November 2008 Archives

Next time you see corporate professionals fiddling with their BlackBerry devices during the commute home, think twice before deciding they are confirming tomorrow's meeting or writing one last email. They may just be checking their MySpace status. MySpace's app for Blackberry was downloaded a record 400,000 times within its first week since release. That's more downloads during release week compared to the Facebook app for Blackberry.

This signals BlackBerry's heightening cool factor, as it grows among consumers and beyond its early market of business users. In addition to teaming up with MySpace, Research in Motion has simultaneously unleashed the BlackBerry Storm through Verizon. The Storm is RIM's sexier, bolder touchscreen smartphone designed to appeal to consumers and volleys direct competition to Apple's iPhone. While the iPhone is still considered the cool kid on the tech block, BlackBerry is branching out of its dominance in the corporate US market, shedding its stodgy image with sleeker hardware and improving social skills.

Taking another stride toward the personalized search model that many consider to be the next wave of search, Google released its SearchWiki product last week. This essentially allows people to alter and comment upon search results to suit their taste.

Google makes it a point to clearly state that edits will only affect your personal results and not affect anyone else's, but it's hard to imagine them *not* using the user generated data in some way. It's the holy grail really, to let the users help refine the algorithm and downvote SPAM. The obvious problem is that spammers will surely vote as well - probably on a grand botnet-powered scale - which might be reason they're so quick to claim the votes won't affect the rankings.

This is yet more evidence that search is social media. Search was rightly hyped up a few years back, though the vast majority of the hype focused on the direct response value of the platform. Users click ads, convert, profit.

Now the hype surrounds social media, and search is often left out of the picture. Digg, Facebook, Twitter, etc. are the new cool kids of the web. But with or without voting and comments, search is still the connective tissue that holds the web together, and its influence shouldn't be overlooked.

So it's pretty common knowledge that the Obama campaign was the first to take full advantage of new media, and it would seem that they have no plans on abandoning that strategy going forward. The Washington Post reports that Obama's weekly Democratic address will be videotaped and posted on YouTube.

I for one am thrilled - in setting this precedent, it's likely that all future Presidents will probably follow. It will mean that the defining technological shift of the past 50 years will finally be embraced by the man at the top.

It's refreshing to have people in charge who understand the web. Let's hope that understanding will spur some much needed infrastructure development and legislation changes that will help America to further innovate and develop the platform.