Supernatural Agency: Online business tales

You’ve got a problem.

I go to the Washington Post daily but lately I’ve been skipping it. One of my favorite blogs is VC Fred Wilson’s A VC but until recently I had stopped reading it regularly. Why? Because the ads and widgets on these sites would load but clog things up so much that the actual content I was there for wouldn’t load.

Fred recently removed most of his widgets (he loves them because they are from companies he invests in- I think if I were him this would raise a red flag) because he was getting slow-loading complaints from his readers. The site now loads fine. The Post isn’t doing so well. This morning I attempted to get to a page I read daily but all that loaded was an animated banner ad which irritatingly kept animating while the site stayed empty with 49 of 50 items downloaded. I guess the 50th item was the actual news.

This makes me wonder how often site owners test loading times, including ads, in conditions similar to an average user. Some sites, like Engadget, load really fast even with a plethora of ads. I suspect this is because they, being techies, actually care about loading times and require their ad servers to achieve certain levels of performance.

The big problem here is obvious. It looks like ads are more important to publishers than the user-experience. That insults me and keeps me away, especially because it looks like they just don’t care or are not paying attention. As a publisher my concerns are acquiring and keeping loyal readers, i.e. traffic. We won’t serve up irrelevant ads or ads that are intrusive including pop-ups, intermediary pages, ads with audio on by default or ads with so much animation they clog up the pipes. I don’t want to lose one loyal visitor because of these things because repeat traffic is where you make the money.

Washington Post…hello? Are you paying attention? It doesn’t look like it.

BTW, the NYTimes.com does not have this issue so it is not a universal problem.

I’ve been a number of conversations lately about data-mining and semantic search (or ‘discovery’ as one company’s CEO told me she preferred- not sure I know the difference…). In one of those exchanges I brought up the idea of tracking ‘habitual information’, a phrase I’ll take credit for originating (my five minutes of fame?). The idea struck me- there are many kinds of information I track on a habitual level: certain stock prices, weather, environmental economics, usability, etc. I am sure that there are many others who share a similar pattern of habitual information.

As a marketer I see behavioral targeting potential in this information. In a previous post I wrote about iGoogle as a potential source of behavioral data for Google. This idea of habitual information takes that model further. If you know my information habits, as opposed to simply tracking what I do while surfing, then you could target me more precisely when I do surf. So if go daily to Techcrunch, NYTimes Business section, Science Daily and have a Google Alert set for Apple Inc.,  I’m guessing there’s quite a few people like me out there. The ads served up on these sites collectively could target my interests.

I haven’t quite got my arms around how this might work but I’m guessing the data-miners at Google and the ad networks have got something like this on their radar- I’ll be watching for it.

Google recently announced some changes to its iGoogle page(s) that will incorporate various social networking functionality. While I haven’t seen it, I expect they’ll include some kind of ‘friending’ capability, some sharing fort files and favorites, message boards, etc. This is a big deal for one because people like me make daily use of iGoogle as the default browser page. Mine serves as a dashboard with stock quotes, gmail, weather, Google news and blog alerts, RSS and more, all organized with tabs. Adding in social networking functions, especially the ability to tap into my existing accounts like LinkedIn is a big deal. Here’s why, IMHO:

One of the big trends in search is the use of actual humans to parse results for accuracy, a la Mahalo. The problem is that this cannot scale  the level required for a universal search engine like the Goog. There are simply not enough people to do it and it’s not fast enough. However there is a way to do human-monitored search and I think Google knows what it is.

First I’m going to back up a bit. There is a Captcha system out there that takes advantage of all these humans typing in text they see as an image that goes beyond a security measure. As they type they are verifying words that have been captured by scanning systems used to scan books. This serves as a human editing system for an automated process. Quite clever really, as it does not require paid employees nor does it add to anyone’s workload- they’re going to type these words anyway.

Fast forward to the social network concept. LinkedIn was built by people entering their own information and updating it, making connections with people they know, forming groups, etc. It has a Q&A function where users can ask questions and get answers from other users who are, ostensibly, experts. It also has a job posting system tied in with a recommendation system. All of these elements together add up to a database of detailed information on people created and maintained by people (millions of people) who are unpaid. They’ve created a human-powered search engine that can and does scale. FaceBook, MySpace, Orkut, Hi5- they are all search engines with the dataset kept up by users.

With Google getting into this space more universally (they were already there with Orkut, which they acquired a few years ago, but is principally popular in South America) they are adding a human screening capability to their data on humans. With iGoogle they have my daily habits at their fingertips. Adding in a social network or two means they’ll also have that data in a social context- who I’m connected to and how. With a few more acquisitions like Tripit, which helps users track their travel itineraries (very cool, BTW), they could also track where I’m traveling, etc., etc.

I suspect there will be businesses that specialize in configuring Google assets to create specialized datastreams and searches. I’d thought of doing one that simply configured Google’s Apps for business use, something like the way RedHat works with Linux- Find out what the business needs, configure browser and application preferences, logins, etc., and distribute those preferences to employees with set-up instructions. I’m not doing it but it will happen.

Google is staying on strategy: to organize the world’s information. Instead of bemoaning their ubiquity, try looking for opportunities in their eco-system. They’re all over the place.

Today I received an email from Fusu, the attempt to create a publicly traded domain market, that was an invoice for a transaction that is neither described nor explained. I have not had any interaction with this site other than to register to see their offerings.

In my mind this sends a red flag about this operation. The site does a very poor job of describing how their system works and it does not appear to have any real trading going on. To send some kind of financial document with no explanation is spam, IMHO.

Word of warning- this looks like something to stay away from.