ambient

On busy weeks, at best, I usually post once or twice on this blog so Google doesn’t index me very often. Today, however, I figured a way to get indexed within minutes: use Twitter.

Google indexes the hell out of Twitter - new posts appear almost instantaneously in Google’s indexes. Most often, when you create links in your Twitter posts, it’s best to use TinyURL to make them shorter. Google’s crawler follows these redirects so anytime you post a new blog entry and create a link to it in Twitter, Google will pick it up within minutes.

This happened this morning to my previous post about Facebook-hachibu. A Google search for the term revealed that it had been picked up within minutes. So, maybe Twitter is the new sitemap ping.

TechMeme, of course, is abuzz with discussion about Amazon’s new SimpleDB. Don’t know if this is a huge announcement in its own right, but it definitely demonstrates Amazon’s commitment to taking distribution, its true business objective, to the next logical, though not obvious, step.

On a side note: Business Week has a good write-up of Google 101, the company’s efforts to teach web-scale computing to the next generation of computer scientists. Makes me wish I was still a college student, in Seattle. (Go public schools!)

And finally, a gestalt moment… I’m reading a book by German Theologian Ulrich Duchrow (whom I had the pleasure to meet in San Diego) called Property for People, Not for Profit: Alternatives to the Global Tyranny of Capital. There is this line on page 36 in regards to Hobbe’s analysis of power and society:

“Then Hobbes distinguishes natural power, such as special physical and mental abilities, and instrumental power, i.e. tools such as riches, reputation and good friends, with which one can win more power. From this he concludes ‘that the capacity of every man to get what he wants is opposed by the capacity of every other man’. In the struggle that results, power means finally the ability to command the services of other people.

Thus a power market develops, in which the power of a human being is regarded as a commodity: ‘The value, or worth of a man, is as of all other things, his price: that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power: and therefore is not absolute; but a thing dependant on the need and judgement of another’…”

So, I read that and realized: hey, I know that. It’s called cloud computing. And even a little MapReduce is thrown in there. We just did it with humans first. We call it society.

The new Facebook Ads network presents some new opportunities for marketers. Whether those opportunities translate into any real value for consumers / Facebook users remains to be seen.

I wanted to understand how it compares to PPC ad networks from the likes of Google, Yahoo, and MSN, so I created a small text ad for Boompaste. It was denied. So I created a new one.

The first, disapproved ad said “Meta is Betta. Get all your news in one place.”

I think Facebook rejected it because you have to use the title of your company, product, or service in the ad title and body. Annoying, but whatever. I guess they are shooting for high quality ads, which is good for users.

My second ad reads “Boompaste: Meta is Betta. Get all your news in one place. Boompaste aggregates the most popular stories on the web.”

It was approved, for two reasons, I believe:

1. I targeted 16-40 year olds the first time. This triggers additional editorial review. The second time I targeted 18-40 year olds and it went live almost immediately.
2. I used the name of the offering in the title, as mentioned above.

So the ad is live, and within 10 minutes I had about 196 impressions and 1 click (CTR of 0.51%). Gotta love PPC.

I’ll post more results later. So far, however, I like the experience. It’s clean and well done, if still immature.

In order for Facebook to really compete, marketers are going to need:

• Data exports: there is currently no way to export campaign / performance data from Facebook. It would be even better if this was available via API, depending on the delivery options for reports. If you could schedule email delivery of reports, that would be fine.
• Some sort of transparency. This is a critical area where I believe Facebook is lacking, and it’s tricky because it’s related to privacy. When you buy ads on search or even content networks, you can easily see it live. For example, if you bid high enough on “laptop,” you can query Google, etc. for that keyword and see your ad running in its live environment. You can also view competitors and their ad copy. More sophisticated marketers automate this process.
• Automated ad placement - Facebook needs to understand that marketers with large budgets work hard to create consistent campaigns across a variety of networks. Nobody wants to manually create thousands of ads on Facebook when you can automate that entire process on Google. Facebook does offer a valuable enough audience to target it as a network regardless, but velocity will suffer in comparison to other networks.

I’ll add more later. You may want to read Fred Wilson’s blog - he is conducting a similar experiment.