Icons of the Web
A sea of favicons, presented proportional to the sum of reach of sites using it; http://j.mp/Webicons (via @VizWorld)
Tagged: Bing RSS
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
Referral Traffic Sources
What are the top referral traffic sources from search, social networks, bookmarking, and media? http://j.mp/d8nq7R
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Gerrit Eicker
Blekko
New Web search engine from scratch: Blekko, differentiating via slashtags, query refinement tools; http://j.mp/9CTrGd
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Gerrit Eicker
Binghoo Ante Portas
Are you ready for Binghoo? The first phase of the Microsoft-Yahoo search alliance starts next month; http://j.mp/d8g6ye
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It’s built right into Gmail, so you don’t have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch – it just works. If you think about it, there’s always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most. We focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately (so you don’t have to use different tools to share with different audiences). Plus, Buzz integrates tightly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you’re sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time.”
NYT: “Google and Facebook are on a collision course in the increasingly competitive market for social networking services. – On Tuesday, Google introduced a new service called Google Buzz, a way for users of its Gmail service to share updates, photos and videos. The service will compete with sites like Facebook and Twitter, which are capturing an increasing percentage of the time people spend online.”
Guardian: “The move brings Google into closer conflict with a number of smaller rivals than ever before. Although the company remains the most powerful force on the web – and has even seen profits from its internet advertising business continue to rise despite the recession – it has also been feeling increasing pressure from competitors that have tapped into a desire to connect with friends and family online.”
TC: “Without having had a chance to play with it yet, it would seem that the core idea behind Buzz is to take on Twitter and Facebook as the easiest way to share content online. Google is offering a number of compelling features such as smart curation (it gets better as you tell it what you like and what you don’t), and a rich mobile experience including location. – Because of the features it adds on to what Twitter does, and its overall look, it’s hard not to compare Buzz to FriendFeed. That service was arguably the better product than Twitter, but never took off in the same way for whatever reason (though I would argue that simplicity was a big factor).”
NYT: “People will find the Google Buzz notes right in their Gmail in-boxes, where they’re marked with a special Buzz icon that looks like a cartoon text bubble filled with Google’s signature primary colors. The comments that follow an update, also known as a Buzz, are grouped in a similar fashion to the way Gmail handles a thread of messages.”
Winer: “I only know about first impressions of Google Buzz because once I saw what it did to my Gmail inbox, which is a mission-critical app for me, my mission became How do I turn this off? … It violates the prime directive of new software. It starts turned on, and the way to turn it off is all-but invisible. And it invades a space that heretofore Google helped to protect. One of the big values of Gmail is its spam filter. Now all of a sudden it’s as if the exhaust was reversed, and it was spraying dirt into my message stream, instead of filtering it out.”
SEL: “Gmail certainly has its share of dedicated, hardcore users – people who have Gmail set as their home page and keep it open all day in a separate browser tab. But do these users want social networking to invade their inbox? We’re all familiar with the challenge of separating work time – which almost always involves email – from ‘social time,’ and Google is taking somewhat of a risk by combining the two with Buzz.”
Jarvis: “I think this could be the beginning of some big things: The hyperpersonal news stream, which Marissa Mayer has been talking about. The key value here is not just aggregating our streams but prioritizing them by listening to signals that unlock relevance. … Local is clearly a big Google priority. Newspapers, Yellow Pages, local media, and perhaps even craigslist better watch out. Google is gunning to organize our areas and with that comes an incredible flood of advertising opportunity. … Personalization is key to this: relevance in your feed; publishing to your friends (even understanding who your friends are). I think this portends the end of the universal search and thus of search-engine optimization (there’ll be no way to calculate how high a result rises when everyone’s results are different).”
RWW: “Google Buzz could quickly become the most popular location-based service on the Internet. Not only does Buzz integrate itself into Gmail, which will give it a large mainstream user base, but Buzz also puts geolocation front and center on its mobile sites. In addition, the new Buzz layer in the Google Maps mobile interface makes it incredibly easy to find geotagged Buzz messages around you. … By default, location sharing is turned on in Buzz, which raises concerns about privacy.”
VB: “You’ll find more location features when you go to the Buzz mobile website. In addition to posting an update, you can see a Google place profile of where you are, and you can click on a ‘nearby’ button to see all the public updates from users near your location. This might be particularly useful if you’re at a big event like a conference, so you see all the conversation around that conference. – None of these individual features are all that unique or innovative, but by tying them into a comprehensive product, which is itself integrated with a number of popular Google services like Gmail, Google might find location-based success in a way that it doesn’t seem to have done with its earlier location service, Latitude.”
RWW: “Google Buzz is headed for the enterprise. According to the Google Enterprise blog, Google Buzz will become a part of Google Apps within the next few months. – Google Buzz applies as much to the enterprise as it does to the consumer market. The real-time application creates an extension for communication that adds a threaded context to a conversation, a critical component for an enterprise application.”
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Gerrit Eicker
Media Goes Bing vs. Google
Will we really see a Bing-News Corporation deal? A wider boycott of Google? An Opec for news? http://j.mp/7mCuli
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Gerrit Eicker
TC: “Rupert Murdoch is pointing a gun to Google’s head, and Microsoft is helping him pull back the trigger. For the past few weeks, Murdoch and his officers at News Corp. have been very vocal about their distaste for Google and their desire to lead other media companies in a boycott of sorts. – Murdoch keeps threatening to stop letting Google index the WSJ.com and his other media sites, and wants other news sites to join him in this self-imposed silence. … In order to actually make a dent in Google’s market share, Bing would have to pay such exorbitant sums to so many different news companies that it would be difficult to recoup its investment. Bing certainly get some marketing buzz out of any such move, but that’s about it. – The big problem with a search engine trying to buy market share by buying parts of the news is that information spreads so quickly these days, exclusives last about 30 seconds.”
SEL: “Lastly (for now, I may update other thoughts later), I think it’s a really poor move for Microsoft to be trying to strike exclusive deals like this. It’s one thing to license content. It’s another to apparently overtly suggest that a competitor be denied that content. – Microsoft has a bad anti-competitive reputation. It’s also in the middle of trying to convince regulators both in the US and Europe that it should be allowed to purchase Yahoo’s search technology and effectively end Yahoo’s role as a search provider, leaving the space to just Google and Microsoft. – So a deal to lockout Google? You can bet Google will use this to argue to anyone and everyone that Microsoft is back to ‘old tricks.’”
FAZ: “Die große Frage ist allerdings, ob Microsoft den Verlagen soviel Geld zahlen kann, um den Einbruch ihrer Werbeeinnahmen zu kompensieren, den das Aussperren von Google zur Folge hätte. ‘Microsoft ist kein Monopolist mehr. Sie können nicht die Bank der Verleger sein’, zitiert Bloggerin Kara Swisher eine mit den Verhandlungen vertraute Person. ‘Auch wenn es großes gegenseitiges Interesse gibt, ist es zweifelhaft, dass Microsoft eine ‘Miete’ für Inhalte zahlt, die das Unternehmen nicht besitzt’, sagte die Person weiter.”
Gerrit Eicker
Verleger: contra Google, pro Bing?
Schmidt: Planen Verleger [Pearson, Springer] ein Bündnis gegen Google – und für Microsoft [Bing]? http://j.mp/2JzQKZ
Gerrit Eicker
Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
TC: “Half of their monthly visitors are already Facebook users, says Microsoft. And 15% use Twitter. So having the ability to read and create Facebook and Twitter messages right from the portal page is a good idea. For users with Silverlight, more advanced apps will be available.”
RWW: “The new site now puts a lot of emphasis on local news. The new local edition features extended weather reports, movie times, concerts, restaurant reviews and information about local gas prices. For restaurant reviews, Microsoft takes users to Bing’s local search.”
SEL: “Microsoft told me that the redesign was prompted by user feedback and a growing internal sense that the old design was cluttered and had grown stale. When I met with Microsoft we also discussed and compared the Yahoo homepage redesign of several months ago. … The new MSN will roll out globally over the next several months. Interestingly the look of the MSN portal may be slightly different country to country, depending on variables unique to each local market. Microsoft also says that it will bring the new MSN experience to mobile devices as well.”
NYT: “MSN, however, is not going nearly as far as Yahoo in its effort to integrate applications from other sources onto its home page. And unlike Yahoo and AOL, which have indicated that they plan to increase their production of original content, Microsoft will continue getting its content largely from partners like MSNBC.com and Fox Sports. ‘I wouldn’t anticipate seeing Microsoft invest in content directly,’ Bob Visse, general manager of MSN’s product management group. said.”
ClickZ: “Ad formats on the new MSN homepage include a 300×250 ‘Showcase’ format; a new horizontal top-of-page ad the company is calling ‘Sliver’; and a ‘Waterfall’ vertically oriented display ad. The Showcase ad unit was offered previously, but Microsoft has made it more prominent by removing editorial content from the space immediately surrounding the ad. MSN is also bundling these ads together for clients wishing to place synchronized executions.”
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Gerrit Eicker
AdAge: “Consider: In 2005, AOL, MSN and Yahoo accounted for a combined 30% of all time spent on the web in the U.S., according to Nielsen. Today, they account for a combined 17%. In September, the average Facebook user spends 5.5 hours on the social network per month, while MSN users spend 2 hours, Yahoo users spend 3 hours and AOL users spend 2.5 hours. – Still, the 17% share means the death of the portal has been greatly exaggerated, and MSN boasts the largest global audience of any of the three. Moreover, MSN is a key audience vehicle for Microsoft to drive adoption of technologies such as Silverlight, Internet Explorer, Windows 7 and search engine Bing.com.”
Gerrit Eicker 09:14 on 27. August 2010 Permalink |
NMAP: “A large-scale scan of the top million web sites (per Alexa traffic data) was performed in early 2010 using the Nmap Security Scanner and its scripting engine. As seen in the New York Times, Slashdot, Gizmodo, Engadget, and Telegraph.co.uk … – We retrieved each site’s icon by first parsing the HTML for a link tag and then falling back to /favicon.ico if that failed. 328,427 unique icons were collected, of which 288,945 were proper images. The remaining 39,482 were error strings and other non-image files. Our original goal was just to improve our http-favicon.nse script, but we had enough fun browsing so many icons that we used them to create the visualization below. – The area of each icon is proportional to the sum of the reach of all sites using that icon. When both a bare domain name and its “www.” counterpart used the same icon, only one of them was counted. The smallest icons – those corresponding to sites with approximately 0.0001% reach – are scaled to 16×16 pixels. The largest icon (Google) is 11,936 x 11,936 pixels, and the whole diagram is 37,440 x 37,440 (1.4 gigapixels).“