Category: Google (GOOG)

Google (GOOG)

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Thoughts on Google Checkout

This is a smart strategic move by Google as it is an advertiser incentive and retention strategy first and foremost. The added “discount noise” will make it harder to compare ROI rates to Yahoo! Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter. Judging by the number of vendors that signed up, they put in a lot of effort to launch this.

But make no mistake, after control of the delivery channel, this is ultimately about control of customer data. And in that regard, I’m not sure the customer value proposition of one account alone is enough for people to make this change. Having one checkout account is nice, but I’m not sure that will be significant incentive alone from customer’s point of view. The consumer already has checkout and/or fraud protection. However, the merchants save by having the payment go through there if they are an Adwords advertiser, so they may eventually provide incentives to do this.

What will be most interesting is to see how and if this service evolves with new features in the future.

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Online E-mail Service Reliability Needs Improvement

At present, I have 4 web-based e-mail accounts, Google’s Gmail, Microsoft’s Hotmail/Live.com, Yahoo! Mail and my University of Chicago Graduate School of Business “Email4Life” account.

I can now discuss the issue without being accused of favoritism or bias because all four of the organizations above have now done this recently. This is the issue of e-mail reliability and making large changes in the live environment and ignoring the issues of a continuous and positive user experience is a disturbing trend. All of the above providers have had large outages and/or rollbacks to previous versions in the past month. This is not optimal and should not become the “norm”.

I’d like to ask program managers to please consider the following going forward:
1) Reliability of service is paramount and should not be sacrificed
2) Sacrificing long-standing features in new versions is not a good idea
3) Communicating and explaining the feature upgrades transparently is encouraged
4) Asking for user feedback on new features is encouraged
5) If the application operates more slowly using Ajax than it did before, please optimize it before implementing

I would hope that these organizations would understand the potential attrition and retention implications of actions such as these and change their future actions before it adversely affects them.

I’d like to share a glimpse at the top items on my wish list for improvements:
Gmail
– I love the conversation bundling feature, though there are times when I would like to unbundle a conversation and adding the ability to do this would be helpful
– Automatic spell checking (the new Hotmail/Live.com Beta has spell check integrated as you type – this should become the best practice)
Hotmail/Live.com
– In Live.com, restoration of the radio buttons to complete actions on multiple e-mails at once is necessary
– Stability of Live.com needs to be a priority, I switched back to Hotmail for now (you get kudos for the feedback form – though an acknowledgment that shows someone read it would be confidence inspiring)
Yahoo! Mail
– In the new version, restoration of the radio buttons to complete actions on multiple e-mails at once is necessary
– Automatic spellchecking (the new Hotmail/Live.com Beta has spell check integrated as you type – this should become the best practice)
– In the new version, I’d like it to look and feel more like the old Yahoo! Mail – e-mail me if you’d like more detail
University of Chicago
– Build an understanding that Email4life is a critical alumni networking tool and treat it as such
– Communicate clearly with all members of the community and act on their feedback in an accountable manner; In summary, providers need to fully consider the user experience when making changes in their offerings
Do other people have other suggestions or thoughts on this issue?

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The Motley Fool Suggests Google is “Killing the Internet”

So far this month there have been two noteworthy pieces written about click fraud and related issues.

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban blogs that click fraud is “FAR greater” than imagined. Quite an interesting read and one coming from a wealthy Internet pioneer to boot. It’s clear that he has a strong opinion on this subject.

The second article is from The Motley Fool and is entitled “How Google is Killing the Internet”

While I encourage everyone to read the article thoroughly, here are some interesting quotes from Seth’s article:
“Markets don’t correct without competition and information, and I don’t think there’s enough of either here to make a difference. Yet.”

“I don’t know the answers — or even all of the questions. But if this problem is as bad as some fear, it could eventually put a major crimp in Google’s entire revenue model, if not the entire pay-per-click business. I would argue that the explosion of link farms and spamblogs is pretty decent evidence that the click-fraud biz is not only alive and well, but also thriving at the expense of all of us. Except Google. For now, anyway.”

It’s interesting to see such high profile articles or blog posts on these topics. It will be interesting to see where this goes from here.

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Google Reputation Management Issue

Before I begin, I want to be perfectly clear that I appreciate Google for it’s recent efforts to integrate blog comments into search results. It is both interesting and not something that can be perfected quickly.

However, I’d like to illustrate fully an example of where this is a concern for me and others whom may not even know about it until it creates a problem. This issue revolves around blog comments not made by an individual that show up in the description fields when Googling one’s name. Please review the following example web page that explains the ‘Google Reputation Management Issue’ before reading further. It’s important that you visualize what I’m saying both proceeding.

These days, it is now common practice for people to search for information about individuals on a search engine before a business discussion or a job interview. Due to the nature of these searches and the types of important decisions being made off of them, it is critical that they be accurate. If it isn’t, miscommunication or even disaster can strike. Due to this search engines have an ethical responsibility to present search results that are an accurate presentation of reality.

Let’s examine my case, on May 16th, I posted a comment in response to Josh Kopelman’s Blog entry regarding “53,651”. The following is what I posted in response to his post: “Great post that reminds us of the importance of true customers and looking past your inner circle.” (please see screen shot on other web page)

However, the Google description tag reads: “Posted by: David Dalka | May 16m 2006 at 11:29AM. Hey Josh, you said it! As one of your first investors in Infonautics wasn’t that the pre-www? …” (please see screen shot on other web page)

At present, I’m neither a investor of this level nor a millionaire. What if someone did not click through to read the real web page? Would they have likely formed the impression that I was an investor in Infonautics? The possibility certainly exists. Where this would be a larger concern is if the post after mine was not professional or even worse contained hate or spam links to porn sites. This would not be good.

So I’d like to please ask all web companies, not just Google, to take extra care in the future before putting releases in the live environment that could affect an individual’s reputation due to inaccurate presentation. Stated another way, “beta software” usage which only hinders an individual is OK, while the public release of “beta results” is discouraged as it can cause significant reputation damage. Thank you for your attention and support of this important issue and making the Internet a more accurate place. 

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I’m #1!!! (literally)

With the most recent index in Google, my site is now in the #1 position on Google and MSN for the term “David Dalka”. I’m also #2 on Yahoo! It’s impossible to isolate the influence of blog crawlers versus new links to this site, though it would be interesting to know which played a stronger role in my rise.

For the search term “Dalka” alone on Google, I’m now #11, up from like #362 or something like that. That is a dramatic rise!