Irreverent Thinking

The New Media world finally shows that it has lost the plot by the great and mighty Nielsen deciding somewhat belatedly that page views are now not the way to measure sites and the way to measure them is by time spent on the site. What is going on?

I think, aside from the obvious mistakes that time-based measurement causes we need to realise that the web is used for different things by different people. Comparing Google’s page-view/time connected metric against, say, Facebook is just plain wrong - it’s like comparing time spent in your car versus time spent in the office - it is completely unrelated.

What it did make me think about was the (sort of) obvious next step of putting a Google search onto Facebook. No ones really goes to Google with the aim of staying there, it is a transit place and in fact the better the answer means the quicker the journey starts (so a huge poke in the eye to Nielsen!).

Many of us now certain forums, communities and other such places as regular drop-in centres and it would be so convenient to integrate these together. I know some people would argue that the Google toolbar means you don’t need to do this but it would be a great chance for Facebook (and Google) to start to tailor the results to the search request based on what they (jointly?) know.