Two years ago I was on the Charlie Rose show and we talked about, among other startups and trends, Facebook. It wasn’t clear then that Facebook had what it took to become one of the great technology companies. They had conquered the college market and were destroying the hopes and dreams of MySpace. But they were also reeling from the Beacon debacle and hadn’t proven that they could turn those massive reach and page view numbers into sustainable revenue streams.
You can watch the whole discussion about Facebook, which begins at about the 22:00 mark. But the key question I asked then was, “Will Facebook Have their Google moment?” I was referring to Google’s ability to pair awesome search in the late nineties with, later, an amazing business model – a bidding system for text ads. In 2008 it was clear that Facebook had taken the first step and changed our culture, possibly permanently. But it wasn’t at all clear that they would create the massive revenue streams to allow them to effectively dominate tech culture.
Fast forward to today. Those questions have been answered. Facebook is profitable and probably is running at a billion dollar plus revenue run rate today. They have 400 million users and 500 million people visit the site each month. Only Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have more monthly visitors than Facebook. And only Google has more page views. And they aren’t done growing yet. In a year they will likely be second on the list of unique visitors. In two years, they’ll probably be first.
In a talk a few days ago investor Ron Conway spoke about the explosive growth of Facebook. “They are the universe,” he said. I asked him if we are in the Age of Facebook. His answer was yes. Ron has been investing in startups for thirty years and he has seen the rise and fall of many companies. This wasn’t just idle chatter.
Microsoft dominated the technology world in the 90s on the back of their Windows and Office products. Google was the champion for the last decade after perfecting the business model around search. Both are still huge companies.
But all the momentum is behind Facebook and how they are changing the Web, and our culture.
Last week Facebook unveiled a variety of new developer tools, and new consumer applications are set to be launched in the near future. What’s most interesting about these changes aren’t the debates about whether what Facebook is doing is good for the Internet or not, or how open or not open their solutions are.
Those debates are important but they don’t affect the Facebook revolution any more than debates about Adsense a decade ago affected the decade of glory that Google just experienced. The fact is that Facebook is permeating the Web. Publishers, us included, are clamoring to organize our websites in ways that please Facebook.
Their vision of an open graph of people and things (with Facebook at the center) is becoming reality, and debates by technologists won’t changes that. Facebook is taking over our identity and we are going along with that happily. It will take a new technology paradigm to disrupt what Facebook is doing.
Microsoft’s Windows platform wasn’t threatened by user complaints, lawsuits or even government actions to weaken it. It took the evolution of the browser as an operating system, and new applications like Google Docs, to give users the comfort to move beyond Windows. And while the Windows franchise is still going strong, the writing is on the wall. Eventually, it will fall.
Someday, maybe a decade from now, some new technology will rise and allow other companies to threaten Facebook. But until then there is little to stop them. Their march to dominance has just begun.
Monday, April 26, 2010
Google Street View Adds Local Business Listings
Last week, the newly renamed Google Places added a ton of features to help local businesses create a directory page right on Google. Today, Google’s Street View is joining the party by showing links to local business listings right in Street View. As you turn around in Street View, names of local businesses and other “Google Places” will show up overlayed on top of buildings. As you hover over those names, a small pop-up window shows some of the listing details such as business name, phone number, and ratings.
There have been links from business listings on Google Maps directly to Street View for almost a year, but now those business listings appear right within Street View itself. Google clearly wants to own local and is sprinkling these listings everywhere it can.
The next step I’m waiting for is to see Street view in a mobile augmented reality app, so that you can just point your phone camera at a building and see the businesses listed inside. That would be so Tonchidot of Google. Our augmented reality future awaits.
There have been links from business listings on Google Maps directly to Street View for almost a year, but now those business listings appear right within Street View itself. Google clearly wants to own local and is sprinkling these listings everywhere it can.
The next step I’m waiting for is to see Street view in a mobile augmented reality app, so that you can just point your phone camera at a building and see the businesses listed inside. That would be so Tonchidot of Google. Our augmented reality future awaits.
Effective Social Bookmarking
If you are looking to promote your business online, you will get benefited from Social Bookmarking. This is a marketing tool which is far more productive than the other traditional methods of promoting. It is an important tool for any online business owner to know, master and take advantage of in order to succeed in their growing online business. Social Bookmarking is now one of the most recent trends online to help you in spreading your voice and presence across the Internet. It is basically a simple and easy yet very resourceful innovation. You would be having an option in which you could share your bookmarks with the wider Internet. Make your favorite websites and web pages available, with comment. This is a good way to promote your own business website to the millions of people that use these sites.
Social Bookmarking is a novel method of locating, storing and sharing files and data among online users, and also allows registered users to store their ‘favorite’ web-links. In most cases, the lists that are created by users of a specific bookmarking network may either be designated as public or private in nature. If the lists are public in nature, then other users would be able to locate and view the links. These lists can be searched randomly, by tags, popularity, or category, tags.
Advantages Of Social Bookmarking:
1. Social Bookmarking websites drive qualified traffic and would also increase your link popularity, because search engines “index” the pages within these sites, and will see the links to your website.
2. Social Bookmarking helps in quick indexing by the search engines.
3. The best way to drive instant traffic to your website. This is the only method which helps to boost the traffic of the website, making it easier to spread your online business’ Web content.
Sites I would recommend:
1. Delicious
2. Digg
3. StumbleUpon
4. Yahoo Buzz
5. Technorati
6. Kaboodle
7. Mixx
8. Propeller
9. Reddit
10. Newsvine
Tips of Successful Bookmarking:
1. Create Accounts in all the bookmarking sites which have good reputation in WWW.
2. Concentrate on building reputation by adding/communicating with other members.
3. Organize your tags well. Try and keep them simple. That makes it easier for the other users to find you.
Basic Steps to get RANKED for the Targetted Keywords
First of all, select the right targeted keywords for your web page. Please don’t do the mistake of selecting the most popular keywords. Instead you can use Google’s keyword suggestion tool to select the most appropriate variations considering both popularity as well as competition. During this process please make sure that keyword phrases should be related to your website content as without that the entire process will be of no use.
Before you start with Off-Page optimization like Building backlinks and generating traffic, you have to make sure that the keywords are placed in the right spot. No page will get ranked if you haven’t clearly indicated exactly what keyword’s the page should be ranked for.
The Basic Steps to get ranked for the Targeted Keywords are:
1) Keyword in the URL
2) Keyword in the title
3) Keyword in the only
1. Keyword in the URL
Just make sure that your URL is in the form www.example.com/keyword (.htm or .php or .aspx or whatever). Avoid URLs without the keyword eg www.example.com/products.htm?id=12. For the URL it is best to have only the keyword and no other junk.
2. Keyword in the title
It is also recommended to use the keyword in the page title, eg “Keyword (with some wording included) | Example.com”. Do not repeat titles on all your pages, and do not dilute keywords by using the same keyword in all your titles. Every internal page should consists a Unique page title.
3. Keyword in the only tag.
When you describe your Targetted Keyword, there should be a header above your description. Just add tags, eg Targetted Keyword
The title should also have some extra wording that is different from the title wording.
4. Keyword Usage in Body
Please make sure that the content that you posted is Keyword Rich.. Because Google Algorithms are more sensitive to pages that do not contain the keyword they’re getting links for. Do not spam the keyword though! Just use it a few times, naturally. (Keyword Desnity of 2%-6%)
So stop trying to implement all the hundreds of factors that could possibly help you rank higher. Unless you are done with these basic steps do not move on.
Before you start with Off-Page optimization like Building backlinks and generating traffic, you have to make sure that the keywords are placed in the right spot. No page will get ranked if you haven’t clearly indicated exactly what keyword’s the page should be ranked for.
The Basic Steps to get ranked for the Targeted Keywords are:
1) Keyword in the URL
2) Keyword in the title
3) Keyword in the only
1. Keyword in the URL
Just make sure that your URL is in the form www.example.com/keyword (.htm or .php or .aspx or whatever). Avoid URLs without the keyword eg www.example.com/products.htm?id=12. For the URL it is best to have only the keyword and no other junk.
2. Keyword in the title
It is also recommended to use the keyword in the page title, eg “Keyword (with some wording included) | Example.com”. Do not repeat titles on all your pages, and do not dilute keywords by using the same keyword in all your titles. Every internal page should consists a Unique page title.
3. Keyword in the only tag.
When you describe your Targetted Keyword, there should be a header above your description. Just add tags, eg Targetted Keyword
The title should also have some extra wording that is different from the title wording.
4. Keyword Usage in Body
Please make sure that the content that you posted is Keyword Rich.. Because Google Algorithms are more sensitive to pages that do not contain the keyword they’re getting links for. Do not spam the keyword though! Just use it a few times, naturally. (Keyword Desnity of 2%-6%)
So stop trying to implement all the hundreds of factors that could possibly help you rank higher. Unless you are done with these basic steps do not move on.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)