As we come to the end of another year, many of us will reflect back on things we’ve experienced, lessons learned, and just everything the last 12 months brought us. 2011 has been an incredible year filled with tons of important world events as well as a lot of interesting celebrity events and gossip. Sadly, but not surprisingly, “interesting” squashes “important” online, putting celebrity news and gossip far ahead of important world events when we measure our digital voice online. Frugal Dad put together the following infographic, showing what the world found compelling enough to search for, share and talk about on Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
Have you ever heard the phrase “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”? This tidbit of wisdom, passed down for generations, refers to not relying on just one thing when the outcome is critical. Savvy investors spread their money among several types of investments. Google doesn’t have everything on one server or network. These are examples of what the phrase means.
Too Many Eggs, Not Enough Baskets
Today, I received an email from Zlio. They’re a company that provided a unique way for people to create online shops and earn money. It was pretty innovative when it began, but I had forgotten about it for the last year or three. Today’s email from Zlio was intended to announce the end of life for their services due to the end of the company, but it also provided some details about how this happened. Those details underline my message.
Six years after its launch, we regret to announce that we are going out of business.
The service will officially end on September 11!
Zlio had a fantastic start, receiving capital from one Europe’s largest venture capital funds, Mangrove Capital. In addition, we held advanced M&A talks with Google, which unfortunately fell through at the last minute.
Our strong initial growth was interrupted on September 27, 2007, when the majority of Zlio shops, which were generally very well ranked, saw their Google ranking drop dramatically, eliminating 65% of our traffic.
Despite our best efforts, and the opening of 380,000 stores to date, it has not been possible to regain our previous Google rankings, except in exceptional cases.
When we founded Zlio, we thought that you, members of Zlio, would successfully promote your shops among your circles. We did not believe that Google referencing would be so crucial. Unfortunately, it has proved to be indispensable.
Among the actions taken to improve our Google ranking, we approached an SEO company who claimed they were able to fix our problem.
In view of their poor performance, we assessed that this company had not fulfilled its obligations. Therefore, we entered into dispute with it, which resulted in a court case whose sentence was rendered on July 26, 2011. This ruling is available on the website of the Paris Commercial Court (Tribunal de Commerce de Paris).
This decision sentences us both to pay the whole of a service that we still believe have not been provided and to pay damages for publishing our opinion about Referencement on Twitter. The latter part of the sentence has already drawn much attention in the French media.
This sentence means we cannot go on. The service has been losing money for several years (which forced us to gradually reduce our staff), and the amounts to which we are sentenced to pay today no longer allow us to meet our obligations.
The email goes on to point out that they will honor amounts owed to Zlio shop owners, etc., but the important thing to note is how they describe a timeline in which they saw some early success with their Google placement that abruptly went away, and how the resulting actions ended up putting them out of business. This may be a unique case, but if you do some searching on Google, you’ll find that every time Google changes its search placement algorithms, scores of blogs and web sites speak out about how they’ve lost over half their traffic. To some sites, this becomes catastrophic.
Protect Your Web Traffic
Search engine optimization is a huge factor in the success of most websites. I’m not here to tell you otherwise, but while optimizing to make sure Google sends you a lot of qualified traffic, don’t forget other marketing channels. Share your voice on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, check your rankings in Yahoo and Bing, comment on blogs and in forums, and hand out business cards at events. Whatever you do, spread those eggs around in many baskets and you’ll be one step ahead of everyone else when the industry shifts.
Today, Google sent me an invitation to Google Music Beta. Until today, I was not a part of the limited number of users allowed in to play around. Launching quietly among all the buzz about Google+ and Google +1, Google Music is yet another attempt by Google to steal a huge user base. This time, Apple is the target.
What Is Google Music?
Google Music is a way to make your music collection available from anywhere you are. Because you upload your music collection to Google Music, it’s on the web for you to access from any computer or Android device. According to Google, it’s “A better way to play your music.”
How Do I Get A Google Music Invite?
When I first saw the Google Music Beta landing page, my first thought was that I wanted to dive in and play around. Of course, it’s in Beta, so they are limiting who can get in. I signed up to be on the list for an account and just a couple days later, I received my invitation email. Head to http://music.google.com and request an invite. If they open it up by time you read this, you should go right to your music collection to start adding. At the time of this writing, there are no invites being handed out to anyone other than via the invitation request system.
Google Music Features
In its infancy, Google Music Beta has one main feature: Play your music from anywhere. Beyond that, it doesn’t really have any ground-breaking features that are going to change your life. It has playlists, the ability to give a track a thumbs up or thumbs down, listings by song, artist, album or genre, and lots of information about the track. So, yeah. It’s like iTunes on the web.
In my quality time with Music Beta, I did find a few features that I thought stood out a little. While playing music, you can navigate to the next and previous tracks with the left and right arrow keys or use the space bar to play or pause. Additionally, the up and down arrow keys, home and end and even the page up and down help you navigate through the list while the backspace or delete keys will remove a track from your collection.
Google also added context menus to tracks to help you add songs to playlists, buy music, etc. My favorite part is the instant mix which just makes a quick mix playlist from the song you chose and other songs Google thinks compliment it. Finally, like in iTunes, you can select multiple tracks with SHIFT+click or CTRL+click and drag things around to make stuff happen. While testing, I dragged a whole album to a playlist to add it quickly.
To get your music into Google Music, you need to install the desktop application. It finds tracks from a selection of locations (I chose my iTunes library) and works like mad to upload them all. If you want to give it a test run, you can create a folder with a small selection of tracks and just import that or you can do like I did and go for broke. If you have a large collection, like me, you should be prepared to wait and keep in mind the 20,000 track limitation Google currently imposes. Seven hours after starting, only 3,400 tracks from my collection have uploaded. The upside is that it doesn’t choke up your computer’s bandwidth, processor, or memory as it quietly churns away in the background.
What’s Missing?
Social sharing : GrooveShark and Pandora set great examples for music sites with ample social sharing options. Google Music Beta doesn’t even integrate +1 or Google+ sharing, but I’d rather see Facebook and Twitter as a minimum. With the existing APIs, it should be really easy to build in.
International availability : At last check Google Music is available only in the United States. With a project like this, it’s probably just a matter of Google getting all the kinks worked out and then working through any legal barriers for offering a music service in other countries.
More keyboard controls : That there’s keyboard controls at all pleases me, but I kept looking for a way to fast forward or rewind with the keyboard. I’d also love to see shortcuts for common actions like SHIFT+Up Arrow to give a track a thumbs up or ways to add to playlists without the mouse.
While it’s not something I expect Google to take care of, I had a number of tracks that would not import because they had the old DRM ball-and-chain from iTunes. Actually, Music Beta intelligently recognized the DRM tracks, refused to import them, and provided a report about them in the desktop application. You can always burn those tracks to CD, rip them back to your computer, and re-import them without the DRM later.
Early Conclusions
The feature set is a little underwhelming, but the concept is exactly what I want from online music… MY music when and where I want it. Everything worked well, too, but I’ve heard others complain about the user interface. Google is touting it as “free for now”, but with an ad-supported option and some polishing, this will completely replace everything else I use to listen to music.
Once upon a time, Google launched it’s new social buzz network called Google Buzz. It wasn’t long before people began to notice, and loudly complain about, privacy concerns that this launch introduced. These concerns were soon resolved and largely forgotten about… until today. This afternoon, Google send the following to users of it’s GMail web-based email service, where the privacy concerns had been a major issue.
Google rarely contacts Gmail users via email, but we are making an exception to let you know that we’ve reached a settlement in a lawsuit regarding Google Buzz (http://buzz.google.com), a service we launched within Gmail in February of this year.
Shortly after its launch, we heard from a number of people who were concerned about privacy. In addition, we were sued by a group of Buzz users and recently reached a settlement in this case.
The settlement acknowledges that we quickly changed the service to address users’ concerns. In addition, Google has committed $8.5 million to an independent fund, most of which will support organizations promoting privacy education and policy on the web. We will also do more to educate people about privacy controls specific to Buzz. The more people know about privacy online, the better their online experience will be.
Just to be clear, this is not a settlement in which people who use Gmail can file to receive compensation. Everyone in the U.S. who uses Gmail is included in the settlement, unless you personally decide to opt out before December 6, 2010. The Court will consider final approval of the agreement on January 31, 2011. This email is a summary of the settlement, and more detailed information and instructions approved by the court, including instructions about how to opt out, object, or comment, are available at http://www.BuzzClassAction.com.
In short, they’re going to give about about $8.5 million (minus expenses) to privacy organizations. This means that, unlike many class action law suits, you’ll get nothing (no money, anyway) if you accept the settlement (by doing nothing). Alternatives include objecting, requesting to be heard by the courts, and opting out of the suit (in case you want to be part of another suit in this matter). Personally, I wasn’t affected and think that giving money to privacy organizations to help people be more informed is just fine, but you should be aware so you can meet next month’s deadline for any option you choose.
