• Can we pretend that Airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars?
• Vicki Chang, do you have something fun planned for the weekend?
• Ordered macho fries and double cheeseburger, but now I feel like tacos. Tacos?
• Is it just me or does Nicolas Cage sound like he’s FREEKING tired of makeing movies? He uses the same monotone voice in every movie DX!
• I am professional to ask and discuss about complicated questions, such as this one : What is a miracle?

I didn’t even have to scroll through dozens of sensible questions to get those – there were literally 4 that I deleted in between to get to those! Not exactly added-value content is it?

I know I’m probably being a bit of a moan-a-lot here, but can’t Facebook concentrate their efforts on trying to make existing elements of the site better, before branching out and trying to reinvent every wheel they can find? I’m not so stupid as to imply that people will leave the site because of this service, because let’s be honest, they’re not. But I’m pretty sure there is going to be a lot of head-scratching going on when it rolls-out in full.

Facebook questions – revolution, or doomed to fail? is a post from: Tamar

As reported in the Telegraph, this makes Twitter the fastest growing search engine at present – a pretty impressive feat for a site that isn’t *actually* a search engine in the main. Considering the guys at Twitter have only in the past few months rolled out any kind of attempt at monetising this functionality, it shows what a powerful weapon they have in their hands, and the sort of money they might hope to make if they ever get to Google-scale monetization.

One thing the Telegraph didn’t pick up on though, is the METHOD of a large number of these searches – indeed, this information isn’t obviously available. The reason I mention it though is that I would imagine a large number of what Twitter is counting as ’searches’ are derived from the trending topics, as opposed to people actually typing in a search query.

Whenever a user clicks on a trending topic, either from the right hand ‘trending topics’ list or from within another user’s tweet, this opens up the Twitter search results. I’d argue that these aren’t actually ’searches’ in the sense that the other search engines classify that, but I suppose it’s all relative.

Regardless of the method of the search, it’s clear that Twitter’s star is still on the rise in a massive way. Whether they can turn this growth in to the goldmine that their older competitors have is another question entirely, but I for one will be watching with eager anticipation.

Twitter now second only to Google in terms of search volumes is a post from: Tamar

If you think I’m being unfair, just type ’sleeping’ in to the Facebook search box, and see how many pages there now are – scroll past the big page like “If sleeping was school I would have straight A’s” and you’ll get to the tens of thousands of these ‘community’ pages that have been created as a result of the move to create a page for every single item listed on Facebook users “Likes” section of their bio…

Herein lies the problem. Facebook claims there are around 30,000 pages containing the term ’sleeping’ in their title, so you can probably imagine just how many of these ‘community’ pages there are out there. One has to assume that at some point Facebook will look to merge some of these pages together, and more importantly merge them with the official brand pages that both brands and users have been creating for over a year now.

Merging official and auto-created (or user-created) community pages sounds good in theory, but it’s actually going to be a logistical nightmare, both for Facebook and for the brands who suddenly find they are having to merge their beautifully created and managed brand page with a community page full of nonsense. Just do a search for “Coca Cola” to see what a nightmare this might be for a brand like that… Where would they even start?!

For Facebook, this merger would be a massive project, but the bigger problem will be the brands and organisations they’re potentially going to upset when this merger happens. Up until now, brands have been able to exercise reasonably strict control over their pages and how they’re run – though admittedly the facility for removing unauthorised pages is pretty flaky at best. But if Coca Cola suddenly find that 500 separate groups have been merged in to their official one, that’s suddenly a whole lot of extra content they’ve got to preside over – and in the case of recent ASA guideline changes, be accountable for…

Community pages seemed like a nice idea in principal – Facebook reps have stated in the past that they see community pages rivalling Wikipedia in the future. But in reality they’ve just created millions (maybe even billions) of pointless, half-empty doorway pages that nobody really wants but somebody will have to take responsibility for. As somebody working for a brand myself, I can tell you now I’m not relishing the day when the big merger takes place…

The trouble with Facebook community pages… is a post from: Tamar

The search journey

I doubt anybody at Google would subscribe this view, but user behaviour definitely seems to be moving away from people using search engines as the start of all their online journeys. Whilst Google have the search engine market seemingly sewn-up, and Microsoft and Google both have significant stakes in the address-bar-based journey start-point, more and more people will start search journeys through sites like Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, or through aggregation services like CoTweet, Hootsuite, Plaxo and many more.

Sites like the BBC and big newspaper sites regularly include search boxes from Google or Microsoft, but as these services develop their social ideal, I’m pretty sure we’ll start seeing more sophisticated services that pull in content from a much more diverse network.

As well as changing the way they start the journey, natural-language processing will inevitably catch-up with what we’ve been hoping it would be in the next few years, meaning not only will content indexing be a lot easier for the search engines, but search queries will become a lot more human-sounding and natural.

This will almost definitely lead to recommendations also becoming more intuitive – Google Mail already makes a reasonable stab at context-related advertising, so REAL natural language processing could lead to some really interesting movements in recommendations based on conversations you’re having and other sites you’re browsing / posting on. There may come a point in the not too distant future when you don’t even NEED to do a search, the results will just come to you.

The evolution of the engines

As Neil demonstrated in his round-up, the search engines have evolved massively since the early days of search – it’s no longer just about ten, textual blue links on a dull white page. As with all progress, this is bound to increase even more in the coming years – with competition from the less-obvious but still powerful search ‘engines’ on Facebook et al, Google will have to evolve more and more in order to keep up.

Whilst add-ons like real-time search results and the Google Labs ’social search’ experiment show signs of Google moving even further in to the social space, it’s inevitable that within the next 12-18 months the search results from Google in particular will become MUCH more ‘real-time’.

Whilst a page full of Twitter and blog-based results might not provide a great result for the research-focused user, ensuring the pages that are being returned have been recently updated (no more dead websites!) and massively ‘current’ will provide a much more useful experience to the user.

Content is king

In the five years that I’ve been working in and around search, we’ve always scoffed a little bit at the mantra ‘content is king’ – mainly because it’s usually trumpeted by people who don’t get great results, or even build links. But the rise of social sites (or should I say take-over?) means that content really IS important to your site – albeit not just onsite content.

The content around your brand is already out there, and more and more it’ll become a factor in how you rank – and we’re not just talking Google of course. Content is essentially your social currency – what’s being said, when and how will have a massive effect on not only your ROI on any activity, but also the influence you hold.

Google have already hinted at how sentiment may be ‘becoming’ a factor in your rankings – the personalised web means that it won’t be long before companies with shocking reputations find their rankings dropping like a stone. After all, Google don’t want to be returning results that are contrary to public opinion, do they? Future iterations of the Google algorithms will doubtless factor in sentiment, volume of ‘noice’, influence and legitimacy – though what they base these criteria on is anybody’s guess…

At the end of the day, whilst we can have a good stab at guessing the future of search, a quick browse through Google for articles on “The future of search” will show you hundreds of wild stabs that fell flat on their faces. If I’ve learnt one thing in my 5+ years in search though, it’s that whatever happens, it’s going to be an exhilarating ride!

Google, Bing and social media bling – taking bets on the content currency exchange is a post from: Tamar

First up is the fairly recent change to Twitter search that demonstrates that it is getting a lot more intelligent – presumably in an effort to ready themselves for a full-on roll-out of their ‘Sponsored Tweet’ functionality. You can see the change quite nicely when you do a search through their search tool – often you will notice that you get results returned that don’t actually feature the keyword you’re looking for. But what you might *not* realise is that the keyword you’ve search for is actually included as part of a shortened URL…

Here’s an example – notice in the top result that the word “Tamar” doesn’t actually appear in the body of the Tweet – but it DOES appear in the shortened URL:

This is a nice little addition to their already-capable search functionality – if only Facebook search worked half as intelligently! The fact that Twitter actually query short-urls to find their destinations is also a good sign for security, paving the way perhaps for Twitter to notify users (as Google does) if the site they are being directed to has any nasties or gremlins on it?

The second change is over at Google, or inside Google’s Webmaster Tools suite to be precise. Up until fairly recently, Google didn’t report any links from Twitter in their “Links to your site” section – presumably indicating that Google didn’t use Twitter links when calculating the rankings of your site. However, anybody who has logged in recently may have noticed that this has changed – again, displayed in the screenshot below (taken from the backlink list of this very blog):

The bad news is, the only links that seem to be getting factored in at this stage are those that are featured in Twitter users’ bio sections – not links coming from actual tweets themselves, or through shortened URLs. So unless you have a way of getting scores of links inside valid Twitter users’ bios, this isn’t going to help you massively at this stage. But what it does show is that Google is taking Twitter more seriously, so it must surely be a good sign for future changes?

Or maybe I’m just eternally optimistic?

Twitter sorting out search, Google loving Twitter… is a post from: Tamar

At about 6pm last night (UK time), anybody logged in to Twitter would have found themselves presented with a shock – the number of people following them had dropped to Zero, as had the number of people they were following. I won’t go in to how this happened (Mashable explain it very well, if you’re interested) but the other curve-ball it threw up was that the glitch was apparently caused by Twitter fixing a problem which was allowing users to FORCE Tweeters to follow them, simply by typing “Accept [user]” in their message box.

News of the bug seemed to spread pretty slowly at first – a few tech blogs picked it up, and a search in Twitter search for “Accept [pick a famous user]” reveals that quite a few people had cottoned on, but it was only when Twitter started trying to fix the issue that it really blew up. Not only did more and more people start trying to use the bug before it was fixed, but the Twitter stream (and trending topics) quickly filled up with people talking about the Zero-follower glitch and what was happening.

Here’s the odd part though – by about 6.15, my Twitter stream was FULL of people talking about the issue – but only a tiny percentage were actually asking about the problem, with the majority of people trumpeting their knowledge of why it was happening and telling their followers to ‘Keep calm and carry on’. The focus was massively in favour of people sharing knowledge, but with very few people actually seeming to REQUEST the knowledge.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that this is an analogy for Twitter overall. I regularly find Twitter to be a very reliable source for information sharing and question-solving. But when big events happen, people seem to switch from conversing and discussing to a sudden desire to prove how knowledgeable they are about the latest news. A similar thing happened while the recent UK leadership debates were going on – whilst being very entertaining, my Twitter feed was FULL of people pushing out their informative/controversial/witty opinions about the debates, with very few actually stopping to LISTEN to what other people were saying.

It seems to me that flash-point moments like these are when Twitter becomes a little bit less useful than it normally is. Maybe it will all even out as the site gains more and more active users – I guess only time will tell.

Have you experienced this yourself? If so, tell us about it in the comments!

Twitter – too much talking, not enough listening? is a post from: Tamar

If you don’t have the time (or the ability – office blocking Spotify?) to read about all the new features, you can watch this cheesy video from Spotify to find out more:

If you have a little more time though (or can’t stand the cheesy nature of the above video…!) here’s a rundown of the new features:

• Starring of tracks – this is pretty common-place in most music applications now, but until this point Spotify hadn’t given users any functionality to mark tracks that they like (other than adding them to playlists). This has now changed with the introduction of star ratings (albeit only a single star!)
• Connecting with Facebook – Spotify now uses Facebook Connect to link itself with your social networking profile, allowing you to import friends, publish stories and share playlists. (NOTE: I gave this feature a go and either nobody I know on Facebook is using Spotify yet, or this isn’t working…!)
• Sharing of tracks – The new ‘inbox’ feature isn’t (as you might expect) a messaging service, but instead a facility to allow you to share tracks with your friends. Quite neat really.
• Import your own music – This is a real doozy, especially if (like me) you frequently find yourself frustrated that a music label has removed your favourite tracks from Spotify. Either by adding files manually, or synching with iTunes, you can now add all of your local music files to Spotify. I’ve not figured out yet whether you can make these songs part of public playlists though…?
• Syncing with mobile devices – Again, I’ve not tried this feature myself yet due to issues with my iPhone and my work PC, but this should allow users to make their own MP3 files available on their mobile Spotify account, which you can play through the Spotify iPhone application and others.

As you can see, Spotify is becoming a lot more ’social’ – and it looks like they’ve got dominance of iTunes in their sights. They undoubtedly already have the weight of a whole load of social ‘influencers’ behind them, but only time will tell if this is enough to take on the mighty Apple…

Spotify moves to become a social music platform is a post from: Tamar

Advertisers will be able to buy ‘promotional tweets’ which will appear at the top of the twitter SEARCH page – and (currently) on that page alone. Here’s how Twitter’s Biz Stone explained the plan on the official Twitter blog:

“We are launching the first phase of our Promoted Tweets platform with a handful of innovative advertising partners that include Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America—with more to come. Promoted Tweets are ordinary Tweets that businesses and organizations want to highlight to a wider group of users.”

He added:

“There is one big difference between a Promoted Tweet and a regular Tweet. Promoted Tweets must meet a higher bar—they must resonate with users. That means if users don’t interact with a Promoted Tweet to allow us to know that the Promoted Tweet is resonating with them, such as replying to it, favoriting it, or Retweeting it, the Promoted Tweet will disappear.”

The official blog included a mock-up of what a promoted tweet will look like, giving the example of a user who has searched for the term ’starbucks’ – no word yet on whether the ad’s appearance will be limited to their own branded keywords, or whether a Starbucks ad might (for instance) appear at the top of a search for “Costa” or even “Coffee”…

Reaction to the news has been as you’d expect – users bemoaning the ‘end of Twitter’ and advertisers rubbing their hands in glee. The announcement has presumably been timed to coincide with the first ever official Twitter developer conference, ‘Chirp‘, which is taking place today – a conference where Twitter have promised to give more details about the roll-out. Only time will tell how users actually react to this – Twitter have promised that whilst they have plans for more wide-scale advertising roll-outs, they’re going to watch closely to see how the first phase is accepted before they do. As usual, only time will tell…

Twitter adds ads, but not as we had expected… is a post from: Tamar

Consolidate smaller photo albums

Now that Facebook have raised the limit for the number of pictures you can fit in a Facebook photo album, you may find yourself wanting to move photos from one album to another – essentially merging smaller albums together. This used to be very simple, as Facebook temporarily instigated a “merge album” tool, but it’s gone again now. So this is a little more time consuming, but still worthwhile if your Photos page is full of “part 1″ and “part 2″ albums.

When you go to one of your existing photo albums, click the “edit photos” tab at the top – once you’re there you will be presented with a little drop-down menu beneath each photo, allowing you to specify the album you’d like to move the photo to. Simply select the new album for all of the photos and click “save changes” at the bottom – then Bob’s your uncle. Easy peasy.

Bag your username – better late than never

If you were on Facebook last summer you will have been given the option to register a ‘vanity URL’ for your profile, as well as any Facebook Pages which you manage. Whilst it isn’t particularly obvious, this option is still available today – and very useful if you missed the boat at the time, or have started a new page since then. All you have to do is visit the following URL, which allows you to select usernames for both your personal page and any brand pages:

http://www.facebook.com/username/

Import your status updates from Twitter

If you’re anything like me, you might be using other social networks as well as Facebook by now – pretty much all of these sites and services will give you the facility to import your status updates and the like in to Facebook, though it’s not always simple. Whilst Facebook make it very easy for you to PUSH your updates to other networks (status updates from Facebook pages to Twitter, for instance) it’s never quite as simple the other way round. But there are ways and means – the example I’ll give you here is Twitter, but search around and you’ll find solutions for other sites too.

The best way to import your Twitter updates to Facebook is to use an application like Selective Tweets. With Selective Tweets, all you need to do is tell the app your Twitter username, and add the hashtag ” #fb ” to the end of the tweets that you want to be imported. Then,  every few hours the application will trawl your Twitter feed and import the updates you tell it to. It’s as simple as that.

Remove app updates from your feed

This is one of the tips that I included in my original post, but also something I get asked a LOT when I’m on Facebook. The basic method is the same, though the place you find it is slightly different. If you get sick of seeing updates from the applications that your friends are using/playing, but don’t want to go to the extreme of removing that person from your feed, all you need to do is click on the little cross next to one of those updates, which will then bring up an option to remove either a) all updates from that friend, or b) all updates from that particular app. It’s as simple as that – click it once, and you’ll never see any more updates from that app on any of your feeds…

Use the Facebook iPhone app for almost everything

The methods of updating your Facebook profile on the move have come on leaps-and-bounds since the last blog I wrote, with the crown-jewel in Facebook’s mobile crown being it’s iPhone application. You can do virtually everything you can on the normal Facebook site, barring applications and games. One of my favourite elements of it is the ability to administer your Facebook Brand pages straight from the app – allowing you to post photos, statuses, discussions and more, right from the comfort of your armchair.

Update your status via e-mail.

Hopefully most mobile users will know that you can upload photos straight from an e-mail – what you may not know is that you can also use the e-mail address you were given for plain status updates as well. And not just of your profile either – you can even have a seperate e-mail address set up for your brand pages too. According to the Facebook marketing bumf, that’s what Eva Longoria uses. And if it’s good enough for a Desperate Housewife…!

You can set up the e-mail functionality, as well as getting the e-mail address to use at Facebook’s “Mobile” page – just click here, or on the little “mobile” right at the bottom of any page on Facebook. If you want to do the same for a Page, simply click “edit page” under the main image and then go to the “mobile” box on that page – just like the one below:

Be choosy who you get chatty with

In the last list I told you how to set up lists of different pages. These lists can be great for organising your friends, managing who you see in your feed, perfecting your privacy options and even choosing who sees your status updates. One trick you might not have spotted though is the ability to block certain lists from seeing when you’re online in Facebook chat.

I personally turned Facebook chat off most of the time before I discovered this – with hundreds of friends seeing you online, you just know that the person who will want to chat is the last person you really want to talk to. But it’s now very easy to selectively appear offline to certain groups. Just click the little slider-looking icon next to each friend list when you expand the chat box – see right for details:

So there we have it – hopefully you might find a few of those useful. I’ll try to not leave it quite so long before I update the list again – I’m pretty sure Facebook won’t slow down their updates either!

7 more Facebook tips you may not know is a post from: Tamar

At the start of 2010, Tamar’s iPhone research & development team were tasked with creating a consumer facing application that challenges our conceptions of what we thought possible with an iPhone. What they have come up with looks sure to set the world of iPhone apps by storm…

Presenting the iHOB

Ideal for those who enjoy camping or for keeping drinks hot at your desk.

The revolutionary 15 ring system heats up in mere seconds to be warm enough to heat a can of baked beans or soup in 15 minutes and once turned off will cool down in 15 seconds.

In addition, a further ‘warm not hot’ setting can be used just like a coaster for keeping a beverage hot at your desk. And the applications don’t stop there – why not stick the iHOB in your pocket on a cold winters day, or stick it inside the (soon the be available) special ‘iHOB Glove’ to keep your mits toasty-warm while you’re out for a jog? The possibilities are simply endless!

The iHOB will be available from the Apple Store on 15th April and will be £2.99. To find out more information, click here…

Tamar announce the ‘iHOB’ – latest innovation in iPhone app technology is a post from: Tamar