Safe is safe
In this week’s digital news: Out of the cloud, Meta verified, Twitter wants your ID, Instagram loves search, And back to the desktop.
Out of the cloud
We had the revolution of cloud computing beginning 20 years ago and the main switch was about 10 years ago and now people are going back. Business-critical data is on-premise safer than in the cloud. The efficiency is also in some cases with big companies better on-premise than in the cloud, the ROI is better. The scale of computing power is different today than it was 10 years ago. We have machine learning systems, we have AI, we have huge computing power being active and so it's getting expensive because the schemes of the cloud computing offers, they explode, the costs explode as soon as they have too much traffic on the system.
What you will learn as a company, you have to see in each case, so check it precisely. For small companies, no doubt, cloud computing is much, much better, but for large companies, it might be different.
Meta verified
In the US since last week, you can get verified on Meta for $12 for the web version and $15 for the mobile, It works very easily because on your profile you got Meta Verified available and you just click it and pay. What are the advantages? The blue thing we all want to have. It means a verified profile and direct access to customer support, and a lot of money from Meta. Snap already did it and 2.5 million users of Snap converted to the paid version. Elon Musk did the same with Twitter and seemingly it worked. So media is doing the same now, so the free internet was in the past and the future is a paid internet where nothing is for free.
What does that mean for you as a company? You have a lot of traffic from AI bots on your website and when you calculate this traffic, you pay a lot of things for just machines. And what do you want? You want your customers, you want real people. And how do you get them? In the future, we will identify real people, which would be a revolution for the Internet, definitely.
Twitter wants an ID
We just heard how Meta is verifying the profiles with some AI. Twitter is going the safe way, which means you have to present your government ID card or driving license in the US, and it works very easily, you just make a photo of the ID for the front and the back side, then you make a selfie of yourself and present it to Twitter and so they accept it to know that it's a real person behind that product.
How do we know that? Because there's a product intelligence firm, I didn't know there were things like that, it's called Watchful.ai and they looked at the source code of the Android version and detected this. So it's not official, it's not published, but they are planning to do that.
What does that mean for you as a company? The web numbers in the future will go down, and web analytics numbers will go down, but on the other side, you know who is visiting you and you know that it's not fake profiles.
Instagram loves search
We invented search engine marketing 20 years ago. It was, by the way, not Google, but it was Alta Vista who invented that we have search ads beside the index. That means you pay for people who are really interested in a certain subject or in a certain product category because they just searched for it. Now Instagram also included the search, so that means you can book search ads. They look like a normal post but below your name, it's written sponsored and they work because people really need your products. That means you as a company can try to find people who really search for your product and advertise there.
It's much more useful than just advertising anywhere where people are just annoyed by your advertising.
Back to the desktop
WhatsApp has a new web client and it's even better than the old one in multi-device synchronizing. You can even have your phone off and still, you can work on your desktop with WhatsApp. What does this mean for companies? WhatsApp is going to become even more important for customer service and customer service is absolutely important for you as a company to be available to your customers.
Egypt Business Directory
Digital marketing expert and author of 25+ books, is an online marketing guru in Germany, known for starting one of the world's first web servers.