*Facebook Asks Microsoft To Integrate The Web Into Their User’s News Feeds

Facebook and Google are trying to integrates as much content as possible into their services to keep users on their sites.

“Hub-Spoke” was the term previously used to describe the navigation patterns of users when navigating on the web. User started their “surf sessions” from mainly one point and then directly went to another, just to return to their homepage afterwards. Then, as search engines got better, the days of “hyperlinks” had come and users indeed used the links to move from one site to the next as it got increasingly easier to place high quality links due to good search engines.

What I see happening with Google and even more with Facebook today is that users always follow the way that has the lowest transactions costs and in the same way the search window has doomed your browser’s address line, Google (iGoogle) and Facebook (Facebook’s News Feed) are nowadays working on providing you all the information you want “just one mouse-click” away.

Most clearly this phenomenon can be watched on Facebook which is currently working hard on integrating web content right into the News Feed of their users. Thus users are kept on the site much longer and only leave the site (in e.g. the case of a commercial transaction) at a very late stage, giving Facebook a chance to supply the user with advertisements all the way down.

Integrating interesting content however isn’t as easy as it sounds and thus Facebook relies on two soucres:

- User generated content (Tweets, Status Updates, etc.)

- Online Content Generators (online newspapers, etc.)

As for the first it seems much easier to supply a stream of tweets and Updates than to constantly have a finger on the pulse of the web, almost predicting which information will be of interest for the community a second later. As the community inevitably however will demand further information and subsequently will search for them, Microsoft’s Bing will be used to provide these information -still within Facebook-. As Google has shown however, it is still very difficult for search engines to differentiate between a DOS-attack and breaking news such as Michael Jackson’s demise.

WIRED: 'Google: Michael Jackson Search Spike Seemed Like an Attack'

As for the second Facebook keeps pushing content generators to open FB’s subsidiaries (Fan-pages) in which they publish their content (along with ads which generate revenues for Facebook). This seems to work just fine… and you might have realized that last Face-lift of Facebook has definitely also pushed the News Feed into the Foreground.

*Google Store View: Providing Pictures From The Inside Of Stores

Google is experimenting with a new service called “Google Store View”, which would complement its existing service “Google Street View” by providing pictures from also the insides of buildings.

Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Land News today reported about an incident in New York where an alleged Google employee came to a small retails store to take pictures for a new Google Maps product named “Google Store Views”. The Google employee took pictures of the inside of the store, every 2 meters, in all directions. Furthermore also took pictures of products were taken.The idea itself is not new as other websites such as hotel-comparison sites offer similar services and users already now can upload pictures from inside their stores to Google Maps.

When the editor contacted Google on the subject Google replied: “We are always experimenting with new features for Google Maps. We have nothing further to announce at this time.“

I unfortunately failed to embed the Google Streetview window into my blog, so please click on the picture above and a new tab with the Google Street view application will open

Google Store View would however take the existing Google Street View service to a new (inside) level while at the same time complementing it.

I wonder what will be next? Photographs from the inside of public places such as libraries and railway stations?

*Does Your WoW-Avatar Have A Right To Privacy?

Recently some World of Warcraft avatars might have become more social and communicative than their owners/players. Why? Advertising Revenues?

Blizzard Entertainment has recently decided not only the expand its in-game-auctioning services but also to introduce kind of a twitter service (WoW-Armory), forwarding relevant information from inside the online-game (level gains, achievements, boss kills, for more information please see the FAQ’s) right into the web, iPhones and Facebook. As The Basic Thinking blog has reported, this has caused uproar among the players of the online game. However, economic pressure seems to have won over privacy aspects.

For an excellent legal analysis under Austrian law (in German) please refer to virtuellewelten.at, which points out that Blizzard Entertainment has boldly declared in its Privacy Policy that “Blizzard deems it a point of honour that the information you send us should be protected and should remain in its original form, i.e. unaltered.”. However, there are of course a couple of loopholes in Blizzard’s Privacy Policy which might bee seen as a coverage for their new service…

So, which is left to do for  employers is to find out their employees World of Warcraft Avatar name … and over are the days of unexplainable illnesses as the Armory Service not only reports about the in-game-development but the precise time and date of any such a development.

.

I however expect that it will be just a matter of time until search engines as 123people.com and others will provide such a service, matching real life people with their avatars.which will  make surveying people much easier than before.

Or how about combining TweetPsych and WoW-Armory… wouldn’t that be interesting, drawing psychological profile based on the activities of an avatar? (If you don’t know what I mean, spend some time investigating the avatar of a friend and you will soon discover interesting aspects .

PS: Please note the “Liar’s Tongue“, a true jurist-goodie I reckon!

*Google Suggest: The Perfect Spot For Ads?

While pondering about a clear definition of the term “Keyword Advertising” I stumbled across the Google Suggest function, which is available to German and Austrian users since 1 April 2009 and I was wondering how the suggestions there are ranked. There are however clearly not ranked alphabetically or according to the number of pages correlating to the topic and the ranking does not correlate to the ranking of the subsequent search result.

When typing in the query “How to get” today on Google.us offered me following suggestions:

I decided to chose non of the suggestions but instead carry out a search based solely on the query “How to get” and I received following SERP:

As you can see on the SERP, the ranking of the suggestions does not correlate to the ranking of the websites. Thus I consulted the Google help files to learn more about the ranking and I was told that:

“If you’re signed in to your Google Account and have Web History enabled, suggestions are drawn from searches you’ve done, searches done by users all over the world, sites in our search index, and ads in our advertising network. If you’re not signed in to your Google Account, no history-based suggestions are displayed.”

I am accessing the internet from a public WiFi-network and I am not logged into my Google account so I guess the suggestions are ranked based on the previous searches from the IP-Adr of the public building I am surfing from. (The Sistrix SEO blog does offer an explanation of how the results are ranked, which I however, don’t understand.) What’s clear however is, that these suggestions DO heavily influence web traffic and have led to an steep increase in hits on sits ranked on top in the suggestions (SEO-blog.de, Bloofusion).

Change of traffic for two search terms which were previously used as synonyms

Ads within Google Suggestions:

The search results however are, one way or another, ranked by Google. Thus, although ads in Google suggestions won’t fall under the definition by Fain/Pedersen they could be seen as Paid Inclusions/Keyword Buying.

Although the webstandard-blog contemplates that ads inside the Google Suggestions would be very efficient, I am highly sceptical about that as I think that users would, following the principle of banner blindness mostly ignore it.

Suggestions by Google.com for "What is Wikip"

Legal analysis:

I think that the question of trademark use shall be judged quite similar to the use TM in ordinary Keyword Advertising. It has to be noticed however that the suggestions, realting to a query entered by the user and containing a TM, are offered in real time and in close proximity to the user’s query. Thus the chance that users might see a correlation between the search term entered and the ad displayed might be, contrary to ordinary Keyword Advertising, higher. Seeing a correlation between the ad and the user query would thus be the key for the (main) trademark function (description of origin of a good or a service) being impaired.

From an unfair competition point of view the “distracting presumptive customers” argument (“Abfangen von Kunden vor dem Geschäftslokal eines Mitbewerbers) shall not be applicable due to the early stage of the search, while the “passing off / slipstream riding/coattail-riding” argument (schmarozerische Rufausbeutung) might be valid one as users are more likely to see a correlation between their query and the ad.

*How Unique Is Your Browser’s Fingerprint? – The EFF’s Panopticlick Test

ORF’s Futurezone.orf.at reported last week about the PANOPTICLICK initiative of the Electronic Frontier Foundation which aims to inform users how traceable their browsers  are and suggest various  relief-measure.  So far nothing new or exciting.

Things however got exciting when I ran the TEST with my default browser (Firefox) and was shown why my browser has got a pretty unique  (unique among the 414,408 browsers tested so far by the EEF) fingerprint on the world wide web.

Summary for Jurists: Browser do not only transmit very basic information such as the computer’s operating system (e.g. Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US), the language selected, the screen resolution, the time zone used but also about the plugins (e.g. Windows Media Plugin 2.2.1, Java Embedding Plugin 0.9.7.1, iPhotoPhotocast) installed and the individual fonts (as I do graphics for clients who use specific fonts, I have added a nice selection of fonts) that are installed on the computer. Each element of this information, continuously provided by your browser while surfing, viewed on its own, is widely irrelevant, but combined however it creates a pretty distinctive “fingerprint“.

Click on the image to be forward to the test page

To definitely identify a single person on the net 33 bits (quantity of entropy) are needed, my browser alone provides around 19 bits of information (For a very interesting description of the whole issue, that will force you to reactivate knowledge untouched since you last maths exam at high school, please click here).

At this point readers of this blog should be reminded of the fact that I also use a free blog counter (Statcounter.com) which allows me to analyse some of the information (OS, browser type and version, screen resolution, location, ISP) mentioned above. I do this to track the performance of my recent post. The counter only stores the last 500 views (2-10 days depending on the traffic). To read more about this blog’s privacy policy please refer to the “About-Tab“.

*First Laugh Then Think: “Online Privacy” and “Opt Out From Google” by the Onion Network

Besides the fact that the videos are both “kind of funny”, both definitely also touch some serious points (e.g. last sentence in the second video: “If you have a question about the Google [...], type it in an email to a friend and Google  will come back to you within 24hrs“).

First an extremly well made, cutting-edge report about officials using social network content to investigate incidents (Warning: contains sarcasm, nudity, sexism and other kinds of content not suitable for some readers):

Secondly, an apparently less funny ideas about a the topic “opting out from Google and living in privacy” (Same as above.)

*Google Won’t Search For Your Private Data; You Will Provide Google With It Yourself

Google Social Search allows users to customize their search results with content generated by those in their online social circle. But it requires everybody in that social circle to opt-in into the program (Google Profile). Thus the members of the user’s  social circle will  have to actively add links to the content they produce through services like Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, to their Google Profiles in order for it to show up in the searches some in their social circle does for a given topic.

If you are interested in Google’s new service in detail I’d recommend you Tom Krazit’s post on CNet , the original post on Google’s Blog (a good read with pictures and videos), Matt McGee’s post on Searchengineland or a  post on the issue in German by André Vatter.

What strikes me however is the fact that Google doesn’t actively search for your private data but instead places the burden on the individual user to actively produce content and to indicate to Google who is within his social circle. Thus a prerequisite for using Google Social Search is the use of Google Profile, a service I am heavily sceptical about.

If you want to try it out, open up a Google Profile and sign up at the Google Labs. After activating the option in Google Labs go to the US site of Google and try the service.

*Estimated Value and Advertising Revenues Of Your Website

I find attempts to quantify online popularity in “brick and mortar“-money always quite interesting. Probably the best attempt I’ve seen so far is the service Peekstats which claims to estimate the vale of a website based on a wide range of publicly available statistics (Alexa Rank, Page Rank, Yahoo Backlinks, etc.).

What I found interesting however was, besides the “value of the website” are the estimations on the expected advertising revenues which states that Eric Goldman earns a $ 1,209 a month while Links and Law only is expected to generate $ 253 a month while the IPKats earns only $ 27 a month.

.

Bottomline: Judged by how much energy I’ve invested into my blog I find Peekstaat’s judgement on my blog indeed a bit harsh

*German Court Surprisingly Liberal on Derogatory Domains & Likeliness of Confusion Online: www.bund-der-verunsicherten.de

The OLG Braunschweig, which used to be known for its TM-holder-friendly attitude, has recently delivered a very surprising liberal decision concerning the likeliness of confusion online in relation to a criticizing website. Special thanks to Stephan Ott, the author of Links&Law for pointing out this decision to me.

.

In its Bund-Der-Verunsicherten decision the OLG Braunschweig 10.11.2009, Az. 2 U 191/09 had to decide whether the rights of the plaintiff, the “Bund der Versichterten e.V.” (roughly translated: “Association of Insured”) got infringed by the criticizing  website “www.bund-der-verunsicherten.de“:

a: through the registration/use of the domain “www.bund-der-verunsicherten.de“. (there were “-” signs inserted and the term”un” inserted into the word “Versicherten“, which however changed the meaning. “Verunsichert” could be roughly translated as “Association of the Scared“) and

b: through the use of the term “Bund der Versichteren” (there is again just the “e.V.” missing) as the title of its Adwords as well as

c: through the use of the term “Bund der Versicherten” (there is just the “e. V.” missing) as a keyword to trigger AdWords.

.

The defendant used to belong to the association of the plaintiff but at some pointed started publishing content on websites which reported about the activities of the plaintiff’s association in a critical way.

.

Analysis:

ad a: Concerning the registration/use of the domain the court found that the meaning of the term (“Verunsicherte” instead of “Versicherte“) used was so different from the original term that there was no likeliness of confusion.

Furthermore the plaintiff did not enjoy trademark protection for the name of his legal entity as the name was just a combination of words which was not protected itself. Furthermore the plaintiff has not used the (alleged) TM in the course of trade.

The court furthermore found that the defendant has not committed an act of name arrogance (Namensanmaßung according to §12 BGB) but only made use of his right of freedom of speech according to Art 5 (1) GG.

Even if the prerequisites for the protection as a trademark or name arrogance would have been fulfilled, the court found that there was no likeliness of confusion.

,

ad b: Concerning the use of the term in the title of its ads the court found that the description of the ad (=other elements of the AdWord; Display URL & two lines of 35 letters each) are sufficient to rule out the likeliness of confusion. Especially the Display URL [which seems to be a different URL then the URL mentioned in a:] on the bottom of the ad, pointing to “www.bundderverunsicherten.de” was found clear enough to rule out any confusion with the domain “www.bundderversicherten.de” [???].

The court furthermore pointed out that the plaintiff had no other way of describing the content of its website and that the use of the name was thus in accordance with §23 (2) MarkenG, allowing descriptive use.

.

ad c: Concerning the use of the term as a Keywords to trigger AdWords  on Google the court in this case ruled out the possible likeliness of confusion by stating that users are aware of the fact that not all hits shown are related to the query searched for and thus read the descriptions of the hit before following a link/navigating to a website. Otherwise, the court pointed out, users would have had to check every one of the 19.000 hits displayed.

The court however referred to its prior decisions, upholding, despite the BGH recent decisions and the pending references at the ECJ, that the use of a TM to trigger AdWords does constitute a trademark use. In this case however, the use of the name would have been covered by the exemption of descriptive use in § 23 (1) MarkenG.

.

Conclusion:

This case strongly reminds me of the Austrian decision “Aquapol-Unzufriedene.at” where the Austrian court issued a similar ruling, based on similar grounds, which however only concerning the registration of a domain name. In the Austrian decision the differing element was the addition of the well visible term “-Unzufriedene” at the end of the second level domain. In an earlier German case the LG Düsseldorf 30.01.2002, 2a O 245/01 “scheiss-t-online” had decided against the registrar of a domain who had published only critical contend about a German company under the domain “scheiss-t-online”.

In the German case at hand the court found instead that the insertion of the “-” and the term “un” was sufficient to rule out likeliness of confusion not only in relation to the domain name but also, together with the argument of descriptive use, in relation to the use of the criticize term as keyword and as the title of the AdWord, actually leading to the criticizing website.

*Wein&Co – Courts Got Interpretations of a Technical Term Mixed Up

The Austrian OGH got two different interpretations/meanings of a technical term mixed up in its Wein&Co decision, thus its decision is not conclusive. As a consequence, Austrian and German authors (Noha and Baars/Troge) have argued that the OGH might actually have generally misunderstood the nature of Keyword Advertising, as the OGH at some point argues that Google displays ads within it’s (organic) search results (= Paid Placement).

I partly disagree as I argue that the court got the basics right and that the basic ratio of the decision is not utterly mistaken, but that the court at some point confused the two terms “Trefferliste” (List of Hits) and “Suchergebnis” ([organic] Search Results) and thus has delivered a partially inconclusive decision. For further observations about other possible (visually misleading) influences onto the court please refer to my previous post.

.

The broad interpretation of the term “Trefferliste“:

In its Wein&Co (OGH, 20.03.2007, 17Ob 1/07g) decision the Austrian Supreme Court basically relied on the terminology and its interpretation as used by the lower instances:[0]

“Suchergebnis” = (organic) Search Results: These are the results provided by Google. The court of first instance describes the whole Ranking Process quite well (p.7 et seq).

“Trefferliste” = List of Hits (broad meaning): This term describes the left side of a SERP (Search Engine Results Page), which consists not only of the search engine’s (organic) Search Results, but also includes Top-Ads (Ads on the top-left side, displayed against a (pre April 2007) light blue background, bearing a sign, marking the light blue section as being a “Anzeige” (sponsored Link)). The OGH uses this (broad) interpretation in the beginning of its decision, but notes however that the labelling of the ads by Google is “more or less” clear.[1]

Trefferliste: broad meaning (3.1)

In 3.5 the court stated that the reference to the site of the defendant (Ad) was displayed on top of the reference to the website of the plaintiff inside the List of Hits (“Trefferliste”). (broad meaning)

Trefferliste: extensive meaning (3.5)

Graphically summarized:

The alternative/narrow interpretation of the term “Trefferliste“:

Things however got complicated when the OGH returned to its earlier understanding of  the term List of Hits as a synonym for the much narrower term (organic) Search Results. The OGH itself has repetitively used the narrow interpretation in e.g. its Numtec-Interstahl and its Glucochondrin descision. Please see below that the OGH has put the word “Trefferliste” in brackets behind the word “Suchergebnisse” which I see as an indication that the OGH, as opposed to the lower courts, sees the List of Hits to be the same as the (organic) Search Results (narrow interpretation). The lower courts in Wein&co had mostly used the broad interpretation.[2]

Trefferliste: narrow meaning

In 3.4 the court also states that the AdWord was displayed immediately above the List of Hits (“Trefferliste”). As there are usually no further ads or banners above the Top-Ads, I take this as another indication that the court saw the List of Hits to be the same as the (organic) Search Results.

Trefferliste: narrow meaning (3.4)

Graphically summarized:

.

Conclusion:

The court used two significantly different interpretations of the term List of Hits (“Trefferliste”) within one decision:

-Once in a broad meaning to include also Ads shown above the (organic) search resuts: (e.g. 3.5) , and

-once in a narrow meaning, just comprising the (organic) Search Results (e.g. 3.4)

The court used the broad interpretation to be able to include Top-Ads into the List of Hits. The court subsequently however applied the narrow interpretation in relation to the question of the likeliness of confusion and thus saw/treated Top-Ads to be a part of the (organic) Search Results.[!] I agree with the court that users expect to see search results inside the (organic) search results which have been ranked in accordance with fair and relatively unbiased algorithms. Thus, the display of ads inside the (organic) Search Results would increase the likeliness of confusion. However, the way with which the court expressed itself in the decision incorrectly suggests that Google engages in Keyword Buying (= Paid Placement = selling ad space within its search results).

The source of all this confusion obviously lies in the different ways the plaintiff and the defendant used the term “Trefferliste“. While the plaintiff, represented by Dorda Brugger Jordis, used the broad interpretation to back up its (Paid Placement) claim, the defendant, represented by Ferner Hornung & Partner, used the narrow interpretation to back up their claim (please compare p. 2 last paragraph, first sentence and page 5, second praragraph, last sentence of the HG’s decision).

The court in Wein&Co however, as opposed to the lower instances, apparently got the terms List of Hits and (organic) Search Results mixed up and thus reached a result which is partly not coherent.

.

.

[0] The decisions of the lower courts in the “Wein&Co” case can be downloaded as PDFs by clicking onto the respective link. HG Wien_34Cg 70/05h_27.12.2005; OLG Wien_2R 28/06m, 27.07.2006.

[1] [The court of first instance (HG Wien) used mainly used the more precise term "Suchergebnisse" but also the terms: "Ergebnisliste" (p.10) and "Trefferleiste"[sic!] (p.26) in both interpretations (narrow p.5, broad p. 10); The court of second instance (OLG Wien) was far less clear and used the phrase  “bei den Trefferlisten” which could be translated as “next to the List of Hits“. However, also the court of second instance saw the ads to be above or beside the (organic) search results thus used the broad interpretation.

[2] The German BGH however, also applied the “narrow“ interpretation of the term “Trefferliste” in his Bananabay-decision. The Austrian OGh however, used the term “Trefferliste” in its Bergspechte decision in the narrow meaning again. In the text of the reference the court referred not only to the term “Trefferliste” but also circumvented the issue by speaking more vaguely abut  “ads [...] displayed on the screen“.