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Find quality online shopping sites
Posted: Sun, 15 Aug 2010 11:46:07 +0000
Here at Pandia, we have gathered tools and tips for all kinds of searching. We even have a page dedicated to shopping search which was recently updated, which will help you find quality shopping sites online.
Pandia Shopping Search has three parts. The first part is a list of shopping search engines and online malls. There are separate sections for comparison shopping, customer information, shopping trends and more.
The second part contains links to selected online stores in 16 categories. Find established online shopping sites for home & garden, food & drink, gifts & flowers and much more.
The third part is a collection of links to shopping sites listed in our own Pandia Plus Directory. This part contains links to some 40 categories each containing hand picked links to quality sites. Give it a try to find quality shopping web sites!
photo credit: jk+too

A World of Friends!
SMX East: NYC Oct 5-7
Click Here for Agenda!
Top 5 real time search engines
Posted: Sun, 15 Aug 2010 09:09:36 +0000
Social media of all kinds are a source of huge amounts of fresh information about news and events, likes and dislikes. But the signal-to-noice ratio is not good: Much, maybe most, of the material posted is personal and it can be hard to find the pertinent information. You need help to sift and sort the items, so why not try one of these five great real time search engines.
There are all kinds of search engines out there, searching the real time web. Some search a particular channel, like Twitter or Flickr. Others search for particular media, like images or video. These five search engines all search several sources and present results in several kinds of media.
Collecta
My personal favorite is Collecta. This is a powerful search tool, yet it is easy to figure out and navigate. The front page holds boxes, each containing a hot topic represented with both images and text, so you have a feeling of reading a real time newspaper.
When you do a search, the screen is split into three columns: The main column shows a live stream of fresh items matching your query. These are updated in real time and the stream can be paused if you want a closer look. The stream contains:
- Microblog updates from Twitter, Jaiku and Identica
- Blog posts and blog comments
- Photos from Flickr, TwitPic and yFrog
- Videos from YouTube and Ustream
When you select an item, it expands in the right column, where you can get a closer look at it. Unfortunately, there is no way to play videos on the results page, you have to click through to the source, e.g. YouTube.
In the left column, you can sort your results by type (updates, images, stories etc.). In the same menu, you can share the results: You can send them directly to Facebook, Twitter, Mixx, Delicious, Reddit or StumbleUpon or you can grab the URL to the page or the feed.
Topsy
Topsy has no fancy front page like Collecta, but the search results page holds plenty of options. By default, the results include news, tweets and photos (no videos). You can sort the results by type in the left menu. You can also sort by time: Choose between news from the last hour, day, week or month, or see all hits for your query from Topsy’s index.
Experts is a feature unique to Topsy. Click this link and Topsy will present you with a list of people on Twitter who appear to be authorities on your query. This can be very useful for research purposes or when you seek to expand your Twitter network.
Topsy’s sharing options include Twitter, Facebook, RSS and email alerts.
48ers
48ers is a new contestant in the real time search race. The search results display hits from Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, Digg, and Delicious. A tiny icon next to each result shows the source. If you want to see the results for each network separately, you can filter the results from a menu on the left.
I love that 48ers search Delicious. This is my most indesposable web tool. I use it not only for storing bookmarks, but for finding vetted web resources and sharing them with others.
There is no RSS, but a button at the top of the search results list lets you share your search with friends through a large number of channels or networks (choose from a list of 287).
There are links to trending topics and a list of recommended searches help you make the most of your search.
Leapfish
Leapfish is a search destination with a lot to offer. If you log in, you can customize the front page to display your favorite news sources (you can log in with your Twitter or Facebook ID). And Leapfish is both a regular search engine and a real time search engine. Enter your query and choose the Real Time button.
The main column displays the results. LeapFish does a good job of sorting and presenting them: The latest from the news corporations tops the list. Then comes the most tweeted links related to your query. Below this is a list of the latest related tweets. To the right are boxes for video and image results.
On the far right there is a set of links that lets you do your search on a sub set of the index: Images, videos, news and blogs along with options for web search and shopping search. Very convenient. There are also links to related searches and trending topics.
Scoopler
Scoopler is a powerful search tool. The front page displays top stories, top videos and hot searches to give you a feeling of what’s going on. There are also links that give you one click access to popular categories: entertainment, technology, sports, world, science, gaming, and politics.
The search results page holds a lot of information. The main list of results contains the most relevant stories from all the sources. A menu on the left lets you sort them to display links, images or videos. You can play the videos without leaving your search results. On the right you can see new tweets matching your query and the list is updated in real time.
The only option for sharing is through RSS.
I also want to mention Sency
Sency is not among the top 5 because it doesn’t meet all the criteria for our list. It only searches microblog updates and displays no videos or images. Still, I want to draw your attention to this swiss army knife of Twitter search. The list of features include local search for a number of US cities and some international destinations, search in French, Spanish, Italian and German, and an easy option to respond to tweets in your search results + much more.

A World of Friends!
SMX West: March 2-4
Go to California!
Search Delicious, Twitter, Facebook and more — all in one tool
Posted: Sun, 08 Aug 2010 13:04:36 +0000
If you are an avid user of social networks or if you want to monitor the hive mind for news about, say, a brand, a sports team or a celebrity, you know it can be hard to keep up across the different networks. Here’s a solution.
48ers is a new search engine in public beta. It lets you search Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, Digg, and Delicious all at once. All you do is enter the search term and hit Search. By default, results from all five networks are displayed. The search results are entire entries (tweets, updates etc). A little logo next to each result lets you know the source. If you want to see the results for each network separately, you can filter the results from a menu on the left.
There is no RSS, but a button to share search results with friends through a large number of channels.
I am particularly happy that Delicious is included among the sources. For years, it has continued to be my most indesposable web tool, not only for storing bookmarks, but for finding vetted web resources and sharing them with others.
(In case you are wondering: The name 48ers refers to the pioneers of the California gold rush.)

Facebook, Twitter and Youtube Marketing.
Hourly rates $15 to $25.
Search Twitter like a pro
Posted: Sun, 08 Aug 2010 11:37:13 +0000
Twitter is a storehouse of information, but how to sort out the gems from among all of the nonsense? Here are some little known tools that will help you find what you need.
Twitter’s own tools
Searching Twitter became easier once the search box was added to the menu on the right of your tweets. Here you can perform searches and save them for later.
But what if you search results are still not great? Visit Twitter Advanced Search where you can modify your search to bring results in a particular language, from a particular person, reflecting a particular mood and much more.
If you don’t want to leave your Twitter home page to search, many of the options on the Advanced Search page are available as operators that you can add to your search in the regular Twitter search box.
Search Twitter in two languages
2lingual Twitter is a cool tool that lets you search Twitter for information in two languages at the same time. It can also translate your query for you (default setting). At the moment it supports these 21 languages: Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Thai. Here is an example search showing results for iPad in English and French.
Find images and videos on Twitter
On Twitcaps, you can search for images shared on Twitter. This is useful in many circumstances, but particularly for breaking news, like this example search for images from the flood in Pakistan.
You can find videos shared on Twitter with Twitmatic. You do your search and a list of tweets appear. When you decide which video you want to watch, click Play Video and the video is displayed inline.
Another great image search engine for Twitter is Twicsy. In addition to searching the index of 140 million pictures, you can filter
search results by date or browse related tags.
Twitter search intro
If you are new to Twitter search, have a look at this short video from CommonCraft that gives a fun and easy introduction to Twitter search:

Facebook, Twitter and Youtube Marketing.
Hourly rates $15 to $25.
A soft spot for the Ask search engine
Posted: Sun, 01 Aug 2010 12:28:44 +0000
Ask is relaunched with a question and answer database.
We have always had a soft spot for the Ask search engine. Throughout the years they have managed to make some serious innovations as regards search technology and the presentation of search results.
For instance: When Google and Bing presents search results in three column table, with results in the center, that is an idea they stole from Ask. But for some peculiar reason Ask seems to lose its direction. Ask abandoned that design for one that looked like the old version of Google before Google and Bing copied them. It is as if Ask lacks the courage to follow its ideas through, and ends up as a bleak copy of its competitors.
Natural language
Ask (or Ask Jeeves as it was called) originally was known as the natural language search engine. The idea was that you could enter a regular question in the search field: “Who is the president of the USA?”, instead of the queries we all use now: “president USA”. Ask Jeeves had a database of such questions, where the results were hand picked by human editors. If a relevant response could not be found in the search engine fetched results from its regular search index.
It turned out that this wasn’t much of a competitive advantage after all, partly because searchers quickly learned the short hand of search engine queries, partly because Google became very good at guessing what you were looking for and partly because it takes a lot of work to manage a human edited database.
A return to answers
Ask has not given up on the idea, though. In 2008 and 2009 it announced that it was going to revive the idea of natural language search, this time base on automated semantic search. It didn’t make much of a difference.
This week Ask (Ask Jeeves in Britain) was relaunched as a natural language search engine again, this time based on a human edited database of responses. Although the search engine will generate automatically produced search results, like Google and Bing, the main focus in on its Q and A feature. It looks a bit likeYahoo! Answers.
The new Ask
On July 26 the Ask Blog announced that they had officially launched the public beta for the new Ask.com
“..which combines our proprietary answers technology (specifically tailored to extract questions and answers from the Web) with the human insight of the thriving Ask.com community drawn from our 87 million monthly uniques. Now available on an invite-only basis …, the capability to pose questions to real people is now possible for those complex, subjective and/or time-sensitive queries that, no matter how advanced, computers simply can’t address.”
The idea is that you may send in a question. Ask will reroute the question to one of many volunteers, who will then send you a response within five to ten minutes. Gradually this will help Ask build up a database with unique content.
Problems
The problem with this approach is twofold. First you need to ensure that your experts really know what they are talking about, and you need some way of controlling the quality of the answers. I guess user comments and voting could help out in that respect.
Second you need some way of updating the database. The world is changing. The web is changing. What was a relevant answer a year ago, may not be so today.
Ask is now displaying its Q and A feature prominently on its front page. The idea is clearly that the featured question will be interesting content for their users regardless of what they have come to search for.
When in Rome
We have not had the time to test the new feature. We have done some searches to see what the database can bring you, though.
A search for “what shall i see in rome?”, for instance, brought up the answer to “What to see in rome?” (fair enough) and that answer was the following sentence:
“Rome is located in Italy. Tis (sic) is one of the most visited city’s. You can see the Colosseum, The Vatican, Piazza Navona and Spanish stairs.”
The next relevant result was a response from another Q & A service, Wiki Answers:
“In Rome you can see many interesting things like:The Colloseum (sic), aqueducts, and other various building remains. ”
Anyone who has been to Rome realize that these are both completely unhelpful answers. A regular web search with a link to a tourist site would be immensely more useful. It should be noted that some of Ask’s responses do include links to relevant sites. When that is the case, a one sentence response may be useful.
One of the questions showcased by Ask is:
“What is Glycogenolysis?”
Again the responses are less than helpful:
“Glycogen is the storage form for glucose in the liver and muscles. Glycogenolysis is the conversion of glycogen into glucose in the liver and in the muscles.”
An alternative answer given is:
“Glycogenolysis is the breakdown of glycogen to glucose for use as metabolic fuel. It maintains the normal blood concentration of glucose in the fasting state.”
These are both correct, but for someone unfamiliar with terms like glucose and metabolic, the answer only leads to new questions. Links to relevant articles (like on the Wikipedia) would have been helpful. But that would, of course, bring up the problem of link rot and the need to update old questions.
The wrong approach to knowledge
These answers remind us of the debate on Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha believes there is one correct answer to any question. This isn’t the case even for quantitative questions in the natural sciences, let alone for the social and cultural questions Ask tries to answer.
Learning is to look at a large number of sources, changing you whole understanding of the world in the process. This is what regular search engines are good at. They deliver a large number of alternative results, helping you find more extensive information on different sites. If you want to replace those sites with information produced by yourself, you need to deliver more than a “factual” sentence.
The fact is that Ask’s Q & A service is not so much competing with Google, but the Wikipedia. And if that is the march Ask is aiming for they need to gain some weight.
New design
Ask has also presented a new design for the site. It is a bit old fashioned, but simplistic and easy to read. There are now links to alternative search queries, alternative questions and your search history in the right hand column — all very useful features.
See also: Search Engine Land: Ask Comes Full Circle With “Q&A” Offering

SMX West: March 2-4
Go to California!
On the new Google Image search engine
Posted: Sun, 01 Aug 2010 11:07:44 +0000
Google has redesigned its image search engine.
Covering the search engine scene from outside the US sometimes leads to surprises. Features that are introduced in the US are not found elsewhere. When researching the new Google Image search enginefor this post, I suddenly realized that I was not looking at the new one, but the old version.
This is how Google Image search results look in my Firefox browser on our PC:
On the Mac I got the new version, and by opening the Google Images US version in Chrome on the PC I finally managed to see what the search blogs are buzzing about:
The main difference is, as you can see, that the old version gave you thumbnails with image information below the images: the title, size, URL and a link to search results for similar images, like this:
Attractions in Oslo
480 × 348 – 40k – jpg
thebesttraveldestinations…
Find similar images
In the new version, the thumbnails are larger and there is no new information under the images.
However, this is another example of how Google is using new web standards to turn static web pages into a dynamic experience. Hover your cursor over the image and a small window pops up with a larger version of the picture and the same information as above:
You could say it does not make much of a difference, but the larger sizes makes it easier to see what the pictures depict.
If you click on the image, the old version would give you a page consisting of two frames – image information at the top, the original page at the bottom.
The new version makes this a much more aesthetically pleasing experience. In the foreground you get a large version of the image, while the original page is rendered behind it, greyed out. This is another example of what modern browsers can deliver.
A river of results
The old version was based on the paradigm of having several web pages for results. At the bottom of each page there was a next page button that forwarded you to the next set of images. Now all the images are included on the same page. As you scroll downwards Google will add new set of images. This is an idea Google has stolen from the Bing image search engine.
In fact, the new Google Image search is very much like Bing’s solution, although Bing stick to frames when it comes to presenting individual images.
Bing has one very useful feature that Google is lacking: It has a row of buttons that lets you select the sizes of the thumbnails. There is even an option where you can get the file information under each image, as in the old version of Google images.
Both Google and Bing allows for advanced search. Some features are found in the left hand column (Size, Color, Style and People in Bing; Size, Type and Color in Google), and Google has a special advanced search page.

SMX West: March 2-4
Go to California!
Outsource SEO/PPC
$11 – $15 per hour
Panda Search Engine News Wrap-up July 31
Posted: Sat, 31 Jul 2010 19:04:34 +0000
We are back with a new review of the latest search engine news articles and blog posts.
- Google’s wind power
  Google’s purchase of twenty years worth of renewable energy from an Iowa wind farm (Inside Google July 26 2010)
- What Does Google Read?
  Want to read like a Google exec? Don’t expect any laughs. (Beyond Search July 27 2010)
- Apple Search Engine Lightning Bolt to Strike Google?
  Is Apple working on an app search engine and trying to stop Google from doing the same? (Google Watch July 27 2010)
- Google Images – just like Bing!
  Google Images have had a make over. (P Bradley July 28 2010)
- Can Ask.com's New Search Strategy Work?
  It’s hard not to think of the new Ask.com community search section as a glorified Yahoo Answers (PC World July 28 2010)
- What’s New With Bing & Yahoo Search Alliance
  Yahoo is currently testing Bing powered results on about 25 percent of the traffic. (SE Land July 20 2010)
- Google Images gets major overhaul
  Google tries to ‘get the app out of the way’ (techradar July 2010)
- French Newspapers Partner To Sidestep Google News
  French newspapers is partnering to create an online news site that they hope will be an alternative to Google News. (SE Land July 23 2010)
- How To Hide News Sources in Google News
  Google adds “news settings” or “source preferences” which lets you block some sources (SE Roundtable July 26 2010)
- AOL Keeping Google (And Bing) On Its Toes For Search Deal Pick
  AOL is currently gauging the offers of several companies to power its search (SE Watch July 27 2010)
- Google's Search-Related Music Store Slated For Holiday Season
  Android VP at Google, Andy Rubin, is having “accelerated” talks with music publishing firm Harry Fox (SE Watch July 27 2010)
- Bing Generates More Clicks Than Google
  Google users clicked on ads at a rate of 1.09%, while Bing users clicked on ads 1.67% of the time (SE Land July 27 2010)
- Yahoo Japan Picks Google Search Over Bing
  Yahoo Japan — an independent entity from Yahoo — has decided to forgo the Bing transition (SE Watch July 27 2010)
- See An Offensive Image On Google? Stay Tuned.
  Google’s report offensive image feature is no longer found in the new design. (SE Land July 29 2010)
- The New Ask.com: A Little Bit Search, A Little Bit Answers
  Ask.com is re-launching as a cross between a traditional search engine and the question-and-answer service (SE Land July 27 2010)
- Diller: Ask.com Was The Little Search Engine That Couldn’t
  IAC CEO: “Ask itself is not a large segment of the company.” (SE Land July 29 2010)
- Street Slide: Microsoft’s Next Killer Maps App?
  Next-generation tool for browsing street-level imagery. (SE Land July 29 2010)
- 4 Common SEO Copywriting Techniques That Ruin Your Copy
  Stay on Search: Long outdated SEO techniques based on pure, unadulterated myths. (July 30 2010)
- Google Ordered To Remove Search Results On Sex Charges But Document Still Shows
  The search results were about a sexual harassment case between her and a guy 10 years ago (SE Roundtable July 30 2010)
- Wolfram Alpha Widgets announced
  Beta release for computational engine apps (techradar Jlu 2010)
- Google: The "Last Thing We Want" Is The "Best SEO To Win"
  Jeremy Sussman, a Google Local Product Manager has been pretty frank and clear (SE Roundtable July 30 2010)
- Google With Direct Dictionary Result
  Google now has a onebox of their own immediately offering the definition(s) for certain words you’re searching for. (Blogoscoped July 30 2010)
- Study Calls Google ‘King Of Malware’
  Google has twice as much malware in its search results as Yahoo, Bing, and Twitter combined. (SE Land July 30 2010)
- Google Acquires Metaweb – Smarter Searches?
  Metaweb is a successful and popular semantic search start-up and it will help make Google’s searches a lot more efficient (Google Tutor July 20 2010)
- The Top Ten Alternative Search Engines
  About.com on the top ten alternative/niche search engines out there on the Web. (July 23 2010)
Video of the week:
Google’s Matt Cutts talk about Google and search engine optimization at Search University in Belgium.
Pandia Search Engine News Wrap-up July 18 2010
Posted: Sun, 18 Jul 2010 13:33:26 +0000
We apologize for the lack of search engine news wrap-ups and newsletters for the previous weeks. The Pandia site is run by a wife and husband team on a part time basis, and we came to the conclusion that we needed a vacation.

It seemed the world of search engines managed well without us, while we were walking in Scotland and the English Lowlands.
But we are back now. Here are some of this week’s headlines, plus a few others from the weeks we were away.
(PS: Could someone please tell the Brits they are driving on the wrong side of the road! It is very confusing, not to say dangerous!)
- The insane world of “No linking Policy” – what happened to the interNET?
  On companies and sites with a “no linking policy” or “linking restriction policy” (State of Search Kuly 15 2010)
- Google Removes WiFi Gear from Street View Cars
  Google cars have resumed their tours of Sweden, Ireland, Norway and South Africa (Inside Google July 9 2010)
- Microsoft’s Search Crawler MSNBot To Be Renamed As Bingbot
  Trivial but a much needed update. (TNW June 28 2010)
- Google Chrome Creeps to 7.2% Worldwide Browser Share
  Microsoft Internet Explorer rose back above 60 percent to 60.32 percent (Google Watch July 1 2010)
- Apple Allows Google AdMob Ads for iPhone 4, iPad
  Despite new language in its developer terms to the contrary, Apple is allowing targeted ads from Google (Google Watch July 2 2010)
- Google News Users Hate Changes, Threaten to Go to Bing
  Many people griped when Google added more refinements to the left-hand rail (Google Watch July 5 2010)
- Google releases 500 scans of Ancient Greek and Latin texts for research
  Google sharing high-resolution digital scans of over 500 volumes of Ancient Greek and Latin, dating from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. (Inside Google Books June 25 2010)
- Bing changes interface
  Options for narrowing a search has been moved (P Bradley June 24 2010)
- China renews Google's ICP license
  Google keeps its google.cn domain ( June 28 2010)
- Rumour: Google Games still on for 2010 launch
  Google puts $100m into Farmville developer (techradar July 2010)
- Microsoft Bing reaches 12% of search market
  Bing and Yahoo both gain ground on Google (techradar July 2010)
- Translating Wikipedia
  Google helps translate more than 16 million words for Wikipedia into Arabic, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Swahili, Tamil and Telugu. (Google Blog July 14 2010)
- Google News Brings Back Its Old Home Page … Kinda
  In response to sometimes loud and angry user feedback, Google News has tweaked its home page (SE Land July 16 2010)
- Picture of New Google Image Search Design
  A new design for Google Images. (SE Roundtable July 16 2010)
- Is Google Getting Sloppy?
  Google Buzz, background images and changes to Google News. Not enough testing? (Marketing Pilgrim July 16 2010)
- Yahoo: We’re Switching to Bing Next Month…or Maybe Next Year
  Expect a full transition to Bing’s search results as early as August (Marketing Pilgrim July 16 2010)
- Google Buys Metaweb To Bolster Answers, Google Squared & Rich Snippets
  Metaweb is a search company that figures out entities and not just words. (SE Land July 16 2010)
SMX West: March 2-4
Go to California!
Google’s China Victory
Posted: Sun, 11 Jul 2010 10:52:13 +0000
China renews Google’s licence for operating in mainland China.
When Google decided to give the Chinese authorities an ultimatum by stopping censoring Chinese search results, many observers thought they were mad. It looked like they were abandoning the world biggest market. Google must have known that the Chinese Communist Party will not give up on censorship. This is, after all, partly what keeps them in power.
We guess Google knew as much. But the Chinese hacker attack on Google’s servers told them that they had to draw the line somewhere, and for the “Do no evil” company all this censorship was damaging for both morale and image. So when the Chinese refused to give in, they redirected the google.cn search engine to the Hong Kong version of Google. Hong Kong is outside the normal Chinese jurisdiction, due to its colonial past.
Google now risked losing the google.cn domain altogether. As the Financial Times says: “Without the licence, it seemed likely Google would end up closing all its operations in China.”
Google reached out a hand. It stopped redirecting search results directly. Instead it put up a separate page, where mainland China users had to click on a link to get to the Hong Kong results. This didn’t make much of a difference in real terms. Google continued to lead Chinese searchers to uncensored results in Hong Kong, but it gave the Chinese authorities a way to save face.
The Chinese took it. Google’s licence and Chinese domain name has been renewed. Google can still market many of its services in China. This especially applies to non-search products and services, like the Chrome OS and the Android mobile phone operating system.
For the Chinese a complete Google withdrawal would be a publicity disaster. The country is trying actively to attract foreign high tech companies. They also know that Google has broad support in the new Chinese middle class — several hundred million people the Communists need to keep happy.
Google on the other hand, with founder Sergey Brin (who grew up in Soviet Russia), takes a long term “Chinese approach” to the problem. Historically speaking nearly all countries with a strong middle class ends up as democracies. There may come a day when a democratic China stop the censorship. At that point in time Google will come out as the moral victor. That means a lot, also business-wise.

Facebook, Twitter and Youtube Marketing.
Hourly rates $15 to $25.
Insights from the developers of a social networking site
Posted: Thu, 01 Jul 2010 11:39:30 +0000
How do you engage the visitors on your site? How do you work to develop new interactivity? A lot of insight can be gleaned from the experiences of the people who are out there getting their feet wet, building online communities from scratch. Here is an interview with Marina Cianfarani, owner of qmpeople, a social network with some original features.
Disclosure: qmpeople is a Pandia Sponsor.
Pandia: Your site has been online since 2004, but it wasn’t launched in earnest before 2008. Did you do a lot of market analysis before launching the site?
Marina Cianfarani: Yes, even though we did have clear ideas in mind for our site since the start. We have seen that many social networks had the same characteristics and lack of personality so it has been simple for us to develop qmpeople.
Nevertheless we understand that nowadays it’s crucial for anyone to know the market, actual and potential competitors and emerging trends. For that reason we initially launched qmpeople only in Italy (our country of origin) and after more than six months of 360 degrees analysis we decided to expand our initiative to the international arena.
Outsourcing
Pandia: We understand that you are a rather small company. How do you manage to keep it running. Through outsourcing?
Marina Cianfarani: Yes, we outsource a large part of our activities.
For example, we chosen our SMS gateway in South Africa, hosting solution in USA, domain management distributed across several authorities/providers thanks to a custom DNS solution, legal experts on Internet laws in Ukraine as well as many young collaborators in different parts of the world.

Pandia: Does this mean that you make active use of computing in the cloud? Will cloud computing be the key to online success for publishers and social web site owners?
Marina Cianfarani: At qmpeople we use cloud computing but we think that the most important key factor on a long time basis is the ability to fulfil the end users needs, better than competitors do. Anyway in these times of global crisis, resources are important so cloud computing can provide important resource optimization.
Language and culture
Pandia: You are based in the UK, but are clearly trying to reach large parts of the world. How do you cope with the needs of different languages and cultures?
Marina Cianfarani: qmpeople is borne as a multilingual platform to allow people from any part of the world to communicate, share interests and contents, play games and enjoy themselves.
To accomplish that task we are running our network on several localized versions of the most common languages such as English, German, French, Spanish and Russian, with native support of different time zones, currencies and languages.
Dating site?
Pandia: So what is qmpeople? The first impression is that it is a dating site. The next is that it is some kind of social web site. A bit Facebook like, perhaps?
Marina Cianfarani: Our slogan is “qmpeople – A world of friends” meaning that qmpeople is a place where people from any part of the world can meet and interact. It seems a simple and common slogan but our vision is that qmpeople will reinvent the idea of friendship on Internet.
In fact we are focusing on people who want to make new friends (not only already existent friends like on Facebook) by using a different paradigm than existent social networks. They allow people to make new friends only in a virtual way, without real interaction.
qmpeople want to solve that problem by introducing resembling real friendship activities, such as “help me” in which you can help friends in their time of need: no virtual gifts, virtual kisses and so on but real help.
The use of design
Pandia: I am fascinated by the visual design of the site. You have deliberately chosen a comic book like design with bright colors and simplistic icons. Is this a way of lowering the anxiety threshold of your visitors?

Marina Cianfarani: Yes. Social networking is almost often too serious. Sites like LinkedIn need a formal design because they are involved in business activities, but in our case we think that people would enjoy a funny and informal environment.
Pandia: This is a social networking site. Key to success in that industry is to reach critical mass as regards the number of active users. What are you doing to achieve this?
Marina Cianfarani: We are exploring all marketing opportunities to promote our initiative but we are focusing on contents and market analysis.
Discussion groups
Pandia: The site goes beyond dating. There are, for instance, discussion groups for topics as diverse as the TV show The Office and Haiti relief. But there is not much traffic in all of them. Can you tell us what you hope to achieve with these groups?
Marina Cianfarani: Groups will boost user experience thanks to several services we are going to introduce during next months. We have deployed a first beta version of them so they simply need some time to reach the same level of user interaction as other well know tools such as those to exchange off-line and real time messages.
Videos
Pandia: There is also the possibility of uploading videos. Is this a good way for contact seeking people to present themselves?
Marina Cianfarani: Videos are very appreciated by Internet users, as YouTube demonstrate. They can be a good way for people to present themselves to other users so we are developing specific applications to facilitate the submission, the internal and external sharing, and enhancing activities such as tagging.
Help Me
Pandia: What’s the deal about the Help Me section?
Marina Cianfarani:The Help me service allows you to give help to your new friends in their time of need. It could be seen similar to Yahoo Answers, but it even allows users to ask for economical help. Yes, thanks to native PayPal support, any registered user can send money to fulfill one or more help request. Please, take a look at how the community decided to help pwilkins by donating him some money to repair his motorbike.
Content production
Pandia: To succeed in the search engines, a site needs a lot of relevant textual content. Do you try to get your members to become active content producers?
Marina Cianfarani: Yes, qmpeople is a closed platform at the moment because we think this approach would increase the user experience.
We are different from Facebook because we have no third party applications but, of course, user generated contents is very important so we are using a viral approach to stimulate our users to write lots of contents such as their statuses, comments, what they like/don’t like and niche contents on specific groups.
Advertising
Pandia: You make active use of Google Ads on your site. There is even a row of Google Ads links that could be interpreted as menu links.
I guess there are some of our search engine marketing readers that would be interested to know why you are doing this. Aren’t you just driving visitors away to other contact sites?
Marina Cianfarani: Advertising is a key factor to obtain important resources to develop our network. That can sound as a risk to drive visitors away because a lot of other social networks are currently interested in promoting their sites on qmpeople. But we think, and our experience demonstrates, that users come back to qmpeople because they love it. In other words, we don’t see the promotion of other social networks as a risk, but as an opportunity.
Pandia: What is the qmpeople secret?
Marina Cianfarani: We can summarize it like this: powerful functionality, originality and simplicity.
photo credit: ginnerobot

A World of Friends!
SMX East: NYC Oct 5-7
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