Scott T. Frey

Its encouraging to see some friendly faces next to a product you’re about to buy, and suggested additional purchases and products based on a much larger data set will be quite useful. However, what everyone is really looking for when they are shopping is a quality product or business. A facepile of friends who know nothing about digital cameras is not the best way to help me find the one that best suits my needs. The current like button is not a replacement for the link; its just a temporary filler for user generated content and point of sales information that the market for data is sorely lacking.

In my mind, the best approximations of where shopping and the internet is headed are Google’s Places and Product search pages. That model is the best representation of how an internet of things could look…..individual product and business pages with content, prices, and reviews collected and organized from numerous trusted sources, from experts to amateurs.

There is just one big problem; there still are huge gaps in the data market. Facebook, Foursquare and others have been trying to fill the gaps, or at least many are suggesting that their data can be used that way, but I don’t think anyone has gotten it just right yet. So if the Google Places/Products model is the future, what do they need to be really to fill in the blanks.

1. Verified user generated content.
On most sites anyone can like, review, or write about products or places whether or not you actually ate their or bought the product. I am sure you have seen your fair share of customer reviews out their whose authenticity should seriously be questioned. Currently, I think Google only uses reviews as a another crude approximation for the popularity of a business since they can’t be sure the reviews are authentic. There is a huge opportunity for reservation/appointment booking services, any website with a shopping cart, membership rewards programs, and point of sales services to provide verified content related to products or places.

For instance, Amazon could leverage Rateitall’s API to allow you to review your recent purchases from inside your account or from within a follow-up email. I can’t really speak on the effectiveness of rating products with “likes” versus “stars,” but there could be verified Facebook “likes” too. Opentable had the right idea in combining reservations with reviews.  Other than membership rewards programs, SCVNGR and QR codes are the only examples I have seen of verified check-ins.

2. A hierarchy of trusted content sources and reviewers.
If you are going to develop a product or place rank, not only do you have to verify the authenticity of sentiment and reviews, but you have to rank the trust of the content generators, websites and individuals.

3. Specialization of Places and Product pages.
Using a generalized layout for places and product pages is a sure way of making them ineffective at visualizing information for a sizable number of businesses and products. There are marked differences between service industry jobs, and local stores for instance. Additionally, certifications, honors, and professional affiliations for doctors and dentists are important pieces of information that should be prominently displayed (and ideally should be verified).

4. Manufacturers should be allowed to claim Product pages.
Algorithms collecting product information and features can’t fill in what they can’t find. You need product information that is as complete as possible to enable comparison of features and specification lists. If you can’t pull a complete and accurate list of this information from a trusted resource somewhere, at least allow manufacturers to do it themselves.

I am an orthodontic resident and not some tech expert so leave a comment and let me know what you think.

I am not sure I totally get all the focus paid to incorporating Tweets into search results. Tweets that include images, video, and other links are simply providing attention and some context to pages containing valuable information. With respect to search they are just an additional dataset that can be used to refine results. I could see Google establishing a filter to view results with the most Twitter buzz or link to a list of Tweets supporting the content, but I seriously doubt the value having Tweets presented among traditional search results.

As you can probably see this blog doesn’t have a whole lot of nuts and bolts, but I set up a social site for my Father’s office that has some goodies on it. I decided to add in the WP Greet Box plugin to it today. It worked great when clicking on individual posts; however, his blog has the Thesis theme and when arriving at the home page the darn Greet Box wasn’t popping up.

I found two great links (1 & 2) with information about troubleshooting and installation of the plugin on non-WP blogs.

After checking the page source, the solution was to add the following code to the custom_functions.php file:

function greetbox(){
?>
<div id=”greet_block”>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://example.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery.js”></script&gt;
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://example.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-greet-box/js/functions.js”></script&gt;
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://example.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-greet-box/js/onload.js”></script&gt;
</div>
<?php
}

add_action(‘thesis_hook_after_header’, ‘greetbox’);

Just replace example.com with your domain and add the hook you want and away you go. Maybe I added some extra lines, but it works so I am happy.

I tore my ACL & MCL this skiing this weekend up at Heavenly Resort in Tahoe. There was more ice than snow so it was probably bound to happen at some point. With my knee like this, it is far too tiring  to do anything other than see patients, so the posts might be few and far between for a while. People have been busy since I last was online. Google Reader has rolled out a new design, and so did WordPress. Very nice. I am going to get surgery pretty soon. Hopefully, I don’t end up like Tom Brady.

On a different note, some girl let me play with her Android phone the other day. Wow. They say the grass is always greener, but I think the Android user interface and software is far better than the iPhone’s. The actual phone is crap…the trackball is too small and the phone doesn’t feel all that comfotable in your hand, but all that is easily fixed by designing a proper phone. I think I will be switching in the future.