Thinking about Twitter and it’s growth, you’ve got all these people talking to each other and thinking out loud. They might be talking about you. Or what you sell or stuff you care about or your competitors. Why you wouldn’t want to hear that (regardless if you listen), I don’t know.
Another major renovation was the blog, especially how we treat the comments. Our plan was to try and switch things up and try and make things feel more relaxed and social, closer to the post itself. We made the text fields fit more organically into the design of the post. Same width, for comfort. Attractive design. Leaving a post, we moved the name/email fields below the comment box, made sure it wasn’t too big, and things like that.
As with our old blog, we publish comments right away, without a CAPTCHA or anything for spam. Akismat for Wordpress works really well (knocks on wood) so that’s one less thing for the commenter to worry about. We’ve had just one or two spam comments get through and couple “false positives”, but we caught these pretty quickly while skimming the spam and pushed them through. Try it out below, it’ll be fun.
If you remember our first website (screenshot) there’s a pretty big difference. We really took a different direction on the messaging on the homepage, too. Our goal was to make everything more attractive, concise, and cleaner.
We wanted to keep the creative, and drop some of the serious to be more direct and let the site tell the rest of the story. You’ll also notice that we actually removed a page (“Approach”) and simplified. At the time we thought it was important to explain and to qualify the fact that we do research and a lot of other plotting and scheming before we produce things. We decided though, to mash this up with what we do and try to communicate the same thing by saying less.
Everything else got a shade or two more casual and a notch brighter, we feel this better reflects our brand. We also took another go at the contact page, and even got a fun new email address. Go have a look.
Last year was a great one – we spent our first six months officially in business, worked with some great clients and colleagues, and I think we all had fun.
For the past couple of month’s we’ve been working out what we’ll do in oh-ten. Step one is a re-align and re-design our website. We sifted through every detail and asked ourselves if we could make it better, friendlier, more concise. We re-thought not just our approach, but how we communicate what we do and how we do it.
We’ll expand on some of the details and discussions we had over the next few days, but for now have a look before and after and tell us what you think!
Twitter’s new lists may be just as important to Twitter (and Google) to help give an idea of who people are, essentially asking people to “tag” their followers. The two main things that could help add relevance to Google’s search in the near future are:
Number listed: If someone’s on a lot of lists, then others must think they’re worth categorizing and adding. (On the other hand, not everyone’s making lists, either).
List name: Name of the list is a great indicator of topic. If you’re on a list about iPhones, chances are you and your tweets are a relevant source on iPhones.
Now, do you think Google could use some sort of TweetRank, like Google’s PageRank, to determine relevance of a tweet for a particular topic? Could Google crawl through Twitter and it’s users and assign value to a tweet or user, and pass along to a website or 140 character bit of info? Here’s some thoughts on where it might get some of that data:
Keywords in tweet: Naturally, the tweet has words equal to or related to a topic.
Number of tweets/retweets: More people talking about it, greater relevance (at least for the time being).
Links in tweet: Links in a tweet pointing to pages about the topic.
Brand concentration: If there are a number of brands in a topic (such as “Flip” in a sea of HD camera discussion that brand would stand out and should be more relevant).
Followers: It’s reasonable to assume that a larger number of followers would mean more influence. However, there are still accounts (specifically spammers) that have a large follower count and there are services that help you gain followers usually by just following back (like link farms/trading links just for the purpose of the link itself, no matter the relevance)
Follower/following ratio: A higher ratio of followers to following should indicate a person of interest and trust. However some people/companies follow everyone back that follows them, so there’s that to take into account.
Frequency of tweets: The faster a topic spreads the more interesting/relevant it should be. This could be interesting though. If something get popular but dies off as fast it’s different than something that’s more gradual.
Related followers: If you’re followed by a large number of people that are in a particular industry and tweeting about a particular topic, your tweets about that topic should be more relevant.
Your profile: Including name, description, website and location, all (hopefully) provided by you. (The downside from Google or Twitter’s view is that they’re all provided by you, and should be qualified by some of the other data).
So, do you think Twitter users will have a “TweetRank” of sorts? In the sense that, based on some factors like above, your tweets carry a different value then someone else?
Google’s uses a bunch of things to decide what pages are most relevant whenever you search, one of the most important being links. It relies heavily on things like number of links pointing to you, age of links, the anchor text of links, and a bunch of details in between.
On Twitter the rules are different. It’s all moving rather than static. Something that’s been around for longer might not be as relevant as something newer.
And you decide what’s important by who you follow. Followers and numbers matter in different a way than a regular link. If Fast Company says something about a marketing conference it’s probably more relevant than if I do. But if I say something about a marketing conference happening in Halifax then it’s different. Especially if other people around me are too. So that might be of interest, but not to everyone, not to the masses.
When Google launched social search not too long ago, something must have been brewing at the Googleplex. A good step, but it really didn’t seem that useful. But now Google’s into realtime search. In the past Google sometimes had a tough time with time-sensitive information due to the way it ranked pages based so heavily on links and age. For example, looking for the latest details on things like functionality of Facebook Page vs. Groups (things that are upgraded over time) you might not get the latest info first, unless it happened to be in the news (typically only something big).
It’s likely this is just the beginning of what we’ll see form Google starting to tap new sources to give you relevant results. Google’s rise to fame was the way it uses static links to determine popularity and relevance (and therefore rank), but now there’s a lot more happening on the Web content-wise than Web pages.