Tangent Thought Gallery

It’s almost fascinating to see the ongoing direction and advancement taking place at LinkedIn (LI). For professionals of any stripe, this community, along with its attendant tools, is continually stepping to the front of the line for both its usefulness and relevance.

LI just announced that your personal network stats will now be available via an RSS feed. I’ve been using RSS feeds to a few LI answers categories for a while now, which is a great place to view the collective cognitive ebb and flow on specific business and technical topics. They’re great. The LI feed on your personal network is a welcome addition.

Back in ancient times, oh, let’s say around 2001, the repertoire of Google apps was much more humble. “Earth”, “Trends”, “Analytics”, “Maps”, and a host of other well know tools had yet to be prefaced with big G branding. But they did have search. Make that Search, with a capital S. As the world knows, that’s done nothing but continue in stride.

Google became a corporate entity 10 years ago this year. Remember Lycos, Excite, AskJeeves? How about Alta Vista? All of these former heavyweights had strong positions until rocked out of place. The early version of AskJeeves used to be my personal favorite until Jeeves staff mucked around with the interface and ruined it. I guess it was someone’s “good idea”, but that’s not how a lot of former AskJeeves aficionados judged the deliverable. We switched to G.

But even back then, in the pre-Blog days, the huge Google lever for me was Usenet (Deja.com) news group postings—all 500+ million of them at that time. You simply couldn’t match having the collective intelligence of all the thought processes and decades of collective thinking that went into all those questions and answers at your disposal—at your queried disposal, no less. This feature alone was worth the price of the internet. For a great compendium of Google milestones, be sure to check out http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html.

Moving forward to 2008, hopefully you’re already familiar with Google Analytics. One of the more intriguing features to be rolled out recently (mid-March ’08) within the Analytics space is Benchmarking. According to Google…

“Benchmarking is an optional Google Analytics service that shows how your website’s statistics compare against other industry verticals. In the beta version of this service, you are able to compare your site’s Visits, Pageviews, Pages per Visit, Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site, and New Visits data against benchmark data from categories of other participating websites. You can use this data to gain broader context for your site so you can identify additional opportunities to improve your site’s metrics.”

For the authoritative word on Benchmarking see: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/topic.py?topic=13909

To keep pace with the G can be daunting but one element that makes it a bit more approachable is their blog spaces. With several flavors available you should be able to find one suited to your taste:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/ — the mother of Google blogs.
http://analytics.blogspot.com/ — one of my personal favorites. Be sure to check out Conversion University videos!

Last of all, another recently introduced API is Google’s OpenSocial, which is defined as “a common API for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.” You can test this out with an Orkut account (Orkut is another Google initiative). I believe a common API for social networking applications has huge potential and I believe Google has the horsepower to pull it off.