Thursday, June 25, 2009

Data Rich Customer Service

Image representing Amazon EC2 as depicted in C...Image via CrunchBase

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...Image via CrunchBase


Businesses collect so much data on individual customers and individual transactions. Social media is becoming so very pervasive. Your social media profile is portable. Soon enough you could take it to Amazon.com and all sorts of vendors big and small.

Just like your Facebook experience is different from mine, your shopping experience at a site ought to be unique to you, unique and rich.

Chris Brogan sounds rather futuristic in his latest blog post.
First One to This Standard Wins Make your website all about me.
From The Netizen BlogRoll
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Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Dynamic PageRank And Real Time Search


Google beat the old search engines back in the late 1990s with its concept of PageRank. The more sites that linked to you, the more valuable was your site.

If something like real time search were to become possible, the concept of a dynamic pagerank would emerge. It would not be about how many sites linked to your site alone. It would be about do people actually click on those links to get to your site? Google's search algorithms have gone through so much evolution, and since they have been secret about it all for understantable reasons, it is hard to figure out what they have already done.

Google has been smart about constantly finetuning its search algorithms. They try to beat the so-called Search Engine Optimization people. It is a constant tussle.

Another thing would be content itself. After billions of search queries from people, Google should be able to figure out what sites and pages best delivered for what queries, and the number of search terms are for the most part finite. So if you can measure satisfaction, would that affect the way you do PageRank?

What about the content of the page itself? It might be a brand new page, but what if it is the most relevant page to my particular query? I guess search engines are not that good at reading yet.

Content creation and searching content will stick around for a long, long time.

And Bing's recent launch showed presentation is a whole new ballgame altogether. Microsoft decided they can't beat Google at its secret sauce of search, so they decided to take a bite at the other side of the coin: presentation of search results. Calling itself "a decision engine, not a search engine" was also a good marketing move.

They did not beat Google, but they did beat Yahoo, looks like. Now Bing is number two. Shoots for the stars, and you will get the moon.

Microblogging Search: What Took Google So Long?
Square Search
Blogger Search Gadget: What Took You So Long?
Wolfram Alpha: An Answer Engine, Not A Search Engine
Real Time Search: Twitter Is Not Doing It
Distributed Search
Google Is Working On Search
Search Come Full Circle: That Human Element
The Search Results, The Links, The Inbox, The Stream

From The Netizen BlogRoll

So, you want to be a Gmail ninja?
The Link Builder’s Guide To Analyzing SERP Dominators For Link Opportunities
First One to This Standard Wins
Learning from Singer
All for Good: Bringing search, scale and openness to community service
A new landmark in computer vision
Search by Author on Google News
Blogger is Turning 10
Designing a lounge for the Day in the Cloud



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Tuesday, June 23, 2009

The Kevin Marks Departure


First Facebook stole the buzz from Google. Well, before that Google stole the buzz from Microsoft. Then Twitter stole the buzz from Facebook. And now Google is back on the bleeding edge with Google Wave. But Google Wave was created by a small team inside Google. That t

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...Image via CrunchBase

eam acted like a startup. And I think it is marvelous that Google Corporate nurtured that team and incubated Google Wave. But one persistent question will remain. At what point does Google become a Microsoft, an IBM, still big but no longer on the bleeding edge? One way to know Google has become big and old is that people with the newest and boldest ideas start leaving. I don't think that has happened to Google yet, but you can see some early signs.

This Reminds Me Of The Web 3.0 Definition Fight
I Did My Part
Google Wave API Google Group: Got To Undo The Ban On Me
Google Wave Protest
Google Wave API Google Group: Stalinist Mindset

Engineering leader Kevin Marks leaves Google for the social web VentureBeat
Google's OpenSocial Evangelist Leaves Google GigaOm Kevin Marks, one of the leading voices on Google-backed OpenSocial and Friend Connect, has left the Mountain View, Calif.-based search engine, he announced on his blog. ..... Google might have lost one of its most visible evangelists ...... Kevin, who in the past worked at Technorati, is one of the smartest guys I have met ....... I wonder if it has something to do with Google’s inability to totally grok the social web. ;-) OpenSocial was launched with much fanfare but seems to be lagging behind Facebook and its Facebook Connect effort.
A Social Force Departs Google TechCrunch Marks says he is working on a bunch of things “related to the social Web” and “activity streams” ...... Asked why he is leaving Google, he responds that his work is pretty much completed: “Over the last two years, we have built out the infrastructure for the social Web. Now it is time to build things on that infrastructure.” ..... is ready to work in a smaller company ..... The action, anyway, is moving to real time activity streams and Marks now seems to be pointed in that direction.
Farewell to Google My first taste of Google was to work on orkut, before starting the project now known as Google Profiles ....... Realising that Google had thousands of engineers, but very few comfortable speaking in public, I became a Developer Advocate, working to bridge external and internal developers, explaining the Social web to Google and OpenSocial and more to the wider web community. ......... build social infrastructure to make the web more social. ...... I'll be coding, writing and speaking on the social web via several new projects ..... If you want to get hold of me, I'm kevinmarks on most social networks, domains and of course Twitter. Or just google me.

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This Reminds Me Of The Web 3.0 Definition Fight


I Did My Part
Google Wave API Google Group: Got To Undo The Ban On Me
Google Wave Protest
Google Wave API Google Group: Stalinist Mindset

I thought I had done a good job of explaining here: Google Wave API Google Group: Got To Undo The Ban On Me. But I never thought I was indispensable to the group. Although vision is a specialty all its own. And just like every Tom, Dick and Harry feels like he is an expert on politics, people think great coders are by extension also great visionaries. Not true. Some are, but it is not by extension.

I think I have come to my conclusion: I Did My Part. I will have to do in the blogosphere what I was hoping to do through this Google Group.

I have a feeling a lot of glass is going to be broken in the fight on the 3.0 definition down the line. Google Wave is not my baby. But the 3.0 fight will be my own.

NY Tech MeetUp Mailing List Web 5.0 Controversy
Web 5.0 Is Da Bomb
Competing For the Web 3.0 Definition
Conceptually Diligent: Web 5.0 Is Repackaging Hello
Defining Web 4.0


From The Google Wave Developer Blog

TwilioBot: Bringing Phone Conversations into Waves
1 Wave Sandbox, 5 Hours, 17 Awesome Demos

Lars Rasmussen, Google Wave


The Making of the Sudoku Gadget
Google Wave API Office Hours
Google Wave team heads to Google Developer Days in Asia
Introducing the Google Wave APIs: what can you build?

From The Official Google Blog

Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave
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I Did My Part

I protested. I did my part. If the protests are not going to work, and the ban on me at the Google Wave API Google Group is not going to be lifted, I move on. I guess I will have to find out other ways to spot trends in Google Wave development. I am sure there will be several good blog options. We are at the early stages of seeing blogs dedicated completely to Google Wave. Maybe some of those bloggers will do the reading for me in those Google Groups.

A great way to follow an open source project is in the very open perhaps.

Google Wave API Google Group: Got To Undo The Ban On Me

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