Finding Mahalo In Them Thar SERPs

So, I’m not disparaging any company that gets 3M or so uniques per month, but its funny.  I remember that when Mahalo was launched some year(s) ago, in its initial incarnation / hype, I remember someone saying something about building its index to the 25k most common terms, and then trying to own those terms in Google.  I can’t find the actual link, so I may have hallucinated that last bit.

Long story short, over the past few years, I know that Mahalo has evolved its strategy, and that it now has a community, has an ongoing video that did have Veronica Belmont at some point, and has an answers-like program as well.

Interesting thing — I have never, ever, found Mahalo in Google’s SERPs since its inception.  Mind you, I’ve never, ever, deliberately looked (past the first few pages, or in specific queries that I knew mahalo was competing for).  But in the casual searches for travel issues, medical topics, geeky topics and what have you, the number of Mahalo pages that came up was zilch.

(Perhaps the same thing happened with you)

… until about two days ago, when I was looking for some help on Ninja Gaiden 2 (playing on “warrior mode” if you must know), there it was! [the query was "Ninja gaiden 2 walkthrough "]

http://www.mahalo.com/ninja-gaiden-2-walkthrough

– ahead of IGN.com, 1UP, and Gametrailers.com.  Impressive!  (For Google.ca, that is)

Not sure what this represents, but it is somewhat odd, since a cursory review of that particular URL in yahoo’s site explorer shows that it has no inbound links except for those that from Mahalo.com.  Weird.

Question of the day, then: when was the last time you saw Mahalo rank for anything?

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Making Friendfeed Better, Part II

Friendfeed needs powerful friends (read: friends with tons of friends, wealthy friends, powerful friends, friends with access).  They could do a lot worse than Thomas Hawk, Zooomr-evangelist, and gigantic Flickr Fan, who suggests a lot more engagement with Flickr Fans everywhere.

I like this idea:

Best of Day Flickr. FriendFeed needs a page where they show the “Best of Day” amongst FriendFeed members’ Flickr photos. Flickr’s Explore page is crappy. It’s a subjective page full of blah photos generally speaking. FriendFeed should allow you to filter your Flickr Contacts photos by absolute numbers of faves on a daily basis. I’d love to be able to see my Flickr contact’s daily uploads organized this way

I am no guru when it comes to design, but its hard to go wrong with gorgeously delicious color photographs in any layout.  Would it turbo charge more Flickr integration and pump up pageviews from random viewers who are utterly entranced by photography-as-art? My bet is on yes.   There are six more ideas … check it out.

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On Using Twitter For Corporate Marketing

It appears as though some institutions are using interns to man their Twitter stations, as picked up by the Big Money Blog at Slate.com — Pizza Hut, in particular has had some success with their own intern: she’s grown their subscribership from 3000 to 13000 and has managed a 4th of July promotion.

A cautionary note is rung by the author, who mentions the danger of unmonitored staffers;

How much trouble can 140 characters really stir up? A lot, it turns out. In London, a twittering intern for home-furnishings retailer Habitat got in big trouble last month after he sent out misleading tweets that included commonly searched words related to the protests in Iran. He added keywords—called “hashtags” in Twitterspeak—such as Iran and Mousavi to messages so that people who searched for information about the protests would see his employer’s ads instead. His bosses were not pleased. “This was absolutely not authorised by Habitat,” a representative said in a statement. “We were shocked when we discovered what happened and are very sorry for the offence that was caused.” Habitat has since deleted the tweets and vowed to “do better for the Twitter community.”

Ethically challenged marketing maneuvers?  Sounds like an issue of management, rather than the age or inexperience of the individual in question.

Furthermore, lest us all forget, marketing gaffes can happen with even the most seasoned of pros — the transient and off-the-cuff nature of Twitter can sometimes lend to inadvertent messages that are, quite frankly, off-message.  Imagine a ‘reply-all’ email goof which happens with about 100x easily and you’ll get what happened with Steve Rubel, PR new media maven, a few years ago:

Rubel had to publicly apologize yesterday to Jim Louderback, Editor in chief of PC magazine, for twitting that he threw PC magazine in the trash. Louderback wondered aloud in a guest column on Strumpettethat perhaps his 11 million readers were not important to Edelman clients and maybe PC magazine should boycott all Edelman pitches.

Twitter, is a powerful tool. Ghost twitterers and corporate tweets alike, however, have to be mindful of of mistakes that can happen in an instant, and that, thanks to the powerful indexing cache of Google, these internets don’t forget.

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Google OS’s Hardware Strategy?

Perhaps the key to Google OS’s success is in this key statement that might have been overlooked yesterday:

Messrs. Schmidt and Page were also careful not to position Chrome as a competitor to Microsoft Windows. They argued that Chrome will expand the market for netbooks, rather than eating into Windows’ share of the netbook market.

Messrs. Schmidt and Page were also careful not to position Chrome as a competitor to Microsoft Windows. They argued that Chrome will expand the market for netbooks, rather than eating into Windows’ share of the netbook market.

Rather than the hubaloo around “of course Chrome is a competitor”, I find the more interesting statment the latter half of that statement — Google’s planning to expand the market for netbooks.  I’ve no idea exactly how they’re going to get as-yet non-existent web-based operating system to drive the market for what is essentially a thin-client technology, but it does make you wonder about the growing relationship between Intel and Google … and it also makes you wonder exactly how important the hardware relationships it has with its other potential vendors, and how, precisely, this particular free OS pre-installed will be different (and *grow* a market segment)  than the *other* free OS pre-installed.
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Army Using Video Games To Fight Smoking Addiction

And there’s spending almost $4 million dollars to produce a game that will likely surface in 2013.  You know, I almost pooh-pooh’d this particular fact until I read this piece in Scientific American about how a similar program aimed at younger demographic actually lead to half of that program’s participants (239 in number) to quit.  Sure, I don’t have the stats or paper in front of me, but 50% quit rate for smoking based on a knowledge-based effort?  I’m waffling between being amazed and being amazingly skeptical.

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The Many — or Singular? — Problems of Friendfeed

The most prolific Friendfeeder of them all (to give you an idea of how Robert-Scoble-as-lifestreamer >> Scoble-as-blogger, just look at the number of comments on his Friendfeed vs. Blog … currently a ratio of 10:1 as of this writing) gives the low-down, which includes the lack of people needing an aggregator, how it sucks on mobile systems, and the “noise” issue.  All valid points (there are more … go read them all if you must).

What Friendfeed has to have is some kind of inflection point where its inherent greatness pulled through, was recognized by all, and contributed to some greater good.  The key, of course, is that “inherent greatness” — as Scoble points out, there are a lot of things it kind of does well, but hamstrung by a manpower (and goodness knows what else), its become easy pickings for Facebook to merely mimick the features off of.  That is to say, if Scoble can’t pin down a few singularly great things about Friendfeed, what hope does any of us have when we try and describe it to would-be fans?

Allen Stern describes it as something like a forum.  I would agree … but perhaps what Friendfeed needs to do, or become, is something more evolved than a mere forum.  The thing that blew my mind about Friendfeed wasn’t just how it was an aggregator, but how it enabled real-time conversations that were impossible to track with Twitter.  Perhaps what Friendfeed lacks, then, is the magic sauce that powered Twitter through its would-be-Nobel-nominating efforts in Iran: its ability to be used through text-messaging and SMS-services.  Imagine, for a moment, the kind of impact that secure and private rooms for conversations to be had, in real time, on the fly, off your desktop for would-be revolutionaries in Iran (or, anywhere, for that matter).

There’s still time for an inflection point to happen with Friendfeed, but I’d agree with one of Scoble’s assertions: to make the transition from good to great, they are going to have to think of something clever that Facebook can’t just copy — Facebook has the manpower and resources to continue making Friendfeed a “feature” without it.

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A Bit of a Personal Update

Just a bit of a personal update.  About a week ago, I finished my medical training.  I’m now fully qualified in Internal Medicine and Palliative Care.  Its culminated about 27 years of schooling, 15 of which has been post-secondary.  Whew!   I’m taking some time off in advance of some “real” work later in the summer and the fall to spend some time with the family … and get back to blogging for a bit.  :)  Thanks to some of the usual folks for noticing my noticable absences, and thanks to all who have stuck around (and remember me!).  Also, thanks to FindInternetTv.com who has faithfully sponsored this blog, and has enabled me to keep the lights on.

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