Small Business Influencer Awards

 

I was recently honored to have been nominated for the 2011 Small Business Influencer award in the guru category. It is an effort by Smallbiztrends.com to recognize those “organizations and people who have made a significant impact on the North American small business market”.  The awards will identify the Top 100 influencers and are decided 40% by a popular vote and 60% by the judges. In the popular voting you can vote for a candidate once every 24 hours.

Whenever I receive this sort of nomination an internal dialog always takes place that goes something like… “ooh, cool… I would like to win ah but I can’t win, oh this is just a popularity contest but there are others more deserving than I … “. By the time the internal chatter has ceased the contest is over and I place 75th or so.

In this contest, since a voter can vote once a day for a given individual, a contestant needs a very large family, a very involved mother, a great bot network or a very supportive industry. I don’t posses a large family, a living mother nor a bot network but do feel that option four (industry support) holds lots of potential.

And this time I have decided to be more proactive, more assertive and more involved and not let my internal dialog slow me down… so I am suggesting that as an industry we get together and we Vote early, Vote often and Vote for ….. Lisa Barone.

Why pimp for Lisa Barone and not myself you ask? Well besides the fact that she has an Italian last name and HAS to have a larger family and active parents, I really think that she deserves the support of our industry for her tireless reporting of industry events, her relentless and smb focused writing and her voice. An opinionated, funny, off beat voice that is a voice of reason and straight talk in an industry that has its share of the opposite. She has done us all a favor and I think it is time to pay her back.

So Vote early, Vote often and Vote for ….. Lisa Barone. Not once but every day for the next 22…spread the word.

Google Places: Google Removes Spam

It appears that Google has removed most but not all review spam from the Moishe’s Moving System’s Places page and from many of the other Places pages affected by this scam. On Moishe’s Places page, the spam that remains (besides their response spam) was posted between July 1 and July 3 and seems to still affect 35 or so other moving companies nationwide. Whether Google just removed the spam affecting the most companies or it is still a work in progress is not yet clear. Kudos to Google for moving on this problem.

Here are a few samples of the spam that still remains and is affecting moving companies country wide:

Another interesting sidelight is that Google is not alone in having been hit with this spam. According to Google’s index, Superpages has been seeing this stuff since February, 2010. It is also present in Rateitall.com, Judy’s Book, Yellowbot, InsiderPages, MyMovingReviews and  Kudzu starting last fall and continuing into early this year. While this dreck is visible in all of these sites, it is much less pervasive than at Google. Whether it was already taken down elsewhere or the extortionists are just ramping up their game is not yet clear.

Fake reviews are a problem whether perpetrated by the businesses themselves or by others attempting to gain advantage at the expense of the business. The answer to the problem is not totally clear but a solution probably will need a number of components:

  • More FTC enforcement and education
  • Better filtering algorithms on the part of the search engines
  • Improved and more viable business complaint options, dispute resolution and removal mechanisms.

Google Places is not the only environment in which this abuse is taking place. But Google can and should provide a lead in developing an exemplary review environment that is fair to the public and fair to the businesses being reviewed.

Geo APIs Summer Learning Series

 

Google has one of the world’s most comprehensive databases of Places information, including over 50M business listings and points of interest worldwide. The Google Places API lets your applications tap into that database, to find the Places your app needs, so that users can indicate the Place they are at, or discover new Places nearby.

Following the introduction of the Places API at Google I/O last year, we worked with developers in a limited preview to understand what was needed to ensure the Places API is as powerful and easy to use as possible. In the “Connecting People with Places” session at this year’s I/O I was very happy to announce that having implemented the feedback we received during the preview, the API is now accessible to all:

 

The Places API is provided in two ways, a set of XML and JSON web services, and a set of corresponding classes in the Maps API v3.

The web services are ideal for mobile app developers, and can be queried from the developer’s own infrastructure, or directly from the app running on the smartphone. The Places API Search service focuses on location-based search, delivering up 20 Places in the vicinity of a user’s location. Search results can be filtered by Place name, or by one of over 90 categories, such as ‘restaurant’, ‘night_club’ or ‘spa’. The Places API Autocomplete service focuses on text based search, providing autocompletions of Places near the user as they type.

The Places API Report services also allows apps to submit new Places provided by users, which are instantly added to subsequent search results, and also delete them at a later date if required. Apps that allow users to identify the Place they are in at the time can also pass this “check-in” signal back to the Places API Check-in service which factors this real time popularity signal into the ranking of subsequent searches, so that the Places popular with users of the app are ranked higher in real time.

The Engineering Lead for the Places API, Marcelo Camelo, dove into how to get started with the Places API web services, and the structure of requests and responses in the “Location Based App Development using Google APIs” session:

 

For web based applications the Places API has also been integrated into the JavaScript Maps API v3. The PlacesService class provides access to Places API Search directly from the web based Maps applications, while the Autocomplete class enables a HTML text field to predict autocompletions of Places as the user types:

 

To use the Places API classes in your Maps API applications you simply need to request the new places library when you load the API into your web page. To use the web services, you must first create a new project in the Google APIs Console, and then enable the Places API on that project. You can then use the APIs Console key for that Project to access the Places API.

Initially your key will offer courtesy quota of 1,000 requests per day. Once you are ready to launch the next great location based app, simply “Enable billing” on the project. You will be prompted to provide credit card details, in order to verify your identity. Once you have done so, your quota will increase to 100,000 requests per day, but the API will remain free to use. Note that you may be charged if you use the same key for other APIs, which you can avoid by creating a separate project for accessing other APIs.

For more information on how to use the Places API, check out the documentation for the Search and Autocomplete web services and Maps API v3 places library. You can also discuss the API with other developers on the Google Maps API Web Services forum, and request additional features you would like to see the API offer, or report any problems you find, using the Places API section of the Google Maps API Issue Tracker.

Our launch at Google I/O this year was just the beginning of the Google Places API story. We are looking forward to bringing you many more features in the future to help you build more innovative and compelling location based applications. So do get started developing your apps, but keep an eye on this blog for more to come!