As tracked by Experian Hitwise traffic to UK websites from their Social Media category is higher than traffic from the Search Engines category.

However what Hitwise don’t explain in the blog post is that they measure traffic in a very different way from what you might expect from an analytics package.

Modern day browsing behaviour means that we very often have more than one tab open in our preferred browser (if not more than one browser open as I do as I type). UK Internet users very often check their Facebook feeds during the work day (some more than others) and when you refresh that page to update your feed this counts as a user action to Hitwise – something which inevitably inflates this figure.

This isn’t a bad thing – it’s merely Hitwise’ way of measuring human behaviour rather than just clicks so it represents an interesting measure.

For ThinkSearch this underlines the shift in emphasis for brands from traditional SEO marketing through to doing business in the social web and merely serves to underline the importance of ensuring your best practice SEO also embraces the benefits of the distribution and advocacy channel of Social Media which also often has direct benefits in the form of links to your website.

Read the full blog post from Hitwise here: http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2010/06/social_networks_overtake_search_engines.html

There are a lot of annoying things about Facebook, but the thing that’s been getting to me most (yes more than the privacy issue) is that whatever anyone contributes to Facebook remains ‘in the cloud‘.

It’s probably my SEO background getting the better of me, but I want to own that information, that content. I want it to benefit me in the traditional sense of content i.e. one that generates links, citations and attention to my websites.

Keeping an eye on the SERPs as we do at ThinkSearch we are now starting to see Facebook pages creeping into the Google results for more competitive search terms. If the balance keeps on as it does it will be Facebook that outranks you, me and our competitors. Obviously the supports the end goal of Facebook’s advertising revenue based business model so they are laughing all the way to the bank.

But what about that content. Well it occurred to me that there is plenty of talk about the new open protocol that Facebook supports - FBML (Facebook Markup Language) – but what everyone is scrabbling to do is support Facebook’s head long plummet to domination by integrating their content the wrong bloody way!

Why put widgets all over your Facebook page that plant your blog content into Facebook? Why integrate widegts into your blog that allow users to jump straight of back into Facebook leaving your site? Surely this must happen the other way. What about all that lovely user generated content? What about all those lovely references to your site and connections to others? Where is the benefit to all the effort that you have put in over the last 20 years of the web gone?

For the time being it seems like the FBML support is basic and developers struggle to implement the code in any other way than within the Facebook canvas i.e. inserting the content using an iframe as opposed to being written into your page, so the benefits are yet to be tested, but to me this is a treasure trove to open.

Amazing news –  Tesco have decided to offer it’s online shopping API to developers to develop what they will with their database and their product inventory.

In a very forward thinking, future-gazing move the supermarket giant are embracing Web 2.0 and opening up it’s doors to allow it’s data to be used elsewhere around the web as third parties see fit.

Interestingly a few months ago now The Guardian also unveiled an API which they called Open Platform. Back then there was equal bemusement as to the use that such an API could be put, and the same can be said of today’s announcement. There will also inevitably be a lot of small print to read!

Of course the whole notion of the API sits firmly within the Open Source movement, and came into the spotlight when Twitter launched, as a minute offering, with an API to allow developers to do anything they wanted to with the data. Indeed this is how Twitter rose to stardom – it’s not the geeky nature of being able to share every engrossing detail of your day, but the ability to chop up and present that data in as many ways as anyone might like to.

So for Tesco – well I guess a whole load widgets might come out of this. They do sell more than just groceries these days… can anyone else come up with anything off the cuff? What is the most useful thing you could do with Tesco’s database? There’s a bunch of bananas in it for the best idea!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jul/14/tesco-api-programming-shopping

Luckily for us there’s an hour long video summary of the 8 posts, and it’s well worth a listen as it backs up Antony’s latest Connect post.

http://www.henryjenkins.org/2009/02/if_it_doesnt_spread_its_dead_p.html

I’m a big believer in any form of communication other than email – inevitably nothing will ever beat face to face communication for productivity – but I am also a great believer in social media as the most constructive and emotive form of collaboration. I also believe that businesses have an awfully long way to go to embrace social media behind the firewall.

At iCrossing we are shortly to complete a trial install of one of the seemingly many products out in the marketplace, to help bring social media behind the firewall, with the ultimate goal (from my point of view) to improve knowledge management …There’s that rather confusing term knowledge management again! In this instance I guess what I mean is collaboration, and the assistance of ideas generation through automation.

The product that we are trialling is called Knowledge Plaza (http://www.knowledgeplaza.be). The same team are behind the launch of one of the many recent Twitter applications – Microplaza (http://www.microplaza.com). Both tools are aimed at business use – enterprise social tools as they are known – the former being a comprehensive tool that ties in all other existing enterprise platforms like Sharepoint and email as examples.

I believe that this is the last undiscovered frontier (for the time being). Once we have enabled the most basic of human desires – interaction – effectively in the work place by the implementation of the most useful, adaptable technology, we will truly be able to put the age of email behind us. Joy!