September 2008 Archives

I had a somewhat bizarre automated email from Bebo reminding me that it is Kate Modern's birthday on the 1st October.

Kate Modern is of course a fictional character in an online soap opera - but she is also dead, having been murdered at the end of series one.  There's a good clue to this in her screen name: RIP Kate.

So if Bebo can't suppress birthday reminders for fictional dead people, it makes me wonder how well their system works with real dead people. 

There have been interesting calls from a prominent group of Internet movers and shakers for questions at future debates between McCain and Obama to be decided by an 'open' system of voting, rather like Digg.

On the face of it, this would be a more democratic way to decide the agenda for the next set of debates - an agenda which is currently being decided pretty much at the whim of the media host.

But given the efforts that some people put into spamming links into Digg, perhaps what this would really do is hand control of the political agenda over to a cabal of social media professionals. 

 

I'm speaking at a seminar at Fox Williams tomorrow, partly covering the subject of tracking techniques in online advertising.

Here's a tag cloud (generated in the ever-wonderful wordl.net) of Gordon Brown's speech to the Labour Party conference yesterday.  Will be interesting to compare it with David Cameron's big speech next week.

There I was in a post-Chrome haze thinking warm thoughts about Google, when the FT spoils my mood by reporting on the first major attack on the advertising alliance between Google and Yahoo.

"a Google-Yahoo partnership will control 90% of search advertising inventory and states ANA's concerns that the partnership will likely diminish competition, increase concentration of market power, limit choices currently available and potentially raise prices to advertisers for high quality, affordable search advertising."

The alliance will also impact on UK advertisers.  My view is that the alliance will particularly drive up the price of niche terms on Yahoo!, which are something of a bargain at the moment compared with the same traffic on Google.

From the perspective of a digital agency, you sometimes get the feeling that the entire world is using either Firefox or Safari.

But in fact the real story of the last few years has not been the remarkable rise of Firefox (and I am a massive fan, of course!) but of the resilience in Internet Explorer's market share.

I cobbled together the graph below (click on it for a larger version) from browser statistics up until the end of Q2 2008 from TheCounter.com.  (This will understate the impact of the launch of Firefox 3 on the 17th of June - Wikipedia quotes a share of 19.73% for Firefox in August 2008.)

So Firefox has eaten into Internet Explorer's market share - but as of June 2008, IE still enjoyed 78.3% of browser usage.  Over the last two years, Microsoft's share of the browser market has dropped by just eight percentage points.  For the majority of users, there have not been compelling reasons to switch from a browser that is stable and works pretty well.

Those who were dissatisfied with Internet Explorer will already be using Firefox or Safari - and it is these early adopters who are most likely to jump once again over to Google Chrome.

I've been thinking for a while that the one area where Google's domination of search is just a tiny bit shaky is around control of the browser.  That's why I got excited about the 'Awesome Bar' in Firefox 3, with its convenient ability to search through your browser history. 

And suddenly it really does look like we might have another browser war on our hands.  Internet Explorer 8 is now available for download in its second pre-release beta.  And around an hour ago came the news that Google is launching a new open source browser - Google Chrome - tomorrow. 

There are signs that Google has acted somewhat hastily to get the launch of Chrome out the door.  They admit that they sent out a comic book release explaining the thinking behind chrome a little early.  And the browser's homepage - www.google.com/chrome - currently hosts a hand-coded 404 not found message.

So a quick take on this news.  Anything that speeds up or improves internet access can only be a good thing.  Pushing the envelope on the web browser could potentially kick start a new wave of site development as companies look to take advantage of new functionality.  And Microsoft does seem to have been somewhat asleep at the wheel with its browser developments - IE7 came out almost two years ago, a lifetime ago in web terms.

On the other hand, Google needs to be careful not to flirt too closely with the 'M' word - its domination of search is clearly monopolistic, it owns one of the largest ad serving companies and is a major player in many other sectors.  Control of the browser as well may well just be a step too far towards global domination.

And this, presumably, is why Google's announcement is of an open-source browser, and they stress that any improvements they have engineered in - for example - javascript support, will be shared with competitors.

So welcome to Chrome.  A shiny, friendly metal... nothing for us to worry about. 

Probably.