John Battelle's Searchblog

Matt Cutts points to a video interview (embedded above) on Google's Caffeine infrastructure update.

"It's a pretty fundamentally big change" Matt says. What I'd like to know is why and in response to what changes on the web. Of course, the major changes in how the web works are clear: Real Time Search.

In this post (and/or this one) I said:

In short, Google represents a remarkable achievement: the ability to query the static web. But it remains to be seen if it can shift into a new phase: querying the realtime web.

It's inarguable that the web is shifting into a new time axis. Blogging was the first real indication of this, but blogging, while much faster than the traditional HTML-driven web, is, in the end, still the HTML-driven web.

Part and parcel to this shift is the web's adoption of Flash/Silverlight/Ajax - a shift to assuming the web works in real time, like an application on your desktop. That makes it damn hard to index stuff, because pages are not static, they are created in real time in response to user demand. This is a new framework for how the web works, and if Google doesn't respond to it, Google basically will become relegated to a card catalog archive of static HTML pages. No way will Google let that happen...

(By the way, one of the reasons I was impressed with Wowd was exactly because of its ability to, at scale, track a new signal in the web - the signal of what we are actually doing in real time...as opposed to the signal of the link...but more on that later.

Matt was asked if Caffeine was specifically about Real Time, and he was not totally specific about this but it's pretty obvious it is all about this shift.

Oh, and Matt says it's not because of Bing. In one way, I agree. But let's be real. Microsoft and Yahoo did this deal because Yahoo alone could never sustain the infrastructure costs associated with indexing and processing the Real Time Web. So in truth, Google did this because it had to, just like Microsoft and Yahoo did what they did because they have to. If you want to play, you have to get the infrastructure right.

Google's new iGoogle upgrades smacks of Facebook. Read this:

we're excited to introduce social gadgets for iGoogle. Social gadgets let you share, collaborate and play games with your friends on top of all the things you can already do on your homepage. The 19 social gadgets we're debuting today offer many new ways to make your homepage more useful and fun. If you're a gaming fanatic, compete with others in Who has the biggest brain? or challenge your fellow Chess or Scrabble enthusiasts to a quick match. Stay tuned in to the latest buzz with media-sharing gadgets from NPR, The Huffington Post, and YouTube. To manage your day-to-day more efficiently, check things off alongside your friends with the social To-Do list gadget. Your friends are able to see what you share or do in your social gadgets either by having the same gadgets on their homepages, or through a new feed called Updates. Updates can include your recently shared photo albums, your favorite comics strips, your travel plans for the weekend and more.

Updates, Status Updates, Tweets....whathaveya. It's all the same play - a social platform for connecting to others. More:

It's developers who have really made iGoogle into the rich experience it is — growing our gadget directory to over 60,000 gadgets today — and we know iGoogle developers will help us quickly expand our collection of social gadgets. You can get information about how to build social gadgets for iGoogle on our developer site: code.google.com/igoogle. We introduced these new social features recently to Australia users and are gradually rolling them out to users in the U.S. over the next week.

Developers developers developers developers....

A month ago I posted that Twitter was back to strong growth after a weak month of June. I just took at look at the numbers for August, which you can see in the screen shot here (I'm using Compete's data, but you can check out Quantcast, which is a "rough estimate" and has not posted any July data yet.)

Twitter is still growing, according to this data, but not at the breakneck pace of the past. Compete has it at 23.2mm US uniques, up just 1.25% from the month before. Visits are up 1.64% month to month. Most interesting to me is the breakdown of referral traffic: 11.44% is from Facebook (see below). Now that Facebook Lite move is starting to make sense....

Multiple sources are reporting Facebook is testing "Facebook Lite" - what some are calling a Twitter version of Facebook. Mashable, RWW have more, TC got an official response from Facebook, which makes it sound like it's not a Twitter competitor. Interesting. Reminds me of my prediction on the two companies back in January:

Facebook will build a Twitter competitor, but it will never leave beta and will ultimately be abandoned as not worth the time. Instead, Facebook will "friend" Twitter and the two companies will become strong partners.

There's still time for this one to come true. If this is indeed a response to Twitter, it strikes me as a bit of an overreaction.

Update: Or maybe it's not, given that Facebook delivers 11.44% of traffic to Twitter...

Facebook's previously announced realtime engine has been released, coverage from Mashable:

Fast forward to today: Facebook just announced that it is rolling out the new Facebook search. With realtime search and FriendFeed in its pocket, Facebook is gunning directly for Twitter.

Also for Mashable, a story on Google's "major revision" of its engine. I plan to dig into this one, as I sense it has a lot to do with crossing the infrastructure chasm to real time:

Secretly, they’ve been working on a new project:the next generation of Google Search. This isn’t just some minor upgrade, but an entire new infrastructure for the world’s largest search engine. In other words: it’s a new version of Google.

The project’s still under construction, but Google’s now confident enough in the new version of its search engine that it has released the development version for public consumption.

I've been meaning to post a long-ish rant on the importance of celebrities taking control of their own platforms, but never gotten to it, in part because I'm not that enamored with the incessant selling of celebrity that occurs in our culture. Yeah, I sound like a grumpy old man, but I can't help myself. It bums me out - not because I don't like celebrities, but because the current approach strikes me as driven by short term thinking.  

If, instead, more celebrities actually used their fame to take control of their own destiny and build a platform for themselves, they'd last longer, be happier, and make more money - perhaps not as much all at once, but more over the long term. And what do I mean by "taking control of their own destiny"? Well, in a phrase, I mean "building themselves a platform through which they effectively communicate with, build, and deliver value to their fan base."

Until recently, those platforms were controlled by others. But now, celebrities can roll their own. And that changes the game, if they chose to play.

Before I explain what I mean by that, let me state for the record that I believe the same is true for all marketing brands. But I get ahead of myself (more on what it means to build a platform for brands in a future post.)

Let's start at the beginning. What, after all, is a celebrity? Well, if you do a Google Image search for the term, you're bound to believe a celebrity is an attractive, well endowed woman. Wikipedia defines the concept thusly: "A celebrity is a person who is famously recognized in a society....There are degrees of celebrity status which vary based on an individual's region or field of notoriety. While someone might be a celebrity to some people, to others he may be completely unknown."

That last part is important when it comes to social media. I've noticed that the class of folks we might call "minor celebrities" have taken to social media far more quickly than those who Wikipedia calls "global celebrities." In fact, the extraordinary embrace of Twitter by A-lister Ashton Kutcher (there, I wrote his name for the first time ever) serves as the rule proving exception - big time celebrities don't often expose themselves in an honest dialog with their fans. Instead, they are handled. They are managed, marketed and controlled like packaged goods, sold through the supermarket aisle distribution outlets of sports arenas, movie theatres, network television, and arena tours.

And because they are treated as product by their managers, they are discouraged to do anything that might smack of honest dialog with their fan base - anything that might feel like "routing around" the manicured image laid out by the business of celebrity.

Case in point is the approach major sports leagues have taken toward both Facebook and Twitter. Recently the NFL and ESPN have banned or curtailed use of either Twitter or blogging or both. (As much as I appreciate ESPN's product, I consider it to be a product of the leagues, not an independent platform for players. From their policy: "The first and only priority is to serve ESPN sanctioned efforts..." Follow the money, after all...).

Following that money explains why these new policies are being put in place. Leagues like the NFL and distribution outlets like ESPN make their money by controlling the output of the product on the field. If that product starts to have a conversation outside of those lines, money, connection, and reputation might be made on those conversations, value that is not being harvested by the NFL or ESPN. That's a threat, and they are treating it as such.

It's no coincidence that the most prolific and natural celebrity users of social media platforms exist outside those manicured boundaries - in sports like tennis (Roger Federer) and cycling (Lance Armstrong, who started tweeting around the time of his appearance at last year's Web 2 conference). These are celebrities who are not handcuffed by powerful leagues or networks, and who naturally gravitate toward platforms that allow them to connect directly to their fanbase.

Does this sound familiar? It should if you're a marketer struggling with how to take your brand online. After decades of manicuring your brands through one-way mass media platforms like television, it turns out millions of people are now talking about your prized possessions online, and you can't directly control the conversation. But a new set of brands have sprung up who seem agile in this environment, and they feel threatening: Think JetBlue and Virgin, over American and Delta. Whole Foods over Lucky. Comcast over AT&T. These "new" brands have taken to social media and are embracing it, warts and all.

I think when it comes to celebrity, the same is also be true. The celebrities who are "minor" now are swarming to Twitter and Facebook, much as unknown bands swarmed to MySpace. Those who have direct, honest connections with their fans will endure. Those who don't might catch the flame of fame briefly, but they will not endure as brands. Why? Because no matter what, the "packaged goods" platforms of movies, networks, and sports leagues are still important, and it will soon be the players and celebrities with a guaranteed base of hard core fans - or followers - who can call the shots with those powers that be. You think Brooke Burke won't get a better deal now that she's in dialog with over a million fans on Twitter? Owning and cultivating your own platform means you no longer are in thrall to "star makers" - together with your community, you make your own star. That's a kind of celebrity I can get behind.

Sorry, it's late, and I just saw this piece in the NYT. But for Bartz to say that Yahoo was never a search company is simply not true.

Yahoo was the original search destination, and a place folks first learned to "search" for stuff on the Web. As the original directory of things worth paying attention on the Web, Yahoo was - and remains for many - the definitive place to start a search query. And also, in the history of Yahoo, let us not forget the entire homepage was redesigned around search just three years ago.

Feh.

Google yesterday announced it is adding more information to Google Maps:

"(We've added) icons and labels of prominent businesses and places of interest directly on the map itself. We've found it super useful for checking out what's nearby a hotel we'll be staying at, orienting ourselves, getting the feel for a neighborhood, or just browsing around for fun."

Wait a minute, let me rewrite that for you, with a business model attached:

"(We've added) icons and labels of prominent businesses and places of interest directly on the map itself. We've found it super useful for  leveraging our Adwords algorithm!"

There ya go! Actually, I think this is a great move by Google, and in line with the concept of AdWords being useful to the information ecosystem.

For instance, if you're looking to check out Martha's Vineyard, the hotels link up on the left might be a link you are actually interested in.  

Flickr has upgraded its search, and I like the results. Funny how we are all talking about Yahoo ceding search to Microsoft, but we all forget there's a lot of other search to be done on Yahoo - like Flickr search. I wonder who Flickr will be integrated into Bing, by the way? Anyway, from the post announcing the news:

Note the new “View” controls at the top of the page, these allow you to display the results in different sizes and formats. Both small and medium views have an ‘i’ icon on every thumbnail — click it to see more detailed information about a particular photo. We’re also doing some whiz bang stuff in the small view to take advantage of as much space as you have on your screen, just try resizing your browser to see.

On the right side of the page we try to provide a new perspective on your search. Based upon how our members are tagging their photos and participating in the Flickrverse, you’ll see links to the groups, photographers, tag clusters and places that are most closely related what you’re looking for. We hope these will occasionally provide a little extra inspiration for your search.

Lastly, we’re exposing simple summary information on the page as you refine your search.

Early this year, well, January 1, to be exact, I made this prediction about our friends at Apple:

Apple will see a significant reversal of recent fortunes. I sense this will happen for a number of reasons ... but I think the main one will be brand related - a brand based on being cooler than the other guy simply does not scale past a certain point. I sense Apple has hit that point.

Now, "brand" is a very tricky concept. A brand lives or dies by how others speak of it. And lately, in the circles of folks who I'd call "brand influencers" in the digital space, the conversation has turned negative.

Not only has Apple taken a major hit from both observers and the FCC for its hamhanded rejection of Google's iPhone application (among others), the company's ongoing refusal to engage in a dialog with its customers (no Twitter account, no participation in industry conferences) is starting to wear thin. For more than a few folks I talk to on a daily basis, the Apple brand means "great products, but the company really couldn't care less about you as a person, and frankly, is smarter than you, better looking than you, and above your station."

Call it a gut feeling, but my favorite maker of computer products is starting to feel, well, out of touch. Am I off here?

What a total surprise (kidding!).

In a statement, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that "as Google enters more of Apple's core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric's effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest."

That Chrome OS was the last straw, I'd warrant. From my earlier coverage:

" At the very least, it feels like it's time for Eric Schmidt to leave Apple's board."

The NYT has a good background piece from Carol Bartz's POV. Carol will be at Web 2 this Fall, so will Qi Lu, the man who will own the deal and the search fight with Google.

And they are opening an investigation into it.

According to a Dow Jones Newswire report, on Friday afternoon the FCC sent letters to Apple, AT&T, and Google. The federal inquiry asks Apple why the Google Voice application was rejected from its App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and why it removed third-party applications built on the Google app that had been previously approved. The federal commission also asks whether AT&T was allowed to weigh in on the application before it was rejected, and seeks a description of the application from its creator, Google, according to the report.

For background, see my piece chastising Apple here.

Yesterday I spent an illuminating hour with the folks behind Wowd, a still-private-beta search upstart that is taking a new approach to, well, just about everything in search as we traditionally understand it.

In a odd coincidence, this morning Venturebeat published a thoughtful piece on how search might shift when more data, in particular social data, is added to the mix.

I point these two links out as a marker of sorts, I've got a much longer piece brewing in me about Wowd's approach to search, and how the Big Guys might respond should an upstart like Wowd get traction. More on that soon. Meanwhile, the Wowd guys posted on Tim and my Websquared paper here.

Unfortunately our schedules didn't match up yesterday, and I did not get a chance to talk to the folks now responsible for the Yahoo Microsoft deal.  

But as I thought through the deal and its implications, a ton of questions came to mind, and it seems worth the time to write them down. Perhaps folks can answer them in this thread- I know there has been a lot of information flying around, and it's entirely likely that many of these questions have been posed and answered elsewhere.

So where to start? On its face, the deal is pretty clean. Microsoft runs the technology and owns the long tail, self service advertisers through AdCenter, Yahoo owns sales with larger customers and will keep the lion's share of the revenue its site generates.

But when you start thinking about it, a lot of questions remain unresolved. To wit:

- What will become of all of Yahoo's efforts in search, many of which were, philosophically at least, quite promising? In particular, what becomes of Yahoo BOSS? Of Yahoo's philosophy of "open search," (witness SearchMonkey), which I find compelling? Does that all go away now?

- Related, the deal states that Yahoo is free to build its own user interface on top of Bing on its own sites. But Bing's interface is actually, to my mind, one of its core strengths. Will there be an open API and SDK for building innovative interfaces on top of Bing, or will this essentially fork between what Microsoft does on sites it controls, and Yahoo's approach on sites it controls? I for one think it'd be really smart to let a thousand developers bloom with Bing/Yahoo.

- Will the two companies work together to develop an alternative to AdSense? So far, it's a one company race in that world.

- What will happen to all the technologies (and people) related to Yahoo's current search platform? Will it be sold to a third party, retired, or continued on some other fashion?

- Will the combined companies go after other major distribution points like AOL, Ask, etc? Will they work together or will that be Microsoft's role alone, and does Yahoo have any say in how those deals might work, given it provides the majority of the distribution?

- Related, and critical, how will data be shared between the companies? What data will be shared, and to what end will it be used?

- Again related, but how will that data be used in each company's display platforms? Yahoo has "apt", Microsoft has aQuantive...both have exchanges, ad networks, and display infrastructure. Will they continue to compete, or might they find a deal, at least in "performance display"? In premium display, which is clearly where both companies will compete, how will search data be leveraged?

- The initial market response to the deal is that Yahoo looks weaker. How does Yahoo respond to that sentiment?

- Related, what is the vision for Yahoo now that it has exited the search business? What is the core mission and vision for the company - is it no longer a technology play? Pure media play?

- What about mobile search? Does this deal extend to mobile? Local (where I thought Yahoo always did best).

That's my first set of questions, I'll add more as you send em in to me...

UPDATE: Both Yahoo and Microsoft have been in touch about chatting further, and we hope to slate time later in the month (as I am on "vacation")....more as I have it.

NYT has a good story:

The terms of the 10-year agreement call for Microsoft to license some of Yahoo’s search technologies, and Yahoo will initially receive a lucrative 88 percent of search-generated ad revenue from Yahoo sites.

Cnet does as well. Many folks are noting Yahoo's shares slide at the open this morning. No "Boatload" of cash upfront...

More as morning coffee kicks in.

Update: YHOO is down nearly 10%, Wall St. no likey. Given the deal was already priced in, that's interesting. MSFT is slightly up.

The formal statement is here. A marketing website called "ChoiceValueInnovation" is now up too. Really.

Update 2: I am trying to slate some time to talk with the principals involved, if I do, I'll write it up here later. In short, though, watch two things: 1/How yahoo plans to "own" the UI on top of Bing - given Bing's UI is key to its differentiation, and 2/Who owns the data and how is it getting used to leverage competing display advertising platforms....

What I find most interesting in Twitter's homepage overhaul is the focus on search. I mean, it's all about search. That might confuse some folks who don't understand what Twitter really is. And there's no explanation of that on the home page...So...what do you all think?

Not my sources, of course, but it's all over the web now, including banking analyst notes, the WSJ, and elsewhere. Here's a Google news link for those who want to dive in.

...and by the Internet, I mean the *values* of the Internet, in particular, the values of a platform. When you build a platform that leverages the Internet, it strikes me you should act like a player in that space - IE, not acting like a monopolist, a bully, or in your own self interest at the expense of those who use your platform - like your customers and developers.

Such seems the case with Apple's refusal to allow two Google apps into the iPhone App Store. Yesterday's ban - on Google Voice - is easy to understand - at least if you are venal and driven by the same corporate interests as your partner, AT&T. Voice bypasses AT&T's networks and means less cabbage in AT&T's pockets.

But Apple also banned Latitude, a mapping application. Why? Might it be because Apple has designs on that category? Or does AT&T?

In any case, if Apple wanted to give Android a boost, it sure as hell has done it. Actions like this are totally contrary to the spirit of the Web, and I hope Apple loses, big time, for taking them. At the very least, it feels like it's time for Eric Schmidt to leave Apple's board.

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Back in 2005, Google bought 5% of AOL for $1 billion. Today, Time Warner disclosed it had bought that 5% back from Google for....$283 million.

Ouch. But wait. There's a silver lining.

Back when the deal was done, analysts like...me... suggested that AOL was going to go public, and that Google was going to profit from that. Well, looks like AOL will go public...but not at the lofty valuation 2005 seemed to promise. Of course, Time Warner dithered for five years about whether to spin the damn thing out (I pleaded in a blog post in 2004 that they do this). Had they done in then, or even in 05 or 06, I'd wager Google would have looked pretty damn smart.   

Now, they've lost $717 million on the deal, but let's not forget, they did keep the AOL distribution for their search services, and that's certainly worth a lot. Not to mention, Google really owes AOL one for the solid that company did in giving their business to Google back in 2002. That deal pretty much set Google's table for a good seven year feast, one that was so rich, Google can afford to write down more than half a billion dollars. And as you may recall, the company already has. Looking at the math, Google wrote it down $726 million back in Q1. That means, if my math is right, Google in fact MADE $9 million on the deal. Whadya know?!