These days, customers go to merchant’s sites and search for what they want. They repeat this process for every vendor. In our world, we want people to just say what they want, and how much they want to pay for it. In the online world, it doesn’t matter much where your Sony TV comes from, as long as shipping is free and the return policies are fair. This is what we offer at GoEyeball. A solution to online shopping that seems intuitive for the shopper and a nightmare for the merchants.

Our booth was fairly low-budget. We had one giant sign and a few business cards. Our swag came back misprinted so we couldn’t give away any keychains or hats. We were still able to demo our product using a laptop and some fast talking.

On the second day, we were asked to participate in a formal pitching contest in front of the entire delegation and be judged by a panel of three judges. The winner of the pitching contest, would win a prize worth $10k. We didn’t win, but we still got a lot of value out of doing it.

It seemed to generate a lot of interest, and people were immediately sending out emails to their friends about it. I’m hoping the momentum continues and we can then start to build a product that changes the way people think about online shopping.

When I got home, I checked our SEO ranking and noticed that we were the #1 result on Google.ca when searching for “price monitoring service“. This was amazing to me, since I really have no idea about SEO at all. I thought about it, and tried to think how this could have happened since I was not actively doing any SEO.

Schools of Fish

In the popular speak, people often refer to  ”surfing the web” as the casual Internet user, going from site to site. I’m not sure how this phrase came about, but it doesn’t even seem to make much sense. The analogy relies on people’s concept that the Internet is a set of crescendoing waves, and you are on some kind of board going up and down. It seems to simplify through misconceptions of how the Internet actually works.

Well, if the Internet is the ocean, then in actuality, “surfers” are not surfers but in fact schools of fish. People don’t “surf” the Internet anymore. There are only a few sites out there that people consistently go to. These days, it is getting narrower and narrower. Near the top of the ocean is Google, Facebook, Twitter and then as you go deeper into the waters, few web sites actually surface as being a common hang out.

In the darkness of the Internet ocean, there are few lights that blink, attempting to attract the attention of these schools of fish. As we know, schools of fish travel in a singular movement, mostly for survival tactics. As their attention shifts, they move synchronously towards the new source of amusement.

Imagine a web site that has attained a cult-like following. Suppose its a blogger that has about 200,000 readers. As soon as he mentions a website and posts a link on his blog, suddenly that website receives a huge spike and would most likely take down the servers. This was known back in the days as being “slash dotted”. This is because slashdot.org was a website that self-proclaimed itself as “news for nerds”.

Before there were Internet surfers, bloggers, marketing gimmicks, viral marketing, and probably before Google (did Internet exist before Google?) there was slash dot. This website was popular beyond comprehension. Nearly anything worth going on in the IT industry was reported here first, then picked up in traditional news media.

This site was frequented by many IT people, including software developers that used the Internet mostly for work and out of boredom from their mundane bank jobs. They would often read slash dot for a daily dose of nerdy amusement. The readership on this site was increasingly growing and they didn’t even make any money from it. When no one understood the voodoo black art of SEO, most people just hoped slash dot would pick up their story, and they would do their best to try to get mentioned.

So there you had a huge school of fish that would move back and forth between lights shining in the ocean. They would always return to the origin, but they would be amused for a few days, maybe a week. These days, there are plenty of sites that operate as such, most with their own group of followers. With the help of Google Reader, they can group all their sparks of light into organized chaos.

Undermining Google and Increasing Web Traffic

So there is a strategy here, to draw the attention of the schools of fish. The next generation of Internet users are here and their attention span is getting smaller. If you look at Farmville and understand how it manages to attract users, you will likely do very well as a business on the Internet.

We can either convince the existing beacons of light to point towards our website, or we can try to influence the way people find you.

You can scheme and try to pitch your website to these schools of fish but often they won’t listen unless their trusted maven has vetted it.  Trying to convince sites with a large number of readers to mention your site will cost you. Nowadays, people already understand how the new Internet economy works. They know they can make money from pretty much anything.

The other way is to exploit search engines like Google. Since Google owns the Internet search market, people have understood that if you beat Google, you beat them all. The other search engines like bing! probably use Google behind the scenes.

Its easy to undermine Google now with all these domains coming available. You can register your domain in over 125 different country codes and publish the exact same content. This of course increases your web presence and your search results always nearly end up in the first 100 results (depending on how much content you have).

This method is easily detectable, and will likely not work for very long once Google figures out what is going on.

The second method is a tried and tested way to increase your web presence. The online dating website, plentyoffish.com was able to increase its web traffic from 0 to 10,000 visits a day, within a month. How did it accomplish this?

The way they did it was they created hundreds of microsites that were online dating related. The owner had a small team that would create 5-6 online dating site reviews a day, or blogs or just pages with static links that pointed to his site. The blogs were all baked, and the dating review sites were fixed but they worked. They all increased the page rank of his main site and drove thousands of visitors there.

This was the equivalent of “google bombing” but in a discrete manner. No automated system or robot could tell that each of these sites were his. All the domains were registered under different names, and all the URLs were unique. It would be literally impossible for a machine to recognize this as being a scam, and even a human would have trouble at that.

How much would it cost to do something like this? Probably a few thousand dollars. Maybe a few hundred if you had connections or outsourced a lot of it. A cheap way to increase SEO and soon enough you might even generate revenue from those microsites with banner ads. That is the Internet economy demonstrating the versatility and strength of its market, earning income for you while you provide it with banal content.

Shine a Light

For us, I think our goal is to become a bright light in swamp of Internet sites. We want to be noticed, but we don’t want to do it disingenuously. We want our users to spread the word to their friends and show them that there is a better way to do online shopping. Once people find us and understand what we can actually provide as a service, maybe they will want to tell their friends. Maybe the search engine results won’t even matter in the end, because with the faith and trust of your users, their referrals are all you really need.

I have often been the first to stand up and defend technology. When faced with arguments for or against the online publications versus the extinction of traditional forms of newsprint, I will always side with advancement of technology. In the arena of litigious issues such as P2P, I will advocate education of technology rather than the wholesale banishment of it.

In the software industry, many of the debates will typically reduce to one question: just because we can do it, does that mean we should do it?

That is the difference between advancing technology, and hindering it. Essentially, technology allows us to do almost anything, but poor decisions often lead to numerous Frankenstein-like creations resulting in a bloodied trail of disenchanted and bitter practitioners awaiting the next round of beatings.

Six Degrees of Tweets from Ashton Kutcher

More than recently, the advent of “social media” and “social networking” has been sold to us beneath a campaign of brotherhood: a worldwide message of “making the world smaller” as though this were a good thing. There has been a global campaign, to create a need for a product that was not there before. What was the need for Twitter, in terms of our ordinary lives? Creating a demand for a product that otherwise had no other purpose or need. As I sit here with three mobile phones, two laptops and a 46″ TV, I can’t seem to help but think I’ve been here before.

Courtesy of Aaron Riddle @ acriddle.com

In fact, before all this social babble there was only SPAM: unsolicited information that ended up in our mailboxes about things that I didn’t want or care about. But SPAM was ugly and it didn’t have a cute, blue bird or Ashton Kutcher. SPAM became our enemy and tools surfaced like SPAM Assassin to kill it and legislations rose deeming it offensive.

How would companies reach us, now that SPAM was marked as an outcast and undesirable? Introducing SPAM’s better looking twin, Twitter.

Somehow, somewhere, before we could completely kill SPAM, Twitter convinced us all that it was in fact, desirable to have unsolicited information. However, it was no longer unsolicited because you could subscribe and unsubscribe to the SPAM.. oops, I mean “tweets”.

The issue is not that you can or cannot unsubscribe, the issue is that people are now convinced that they want this! To be inundated with information is suddenly in vogue and it now becomes some kind of sociological phenomenon (endorsed with bizarre CNN segments where they read users tweets out loud).

Somehow, the marketer’s message came full circle, and now they’ve created a need for all of this typically mundane information. We find ourselves wanting to know more and more useless things, spending hours clicking links, re-tweeting, and following the endless streams of consciousness around the world. They’ve successfully enlisted the help of millions to do what they would’ve had to do themselves.

Social Solidarity and Critical Awareness

What is the sociological impact of this mass hypnosis? Why do we feel that we need so much information? Why is there never enough? The answers to these questions will help us understand ourselves better and show us where we are headed, maybe alter our course. Is this a path that we even want to be on? Should we be doing this?

Social interaction now centers around what people are tweeting about and its a race to find something interesting enough to keep your attention for 140 characters or less. If you stood quietly for 5 minutes in a bar, the most common word you will hear is ‘tweet’. People have fallen into a lull — a sense of false consciousness.

Have we become so bored with our own lives that the stream of information on other people’s lives are the top items on the menu of discourse? With advanced tools like HootSuite, you can also schedule your tweets every few minutes so that they get a fresh burst of, now solicited, messages. This isn’t about sending periodic updates about a natural disaster in Thailand, this is about self-promotion; or a link to your blog, if not an RT of someone else’s RT of a blog article.

As with most things, you cannot blame the medium but only the lack of critical awareness. As Marx suggested, we need to stand outside society and through scientific critique we can understand and alter our historical position. Separate yourself from the glue of social solidarity and objectively consider what it is these companies are asking you to do and decide for yourself.

Becoming aware and finding the right use with the right medium is the answer. An example of social interaction would be MeetUp.com, a website that has enabled loners to meet other loners. Here, you find the best use of technology to make your world smaller where groups of people actually want to interact with each other in real life.

Of course, this is nothing new. In this age, a successful marketing campaign can win you the presidency so it should be no surprise how SPAM was able to make its return from its half-grave, tarred and blue-feathered. Perhaps one day, I will read a tweet that you just fell down and can’t get up. Or perhaps you’re appendix has just exploded and are in critical condition at the hospital. Bear in mind, they will likely need to sterilize your iPhone before they let you go under the knife.

What we need to do is to be aware of what is looming on the horizon if we allow this nonsense to continue unabated; without checks or absent of any critical thinking. Our aim should be to use Twitter to further our progress in both technology and society, and less to further the art of self-promotion.

Twitter can be a great vessel, and it can help others reach those that would otherwise be unreachable. With no ulterior motives, we can take this medium and use it to lower the costs of helping those in need (as with natural disasters). It can reach millions instantly with a simple message that brings education to the uneducated. It can grow a network of unbounded numbers of people gathered for a noble cause and show strength in numbers. That is the greater purpose that lays ahead of us.