WebProNews

Tag: pubsubhubbub

  • How Open Web Developers Are Trying to Make Social Media Better for You, the User

    Last week, a new open protocol called OExchange was released with the aim of simplifying sharing. Right out of the door, it had names like Google, Microsoft, and LinkedIn signed on. WebProNews spoke with Google’s Open Web advocate, Chris Messina about how the protocol could benefit businesses and site owners.

    "There are a couple different ways to look at this as a website owner," he told us. "If you already use a sharing service like AddToAny, ShareThis, or AddThis, you might not notice much difference. However, OExchange makes it easier for those service providers to support less well-known sharing services. As such, that means that site owners may see a boost in attention from a wider audience than before."

    He said that "because this may give rise to a long-tail of sharing providers, it’s possible that content will be shared across a wider and more diverse audience than before."

    OExchange is just one of handful of open protocols that are being harnessed to smooth out the social web, and make for a more seamless user experience from site to site. Others include OpenID, OAuth, Webfinger, ActivityStrea.ms, PubsubHubbub, and Salmon.

    Google is playing a large role in the advocacy of of these open protocols. Google Buzz, for example, places a great deal of emphasis on the kind of openness they provide, and the kind of openness that is frankly lacking from the much more popular (at least in terms of user count) "Open" graph of Facebook – by far, the largest social network.

    At Google I/O last month, WebProNews spoke with Joseph Smarr of Google’s technical staff about various open protocols and how they can help websites. He does a pretty good job of putting it into terms the non-techie can probably understand:

    "If you’re a webmaster and you’ve got a new site and you want people to check it out, you want to limit that friction as much as possible, right? You want to make it super easy for people to come and find out about who you are," says Smarr.

    "It’s going to be better for you, and it’s going to be better for you users, who are going to have a much more convenient time," he says.

    Smarr also makes an interesting point about the web in general. "The web started with the right open standards. You know, HTML and HTTP, and then anybody could just stand up a new webserver, and anybody could link to it, and that’s what allowed that incredible innovation to happen. So we basically want to get that same set of building blocks right on the social web…"

    As Messina told us upon the launch of OExchange, "the benefits of any open protocol or technology really only offers dividends when it becomes widely adopted by many providers."

    We also have an interview from Google I/O with Messina we will be posting on our Video Blog before long.

  • Would Google Archive the Web Like It’s Doing Twitter?

    Google has launched a very interesting new search option, with its Twitter archive. What this does is let users search for a topic, and look at all available tweets about that topic in chronological order. If you want to see tweets about President Obama for example, you can do so by going to any year, month, or day and seeing what was said about him on Twitter. Google can do this since it has access to Twitter’s info, which allows Google to index its real-time Twitter results. A Google spokesperson tells WebProNews it would be possible to do something similar with other sites through PuSH.

    To me, while this is an interesting way of searching Twitter (in fact, I called it what Twtiter search should be), it gets even more interesting if you consider that Google is developing a system for sites to push content to Google in real-time, via PubSubHubbub (or PuSH). Google’s Matt Cutts spoke with WebProNews about potential PuSH integration recently (read about it more here):

    Will Google make it an option to browse entire archives of sites in a similar fashion to what it is doing with Twitter? This could be a quite useful feature, and it would certainly fall along the lines of "organizing the world’s information." Let’s say I remember reading a New York Times article several months back that I’d like to reference in one of my own articles, but I can’t remember what it was called exactly, and I have a hard time finding it through a traditional web search. Being able to drill down into the archives in this way could make the search process much more helpful – a better user experience.

    Of course most content sites have their own search features (sometimes even provided by Google), and you could try using that, but quite frankly these site search features aren’t always that great. In fact, they’re very often terrible. Google knows search, and it is still the most dominant search destination. It would make a ton of sense for such an option to be available.

    I reached out to Google to see if this was a potential option. "The scenario described is indeed possible but we don’t have anything to announce today," a Google spokesperson tells me. To be clear, when he says "possible," he’s referring to the technology making such a scenario possible. As he said, there’s no announcement, and this may not even be on Google’s list of things to do. But, you never know. 

    Google Labs already has a timeline feature for news.

    Would you like to see Google offer timeline-like archives of site updates? Tell us what you think.

  • If Google Indexing Goes Real-Time, What Will it Mean for Ranking?

    Last year, we saw the emergence of the technology PubSubHubbub, which provides real-time notifications to subscribers of content when there is new content or updates being made. There has recently been talk about Google developing a system that would use this technology it its indexing process.

    Do you want your content indexed instantly? Share your thoughts.

    In fact, Google’s Matt Cutts spoke with WebProNews about this, among other things:

    "Maybe some small site, you might only find a chance to crawl its pages once a week, but if that site is blogging like every 20 minutes, boom , you hit the submit button, and the search engines can find out about it," explained Cutts.

    "Now the tension is that more spammers would use this as well, so you can’t just say, ‘I’m gonna index everything that everybody pushes to me.’ So finding the right balance there is tricky, but the potential is really, really exciting," he said.

    "You can definitely imagine the reputable blogs getting very fast updates – the ones that we think are trustworthy, and then over time, maybe ramping that up, so that more and more people have the ability to do…just like, instant indexing," he says.

    And here we see another way Google may end up looking at the trust factor, with regards to ranking.

    Can We Learn from How Google Does Real-Time Search?

    Liz Gannes at GigaOm recapped a few things Google senior product manager Dylan Casey said at SMX last month:

    Casey said perhaps the most complex project in real time is to determine when to trigger the appearance of real-time results in search results. "We have huge internal debates on: Is this a good answer to this question, or are we just creating a tool for low-quality content?" he said.

    Casey spent some effort justifying Google paying to include Twitter’s real-time firehose of tweets, saying it was an intensive technical integration on both sides, and that tweets are a fundamentally different form of communication due to the restrictions of their form. For example, Google has developed a ‘complex system’ for removing users’ public tweets that are later deleted or marked private.

    Earlier this year, Amit Singhal, who has led development of real-time search at Google talked about how Google ranks tweets. According to him, Google ranks tweets by followers to an extent, but it’s not just about how many followers you get. It’s about how reputable those followers are.

    Singhal likens the system to the well-known Google system of link popularity. Getting good links from reputable sources helps your content in Google, so having followers with that same kind of authority theoretically helps your tweets rank in Google’s real-time search.

    "One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation," Singhal says. "As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well."

    Now Google’s current real-time search product is separate from the whole PubSubHubbub-based system that isn’t in place yet, but Matt’s comments about blogs being trustworthy, indicates to me that trust is going to be key in being able to push content to Google’s index in real-time. So, I wonder if a similar strategy to how Google ranks its current real-time and Twitter results will be employed in determining this kind of trust.

    Does This Mean If You’re Not Trusted You Won’t Get Indexed?

    "PuSH wouldn’t likely replace crawling, in fact a crawl would be needed to discover PuSH feeds to subscribe to, but the real-time format would be used to augment Google’s existing index," says Marshall Kirkpatrick, who spoke in a session on the real-time web at SXSW, which also included Google’s Brett Slatkin, one of the guys responsible for PuSH (he’s in the following video explaining the technology in simple terms).

    Lots of sites out there already have PuSH technology in place. For example, WordPress and Typepad blogs have the ability to "PuSH" their content. That’s a lot of content itself. A lot of user-generated content, and that means the potential for spam is huge, which is why the trust factor is so important.

    If PuSh is to be heavily utilized by the search engines, and you want your content indexed as quickly as possible, you’re going to want to do what you can to build community trust and a solid reputation. One more reason to engage in meticulous online reputation management, put out great content, and engage with the community.

    Do you want to see Google index the web in real-time? Discuss here.