Tag Archive | "Traffic"

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Google Analytics Gets an App Gallery


Google has launched the Google Analytics App Gallery, which includes 32 apps so far.

"All Google Analytics customers have access to a worldwide network of Google Certified Partners (formerly known as Google Analytics Authorized Consultants)," says Trevor Claiborne of the Google Analytics Team. "And now the ecosystem is growing further with developers who are creating a variety of applications on the Google Analytics platform."

Among the apps in the gallery are ones that let you work with analytics data in an Excel spreadsheet, and one that automatically implements Google Analytics across a WordPress site.

Developers can find more information here about how to publish apps in the gallery.

Google also announced it will be making a new set of AdWords reports available in Google Analytics over the coming weeks.

"These reports expand significantly on the AdWords reports you currently see in your account," says Claiborne. "For example, you can break out your AdWords traffic by actual search query, match type, distribution network, and many other AdWords attributes. We’ve added reports for day parting, placements, and destination URLs."

Developers can access AdWords info with the Google Analytics APIs, which Google says makes it much easier to combine AdWords and Analytics data for analysis and automation.

In addition to these announcements, AdWords Search Funnels are now available for all AdWords accounts.

 

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Mobile Now Accounts For 10% of Topix Traffic – And It’s Mostly From Small Towns


This morning I caught up with Chris Tolles, CEO of news aggregation service Topix. I’ve been following Topix since it began, back in 2004, so it was interesting to find out how the service has evolved. Originally, as the name suggests, Topix was focused on being a news site that categorized its content into topics. Nowadays Topix is very focused on localized news, particularly for small towns across America. Tolles said that 44% of their traffic comes from rural areas, rather than metropolitan areas.

Topix has also seen rapid growth in mobile access over the past year, from about 1% of their total traffic to 10% now. Tolles told me that 70% of that mobile traffic is coming from the iPhone.

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When Topix began in 2004, just 10% of Topix’s channels were local. But soon after, Tolles told me, they noticed that about 45% of their traffic was coming from those local channels. Topix then embarked on a journey to “own local news” for towns. By 2007, Topix was focusing almost exclusively on local news. It aimed to become the “home of local voice on the Web.”

Small Town News

Topix is about discussion, rather than traditional journalism. Tolles explained that they use a community approach to get people to participate and add news for their town. The content on the site is largely driven by community discussion. Tolles said that small towns often don’t have enough news, so “discussion is what fills this out.”

According to Tolles, Topix can be a substitute for traditional press in some small towns – especially if there’s no local paper (or if there is one, it’s not daily but, for example, a weekly publication). Given its focus on discussions, Tolles said that Topix is the place to go “if you want to throw rocks at your mayor.”

As noted, Topix does well in small towns. The southeast of the U.S. is currently working very well, said Tolles, with some small towns attracting thousands of comments a day. However, by his own admission Topix does poorly in big metropolitan cities like New York City and San Francisco. Tolles attributes this to increased competition in those places, but also in smaller cities or towns locals often “have axe to grind” and so that fosters discussions.

I asked how Topix markets itself to towns. Tolles replied that the biggest way Topix is discovered is through Google – for example, people searching for their town’s news. He said that 40% of Topix’s traffic comes from Google, but that 50% is organic – meaning that people come via the URL or a bookmark. That means that a solid percentage of Topix’s traffic is return visitors. Tolles noted that when people first visit Topix, they are attracted to the comments.

Mobile Usage Dramatically Increased

Probably the most interesting factoid I discovered about Topix today is that mobile usage is increasing at a rapid rate. Tolles said that in just one year mobile traffic went from 1% to 10% of the site’s total traffic. Most of these are iPhone users: 70% of mobile traffic, as noted above.

What’s more, mobile users are good commenters, too. Tolles said that about 30% of mobile users leave comments on Topix, which is a high ratio when you consider how difficult it is to leave comments via a mobile device.

Tolles noted that Topix has an iPhone app, which was released almost two years ago. However, he said that most of the mobile traffic comes from a mobile browser. Topix supports 38,000 towns or cities, all of which are available via mobile.

Mobile is by far the fastest growing aspect of Topix currently, said Tolles. He also remarked that advertising space in mobile is an open field. Topix monetizes well on the Web, at almost $4 per CPM. However, the mobile side is not quite so high currently. He expects this to grow, but he isn’t sure if it will be Google, Apple or another company that will provide the optimal mobile advertising platform.

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AdMob Shows Android Traffic Passing iPhone


robot.jpgad network AdMob has released its March report. Surprisingly, perhaps, the report notes that advertising traffic on the Android phone has surpassed that on the iPhone.

Android ad traffic in the U.S. was 46% in March of this year versus iPhone’s 32%.

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Android’s ad traffic has grown 32% per month, rising from 72 million requests in March of last year to two billion last month. Last March 12 manufacturers were responsible for 34 Android devices though only two, the HTC Dream and HTC Magic comprised 96% of total traffic. This year, that 96% was shared between 11 devices. The Motorola Druid has the most traffic, at 32%.

Although the fact that advertisers in the U.S. have elected to put more ads on Android than iPhone is a good indicator as to the desirability of that platform, Apple is still ahead of Google overall. Second quarter reports from Apple indicated that the company had sold 8.75 million iPhones in that three-month period. Android sold seven million in the whole of last year.

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Top photo by Gene Wolf

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One Third of iPhone 2Gs Sold Still In Use, Will Be Unsupported


A couple weeks ago, we reported that Steve Jobs had quietly stepped out from behind the shadows to send one of his brief, seemingly random email responses to a customer inquiry about whether or not the company would continue “supporting/updating the iPhone 2G in the Future”.

Jobs’ answer, in case you hadn’t heard, was a quick “Sorry, no” and we were left wondering how many people this might affect. According to an article today in Apple Insider, it could be more than you might have first thought.

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According to the article, the number of first-generation iPhones out there, still in use, accounts for a very small percent, but apparently there are a lot of iPhones out there. And before we go any further, let’s just note that the iPhone 1st generation, the “1G” and the “2G” are all synonymous.

Just 2 percent of all iPhone OS handsets still in use are Apple’s first-generation iPhone, but a new calculation estimates that amounts to nearly 30 percent of the 6.1 million iPhones sold between June 2007 and July 2008.

That means that there are nearly 2 million iPhone 2Gs still out there, in the wild and in use, that will soon be unsupported. While we wouldn’t expect Apple to continue releasing full OS updates for these phones, we would hope they would continue basic support for their customers.

The calculations come from Philip Elmer-DeWitt with CNN Money, who says that “If 7% of those iPhone 1Gs are driving 2% of AdMob’s Apple traffic, that suggests that nearly one in three is still ticking — and visiting the Web.”

The data comes from advertising firm AdMob’s monthly report, which shows that the iPhone 3GS has become the dominant device among iPhones and iPod Touches.

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Google Earth Sandwiched Into Google Maps


Ready or not, another integration of Google’s products has occurred.  Now, when Google Maps users go looking for a terrain view, they won’t find it; instead, a new option that essentially functions as a link to Google Earth is at the ready.

People who don’t already have Google Earth installed will in fact be unable to proceed until they download a browser plugin, and it’s almost certain that this change will disappoint some folks.  A 3D pan-and-zoom experience is likely to be seen as overkill (and a resource hog) if all that’s needed is a rough idea of how some land rises and falls.

Google Earth is definitely a more entertaining product than a simple terrain view, however, and people who weren’t aware of Google Earth or just weren’t in the habit of using it may appreciate the update.

Also, it’s fair to say that the average computer of 2010 should be more capable of handling Google Earth than the average computer of 2005 (the year Google Earth launched).

All in all, Google has at least brought its product line closer together and succeeded in upping the eye candy factor of Google Maps.  Traditionalists can still enjoy the same old "Map," "Satellite," and "Traffic" overhead views, as well.

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Just the Facts: Statistics from Twitter Chirp


This morning’s presentations from Chirp, Twitter’s developer conference, have showcased the growth and the innovation of the service.

A few of the statistics announced this morning include:

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  • Twitter has 105,779,710 registered users
  • 300,000 new users sign up per day
  • Approximately 60% of them are coming from outside the U.S
  • Twitter receives 180 million unique visitors per month
  • 75% of Twitter traffic comes from third-party applications
  • 60% of all tweets come from third-party apps
  • Since the new Blackberry application was launched, it has accounted for 7 to 8% of new sign
  • Twitter now has 175 employees, up from 25 one year ago
  • There are 600 million search queries on Twitter per day
  • There are over 100,000 Twitter applications
  • Twitter gets 3 billion requests a day through its API
  • 37% of active Twitter users use their phone to tweet

While the company is making several announcements at Chirp, including the archival of all public tweets since 2006 with the Library of Congress, these statistics confirm the impressive growth and potential of Twitter.

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Search Engines in March: Ask Continues to Grow – Bing and Google Lose 1%


hitwise_logo_apr10.jpgAccording to the latest data from analytics firm Hitwise, Ask managed to grow an astonishing 21% last month (from 2.84% to 3.44%), while Microsoft’s Bing actually lost 1%. After a long period of slow but steady decline, the total number of U.S. searches on Yahoo grew about 3% last month, while Google lost about 1% and fell under 70%. Alternative search engines only accounted for 1.93% of all U.S. searches.

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Verticals

Even though Bing lost some ground in the overall search market, it did quite well in the verticals it already specializes in. Year-over-Year, the percentage of upstream traffic from Bing to automotive, health, shopping and travel sites grew more than 100%. Month-to-month, Bing also saw double-digit growth according to Hitwise.

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Google, of course, remains the most important source of traffic for these verticals and it’s worth noting that even though Bing’s important is growing, it only delivers between 2 and 4% of the upstream traffic for these key industries. To some degree, though, Bing isn’t really interested in delivering this traffic to outside sources and would rather serve its customers by giving them answers right on its own site.

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Google Gives AdWords for Mobile Interface to Advertisers


Today Google has made AdWords for Mobile the default mobile interface for a small percentage of English-language advertisers.

"AdWords for mobile works best when you customize your experience," says Miles Johnson of Google’s Inside AdWords crew. "Before using the mobile website, you should log in from your desktop computer and choose the parts of your account that you want to monitor closely. Set up custom alerts for key account events (like when your campaign reaches 90% of your daily budget, or when your traffic drops substantially compared to the previous week), and saved filters to flag your most important keywords and campaigns. You’ll then see these filters and alerts on your AdWords for mobile home screen."

AdWords for Mobile

"We built AdWords for mobile to help you quickly access the essentials in your account, so we’ve focused on letting you view and make basic edits to campaigns and keywords through the mobile application," adds Johnson. "If you need access to the other parts of your account, like ads or campaign settings, you can switch to the desktop version of AdWords through a link at the bottom of the screen."

More advertisers in more languages will get the feature in the coming weeks. Those who wish to try it out immediately, can go here with their Android, iPhone or Palm Pre device.

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Google Gives AdWords for Mobile Interface to Advertisers


Today Google has made AdWords for Mobile the default mobile interface for a small percentage of English-language advertisers.

"AdWords for mobile works best when you customize your experience," says Miles Johnson of Google’s Inside AdWords crew. "Before using the mobile website, you should log in from your desktop computer and choose the parts of your account that you want to monitor closely. Set up custom alerts for key account events (like when your campaign reaches 90% of your daily budget, or when your traffic drops substantially compared to the previous week), and saved filters to flag your most important keywords and campaigns. You’ll then see these filters and alerts on your AdWords for mobile home screen."

AdWords for Mobile

"We built AdWords for mobile to help you quickly access the essentials in your account, so we’ve focused on letting you view and make basic edits to campaigns and keywords through the mobile application," adds Johnson. "If you need access to the other parts of your account, like ads or campaign settings, you can switch to the desktop version of AdWords through a link at the bottom of the screen."

More advertisers in more languages will get the feature in the coming weeks. Those who wish to try it out immediately, can go here with their Android, iPhone or Palm Pre device.

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Big Changes Are Coming to Digg: More Power to Publishers, Less Power to Top Diggers


digg_logo.jpgLast night, during Digg’s annual SXSW party, Digg’s CEO Jay Adelson announced a set of significant changes to Digg. Among the changes Adelson announced are a streamlined submission process, a personalized homepage, an unlimited amount of topic pages, a new commenting system and better curation tools. Earlier this morning, we got a chance to sit down with Adelson to discuss these changes in greater detail. Some of these changes will surely be extremely controversial in the Digg community and might also make some publishers who rely on Digg’s traffic a bit nervous.

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It’s hard to underestimate the influence these changes will have on the Digg community. Not only did the Digg team create a completely new backend architecture, but Digg is also making a lot of changes to how the site will work from a user’s perspective – some of which will surely be controversial among Digg’s most active users.

Digg will launch the new site in alpha in a few weeks. You can sign up for an account here. It’s important to note that Digg plans to work directly with its users and is looking for feedback from its alpha users. The alpha site, for example, will feature a large feedback bar at the bottom of every page.

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Personalized Homepages as Default

On the new Digg, every user will get a personalized homepage which will be populated with stories that are popular among this user’s friends and relate to topics this user has expressed interest in. This personalized homepage will become the default Digg frontpage for all users who have signed in to Digg. Users who are not signed in will still see the old Digg homepage. With this, the Digg team is clearly looking to get more users to sign up for the service. Digg will also update its users’ profile pages.

Submitters Lose Power

Another major change to Digg – and one that will surely create some controversy among the most active users of the service – is that the new Digg will de-emphasize the power of submitters and put an even stronger emphasis on who votes for stories, as well as on outside signals from third-party services like Twitter and Facebook. Indeed, the new Digg will now allow publishers to auto-submit their stories through RSS feeds and a number of other mechanisms that the company plans to unveil in the next few weeks. Until now, while Digg didn’t forbid publishers to submit their own content, this behavior was generally discouraged by the Digg community.

As Adelson told us, on the new Digg, submitting a story will basically mean that you are the first voter. Currently, a relatively small group of submitters has a lot of power over which stories will appear on the Digg frontpage.

Signals from Twitter, Facebook and Co.

While there will still be a role for those users who regularly discover new and interesting content, the new Digg will put a strong emphasis on votes and signals from your friends on third-party sites like Twitter and Facebook. Indeed, Digg will create a social graph for you that will take all of this information into account when it create your personalized homepage. On the homepage, Digg will also expose why a story appeared in your feed.

While Adelson couldn’t go into details, it seems like Digg has established a very good relationship with Twitter and has had access to Twitter’s firehose feed to almost a year.

Once the new digg comes out of beta, anonymous users will also be able to vote on stories. While the team is still working out the details, it is clear that Digg is looking to get as many signals as possible to augment the current voting process. It will be interesting to see how Digg will weigh all this information in the creation of personalized pages and the new topic pages.

The submission process for stories that haven’t been submitted to Digg already will now be a one-click process.

Digg will also soon use third-party sign-on systems, including Google, Twitter Connect and Yahoo to allow its users to sign in.

Working With Publishers: What Will Happen to the Digg Effect?

Obviously, quite a few publishers will worry that the old Digg effect – which would often take sites down because of the huge amount of traffic a story on Digg’s frontpage can create – will now disappear. Adelson, however, who also noted that Digg “wants to be a good source for traffic for publishers,” thinks that this new system will create a more regular stream of traffic to publishers.

In the long run, Adelson noted, Digg also plans to open up its advertising platform to share revenue with publishers. This project is still in its early stages, but according to Adelson, this could involve using a widget on the publisher’s site or by using Digg’s salesforce to sell ad inventory on these sites directly.

To make all of this work, Digg completely stripped out the old infrastructure and started over by building a completely new platform. This, said Adelson, will allow Digg to easily make changes to the frontend and react to user feedback during the alpha and beta phase. At some point in the future, Digg might also open this platform up to third parties.

A Completely New Platform

Digg is clearly taking this new version extremely serious. The company plans to hire 50 engineers this year to help with scaling the architecture. Adelson was clearly proud of the work his team has done on the backend architecture. The new site will be “wicked fast,” thanks to a complete retooling of every aspect of the site, up to the point where the bottlenecks for Digg are now network speed and latency. This is quite a feat, given that Digg now offers an almost unlimited amount of topic pages and a personalized homepage for every user – all of which will have to be recalculated constantly.

How Will Users React?

It will be very interesting to see how users will react to all of these changes. Adelson and the rest of the Digg team are very aware that this will create some controversy, but Adelson clearly thinks that this is the right way to go for Digg. The topic pages will allow Digg to cater to users who care about every type of news, be it the Boston Red Socks or the latest gadget news.

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Google Buzz Draws New Content-Scraping Controversy


If you were under the impression that the controversy surrounding Google Buzz was starting to die down, think again. So far, we’ve mostly heard about privacy issues, which Google has publicly addressed. They’ve also made changes based on user feedback. Now, we’re hearing about possible copyright issues. Google appears to be republishing full articles without permission, and stripping out any ads that may be in those articles.

One can easily see why any blogger or publisher wouldn’t be very pleased with this scenario. Not only are they serving up full articles that others have written without sending authors the traffic or even ad clicks, but if a user reads the article through Buzz within their Gmail account, they will likely see the ads Google itself serves.

Google Buzz - Is it scraping Content? Blogger Jesse Stay of Stay N’ Alive brings the subject up in a post, claiming that this is exactly what is happening to his content. However, Google did respond to him, saying they would "have the ad scraping issue fixed by next week." That would solve one problem, but presumably, this doesn’t change the fact that they are showing full article text, which is an interesting choice on Google’s part, considering the controversy surrounding how Google News aggregates publishers’ content.

That is a different situation entirely, because Google News does not publish full articles (unless they come from one of their partners). They simply provide a title, small snippet, and link to the original source, hence driving traffic to that source. Based on Stay’s story, Google will not likely be driving much traffic by showing full articles in Buzz. We’ve contacted Google for comment on this (we’ll post when we receive it).

One might compare reading an article through Buzz to reading one through a feed reader, like Google Reader. Sometimes you can read a feed in its full text, but the author has the ability to prevent this. With Buzz, the full-text articles appear to be coming simply from people sharing the articles, which is out of the author’s control (we asked Google if their is a way authors can prevent this…again, we’ll post a response when we receive it). 

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Blazing the Path to Email Collaboration: Without all of the Buzz


yousenditLogoFeb2010.gifToday, email is nearly as ubiquitous as the computer itself. It offers a simple process that “just works” for most users and it has become a defacto communication process for enterprises and individuals alike.

YouSendIt found its place in the evolution of email by providing existing email users a solution to a common problem – sending large files. Along the way, the company has leveraged its position in cloud based solution to offer additional benefits to its users.

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What do we Know about Email

A few things about using email that define it as a communications tool.

  • Each message can be targeted to a person, a list of people, or an entire group of people.
  • Individuals can respond to the message, ignore it, or mark it as Spam.
  • It’s security and privacy model that starts as opt-out, rather than op-in. Meaning that if you get an account *anyone* can send you a message.
  • Spammers are the single largest sender of email traffic.
  • Email messages can include file attachments that offer a way to send a file from one computer to the user on another one.

Improving the flow of attachments is part of email is that YouSendIt specializes in.

Large Files Needed a Home

For both user experience, technical infrastructure, and cost reasons many email systems cap the size of attachments they allow to pass through the gateway. Large files are routinely blocked, causing email users the challenge of figuring out another way to get them across the network.

One way to think about it, is that large file attachments “real” home is not the inbox, but more rightfully the filesystem (aka My Documents). And, increasingly these files are being stored in the cloud rather than the filesystem.

A diagram describing how it works shows how it creates a new channel for connecting the user to their file, while continuing to use email “as-is”.

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Collaboration Happens: Did You Get my Email?

By offering a cloud solution to deliver the files, YouSendIt was also able to track whether the recipient downloaded the file. The company currently has has about 5 million “file batches” sent per month with over 10 million downloads. On average, each file is being read by two persons on the other side and the sender is able to see which ones.

This audibility provides YouSendIt users a way to close the loop and gain a deeper insight to the status of their communications.

Imagine the sales person, who sends a brochure to the prospects, getting a report back for who opened it and who didn’t. It automatically separates out the interested from the others and gives an opportunity to target the next message.

Email is a social application that has it’s own rules and nuances – Google reminded the world recently with the launch of Buzz that connecting email and social networks is harder than it looks.

YouSendIt might be onto something. Instead of reinventing the entire social context of email, the company is focused on enhancing the existing email system as it works today.

YouSendIt Adopts the Enterprise

Microsoft Exchange has become the dominant email system in the enterprise. YouSendIt spent a lot of time working closely with Exchange and it’s client counterpart Outlook to bring its cloud-based attachments solution to the platform. This solution offers an approach to a gradual transition to cloud computing – one message at a time.

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Change is in-the-air around collaboration and email. We wonder if the next generation of email going to evolve into the killer app for bringing social networking it into the enterprise.

What do you think, will email ever fade away?

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How Google Failed Its Users and Gave Birth to an Internet Meme


google150.jpgIt’s not every day you get to watch the birth of an Internet meme, but yesterday, I was there at the moment of conception. I didn’t give birth to it but I certainly played a completely inadvertent and circumstantial part.

Facebook and AOL had announced their partnership and I decided the news merited more than the two paragraph treatment I saw everywhere else. So I embarked on a diatribe about how Facebook was trying to be our “One True Login”- and unknowingly set in motion what has become the most epic comment thread ReadWriteWeb has ever seen. But how did this happen and why?

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Within a half an hour of posting, the number of visitors had skyrocketed. It looked like a real winner. An hour later, it had reached the number of visitors an average post might see in an entire day. I figured I’d hit a home run.

But then the comments started rolling in.

“When can we log in?” asked one commenter.

“I WANT THE OLD FAFEBOOK BACK THIS SHIT IS WACK!!!!!” complained the next.

At first we wondered if it could be a giant, orchestrated prank. We weren’t sure who we might have offended, but obviously it was a premeditated assault. When we looked at our traffic, however, we didn’t see any of the usual suspects, just two little words on a very big website: “Facebook login” and Google. The post had become the number two search result.

By the end of the day, the post had several hundred comments and our back-channel chat room was still debating whether or not it could all be real.

It was like we had unearthed a long-lost city, the Atlantis of the Internet. But instead of treasures and gold we’d found a steady deluge of confused and frustrated users who had tried everything they knew to do and just wanted to log in to Facebook, damnit. But how had this happened? It certainly wasn’t that thousands and thousands of people had just started searching for “facebook login” yesterday. This stream of people has been there all along and something is broken.

Google had completely failed its users. It put us, with a post about how an AOL partnership foreshadowed Facebook becoming the de facto user database, above the most logical search result possible – Facebook’s login page.

While for us this was completely random, other search results show that this is actually a space that is otherwise intentionally occupied by sites trying to siphon off this traffic and profit from it. I don’t think the first search result for “Facebook login” was actually English, and the one that followed wasn’t either, but those two key words are used over and over.

By the next morning, the scale had tipped. News of the epic thread had started making its way around the social web, being retweeted across the Twitterverse, posted by early adopters on Buzz and submitted to sites like Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, HackerNews and Fark.

“No, really,” everyone seemed to be saying, “You GOTTA see this one.”

Suddenly, the two worlds collided. The tech savvy ran head-on into the tech illiterate and mockery and disbelief started to overtake confusion as the general tone in the comment thread. As the post made its way around the web, other comment threads, like those on Reddit and MetaFilter, began mimicking the now infamous comments. I suddenly realized that we might be standing at that flash point, that moment where it begins – the immaculate conception of an Internet meme. I’ve always wanted to be there at that moment. I’ve always wondered about the first person that saw a lobster and said, “You know what? I’m going to eat that.”

“I LIKE THE NEW ALL-BLUE FACEBOOK BUT CAN I JUST LOG IN NOW PLEEEEEZE?????!!!11″ reads one comment on MetaFilter.

Another comment on Reddit reads, “IS THIS THE ARTICLE!!? ALL I SEE IS COMMENTS!!!!! HOW COME WHEN I TRY TO LOG IN I PEE ON MYSELF AND PASS OUT?!?? I LIKED REDDIT BEFORE THE PEE!!!”

One person has even written a sonnet, detailing the plight of the lost Facebook users.

While we mock those users, the simple fact is they haven’t necessarily failed, something failed them. With all of our talk about the semantic Web and search engine optimization and tailoring search results to the individual user, there are thousands upon thousands of users performing the same simple search and following the same wrong road. If this were a standard traffic sign misdirecting this many people, it would have been pulled down long ago. There would have been outraged citizens at town meetings and special reports on the five o’ clock news.

So, when five years down the road someone, somewhere, in a completely unrelated comment thread says “i need the old facebook this new one is very bad bbbbbbbbbbuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!” I will be happy to say that I was there – I was around for the birth of that Internet meme. But I also hope that, by then, we’ve addressed the problem at the core. This is the Internet and these are its users.

If this many of them can’t login to Facebook by typing that into Google and clicking on the first thing they see, it’s probably not them that are wrong, it’s Google.

Discuss


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Google Gives AdWords Users New Alert Options


Google has introduced a couple of new alert options for AdWords advertisers. Users can of course use account alerts, and can also use custom alerts. Now Google has added new alerts for keyword and budget ideas, which are personalized tips to help users improve their campaigns’ effectiveness. These are in the "opportunities" tab.

"New ideas are usually generated for campaigns and ad groups every few weeks, but you may miss ideas that can expand your coverage and boost your traffic if you don’t check the Opportunities tab regularly," explains Google’s Dan Friedman. "Now, when there are new ideas available for your review, you’ll see them highlighted along with the rest of your campaign alerts."

AdWords alerts

Google has also added the ability to create custom alerts for changes in conversion volume, conversion rate, and cost per conversion for users using AdWords conversion tracking.

"By setting alerts for your conversion data, you can make sure that you’re quickly notified about fluctuations in your key metrics," says Friedman.

Google says it is still working on bringing custom alerts to all linked accounts for My Client Center (MCC) users, but until then, you can just set custom alerts for individual accounts if you can log into them directly.

Related Articles:

> Google Gives AdWords Advertisers New Comparison Option

> Google Launches Latest Version of AdWords API

> More "Ads by Google" Across the Web

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