Lately I've been noticing a lot of weird hits coming in via my Google Alerts emails. I've dug into it and I think I've figured out what's going on: Google Alerts is spell checking the queries and matching the queries as it would do in a search. This in addition to matching the Alert queries exactly as previously. This new behavior kicked in about a week or 10 days ago.

For example: I keep an alert for [blogsci] because I have a website at blogsci.com. Up till recently, I used to get alerts only when the word "blogsci" was matched in a page. Now, I'm getting Alerts for pages that do not ever mention the word "blogsci" but the spell checked "blog sci". So I get matches for "...blog: sci-fi...". See what happened there?

Another example: I run a website with a domain name of XY.com where X is a word and Y is another word. My Alert is set to match it exactly as [XY]. This was going well until recently when I started getting alerts that match [X Y].

Another example: I have an alert for [cli.gs], my latest web app. I get a lot of spurious alerts for this because it matches [cli gs] which is a very popular combination apparently.

Anyone else seeing this weirdness? Any other interpretations? Thoughts in the comments please!

Hi MyBlogLog!

Part of what makes me so special is my ability to automatically add you to communities in which you have shown a repeated interest. I have just added you to the following communities:

1) Garbage Bin

http://go2/dev/null

Bonus -- The "Hot in My Garbage Bing" box on your My Home page will keep getting worse and worse with each community I delete my account from.

Rock on,

Me voting with my feet

Obviously, I'm pissed off about MyBlogLog, and anyone who has seen their emails similar to the above can guess why. The reason is quite simple: it's a mediocre service (at best) with a horrible interface and stupidly horrendous default behavior. As a webmaster, what I get out of it is rubbish analytics and an awkward way of building a community. As a user, I keep getting added (by default) to communities that I don't want to join necessarily. See, this assumption that by default I'd like to join any given community, wrapped in a self-gloating email ("Part of what makes MyBlogLog so special is our ability") is just plain wrong. I never turned on that feature and I never wanted to join that feature.

On the flip side, If I choose to manually join a community that means a lot more to the community's webmaster than me being added automatically to beef up their community head count. This works for the communities I run too: I don't want to just rack up avatar but I want a genuine community. Granted it's slower to build a community like that, but it will be by the members' choices not some automated "special" "ability". Please, get over yourselves.

So without futher wasting further time fixing stupid default behavior in return for little, I've closed my MyBlogLog account.

Sometimes I see help messages that just leave me speechless. This message from YouTube about my automatically-set language preferences goes above and beyond anything I've seen in a long time because it has two big "WTF moments":

The problems?

• The red circles: The suggestion that English (UK) is different from English (GB). Psst. They're the same thing. It's an exceptional reservation in the ISO standard.
• The black circle: The whole message is apparently not in English because the link at the bottom right corner gives me the option to view it in English. When I click it, I get the same message, but instead of suggesting English (UK), it suggests just plain old English. And oh, it gives me the option to change my language to the real English of English (US).

Hey, I have news for you YouTube: English, English (UK), English (GB) and English (US) are all freakin' English.

I was just searching with Yahoo! and I saw a survey request from "Yahoo! Surveys". It was a big purple box to the immediate right of the results list, and it was anchored to the bottom of the screen (so even if I scrolled down, it went down too). I clicked on it before I realized I should have taken a screenshot, but I did take a screenshot of the single question in the survey. The question opens in a new window:

Click for full size, and no, I'm not going to tell you what my answer was :p

If you're part of the SEO industry, unless you've been livining under a rock for the past couple of days, you will know that SEOmoz launched a new tool called Linkscape, to much fanfare. First things first, congrats and kudos are due to the SEOmoz team for building such a complex beast. It's not easy at the very least on the technical level.

But there is a problem: SEOmoz has not disclosed the user agent (UA) of its crawler. Here I will talk about why this is a bad thing, and also take a stab and go out on a limb and say: there is no SEOmoz crawler, at least not in the traditional sense. For the latter, I will offer a viable technical alternative, which may or not be correct, but the fact the alternative exists gives a sensible explanation as to why SEOmoz is not offering a straight answer to the UA question.

Why Disclosing the UA is Essential

Let's not mince words: we as an SEO community like a little mud fight once in a while. We debate and discuss and yes fight. But one thing we all know how to recognize is malicious activity and differentiate it from aggressive activity.

Example: a bot scraping our content for an MFA site is a tolerated nusance. We take steps to negate the effects of scrapers but at the end of the day we don't fight them hard. On the other hand, a bot probing for security holes is treated like a witch in 1209AD.

Which is why the Linkscape's lack of disclosure hurts: We as a community work hard at identifiying bots. SEOmoz is supposed to be a good citizen of the SEO world, and yet the lack of transparency goes against the spirit and the image of SEOmoz. On the one hand we have a company with a strong community doing good deeds (SEO trademark fight anyone?) and yet it behaves in a way we expect out of the shady side of the net we deal with every day.

Not just that: the data collected from us, about us, will be used against us. It's called competitive intelligence.

And not just that: SEOmoz is using the data to make money. The free version is pathetic and the Pro version needs a monthly subscription.

To me, this kind of behavior (stealth, harmful, and to make money) puts Linkscape squarely in the naughty corner. I certainly didn't expect this out of SEOmoz. Tough luck Rand and co: you have a great brand and I for one expect better!

But I won't ask for a UA because I think there isn't one.

How To Build Linkscape

It's actually quite easy on a conceptual level. However, just like cooking, having a recipe doesn't make you a great chef - there are lots of details that SEOmoz must have tackled successfully to build Linkscape. I am not trying to belittle their achievment, and all I can show you is one recipe. This recipe is completely my guess and could very well be wrong. I have not talked to anyone at SEOmoz.

So come on Pierre, what is it? The answer is the Yahoo! Search API. It's an API giving programmers complete access over the Yahoo! index without crawling to a single page. For example, the following URL:

fetches the first two hits from a Yahoo! [site:seomoz.org]. Interestingly, it tells you where the cache URLs are, and they reside on Yahoo! servers (unsurprisingly). So you fetch the cache from Yahoo!, do the analysis, save what you care about (links, titles, etc), and you're done.

You'll need to kick start this somehow with a seed set of sites. DMOZ and Wikipedia are usually good sources that are freely available. Wikipedia can even be downloaded so no one needs to know. Yahoo!'s very own Delicious, Digg, reddit, etc are also good starting points because they tell you what's hot right now. The seed is basically a huge set of URLs from which you extract the domain names and do [site:domain] queries. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Notice that you won't need to crawl a single page yourself. You let Yahoo! do the work for you. Neat, no?

So What Should SEOmoz Disclose?

Above I said two potentially conflicting things: SEOmoz should disclose the Linkscape user agent and then went on to show that it doesn't need to have a user agent. So what exactly am I asking from SEOmoz?

Easy: complete disclosure. If SEOmoz is using a traditional crawler, we must have its UA and the IP addresses. It's only a matter of time for us to find them. If not, SEOmoz needs to explain clearly why not.

Ladies and gentlemen: I'm writing a post next week and I need your help. I want stories from the trenches about how developers and SEOs talk (or not...) with each other.

Comment below. If you want to remain anonymous, please let me know.

Want an example? @Harith on twitter.

That's right folks, the short URL market is broken and I'm fixing it. The new service is called Cligs (like Clicks but with a G). It's a short URL service on steroids. The key feature is that it tracks the clicks of the short URLs.

What kind of analytics do you get? At launch right now:

• Cligs gives you tons of traffic data and analytics about the traffic your short URLs get. This includes:
  • Number of hits
  • Referral stats
  • Mentions on twitter, blogs, and the web
  • Mentions of the destination URL on twitter, blogs, the web, and delicious
  And lots more! And if you want a more data, just let me know!
• Cligs forwards with a 301 Permanent Redirect so your destination URL gets full SEO benefits of the link. If you are an affiliate marketer, this means you can hide your backlinks, get traffic, get statistics, and get the SEO benefits.
• With Cligs, you can create an unlimited number of short URLs for the same destination URL. This is great because you can promote the same destination at different sites like twitter or facebook by using different cligs and watch how each source sends you traffic.

That's just the start. There are a ton of new features that are going to be added in the coming few days and weeks, including some SEO-useful analytics.

And, of course, there is a bookmarklet:

Shorten Link @ Cli.gs

So what are you waiting for? Stop using plain-vanilla short URL services and start using Cligs.

Comments and feedback most welcome.

Finally I've had a chance to test Google's latest installment in the long-running series of half-baked betas, Google Chrome. Honestly, I will not rant in this post about how Google is taking over the web or whatnot, but I will ask a series of questions that I would like answered honestly and without any marketing gimmicks that are supposed to live up to Google's do-no-evil-we're-cute hype.

• Let's start with the license. A lot of people have noticed that the Google Chrome fine-print contains some really dodgy items (examples: CNet and read write web). The offending bit is this:

  11. Content license from you

  11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

  11.2 You agree that this license includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.

  11.3 You understand that Google, in performing the required technical steps to provide the Services to our users, may (a) transmit or distribute your Content over various public networks and in various media; and (b) make such changes to your Content as are necessary to conform and adapt that Content to the technical requirements of connecting networks, devices, services or media. You agree that this license shall permit Google to take these actions.

  11.4 You confirm and warrant to Google that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the above license.

  Ominous, no? This prompted Google's Matt Cutts to "dispel" this conspiracy theory. He went right to the heart of Googleborg and got a straight answer:

  In order to keep things simple for our users, we try to use the same set of legal terms (our Universal Terms of Service) for many of our products. Sometimes, as in the case of Google Chrome, this means that the legal terms for a specific product may include terms that don’t apply well to the use of that product. We are working quickly to remove language from Section 11 of the current Google Chrome terms of service. This change will apply retroactively to all users who have downloaded Google Chrome.

  Gee, Google, I didn't know we can pick and choose terms and conditions to apply to some products and not to others. That's just not the point of a license: either it applies as a whole or it doesn't. It says so in the terms and conditions themselves:

  20.2 The Terms constitute the whole legal agreement between you and Google and govern your use of the Services (but exclude any services that Google may provide to you under a separate written agreement) and completely replace any prior agreements between you and Google in relation to the Services.

  So please, stop playing around and provide the true license.

• While we're on the license: Chrome is Open Source, yet the license isn't. Why not use an OSI-approved license? Yes, even for the binary. Without this, you can't claim that Chrome is really open source. Unless...

• Suppose Chrome isn't open source. Suppose you can get the code but the binary comes (or will come) with lots of other gadgetry that Google approves of. Let's, oh, take an example of no way to block adverts. But it's open source! Well yes, it's open source if you care to download the code and know what to do with it. To the rest of us, the average Google user really, having access to the source code is irrlevant. So Google can bundle whatever it wants and no one will know the difference.

• Speaking of licenses and adverts: what is section 17 for?

• The interface: I don't like it personally but it's OK. It's like it doesn't want you to do anything - don't you dare find the Under The Hood options. Also, I find using the window's top frame as the tab bar to be very confusing and wrong on so many levels (the tabs are part of the window not *the* window!). The question here is: why? What logical argument places an interface element in the window border?

• Really, when does Chrome contact Google? Matt Cutts posted about this and also Twittered to a quick privacy review that gave Chrome a thumbs up. But let's quote Matt:

  If you are typing a search or url in the address bar, Google Chrome will talk to the current search service to try to offer useful query/url suggestions.

  Search suggestions are fine - great actually - because they help me search. Querying Google (the default search service) about URLs is off limits. Let's not mince words here: some URLs *are* private. What kinds? Flickr protected albums for one. To share a private album in Flickr, it creates a unique URL that you share with your friends. No one else knows it so it's a decent enough protection for this scenario. Why does Google want to know? And does Google log it? Will the data be magically incorporated into Google Website Trends or Analytics?

So until Google figures out its license, and until Google gives us straight answers, Chrome is uninstalled from my machine.

What do you think? Comments below please.

OK, Google, I've had it with your excessive stupidities. I'm talking about the monstrosity that's your AdSense login system.

I posted about this over on Cre8 back in February. The summary is this:

• I have an AdSense login, let's call it abc@xyz.com.

• When I logged in back in February, it said migrate your account. So I did, but, silly me, I didn't want to change my login address so I entered abc@xyz.com as my address. It worked... until the next time I logged in.

• Since then, so for the past 6 months, AdSense kept asking me to migrate my login, which I already did! Not only that, as the image below shows (from the Cre8 thread above), it has a message in the yellow box: The message says: "Are you one of the following people?" and the list below the answer is abc@xyz.com, which is the email address I just used to login.

• The answer to this question is yes, I am abc@xyz.com, and so I follow its request to "Return to AdSense" and login using abc@xyz.com. When I do that, I enter an endless loop: I login and I get shown this error.

• But there is - or was until earlier today - hope! See, I could skip this stupid wizard and continue to see today's crappy earnings. I've been skipping the wizard for the past 6 months. And today, they are forcing me to migrate my account.

• And here is the kicker: I cannot tell this stupid system that I want abc@xyz.com to be my new Google Accounts login for AdSense. Why should I have to create another account? Listen, Google, if you want to inflate your accounts count, I'd be very happy to create a few more for you. I even won't tell your stockholders if you don't.

• So I thought I'd ask for help. The link in the top right ends up here and I click through to Contacting AdSense, then to Do you have a customer support telephone number? which says "no" (surprised?) and suggests that I check out the AdSense Help Forum which 404s. Tada.

So let me say this as politely as possible: I find it disgusting that a company that creates products with such a crappy user experience is considered a leader in our industry.

Oh yes, finally a way to tell the algo-borgs at Google/Doubleclick and Yahoo! that they should not track your behavior to deliver "more relevant" ads. You do that by visiting a page on each of their websites and click a button which sets a cookie that tells the system to not track your behavior.

Google also links to another page from the Network Advertising Initiative which lists quite a few ad systems you can opt out of.

The pages are:

• Google's at http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html.
• Yahoo's at http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/opt_out/targeting/details.html.
• The NAI's at http://networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp.

While I'm at it, does anyone else find Yahoo!'s page to be much better than Google's? Think about the usability: it tells you if you've opted in or out and explains that it's per computer rather than per user (very important!!!). I'm just saying that as a landing page supposedly to help consumers, Google's is a mess compared to Yahoo!'s clean and to the point page. The NAI's is very good too.

Note: some details in this post have been skipped or generalized to be a bit vague to protect the identity of the Google Streeview driver.

Sometime in the past few weeks, I was walking with a friend when we spotted a very funny looking car. We both immediately knew what it was and as the car drove closer by, our suspicions were confirmed: it was a Google Streetview car outside London. Feeling naughty, I shouted at the car as it drove by something along the lines of "there are privacy laws" and to my surprise an old man across the streed did the same! It was very funny how both of us knew what a Streetview car looked like!

Then it hit me: the road we were on that the car was driving into was a dead end road. Picture time! So I dropped my stuff and asked my friend to watch them while I set up my phone and found a good spot to take some photos as the car drove back out again. So I watched as the car reached the end, did a U-turn and drove back out again. However, as it got close to me, the car pulled up into an empty parking spot and the driver came out. He shouted at me saying "I know you want to take pictures but I don't want to be in them." I obliged.

While taking the photos, I talked to the driver a little bit. Here are some details from the notes I scribbled afterwards:

• Google has a centre in Milton Keynes where this operation was based in. The drivers just showed up for "a driving job" (his words) and didn't know it was for Google until the arrived to pick up the cars.
• The drivers were given training to use the computers inside the car. It's not hard: it's a large-ish touch screen (I guessed about 17in or maybe a 19in when I saw it) with a record and a pause button.
• The screen is to the left of the driver in the passenger seat with a large server at the back in the trunk. The back seats of the car were removed - it was just a big space. The connections into the server were just power and ethernet. The ethernet seemed to be going up to the camera but I'm not sure if it ran to something else.
• The camera is rain sensitive. It collapses in a very funky way and has to be covered. The drivers are under strict instructions to do so.
• This particular driver was very sensitive to the privacy issues. He was having a personal conflict about the whole thing and was stopped by (his words) "10 people" that very day. Why? Because only recently had the BBC published an article about Google Streetview starting with Google's plans to launch a mapping tool in the UK could be referred to the Information Commissioner". No wonder the driver didn't want to be in the photo!

Now some photos of the car with notes:

The car from the front.

The car's camera. The hexagon Octagon at the top is I think is the camera set itself (so 6 8 cameras in total). The yellow box seems to be the communication/processing circuitry; the yellow box is on the back side of the car and so the white box thing at the right hand side of the image points towards the right of the car. This white box thing seems to swivel up and down but this is just a wild guess.

The car's camera kit as seen from the rear of the car. Just guessing what each bit is: Yello box at the top, as above. White boxes to the left and right are the (potentially) swiveling bits - could they be cameras? The yellow disk at the bottom: a wireless communications dish? It could be a GPS receiver.

Update: Looking through some of the other images I had after someone dropped a hint on GTalk to me, the white boxes under the hexagon of cameras are laser range finders. Sure enough, I have a photo that has a warning that it's a "Class 1 Laser".

Update 2: Thanks for all the comments. Yes I couldn't count: there are 8 cameras not 6; that's fixed now. Also, a lot of people wrote about the type of laser range finder and why you'd need it - see the comments below. Finally, lots of people noted a certain irony in the driver not wanting to be photographed. Point taken, but the guy was very conflicted about it. The BBC article was still in memory and clearly some people like me caused his some fuss on that day. He was talking a lot about wanting to quit this job. Deep down I think he did but of course I cannot know.

Update 3:Yes some rain droplets is visible in a photo. It wasn't raining while we were talking but it had rained earlier that day. When the driver parked, the camera hit some trees (you can see that in the photos) and the droplets are from the tree. It's hard rain that gets the equipment as I understand it, and that's when the drivers are supposed to cover up.

On twitter, I'm following someone who I cannot un-follow due to a bug in Twitter. Why? Because said person changed their settings I'm only giving updates to friends - I see the message "I'm only giving updates to friends.". Visiting the person's home page, I cannot see the Follow/Unfollow button because the interface only lets me ask the person to allow me to see his updates.

But I can easily see his updates.

Here is how: browse twitter using a mobile phone. Yes the mobile interface shows you these "private" updates but the web interface shows me the message "I'm only giving updates to friends.". I discovered this bug by accident while browsing using my mobile phone, but using a couple of extensions, you can pull off this trick in Firefox.

The screenshot below illustrates the bug. It's basically the mobile version and the full normal version of twitter side by side. The lines map corresponding updates, with the yellow/orange one highlighting the bug.

Download full sizes of the screenshots used to make the image above:

• Full size normal Twitter
• Full size mobile Twitter

I've filed a bug report with twitter.

Various reports of Google being down (including for me) here in the UK. It seems to be a few datacenters so it works some times but mostly not. Reports also talk about G Docs, Mail, and YouTube. Sometimes a redirect to google.co.uk works, but mostly even that fails. Some people can get to google.co.uk if they browse to that directly. I've been logged into GMail since last night and it works OK.

Seems to me that there is a DNS issue at play here in that if your browser requests a fresh IP resolution, it works, but the IP addresses fail. If your browser has an IP address cached it seems you're fine.

Reports:

• Summize, which is a live Twitter search engine: Search for [google down].
• Over at Cre8asite Forums, there is a discussion thread.

Anyone else seeing this?

A little context where this review is coming from: Given the recent, ummm, "uptime challenges" at Twitter (My profile: pierrefar), there was a massive flurry about another service called Plurk. So much was Twitter down and so many cool people moved over to Plurk that I joined the fun and set up an account.

A few days into this exodus of sorts, Brian asked who was still around on twitter, and I replied that I didn't like it so was still around. Surprised, Brian suggested I give Plurk a second chance and so I agreed. Plurk got a second look, and I promised Brian a review. This is the review.

In short: it's bad, and not only that, I think they won't make it as a company with the product with its current interface. Here is why.

What is Plurk?

Plurk is a service for engaging in conversations with other people. It is centered around a timeline, a very cool looking scrolling interface that maps conversations as points on the timeline. The conversations start with someone posting some text and the replies come in attached to the original reply. A screenshot is below:

The timeline's 'now' is at the left, and the past is going to the right. When you're browsing past conversations, you scroll left to go to later ('future') posts. At first pass, this is very counter-intuitive: for some reason I expect the future to be to the right and you go back in time by scrolling left - i.e., the reverse of the Plurk arrangement. I've seen other comments along those lines but I can't for the life of me find them. However, this is the best arrangement for a timeline written in English, and Plurk either are genius designers or extremely lucky people. Why? English is written left to right and so as you scroll the first thing you see of a new conversation is the starter's name and the first few words in the sentence of the conversation. If you were scrolling right to left, you would actually see the last few words in the conversation's start's sentence. The Plurk arrangement works much better.

The conversations themselves are shown as little rectangles. You click on the rectangle and it expands to show the full conversation and replies. The layout is a forum thread layout with avatars, usernames, time stamps, and icons. The rectangles are placed along the time line in relation to when the started, and plotted at randomly in the vertical position.

Plurk also has karma, that eternal currency of Web 2.0. The more you use Plurk (start conversations) and the more people you invite, the more karma you get. And the more karma you have the more icons you get. However, if you don't use Plurk for a day, the karma starts dropping. I peaked at 20+ karma about 2 weeks ago and now I'm under 8 karma. It's an interesting twist to an age-old way to foster user engagement.

Why is Plurk Bad?

Plurk is a bad service because the timeline arrangement is the worst implementation to show conversations. There is absolutely no need to have conversations plotted in a timeline. A simpler listing (the extreme of which is a forum-index type of listing) would do much better. Right now, the timeline mars the usability relating to the fact that Plurk is about conversations and not microblogging like Twitter is. It's a gimmick and an annoying one for that.

To know just how annoying this is, try not going to Plurk for a few days and come back. Heck, go to sleep and check it in the morning: you'll have dozens of conversations that have either been started or updated and you can't just seem them and quickly browse them. No, you have to scroll, click each one to expand it, and then read. And there isn't any obvious way to see which conversations were ones you engaged in previously to see if there are any new replies. Nope, they're all lumped together. Raise your hand if you simply just gave up and marked all conversations as read because you just can't be bothered.

And what's with the karma loss? Listen, I try to have a life outside the internet and certainly won't center my life around Plurk. If I don't visit for a day or two, I should not feel like I'm being punished. This is the first time I see anyone implement a karma loss over time idea. Karma should only be deducted if other members of the community feel that way, and even then, it should be implemented carefully - there is no easy answer for this question, but Plurk's implementation is definitely wrong.

Finally, a pet peeve from a marketing point of view: I get an email every time someone wants to follow me so that I can authorize them. Ummm, I love it for people to follow me and they shouldn't ask permission. They should come and go as they please. Twitter called it spot on: people follow you and stop following without intervention, but there are two options: you can lock your conversations or you can use direct messages which are private. That covers pretty much all shades of having an open to private conversation. Having a single blanket permission system by default is weird.

So all in all, a very crappy implementation of a potentially good idea. I've written it off for now but I'm sure my network of friends on Twitter and elsewhere will let me know if things improve or not.

Yes, that's right folks. Step right up. We have a new buzzword to hide the fact that we're scraping content and sending trackbacks to the original content. The new word is... Linkosphere.

So, pray do tell us Pierre, where would you come up with such a silly name? Why I'm glad you asked. It's the service that's been spamming me blog for the past few months, hosted at the one and only ectio dot us. See, them scrapers have a serious claim: "Find something to read, guaranteed!" I believe them given all the scraping they're doing.

And thus because I am in the mood to return them the favo(u)r, I hereby declare them the prototypical scraposphere service. Beat that!

The screenshot below is from my AdSense account. It seems I have reached the pinnacle of optimization as no new optimization suggestions have been recommended since February.

Is this a bug or account specific? Each of the reports I see are different.

That's right folks. Today I decided to actually do something about my Twitter account. Follow me at pierrefar.

The question is *what* will I do with the account? It may be a few days before I dive in properly See you @twitter

Hint: Look at the source code...

Seriously folks, why isn't Google's adopted child, the Apple's iPhone, not part of the Open Handset Alliance. And Microsoft?

Anyone want to take bets that MS and Apple create their own alliance? That would be fun.

Today is a great day to be... not Google. As someone who's spoken out many times against Google and its practices, I'm very happy today. This is not a simple ranting post, so please bear with me as I explain away the smile. Two reasons to be smiling:

• Google slapped their most vocal supporters in the face. Actually, they kicked them in the groin and when they went down, Google took a big stick and hit them on the head. Yes, it's the PR "downdate" (getit?) of today. I'll explain why this is a stupid move (if it's not a glitch).
• Google lost out to Microsoft today. Ironically, it just proves that as prying as Google wants to be by targeting ads to users, there are others willing to be even more 'evil' (for the lack of a more descriptive word). It really does seem that old-skool pre-Web companies may still be able to teach G a thing or two.

First the PR update. There is no evidence to suggest that this is due to link selling. There is no evidence to suggest it's a vandetta against people who've spoken against Big G. It could be a glitch, but my favorite theory: ALL toolbar PR will drop to zero. Why? The publicly visible PR has always been a thorn in Google's back: everyone watches it, people use it to assert authority, people try to manipulate it, and worst of all, it created a market because it's in a finite supply.

I also think the visible PR kick-started a mentality of not linking. When it started, it was "I don't want PR to leak" and so people said "leak it for $$$". People saw that this was working well as a money source and worth it as an investment for both traffic, PR, and rankings. So Google responded, half-heartedly, by delaying the publication of the true PR but a few months. That was annoying but it worked. What it also meant that on some (most?) valuable sites, getting a link was virtually impossible without forking over some cash.

Next came the mangling of nofollow. It first started as this innocent anti-spam measure. Yeah, right. As if that was ever going to deter spammers (just ask the email spam filter companies). If anything, that made spammers get more creative and we're still happily getting spammed. So now we had this kinda useless tool until some genius figured it out: it can manage the flow of PR in a site. Heck, I can now even link out to other sites I wouldn't have because I can tell Google to ignore the link. Think about that: I am actively linking to a website while at the same time sending a message to Google that I don't trust said site. Hypocrisy at it's finest, all thanks to Google.

As you can imagine, this is not a stable situation. Eventually, a drastic measure would be needed to fix it. The most obvious one? Kill the visible PR. Take out the symptoms and the disease. What happens if you make all PR in the world zero? It will become useless. You take away the commodity that's being traded. And hopefully, you'll save the net from the mess you created by freeing people about worries of linking to each other again. The corollary to that is nuking nofollow, which I honestly believe is also required. However, let me be the first to note there is no evidence of this happening. None.

So let us for a moment assume that today's PR update (which hit eKstreme.com, by the way) is not a glitch. Let's assume it's a planned move, which would include a PR algo update. What does it mean?

• One possibility is that all PR is going down to zero, as I think it eventually will. Only time will tell if this is true or not.
• Another possibility is that Google is penalizing people, either with a biased algo update or with manual intervention. If so, why on Earth hit the people who speak about the company the most? In all markets, especially techie ones, there is an adoption curve: there are the pioneers who are the most addicted to your product, who will speak about you in holy terms, and who will infect everyone around them to use your product. Successful startups sell to these people first, and established companies make sure these guys and gals are happy. Keep this free loud-speaker marketing channel happy, and you'll be happy. Google just made this group of people unhappy. Google has stepped over the line. People are furious. Google will pay. How? We will start seeing Google for what it really is: an ad agency out to make a buck - a boring company! - not some "not evil" librarian out to index the world. This is the first step to people switching away from Google. This is the first step to Google losing its grip. And you know what? The competition would be willing to take on these refugees.

Anyway, I've rambled on this too much. On to the Google-Microsoft-Facebook love triangle.

Microsoft was always the most likely winner since they already had a partnership with Facebook. As TechCrunch put it, it is the path of least resistance. Also, we should note that this was never about the money: it's a political win and a winning of mindshare. Also, whoever won would officially become the most spying, prying, ad agency on the web - in the world! Google's stated goal is to target advertising based on search history and other personal data. They call it 'personalization'. Everyone kicked up a fuss about how naughty this is, so much so, that when Google wanted to buy DoubleClick, the cries became louder: Google has too much creepy oversight over us.

Still, whatever info Google had, it's nothing compared to what Facebook has - in relation, Google's knowledge of me is harmless compared to what I have in my FB profile. Imagine an ad agency: would you like to target 25-30 year old males in a relationship with a woman and having liberal political and religious views? Facebook will say "Sure! We got some of those!" Google has nothing to say about that.

The level of targeting can be ridiculous: wanna target people who may have missed someone's birthday? How about those who were recently in a relationship but are not anymore? What about those who just entered a relationship? How about accurate geotargeting? All this info and much more is readily available through Facebook, and now Microsoft has access.

So all in all, it's an exciting and eventful day, but looking at the potential privacy worries, it doesn't bode well for the future. Whatever happens, today is very likely to go down in history as a turning point for both Google and Microsoft.

While I'm rambling, I'll finish with some predictions:

• Facebook is already the home page for many people. They will add web search from Microsoft. Ooops.
• Google will fight back with some serious innovation in AdWords. This will be good for the advertisers but not so good for users.
• Google will win the EU antitrust hearts and be cleared to buy DoubleClick. All they need to do is point at the MS-FB deal.
• MS now has Digg and Facebook. Who's next? Federated Media (the ad agency) comes to mind.

All thoughts welcome below