Frankly, Verizon is long overdue for the “next cool gadget phone.”  AT&T has had the iPhone locked up and all the other Android phones have all been T-Mobile. With all the brouhaha over Chrome OS and the rumors that it would be mobile-device bound, that would be a pleasant surprise.  AndroidAndMe.com is already reporting a Verizon-bound Android 2.0 phone, the Motorola Tao, will be launched on December 1.

We’ll (hopefully) know more this afternoon.

Granted, this is not a normal occurrence, and (you would think) this would most certainly not become a regular issue.  However, I think the quote from Twitter user @Tadiera says it all:

“The Internet dies with out Google. Can’t get to my bank Web site because it’s waiting on ‘google-analytics.com.’ This is made of lame,” said Twitter user Tadiera.

I repeat what I wrote earlier this week: If you’re a large company, you do not want to rely on Google Analytics.  At this point, the little guy is now suffering.

From @Google on twitter:

We’re aware some users are having trouble accessing some Google services. We’re looking into it, and we’ll update everyone soon.

C’est la vie.

Updated: 3:30 PM

Oops, we’re sorry, air traffic control rerouted our flight.  That’s the answer from Google about their outage.

One of the cool things about Google is their laid-back attitudes.  It’s what makes them, Google. It’s also what makes them successful and desireable to work for. But 14% of Google’s user base is a lot of affected users.  On the search or mail front, that’s annoying and inconvenient.  On the analytics side, it’s lost data that can never come back.  In some cases, it’s your site’s pages that were never served which is potentially loss of business and certainly inconvenience for your customers and potential-customers.

Google’s non-technical answer is appropriate. However, the short reponse without reassuring their customers it won’t happen again is as tasteless as an airline meal.

Why Google Analytics?

Well, for starters, it’s free.  When your marketing mix and marketing tracking tools have ever-rising costs, a free tool for Web analytics is right up every CFO’s alley.  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I heard the murmurings of the old adage “you get what you pay for.” Granted, that was apropos when Google Analytics first launched, but they’ve gotten far better tools and reporting since then.  But should your company solely rely on it?

The Good

Google Analytics is a client-side solution.  This means that you rely on your site visitor (and its browser and security settings) to give you the information you desire.  You have to insert JavaScript code into every page of your site that you want to track.  This includes any customized redirect pages or error pages.  Upon hitting your site, the JavaScript is loaded into the visitor’s browser, makes additional network connections to Google, where the visitor’s actions are tracked.

The Bad

Simply put, if a visitor to your Web site has JavaScript disabled or only accepts certain cookies, you won’t get the analytical information you want. Keep in mind, there is a setting that says “only accept cookies from the originating domain,” which many people choose to use.  In essence, this means that Google’s thrid-party cookies set by their JavaScript code are never accepted.  An entire subset of security-conscious, naive or simply unknowing users of a high-security corporate network are never tracked. An incredibly large bias has now been introduced into your statistics.  How can they be trusted?

Is It That Cut-and-dry?

In a nutshell, yes.  While Google analytics are great, free tools, the data you collect are not entirely accurate.  Server-side analytics are generally more accurate and don’t rely on cookies or JavaScript.  Every time a visitor hits a Web page, they leave a footprint of date, time, page requested, any parameters attached to that page, browser, operating system, IP address, referring page and any status codes that indicate errors, redirects or caching checks.  This always happens.

Google’s JavaScript code can’t catch all of that. To track a user back and forth, Google needs to rely on pre-existing data and cookies that the visitor may or may not use. In this day and age of Web-based scripts and security, many Web programmers have begun to use technology called server-side redirects to masquerade how certain parameters are used so hackers can’t take down their site.  These server-side redirects are not pages, which means you can’t put Javascript onto them, which further means more skewing of data, even if people have all their cookies enabled.

So doesn’t it make sense to use analytics tools that read data you already are collecting? When you rely on Google for analytics, you’ve just increased the bandwidth used by your visitor. (Ask Time Warner, this will be an issue in the future.) You’ve also increased the time it takes to display that page, because you have to wait for the connections to Google to be made, processed and returned to the visitor.

So Why Does It Matter?

For your personal blog, or your start-up, brick-and-mortar small business, Google Analytics is a fine tool. For the most part it  gets the job done. But when you heavily rely on accurate visitor traffic, you need something that analyzes ALL your data.  If your average target demographic is not a dumb novice computer user, you’re probably missing data on many of them.

I recently sat through a presentation where the primary marketing officer talked about multi-variable testing on creative and landing pages and the usual lather, rinse, repeat that every good marketer should be able to preach. They talked of diverse audiences and of key words, SEM, SEO, SMM, ad spends, tracking and analytics and pretty much every marketing buzzword you could think of.  Lastly, they lauded their clients’ organic placement. Yet, I ran simple searches for their key phrases and only came up with one of their clients in the top-ten.  This made me suspect.

Post-meeting, I approached one and asked about A-B testing of creative to landing pages and of methods of tracking used.  On cue, I was told they test multiple creative ads and ”of course” they test multiple landing pages with each of the many creative ads.

Yet, I was shocked that a multi-national company that effectively flaunted their reputation in this presentation so matter-of-factly stated they relied solely on Google Analytics. This company has dozens of large organizations as clients.  Each of these clients should have far outgrown a solution that consists only of Google Analytics.  However, this entire marketing department that juggles dozens of client sites uses the free, unrobust tool.

To Use or Not To Use?

Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying don’t use Google Analytics. I’m saying it shouldn’t be the primary means on which you base your marketing decisions. Worse yet, it should not be the basis of marketing decisions you make for others.

While no official press release from the company seems to exist either way on the subject, Time Warner’s VP of Public Relations, Alex Dudley seemed to tell one blog reported exactly why there’s no DOCSIS upgrade in sight for Texas, North Carolina and Rochester, NY:

Time Warner PR: No Caps, No DOCSIS

The image at right depects a Twitter search result from the conversation between Stacey Higginbotham from Gigaom and Time Warner’s PR Rep, Alex Dudley.

Stacy appears to ask is/was DOCSIS 3 planned and if so, was it tied into the bandwidth tiered pricing trials.

Mr. Dudley’s answer was a resounding yes, it was a part of their consumption based billing (cbb) trial, but “we all know how you feel about that.”

Now, speculating a moment here, does that mean that Time Warner isn’t unrolling DOCSIS 3.0 because the consumers voiced concern against unfair tiered billing?  Seriously?

In markets where there really is no choice: Time Warner is telling their customers: You’re stuck with us.  Go pay for substandard service, or pay additional, still unsubstantiated fees and we won’t upgrade your speed or technology.  All because their costs are purportedly going up. Something they swear to the press, but not to the SEC.  But keep telling the media how “Internet brownouts” could happen and how Sunday’s 3-hour outage was a part of that.  Your Q1 financials yielded “healthy numbers,” growing 5% to almost $4.5 Billion according to today’s financial press release. Oh, and look. TWC is up over 11% on today’s news.  There’s more revenue.

Every network engineer knows that high data traffic usage doesn’t explain your broken routers any more than how far you drive affects your car’s glove compartment capacity.  Being greedy, however, might.

Everybody Else Is Doing It: Cablevision unrolls 101Mpbs Speeds for Under $100

In the meantime, the 5th largest cable company, Cablevision announced their DOCSIS plan to start May 11th. They will unroll DOCSIS 3.0 at a whopping 101Mbps download speed to everyone in their coverage area starting May 11th.  That’s right, 101Mbps, twice as fast plus one (just for a kicker, I presume)  than Time Warner’s original plans and Verizon FiOS’s current offering.

What’s the price tag?  Only $99.95/month, compared to Comcast and Verizon who offer $140 for half the speed.  While I’m on the subject, let’s note here that Cablevision’s standard service is 15Mbps at only $30/month compared to Time Warner’s 10Mbps for $45/month.  To get 15Mbps from Time Warner, you need to pay for “Turbo” which was listed at one point at $15 additional per month.  Cablevision’s equivalent of Time Warner’s “Turbo” brings you up to 30Mbps is only $10 more per month.

Again, Time Warner:  If your incredibly smaller competitor can do this without imposing caps or additional fees and isn’t realizing problems, why can’t you?  You’re huge.  You have an “advanced fiber network,” right?

Again, I challenge you to take the higher road and not use sarcasm with your customers.  Offer the service.  You bought the equipment.  If you want to triple people’s bills to $150/month, then do it with an uncapped DOCSIS 3 service.  Leave the tiered stuff to the people who truly would use the lower-cost, slower network, as your information proclaims.

Using publicly accessible financial statements filed with the SEC and readily available on Google Finance, Time Warner’s total revenue has nearly doubled from $8.8 Billion at end-of-year 2005 to a whopping $17.2 Billion at end-of-year 2008.  Gross profit has mirrored those numbers, growing from $4.9 Billion in 2005 to over $9 Billion in 2008. The percentage  increases are as close as you’ll see to a 1:1 revenue-to-profit ratio.The argument that expenses have increased are grossly understated as well.  In 2005, General and Administrative expenses were $1.5 Billion.  In 2008, $2.8 Billion.  Again, the same ratio as revenue and gross profit.

The Line item for “Unusual Expense” is more interesting:  $42 Million in 2005, up slightly in 2006 and down to $23 Million in 2007.  Mysteriously, there is a $14.9 Billion figure in 2008. Presumably that would be the big set-up before this fall out.  But, through 2007, revenue and profits went up, operating costs went up proportionately and “unusual” costs went down.

Let’s give them the benefit up the doubt and call 2008’s massive $14.9 Billion expenditure a system upgrade. It’s not a “usual” expense.  It would be a capital improvement expense for  more fiber, better equipment (although my service hasn’t changed and I’m still using an out-dated cable modem and waiting on DOCSIS 3.0).   Looking at the financial trends,  that all the experts like to look at, tell me how that won’t be recouped in about two years?

Time Warner – who are you trying to play at here?

You realize your customers have been using your Internet service to be able to access this kind of public, readily-available information.  As a result, we are now a world of more intelligent consumers.  It’s marketing 101: build a relationship with your customers.

Time Warner COO, Landel Hobbs as quoted in E-Week:

“We realize our communication to customers about these trials has been inadequate, and we apologize for any frustration we caused…”

“We’ve heard the passionate feedback, and we’ve taken action to address our customers’ concerns.”

No, sir you haven’t.  Please explain to us how increased bandwidth usage increases your costs. At the top-tiers of Internet backbones, companies are charged for the capacity of their connections, not for the amount of data passing through them.

Mr Hobbs:  your public-record financial numbers do not match the costs you are claiming.  You cannot justify a more-than-tripled price point for a service without justification.

But it would seem that Mr. Hobbs is making quite a few really interesting statements recently.  Ars Technica is reporting Hobbs has some choice words about FCC about getting bailout money and why this is “not the time, nor…the appropriate proceeding to engage in a debate about the need for net neutrality.”

From Matthew Lasar in that same article:

Golly gosh, an observer might wonder, when exactly would be the right time to have a discussion over at the FCC about bandwidth cap plans that potentially ding consumers for accessing non-cable provider video content?

Mr Hobbs:  You cannot pretend that limiting Internet service and restricting free Internet consumption does not infringe upon the fundamental concepts of Net Neutrality.

Time Warner is truly trying to pull a fast one on their customers in an apparent greed that is scarily similar to the financial sector’s greed.  Perhaps this is why they’re rolling this service out in select markets where you have no other threat of competition?  I see you’ve done your SWOT analysis.  Now try some customer relationship building before it’s too late.

Google didn’t disappoint, keeping with the tradition of their April Fool’s pranks.  This year, they carried a unified message with Google’s CADIE, and it would appear that every department got involved in this effort.

CADIE (Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity) is Google’s new I-can-think-for-you artificial intelligence supercomputer.  CADIE has been featured on (or has she taken over?) many of the Google properties and blogs.

Given a female persona and voice, CADIE apparently learns and acts from what it sees others doing.  Stepping out of a bad technology/”Big Brother” movie, CADIE is able to make decisions for your, based on general socially accepted behavior.  Disregarding ethics, completely, CADIE has a tricked-out home page in Blogger that mimmicks many adolescent MySpace pages.  CADIE’s YouTube page follows suit, with a great amateurish background. CADIE’s justification is that it’s scraped the Internet, looked at what is socially acceptable and presented “herself” accordingly.

• Google Images,
• GMail (Auto-reply)
• Google Maps
• Google Mobile
• Google Documents
• Google Earth
• Google Knol
• Google Code
• YouTube
• Google on Twitter
• Official Google Blog
• LatLong
• Google Chrome Blog
• Google Code Blog

Did I miss one? Leave me a comment and let me know.

I’ll have a whole wrap-up of the Web’s best April Fools pranks later in the week. If you can’t wait, Search Engine Land has a nice write-up of what’s going on today. Dont’ forget about the annual new products at Think Geek.

Does anyone know where Matt Cutts is today?

Now, the candidate who took the Internet by storm is looking for a Search Engine Marketing expert. He – or his campaign – apparently knows there’s more to SEM than stuffing HTML code on a page.

From the official job posting:

We’re looking for internet experts who strongly support Barack Obama for President and have expertise in one or more of:

• Search Engine Marketing
• Search Engine Optimization
• Online Media Planning (Internet Display Ad Buying)
• Flash Banner Animation and Design (and Web Design)
• Ad Optimization Analytics
• DART Ad Server Trafficking
• Web Video Ad Editing / Producing

Not only are these specific talents, but the job posting is on ClickZ, a forum for Internet Marketing professionals.

Color me impressed. Someone in that campaign did his or her homework. Looks like that campaign is gearing up. But what will this person have to do in the realm of SEO work? A Google search for Obama already returns the following in order:

1. Obama for America – offical site
2. His healthcare plan
3. The Wikipedia entry
4. His U. S. Senate main page
5. His U. S. Senate contact page
6. Obama’s MySpace page
7. Obama’s Twitter page

CNN’s coverage of Obama takes spots 8 and 9 and a survey company rounds out the top-10.

I suppose the individual to fill this position has to get Obama’s Facebook profile (16th), Flickr profile (30th) and the my.barackobama.com (18th) site up into the top-10. Who knows.

OK, for the squeamish, truly, it’s nothing. I’ve never has any surgical procedure outside of having my wisdom teeth pulled. When I laid down on that table and saw nothing but surgical masks, gloves and those bright, silver surgical lights, I really started to wonder what I was getting myself into.

But then, the next few events happened in a span of less than 6 minutes:

• my eye was taped open (weird, but not scary)
• I was pelted with lots of eye drops
• there was a fan sound and some air
• a lot of blurry lights and happenings above my head
• a few loud buzzes

After all that, I was happy to find the lights and the faces looking down on me back in better focus and the doctor said “you did great.”

What, that’s it? The whole procedure was about 9 1/₂ minutes. Wow.

It’s been six days now and I am – and have been – pain free. Every morning my eye is dry, but that’s to be expected for the next several weeks. The only change to my daily routine has been lots of eye drops. I need to use preservative-free artificial tears every half-hour (will be every hour later this week). I also have had to put antibiotic drops in four times a day. Yeah, that’s it.

After Friday’s hearings, it’s apparent that LASIK is safe, but as with any medical procedure, you need to find a competent doctor. This is not a one-size-fits-all, shop for the best price procedure. After sitting in and reading up on a number of doctors in the area, I selected Dr. Scott MacRae at Strong Vision. They took extra time before allowing me to schedule the surgery. They actually made me see a specialist for a consultation because there was a slight concern because I had larger optic nerves than most people in my demographic. It turned out to be nothing to worry about, but Strong’s doctors were more than cautious about not rushing me into it.

Do I recommend it?  Highly.  Just don’t scrimp on the service.

First, Googler and practical funnyman extraordinaire Matt Cutts decided he was “skipping April Fools this year.” What?! OK, well so it turned out that his post, itself, was actually the joke. But really Matt, we expect more from you than a faux Firefox tattoo. Although I did like the iPhone feature gag.

As for Google, Virgle was neat and had a bunch of people talking. But the Google Custom Time was truly clever. How many people actually fell for that one?

G’Day – With MATE was a bit obvious, though, wasn’t it? Was this a bad spin-off from a another team that tried to capture the creativity of Custom Time?

Since Google owns YouTube now, I guess you have to give them credit for the Rick Rolling, I guess. What? You weren’t RickRolled? Another great prank with a prime property, we’ve now have another Internet lingo added to our vocabulary – Rickroll, verb, to force someone to watch the video for Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up.

But What I Really Wanted To See…

Where was the Microsoft logo on the Yahoo! home page? Come on, Jerry. Really, now. If the ship is going down, wear the damage as a badge of honor. If Yahoo! will sail away on its own, then use it as a symbolic middle finger to the giant corporate bully. Either way, you’ll get people talking, some PR and perhaps a stock boost when we all find out it was a joke.

If Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang finally caves in and accepts a buyout offer, it would still make Micro-hoo! number two behind Google. But Jerry Yang has always thought that he would be the one to lead Yahoo! out of its current slide.

According to All Things Digital, Microsoft purportedly placed their offer quietly, and tried to bully Yahoo! into a response or Microsoft would go public with the information. I guess Yahoo! couldn’t find a result fast enough.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s letter to Yahoo!’s board of directors has been acquired by Silicon Alley Insider. In their own words,Microsoft claims to “have great respect for Yahoo!” and thinks this deal will make them “better positioned to compete in the online services market.” The Press Conference Call and details from Microsoft is available to read online and includes a Webcast and related PowerPoint presentation.

Clearly, Microsoft is trying to flex their muscles and show that they’re still a contender in the Search game. But really, throughout 2007, Google maintained a 64% share in all U. S. searches. Microsoft’s Live search never saw better than 12.9% in 2007, depending on which numbers you look at. comScore tallied Google as only 56% share of searches. Together, Yahoo! and MSN/Live searches still couldn’t equal the share percentage Google held all year.

But search isn’t the reason for this huge gamble of an offer. This is about really ad revenue. Yahoo’s properties are currently the #1 trafficked Web sites, Microsoft’s are #5. Google, public enemy number one, hits the most trafficked properties lists at #2.

But does more online traffic really equate to more online advertising revenue? Clearly Microsoft thinks so. Their offer letter to Yahoo discusses the use of economies of scale in online advertising platforms. Oh wait – do I have this right? Someone built a better mousetrap and Microsoft wants to buy it and brand it as its own. Haven’t we’ve seen this before?

Groundhog day is tomorrow. It’s that festive day that inspired a movie about a ever-recurring situation. Perhaps Microsoft released their offer a day early? No, that can’t be. Microsoft never beats their deadlines … unless, of course, what they release is seriously flawed and broken. Hmm…..