a week goes by..

A rapid fire post on the past week having been away from it all in Atlanta.

FAST is being bought by Microsoft - Dylan Fuller, formerly of FAST has a good run down on it. I do think it is interesting that Microsoft bought it rather than Google - it’s an obvious fit for Microsoft in the enterprise search space where it is strong but I thought Google wanted more of this space - is it that they think they can do it themselves? or does it not fit with their “everything in the cloud” philosophy?

Xobni launched its beta. Scott Voigt saved me the trouble of installing it right now by giving me a preview. It looks nice enough and gives you some interesting information about your inbox but it doesn’t aid your productivity. It will be interesting to see if this can evolve into a “Email 2.0″ plugin for Outlook, creating a social network through which it prioritises your email. Very early days right now though.

CES happened, the only highlights I heard about were Yahoo Life (integration of the various Yahoo services to give a better user experience - more in a later post); great looking TVs (very thin, bigger..) and Bill Gate’s disappointing keynote looking more at what we know Microsoft is doing rather than anything new. Still it was his last one..

Finally.. Newsgator went free. Finally. The question is whether it is too little too late for them.

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apophenia wrote an article about “who clicks on ads? and what might this mean” which talks about that common phrase from people - “I never click on ads”. It then concludes that the majority of people clicking on ads online are from the lower socio-economic groups online, taking this conclusion from a study produced by AOL. Go here to read the full article.

AOL’s customer base has traditionally had a bias towards this demographic and this would certainly lead to them having a skew towards this demographic clicking on ads. Even more so, marketers advertising inside AOL seem to understand this and display banners suited to this demographic. Yet those same marketers do not seem to do this in the wider Internet. If this demographic is clicking in the majority on online ads, then surely the majority of agencies are wasting their client’s money online?

I don’t agree with this conclusion, not just because doing so would mean Google’s valuation would very quickly collapse

People do click on ads online, but they do so only when it is of interest to them (or to put it another way, when they benefit from clicking). Whether it is because they are in the market for a car and see a car ad they liked, or because they have seen a film trailer they want to find out more about. Marketers everywhere are trying to show an ad to the right person in the right place and at the right time. Achieve this and click-thru and economic returns would be sky high. This is why Google is doing so well, its technology is able to place adverts in front of you at a time when you are interested in a specific topic.

It is not so long ago that your internet experience went something like this:

1. Connect to Internet
2. Check your webmail account
3. Check your favourite sites
4. Go to Google to search for something

Then came RSS/webfeeds which allowed you to centralise most of the above into a single page - your personalised home page. There are plenty of options - iGoogle, Microsoft Live.com, My Yahoo and Netvibes (which I use) to name a few.

This was supposed to be the page that became your first port of call and Google has been leading the way.

..except something has happened to divert people away from it.

Facebook

How did this happen? Well actually most people online never really got to that second stage of using a personalised homepage. It was just a bit too geeky and difficult to use. It still is. Instead they joined Facebook in the millions and stored all their info there.

I keep hearing stories of teenagers who say that they use Facebook to message their friends and only "oldies" use email. Photos are stored on there; quick updates (a la Twitter) are submitted there and now you can even play games and chat in there.

So it’s fast becoming a user’s first point of call, integrating your life offline - online. As many have pointed out, it contains a significant amount of info about your life. This has rapidly pushed privacy to the fore.

So where is the threat to Google? Well Google survives by scavenging off the information you leave behind when using its products. So if you are no longer using its products then there’s a problem.

What if Facebook added a search bar for the web into its platform. Since you are there already will you use it? I think that’s only likely if its good enough.. but Yahoo and possibly Microsoft Search isn’t that much behind Google in terms of quality - it’s just habit that keeps Google where it is.

Or Facebook added:

a decent calendar service..

..or a decent email platform

If they can do it well enough.. those teenagers will be shifting away from Google to.. yes you guessed it.. Facebook’s platform.

What would be more interesting would be if Facebook opened up its messaging platform - allowed 3rd party providers to provide the solutions. Oh its doing that already.. but not enough.

Imagine - your preferred calendar/email/search service all embedded in to your Facebook page. Facebook becomes the glue that connects everything together.

First they need to get the privacy right though..

[update] Just read that Facebook signed a deal with Microsoft to place Microsoft adCenter sponsored links and other ads on Facebook and that now there is talk that Microsoft is possibly looking at a £150m-£250m investment in exchange for 5% of the company. That values Facebook at a cool £5bn. More importantly, it would place Microsoft in a stronger position for access to Facebook’s userbase.

I can’t believe the figures being bandied about for the sale of Doubleclick.. even the initial figure of a $2bn bid by Microsoft sounded high. Now supposedly there is a $2.6bn bid by Google.

I can see the reasons for either party buying Doubleclick - Microsoft is losing the battle to Google in the advertising space and it will complement their offering. Google is already in this space so not sure if there is a benefit for them other than stopping Microsoft?

It would certainly be great for Hellman & Friedman who bought Doubleclick for $1.1bn only 2 years ago.

But there have been several acquisitions by Doubleclick recently (Falk, Tangozebra, Klipmart) so there are multiple ad tracking systems inside the company - I guess there must be some form of consolidation going on internally? Seems to me to be a difficult time to be buying Doubleclick at an expensive price when you look at their turnover. Maybe Atlas is a cheaper alternative? Though even they have just bought Accipiter.

After my previous post about Google losing its battle for the right to use the name “Gmail” in the UK and Germany, the European trademark office has now ruled that Google cannot register the trademark across Europe. Google however is standing firm and says it will continue to use the name Gmail in Europe (outside UK and Germany) as before.

Looking at the number of searches for gmail uk that comes to my blog looking at how to register a “gmail” address in the UK, there is plenty of confusion out there. Is it too late now for Google to rebrand gmail entirely? Everyone I know in the UK still refers to it as gmail..

If you are in the UK you can get a googlemail.com email address by going here - you may even be able to get a gmail address if you pretend you are outside the UK. No you cannot seem to get a gmail address by pretending to be outside the UK anymore.