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Quick update on Macworld iWorld 2012
I saw a lot of kinda cool stuff at Macworld yesterday. A lot of stuff I’ve seen before. The Berklee College of Music folks always put on great informative and entertaining sessions – they’re worth the price of admission alone. I like them so much, let me plug their new online extension school: Berkleemusic.com
I’ve already seen a number of sites listing some of the gadgets at the expo. In my usual contrary style, let me point out a few that some people are all excited about but that I see as dead ends:
- Flash Drives.
Really? This is cool? At $100 or more? I don’t get it. - Scosche myTrek
Isn’t this just a $130 $3 pedometer? I know, it’s not really, but still. - TV Remote app/gadgets
This sounds so cool, but think about it. The iPhone makes a terrible remote because it has no tactile feedback. For a small number of functions, it might be possible to have a simple gesture based UI, but I think in real life this is nowhere near as cool as it seems at first glance.
I did buy the Blue Yeti Pro USB and analog XLR microphone ($199 show price), despite some mixed reviews on Amazon. Hopefully it will meet my expectations for a home studio mic that I can also take with me and use with my Macbook Pro.
And I love the Discovery Bay Atari Arcade for iPad ($59.95) with the “Atari’s Greatest Hits” app. But be advised, the games are $0.99 each or $9.99 for all 99 available old-school Atari arcade games.
Another interesting piece of hardware is the D1 DAC (digital to audio converter) from Audioengine. I have a Mac Mini that is dedicated to my living room TV entertainment setup but at $169 I need to do a bit more research to see if the improvement in sound quality is really that dramatic. It is a really solid and attractive bit of hardware though.
There was a lot of other stuff at Macworld | iWorld like navigation, home automation, a nice portable projector from Epson ($800) and a whole bunch of music production apps and hardware – oh, and a bazillion cases, screen protectors, and other such, of course 
Macworld Expo now also “iWorld”
It makes complete sense. Starting a few years ago, and following Apple’s own shift in focus, the Macworld Expo has been less about Macs and more and more about iPhone et al. Last year I noted that it was dominated by iPad apps, accessories, and hardware. Now the show name has officially taken on that character as “Macworld | iWorld”
I’m going, of course. I’ll report here if anything grabs me.
How to Improve PageRank Using 140Plus.com
There are many great reasons for businesses to use 140Plus.com but one clearly stands out: increasing your keyword rankings and growing your organic search traffic.
140Plus.com makes it easy to increase the number of terms that your website can rank for without cluttering your site with extra pages that might make your site bloated and hard to navigate.
Below is a step-by-step guide for using 140plus.com as a highly effective and easy to use tool for SEO and traffic building.
1) What do I write about?
The most common road block to getting started with 140Plus.com is deciding what to write about. The answer is simple: write about your keywords. Since you’ll be using 140Plus.com to write about your industry and niche, it will be a natural place to create content around a wide variety of keywords.
2) Identify keywords (be realistic)
As an example, let’s say you want to increase the amount of traffic coming to your site for searches related to the term “pagerank.” Let’s face it, unless you’re Google or Wikipedia, you’re not going to be taking the #1 search engine result for the term “pagerank” anytime soon. That’s okay, you can still get crafty and take a sizable chuck of traffic by thinking about the way people search.
Most experienced Google users understand that using general terms isn’t going to get the results they want. Instead, people typically search for keyword phrases, for example: “increase pagerank,”, “improve pagerank” or “how to improve pagerank.”
I might never get the #1 spot for the term “pagerank” alone, but there is actually a chance that I could rank for the keyword phrase “how to improve pagerank.” Granted, it may not have a high search volume, but if you can rank for a dozen or more of these kinds of keyword phrases related to the term “pagerank” you’ll end up with a significant amount of traffic.
3) Optimize your post around your keyword (Page Title, URL, H1)
The most important places to included keywords on any page of your site is in the page title, the URL and the H1 tag. This means that if you’re trying to rank for “how to improve pagerank” you need to make sure that phrase, in that order, is in all three places.
You also need to make sure that this phrase appears first. A common mistake is for a company to put it’s name before it’s keywords in page titles. For example “140Plus – How to Improve Pagerank.” Instead you would want “How to Improve Pagerank – 140Plus.”
Fortunately, 140plus.com handles this for you automatically. Once you’ve identified your keywords and ensured they’re part of the title of your post, 140plus.com ensures that the page title, the URL and the H1 tag are automatically optimized for search engines for you.
4) Publish your post
Finally, publish your post. 140Plus automatically arranges your page into a clean, search-engine friendly format, while automatically publishing to the web, to Twitter, and to Google. Depending on how frequently Google and other search engines scan your 140plus.com site, it could take a few days or longer for your pages to be indexed and show up in Google. A simple tip to get your 140plus.com pages into search engines faster is to publish more often. When Google notices that a site is getting updated daily, it will scan the site more regularly.
This is another place where 140Plus.com does some for the work for you, automatically posting to Twitter and posting your RSS feed to Google, leveraging the real-time social web to help your 140Plus.com posts get indexed faster.
140Plus.com gives your site more inbound links, which increases pagerank and improves organic search results to greatly increase traffic to your site. 140Plus makes it astonishingly easy to publish content to the new real-time social web. No set-up or configuration required. Just publish your content and share the link in seconds.
The world’s simplest Twitter-integrated, SEO-optimized pages.
5) Check the results
Try an experiment: If it’s been more than a few hours since your post has gone live, open up a new browser tab and do a quick Google search for “how to improve pagerank using 140plus.com.” Does your post show up on the front page? If so, do another search for “how to improve pagerank.” Does it show up again?
Using the T-Mobile 4G Mobile Hotspot
Several months ago, I purchased the T-Mobile 4G HotSpot
First, the T-Mobile 4G HotSpot
Overall, I’ve been happy with it, for my purposes. Here a few high points:
- Easy to set-up and use, no software or hardware dongles required
- Battery life is good
- When the speed is good, it’s really good (you forget you’re on wireless)
- Pre-paid, no-contract options
- It’s small and travels well
The only downside I would cite is that it can be slow at times (sometimes speed drops for no apparent reason). The cost and data-caps might also be a concern for some, but it hasn’t been a major issue for me. Coverage, so far has not been an issue for me either. I’ve been able to get a signal everywhere I’ve wanted one. But it is T-Mobile, so check their maps to see if it looks like they serve the areas you need.
I wanted a no-contact option because I wasn’t sure how often I’d use it and I didn’t want to get into a long-term monthly bill for something I wasn’t using. This meant I had to pay more up front for the hardware, $130 ($119 at Amazon Disclaimer: affiliate link) instead of $60 with a contract. It also meant the buying experience was, um “challenging” – to be kind. Because the incentives are different, T-Mobile runs the prepaid/no-contract and subsidized/on-contract businesses separately. The T-mobile stores don’t carry and don’t support the no-contract devices or service. I ended up getting the device at Bestbuy and that was comical because if I didn’t have a smartphone with the Bestbuy website up, showing the SKU and that the store I was physically in sold the product and had it in stock, the “expert staff” would have sent me away saying they don’t even sell that product. I had to explain to them that I could click “Buy Now for in-store pick-up” and walk over and pick up the device, so it’s in the store somewhere. I finally found a manager who actually looked and found the item “in the back” (and they had many of them of course).
Bestbuy also sells the prepaid cards to activate data service; or you can purchase online, using the device itself. T-Mobile offers a $30 recharge providing 1GB data or a $50 recharge with 3GB – both options are active for one month and allow up to five simultaneous wi-fi connections.
When we stay in a hotel that charges $20 per day for wi-fi, it often makes more sense to just buy a month of the T-Mobile service, which we can then use with all our devices at the same time and the performance is often just as good – and we could, if we wanted, use it in more places (like at the airport when waiting for flights etc.)
I also wanted a device that was independent of the type of device and operating system. I didn’t want a USB modem or something that required software drivers. We’ve connected with laptops, iPads, and other devices at the same time and had no trouble connecting to the T-Mobile 4G Mobile Hotspot. The only problem we’ve had so far was once the device got weird and wouldn’t turn on and I had to pull the battery for a few minutes to correct that problem, but otherwise it has been pretty painless.
I now take it with us every time we travel, along with a recharge card that we only activate if we really need it. It’s nice not to worry whether we’ll find a hotspot or free wi-fi or whether the hotel Internet is going to work etc.
If you’re looking for a no-contract option for mobile data when traveling, the T-Mobile 4G HotSpot
Facebook has just done Google a huge favor
Facebook is rolling out two new features that appear to be a direct reaction to Google+ (and to a lesser degree Twitter). Of course we have no way of knowing how long Facebook has been planning these features, but the timing and similarity to Google+ features certainly makes it appear to be a copycat response to the new Google+ threat. Facebook rolls these features out over time (and without warning), so they may not be on your account yet, but they will be.
The two features are interlinked, in what appears to be an attempt to make Facebook “friend lists” be more like Google+ “circles”.
New Sharing Options
This change started to roll out a few weeks ago and now appears to be site wide, applying to all accounts. The status box used to update your status got a few new controls and widgets.
New facebook status box
First, on the left are two new options. The “who are you with” button lets you tag people in your status update. The second widget adds location to the status. Ok, fine.
But the biggest change is the drop down on the right, next to the “Post” button. This lets you set who the status update goes to (sort of). The normal option (the way Facebook has always worked) would be the “Friends” choice, meaning the status update is seen by your friends only. If you specify “Public” your status is visible to anyone, basically making Facebook more like Twitter, where if you want to, you can publish your status updates for anyone to see. Bringing us to another new feature (described further below) where people that are not your friends, can “subscribe” to your public updates, again, more or less the way Twitter works. I think by default, Facebook has made the new default “Public,” so if you don’t change that, your status updates will be visible to everyone.
In addition to the “Public” and “Friends” options, you can now specify that an update should only be sent to friends on a specific list, one of your old “friend lists” (if you ever used that feature) or one of the new “automatic” lists that Facebook calls “Smart Lists,” which are managed by Facebook automatically for you based on profile information – another case of Facebook telling us “trust us, we know what you want.” Time will tell whether people find these automatic lists useful and trustworthy.
Finally, there is another special list called “Restricted” which is for friends that aren’t really friends This is where you put friends when you don’t want them to see your status updates. Friends on this special “Restricted” list will only see your “Public” updates (but I assume they still have access to your photos etc.)
Managing Friend Lists
The other significant change is in managing friends and friend lists. There are new options when you visit someone’s profile:
The new “Friends” widget shown above makes it easier to manage the lists a given friend is on. Every time you visit their profile, you can check or change what lists they are on. For anyone that suffered through the old cumbersome way of managing lists this is much easier than before, but there is still plenty of room for improvement.
There’s also the new “Subscribed” button, which allows you to subscribe to a person’s “Public” updates, so that any status updates they mark as “Public” will show up on your page, even if they are not your friend. This is clearly a case where Facebook wants to be like Twitter.
Why This A Potential FAIL
These new changes are mostly being heralded around the net and in the media as a brilliant move by Facebook. Technically, for being obviously bolted-on, I have to admit they are not that terrible, in terms of the implementation. But here’s where I wonder if Facebook might be shooting themselves in the foot here, and actually helping Google+ (especially) and Twitter (to a lesser degree) which is probably not their intent.
Twitter is essentially still a mainstream failure, with only 8% of online Americans using it. It’s clear that one big reason is Twitter’s complexity and the inability of Twitter to explain what it does and how to use it to mainstream users. It’s too early to tell whether Google+ will reach deep into the mainstream the way Facebook has. One of the points I raised about Google+ is the complexity and that it is too confusing to mainstream users:
Google+ is too complicated and too geek-oriented. When people share something with Google+, they are going to constantly find themselves asking “who is that going to?” Twitter suffers from being too confusing to people too. But if Twitter is too complicated, Google+ is going to be like a third-semester Calculus class for many people. Only a tiny fraction of Twitter users ever figure out how to effectively manage notifications or “who sees what” on Twitter. Google+ hasn’t made it any easier. If people are overwhelmed and confused with the Twitter options, their brains are going to explode with Google+.
With Facebook now essentially copying the Google+ “circles” model, they have now introduced the same kind of complexity into Facebook that hinders their competitors, effectively removing a major differentiator of Facebook: being easy to understand for mainstream users.
Facebook has just done Google a huge favor.
In essence, by force feeding this change to its 750 million users, Facebook will be doing something Google themselves may have spent years doing: teaching them how Google+ works. Facebook users have no choice but to accept these new features, and struggle to learn them, which will make all Facebook users more comfortable with the “circles” model, and that level of complexity, ultimately making it that much less painful to switch to Google+.
Before this, if a Facebook user went to Google+, they had to figure out how “circles” and selective sharing work using Google+ itself. Google+ would be their first exposure to this mode of operating. They would have no mental model for it and no prior experience with the ideas of it. Now, a Facebook user will have a direct analog from their Facebook experience – as soon as they hit Google+ they will already have an idea how ”circles” and selective sharing work, removing a huge switching barrier.
Likewise, with the new “Public” and “Subscribe” features, Facebook is teaching those 750 million users how Twitter works too, something Twitter themselves has been largely unable to do. However, I think in this case, Twitter is the loser and Facebook the winner (more on that in a separate post).
But Google+, on the other hand, just got handed an enormously valuable gift by Facebook.
Wow am I happy now that I didn’t deploy serious apps on Google App Engine
First released in 2008, Google App Engine (GAE or AppEngine) was Google’s first attempt to compete with Amazon Web Services in providing cloud computing platform services for developers. In earlier posts, I took some heat for concluding that Google App Engine was not ready for “serious” applications, even when it was “free”.
Recently, Google announced shocking new pricing for appengine that has its users reeling. In short, the new pricing means:
- “Free” quotas have been drastically reduced
- Pricing of paid apps increased significantly
- SLA and operational support available for a premium
Google has provided a tool so customers can compare their current bills versus expected billis under the new pricing and customers report anywhere from 3x to 30x price increases, leaving many scrambling for alternatives.
Two of the most common complaints from customers are lack of notice and the uncertainty of the pricing (lack of control over costs).
In terms of cost control, the only way to know how much your costs are, is to ask Google, after you have already incurred those costs (and built and deployed your app). It’s impossible to map users or usage directly to cost. Google’s pricing scheme is as inscrutible as the worst telephone company billing.
The pricing was originally planned to take effect in September, which only gave customers a few weeks to react. Google has provided optimization guidelines for customers to try to reduce their costs, but given the short notice, customers simply do not have time to make major changes to their apps. Companies already had their development resources planned out. They aren’t sitting around waiting for Google to throw a wrench at them. And it’s not clear how much further optimization will really save you anyway since a lot of apps have already received cost-cutting optimizations.
To me, I think this goes a long way to confirm some of my concerns about Google as a cloud platform vendor and as an enterprise vendor in general. A lot of people think anything Google touches is golden (especially Google, just ask them), but I think this shows how they still just don’t get it when it comes to providing commercial grade services. I have asked before, regarding many Google products, whether Google was serious this time. This is the risk to me of doing any business with Google. All these other non-search products are simply “tests” for them. A few billion here, a few billion there, throw it out and see what sticks. The problem is, if you latch on to one of these products and then it becomes critical to your business, you just never know when Google might, on a whim, go in a different direction, hanging you out to dry.
And that appears to be how a lot of customers feel about this move by Google, such as expressed in this post on the mailing list:
App Engine is finished, here’s why
What has always been the biggest concern about App Engine? Lock-in. You’re at the mercy of Google. Sure there’s TyphoonAE etc… but really those are not alternatives.
What does Google go ahead and do? They do exactly what their critics said they would do and what us GAE adopters hoped like hell they would never do, screw us over.
App Engine is finished not because we’re all going to move off to EC2, but because people who are considering using App Engine will see exactly what has gone on here with the pricing, think about the lock-in argument against GAE, and decide not to use GAE. There will be a drop off in new apps, and eventually Google is going to see GAE isn’t really panning out and pull the 3 year plug.
Thankfully, I don’t operate any services on GAE with high costs, but even as it is, I feel ripped-off for my investment in AppEngine. I do run some services on it, some of which I would rather not have to shut down, so I might have to move those elsewhere. And there are some apps I will simply shut down because they are not worth the trouble to port elsewhere. Some of those apps were potentially interesting and gathering users – in that sense, I’m glad this move by Google is happening now, before these apps got big enough to have to now decide what to do with them.
What’s worse for me though, is simply all the time invested in learning AppEngine. What a waste of time that appears to have been. As one developer says:
The biggest complaint is that when my friends and peers objected to App Engine, its strange requirements and its potential lock in, they were right and I am a fucking naive idiot. And I really don’t like to be proven a naive idiot. I put my faith in Google’s engineers and they have utterly destroyed my credibility. THIS more than anything is the cost to me.
Google+ The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
I’ve been told that nothing we know about Google+ can be criticized because it is pre-beta.
Okay then. Well, here’s some quick takes after trying it out a bit.
1. The Good
This section is the hardest to fill in for me. We already have Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (and others). It makes it hard to identify an obvious place for Google+. There’s the much acclaimed (and sometimes befuddling) “Circles” (to scope the distribution of updates). There’s also “Sparks” (search) “Huddles” (group chat), and “Hangouts”. Of these, “Hangouts” is perhaps the most unique. It is a way to announce your interest in video-chatting. That’s very much like something we did with Phweet back in 2008, so perhaps that’s why I like it.
One other good thing? It’s not Zuckerberg. Google’s famous “do no evil” comment has to be something they regret saying by now, but even so, I still feel that Google is a lesser evil, especially when it comes to handling my personal data. Facebook has a simply atrocious record in this regard. The less they have of my data, the better.
David Pogue gives a number of reasons to like Google+ in Google+ Improves on Facebook at the New York Times. I don’t disagree with his points, so I recommend you check out the article. He concludes with:
Until now, Facebook and Twitter have been the Dominant Duo of social networking. But Google’s less sprawling, more video-centric, better-controlled new service is already too good to ignore. Now it’s the Dominant Duo …+1.
2. The Bad
Google+ is too complicated and too geek-oriented. When people share something with Google+, they are going to constantly find themselves asking “who is that going to?” Twitter suffers from being too confusing to people too. But if Twitter is too complicated, Google+ is going to be like a third-semester Calculus class for many people. Only a tiny fraction of Twitter users ever figure out how to effectively manage notifications or “who sees what” on Twitter. Google+ hasn’t made it any easier. If people are overwhelmed and confused with the Twitter options, their brains are going to explode with Google+.
All the cool features discussed above under “The Good” could be put under “The Bad” when it comes to complexity and learning curve. Features are a double-edged sword. Confusion about how it works keeps a lot of people off Twitter, or at leasts keeps them from using it to share and Google+ appears that it is going to suffer from being confusing too.
3. The Ugly
Google will tell you that the coolest part of Google+ is that it is (or will be) integrated with all other Google services and features. I argue that this is the biggest thing that hinders the chances for Google+ to succeed and not just become another Wave or Buzz that people try for a while and then dump.
This is the “Google Account” problem. It’s the assumption by Google that you have one Gmail account that you use for everything. After jumping through some non trivial hoops, Google now allows you to sign in to “multiple” accounts (up to three, if they’re the right kind of accounts) at once, but one of them is the “primary” account and trying to use one of the others is like dancing a tightrope carrying an anvil in one hand and a sharp knife in the other. You’re probably going to get bloody… or hurt someone. You log out of one, and everything you use on Google gets signed out too, even if it wasn’t using that account. This is why people end up running a different browser for every Google account and for every Google product. I could go on and on about this nightmare.
At the moment, you can’t use Google+ with anything but the “primary” Google logged in account.
This is all fine for people that have exactly one Gmail account and it’s all they use. However, with more and more companies converting to Google Apps and more and more people working from home etc. many people are using more than one Google Account at the same time and using different Google Accounts with different Google services. For example. I’m using Gmail with one (or more) accounts, using AdSense with a different account, using Google Docs with another account, Analytics with yet another account etc.
When it comes to Google+ this problem affects you even if you don’t use multiple Gmail accounts and multiple Google services. Requiring and binding by browser session to a “primary” Gmail account means Google+ is limited to people that use Google and Gmail in that way. This means Google has pre-selected which friends you can and cannot find on Google+. If I look at the groups of people I interact with, I have never segmented them into “those that use Gmail and those that don’t.” That segmentation is not meaningful to me. Google might care, but I sure don’t – it doesn’t help me organize my contacts. As @sreejitkk2000 puts it:
One needs to get a Google Account to use Google+ and they have to like it, in that they have to log in with that account and use it for every Google service they will ever use. Quick: What percentage of your friends have a Google Account? Which ones don’t? Is that a breakdown that is meaningful to you? Is that a group categorization you would normally use to divide up your friends? I don’t think so. And yet, that’s what Google has done for us.
For those of your friends without a Google account, do they know how to get one? Would they want one? Is Google+ so great that you would walk all your friends through setting up a Google Account and Google Profile? And what about those friends that you’d like to have in a “circle”, but that simply can’t (or won’t) use Google the way Google wants?
I think this is a fundamental mis-judgement by Google. They see the tie-in to a Gmail account and other Google services as a good thing but I see it as a massive albatross.
Summary
Google+ is kind of a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook. It takes some features from Facebook, like rich content, updates longer than 140 characters, and comment threads. And it takes some from Twitter, most notably asymetrical connections as in “Circles”. Then it brings in a few unique features like “Hangouts”.
It’s too early to tell what will become of Google+. For me, it’s a wait and see. I’m using it, but it has not grabbed me yet, mostly because nobody is there yet. The above “Google Account” problem already means I’m using an identity on Google+ that is not the identity that I want to use with it (because the identity I want to use is not compatible with it). And I see the self-selection discussed above coming into play and selecting for me the domain of people that I can connect with on Google+ (and more importantly, who I cannot connect with). This severely limits how I can use Google+ – until everyone I want to connect with converts to using Gmail as their primary login with a Google+ compatible “Google Account” and “Google Profile” it can’t replace Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter for me. Instead, it’s simply one MORE place I have to check. I think this was a key factor in limiting and killing Buzz and Wave and it could easily also be the thing that kills Google+.
SEO revisited in brief
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of those things that keeps circling back into my life. On the one hand, SEO sort of makes you feel dirty when taking part in it. On the other hand, as a research topic, it can be fascinating.
I have worked on SEO in various capacities, from a number of angles, over the years. Much of the information I’ve gathered I cannot share under NDA or otherwise. However, I find some of these results so unexpected, I have to share, in at least general terms.
When you mention SEO, a lot of people roll their eyes. It is so yesterday. But the reality is, you cannot get away from it. A slight change in Google ranking can mean a difference of thousands of visitors per day and potentially a lot of money. It was worth enough for J.C. Penny, a $17.8 billion company, to allegedly risk so-called black hat SEO practices to improve their ranking.
Everybody in SEO knows its easier to get ranked highly than it is to stay ranked highly. It’s difficult to say if this lowering of rankings for some sites over time is due to algorithms or manual intervention – it’s probably a bit of both.
Fresh content will move up quicker, with Twitter and other social media, and Blog “juice” helping a lot in the short term to move a site up in the rankings – and Google says as much. However, we also notice some very stale content stays at the top of the results seemingly forever.
Speaking of Social Media, here’s the result of many hours of analysis of vast amounts of data collected over many years boiled down to one sentence: In terms of “free” (viral/guerrilla) marketing, Twitter gets you many more vistors quicker but Google gets you way, WAY more vistors in the long run (if you can move up the rankings). You’re welcome. In other words, Twitter is great for some initial buzz and driving some traffic to your site/service almost immediately, but it peaks fast. Google (and Facebook) on the other hand are harder nuts to crack and take more time to build effect, but once achieved, these “old school” media services blow Twitter away in terms of drivers of traffic. Maybe the days of the web search engine are numbered, but for now, it is still the absolute king in terms of driving traffic.
If that doesn’t blow your mind, here’s secret for SEO success #2 (and this is for real): If you’re on a tight budget, focus on keywords with a large volume of queries but that don’t have much competition (i.e. they aren’t targeted). Forget the most hotly sought after keywords with a lot of competition. For every one of those, there are some keywords that get a lot of hits too (often almost as many as the highly coveted keywords) but are not targeted very much, if at all, by other sites. Implementing this trick alone properly will get you significant results, if you’re not already doing it, and is worth the price of reading this post. (Of course we’re assuming your site is actually related to these keywords and is worthy of clicking and is useful to the visitors etc.).
SEO success secret #3: Blogs still have a powerful effect on rankings. Twitter has a huge valuation and blogs are supposedly in decline, but they still have a much greater impact on search engine ranking than Twitter does. Don’t ask me why, but the data doesn’t lie. However, a blog with Twitter integration (like our 140plus.com service - gratuitous plug) has far more effect than a blog that isn’t in some way linked with Twitter. It seems like Twitter, Facebook, and other social media mentions help keep your blog appearing more relevant and fresh to search engines.
And finally, one thing I’ve also learned in this is that, frankly, Google results kind of suck. Google introduced a supposedly big change earlier this year that received a lot of press. Google said the change was ”designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites” which insiders claimed really meant going after so-called “content farms” – I have a whole contrary post to write about that subject some day – but back to my point. In testing results for lots of keywords, I can tell you that there is still plenty of “pollution” in the Google results (and Bing and Yahoo too for that matter). Every Google search result page has at least a couple of sites that have essentially nothing to do with the search query – but there it is, getting a coveted high ranking. This may be because of the issue stated above where it is relatively easy to move up the rankings in the short-term, so there are always a few sites that have successfully gamed the system but have not been detected yet, so they temporarily have an artificially high ranking and thus appear in the top Google results. However, some sites seem to manage to stay in the top rankings despite not being relevant or useful.
Anyway, hopefully you find this information interesting, as I do.
Russian engineer claims to have reverse engineered older version of Skype
Via Dan York, we find a post on http://skype-open-source.blogspot.com/:
Skype protocol reverse engineered, source available for download
UPDATE: Here’s the Github page for it:
https://github.com/skypeopensource/skypeopensource/downloads
Closing of Gizmo5 / SIPphone, a sad day for open-standards VoIP
Gizmo5 (formerly known as Gizmo Project and SIPphone) will be shut down by Google April 3, 2011, according to the website. Google acquired Gizmo5 in November 2009, reportedly for around $30 million.
With the passing of Gizmo5, so goes one of the last and largest open-standards based VoIP services. Gizmo5 supported the interoperable SIP Internet standard protocol. That meant it worked with any SIP hardware, software, PBX, etc. Most VoIP services, especially the consumer-focused ones, including Google Voice, do not support standards, and instead require proprietary, closed, hardware or software.
As can be seen below, from a snapshot of the SIPphone.com site in 2004, the company started off being an advocate for SIP and open-standards, with an emphasis on free SIP to SIP calls, using any compliant device or software that you want.
Gizmo5 could be used with off-the-shelf hardware devices, ATAs, SIP phones, Wi-fi phones, and standard software on smartphones and PCs. Google Voice can’t.
In fact, back in 2008, Michael Robertson (CEO of Gizmo) wrote a long open-letter on the subject: Gizmo Project’s Michael Robertson Sounds Off explaining about how Skype was closed (it still is) and why being interoperable was a good thing for competition, etc. You could pretty much take that letter today, and replace “Skype” as the target with “Google Voice” – for instance:
If Skype truly believes there should be open competition then they should start by enabling other networks such as Gizmo5 to call Skype users in an official and supported capacity.
Reads just as well as:
If [Google Voice] truly believes there should be open competition then they should start by enabling other networks such as [Insert Third-party-Provider Here] to call [Google Voice] users in an official and supported capacity.
I guess it was convenient for Gizmo’s business objectives to “wave the flag of openness” back then, but it apparently isn’t so for Google and Google Voice now, who conveniently ignore competitors, as well their own customers’ requests for openness and interoperability.
It sucks. The suits won. I expected better from Google.
Maybe I’ll have more to say on this when I have more time.
