I had to create a new gmail account yesterday for a project and was greeted with the following screen right after creating the new email address:

That’s right, big G was asking for my mobile phone number to verify the new email. I was kinda surprised honestly. You know, Google already has a lot of information on me and probably already have my mobile phone number somewhere, but I just feel it’s information I shouldn’t have to share for a free email address. Then, I asked myself: “Let’s say I don’t have a mobile phone, can I still create a gmail account?”.

No phone, ask a friend

The process is not flexible at all. If you don’t have a mobile phone, you’re screwed, ask a friend:

If you’d like to sign up for a Gmail address, you need to have a mobile phone that has text-messaging capabilities.
If you don’t have a phone, you may want to ask a friend if you can use his or her number to receive a code.

What’s going on big G?

We’re Google, of course we store your mobile number

Google will use your phone number to send an invitation code in a text message to your phone. In doing so, we store each phone number to make sure it is used to create a limited number of accounts.

Your number will also be associated with your account to avoid unnecessary future verifications for other Google services.  For more information, please review the Gmail Privacy Policy: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/privacy.html. In accordance with this policy, your number will never be sold or shared for marketing purposes without your permission, nor will we contact you using this number without your express permission.

Your country is not available, ask a friend

There are a number of countries and carriers for which we don’t provide service because of varying limitations. If possible, you may want to try a friend’s phone on another carrier.

Can it get less flexible?

I don’t think so. I mean, you have to admit the limitations and conditions are a little crazy for creating a free email address. But, if it happens to you and don’t want to give your phone number, go through the process again, you might not have to verify by SMS. That’s what happened to me: I just started over and everything went fine. So, I don’t know exactly what triggers this SMS verification process, but it’s annoying.

I was reading this article on Read Write Web about the fact that the traditional comment system is about to change. In fact, the post is about the new product by the people behind the popular comment system JS-Kit, currently installed on more than 600,000 websites. The new comment system, called Echo, actually aggregates conversations from twitter, friendfeed and a bunch of other social platforms to give a better idea of what’s being said about your content outside of your website. Because let’s face it, more and more people talk about your content outside of your website.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while honestly. The amount of comments I leave on other blogs have considerably dropped in the last couple of months, but it is not because of my lack of interest. In a certain way, I still comment: it’s just not formal and traditional comments. I retweet posts, I comment on them on twitter, friendfeed and Facebook and sometimes on  blogs directly. I still show my interest and give feedback, but just not in a traditional way.

In fact, I think the 2 lines comment is dead. You know, the classic “nice post, you rock!” comment. While it is extremely annoying on a blog, it is perfectly suited for twitter. On the opposite, the smart 10 lines comment won’t and will probably never die.

I think we’re about to see some important changes in the blogging world, but all for the best. Things have already changed a lot with all the different channels available to produce content, but in my opinion this is only the beginning.

How do you see this evolving?

I’ve never been a huge fan of posts with topics such as “top 15 tools to…”. You know, I’ve found some blogs that successfully made those lists useful, but I feel that the added value is usually very low. Sure they do well in the search engines and are easy to read and share on social media platforms, but I much prefer a good analysis instead of a list and here’s why.

I stumbled upon an article on Mashable that express my feeling about “list posts”: Twittermania: 140+ More Twitter Tools!

I understand the funny reference to twitter with the 140 tools, but what really is the added value of such posts? I highly respect Mashable, but they do post a lot of similar articles and they spread viraly and I’m sure you know a lot of other blogs doing so. It’s not an isolated case.

I mean, what is the benefit of listing 140 tools, do you really expect me to try all of them? Of course not. That’s why I want an analysis. It’s easy to break down this post into 10 other posts that could be called something like “10 twitter clients compared”. Now that’s a useful post. But more work.

I can’t take any action with 140 twitter tools listed in a post, but I can surely take action after reading a comparison of 10 twitter tools. I don’t want to know every tool that is available to me, I want to know the best tools and why.

That’s the same reason why companies are ready to pay a lot of money for experts’ advices: they don’t have time to evaluate every single solution, they simply pay someone to do the evaluation and give them the top 3 options in a nice report.

You know, there are reasons why lists are popular and you might like them, but I just prefer a good analysis.

It hit me tonight. Have you ever looked at all the content you’re creating and that you do not own?

I’m the biggest fan of “own your content”. Whenever I evaluate different technologies or solutions when it comes to content creation, I always ask myself: will I own that data? When I say “own my content”, I mean on my own server or at least I make sure I will be able to leave the service with the data I created.

It is so easy to spend half a day on twitter and Facebook building a brand and retweeting your friends, but these are services that could shut down tomorrow with all your data. Of course you would keep the brand you worked so hard to build and all your connections, but without a solid home (website) and a central place to access the content that made you so special, you’re screwed.

Don’t take me wrong here, social networks are useful tools for sure, but they are only tools: they shouldn’t replace your home (your website). Your brand has to go beyond the tools you use because the platforms can be replaced anytime.

What do you think?

The Web has definitely changed a lot of things in our life and I find it fascinating when it has a direct impact on the way I see things offline. Among many other things, it has dramatically changed my expectations as a customer in my everyday life.

As a customer buying online, you have to trust the website, product and company you’re buying from. As an e-commerce owner, when you’re doing business online, you can’t fail and you have to meet customer expectations or they’ll just go elsewhere. This “meeting customer expectations” thing goes from the moment the customer arrives on your website to the after sale customer service: every aspect is important. Companies have worked really hard to build a safe and interesting enough environment so that customers would buy online instead of offline and trust me, nobody wants to screw that. Then, customers became used to live chat customer service, digitally delivered products, fast email answers, etc. This is all good because as customers, we like quality products, delivered fast and on time with an awesome customer service. The Web was able to deliver that. In fact, it had to, otherwise people would have continued buying offline. E-commerce businesses won such a big war.

Social media has also helped to bring that brand-customer relationship to another level. More than ever, customers are close to the brands and products they love and can “interact” with them. It’s all about building trust.

Now, whenever I go to the restaurant or go shopping “offline”, I expect all of the above. I expect to be able to talk to someone when I need it, I expect to be able to ask all the questions I want when I want to, I don’t want to talk to someone who simply try to sell me stuff: I want to talk to someone who’s trying to help me, I expect the buying process to be smooth, I expect awesome customer service, I expect a positive experience all the way. I simply expect this offline because I can get it all online. If I can chat live with a customer service rep online, why would I wait 25 minutes in store for an available rep?

There is just so much offline businesses could learn from e-commerce. Offline businesses will always be around, but some will have to re-think the way they work in order to stay in business. That’s just how strong the Web is.

Honestly, I think saying “don’t write for search engines” is just as ridiculous as saying “write for search engines”. Both are bad ways of doing things. I prefer to say: don’t write for search engines, but think about it.

I’m all about building communities, authenticity and transparency, but why are we always putting social media efforts and SEO appart? Why do people say: “I don’t care about SEO, I prefer to spend time building a community”? Both can go together.

I would never advise someone to write an article solely for search engines, but why not think about the fact that Google, Yahoo and Bing will index your content? I mean, your content is going to get indexed anyway, so having search engines in mind when you write content isn’t a bad thing for extra visibility. Having search engines in mind doesn’t mean writing keywords stuffed articles, it just means paying extra attention to basic SEO.

Then you know what? You can still build that community and benefit from some search engine traffic.

It’s so easy to take everything for granted.

I learned today, like most people on twitter, that my friend Meg Porter (@megapixel on twitter) was killed in a car accident last week. She was only 24 : my age. This is a weird feeling as I never met Meg in real life, but we definitely built a friendship online. Social media is all about people and while it is 99% fun, this reminds us that it is not a game: it is all real.

Meg was awesome and there was no reasons for her to go, but it happened. She will be missed.

I offer my deepest sympathies to her family.

Some companies and websites really put a lot of efforts in design to make sure their website provide the best user experience possible. While we should talk about these great companies embracing the Web 2.0 philosophy, there are a lot of websites making huge efforts so that their website remain outdated. It’s Friday, so let’s have some fun and talk about one of these websites.

My Web 0.1 award this week goes to awesomebackgrounds.com that I discovered while searching for some backgrounds. It is a great example of what not to do if you want people to buy your products and before you think it’s an old website last updated in 1999, let me tell you that the page was last updated March 4th 2009.

They sell awesome PowerPoint designs, perfect for professional presentations (?):

And yes, there are some classic Web 0.1 animated gifs:

Visit the site and share your hidden gems.

I plan to do more of these, so feel free to send me your favorite Web 0.1 examples by email ( benoit at bentremblay.com ) or directly here in the comment section.

Like a lot of people, I really like Gary’s business approach and his unique “over the top” personality really makes him a good speaker. This keynote is definitely one of the best I’ve seen from Gary so I’m sharing it with you. Hope you like it.

Gary Vaynerchuk @ Big Omaha 2009 from Big Omaha on Vimeo.

Like some of you might know, I’ve changed my domain name quite a few times and I’d like to talk about the impacts of theses changes from a SEO/traffic and branding point of view. Changing a domain name can be quite bad, but honestly it depends on a lot of things like the size of your website, if you already have a very well established brand, if you’re targeting local traffic, etc. For me, it has proven to be quite a smooth process, but here are my experiences and recommendations.

SEO

SEO is usually the biggest concern when changing a domain name because most people think this will lead to losing all their backlinks. While it is not the best decision ever SEOwise, there is some techniques you can use to make sure you don’t lose your existing PR and backlinks. Fortunately for us, Google published some guidelines for moving a website:

• Test the move process by moving the contents of one directory or subdomain first. Then use a 301 Redirect to permanently redirect those pages on your old site to your new site. This tells Google and other search engines that your site has permanently moved.

• Once this is complete, check to see that the pages on your new site are appearing in Google’s search results. When you’re satisfied that the move is working correctly, you can move your entire site. Don’t do a blanket redirect directing all traffic from your old site to your new home page. This will avoid 404 errors, but it’s not a good user experience. A page-to-page redirect (where each page on the old site gets redirected to the corresponding page on the new site) is more work, but gives your users a consistent and transparent experience. If there won’t be a 1:1 match between pages on your old and new site, try to make sure that every page on your old site is at least redirected to a new page with similar content.

• If you’re changing your domain because of site rebranding or redesign, you might want to think about doing this in two phases: first, move your site; and second, launch your redesign. This manages the amount of change your users see at any stage in the process, and can make the process seem smoother. Keeping the variables to a minimum also makes it easier to troubleshoot unexpected behavior.

• Check both external and internal links to pages on your site. Ideally, you should contact the webmaster of each site that links to yours and ask them to update the links to point to the page on your new domain. If this isn’t practical, make sure that all pages with incoming links are redirected to your new site. You should also check internal links within your old site, and update them to point to your new domain. Once your content is in place on your new server, use a link checker like Xenu to make sure you don’t have broken legacy links on your site. This is especially important if your original content included absolute links (like www.example.com/cooking/recipes/chocolatecake.html) instead of relative links (like …/recipes/chocolatecake.html).

• To prevent confusion, it’s best to make sure you retain control of your old site domain for at least 180 days.

• Add your new site to your Webmaster Tools account, and verify your ownership of it. Then create and submit a Sitemap listing the URLs on your new site. This tells Google that your content is now available on your new site, and that we should go and crawl it.

• Finally, keep both your new and old site verified in Webmaster Tools, and review crawl errors regularly to make sure that the 301s from the old site are working properly, and that the new site isn’t showing unwanted 404 errors.

From my personal experience, within a month or two, you should recover your PR and the Google Index should be updated. So yes, expect some bad days especially within the first 2 weeks. Redirecting all your content to your new website using a 301 redirect is really the key, as it will tell Google the page has permanently moved and the new page should be considered as the original source from now on.

A nice side effect of using anchor text in the ranking algorithm Google uses is that you will continue to rank for your old name on Google. Even if the name is completely different, the links with your old website name now points to your new website because of the 301 redirect which mean you will most likely rank for that your old keywords.

A negative side effect that I can see from a SEO point of view is if you were targeting a specific geographic location with a particular TLD (.co.uk for example) and switched to a .com. If you don’t have enough backlinks from the country you are targetting and now don’t have a proper TLD for that country, you might disappear from the results for this country. So, be careful if you target a specific market or region.

Another negative impact that can happen is if you redirect your old domain to a subfolder of the new domain. Let’s say you are redirecting your established pizza.com domain to xyz.com/services/pizza. This might not help your rankings but honestly, it has nothing with moving the website, it’s a pure SEO issue: root domains tend to rank better than subfolders.

Backlinks

This is related to SEO, but backlinks are probably the biggest SEO concern for most people, so let’s make a new section for that. It is important to note that when using a permanent 301 redirect, all backlinks will now link to your new domain. If you look at Yahoo Site Explorer and  don’t see your old backlinks, it is absolutely normal, they will never appear for your new domain. They still exist, but Yahoo Site explorer doesn’t update with 301 redirects: it’s a bit dumb and only look for backlinks linking directly to your domain name. So, don’t panic, they’re still there and still giving you PageRank juice. Maybe not for the right keywords anymore though…

Branding and RSS Subscribers

To me, the biggest issue has always been branding and RSS Subscribers. I feel I’ve always made the right decision, but changing a brand’s name is never a good idea. People know you under a certain name and all of a sudden you’re someone else. Imagine if Wal-Mart decided to change their name, this would certainly impact their brand. Well, this is no different for a website, even if it’s on a much smaller scale. But you know, as long as changing  your name is a long term decision, it’s a good decision.

Another important aspect to consider is if the site you are moving is a blog and you have to change the RSS Feed address. If you can keep the same address do it as it will avoid you a lot of pain. Services like FeedBurner usually offer a 30 days redirect to the new feed address, but you will lose some subscribers in the process as not all of them will take the time to update their feed reader. You can also see it as a way to keep only your interested readers.

Conclusion

As you see, moving a site to another domain isn’t as bad as it seems from a SEO point of view, but could hurt your brand. I’m sure you can find quite a lot of horror stories out there and I can imagine it can be quite a nightmare when moving a website with a million of pages indexed (delicious for example), but for most people I feel it’s not that bad.