Amazing, because I just finished a post about Google’s me-too-ism affliction. Amazing, because as MG Siegler points out, the Mountain View, Calif.–based Internet giant will make hardware.

Amazing, because Google thinks that it will actually be able to crack the consumer electronics marketplace. Amazing to think that this company will build a supply chain and manage relationships with retailers and get people to buy it. (Or it can sell directly over the web, much like it did with its Nexus phones — pun intended.) Amazing, considering that the company’s track record on products beyond its core offerings — search, advertising and communication-oriented software — is spotty at best.

Amazing, to see one of smartest companies show such lack of discipline and self awareness. Amazing!

P.S.: By the way, this is the mystery Google device that Stacey Higginbotham reported last week.

Like Dropbox, Google’s storage service, called Drive, is a response to the growth of Internet-connected mobile devices like smartphones and tablets and the rise of “cloud computing,” or storing files online so that they can be retrieved from multiple devices, these people said.

Drive allows people to store photos, documents and videos on Google’s servers so that they could be accessible from any Web-connected device and allows them to easily share the files with others, these people said. If a person wants to email a video shot from a smartphone, for instance, he can upload it to the Web through the Drive mobile app and email people a link to the video rather than a bulky file. [The Wall Street Journal.]

The question we should all be asking: How is it that Google, with its vast army of smart people and billions of dollars, couldn’t build a cloud storage drive over past five years? Why did it fail in its previous attempts and how is it that a company whose core competency includes “infrastructure” has failed to build this very basic cloud offering? And most importantly, how can a company that is intimate with the concept of cloud and owns Android, the mobile computing platform, not be able to understand the strategic importance of an “online storage drive”?

What’s Wrong With Google?

The answer for those questions lies in what I see is a growing problem at the Mountain View, Calif.-based search giant — me-too-ism. Saying that won’t win me any fans — certainly not amongst the Google faithful — but the fact remains that with the exception of “search & advertising” & “communication” — its two areas of core expertise, Google has been unable to predict where technologies are going to lead the society (and yes that does include business.) Android? That came through an acquisition and that too at the insistence of one of Google’s founders.

Where Google does have a stellar track record is web infrastructure and innovations in network design and architecture. And that is because, infrastructure is Google’s DNA. The companies, I have always maintained, have a DNA and it is what makes the companies self-aware, which in turn defines how they view the world, how they compete, hire people and most importantly build products. Google has spent a lot of its corporate energy chasing Facebook instead of focusing on what was really important — not only its present, but its future.

Social as it stands today is a battle between two companies — Facebook and Twitter. Google’s quest to become social is making it do some unnatural things. Instead, Google should have been figuring out ways to use its infrastructure and delivering magic on the Android phones. Some good examples include Google Voice on Android or Google Mail on Android.

The reason they are so impressive are because they leverage Google’s awesome infrastructure. A virtual online storage drive should have been top priority for the company. Why? Because it would have enhanced company’s Android experience. Many of Google’s customers — handset makers like HTC who are using Android are turning to Dropbox to add more space to the phone.  In an interview  Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston told us:

Dropbox can help deliver on the “connected anywhere” promises that have been around for years, but that he doesn’t think have truly materialized with regard to data. But once consumers experience having their “stuff” with them wherever they are, it will be “like the first day of the rest of your life,” he explained, like when we first were able to boost productivity by using e-mail and other applications on our phones.

A month later, when Houston and I chatted on stage at our GigaOM RoadMap conference in November 2011, Drew hinted that the company was looking beyond what was simply storage.

Dropbox will also be able to store not only a person’s photos but the metadata about that photo, the location information. “All of these things become possible. We can index all that metadata in the pictures and then tell you where the picture is taken, and maybe give you all the pictures taken within ten mile radius.” This sounds like a lot more than storage.

Google, too, should have been looking at its “drive” from the perspective as Dropbox long before now. It would have allowed the company to get better traction with app developers and at the same time differentiate from its biggest mobile rival, Apple.

Google is really good at finding information and using the “drive” as a hub to connect to various services, and then finding information on top of that should have been a primary focus for the company. Instead, it went chasing Facebook and social. Much like Microsoft kept chasing and chasing and chasing opportunities in search and advertising.

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According to the WSJ, the device is “a home-entertainment system that streams music wirelessly throughout the home and would be marketed under the company’s own brand.” It’s reportedly been developed over the last few years from within Google’s Android unit, and could possibly stream other media (like video?) to connected devices as well. But to me, the whole thing sounds a whole heck of a lot like what Sonos already does.

Of course, what’s most significant about the story isn’t the type of device that Google is developing, but that it’s considering making hardware at all. Up until this point, Google’s Android unit has developed software that it offers up to consumer electronics manufacturers and lets them do the actual device making. That’s worked for Android mobile phones, tablets and its Google TV devices.

But with the development of Google’s wireless streaming device, as well as its pending acquisition of Motorola Mobility, it appears the company is shifting away from a pure software play to building its own branded hardware as well. Whether or not that’s a smart strategy remains to be seen — the consumer electronics world is notoriously cut-throat, with low margins and intense competition between device makers. That said, having its own hardware capabilities could enable Google to gain a little bit more control over its own destiny, as it positions its Android software and devices against Apple’s vast iOS platform and ecosystems being developed by CE makers like Samsung.

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The code, which can be viewed with any browser, shows a button labeled “Add to My Drive,” but the button itself is currently not visible to end users within Google Docs. Notable about this is the capitalization of “My Drive” — The Journal reported that the product will simply be branded as Drive, but this suggests that at least the personal storage component of it may actually be called My Drive.

It’s unclear when exactly Google added the button to the Google Docs code. A quick Google search revealed that the Spanish Tecno-Net blog stumbled across the code snippet as well some time last month.

Update: Traces of the product apparently popped up in Google Docs as early as last September, as one commenter pointed out below. Also, take a look at some of the rather interesting things reader Brian Ussery has unearthed.

Image courtesy (CC-BY-SA) of Flickr user Sebastian Fuss.

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Updated: Path and Pinterest are probably two of the hottest social services right now, racking up millions of users and generating an ocean of favorable coverage. But both have gotten tripped up by the same thing that has made the social web a minefield for both Facebook and Google: namely, decisions that put their interests ahead of their users and a lack of disclosure about what was going on behind the scenes or under the hood of their services. Will these missteps spell doom for either company? Probably not. But the backlash is a welcome reminder that for social apps, the trust of users is not something to be toyed with.

Path, a mobile photo-sharing app that expanded to become a full-fledged mobile social app when it relaunched a couple of months ago, was co-founded and is run by Dave Morin, an early Facebook staffer. You might think the privacy blowups that the giant social network has experienced over the past couple of years would make Path pretty sensitive to handling user data properly, but that doesn’t seem to be the case: Earlier this week, controversy erupted when it was revealed that Path was uploading all of its users’ contacts to the company’s servers, something many users have taken as a breach of their privacy.

It may not seem like a big deal, but you should still disclose it

In public comments on the blog post that first brought this to light, Morin apologized and said that Path will fix the problem in an upcoming version by requiring users to explicitly opt-in. He also tried to defend the company’s behavior by saying that it is the “industry best practice.” As a commenter on the Hacker News thread about the issue put it, however, a better phrase might be “industry lowest common denominator.”

Update: Path’s CEO later apologized in a blog post for the way the service handled users’ data, and has said that in an attempt to make up for its mistake it has deleted any address data that was stored on its servers.

It is true that other apps and services also do this, including WhatsApp, Beluga, Hipster and others, and the ability to do so has been a part of Apple’s iOS since 2008. Others have also noted in Path’s defense that Apple allows apps to upload contacts without explicitly asking users for permission – something that it doesn’t do for other data such as a user’s location. And it is also true that importing a user’s address book makes it a lot easier to scan for friends who are already on Path and that this can be a benefit for a user in the long run.

That said, however, the anger and shock that Path’s move seems to have triggered among many users — some of whom say they have deleted the app and will never return — makes it pretty clear that even if this behavior has benefits for users, the lack of disclosure about what Path was planning to do is a deal breaker for many.

Pinterest, meanwhile, did something completely different to upset some of its users, but the underlying lesson is the same: The company — which says it has built up a massive user base of more than 10 million in just two months — is a content-sharing service where fans of different products and websites can post (or “pin”) their favorites. Since popular posts can drive a lot of traffic to websites that sell these products, Pinterest has been adding affiliate links that generate revenue for the site when users click on them.

Lesson: Never take your users for granted

As many of the company’s defenders have pointed out, this behavior makes a huge amount of sense for Pinterest, since it is providing a free service and needs to generate revenue somehow. But as with Path’s move — which also makes a lot of sense from a purely utilitarian point of view — Pinterest failed to disclose what it was doing to users or at least failed to make it obvious. Perhaps the company thought (as Path likely did) that users wouldn’t mind. But it turns out that plenty of them do mind.

Path’s decision seems the more surprising of the two, if only because there are so many examples of similar undisclosed or opt-in-by-default moves that have triggered a huge amount of backlash, and not just for Facebook but for Google as well. The search giant’s engineers also clearly thought that merging people’s email contact lists with their new Buzz service was a great idea — after all, it was the most efficient way to populate a user’s follow list. But many users disagreed, and so did the federal government, and the resulting backlash arguably helped kill Google’s first attempt at a real social service.

The lesson here is that for social apps, the trust of users is paramount, and the best way to maintain that trust is to be as open as possible about everything that is occurring, particularly if it involves a user’s personal data. Whatever you are doing with it may not seem like a big deal to you, but better to be open about it than have it revealed by someone else, at which point you look sneaky. As Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has put it, “Trust is the new black,” and it never goes out of style.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Lars Plougmann and Christian Ditatompel

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As Facebook draws close to the billion-user mark and a $100-billion market valuation, the giant social network’s dominance has reignited old fears about the decline and fall of the open web. John Battelle argues that we need a manifesto for the truly open Internet in order to rally the troops, but blogging veteran Robert Scoble says it is too late and he has already given up the fight. And longtime technology watcher and investor Esther Dyson says we need to remember that the Internet is prone to cycles of open vs. closed. In the end, the only thing that determines whether a closed model succeeds is the willingness of users to put up with its restrictions. For Facebook, that is both its biggest strength and its biggest weakness.

Not that long ago, the open web seemed to be the default for most users: America Online, one of the longest-lasting of the old walled-garden portals, was mostly an afterthought, used only by older consumers who were tied to its dial-up business (a business that even now continues to provide the lion’s share of AOL’s declining profits). Google was the model of the open web, with its objective algorithms and its commitment to sending users away instead of trying to keep them on its site. Websites and blogs were run on open platforms like WordPress (see disclosure), TypePad or Blogger, and anyone could link to anyone.

Then along came Facebook, which took the ultimate “gated community” approach right from the outset by restricting access to university students. As it grew and expanded, it maintained this walled-garden strategy by making it easy for users (and their precious data) to get into its network but much harder for them to get out — something Google highlighted in an attack on the social network’s data-hoarding policies. And the trend has only continued with the rollout of Facebook’s frictionless-sharing apps, which effectively make the network the hub of personal activity of all kinds, even newspaper reading.

If the garden is appealing, the walls don’t matter

What is the benefit for users that makes them so eager to place their entire online experience in the hands of a single company? The same as it was with America Online: namely, the fact that it provides a friendlier, safer — and ultimately easier to use — version of the Internet for non-geeks. As John Battelle puts it:

The open web is full of spam, shady operators, and blatant falsehoods. Outside of a relatively small percentage of high quality sites, most of the web is chock full of popup ads and other interruptive come-ons [but] in the curated gardens of places like Apple and Facebook, the weeds are kept to a minimum, and the user experience is just . . . better.

For open-web advocates like Dave Winer, there is almost nothing to like about this phenomenon — or, to shift the spotlight from Facebook for a moment, the fact that a powerful, global real-time information network like Twitter is controlled by a single corporate entity. The risks for Twitter users have been highlighted by the company’s announcement that it will censor tweets if asked to do so and by attempts on the part of countries like Brazil (and even the U.S.) to force the company to either turn over data or block specific accounts that they disapprove of.

Open alternatives such as Status.net and the would-be Facebook competitor Diaspora exist, and they have attracted support from the hard-core geek community. But they have made virtually zero impact on the vast majority of Internet users, who seem more than happy to disregard all the warnings about proprietary models coming from open advocates, including the man who invented the World Wide Web.

If there is one thing that we can learn from the runaway success of Apple, it is that the vast majority of users don’t particularly care about abstract concepts like openness or metaphors like walled gardens. What they care about, as Chris Saad of Echo and Dataportability.org noted recently, is that the products or services that matter to them about are easy to use and provide some benefit to them. In effect, they are willing to make a trade-off between the virtues of data portability or the downsides of having a single entity control their experience and the benefit they get from that product or service.

If you stop being useful, users will revolt

If you have a really attractive garden, users are more than happy to spend time there without moaning about the walls or the gates. In a nutshell, that explains Facebook’s dramatic rise: It has made connecting with friends and sort-of friends so easy and provided so many obvious benefits — photo sharing being one of the main ones — that most users have been blissfully unconcerned about giving so much of their personal data to the network. And while some argue they should be paid for their membership, others clearly feel that the trade-off is more than worth it.

So far, so good. But the looming risk for both Facebook and any other provider that wants to control the output of its users — including Twitter and Google — is that even complacent users can become militant when the service they depend on mistreats them in some way. We have seen flashes of that whenever Facebook changes its privacy settings, when Twitter changed its censorship rules, and even when Google started fiddling with its search results to promote its own social network instead of remaining objective about its content. And we see flashes of it when Facebook blocks content, as it has with breast-feeding photos — causing demonstrations by outraged user groups.

While none of these tremors has turned into a seismic shift so far, that doesn’t mean they won’t. AOL seemed so dominant in its time that it managed to convince Time Warner that it was worth $160 billion, in what is still one of the most disastrous technology deals of all time. But it faded because users realized that the benefits of being inside its garden were far outweighed by the downsides and that the open Internet wasn’t so bad after all. Will users eventually come to the same conclusion about Apple or Facebook — or even Google?

For social networks and tools like Facebook and Twitter, the relationship with users is an even more fragile one. Facebook’s 800 million users may seem like an unassailable moat around the giant social network, but if enough of them decide they are better off elsewhere, Facebook will become a ghost town. Twitter could easily meet the same fate. As Mark Zuckerberg prepares to count his billions, he needs to remember that in the end, it’s not open or closed that wins — it’s useful and not useful.

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After all, what does Google have to gain from opening up a place just a few miles from its swish base in West London? Sure, the new space is at the heart of the city’s much-hyped “Silicon Roundabout” area… but is that really enough?

Now more solid details are emerging about what the company plans to do with the 25,000 square foot space, though, I have to admit they’re intriguing.

According to the London Evening Standard, 4-5 Bonhill Street will open next month under the name of “Campus”, and essentially become a co-working space for London startups:

It will feature open plan office spaces where firms can rent desks, along with cafes, meeting rooms and event spaces. Google will also have an office to give advice to firms.
Plans for the building seen by the Evening Standard show space for over 200 desks, along with lockers to leave expensive equipment, table football tables and even tea making stations. Small wooden booths can be hired to work on sensitive projects, while upper floors feature open spaces and even a cinema area for presentations.

Google will keep plenty of desks in the building too, but what’s particularly intriguing is that other companies will be moving in as well. I understand that Seedcamp, the pan-European incubator, will be moving its operations entirely into the Campus building, and it seems that other groups including Springboard and TechHub will also be using the space.

That makes it a smart move for Google in more ways than one.

Most obviously it gives it increased visibility in the developer community: London’s a city where small distances can make a big difference, and while its main Victoria complex is only four miles from the new building, that is in fact a world away for many of the engineers who are clamoring to be near the heart of the British capital’s technology scene.

In the short term this gives it a boost at a time when rivals like Facebook, Twitter and others are starting to increase their British presence. And that means it could be useful in the longer term for hiring and even acquisitions.

In addition, Campus also allows Google to do a little public relations work, acting as a champion of the local technology industry and working alongside the British government: no small thing when the company has been under fire for paying just $1.9 million in U.K. taxes on more than $3 billion in revenues.

But while the deal appears to have been blessed by the authorities — though Google hasn’t yet answered my questions on what incentives it was offered to open Campus — the truth is that the government may be smiling about this deal through gritted teeth.

The authorities have made a concerted effort to woo major technology companies into the area — dubbed the “Tech City” development — in the hopes that big businesses can fill the vast space left behind when the Olympics finishes this summer.

But while the official Tech City group has been bending over backwards to get Google to sign on the dotted line and take over a significant office space in the Olympic Park, it seems that Campus may be the best it can manage. Instead of committing to East London as Downing Street had hoped, over the past few months Google has leased hundreds of thousands of square footage elsewhere in the city and continued negotiations to move its operation to an 8 million square foot space in North London — just outside the Tech City zone.

So while government officials may crow about bringing a major Silicon Valley name into their orbit, the reality is that Google’s only serving one master here: itself.

Update: Shortly after publication a Google spokesman responded to my question of whether there were any incentives given for opening Campus: there were none, he said, and Google is “just looking to help fuel the community and support their ideas and concepts.”

Photographs used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr users mbiddulph and osde-info

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But while the Google founders went on to become dotcom billionaires at the head of one of the Internet’s most powerful companies, Marchiori turned down the offer of a job with them and returned to Italy to work on his own projects.

And today, finally, he unveiled what it is he’s been tinkering away on all this time: a social search engine called Volunia that he claims represents the “third generation of search.”

And what is it? Well, that’s hard to tell.

Not only is the service not yet open to the public — although Volunia promises a hundred thousand users will be let in today — but the hour-long press conference to launch the site was held entirely in Italian, struggled with technical problems and had very little in the way of actual demos to show us what the service really did.

The best visuals were a handful of ropey screenshots that suggested little about what was on offer. Most reports seem to repeat the rhetoric without offering any significant insight into how the site works.

So given the lack of hard information, here’s what we have so far:

Volunia is a search engine that indexes and maps out the web and then ranks it through a mixture of algorithms and the opinions of visitors. Marchiori alluded to the fact that it was intended to be like GPS for the web — but said it does not use semantic technology.

At the same time, Volunia provides a place for social interaction in a sidebar that lets users talk to each other and to the owners of the websites they are visiting; a service that seems to be half chatroom, half SideWiki, the universal commenting engine introduced — and then killed — by Google.

And that, for all of the words, seems to be the heart of it.

It’s a search engine that lets people talk to each other while they surf around the web. Marchiori was keen to stress that he wasn’t trying to take Google on, and intended to simply offer a new way of doing things, but the comparisons will inevitably be made.

I’m not going to pass judgment on the product itself, however, not least for the simple reason that I haven’t seen it in action.

But there are a few conceptual problems I have with the project as it stands.

First, there is the simple question of whether it can live up to its own hype. The approach taken so far leaves it wide open to criticism of over-promising, with Volunia doing some serious PR ahead of the launch, mainly with the Italian press and odd little pre-announcements. Such bluster usually end in disappointment — a perfect reason why you should never launch your startup in the press. Who remembers Cuil, the site that promised to take Google head on but turned into a $33 million turkey?

Second, the idea that social search has not been done is only true if you have a very particular view of what social search is. Google and Yahoo have talked a lot about it over the years — and Google has finally got around to seriously implementing that vision with its awkwardly named Search Plus Your World features. But the reality is that social search is something different today than it was to this previous generation of web companies. Right now, Facebook and Twitter are social search, because they are where people interact.

That doesn’t look much like traditional web search — certainly not the sort of search engine that Marchiori has spent his life building — but it’s hard to tell whether Volunia is a step forward or a move back.

And third, regardless of how good your service is, does it work to compete like this? Google has slugged its way to the top, and seems more likely to be unseated by antitrust investigations than straight rivals like Bing. Facebook, meanwhile, is preparing to fill up its coffers from an IPO that will probably make it unassailable in the social space as we understand it. Once somebody has won a market, is it worth fighting them on their own ground — or is it better to simply try and work out where the next big developments online are going to come from?

The Volunia team, backed by serial entrepreneur Mariano Pireddu, may be playing down their attempt to revolutionize the world. Marchiori explicitly told journalists at the press conference “not to expect the moon”.

But evidence suggests they think they can make a significant impact. By my count, judging by the various landing pages, the site appears to be launching in a dozen languages, including English, Chinese, Spanish and Japanese. That means it’s either ambitious or covering as many bases as possible — or both. It is not something that can be dismissed as merely an experiment.

Reaction online seems mixed at best. To me, everything from Volunia so far seems to suggest it’s trying to solve a problem that nobody needs to solve right now. I can’t wait to see it open up and find out whether I’m right or wrong.

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Below you’ll find four key take-aways from teaming up with Google. I believe they can be applied by any startup, in any industry.

Lesson 1: Set the agenda

Consumer adoption of the mobile web is outpacing the rate at which mobile web experiences are being built. In less than three years, more people will access the web via a mobile device than by any other way. Google recognized this trend, and now its showing others where the world is headed.

By painting the bigger picture for everyone else, Google is also framing what the future will look like. Setting the agenda may sound like a lofty goal for a startup, but that’s what you should be focused on.

Startup companies are all about painting the big picture before anyone else can see it. Without a big picture idea, who will join you as a co-founder on your high-risk, potentially hallucinogenic quest? Who will fund you? Who will buy your product, rent you office space, listen to your pitch, or support your ideas? It’s this kind of foresight that creates new opportunities in the marketplace.

Lesson 2: Make your innovation tangible

Now that you’ve created your framework, you need to show it to your audience.

Google goes to great lengths to make its products approachable for users and developers. And they work hard to get users to test out new products as soon as possible.

For the GoMobile initiative, they built the GoMo Meter — a mobile preview tool that “shows you how your current site looks on a smartphone, and provides a report on what’s working and what you can do better.”

The GoMo Meter embodies several aspects of Google’s philosophy when it comes to new products. It has a low barrier to start, requires no commitment to use it, and offers easy access with a simple and obvious interface, all tied to a topic that interests each of us endlessly — ourselves (or, in this case, our websites).

How do you make your startup’s innovation tangible?

Start by figuring out what makes your innovation meaningful to your customers. What do they see and feel in their initial product encounter? When they ask themselves, “What is this?” and “Is it for me?” guide them to the right answer.

Look too for the human behaviors that your product is working on. It’s humans who will make decisions and judgments about your products, and you can tap into some enduring human traits in well-known ways. For example, after successfully raising a VC round, Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman mentioned that well-known VC Roelof Botha only invests in consumer companies that let consumers indulge in one of the seven deadly sins.

Lastly, give users something obvious and easy to do. This could be watching a video or slideshow, clicking a button to initiate an action, entering a few data points, showing some before and after screenshots — anything that leads to a tangible and specific interaction.

As a startup, if you get people interacting with your product, you start to influence their behaviors. Their behaviors then influence their beliefs, which again influence their behaviors in a virtuous cycle.

You could try to influence beliefs. Untold millions are spent everyday attempting to influence beliefs – that’s much of the advertising you see. But it’s very hard both to influence beliefs and to measure changes in beliefs to learn if you’re effective. So focus on behaviors and let them lead to beliefs.

A simple way to prove that you want to influence behaviors over beliefs is to consider fast food. People eat it (a behavior) but they don’t believe it’s good for them. And how many of the seven deadly sins does it appeal to? Sloth, to start, and greed and gluttony for good measure.

Ask the hard question: what are the behaviors you want to have happen because of interaction with you product? Are those behaviors plausible and part of human nature?

Lesson 3: Focus, focus and focus

Focus on the parts of your business that are fundamental to how customers use your core product.

Since a growing number of customers are accessing Google’s core search products through mobile devices, the company has purposefully allocated time, people, and money to development in this sector. It may sound simple for a multi-armed beast like Google to redistribute some of its wealth, but having a lot of resources means the company can easily get derailed and scattered. It’s just as hard for a large company to focus as it is for a startup.

While a startup tends to have a scarcity of resources, it also has the freedom to focus wherever it chooses and to change that focus whenever it wants. The popular term here is “pivoting.” Startups, like all businesses, find success in momentum, and momentum is all about velocity. A startup that changes direction all the time ends up going in circles.

Lesson 4: Track the micro, decide on the macro

Google has built a superb business by understanding the value of data and gathering that information so that others can make meaning from it.

Google tracked the traffic it generated from the Go Mobile event to see if the initiative had been persuasive. Let’s call those micro-metrics.

Micro-metrics — visits, conversions, leads — were used for tracking and tuning, and the macro-metrics — years of mobile adoption, traffic, revenues — drove the strategy and focus.

Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, has a great blog post with much more detail on startup metrics (and tracking the micro while making decisions on the macro) called “Learning is Better than Optimization.

The hard part is balancing the micro and the macro. Every day in a startup involves a ton of detailed work in the micro details of execution, while each decision in the micro details of execution influences the macro strategy.

The answer to balance out the two? Habits and self-reflection.

For Google’s GoMo we connected monthly on a few measurements we’d established to track our success – traffic numbers, leads and conversions.

Internally at my company Mobify, we have a weekly process where each team lead announces their key numbers. Then on a regular basis we review the key numbers. In that review we talk about both the key numbers – their sources, influences and meaning – as well as whether these key numbers are the right numbers to be tracking.

A great framework for figuring out your key performance indicators (KPIs) is to think about your segment ABCs: Acquisitions, Behaviors, Conversions. This ABCs framework is from Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist and author of two great books on web analytics. His blog post Web Analytics Segmentation is a terrific guide to getting started and improving your abilities to balance the micro and the macro.

Combine the ABCs framework with good habits and self-reflection and you will find meaning in measurement.

Bringing it together

While it’s hard to imagine that your startup has much in common with a giant like Google, these four strategies should resonate with any sized-business. Think big and paint the picture before anyone else can see it. Have the resolve to focus where attention is needed. And most importantly, never lose sight of what makes you meaningful to your customers. Your company may never reach the size and scale of Google, but your startup can still make a sizable difference.

Igor Faletski is the CEO of Mobify, a web platform that optimizes ecommerce and publishing sites for mobile and powers more than 20,000 sites.

Image courtesy of Flickr user thinkpublic

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On the what is it category, it appears to be homebound, so it could perhaps be a set-top-box style device, or a new addendum to Google TV. Here’s what Google’s application, which was filed in December, offers in terms of information:

Google is developing an entertainment device that requires testing outside the laboratory environment. The device is in the prototyping phase and will be modified prior to final compliance testing. … Users will connect their device to home WiFi networks and use Bluetooth to connect to other home electronics equipment. This line of testing will reveal real world engineering issues and reliability of networks. The device utilizes a standard WiFi/Bluetooth module, and the planned testing is not directed at evaluating the radio frequency characteristics of the module (which are known), but rather at the throughput and stability of the home WiFi networks that will support the device, as well as the basic functionality of the device. From this testing we hope to modify the design in order to maximize product robustness and user experience. Utilizing the requested number of units will allow testing of real world network performance and its impact on applications running on the device, so that any problems can be discovered and addressed promptly. (emphasis mine)

Google asked to test 252 devices between January 17 through July 17 in Mountain View,Calif.; New York, Cambridge, Mass. and Los Angeles. Its employees will have them, so maybe you can hit a Google employee’s home to watch the Super Bowl and then start sniffing around.

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The system works by analyzing new and existing applications in Android Market and also developer accounts. Bouncer scans for known malware, spyware and trojans and monitors for suspect behavior that could indicate a red flag. Google also runs each app through its cloud infrastructure to see how it will run on an Android device. Additionally, Google analyzes new developer accounts to keep out repeat offenders.

Google’s Hiroshi Lockheimer, the VP of Engineering, Android, said it is impossible to prevent all malicious apps from entering Android Market but that the company is making significant progress in decreasing the number of bad apps being downloaded. Said Lockheimer:

No security approach is foolproof, and added scrutiny can often lead to important improvements. Our systems are getting better at detecting and eliminating malware every day, and we continue to invite the community to work with us to keep Android safe.

Google is attempting to make Android Market safer without imposing more burdens on developers. That means developers can still upload away and consumers can get the apps immediately, unlike Apple’s App Store, which reviews and approves each app, creating delays. It is a tight balance, because Google has been increasingly called out for malware apps that make it into its store. Working in the background allows Google to apply a technology solution that should require less manpower. And it can still encourage developers to keep iterating and developing for Android without enforcing time-consuming reviews.

But while this may cut down on the overall number of malicious apps, it only takes one or two big attacks to undermine Android’s reputation here. And that may be enough to still fuel the work of companies like Lookout and Symantec, which are getting mileage out of harping on Android’s security concerns. Of bigger concern is the fact that there is still not much disincentive for bad actors to introduce malware into Android Market. Google will boot out offenders and work to prevent their return, but with just a threat of losing a $25 developer registration fee, the penalties for getting caught may not keep bad developers out. But at the very least Google is addressing the issue further and seems to understand that it is only going to become more of a target as it racks up app downloads, which are now up to 11 billion.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Anuj Biyani

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And much like Netscape and Google before it, the $5 billion offering is being viewed as the much-awaited catalyst for the technology industry and is expected to set off a flurry of activity. I have been here long enough to cover the IPOs of both Netscape and Google, and on both occasions, the tailgate effect was enough to pull even the clunkers (read: marginal startups) to the proverbial finish line.

We are already seeing four recently public companies — Pandora, LinkedIn, Zynga and Groupon — ramping up their efforts to buy little startups. Google is competing for talent, and so are other Internet giants. And now Facebook!

I have been wondering whether we would see a slow exodus of Facebook employees, which in turn would force the social networking giant to go out and start acq-hiring people by buying a lot of tiny startups. And if more of these little companies get acquired, more dollars will rush into the startups and thus create a fly-wheel effect. The presence of Facebook millionaires is only going to accelerate angel investment activity.

Nevertheless, I wanted to see how some of the top venture capital investors (whom I deeply respect for their clear and concise views of the industry) were thinking about the landscape.

Fred Wilson, a general partner of New York–based Union Square Ventures and an investor in red-hot companies like Zynga, Etsy, Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr and Kickstarter, emailed me back with this answer:

Yes, I said exactly that on Friday evening at a talk I gave at social media weekend at Columbia University. I think this is great for entrepreneurship, startups, angel investing, etc., etc. because we are going to get a bunch more capital created and entrepreneurs created and we’ll also get more exits.

What this means is that super angels and hacker universities like Dave McClure, Y Combinator and TechStars are going to see a lot more of their companies get acquired. Jeff Clavier, the founder and partner of SoftTech VC, an early-stage investment firm based in Palo Alto, Calif., who recently closed his $55 million fund, had a multitude of thoughts:

Because of the ginormous valuation, it is clear that the number of Facebook employees reaching tens of millions of dollars in (paper) net worth is unusual. Candidly a number of early Facebookers have already taken off and “retired” at the age of 30/35. One of the questions moving forward is how much of a carrot can Facebook give new employees with such a high base valuation.

Remember that Facebook has a very high bar to talent acquisitions, and should not compromise on that. Once Facebook has a public currency, it will make it easier for them to make larger paper acquisitions. Until recently they were not doing that to avoid issues with the 500 shareholder rule (Ed Baker’s Friendly was a rare, recent deal where equity was used).

Brad Silverberg, a veteran of Microsoft and other tech companies and a general partner at Ignition Partners, a Seattle-based venture fund, thinks the IPO could have a corroding influence on the company culture.

One of the biggest challenges Facebook will face is the gulf between the have’s and have-not’s within Facebook.  It can create tremendous internal stress and can result in people leaving to follow their own entrepreneurial dreams. This can be both for early people who made it and love the thrill of the startup, and for later people who are contributing, gain confidence, and now want to go off and make their own fortunes.

I think Silverberg’s point is pretty spot-on. I have seen this haves-versus-have-nots dynamic create havoc at many companies before. I have spoken to multiple people, and there is a general sense in the Valley that there is a large contingent of Facebookers who are ready to bolt. Google in comparison didn’t see an exodus of employees until recently, mostly because of its deep engineering-centric culture. Before it was grafted with the Microsoft genes, Google was a company where the smartest people went to be with the smartest people. It wasn’t till 2007 that the company started to lose its top-rated talent.

Facebook — Mark Zuckerberg’s Hacker Way missive not withstanding — is a lot more mercenary and materialistic. And part of that means employees are likely to cash their chips and run, only to place them on some new startups. And whichever way you look at it, I am pretty sure 2012 is going to be one heck of a ride. Buckle up!

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Updated: If there’s one thing that has been sucking most of the oxygen out of Silicon Valley — and Wall Street too — over the past few months, it’s the growing frenzy over Facebook’s IPO filing, which is rumored to be taking place as early as today, and is expected to put a price tag as high as $100 billion on the giant social network (Update: The Facebook S-1 prospectus is here). But apart from the rampant speculation about the company’s ultimate valuation and who will benefit the most, the bigger question about the offering is whether it marks the beginning of a new era of growth for Facebook. Or is it just a massive cashing-out exercise, and a sign that this generation’s version of AOL has finally peaked?

The fact that Facebook’s stock issue is expected to be one of the largest technology offerings of all time — as much as five times the size of Google’s $1.7-billion initial share issue in 2004 — reinforces that this is a company that is already a behemoth in terms of its market power and sheer size. Not only does it have close to a billion active users, but it has more than 3,000 employees, and revenues that are estimated to be in the $4-billion range. The company already controls almost 30 percent of the display advertising business, giving it almost three times the share that Yahoo has.

Facebook doesn’t really need to go public at all

For many technology companies that go public, the IPO is a necessary step on the road to scaling the business — an injection of financing that allows the company to grow, move into new markets, hire staff, etc. But Facebook has no real need for this kind of financing, if it ever did: The company has already raised several billion dollars worth of funding from Goldman Sachs, Russia’s Yuri Milner, China’s Li Ka-shing, and various syndicates of private venture capitalists, and is widely traded on private stock exchanges such as SecondMarket. It could certainly continue to do this without any trouble, given its ongoing growth, and at one point it looked like Facebook might never go public at all.

More than anything, what the Facebook IPO seems to represent is an opportunity for all of those initial backers — and many of the company’s own employees — to cash out. While many public stock offerings are orchestrated to allow this to happen, the sheer scale of Facebook’s IPO puts it in a category all by itself. And if the thousands of millionaires and dozens of billionaires who are created by the offering eventually put some of that windfall back into the startup scene, perhaps it will be worth it.

But surely some investors will stick with the company, to watch it grow even further? Undoubtedly some will — but that raises the $100-billion question for investors of any kind looking at this offering: How much bigger can Facebook possibly get? It already has a committed user base of close to one billion people, and it controls a massive chunk of the online display advertising market. Yes, both of those numbers are still growing, as users in other countries discover the network, and advertisers move their campaigns to Facebook in an attempt to benefit from social activity there. But how much growth is left?

Already, there are anecdotal signs that some are giving up on the network because it is simply too noisy. Younger users are said to be leaving for newer platforms like Twitter and Tumblr, in part because they want to avoid their parents — who are all on Facebook.

Where does Facebook look for growth now?

The biggest single challenge for Facebook is to find a way to generate more and more revenue from those billion users. Social games are well-established thanks to Zynga and others, so there is little likelihood of a major moon shot coming from that segment of the market that will propel Facebook’s growth into the stratosphere. Could it become a bank, by building on and expanding its virtual currency, Facebook Credits? Perhaps. But the most obvious route to growth is to grab a larger share of the advertising market, and that’s what its “frictionless sharing” apps are designed to do.

Many advertisers, however, seem to be unconvinced — at least so far — that Facebook’s social advertising is worth paying very much for. The social network has a large share of the market, but its click-through rates and other metrics of engagement are still relatively low, and that is likely keeping a lot of money on the sidelines. Facebook has to prove that the benefits of targeting users through their social activity is worth more than their existing ads, and there are still skeptics who believe users who are sharing personal thoughts and behavior are fundamentally not interested in or receptive to traditional advertising.

All that comes on top of continued competition from Google, which already has a massive advertising base and the algorithms to parse search and behavior with equal precision — and is busy building a social platform that will give it both activity information on millions of users and a built-in identity structure for keeping those users in place. By comparison, Facebook’s walled garden could start looking even more like AOL than some believe it already does, and we all know how that movie ends.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Franco Boully and Rosaura Ochoa

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What’s the best way of challenging that stereotype? Step forward Britain’s brand new gov.uk, a service intended to smash those perceptions, help get citizens the information they need — and save money for tax payers.

The site, which went live overnight, is simple in the extreme: instead of a complicated nest of subject areas and atoms of information — the approach that typiied the previous one-stop shop, Directgov — it is a Google-like search bar that takes you directly to the information you need. Canny autosuggest options mean that keywords can be useful, while larger subjects of interests are clearly pushed without.

It is, effectively, the difference between the Yahoo and Google of old — one is a contents page for information that forces you to interpret somebody else’s filing system, the other is an index that allows you to find what you’re looking for more directly.

If you want to get an idea of this change, here’s a comparison between Directgov’s homepage (on the left) and Gov.uk’s (on the right).

It’s probably the biggest concrete example so far of the British government’s commitment to using technology to make the nation a better place.

So far Prime Minister David Cameron has been keen to court technology businesses and use the rhetoric of a high-tech future as part of his campaigning, with only minimal real impact or action.There have stunts aimed at projecting a futuristic — such as the development of a custom iPad app for Cameron to monitor national performance — and the creation of a pseudo-public body to promote London as a technology hub.

In reality, though, that commitment has wavered, not least when the Prime Minister decided to close down a proposed open data research organization to be led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, before starting it up again amid a huge PR push.

This is not unusual in and of itself. As The Guardian put it recently, a sequence of leaders from the U.K. have used “rhetorical flourishes to disguise the fact that for the past century Britain has gone steadily backwards as an industrial power.”

But Gov.uk — which is still in beta, for now — seems like a good step in the right direction. I just used it to find and fill out some forms that I needed to send, a task that would have taken a few minutes in the past: now it took just a single click to get to the right place. And it’s all been done on a budget of £1.7 million, a far cry from the British government’s most infamous technology white elephant, when it famously spent years preparing a new IT system for the National Health Service that saw its costs balloon from £2 billion to more than £12 billion ($19 billion) — before the financial crisis loomed and the project was duly cancelled.

The gov.uk team, led by Mike Bracken (disclosure: a former colleague and friend of mine) is actually trying to cut costs and help reinvent government to focus on users. As the Financial Times reports, the project aims to save almost £50 million ($78 million):

“Instead of a government with an IT department, we need to be a digital government,” Francis Maude, minister for the Cabinet Office, told the FT. “Our approach to the way the public sector should be doing its digital offering is very different. We want sensible platforms with common standards and a move away from the big overarching IT projects which had a terrible reputation for running over budgets and over time.”

This change is only just beginning, and it hasn’t come without some friction. Jobs have gone in the civil service as the organization effectively used smart technology to replace humans in charge of huge libraries of media materials that were rarely seen by the public. And it may be too much of a stretch to imagine ministers used to the privileged, dusty corridors of Westminster talking about Hadoop clusters and agile operations.

But ultimately it’s a smart, sharp product, and the focus on getting users what they need, faster has got to be good news. An example for other countries to follow?

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At the Dive Into Media conference on Monday, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said the company doesn’t see itself as a media entity, although he admited it is in the media business. It’s not surprising Twitter wouldn’t want to come right out and call itself a media company, since a growing part of its business is working with traditional media companies — including television networks and movie studios — to promote their content through its network. But in most of the ways that matter, Twitter definitely qualifies as a media entity, which is why its decision to selectively censor the user-generated content that flows through its network is so important.

In fact, the criticism Twitter got after its announcement that it would start selectively blocking tweets (if requested to do so by a government or court order) is just more confirmation it is a media company. Its decision drew attention for the same reason that people reacted suspiciously when Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal invested so heavily in the company — a reaction almost identical to the response many had when News Corp. billionaire Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal.

It may be handled well, but censorship is still censorship

When you’re a media company, the question of who ultimately controls the levers that distribute content is a crucial issue. How would readers of the New York Times  respond if the newspaper said it planned to black out certain pages or remove certain articles if requested to do so by a government edict? Probably very much like some Twitter users have responded to the company’s recent announcement (although the NYT and other newspapers don’t print stories if they are subject to a publication ban by the courts, which some might argue is roughly analogous to Twitter’s new policy).

Is it safe to say that #Twitter is selling us out? blog.twitter.com/2012/01/tweets… what if the content provider is from the country oppressing him?—
Mahmoud Salem (@Sandmonkey) January 27, 2012

As a number of smart observers like Jillian York of the Electronic Freedom Foundation and sociologist Zeynep Tufekci have pointed out since the censorship furor began, there is actually a lot to like about the company’s new policy. For one thing, it’s going to be transparent about these demands, and says it will try hard to resist government attempts to block certain topics during events like the “Arab Spring” revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia. It’s also relatively easy to get around the country-specific blocking, and the Twitter API would probably make it easy to re-route tweets as well.

That said, however, there is still a lot that remains unclear about how this will work in practice. The company’s approach to such requests in a foreign dictatorship like Egypt or Libya might be obvious, but what happens when the authorities in a place like Britain try to force the company to remove tweets that breach one of its sweeping “super-injunctions” — which prevent anyone from even mentioning that there is a publication ban on information about a certain legal case? How will that work?

What kind of media company does Twitter want to be?

Dick Costolo may want to avoid calling Twitter a media entity, in part because he doesn’t want to jeopardize any relationships with existing media companies like Disney or NBC.And he is right in the sense that Twitter doesn’t create any of its own content in the same way a TV network or a newspaper does. But YouTube doesn’t create a lot of its own content either — does that mean it isn’t a media entity? Hardly. In fact, the filtering and curation and surfacing of relevant content is arguably an even more important media function than it has ever been, and that seems to be the direction in which Twitter is going.

Google also likes to strenuously deny it’s a media company, but it is a media entity, whether it wants to be one or not, and so is Twitter. They may be a different kind of media company — one whose business consists primarily of distributing other people’s content, filtering and curating it, then monetizing the attention around that — but they are members of the media nevertheless. And as Peter Kafka pointed out during his interview with Costolo at the Dive Into Media conference, the fact that Twitter relies primarily on advertising revenue is just another sign of that.

There’s an existing category of media company that looks a lot like Twitter in many ways, and that is the newswire provider — a company like Associated Press, for example. While it also has a lot of staff who create their own content, the bulk of its actual business consists of distributing content from other media entities to various customers. And as I’ve pointed out in the past, when it comes to distribution of real-time breaking news, Twitter has become the newswire for many users.

Because of the way it’s structured, there has always been tension between AP’s interests as a business — including the monetization of the content it distributes — and those of its member newspapers. In a similar way, there is a tension between Twitter’s business interests and those of its content creators: its users. Twitter has its own reasons for making the decisions it does, and the new censorship policy may or may not be the best solution to a bad situation, but that doesn’t change the fact that its users are the ones who ultimately create all that content — and if Twitter’s interests and those of its users get too far apart, it may find it has a lot less content to distribute.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users George Kelly and Petteri Sulonen

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“Google crawls us at a rate of 1300 hits per second… They’ve indexed 3 billion of our pages,” Costolo said. “They have all the data they need.”

Costolo went on to say that the dispute between Google and Twitter was never about money, as it’s been reported previously. Instead, he said that the disagreement between the two companies wasn’t limited to the financial disagreement. “Both of us wanted a value exchange where it wasn’t just about money,” he said.

Other interesting info from the keynote:

• On the company’s decision to allow country-by-country takedowns of tweets, Costolo said: “We want to be able to leave the content up for as many people around the world as possible,” while operating within the boundaries of laws in the countries in which it operates.
• On Twitter’s reasons for not participating in the SOPA/PIPA blackouts, Costolo said, “When you’ve got a voice like Twitter, you don’t take the batteries out of the microphone,” he said.
• On whether or not Twitter is a media company, Costolo said it is in the media business. Specifically, he said that Twitter is a distributor of traffic to other media companies. “We’re one of the largest drivers of traffic to all sorts of other media companies,” Costolo said.
• “One of the reasons we’ve got so many [celebrities]… is that they can interact directly with fans,” he said.
• Costolo said that Twitter was tremendously valuable for television, as it has become the focal point for television conversation and also extends the conversation about TV shows. “I think it will be commonplace to use Twitter as the focal point on the second screen,” he said.
• “Maybe 10 years from now, people will look back at my tenure and say, ‘Gee, what a moron.’”
• “I don’t think about how can I extract as much value out of this platform as possible… It’s about how can I create more value,” he said.
• Costolo doesn’t appear to see much value in second-screen social apps, repeating again the thought that Twitter would be the focal point for TV viewing in the future.
• About 40 percent of Twitter users don’t actually tweet, they just consume. But Costolo was quick to note that more than 99 percent of TV viewers don’t create TV shows.
• On Twitter founder Jack Dorsey: “The fascinating thing about Jack is, he’s got all of these people in the world telling him, ‘You’re the next Steve Jobs.’ …but… “It’s pretty amazing to be as open-minded and humble about the product as he is.”
• When it comes to mobile, Costolo said Twitter had yet to create a good feature-phone experience. “There are lots of places in the world where feature phones are the majority of devices. We need to be on those devices so that when those people upgrade, they’re already active Twitter uses,” he said.
• Costolo downplayed the “palace intrigue” associated with major changes in his company’s board that were reported earlier Monday. He said some people would like to ascribe the changes to “some crazy ninja move” … but he said “the reality is a lot less interesting than that.”

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