Web

I don’t have a Facebook or twitter account and that surprises a lot of my friends since I am such a geek :). And the reason I keep (kept) giving was that I want to be in control of my destiny. In this case, destiny being content. While Facebook and Twitter provide you with a easy way to connect with friends/relatives/stalkers etc, I believe it gives a lot of leeway on control over the content for the companies running these applications. I have all the means and ways to communicate with my friends and advertise what I need to world. How I do that? That is a blog post that I have been “drafting” for the last couple of months :)..Hope to publish it soon. And looks like the wider audience is finally waking up to it.

Check out this article on ReadWriteWeb regd how the tech leaders are calling for a boycott of Facebook and advocating for an open social networking protocol (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/more_web_industry_leaders_quit_facebook_call_for_o.php).

Another article on the same website, speaks about a study by the Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Korea, which shows that Twitter is really not a social networking site, but more of a medium to broadcast your content (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/study_twitter_isnt_very_social.php). Doesn’t really support the argument I made earlier that Twitter is not going to make it..but it certainly supports the notion that once the hype is gone the influence of twitter as a medium will decrease.

Pretty dramatic prognosis eh..Esp, after all the hype that twitter is getting in the media, one would think that the whole world uses twitter. Here’s why I don’t think twitter will not be such a darling 2/3 years from now. It might still exist in some shape/form (I think it is going to be acquired and integrated into a larger offering), but it won’t be the buzz word anymore.

First the good part.. Let’s take a look at some data from Compete and Alexa (companies that provide web statistics about sites) in comparison to facebook and myspace (the 800 lbs Gorillas of social networking)

Traffic Ranking :

Similar data from Alexa (where the long term data is available for free, unlike Compete)

No surprises here. We see that the ranking of Twitter has gone up drastically and is staying there..

Reach :

Interesting trend. One would expect that the reach (i.e. the number of people accessing the site) would go up as drastically as the ranking, but it is not as linear. Facebook is doing pretty well in this statistic.

Page Views :

I think this is to be expected. Twitter does not rely as much on page view due to the design and nature of the site.

Looking at all the data above, it looks like twitter is in a good place right. Now let’s add another dimension to the analysis. Let’s take a look at how Google views twitter. “Google Insights” is a service offered by Google to help analyze the “search” volume of keywords across regions and timelines. Since Google has ~70% of the search engine traffic, this is a good way to observe the trends.

Here is a graph showing the “interest” starting from 2004…

Zooming into the last 12 months..

Interesting to see that while facebook is getting more and more “interesting”, twitter is not catching up. This might be due to two reasons.

1. Twitter really did not promote it’s search function until July 2009, meaning the search engines did not have a way to scrape the site and as such did not have a lot of content to show to users.
2. Twitter partnered with Google and Bing in Oct 2010 2009 to index it’s posting. Again, this means that the search engines just got to the data and it might take some time for them to start showing the data in the search results.

I don’t know if this is conclusive evidence to show that Twitter will not make it. Twitter definitely has its place, but I don’t think it is all that the media has hyped it to be. Even though the media hype has driven more and more users to Twitter, the company has to yet come out with an viable business plan. I think that businesses are flocking towards twitter, because users are.. but once the fad passes on, the world is also going to move on.

P.S : I don’t think I need to mention to anyone looking at the data presented above that MySpace is on a downward spiral :). Who still uses Coldfusion to run a site?? That is so 90s!! :).

First there was msn.com, Microsoft’s first attempt to become a major online player. Users were told that this would become the one portal that they would need to go to for all their needs. At that time, it was a competition to portals like Netscape and AOL.

Then came along live.com..Microsoft’t second attempt to bring all it’s on-line properties into one place. And live had(s) some really good features (skydrive, sync, spaces). Esp the revamped hotmail, now called live mail. Life was good right..

No..Microsoft then decides to spend a couple hundred million dollars to launch and promote Bing, it’s new search engine.

So you might be wondering, where is the confusion!! msn.com is for content, live.com is for services and bing.com is the search engine. Makes sense right?? Well, for some reason, Microsoft decides to redirect anyone going to live.com (the site that was once promoted as the only home page you ever need to visit) to the bing site. What about average Joe, that just wants to get to his e-mail and goes to live.com? Well, he gets redirected to bing. And can he at least get a link to his old mail services from the bing home page? NO!! One would think that is common sense, but then I am not smarter than the marketing/product folks at Microsoft :). Or is this just a clever way to drive more traffic to bing to increase it’s exposure? I think that is the case. Take a look at the web ranking from Alexa, comparing bing to live.com and msn.com

Now, if you dig deeper into the clickstream data for bing.com (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bing.com#clickstream), you will see that roughly 70% of the traffic originating from live.com is going back to live.com (p.s. : This is a back of the napkin calculation 🙂 ).

Let’s compare that to the all knowing Google God’s way of doing things? If you go to Google.com and click on More at the top you can see links to all the services Google offers. And if you do the same thing on Bing.com, you don’t get the big picture of what Microsoft can offer..

All I am asking Microsoft is to put a link to http://home.live.com (the home page for all live services) on Bing.

Also, it would help Microsoft to start backing up all those millions of dollars in ad money with real content in it’s search engine. I used “kudithipudi” (yes.. I am pretty selfish 😉 ) as a search term in the major search engines and here is the ranking by the number of results