Error Forum Blog

Facebook opened up to all a while back. I joined.

Usually, these contact networks leave me cold. The business contact networks are a bit too…business-y…..and MySpace is a glitter-covered mess.

Facebook sits somewhere in the middle. It proves the value of usability. It’s easy, transparent, and does what it says on the box.

It’s also a hugely, hugely powerful revenue platform:

“Facebook Platform, which allows companies to build applications — and entire ad or fee-driven businesses — inside Facebook is a brilliant move, which could given Facebook the opportunity to become the next Google. The secret to Google’s success with AdSense was sharing revenue with publishers and letting them figure out how to optimize the revenue. At launch, Facebook isn’t taking a cut of any revenue generated by businesses using the Facebook Platform, but it could easily do so.

Following the crack cocaine model, i.e. give it away for free then charge once users are addicted, businesses that achieve profitable growth through Facebook would have no choice but to accept a revenue share agreement. “

Check this out…

“ This report fetches the headlines from Google news on a schedule. Only headlines on the home page are fetched.

These results are then ranked by score. The score is determined by a combination of factors: appearance day and time, prominence on the google news page, number of appearances, and others, all weighted using a custom algorithm. The algorithm is designed to estimate referer traffic to the source.

Listed are the top scoring stories in recent time periods, followed by a ranking of sources. You can bring up more detailed reports by clicking on the links at the bottom of each table “

Jack Tretton, the new chief executive of Sony Computer Entertainment America, may have the toughest job in the video game business (with the possible exception of his boss, Kazuo Hirai, who is taking over Sony’s global game operation).After years of relentless hype, last November Sony introduced its flagship game machine, the PlayStation 3, with a resounding thud. The brainchild of Hirai’s predecessor, the engineer Ken Kutaragi, the PlayStation 3 has been hobbled by its lackluster online service, a dearth of “must-have” games and, perhaps most important, its stratospheric $599 price.

A result: molasseslike sales for a product that must succeed if Sony is to retain its global leadership in electronics and entertainment. According to the NPD Group, a market research firm, Sony sold just 82,000 PlayStation 3s in the United States last month, fewer than half the number of Xbox 360s sold by Microsoft (174,000) and less than a quarter of the number of Wii consoles sold by Nintendo (360,000).

But recently Tretton took the vital first steps toward rehabilitating the PS3’s already tattered reputation. At a three-day presentation at the company’s game studio in San Diego, Sony showed off an impressive lineup of new games and online services in development. There is a long way to go before the PS3 becomes the home run that Sony desperately needs, but display was strong.

Almost as important as the substance of the presentations was their tone. In recent years, Sony’s game operation has hurt itself badly in the eyes of consumers by overpromising and underdelivering. No longer. Tretton adopted a refreshingly low-key, realistic approach.

“We know we face a challenge,” he said. “The long-term goal, and one we will not fully get to by this Christmas, is to get people to understand what the PlayStation 3 can do and all the technology that is under the hood. The short-term goal is to give them proof points in gaming experiences that blow them away. One software title at a time, we want people to say: ‘Wow, check that out. I’d like to have that machine.’

“With the recent release of Vista, a short-term rise in PC demand is anticipated,� says Ian Lao, In-Stat analyst. “System sales that had been muted waiting for systems pre-loaded with Vista rather than XP are expected to work through sales channels in the next two quarters. However, these sales represent an offset from last year rather than actual new demand creation.�

Recent research by In-Stat found the following:

Improved security is the main reason for companies to upgrade to Windows Vista, according to a survey of network and system administrators, with 53% of those who had either tested or already installed the OS identifying it as the most important factor.

Danny has written a great overview of PageRank.

Too much reading?

Here’s a nice summary in terms of SEO link building strategy:

“If you really want to know what are the most important, relevant pages to get links from, forget PageRank. Think search rank. Search for the words you’d like to rank for. See what pages come up tops in Google. Those are the most important and relevant pages you want to seek links from. That’s because Google is explicitly telling you that on the topic you searched for, these are the best“

Google updated their search engine today.

They key points:

• Google introduce Universal Search, integrating news, images, videos, books and local results into the main  results: “Google’s vision for universal search is to ultimately search across all its content sources, compare and rank all the information in real time, and deliver a single, integrated set of search results that offers users precisely what they are looking forâ€?.
• Google introduce a context-sensitive navigation menu - dynamically generated navigation links have been added above the search results to suggest additional information that is relevant to a user’s query.
• Google launch Google Experimental,which allows users to try out new search features.

Further select reading and reviews:

• Google’s Official Press Release
• Danny Sullivan’s excellent write-up, including the consequences for SEMs
• Techcrunch
  
• Videocast (â€?featuringâ€? some very tedious user stories spouting undying Google love - I switched off. Also note the Microsoft-y colors used beneath the Searchology logo….)

Great link bait from Tropical SEO. “Why the Rest of the World Should Love SEOs“.

“Now, I hear some white hat SEOs whining: but it wasn’t us! It was our black hat SEO cousins! To that I say: bugger off. Yes, we come in different shades and colors and types, but none of us wants to rank ‘correctly’, we all want to rank ‘as high as possible’, so stop pretending you’re on Google’s ’side’“

Someone give that man an award…

Well, some of them.

It’s been reported that Google have been closing numerous Adsense accounts, and some people have been speculating it’s due to a new crackdown on arbitrage tactics. Without a copy of the email, it’s difficult to know for sure.

From WebmasterWorld:

� know of two associates who were doing arbitrage and yes they got the same email on the 15th…..their accounts will be disabled June 1st. These guys were sending adwords traffic to their landing pages. From what I saw their landing pages had good content but were a MFA site with two blocks of adsense code at the top and one at the bottom. No other external links on the page�.

Somehow, I doubt it’s due to arbitrage. It’s more likely due to non-performance, from the advertisers point-of-view.

Arbitrage can provide value - there are examples all over the web, and offline. Advertising buys, local search, affiliate, e-bay stores, and, yes - major search engines - all use arbitrage, to a degree. Arbitrage is a given in any inefficient marketplace - which is all of them.

As far as Adsense goes, it will come down to how the arbitrage is implemented. If there is no value provided to the advertiser, expect to get canned by Google eventually, arbitrage or otherwise. Google have made no secret of the fact that their philosophy orients around providing utility to the end-user, and that includes PPC advertisers. Many made-for-adsense sites provide no utility whatsoever.

So, less to do with arbitrage. More to do with publishing page-after-page of nothing but Adsense, methinks.

Nick Carr makes some good points about Google’s strengths, and their weaknesses.

“To competitors like Microsoft and Yahoo, Google must seem like a greased pig. You can see the damned thing running amok in your garden, but you can’t figure out a good way to get hold of it“

The beauty of Adwords, in terms of defensibility, is that Adwords uses an auction model. It can’t be underpriced.

“Schmidt: Another example of Sergey [Brin]’s observations is that our advertising network is very powerful because it’s quite resistant to certain competitive attacks.

Vogelstein: Such as?

Schmidt: Because it’s an auction market you cannot under-price it. This point is lost on many, many people.“

However, Carr identifies an area where Google might be vulnerable: Adsense payouts.

�Introduce a free version of AdSense. By free, I mean that you tell publishers that if they run your ads on their sites, they get to keep all the advertising revenues. 100 percent. You won’t take any cut. Immediately, you put a lot of pricing pressure on an important source of revenues and profits for Google.“

This is certainly an initiative many publishers could get on board with. Google would be forced to compete on payouts.

However, Yahoo and MSN would also need the volume of advertisers. And they’d need to get off their behinds and actually provide an international distributed ad network . Adsense was rolled out internationally - when? 2003?

It’s now 2007.

Where is MSN? Where are Yahoo (internationally)?