Beyond Blame, Believing In Cooperation

Let’s set aside blame, because blame isn’t going to move anything forward.

Let’s also assume that all the players can be taken to some degree at their word, that they do indeed want to work together in some ways.

What does everyone want?

The Wants & A Game Changer

Google has wanted its own social graph for some time. By social graph, I mean a way for it to see how people are interconnected, which could potentially improve Google’s search results. Better ways to target ads, new “sticky” content where people spend huge amounts of time are other things it wants, but let’s focus on the search aspects.

Twitter has wanted, well, clearly money along with other non-disclosed things for what is mistakenly assumed to be its most valuable asset, its “firehose” of tweets. What’s really Twitter’s most valuable asset is actually its sharing activity, but I’ll get back to that.

Facebook has wanted, well, I don’t know — maybe to be the best social network out there. Don’t laugh. If Google once had a laser-like focus on being the best search engine out there, Facebook can have the same focus on social. That’s a vision that Facebook probably doesn’t want ruined by Google encroaching on its territory. A vision that, of course, makes Facebook plenty of money by tapping into social actions.

We also now have something new that both Facebook and Twitter say they want — to be better represented in Google’s search results. It’s not as if they haven’t been there. But releasing today’s Don’t Be Evil bookmarklet — which alters the Google’s Search Plus Your World service — was a game changer in these Cold War years between the search and social superpowers.

The Bill Of Social Data Rights

Can everyone get what they want, all succeeding in their own ways, without further banging of virtual shoes in outrage?

I think they can. Or at least, I think there are some ways forward, some common ground that has emerged. I’ll lay these out in what I’ll call a Bill Of Social Data Rights. I’m open to better names, believe me — that name I know has been used for other things than I’m covering. But hopefully you get the point.

1) Public Is Public

If someone posts something public on a social network, that’s public for any search engine to index. It’s not up to Twitter or Facebook or Google+ to decide if Google or Bing get to index it through some special deal. The content of what was written belongs to the person who wrote it. If that person publishes publicly, then search engines can spider what they find.

Posts are, after all, web pages. People who create them can choose to block them from search engines if they want. People can choose to withdraw public posts after they’ve been published and know that, like with any web page, the posts will eventually be dropped from search engines.

Social networks have lots of content. Search engines like Google and Bing could bring them to a halt, if they tried to grab everything without special arrangements. So make the “firehose” arrangements, and make them on behalf of the users, who might actually want to find their own content in the search engines of their choice.

This helps solves, by the way, the concerns that Facebook and Twitter have raised about not being included enough in Google. Much of their content is included. Much more of it could be included, if deal making was set aside in favor of the Public Is Public principle.

2) Profiles Are Meta Data

If someone creates a public profile, certain types of information from that profile should be expressed in an easy, machine-readable format. Any social network should provide the profile’s name, the number of followers, the number of people being followed, as well as a flag to indicate if a profile is somehow verified or trusted. A trusted way to link that profile to other profiles or web sites should be implemented.

Search engines need this type of information, so that they really know who someone is, in order to return search results. That’s true even if the person is using a pseudonym. You still want to know that the pseudonym account that comes up is the right one, not some faker.

Providing meta data abut profiles will help. Search engines won’t have to guess where to scrape for key information such as follower counts, which can be used to tell if an account might be real or not, in the case of celebrities. Cross-linkage can help avoid problems that both Google and the Don’t Be Evil tool have, where Larry Page gets listed with Facebook and Twitter profiles that aren’t really his.

If Facebook and Twitter really want better inclusion in things like “People & Pages” listings at Google, this type of data will help. Similarly, if Bing wants to include Google+ profiles, it could use the information as well.

3) Your Friends Are Yours

If I have friends on one service, I should be able to import those friends in some machine-readable format to another service. That doesn’t mean a list of text names, as Facebook’s tool will kick out for me.

It might mean email addresses, as Facebook will give me for Yahoo or Microsoft but not for Google.

It really means some way that the geniuses at our social networks can concoct, I’m sure, so that if I want to find my Twitter friends at Google+, I can. If I want Path to know a particular Google+ circle of friends I have, I can do that. If Pinterest wants to know my Facebook friends, they are my friends to take — not Facebook’s to decide.

What is there really to fear, by allowing this? Even if I take my 50 friends to a new social network, if that social network is crap, no great victory has been won. Heck, taking the names doesn’t mean any of the 50 will actually follow me over.

4) Social Shares & Social Actions Are Proprietary

The real gem each of the social networks has isn’t our posts, isn’t our profiles, isn’t our friends. It’s knowing what we do, how we interact with our friends, how we interact with content.

That’s where the walls should remain. Facebook and Twitter, for example, have real reasons to fear that handing over streams of data to Google might allow it to better understand how people are acting on their services.

So don’t. Make content public, yes. But find a way to agree that the actions — the number of tweets, the number of likes, whatever — are declared off-limits for use by other search engines. If things like robots.txt and the nofollow attribute can work for search, the social networks can figure out their own mechanisms.

Moving Forward

Does everyone get what they really want with this?

Google already has a social graph that’s building in Google+. It really doesn’t need to be worried about getting social shares or actions from the other services — though if they want to offer this, that’s their option. But giving Google the additional information I’ve outlined will allow it to do a better job of exposing content from these other services in search.

Twitter doesn’t get some big payday for its feed, but it’s not getting that now. What it does gain is people who stop complaining they can’t find their own tweets. It gains the chance that with decent meta data, Google will rethink the Google+ification of its search results and return to the idea that search results can be social using anyone’s network. And Twitter’s content gains more exposure, important for a service that more and more talks about itself as being a content play.

Facebook gets even more exposure within Google than it has now. Opening up keeps pressure on Google, as with Twitter, that there can’t just be some Google+ification with the excuse that Google has no choice, because Facebook won’t do a deal. And Facebook potentially avoids the anti-trust critics that almost certainly will come for it in a few years, just as they’ve come for Google now, claiming that Facebook is staying to closed and using its market dominance to keep others out.

I know these proposals may sound naive. Some of what I describe might already exist. But we do need a way forward. Search and social have been colliding, but we don’t need a collision. We need a collusion, and not in the negative sense but a collusion where the users really are being served best by the services they depend on. That can happen, even supporting healthy competition, but without the social superpowers going to war.

(Stock image via Shutterstock. Used under license.)

Related Stories

Looking to understand more about some of the issues in the data war between Google, Facebook and Twitter? See especially the first two articles:

• Google’s Results Get More Personal With “Search Plus Your World”
• FAQ: What’s The Debate About Google’s Search Plus Your World?
• “Don’t Be Evil” Tool — Backed By Facebook & Twitter — Shows Google’s “Search Plus Your World” Can Go Beyond Google+

The tool — a bookmarklet that works in your browser — changes three parts of Search Plus Your World that currently shows information only from Google Plus. These are:

• People & Pages results
• Google+ Sitelinks
• Google+ Suggestions In Autocomplete

The tool can be found on the Focus On The User web site. It was created, as the site says, by engineers at Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, who in turn consulted with other unnamed social networking companies. The “Don’t Be Evil” name of the tool comes from Google’s philosophy of wanting to focus on what’s best for users, rather than what’s best for Google.

The companies behind the tool feel Google’s hasn’t focused on what’s best for its users with Search Plus Your World. They have a good point. But the tool makes this point better than all the debates that have happened so far around Search Plus Your Word, because it shows what Google could have done to better serve searchers, if it had wanted to.

Below, how to install the tool and how it works, once you’ve done so, along with a revisiting of some of the issues it highlights.

Installing The Don’t Be Evil Bookmarklet

To get the tool, head to the site and look for the “Try a more relevant Google” button:

Clicking the button will make a new window appear, with a “don’t be evil” button that’s visible:

You click and hold on that button, then drag it to the bookmarks bar in your browser (if you don’t see your bookmarks bar, look in your browser’s options to make this visible):

Once it’s installed, you’ll see it on your on your bookmarks bar:

When you search on Google, you push that button to transform your results, as I’ll cover next. By the way, I’ve tested this with both Google Chrome and Firefox. It should also work with Safari. It doesn’t work with Internet Explorer.

Problem: “People & Pages” Powered By Google+

One of the biggest issues I’ve had with Search Plus (my shorthand name for Search Plus Your World) was the new “People and Pages on Google+” results that appear for some searches. These can show up even if you don’t have a Google+ account or are logged out of Google entirely.

These are the first search results that I’ve ever seen on Google that haven’t been inclusive of sources beyond Google, when those sources are available. To understand more about this, and how it’s such a major departure for Google, see my previous post, To Understand Google Favoritism, Think If Google+ Were YouTube.

Aside from favoring Google in a way that I’ve never seen before, I’ve felt that the results simply weren’t providing the best information to searchers at Google, especially given the prime real estate being given to them. My previous story, Real-Life Examples Of How Google’s “Search Plus” Pushes Google+ Over Relevancy, explains more about that.

The reason for the relevancy gap was simple. Google+ still lacks many important or notable people that might be on the other social networks. Indeed, until last week, Lady Gaga wasn’t on Google+ despite being one of the most followed people on Twitter and Facebook. Her absence meant she’d never have a chance at being one of the music recommendations for the People & Places results that Google was showing.

Including other social accounts in People & Pages results would, as I’ve written repeatedly, done what I expect of Google as a search engine, delivered a great search experience. From one of my past posts:

I’d love to see is Google retool the social suggestions that come up, so they aren’t simply Google+ “People & Pages” results injected into Google but more inclusive of other social sites, as well. Because that type of inclusive search product is what Google does well, and what we expect for the company to provide.

Now the engineers at Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have done what I expected Google to do, create a social suggestions search engine. Let’s see some examples.

Solution: “People & Pages” Powered By Google Search

Let’s start with a search for music. On the left, what you see from Google’s Search Plus. On the right, how things change after you click the Don’t Be Evil bookmarklet:

The first set of arrows at the top show how “People and Pages on Google+” is changed instead to “People and Pages from the Social Web.”

The second set of arrows shows how for Britney Spears, rather than her Google+ profile being shown (where she has 1.6 million followers), her Twitter account is displayed (where she has 12.6 million followers). Underneath her Twitter account, links to her MySpace, Facebook and Tumblr accounts are also shown.

The third set of arrows shows how for Snoop Dogg, rather than his Google+ profile being shown (with 1.4 million followers), his Twitter account (with 6.2 million followers) is shown. Underneath that, links to his MySpace, Facebook and Google+ accounts are displayed.

I’ll explain more about how each profile gets selected, but first, let’s do some more examples. Here’s a search for cars:

For this search, the Google+ page for Ferrari (6,500 followers) is changed to Ferrari’s Facebook page (5.6 million followers), with its YouTube page as an alternative link. Toyota’s Google+ page (180,000 followers) is also changed to the Toyota Facebook page (700,000 followers).

One of my favorite examples to show the failing of Google’s current system is a search for Facebook:

On the left, Google’s regular listings suggest Mark Zuckerberg’s Google+ profile as something people should follow. It really is Zuckerberg’s official page, with over 600,000 followers. However, Zuckerberg has never posted to it since creating that profile shortly after Google+ launched.

On the right, the Don’t Be Evil button transforms that listing into something useful, a pointer to Zuckerberg’s Facebook page (his Google+, Twitter and Quora pages are listed as alternatives.

Also notice the arrows. In this case, I was signed-in to Google+, which is why an “Add to circles” button appear next to the Google+ result. However, when the result was transformed to show a Facebook listing, I got an indication showing that I was already following Zuckerberg on Facebook (if I wasn’t, a Like button allowing me to follow him would have appeared).

One more example, this time to show that there’s more intelligence going on that just stripping out Google+ links and swapping them for any other network. Here’s a search for Google:

The first suggestion is for Google’s own page on Google+, which is changed to Google’s page on Twitter. Notice how there’s a “Follow” button next to the Twitter link, as well.

Under that is Larry Page. His listing isn’t changed. It remains pointing to his Google+ page, which makes sense. To the best of my knowledge, that’s the only place he’s active socially. While LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter accounts are also shown for him, none of those seem to be real accounts for him.

What’s The Most Relevant Social Account To Show? Ask Google!

We could debate which is the most best social account to show for each of the examples above in various ways, such as:

• Should it be based on followers? If so, in many cases, accounts on the established social networks of Twitter and Facebook would easily trump Google+ accounts, though not always.
• Should it be based on activity? Britney hasn’t posted to Google+ since January 18. Her last tweets are more recent, as of January 21. Does that count for more?
• Should it be based on engagement? Even if Britney hasn’t been on Google+ recently, perhaps her engagement with fans is better there?

Rather than try to figure all this out — and potentially come under accusations they were selecting metrics to favor their own social networks — the developers of the Don’t Be Evil bookmarklet decided to let Google itself figure out which social account was most relevant.

For example, let’s go back to how the listing for Snoop Dogg was changed:

What happens is that the bookmarklet looks at which accounts are listed initially by Google in the People & Pages section. It then does a search for the people or companies listed to find which social profiles Google itself believes are most relevant, in the first 100 results.

In the case of Snoop Dogg, the bookmarklet sees that he’s listed as a People & Pages suggestion for a search on “music.” It then conducts a search for “snoop dogg” on Google, to see which social account Google lists first for him.

As you can see above, Twitter is the first social account shown, so the bookmarklet rewrites Snoop Dogg’s suggestion to link to his Twitter account. His MySpace account is found next, so it’s listed as the first alternative. Facebook is found after that, so it’s the second alternative. Google+ is found after that, so it becomes the third alternative.

According to the tool’s FAQ page, it checks for links from any of these social networks:

• CrunchBase (weird, I wouldn’t consider this a social network)
• Github
• Google+
• Facebook
• Flickr
• Foursquare
• FriendFeed
• LinkedIn
• MySpace
• Quora
• Stack Overflow
• Tumblr
• Twitter

All the information the tool finds comes solely from Google itself, even the profile pictures, which are generated using Google’s own rich snippets testing tool, as the FAQ page explains.

Because only Google’s own information is being used, the tool can’t patch up a key weakness, which is that all the suggestions are initially based on people who are in Google Plus.

For example, you will never get Katy Perry as a music suggestion, despite her being one of the most followed musicians on Facebook or Twitter. That’s because she’s not on Google+, so she has no chance of appearing as a suggestion to music-related queries. If she doesn’t get suggested, then the tool can’t add her.

Problem: Autocomplete Profiles Only For Google+

Another feature of Search Plus that favors Google+ is within Google’s search box. As you type, the autocomplete feature of Google Instant will suggest things you should search for. For notable or prominent people, these suggestions may also include a link to their Google+ profile. For example, consider this search for Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg:

Just typing in the word “sheryl”  – when I was completely logged out of Google — was enough for it to suggest that I select her Google+ page, where Sandberg last posted in September. That’s pretty preferential treatment. Why should that be suggested over Sandberg’s personal web site or another social profile?

Solution: Expand The Choices

The Don’t Be Evil button developers call the autocomplete suggestions “typeahead” results. When you use their button, the typeahead suggestion is changed. For Sandberg, her Facebook profile is shown:

The same logic I explained above is used to do this. Whatever Google lists as the first social network for a search on Sandberg’s name, that profile is used to go into the autocomplete box (though for me, it should be her CrunchBase profile there, not her Facebook profile).

I’ve covered this in my earlier articles, but I’ll stress it again. Pointing to Google+ profiles — and no other profiles — was a significant change to favor Google+ than how Google operated in the past. Consider this:

That’s where I’m starting a search for “facebook.” I’ve only entered the “face” part and, already, Google suggests that I go directly to the Facebook home page from within the search box itself.

Google started offering these types of suggestions back in 2008 and 2009. You can still see it working today, if you disable Google Instant predictions within your search settings. Typing in Amazon, or Best Buy or New York Times brings up other examples of this.

Most people have Google Instant on, since it’s the default, so they never see these type of “old” web link suggestions. Instead, they get the new Google+ profile ones. Google didn’t have to only push these, but it chose to.

Problem: Sitelinks Only For Google+

Ever done a search and noticed a bunch of listings “indented” under the main listing? Those are called sitelinks. For listings associated with Google+ accounts, they pick up special sitelinks, their last two posts on Google Plus. Here an example for TV Guide, what someone who is logged out of Google would see:

The two arrows point to the special Google+ sitelinks that are appearing. This type of thing existed before Search Plus Your World rolled out, though I can’t recall any formal announcement of it. Certainly when Direct Connect for Google+ came out, there was nothing that highlighted these sitelinks as part of that.

In fact, the addition of them feels very odd, given how just over a year ago, Google was showing sitelinks of a different sort for other social networks. For example, here’s how a search for Twitter was suggesting people our news editor Barry Schwartz should follow:

Solution: New Social Sitelinks

The Don’t Be Evil button replaces the Google+ sitelinks similarly to how other changes are done. Here’s TV Guide again:

Rather than two Google+ sitelinks being shown, only a single one appears. In this case, it’s a link to TV Guide’s Twitter profile, since that’s the first profile that the tool finds when doing a Google search for “tv guide.” A link to TV Guide’s Facebook profile follows as an alternative.

Which Way Forward?

As I’ve explained in many articles over the past two weeks, I’ve been pretty disturbed by Google’s promotion of Google+ within its search pages.

The “People & Pages” results, if they’re intended as a promotion for Google+, still come across as if they are regular search results — results that I think Google users assume come from across the web. They do not. The come only from Google+ itself.

You could argue with better labeling, that type of promotion might work better. But that still leaves questions about why Google+ profiles are being pushed within Google’s search suggestions, rather than links to other pages from across the web. The links shown there aren’t necessarily the most relevant suggestions to be shown.

Google, in particular its executive chairman Eric Schmidt, has argued that it doesn’t have all the data it needs to include other social services in the way it does for Google Plus. The failure to reach a deal with Facebook; the failure to renew a deal with Twitter, these have prevented the social signals it needs from being used, Google has said.

The Don’t Be Evil tool demonstrates this isn’t the case, that there are social signals that Google already can find which could be used, if it wants.

Of course, if Google had done so what the Don’t Be Evil tool is doing now — incorporated links to Facebook and Twitter after they’ve rejected deals — potentially Google could have been accused of scraping content from them without permission. Indeed, that was one of the things Facebook suggested last year in what was widely seen as a smear campaign.

I put that to Facebook when I talked with the company last week about the tool. I was told Facebook saw a difference between taking public signals to build a competing social service — as it felt Google was doing — and using those signals as part of a search service that points outward.

I was also assured that if Google wanted to do the types of things that the Don’t Be Evil tool is now doing, Facebook wouldn’t complain.

We’ll see. I’ll be following up with Google. In the meantime, you can read more at the Focus On The User web site, and there’s also an overview video available:

Click here to view the embedded video.

John Battelle also has a nice write-up with his perspective here, and Techmeme has a round-up of coverage from others.

Google’s Unusual Balancing Act

It can seem confusing — even hypocritical — for services like Facebook and Twitter to not release their public data more fully to anyone (including Google) without demanding deals, then complain they don’t feel represented enough in search results.

It can also seem odd that both of those companies might favor themselves in their own social networks, not include Google+, yet demand that Google somehow be “fair” to them.

The challenge Google faces, however, is that it operates both a social network and a search engine. The Google+ social network does compete with Facebook and Twitter, and anyone would expect that it should favor itself.

The Google search engine, however, was founded on the idea that it should be fair to all. That is, after all, what a good search engine should do — provide the best results, not the results best for its parent company. The continued Google+ification of Google’s search results is bringing that fairness into question.

Potentially, that’s an anti-trust issue (and Facebook, as the dominant social service, might find itself similarly under pressure to open up to competitors). But anti-trust issues aside, it’s simply a trust issue. Will users trust that Google’s results are doing the right thing by them?

I strongly encourage anyone feeling lost in all this debate and some of the tricky issues it presents to see my post from last week, FAQ: What’s The Debate About Google’s Search Plus Your World?

Finally, you can expect we’ll be taking a close look at the huge changes that Google+ is unleashing in the search marketing space at our upcoming SMX West conference in San Jose Feb. 28-March 1, in particular during these sessions:

• Getting Personal, Part 1: How Google & Bing Personalize With Social Connections
• Getting Personal, Part 2: How Google & Bing Personalize With Search History & Geography
• SEO For Google+ & Google Search
• Ask The Search Engines – Open Q&A Forum

Be sure to see the full agenda and register soon to save the most on a ticket.

Postscript: See A Proposal For Social Network Détente for some further reflections on moving ahead from today’s events.

Related Articles

• Google’s Results Get More Personal With “Search Plus Your World”
• Search Engines Should Be Like Santa From “Miracle On 34th Street”
• To Understand Google Favoritism, Think “If Google+ Were YouTube”
• Real-Life Examples Of How Google’s “Search Plus” Pushes Google+ Over Relevancy
• Pimping Google+ In Search Works: Lady Gaga Finally Joins Google+
• Larry Page Ousts Mark Zuckerberg As Most Popular On Google+
• How Google Instant’s Autocomplete Suggestions Work
• How Facebook Enables The Google Social “Scraping” It’s Upset About
• Schmidt: Google+ Not Favored, Happy To Talk Twitter & Facebook Integration
• Google Now Forcing All New Users To Create Google+ Enabled Accounts
• “Ask On Google+” Links Appearing In Google’s Search Results
• Google To Close Social Graph API, Not OpenSocial
• FAQ: What’s The Debate About Google’s Search Plus Your World?

An easy to use but powerful web tool (it’s also free) named PolitickerUSA can save you a lot of time and effort informing you as to what members of congress are tweeting about right now.

In one location you can quickly access the non-stop real-time stream of tweets from Senators, Reps, President Obama, governors, and a few of the republican presidential candidates.

You can also filter the entire PolitickerUSA stream of tweets using a hashtag or word into the filter box. You do not have to click <enter>.

But Wait, There’s More

Here are a few other things you can do with PolitickerUSA.

1. Clicking any word or hashtag in a word cloud will run a search on Twitter for that hashatag or word.

2. Politician Trends allows you to quickly isolate and visualize the latest tweets from a specific politician.

3. A table of all politicians accessible using PolitickerUSA is available linking to their Twitter stream and providing their handle.

Kudos to the PolitickerUSA developer Brian for making the site available. You can read more about how he built the site here.

Pew surveyed just over 1,000 US adults by telephone in January, 2011. What it found was that 55 percent of people “say they get news and information about local restaurants, bars, and clubs” and 60 percent “say they get news and information about local businesses other than restaurants and bars” (presumably everything else). Here is the list of sources used . . .

Restaurants, Bars & Clubs, Internet Rules

When it comes to finding information about bars, restaurants and clubs, 51 percent use the internet overall, with this breakdown:

• search engines – 38 percent
• specialty websites – 17 percent (e.g., Yelp, though that was not specifically identified)
• social media – 3 percent (social networks and Twitter)

• 31 percent use newspapers (print [26 percent], online [5 percent])
• 23 percent word of mouth
• 8 percent rely upon local TV (traditional, online)

Internet Tops For Local Businesses, Too

When it comes to seeking information about other types of local businesses, 47 percent use the internet, with the breakdown this way:

• search engines – 36 percent
• specialty websites – 16 percent
• social media – 1 percent

• 30 percent use newspapers (print [29 percent], online [2 percent])
• 22 percent word of mouth
• 8 percent rely upon local TV (traditional, online)
• 5 percent rely upon local radio

Multiple Sources Used

Pew also found people used roughly 14 different kinds of sources to get local information. A large percentage used or “relied upon” multiple sources. In addition, 47 percent of respondents said they got “local news and information” on their mobile phones.

Very strangely, online yellow pages or “local directory sites” were not among the choices given to survey respondents.

The finding that so few people use social media for local recommendations is somewhat surprising (given that it has been likened to “online word of mouth”). It shows that Facebook and Twitter have quite a distance to go to become useful local business discovery tools.

Twitter has 700 employees today and expects to be able to accomodate “thousands of people” in the coming years as Twitter scales. But it will also maintain and grow other regional Twitter offices around the world according to CEO Dick Costolo.

(The connection is really bad.)

Co-founder Jack Dorsey is with him, saying that the Apple integration has increased Twitter growth dramatically around the world. He cited a 25 percent figure but I wasn’t clear if that was monthly.

Dorsey: revenue is growing. Advertisers are seeing 3 percent to 5 percent engagement. VW has seen 50 percent engagement. These ad products are coming to mobile as well. Self-service ads have launched.

Costolo: Speaking about the redesign launching today he says, “We wanted to create an experience where the universe of the tweet is contained in the context of the tweet.” That’s like a Zen koan. What does that mean exactly? It means that more content and context will follow the tweet wherever it goes.

Dorsey: people are using hashtags everywhere. Twitter @ sign is a shorter substitute for a URL, so is a hashtag. “This is the new URL, the way people are interacting with content. But the problem is no one understands what theses symbols mean.”

They want to make it easier to discover content and information on Twitter more intuitively. They cite Apple as a “mentor company” in this regard.

Costolo: we have an obligation to reach every person on the planet. “There are still billions of people who aren’t on Twitter — yet.”  He says, “We have to provide the simplest and fastest way for people around the world to connect to everything they care about.” We have to create the “simplest, fastest service” that will enable us to reach everyone on the planet.

Dorsey: Four elements to redesign with simplified navigation and content discovery:

• Home timeline: the “universe of the tweet” is contained within the tweet anywhere it appears. Costolo: you’ll be able to get the embed code that can embed the universe of the tweet in blogs and sites. “Timeline delivery is 500 percent faster than it was.”
• Connect: Enter @username in the searchbox: “The new URL; the fastest way to connect someone to brands and content anywhere in the world,” explains Dorsey.
• Discovery: People can click on or enter the hashtag and see all the content and conversation relevant to that story. But they’ll be able to search on company names, topics, brands and keywords and get the same content as if they had the hashtag. Costolo is also talking about personalization around hashtags. (It wasn’t clear to me how this works.) He also says that now you’ll be able to see all the “activities” of the people you follow and how they’re engaging on Twitter.
• New improved profile pages: Profile pages are much richer; more media, video and images — for individuals, brands and organizations. Brands will have a “much richer canvas” to promote and explain themselves. Only select brands and orgs for now, however. (This is intended to be a challenge to Facebook pages, and perhaps Google+ as well.)

Costolo takes an indirect jab at Facebook: “As other services offer feature after feature, where going to take a different approach” — simplicity. The “new Twitter” is “just the foundation that will enable us to innovate really quickly across all of our platforms.”

Dorsey: The tweet button is more broadly integrated across the site.

Costolo: New twitter is launching now across all apps as well. But will slowly roll out to 100 percent of users “over the next few weeks.”

This is not just a physical redesign but a “conceptual redesign.”

It strikes me that Twitter is doing something really audacious here: it’s going after Facebook more directly with the enhanced profiles (for brands and companies, as well as users). It’s also aiming to replace the URL for companies with the @ symbol (and to a lesser degree the hashtag). That has been a kind of informal practice, but this is much more explicit and self-conscious now.

Improved search functionality

Twitter’s ambition is to make content and conversation discovery much more intuitive and broadly available, so that users don’t have to use specific hashtags. Some improvements — although no one could tell me specifically what they were — have been made on the back end to make search better on the site.

Here are several screens that show the new Twitter, which offers simplified navigation and easer content discovery (note the @ and # on the nav bar across the top of my profile):

Here’s an example of a corporate profile (DisneyPixar). You can see that it’s much more effective as a branding and promotional tool. These new pages are intended (though no one said anything like this) to give Facebook Pages a run for their money — though brands will do both.

Postscript: See our follow-up stories:

• New, Enhanced Profiles A Boon To Brands On Twitter
• Embeddable Tweets: Add Single Tweets To Any Web Page & Skip The Screenshots

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As Mozilla’s blog post explains, the Twitter search option can be used to search Twitter usernames, hashtags and topics (without hashtags). It’s available in four languages: English, Portuguese, Slovenian and Japaneses. Mozilla says more languages will be enabled in future releases.

Twitter search was previously available as a separate add-on for the Firefox search bar. Today’s news means that Firefox users won’t have to go find the add-on if they want quick access to Twitter search.

Deals like this have historically involved payment of some kind. We asked Twitter for confirmation of any financial arrangements between it and Mozilla; our request was sent to Mozilla’s PR team and a spokesperson told us they have nothing to share about the business aspect of today’s announcement.

Mozilla recently revealed that 98% of its revenue comes from existing search deals with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. The company’s deal with Google is due to expire this month.

Google also sees mobile as a strategic front for social networking growth. The new version of Android (“Ice Cream Sandwich”) prominently features Google+.

The chart below shows comScore traffic estimates for mobile usage of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Facebook has many more mobile users than the other services, although I assume comScore underestimates the number of actual mobile users across the board.

For example, Twitter recently said it had 100 million active mobile users. It also said, “46 percent of active users make mobile a regular part of their Twitter experience.” That would mean 46 million mobile users at least for Twitter. If 60 percent of Twitter users come from outside the US we can crudely estimate that there are just under 20 million mobile Twitter users in the US.

Overall comScore says the mobile-social networking audience in the US is just over 70 million people. The total mobile internet audience is now over 100 million people in the US according to data from Nielsen.

Active Users Vs. Sign-Ups

Let’s start with Facebook. At various points, Facebook has given out a count of how many users it has. Currently, on its stats page, Facebook claims 800 million active users.

Active users are key here. By active, Facebook means people who have logged into Facebook at least once per month. Facebook has many more users than that who have signed-up for Facebook at some point but who don’t actively use the service.

Counting active users make sense. It can help filter out people who might create dummy accounts for spamming social media networks, or to secure vanity URLs (more an issue with Twitter) or those who signed up but maybe never went back.

Twitter recently reported its active users, claiming 100 million last month. These are people that Twitter says logged in at least once per month.

Google Reports Sign-Ups, Not Actives

How about the 40 million figure that Google released today. Those are simply the number of people who have signed up for Google Plus, the company tells me. It’s not an active user figure.

More accurately, it would be called the sign-up figure. Some of those will be active. Indeed, millions will have signed up within the past month, when Google+ opened to anyone. The mere act of signing up would make the active, at least for a bit longer. But not all of them.

What is the active user figure for Google Plus? That’s not something Google’s giving out, right now. That means going forward, until you hear the word “active” next to a figure that Google provides, don’t use it to measure against the active figures given out by its competitors. It’s just not accurate.

Figures, Figures, Everywhere!

It’s also important not to compare Google’s figure to Google+ growth figures from other sources.

For example, in August, comScore reported that Google had 25 million visitors. So has Google grown by 15 million visitors to reach 40 million as announced today? No — because one figure is from comScore, using comScore’s own estimating methods, while the other figure is from Google. You can’t compare the two directly.

Another source of Google+ growth stats has been Paul Allen, who has done a number of estimates over time based on counting surnames. But his figures can only be compared against his own figures, whether they’re for Google+ (which is all he’s been doing) or for other social services.

Even comparing within the same data set can be tough. Consider this chart from the comScore estimate I’d mentioned earlier:

The growth of Google+ looks incredible impressive compared to other social networks. But the overall environment of that growth is also much different.

There were more people online when Google+ launched than when Facebook, Twitter or MySpace did. There were also many more people who were already acclimated to the idea of being on a social network.

Google+ also had the advantage of launching a network where people had already signed up for Google in general, making Google+ an easy “add-on” rather than a starting fresh account elsewhere.

Google’s Given Only Two Official Figures

To date, the only other figure that Google itself has given out about Google+ was that it hit 10 million users as of July 14, 2011. That was provided during Google’s Q2 2011 earnings call. That can be compared to the 40 million user figure given out today. That means growth of 30 million sign-ups in 3 months, an average of 10 million sign-ups per month.

In contrast, Facebook gave out a figure of 750 million ACTIVE users on July 6, 2011. On September 22, it announced it had reached 800 million ACTIVE users. That’s growth of 50 million active users in about 2 1/2 months, about 20 million more active users gained per month.

But wait! Google+ wasn’t open to the public during most of that period while Facebook was. If it had been, Google+ might have gained more users than Facebook. The average figure doesn’t accurately reflect this!

No, it doesn’t. But then again, Facebook’s count is for active users and so will be lower than Google’s count for sign-ups. See why you shouldn’t compare these figures?

Similarly, while Twitter and Facebook both have active user figures that you can compare, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is pretty relaxed about those people not logging in, since plenty of them apparently still consume content from the service in ways that Twitter finds valuable.

Related Reading

• By The Numbers: Twitter Vs. Facebook Vs. Google Buzz
• Has Facebook’s Active User Growth Dropped 25% to 50%?
• Facebook Hits 750 Million Users; Zuckerberg Yawns
• Twitter Hits 100 Million ‘Active’ Users.
• StumbleUpon: 20 Million Stumblers & Counting
• Schmidt: Hard To Beat Facebook, If Playing Exactly The Same Game
• Google+ Gains Nearly 10 Million Users In First 2 Days Of Being Open To The Public
• Behind The Numbers Of Google+’s Monumental Rise To 25 Million Visitors
• Google, Twitter Flaunt Social Stats … It’s Like 2003 All Over Again

Page said in the earnings release:

“We had a great quarter,” said Larry Page, CEO of Google.  “Revenue was up 33% year on year and our quarterly revenue was just short of $10 billion. Google+ is now open to everyone and we just passed the 40 million user mark. People are flocking into Google+ at an incredible rate and we are just getting started!”

Last month, Facebook announced 800 million users last month during its F8 conference, and Twitter announced 100 “active” users last month.

Here are some background pieces:

• Facebook Hits 750 Million Users; Zuckerberg Yawns
• Twitter Hits 100 Million ‘Active’ Users.
• StumbleUpon: 20 Million Stumblers & Counting
• Schmidt: Hard To Beat Facebook, If Playing Exactly The Same Game
• Google+ Gains Nearly 10 Million Users In First 2 Days Of Being Open To The Public
• Google & Facebook Bicker Over Invitation Sharing & Number Of Users