaging and meaningful value can expect less than that, maybe in $3-$7 range. But that’s still too high – getting a million users will cost you a few million dollars. So what do you do? You make your application viral, to let users bring in new users without you spending. Now, you can either build the viral elements inside your application, or you can leverage the tools and the platform that inherently exists within a social network and just create the right hooks between your application and that platform. It’s still easier said than done though. It’s been very hard to predict how users react to these viral mini applications added to their social network such as the ones on Facebook. Most of the ones that are very viral are not adding value (depending on how you define value); they are just for fun. The problem with the “fun” applications is that they become viral quickly, but they also die down and disappear quickly. So there is no recipe out there for tapping into a social network to do the marketing, but it’s definitely one of those things that should be on the task list of a good marketing manager to look into how they can design their marketing strategy to take advantage of social media.
Yahoo Mobile’s oneSearch Goes 2.0, Now with Voice
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | April 2, 2008 | Share This
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Yahoo is beefing up its mobile capabilities, today announcing key improvements in mobile search. According to the company’s press release, it will blow out its user-facing products, create standards for mobile widgets, and continue to develop monetization in the mobile space.
More specifically, Search Engine Land notes Yahoo is opening up its oneSearch platform, and also cut a deal with voice-search technology company Vlingo. Yahoo led a $20 million round of financing for Vlingo, which makes speech recognition software that will better position Yahoo against Google and other competitors. Mashable notes that speech recognition will likely become more integral to mobile search:
It’s evident that speech recognition is going to be pushed as a driving force for a good portion of development regarding mobile search over the next few months, to say the least. Perhaps Yahoo will even apply Vlingo more directly to some of its other mobile applications as well.
Google Gears for Mobile Apps Launches
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | March 4, 2008 | Share This
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Google has just released Google Gears for mobile, which allows users to access online data when offline. From the Google Mobile blog:
Ever use a mobile web application and suddenly lose your cell connection? That’s happened to me many times. If you’ve shared my pain, you’ll be excited to know that we’ve launched Google Gears for mobile, which lets users access Gears-enabled mobile web apps offline. Initially available for Internet Explorer Mobile on Windows Mobile 5 and 6 devices, mobile web app developers have already started integrating Gears for mobile into their online services.
This functionality will also be built into Android. Here’s a video of Google engineers talking about how Gears for mobile works.
Mobile Browser Wars: Google Yanks Opera from Yahoo
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | February 28, 2008 | Share This
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Opera yesterday picked Google as its new search partner for its mobile browsers, giving the search engine a boost of about 130 million Opera users who browse 1.7 billion pages a month on their phones. The partnership will be effective on March 1 and applies to users outside the former USSR.
Google has been the default engine on Opera’s desktop browser for the last seven years. Yahoo, Opera’s old mobile partner, claims it is walking away willingly from its position as Opera’s default search engine, but it doesn’t make sense for Yahoo to give up 130 million users. Though Yahoo says that it and Opera continue to remain partners, with Opera users still able to access Yahoo’s mobile oneSearch from the browser, clearly being the default browser is the best position in a partnership like this.
Both Google have been working to close search deals with phone makers and mobile providers: Yahoo is the default engine for AT&T and recently bested Google in a fight for European T-Mobile, and Google will be in certain Nokia phones.
Searchviews: Week in Review
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | January 18, 2008 | Share This
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In this edition of the Week in Review, the Facebook news keeps coming, MySpace tries to wrap its arms around the whole child online safety thing, and it might start costing more to watch video online than just to buy it in a store.
- Hasbro, the company that makes Scrabble, demanded removal of the very popular Scrabulous Facebook application this week, and is going after a Boggle-style game on the social network, too. More on Facebook: CEO Zuckerberg appeared on 60 Minutes, the site got some German funding, MySpace is still leading in traffic, and the British government wants to know what happens with deactivated accounts (and so do we, actually…).
- Contextual search startup Proximic adds a huge inventory of auction listings.
- Widget developer Slide was valued at $500M just today. Bubble?
- Compete revealed winning 2007 sites and their loser counterparts.
- MySpace teamed up with state attorneys to put in place some new security features protecting minors.
- We explored ISP censoring earlier this week, then Time Warner announced they’ll test a “metered” model that charges broadband users by how much bandwidth they use instead of a monthly “buffet” fee, potentially making music and movies extremely cost-prohibitive to download or stream.
- Some in-house news: we’re on Facebook, and we’ll be in San Diego for the Online Marketing Summit next month (Also - last call for discount tickets).
- OpenID, the organization/consortium/movement to eliminate username overload, got a boost from Yahoo’s support this week. Another exec left Yahoo this week. And is there more to come from Yahoo in mobile this year? Their ad deal with T-Mobile suggests so.
- Popular microblogging format Twitter is going to Japan. They still have some kinks to work out here in America, as this week all the tweeting over Steve Jobs’ MacWorld keynote crashed the site (and Jobs’ talk tanked Apple stock). Other international bloggy news: Blogger’s now available in Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew.
- In non-profit news, Wikipedia turned 7 this week; what did we ever do without it? For history buffs, the Library of Congress put two of its collections on Flickr. And take note, Google.org applicants: the search giant’s philanthropic arm has a roadmap now.
Google: Soon to be Big in Japan?
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | December 26, 2007 | Share This
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An agreement between Google and Japan’s largest mobile provider, NTT DoCoMo, will reportedly make Google the search engine and email service on NTT DoCoMo phones. According to Reuters, DoCoMo accounts for fifty percent of Japan’s mobile market and, as of last week, the company is also in talks with Apple to sell the iPhone.
The DoCoMo-Google agreement will go into effect in the spring, giving access to Google search, email, calendar, and photo sharing (Picasa). It is also said to include development of a handset using Google’s open-source, mobile operating system, Android, which will help Google increase its visibility and influence in Japan; Google is currently the second-place engine in the country, while Yahoo is first. Mobile internet use in Japan exceeds wired PC internet use, making mobile a crucial area for search engines to dominate in their bid for market share.
Though the deal between Google and DoCoMo is as yet unconfirmed by either company, it would be consistent with Google’s strategy in Asia: execs confirmed several months ago that Google’s China strategy emphasized mobile and included a total overhaul of its mobile offerings.