Google gets you talking

I've been a long-term fan of Jaiku, the microblogging platform which a couple of days ago announced that it has been bought by Google - a move that will certainly un-nerve Jaiku's main rival Twitter.

The terms of the deal are still under wraps, but I'm sure founders Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen will have done pretty well out the service that they founded back in February 2006.

Google is still keeping quite about what it's plans for Jaiku are. Tony Hsieh, Google Product Manager, said in a recent announcement...

We plan to use the ideas and technology behind Jaiku to make compelling and useful products. Although we don't have definite plans to announce at this time, we're excited about helping drive the next round of developments in web and mobile technology.

At the moment, new signups to Jaiku are on hold - no doubt to allow for smooth transition of the service to Googleland. Existing users are still free to use the service.



Interesting that Google has added to their acquisitions by opting to buy Jaiku and not Twitter, since the latter service, while similar, has a larger user base. For me, Jaiku's ability to integrate multiple RSS feeds into its service has always been a plus over Twitter. Together with it's superior mobile features.

The mobile space is something that Google is making significant inroads into - with rumours of the Gphone abounding plus its recent acquisition of the mobile social networking service Zingku.

Where ever there are vast numbers of people, Google wants to dominate as these recent moves show. And you can be sure monetisation of the mobile channel is at the forefront of the giant's mind.

Do you think Google's future dominance of the mobile channel is a good thing?

Google "launches" (shhh) behavioral targeting...or not, as the case may be

Not if you ask Google, that is, since it is trying to distance itself from the term behavioral targeting. But what they are doing amounts to something not a million miles from it though...stitching together different search queries to produce search results that become increasingly focussed, based on the combined terms used in the different queries.

Try searching for Paris and then hotel. You'll notice that on the second search, the ads are for hotels in Paris.

As Enquiro reports, the launch of this new functionality was kept low key. There were a couple of articles written about it on ClickZ and SearchEngineLand.

Is this behavioral targeting? Sounds to me like it is. But as Reuters reported, Susan Wojcicki, Google vice president of product management for advertising is distancing Google from this term. Reuters quote her saying:

"That is not something that we have participated in, for a variety of reasons," Wojcicki told reporters at a briefing at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California.

"We believe that task-based information at the time (of a user's search) is the most relevant information to what they are looking at," she said. "We always want to be very careful about what information would or would not be used."

Although on the face of it, this is a useful technology, I'm sure there are many people out there who will become even more uneasy about their privacy and just how much the mighty Google knows about them.

It's good to link to LZZR.com

I've just been reading the lzzr.com seo blog with interest. His thoughts on backlinking are worth a read and turn classic site-promotion thinking on its head a bit. Rather than (hmmm...perhaps as well as it better) promoting your own site to gain search equity, promote sites that already link to you. Build their importance and thereby your own by the fact that (more important) sites are already linking to you. Give them some link love and the love will be rewarded.

Of course, you can see both your own visibility in search using the site: operator (like this) and how many sites link to you using the link: operator (like this). By using the latter, you're effectively creating the perfect 3-way link structure which is known to be better than utilising link farms (which of course suck).

But search engines don't generally index their own SERPs (although Netscape results do get into Google SERPs), so LZZR suggests building an intermediate feed of results pages (such as that from Google Blogsearch) that will then itself get included in results.

So in short: add links to feeds of searches that return sites that link to you where ever you can...and watch the love flow in. LZZR suggests places like Squidoo which allows you to publish feeds directly on your lens.

I'll be watching the love with interest and will report back here on this blog.