It is my theory that human beings are inherently self-obsessed and in need of constant attention.

For years, people had to call or meet up with friends to update them on the latest happenings in their lives.  As lives became busy and distances grew, that evolved to emails sent to friends.  A circle of friends was limited to 20, maybe 30 people.

But that wasn’t enough.  We wanted more friends, more attention.

Enter Facebook.

At first, it was great.  It brought long lost friends together, reunited families across the world, allowed young men to gaze at bikini pictures of young women they barely knew.

But then it got worse.

There came a point where it basically allowed people to broadcast to the world what only their Toto used to know.

Just ate a ham and cheese? Why not tell Facebook about it.  Caught your bus on time?  Facebook would want to know. You favorite baseball team just won one of 162 regular season games? Facebook’s gotta know.  Went to work on a Monday just like everyone else?  You get the point.

If there was an inane, vapid comment popping up in your brain, you had a medium to broadcast it.  What was worse was that there were people commenting on those posts, encouraging and enabling that behavior.

Enter Google+, the anti-Facebook.  Social networkers weary of the Hyde Park podium that is Facebook rejoiced.

Ah, circles.  Circles, where you could create little groups of friends and post information that was relevant just to those friends.

Did your team just win a cricket match?  Celebrate with your “Cricket Fanz” circle.  Found out about a job opening at your company? Help out your buddies in the “9.2% of My Friends” circle.  Just won the lottery?  Oh, what the hell, post it to everyone.

But it didn’t work.  Man’s inherent need for unwarranted attention and self-importance came in the way.

In my three weeks of using Google+, I have seen it become yet another extension of Facebook.  In an absolutely unscientific survey of my stream, 85% of the posts are still sent to the “Public”.  Even “Limited” posts are addressed to over 50 people.

Could circles already be dead?

I hope not, because I think it’s an idea Facebook was never able to figure out (or maybe didn’t want to figure out).  It could be that people are still warming up to the idea and we will see more use of it in the near future.

Until then, I look forward to the day I will have only relevant content in my stream.  Sorry, friend-who-just-saw-a-puppy-and-decided-to-post-a-picture-of-it, I really don’t care.

Are you having similar experiences? Will Google+ ultimately succeed? Click the link to vote!

Earlier this week, I received a heads up from my Google rep that the tablet interface for Google search will be changing to look just like mobile. This comes at no surprise considering the incredible growth of tablets.  It looks like the change has taken effect this morning, and instead of the desktop style interface with up to 10 ads, there are now only 2 – 5 ads. The new interface focuses on making content more visible and accessible for tablet users by increasing the size of the search button, adding more white space, and making the search results bigger.

OLD INTERFACE:

NEW INTERFACE:

What does this mean?  Search marketers will need to be more vigilant and cautious about how they manage advertising on tablets, and some initial optimizations will be required.

Following is a quick how-to on getting your campaigns up-to-date with this change:

1. If you haven’t already, split out your campaigns to Desktop, Tablet, and Mobile.  This is a best practice Google has been pushing for a while, and with this new change it has become almost essential.
2. If you already have your campaigns split, take a look at your Tablet/iPad bids, and ensure that you are in 1^st or 2^nd position.  Similar to mobile, most traffic will come from the top 2 or 3 positions because there is no right sidebar, and no one’s really going to scroll all the way to the bottom for additional ads.
3. If you don’t have Sitelinks activated on iPad, do it.  This will actually ensure that you are the only advertiser showing up on top, giving you access to pretty much all the paid search traffic for that term.

With these steps, we can definitely expect much higher CTRs, as the user will get a much simpler, cleaner interface to work with.  The coming few weeks should be interesting to see how this change pans out, and what effects it has on overall campaign performance.

8 Minute Abs. Tae Bo. Pilates.

Exercise crazes come and go, but the P90x seems to be holding its ground.  The program has been around since 2004, but Google Insights for Search shows an increase in demand over the past year.

After a surge in search volume during January 2010, interest in the make-me-huge-in-90-days videos has plateaued (undoubtedly tied to ambitious New Year’s resolutions).  Will this exercise craze remain strong for the next few years or is it just another fad?