subject: Web 2.0 Technologies - Promoting Your Site Through Social Media [print this page] For information regarding the future of web 2.0 technologies, go out and get the book Socialnomics. It's an excellent book. The author is Eric Qualman and the biggest thing that he understands is that Google wants to get on board with this whole web 2.0 thing.
We just saw it recently with the launch of Buzz and they're starting to get you to enter in all of your other web 2.0 accounts so that they can monitor what it is that you're doing.
Facebook just overtook Google in traffic recently because people find it is a safer community. A lot of people, not we internet marketers, a lot of people load up the internet and they go straight to Facebook and that is where they engage. Google obviously wants to make sure that they don't miss out on this. That's why they launched the most current of the web 2.0 technologies - Buzz. They forced you to do it when you signed up because you've got a Gmail account and they would put it right in front of you.
I think the way the future is heading, and this is mentioned in Socialnomics, is the idea that search engine results are going to get a lot more customized. When you're logged into your Google account, when you search something on Google, the results are tailored to you.
I log in, and if I'm logged into my account, davidjenyns site comes up higher for words, Melbourne SEO comes up higher for words because Google is watching what I'm doing, realizing that I'm clicking those sites, therefore it is of interest to me, therefore it's pushing them higher up the search engines.
I think Google will be starting to monitor a lot of things going on in web 2.0 applications and it will start to monitor things like, what do your friends say in part of your social network? Ok, well, Dave is friends with Ian Howard, and Ian Howard said that he just went on a holiday to Europe.
Now I'm on Google, I'm logged into my Google account. I type into Google European holiday accommodation, it knows that I'm friends with Ian, scours his website and then says, oh, Ian has just been to Europe and here are some photos that he took when he was in Europe. Here's where he stayed because this is what his review said that he posted on TripAdvisor, one of those places where you can log reviews of accommodation and things like that. Then it will say, oh, that is obviously of importance and relevance to me.
I think that is the way things are evolving so it's really important that you start to engage in this web 2.0 space. Things are also getting even more local. All you have to do is look at Foursquare which is just exploding.
If you haven't had a look at Foursquare, at the moment I don't know if they've really got an idea of how they're going to commercialize it but that is coming. What it is, is people checking in on their mobile phones when they're out and about to log where they are. All there are part and parcel of web 2.0 technologies.
