1. Facebook have more traffic than Google and this continues to increase
2. Facebook are creating a new killer OS (a delusion based on a recent quip by young Zuckerberg)
3. Facebook’s targeted advertising is more effective than Google’s version.

In this series I will show that each of these assertions is false and argue that Facebook are nowhere near being a competitor to Google. Before anyone gets upset, I’m not arguing that Facebook is doomed. This year they will grow their user base enormously, incrementally add new features and continue increasing their profitability further into the green, perhaps even to $3 billion in advertising revenue. They’ll do fine. But they ain’t got nothing on Google.

Myth 1: Facebook have more traffic than Google and this continues to increase

This statement is both wrong and irrelevant – yet has been propogated throughout the media throughout the past week – including Newsweek and The Times.

To understand why it’s wrong you need to first learn a little about how domain names work.

Avoid if you don’t like set theory (or better yet learn set theory then read).

A website’s domain name (e.g. www.example.com) should be thought of as three sets, each of which is a subset of the set to it’s right. Taking the domain “www.example.com” and reading from left to right the first set (www.) is known as the subdomain. A domain (“example” in this case) can have many subdomains (e.g. www.example.com, mail.example.com or app.example.com), all of which are contained within the overall domain (“example”). Now the example domain (which contains all the subdomains) is itself just a subset of the top level domain, in this case (.com). Thus “www.example” is subdomain of “.com” just as “app” or “www” are subdomains of “example”.  Differing entries at lower domain levels are all included with the superset to the right, but this relationship does not work in reverse. Thus app.google.com and mail.google.com are both included in google.com, but google.ie not included in google.com since as .com and .ie are different sets, each of which contains every single website or domain within that top level domain.

End avoidance warning.

Now, why does all this matter? One simple and important reason: Statistics for Google.com DO NOT include statistics for Google.co.uk.

Facebook only exists as “Facebook.com”, i.e. it only has one possible top level domain (.com in this case). Unlike Facebook, Google have many different top level domains (e.g. .com, .co.uk, .ie etc.). Thus we have  Google.com, Google.co.uk, Google.ie, Google.de and so on. Each of these is a separate site drawing enormous traffic. At time of writing Google.ie is Ireland’s most used website, followed in second place by Google.com, and then third by Facebook.com. As you see the first and second spots in Ireland were held by two versions of Google existing at different TLDs. Whenever Facebook manages to end up in first place for a period this only means it is beating Google.ie or Google.com. It does not, however, mean it is beating the aggregate of the two. The only way to get an accurate picture of Google’s size is to aggregate the statistics for all these entries, something I’ve yet to see a journalist actually do. Indeed in the last week many prestigious publications (including NewsWeek and The Times) made the mistake of thinking Google.com traffic was representative of all their top level domains, thus exhibited an upside down understanding of the way domain system work. One last time for the audience: Google.co.uk is not a subset of Google.com

Even at this point the picture is far too simple.

Google owns a lot of websites besides it’s search core. Some of the biggest are Youtube, Blogger, Gmail, Maps, Docs, Translate, Wave, Picassa, FlickR, Ortuka. For a list of their acquisitions to date (92 at present) see the wiki List of Acquisitions By Google and to see a list of other service they provide see this wiki entry on Google Services. In calculating Google’s size (and quantifying the informational resources available to them), you really need to be taking all of this into account too.

Another dimension to take into account is when Facebook get their traffic. According to analytics firm Hitwise, Facebook was the “most visited site in the United States on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day”, beating even Google. There is a message here if we read between the lines: Facebook is where you go when your bored!

What is left unsaid is that Google is where you go the rest of the time. Surely your own experiences confirm this. If you’re busy at work you close down Facebook. If you’re finals are coming up in college you stop going on Facebook. In both these times your Google usage shoots up. You use Google when it counts.

More fundamentally, the idea of web traffic is misleading and needs further disaggregation. Traffic refers to a lot of different things – hits, unique visitors, time on site. With many of these statistics, less is actually more for Google. Google do not want you spending ages on their search site – they want you to find what you want and leave. They want you to solve your problem. If their results are good enough to give you the correct site in one second then that’s great. More time spend on Google’s site would indicate a failing on their part – you couldn’t find what you wanted so had to keep searching. Now Google ends up paying for not just one search query on your behalf but five or ten. Servers are expensive and the bottom line is that every time you click search you cost Google money.

So, the metric that counts is not simple traffic in Google’s case, but rather is the number of successful queries per day,  success being defined as a user having solved their informational problem. As long as Google lead in this respect, it’s irrelevant to them where you spend the rest of your time online. So, in conclusion, even if Facebook  oneday did top the Google aggregate in traffic, (something I see as possible in a few years), it still doesn’t even matter.

Next week I’ll deal with Mark Zuckerberg’s confusing quip that Facebook is a killer OS. It ain’t gonna be pretty….

Related posts:

1. How to stop checking Facebook, Twitter or Google Analytics every 4 seconds
2. Get Your Website to the top of Google Ireland Using Web Directories
3. Change the search engine from Wordpress’s built in engine to one powered by Google

I’ve changed my mind. We are perched on the apex of a revolution – I cannot conclude otherwise. Fearing that the optimistic bias has defeated me too, my goal today is to attempt to prove this hypothesis. I’ll start with my “idea collision” theory, one tenet of my model for the creation of novel knowledge in a society :

“The probability of  the formation of new knowledge is directly proportional to the number of collisions between ideas multiplied by the distance between the two colliding ideas.”

What happens when ideas collide

New ideas occur when two previously existent ideas collide for the first time. Combine the old fashioned telephone with battery technology and wireless signaling and you get the mobile phone. Combine the physics of mass, energy and electromagnetism signals and, with a lot of thought, and a stroke of genius, you get relativity. Don’t be fooled into thinking that every collision creates valuable new knowledge. The vast majority of collisions are fruitless and their results must be discarded.

Filtering out the many bad combinations from the few good ones requires testing. Here you have two choices – carry out experiments in the physical world or carry them out in your head using your own internal model of the world to test hypotheses. Carrying out experiments in the world is safer since the real world results provides feedback showing you if you are wrong or right.  Carrying out experiments in your head is more efficient and sometimes necessary, given limitations of real world experimentation (such as unavailability of resources, data or time). It was through a vast network of mental experiments that Einstein discovered relativity – he imagined himself as a photon of light observing how things moved around him, eventually arriving at a theory he proved later with mathematics. Be warned, however, to carry out mental experiments you need to have a seriously accurate mental model of your domain of experimentation.

Einstein: the daddy himself

Digressions aside, every Eureka moment eventuating int the formation starts with a collision -  followed then by testing. Thus more collisions are better than less for the generation of new ideas.

Moving on to the second part of his hypothesis – the multiplication of theses collisions by the “distance” between the colliding ideas. Lets start by defining distance: if ideas are “close” together this means that they are frequently thought of together by others, meaning the collisions have already occurred and most of the knowledge has already been harvested. Here, we approach a saturation point, whereby collisions no longer results in the generation of new knowledge. Contrast this with when ideas are “distant”. In this case the colliding ideas have seldom, if ever, been thought of together. It during these collisions that the most powerful new ideas are generated. Take the double helix structure of DNA, which was discovered by Crick and Watson. In their research the pair immersed themselves deeply in genetics, biochemistry, chemistry, physical chemistry, and X-ray crystallography. You might say there is little “distance” between the fields, as all are sciences -  but remember that distance here is defined as the frequency with which two ideas are thought of together. Very few minds have the drive or ability to simultaneously understand so many complex scientific fields fields and so the intersection of ideas explored by Crick and Watson was at zero saturation, a field ripe for the harvest of fresh knowledge.

Crick and Watson discovered the double helix structure of these jeans

Returning to the title of this post – how is it that internet changes everything? Because it vastly increased the number of collisions occurring between ideas and the distance between the colliding ideas, in exactly the same way that urbanization did (the only comparable revolution in the past, the consequences of which were the industrial revolution).

Before mass urbanization people lived together in small communes, most staying put for the majority of their lives. These rural settlers had low numbers of idea collisions in their lives, given the small number of members in the community (and the time taken to travel to one another) and the small number of non human idea carriers (e.g. books, work practices, etc. – the medium through which an idea collides is irrelevant – what counts is that in someone’s brain the two somehow meet). The infrequent collisions during the agrarian age rarely generated new knowledge since the distance between the colliding ideas was miniscule as most members of the community had spent their entire lives together, preoccupied with the same narrow domains.

Contrast this to the industrial age. Settlers moved from across the countryside to big cities and instead of bumping into five or ten people in a day (and similarly low numbers of other “idea transmitters”), a person might now bump into ten to one hundred times more people or idea transmitters. As these people often came from different villages and different backgrounds the set of ideas they each held differed significantly and so the distance metric increased too.

We still live in cities – and cities today are bigger than before, better connected, and draw people from a broader background that in the industrial age. These factors increase both the number of collisions which occur and the distance metric for these colliding ideas. Distance is also increased too by improvements in the standard of living which enables many in the developed world to devote themselves deeply to the world of ideas. That being said, these improvements do not have the same revolutionary quality as the move from rural to agricultural. I

Now we have the world wide web, where people’s ideas collide with an exponentially greater frequency with ideas of exponentially greater distance. Your Facebook profile puts you in touch with hundreds through it’s mini feed. An individual wiki article may have thirty or forty editors, and by reading through the page you are exposed to the sum of their collisions (remember too that each of their inputs may itself draw on a similarly huge array of past bombardments). There are a lot more collisions – things are heating up.

Idea Collisions on the Wa-Wa-Wee-Wa scale

Not only are there exponentially more collisions – but also these collisions are from disparate fields. With the web an American can communicate effortlessly with other English speakers across the world. The spread of English as a new latin means that other previous boundaries  separating distant ideas are now crumbling. Powerful tools like Google Translate provide a Rosetta Stone across language barriers. The rise of links between information on the internet and the Google powered search engine makes delving into distant ideas effortless – the barriers to learning distant fields are dropping harder than a banging London beat.

We are living on the slope of a steeply rising knowledge curve – and it has not been since the rise of urbanization has this slope been so steep. This, I argue, is why we are living in the age of a revolution.

Think otherwise? Agree? Say so in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Why I Blog
2. Balancing knowledge you should share with trade secrets you keep
3. Educational reform in the information age: Part 2 Skills, not just useless knowledge

1) To Build Trust.

If you are working in the cloud, some of your co-workers, business partners or customers will never meet you. Most of these will still Google you before doing business with you – it’s a natural and understandable instinct. If  someone Googles your name and finds nothings, or very little then you are an unknown quantity. If instead they find a blog, with hundreds of articles you have a personality. You have interests and a voice. People can get to know you through your writing, and can dig as deep as they like by looking through your archives. With my blog I hope that my current and future readers will become acquainted with my values, and from that infer information about my companies’ products.

I wear suits and I blog. Therefore I am trustworthy.

2) To Get Feedback on Ideas

The best way to develop an idea is through dialogue. Read through Plato’s Socratic Dialogues before you try to argue otherwise. When I blog, I have an audience of readers who think about what I say, then either comment, email or talk to me in person about the ideas. An added bonsus is that my readers learn about my interests and so bring them up with me when they see me in person, with such exchanges helping me develop my ideas further. My most valued readers will even tell me when I get something wrong – saving me from embarrassment or worse yet, from making a poor decision.

3) To Crystallize Thoughts

In an ideal world you would take half an hour aside everyday to think ideas through. We don’t live in an ideal world, and the truth is that the best way I know to think something through is to write about it. Mistakes in your logic become glaring as you type and the added knowledge that what you write will be read and judged by your readers ensures you keep strict quality controls . When I write, I don’t really have a clue what my conclusion will be until I’m nearly finished. I don’t write in chronological order either. I jot down ideas across the page, throw in various TO-DOs, then play around with the structure and content until it makes enough sense for me to hit “Publish.” The point is to get a reasonably firm conclusion about some topic out of my time spent writing – a new idea I can hopefully apply in the coming weeks.

4) Ego

Right know there are nearly 200 people who have read every single one of my posts. Some of my posts have 2000 readers. Not only that, but they spend a significant amount of time reading these posts. According to Google Analytics, my average reader spends 2:30 on each page. That’s huge. I feel flattered that in the age of the 10 second attention span so many people are willing to wait around to hear what I have to say, then come back for more the next day. It feels good.

5) To Demonstrate Knowledge

I studied law at University, yet I work with computers for a living. Someone might ask, rightly, how I can prove I have any expertise with the Internet since I have no qualifications in the area. My blog provides an answer to this – it lets people know I have thought a lot about what I am doing, and that I know the lingo and the ins and outs of my domain.

6) To Sharpen my Writing Skills

The secret to getting good at writing is to do a lot of it. Surprise surprise. That’s the secret to being good at anything – anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar.  By writing regularly I improve my style and, since I hope to write a book in the distant future, I’ll take all the practice I can get.

Hopefully you can now see why I  blog and perhaps get inspired to start blogging too.

Related posts:

1. Balancing knowledge you should share with trade secrets you keep
2. Add a recent comments bar to your blog to encourage more commenting
3. How to spell check your entire blog for spelling mistakes

About two years ago I discovered Mozy, a free downloadable program which automatically backs up  your PC/Mac. Now if your Hard Drive dies, your Macbook gets stolen or you get drunk and stupidly delete all your files you don’t need to worry. Using Mozy you can easily restore all your documents and pick up where you left off.

Mozy offers 2GB of free space to store your files online. Use this wisely: there is no point in backing up downloaded movies and music. You can download this stuff again easily and you are better off putting these space intensive files on an external hard drive where 500GB only costs £50.

Instead you should use your free Mozy account to backup mission critical files. I use Mozy to backup my computer code, my documents not yet on Google Docs, my finals notes (back when I was in college) and my Mac settings and passwords. Once you install Mozy you select what you want it to backup and that’s it – you’re done. From that point on Mozy will automatically run every day (without distracting you in any way) and backup all your files.

The beauty of Mozy is that it stores your files online. That way you can access the files anywhere – and should there be a fire in your house destroying your external harddrive, you will still have a backup of your important files available online. Now that’s conscientiousness!

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2. Messages sent by the admin of a Page appear only appear in an “updates” panel. Problem: no one ever checks their “updates” panel  and so these messages are left unread. Facebook groups send their messages directly to their member’s Inbox and so actually get read. I mean it’s right under your nose appearing alongside personal mail so it makes sense right?

3. You get “invited” to a group, whereas a page only gets “suggested” to you. Semantically, there is a huge difference between an invitation and a suggestion. An invitation feels exclusive, fun and special. A suggestion feels like criticism – it connotes that whatever is being suggested is in some way tainted as it is only worthy of being weakly “suggested” rather than more overtly offered. Invitations switch the power around – an invitation says “hey, we’ve got something great… want to take part? it’s cool if ya don’t, we’re having fun anyway”.

Pic unrelated.

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At the same time people are busy. Besides your project they may have others they are working on. They may have full time jobs or degrees. They may have, god forbid, real social lives – friends who don’t speak in status updates or tweets; maybe even a love life; or a family. These people actually exist -I’ve even met a few in my travels. They don’t have the time to read lots of detailed emails about your project, so a balance must be found.

I decided on a solution: Inbox Texts – quick emails with the entire message in the subject title. Tiny status updates. Quick to-dos. Readable from IPhone or Blackberry – even if you’re out and about and don’t have time for the cloud.

Take some examples examples from my Bolivian Express project, where I am working with a team of three to set up an English language publication in Bolivian and set up a program whereby people can travel to Bolivia on a short term basis and work with the publication whilst there:

UPDATE: Internet explorer bug fixed (was HUGE)+ Backup system in place + Destroy links “destroyed” + Fixed problem with “edit” page

TO-DO AMARU: Digg our site and walk around the library FORCING people to do it with Facebook connect

UPDATE: Modified site to say program, modified pdf file to say program, cut 10% of basics sheet to fit on one page

Before you say it, no, I shouldn’t have written this entire blog post in the title. This is a blog. Not a project management system. HA.

Related posts:

1. Introducing: The Bolivian Express
2. Automatically update your Twitter account with automatically shortened links to new blog posts
3. Best e-fit artist ever?

From the website:

Our website is http://www.bolivianexpress.org and we have a Facebook group too, which is pretty dang retro  these days what with all the page suggestions and all.

Come back over the next week where I’ll write about how we managed to set up the business in less than three weeks working on the cloud across three different countries and without spending a single penny. It’s a good story. For now, just tell your friends about this thing.

Related posts:

1. Best e-fit artist ever?
2. Inbox Texts: The best way to update team members about a project’s status

A good first step is placing a photo and a short biography on every page of your blog. Notice I said to place in on every page of the blog – I’m explicitly ruling out limiting yourself to only placing the picture hidden away in some “About Us” page which nobody will ever read. I mean you need to place the picture loud and proud in your template for all to see.

Take this example from Gretchen Rubin’s blog, The Happiness Project”:

On every page of Gretchen’s blog  you see this photo of her and a snappy bio. Whether or not it was her intention to become well known (and don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a healthy and perfectly normal intention to try to draw attention to oneself), having a picture on every page means that most every person who ever stumbled across her blog knows her face and a little about who she is and what she stands for.

Having a pic and a short biography humanizes your Internet presence. No longer are you just one more page of Times New Roman font and blue/red links. You are now a person, with a face and a story.

Related posts:

1. A simple tip to help promote your blog & Twitter feed
2. Idea Collisions or why the internet changes everything.
3. A practical tip on how to concentrate harder

GoBus Ireland Defaults to a booking of zero tickets. Handy.

When you use their website to book a ticket it asks you your starting point, destination and time. At this point I usually click next, only to get the form spat back at me telling me “zero is an invalid number of passengers”.

Now I don’t mean to offend the adorable web designer who designed this piece of code but COME ON!! How many people do you think go to the trouble of filling out that form to book zero tickets? Let me take a wild guess: none?

Whats more there is a second failing with this form design: users must first select which “route” they wish to take, before then choosing a starting point and ending point. Considering that there are only two journeys available with GoBus (Galway-Dublin and Dublin to Galway), having to choose your route THEN your starting and ending point is tautologous, as one is implied by the other.

Forms should be designed to cater for the typical user in as efficient a way as possible. Your typical visitor to GoBus is there to book a single ticket for themselves. Intelligent web design would mean defaulting to a passenger number of “one” so that these typical customers can book without needing to fill in an extra tautological.

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As a law student turned web professional I’ve got a lot of learning to do: HTML, CSS, SQL, Scripting, Linux, DNS – every day there seems to be more and more buzzwords and languages I need to pick up. Luckily the web programming community has come to the same conclusion about the benefits of cheat sheets. Web professionals frequently make and distribute their own cheat sheets to the world and websites like Devcheatsheet and Cheat-sheets.org aggregate all these cheat sheets from across the web and present them all together in one handy portal.

If you’re serious making it online, I’d recommend you print off a folder worth of these badboys and stuff them into every corner of your life where you might find a spare minute or two. After a few weeks of  sneaky cheat sheeting you’ll be amazed by how much you learned and by how much coffee you’ve drank.

Excited? Then take your first step and download a set of html cheat sheets to start seeing how the web around you is constructed.

Related posts:

1. Educational reform in the information age: Part 2 Skills, not just useless knowledge
2. Education reform in the information age: Part 1 Emphasise search skills
3. New decade, new leaf: Pick a goal and do one thing towards achieving it every day for 30 days.