May 6, 2011
Google continues to make upgrades to Places and Maps having recently announced a wider rollout of Google Business Photos. As noted last week there have been a number of changes/additions to Places pages themselves.
Adam Dorfman of SimPartners pointed out this additional visual upgrade to the Hotel booking feature. The new emphasis makes the feature more obvious by adding its own subheading, emphasizing the dates and bolding the price on a contrasting color.
Another change that occurred last week was that the photos, which had been much lower on the page, also are now appearing above the fold.
Google has often indicated that they will continue to change and move the content of the Places Page based on their perception of end user utility. If that is the decision criteria of how they reached the current layout the implications are not quite believable.
By that logic the review totals being duplicated above the fold implies that Google’s own reviews and fully formed review content are somehow less valuable than 3 party review totals. Google would also have to argue that users really want to do little more in Places than book a hotel.
It would seem that politics, business relations and income considerations more likely explanations for the new layout.
This interview appeared yesterday in TechCrunch and is worth a watch.
Takeaways?
* Mayer while not the top dog in Local, she is becoming its public face
* Google will be focusing all new local product developments in the context of their two core products, Maps and Places
* Latitude is just a social view of Maps to which they will be adding functionality
* Hotpot recommendations is the first salvo of differentiation
* Integration of rating and reviews into search results will lead to increased uptake
* Mobile will be the primary focus for local development
* Over 50% of Maps usage is now coming from Mobile… up from 40% only 2 months ago
Questions that I would have loved to hear the answer to:
OK so Hotpot is now rolled into Places. When will Hotpot functionality really be integrated into Places and/or Maps?
What are Google plans for Places and Maps on the iPhone?
May 5, 2011
In a very good online webinar that Google offered called Are You Mobile Ready? they shared some interesting internal data on the percentage of mobile queries. The charts show the % of mobile queries to total search queries from January 2007 through January of this year. Previously Bing had noted that as many as 50% of all restaurant queries are mobile.
In Google’s data the % of mobile queries as a % of total queries range from 15% in the insurance industry to almost 30% in restaurants. It is interesting but not surprising that Christmas peaks are obvious in the consumer electronics chart.
Click to view larger:
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May 3, 2011
Texting, invented in 1992, has changed little over the past 19 years. In the absence of innovation on the part of the phone companies, a number of companies have stepped in and created this new class of texting product that adds a significant value layer to the basic texting function. Group texting is like adding a party line (for those of you that remember them) to your text messages.
Texting is one of the most personal of communication technologies, it is ubiquitous and typically reaches into the most intimate social circles a user has. It has always been a one to one or a one to many product. Group texting does it one step better and puts any given circle of users into the same context and allows many to many communications through an online hub.
The players in the field, GroupMe, Disco.com, Huddl, FastSociety and Beluga offer up pretty much the same basic functionality of being able to create a new group of texters and an associated voip number via an online interface or a smart phone app. When a message is sent to the group’s unique number by any member, all members of the group receive the message. It is a service enhancement whose value is immediately obvious to even the most technically illiterate user. Group texting allows a group of users (up to 25 99) to coordinate their activities and/or movements quickly and easily.
To experiment with the technology I created a group for my four family members. To the right you can see their responses. My daughter, immediately upon experiencing it, set up one for her small group of 4 girl friends and has since been using it enthusiastically.
There is a business use case for the technology as well as a personal one. When I showed it to my brother-in-law, a surgeon in a small practice, he created an account to allow the four doctors in his practice to help communicate hospital call schedule conflicts without the intervention of a secretary/intermediary, an immediate stress and time saver.
Beyond the basic functionality each of the services has a slightly different feature set that differentiates them.
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May 2, 2011
The good news is that York Me, having been lost repeatedly, has once again been found.
But the story of York is really the story of Maps and Places and it is in many ways bigger than the loss of a single geographic entity. Google has insinuated Maps and Places very deeply into our lives. People and business depend on both products day in and day out to get their jobs done and their sales made. Google Maps and Places are no longer just services but have become critical utilities.
People expect utilities to work and when they don’t, folks expect that they will be repaired in a timely, seamless way.
With York, the process of repair was anything but seamless and the residents decided to involve their local Congresswoman, Chellie Pingree on their behalf. Shortly before the problem was solved, she shot off a letter to Larry Page looking for a solution that got the attention of the local news.
The issue isn’t just that York was lost (although that is a growing social and business problem). Nor even that it was lost again. As Top Contributor EHG (who did a great job on the problem) points out, the real failure is not in the data error per se or even in the repeated loss of the data but in a business process that takes repeated and oft times futile interactions to get a serious problem fixed. This is not the only problem that is handled this way as virtually every issue with Maps and Places, and there are many, have had these process issues since day one. I went so far as to flow chart the process of how a typical problem is solved in Maps and it ain’t pretty!
In Maps and Places Google has long been steadfast in their insistence that new products should be shipped before old products were fixed, They have long insisted that there would be no support on a “free” product. They have long ignored and not fixed problems of both product and more importantly process in the Maps and Places arena.
The question though I have is at what cost to Google? (more…)
Last week there were a number of new features that appeared in Places and in the 7 Pack including the inclusion of event information on venue Place pages and pushing the ppc hotel booking feature to the front page. There were several that I did not have time to report on that hit my radar:
Whether a bug or by design, the business email address has been removed from the Places page (thanks to reader Robert Ramirez of localrezults.com). He noted, and I agree, that it is a critical piece of information to have about your business on a page that Google positions as a comprehensive “search result” and its absence is strange.
Another interesting tidbit, particularly amidst the frequent disputes over reviews that have occurred, is that Google is now including links to the major review sites near the top of the listing. From a UI point of view it is redundant as the information is readily available down the page. One can only speculate that its inclusion above the fold was an effort to placate the likes of TripAdvisor and Yelp (and I am sure others).
