SearchForecast continues to build out exciting technology for optimizing content on search engines. One of the key players on our technical team for the past three years has been Sham Haramalker who last year was married and has been instrumental in converting much of the architecture plans into code that drives our internal and client websites.

Sham is an expert in LAMP technologies and consistently innovative in open source code implementations. Now that he’s grown a moustache, he’s come of age and we hope he continues with his great work in 2011.

In 1997, I wrote a book called “Successful E-Commerce”. The title was the promise of tomorrow. I had no idea then that e-commerce would be so huge. Today I read that Macy’s are putting on an extra 700 staff to deal with online orders. The compound growth rates of the Internet Retail Top 500 is stupendous.

Here at SearchForecast we’re investing in a new technology publishing platform to help clients produce local pages with control of how their brands and products are displayed.

Tomorrow is about Mobile and the bus going down Townsend Street in San Francisco this morning says it all. Whether you like it or not, you do have a mall in your pocket!

As all software developers will tell you, getting in the zone is critical to execution. When I caught up with Jay McKinsey recently, we discussed the cloud and the requirements for helping clients manage product catalogs and dealer databases in the age of hyper growth e-commerce sales.

Like the sun shining off Half Dome at Yosemite National Park, the light only needs to shine on the software built at the right time to make it seem so perfect.

Over pasta and Tiramisu in Palo Alto last week I met up with Aayush Phambhra, founder of Chegg. Having both had the problem of overly priced University textbooks, we discussed the mission of Chegg – which I fully endorse.

Firstly, it’s a noble profession to help the world in education and with Google Books making it an open environment where any device can (not like Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle ) access books, I like what Chegg are doing.

At some point, mankind needed to invent a distribution system that would take in real time the knowledge contained in books to those who afford to buy a book or find a library who could lend them a book. Having a library to last forever is a noble cause and I hope others around the world help Chegg make books accessible to their people. Education is the key to a better world. Aayush, Chegg and Google Books are doing that. Keep up the good work.

Recently, I had a conversation with Anaïs Saint-Jude, a PhD in French Literature at Stanford University about the lack of emotional fibre and humanity in Facebook’s commoditized version of connectedness (which I don’t fundamentally agree with).

When I studied Economics at the University of Melbourne, we learned about subsistence economies drove people to live in towns and communities so they could barter as there was a lack of liquidity and divisibility in exchangeable goods and services. Along comes money and currency and solves that problem.

So Facebook doesn’t make sense as the whole word does not want to be open (need to live so close together like in pre-currency days to trade goods and services). There is no economic requirement to do so.

Yesterday I was reading an article on Google’s + 1 project and I thought about what my friend and I discussedand it occured that from a math perspective (Google is all math – a play on the name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googol) and so I find it amusing that software guys are creating technologies that go against with the laws of economics.

So I was thinking of the lack of privacy and the fact that I’m sure one person on every persons Facebook account is not really connected….. hence the math is “minus 1”.

So whilst the project being pursued by Google and other is more, more, more, social, social, social – I think there are lots of people (or atleast a segment) which are thinking less, less, less, privacy, privacy, privacy – which leads me to the economic rationale that we are in a social bubble and the laws of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns will prevail and people will find that they get less value from adding more Facebook members.

Hence, I do believe in an economic (and might I say humanities) solution is “prive-1” (“prive” is French for private” less one). That is an economic truism I feel will result from the overproduction of friends on Facebook and feel a business will result from this theory.

I have been a bear on Facebook in the past for various reasons. Low click through rates as the average user is spending 30 minutes on average (versus <30 seconds per visit time on Google) means Facebook doesn’t convert as fast. Branding aside, Facebook are generating $1 per user in sales (500M users, $500m in sales) and Google crushes them by a factor of 50x in respect to profit. BUT…..

The famous but…. the Facebook Places and Check in is very interesting as it allows mobile phone users to”check in” via Facebook Places and then advertisers can offer local deals based on location. It happened to me at Macy’s in Palo Alto the other day. Now that has value!

RIP Google Suggestion Tool. We’ll miss you!

Whilst we continually update our Keyword Suggestion Tool, we have over 1.2 Million keywords accessible via our Publisher Directory Keywords API and it is our intention to keep running our crawler over the top 6 million sites globally and publishing the open directory of keywords used on these large websites.

Tyron Ball, one of the young guns of the website buying and selling on the SearchForecast marketplace has provided a very good segmentation of buyers and sellers of websites and domain names:

The Industry Operator: Owned by a business/professional within their industry – as per dentist being owned by an actual dentist. In many cases this person is just forwarding the domain into their corporate website. Have probably had the domain for many years. Good chance they have already been approached by people wanting to buy their domains.

The Capitalist: Someone who has set up a website on a good domain, served some Google ads and bs content. Usually a bit of a tech geek / online marketing guy. Probably has some view of what their domain is worth – no doubt much higher than its actual value.

The Lucky Opportunist: Someone who managed to register a great domain name early on and has no idea what to do with it but knows they have something of value.

The Savvy Domainer: e.g. Dark Blue Sea. Usually an ads portal site. Going to want a lot for the domain if they even want to sell it at all.

For more information on buying and selling websites, visit http://marketplace.searchforecast.com