Darby Sieben -

Well it is Friday night and I had another week of travelling. This week I was down at the Chirp Conference (first developers conference for Twitter) in San Francisco. The team at TechCrunch did a great job of covering the conference, here are some articles to check out if you have not already:

– Twitter has 105,779,710 Registered Users, Adding 300K A Day
- Twitter Adds Places To Its Geo-Tweets, Just Don’t Call It A Check-In
- Live From Chirp: Twitter’s Platform Roadmap
- Ev Explains Twitter’s Move Into Mobile Apps: “Otherwise We Are Failing Users”

So enough about Chirp, this has been covered extensively this week.

While I am waiting for my wife I was playing with my iPhone, actually wishing I had an iPad (after the Chirp conference and speaking to a number of people about their iPads, I am convinced that I need to buy one, but that for another day). Back to my iPhone – I was playing with Mobile Web, not iPhone applications and I got to wondering about the Mobile Web experiences for Canadians?

So here is what I did.

I visited the following sites through my Safari browser on my phone. Google.ca, YellowPages.ca, Yahoo.ca, and 411.ca. I tried to visit yelp.ca, but it gave me their actual website, not their mobile enhanced so they are not included.

I then entered the exact search term “restaurants toronto” for each site and was presented with their results. The screenshots below are the results page for each of the above websites. Check them out yourself.

So here is what I want to know? Based on the screenshots below for the search “restaurants toronto” and nothing but the screenshots below, which mobile application provides the best results? I am going to leave it as best results, you decide whether best results mean content, look and feel or brand loyalty.

In alphabetical order:

411.ca

Google Web

Yahoo Web

YellowPages.ca

One more screenshot from an application that I am testing on my iPhone (it is not available to the general public yet) called Urbanizer, mood based searching. This application is going to rock. You can subscribe to get notified when it is available in the app store.

Urbanizer

If we are missing your favorite mobile web application, put the URL in the comments, I would be happy to add it to this post.

Popularity: 3% [?]

The following data points relate only to my personal blog, Darby Sieben, but I find it interesting that Google Chrome is increasing in terms of usage but more fascinating is the growth related to Google Adsense Revenues from Chrome users. This comparison is from Q2 to Q3 of 2009.

Here are the stats from Q2 to Q3:

Some observations:

Internet Explorer continues to lose market share. Firefox also lost market share while Safari and Chrome have increased. From a revenue perspective, IE users are over producing in revenue compared to usage, while we see a massive drop from Firefox users and a drop from Safari users. Chrome users are over producing in revenue relative to market share.

So what does this mean?

Perhaps FF users are getting more savvy in ad blocking. If so, should websites tailor their sites specifically to Firefox users who use ad blocking? Based on this small subset of data, are Chrome users more engaged with Adwords and is this the main driver behind Google investing in the browser wars? If you are a website owner, should you encourage people to stay with IE – they seem to be the ones generating the revenues?

Of course this sample size is way to small to make any broad conclusions, but I found them interesting and wanted to share. Also, if you monetize your site using Google Adsense, what do your stats tell you? Are you seeing a similar trend or something completely different?

Popularity: 3% [?]

As I was planning my trip in the valley this week, I was printing of Google Maps to take me from my hotel to meetings and to the SES San Jose. I am staying at the Sheraton San Jose in Milpitas. The exact address is 1801 Barber Lane, Milpitas, CA, 95035, USA. When I was printing my iternary on Friday I did not really notice the placement of the icon on the map for the location of the hotel. Driving from the SFO on Sunday night to the hotel, I noticed the mistake.

Here is the screenshot from Google Maps for this exact query “1801 Barber Ln, Milpitas, CA, 95035, USA” notice where Google plots the location, the yellow circle is where the location actually is. Click the images below to load the maps.

I tried the same map search using Bing Maps, they hit the location:

I am sure that Google will be correcting the geo-code for this location once they see the image listed above. All in all, the inconvenience was not that bad, took me a few extra minutes, a few scratches on the forehead and my iPhone to get to the right location on Sunday night.

Morale of the story : double-check your printed maps before leaving and verify using Satellite view (I would have noticed the mistake if I looked at Satellite view) – sometimes they may be a little off.

Popularity: 4% [?]