7 Outlandish Predictions for 2008

It’s time to put my neck on the line and make some predictions for 2008. Some of these predictions may seem like bold outlandish statements – but it is New Years Eve after all.

So here goes...

1. Facebook will topple Google as the #1 ranked website before the end of Quarter 3.
2. Paid search will become less viable as a marketing channel due to increased competition and CPC exacerbated by widespread click fraud. Smart marketers will shift paid search budget over to organic and social media marketing.
3. Open Social will come out of beta, will bridge the gap between the coalition of the willing and even though no one outside the tech establishment will care, behind the scenes it will help enable social graph driven discovery.
4. Microsoft will buy Yahoo, then use it to power Live Search, dramatically improving their search quality and increasing their market share.
5. Facebook will use the Yahoo powered Live Search to power keyword driven search queries within facebook, generating a massive revenue stream for facebook and providing Ad Centre with sufficient ad inventory to overthrow Adwords.
6. Google talk and Google mail will remain in beta.
7. All your data are belong to GBase – Universal Search will make it vital to optimise and submit to GBase. Feed-optimisation will become a critical part of natural search marketing.

It'll be interesting to look back in 12 months and see how “on-the-nail” or “off-the-mark” these predictions actually are.

For me 2008 looks set to be the most exciting time there has ever been online. I wish you a happy new year and wish you and your family the very best for 2008.

Google Talk gets translation bots.

Google has added translation bots to crawl their Google Talk chat software. The intention is to translate whatever you type in a Google chat to Chinese. For example, open a chat with en2zh@bot.talk.google.com, type hello and the bot automatically translates to 你好. This will certainly make international communication  Much easier and faster. "En2zh" which determines the language pair, in this case Chinese and English.

 Other language pairs according to Google are:

ar2en, bg2en, de2en, de2fr, el2en, en2ar, en2de, en2el, en2es, en2fr, en2it, en2ja, en2ko, en2nl, en2ru, es2en, fi2en, fr2de, fr2en, hi2en, hr2en, it2en, ja2en, ko2en, nl2en, ru2en, uk2en, ur2en, zh2en.

 Add the @bot.talk.google.com to the right language pair to get the full bot address, add as a contact and chat. Although this is quite a handy feature the quality of Google's translation program still needs quite a lot of work. To view this feature you need to install the chat program - Google Talk.

Google off the hook… almost

Today the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) cleared Google’s acquisition agreement of ad serving company DoubleClick Inc. With an approval already under their belt from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, we’re likely to see the European Commission follow suit. An approval from the European Commission is the last barrier Google face before their acquisition of DoubleClick is closed.

 

The FTC denies any competition concerns as Google and DoubleClick are seen as complementary businesses. While Google sells text ads, DoubleClick provides technology that provides publishers and advertisers statistics on their ads.

To view Google's press release visit their Press Center.

And as if by magic....

Let it not be said that companies do not listen. I have been inundated with replies since yesterday suggesting sites that provide exactly what I’ve asked for – product videos. However, as with most things that sound too good to be true, it is, except for our friends at ASOS (As Seen On Stars) www.asos.com. Just use the “Click here to view catwalk” link on a product page to view their great offering.

Those in the dress-buying business (as a married man I’ve had to cut back) have let it be known to me that video could perhaps have the opposite effect to the one expected. Where a picture may entice someone to buy, a video might persuade them not to. Hey ho. My New Year’s resolution is to not even try to delve into the mind of the dress buyer.

Social networks vs Email

  One of the researchers at Hitwise, have released a graph that show that webmail services are being taken over by the top social networking sites. This stat does not include desktop emails sent from your mail programs but it is an impressive comparison indeed.

A lot of people are abandoning traditional emails because of a number of issues. Spam is one of the biggest, social networks are not immune to spam but it is so much easier to control because it is a closed system, whereas email is completely open. Social networks like Facebook allow people to keep in touch in a far more "immersive" manner, they do email, too.

Perhaps we are seeing the end of the email generation and will soon see individuals and companies move away from traditional emails. Moving on to a more secure, more productive and measurable means of communication.

Show me the video!

Whilst online stores cover their ears and pretend not to hear us, they will find we will only turn the volume up and our message is: we want to see product videos before we buy. A 2-D photo of a dress - no thanks. A video of the garment on the catwalk – now you’re talking!

Whilst the retail sector plays catch up and tries to give us the touchy-feelyness we crave, we will need to be satisfied with zoom, a semi-new online gimmick to show us more detail of the products we are browsing. Different examples of the same tool can be found here and here. I for one will continue to buy offline until they show me the video!!!

Google's yearly 'Zeitgeist'

Every December, Google releases information that they compiled over the year containing information about the most used searched terms. This compilation is known as the Zeitgeist.

The Zeitgeist is a look at which search terms people are typing into Google most often and which terms are increasing or decreasing in usage. Every year hundreds of companies make use of this information to help plan there SEO strategy, but this year Google sprung a surprise. Google released the most bizarre set of results which was criticised as useless by some.

Some of the more useful results came from the 'Newsmaker' category (one of the four Zeitgeist categories). The number 1 search in this category was "American Idol", number 2 was "YouTube" and number 3 "Britney Spears". The more useful ones were "I-Phone at number 6 and "Iran" at number 9.

The overall picture painted by this years Google Zeitgeist was that Google users were obsessed with celebrities and technology during 2007. The information might not have been useful to some, but still a good read to many.

The Future of Google and Natural Language Search

The MIT Technology Review recently posted an interview with the director of research at Google, Peter Norvig.

Some of the topics touched in this brief interview included:

• The approach Google take to user testing and research
• How natural language search has changed in the past 10 years and what Google's response is to question based queries, such as what Ask are promoting
• Personalization of search results; with a brief mention of how this is already being implemented on news sites
• The future of search; the combination of different devices and integration of different types of content

Although short, the interview really gives us some good insight into Google and what direction their products are heading in.

Pubcon Top 3

It's not been long since the end of the coveted Pubcon 2007 and it seems like some gems have surfaced.

My Pubcon top 3 so far have been:   

1. Stephan Spencers interview with Matt Cutts
Matt advised using the Search Engine SDK for Flash and gave a simple explanation as to why Google have the Flash problem in the first place.
Other titbits include confirming that a good link is just a good link, regardless of being on a .edu domain and that social bookmarking links are not inherently devalued unless done so by the service provider.

Another interesting topic was Matts views on the use of humans in search; he also mentioned a case when an entry would be manually de-indexed. 

2. Subdomains and subdirectories
There was some "confirmation" on the use of subfolders vs. subdomains and host crowding; this was covered in an earlier Tamar post so I will not cover that in detail but you can read the earlier post.

3. Interview with Neil Patel
Lee Odden interviewed Neil Patel who revealed a rather unorthodox approach to generating Youtube subscribers.

Google 411 is listening...

Google's revolutionary 411 service that they have been running in the USA seems to be more than it appears. The service was implemented earlier this year (April) and is a free phone operated directory inquiries, like the yellow pages but your connection phone call is free. It is not known how many people use the service but if its free I am guessing quite a few.

Google's Marissa Meyer (VP) has recently purported that the voice service might be doing a bit more than meets the eye. Google seems to be using all the voice data to compile a massive database for phonemes and word pronunciations for use in future voice recognition projects. Marissa Meyer is quoted saying "The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model ... that we can use for all kinds of different things, including video search."

Yet another example of the ingenious methods that Google employs to make the most of their free services...