Spam Statistics, Personalized Search, and the Nature of Beauty – Monday Jan 23rd Roundup

Lots of stuff this week. With hype building over Apples show on the 27th the tech blogs are filled with tablet rumors, burying a lot of good content with hype and speculation.

This week we’ve got European spam statistics, studies on personalized search, SEO analytics tips, and the connection between beauty and fluency…

• In 2009 95% of EU mail traffic was spam. Let me repeat that. 95% of email in the EU is spam.
• In other news, Huo Mah looks at Google re-ranking and personalized search.

• Adage thinks that sooner or later Facebook will launch a phone and Google won’t be able to compete. Suuure. Hilariously it starts with an explanation of how Microsoft upset the market controlled by IBM, and Google upset Microsoft, and then “Just as everyone is thinking Google is unstoppable comes Facebook” (yeah, hurts your head in more ways than one). Now you’ll have to excuse my ignorance of the pre-2000 market (that was a decade ago and I was still moping about trying to finish school), but didn’t IBM continue to control the server market (albeit failing in the desktop market), didn’t Microsoft continue to control the desktop market, and doesn’t Google still dominate search? What’s this upset? All I can figure is he means that they stole their hype, but a)hype is a dying game (no matter how awesome you are your hype fades), and b) to quote roundup-regular Gord, as long as we’re chasing hype followers “Our audience will always be “just passing through” on the way to the next thing”.But to get back on topic, the problem is that Facebook isn’t in a position where a phone is a realistic extension of their service, or at least not a realistic extension of their current service. It was for Google, who already had a mobile OS out and a desktop OS on the way. Further Google had the money to throw around while Facebook is still struggling to make a profit.

  Given Facebook’s goals it would be considerably cheaper and more effective for them just to make their service interoperable with every other phone, so that their market includes Nexus users, and iPhone users, and Nokia users…

• More Adage in the tech section this week, with their five mobile trends of 2010. Again, what’s going on Adage? This starts by proclaiming that invasive anti-permission “location aware” mobile marketing is going to be a savior for mom & pop stores, then that “consumers” “enjoy” “micropayments”. Let me assure you, no one enjoys micropayments, and buying apps isn’t a sign of the contrary, it’s a sign of excitement over a new tech. They are right on the potential for mobile comparison shopping engines to provide a boon for marketers, but given their role in reducing proces they might cause trouble for the very mom and pop stores that Adage claims that mobile technology is going to help.

• Avinash strikes again. This time in his Q&A, which answers one of the first questions everyone starting at Search Engine Optimization asks: how do I measure SEO performance on a page level?. The article goes on to answer a lot of great SEO related questions. A really great post, if a little less analyticsy than most.
• More Q&A, from Luna Metrics this time. A reader asks about how conversion goals would work across a domain, and in the process points out how conversion rate functions in GA, and how to determine a per landing page conversion.

• Easily the coolest story I’ve read in a while, and a great example of why one should test: OkCupid busts 4 profile photo myths. Included are a bunch of “really!?” moments, such as that guys who look off screen do better than those who make eye contact, or that having your face in the photo doesn’t really do anything.
• Humanfactors. They have something to do with usability or user experience or something, right? Maybe a little old, but too good to pass up. In it the author looks at three theories of beauty and the role that “fluency” plays in it.

• In CAN-SPAM news, WHOIS privacy has been ruled “material falsification”. While I am totally for CAN-SPAM (as anyone who reads my email posts knows) I actually find this a little bit harsh, given how common WHOIS privacy is.
• One for the Facebook privacy crowd: Forrester breaks down Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s claim that people have gotten more comfortable sharing more information online.