Marketing Pilgrim

If you are following me on Twitter or a friend on Facebook you might already be aware that I am a heartless b@st@rd. OK so maybe that’s a bit extreme but the truth is, I think a lot of what mainstream social media users take part in is a waste of time. For example I don’t thank people for retweets, I don’t participate in follow Friday, and I don’t join every Facebook fan page that comes along. Why don’t I do all of these things? Because quite honestly they do very little to help promote my ideas and the people I believe in. And more importantly they add more noise to a medium that is already saturated to the rim with useless content.

If you’re going to send me a media pitch, this is how you do it:

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Happy Friday!

We’ve seen it happen a hundred times: popular website launches new feature, people either hate change or see it as an invasion of privacy, popular website blinks. Usually it’s Facebook (*cough*Beacon*cough*privacy changes*cough*), but this week it’s Google. Launched on Tuesday, Google Buzz became an opt-out feature in all Gmail accounts. Not a huge problem—until people realized that, by default, Google was publishing the list of people you email and chat with most frequently, with real-life implications.

Last night, Google took a step back and listened to the complaints. Yes, people could eventually opt out of sharing those lists—if they knew where to look for a single obscure checkbox. But now Google’s making it easy to keep your friend lists more private by default:

And thus concludes probably the only time in my life I’ll intentionally quote Top Gun.

Yesterday, YouTube released a Speed Dashboard to clock how fast your video downloads are coming through. In addition to displaying your Internet speed, the dashboard also offers comparative data. For example:

The comparative data comes from not only other customers of your ISP but other YouTube users in your neighborhood with different ISPs—in case you wanted to know just how fast the Joneses can watch the latest Weezer single.

Says YouTube:

Bing has a lot to learn about sharing big news on its blog.

Take this post for example: spatial search: the next frontier

Cute title, but doesn’t tell me anything about the announcement.

Or take the actual post. 1300+ words and you have to read 628 of them, before you get to the announcment. Talk about burying the lead!

Fortunately, I have a man on the inside (hi Scott) that makes sure I don’t miss important news from Bing. Such as, the awesomeness of the forthcoming Streetside Photos in Bing Maps.

Watch this 2:35 video and you’ll see this cool technology integrates with Flickr images:

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What, you don’t have a couple of minutes? Here’s the summary:

Remember when I asked if social search engine Aardvark might suffer from "participation fatigue" as its members grow tired of answering the questions of others.

Yeah, you can forget about that, because Aardvark was just acquired by Google for a cool $50 million.

< I can hear CEO Max Ventilla now: "I’ve got your participation fatigue, right here, Andy!" >

Anyway, I thought Google was out of the "using humans to answer questions" business? I thought all of our search problems were going to be solved by robots and algorithms?

I have no insider knowledge on why Google made the buy, so I’ll just wildly speculate as normal.

Perhaps, it’s because Aardvark was gaining ground in the mobile search space. Something I speculated a couple of weeks back: