why not Microsoft (Part 2 of many)

Round 2 of this series. I'm about to gut this video and turn it inside out. Kids, cover your eyes, this will get ugly.

• Delegation of mail and calendar. Once upon a time, in a world when dinosaurs roamed freely on this Earth there was a need to do this. (Okay, it wasn't that long ago, but you get the point). However today, I don't think this is needed anymore. You get an e-mail invite, and you can quickly accept or reject it, find out if it conflicts with other meetings, etc. The need to delegate your mail and calendar is now obsolete. There is an exception to every thing, and some executives may still have a need for this, but come on, how many of these executives are there out there? This point is moot at best.
  
• Folders or labels. That is the question. Yes you can't create folders because the whole concept of organizing mail in folders is from that 'dinosaur era' I mentioned above. The problem with folders, is its one-to-one. How do I file an e-mail as "High priority, I'll lose my job if I don't get this sorted out ASAP" and "this is for project X". Then after completing this task, I want to tag it with my "followup" tag so that I remember to check in a month later. I don't want to lose the other tags. I haven't found a way. Again, once upon a time, when you got physical mail you had to file it somewhere, you can only file it once. E-mail is different, and if you haven't figured that one out yet, then yes you should get an assistant.
• Full corporate directory, and contact delegation. Ok you lost me here. There is an address book. I can search for people in it. Thats all most of us need.
  
• Folks, its called GMail, and not GRemoteWipePhone. If that is available via Outlook, then it shouldn't. Remember point #3 from the first part? A costly excess of tools for people who don't use them.
• Can't Manage Conference Rooms. These guys must be looking at the regular, public gmail and not the corporate google apps. You can manage conference rooms, and schedules. AND double booking still happens on Outlook. Don't blame the tools.
• Sure, lets say you do need to install all this stuff to hookup Outlook with GMail. Sounds like FUD to me, but for the sake of argument I will accept this. Here, the problem is really Outlook. The world is moving to web based applications, keep up. You only need a browser if you were using it via the web interface, which by the way does not contain a costly excess of tools for people that don't use them. On the other hand, if you are obsessed with Outlook or absolutely need it - for whatever reason - , then perhaps Google Apps and Gmail is not for you.

Judge for yourself.

Why not Microsoft (Part 1 of many)

I just saw this Microsoft channel on Youtube comparing Microsoft solutions with Google's. I couldn't resist writing this up.

1. If I need to mix different features in a blender then its not easy to manage. In fact it could very well turn out messy.
2. "Documents zip across back and forth without a hitch". Okay, but what usually happens when you have "documents zipping back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth, and..." Think turning the blender on without closing the lid.
   I'm also not sure why the diagram above shows a "phone" between a "PC" and a "browser"? Are you seriously telling me to e-mail my 40MB powerpoint slide on dialup? back and forth..back and forth..back and forth?
3. "A costly excess of tools for people who don't use them" I just don't understand how the fool who approved this could have done so while keeping a straight face? Isn't MS Word and Outlook bloated beyond belief with tools that most people don't use?

Here's the video. Judge for yourself.

I would pay for personalized news delivered to my [insert gadget name here]

After reading a post by Kevin Kelleher on Gigaom titled "Does Google Event Understand What News Is" and Schmidt's opinion on the WSJ this week titled "How Google Can Help Newspapers" I came up with some comments on this.

I agree that Google is forcing a new business model down old medias' throats (such as the newspaper), and I agree with Kevin's comment that Murdoch is merely testing how much he can get away with in this 'new world'. However, Google did cave in and closed a 'loophole' in this free access to paid content on News Corp.
But I do differ on the point about Schmidt's fantasy '..suggests ignorance of what news actually is...'.

Schmidt's 'fantasy' is 3 fold:

Know who I am

Personalization starts with this. For any recommendation based service one must know who you are delivering this recommendation to, by definition a recommendation is personalized or customized.
Knowing "who I am" is not limited to knowing my name, or date of birth for example. It can include many other things that span where I was born, my current and past fields of work, where I went on vacation, my blog, my twitter, etc. Odds are "privacy" comes to your mind right now, but if you are a member of any online network you are already sharing more about yourself today, than you ever did in any other form in the past. Think about your Twitter account, Facebook profile, Amazon, Flickr, eBay, MySpace, Hi5, blog, RSS feeds you subscribe to, etc. etc. Why not put "your lack of privacy" to a good use? such as receiving better news.

Know what I like

You buy a newspaper today and you get a dozen different sections, all of which you have technically paid for but in reality you might not read them all. You get the main paper, the financial pages, sports, entertainment, comics, health/living.
I never read anything past the main page of the financial times, I never read the health/living pages, I never read non-football (or soccer as it is called in this part of the world) news - why should I pay for them? I rarely buy a newspaper, I read it online, why should the online version be modeled exactly like the paper version.

Kevin claims this will lead to tunnel vision, but on the other end of the spectrum I don't have time to digest 60 pages of news. I do see his point though, just because news about the Middle East is more often bad news than good, doesn't mean this fantasy gadget would block it from me. By knowing who I am personalizing my news would mean that news about the Middle East would bubble to the top of my reading list - maybe not your reading list.

I would also argue that the current model results in tunnel vision. Looking at the Toronto Start page today I see news about PM Harper's stop in China, Lessons of the Montreal Massacre, Michael Bryant, Pakistan troop surge, Russian nightclub, GM shakeup, violence and racial slurs in kid's hockey, etc.
Seems like tunnel vision to me. What I see is completely controller by the paper's editors, not me.

The only thing I clicked on that front page was the Montreal Massacre link, why? because I learned of it at McMaster were I studied.

Its not a lack of creativity, its a lack of courage and the ability to know when a business model has passed its final stretch. It was a good run. Move on.

Know what I have read

This one is the most important step, not because it decides what not to show me again, but vice versa. Knowing what I have read, helps identify what follow up stories I need to see. By reading about the real estate fiasco in Dubai the past few weeks, I would like to see what happens next.

Google can help newspapers

Yes, Google wants to do that, not because it wants to help them, but because it wants to shape them into a business that it can benefit more from. Asking them to share their 'treasure trove' i.e. access to users' data - for free - is absurd. But by investing in AdSense, the newspapers can gain access to this treasure. Why should Google give 'unrestricted access to the data of its users'? , they worked hard to get that, and provided a lot of free services to gain access to that treasured currency.

Murdoch Fantasies

Murdoch is a business mastermind, but I think he got this all upside down. People don't pay for content, and whether its on Google or on Bing I will get a link from Twitter that will point me to a 3rd party site that aggregates this news or some other way that bypasses the wall he is erecting around his content.
Can you really believe you don't need Google?
Ten years ago people paid for online content, only because it was a new way to deliver newspapers i.e. you didn't have to wait for it to be delivered, or end up with a stack of papers to throw out next to the shoe rack. People will pay for how content is delivered, but unfortunately delivering it via a browser is a decade old model. Today there are many other forms that people would pay for such as on your phone or Kindle. Its the same content though, and some might not want to pay for it. However, personalized news is yet another form, and personalized form delivered to your favorite portable gadget is yet another. Now that is something I would subscribe for or watch ads to read.

On Guaranteed SEO Results: Have I got a deal for you

A search for "guaranteed SEO" on Google returns about 5,300,000 results. On the first page alone 6/10 results mention the word "Google". So this begs the question, is there such a thing as "guaranteed SEO"? Let's find out.

According to Matt Cutts Google ranks pages according to relevance and reputation. Why should you believe him? well because he is the head of the Google Webspam team. When it comes to search; Google Search, Matt Cutts is the man to listen to. So listen to him.

Reason 1: You can't become relevant over night

Being relevant is something you acquire over time. Measuring relevancy is something that gets tweaked over time. So by nature Google's ranking algorithms will and must change over time to maintain relevant rankings and improve their measure of relevancy. So how can you, you or you guarantee relevancy? I can promise you the sun will rise from the east tomorrow (if it didn't then SEO is the last thing on anybody's mind), but can anybody promise you a million dollars tomorrow? Sure someone can; somebody very generous and with a million dollars to give away. For SEO that generous billionaire would be Google, but then if they do, can they remain relevant? You get my point.

Reason 2: You can't become reputable the next day

Building any reputation takes time; even a bad reputation. Your website's reputation is critical for ranking on the SERPs. The more PageRank the higher you rank. You get more PageRank by getting inbound links from others with high PageRank. Quality over quantity. 1 million times zero is still zero.

Reason 3: Because Matt Cutts said so

According to him, the best SEO strategy is adaptive SEO. Just like any optimization algorithm, you make gradual improvements and take a measurement against the objective function. Rinse and repeat, but don't get overly obsessed with it; quit when you hit the point of diminishing returns, then try something else. 

This process obviously takes time and research. But thanks to Google they give you all the tools and information you need to rank high on the SERPs.

For my blog I follow three simple rules:

1. When I write about something, I put myself in the shoes of someone looking for the information I am about to write on. I make a list of these keywords and naturally include them in my post.
2. Every month I use Wordle.net to generate a tag cloud of my blog. This gives me a good idea about the keyword distribution and whether I have enough keywords on the topics I would like to rank high on.
3. I make sure each of my posts' URLs contain the main keywords. This step is crucial.

With these three steps, I rank pretty well on some topics:

"photoshop vector cartoons"

"liferay seo best practices"

"liferay virtual hosting"

Now, have I got a DEAL for you... : )

Real time, social, microblogging and context aware searching

A couple of days ago Google's Eric Schmidt reportedly said that Google is looking into ways of intergrating microblogging within their search. 'Microblogging' is really code name for Twitter and this news is rather interesting after the rumors earlier this week about Apple, Microsoft and Google were eyeing Twitter - Twitter's co-founder Biz Stone was on the The View on Wednesday to announce that Twitter is not for sale.

What could real-time microblogging search do for Google?

From a user experience point of view, the current search does not really feel real-time mainly because the results don't update as they do on Twitter Search. Real-time search would also make the Google search engine more aware of the context of the search query and hence be able to deliver context-aware advertisements.

Yet micro-blogging introduces an interesting problem that Google would need to solve first. Conversations on twitter are threaded and posts can come down to a short

user2: @user1 yes its amazing

which means context is spread across all the conversation's threads. There are several applications online that give you access to a threaded view of Twitter - something that Twitter does not have but it should. Any real-time microblogging search needs to support threads to be able to deliver more relevant content. By nature search queries are really questions which works well because conversations usually start with questions or an opinion. When I search 'mac mini' on a real-time search I'm not very interested in Apple's Mac Mini product page, I am more interested in knowing what others are saying about it right now. So If my hypothetical Twitter post above was in response to:

user1: do you like your new mac mini?

searching for 'mac mini' should ideally be able to show that threaded conversation even though the words 'mac mini' are not present in user2's response.

Real time search and Search Engine Optimization

Not so long ago - when people read physical news papers instead of online news - if someone wanted to know what has happened in the past 24 hours they would buy a newspaper. The news paper is similar to real-time search, it will inform you of new events around you and in the world. Also not so long ago - when people went to the library to get access to newspaper archives instead of online archives - if someone wanted to learn about an event that happened 10 years ago they would visit the local library and pull out archived newspapers that mention that event. Although current search engines can index pages very quickly, it still feels like archived news - in fact search engine result pages are really archived news.

In a real time search engine pages need to be ranked a little differently that how they get ranked right now and hence SEO practices need to change to accommodate these changes. Because conversations on a microblog like Twitter are threaded user2's response 'yes its amazing' would not rank at all on a search for 'mac mini' although that response is probably what the user wanted to see i.e. mac mini reviews. Maybe another user responded:

user3: @user1 its great, i installed tweetie, evernote and am in love with front row

That too should show up on a real time search since it is showing different applications one can get on a Mac. Threaded conversations on microblogs should be looked at in the same manner comments are viewed at the bottom of a blog post - except these comments are not nicely grouped together with the original post on Twitter. 

This introduces new problems, since conversations can have nested threads:

user4: @user3 yup tweetie is the best Twitter application and front row is just too sexy

and then loops:

user4: @user1 I use my mini as a media server at home

Real time search is Social Search

Information is being added to the Internet today at a much faster rate than before the Social Networks age.  A lot of this content is being added by individuals all over the world on dozens of social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Blogger, Youtube, etc. In my opinion this content is the most useful to be presented in a real time search engine. Real time news can still be delivered through the participation of news organizations in social networks - as they do today. 

Real time search would also allow the search engines to deliver truly personalized content and targeted advertisements.  Google recently allowed users to create Google profiles and link it to your online identities across the many social networks. Search today is not aware of "where you are right now" so how can it truly direct you to where you want to go? Consider the Google search page as a map, and for Google to be able to deliver relevant answers to you, it needs to know your "location". I don't mean location as in a physical location with a latitude and longitude, I in fact mean context but for the sake of the argument I am using "location". So imagine the Google search page is a map and you are looking for "mac mini". Google goes out and gets you the most relevant results according to Google for that search term and plots it on the "map" i.e. the search engine results page. If your search term is broad, then your "map" will just contain "locations" all over the place - i.e. Google is unaware of your search context and depends on you to point it to the right context. With real time search and Google profiles, Google can make an educated guess about that context i.e. Google is able to tell what your current "location" is. Real time search on Google can now become a "GPS" and route you to the most relevant "locations" to you. By being able to search your threaded conversations on Twitter for example about the "mac mini" Google can customize the real time results page to contain content that you have discussed with others. Now my search for "mac mini" would produce results on "tweetie", "evernote", "front row", "media server" and "mac mini" - all keywords in the threaded conversation above. 

Now even the advertisements on that page can be personalized instead of the ones I see now including "mac mini store" and "mac sale". These ads are not relevant to me since I already have one - so there is absolutely no compelling reason for me to click these ads. But on the other hand if the advertisement showed "evernote sale 50% off pro account today only", first I would be blown away that AdSense showed that to me, and second I am more likely to click it because  I have the free version of Evernote.

Thinking Out Loud: Content Personalization - Context Aware Ads and the Social Web

In continuation from the first Thinking Out Loud post titled "Content Personalization - Tell Me Who Your Friends Are" the second - yet more important - use of this type of personalized content is targeted advertisement. Google has owned this area with their AdSense and AdWords products to deliver 'personalized' advertisements to you. Delivering ads based on content and context are very precise methods to target advertisements, but can it be done better? and where can the Social Web have a role?

I'm logged in to my GMail right now reading a message from Rogers regarding my TV cable service and guess what? All the ads on the right are about TV, whether it is watching it online for free, switching to another cable company or getting satellite TV. Those are very precise advertisements, but they are just guesses based on the text around it. If I just signed up for Rogers last week, odds are I am not looking to switch my provider today - what a waste of precious ad space. Is there a better way to target ads?

Here is another example that will better illustrate the business case for this type of advertisement. I just bought a Mac Mini this week and I just Googled "Mac Mini". Based on my  search criteria, the content present on the page and some complex weighting algorithm the ads Google will serve up will be related to purchasing a Mac Mini or a computer in general, but I already bought one  - again very precise but what a waste of ad space.

One might say "but Nael, your search term was vague, Google did the best it can". Unfortunately the average user does not know how to build a proper search engine query to reach to the results they are looking for with as a little searching as possible. The first thing that will come to mind is to search the product name, and then if that did not give them what they want they'll add another term and so on until eventually they will find what they need or they give up and try later.

Now imagine you can create a profile on these search engines that deliver these targeted advertisements, not just a profile with the usual information on it; i.e. name, location, picture, interests, etc. but one you can point to the different windows into your online identity; blog, Twitter, Picasa Web, and LinkedIn. Now the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

In this manner, advertisements can become even more personalized - not just by the search terms you provide - but by using the aggregate of all the content you freely publicize on the social web.

So what is very interesting is that it seems Google picked up the ball in this field by allowing you to create your own Google Profile like the one I just created. What is this for I wonder? It is not so hard to imagine that it can be used for the next generation of personalized advertisements, or it can also be Google's Facebook killer, either way we can agree on at least one thing, there is no better place to have such a profile page than on Google.

Recursive Search in Google Maps - Why is it interesting?

Apparently this has been out for some time now, but I am able to run recursive searches on Google Maps. I have used the "What is nearby" searches, but I was unaware I can do this from the search field.

What is a typical search on Google Maps?

Obviously the most common would be something like "2000 Main St. Hamilton, ON"

Then there is a slightly more interesting search query...

something like "Coffee in Toronto" is something typical to have on a location map

View Larger Map

Finally, there is the ultimate - so far - location query; the recursive query

for example "Coffee near highway in Toronto"

View Larger Map

I like it, I like it a lot actually. 

So how about we use some nested recursion?

"Tim Horton's near airport and Starbucks"

View Larger Map

Now this is getting really interesting, you can now see the bunch of points around Pearson and another bunch around the Island and some orphaned point by Scarborough. This is beyond finding directions, one could use this for some analysis on where specific brands focus their stores, or even which regions in a city different brands clash ex. Tim Horton and Starbucks. Actually it would be useful if Google Maps colored each marker differently in the above recursive search, ex. red vs. blue. This way I can actually see where Tim Horton and Starbucks are throwing punches at each other.

Let me just check one of these locations, and make sure there is actually a Starbucks near the Timmies - just to make sure Google Maps is not pulling my leg here.

I picked that point marked "A" on the very left, and searched nearby locations...

View Larger Map

and sure enough that Tim Horton is near a Starbucks and the airport. You can even click the markers to view the info windows and verify this yourself.

So next time you use Google Maps remember you can do more than just a location search.

Track Swine Flu On Google Maps

Google Henry Niman has published a Google Maps application to track the recent Swine Flu outbreak around the World. Google Google Maps platform is a great way to quickly publish applications regarding current events.

For a Swine Flu tracking application I would like to see someone do any of the following:

• add a timeline and be able to view how the disease spread, just like the Google News Timeline launched at Google Labs
• notification via e-mail or twitter if there was a case reported around your location
• be able to compare the patterns of this outbreak with that of SARS or some other disease

Comment if you know of any application that does any of the above.

The first McMaster website? possibly

I just came across the internet archive - WayBack Machine. Always wondered how the first websites for different companies and organizations looked like.

This is the first McMaster site for everybody I know who studied there, or is still there:


The first Google.com site. What is really interesting, is that Google remained mainly consistent and they maintained the simplistic approach from the start.

The first Yahoo! website. Again interesting, Yahoo! did not believe in simplistic designs from day one. In fact their site just got even more complicated over the past 13 years.

And finally, who remembers the first Etisalat website?

So much can change in 10 years, who knows what the world will be like in another 10.

Why is Yahoo bigger than Google in Japan?

Found this post on mashable.com about Yahoo being bigger than Google in Japan - when it comes to search. Why?

Stan Schroeder attributes this to things being different in Japan; for example the iPhone is struggling for market share there. Japan is way ahead of the rest in the world in technology, and it looks like that the iPhone is well behind in features compared to local phones. Japanese phones are built in with QR readers, fingerprint readers, watch TV, higher resolution cameras, conference call features and IC chips to charge for purchases, ex. transit tickets!

So why is Yahoo! bigger than Google there? I look at the Yahoo! and Google sites, and Google's simplistic approach is definitely more effective in my opinion. You visit google.com and you know what Google does - Search. On the other hand a visit to yahoo.com is overwhelming. This is true in the case of the Japanese version of both sites as well:
http://www.yahoo.co.jp/
http://www.google.co.jp/

So yes, things are different in Japan, but I am curious to know what is different that makes Yahoo! more popular than Google. Is this tied somehow to the local super-phones? and perhaps that is why on the Japanese Google site there are links to mail, youtube, news and maps at the top and under the search unlike the .com site where they are only present at the top.

Google your computer

Since I formatted my computer last week I had to reinstall a lot of the software I initially had. I was downloading Google Earth since I like just playing around with it once in a while, and I came across Google Desktop. It brings Google search to your desktop and allows you to search for files on your machine very quickly and efficiently. It has several nice features since you can add several gadgets suchs as weather, news, etc. I took them all off since itll probably just slow down my computer, plus I dont need all these things all the time.

By default the Google Desktops bar will appear on the right of the screen, but it took too much space so I just moved it down to the bottom in the taskbar and then made it more compact by removing all the other unecessary features like the weather.



I also installed a neat virtual desktop called MSVDM and thats what you see in that image next to Google Desktop. This gives you 4 virtual desktops to organize your work on. I am a fan of multiple desktops and alway use it on my Apple laptop and it just makes working on several things less chaotic. For example on one desktop you can have your favorite email program open, and on the next desktop your assignment work, while on the third you have some reference website for your assignment. Switch between desktops by clicking on the desktop number and everything assigned to that desktop will appear while the rest is minimized. That is why it is called virtual, as its really not 4 desktops, but it just behaves as if there were 4.