Marketing Pilgrim

Google has gone ahead and done what search marketers could only have previously dreamed about: given us an advance preview of search engine update "Caffeine."

Announced at the Webmaster Central Blog, Caffeine is "a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search." Ooh, how exciting! While the official announcement warns not to expect any obvious changes–it claims most of the updates are "under the hood"–Matt Cutts admitted that "some of the search results do change, so we wanted to open up a preview so that power searchers and web developers could give us feedback."

Well, here’s some feedback–garnered on my very first query–Google may have dialed up too much focus on Twitter. Take a look at this comparison:

Yesterday’s announcement that Doug Cutting was leaving Yahoo for start-up Cloudera was big news considering how important he was to establishing the Yahoo search business. It seems that the thrill is gone for him at the new and improved Yahoo. Cutting’s departure was covered yesterday by the New York Times and then expanded on a bit by the folks at ReadWrite Enterprise.

Cutting was one of Yahoo’s best and brightest, especially in the area of search and software infrastructure. He got to work on the largest installation of his wildly successful software Hadoop, an open source solution for dealing with huge data sets. Both Yahoo and Cloudera use Hadoop, so the work is the same on the most basic level. Why would he leave to join a 20-person team at a young company?

One of the more difficult aspects of Facebook up until yesterday was the search capability on the site. Yesterday was a busy day at Facebook as the “FaceFeed” acquisition was put in motion .Under the radar of sorts was this announcement about improvements made in the search capabilities that helps heavy Facebook users considerably and, in particular, marketers.

Let’s be honest here. Facebook is like every other social networking / media / engineering marketing site in that it promotes communication and a kind of online hippy mentality. It’s all peace, love, everyone getting along and basically knowing way too much about each other. Well folks, let’s remind ourselves of one thing about the lovable hippies of the 60’s. They went on to become major league capitalists (the ones that could at least feed themselves like Jerry Rubin) and while Facebook may always talk about the user experience what they are most interested in their financial experience. At the end of the day it’s a business and who can fault them? The search capabilities help the business of Facebook even more and may help them hit those lofty revenue numbers.

Google has given the good folks who use their Australian engine some social networking features that come with a gaggle of Google gadgets. Looks like the only way to get the social networking aspects of the gadgets is to be putting your shrimp on the barbie. Smart Company tells us

The new gadgets include the “Updates” feed, which is similar to those seen on the Facebook home page. Other gadgets include news.com.au, Biggest Brain, YouTube, Photos, Chess, Flood-It!, NY Times Crossword, To Do, Go Comics, Trivia, Timeline, and Tile Game.

Users outside of Australia can use the gadgets, but only Australians can use their social features. Regan also said in his post that the social features are completely optional.

As the Internet space grows there are going to be some casualties for sure. As to who they are that remains to be seen because you just never know. This space is changing rapidly and what used to be the “latest and greatest’ can quickly turn into the lamest and not so greatest’.
The latest ‘victim’ is Bloglines and Michael Arrington of TechCrunch tells it like it is

The once-great feed reader, bought by IAC in February 2005 for around $10 million, has been on life support for a couple of years now.

A two year old beta site with new features remains in beta and has never been launched on the main domain name. A band aid was put on the problems the service had a year ago, but not a single new feature of note has launched since then.

This is one of those posts that we’d rather bring to you quickly and fill in the blanks later–Facebook has just announced that it has agreed to acquire social network aggregator FriendFeed.

Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.

The full release is here.

It’s interesting that Facebook has intentions to become an aggregator of the social web. It’s already testing the integration of Twitter feeds, and this acquisition confirms its intentions. The big question for me is how will FriendFeed’s loyal users react? Many of them–Robert Scoble included–flocked to FriendFeed’s apparent bipartisan approach to social networking. Will that disappear now that it’s part of Facebook?