Alex Schultz: APIs

Taking Brand Advertising Learning's Online

A relatively standard way of working out the value of a brand building campaign in old media is to advertise say Bold washing up powder in all regions but the Northwest and define that region as a control group for research. The advertiser can then watch the uplift in purchases of Bold in the regions with the advertising vs. the trend they would have seen based on the control. This is obviously tricky because it is hard to pick out local PR effects and so on from the overall trends and does the Northwest really have the same trending as the rest of the country in general but in broad strokes it works.

Something that shocks me is that I have not heard of large brand advertises using this trick online and I have been browsing blogs and searching for evidence of this happening. Geotargetting through Ads on Google/Yahoo/the big banner networks to a city level is totally doable. Why not just for a test spend a few hundred thousand dollars on a banner advertising campaign in say for example York in the UK or Boston in the US on a sizeable network like adsense or valueclick. Running this campaign for a similar period to an offline campaign and looking for uplift.

Maybe I am being foolish and this is already happening, I just don't know about it or maybe brand advertisers are convinced of the value of online already (as a site owner I don't believe this... if they did I wouldn't have smiley ads continually appearing through Valueclick, Casalemedia and Burst on my site) but I love to do things that I can measure and as such this idea really excites me esp. since it could convince more advertisers to spend money online.

Facebook - Just a little bit of history repeating

So I for one am quite enjoying the facebook fun going on at the moment and particularly like this image.

But I will say all the fear of stalkers is more than a little silly, everything it is possible to now "stalk" was 100% possible before and these newsfeeds don't make it that much easier.

I will say that one arguement has totally gathered my support and that is the simple "publically available isn't publically announced", it's a really good distinction. Say I change my status to in a relationship because I don't want to offend my new partner but don't really want to make a big thing of it with the new newsfeeds I have announced it to all my acquaintances.

A few comments totally go with that "don't live your life by facebook" being one however when I was at Uni message boards were actually a big part of sorting out rowing stuff and getting hold of that girl's crew we saw on the river and wanted to ask back to our college for a meal and some drinks before clubbing or whatever.

Either way this really reminds me of the million auction march back in the 90s at eBay and Mr Z of facebook fame really should read his internet history books. Nothing is new between heaven and earth :)

Affiliate Marketing 2007

I spent a lot of time in 2005 encouraging friends in the affiliate community to build apple widgets and get into the widget space in general. With Vista coming and live gadgets being a large part of that, with sideshow and other widget type "easy program desktop apps" I honestly believe that 2006 is the year to position yourself for entering into the "I have a small snippet of code... add it to your dekstop/website, get a great user experience and earn me $$$".

Looking around I see a hell of a lot of people entering this area, with postapp, typepad widgets, the plethora of live gadgets and apple widgets and even big companies entering the space, for example the yahoo finance widget. Widgets rock, widgets can make money, widgets can be link bait and guess what those clever folks out there playing around with the web have worked it out and are moving into the space heavily. If you aren't already moving rapidly you will need a really good idea to beat those first and (in particular) second movers who have had some time to think about what they are doing in this space. These guys will make the new big money in 2007 but a few guys will start making big money on something else before everyone else spots it... So for me the challenge of what's next springs to mind again.

Well I will stick my neck out and suggest we are about to enter an era of back to the future and in 2007 push technologies will make a resurgance. "Oh don't be soooo 1999!" I hear you all shout but no... wait and think about it. VOIP is growing like crazy and instant messengers have never been larger. Mobile commerce has taken off in Japan and in JP and EU the mobile phone companies are raking it in with text messages (now I have a blackberry the idea of paying 10c a text message seems crazy!). I see a lot of convergence in this field though as large WIFI networks take off and blackberry/treo etc... get integrated into more consumer (rather than business) mobile phone style products. More products like sony mylo will launch and you will soon be reachable almost anywhere for free (or a slightly more expensive mobile contract) by instant messenger in the large cities. This will open up millions of people used to text to more innovative text services previously held up by a. the lack of easily sending texts from computer apps, b. the cost of text services and c. the lack of IM apis (which all the interoperability conversations should help). This discussion misses off the whole upside of IM on the desktop too.

So think about it... what can be done when you can alert anyone, anywhere to anything and how can you make money from that. In 2007 this will be a big new:old thing... I am sure of it!

Ripe for Regulation

I spent a little time thinking about the whole aol research fiasco where they released search records which although the user names were removed and replaced with unique number ids could be used to identify people from their search logs. A friend said to me he was really hoping that this would not cause the internet to become overly regulated and stop companies like AOL/Google/Yahoo/MSN from saving user related data since analysing and improving services based on this is a key part of making better, more relevant services.

I certainly agree with him about the fears of regulation strangling research and the benefits of data to innovation. Strangling research is always a valid fear with increased regulation. I however am hoping quite the reverse to my friend. I hope this fiasco does bring tighter regulation of the search engines and those with user data. To explain why I want to draw a few parallels to the real world and internet.

In the media in Germany any flattery of the Nazi party is banned, sale of Nazi memorabilia is banned (inc. online), Mein Kampf cannot be bought in a shop and using the Nazi salute will wind you up in jail. On Google.de you could however search for "why hitler was great" and see tonnes of neo-nazi results from outside DE turn up. Incitement to racial hatred is an important law in the UK and any newspaper or political group suspected of doing so can face harsh fines and jail sentences for anyone directly responsible. Again a search for any racial hatred topic online will turn up tonnes of related material.

Search engines are portals to this content. Without the oxygen of publicity movements often die but in the age of the internet anyone can type in their personal prejudice or hatred and quickly find sites with information about it and communities of people with similar mindsets. These sites are then further fuelled by getting visitors and those visitors can build out a community around the site. Television, radio and even newspapers are regulated to control access to this sort of information and the publicity that fuels and fans hatred. Perhaps search engines should too. Often the bulk of those with thuggish hatred are not well educated and I suspect (based on typical web-browsing behaviour) placing even placing simple obstacles to finding the data they need in their way (like hiding it in search engines) will stop them in their tracks.

I understand esp. in the web community where the pace of development is so fast right now and the opportunity to make millions still so huge that the idea of regulation isn't popular. A number of the searches I saw on the AOL logs convinced me it is and should be coming. Questions about murdering your wife and people searching for perverted pictures of children closely followed by looking for local schools suggest to me that AOL/Google/Yahoo/MSN have a responsibility to understand better what they are making available and to who and the government should stop worrying about whether to allow people to make more money from their "tubes" and more about what's passing through them.

Microsoft Windows Live Writer Download

Great job from microsoft today in providing a simply awesome bit of desktop kit. I love being able to work on the web without going through numerous layers of authentication and the usual vagueries of a browser. With the new windows live writer I can post to this blog from my desktop! Great job microsoft keep on creating good work like this. Download it now.

A final point is that the live homepage and widgets are great, the live search is looking actually very competitive in terms of user experience and quality listings. I think Microsoft are seriously starting to get their act together. The next 5yrs is gonna be fun and on a totally personal note (since I have mates working in classifieds) I am going to be really interested to see the classifieds offering when it comes out!

The Economist Likens Google to Napoleon

Something that has continually surprised me since starting a job is how often companies repeat the mistakes countries and armies of the old world have been making for centuries. Perhaps this is a foolish statement because huge countries still make them but it seems to me at least at a lower frequency than in history.

The economist has an interesting article likening Google to Napoleon at the start of the 19th Century when he was advancing and succeeding on all fronts, the economist likens eBay, MSN, Yahoo to the enemies of Napoleon at that time and further to that they note these companies are already stricking similar allegiances to those set up in the 19th Century to battle the little man.

I think perhaps the economist takes their argument too far but good grief they have a great point. I personally would prefer to look at the armies of the third reich or Wilhelm II (pehaps that is because I loved history at school and I studied WWI and II not the Napoleonic wars). Now don't get me wrong I don't think Google is evil like the third reich and I certainly don't want to insult them at all, there are some great people in Mountainview and around the world working for Google. I merely want to take a quick look at how their tactics compare to the military and political tactics of those regimes, not any of the social attacks. Google is right now a force for social GOOD IMHO.

Google is technologically superior to their competitors like DE in both wars, Google has made massive progress in a short blitzkreig against the old empires of Yahoo and MSN with Search, eBay with Checkout/Base and even smaller companies like YouTube with Video. They have forged alliances like those which formed the Axis powers in both wars by buying companies like urchin or working v. closely with the Mozilla Foundation. Now I don't want to oversimplify conflicts I spent 4yrs studying at school but I feel I am not being too controversial when I say that at the end of WW I when DE broke the lines and roared into France they overstretched themselves and esp. their supply lines which was a major contributing factor to their defeat and in WWII DE had simply too many fronts and could not sustain battles on every front. Finally their lack of focus on destroying the UK (esp. the retargetting of their aircampaign to cities and not airfields) allowing it to be a US staging point and their disaster over-stretching their supply lines in Russia at the wrong time of yearbrought them down.

Has Google overlooked and failed to kill off a key competitor (Yahoo?/ISPs?) and are they reaching into a new market that could become a Russia (ecommerce?)...

Only time will tell but it's gonna be interesting seeing if they acheive something history seems to tell us is really difficult in business as well as war. You cannot have a war on multiple fronts and win. With search (Yahoo/MSN), ecommerce (eBay/PayPal) and Advertising (Newspapers/advertising companies) I think google has at least three fronts (let alone all their upcoming plans for Wireless etc...).