Category Archives: Social Networks

Jimmy Wales on Charlie Rose

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Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, discusses his Wikia search projectand the internet. He’s the chairman of Wikia, Inc. He thinks it’ll be 2-3 years before they have a robust product.

“Democratic, participatory” search project.
“Google, Yahoo, Ask” have similar, proprietary and closed search. He wants to break up the idea that a few companies should be so dominant.

Making search ubiquitous. He thinks Google may not have problems with WIKIA because they can keep matching up ads, advertisers, and buyers as they have been.

Wales thinks Facebook made the right decision to turn down Yahoo’s billion+ offer for Facebook, calling it an “interesting gamble”. “He’s a pretty sharp guy” (Zuckerman), and Wales thinks that unlike Myspace, Facebook is doing right by the customers. Notes increase of spam and advertising intensity of Myspace.

Wikia major initiatives: Search, Reference Works for humor, opinion, sports. 66 languages plus a “Klingon language” project. “Roll this revolution” into many other areas. What makes the internet great is that it’s a “global platform for people to share knowledge”. Keeping it “open” appears to be a key guiding principle for Wales, and his admirable efforts at Wikipedia support his sincerity in that mission.

Wales suggests that Firefox is the best browser, primarily due to features that he sees as the result of the open source development model that created Firefox.    He says that monopolistic activity by Microsoft has slowed innovation, but feels that Google is a friend of Open Source.     Wales recounted telling Bill Gates at Davos that Microsoft search is so bad people are switching away from it as the Vista default, and suggests that he’ll have fun trying to build a better search than Google with Wikia.

Bebos, billions, and why Yahoo is starting to piss me off.

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Yahoo may buy Bebo, the British “Myspace”, for a billion dollars. That is a LOT of money – about 3% of Yahoo’s market cap. Presumably this, like Yahoo’s unsuccessful Facebook aquisition attempt, is Yahoo’s approach to recapturing the market dominance it enjoyed back in the day. Dominance through the aquisition of a social network rather than developing their own.

They should know better than to trust their existing criteria for decisions about aquisitions. Yahoo is the company that aquired Overture’s pay per click technology years ago, and then managed to cede dominance in that area to Google. Ever heard of Google? Yahoo probably could have *owned* Google, but it seems higher management didn’t think search had the monetization potential of … broadcast.com which was purchased for billions.

Isn’t it time for top management at Yahoo to let innovation, not aquisitions, rule the day? This approach has worked very well for Google, who’s main mistakes now appear to be in aquiring things like YouTube which in my opinion is unlikely to recover YouTube’s 1.6 billion price tag and will certainly pester Google with big money lawsuits for decades. Yahoo’s still got a LOT of great technical people, especially in the developer and new business divisions. More importantly, the world is producing hundreds of thousands of new, brilliant innovators every year, most of whom are chomping at the bit to bring new and exciting innovation to the hungry online world. Why not devote the billions to this rather than purchasing companies with marginal revenues and long term prospects that are more hope and prayer than reality?

With the latest flurry of high priced aquistions it almost seems like, to the big players, the billion dollar deal is the new million dollar deal. I remain skeptical that deals of this size pay off in the long run – certainly very, very few of the early pre-bubble ones did not pay off for companies. I’d suggest that the smaller deals (e.g. Flickr) do have potential, but that Yahoo’s top management is looking for a killer deal that simply does exist while the innovation approach (ie much, MUCH more support to the core values and teams at Yahoo) is starting them in the face. Traffic? Yahoo’s got plenty of it. Modest changes can send millions of Yahoo users to any new idea, so why not do this *a lot more* and test *a lot more ideas*.

Edison suggested that there is always a better way, and it’s time for Yahoo to ….. find it.

More Bebo-logy from Techmeme:

Yahoo may net Bebo owners $1bn

 

 

Bebo/YHOO: My Rumor’s Bigger Than Yours

Yahoo May Be Bidding For Social Network Bebo: Report

Yahoo: When You Can’t Buy Facebook, You Buy Bebo

Bebo is not for sale


Sex, drugs, and blogs – New York Times on the rise of the “Artist 2.0”

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The NYT has  been doing a nice job of making Web 2.0 more accessible to a non-tech audience via a lot of good stories about people and biz.    This latest NYT story “Sex, Drugs, and updating your blog” follows a programmer turned rocker who now lives his musical life … online with his fans.    We’ll see a LOT more of this in the future and I think it’ll be a great thing:

It’s possible to see these online trends as Darwinian pressures that will inevitably produce a new breed — call it an Artist 2.0 — and mark the end of the artist as a sensitive, bohemian soul who shuns the spotlight.

Twitter and SEO

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Interesting.   My Chico the Wonder Dog SEO experiment is yielding some unexpected results.    A tweet about this is now higher in the ranks than the original blog post page.

Chico the Wonder Dog has been trading places with another Chico the Wonder Dog.   That post is much older and may have more incoming links since that guy seems to spend more time posting about his dog than I do, though based on my quick analysis of this and a few other cases I think it indicates that Google looks carefully at the rate of link growth, and if it slows they tend to put back the “old, tried and true” page in favor of the newcomer. This makes sense from an anti-spam perspective although in Chicos particular case it probably does not yield the top dog.

However, the Twitter reference rising to high seems really surprising because Twitter posts are generally small and insignificant (as it is here).  I’m surprised Google ranks these at all, let alone makes them competitive with meaty postings.  Perhaps Google has elevated “social media” in some algorithmic fashion though my guess is this is a defect that will be corrected – ie Twitter is structured in a way that links to these posts from many Twitter people and this is messing up the Algo’s handing of this insignificant material.    If I’m searching for “Tesla Coil”, let along pretty much anything of any relevance, I hardly want a bunch of Twitter posts!

Pew Study – new web stuff is catching on *fast*, not slow!

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Matthew Ingram has got it right when he suggests that the recent Pew study results are an indication that many, not few people are engaged in Web 2.0. Several headlines about the study suggest, oddly, that there is some sort of tech elite who participates in web stuff when in fact the study is a powerful indication that the social internet is thriving and getting adopted by a broad spectrum of society rather than an elite group.

Click here for the Pew study with these key findings:

8% of Americans are deep users of the participatory Web and mobile applications.

23% are heavy, pragmatic tech adopters – they use gadgets to keep up with social networks or be productive at work.

10% rely on mobile devices for voice, texting, or entertainment.

10% use information gadgets, but find it a hassle.

49% of Americans only occasionally use modern gadgetry and many others bristle at electronic connectivity.

MORE:  Wow – I don’t think I’ve ever seen research so hopelessly misinterpreted as these findings.  Perhaps those writing about this like the idea of being a “tech elite” so they interpret accordingly?

The significant finding was that only 15% are “offline”.     Hmmm – compare this to 10 years ago when only about 15% were “online”.   This is called “rapid adoption” rather than “tech elitism”.

Off the network (15 percent)
People in this group, tending to be 65 or older, do not have a cell phone or Internet access. Some have computers or digital cameras.

Digging Copyright Infringement?

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Today’s excitement at Digg regarding posting codes to override copyright protection on HD DVDs, combined with the pending Google v Viacom showdown, may be referenced for some time to come as the “starting date” of the online revolution against old notions about copyright and intellectual property.

My take on this is, as usual, unusual in that I think two things that everybody is arguing about are actually very clear:

1) Based on existing law, YouTube and DIGG have an obligation to remove offending materials, and probably are in violation themselves for posting those materials, basically ignoring the rights of the copyright holders in favor of community enthusiasm for the coming IP revolution.

2) Existing law is outmoded (perhaps more accurately it should be considered irrelevant and unenforceable, and won’t stand much longer without significant modifications.

Diggers, YouTubers, and other online enthusiasts seem to think that becuase 2 is true, 1 is not true. That’s silly. law is law, and these are violations and everybody knows it. The copyright laws are not outrageous or fundamentally unfair in their *intentions*, and thus they’ll continue to hold up in the courts until we see new laws enacted that are relevant, enforceable, and in line with new sensibilities about what constitutes fair use.

Personally, I’d like to see more experimentation with dramatic expansion of the principle of “fair use” to basically include all non-commercial uses. We see this principle in play in the open source community and even at Google, Yahoo and MSN with many of their web innovations. This openness has arguably done more to foster creativity than any proprietary projects could ever do. Examples: Linux and Firefox to name two of thousands of brilliant and innovative projects that thrive, unencumbered by most old fashioned copyright restrictions.

So, what needs to change here? The law, and thus it’s up to congress to enact new rules that make more sense. Perhaps these could be as simple as suggesting that the commercial benefits of programs and music and other creative stuff should be controlled by the creator of those programs, but that the *societal benefits* should be considered part of the obligation of any artist or creator to contribute to society at large.

Web 2.0 adapter for Grandparents is needed.

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Don has a very insightful look at trends in Web 2.0 based on a couple of recent conference experiences.  What I found particularly interesting was the graph which correctly noted the large missing link in Web 2.0, which is a simple (ideally I’d say a seamless, one-click) way to integrate the tons of independent content “silos” out there with the collectivce online body of work that falls under the Web 2.0 categories.

For example wouldn’t it be interesting if you could unleash a program that would scour your computer for pictures and writings, then ask you “do you want to send this out to the world?”, then shoot stuff off to the legions of online content repositories that might have an interest in that topic?      Despite the growth of online photo sites like Flickr, I bet they contain less than 1 in 1000 of all existing digital pictures.

Some tech people will say “hey, I already make sure the stuff I want online makes it online”, but tech people often forget how averse a lot of regular folks are to the interactive part of the internet, let alone to figuring out how to place their own stuff online.    This aversion won’t change anytime soon, and ironically it’s often the people with the stuff of the least interest who are mose likely to post it online.  For example gossipy myspacy party pix are plentiful where an old-timers thoughtful travel recollections often are relegated to Christmas letters and photo albums only found in a dusty old file cabinet.  Unleashing this treasure trove of experience and wisdom would be neat.

Battelle Online WebEx Conference: Web 2.0 digitizes the customer

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Hey, I’m (sort of) liveblogging John Battelle’s search presentation which is currently … online via WebEx conferencing. John’s always interesting to hear, but this is more about the process than the content. I did like his slide noting that Web 2.0 is about digitizing the customer where early efforts were digitizing the office.

John’s talking about search and it’s neat to have some real time attention and the chance to ask questions via a text control panel – but HEY, nobody answered my questions yet! The WebEx system is not quite as navigation friendly as I’d expected but that’s OK because it’s trying to do a lot of things – polls, questions, and the audio broadcast itself. However I think Pirillo’s videocasting efforts may be a good lesson for WebEx as they move ahead with these approaches.

Even on my laptop with WIFI the audio is fairly stable and good quality. There appear to be about 64 people online per the poll results.

After attending about 10 conferences last year I’ve wondered how much better learning and retention I’d have if I’d just read up on the presenters and topics rather than actually go to the conferences. Shmoozing is fun and often educational, but even that might be done better away from conferences.

Tweet, Tweet?

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New York Times is talking about Twitter, the social media chat application that is storming onto the internet faster than you can twitter to your friends as well as the public at large about what you are doing at the moment.

My initial reaction to Twitter was that I was somewhat underwhelmed but now I’m thinking that Twitter is appealing partly because it takes so little time yet keeps you “up” on a bit of the lives of friends and biz folks you know. This may even have a practical application when you run into them in person in that you’ll be able to communicate more effectively having a bit of background that will help frame your “catching up” during conferences or whatever. Twitter’s success may be in it’s simplicity of use. Unlike blogging you can quickly post a note and preview your pals, all in a few moments. If there’s one thing we like to see online, it’s things that cater to our increasingly *short* attention spans.

Startups … often suck

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Pete Cashmore has been coming up with very clever titles (and as always great insights on social networking) over at Mashable. A good example is today’s “Web Startups and the Lying Liars That Lie About Them” where he basically makes the case that in general startups suck worse than one would think if one simply took what is written about them in blogs (including his) for granted.

This point hits home hard when you note, as Don Dodge recently did, that it appears startups absorb more money from venture capitalists than they return to the VCs that keep new web companies spinning out of the web, and often (more in the old days than now) keep them spinning out of control even after the startup’s business model has failed.

Interestingly, my own experience with our travel startup Online Highways was something of the opposite of the normal deal. We grew fast, did not get VC money, and started to make enough that we could open new offices in India and a second in Oregon. Initially by many measures we were not a great travel site but we were doing spectacularly well – by July of 2003 we had over 3 million monthly unique visitors. However, after pouring over a million of revenues into developments, maps, and other improvements we actually got nailed by Google for reasons that remain unclear, but as always make the internet a darn interesting place to hang out whether you are a startup that sucks or one that rocks.

Great article by Marc Andreessen about VC

More on this from NYT May 11th