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May 31st, 2007, 12:37pm
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Last night I found myself watching an interview of Al Gore plugging his new book “The Assault on Reason” on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. The two joked about the blurring of entertainment and news, and Gore stated that the Internet was a beacon of hope for democracy due to low entry barriers and active contributive efforts. Ironically enough, this statement was made on television, a medium that involves passive learning. This made me wonder about the future of the Internet television. With technological advancements growing at an exponential rate and the active participation of prosumers, will television be anything like it is now in a matter of a few years? Will traditional television as we know it even exist?
The CRTC has recently modified its advertising limits to conventional networks. By 2009, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission said there will be no restrictions on advertising for over-the-air TV broadcasters, who have complained loudly about a shrinking advertising base as viewers migrate to cable, satellite and the Internet. What will this mean for the networks? As programming is sent out for free over the airways, advertising is their means of revenue. If networks cram their programming full of advertisements to increase revenue, viewers will simply jump ship to alternative media sources, most notably the Internet. It just doesn’t seem logical to me. I mean, unless you really love watching commercials.
So let’s take a look at the alternative: programming via the Internet. With products such as Apple TV and the recent buzz about Joost, it looks as though we can abandon our TV cable accounts and use that money to increase the bandwidth of our Internet accounts. We can sit back, relax, and watch a wide range of programs with the potential of less advertising for one flat rate.
Or not.
There are issues that need to be addressed. Just ask the British. With a cap on Internet usage allowance, any Briton with an Internet connection can typically only view roughly three hours of programming on Joost before using up their monthly usage allowance. After that, top-up charges apply. Both in Canada, and in Britain, bandwidth restrictions, placing caps on data transfers, throttling during peak times and ‘traffic or packet shaping’ from high-speed ISPs result in much slower internet connection speeds (than what you are actually paying for) and limited usage. With Apple TV you can’t even directly connect to the Internet to view programming. The footage must be downloaded to one’s computer first before transferring it to your television via the stripped down MacMini. Besides, any computer with a TV Card has the same capability of viewing downloaded footage on your television set. With AppleTV, it is also necessary that the user have a High Definition Television. However, most of the footage available for download on the Internet is not HD compliant. Despite the fact that Joost is compatible with Apple TV, and the viewing quality is quite good with Joost, what is the point of spending all of this money on a HDTV and AppleTV, when the quality of the footage viewed will be equal to, or less than that of broadcast cable television?
For now, it doesn’t appear to me that an immediate switch from the television to the Internet for your programming needs is viable. Only when ISPs can provide their customers with reliable, secure, and unlimited connections will the transfer of programming from television to the Internet be feasible for the general public.
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May 30th, 2007, 05:02pm
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If you haven’t heard already, Apple and EMI are now offering DRM free music on iTunes. Apple is not the first company to offer DRM free music, but as the industry leader they are the most important. This may just be the first smart move the music industry has made in the last decade. As consumers we need to put all our past grudges behind us and support this initiative and reward EMI for taking the leap.
Sure big music companies and the RIAA have been accosting their customer base and suing children for the past decade, but we need to help them change. It took music companies over 6 years figure out that CDs are DRM free and anyone could rip and pirate them if they so choose, making DRM completely and utterly useless. Now that digital music has finally caught up with the CD, as consumers we are responsible to make sure that it’s successful.
My complaining and ranting about the incompetent and inept music industry is over for now, instead I am off to iTunes to buy some EMI music.
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May 29th, 2007, 11:20pm
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It’s going to get worse before it gets better.
Every day it is adding more functionality and the network effect keeps exploding (see Metcalfe’s Law for the effect your mom will make if she joins).
One of the subtle, but important features on Facebook is the birthday reminder – it alone accounts for a great deal of “wall on wall” communication. Many websites in the past have tried to incorporate this into their online calendars – often pleading for you to purchase an e-card or some sort of gift. Facebook, on the other hand will sell you an animated gif(t) such as boxer shorts or fuzzy dice, but really make it appear that they don’t really need your money. Especially with all the new applications such as the Compass and Horoscopes all loaded with potential (extremely profitable) revenue.
A good example from my personal life. I’ve been very close friends with Stephen J. Morrison (seen below in his only onscreen credit opposite Dean Wormer) for about fifteen years. Never once has it occurred to me to call him on his birthday. To be honest, I didn’t even know when it was, other than vaguely earlier in 1968 than mine. If asked, I would have guessed September. Not this year (in, uh, May)…I was on Facebook anyway, so I managed to make an extremely little effort to spread a little cheer.
In other Facebook news…the Wall St. Journal reports that the University of Michigan and M.I.T. among others are offering a masters program in social computing.From the article…
Schools not traditionally known for their technology programs are also venturing into the study of social computing. For the past year, Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas has funded two research projects that use social-networking site Facebook to examine student retention trends, in part because the school noticed its students were already spending so much time on the site, said K.B. Massingill, executive director of the division that funded the research. A group of undergraduate students also studied faith-related conversations in Facebook and MySpace and presented their findings to what Mr. Massingill called an unusually well-attended faculty session. “We filled up the room,” he said.
For an upcoming issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, a peer-reviewed journal sponsored by Indiana University, researchers Danah Boyd and Nicole Ellison issued a call for papers on social-networking Web sites. “We wanted to encourage scholars to get their research out there because we both knew it was brewing, but folks were being slow about publishing,” said Ms. Boyd, a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley’s school of information. Expecting a handful of papers, she was surprised to receive more than 100 submissions.
Personally, I’m looking forward to the peer reviewed thesis “the poke function and the human condition.”
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May 29th, 2007, 05:40pm
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One of the least known internet business models revolves around ad revenue from the ownership of domain names. The revenue comes from the small percentage of people, between 5-10%, who guess the address of what they are looking for instead of using a search engine. The owners of these addresses place pay-per-click ads which are often relevant to the domain name. While the business model may appear to prey on lost internet surfers, there is some utility in providing relevant links to what the user has expressed interest in. Critics of this system claim that these “squatters” are preventing legitimate websites from getting prime domain names. The debate is likely to continue.
The interesting aspect is the sheer size of the industry. NameMedia, the largest company, is reported to have 725 000 domain names with a further 1.4 million independently placed web sites in its portfolio. This brings over 60 million monthly visitors along with $60 million in ad revenue for NameMedia. The “direct search” industry is expected to grow to $1.1 billion in 2007. A hefty chunk of the $17 billion plus internet ad industry.
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May 29th, 2007, 12:46pm
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One of the best blogs on the web today is written by Jonathon Schwartz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems - it is really worth your time if you are interested in how wikinomics and the Web 2.0 are changing the world. One of his more recent and informative posts on such topics was published on May 21st. It opens with a long discussion about the many ways online media has been trumping print media recently - and how print media is effectively fighting back by (among other things) focusing on community.
While interesting in it’s own right, the really good stuff comes when he goes on to talk about how this relates the software industry that Sun plays in. A particular focus is placed on how seven years ago everything was created by Sun’s own employees, with little or no community involvement, and how their biggest competitor in the late 1990s turned out to be a product built by a company that aggregated and organized open source software on the web. To quote Jonathon on how Sun reacted:
Could we have sued them? Sure. Sun has what I’d argue to be the single most valuable and focused patent portfolio on the web (and yes, we’d use it to defend Red Hat and Ubuntu, both). But suing the open source community would’ve been tantamount to a newspaper suing the authors of their letters to the editor. We would’ve been attempting to censor rather than embrace a free press. It might have felt good at the time, but it wouldn’t have addressed the broader challenge - community content was becoming more interesting to our customers than our professional content.
He then goes on to explain how Sun dropped prices for some products to free, made their code available, and “got busy engaging rather than fighting the open source community.” There are lessons here, and in how Sun is trying to grow, that every company can learn from - and particularly those in the media business. To quote Jonathon one final time:
And yes, I’m well aware that we have a long ways to go to return SUNW to its heights, and to get revenue and earnings growing more aggressively. But the best way for us to do so is to embrace community content, not litigate against it. Those that resist the transition to free media are valuing their patent portfolios more highly than their customers. And that’s not Sun’s business model.
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May 28th, 2007, 01:21pm
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So let’s say somebody invented something that tracked each and every thought that went through your mind over a period of time, while also keeping tabs on everything you did before and after each one. Then, this somebody used all the information they had accumulated to start predicting what you would do after a given thought, and provided you with extra information to “help” with that experience in someway.
Could such a thing be of value to you? Sure, in some cases - but in many other cases it would give you back some funny looking stuff, and either way it would probably also weird you out a fair bit when you saw the results. Humans are known to think some really, really weird things that they don’t neccesarily act on, talk about, or even really remember sometimes. Perhaps more to the point, if you didn’t trust the person that invented this device (or someone who might get a hold of it in the future), you might worry just a little bit that they know way, way too much about what goes through your head.
Which brings us to Google. They haven’t come up with such a thing - yet - but where they appear to be trying to go right now is a little to close to this reality for many. Through their market leading search engine, Google is trying to create and leverage the most comprehensive database of personal information ever assembled, which will enable them (among other things) to offer tailored, personalized services for their users that better predict what it is they are actually looking for when they do a search - based on what they’d done in the past.
Now it’s not nearly as invasive as tracking every individual thought, it’s as close to a proxy as there is today - for example, if one actually sits and thinks about everything they’ve ever searched for on Google, at what times they did so, etc…. it’s really quite an astounding amount of insight that Google can have into each of their users heads.
While the fact Google has such information is hardly new, the explicit “personalization” of service based on this knowledge might just be a stark reminder to people of how much information the company has to act on - particularly for those with Gmail accounts and other registration based Google services.
Oh right - in April Google announced it would pay $3.1 Billion for DoubleClick, the online marketing behemoth that has an astounding number of cookies saved on people’s computers, tracking all kinds of sites that people visit no matter what route they take to get there. Put these and other pieces together and presto - a whole lot of information all consolidated in one place, that could be used in a variety of ways depending on where the privacy barriers are set.
The European Union is now eyeing this pretty closely and asking some hard questions which Google is going to answer in mid June. Reports are indicating that Google will argue they need to hold search data for two years - for security and commercial purposes - a limit they imposed on themselves in March (they had no limit before). Where it goes from here, and what Microsoft, Yahoo! and the other big players are going to do… only time will tell.
This will be a really big deal in terms of the future of the Web 2.0. While at first blush it can look rather innocently like the Amazon recommendation service on steroids, the information people give Amazon is very focused on commerce. There simply isn’t a lot of downside (or privacy concerns) if a company is recommending the book The Black Swan because people similar to you liked Fooled by Randomness.
But when you take everywhere someone goes on the web, and every little thing they’ve searched for over a long stretch of time, and all kinds of other personal information, and smush them all together a whole lot of interesting issues come into play - particularly if/when the government comes knocking at Google’s (or any of their competitors)) door again in the future.
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May 28th, 2007, 12:50pm
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Wikinomics has hit a few milestones recently. First, we’ve now reached over 100,000 copies in print. Second, there are plans for an expanded edition with a new chapter and a new introduction. Portfolio (our publisher) is aiming for an early 2008 release date. Finally, foreign editions of the book are starting to appear on bookshelves around the globe. We’ve got 19 translations and counting, many of which we be released during the next 6 months. Here’s a selection of book covers from a handful of the first foreign editions, including: United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, South Korea and Spain.
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May 28th, 2007, 11:15am
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YouTube is on the verge of reaching ‘google’ status. If I tell you to ‘google’ something, you understand it means to search it. Google has become a verb, and as ESPN columnist Bill Simmon’s describes, YouTube is also heading that way.
excerpt from 10 more reasons why I love sports
“Until recently, we described every hellacious NBA dunk in someone’s face as “He posterized him” or “He put him on a poster.” But after Baron Davis’ dunk in Round 2 , there was a seismic shift. For the first time, you could have said, “Davis YouTubed Kirilenko!” and gotten the point across. A few more monster dunks, and I see YouTube becoming a verb along the lines of Google and TiVo. Frankly, it’s time. Who buys sports posters anymore?”
At the heart of this shift in vernacular is the new way we consume sports. YouTube has become a tool for sports fans to revisit dramatic moments (Joe Carter 1993 World Series), watch improbable plays (Tiger Woods Master Shot), research upcoming stars (Andrea Bargnani) and judge controversial calls, hits and brawls (Emery v. Biron v. Peters fight ). It’s an on demand highlight factory, and as such I think has earned its verb status.
(And yes, I am from Toronto)
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May 25th, 2007, 05:26pm
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Facebook is the latest web 2.0 poster child to blow open the windows and unlock the doors by harnessing a platform strategy.
In a bid to become the mother-of-all social networking platforms, Facebook is opening up its APIs so that third party developers can add new features and functionality. Users will be able to assemble their own personalized collection of Facebook applications, much the way you can customize Firefox with thousands of third-party extensions.
Following in Amazon’s footsteps, Facebook has promised that developers will have significant freedom to monetize their widgets through ads and transaction revenue. Meanwhile MySpace has been muddling about — trashing third party widgets it doesn’t like and acquiring the ones it does like in typical command and control fashion.
In Wikinomics, we argued that platform strategies are all about harnessing the power of self-organization: the idea that tens of thousands of inter-operating agents can often marshal more bandwidth, more raw intelligence, and more requisite variety than the largest organization.
Other startups like flickr, 43 Things, del.icio.us, and Technorati opened up their APIs as a way to crank out new features, attract users, and scale up their businesses quickly. As Technorati’s CTO Tantek Celik put it recently: “It comes down to a question of limited time and, frankly, limited creativity. No matter how smart you are and no matter how hard you work, three or four people in a start-up—or even small companies with thirty people—can only come up with so many great ideas.”
With millions of developers who might just have the right combination of skills and insight to create something really valuable on the Facebook platform, it will be interesting to see where this goes.
Meanwhile the folks at TechCrunch are reporting some impressive stats, straight from the keynote delivered by Zuckerberg earlier today:
Facebook is growing 3% per week, which is 100,000 new users per day.
The fastest growing demographic is the 25 and up age group.
50% of registered users come back to the site every day.
Facebook is generating more than 40 billion page views per month. That’s 50 pages per user every day.
6th most trafficked site in the U.S.
More page views than eBay.
Their photos app is by far the number one photo site on the internet.
3x more people invited to events through facebook than evite.
Will Facebook’s platform strategy guarantee success? That depends on execution. One thing we do know is that winning in a world of co-creation and combinatorial innovation is all about building a loyal base of innovators that make your ecosystem stronger, more dynamic, and more expedient in creating new value for customers than the ecosystems of rivals. MySpace better get ready.
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May 25th, 2007, 04:30pm
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Don says “the fate of content creation and distribution on the web will be bogged down by legal wrangling for years,” but it seems that George Lucas isn’t the only one thinking creatively about how to bring co-creation out of the grey zone.
Back in February YouTube added AudioSwap to it’s growing repertoire of “TestTube” innovations — a service that enables YouTubers to easily swap the “unlicensed” soundtracks to their video masterpieces for tracks that have been cleared with the copyright owners. As far as I can tell the exact terms of the deal that YouTube struck with the artists and labels are not public. YouTube has said that the artists who have agreed to license their tracks get attribution every time their song is used as a soundtrack, but I’m guessing there is some ad revenue in the mix as well.
It’s a great model and hopefully something we’ll see more of. For artists, it’s nice a compromise between making their music freely available under a Creative Commons license and the wholly impractical option of forcing individual mash-up makers to request permission from the labels every time they get the urge to be creative.
The collection of tracks on AudioSwap seems a little sparse at the moment. But perhaps one day soon humanity’s entire library of recorded music and video will be mashable because of services like this.
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May 25th, 2007, 12:41pm
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As YouTube gets hit with yet another lawsuit, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the fate of content creation and distribution on the web will be bogged down by legal wrangling for years. However, at the same time there are a lot of interesting innovations happening that demonstrate how companies and content creators can effectively leverage the Web 2.0, rather than trying to fight it.
The most recent of these is Lucas Films and Eyespot.com teaming up to allow users to create their own Star Wars movie. Rather than trying to prevent fans from creating and sharing videos related to the popular movie series, users are being given over 250 scenes/ musical selections to mix and match, and they are also free to use their home made material as well. To quote the press release directly:
Star Wars fans can connect with the Force in ways they’ve only imagined beginning Friday, May 25, when StarWars.com launches a completely redesigned website that empowers fans to “mash-up” their homemade videos with hundreds of scenes from Star Wars movies; watch hundreds of fan-made Star Wars videos; and interact with Star Wars enthusiasts from around the world like never before.
With an innovative, interactive home-page design that allows users to navigate to multiple Star Wars worlds, a new video focus, and groundbreaking “Web 2.0” features – including a unique online multi-media mixing platform from Eyespot – the new StarWars.com will unveil its redesigned website on May 25 to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Star Wars Saga.
Among the most compelling features of the newly redesigned StarWars.com is the incorporation of an online video-editing tool provided by Eyespot. It allows users to add their own video shots to more than 250 scenes and music taken from all six Star Wars films and create their own Star Wars movies to share with others.
StarWars.com is also unveiling a new collection of hundreds of videos – many never before seen on the Internet – that will let fans enjoy some of the best user-generated Star Wars videos from across the web, including such cult favorites as “Chad Vader,” and five years worth of Star Wars Fan Movie Festival shorts, co-presented by AtomFilms.com. StarWars.com will also showcase extensive mini-documentaries that explore the making of the Star Wars Saga.
Some may see this as revolutionary, and in relation to what most other companies are doing it really is. At the same time, it’s really more common sense than anything else. When one considers all the positives that could come from it in terms of marketing, community engagement, innovation, and fan loyalty, the question shouldn’t be why Lucas Films is doing this - but rather why most other companies and content creators aren’t following suit.
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May 25th, 2007, 12:11pm
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Ever have your mom tell you to play nice in the playground so that the other kids would like you? Well, if Facebook and MySpace are the new virtual playgrounds for youth, there seems to be a whole industry built around a new way to make alliances, with methods that stretch far beyond the bribery of offering to share a chocolate chip cookie . According to a recent Globe and Mail article, there has been a proliferation of businesses and services which, for a fee, will help you ‘explode’ your friends list. Many of these businesses cater to corporations hoping to launch a new product and gain virtual community cred (never mind that the act of buying friends seems diametrically opposed to the concept of credibility). But they also help teens hoping to compete in the online popularity game, or, on the other end of the spectrum, offer to assist those who simply don’t want to look like they are lacking in the friend department. While both purposes seem dubious at best, the growing number of services in this area suggests (sadly) that there is a market for this kind of activity. Recognizing the threat these kinds of services pose to the legitimacy of their network, MySpace is on the warpath, shutting down and limiting the scope and activity of these businesses wherever possible.
In terms of the end-game success of these companies’ efforts to purchase acquaintances, in a market where throwbacks are the new purveyors of cool and anything vintage is coveted, these folks could probably do well to learn a line or two from the old Beatles tune come Patrick Dempsey movie – Can’t Buy Me Love.
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May 25th, 2007, 08:38am
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There was an interesting post on Digg this morning about an open source cola project. The beverage dubbed OpenCola is “an open-source cola beverage that invites makers to create and modify their recipe to achieve a better beverage. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License.” A Canadian company created the beverage and was founded by Grad Conn, John Henson and Cory Doctorow.
I thought the most interesting/scary part of the recipe was the warning section which I will reproduce below.
Warnings
- Caffeine can be toxic in high doses. Be careful not to add too much to your mixture, and do not ingest large quantities.
- Many of the oils needed for flavoring can burn skin. Use caution when preparing. They can also dissolve the plastic lining of a refrigerator; store with caution.
- Gum arabic is available in two forms, art grade, and food grade. Be sure to get food grade Gum arabic, or you could have an unpleasant toxic reaction.
I think open source initiatives and sites such as wikiHow.com are great, and a valuable resource for adventurous do-it-yourselfers. However, judging from the warnings I think I might leave making my own cola to the professionals at Coke and Pepsi, or perhaps a better idea is to not even drink the stuff.
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May 24th, 2007, 05:36pm
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One of the major problems with the internet, and a leading cause of the digital divide, is the fact that over half of the websites in the world are in English. While currently, the largest proportion of internet users (30%) are English speakers, the fastest growth in internet usage is in languages such as Chinese, French, Portuguese and Arabic. Assuming that the website language ratios stay the same, one solution is for everyone to learn English. Another is for websites to be freely translatable from one language to another.
On the first point, 380 million people speak English as a first language, 600 million as a second and a further billion are learning. This covers about a third of the world’s population having access to at least half of the internet. The other two-thirds are obviously feeling left out. On the flip side, just under half of the internet is inaccessible to those who may speak English but do not speak the other top internet languages. (German, French, Japanese, Spanish) It seems far fetched to assume that the entire world will want to learn English and that all future websites are created in that language as well.
The second option is to make the web translatable. This is a very difficult undertaking but increasingly looks like a more likely option. Although far from perfect, Yahoo has had a search result translation service since 2005. Now Google has decided to jump on the bandwagon with their own translation service announced this week. The Google tool will allow search terms and results to be translated to and from 12 languages. Google admits that machine translation, which does the work, has its flaws. However, Google’s brilliant engineers and scientists coupled with the company’s financial resources are bound to make a significant and rapid improvement to the technology. After all, you can’t organize the world’s information if you don’t understand half of it.
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May 23rd, 2007, 04:25pm
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Great title to a Business Week article written by Anastasia Goodstein who is my co-author of an upcoming study for the Net Generation project.
From the article:
When you think about paper dolls, you probably think about children from past generations painstakingly attaching little outfits onto a cut-out female figure. Paper dolls have come a long way since then.
Teen and tween girls these days spend hours dressing up dolls—only these are online, in the form of avatars, or virtual representations. Consider Mattel’s (MAT) Barbie, who was also a favorite paper doll. She now has a virtual world called Barbie Girls where girls can create their own avatars and try on clothes at a virtual mall. And Barbie isn’t alone. A whole wave of avatar sites is hoping to capitalize on this age-old desire.
Part of the fun of virtual worlds for teens is experimenting with identity. Boys do this all the time in video games where they assume fantastic identities very different from whom they are in real life. For tween and teen girls, fashion has always been a big part of self-expression. How else to explain the popularity of Teen Vogue, which stands tall even in a ravaged teen-magazine market, where many publications are going online or folding altogether.
Passion for Fashion
And while most girls can’t afford the junior couture featured in Vogue, they can afford virtual couture online. And for this creative, tech-savvy generation of girls, it’s not always enough to just click and wear virtual clothes or accessories. Many design their own. They even have a role model. Lauren Conrad from MTV’s (VIA) The Hills has her own virtual clothing line for sale in MTV’s virtual Hills.
Virtual fashion is nothing new in online worlds such as Linden Lab’s Second Life, an adult-oriented venue filled with fashion designers and virtual clothing outlets from chains such as American Apparel. But it’s a relatively new phenomenon in the tween space. Helping fuel this trend is parental demand for safe spaces where their kids can hang out that are anything but MySpace, which has been plagued by instances of predatory behavior by adults.
But the real driver is the combination of girls’ passion for fashion, their desire to socialize, and a high level of comfort with using digital tools to express creativity. Because of this, girls are spending lots of time online, dressing up and showing off avatars. Little wonder that young females—and venture-capital dollars—are gravitating to startups like Stardoll, which lets users create and dress celebrity paper dolls; GirlSense, a virtual doll community; and Gaia Online, a virtual world where avatars look like Japanese manga characters.
For those from, well, the Net Generation, the title is a reference to one of the most commercially successful novels of all time. The parody (not sequel) response to the film version, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was written by? If you gave thumbs up to Roger Ebert, you are correct, my friend. The director? Russ Meyer, whom you might remember being referenced in the Seinfeld episode when all the waitress were of similar build. If you’ve never seen it…trust me and rent his film Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
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May 22nd, 2007, 06:22pm
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A very good article, written by a young reporter from Fortune, describes the many unique characteristics of Generation Y, or the Net Generation as we like to call it. As the generational shift is a major driver of the Wikinomics era, our team has spent a lot of time researching this demographic globally. A few interesting characteristics that were highlighted in the article:
• Young people question everything – their superiors, themselves, the media etc.
• Their loyalties lie with friends and families not with their employers or corporate brands
• They are very close with their baby boomer parents often moving back home after college
• They are ambitious and want to make a difference in their workplace, community and society
• They are impatient, expecting quick results
• They are very comfortable with technology often using it to multitask
And they are not immune to criticism. The N-Geners are often called high-maintenance, self-centered and demanding. Something marketers and employers will have to deal with as this huge generation grows up.
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May 22nd, 2007, 08:40am
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The WSJ is reporting that Facebook will be opening up its pages, and inviting corporate America to come in and take a shot at peddling their products. Later this week the company is expected to announce “a new strategy to let other companies provide their services on special pages within its popular Web site”. The service would allow, for example “an online retailer to build a service in Facebook to let people recommend music or books to their friends, based on the relationships they’ve already established on the site.” The company’s goal is to keep users on the site longer and hence increase ad revenue.
What value will this provide to Facebook users? They are already able to list their favorite musicians, TV shows, movies, books in their profile. If you are a crazed supporter you can even start a group or create an event to celebrate your love for a given product. I can see some value in allowing users to share news stories with one another, but selling a friend your new favourite song?
Facebook is the best social networking site, just as Google is the best search engine. Google has remained on top of the search market because it refuses to clutter up it’s home page. Even when new services are added, they are based on search and discovery and always take a back seat to the generic web search on the main page.
If Facebook plans to become the Google of social networking, they are going to need to make sure they don’t lose sight of what has brought them success in the first place. The ability to help users find, connect and interact with past and present friends.
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May 18th, 2007, 02:14pm
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Engadget apparently posted a blog yesterday claiming an inside source at Apple sent out an email notifying employees that the iPhone and OS X Leopard would see further delays. See if you can guess roughly what time the blog posting became widely known:
That’s one powerful and expensive blog post, as $4 Billion temporarily vanished into thin air (for about 5 -10 minutes) until it became known the message was false. While there’s some uncertainty over exactly what happened, either Apple itself issued an incorrect email (which engadget reported on after it was sent to them) and corrected it after, or someone was able to “fake” an email from Apple that engadget said was a “trusted source.”
Next thing you know there is a big argument going on all over the web, people are asking if bloggers should start adopting journalistic ethics, and a sampling of other bloggers are none to happy with engadget about this whole thing:
“What a joke. Engadget posts unsubstantiated rumor, AAPL drops. Engadget later posts correction, stock fails to fully bounce back. Reckless and irresponsible, Engadget. Thanks a lot.”
This person has a point - by 12:10 pm the stock only made it back to 11 am levels, rather than the more optimistic times Apple was experiencing around 11:30 am - and don’t even get me started on the good old days of 9 am or I might get teary eyed.
Now the Securities and Exchange Commission has declined comment on whether the spoof’s impact on the market would warrant an investigation - but let’s hope it doesn’t. Any Apple shareholder that sat on their butt and did nothing all day experienced a loss of a few cents per share, which may or may not have had anything to do with the little blogging mishap. The only people that lost anything were those that saw a blog post, and decided to instantaneously engage in a massive sell-off - otherwise known as hyper active daytraders. Just because they like to react to every bit of news or non news out there shouldn’t be anyone else’s concern.
What should be a cause for concern is if that’s how quickly a subset of people react to a bit of almost non-news, what the heck is going to happen when really bad, well sourced news comes down the pipeline for everyone to see? Like Asia’s richest person announcing China’s stock market must be a bubble? Or if Greenspan contradicts the current Federal Reserve Chairman and indicates the U.S. housing market just might keep getting worse and plunge the economy into a recession? Or when Bank of America’s CEO says things like:
“We are close to a time when we’ll look back and say we did some stupid things. We need a little more sanity in a period when everyone feels invincible and thinks this is different.”
In other words, what happens if today happens? Well all major markets go up of course. Investors collectively react to big news that would indicate stock prices might come under pressure soon by driving them up, and a few individuals investors react quickly to non news to drive stock prices down - a very interesting time in the stock market indeed.
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May 18th, 2007, 10:23am
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The results of the first round of our Net Generation video contest can be found here. Thanks to Madeline and Michael from Taking It Global for organizing the contest.
Lot’s of compelling moments in these videos. The winner’s entry included some cool sound bites, such as:
“My high school reunion is held on Facebook. All day. Every day.”
Personally, that hits home. I’m one of the “old” people that has recently invaded Facebook and am on the cusp of my 20 year high school reunion. Slowly, the Silverthorn C.I. class of 1987 is showing up on Facebook (I’d say we’re still only at about 5%). It’s good to hear from people, but I’ve received some odd questions, like the dentist that asked me if I married someone that was never even my girlfriend (full disclosure: I think I held her hand during Children of a Lesser God).
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