Search Engine Optimisation BlackDog

On the verge of their IPO on Friday, I’ve realised that over the past 6 months or possibly longer Facebook has really started to annoy me. It’s not just a niggling bug or strage feature that I don’t understand. It’s more than just an irking, they’ve really put me off from using their service. It’s just the little things, like giving you a million different options for notifications (well at least over 100) but yet I can’t turn off ‘key features’ that I don’t want to be forced to use, i.e. their messaging feature / chat feature.

Messaging tells people when you read a message

One of the great things with emails, besides the attempted and largely non-functional implementation of read receipts, is that it can be a one way communication if you need it to be. People don’t know if you’ve read a message, and whether to expect a response based on that fact. This week Facebook released a messaging notification feature.
It’s been reported that younger people (15-25) are gravitating towards Facebook messaging rather than email. You can even email someone by sending a message to their username@facebook.com . The only problem is that’s not email, adding attachments for example simply doesn’t work. Messaging someone outside the system aslo won’t work. Facebook wants to be the internet of the future, and while it’s ambitious I really don’t see it happening.

Struggling to engage users

Facebook have been sharing more and more of your data with your friends’ friends. They are now sharing that you like or comment on a status update of a friend of a friend. As to why someone would want to know these tidbits I just don’t know. If I was interested in this data I would be connected to the friends’ friend, but I’m not, so stop shoving it down our throats !

Ads on mobile

Just wait until facebook find some way to start to put ads on your mobile. One potential idea they’ve been testing is that you can pay to push your own message to the top of people’s feed, a so called promoted status update. For $2 you can make sure someone sees your ‘all important update’.

Their ad system is indeed broken. We’re already heard this week about General Motors saying that they are pulling their $10 Million budget for Facebook ads. And it’s not just large organisation finding that having a successful campaign extremely difficult, even if you have help from a so called guru. Read about how a small pizza company experience more likes for their $240 spent on ads, but little or no return on that investment.

There are rumours that Facebook will start to offer a social ad platform. This would be something akin to AdSense, but only allowing publishers to target you on 3rd party web-sites. These ads could be based on such things as :

• personal information :
• age
• sex
• martial status
• family info
• location
• job
• job history
• phone network
• ISP
• email address
• where you’ve taken your photographs
• what type of camera / phone you own
• etc.
• social signals :
• your likes
• pages you’ve visit often
• places you’ve checked in
• your interests
• etc.

Facebook will break

In the end facebook will break. Either you’ll break if yourself by constantly being encouraged to add friends. How can you realistically connect with 500 people ? Perhaps if you start to add people to lists and groups, it might work, but it almost feels like a full-time job managing your relationships online.

Or facebook will break itself, possibly by :

• increasingly adding these inane features and alienating their users further
• selling our data and removing our privacy
• becoming the successful target of hackers or activist group like Anonymous

It is Facebook really worth $100 Billion ? Perhaps the amount of data they have on us 800+ million people is indeed worth it, but is it a business that you’d like to invest in ?

Let me turn off chat

One final word in case anyone at Facebook reads this, I don’t want to use it, I will never use it, it wastes, let me remove the feature completely, give me one more option !

I hate spam. I hate when people put me on their newsletter list that I never subscribed to. I hate when SPAM wastes my time and the time of 300 other innocent people. PokerPromedia.com I hate you. Here’s an email response I sent Will Jordan from PokerPro Media

Will,

1. Take me off your f’ing list.
2. I’ve reported you to SPAM COP http://www.spamcop.net/ who will send a report to your host RackSpace about the unsolicited email
3. Sending an email to 300 people on CC is just plain fucking stupid. What’s privacy these days ?
4. I don’t give a damn about your magazine. If I wanted a newsletter I would have signed up. Shoving it down my throat won’t make me any more likely to buy it. Perhaps your company should hire someone to do some in-house training about email etiquette. Besides the unsolicited email aka SPAM you didn’t include an un-subscribe option and you didn’t include any concrete contact details.
5. I did look at http://www.pokerpromedia.info/ (interesting that your .COM redirect to .INFO) 2004 called and they want their web design back.

P.S. for those on BCC (yes Will I used BCC to inform the other people on this list about my actions) , sorry about the extra email, but please do consider reporting Will’s email to SpamCop if you too didn’t subscribe to this type of email http://www.spamcop.net/
P.P.S. Comments welcomed on my blog post about this http://www.blackdog.ie/blog/dear-will-please-fuck-off/

Other thoughts

I just wonder why someone would think it’s a good idea to email people in such a manner. Judging from the number of bounced messages I got I think that this list is a rather old one. My guess is that someone copied a list of poker affiliates (I have a small poker forum that I run), and I probably got on some list by signing up somewhere. Still I never heard of ProPoker Media and certainly never subscribed to an email newsletter. So it’s still not right to use my email address for something that I might (but I’m not) interested in, plus I doubt you got my email address in a ‘legal’ manner.

Update : 13/03/2012 15:30 CET We seem to be linked to a ripoff report.
Update : 13/03/2012 16:00 CET Another ripoff report this time from someone calling themselves Will.

Later on this year, Google plans to roll out their Street View system across Germany (see below for the cities they are targeting), but it’s been hit with a number of privacy concerns. At an event I was at a few weeks ago, Wieland Holfelder, Google’s Engineering Director in Munich, said that Google sees that Germany is their privacy capital of the world. And because of this, one of their teams in Munich is focused on this topic of privacy. He said if they can make the Germans happy, their policies should be okay almost everywhere else.

Street View Privacy

Besides the issue with the WIFI networks, people have been requesting that their should have a way to “opt-out” of this service. Currently Google blurs out faces & number plates of cars, but in Germany people have the right to request that the image of their house can be removed. Right now this is a storm in a tea cup for the German regional Information Commissioner, Dr Johannes Caspar. Some{DE} newspapers {DE} are reporting that there are over 10,000 requests already to remove information, and it’s expected that this number will continue to grow.

I must admit, I think that these people are forgetting how the internet works. This type of information is not just available from Google. Here are a series of videos from a Düsseldorf letting agency, which show houses and other details of locations through the city. People fail to realise there isn’t much you can do from stopping someone taking a picture of your house, and putting it on a service like Panoramio, here is an example of a house close to my office. And the bigger question, is this something you should be able to request ? Is this an invasion of privacy (either morally or legally) to have a picture of your house on the internet without your permission ? All that Google is doing is making this information easy to use, and filling in the many holes in what other services offer. While I realise that Germany’s privacy laws on photography of people are stringent, I really don’t understand why this could extend to an image of your house.

There are other issues that I wonder about, like if you live in an apartment building, and one person requests your building removed, but the other 11 tenants are perfectly happy with the image being included. In the end, my fear is that it will just render this service unusable in Germany.

Google Video on Street View Privacy

Here is a video from Google’s Street View page in German that talks about data privacy {DE}, from their microsite about this topic.

Street View German Cities

The cities list of cities that google plans to roll out streetview in, via google blog {DE} :
Berlin, Bielefeld, Bochum, Bonn, Bremen, Dortmund, Dresden, Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Essen, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Hannover, Köln, Leipzig, Mannheim, München, Nürnberg, Stuttgart and Wuppertal.

Recently I was posed with a question using one of my favourite CMS’s, namely CMSMS. As will all apps that require email addresses, making sure it’s a valid email address is not as easy you would think. Coupled with the possibility of underscores, dashes, plus signs, etc, it can be a nightmare.

The FrontEndUser Module is a great addition, where it allows you to have a login for your site, and display certain parts of templates whether a user is logged in or not. Sadly their email validation is slightly flawed, as it didn’t like email addresses with dashes in the username part.

I came across a great post titled “Comparing E-mail Address Validating Regular Expressions” , which show various examples of what regular expressions will match and check for valid email addresses.

FrontEndUser Fix

To fix the FrontEndUser module to allow dashes (some of you call them hyphens) you can take the following steps

• go to /modules/FrontEndUsers/FrontEndUsers.api.php
• find the function IsValidEmailAddress around line 965
• comment out :

if( !eregi("^[_a-z0-9-\.-]+(\.[_a-z0-9-\.-]+)*@[a-z0-9-]+(\.[a-z0-9-]+)*(\.[a-z]{2,4})$", $email ) )

• and replace it with

$reg ='/^([\w\!\#$\%\&\'\*\+\-\/\=\?\^\`{\|\}\~]+\.)*[\w\!\#$\%\&\'\*\+\-\/\=\?\^\`{\|\}\~]+@((((([a-z0-9]{1}[a-z0-9\-]{0,62}[a-z0-9]{1})|[a-z])\.)+[a-z]{2,6})|(\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3}(\:\d{1,5})?)$/i';
if( preg_match($reg, $email ) )

Note : this is just more a little mind wander, rather than an actual Google product, but it’s one that I can really could foresee them producing.

The next thing from Google

I’m thinking out loud here, while looking at my credit card bill earlier today I am really quite surprised that Google hasn’t launched their own version of a credit card. They already have a payment gateway, google checkout, which can provide data on consumer spending processes. But it is limited to online transactions. I’m sure that offline transactions, and the data set of

• what people buy with the cards
• where they are when they purchase
• what time of the day they purchase
• what their average purchase amount is
• frequency of purchasing at a location
• etc.

could nicely be tied in with the data on into

• how they search (google search)
• use a phone (google voice)
• use broadband
• use email (Gmail)
• use health care (health.google.com)
• etc.

to allow them to create a comprehensive profile of a person, and ultimately target ads to people with products that  now that they like to buy.

Again this would align with their strategy to organise the worlds data. hen I see Google touching into these markets with their recent  credit card comparison tool for the UK, I really start to think that it could be a possibility.

We’ve seen how they will soon destroy the GPS industry with their Google Maps Navigation (which I wish would be launched in Europe, so please hurry up) to provide free turn by turn directions to users instead of having to buy rather expensive GPS devices. Google entered the market under the radar so to say, by licencing the content until they were in a position to use their own. Maybe with the comparison tool google will be able to see what offers interest consumers most, is it a low APR , balance transfer or rewards ?

Ways to make the Google Credit Card attractive

I’m sure they will want to avoid another backlash like they got from the launch of Buzz earlier this year, so it will have to be something people are willing to trade their data for. Most cards in the United States don’t have an annual fee, unlike European cards, so I don’t think that a no-fee card would be a such an attractive proposition. And offers of points, air miles and cash back are also quite standard. To catch the attention of the public it would probably need to be something significantl that people wouldn’t mind their purchasing data being analysed. My thoughts that it would be something with an extended credit limit, lower balance, and then tied in with another google product like say a free phone for example. Again these are just some random thoughts on what they could do.

One other possible entry into the market would be to purchase one of the smaller credit card companies, like say Discover.

After Google Credit Card

And what will Google do after that. Could Google start to be an cheap energy provider or even a  bank ? Sure why not ! At the end of the day it’s all data.

Here is a quick tip on how to save paying PayPal fees. I was sending a large amount of euros today, and this would have resulted in about €50 of fees. So I did a bit of poking around and came across this tip, with this method it brought it down the fees to €30.

The stipulation for this to work is that you need to have either a Premier or a Business account. There is a feature called MassPay on Paypal where if you wanted to send multiple payments, you can simply upload a CSV file with the email address, the cash  amount and the currency. The fees here are much less, and there is just a flat fee charge of 2%. Here is what you need to do :

1. open up notepad
2. enter in person@email.com <tab> cashvalue <tab> currency code (USD / EUR/ etc)
3. for multiple payments you can enter the same as 2 , on the next line
4. save as ASCII .TXT file.
5. login to paypal and find the mass pay link at the bottom of the page
6. click make Mass Payment on the left hand side of the info page
7. fill out the form, and identify people with email address when asked.
8. click review, do a review and see the fees.
9. Click send and save some fees !

Paypal Fee Savings

For example if you wanted to send someone exactly €1000, it would typically cost you 3.4% plus €0.35 for the transaction charge so you would need to send an extra €35.56 . With Mass pay this would be the flat 2% or €20. Also what is nice with this method, you don’t need to calculate what you should pay someone via paypal so they get €1000, rather you would have the CSV file person@email.com  1000 EUR

So not only does it save you a few quid, the payee doesn’t see the unusual €1035.36 transaction, and a fee charge,  rather just get an entry for the whole €1000.

It obviously works for smaller amounts, so it depends on whether you want to spend the extra few steps to save cash. I always think, better in your pocket than someone else’s !