Facebook, Search Engines, Social Media

Building communities or bubbles?

The increasing personalisation of the web has been heralded as a great leap forward – it offers a personalised online experience, using search history and cookies to provide online users with highly relevant content that has been customised just for them. The effects of this can already be seen with social media and search now giving users a streamlined experience based on their unique interests.

However, this positive view has been challenged. According to a fascinating extract from ‘The Filter Bubble’ by Eli Pariser in the Guardian article at the weekend, “the race to know as much as possible about you has become the central battle of the era for internet giants like Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft.”

He argues this is creating a blinkered view of the world based on narrow interests and just your own personal tastes.  These ‘internet giants’ are ‘prediction engines’ who look at your online activity and try to create a personalised experience which they feel reflects these interests and ‘Likes’. From Facebook’s newsfeed to retargeted ads this is happening throughout the web:

• Facebook: Facebook’s EdgeRank uses the information that Facebook has on users to provide a personalised newsfeed based on how often they interact with certain people and Pages (read our post on ‘Top 5 Tips for improving your Facebook EdgeRank’ here). With personalised news feeds becoming a primary news source for many people this will have a big effect on the news they receive.
• Google: Google use 57 signals – from where you log in from to what your searched history – to try to predict what kinds of sites you’d like. To put it simply, there is no set Google search any more – it is all based on that user’s unique activity.
• Amazon: the online retailer sells billions of dollars by using its algorithms to predict what each customer is interested in and putting it on their own personal homepage.
• Retargeting: cookies allow businesses to store and track information such as age, location, passwords and other personal data. They can then embed this data and target the user with personalised, relevant content and ads. This is why if you search for a pair of shoes you will see the same shoes in banner ads as you browse the web.

The main problem of all this customisation to Pariser is that “As a consumer, it’s hard to argue with blotting out the irrelevant and unlikable. But what is good for consumers is not necessarily good for citizens. What I seem to like may not be what I actually want, let alone what I need to know to be an informed member of my community or country.”  Furthermore, he also states that you create your own vacuum where “more and more, your computer monitor is a kind of one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click.”

While Pariser puts forward an interesting argument and articulates it very well, personalisation has always been the holy grail of the internet. As Yahoo Vice President Tapan Bhat has stated: “The future of the web is about personalisation.  It’s about weaving the web together in a way that is smart and personalised for the user.”

This is the point. Providing the user with a personalised online experience makes it more relevant, more efficient and, therefore, more enjoyable. It is certainly a much better experience than the previous scattergun approach where adverts bore no relation to what the user was interested in.

Of course, there needs to be a balance between this and presenting people with an unknowingly self-serving version of the internet which presents to you views which you already hold. However, if this balance is achieved then social media and search can provide an incredibly useful and powerful way to find what you want in an environment in which people can contribute, interact and shape the conversation themselves.

Twitter growth – enhances search, adds ‘Follow’ button and photo sharing service

There has been a flurry of activity at Twitter recently. Last month it spent $40 million on desktop app TweetDeck which represents 13% of its user base. This week things have been moving on at an even greater pace. The micro blogging service has launched its ‘Follow’ button, a new version of Twitter search and has also revealed details about its own photo sharing app which will be rolled out within the next couple of weeks. This is all a part of Twitter’s movement towards a stronger social graph with more connections and greater usability.

Here’s a more detailed look into each element of these developments:

Twitter Search

With Twitter search serving an average of 1.6 billion queries per day it was vital that they enhanced their search functionality. Twitter says its new version of search will deliver more relevant Tweets when you search for something or click on a trending topic. Not only this, it will also show you related photos and videos on the results page.

This new version is a ground-up rewrite of their whole search infrastructure with the aim of making the results as personally relevant as possible. “Our ranking function accesses the social graph and uses knowledge about the relationship between the searcher and the author of a Tweet during ranking,” the company explained. This means that Twitter’s search index will now incorporate dynamic information such as information about the searcher and how users’ interact with tweets.

In addition to this if you access Twitter using the newest version of Firefox, you can type a #hashtag or @username into the address bar to take you directly to a search results page – for example you could type #bing or someone’s profile page like @bbcapprentice.

Twitter Follow button

Twitter’s ‘Follow’ button, their equivalent of the Facebook ‘Like’ button, allows users to follow Twitter accounts directly from an external website with a single click. With a prominent tweet button already in place the launch of the ‘Follow’ button helps Twitter further grow its social reach and makes Twitter’s reach even more accessible, which can only help grow its users.

More than 50 sites including AOL, The Wall Street Journal and MTV have already added the ‘Follow’ button. The use of the button by these brands means that Twitter is gaining more reach on the social graph. You can also see the profile and latest Tweets of the account you want to follow by clicking the username next to the button.

Twitter photo and video sharing service

Having left photos and videos to third-party services like Twitpic and Yfrog, Twitter has now partnered with Photobucket to launch its own photo and video sharing service. This week Twitter CEO Dick Costolo told the D9 Conference that “A native photo sharing experience will be rolled out to 100% of users over the next couple of weeks.” This will allow Tweeters to upload a photo and attach it to their tweet directly from Twitter.

The service means that photos and videos will be directly connected to tweets. They will be viewable on Twitter without having to leave the site (unlike, say, Twitpic). Costolo also said Twitter will “surface the most popular videos and tweets” in a new section of the homepage. You’ll also soon be able to easily do all this from its official mobile apps.

Twitter’s advertising model

Add to this Costolo’s words on advertiser’s performance on Twitter and there is much to be excited about for the micro-blogging service. Costolo presented the example of an ad run by Volkswagen for the new VW Beetle. He said the promoted tweet for the campaign had an engagement rate of 52%. “These are amazing statistics that marketers just can’t believe when they first hear them…So the business is working phenomenally well.”

Twitter had been projecting to have around 100 advertisers by the end of last year. It managed to sign up with 150 and in 2011 they have 600-650 advertisers. It will be interesting to see how this grows as the platform matures although Costolo noted that “We’re in no hurry to go make sure [that we jam Twitter up with ads]. It just doesn’t make sense.”