theEweekly Wrap: Firefox, fakers and festivities

Foxy searchers

It was announced this week that the search deal between Mozilla and Google has been renewed for at least another three years. The original three-year deal expired at the end of November 2011. As Mozilla announced in an official blog post, "Google Search will continue to be the default search provider for hundreds of millions of Firefox users around the world". The financial terms of this "mutually beneficial revenue agreement" were not revealed. However, Mozilla revealed in October 2011 that 98 per cent of its total 2010 revenue came from search partners, and 84 per cent (£64.8 million) came from Google alone. Firefox and Chrome boast a combined global browser market share of 50.9 per cent. This gives Google an advantage over Bing, which is the default search engine for Internet Explorer, with 40.6 per cent market share. To add insult to injury, a recent study found that there are 117 million Bing searches per month for the term 'Google', suggesting many users are bypassing their default search engine.

A tale of two Zuckerbergs

Mark Zuckerberg has been selling Likes through a company called Like Store, prompting Facebook to threaten legal action. This is not, of course, the founder of the social network; rather an Israeli entrepreneur who has changed his name to Mark Zuckerberg. The pretender formerly known as Rotem Guez was sent a cease and desist notice in September 2011 for selling Likes, which violates Facebook's terms of service. On December 7th, he officially changed his name to Mark Zuckerberg; the name now appears on his ID and passport, and according to his website www.markzuckerbergofficial.com, "will likely be his legal name for the rest of his natural life". The 32-year-old father of two seems to have changed his name as a publicity stunt. He told ABC news: "I just thought it would be funny when they sue Mark Zuckerberg [...] The hope is to grow the company, we like to do funny things". He has also set up a Twitter account and Facebook fan page (with around 5,000 likes) with the title 'I'm Mark Zuckerberg'. All the trouble seems to have started back in January 2011, when Facebook shut down an account belonging to Guez and he sued them in return. However, it's hard to see where his antagonism stems from as the original account was reportedly under the name - you've guessed it - Mark Zuckerberg.

Deck the SERPs

Google has been getting into the festive spirit this week with a new Easter egg. Google Easter eggs are effects that appear on the SERPs when a certain search term is entered, as popularised by Do A Barrel Roll in November 2011. Currently, entering 'let it snow' will cause snow to fall from the top of the screen, while the results are gradually obscured by frost. Furthermore, any search term that includes 'Christmas', 'Xmas' or 'Santa' causes a row of Google-coloured baubles to appear just under the search box. Google has also launched the Ho Ho Hotline, allowing Gmail users to send each other personalised video messages delivered by a cartoon Santa. Meanwhile, on the big night you can track Santa's journey using Google Maps and Google World. The project is the unlikely brainchild of NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command), and lets children see the sleigh flying across the world in real time, with 3D images collected by "radar, satellites, Santa cams and fighter jets". NORAD Santa began over 50 years ago, when a Sears Roebuck & Co. advertisement for children to call Santa misprinted the telephone number. Children were accidentally put through to NORAD Director of Operations, Colonel Harry Shoup, who began giving them Santa's current location on the radar.

theEweekly Wrap: Digital, dragons and disasters

Online nation

The UK communications regulator Ofcom has published a report revealing the full extent of our digital engagement. The International Communications Market Report shows that in many areas, the UK is one the most engaged of the 17 countries surveyed. We spend an average of 746 minutes (12.5 hours) per week online, which puts us in third place after Germany and the US. E-commerce was worth £1000 per person in 2010, while 79 per cent of Brits have visited a social networking site. Smartphone ownership has doubled to 46 per cent of the population, leading to a large number of people using their mobiles to access games, news, social media and apps. The UK is also the country with the highest proportion of online advertising spend at 29 per cent of the total. However, we're not leading in everything; our likelihood to make Skype calls, download podcasts and music or listen to the radio is lower than other countries such as Italy and France. Meanwhile, the UK is lagging behind the US and Japan when it comes to superfast broadband. Although 59 per cent of households had access to a superfast service by June 2011, just four per cent actually subscribed. Ofcom speculated that the 4G spectrum auction in late 2012 could mean an incredibly fast mobile broadband offering at some point in 2013.

Skywin

Cult video game Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has been crowned Game of the Year at the prestigious Spike Video Game Awards in California last weekend. The dragon-slaying adventure for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 was also named best role-playing game, while developers Bethesda Game Studios won Studio of the Year. In the UK, retailers offering discounts on Skyrim saw the game overtake Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 to top the multiformat gaming charts. However, it's unlikely to match up to the success of CoD, which on Tuesday became the fastest-ever entertainment product to make a billion dollars, just 16 days after general release. Despite Skyrim's cult following, plenty of criticism has been directed at it. Players have noticed dragons flying backwards and other glitches, while the huge save file has reportedly slowed down the gameplay and graphics for some. Bethesda has said they plan to address this issue of memory and 'lag' with a software update. Another criticism - or rather, backhanded compliment - was offered by Wired's Geek Dad blog in that the game is damaging the economy: "Skyrim is incredible. The game's world is so big and there are so many quests to complete that those millions of dollars in sales are being nullified by players' lost productivity and lack of economic participation in the real world."

Mapping a disaster

Google has announced the completion of a project to photograph 44,000km of Japan's roads following the earthquake and tsunami disaster in March 2011. The images will appear on Google Street View, allowing users to get a 360-degree street-level view of damage in the worst-hit areas. As well as replacing the existing Street View images for north east Japan, the new photographs will appear alongside the old ones in a 'before and after' maps project, titled Memories for the Future (www.miraikioku.com). Members of the public will be invited to post their own photos and videos as part of the project. Street View senior product manager Kei Kawai said: "We hope this particular digital archiving project will be useful to researchers and scientists who study the effects of natural disasters. We also believe that the imagery is a useful tool for anyone around the world who wants to better understand the extent of the damage." Simultaneously, Google has introduced a time stamp to all images, providing users with some idea of how relevant the image is - apparently, this was "the most requested Street View feature for the last few years".

User trust essential to successful evolution

Shortly after our recent blog post about Google's mysterious fiddling about with its search function, the company announced some significant changes to its interface, which will see the top navigation bar removed completely and a new dropdown navigation menu take its place.

This perhaps explains why some features seemed to be switching off and on again at random during November 2011 – though didn't cast any light on why Google chose to experiment in such a visible way without explaining its actions.

The speculation and irritation that occurred as a result of the latter highlighted the significance of familiarity and intuition within our favourite internet services. The kind of tiny changes that some people perceive as minutiae can cause huge ripples in the comfort zone of someone who uses the internet intensively on a daily basis, whether for research, marketing or even social or personal connections.

Google's new navigation design will give it a much more personal focus, including increased prominence for Google+ – almost making it feel like a social network and search engine rolled into one, for those logged in.

Google has clearly been doing something right in the last decade, based on its meteoric rise and enormous market share. Arguably, a large part of this is the brand's minimal, straightforward approach. Web browser Google Chrome, in particular, appears to be thriving due to its uncluttered focus on speed and convenience.

This simplicity, however, is also what renders any changes so momentous.

Behind the scenes it is a different story, as the digital marketing industry fights to keep up with continual changes in algorithms and results selection processes – but the mainstream searcher usually sees little of this.

Brand identity

Some companies, on the other hand, wear their continual evolution on their sleeve. Facebook is one such brand – being complex and transient in nature, yet very accessible – and the news headlines that it generates don't seem to do its popularity much harm.

The social media website famously encounters intense criticism whenever it alters features, with users campaigning to restore previous formats. In September of this year, the Daily Mail reported that Facebook's news feed algorithm update had succeeded in 'goading its 750 million users into a fury'.

The report continued: "On Facebook's official blog, more than 7,000 users have offered comments on the new 'update' to the news service – many of them furious rants in capitals – and a mere 1,800 users have 'Liked' the service."

However, the website's membership is still on the rise – now standing at over 800 million. This indicates that while Facebook's changes upset users in the short term, the majority do accept them and move on, as the company steadfastly stands by its developments. Its design has been in a constant state of flux since its creation in 2004.

Facebook is also very focused on interaction and debate, being a public forum for information sharing. Google, meanwhile, is more authoritative, operating primarily to serve users with the results they want without any discussion.

In an industry where new initiatives launch every day and users are often fickle, users want to trust a brand. This applies not only to its corporate morals, but also to its dependability to provide what they want – and to being open and clear about what it is doing and why.

Liane Baddeley

theEweekly Wrap: Crackdowns, CTRs and copycat app stores

In support of social

The government's claim that social media helped organise the riots in Manchester and elsewhere has been refuted by academics from the University of Manchester. An analysis of more than 2.6 million riot-related tweets for Reading the Riots - an investigation by the Guardian and the London School of Economics - has concluded that Twitter at least was not to blame. The findings are likely to prove embarrassing for prime minister David Cameron, who even went so far as to suggest at the time that the government could shut down social media sites to "stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality". Professor Rob Procter of the University of Manchester, who led the academic team running the research, commented: "Politicians and commentators were quick to claim that social media played an important role in inciting and organising riots, calling for sites such as Twitter to be closed should events of this nature happen again. But our study has found no evidence of significance in the available data that would justify such a course of action in respect to Twitter." Interestingly, the research also named the top 10 Twitter users during the riots, based on @ mentions. Manchester's very own @gmpolice squeaked in at number 10 with 8,904 mentions - although that's still a fair distance behind riot response coordinators @riotcleanup (40,960), Guardian reporter @paullewis (30,031) and - err - @piersmorgan (20,412).

Click through ruckus

If there's one thing that divides SEO people, it's Bing. Search marketers are sharply divided about whether it's even worth bothering with Bing, given that Google accounts for more than nine out of ten searches in the UK. One thing that usually counts in Bing's favour is higher click-through-rates (CTRs). However, a new study from US agency Slingshot SEO suggests that even that advantage isn't a given. A Tale of Two Studies: Google vs Bing Click-Through Rate found that the average CTR for the number one position on natural Google search results stands at 18.2 per cent, while for Bing it's just 9.7 per cent. CTRs typically differ considerably depending on various factors, such as whether the searcher is looking to buy or simply to find out more information. Nevertheless, the overall message is clear - a top listing in Google will generate an awful lot more visits than a top listing in Bing. As if that wasn't bad enough for Bing, the researchers also made another discovery. Every month, approximately 117 million people search for 'google' in Bing.

Microsoftware

Microsoft has announced plans for a new app store on its forthcoming operating system, in a move that bears an uncanny resemblance to developments over at Apple. The company plans to offer a 'Windows Store' on its forthcoming Windows 8 operating system, just under a year after Apple introduced an app store for OS X. For the majority of apps built on the platform, developers will receive 70 per cent of the revenue generated with Microsoft taking the remaining 30 per cent - exactly the same split as on the App Store. However, if an app hits the magic number of $25,000 (£16,000), developers get to keep 80 per cent from that point on. In an official Microsoft blog post, Ted Dworkin, partner program manager for the Windows Store, said: "We intend to offer the industry's best terms, so that the best apps make developers a lot more money on Windows than on any other platform." Platforms like the App Store, for example.

theEweekly Wrap: Spotify apps, bars and e-books

Google erases the bar

Google has announced that its redesign of the search engine interface is about to enter its second phase. The official blog post on Tuesday revealed: "Instead of the horizontal black bar at the top of the page, you'll now find links to your services in a new drop-down Google menu nested under the Google logo". This means links to Maps, Images, Gmail, News and so on will in effect be hidden in the drop-down, leaving just a basic search bar that Google calls "beautifully simple and intuitive". The only feature that will become more prominent in the new design will be Google+. The user's profile picture, notifications and a big Share button are the only things on the bar apart from the search box, while Google+ is the first link in the drop-down menu, underlining Google's current emphasis on the new social layer. It has been a mere six months since the last redesign - introducing the black navigation bar at the top of the homepage - was rolled out. The news comes hot on the heels of changes to the Google navigation that were noticed by forum users in November; it was unclear at the time whether it was a bug or an experiment.

Spotify gets apps

Music streaming service Spotify has launched the Spotify Platform. This allows third party developers to build and distribute apps that will work within the Spotify desktop music player. The announcement on Wednesday said the Platform "opens up a new world of possibilities", and will "add many more layers of music enjoyment". The launch was celebrated with a press conference in New York, where the company has just set up new headquarters. Some of the 16 free Spotify apps launched so far include reviews and playlists curated by publications such as Pitchfork and Rolling Stone, recommendations from Last.fm, TuneWiki for real-time scrolling song lyrics, and Songkick's gig finder app. The Guardian has also launched an app where you can listen to an album or single while reading a review of it, add your own star rating and share it. This is part of the Guardian's 'digital first' strategy launched in June, which has seen the introduction of a Twitter tag bot and the Guardian Facebook app - which, it was announced this week, has been installed by 4 million users and is generating a million extra page impressions per day.

Books they can't burn

One of the e-book's most vehement critics has allowed his novel to be published in the format this week. Ray Bradbury wrote Farenheit 451 in 1953, portraying a future where books are sprayed with fuel and burned to preserve the ignorance of the general population. The 91-year-old author had previously stated that e-books and e-readers "smell like burned fuel". In 2010, he told Yahoo to "go to hell" when the company asked to publish a digital version of the novel, while his opinion of modern technology in general is equally negative: "We have too many cellphones. We've got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines." However, as his publishing contract with Simon & Schuster had to be renegotiated, Bradbury's agent Michael Congdon realised digital publication was the only option: "We explained the situation to him that a new contract wouldn't be possible without e-book rights [...] He understood and gave us the right to go ahead." The e-book costs $9.99 for the Kindle or Nook in the US, while the UK publisher HarperCollins is still 'in talks' with Congdon. Whatever reservations Bradbury may have, many are pointing out that digitising books could prevent the dystopian future he envisaged ever coming to pass.