Google has become so much more than just a search company in the past years, that I wonder how they would define themselves today. When you think about it, Google offers a whole suite of Web-based (and desktop-based) softwares for free. Many of their products have outgrown their initial purpose to become priceless tools of our everyday lives.

In the case of Google Maps for example, the mapping service goes way beyond spotting a geographic location and telling you how to get there. First, thanks to crowdsource efforts, it is smart enough to show you the cheapest gas stations around. Not only will it drive you around, but it will tip you on which roads to take to avoid tolls. Those two tools alone can help anybody reduce their car-related spending.

This positions Google very closely to our transportation habits. The Mountain View juggernaut has pushed a bit their product in a fantasy world by adding street view to their map. This means that you can save even more gas dollars by checking out a home and its neighborhood from your computer screen. An increasing number of real estate companies are adding in street view to their sites. One could start to argue that Google Maps is a transportation mean all to itself (like a car or a plane).

My point is not to say that I will spend the week end in Vegas on Google Maps, no. However, all those elements perfectly show that Google thrives to become a major provider of transportation solutions. The project RechargeIT is the perfect example to illustrate this idea. RechargeIt is a project to design an electric car which tank you fill up with sunlight. Here is a short explanatory video from the Google.org team:

The next generation of cars will be smart cars, and what was initially a project to create and share maps online is quickly turning into a crowdsource wisdom for electronic devices. Google Maps is the cornerstone of all this, and so we at Click2Map are proud to be a part of this cultural movement.

xavierv

As Darren Herman states in a recent post, “widget” is one of the dominant buzzword of 2008. As the Web turned into a shattered media environment, the portable and sourceable nature of widgets made it a must-have for marketers, advertisers, and distributed service providers. That it be for your Myspace profile or for your blog, there are so many types of widgets available out there that, just like Facebook Apps, end-users are now less compulsive about those flashy little objects. The market is reaching a point where the supply overwhelms the demand, therefore a tougher competition between widget providers is getting off the ground.

So what makes a good, competitive widget? To answer this question, I turned to widget-expert Lawrence Coburn, Co-Founder and CEO of RateItAll, publisher of the Sexy Widget blog, and early-adopter of widgets (RateItAll was the first Web company to offer distributed rating widgets). Here is Lawrence’s answer:

I typically look for three things in a widget: 1) Fresh content; 2) Fast load times; 3) Easy share-a-bility. In my experience, the best widgets are those that are constantly showing new and interesting data, don’t slow down the host site, and do their best to enable the easy republishing of the widget elsewhere.

Obviously, if a widget doesn’t show fresh content, there is no point in using a widget. An iFrame with a static page src’d would do. The fast loading aspect of widgets is crucial on the end-user side of things: if retrieving information for a widget takes up too much time in the page loading process, site/profile publishers will get rid of the widget to gain in accessibility. Regarding share-a-bility, I think there are two dimensions implied there. First is the embed code that makes grabbing and placing a widget a breeze. Second is the customization features that enable site/profile publishers to adapt the widget to the look & feel of their sites.

To diversify the ideas brought in this article, I also asked Daniel Ha, Co-Founder and CEO of Disqus (Disqus is a commenting system that offers different widgets to make commenting more engaging). Here is Daniel’s take on this question:

A good widget needs to meet just a few points that immediately come to mind: a) easy to install, b) immediately useful, c) customizable, d) reliable and fast. Because widgets are usually low-barrier applications, they should be simple to install and its benefit should be recognizable from the beginning (you shouldn’t need to wait for network effects). Being customizable and reliable/fast is important because widgets are applications that are distributed across websites, but still need to feel like they’re native.

Daniel and Lawrence seem to agree a lot on the positive characteristics of a widget. “Easy to install and customizable” are synonymous to share-a-bility. “Reliable and fast” means fast loading time. Daniel also mentions “immediately useful”. That is a very good point, probably the most important now that widget consumers are getting pickier by the minute: “Will visitors interact with it/Will I benefit from this interaction?”

If we are so interested in widgets here at Click2Map, it is for the simple reason that we are developing a widget to make sharing Google Maps a fuller experience. Even though Google is doing an awesome job at bringing online maps to the masses, the sharing features are still a little limited. Our goal is to enable our users to benefit from our unique features from creation to distribution.

To follow on the great ideas shared by Lawrence and Daniel above, I would add - at least in Click2Map’s case - that a good widget creates loyalty. Maps are a way to localize places/people on a map through markers. GeoRSS enable subscribers to be automatically informed of new markers’ creation. If a widget is visually attractive, offers useful information in the context of the site it is embedded in, and enables to create a long-lasting tie through RSS-like technologies (similar to subscribing to comments in a post), then the benefits for the site/profile publisher are worth the awful sweat of copy/pasting the widget’s embed code.

xavierv

GeoRSS is a simple way to include location in RSS feeds. In Dan Catt’s own words, “it’s pretty simple. This is what you get in the rss XLM:
<georss:point>37.79586 -122.395259</georss:point>“
It is, indeed, dead simple.
So when Google announced that the GeoRSS support had been added to Google Maps, rapidly followed by Microsoft a month later, the news got very positive feedback. By enabling the attachment of geodata to any media content online, Google made it possible to easily spot online content on a map.

Some of the interesting applications of GeoRSS include Outside.in: once you gave your zip code to the service, it automatically retrieves all the blog news in your geographic parameter. While the site is still building up, it holds a nice vision of a new way to receive news. Outside.in even received funds for this project. BrightKite - the location-based social network - is also good example of how to apply GeoRSS to online social behaviors.

Unfortunately, things get more complicated when it comes to monetizing a geoweb service. As Sean Gorman clearly explains in the Off The Map blog that selling ads on maps is Google-Yahoo-Microsoft’s business, and they have pretty much locked down the market.

I guess the real question becomes: if you cannot rely on the good-old advertising model, how do you integrate GeoRSS as an active component of your business model? What is the value added by GeoRSS that is psychologically important enough for money to be traded in the process? For some companies, and that is going to be the case here at Click2Map, it simply enables paying-users of a broader mapping service to create loyal ties between map publishers and location seekers.

Let’s take the example of Benny Benassi, the famous Italian DJ and user of Click2Map’s services. On his tour page, a map of all the oncoming shows allows fans to easily spot the next show in their surroundings. If you add a GeoRSS function to this map, then you enable all those fans to create a direct tie with Benny Benassi’s whereabouts. Such a service is extremely valuable for professionals whose jobs imply traveling a lot.

Nonetheless, this isn’t the only way to go with GeoRSS. My personal take on it is, maps might be an increasingly growing online media, it still isn’t a mainstream online search behavior. Any projects undertaken in the field of mapping and GeoRSS must be led with a spirit of patience, as mapping will become more prominent, but it’s not quite there yet.

Xavier

Are SMBs confused about new online marketing strategies? A recent article on the Sf Chronicle sparked up quite a few reactions on the blogosphere. At the center of the debate is Yelp, a San Francisco-based platform for user-generated reviews of small businesses:

Last week, Yelp purged an undisclosed number of accounts after finding that the business owners had swapped positive reviews with other business owners. Yelp also regularly deletes reviews it believes are phony. The move sparked an outcry among local businesses, and has even led some entrepreneurs to band together with thoughts of a class-action lawsuit. Their reasoning is, if they legitimately spend their money and patronize a service, why can’t they review it?

Will Scott from Website Promotion is not Voodoo thinks this situation reflects the overall confusion that most SMBs are facing with social promotion tools. For Will, times were simpler for SMBs when the major online promotion tool was YellowPages: Buy ads, get more exposure, sell more.

Today, with the new online social trends, SMBs have to push people to talk about them, and this kind of public relations is hard to handle when you are not a killer online PR pro. How do you tell your customers to spend half an hour on a website to create a profile and rate the transaction they just made at your store (something customers automatically do if the transaction went bad btw)? When it comes to reviewing a business, the incentive is small for customers, but extremely high for merchants wishing to increase their exposure. Therefore, it becomes much easier to create strategic partnerships with other merchants who profoundly understand the benefits of writing positive reviews about each other.

Greg Sterling calls this a gray area:

The reviews may be entirely legitimate in many cases. But, as the (SF Chronicle) article points out, it underscores the influence and impact of Yelp. It’s very much like Google and people trying to game or improve their ranking on Google because of how that maps directly to the bottom line.

If this is a gray area (and I agree it is), then the whole Web 2.0 is a gray area: The line between power users and system gamers is too thin. The PageRank fiasco that hit Google a few month back reflects the same problematic. Is Robert Scoble gaming the system by being omnipresent on Friendfeed? Is Friendfeed gaming the system by sucking up all of Twitter’s juice? Let’s not get too excited here…

Back to SMBs: if small merchants’ strategic alliances are not permitted, then how do you boost your online presence? What do you do if your customers are not user-generated review enthusiasts? Here at Click2Map, we are very SMBs oriented. We do not provide a solution for businesses to improve their ranking on user-generated review sites, but we surely help them build their presence on Google. How? When people search for a specific location on Google, a Google Map is the first organic result that pops up on search result pages. Here at Click2Map, we make Google Maps creation a breeze: It’s easy to upload spreadsheets of geographic data, to manage a wide number of map markers, and to publish it on the Google Maps platform. This is a valuable tool to help you optimize your natural presence on an increasingly popular medium (Google Maps). Check out Click2Map’s free version to see how easy it is to be mapped in.

Xavier Vespa
http://twitter.com/xavierv

Yesterday, a very accurate comment was made on a press release from the Ripley Attraction Inc. The press release states:

53% of U.S. Population Lives Within a Half Tank of Gas of a Ripley Attraction.

Adena Schutzberg from the AllPointsBlog called this the New Gas Conscious, Distance Conscious Marketing. These past few months, US consumers have been increasingly exposed to this new form of marketing, obviously related to the rise of gas price. Even radio ads selling jewels start with a reminder of the price of gas before announcing their great money-saving deals on diamond rings.

This probably isn’t the first time that this sub-category of anxiety marketing is used: I can hardly imagine advertisers in the 70s not grabbing the gas crisis opportunity to make their products look cheaper in comparison. However, this is probably the first time in history that discounted diamonds are not the ultimate alternative to fight high gas expenses. The user-generated mapping phenomena is emerging as the solution to fix our geospatial restrictions.

Thanks to map editing tools like MyMaps, a specific geo-centric expertise - like places to find cheap gas - now has a serious appeal for consumers. Comscore released a report that confirms this new consumer behavior. Online maps rises as the rational choice to find the best shortcuts. The “at a location near you” marketing is more meaningful than ever, and it is user-generated. Google Search cheap gas and check out the first sponsored link result, it reinforces the statement made here.

Crowdsourcing geo data requires a crowd, and it also requires powerful tools to create maps where a lot of information can be indexed, distributed and syndicated. There’s a few Google Maps mashups out there that offer enhanced map creation tools. Some tools develop social interactions around maps and others are focused on sharing and collaborating. Click2Map (yeah that’s us) offers a means to easily manage heavy loads of geographic data, a perfect tool for professional purposes.

In this era of New Gas Conscious, Distance Conscious Marketing, maps are on the edge of being a much sought-after result in SERPs. Marketers beware.

How to Save Gas and Time With Google Maps