Category Archives: Web 2.0

Androids bearing gifts

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 The Android SDK is out.   This would be geek speak for saying “let the cell phone games begin”, and perhaps market speak for “Palm’s Dead and Symbian is probably screwed”.

The Androids haven’t just landed though, they are bearing suitcases stuffed with cash for developers who bring neat applications to market.   This is more of the normal Google cleverness at work.   Don’t just make it free,  *pay* people to make it, and make it better than anything that has come before.    Brilliant!

Unselfish of Google?  Hardly. With their lock-grip on online advertising don’t forget who will be the big winner in a world saturated with mobile users surfing around a lot more stumbling upon super relevant geo-targeted pay per click advertising.    For those of you in the back of the class, that winner would be …. Google.  

Over at Om’s blog somebody in the comments suggested that Open Handset seemed like a solution looking for a problem, which seemed very ill informed to me.     It solves two big problems – crappy phones that will soon be like iPhones, but much cheaper, and it will bring more organization and convergence to our harried digital lifestyle by blending mobile and online worlds more effectively than the current players have managed to do.

Maybe I’m missing something but I agree with those who see the Open Handset Alliance approach as a profound sea change in mobile, and something that will shake things up quickly  (though not necessarily the prize money because  $10,000,000 is a drop in the bucket of cash at stake here – over a trillion dollars in the coming decade. )

I’m *already* anxious to get rid of my nasty Palm Treo software (and maybe the whole phone) given that it won’t even synch anymore without me losing all my data.  I envision a mobile future where my phone, PC, GIS, picture, and online needs all merge *seamlessly*, are accessible from all my devices easily and without any extra steps, and where I pay *nothing* for services in exchange for viewing ads or pay something if I want to get rid of the ads.

Open Handset is going to make that happen fast, and I wish them well. 

Rethinking Privacy

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Hey, it’s nice when you agree with the Government’s interpretation of how the future is going to shake out. 

Donald Kerr is the USA’s Dept. of Intelligence Deputy Director and noted correctly:

Protecting anonymity isn’t a fight that can be won. Anyone that’s typed in their name on Google understands that. 
… Our job now is to engage in a productive debate, which focuses on privacy as a component of appropriate levels of security and public safety,”

Wait a minute….maybe the Government is just (finally) coming around to agreeing with me as I’ve been noting for about two years now that online privacy is an oxymoron.  Hey, here’s another online privacy is a mirage post!  

We don’t (actually, cannot) know where many of our pictures and data and writing and comments and email is stored, we don’t know who misquotes us, scrapes our content, has our credit card data and medical records, reads our email, or even know if we own what we write (many reviews sites will claim they own *your* reviews). 

It’s actually *not* as big a deal as one might think.  This is the brave new world of onliners and the benefits of the information explosion easily and dramatically trump the handful of privacy pitfalls.    If this were not the case we’d have seen a *lot* more trouble by now.

CNN Reports

Google to buy Sprint? Only if Sprint gets really “gets lucky”.

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Rumors that Google might buy Sprint appear to be mostly just that – silly rumors to catch a headline.    Not so much that it would be a bad idea – for Sprint it would be the rescue they can only dream about as shifts in subscribers and the mobile landscape do not appear to favor Sprint right now.   As a Sprint customer with 4 phones on the plan you’d think I’d be rooting for them, but my misadventures with bad coverage here in Oregon and back east, the overhyped Treo 650, and a ringtone scam I had to *remind* them remove too often has basically soured this customer.    

If Google buys Sprint the Champagne should be popping – but probably not at Google though the economics of a deal like this are well beyond my expertise – probably anybody’s for that matter.

Google clearly wants to enter and effectively destabilize and reinvent the mobile market and they’ve already taken a major first step in the direction with the Mobile Handset Alliance.    Also true that Google can keep a secret as the recent Myspace “Open Social” partnership made very clear.    But I have a hunch they’ll do this more indirectly than managing their own mobile network.   Cleverly, Google is poising themselves to be the keeping of most mobile advertising which is where the “extra” cash is now laying on the table.    Open Handset Alliance phones will combine with mobile services and ads to bring a lot more advertising revenue into this market fairly fast, and Google is making sure a Google mobile OS, or something very compatible, is waiting there to scoop up the bucks.

Why buy the cow when you can get all that milk … for free? 

News Corp Advertising Network. Under the Radar?

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Facebook’s targeted advertising was criticized heavily last week by bloggers despite Facebook promises to create a better user experience through better targeting of the ads.   I’m guessing users will hardly notice the change, and advertisers will continue to be underwhelmed with the performance of social network advertising although these ads will play an increasingly important role as social networking explodes and the number of page views on social networking sites like Myspace exceeds pageviews on any other site.

I think Myspace now has the top global pageview count which is why the new ad network from News Corp (Myspace’s parent company) is an important development.    It appears they will sneak in under the radar and avoid the heavy criticism levied against Facebook even though presumably they’ll also be working hard to target the ads to the specific Myspace user profiles.

WordPress Rocks!

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I’m a huge fan of WordPress, which is used throughout the world to spread the word about topics as diverse as you can imagine.   WordPress is not only simple to use, but it’s a very robust content managment solution.   It is also free in a great testament to the online virtuousness of WordPress and it’s 18 employees including founder Matt Mullenweg, who the ripe old age of 23 has already become a key figure in the blogging world.

Here’s an interview with Matt from the Blog conference now on in Las Vegas.   Hey -why didn’t I go to this?

I had the pleasure of meeting Matt at a Mashup Camp (or was it Startup Camp?) in Silicon Valley last year.    He’s a brilliant but unassuming fellow and a great example of how insight and innovation can lead to a magnificent achievement.

A Slap in the Facebook?

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Facebook’s recent announcement of their new advertising platform – one that is better targeted to the information they have about Facebook users – has not been greeted very favorably by several bloggers who are basically suggesting this is a “sell out” of Facebookers.    Matt Ingram has a clever post noting how *annoying* this type of advertising might get and also how annoying it is that Facebook thinks you can really meet a person’s targeted information needs running ads for national brands.    Valleywag and even CNET were more blunt about this, saying that Facebook just “bastardized” it’s user base.    

Yikes – I don’t want to be a Mark Zuckerberg User Base Bastard!  

The idea that my use of Facebook means I “owe” Facebook something went out with the massive monetization of the web.  My eyeballs have value to Facebook that, as of last week’s launch of Open Social and the MS Facebook deal, appears to far exceed Facebook’s value to to me.  Unlike Matt I do like Coca Cola but I’m eventually going to go with the social network that gives me a piece of their action.  Is it greedy to ask for that? Maybe, but only about 1/1,000,000,000 as greedy as Facebook or Google. I can live with that level of greed, and I can live without Facebook, or Google, or any single online environment.  There are hundreds more where you came from, and don’t forget that you big internet players, or if I have anything to say about it you’ll become … small internet players. 

My initial reaction to the Facebook revolutionary-never-been-seen-on-earth advertising news was basically in the “so what?” category because I think this type of targeting in social network websites is overrated, and Facebook’s Coca Cola partnership is an indication I am right.   Are they seriously telling Coca Cola they are profiling for pop drinking? Youth?  Caffeine addiction?  Obesity?   That’ll allow them to filter out, what, 14 people from the  50,000,000 users of Facebook?   “Mr Coke we’ll only be running those ads on our the super targeted Coke drinking Facebooker user base of 49,999,986”. 

Hyper targeting of online advertising works extremely well when peole are searching for information about a topic, especially information related to purchasing a product.   Google’s built an empire with the profits from this approach which uses targeted pay per click advertising called Adwords (at Google search) and Adsense (at other publishing websites).    However intuition and some indications from current advertising failures suggest that Social Networking is not very fertile ground for high value advertising.    There are exceptions to this – at a recent conference I talked to a marketer of a very targeted national educational service who said Myspace offered him great ROI and a huge number of leads.   There, the demographic matchups seemed to overcome the tendency of people to simply ignore advertising while socializing.   

Print Media Future – so dim, you won’t need to wear shades.

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Two articles today suggest how tough it’s becoming to turn a buck in the print media world.   Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine and founder of eWeek, notes in “Whither Mags”, that major print efforts require a huge capital outlay before they can even hope to be profitable, and that the current high risk associated with print publications means we probably won’t see nearly as many new big magazine efforts.   

Even more ominous is the New York Times report today showing circulation declines almost across the board for US Newspapers.  The  NYT Article “More Readers Trading Newspapers for Websites” has a great graphic showing how circulation has fallen at most newspapers since last year with an average drop of 2.4%.    Given the relatively thin profit margins at many papers and the fact many costs are fixed this does not bode well at all for the future of newspapers.   The future of news?   That is a far more complex question and I think the answer is not knowable at this time.    Blogs are picking up some of the journalistic slack, but I’m not convinced they can pick up all of it. 

Those late night guys have … writers?

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Like most people I find myself unsympathetic to the plight of those poor, underpaid, overworked Hollywood writers.    Also confess I’m ignorant about the issues involved and might even wind up agreeing that the writers are the cornerstone of Hollywood content, and therefore may deserve fatter paychecks and tons of internet royalties.

But this raises the key problem.   Hollywood writing stinks. 

You are telling me it takes a legion of clever writers to put out a few hours of the late night network talk show drivel that passes as “entertainment?”.  Apparently so because they are immediately switching to reruns.  Reruns of late night talk shows.    (better stock up on barf bags before I tune in).  

Even with the most robust satellite network you can hardly escape the constant onslaught of Britney, Paris, and Lindsay party jokes mixed in with silly monologues featuring a few clever shots at Hilary or Rudy G.   This is writing?

Is this going to affect Charlie Rose or McNeil Lehrer?    Now THOSE are writers who deserve a raise.   Or how about the writers at the New York Times, Washington Post, or the legions of hard working and *really* underpaid journalists struggling under the weight of blogOspheric news mania?  THOSE writers deserve raises as well as they keep the fires of quality journalism burning even as, um… those of us who don’t have any of them journalism degrees keep on jabbering away as if we were real live journalists.

But don’t take my word for it.   Here’s a quote about the implications of this strike from the President of the Writer’s Guild East:

“Losing Stewart and Colbert is something like losing Cronkite during the Vietnam War. ”

Excuse me, but now I definitely have to go find those barf bags…. 

David Carr has a good summary of the event, and the lack of much interest.   Hey, I say give HIM a raise instead!

Open Social challenge – Guilt by Open-Social-Association ?

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Don Dodge has an excellent post today where he suggests the Open Social hype machine has spun out of control.    I don’t really agree with him because I think Open Social is a sincere effort by Google to create the truly open social networking many have been wanting for some time.    At the same time I would say there are a lot of challenges with Open Social, and it certainly was an aggressive move to kick Microsoft in the Face-book and take the winds out of the Microsoft Facebook partnership deal.    Google is remarkably good at being sincere, innovative, brilliant, and ruthless all at the same time.  In fact it’s become a hallmark of their success though they never seem to acknowledge the ruthlessness of some of their decisions – it’s kind of a collective delusion at Google that what’s good for the Google is good for the gander.   This is often true, but not always.

Back to Don’s interesting point:   What happens if a friend of yours – on whose profile you appear as a “friend”, goes over to a porn site which is using Open Social networking.   Does your smiling mug and name wind up appearing next to objectionable material?   Yikes – you could lose your job, wife, and family all in one fell Open Social swoop and you never even did anything !     

Although I can’t say be sure I’m confident this problem has been solved.  Probably via some form of content controls or content ratings for sites that are allowed to participate.  Will there be bugs in this?  Of course, as Don notes Plaxo already had a problem with their Open Social implementation, but on balance I think it’s still reasonable to see this as a social networking sea change, albeit one that will take some time to shake out.

Mark Cuban on Open Social v Facebook: He’s being lazy, not smart.

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Mark Cuban generally has great insight about the online landscape but I think he’s just being a lazy social networker to suggest that Google’s Open Social is too late to the social networking party – a party Mark seems to think is going to be run by Facebook regardless of what the other players do.

Don Dodge of Microsoft also seemed to be thinking along these lines when he noted that 50 million users is nothing to scoff at, and suggested the rumors of Facebook’s death have been greatly exaggerated (agree with that).    Mark also correctly points out that those 50 million are mostly “real people” with real profiles, sharing important personal information that would make most advertiser’s drool over the targeting prospects.

But as I noted over at Mark’s place:

Mark I don’t follow why you think Open Social is “too late”. Facebook only has 50 million people. Within a few years there will be billions of people with social profiles and even if Facebook opens up (as they must), a lot will choose to enter this from other social networks or websites that have “socialized” via the Open Social.I don’t see why Facebook should get all the social glory – they weren’t first to the table and they are by no means the last viable way to socially empower yourself online.

Dude…I just think you are lazy and don’t want to set up all those friends again for next year’s Dancing with the Stars.

[Mark has thousands of friends on Facebook and had asked them to vote for him during his recent performances on the TV show “Dancing with the Stars”.    He’s out now which, to me, is yet another tiny indication that social networking is still very much in its infancy.