Category Archives: Web 2.0

Hulu Aliens Eat Boxee’s Brain

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Hulu.com had one of the best superbowl commercials, where the increasingly menacing and chubby Alec Baldwin explains Hulu’s plans for world domination as a brain-eating alien.

I thought they were kidding and just pretending to be ruthless and menacing aliens.

But today Hulu announced that it is dispatching Boxee in one fell swoop by preventing the very popular, award winning service from distributing Hulu’s content. Boxee’s approach was allowing people to view the Hulu content on regular TVs – in a sense focusing on the opposite direction of Hulu which is allowing you to view TV shows on computer and mobile devices. The Boxee/Hulu combination could be used to cut out a cable or satellite provider while retaining a lot of that functionality, but I don’t think this is what bothered Hulu. Instead I’m guessing they simply are dispensing with the big happy family convergence model and doing their Web 2.0 business the old fashioned way – kill your competitor before they can grow to threaten you.

Hulu’s apologetic blog post “sorry we ate your brain Boxee”

Fred Wilson’s take.  As a Boxee investor it’s not surprising he’s unhappy though I’m guessing he expected a buyout rather than a freeze-out.

If I was a better advocate for the virtues of convergence, open media, and copyright dodging I’d express more outrage but I don’t really have dog in this fight, and frankly I’m tired of the predictable and short sighted arguments on both side of the convergence and copyright issues.

New media folks whine about how the big players need to see the light and give away their high cost of production stuff and will make more by doing so when of course they will not make more. Legacy media profits have come in large part from controlling the means of distribution and profits will fall as that control goes away. I don’t see this loss as anything all that significant. Our entire culture is adrift in a sea of media mediocrity and whatever replaces it is more likely to improve rather than diminish our lives.

Old media folks are on even weaker ground when they suggest that users benefit from copyright rules, which currently do far more to protect the interests of the vast network of distribution and marketing middlemen than the interests of most artists and end users. Does anybody seriously think that pruning the songs and mega profits of Britney Spears or the Jonas Brothers is worthy of more than a tiny footnote in music history? Even now, as the old rules fall away and are ignored by end users we are seeing something of a niche musical renaissance as artists who had no chance in LA or Nashville can make their mark, promote, and distribute their work online. Few will make millions this way but many will be able to keep doing what they love and entertaining fans – in many cases establishing closer relationships with fans than any superstar could ever enjoy.

If Boxee fans show enough loyalty Hulu may even have to regurgitate their tiny competitor, though I’d guess Hulu is already close to launching their Boxee equivalent.

The Hulu aliens ate Boxee’s brain, and the show goes on.

Death of the Media Mogul: Digital Diaspora means …. less for everybody.

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As podcasters and webcasters and such try to turn a buck they come up against fixed ad revenues.

Ad model is a problem

(Note several comments came in based on those two sentences before I finished this post)

The main point I’m trying to make here is that the internet has created a remarkably cheap and effective content distribution mechanism – a global soapbox for anybody who cares to make a point online.    The cost to publish online is now essentially zero for all but very  large scale online publishing efforts.    Although eventually the number of publishers will level off as everybody who wants to be online gets online and the dropping out folks balance the new arrivals, I think we are still early enough in that process that there’s a lot of new website and blogging action ahead of us.

This suggests that it may be increasingly hard to become a  *Media Mogul* even in fairly specific niches.      We’ve seen the rise of mini moguls like Arriana Huffington in the Political space,  Mike Arrington in Technology at TechCrunch, Jason Calacanis , and Nick Denton of the Gawker Yellow Journalism and Celebrity Blog Empire,  but I think the success of early blogs is more a transitional thing than a trend that’s going to stick.     Few blogs make much if any money and that’s not likely to change a lot although I suspect we’ll see lots of hard working good writers find comfortable niches of expertise managing to make a living providing online content – at least until the machines start to slice and dice and repackage online information so effectively nobody can tell if it’s organic or artificially intelligent organization.

Now, contrast this trend towards many publishers with the fact that online advertising total spending may actually decline in 2009, and more importantly can only grow so much.    Now, it’s true that the online spend is currently low enough that we may see online advertising grow enough to support the growth of online content for some time, but my guess is that content is growing many, many times faster than online advertising it needs to be profitably supported.   Luckily for users the content is not going to go away and will keep flowing online, but unluckily for online publishers they are going to have to produce more and more to make the same amount.   We’re already seeing this trend with sites like TechCrunch which often spin out dozens of articles daily.

As an online publisher myself I’m not really sure how to address this challenge.    Certainly I tend to favor keeping expenses under control and not making the mistakes we did earlier in the travel empire by spending too much to improve websites that were always under the gun of Google’s somewhat algorithmically arbitrary content policies.   Better I think to use small amounts of capital to seed a lot of project and then fund the winners and let the losers whither on the vine.     I’ve written a lot about this process which I think is somewhat analogous to biological evolution where smart businesses actually are usually working away from failure more than towards success.    I know a many successful business folks (and perhaps even *more* biz wannabes) would bristle at the notion that serendipity plays as much a role in success as careful, reasoned strategy but the more I see of success and of failure the less convinced I am that formulas play much of a role.    Sure it helps to work hard, have a general idea of what you want to do, etc, but like evolution I don’t think a whole lot of planning is the recipe for most success stories.  On the contrary you find engaging people engaged in things they enjoy and are very good at doing, and you find lucky breaks or circumstances that propelled thos particular people to fame.    Music and sports are a great example of this – for every thousand excellent singers or sportspeople there are only a handful of superstars, and the road to that stardom is often littered with personal tragedy as well as the failures of the other 999 folks who didn’t make it.    I think the reason we tend to think there are success “formulas” is that we examine success too much and failure … too little.

OK, I got too far afield  – must be the turkey talking.   Hmmmm …. where is that leftover stuffing anyway?

Luke … I’m your Facebook Father

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Parents are starting to flow online and although I’m still searching for some data on this topic I think the main reason is not at all to follow their own college-aged children, almost all of whom have been socially interacting online for many years.    Rather it is to connect with their own friends and relatives as the online social universe expands to include …. virtually … everybody.

Facebook’s dignified style probably has helped with this trend as Myspace  is is less appealing to the professional and parental style world view.    However I think mostly we’re just seeing something of a Gladwellian  “tipping point” where enough friends and relatives of online friends and relatives  have come online to reach a critical mass.

Obviously we still have many years to go before “everybody” who wants to be connected online is connected, but I think we are  crossing some thresholds that will be sociologically significant.      One of these thresholds is the parent / child continuum, where parents like me with college age kids like Ben become “friends” on Facebook and wind up sharing types of information that are generally *not shared* between parents and their kids or the friends of their kids.

On balance I’m very optimistic about this development.  I think it’s a way to *add transparency* to the system, especially for kids who are facing personal challenges and sharing information online that their parents should know and act on.     More common however will be an *enhancement* of functional relationships between parents and kids.     In fact what inspired this post was noting a very thoughtful and loving “wall” note at Facebook had come from the *mom* of a friend of my son’s.    My first reaction (my “legacy media” reaction) was that it seemed like too public a place to rave about your kid, but I quickly realized that the mom was just adopting the very nice new tendency of the bright and shiny kids in the new generation to give glowing praise to each other very publicly.    Note to Loic Le Meur and Mike Arrington – you guys could learn from those young whippernappers!

A threshold I find even more interesting is something I have yet to experience but I’m sure better connected folks like Robert Scoble have by now, which is where social networking finds new and significant, but previously unknown connections between friends and relatives.     e.g.  you find out you are your close friend’s second cousin once removed.    Or, I suppose in some of those “fun but alarming”  stories, people will  find that they really were adopted and their biological parents are actually their … current in-laws.        Hello, this is Jerry Springer calling.

Still, the implications of a massively interconnected social sphere are to my way of thinking very positive.      We’re not there yet but we’ll be there soon, and at the very least it’s going to get even more … interesting.

OMG – It is Socialism on the Internet!

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There does not seem to be enough reporting or buzz about about Google and Facebook’s social networking widget strategy..

The Industry Standard notes the growing Facebook v Googe battle for “internet mindshare”.

I’d argue this is the single most important aspect of the current internet landscape, where users will eventually insist that their their single identity flows around the internet as seamlessly and simply as possible,in what I like to think will be an analogy to a global gathering / party / conference / lounge environment.

Soon we will surf on in to a website and decide what information we’ll share with that site and with others who arepresent there at the time.

MyBlogLog, now owned by Yahoo, is for me the closest thing to that ideal environment because it allows you to see others who are at the site and then click off to more information about them.

Twittering Thanksgiving?

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Like most folks who spend a bit too much time online, it’s always odd trying to explain things to folks who … don’t have an online life outside of the weekly checking of the email or surfing for a cranberry recipe.

Over Thanksgiving in Minnesota I was asked to explain what Facebook was and got in some trouble for suggesting that it’s more of a “coastal thing” which was in fact probably wrong anyway but also seemed to imply the heartland wasn’t up to snuff on digital happenings.    Interestingly though Craigslist was well known and loved by all even as the social networking tools were largely unrecognized.

I’ll definitely want to wait until next year to explain Twitter, but when I do I’ll have them read Tim O’Reilly‘s insightful post where I think he correctly observes that Twitter has moved from something that didn’t have obvious relevance or usefulness to an almost indispensable part of the work life of many onliners.

In some ways Twitter has replaced both email and blogging as the tool of choice for the digitally obsessed, and this has come about from it’s usefulness combined with the natural problems that have cropped up with email (spam, attachments, delays, lack of brevity, timing, etc, etc) and with blogging (surfing issues, navigation problems, wordiness, unequal playing fields, comment moderation, etc, etc.

Google Social Search Wiki Launches

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Today’s tech blogOsphere buzz is about Google’s new wiki search feature that allows users to rank their own results.     This appears to me to be a splendid idea although I agree with some who say it won’t get used much.

However, for those who use this it may eventually allow a kind of search ranking we have never seen, where user defined preferences trump the mysterious algorithmic magic mistakes, gradually giving the user a great set of results well optimized to their needs.

I’d suggest that “perfect individualized search” may only require two basic steps – the first is a *discovery* part where you surface content relevant to your particular query and then plow through that manually to determine which sites best fit your needs.   Google does a pretty good job of facilitating that right now. However a second piece would allow you to build on those “personally filtered” results in various ways – some as simple as just listing them in rough order of relevance to you as Google is now doing.

Is this a good Google idea?    Yes!     Will anybody much use this?   Nope, because our habits as humans don’t incline us to be this organized.     I had a great conversation a few days ago with the developer of Reuters Calais semantic search – a brilliant tool designed to surface relevancy and meaning from massive document archives.    We were noting how difficult is is to simply break the habit of using Google search, even when it’s not the most appropriate tool for the job at hand.

Funny primates we !

Google Blog reports on the new search wiki

Schmidt won’t become Obama’s CTO for the USA, so how about Craig Newmark?

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Eric Schmidt said on CNBC’s Jim Cramer show today that even if asked he will not accept a position in the Obama administration that is expected to be something of a chief technology officer for the USA.

Reuters reports on the statement

Technology remains a vital US concern in terms of economy, national security, and offers the potential to extricate us from at least some of the pressing problems of the day.

Who would be a great choice for this position?

Mr President Elect Obama, I’d like to nominate Craig Newmark.  Craig’s  technology credentials are superb, he’s got global vision, and … his website is so successful he’ll never be bothering you for a raise in pay.

Here’s a good discussion of the CTO issue and potential qualifications.    I hope Obama realizes how important it is that this person comes from Silicon Valley, deeply understands the internet from both a technical and business perspective, and has the ear and respect of many other major players.    Schmidt and Newmark meet this test.

Other good choices might be Meg Whitman or Carly Fiorina.   Both which would help cross the party line and the conspiculous tech gender line as well.

Death rumors of blogosphere are greatly exaggerated

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Nick Carr is usually insightful over at Rough Type, but he’s missed the point of blogging if he thinks the best of the medium is behind us. On the contrary I think the real promise of blogging – as well as the web in general – is yet to come.

Why are the rumors of the death of the blogosphere greatly exaggerated even while the medium is still improving? Because things are not happening in the structured way articulate and/or elite information folks often prefer.

Rather we see regular folks sharing their observations, sometimes in inspired ways but often just as part of a growing amateur and untuned symphony of insights.   Although it is *certainly* true to note how much more crappy material there is out there than there was a few years ago before blogging went “mainstream”, it’s also true there is much more good material – it’s just become harder to find.

The good stuff is now distributed across such a large space and within massive comment streams that we need to build better blog search rather than a big blog mortuary.

I think folks like Nick are also correctly noting that the big blogs – thanks to big money – have become much worse because they now pander to large audiences with a lot of fluff pieces and filler.   Often the original writers with unique and interesting voices are eclipsed at their own blogs by hired hacks who offer either quirky irrelevant views or inferior insights to the original.  Part of the problem here is that writing has become commoditized at money blogs such that the spoils are reserved for the owners not the current writers.  Ergo, formerly first class blog writing becomes…second class.

These speed bumps in my view will ultimately work themselves out and we’ll see the “real” voices (Nick Carr’s blog above is a great example) gradually gain more of a  following at the expense of those who simply push out more information for the sake of a larger footprint.    For me, blogs that have lost their appeal even as they gained in theoretical “valuations” were Searchblog by John Battelle and TechCrunch by Mike Arrington.    Both remain “good” sources of information with “good” writing, but before these were *great* blogs with great new insider voices.    I think this is the problem Nick and many others are worried about without justification.   On TV you can only change the channel so many times before you are back at the same old junk.  On the internet there are more channels than minutes in a lifetime.

Mashup Camp and Convergence08

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Looking forward to two upcoming conferences – Mashup Camp and the very first Convergence 08 conference.

Mashup Camps have been coming to Mountain View for over two years, bringing great startups for their product launches as well as lively discussions about innovations and new products to help the mashup community. There also will be mashup experts from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, and many more key players. Programmable Web has the best coverage of the Mashup topic.

Convergence will have even more provocative content as the first conference to address the intersection of four technologies likely to shape the world in extraordinary ways: Nanotechnology, Biological technologies (gene splicing, stem cells, DNS mapping, life extension) , Information technologies (internet and computing) and Cognitive technologies. This last would, I think, broadly include everything from brain enhancing drugs and devices to artificial intelligence. AI is the most exciting category for me, and I remain convinced that we’ll see conscious computers within about 20 years – hopefully and very possibly less. Conscious computing is likely to change the entire planetary game to such a degree it’s nearly impossible to predict what will happen *after that*, which is one of the issues that will be discussed at the conference.

My main concern is that proponents and predictions keep things real and this does not become a sort of brainstorming session for half-baked ideas and ideologies.

After millions of years of very slow biological evolution we’ve now entered a new age where technology is likely to eclipse most and probably all of our human abilities. Even that fairly obvious idea – which simply is an extension of current developments – leaves many people skeptical, cold to the idea, or even antagonistic about the changes that are coming. Like it or not … we are all in this together and it’s best to keep it that way as much as possible.

StumbleUpon for sale by eBay

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TechCrunch is reporting that Social networking and bookmarking site StumbleUpon.com is for sale by eBay which bought it only about a year ago for 75 million.    It’s not clear how much they want for the site but due to stagnant growth in traffic and the ongoing challenges to social network monetization, it would seem likely that eBay would be happy to get little more or even less than 75 million to unload a site that does not really match up well with eBay’s core values and experiences which are “selling stuff by auction”.

Interestingly eBay already has one of the world’s largest social communities in the form of buyers and sellers who interact in a huge way on a grand scale every day, although I don’t think eBay has made a concerted attempt to extract additional value or community from those buyer and seller relationships.