I think it is, and I tweeted so  yesterday.  And the reason is obvious. What is SEO about? Ultimately, it is about one thing: the ‘website’. It’s about making a website and its pages discoverable, ranked favorably in search results, described appropriately so that searchers hook on the description etc.

But ‘websites’ are not ‘in’. Check the diagrams  from Google trends for websites below.

Website traffic for 5 major IT companies

Website traffic for the 2 major consumer goods companies

While the overall number of people online is increasing, the visits to the web sites keep falling.

At the same time the volume of searches for these brands shows a completely different picture.

Search volume for the 2 major consumer goods companies

Search volume for 5 big IT companies

In the last 12 months CG companies see a volume increase or remain steady (amidst the crisis) while, for IT, a longer perspective reveals a mixed picture that has to do with what these companies are and technologies they offer:

• oracle and ibm are gradually decreasing,
• apple is increasing,
• dell  increases too  although less quickly,
• and hp seems to hold its ground or slightly decreasing.

But there is an equally important movement undergoing: people shift their reliance from search to peers for news,  recommendations and answers.

I don’t remember how many times and about how many things I  have asked my twitter friends’ advise. And it always comes. And most of the time  it’s good too. Not so  abundant as  search results, but who reads search results past the first page anyway?

Enter social seach. Google injects results in search from our social graphs (opt in). I don’t have to reason the usefulness of this.

What should we expect? What else than  these two inversely related trends accelerating?  Less reliance on search, more reliance on peer recommendations.

There are some interesting implications here: SEO consulting and search advertising have profited from our reliance on search. Search won’t go away anytime soon, especially with the social element in it. But what would be the need for SEO? And what would be the need for adword advertising, if the important factor in search results turns out to be our peers?

Is Google shooting its own foot?  So it seems. But I am sure they have figured it out already and they are thinking of alternatives.

Conversations on the social web are mostly performed through comments. But comments are so fragmented! Consider this example:

• Publisher  publishes a blogpost
• A regular reader of the Publisher comments on the blogpost
• Someone else reads the post in  Google Reader and shares it
• Another comments and reshares the Google Reader item
• Another decides to share it on Facebook
• Another comments on above  the Facebook link
• Another submits the link on Digg
• Another comments on the Digg link
• Publisher  has a Friendfeed account and the post appears in his FF stream
• Another user comments on the FF stream item
• etc

Obviously the post has stirred some interest and generated a conversation. But the conversation is dispersed in many different places. Publisher looses track of many aspects of the conversation around the post. Commenters also mostly ignore what happens outside their area of interaction with the content: Facebook users ignore the FF commenters etc.

This situation has fired some intense debates. Many publishers think this situation is not  in their best interest as potential traffic to their sites is deflected to an ‘aggregator’. Especially publishers that have a financial interest in their site traffic and do not just want their opinions spread, find this particularly not appealing.

To mend this situation, a group in Google is working on a new protocol that will allow comments to ‘return’ back on the original publisher site. The protocol is called Salmon

Salmon protocol logo

and you can get a basic idea of its workings  from this  presentation.

Salmon does bring back the comments to the publisher site but it does not solve the publishers’ problem.  As you can see from slide 4, once a comment is back to the publisher’s site, it  is republished back to all its subscribers (including the aggregators). What this would mean is that each aggregator has a full picture of the comments around the post, regardless of origin. From the user’s standpoint there is no need to move to the publisher’s site or to another aggregator for any reason, as the  full picture will be available in  whatever site the user prefers to frequent. The publishers may object it, but in what right? The publishers’ protests imply  they OWN the comments which is hardly the case. The user owns his comments.

But let’s leave aside the publisher’s concern for  a moment. Is slamon a good thing for the user? I would argue it is. He can have access to a discussion in its entirety  without much hassle. And therefore he might be tempted to engage or engage more.

But there is something still missing: the user does not have easy access to his own comments for ALL pieces of content he has interacted with. And he has no control either. They can disappear with a site that closes down. Or in the simplest case, the can be deleted by the site moderators. This is the problem that systems like disqus, intense debate and JS-Kit are aiming to solve. But they won’t. Because it is very unlike that one of them will become ubiquitus.

I think the problem should be approached from another angle. A comment is a piece of content. There is no distinction in form from any other piece of content. They are both text (or audio or video in some cases). What subordinates a comment-content to the original post-content is notional and semantic: the post-content preceded the comment-content and actually the post-content was what aroused the commenters interest in the issue. But the same applies to a post that pingbacks to another post. So a comment is a piece of content and should have independence.

The question is how?

The issue is related to our digital identities: if in the web -to-come we can  have a unique independent central point for our digital identities, this central point could be the originator and hoster of our comments.

A modification of the salmon protocol could easily let this happen: whenever a user comments on a publisher site, the site will send the comment back to the users digital identity home. Likewise, whenever an aggregator receives a user comment, the aggregator sends the comment back to the user home, as well as to the publisher.

I do not think this is difficult to implement although I can predict the frictions about who controls the user’s  digital ‘home’. But that’s another issue.

Read also Louis Gray’s post on Salmon

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Taken from the Yahoo Mail Blog feed in Google Reader

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A couple of days ago I came across this terrifying presentation from John Graham-Cumming.

Although the topics covered weren’t entirely new to me, put together in one presentation, had an impact.  I came to wonder if and how would the major web 2.0 sites work, if javascript was out of the picture.

I decided to make a little test to find out: I disabled javascript from my browser  and started logging  in such sites to see how would they behave.

Here is the outcome for the three most important for me.

a. Twitter

Most of the functionality was in place: the timeline, friend and followers. From the various buttons on the tweets and the timeline pages, the reply did work but not the fav button.

The direct message and delete buttons did not work either. Same with the drop down where you select a follower to dm, and finally, the followers and trending topics buttons.
But all these are rather trivial. Because most of the tweet buttons replicate user behavior (putting the @ sign in front of another user name for a reply, or the d letter for a direct message).
Not being able to fav, or, more importantly, to delete is a loss, but not a major one.

b. Facebook
Things are worse in Facebook: while Home, Profile, Friends and Settings are accessible, the inbox and chat are not.
Also, from the bottom bar, the applications menu is inaccessible. Most of the edit links and buttons don’t work either and finally the status updates, link sharing , photos etc cannot be submitted.

c. Youtube
Here things are disastrous: without javascript you cannot see the videos! On top, you cannot access your account settings or you mailbox. There was no point looking for more.

A small gallery with pics of the failure areas of the above web applications follows

The recent update  of twitter’s  Terms of Service, brought to my attention this page from twitter support :  The Twitter Rules. Is it not a long read but it is quite educative as to what twitter considers as spam or spamming behavior.

It is interesting to note that there is no rigid definition of spam:

What constitutes “spamming” will evolve as we respond to new tricks and tactics by spammers

Instead, the following  14 points list of spamming behaviors is cited.

• If you have followed a large amount of users in a short amount of time;
• If you have followed and unfollowed people in a short time period, particularly by automated means (aggressive follower churn);
• If you repeatedly follow and unfollow people, whether to build followers or to garner more attention for your profile;
  
• If you have a small number of followers compared to the amount of people you are following;
• If your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates;
• If a large number of people are blocking you;
• The number of spam complaints that have been filed against you;
• If you post duplicate content over multiple accounts or multiple duplicate updates on one account
• If you post multiple unrelated updates to a topic using #
• If you post multiple unrelated updates to a trending or popular topic
• If you send large numbers of duplicate @replies
• If you send large numbers of unsolicited @replies in an attempt to spam a service or link
  
• If you repost other user’s content without attribution.
• If you have attempted to “sell” followers, particularly through tactics considered aggressive following or follower churn.

The one  in bold has a special interest.

If your updates contain mainly links  you are considered a spammer!

Well this is news!

There’re thousands of accounts in twitter that do just this. How? By linking a blog feed to a twitter account. In such a case all twitter updates are links back to the blogposts.  Leaving aside the fact that these might not be appealing accounts to follow, considering link-posting as a spamming behavior  contradicts the presence of major media organizations in twitter and there are no signs that twitter actually objects their presence.

But if link-posting is ok for, say, CNN why would that  be bad for blog xyz with the 20 followers? The rule becomes a size discrimination.

Another notable notion in this rule is that twitter seems to still attribute value to the personal updates.  For me personal updates are irrelevant but that is not the issue. The issue is that one should have the right to write about the things he truly cares. If drinking coffee with his spouse is one of them, that’s fine. But if not, that should be fine too.

Besides, in order to have personal updates you must have a person too. With all these business accounts, what sort of personal updates is to be expected?

I thought it was just me but a search (employing Facebook search) reavealed that this is a widespread issue. See the picture.

I haven’t seen any announcement anywhere. Or a post in one of the tech blogs. Anyone?

Maybe the reason why Twitter succeeds is because people don’t really want to have conversations. They just want to be able to scream out into the void and listen for echoes.

says Victor Ganata.

If true, then all web 2.0 product developers should go back to the design desk.

The real underlying question though is: “What is a conversation?”

Web 2.0 is about conversations. The markets are conversations, says the Cluetrain Manifesto. New services want to be conversational. New marketing urges us to form relationships and interact through conversations.

With so many claims  on the term ‘conversation’, I am afraid the term is stretched to a point where it will either break or become meaningless.  Defining  is confining.

If we accept that ‘conversation’ is a more serious kind of discussion (as opposed to chat), we can hardly apply this notion to  the conversations happening online. Most of them are simply chat.

Next comes the shouting in the void, like the tweets  ’I woke up and I am drinking coffee’ which occassionaly turn into a chat again.

In blogs, we often see  large threads of hundreds of comments, which, excluding spam and trolls, can be deemed as real conversations but not as one conversation. They are mostly conversations between the blogger and the commenters and secondly between the commenters themselves.

The pingback mechanism has  enabled a more sophisticated kind of conversations:  through blog posts. These can be extensive and spread to too many blogs, so they are difficult to follow.

In Friendfeed,  humongous threads are commonplace, especially if Robert Scoble is the initiator.  Yet, I don’t know many that  read such threads from start to end. So, what is the point of these threads, conversation wise (because I can think of many other points apart from conversation)?

In real life, you can have a conversation with only a few people. You cannot have a conversation with a whole football stadium!  Likewise, online conversations that can have an impact, and feel like they do,  are the ones  that people can participate from start to end, understand who else is participating, and catch up really quickly, if  joining late.

For this reason (and contrary to the popular perception)  twitter and twitter-like tools, by restricting the length of the what is being said and by limiting the participants of the conversation,  turn out to be more conversational (subject to abuse though).

When  people complain about twitter not being conversational, they may actually complain not been allowed  to blah blah endlessly.   But we agreed that this isn’t a conversation, didn’t we?

I added a Lifestreaming plugin to my blog recently and as I was entering the feed urls of the various Web 2.0 sites I am participating, I stumbled upon the Facebook problem.
Since its last change, the old mini-feed feed has disappeared, so one has to reassemble it by its components.
I was particularly interested in the Noted Feed, the Links feed and the Status feed.

Why?

Well, the notes is the facebook blogging.

Notes
Although I rarely use it, it can occassionaly contain some thoughts that are posted nowhere else.

By clicking to the notes tab in your profile (hoping you have added the tab to your profile), you get on the right side a column which, at the lower part has the notes feed. Like this:

The structure of the url is as follows:
http://www.facebook.com/feeds/notes.php?id=<yourid>&viewer=<yourid>&key=<yourkey>&format=rss20

Links

The Links feed is essentialy the feed of all the sharing activity in facebook, so it is a must to include in a lifestream. Working as with notes we can find it at a similar place.
The structure of the url is as follows:
http://apps.facebook.com/feeds/share_posts.php?id=<yourid>&viewer=<yourid>&key=<yourkey>&format=rss20

Status
Last, the Status feed is the most important one, especially if no cross posting is taking place on your Facebook Wall, as it comprises of all the original thoughts and situations you share in Facebook.
But where is this feed located?
As much I have searched I could not find it.

So after discussing this in twitter, from the responses I realized that the structure of the statuses feed url must be the same with other two feed.

First guess: replace notes.php with status.php and … voila, it works!
http://www.facebook.com/feeds/status.php?id=<yourid>&viewer=<yourid>&key=<yourkey>&format=rss20

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I am ‘locked’ up today in my mother’s house, which, quite unsurprisingly, does not have internet access.  One option is to steal my way to the net through a neighbors’ open wifi. Not without some odd problems though: I can open my Gmail in https, send and receive mail as normal, I can browse pages in https (where supported), I can use a twitter desktop client, I can use twitter through (you guessed) https, but every other simple web page request through http fails!

See the full gallery on posterous

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