Posts tagged Forced
New Google Users Now Forced to Join Google+
Jan 21st
New users who sign up for a Google account now have no choice but to join Google+. The sign-up form now requires a first and last name and a gender (‘other’ is allowed). It also asks for a phone number. At the bottom of the sign-in form, there’s a checkbox allowing Google to use +1s to personalize content on non-Google websites. It’s checked by default.
“Your Google Account is more than just Search,” the first box on the sign-up page now says. No kidding. When you click to the next page, you are instructed that you have joined Google+. Yesterday, Google trumpeted that it has 90 million Google+ users, but it made clear that it can count basically anyone with a Google account. Google has been saying it all along, but now we’d better believe it: Google is Google+ now.
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More Than Just Search
Earlier this month, Google revealed Search, plus Your World. Before that day, public Google+ content was smushed into all logged-in searches, occasionally to the detriment of our Web searches. But SPYW split search in two, offering one side that was personalized with Google+ content and another that was “global.” Furthermore, users could turn off personalization for good in their preferences. I thought we dodged a bullet there.
I even gave Google’s social search results the benefit of the doubt. It looked like Google would try to pull in other identities from blogs, even Twitter and Facebook, if they could make a deal. That seemed okay. It seemed like Google’s “plus Your World” didn’t have to mean Google+ if we went out of our way to turn G+ off.
But then John Battelle made a point that unsettled me (in a good way). Google is not about search anymore, he wrote. “It’s about deals.” That’s not an open Web. That’s a cartel.
The Only Game In Town
No matter how many outside services I added to my Google profile, Google+ was still the only game in town on the social side of Google search. My network isn’t really on Google+ – except for the ways in which they haven’t yet opted out – so I don’t find what I’m looking for. I opted out. My instincts about Google+ social search messing up the Web were true in practice. But at least I could opt out.
But now, as the unofficial Google Operating System blog discovered today, new users have to wait to opt out until they’ve opted in. Once you’ve gotten the whole “Google is more than search” spiel and seen the “Welcome to Google+!” messages, you can dig into your settings and delete it all.
You’re All Set
And in the meantime, do you count as one of the 90 million so-called Google+ users? Do you count as one of the 60% who “engage daily?” Why is Google so shady about Google+ activity numbers? If it was going well, they would be straightforward about it, right? I gave Google credit for letting users opt out of services they don’t want, but it’s getting harder and harder to do.
For the really sneaky, Google Operating System points out that you can still access the old sign-up form if you know the URL. Let’s see how long that lasts.
What do you think of Google’s new personalization features? Do you use Google+? Tell us how you use the new Google in the comments.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Will Data Collection on User Behavior Be Forced to End Soon?
Jan 10th
Harvard Business Review ran three interesting short pieces in this month’s magazine, under the misleadingly timeless title “Tackling Business Problems.” The three essays are actually guest submissions from business radicals, the final of the three being from social media luminary Doc Searls.
Traditional Customer Relationship Management is dead meat, Searls argues. Companies should stop collecting data about their customers. Right now, before the customers revolt! This populist vision of revolt is balanced out a little by Searls’ vision of what’s likely to come next. You can get the picture from the title of his forthcoming book, The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge. It seems crazy, but his view of what the future will bring with regard to customer data is fascinating to consider.
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Writing about the massive collection of consumer data, Searls writes:
“Customers naturally see this trend as a gross invasion of their privacy and are starting to resist providing accurate information–or any information at all.
But the main reason for vendors to quit this practice is not that it’s bad manners. It’s that businesses soon will no longer own the data anyway–customers will. And when that happens, vendors will end up reaping greater benefits than they do now.”
As someone fascinated by the possibilities for innovation, I am very hesitent when I read people cheering the revolt of users against the collection of their data. I hope that data collection will be done in a positive way and will lead to big wins for everyone.
It’s not clear that’s going to happen though. Behavioral marketing trailblazer and Tacoda founder Dave Morgan once told me that no one had yet found a way to articulate the value proposition of aggregate data analysis to end consumers because there wasn’t one yet. No one had really built it, people were generally focused on sleazy short term wins at the expense of the consumer. It is the job of startups to build something compelling, he says.
Searls believes this will happen when consumers are in control over their own data. He thinks that’s going to be a net win for the consumer and the companies that sell to them.
“Here’s why,” he writes. “When customers own and control their own data, demand will drive supply more efficiently than supply currently drives demand.”
By that he means that satisfaction of real consumer demand, demand felt my consumers in control in a market that strives to delight them, will be more efficient than demand that gets manufactured by manipulative advertising driven by supply that must be sold.
Customers not only will collect and manage their own data but will be equipped with tools for declaring their intentions directly to the whole marketplace, without having to flit from store to store or website to website looking for what they want.”
That does sound more efficient, but it’s sounding more far-out too.
In this ‘intention economy,’ customers will determine the products they want, the prices they pay, and the terms of engagement they require. Those terms will include both permissions and restrictions regarding the use of their data.”
And I suppose dogs will be friends with cats, lions will kick it with lambs, etc. I don’t know.
This is reminiscent of the Lean Startup philosophy, which emphasizes building products that serve demonstrated market needs, in response to working closely with customers.
That works, so many this will too. What will it look like? Understanding that better could make the whole thing feel more real.
Will users opt-in to participating in bucket targetted advertisements on Facebook? Is that an example of what Searls is discussing? Surely if I choose not to offer up an introduction to myself for conversation, vendors will instead continue to shout at me as I walk by them in the market.
There has certainly never been as much data recorded about each of us and our lives as there is today and will be tomorrow – but will that really be able to change the directionality of power projections between consumer and producer? That’s a very, very tall order. I can imagine the dynamic changing, of course. A radically changed dynamic between the individual and the market seems like something the web would be capable of facilitating. It already has in many ways – but can the consumer really ever be in control? I’m not so sure.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
WikiLeaks Proves U.S. Forced Spain to Adopt SOPA-Style Law
Jan 5th
Last week, the Spanish government enacted a law containing provisions that allows copyright holders to have allegedly-infringing websites shut down within days of a complaint. The legislation, which sounds like a more extreme version of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) being debating in the U.S., had actually already been passed, but wasn’t implemented until Spain’s new, notably more conservative government took control.
The Sustainable Economy Law, which contains the anti-piracy provisions, was enacted in part to help encourage investment by U.S.-based media and technology companies. Today it was revealed that American interest in the law being enacted may have been more than casual. Spain was actually threatened by the US with being put on a trade blacklist if the law wasn’t passed, according to cables released by WikiLeaks.
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In addition to the WikiLeaks cables, Spanish newspaper El Pais obtained a letter from the U.S. ambassador to Spain expressing “deep concern” over the country’s failure to enact the law and suggesting that economic punishment may be in order.
The revelations confirm what many had suspected about the extent of U.S. involvement in encouraging the legislation. It also says a thing or two about the influence of the media industry and its lobbyists, which apparently goes well beyond domestic initiatives like SOPA itself.
Last month, as the administration of Spanish President Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero was on its way out of office, the U.S. Ambassador evidently ramped up pressure on the government to enact the anti-piracy law, which was crafted with help from the U.S. government. The Zapatero government declined to cave in to the pressure, but Spain’s newly sworn-in administration made it a top priority and officially made it law last Friday.
Explains TorrentFreak:
In the letter, which was also sent to Minister of Culture Ángeles González-Sinde after whom the law is named, Solomont noted that Spain is already on the Special 301, the annual report prepared by the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) detailing ‘trade barriers’ based on intellectual property issues.
Solomont’s threat was that should Spain not pass the Sinde Law (described by some as the Spanish SOPA) then the country would be degraded further and placed on the Priority Watch List. This serious step would mean that Spain was in breach of trade agreements and could be subjected to a range of “retaliatory actions”.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Google Forced To Punish Itself For Chrome’s SEO Mistake
Jan 3rd
Google Chrome made a booboo, and now its own company is punishing it. Yesterday, the news broke that bloggers were being paid to use SEO spam tactics to boost the Google Chrome website’s page ranking in search. Hundreds of paid articles, many of them totally incoherent, were used to promote Chrome. At least one of them violated Google’s policy against paid links. As Google’s search guru Matt Cutts wrote in 2009, “paid posts should not affect search engines.”
So that was awkward. Fortunately for Google, the infraction could be blamed on Unruly Media, the third-party company Google hired to promote Chrome. Links from the paid posts were supposed to use the rel="nofollow" tag, so they wouldn’t affect page rank. At least one blogger didn’t, even though Unruly “advised” them to. In order for Google to get out of this mess, it would have to punish itself as it has done to others. Sure enough, Google says it will reduce Chrome’s page rank.
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From the statement Google sent to Search Engine Land:
“We’ve investigated and are taking manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome and lower the site’s PageRank for a period of at least 60 days. We strive to enforce Google’s webmaster guidelines consistently in order to provide better search results for users. While Google did not authorize this campaign, and we can find no remaining violations of our webmaster guidelines, we believe Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site.”
At least Google won’t come out of this looking like a hypocrite. It goes to great lengths to punish sites that play games with search ranking, and it already takes heat for favoring its own sites. PR-wise, there was no way out of this for Google but to punish the Chrome site.
But it sure does look sloppy. Google’s left hand didn’t know what its right hand’s hired hands were doing. If the Chrome team knew that paid links were a violation of the search team’s policies, it should have been more careful to avoid this. Google is relentlessly tweaking search, its core product. It’s making its other products, particularly Google+, more important. Getting caught in this old-school SEO trick is not what Google needed to instill trust.
Now that the story has broken, the results look very different, but check out what a search for “This post is sponsored by Google” turned up before:
Image, follow-up, pretty much the whole scoop via Search Engine Land
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Google+ Invites Forced To Shutdown
Jun 30th
Due to overwhelming response, Google had to shutdown the invites to their newly launched social project Google+. Perhaps they can take a page from Twitter and just come up with their own Fail Whale, afterall most people found out about the closure…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Google Forced to Tweak Instant Suggestions in Italy
Apr 6th
Yesterday I talked about the legal battle Google lost in Switzerland. That legal action is mandating that Google Street View do so much manual editing that continuing that project’s Swiss division simply isn’t feasible. However, it’s just one of the many legal battles that Google is fighting all over Europe. Another major loss happened on April 5th when Google was ordered to censor the content of their Google Instant search suggestions.
For those who haven’t been paying attention to Google development over the last few months, Instant is the HTML 5 feature that gives you “results before you type.” When you type in just the first few words of a query, Google will look at the associated phrases that are search for frequently and will, instantly, provide those results on your page. The issue in Italy came from an individual who was unhappy with the autocomplete suggestions on his name – which implied that he was a con man.
The Italian court determined that Google was responsible for any libelous accusations, even if indirect, since the autocomplete results are seen as content generated by Google, “although through an automated means.” As support for this case, the plaintiff’s legal team demonstrated that Google does censor its results in other instances, including when copywritten or offensive material is included.
This court order doesn’t mandate that Google start censoring the Instant suggestions for every possible name, but it does open the door for similar legal actions. This could mean a long and irksome road for the company unless an automated complaint tool or similar solution is implemented.
[via ZD Net]
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Google Forced to Tweak Instant Suggestions in Italy
View full post on Search Engine Journal
Will Google Be Forced into Anti-Piracy?
Mar 15th
There’s little doubt that piracy has become a part of our internet culture. Numerous congressional hearings and high-profile legal cases have highlighted the issue, but little has actually been done. To help appease the entertainment industry and prevent these “rogue websites,” some members of congress are now considering new mandates – including forcing Google, ISPs, and other groups to block piratey sites completely.
The Age of Piracy
File sharing is the status quo, and almost any movie or album can be found online as it’s released to the general public – if not before. Some groups have found clever ways around this, showcasing themselves as a service that simplifies media access rather than a reseller of content that could be pirated (one excellent example of this being Netflix). However, there is plenty of commercial incentive for piracy as well. MegaUpload, a site that prompts users to upload (possibly illicit) videos and then pays them for views, earns somewhere between $40 million and $300 million annually.
Lobbyists from the entertainment industry, including Frederick Huntsberry, have brought the issue before congress, stating, “We’re have reached the limits of self-help.” Some members of congress are willing to consider fairly extreme measures to help the industry, which is seeing decreased profits thanks to the various “rogue” groups on the net.
Google: A Problem and Solution
Part of Huntsberry’s complaints centered around Google. He demonstrated how easily pirated results can be found just by plugging in a few key phrases into the Google search engine. Several of the possible steps forward in the rogue site crackdown included forcing Google to block rogue sites, or at least to promote legitimate sites such as Netflix, to the top of the SERP.
Concern still abound, however, including the potential impact such mandates could have on the legitimate uses of copyrighted materials. Additionally, the possibility of scaring companies like Google offshore may keep “forced tweaks” at bay.
[via Paid Content]
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Will Google Be Forced into Anti-Piracy?
View full post on Search Engine Journal
Vodafone Forced to Send Pro-Government Text Messages in Egypt
Feb 3rd
Telecommunications company Vodafone says that it has been forced to send pro-government messages to its subscribers in Egypt during the country’s recent protests.
In a short press statement released today, the network said that the Egyptian government had invoked emergency powers to instruct the mobile networks of Mobinil, Etisalat and Vodafone to send scripted messages to subscribers.
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These messages included statements like “The Armed Forces asks Egypt’s honest and loyal men to confront the traitors and criminals and protect our people and honor and our precious Egypt.”
“These messages are not scripted by any of the mobile network operators and we do not have the ability to respond to the authorities on their content,” says the company. Vodafone claims it has protested the Egyptian government’s demands and regards these messages as “unacceptable.”
“We have made clear that all messages should be transparent and clearly attributable to the originator,” today’s statement reads.
The company has come under fire for its role in the week-long Internet blackout.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Google’s New Forced Transparency: Is Your Agency Ready?
Aug 16th
Google is making changes that require agencies to be more “transparent” in their reports to advertisers. But will this change benefit advertisers—or is it a move by Google to build its own brand and assure customer loyalty? The answers aren’t entirely… “transparent.”
*** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above ***
View full post on Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing
