So Google, this is the future you imagine for us ? Can i Google –1?

I wonder what Matt Cutts has to say about this ?

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But Google don’t listens anymore to their users. Their have gotten into a position from where they can dictate how we should use everything and how should we think. They decide what is good for us and what is bad. In other words, its their way or the highway.

I decided a few days ago that for me its the highway, at least regarding the e-mail client i use. This happened after they forced the new interface into my Gmail account, without having an option to return to the old look. This brings me memories from the past, sometime 7-8 years ago when for similar reasons i have dumped Yahoo Mail.

After looking for a few options i decided that its time to use Thunderbird again. I still have my Gmail account but i set it up in Thunderbird and i use that as an e-mail client, so its not yet a definitive goodbye. At least until i will be able to migrate all my data from Google and have time to make a permanent move to my own domains for everything e-mail related. Actually i have set up all my email addresses in Thunderbird so i don’t need to have a high number of browser windows open for each and every one of them.

Having Thunderbird as an e-mail client has a few advantages. For starters you do have the IMAP protocol which means that you have your email synchronized with the server and don’t store it locally (only for caching). Its just like a web based client. Everything you do is reflected on the server and if you need from time to time to log in from another machine you have everything there just as you had it on your own machine. Another advantage is that you don’t have any advertising in it.

Regarding disadvantages, after a few days of use, i’m happy with this system and didn’t yet encounter any drawbacks. I will se how it goes in the next few days.

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The video above is not made by me, i have found it on a blog (via zoso) some time ago and it caught my attention. Now let’s get back to my view on the subject. In fact this subject can be divided into several different topics. So let’s debunk some myths about social media experts and their tools: Twitter, Google+ and Facebook

The social media experts

Social media “experts” are popping up everywhere like mushrooms after a good rain. In fact they are the fastest growing segment of “experts” in the world, the growth rate being unprecedented in marketing history. If you go to an internet related conference you are certain to find them there in ever growing numbers.

But what makes someone an expert ? School ? Study ? A certification ? Experience ? A reference ? Should someone proclaim himself as an expert ? Or should he be proclaimed by others as an expert ?

If so, do any of these people have what it takes to be an expert ? An expert should give you a solution for which he/she can vouch. An expert should deliver measurable results to you and should be paid according to results. The fact is that they rarely deliver but they take the money anyway.

Let’s go back a few years and remember the thing called Second Life, younger social media “experts” might never heard of it – though calling yourself an expert should be updated on things like this. Well,  when Second Life was at the peak of its hype factor, the social media experts back then advised everyone (companies especially) to open up virtual offices in Second Life because that’s the future and everyone will be on Second Life – and customers will even queue in front of the virtual desks. I know a few banks and other companies who took the advice and invested money in these virtual offices. A few years later we can see that Second Life is not what social media experts promised. However they took your money and they are gone.

Obviously we are the ones who are responsible for allowing anyone to call itself what he/she wants and get away with it. As the video above states it – we accept experts without a reference.

Twitter

Twitter is “the promise land” for quite a few years. “A great service that didn’t yet reached its potential”. And it never will, i might add. I was writing about how useless is Twitter almost four (4!) years ago. Since then most social media experts discovered Twitter themselves. Now they advertise it as the next big thing in social media.

Twitter is social, i must admit. Everyone was told that Twitter is cool, Twitter is the thing to do. So all my friends have an account on it. And most of them didn’t even bother to log in a second time and don’t use it at all. I think that is because the signal to noise ratio on Twitter is absolutely frightening.

I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. (source: leoville.com)

Why is that ? Most of the people who actively use Twitter are marketers and social media “experts”. And the one single thing they do is to spam. If they are not sending you promotions or links to their content & articles then they are spamming you by following / unfollowing.

Can anyone tell me how on earth can someone follow almost 95000 people ? See this screenshot:

To effectively follow that many people you must be unemployed. Just to click “Follow” on ~95000 people would take you 26+ hours if you spent one second for each people you follow. But to check a person if its worth following or not, it will take significantly more time. That is unless you follow everyone.

People like this actively seek followers and follow themselves just to be followed back so they can send you whatever they’re trying to sell. Some of them went to the point of using automatic tools to follow/unfollow users.

Well there is nothing social about bots that scour the Twitter wastelands and add/remove followers regardless of who they are.

Twitter is heading toward "everyone following everyone." …To me that makes Twitter more like playing Pac-Man than a valuable social networking tool, as people’s robotic software programs digress into an outrageous dance of following and unfollowing. (source: Reed J. Caldwell’s blog)

Google+

Although Google+ is a newcomer to this game they are already in the same situation as Twitter. I will not go into specifics here but its enough to mention that i receive many notifications that people added me to their circles on Google+. That would be fine if i would have posted anything worthwhile there after creating the account and would be even finer if i would also know those people who are adding me. Fact is that Google+ is the single social platform where most of the people who added me are strangers. I don’t know them, i’m not a celebrity to be added and i didn’t post anything there. So why are they adding me ? Probably because Google+ is heading towards what i wrote for Twitter “everyone adds everyone”.

Facebook

And now the cherry on the cake. The new Holy Grail of the social media.

Facebook is useful if you want to follow what everyone you know did lately. People use Facebook to post all kind of content. From their last vacation photos to their naked newborn child and from silly videos to stupid chainletters, they post everything. Unlike other mediums, here there isn’t anyone verifying if something that is posted is true or not.

I’m not an adept of censorship but i truly believe that when someone states something publicly it should be at least verified. Unfortunately people are lazy, and they do not verify anything, most of them take it for granted. Facebook leveled the playing field and everyone (no matter of his/her abilities) has been given a tool to spread anything he wishes. Just read the above link with stupid chainletters if you don’t believe me.

The most painful thing is that they become accustomed with this shallow content. And if someone comes up with something more challenging or deep, they usually don’t like it. They like simple things that can be assimilated easily and quickly. This is one of the reasons why most Facebook marketing doesn’t work. And that’s the reason of the Like button. You can quickly Like something or not and move on.

Like

What is bothering me most in Facebook is the “Like” button. One of the more annoying applications of this button is the Like blocking used by some pages on Facebook. The user must first Like a page in order to access it.

Like blocking, where a user has to "Like" a Facebook Page in order to access a feature, typically has a 50% or more drop off rate, even when there is something there that is actually worth liking the page to get, such as exclusive content or a great coupon. Putting a Like block on basic content will almost guarantee a 100% drop off rate. (source: Why most Facebook marketing doesn’t work – part 2)

Yet most of the social media experts recommend it. In the screenshot above you have the page of a company where in order to access the current job openings you must first like the page:

First of all this is like sitting in front of a church and begging. I see no difference between a company that begs for Likes and a beggar on the streets. Beggars receive money that they not earned and companies receive Likes which are not Likes in fact, these begged Likes lacks the significance, the user is not really liking your brand, it just pushes the button to access an offering.

Secondly, this is like a complete stranger showing up at your door and asking you to vouch for him,  vote for him or doing some other thing that implies trust from your part. Would you vouch for a complete stranger showing up at your door ? Think twice!

I personally never push the Like button on these kind of pages. If they condition me with a Like block to access their page i’m gone in no time!

Don’t like or Dislike

Why isn’t there a button called Don’t like or Dislike ? I have no explanation for this but i suppose this is part of a politically correct movement where they don’t want people to be “emotionally hurt” when they receive 99% Dislikes on their latest post about what they think to be smart and helpful information (the end of the world in 2012, wealthy African princess looking for love , etc.) 

Bugs

Facebook is full of bugs. There aren’t too many days when the service is functioning within parameters. If i would receive a dollar for every instance when the page was buggy i would be rich. And the odd thing is that people don’t care. Working in web development i had cases where websites with a few visitors where an image was misaligned by 1 pixel, the customer called me and was very nervous about it. I can understand that. He was right to be nervous as he perceived it as a thing that might be bad for his business. But it seems that for Facebook it isn’t bad for business. Its business as usual.

Content and privacy on Facebook

The content users post on Facebook is not theirs, i said it a while ago, others said it a while ago but the fact is that no one cares enough to do something about it. Content posted to Facebook becomes the asset of the company that operates Facebook and they can do whatever they want with this content.

But its not just the content, it is also the privacy which is not yours anymore. Facebook is like a Big Brother which constantly monitors your activity online. They know every website you visit even if you are logged in or not to Facebook. That is because the Like button is used on so many sites and if the Like button is displayed on a website which you access, they can record that.

Facebook might be well intentioned with this monitoring, i can’t know what they do with this data, but unfortunately there are others on Facebook who can steal your information and use it (sell it) to not so well intentioned people. These are the 3rd party developers who develop applications for Facebook.

You know those little funny apps that ask you a few questions and tell you where you should live, or what historical leader you match with or what were you in an earlier life. These applications when you launch them first time (pay attention!) ask you to allow them access to your data. This data can be your email address or even your personal profile information or friend list. These funny little applications have a viral spread and this way the developer has access to millions of personal profiles of Facebook users.

So i would be careful what applications i allow to access my profile information

Is it the beginning of the end for Facebook ?

Empires come and go. Every empire, application or company have a rise, a peak and a decline. It seems that Facebook’s decline is already started:

Here’s a sad statistic: Facebook users spend 23 hours of every month browsing the website. That’s 500 million people staring at a computer screen as a social network swallows up 700 billion minutes of their time. Shouldn’t they all get a life?

The bad news for Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 27-year-old billionaire creator, is that many people are doing just that. They’re using Facebook less, or leaving it altogether – which is known, would you believe it, as “Facebook suicide”.

Figures show that 100,000 British users deactivated their accounts during May, reducing the total number to 29.8 million. And six million logged off for good in the United States. What started off as an exclusive online social club at Harvard University has saturated Western society. (source: Is this the beginning of the end for Facebook)

So, i’m not a social media expert but i can tell you that the fate of Myspace will not be avoided by Facebook. It will not disappear, but it will be less important and much less used. Of course this will happen in time, right now it just starts to gain traction in underdeveloped countries. But in marketing the most important people are the ones with the big pockets, and these aren’t in underdeveloped countries but in more developed nations which just start quitting this service.

In the end

Everything i wrote here are my interpretations of certain facts, so these are my opinions. You should not take for granted any opinion. You should double check, you should form an opinion of yourself and you should share this opinion. But be careful where you share it. Because it might not be your content anymore after you have shared it.

About myself i can tell that i will use Facebook, Twitter (and others) less in the future, probably i will redirect the RSS feed of my blog there. So if you are curious what happened to me lately, drop me a call, write me an email or visit my personal blog.

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Well, i don’t like this new layout but it really didn’t bothered me too much either. This is until yesterday when Google Reader switched to this layout. And Google Reader looks awful with this theme. And not only it is uglier but its less usable.

For example its rather hard to distinguish between individual posts in the feeds, the options on the bottom of each post are also less visible (harder to find). There is too much white space everywhere, it is like the thing has no design at all.

I think if you put a few first grade school kids they do a better design. And the worst part is that they are feeding it to me and i have nothing to do but accept or change the product, which will i do shortly.

Actually i’m planning to switch from most of Google’s products to something else. Not because of the layout but also for other reasons. Soon i will write a post about the alternatives to all Google products and to many people’s surprise, there are quite a few good alternatives!

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Although Google is doing this from the beginnings of Gmail, many didn’t realize this until now. Maybe because Gmail’s adoption wasn’t as big as it is now. Anyway, interesting times are ahead of us.

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Apart from the odd colors they’ve put the URL’s in the search results at the top. This makes reading the results more difficult as you must stop, skip the URL and read the snippet. Hey Google, not everything is about URL’s!

I decide if i visit the site based on the excerpt and not the URL, it was perfect at the bottom of every result!

Someone should really start thinking about a new search engine, as we are at the mercy of this thing that Google became.

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Well, 8th of June is just two days away and on Wednesday we will find out how the test affects internet users. Google claims that less then 0.5% of the users of the Internet will be affected.

Are you among those ? You can find out easily by accessing the test page Google has created for this event. If you can see the page i’m seeing (below) then you’re safe

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I will not comment on the morality of this decision from Bing but rather on something that Danny Sullivan observed about “search voices” : “For 15 years, I’ve covered search. In all that time, we’ve never had so few search voices as we do now“.

The fact is that only one relevant voice remained: Google. We have no other search engines to choose from. I mean relevant ones. Sure there are quite a few search engines that exist beside Google but none of them are really usable for searching. They all come and go. At one moment Cuil appeared and everyone started praising it as the next Google. But two years later on 17th of September 2010 Cuil shut down. Their results never were relevant enough. Now Blekko is the hipsters sweetheart. But maybe you could use this search engine if you’re in the US. Their international results are just poor.

So right now Google is clearly in a position where they have a monopoly on search. We depend on them for finding almost everything we search on the internet.

Is this something we want to do on the long term ? How can we be sure that the results they serve us are the right ones if we cannot verify them from another source ? Can we blindly trust just one company ? A company that ultimately has one goal (as every public company): to make money, more money, all the money they can ?

I don’t know the answers. Maybe you do.

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Why is this happening and what are the reasons ?

Well, the reasons are many. It’s not a single reason and that’s why its more likely that this prediction will turn into reality.

1. Google search results getting more and more useless

I’m trying to acquire a new phone and being a Sony Ericsson customer for quite some time i wanted a new Sony Ericsson phone. I didn’t know which one is the best right now because i don’t really follow that niche very much. I searched for the best sonyericsson, results are mostly useless spamsites, i searched for sonyericsson ratings … results are also mostly useless spamsites.  Accessing a site from the above results can gives me in most cases no additional information to my query. I receive polls, lists of sonyericsson phones but not any good content site where i can see a comparison of the phones or a breakdown of their characteristics.

2. Spam is ruling the search results and they all profit (Google and the spamsites)

If you’re trying to do any real research with Google you will end up seeing lots and lots of spamsites.  Sites that were made with one single goal. To attract visitors who will click on the paid advertisements displayed beside the content. And this content is in most cases very poor content. It’s either syndicated from other content sources, either poorly written in very short time just to have some content to sell ads with it. When one single website produces 4000 pieces of content a day or when content farms are thriving then traditional media and blogs should raise an eyebrow and ask Google what is happening.

But Google has no real interest in solving this problem. Because in most cases they are selling the ads together with the spamsites (through Google Adsense). So their interest is to have as much content as possible and to sell as many ads as possible against this content. It doesn’t matter the quality of the content. The money is pouring in, Google is happy, spamsites are happy, end users … well who cares about them anyway ?

3. Content syndicators regularly outrank the original source of an article

Often i find my articles and pictures ripped of and posted on some crappy spamsite. Sometimes they mention the source and link back to it, sometimes they only mention the source without link and sometimes they doesn’t mention the source at all. I often found that they even removed watermark from my pictures and presented them as their own.

Every time i find such a site i try to get them to remove the article or give credit to the source. But many times i get no response and the ways to remove them (lawsuits, cease and desists, suspend hosting) are costly (either as money or as time effort). Leaving things as they are wouldn’t be that bad if Google would credit the original author of the article or picture. But this is not happening. In fact in some cases the stolen articles end up showing in search results ahead of the original article.

And this is not a single isolated incident. Others have also lived this painful experience: read about Trouble in the house of Google and Google, Google, Why Hast Thou Forsaken the Manolo

So on the long term for original content creators its not worth creating content because they are being buried in Google results. Scrapers on the other hand are thriving but this isn’t helping the end users. Often people run into the same article on 4-5 different sites, all showing up on the first page of the search results. I’m just curious though what will happen with scrapers when no one will be left to scrape.
4. Google promotes its own products in top of search results
The other annoying thing is that Google shamelessly promotes its services in search results effectively killing of competition, competition which is in some cases better then Google at some things.

For example i will present you a very good example. When i search after a map of Huedin (Huedin is a small city in Romania) Google will return its service (Google Maps) on the first place, even though they have a very poor map of that city.

And what is more important is that Google has maps for Romania only for about 1 year. Before they had nothing and it still showed up on the first place some time before they had the maps. This is clearly an artificially introduced alteration of their algorithm to promote their own service.

And meantime they are killing of the other local mapping websites that had good maps long before Google employees know where Romania is on the map.

5. Google spams when it suits him and disobeys its own Technical Guidelines
Yes, Google spams its own search results by indexing search results which is a clear violation of their technical guidelines. For example when you search for “tab mix plus chrome” which is a Google Chrome extension in the search results they show indexed search results from their own domain : chrome.google.com.

This is forbidden for us mere mortals because it would pollute search results with useless junk and Google’s guidelines clearly state that one should block these pages from indexing. You can see below what their technical guidelines say (look for the highlighted text) :

Of course they are allowed to do this because Chrome needs to be pushed forward. If i would do this i would be penalized in an instant. So i’m sick and tired of them lecturing us on ethics.
6. Google is getting its nose in everything
They are into search, maps, email, social, blogs, mobile business, advertising and constantly getting into all kinds of new niches. Now they want TV, netbooks, travel and whatnot ? One epic example is the ITA deal. ITA is a company that provides air fare software and services,  which are used by many of the major players in the online travel industry.  Obviously Google wants a piece of that pie too. So if the ITA deal would be approved they could just display their service on the first place and kill off the other industry players. That’s why approving the ITA deal would be a dangerous precedent. To prevent this the online travel industry has setup a website on this matter which contains more information on this:  http://www.fairsearch.org

Google’s big advantage over the world is that they have “The Database of Intentions” – basically Google knows at any given moment what are the most searched keywords in their search engine. If one day they would discover that crap is the most searched term, they would get into that too. This looks like kindergarten where kids try to do everything that the other kids do.

Unfortunately this is not kindergarten. Google now has more information on our society than any other entity has ever had and Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) admits it: “We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about” (source). So we must realize that never in the history of mankind was this kind of power in the hands of  single entity.

7. Increasing privacy implications

As i pointed out in the previous section Google knows more about you then anyone else. But this is not enough for them, recently they were caught collecting private wifi information from unprotected wireless networks while they were creating Street View images of cities. They say it was by mistake but that’s very improbable. Quality control and testing is usually very strict in this kind of companies. Such a software goes through many people and i can’t believe that no one noticed.

Conclusions

Well, these are the facts, everyone draws its own conclusions. As for me, i’m convinced that Google is heading into a wrong direction and this comes from someone who a few years ago was an absolute fan of the company. It is a matter of time before Google steps on the toes of too many people and too many authorities will be scrutinizing Google for its practices. They will be the “Microsoft” of this decade, ending up just like the Redmond giant was ten years ago, hated by people,  considered evil and watched carefully.

I’m not alone in my thinking, see what others say on this subject:

• Why we desperately need a new and better Google
• Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried
• Google, Google, Why Hast Thou Forsaken the Manolo
• On the increasing uselessness of Google…..
• The End of Hand Crafted Content
• Dishwashers and how Google eat its own tail

You could argue that most of the above applies only to webmasters and only the webmaster community will turn against Google. But end users are being affected as well. When you have to search for a new home appliance and the first two pages of results are full of spamsites you are losing time and money. Not to mention your mental sanity. Also lots of people working at companies that compete with Google or offer services that will be killed of by the Mountain View company will have a reason not to like Google. And the number of these companies is growing daily.

It will be an interesting year, that’s sure.

P.S.

The research and the writing of this post took 2 hours. I’m pretty sure some scraper is reposting this in about 3 minutes. So if you’re not reading this on the domain www.lacisoft.com/blog then it is stolen without my permission. Watch out what sites are you reading!

UPDATE 21.01.2011

It seems that the recent posts about Google search quality, prompted a response from Google’s Matt Cutts on their official blog.  He says that search quality is better than it has ever been. Should we believe him ? Do you believe that search quality is better then ever ?

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Why i did this ? Well, there are multiple reasons:

1) I didn’t really used it. Although Extreme Tracking is not free (at least the Pro version i’m using) i like it more then Analytics.

2) It slows down the website.

Yes, although now also an asynchronously loading version is available, the old version was slowing down the websites. I have the same problem with Google Adsense which also slows down the websites (you can see in the status bar: waiting for <some google domain> )

And if you didn’t know lately Google measures your site speed and performance and takes this into account when calculating pagerank and your position in the search results. So while it was sometimes useful to see Google Analytics data, it’s not worth it lately to keep an additional statistics service at the cost of being pushed down in search results.

This solves part of my problem, but what should i do with Adsense ? There is no fast loading alternative available. As one can observe, most of the times the ad networks slow down websites. The solution would be to remove that one too. But then i would lose some revenue that is helping me paying the hosting bills.

I believe i will be thinking about this for a while and if i find a solution, i will let you know.

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