Google

With all the blog posts popping up on Google’s Latitude service, I thought I would comment on the user experience aspects.

First thing to say is it isn’t exactly new. There is precious little difference with existing services such as Brightkite or Loopt. It is only that Google is the enemy of the hour which has made everyone go crazy about it.

As a result, like the others, it doesn’t work unless your browser is open. For many people that is not very often at all and so this is not an application that is going to change the world overnight. It’s time may come, but not until mobile devices use the browser to access more services as a matter of course.

The blog hype has all been about big brother and stalking, which is a little wide of the mark. Google is so paranoid about its public image they have even supplied a video to show how the privacy settings work. In essence you chose who can see your location on a person by person basis and when a contact requests your location information you can accept or deny each individual request.

The main advantage Google has over its rivals is the integration of other Google services like Gmail that allow you not only to see where contacts are but also communicate with them. A concern is the impact this will have on battery life.

Of all I have read my favourite comment about Latitude was from a momoLondon member. He was concerned about how he was going to explain to his girlfriend that he didn’t want her to know where he was. Not a problem that can be solved with technology but as it happened he then revealed that he didn’t actually have a girlfriend anyway. I wonder why!

Blog by Ronan Tighe

A couple of months, after the launch by Google of their new browser Chrome, it’s now worth taking a moment to analyse the effects that it has had, and will have, on the browser market. Although Chrome’s current market share of around 1.4% may seem insignificant, its launch is extremely interesting and another example of how Google keeps trying to improve the already excellent user experience of their products.

It is worth understanding Google’s motivations behind launching Chrome. The reasons Google provided in their initial blog post were to add value to users and drive innovation on the web. Although Chrome is still very much in development, it’s clear that in one area in particular they have succeeded with those goals.
Anyone who has used Chrome will confirm that it runs JavaScript applications very fast, a lot faster than both Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox. It’s clear from this that Google wants to improve the current user experience of their online applications such as Gmail, Maps and Docs.

A faster browser will also enable users to browse more pages in less time. Google naturally hopes this will increase the chances of users clicking on their adwords, which is still the source of the majority of their revenue. By raising the bar in terms of browser speed, and by making the code used to develop Chrome open source, Google hopes that IE and Firefox will catch up.

The big question of whether Chrome can actually challenge IE or Firefox in terms of market share remains to be seen. IE users have traditionally been lazy in switching browsers; there are still a large chunk of users still using IE6.

Firefox’s users are also unlikely to swap due to the multitude of extensions available, many of which have become an essential part of the browsing experience. If Google continues to innovate, and manufacturers such as Dell and HP start selling PC’s with Chrome pre-installed, it could pose a real threat. This isn’t likely for awhile though. In the meantime, Google will be satisfied with the initial effect Chrome has had. Even if it doesn’t succeed, by motivating IE and Firefox to improve the experience of browsing, it will only mean more users will click on those lucrative adwords.

Essentially Google has looked at the user experience of their products, tried to improve and take control of something which they had previously little control over, but had a major impact on the experience – the browser. Other companies would do well to learn from this. They need to consider ways in which they can improve touch points that their customers currently have with their brand, that they don’t control and may be responsible for reducing the overall user experience.

Google Analytics came out shouting “We are coming to get you” at the big 3 vendors (Oct 22nd) with the announcement of its new enterprise class features due to be released in the next coming weeks. Advanced Segmentation, custom reporting, a data export API and the long awaited integration with AdSense all feature on the list to really add some serious weight to the GA offering.

After IndexTools was acquired by Yahoo! and they announced that they would join Google in the “free tool” market space, we have been watching with eager eyes to see how Google would raise their game and from what we have seen so far it is a big improvement. The big win for most analysts will be the new Advanced Segmentation feature, which enables you to create your own dynamic custom segments based on multiple dimensions and/or metrics so you can properly slice and dice your data as you want it. Say goodbye to fixed dimensions and multiple profile settings and filters. If you want to find out more, Avinash Kaushik has written a great post teaching you how to become a segmentation ninja. Google Analytics Releases Advanced Segmentation: Now Be A Ninja!

Custom reporting is also another big benefit with a drag and drop interface similar to that of IndexTools allowing you to choose the dimensions and metrics which you want to see in your report. Concerns over data privacy will also be put to rest with the introduction of a data export API, giving users more transparency over the data which Google holds. There is also some new eye candy for all you marketers out there with a funky motion chart to give a new twist to data visualisation.

Some of the features such as AdSense integration are still in private beta for the moment, but I can’t wait to get stuck in. Mamma’s got a brand new toy to play with!

On Monday 9th June I attended the EDM08 conference. It was a fairly small affair with perhaps 100 delegates, but they had travelled far and wide to be there and on my table were people from the US, Nordic region and mainland Europe.

EDM stands for European Directories Marketplace and the event is run by Whitaker Associates. I had little idea about how the connection with directories worked before attending, but soon discovered that it was all to do with the delivery of information services, leading to this year’s theme: mobile.

The keynote was delivered by Dr Mike Short, director of R&D at O2 and a man with impressive credentials in the mobile arena. Chair of the mobile data association (MDA) among other things, Dr Short has spent 20 years in the mobile and wider telecoms industries. He shared plenty of industry stats and previews of O2 research to be published in July, both of which I can summarise here for you in a few bullet points.

General statistics:

• There were 2.95 billion mobile subscribers globally by June 2007.
• The forecast for the end of 2008 is 3.3 billion (source: The Mobile World).
• There is 115 percent mobile penetration in the UK, equating to 69 million handsets.
• There were 57 billion SMS and 449m picture messages sent in the UK in 2007.
• The mobile internet was accessed by 17 million UK individuals in 2007.

From O2′s research:

• Most people would rather leave home without their wallet than their mobile.
• Trials which combined mobile SIMs with Oyster and Credit cards (separately and together) using near field communication technology (NFC) resulted in a greater degree of success with Oyster cards than credit cards. It will be interesting to see what conclusions O2 draws from this, as it seems to me that it is a moot point because ultimately they will all surely be combined anyway.
• Mobile development began at phase one with voice and text. Present
  day is phase six which is the ‘content’ phase. He believes that the next stage, phase 7, is the ‘application’ phase.

Following the keynote there was a range of presentations, discussions and some really interesting debates and opinions that I would like to record.

There was plenty of debate around the importance of mobile compared to PC. James Levey of Amdocs suggested that click-through rates online were currently at about two percent on average but predicted mobile would achieve four percent click-through rates in the near future. Mobile search currently represents two to four percent of desktop search globally, with the exception of China where mobile search accounts for 25 percent. Google predicts that the crossover point, where mobile search overtakes desktop, will come within four years, then rapidly grow to double the desktop search share.

To provide a little more context to this, it is worth mentioning stats presented by Russell Buckley of Admob, the world’s largest mobile ad marketplace. Russell currently estimates that Admob sees three billion page views per month on its network, on which they serve ads today. The largest contributors to that number, notably all in the English language, are:

• US = 50 percent
• India and UK = 10 percent each
• South Africa = 5 percent
• Indonesia = 5 percent

Other presentations gave me some interesting nuggets worth noting, such as: “In ten years you will be able to access the knowledge of humankind from a mobile.” Or: “The fastest growing age of penetration of mobile phones in the UK is seven to eight year olds. All exciting stuff, but I was most impressed by Simon Grice of www.ideas.org. He managed to rattle off more concepts and ideas in ten minutes than I have in a decade. The few I managed to grab were:

• Information is the new pollution. In a conference focusing on information services and directories Grice argued that in the future this will be too much and humans won’t be able to deal with the flow of info.
• Search will become useless because the range of results will be too difficult to filter. Grice suggested that when people get bogged down with information they ask people they know for advice and in this way sites like Twitter and Facebook become the information services networks of the future.
• Discovery as opposed to search. Search is fine if you know what you are looking for but what if you don’t? For example your local pub is holding an Italian night. If you don’t search for that you may not find out so you need to be told or have a way to discover it that is not necessarily advertising. Location based services have a role to play but it is not clear what role at this stage.

All of the great new ideas discussed at EDM08 are definitely worth exploring further, which is exactly what I intend to do now.

By Marty Carroll

How often have footie fans stood on the terraces, shaking their fists in the air and berating the manager’s choices? So-and-so shouldn’t be playing today, so soon after his injury! Can’t believe how much they spent on that useless goalie! Everyone’s a critic, it seems.

Now one football club will find out whether the fans really do know best. 20,000 members of MyFootballClub have chipped in to buy Ebbsfleet United, raising a total of £700,000 between them. The joint owners will vote on all major decisions, including player selection and transfers.

There is a theory that crowds are smarter than even the brightest experts, in certain circumstances. The book ‘The Wisdom of Crowds‘ by James Surowiecki says that four conditions must be satisfied for a group to be smarter than its most able members: it needs to be diverse so that members bring different information to the table, it needs to be decentralised so there’s nobody dictating the crowd’s answer, it needs a way of summarising opinions into a collective verdict, and the people in the crowd must be independent so that they’re not swayed by the opinions of others.

The new owners of Ebbsfleet United satisfy all those requirements, so they should be able to make much better decisions than the previous manager.

A similar selection process takes place online. Google rose to prominence, despite entrenched competition from the likes of Microsoft and Yahoo, because it offered a better user experience. It was faster, adverts were less intrusive and the results returned were higher quality. The crowd chose Google.

Internet users worldwide continue to pick the winners of the web, without consulting each other. They return to sites that offer the best user experience and neglect those that don’t. Because the internet offers near perfect information, price is a secondary consideration to the user experience. According to the wisdom of crowds theory, internet users can identify the best sites much more easily than experts can. That underscores the importance of listening to your customers, undertaking user testing and responding to their feedback. Only then can sites truly evolve. Only the fittest will survive.

This post originally appeared on Applied Insights’ blog. Foviance acquired Applied Insights in November 2008, with Neil Mason joining us as Director of Analytical Consulting. As part of this acquisition, we’ve incorporated Applied Insights’ blog into our own.

Here in Washington, Google have just announced the launch of a new multi-variate testing service, Website Optimizer. It’s a beta launch at the moment and will only be open to a few advertisers. The service is free and will obviously mean that one of the concerns I have had about the cost/benefit balance of testing programmes here is the UK has largely gone away. No doubt more details soon.

This post originally appeared on Applied Insights’ blog. Foviance acquired Applied Insights in November 2008, with Neil Mason joining us as Director of Analytical Consulting. As part of this acquisition, we’ve incorporated Applied Insights’ blog into our own.

Neil Mason recently contributed an article to Google’s “Conversion University” on the need for a holistic approach to measuring online business performance. You can read it over at the Google Analytics Conversion University site.