Yesterday Mobile Marketer put up a nice article on the Facebook phone which featured quite a bit of my commentary/opinion on the device. Read the article for my overall thoughts, but a few interesting points I see:

• There’s no way Facebook can win with a single phone
• Will this lead to a range of FB-powered phones?
• Will this lead to a FB app store running on stock Android devices, a la Amazon?
• If they can succeed, it could be a big step for HTML5 apps on mobile devices
• Why are they building on Android if the goal is to compete with Google?

I’m certainly not in a position to tell Facebook what to do, but I’ll opine anyways… they’ve got cash. They’re considering a $10 billion IPO this year. Why not give HP a call and take their woefully underutilized webOS off their hands, breaking free of Google’s mobile OS clutches?

If anyone can make webOS flourish, it’s Facebook. The operating system itself was, in my opinion, far superior to both iOS and Android when it was launched. It’s fallen behind, to be sure, but the only thing that held it back was a lack of apps – something Facebook has and is looking to spread to the mobile market.

Either way, I think Facebook will be well worth watching as they move into the mobile world. Will people buy? That’s hard to say… as I mentioned in the article, people aren’t exactly lamenting what they get out of the Facebook apps for iOS and Android. If a Facebook phone succeeds it’ll be because people love the apps FB offers and respond to the name recognition of the social networking giant.

We’ll see what happens. It will be interesting.

This past week, Facebook made a big splash by announcing their HTML5 app support. For many, this is viewed from the perspective of Facebook developers – they’re becoming even more of a platform with a wider range of supported devices, and Facebook apps may well explode in the coming months (in a good way). My interest, however, leans towards native smartphone app developers who have been integrating Facebook in their apps at a 20% rate – this despite the fact that the Facebook actions they could integrate were limited mostly to Like and Share.

Now, however, app developers have the option to add full HTML5 Facebook apps to their apps (yo dog, I heard you liked apps…). Imagine the iconic New York Times crossword puzzle, set up as a Facebook HTML5 app and integrated into the New York Times’ iPad, iPhone and Android apps. The usage would spike, the NYT’s social presence would expand, and people would start seeing NYT crosswords everywhere they went. A spectacular opportunity, albeit with some downsides (I won’t really go into them here, I’m too excited).

That was the basis of my quotes in Mobile Marketer earlier this week: Facebook is trying their best to turn the app development landscape on its ear. In a good way, though: dramatically expanded social interaction capability is nothing but a good thing, in my (not so) humble opinion. Me? I feel like I should start working harder to learn advanced Javascript and HTML5.

Interestingly, Facebook’s moves have been followed by a tremendously interesting rant by a Google engineer on how Google Plus is a failure as a platform. I kind of like Google Plus, although I rarely use it, but he’s got some interesting points.

My first study at Localytics has gone out, and it’s an interesting one (my obviously unbiased opinion): of all iPhone 4s in the US, 32% of them are running on the Verizon network. For those of you who don’t follow the Cult of Steve Jobs, the iPhone 4 was an AT&T exclusive from its launch last summer until Verizon got their own version in February. So, over a fairly short period of time, Verizon has made some pretty impressive inroads into the iPhone market – meaning when the iPhone 5 comes out (presumably on both networks at the same time), AT&T may well have a fight on their hands.

The trend over time was also quite interesting, as Verizon seemed to see a sharp uptick in their market share gains the past two months. A theory that we’ve been kicking around is that, since Verizon was doing away with their unlimited data plan (which ended yesterday), people were jumping in to get it while they could. AT&T’s unlimited data plan was discontinued last year, and only those who were grandfathered into it (like me) can still use it.

I’m very excited to say that yesterday, I started a new job at mobile analytics firm Localytics as their Director of Online Marketing. I had an absolutely wonderful two years at Chitika, but the opportunity with Localytics was too interesting to pass up.

At Chitika, I had access to a wealth of very interesting Internet usage data, and funneled that into Chitika Insights, a blog of useful data and insights into the web and its users. I’ll be continuing that at Localytics by way of the Localytics blog. The main difference is that I will be looking at mobile app usage rather than web usage – very exciting to me, because apps is a world into which I’ve had little to no insight until now.

To my friends at Chitika, I can’t thank you all enough – you’ve been more than coworkers these past years. I know we’ll remain close… you’re all too awesome to let slip away.

As for Localytics, I’m excited to be there. Check out some of the great research they’ve done already – 15% of mobile app usage is done offline, 26% of mobile apps are opened just once, and 20% of iPads are running outdated versions of iOS. Can’t wait to get my grubby fingers on that data set and see what kind of interesting stories I can find.

Why in God’s name would any sane entrepreneur spend their time, money and effort on building a new search engine? Look at Blekko, for example: a really spectacular engine with features I absolutely love, but which has less search market share than such search powerhouses as Dogpile, Lycos, and Excite.

Why the failure? To me, it’s simple: rule 1 of starting a business is find a pain point. Find some complaint about a service that lots of consumers have, and fix it. The problem with starting a search engine? What do people want out of search that Google doesn’t already provide?

Sure, people are concerned about Google’s privacy policies. Nobody likes thinking that they’re being watched, particularly on the scale that Google does. But the product is impeccable – you never hear anyone complain that Google just doesn’t search like a champ, or that they couldn’t find the result they wanted.

And therein lies the problem. The product is great. Other search engines can attack Google on their privacy policies, but they can’t offer a product that is superior in the eyes of the consumer. With Google holding as much as 84% of the search market, for a company like Blekko or Duck Duck Go to get market share, they’ll likely have to appeal to users who are already invested in their usage of Google.

So I ask again: why would anyone want to enter the search market? Lucrative as it is, unless someone is complaining that Google (or to a lesser degree Bing or Yahoo) is failing to find them search results, there’s nothing that an upstart engine can offer to really pull people to their product.

Last week I had the opportunity to consult for Morris Nathanson Design, a full-service hospitality design firm in Rhode Island.  I happen to be related to the owners, and after a bit of cajoling I convinced them to bring me in and give some pro-bono tips on making the site more usable and SEO-friendly.

First of all, their landing page was killing their site, from both a usability and a SEO perspective.  It consisted of a two-stage Flash intro, both of which were basically static images with perhaps 5% of the image clickable.  No meta data meant that Google knew nothing about the page except for the URL and the fact that it contained some manner of Flash.

Once you got past the Flash, though, the site is surprisingly well designed; yes, the menu architecture left something to be desired, but the HTML was clean, there was a decent amount of good copy, and overall it should be a good lead-driving vehicle.  I was quite happy, as I was able to give them one simple step to vastly improve their site: lose the Flash.

And they did.  By the time I got from Pawtucket to my office in Westborough, Mass., the Flash intro was gone, and the landing page was chock full of great text for Google to spider.

In all, I enjoyed the experience.  I expect MND to see a significant boost in the number of leads they get online (and they should, they’re a damn fine design firm), and they should start showing up in search results.  They were doing a lot of things right already – they had claimed their Google Place, which is great for a local/regional company – there was just one major roadblock between them and online success, which has since been removed.

It’s apparently official: the Google killer, search engine Cuil, is dead, according to a report by TechCrunch this evening.  If you’re wondering why I linked to the Wikipedia entry about Cuil instead of Cuil itself… well, then you obviously don’t read.  It’s dead.  Trying to open cuil.com is futile, and the fact that a Google search for Cuil still has as its #2 result the phrase “Cuil – The World’s Biggest Search Engine,” just underscores the weirdness that is the tech world.

For those of you who don’t know the story, Cuil was supposed to be the Search Engine To End All Search Engines.  They were going to Take Down Google, and they were going to Establish A New Level Of Search Engine Awesomeness.

They Didn’t.

Cuil (paradoxically pronounced “cool”) was plagued from the beginning by insufficient servers and overly sufficient hype.  With some $33 million in funding, Cuil somehow made headlines in BusinessWeek, proclaimed one of 2008′s top startups.  Apparently, this was because they had raised $33 million.  So entrepreneurs, you want to make it as an award-winning startup?  Create a pile of crap and waste historic amounts of investors’ money on it.

Well, Cuil was far from cool.  It was, in fact, crap.  Massive amounts of indexed pages (so they claimed), but it was slow, buggy, and just all-around awful.  I fell for the hype and tried it pretty much right after launch.  I was back using Google faster than you can say “What the hell does that have to do with my search?”

Which leads me to a point I’ve made multiple times: WHY dear GOD do these startups with a few million bucks INSIST on attacking Google?  Rule 1 of entrepreneurship: have SOME SORT OF PAIN POINT (pardon the shouting) that you’re trying to assuage.  Search engines have, quite frankly, no pain points that can be fixed with other search engines.

When was the last time you heard someone say “Man, that Google is great.  If only it indexed more pages.”

Never?  Hmm, what a coincidence.  I’ve never heard it too.

So anyone who’s out there thinking of making a new search engine, just stop.  Microsoft has done well with Bing, growing in market share, working with Yahoo!, and making a dent in Google’s dominance; but Microsoft also poured the monetary equivalent of about ten Cuils into Bing’s marketing budget alone.

Nobody cares how many pages your search engine indexes.

Nobody cares if you load your results in half the time Google does.

Nobody cares if your results are seventeen percent more relevant than Google’s.

Make something people are clamoring for.  Stop making search engines.  For God’s sake, stop making search engines.

Let Cuil be your warning.

I know it’s my own research, and it’s weird for me to report on it, but hell… it’s my blog, I’ll do what I want.

The latest Chitika Research study to come out – from me – shows that iOS 4 continues to make big strides in the iPhone world.  Not surprising, really – I reported earlier in the summer that after just one month in the market, iOS 4 had already snatched up 50% of all iOS devices.  It’s a big upgrade.  I’ve got it now on my iPhone 3GS and iPad (yeah, I have a friend with a developer account, so I get the operating systems early… be jealous of my awesome multitasking, folder-making iPad with a unified inbox).

It’s interesting, too, to know that despite iOS upgrades being a manual install, iPhone owners are taking the initiative and doing them.  In comparison, Android updates are performed over the air automatically, but their newest OS – Android 2.2 Froyo – is only appearing on 43% of Android devices coming through Chitika.

This illustrates the difference in mobile strategies between Apple and Google.  Apple, obviously, wants to create a Disneyland sort of experience, with every ride (read: app) and every interaction controlled, overseen, and quality assured by Apple.  Thus, Apple provides one handset (per year), and one carrier.  All apps are approved by the App Store, which allows no nudity, sexual innuendo, or political cartoons (I kid).

Google, on the other hand, is all about the open.  Every handset running Android has its own unique variant of the operating system, which is a big part of the reason new versions take so long to proliferate.  Sure, Froyo is done and ready to go, but everyone involved with an Android phone has input on it – just to update, say, the HTC Desire, it’s a project.  HTC puts their own spin on Android, which must be ready and updated for a new OS structure.  Then either Verizon or AT&T has to sign off, adding their own little quirks and software skins to brand the phone to themselves.

In the end, Android users have some good and some bad.  The good is that their phone is open; they can install any app, they can get into the source code and screw around, and they can pick carriers besides AT&T (not a part of the “open” mentality, but I’m kind of sick of AT&T… Free my iPhone!).  On the other hand, everything that’s involved in their operating system must be updated by a dozen third-party engineering groups before their particular handset is ready to update.  Apple users can just pop their phone into iTunes the second a new OS is released, click “update”, and voila – they have the newest version of iOS.

Unless they’ve got an iPhone 3G, of course… then they just have a brick.

IE9 came out officially as a beta product today, and by crackey, Microsoft has done it again – they’ve continued their surprising trend towards impressive, innovative products.  I’m not going to say it’s perfect, but it’s a great start.  I played around with it for a few hours today, and although I ended up going back to Chrome (more stable), I was left feeling like IE9 can reverse Internet Explorer’s downward market share trend.

First of all, the browser is fast.  Wicked fast.  From a pure ‘feel’ standpoint, it ‘felt’ faster than my browser of choice, Chrome.

The minimalist design is beautiful.  Microsoft has removed all traces of corporate logos or branding from the toolbar and left it a utilitarian, minimalistic bar of goodness.  Of course, this doesn’t mean it takes up any less real estate… from what I could tell, Microsoft has managed to get the space taken up by toolbars on par with Chrome and slightly better than Firefox (default settings).

I did have one gripe with the toolbar: any tabs you open are on the same plane as the address bar.  Since the address bar covers some 2/3 of the horizontal space, that leaves your tabs feeling cramped, smashed together into some kind of a browser-tab butter.

Tabs, though, are something IE9 does right.  Like Firefox 4, IE9 takes Chrome’s idea of draggable tabs that can be split off of the main browser window and implements it in a slightly different way.  Unlike Chrome, IE9 (and Firefox 4, for that matter) treats each open tab as a separate program in the Windows toolbar.  That gets kind of annoying; I greatly prefer Google’s solution, which is to group all tabs in the same browser window together as one open program.

Of course, that’s an opinion gripe from someone who routinely has two screens running, each with its own single, lonely instance of Google Chrome open (with a dozen or so tabs).

In all, IE9 is head and shoulders better than any browser Microsoft has ever released.  There’s bugs – for example, I couldn’t open the Acid3 test site.  IE would just kick me back to the Google results page, unable to load it.  Also, on a forum site I frequent, dragging the mouse over the topics would somehow cause them to shift around.  Shades of Firebug, I suppose.

I’ll be looking forward to the final release of IE9.  Microsoft, you’ve done well, and congratulations – you’re still innovative.  Don’t fall off the wagon.

So I’m under no delusions of my blog looking anything like… a well-designed blog.  Thank God for Thesis, at least their default template looks fairly respectable, but as an Internet professional, I really need something that looks better.

So, I’m going to do something about it.

Luckily there are great online resources for learning how to code websites – I’m going to be using mostly w3schools.com to teach myself the necessary skills.  You know the ones I mean.  The skills that people like me, technology freaks, social media “gurus”, online marketers, etc., like to talk about without knowing how to perform.

CSS.  Better HTML than I already know (give me a little credit, I’ve been dicking around with HTML since 1995).  PHP.  That should about do it, but three (admittedly related) languages, from very close to square one.

I’m leaving this image of my blog, as it is as of September 15th, 2010, up at the top of this post so if I lose interest or start slacking on this adventure, I can look at it, shudder a little bit, and re-interest myself.

This blog represents me, and for the most part, I don’t look like crap.  So, let’s see what I can do about this blog, eh?

Suggestions, tips, tricks, and criticisms are always welcome.