Anyways, i signed up this morning for the account and found i had 8 Invites/Nominations.

I posted this on twitter, boy did i underestimate the demand for the invites. Within a few minutes i had a few 100 @replies, from people not even following me. So… who to send the invites to? I decided to be fair, and offer it to the first 7 people who Retweeted my last tweet. People already following me obviously had the advantage (since the last tweet was already on their timeline)

Aneways, most of the invites have been sent (Note: Google will not send out invites immediately, as and when they have capacity they will send out the invites, see above)

If you get an invite, play it forward and send others!

If you have a wave account and havent figured out how to invite people, just search for ‘Invite Others’ in your inbox window and the wave to invite people will come up.

If you are on wave, feel free to add me:
My email address:
Initial of my First Name+surname:
(i+my surname)(at)googlewave (dot) com

p.s I am out of invites, the 2 left have already been won by others see my tweets

According to ArabCrunch, Google is using it’s monopoly on search and advertising to promote it’s own service. When a search is done for Yamli, an ad is displayed for ta3eeb (see the screenshot below, Source: ArabCrunch

To my understanding you cannot use keywords that does not match your ad when advertising on Adwords, so here Google is going against its Ad words policy

I do not believe there is anything wrong with bidding for competitors keywords (i.e Obama Buying out keywords for clinton/palin) however you cannot use the name in your AD copy, something Google has not done. So they have not violated any of their policies.  Though the other point made in the post is valid, Google has the monopoly on search and advertising and could use this to promote their own service extensively at no cost. It could also be used to spur Yamli themselves into buying keywords for their own name. Since then the ads have been removed and this was also covered by TechCrunch

ArabCrunch likens it to

it is leveraging monopoly, similar  to Microsoft using its OS monopoly and installing IE to kill Netscape back in the 90s.

So, is Google being evil?

Previously, it recommended people from the local SA blogosphere, that i had been following on twitter.  This morning, it recommended me the twitter stream of Umair Hague who blogs at Harvard Business Online as a discussion leader. I already follow his tweets and it’s the first time i have seen a recommendation for a twitter stream. (See the screen shot below)

A few points:

• I subscribe to his blog at harvard business online
• I subscribe to his twitter stream (On twitter and not rss)

So the question is that, has Google figured out that the discussion leader blog, is written by the same person as the twitter account and since i am a subscriber to the feed it recommended to me the tweets as well?

Or

Is it that people with similar RSS feed’s as me, are also subscribing to the RSS feed for Umair’s twitter account?

This would make a good pitch for SEO business.

When Google launched image based mobile ads. i briefly covered what google mobile ads were missing and why context (what is the person doing?) is important. Twitter offers that context, add a location to that and your pretty much have killer mobile advertising. Its contextual to what the person is doing and localized.

No one out there can offer advertising for mobile as relevant as that right now , not even Google. This is the reason Google was quick to snap up Jaiku, they realise that twitter is actually a threat to their mobile advertising business. Some people may have been confused about why i sent this tweet, it seems a far fetched but Twitter is actually a threat to Google mobile ads business, which according to reports could be a larger market then internet advertising.

Google has taken their current Ad system, and have adapted it for the mobile screen. When you consider how different the use of your mobile is compared to the use of a desktop computer this is not the best solution. For example:

You are most likely accessing the internet on your mobile phone when you are out & about, at the mall, on the beach, in your car, waiting in line at the bank, the point being you are currently doing something else. You are doing some sort of ACTIVITY and your mobile phone is just there to add value.

When you sit at your desktop/laptop you are most likely sitting down with the specific purpose of achieving something such as surfing the net, typing out a document, researching some topic,, catching up with social networks/email.

There in lies the fundamental difference in how we access the internet on PC/LAPTOP vs a mobile device. Just for a moment, analyse the psychology of this and the motivations behind it.

… got it?

With the traditional method of accessing the net we make the decision to set away time to spend at the computer and surf the internet, we are doing nothing else but sitting at the computer.

With mobile devices we are making a decision to DO something else. The mobile phone and by extension the internet is there purely to serve a purpose which is to add value at that specific time, in that particular context. It may be used to do all of the things we do on traditional desktops/laptops but it usually means we are also doing something else.

This is why mobile ads may not prove as lucrative with enough click through as your normal internet ads. The time you have when you are accessing a mobile device is of HIGHER value, then when you are sitting at your desktop surfing the net. Therefore you are less likely to click on a link for an AD. The AD has to be much more relevant than it is currently.

Yes, Google ads are currently relevant using the query, possibly the location of your IP and other factors but with mobile ads there needs to be another level of relevance and that is CONTEXT.

What is the user doing at that point in time? What is he actually looking for? Where is he?

And that’s what’s currently missing from Google mobile ads, Relevance + Context. I have ideas on how to achieve that but we can save that for another day.