Digital Always Media Inc.
: Search, Social & Analytics :

Google has made a fundamental change to the way it ranks websites. Over the past three years, Google has been placing increasing emphasis on localized and personalized search results. This week, the search engine moved from being a general search engine to being an almost entirely local search engine.

Google is now rewarding locally based businesses who take advantage of the Google Places mapping program. Dave Davies of and I covered the topic on our WebmasterRadio.FM program Webcology earlier today in an episode titled, “” (Link leads to podcast)

Facebook has a long and tangled history with the concept of personal privacy. By its nature, Facebook opens two way window to the world, allowing you to see an enormous amount of information about other Facebook users and them to see an enormous amount of information about you. For many, the ability to see deeply into the lives of their friends and contacts is unendingly interesting. For marketers, that ability is absofreakenlootly amazing, so amazing in fact that some marketing firms will do almost anything to attain the ability including violating Facebook’s own privacy policies and the privacy laws of several nation states.

Earlier this month, Facebook took the unprecedented step of shutting down several games and applications which collect information about their subscribers. They did this because those application makers were selling the information they collected to large-scale marketing firms who in turn used that information to pad consumer profile dossiers and sold that data to their advertising clients. Scary enough eh?

To complicate matters, it’s not just your own privacy you need to protect. Facebook games and applications tend to be based on interaction between Facebook members and that requires allowing the application to extract information about your friends to create as complete a picture as possible of the web of personal networks that make up the Facebook universe.

Think about this for a second. One set of connections leads to another which in turn leads to other sets of connections. As with the concept of six-degrees of separation, designers of extremely popular games can eventually capture a fairly accurate snapshot of the entire population of Facebook users. In other words, you are not just protecting yourself; you’re helping to protect a large chunk of the world’s population.

Unfortunately, all the personal security in the world is useless unless everyone in that world also takes measures to protect themselves and their data, or, unless Facebook itself makes a serious crackdown on application makers and the marketers who pay for the data. While Facebook is making the effort, it is unlikely to be able to stem a tide that has already washed ashore. In other words, once the cat is out of the box it is very difficult to get it back in again.

Consumers have had the ability to protect themselves all along though most have no idea how to do that, aside from disconnecting entirely. So how, without fully opting out of the social networking scene does one protect their privacy while still enjoying use of popular applications and games? Here is a quick run-down of the personal privacy settings allowed by Facebook.

Friends Settings
If you look to the top right side of your Facebook screen, the furthest tab to the right is a drop-down menu marked Account. The first link under the Account tab lets you see your friend list. Placed in alphabetical order this link allows you to view and group your friends list in a number of ways. The default view shows friends you’ve recently interacted with. This allows you to visit your friends’ pages to see exactly how you interacted with them. It is not entirely accurate however. For instance, my girlfriend and I share and like each others posts regularly but I don’t see her name come up on my recent interactions list. Other views include All Friends, Recently Added and a variety of location and interest based options.

Beside each image and name is an X allowing you to “de-friend” or delete the person from your account. It should be noted that even though you might delete a person from your network of friends, interactions between you and them will remain active on Facebook servers forever.

The next link in the drop-down menu is for pages you might have established as part of a group or a business. There are likely few privacy concerns to be found here as legitimate businesses tend to operate in the open and if you’re running an illegal business with a Facebook group, you’re too stupid to worry about privacy settings anyway.

The third link in the Account drop-down menu, Account Settings is extremely important for establishing and maintaining privacy on Facebook. This is the area in which you can set what information is visible on your Facebook profile page. The Account Settings section is divided into four main areas, Basic Directory Information, Sharing on Facebook, Applications and Websites, and Block Lists.

Basic Directory Information controls how you want to present yourself to the world through your profile. This is the area that lets you say who can and can not see your news posts, your friends list, your hometown and current location, and other information about your present and past. By default, everything is set for everyone to see. Beside each option is a button allowing you to set preferences from “Everyone” to “Friends only”. Resetting your preferences has implications over who can and can not connect with you. These settings also have implications surrounding what information Facebook says it shares with third parties such as game and application developers. According to Facebook’s Terms of Service,

When you use an application, your content and information is shared with the application.  We require applications to respect your privacy, and your agreement with that application will control how the application can use, store, and transfer that content and information.  (To learn more about Platform, read our Privacy Policy and About Platform page.)[source: ]

That said, Facebook doesn’t have a lot of control over what application makers might actually do with your personal information once they get it. A recent study conducted by Microsoft India and the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany (link: PDF ) demonstrated that advertising networks use private information, including data indicating sexual orientation, to target advertising to consumers who have clearly been personally identified.

Facebook also gives you the ability to control the information application makers and game designers extract from your account though there is no way of actually verifying that privacy settings prevent marketers from gaining your information. You can however see when an application last extracted information from your account and what that information is.

At the bottom of the Privacy Settings page, accessed from the ACCOUNT tab, you can edit your Applications and Websites settings. The first screen you’ll see shows you the applications or games you most frequently use. Clicking on the name of the application will show you your last usage and will also show you information on the application developer. The more details link on that page shows you what information was extracted by the developer and when. Unfortunately, following up on this information is extremely time consuming as each application extracts data differently. Facebook thus lists each application separately and you the user must examine each specifically to see what was done when. Even more unfortunately, the only way to prevent such applications from extracting that information is to delete them from your account. You did, after all, give them permission when you signed up for their service.

Users of MySpace, FourSquare and other social media tools also face extraordinary privacy concerns. Most social media tools are built on sharing personal information with larger networks. As stated earlier, digital marketers live and die by that information. Perhaps the only true way to shield your privacy is to shun social networks but, for most of us who have become accustomed to gleaning information and entertainment through our social networks, that is hardly an option. The only real way personal information is going to be protected is at the platform level. In other words, the onus is on Facebook, MySpace and other interactive networks to guarantee their users’ privacy. Facebook did take a mighty swing at several application makers in a “big-stick” attempt to meet user privacy concerns but few fully believe that Facebook can actually prevent application developers from parceling and selling private info to marketing firms.

For now, check your own settings regularly, modify your passwords from time to time and be very, very careful who you allow into your personal information space.

What, exactly, is search? The question is deceptively simple but finding a precise answer is surprisingly difficult. After a dozen years in the industry, you would think I would know a number of ways to answer the question but, after a dozen years in the industry I know enough to know my answer could change in an instant.

Search has come a long way from the earliest days of Alta Vista, Yahoo and Infoseek. Formerly a domain characterized by 10 – 20 blue links generated by a two – three keyword query, search has grown to encompass virtually every aspect of a user’s experience on the Web. Search happens even when an Internet user is unaware it is happening. Information references are generated, delivered and followed as a matter of course and not necessarily as a matter of user-choice.

Search has segmented into several styles. The major search engines, Google and Bing continue to define search as we knew it though each are adding new signals on a daily basis to their ranking algorithms. Recently, Bing added social recommendations or “likes” by friends on Facebook to its ranking algorithm, one of the strongest signals that Bing is personalizing search results the new engine has ever sent.

It can be argued that social recommendations fostered by Facebook and, to a lesser degree, Twitter are forms of search as information passed drives a user from one place to another on the web. That such information is not necessarily directly requested does not diminish the power of the user-action or the faith the user has in the information provider.

How the changes in how a search engine determines which signals to accentuate and which to ignore affect results remains to be seen. How these known signals will affect the work of search engine optimization professionals is fairly clear. SEOs and SEMs will have to spend a lot more time mining social media applications on behalf of their clients. The job of a SEO is to make web documents visible in search engines and other information applications. Getting a link to a client page in the news feeds of as many Facebook users as possible is a method of making client documents visible. It is also simply good SEO as we now know that those links are counted quite highly by Bing and by Google.

Search, as both a business and as a puzzle is getting exciting again. For several years, we have laboured under a monolithic and virtually monopolistic culture ruled by Google and its brilliant but constantly flawed PageRank algorithm. This week’s announcement of the deal between Facebook and Bing to include social recommendations (or “likes”) is likely to force change both at Google and in the way digital marketers market their clients’ digital assets.

By including social recommendations as a signal in its ranking algorithm, Bing is using an innovative way to include the ideas of general web-users in determining how relevant a page, document or web property will be to individual users. Social recommendation both personalizes and localizes search results in a way that gives a search user access to their friend’s opinions as opposed to the opinions of invisible and often unknown webmasters or link builders.

Though the move in and of itself is not likely to have serious impacts on Google’s popularity, over time it will help Bing increase its market share. It will also help Bing and Yahoo! better ad-targeting by giving Bing access to the profile information freely supplied by Facebook users.

For webmasters and search engine marketing specialists, the addition of social recommendation to Bing’s general algorithm provides an easy method of moving a website higher in search results, provided enough people click the soon to be ubiquitous Like button on client pages.

Adding a Facebook Like or Recommend button to a web page or document is extremely easy and fully explained at the .

There are a number of questions search marketers need to answer before fully understanding the implications of social recommendation as a means of ranking web documents. Off the top of my head, I can think of three easy ways to game social recommendations and I’ve not really put much effort into thinking about it. Aside from the obvious, here are a four questions I would like answers to before making any further comment on the SEO value of social recommendations:

• How much power does a “like” recommendation have over a number of relevant incoming links?
• What is the active-lifespan of a “like”?
• How long will it take for Bing to be “like-spammed” and what will they do to verify Facebook user profiles?

Whatever the answers to these (and dozens of other) questions, the deal between Facebook and Bing will unquestionably open a new set of signals in search. The face of our industry is changing and that change is known as Facebook. Things are getting interesting again.

Last week, a breathless and rather confusing story appeared in the stating Google and Verizon were about to sign a deal which would, in effect, gut the spirit of Net Neutrality. Several web-journalists, bloggers and activists added their voices in virtual unanimous condemnation of what we believed Google and Verizon were proposing.  Within 48-hours, were denying the story as vigorously as the New York Times was defending it. Something potentially disruptive is clearly brewing between the Web’s most powerful publisher and a company that owns a significant portion of America’s data delivery system but we don’t really know exactly what it is.

Earlier this week, Google and Verizon held a joint conference call news conference () and released a joint statement outlining the scope of a “” the two companies have reached. This agreement was forged during but outside of an ongoing series of meetings regarding Net Neutrality convened by FCC chairman Julius Genachowski earlier this year.

The functioning of the Internet is at a crossroads with ever increasing costs being borne by data delivery providers matching the ever increasing file sizes their fiber networks deliver. As with the entertainment industry revenue models for data delivery providers were thought out long before the evolution of the Web. The data delivery providers see a solution in charging extra for premium transmission. The web development community however, sees the situation a little differently.

When the World Wide Web was opened to the public in the early 1990’s, a very loose set of academic traditions formed the kernel for general rules of conduct. For instance, information must be free to move, to morph and to be transformed into something more refined and better. In a truly intellectual setting, all ideas are considered equally worthy of public consideration. While one might not wish to spend their own time considering certain ideas, it is widely considered anathematic for an academic body to block, censor or otherwise deny public consideration of other people’s ideas.

The same can be said for data. All legal data must be considered and treated as equal on the Web. That’s one of the basic tenants of Network Neutrality. For the most part, all legal content has, by tradition and agreement, been treated equally by data transmission providers. While there are a number of specific instances where data transmission providers have not respected this ideal, for two decades the Web has provided the freest and most effective publishing medium in human history.

Proponents of Net Neutrality, unfortunately, do not have answers to the vexing questions of costs facing the ISPs. They do however have an important point that transcends basic cost/benefit statements. The benefits of an open Internet far outweigh the costs currently borne by  service providers. Try for a moment to imagine what unemployment figures would be like without a free and open Internet. Try for a moment to imagine what your own life would be like without the Internet as we know it today.

If the framework agreement Google and Verizon have come up with comes to fruition, the Internet as we know it today might just wither and die away. Google is looking far beyond the Internet as we know it and Verizon wants to take it there.

We have known the World Wide Web and its delivery systems had to change for some time now. Mobile computing devices are becoming more powerful and prevalent. Much of what Google has been doing for the past year points to the company putting extraordinary energy into mobile to the point of developing its own mobile operating system, Android and altering its algorithms to favor mobile friendly documents.

Google is doubling down on mobile and Verizon is preparing to redouble its energies to have mobile data delivery considered separate and unique from terrestrial Internet data delivery. The two companies are prepared to go as far as developing a new alternative to the terrestrial Internet. Using the phrase, “additional differentiated online services”, Google and Verizon are proposing to build a “fast-lane” pipeline to run alongside the World Wide Web. It would by necessity be TCP/IP based and also by necessity use some of the same lines being used to deliver data today but, according to the framework agreement as I vaguely understand it, the delivery system wouldn’t be the same as the Web. It will certainly be faster.

When does the Web stop being the Web?  The same technologies are used with the exception of those stretching the “last mile”. The same protocols will be used as packet delivery is the only efficient way to allow so many signals to cross paths at the same time. The product viewed by the consumer will likely look, feel and act very much like a traditional web document or object does today. According to Google and Verizon, the Web ceases being the Web when we stop calling it the Web, and therein lays the crux of the conundrum.

The moment the premium content is delivered across a premium network to premium subscribers is the moment the free web dies. That free web, while actually quite expensive, provides the foundation of extraordinary innovation, wealth creation and intellectual progress. Someone has to pay for its maintenance, improvement and extension but creating a parallel universe to circumvent Net Neutrality traditions (or legislation) is an enormous mistake.

We might be witnessing the birth of a tiered Internet where you the consumer and we the content creators are asked to pay more for the right to consume and create. Critical community components such as WebmasterRadio.FM or SMX Webcast training sessions might be forced to pay more to stream content at a functional bit-rate. Packet sniffers might decide the data you’re downloading should be degraded. Your SKYPE client might not work as well as it had in the past.

The Internet is the last free frontier on Earth where everyone starts on truly even playing field. It is a place where true capitalism can be practiced without the stifling interference of ham-fisted corporate interests and honest competition breeds stronger winners and well lessoned losers.

Google and Verizon appear to be acting like ham-fisted corporate scallywags. They need to re-explain and allow the web-community to help them clarify their plans. While I honor their right to innovate as they see fit, I also recognize the tsunami of ill flavored change their current plans might unleash could have the harshest effects on Internet entrepreneurialism. The web is an economic ecosystem. You are the web community. This is your environment. Please research this issue further and make your opinion known.