Google OS and The Privacy Issue: For Some, Google Is Quite Evil
by Tony Hung on July 10, 2009
Nice pick up from the USA Today on privacy concerns regarding Google’s upcoming Google OS. In particular
Privacy advocates want more transparency from Google about how it plans to monetize the vast amounts of behavioral data it collects. Google could charge a pretty penny for this intelligence, which could help advertisers better target their pitches, says Court.
“Even though the company espouses that it doesn’t do evil, the potential for a lot of evil exists,” says Court. “It may start with simple ads you get based on whether you like soccer or baseball, but the evolution of being spied on, not only through your searches, but on all the files you create, that’s pretty frightening.”
At times like this, I like to remind myself that as tin-foil-y as privacy advocates sound (at times), Google has been known to add cookies that last 30 years long, was almost strong-armed by the government in handing over a ton of privacy related information, or how the Google van has been known to take photos of people without their specific consent. Yep … sometimes, I’d like to refer to Danny Sullivan’s seminal article which is only two years old, but details a great many “tipping points” towards malevolence since 2001.
Speaking of Accidental Tweets …
by Tony Hung on July 10, 2009
Speaking of careless tweets: unintentional, accidental, pre-maturely scheduled, or actually intentional?
EA’s UK PR team just tweeted an announcement that Command & Conquer 4 is now in development, though the linked press release doesn’t seem to exist yet. This seems to us like the result of an itchy trigger (or tweeter) finger. With recent online surveys asking what people would like to see in the next Command & Conquer, we were expecting an announcement sooner rather than later. Still, this is a little earlier than we — and EA, seemingly — had expected the announcement to come. We’ll update you with more information on the game once the press release becomes available.
Finding Mahalo In Them Thar SERPs
by Tony Hung on July 10, 2009
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?
Making Friendfeed Better, Part II
by Tony Hung on July 10, 2009
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.
On Using Twitter For Corporate Marketing
by Tony Hung on July 10, 2009
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.
Google OS’s Hardware Strategy?
by Tony Hung on July 10, 2009
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.
Army Using Video Games To Fight Smoking Addiction
by Tony Hung on July 10, 2009
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.