Andy Abramson responds with “Taking Aim and Telling the Truth”.  Stuart also chimes in with his interesting and unique spin on it: Video Conferencing and the Dinosaurs?

“Is Apple’s dominance of Mobile Development on the Wane?”

It appears to be an old editorial trick, the classic alarmist headline, because the article itself goes on to answer in the negative:

Apple is the logical choice for mobile development today

Where is market share going? The best bet is still targeting the Apple iPhone

This, providing further evidence for my calling BS on “Android Dominance” post last month.

I completely agree with author, Todd Warren, when he says “there are so many things wrong with developing on iPhone.”  From a purely technical standpoint, developing for Android (or perhaps even, cough, Windows Phone) is a much more pleasant experience. However, from a business standpoint, the cold hard fact is: one can completely ignore Android, Samsung, and Windows Phone without consequence. Again, quoting the Forbes story:

As the success of Instagram shows, the iPhone market is big enough to bootstrap an application to millions of users.

I would take this a step further and say that not only is Apple iOS the logical choice for “mobile development” but that iOS is the choice for all future development, other than niche enterprise apps. In other words, the whole term “mobile development” as an exception is itself an archaic model. Non-mobile is now the exception.

As I kept hearing more and more about  ”Android’s Dominance” I was seeing quite the opposite in the real-world. I operate and assist clients with a number of sites and, as a result, I have visibility into tracking data for many sites. What that information showed, in spot samples, was overwhelming iOS dominance and, in particular, iPhone dominance. It was glaring. Something didn’t add up.

I was also seeing a staggering shift away from desktop/laptop computers (Windows and Mac) to mobile devices, particularly over the past six months.

So I decided to look at the data more closely to see if I could find any indications of this supposed “Android Dominance” and to see how real this apparent shift to mobile is.

Below I present two info-graphics. Both are ”how people accessed the web.” The first is from early 2010 and the other is basically now, very current data (the first 10 weeks or so of 2012).

How People Access The Web 2010 - © Copyright telEvolution, Inc.

How People Access The Web 2012 - © Copyright telEvolution, Inc.

Wow!

I first put together the 2012 chart. Once I had that in hand, in this visual form, I found myself compelled to look back to how much things had changed. So I put together the 2010 chart, thinking 2010 is not that long ago. The iPad was out at that time. iPhone had been out for two years.

To say I was surprised by the shift from 2010 to 2012 would be a colossal understatement.

In terms of the 2012 picture, when you see it this way, the so-called dominance of Android is put in more realistic perspective. Also obvious is the Android fragmentation.

At the same time it shows, rather dramatically, just how dominant Apple is in the overall mobile space and, in particular, iPhone. That iPhone pie slice in the 2012 info-graphic is just staggering, visually. Almost as dramatic, visually, is the fragmentation of the Android segment. And that 42% figure is not just 42% of iOS but actually 42% of the entire mobile space! Nothing else comes even close to that dominance. People may well be buying Android devices, but they are clearly using their iPhones.

If you’re wondering, the 0.3% “All Other” segment is things like game consoles, Playstation, Wii, Google TV, connected TVs etc. The only reason that even gets a label is because I was surprised how small that segment was. People watch Netflix on those boxes, but they apparently don’t use them to surf the web very much.

It’s also kind of interesting, but probably not all that meaningful, that the Mac pie stayed about the same size overall between 2010 and 2012, about 7%-8% of the total. The dramatic desktop decrease is in the Windows segment, dropping from about 87% of all accesses in 2010 to just 38% in 2012.

Another side note is how, even in the much larger 2012 mobile pie, Blackberry, Nokia, and Windows Phone, which may have actually grown in terms of raw numbers over this period, are still so visually insignificant that they don’t even get a label in the chart.

Far beyond the real Android story, Google has to be worried even more about the decline in the desktop pie, given that according to their own SEC filings, 96% of their revenue comes from web browser clicks – and people aren’t clicking those ads on their mobile devices. Google’s entire revenue model falls apart on mobile and so far, they’ve had no answer for that. Perhaps this is one reason they are shifting gears so much toward Google+ which seems to me to be chasing a 2002 dream.

I’ll stand by this dataset as a good representation of the net at large, although it is slanted toward the English speaking net. This is the aggregate of a number of popular and general sites. If you look at one focused niche site, it might vary a bit from the above, depending on how narrow the site is, but if you look at enough varied sites, I’m certain you’ll find something that looks a lot like the above.

The take-away for me is that not only are we headed into a mobile future, but we are headed, for better or worse, into an Apple future, and we better get used to it. If you take the Mac and iOS combined, Apple now owns 45% of the surfing experience, already surpassing Microsoft Windows at 38% – and it’s only getting worse for Windows, as iPad sales continue to steamroll PCs. This “Android Dominance” meme is utter fiction and wishful thinking. Windows Phone? Get real. Unless you’re fine playing in a niche space, if you’re building a product or service and it isn’t designed with mobile first, it’s time to re-think it – throw out your plans and start over. I’m dead serious. What’s more, if it doesn’t thrive in an Apple-dominated mobile ecosystem, it’s also time to go back to the drawing board.

Meta: If you use these graphics, please give credit.

I talk about search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) on this blog and elsewhere. It’s important to note that I’m speaking about those topics with a different mindset than many SEO “experts” out there. First, I’m always talking so-called “white hat” techniques of course. But more importantly than that, I’m talking about SEO/SEM with the assumption that there is an underlying website or service of value, providing a service people actually want, and not simply a site getting revenue from clicks or ads etc. In other words, SEO / SEM isn’t the end, but only the means.

Google’s Panda update seems a bit like Yosemite Sam killing a fly with a shotgun – there’s a lot of collateral damage… and the flies are right back in the house again before long. I’m not sure the net result of Panda is positive or negative. They killed a certain class of what google considered “bad guys” but they may also have killed as many legitimate and useful sites as they did “bad guys”.

But the fact is, search results are still polluted with bogus sites and pages. You know what I’m talking about. You click a link in the top search results, only to arrive at a page that offers no content even loosely related to the search. What’s even more common is arriving at a page that is clearly “planted” through SEO/SEM tactics that contains content, sort of, but clearly really exists for some secondary purpose besides informing, usually to sell something else or drive you to other assosiated properties, products or services. It’s perhaps not full-on spam, but it’s not exactly legitimate either.

For many search terms, especially in Google’s case, the top few results appear almost hand picked, with Google clearly preferring Wikipedia pages. But after that, the next 50 top search results are often more than 50% junk. This sucks. The tricksters are out tricking those with legitimate sites with legitimate content that are also applying SEO and SEM but, for whatever reasons, the trickers still fool Google.

It’s easy to fall into the thinking that all SEO and SEM is “fooling” Google, but every site has to do what they can to get reasonable placement in search results. What’s sad is that a good site, with legitimately, highly related content, combined with a reasonable amount of SEO / SEM is not enough to beat the tricksters and their less-useful, less-legitimate sites. For the bogus sites, SEO / SEM is the business – for the rest of us, it’s just something we have to do to support the business.

It’s a huge business. There appears to be be far more money spent promoting all these bogus sites than there is spent promoting, perhaps small, but legitimately useful sites. People spend thousands of dollars on software and services that automate dastardly SEO / SEM tactics, like back links, link wheels, auto-posting to forums, blogs, etc. (what we would call spamming), automatically re-writing scraped text and re-posting (spinning), and all sorts of other ugliness. It boggles the mind.

For a given topic or category, there are some number of legitimate sites and services. And what I’d like to be able to see in the search results would be a reasonable and fair competition among those legitimate sites. Say there are 1,000 legitimate sites that would be appropriate in the top-1000 search results, where those sites should be ranked by a search engine and ordered fairly. What happens in real life is the bogus “search engine manipulated” sites increase that by some rather significant factor, so now there are maybe 10,000 sites being ranked by the search engine and those 1,000 legitimate sites are hiding somewhere in the 10,000 search results. And to make matters worse, the 9,000 bogus sites will often be better at applying ”search engine manipulation” so that they get ranked higher than our original 1,000 “good” sites.

The Panda update shows that it is not easy for Google to identify the 1,000 “good sites” from the 9,000 “bad sites” through automation (and whatever other techniques they may be applying). Most attempts to fix it tend to throw the baby out with the bath water. The “bad sites” are better at “cheating” since most their energy is spent on SEO / SEM whereas most the energy of the legitimate sites is spent operating their service, improving the customer experience, and supporting their customers.

Getting your site seen among the 1,000 competitors is hard enough. But when you have to also compete with 9,000 “bogus” sites, it’s absolutely mind-numbingly frustrating. Instead of devoting your energy toward your customers, you end up having to devote a lot of energy to try to beat the tricksters. This sucks as a user and as an operator of websites and online services. As a user, I’d rather see a site that is poor at SEO / SEM but has related content than the bogus sites that are better at “search engine manipulation.” And as a site operator and service provider, I’d rather spend all my energy improving the service and supporting customers, instead of campaigning in the SEO / SEM battlefield. But that’s not how it works in real life.

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.

UPDATE: After struggling for quite a while, reading about and trying all sorts of things to fix the problems, I couldn’t get the Yeti Pro to work properly. I couldn’t get it to work AT ALL in analog mode. Not wanting to mess around with it anymore, I have been trying to return it and get my money back and Blue has been absolutely horrendous to work with and refusing to refund my money. DO NOT DEAL WITH THESE PEOPLE.

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

I’m going, of course. I’ll report here if anything grabs me.

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?

First, the T-Mobile 4G HotSpot is a ZTE data-only device (it might look like a phone, but it’s not). It connects to T-Mobile’s data network at up to HSPA+ speeds and then acts as a Wi-fi hotspot for up to 5 devices (I’m not going to get into whether T-mobile should be calling its HSPA+ device 4G or not).

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 is certainly a reasonable choice that I’m pretty happy with.

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.

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.