Scott Rafer's Blog

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number of tweets posted on Seesmic Web

(via Loic Le Meur Blog: Twitter.com traffic down? Seesmic Web is +30%/month)

Seesmic Rocks Again With New Facebook Pages Update (mwd.com)
Seesmic Team Made Seesmic Web Improvements (mwd.com)

Posted 22 November 2009 at 13h03 | Comments

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reblogged from: tedr*tumblr

Image by B G via Flickr

tedr:

mikehudack:

kevin:

I just learned this about 90 seconds ago and it’s already changed my life.

Wow. That’s awesome. Thank you, Kevin.

So good for apps like Mail, Preview, Word that don’t have tabs. Thx!

Rafer sez:
Sounds good for the window that the Tumblr bookmark brings up too.

Posted 13 November 2009 at 10h02 | 227 notes and Comments

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"In Google we have a company that believes “Don’t be evil” is sufficient a promise for their users to trust their intentions, yet it is a company that have never articulated what they think is evil and what is not (Google.cn, anyone?)."

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Image by davemc500hats via Flickr

THINK / Musings» Blog Archive » lines in the sand …

Rafer sez:
To your main point, I agree that the government anti-trust actions are dubious from several points of view. And, the only way to win is to use some version of your six principles to build a great company that builds on G’s increasing vulnerabilities. However, I’m more than happy to see my tax dollars hamstring the competition and make my job easier. I hope the DOJ sues them six ways to Sunday, and the sooner the better.

I’m specifically open to Google declining by any means necessary due to your quote above. It is the nature of judgmental, wannabe totalitarians to have a slippery code of conduct. They are particularly likely to apply higher standards to weaker third parties than they do themselves. It’s a particularly American problem to confuse morals and ethics in this way. The results are predictable.

Anything Google does is by definition not-evil. Google’s definition of other peoples’ evil changes so often that they’d need to use Twitter to keep us all up to date.

That’s why I’d rather deal with Facebook. They make no bones about being Out for #1. Their motives and future plans are transparent for anyone who cares to pay attention. They hate to say “no” directly about features they don’t want to ship, but hopefully that’s just organizational immaturity.

1 November 2009 at 20h43

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"Taken together, search engines made almost 98% of all referrals, while social networking sites made up just 0.55%. Top Referring Website Categories Worldwide, September 2009 (thousands and % share) Twitter in particular—despite the hype—was low on referrals, and falling. In July, Twitter was No. 24 on Chitika’s list of top referrers, with 0.05%. By September, it had moved down to 44th place, with just a 0.02% share."

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Image via Wikipedia

Loyal Visitors but Small Share from Social Sites - eMarketer

Rafer sez:
Would all you people claiming that Twitter’s traffic and referrals are flat or down please at least admit that you can’t _at all_ measure their API usage or referrals from the huge majority of twitter clients, URL shorteners, etc.?

23 October 2009 at 8h03

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reblogged from: tedr*tumblr

One parting thought for the evening

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tedr:

giantrobotlasers:

I’m about to hit the hay, but just had a thought.

There are more people actively playing Farmville on Facebook than are on Twitter.

That blows my mind, for a few reasons. The $1B valuation / uber hype around twitter is one part of it. But coming from the other direction, that so many people would try out something so frivolous and un-fun as farmville is really quite amazing.

I get the same emotions when I look at trending topics on twitter. People get really excited about them. I think they are pop tripe. On the face of it, Twitter made a huge error highlighting them so much. The trending topics are doomed to be uninteresting to most people. Take a recent, sad example like #lightskin.

But I know I’m wrong. Most people want to see what most people appear to want to see. That thought is such a downer for me.

Rafer sez:
I disagree. The median of what people want to see is a downer, but it’s not the median that counts. The #2 trend for today is the Red Cross and the work they are doing for the victims of the typhoon in the Philippines. That’s a completely unmediated generosity of spirit, attention, and action that we could never be sure really existed in an MSM world.

28 September 2009 at 10h30

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"Facebook has 300 million users. FriendFeed and Twitter do not."

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Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!

@scobleizer 1M US uniques vs. 23M US uniques, in Twitter’s favor. That might be worth pointing out.

Facebook acquires FriendFeed (downloadsquad.com)
Facebook buys FriendFeed (thenextweb.com)

10 August 2009 at 16h14

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reblogged from: Marco.org

» Anybody know the Tr.im URL shortener people?

marco:

… all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009. Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.

We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed. No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount. There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and we just can’t justify further devleopment since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner. There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.

There are two stories here: how sad it is that this type of tool, despite being extraordinarily cheap and easy to operate, isn’t worth running for one of its most successful players, and the inherent danger that this shows in relying on shortened URLs for anything other than temporary, disposable use.

Rafer sez:
Anyone know the tr.im people? Let’s use this situation to start fixing the problems with the URL shortener world. Per my comment on Schachter’s blog:

@joshu

A possible solution; one i pitched to the bitly guys. It’s more passable than perfect, but I think it meets your criteria as long as the shortURL vendors use 301 redirects.
1. public publishing of all shortURL|baseURL pairs
2. release of server side JS (and/or an apache plug-in, or …) that subscribes to the shortURL|baseURL directory, stores all relevant URL pairs locally, and rewrites the locally used shortURLs to baseURLs at pageload, or in the DOM, or only if the shortURL provider has been timing out in that 5 minutes period, or [pick your criteria].

anybody know the Tr.im people? I’d like to be in touch.

9 August 2009 at 17h18

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- Twitter

Social Referrers are Really Semantic Referrers

“First Step of Compost” via Wikipedia

Google is starting to lose market share of an esoteric, yet important, sort. For early adopter web sites including the leading tech blogs, Google is becoming a little less powerful as measured by the number of visitors it drives to a web site. If the trend continues and goes mainstream, it’s a big deal. Billions of dollars are spent on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) each year. SEO is a series of practices and tools through which web sites on seek to drive clickthroughs from Google’s organic (i.e. free) search results. According to SEMPO, Google’s advertisers alone spent $1.4 billion on SEO over and above their payments to Google in 2008. Millions of sites that don’t buy AdWord also practice SEO and the entire market for SEO has to be at least twice the SEMPO figure.

When a user clicks on one of Google’s ten blue links, the web address of that particular Google Search Engine Return Page (SERP) is written into the records of the destination site that to which the user clicked through. The same is true of any other link from any other page on the web. Those records are called Referrer Logs. They are the lifeblood of scientific web traffic management and online marketing. For the in-crowd blogs and a number of other leading sites, Search Referrers are dropping as a percent of total referrers in favor of so-called Social Referrers from Twitter, Bit.ly, Facebook, and others.

Semantic Referrers
I say “so-called Social Referrers” as I don’t believe social is the key property of these referrering URLs. The key property is that these referrers are generated by data systems more heavily structured, i.e. semantic, than the huge majority of Google’s index. Facebook’s heavily detailed social graph and Application Platform are the clearest example. It would be simple for them to let web site owners know how the the link came to be clicked on, by a person of what anonymous profile, etc. Facebook is starting to provide such tools to its platform and would hurt Google significantly if they provide the information to outside web publishers via the Referrer URL. Twitter is not formally structured like Facebook but its abundance of links, #hashtags, and limited message length make structure far easier to infer than in freeform web content. In aggregate, the rise of this Semantic Referrer traffic means that we all finally need to take the Semantic Web seriously.

Accidentally Semantic, i.e. Semantic Search Provides no Clicks
Taking the Semantic Web seriously doesn’t mean relying on magic or Google to get us there. In very few cases can semantics be reliably derived out of the unstructured web. That’s why Semantic Web Search will remain a pipe dream for years to come.

Machine approximation of structure does work in a few cases, but Google is pursuing those cases with Google Janitors and will dominate them. Per this post in June, Googling “Rocco Mediate age” provides the answer of his birthdate displayed in a differentiated fashion above the standard search results. Similarly, Googling “Maverick 17th Street” provides the specific address, phone number, map, etc. for the restaurant. Notice that the user gets a self-contained answer to their query, that doesn’t depend on a link to the answer. This sort of search with no click is particularly useful on my Blackberry.

Maverick probably doesn’t care if you click through to their web site as long as you actually eat there, but the ESPN Golf with the great Rocco Mediate profile [NB: what terrible SEO on that link] certainly does as do the Wikipedia page editors. With little or no traffic to gain, why would ESPN Golf or Wikipedia optimize their content for semantic search à la SEO or even allow the semantic search engine to gather its content?

Semantic and Networked Publishing
Taking the Semantic Web seriously doesn’t mean relying on Twitter and Facebook to get us there either. Hopefully, Google’s behavior has taught the big publishers the dangers of dependence on a monolithic third party.

Because semantic data and Semantic Web Search can’t generally be derived ex poste facto, almost the entire web needs to be re-recorded in a structured form. That sounds like an insane amount of work, and it is, but it’s already happening. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Bit.ly, Awe.sm, FourSquare, Zemanta, and their various peers are getting all of us to type everything on the web back in, this time using more defined forms that they store and publish more robustly. It’s called User-Generated Content and Social Media.

The best way to think about the overall trend is that the mainstream web audience learned how to use unstructured web content during the DotCom boom; learned how to publish and search it during Web2; are beginning to learn how use structured web content now; and will learn how to semantically publish to and search the web starting in 7 or 8 years. Following the same patterns as the DotCom and Web2 eras, the professional publishers who start publishing semantic content early and as their mainstream effort stand a far better chance of becoming the dominant media property in their sector. Those who wait will devolve into unstructured compost.