Jonathan Mendez's Blog

API Battle Plans: Fighting for Next

We have reached maturation point with APIs where the three core components of the web experience – content, utility & data – are becoming readily available via API delivery. The implication of this growth is nothing less than the next web. A smarter web that delivers improved relevance, a better experience and expanded revenue generation opportunities. As the ramifications of these benefits become understood businesses now have no choice but to support an API superstructure, the pillars of which are content, utility, development and analytics.

But where do forward thinking businesses begin? 

Though APIs have been around quite a while for information we are still in a nascent period of growth for content and utility. Amazingly we’re even earlier in using APIs to optimize digital media and experiences. Can you imagine a fully dynamic web? I know it may seem hard when in some respects we're guilty of leaving the mashup behind with the rest of Web 2.0.

An ambient web calls for strategies that leverage that ubiquity. APIs are they key to this. Semantic web (or the new & improved term, linked data) will also have a big role. As best I can I am sharing my thoughts on how start-up, legacy digital, and traditional businesses should approach an API strategy for their digital business. I welcome your thoughts in the comments. The only thing I know for sure is the ramifications of not having a battle plan are as large as the opportunity for those that do.

Bitly: A Model API Army

There are many approaches to using open content and data however unless you create something that blends the core API components (content, utility, development and analytics) you will always be vulnerable or at a competitive disadvantage. The best example might be in URL shortening.

There are quite a few URL shortening solutions however only bit.ly marries content (linked page), utility (URL shortener & link), development (Calais) and analytics (click data). The sum of bitly's parts are greater than it's whole but even the parts on their own are valuable at different times depending on the goals of the user (and the biz dev goals of bit.ly). This layered approach is why bit.ly is a homerun and should be a case study for how create new solutions using APIs.

So let’s dive into using each of the API components of the web experience together in the manner bit.ly is doing and see what we can learn.

CUDA: The API Stack

Everyone likes to talk about stacks these days so I’ll frame what’s involved in successfully creating API battle plans within your organization in that manner.

I'm calling it CUDA because, well I'm a marketing guy and it sounds cool.

Layer 1) Content APIs: Text, Images, Audio & Video

Since the web is an information medium content APIs present the biggest opportunity but also the biggest challenge. The thing holding back success for content providers might just be themselves. Creating an API is but just one layer of the stack.

The New York Times believes its API will deliver 2.5X the amount of eyeballs on their content. But how? Depending on unknown third parties to bring you revenue from your API is akin to a salesman sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. The content API is your raw material but how you mine it and what you chose to make with it can be the difference between diamonds and coal.

One problem for publishers is that they have never been very good with digital marketing or technology innovation. To make matter worse technology innovations have been publisher agnostic. The fact that the Kindle brings Amazon higher margins on Wall Street Journal subscriptions than the WSJ gets (not to mention the direct loss of revenue and customer relationship to the Journal) should be all the motivation needed for in-house solutions to take priority. When it will happen in earnest is anybody's guess.

Layer 2) Utility APIs: Messaging, Payments, Pricing

It’s becoming clear that messaging, payments and other API based tools &utilities will ultimately lead to the most creative use of APIs. We have already seen this around the API fueled Twitter ecosystem with numerous products being developed off the API and some even being acquired by or partnering with Twitter. I think this area is going to explode in the next year. Integrating utility is a one-time deal with long payoffs for core platforms. For entrepreneurs and VC this biz can also presents a quick flip opportunity.

We’ll soon see more transactional APIs in place with the much-anticipated Facebook payment leading the way. At my own RAMP Digital we’ve incorporated mobile carrier transaction APIs into a display ad to facilitate a subscription purchase from within the ad unit. Solutions like this are just the beginning of the next wave of API fueled utilities.

Layer 3) Development: API Services

In many ways dev is always the core layer. On the path to a true web of services it will be the innovation that can be built on top of it all. http://camelbuy.com/ is a great example. Created using the BestBuy API it delivers a wealth of information and value. It’s a great start but businesses can’t be lulled to sleep believing their API’s success (and ultimately their own) will be taken care of by developers earning affiliate commissions or contest winners.

My last company (Offermatica) built an insanely great web services tool. Instead of API calls we made JavaScript calls. Left to the their own devices most customers were nowhere near able to fulfill the full potential of the technology on their own. This is an old story in new technology. If it's too hard for people to use they just won't. This is the human element to it all.

Creative and media agencies will be of little help. Not until service businesses are built that uniquely understood the technology and have developed methodologies (with results) will the promise be fulfilled. Without services I’m afraid that there will be no case studies, no evangelists, no competition and ultimately no performance improvements for the web. But why build these businesses if there are no customers? Or why not just DIY if you're so smart about it?

If anything is holding back the next web it's not optimizing the content delivery -- it's optimizing the content presentation.

Layer 4) Analytics APIs: Data Profiles, Parameters,

API fed data has already had a profound impact on the web. Google is making 4 billion calls a day on its APIs (think for a second about the competitive advantage they have in place in order to do this).

The first decade of the commercial web saw counting. This new second wave seems to be about insight. This game changer is realtime data. RT is going to change everything from content delivery to dynamic pricing models for ads and traffic.

We are also moving from a browser web to a web where anything can make a request, not just a browser. This requires new ways of collecting and analyzing data along with new ways of optimizing. Good thing that is what we’re using APIs to make it all easier.

Summary

The winners in the first decade of the commercial web were sites like Amazon and Google that focused on performance, user experience, testing and optimization in order to deliver relevance and revenue. The winners over the next decade will be those that take those same tenets and apply them to how they aggregate and develop the content, utility and data that APIs will deliver. We are at a point in time where we are optimizing how we incorporate what the web has to offer. Unlike before, it now offers us everything.

Some Previous Thoughts on APIs:

Using APIs to Mashup Ads & Landing Pages

Why Mashups are Mandatory for Marketers

Platforms, Applications and the Future of Digital Marketing

Think Like a Search Engine – APIs & User Control

Transcendence: The Power of Publishing is Marketing

This is getting tired. Recent comments by Jim Spanfeller and remarks at yesterday’s hearing on The Future of Journalism are just the latest show of disregard for the major changes that have taken place in the digital medium over the past five years.

As Grove said about technology, only the paranoid survive. Publishers haven’t been paranoid though, they’ve been sleeping through the transformation of the digital media landscape. Wake up! You can’t operate strategically the same way for 5 years in a row in digital. The technology moves too fast.

While content channels like search, mobile and social continue to rise and technology like APIs, JavaScript, XMP & RDF continue to advance publishers have made little to no investment innovating to provide better experiences with their content or revenue generation for themselves. Instead, they sat there like fat cats measuring all the free search traffic and impressions of countless display ads on their pages – and God forbid they do anything with that data.

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What’s become clear in the morass of low CPM and poor performance is that publishers can no longer rely on third parties to deliver revenue. The plunge has magnified an online ad ecosystem fraught with multiple inefficiencies – creative agencies, media buyers and planers, ad ops, networks, and on and on. Recent innovations like yield optimization and real-time bidding are only anesthetic on a wound bleeding from both sides.

Solving the revenue problem requires publishers to look in the mirror and take matters into their own hands. There have been small moves in this direction with marketing technology/services acquisitions by Cox, Glam and Meredith. Still, too few publishers understand to survive they need self-reliance.

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Ironically or not, the best example of these ideals for publishers springs from the same area as Emerson himself, TechTarget (full disclosure: TechTarget is a previous client while I was at Offermatica).

If you don’t know Tech Target your sys admin does. They operate over 50 websites in the IT space. Here’s a brief description of the company:

TechTarget Inc. is a provider of online content for buyers and sellers of corporate information technology (IT) products. Its product offerings address both lead generation and branding objectives of advertising customers.

That’s right, TechTarget has its own product solutions for advertisers. They are marketers as much as they are publishers, an agency as much as they are authors. They understand the traffic on their site, there to view their content, is theirs and the onus is on them to find the best ways to monetize it.

Really, who better to do it? Who knows more about their audience than they do? It makes perfect sense then to discover and then help meet the goals of their audience. With all the explicit and implicit data about their audience shouldn’t they be able to do this better than anyone else?

Once you have that mindset everything changes. You focus on the goals of your visitors, not the goals of your advertisers. You focus on gaining expertise on page optimization to derive the highest revenue per visitor. You focus on loyalty by knowing who your visitors are and what interests them. Your buyers become partners, not faceless networks and agencies. You do it yourself and you keep all the rewards, never for a moment aligning with revenue streams that don’t properly valuate your visitors and the content you created for them.

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Don’t tell me this will not work outside of B2B. While content may differ the user goals of information recovery and discovery and the ways to optimize and monetize them are agnostic to verticals.

I shed no tears for publishers. I’ve been beating the drum for three years that every page is a landing page. We even had a name for it at Offermatica, Content Merchandising. It never really caught on like we expected but then again it didn’t matter. There were lots of performance-based businesses that needed our services. Not surprisingly there are even more of them now (both optimization tools and performance marketers). Publishers can’t continue to be run into the ground by these savvy marketers exploiting the delta between the value of the publisher’s content & audience and what they are paying for it.

I see no other option. Use your content as the basis for your own advertising and marketing services. Be innovative, control your destiny, own the page, own the next page and deliver relevance, great experiences and utility with every pixel. Most of all help your visitors to make decisions and take actions with your content. Inherent in those actions resides the value of your content.

Related Posts:

Platforms, Applications and the Future of Digital Marketing

Mashing Up the Value of Ads & Content

How Semantic Apps Can Deliver Relevance to Implicit, Explicit & Latent Intent

Busy Being Born: Creative Technology & Analytics

Twice in the past week I have had conversations about the creative use of technology. My point was that technology by itself has all the elements necessary for creativity to flourish. Coding is creative. The web has progressed to date only because of those who thought about technology from a creative perspective. It’s something many people don’t appreciate.

However, we’ve now reached a point in the development of the web where the inverse has become just as important. Technology’s use with creative will powerfully change the web experience for people by delivering more relevance and more engaging experiences. Creative is becoming part and parcel of the platforms where it resides and applications that deliver and present it.

Right now testing technology sits at the forefront. It’s been amazing to witness the rise of creative testing over the four years I’ve been speaking about it on the conference circuit. From 0-70% of the audience in 4 years and every one of the major testing players acquired by companies like Omniture, Interwoven, Accenture & Acxiom.

As we move towards a real-time intelligent/dynamic web, content targeting and analytics will play a larger role and get rolled up into creative technology. It’s important to understand at its core creative tech is about two things - rules and results.

Data Driven Design

In the past few weeks two high profile events took place that illuminated the role of technology on creative.

Facebook’s redesign: Whatever you want to say about the design it was driven by data (or FB needs to sell NOW). As Scott Rafer mentioned at SES the design really was about revenue metrics as much as it was copying Twitter. It still amazes me how many creative decisions are not about revenue. Which bring us to…

The departure of Google’s Visual Design Lead Doug Bowman: He could no longer work at a company that made most every design decisions based on testing and revenue data rather than an opined aesthetic. There is a great discussion of that conflict here.

What we can learn from Facebook and Google – two of the most technically savvy organizations on the web. Both are at their core about delivering rules based content. Both use data on revenue generation to drive design. They are the blueprint.

Design Power

For all the Silicon Valley geekery and new found fascination with quants on Madison Avenue there is a giant issue playing out. Design power. You see, as soon as your audience has the right answer the rules of creative change. Design becomes a question of how well you know your audience. To paraphrase Steve Jobs design is not about what it looks like, but how it works. This is not an ad agency strong suit.

The agency problem (and one I’ve experienced once over twice) is that literally and figuratively they can’t afford to test. Testing creates too much conflict (fearful Creative Directors) and inefficiency (training, increased costs & multiple creative). I’m aware that some like WPP are talking the talk but change would require ground up realignment of their workforce, business operations and structure. Even if they tried they may simply be too big and too old to succeed at this.

Additionally, the progress of creative technology is in many respects making testing more difficult (but more valuable). As mentioned, moving the needle now is becoming more about targeted content and the dynamic real-time web. Testing informs these rules but this scales at a content delivery/management platform, something Madison Avenue is once again far behind on. In the web's next phase technology needs to be your Chief Strategy Officer and the data collected from your audience needs to be your Creative Director.

Creative Distribution

The irony is that there really isn’t anything more creative than testing. Testing allows creativity to flourish within a company. I call it creative distribution. Getting more creative variation in front of more people to measure results is a good thing – always!

Testing democratizes the creative process. Good ideas can come from anywhere. Testing also allows the ultimate creative license. Radical ideas can have a place right beside the status quo. Often those radical ideas are the ones that get the best results. While other times it may something as simple as the color of a button that matters.

Most importantly testing allows you to learn and get better as a creative. Measurement lets you know how good you really are as a creative. Business is competitive – why shouldn’t creative be as well? Maybe one day we’ll see a league of optimizers where we keep track of their stats on an ROI basis. Maybe even Rotoptimization.

Results

Testing, targeting, data and analytics have continued to pick up speed in the digital world with the explosion of PPC and continued velocity towards a “pay-per” economy. There is no going back. This is exactly what the web’s “services” model should be and it remains the web’s economic destiny -- many would say we’re already there.

Those of us working on developing creative technology are now in a period of tremendous innovation. Our Newport 65 is upon us and we're going electric. As with everything creative there will always be people with rigid ideas of what creative is and whom they look to for creative ideas. There will also be another group of people. People who just get better results. People busy being born, not dying.

Speaking and Clinic at SES New York

Next week Search Engine Strategies rolls into my home turf and I’ll be involved in a couple of ways.

On Tuesday March 24th in the Expo Hall I will running an audience based clinic.

3:00pm Expo Hall: CPA Optimization Station
With advertising dollars more accountable than ever optimizing your Cost Per Acquisition or Cost per Action (CPA) has never been more important. Take advantage of this rare opportunity to sit with Jonathan Mendez as he finds ways to improve your ROI. Jonathan will perform strategic evaluations and provide actionable insights on the consumer touch-points in your conversion path - keywords, ads, landing pages and registration/checkout. Jonathan will also offer test ideas for use with Multivariate & A/B testing and advice on how to use emerging marketing technologies to further improve your results.

On Wednesday March 25th I am very excited to usher in something close to my heart; the first search engine conference session exploring the rise of search-based strategies, technologies, analytics and performance moving at high velocity into the world of display.

2:15pm Advertising Track: Search Becomes the Display OS
Search advertising, the onetime bastard stepchild of internet marketing which only five years ago barely existed, is now poised to double the spend of display advertising in 2009 (eMarketer). With the continued decline in Display performance, some people believe the only thing that will save Display advertising is making it more like Search. This session explores these leading edge ideas, technology and provides some early case studies the effectiveness of making Search the Operating System for Display. We will provide case study examples of the above and the amazing results achieved and ads that are not only search applications themselves but that can be purchased and targeted based on the keyword.

Moderator: Gregg Stewart, Senior Vice President, Interactive, TMP Directional Marketing
Speakers:
Jonathan Mendez, Founder & CEO, RAMP Digital
Scott Rafer, CEO, Lookery
Amit Kumar, VP Product , Dapper

Let me know if you’ll be there. I would love to connect at the show with anyone working on interesting things.

Will New OPA Creative Sizes Help Redefine Display?

I’ve been pretty adamant that new creative sizes were needed to help advertisers so when I woke up this morning to see the OPA has announced three new ad sizes I was thrilled. Clearly my excitement has not been matched by a lot a folks who see this as “shouting louder” and in fact if theses sizes are being used to just create bigger billboards that is not going to help anyone.

However, if they are weaved into the distributed web and are more like landing pages than ads these sizes offer phenomenal potential to share content and functionality that will possibly redefine display by bringing back higher CPMs to pubs, huge ROAS to advertisers and great experiences to people.

Here’s a look at the new sizes I put together since I have not seen anyone lay these out yet:

O P A New Creative

View more presentations from jonathanmendez.

I have little interest in the 970x418 pushdown. Any interruptive experience is a bad one for your audience. This should be killed on sight. But the other two formats are incredibly interesting.

Let’s take a look at this from a transactional advertiser perspective. Let’s say Old Navy is the advertiser and we use those sizes to deliver the kids clothing section of their website in an ad for a back to school campaign. The ad has full site functionality up until a product page or an add to cart.

Let’s say the ads run at $30 CPM as a direct buy with top tier publishers. Here’s a numbers crunch.

$100k buy = 3.33M Impressions
Assume 5% of audience engages in the ad= 166,666
Assume 3% of engagers convert to a transaction (industry avg.) = 4,998 conversions
Assume AOV (average order value) is $40 = $199,920

That’s a whopping 99% ROAS!

Of course these are just estimates but I think they are exciting. The key is getting the proper advertiser functionality in the ad so that is a useful utility rather than a billboard. But as far as I’m concerned, been there, done that.

The other nice part about this is working with direct sales teams can offer a greater understanding and ability to provide contextual relevance with the ad content and the publisher content. My semantic tech brothers and sisters should be stoked about this as well.

So, I’m immediately in the market to build these ads and test them in July. My contact information is above if you’re an advertiser or publisher interested in being a part of it.

Search Becomes the Display Operating System

I first wrote about the idea of search strategies working in display to deliver more relevant ads two years ago. In the ensuing two years as followers of this blog know I’ve become passionate about the opportunity to build creative technology that makes display ads more relevant. One advantage I have working on these solutions is that I’m an outsider. I don’t think the way people in the display world think. I’m wired differently. I am and will always be a search guy.

That mindset helps because search is more than a channel. Search is the way people use the web. People don’t just fire up a browser without a goal in mind. We are all taking actions on the web based on our goal. Information we notice and content we experience along our goal path may change our goals, but it does not change the two basic natures of how we use the web – recovery and discovery.

Therein lies the key functional distinction between display and search. Search (as an app on the platform) is weaved into the web and the way we use it. Display is not. Display is layered on top of the web. This is why despite twelve years and countless millions of investment it has never performed. Frankly, it was doomed from the get-go. It never was a web service but rather built to be its own parallel platform (ehem, “Platform A”). The problem inherent with that is the medium is itself a platform. Ads will never control this medium. Here the medium (users) should control the ads.

These ideas formed the basis of RAMP - to shrink dynamic landing pages and serve them to people based on any number of rules - effectively reverse engineering the search experience into display's near limitless inventory and producing higher ROI through lower display CPM than search CPC. One year later we are doing all of this with some amazing technologies supporting these endeavors. We are creating display ads to be off ramps to existing goal paths and on ramps to changed goals. We are using keywords to define the ad that is shown and allowing users to maintain control over the content experience within the ad much the same way one would use a SERP.

That brings me to this:

"The increasing marginal returns of search advertising are now doing more than taking market share from display advertising, they are en route becoming display advertising's operating principle."

I read this from Scott Rafer (Founder of MyBlogLog, Mashery & Lookery) this past October. It encapsulated my own thinking and at the same time made me think the ideas I was working on with RAMP were part of something much larger and something that it was time to talk about.

So when it came time to pitch session ideas to SES New York I contacted them and led off my pitch with Scott’s quote. They immediately agreed to add this session, give it primetime slot on the agenda and kept Scott’s quote in the summary.

I’m psyched that Search Becomes the Display OS will be the first conference session explaining and exploring the many ways search strategies, technology and innovation are making advertising more relevant, creating better experiences for people and delivering increased performance for advertisers and publishers.

So on March 25th at 2:15pm I hope you’ll join me in New York when Scott Rafer, Amit Kumar (former lead of Yahoo Search Monkey now VP Product for Dapper) and Bob Dillon VP of Product Marketing at Yahoo help usher in a new era of technology, functionality, relevance and performance in display.

Previous Posts on Bringing Search to Display:

Intelligent Web: Where Search & Display Advertising Meet

Display Becomes Us

Real Behavioral Targeting Focuses on Intent

Behavioral Targeting is Not Just Banners

Advanced Landing Pages - SMX West

For years, first with javascript testing and content targeting tools and now adding APIs and semantic technology, I have maintained that landing pages are the most advanced forms of digital marketing -- the ultimate marriage of technology with creative.

So it was great to finally get an “advanced” landing pages session on the schedule this year at SMX. I guess advanced landing pages have arrived. I enjoyed seeing the interest in the crowd and also how the other presenters defined what an advanced page is.  Here is my definition.

Advanced Landing Pages

View more presentations from jonathanmendez. (tags: api semantic)

Up Close with YouTube - SMX West

I love YouTube and have written about it extensively on this blog so I was really excited to participate and present on this session at SMX. My highlight was hearing from Matt Liu, a pre-GOOG YouTuber about how YT is starting to tackle advertising. I really expect YT as a media and ad channel to start taking off towards the end of this year and explode in 2010.

I evangelized a little and then presented results from a highly successful awareness and demand gen campaign by GotVMail that readers of this blog might recall from last summer. YouTube is here to stay folks. Start experimenting with it.

Up Close w/ YouTube

View more presentations from jonathanmendez. (tags: social ugc)

Misguided Notions: A Study of Value Creation in Real-Time Search

This past week has seen a ton of hype that real-time search is different. That the content creation and behaviors expressed and implied are fundamentally new and exclusive to places like Twitter and mining this data has incredible potential. Having spent a decade in search and the last four years working with dynamic content, APIs and what is now being called real time web I want to add some much needed perspective.

Getting Up to Speed

Real-time web did not start with social updates. Representative State Transfer or REST has been a key component of social media from the start of blogging to sites like Flickr and now to the cloud with services like Amazon S3. Cross platform synchronization (e.g. mobile, XMPP) is also not new. Many of these web services have had this ability for sometime. Certainly there is a slow boil with the opening of structured web of data, but technically there is nothing new here.

The “real-time” threat to Google has also been mentioned more than once. As far as search, nothing going on somehow surpasses Google’s ability to index it in real-time (milliseconds). I have personally seen my blog posts indexed immediately and presented on SERPs. The idea that Twitter has some magical real-time stack that Google should be concerned about it is quite simply laughable.

While I’m on the subject of GOOG an important real-time aspect to Google that has gone overlooked in all the chatter is their advertising platform. AdWords is a dynamic marketplace with numerous synchronous and asynchronous real-time rules. Last fall Google moved to real-time quality score calculations meaning these computations are taking place at the time of the query, based on the query.  Let’s be clear, Google has a real time advertising optimization platform for content that works insanely well. It is to date the ultimate achievement in real-time web and search. Nothing comes close. Positioning them as a laggard is naive. In fact if you want to know the real web of sentiment you might be best off looking at keywords and bid history.

The Question:

Now that we put aside the technical and competitive aspects the question remains, what is the value of real-time search? The answer must be looked for not from the perspective of content creation (new content is always being added to the web) but in how and why people search. Does “real-time” data to sentiment and opinion provide increased relevancy, new relevancy or changes behavior in a way that’s different or more beneficial. Keep in mind, these numbers are not about how many people will search for real-time data they are about how many queries conceivably could benefit.

Methodology:

My guide through searcher behavior is the landmark 2004 research “Understanding Goals is Web Search” by Daniel Rose and Danny Levinson that built off the seminal work “Taxonomy of Web Search” by Andrei Broder. Broder came up with the original trichotomy of web search “types”: navigational, informational, and transactional that Rose and Levinson expanded upon. To this day their work remains search’s de facto query classification system.

I also used Rose & Levinson’s percentage classifications* as a baseline for overall query percentage. They are generally regarded as accurate if not low on the navigational data.

To get an idea of representative percentages of queries that would benefit from real-time data contribution within each category I incorporated my own research on both in AdWords and Google Trends for query volumes looking at about 100 queries with real time relevance (e.g. “what’s on tv right now”) vs. those without. Lastly, I added my years of experience in search data and behavior to extrapolate the results. Also, the benefit number assumes result sets that simply don’t exist yet and as such these percentages are forward looking.

Was this scientific? No. Do I think the numbers are pretty accurate? Yes.

Results:

Key: Query Type (Overall query %)* Real-Time Data Benefit %

Informational Queries: My goal is to learn something by reading or viewing (61%) 14%

·      Directed: I want to learn something in particular about my topic (7%) 2%

·      Undirected: I want to learn anything/everything about my topic (22%) 5%

·      Advice: I want to get advice, ideas, suggestions, or instructions (5%) 2%

·      Locate: My goal is to find out whether/where some real world service or product can be obtained (24%) 5%

·      List: My goal is to get a list of plausible suggested web sites each of which might be candidates for helping me achieve some underlying, unspecified goal (2%) <0.5% 

Resource Queries My goal is to obtain a resource (not information) available on the web (25%) 5%

·      Download: My goal is to download a resource that must be on my computer or other device to be useful (5%) <0.5%

·      Entertain: My goal is to be entertained simply by viewing items available on the result page (6%) 2%

·      Interact: My goal is to interact with a resource using another service I find on the web (6%) 2%

·      Obtain: My goal is to obtain a resource that does not require a computer to use. I'm not obtaining it to learn some information, but because I want to use the resource itself (8%) <0.5%

Navigational Queries: My goal is to go to specific known website that I already have in mind. The only reason I'm searching is that it's more convenient than typing the URL, or perhaps I don't know the URL. (14%) <0.5%

Analysis:

Overall I feel the query numbers for real-time benefit (about 19% of all queries) are optimistic. I have made some very large assumptions both about the ability to index and query real-time data in a manner that is useful and about the changes in people wanting or needing to query this data once knowing that it is available. Also, I did not want to discount any category as being useless even though it is hard to see at the present time how navigational or resource>obtain queries stand to benefit from real-time data. In every instance I gave the benefit of the doubt to real-time.

The technology to present real-time data as helpful to queries has not yet emerged. Even so, while it real-time updates might be helpful for a small percentage of queries it is not even close to being more helpful in any one category. That’s the biggest problem for real-time search.

The largest percentage is not surprisingly informational queries. If Twitter search can become anything it would be more a discovery engine than a search engine -- more Craigslist, Wikipedia or Yelp than Google. It is after all a publishing and communications platform. Put another way, people search on the NY Times for opinions, sentiment and news of the day but that does not make the NY Times a search engine.

Conclusion:

The underlying value of temporal content correlates to benefit it provides to the searcher at that moment of attention. Those ‘real-time’ moments are fleeting and once they are gone the value of the content disappears with it. Thus to have substantive value you need millions of fleeting moments, all the time, that can best be helped by understanding what is happening right now. That’s an interesting idea but it is simply not the way people search. Understanding the way people search the opposite actually holds true. The greatest value rests in content that retains usefulness or importance the longest. In fact, that’s one idea that transcends search. Though with the vigor that Google is scanning books, maybe not for long.

Also for search to work properly there must be a level of authority associated with the results set. I just don’t see how to filter through this noise in real-time. Even trying to do so begins to destroy the value of an open real-time system where the benefit of "right now" matters more than "who."

It’s great to imagine what can be possible with the web but we’re not going to build anything that changes human nature, only stuff that amplifies it. Certainly Twitter does that incredibly well, just not in a way that benefits most searchers.

@jonathanmendez now live on Twitter

It took a year of observation but I’ve decided that even though I could continue working with and evangelizing APIs & real-time web and not be on Twitter, it was starting to feel weird. I mean c'mon, how would you feel buying a Mercedes then finding out the owner of the dealership drives a Pontiac?

Also, while there are many things I don’t like about Twitter (and I’ll post about that once I’m off my self-imposed hiatus writing about social media) at this point there are conversations happening about me, the things I do and the business I’m in  -- and I haven’t been able to be a part of them -- until now.

Hopefully I’ll do more listening that talking, be more inspired than inspiring and connect with people smarter and more interesting than myself. If I learn one new thing a week about the way people interact and experience real-time web it will be worth it. With that said, I invite you to follow me.