Smart Keywords

Launched in broad beta on Wednesday, closed for inviting Thursday and now spam potential discovered Friday. One has to wonder what else will surface over the weekend. Hey, maybe there will be real fireworks Monday!

Thursday night while playing with Google’s new toy – okay is way more important than that, but to me just another thing to play with – I discovered you could do some serious bulk emailing inside the system.

I wanted to see if my thinking was off so I reached out to Michael Gray, Rae Hoffman and Dave Naylor – we had discovered the flaw in Google’s real time search launch a couple of years ago in Chicago during an SES conference. Dave’s crew must have been on it already as they posted about it later that day.

So what is the problem? Well if you import a large list of contacts in to your Gmail account and then port some to your circle in Plus, any not contacted people can potentially be emailed any time you make a post. See the nice radio button asking you if you are ready to spam below.

“The fact that Google Plus allows non Google Mail accounts to be placed into the contacts list within the site has opened up a huge security issue for email users based on the fact that Google have allowed you to share anything that you wish with huge contact lists, regardless of whether they use Gmail or not,” Alex Graves posted on Dave Naylor’s blog.

Actually it can include any Gmail accounts that have yet to join Google Plus or you may not share a circle with. No doubt this will disappear some time soon. One of the commenters on Dave’s blog asked if it was reported to Google yet, to which Dave replied “I used the form on google+ that count”.

Interestingly, if you are not using Gmail and receive messages from Plus, trying to unsubscribe cannot be done – you get a 404 page at the moment.

It is unfortunate this happened this weekend, no doubt many Google employees are off celebrating the July 4th long weekend. Matt Cutts I am hoping this does not interfer with your celebrations.

As I was dragging and dropping my 400th avatar in to one of my predescribed circles, it dawned on me that Google has created the ultimaate profiling program.

Throughout the 5 days Google Plus has been offered and people have given feedback, one of the most prevalent comments has been the beauty of the cirlces. Facebook groupings are too rigid and limited.

Now that we can drag and drop people in to categories, these circles really become descriptors of any person we drop in to a named circle. Using inclusion in a circle the same way they use a link as a vote for a particular topic, Google now has us helping to better qualify everyone who joins this new service.

As I reported the first day Plus started it broader beta:

“And while many reports have looked at what will be offered, the New York Times went a little deeper in to the reasons for this grab at social. Speaking to its two project managers – Bradley Horowitz and Vic Gundotra – the focus seemed to be about the increased information this project provides to advertisers. Google obviously watched as Facebook struggled at first to find monetization avenues and seem to have that covered:

“Mr. Gundotra and Mr. Horowitz said that knowing more about individual Google users will improve all Google products, including ads, search, YouTube and maps, because Google will learn what people like and eventually be able to personalize those products.”

Distracted by the bells and whistles, the people on day, one who thought Plus may have a hard time countering the established Facebook, are the ones who have spent the long weekend preoccupied using it.

If ‘Do Not Track’ legislation comes in to effect, Google will not have to worry – they can demographically and behaviorally target people from the circles that people create and tag the people they know.

Basically we are profiling every contact for them. Facebook’s Groups and Likes has a much smaller ability to do this. Google no longer needs access to Facebook data – in fact they may be better served developing a relationship with LinkedIn, between the two services they could develop a powerful targeting tool.

We are working for Google to create the ultimate Venn diagrams of the world’s population. Could the
Even if the general public does not jump on to the Plus bandwagon in mass, the information Google is gaining from businesses – marketers, brand socializers and others – will create very granular ‘circles’ for them to sell pinpoint advertising to many industries that already pay for the high priced clicks.

Well done Google, your efforts here are impressive. So when can I start buying advertising to specific circles?

If the headline got you reading this, guess the GoDaddy advertising model works and that may be why it was bought late Friday for $2.25 billion. The world’s largest domain registry was bought by a group of private equity firms.

GoDaddy.com used racy ads during the Superbowl – including ones that were not allowed to run on TV – to brand themselves and become the leading domain seller and website hosting company. They have shown exceptional growth over the past few years, sales rose by 25% to $947 million between 2009 and 2010. 2011 predictions were for sales of well over a billion dollars.

“What these guys see is a company with a lot more potential internationally and more potential to make partnerships and acquisitions,” Bob Parsons, the company’s chief executive and founder, told the LA Times. “They’ll help us finance and they’ll help us recruit talent.”

With the push of local in the search space, many small businesses are now buying domains and creating websites; and this is a global phenomenon.

“The purchase, which includes assumption of the company’s debt, was announced Friday afternoon by Go Daddy and the group of firms, made up of KKR & Co., Silver Lake Partners and Technology Crossover Ventures,” the LA Timnes reported.

The success of the advertising in previous years shows the company had a good read on who was buying domains, with the economy changing one will have to wait and see if that changes or if the company can adjust their message as needed. Either way, stories seem to indicate that the current company employees will be staying on.