How perceptions of Being Bigger may not always play out in reality.

First Mover Advantage. A popular adage in this era of perennial web startups. Equally as strong has been the thought that established players – the big fish – can simply move in on the small fry’s niche patch and bring it to the mass market – the Free Rider effect.

Groupon is arguably a case in point. Out of nowhere the young gun from Chicago has been described as the world’s fastest growing company and a $6bn gamble, only for such heavyweights as Google and Facebook to begin to muscle in on it’s coupon territory, sensing their already huge ecosystems will at least make the new guy irrelevant.

This is the textbook case. What happens when the innovator is somewhat higher up the foodchain? We may be about to find out.

Google has accused Microsoft’s search engine Bing of ‘monitoring’ their results for search terms and seeking to mimic them on it’s own site. While kudos go to the Googleplex for gaming their own search engine to find proof, it’s interesting that Microsoft feel that Free Riding on an innovator the size of Google can actually work.

Think about it, what hold has Redmond got on your computer these days?

Apart from the difficult to ignore growing band of Apple eaters, personally I can’t remember the last time I used Office or IE, both systems previously heavily relied upon by Microsoft to cross sell/arm twist users into other services. Sure they’ve still got the OS. But then the legal battles have all but robbed them of the leverage this previously gave them.

Google on the other hand have a rapidly developing web services suite that is keenly integrated with their search – when you sign into Google, you get all their services without downloading one byte more.

Mimicking Google’s search will do Bing – and by extension Microsoft – absolutely no good whatsoever, because their ecosystem is no longer the trump card it was.

Indeed if informed opinion is anything to go by, it should be attempting to differentiate and not play copycat.

However as someone who takes a pretty guerilla approach to the matter I’ve never been exposed to anything approaching the Zeitgeist of typographic design. Now I can say Tim Brown’s talk at last year’s Build has succeeded in forcefully injecting me with the importance – and centrality – of typography in modern web design.

If you haven’t already, I’d recommend taking the half an hour to listen in:

Tim Brown – More Perfect Typography from Build on Vimeo.

One of the two external links Brown provides goes further into how basic characteristics of type can influence the wider design.

The theoretical physicist Geoffrey West criticised existing accepted thought in urban theory before coming up with a set of constants that defined the relationship between city size and the output of it’s citizens (Each time a city doubles in size it’s per capita innovation, income, etc increases by 15% – and likewise the negative social actions of crime, pollution…). Previously he found a similar efficiency in biology where the larger an organism was the less energy per unit mass it required to go about it’s life.

It’s this track record in reducing a problem domain to a simple set of rules & constraints that is so impressive. The way in which theoretical physics practitioners go about solving for x – the sense of minimalism that drives the crunching of gigs of data and seemingly chaotic environment into understandable, predictable systems. It’s raw data visualisation in it’s purest form.

And then we have the humble infographic.

A little like urban theory at present far from being a true ‘data’ oriented approach they have morphed from original good intentions into a viral sub-genre seemingly as gratification for the design community while conveying no more than a smattering of anecdotal crumbs as an afterthought. Who cares if it’s insightful so long as it’s typeface looks cool.

Unconvinced?

Look at a recent effort from the popular information is beautiful site. The title leads us to believe there is a message about debt buried in the animated visualisations. Well, that’s a matter for debate. There is a bunch of figures expressed in terms of tetris blocks with area equating to amount. But it’s such a jumble of data without any clever way of giving context or connection beyond one dimensional “Data A vs Data B” scalar quantities.

For instance, the cost of the credit crunch is compared to African debt. One is many times more than the other. Perhaps worth some kind of further analysis, if only to see if there is some kind of basic relationship holding these unrelated numbers together. But it’s actually at the end of the clip, one that started off with everything from Tesco’s revenue to some guy’s net worth to the annual level of corporate tax evasion. The clever bit is apparently getting all these random amounts to slot together nicely as Tetris blocks….

So what? Where is the relationship? What is linking them? Where is the message?

And so here is an animated gimmick that tells us a bunch of unrelated numbers and surprisingly enough doesn’t try to relate them. It’s medium is certainly graphical. Is the data presented really ‘info’? Has the web deluge instead merely managed to dilute ‘info’ to mean any random factoid? I’ll be honest, there are people out there describing themselves as data geeks and I doubt they’ve touched the fundamentals of mathematics since GCSE.

Btw I’m in no way picking on just the above case, it just happened to be the first one I found. The web’s full of similarly vacuous ‘infographics’ that offer little in the way of truly informing people..

Undoubtedly there is an important place for real data graphics in popular science today. Peer through the sea of non-existent ‘insight’ and hubris surrounding the more widely circulated pseudo-data variant. The best graphics can guide the viewer no matter what they’re level of expertise to take in a startling array of data in a matter of seconds and crucially allow expression of context and relationship.

We need to get back to what infographics were developed for: rich visualisations of complex data expressed in a manner that conveys a simple overarching relationship to the observer free from narcissistic clutter and plain randomness.

A grand title, considering the relatively niche aspect of government communications that piqued my interest in the subject. But it’s something that should perhaps be given much greater emphasis as society increasingly interacts with the state online.

I got the link to my regional government’s draft budget on twitter via a url shortening service run by the department in question. Nothing radical about that except for the fact they chose to use ‘.me’ as the top level domain – a snappy TLD that is utilised by many url shorteners no doubt (including a friend’s) but also one that is run by a foreign government – Montenegro in this case.

I’m not about to suggest Montenegro, a superbly sunny state similar in size to NI and one which I’ve had the good fortune to visit, is about to turn rogue. But there are potential issues with using foreign TLDs, sufficiently to warrant a second opinion by government on whether they should be relying on such a service.

And this is the point about info flow for government online. Links are obviously the lifeblood of the internet and anything aiding the sharing them is to be encouraged. URL shorteners are predominantly used for temporary communication. But surely it’s important for government services that they can guarantee their links will not go stale, whether due to shortener natural ‘overwriting’ or overseas issues beyond their control?

In the real world, lost communications cost government and people money. The same is true online.

http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp

Incidentally I came by this information by way of Rapleaf, who are one of these ‘database marketing’ companies who engage in datamining browsing habits in a big way. Interestingly I remember them from a TechCrunch article a few years back where they started out innocently enough as an online social networking reputation tool – until eBay didn’t like it encroaching on their space and banned Rapleaf content from sellers auction pages.

If you’re still registered with them and like myself didn’t realise they had morphed into an marketing data company you can delete your account with them here.

Google has done two ‘real-time’ things lately, one good one not so good: Real Time web indexing and real time web search.

With ‘er, hang-on a minute…‘ moments now surfacing in the public domain I find the contrast between the two to be especially important. Google in their traditional engineer style expound the benefits of both in shaving seconds of search: ’11 user hours saved globally each second’; ’50% faster indexing rate of content’; figures that prove the mantra – machines search better than humans.

Machines definitely do the donkey work better than humans. Indexing is a dumb process easily solvable by machine and has been for decades. The migration from batch processing to incremental updating of the search index that Google Caffeine delivers is an essential improvement to real time search.

The Google Instant realtime GUI trick is not such a homerun. Instant brings up a full page of results updated character by character. In cases where the user searches over two or more words – in my experience the vast majority of search – context is vital. Rarely is that context clear until the entire phrase is typed in. This is why google instant, as fast as it undoubtedly is, rarely returns what you’re looking for until you complete your search term.

In any case, the Mind Machine Interface is a delicate thing and only as strong as the weakest link – the human. And it’s the human that has to comprehend this extra flow of data, most of it extraneous.

Google does not yet do the contextual understanding the user must accomplish to use Instant search successfully – and I wouldn’t like them to try, as that would likely involve personalisation based on past searches and as my browsing habits change over time I don’t want past results skewing things.

Incidently an ulterior motive for Google Instant can always be found on the web.

So in conclusion real time is only useful when the data can be transformed into a form easily processed as by the end user. If it cannot it instead serves to exacerbate the problem of information overload rather than lessening it.

The ideal real time UI has yet to be realised.

Techcrunch lead on a $100m investment by Google in Zynga the social network gaming company. It’s the latest in a long line of Google failures in a vital area of capturing web traffic – or, “organising the world’s information” as Google diplomatically puts it.

Canny move or desperation?

When examined in detail for such a blazingly successful company as Google are their record in social really is shocking: a near-continuous stream of failure with little apparent success on the horizon anytime soon. Something is playing up in non-evil algorithm land.

Dead

• Dodgeball
• lively
• Jaiku

Not Dead

• Latitude
• Wave
• Buzz

All are relatively unsuccessful on either Google or their own niche terms.

All elements of organising a user’s network around their infrastructure and not someone else. Each one concentrating on a certain social metaphor and each one failing in their own anonymous way. What will be different about gaming? What will make users skip their existing social accounts and networks that already have these games? While they tend to be pretty limited in depth what will Google do that will be different?

Obviously I’m highly sceptical but when you look at the stakes it’s vital for Google that they find a social something that sticks. Especially when the CEO has always seen them as a media company first and foremost.

Facebook with their über-targeted ads has a technology and reach that is arguably more powerful than Google’s. It is a big threat to continued adwords growth, which despite all the moves against Microsoft & Apple is surely Google’s #1 priority.

If gaming really is the leverage to unseat Facebook then Zynga may turn out to be a great choice – the 3 year old company is already rumoured to be projecting $1bn in revenue for 2011, signalling the undoubted importance of this much derided gaming sub-industry.

It may be blood from a stone attempting to get Google to admit it’s worried about anything – least of all a single web site – But putting yourself in their shoes it’s difficult to see Facebook’s rise as anything less than the #1 threat to their existing revenue model.

Perhaps, when attempting to convince users your browser is rock solid haxor-proof, it’d be advisable to demonstrate to them that your sites can detect which browser they’re currently running?

First off I point out that although FB Pages are public, Facebook adds rel=”nofollow” to all external links posted on users & pages walls, meaning no benefit for seo.
However I have seen a number of SEO-sites claim that adding one of the many RSS feed apps to their fb page and configuring it to auto publish their target site feed will result in the fb link juice flowing back to them.

not so.

A cursory glance at the structure of fb pages dispels this myth:

The special tabs that display these feeds are rendered inside special CDATA sections that facebook javascript libraries then parse themselves. And search engines don’t crawl this data – especially in it’s ugly preprocessed javascript-escaped format.
The only way to display untampered urls within facebook is in a fully fledged application iframe – and even then these are the poorest inbound links possible as users installing them on their facebook profiles is still optimistically hoping the profile will be a) public in it’s entirety and b) indexed by Google.

They also ask about page apps like RSS Graffiti, Networked Blogs or Social RSS but the bottom line is it’s impossible for them to publish indexable links within the public facebook page structure (and besides, some of them mangle your links through their own forwarding service anyway). So don’t waste your time – Faceook links are not an aid to SEO.

I agree with the enthusiasts – form factor is all-important

For this reason I believe a netbook is superior when veging out in front of the tele – after all, I don’t hold the remote continuously while watching a programme so why should I have to hold a computer to surf the web?