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The loophole of accessing content from subscription services on devices will only be extenuated via the ubiquitous ability to share links from platform to platform with a consistent user experience.  That is why the new generation mobile websites need to be link-compatible ( a process called Deep-link matching ) so that no matter what the device is, the access to content is achievable.

For any mobile website that I recommend it is important that all the links match up between the website content and the mobile view of the mobile experience.  Mobile versions of websites that have this compatibility will be better in sharing and accessing content.

For most of my clients, I have found that from 5% to 20% of the hits on the mobile web properties is from just basic Google search and not from traditional mobile marketing of using SMS to spread links or even mobile banner ads.  Making sure your site is mobile friendly with links so that you are visible to end-users from PC based click-throughs or mobile click-throughs is very important for your mobile strategy.

NYtimes has done a great job with deep link matching, but it seems like it was done manually.  I am curious if NYTimes moving forward will keep these links available for mobile on these subscription services to enable users on mobile to actually access the content.

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Via Techcrunch

The Google Loophole Has Become The Facebook/Twitter Loophole

There are a lot of interesting angles to the news this morning about The New York Times’ new paywall. Top news will remain free, a set number of articles for all users will remain free, there will be different pricing tiers for different devices, NYT is fine with giving Apple a 30 percent cut, etc, etc. But to me, the most interesting aspect is only mentioned brieflyabout halfway down the NYT announcement article: all those who come to the New York Times via Facebook or Twitter will be allowed to read for free. There will be no limit to this.

Up until now, we’ve seen paywall enthusiasts like The Wall Street Journal offer such loopholes. But they’ve done so via Google. It’s a trick that most web-savvy news consumers know. Is a WSJ article behind a paywall? Just Google the title of it. Click on the resulting link and boom, free access to the entire thing. No questions asked. This new NYT model is taking that idea and flipping it.

The Google loophole will still be in play — but only for five articles a day. It’s not clear how they’re going to monitor this (cookies? logins?), but let’s assume for now that somehow they’ll be able to in an effective way. For most readers, the five article limit will likely be more than enough. But that’s not the important thing. What’s interesting is that the NYT appears to be saying two things. First, this action says that spreading virally on social networks like Twitter and Facebook is more important to them than the resulting traffic from Google. And second, this is a strategic bet that they likely believe will result in the most vocal people on the web being less pissed off.

Paywalls are not easy. For proof, look at well, just about every site that has ever tried to implement one. The barrier is always met with huge backlash. But much of that backlash often comes from the savvy readers who had been used to getting at the content for free on the web. NYT seems to be betting here that these users are the same ones that now rely on Twitter and Facebook for their news discovery. And they will be unaffected.

Is that the right bet? Maybe, or maybe not. Facebook has around 600 million users now. Twitter has another 150 million plus. These are mainstream services that extend far beyond the early adopters. But even if this move goes beyond the vocal users and into the mainstream population that might otherwise be willing to pay, at the very least, it will still mean less overall backlash.

And it’s yet another sign of a changing of the guard on the web from Google to Facebook and Twitter. It will arguably be easier to find all the NYT content for free via Twitter search than it was via Google search. At the very least, it will be more obvious. And the social filters of Twitter and Facebook will have people sharing only the best articles that you’re likely going to want to read anyway.

Meanwhile, the other side of the bet is that those coming in from Google are probably more likely to pay if asked nicely every once in a while. You know, the more mainstream and perhaps slightly older and less tech-savvy audience. The people who may actually pay.

The main point? If you’re reading this post, you’re unlikely to be affected by the NYT paywall because you probably came here from Facebook or Twitter — the two key players in the new social loophole.

Here is the interview of Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, in the Web2.0 Summit.  I had the honor to work with Robin and team with their first mobile search product with Nokia back in 2005 ( 5 years ago). When we met he said the success of Baidu would be to keep focus on search.

Even at that time we discussed the vision of the ” Magic Search Box” that what ever you type in you find and it happen….

It is interesting how Google has left the focus only on search for many different things.  As social is now becoming a key part of search and new emerging opportunities around Twitter Search…. I am sure we will see

Today Multipled Media announced their Gas Price Search Engine as part of their different search engined federated around a unique location based map application.   I saw this product at CTIA in Las Vegas in March and was very tickled on how local-local they have made this.  Is there room to compete against Google Maps or Bing Maps? According to Multiplied Media- Yes.  Create a deeper more relevant intimate user experience that refines more verticalized search engines around maps.  As Google only adds many new features and content at a National and Global level, can they keep up at a local level?   This Calgary based company ( funny that a lot of Oil for North America is also coming from their back yard) is finding a way to innovate at a local level.   As Search products grow organically, Google has looked at a media strategy at the Global => Local level, where as many of  these emerging companies are growing from hyper-local => local => National level.

As they build this local audience and grow, where does this position them with the Mega providers? Acquisition or fragmented marketplace?

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Multiplied Media Announces Addition of Gas Price Search Feature to Poynt Application for iPhone.

Now with the recent annoucements of the new platform API’s from Facebook we are potentially looking at a completely new cycle of the Web called the Social Web.  Is this Web 4.0???  I have been trying to get my head around this progression, and I found that if we look at the flow of context and the 5W’s ( What, Where, Who, When, Why) there may be some hint in the overall progression of Search along this evolution.  Maybe the internet as well is in someway following this progression of context?  At the end of the day, the automatic answer of  ”Why is the User really searching in the first place” is a definite challenge that many platforms have been trying to solve with recommendation Answer Engines, but maybe the technology, the web and the timing is just not right to get this perfect yet.    Here is a brief summary of context and the 5W’s from what has been swirling around in my mind.    At this time it really appears that we guiding along the evolution of  ”When”.

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WHAT ( 1995~): What you are looking For? A  strong paradigm from the 90′s from the standpoint of web search and the emergence of vertical search.

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WHERE (2003~): Where are you are looking for some thing?  This strong  paradigm that started with the local directories ( IYP’s or Yellowpages) that basically had platforms with two search boxes.  This was revolutionized by Google and other to majors with one-search box pulling it together.  This evolved quite quickly from the early 2000′s and has become a major modifier for search today.  It is a very strong parameter that will be key to all search traffic on mobile.

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WHO ( 2009~): Who is looking for that item and the relevancy of Social?  For the first time in history Facebook is having its “Google Moment” as described by Michael Arrington in his Article titled- The Age of Facebook.  He described and I quote,

” In a talk a few days ago investor Ron Conway spoke about the explosive growth of Facebook. “They are the universe,” he said. I asked him if we are in the Age of Facebook. His answer was yes. Ron has been investing in startups for thirty years and he has seen the rise and fall of many companies. This wasn’t just idle chatter.

Microsoft dominated the technology world in the 90s on the back of their Windows and Office products. Google was the champion for the last decade after perfecting the business model around search. Both are still huge companies.

But all the momentum is behind Facebook and how they are changing the Web, and our culture.

Last week Facebook unveiled a variety of new developer tools, and new consumer applications are set to be launched in the near future. What’s most interesting about these changes aren’t the debates about whether what Facebook is doing is good for the Internet or not, or how open or not open their solutions are.

Those debates are important but they don’t affect the Facebook revolution any more than debates about Adsense a decade ago affected the decade of glory that Google just experienced. The fact is that Facebook is permeating the Web. Publishers, us included, are clamoring to organize our websites in ways that please Facebook.

Their vision of an open graph of people and things (with Facebook at the center) is becoming reality, and debates by technologists won’t changes that. Facebook is taking over our identity and we are going along with that happily. It will take a new technology paradigm to disrupt what Facebook is doing.”

Facebook’s Pageview’s have now superseded Google’s pageviews to be #1 in North America for Internet Traffic and with the latest Social Web links tied all to users is really demonstrating a power shift to “Who” and the content they create that can be linked and shared in many different circumstances.  Even though the power players behind “What” and “Where” are still evolving, this piece to the puzzle has been added and it makes for an interesting shift in the game of Search as well.

So what is next…… this is where I think we see something very interesting with Twitter and ” When” or there might evolve a new game in town. The “When” Search Engine will evolve that will combine the facets above and create a new momentum.   It is clearly possible for all of the majors now ( Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook)  to move and capture the “When” as it is evolving, but there is again opportunity for others.  Even though new start-ups like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and others have been accelerating with their own index and unique user-interfaces building up  around “the data base of places” that combines What, Where, Who;  the key in my mind for the next wave seems to be clearly “the When”.  It was stated recently by ( could not find it correctly on Twitter- so I guess there still is the problem) about the evolution from Real-Time Search to the Context of Right-Time Search.

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WHEN ( from 2010~2012~): As information and micro-conversations explode in real time,  getting the latest information is one of the paradigms of the latest Real-Time Search Engines.  But the attribute of the Right-Time is something that is evolving to be a key driver in the evolution of Search.

As this has only started and Real/Right-time search is at its initial stages of growth, I did some research and looked at all the different Right-time Start-ups and companies listed in Crunch Base.  Here is a list of all the Right/Real-time search engines they list today.  Besides the work going on with many of the majors there are approximately 50 start-ups listed.  They are listed at the bottom of this article in Alphabetical order.

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WHY ( 2015 and beyond):  To me this final piece makes the ultimate Search Engine.  It knows “Why you are searching and can give you the right answer at the right time, at the right place, with the right links to all of your social graph and friends- the Who…..  I believe it will take years before we see this working perfectly, and it might evolve around the time linguistic enablers are in place for the perfect Voice Search.   This intelligent six-sense and search will then complete the picture of search and the 5W’s.

-  End of Post-

[Reference:  The Real and Right-Time Search Engines battling it out today]

However, the differences between Google and Twitter is that Google is an advertising company and Twitter was just growing larger and larger as a bit-pipe. Google was once in the similar situation and added advertising as the balance to only building out a user-base in the beginning.  In order for Twitter to start to build up its advertising business ( which will probably be the next announcement) required them to have the ability to test and launch it first through their own properties…. hence Tweetie.   It is like Google not having a tool-bar strategy to test cookies, etc…  This is my reasoning why the Tweetie client will be free and just called Twitter.  They needed this kind of product to test and build the best user-experiences to surround their product and build out all the API’s for syndication.  Now especially advertising.

I am bullish on the fact this acquisition took place at this time, and it looks like Twitter is really coming together to potentially be  the next Real-Time Search and Real-time advertising engine that links to mobile.  They now have a platform to test and evolve as a free app…..

So in my mind the Twitter+Tweetie is basically Twoogle.

Many SEO’s have struggled with the use of Flash in a site from the standpoint of this discovery and it has been a pain point in marketing for the greater search or social media marketing community.  New methods of tagging or marketing the Flash content and the use of other meta data/ keywords on a site have been used to refer to content , but it has not been optimal.

As Apps become more and more relevant and devices centralized around this experience has made it so that today we are looking at an entirely new Internet in my mind.   An Internet that has been structured by massively indexing webpages of content and the discussion and road map of the future of the Semantic Web.  Everything has been tied to links and now the rise of the meta-tags that can make discovery and access that much easier.  All of the things from the deep content we can search and discover to the apps and content that once was discoverable from a webpage.  Now with the growing trend of user experience and content consumption that are really self-contained packages derived from App stores the type of search needs to be treated differently.  This could be a new revolution for the advent of a new search engine to take on the Google, Yahoo, Bing of today that could essentially even be more social-media friendly as a search architecture.  Lately, I have found Google to be a mess in search relevancy, and I have been using Twitter as an alternative search engine for news and discussions more then 50% of my time.  It is also interesting to hear that   if Apple were to launch a new kind of search engine for applications it would clearly make sense given the course of this new Internet.

However, my gut still tells me it is going to be very difficult for one company like Apple to take on the world and create the next generation of Global Search Engine.  Rather a Search Engine for its own world and hopefully we will see some of the cool social elements associated with it.  What I believe could be the case from this strong spike in user adaption and the massive effect of apps on all of us is rather a new debate that stems back to the HTML5 vs. Flash discussion.  As Apple has been a strong advocate of the usage of HTML5 and has left Flash as the proprietary rich media standard out of its devices, there is room for the new innovation of leveraging now HTML5 as the new Application platform of choice for many media companies and developers and to breed an entirely new industry of Search Engine Optimization around HTML5 as it becomes the next foundation of the webpage and the run-time widget architecture of the Web.

Of course we will probably continue to see this self-contained in the closed ecosystem of Apple, and even through they are working with these open standards of HTML5 and others, there is this new paradigm shift toward Apps that will exist across all platforms that makes this discussion quite interesting.   Last week, at CTIA, I was discussing this with several different App developers from the Blackberry camp and found that they have started to do unique tagging of content even in the alert and push architecture of content from Apps.  This could be another hook into strong opportunities for searchable methods to all of this content that is formed from push experiences.  Apps have now been definitely know to be able to give us better experiences then typical web pages, but  the opportunities surrounding them from the standpoint of market discoverability of the deep content is still very open.  Will Blackberry at some point come up with there own search engine as well?  Will we see multiple search engines for different forms of App content that will then lead to the subject of an open API for the massive crawlers of the world to link each one in a greater search interface to find across multiple different channels?   Will this phenomena of the app keep evolving and create the opportunities for a new internet of channels and deep search accross those channels with dedicated tagging platforms within the apps of a each of the different platforms?

As the iPad’s application ecosystem evolves and so does the application ecosystems of  Blackberry, Nokia, Android, Palm, Windows, we will need to have a new kind of search and discovery mechanism that will lead us to a new form of Internet?  Look at all the Apps that live across Facebook and other social media and the opportunity for discovery requires one to be living in that portal. A simple Google or Bing search may take you to the App, but not the content within.

I would have never expected to see Apps over take Web pages, but this phenomena is getting so strong that it has and will create a New Internet  or Branch of the Internet that will keep evolving with the phenomena of  mobile usage case.  As we saw a strong growth in the area of SEO, SEM of the last 10 years, will we see a new form of SEO called SEOA ( Search Engine Optimization for Apps)?

Regardless of where this all goes, there is clearly new business opportunities for the SEO’s to start to design services and products for Application Publishers and Developers in designing their marketing and discovery platforms in a new way that is related to this phenomena of the mobile usage case.

Once searching for this topic, I can have direct conversations with those that are experts or interested as well with the subject.