Category Archives: yahoo

Yahoo 360 and the perils of early adoption

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I’m was messing around *a little* with Yahoo!’s excellent social networking application “Yahoo 360”, wondering why it’s not more popular and why I’m not spending more time with it. They are of course related, since widespread adoption is going to justify more of a committment from me and until I see that happening I can’t “afford” to spend time building up contacts and 360 groups only to find nobody else is using it.    I had a similar experience with LinkedIn which is also very good but seems narrowly focused more on those who are looking for work, hiring people, etc rather than lazy pseudo-tech bums like me who are happy where we are.

I’d like to keep up with Jeff Clavier and the Silicon Valley Search SIG group, but the 360 group is not active at 360…yet.   I do think Yahoo’s built a great environment for virtual biz “meetings” and it may spring to life.  It’s totally understandable that the SIG is not using this much –  they also would need to see a “critical mass” of interest and commitment to become more involved.

In terms of utility Yahoo 360 seems to be in what I’d think would be a sweet spot – somewhere between Myspace’s legions of ranting teenagers and LinkedIn’s almost elitist business formality and (at least for now) narrow focus on technology workers.

I don’t spend much time on any single application – even my own sites which really need the TLC not to mention major overhauling, but to me 360 is really getting close to the right social networking environment if it had widespread adoption.

Death to Brands! Death to Brands?

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Although it’s early in the process, I think, and hope, that the concept of “brand” is going away in favor of the concept of utility/efficiency/pragmatism/reason.     As mass marketing, and the masses, move to online venues I think the notion of advertising as “branding” is suffering.     Online advertising such as pay per click and the increasing importance of marketing to highly targeted niches will make branding more difficult and expensive.   Online venues allow you to select a service or product provider far more objectively than before and with the benefit of tons of input from other people.    Real commentary is trumping advertising as the information source of choice, and this is a very good thing.

Yet many 2.0 companies don’t seem to get the message yet.    I think the Silicon Valley echo chamber makes it hard for many new online efforts to see how they have little chance of becoming more than an online footnote once the angel funding dries up.  In fact I think the new “life cycle” for 2.0 companies takes advantage of this ignorance about the death of brands which is why you see so many new companies with great logos, cool schwag, good business plans, attractive booth salespeople, and bright technical teams, and a killer plan to “brand” themselves as the next best thing …..but they have NO REAL BUSINESS.

I haven’t done much research, but I think it’s notable how many of the huge success stories did not seem to start out with big notions of branding their efforts.     Google, Yahoo, Myspace, etc etc are not products of clever marketing, rather great ideas that came at the right time.

Me? Sue Yahoo!? Sure, what the heck.

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The “Checkmate Strategic Group, Inc.” of Florida has been sending me notices about why I should jump on the click fraud bandwagon and help them sue Yahoo! as part of their class action Yahoo! lawsuit because I have bought Pay Per Click ads over the years, and as everybody knows some of that money went to pay fraudsters.

With a name like “Checkmate Strategy Group” they must be good – or at least be good marketers, since I think the main goal on these suits is to pay out some pittance to the class masses and land several million for the firm.   Hey, you can trust those “Checkmate Strategy Group” guys in a way you would not trust “Vegas Craig’s $2 legal opinions dot com”.    Sorry, no offense to Vegas Craig.

Ha – it’s sort of like PPC in reverse where Yahoo will lose or settle and “return”, say,  five hundred million nickels and dimes and quarters to hundreds of thousands of advertisers in the form of $100 here and $1000 there, while the CheckMate Group gets to keep 100 million nickels and dimes and quarters which is a LOT of  cold, hard cash.  100 million dimes is ten million dollars – I bet that sure beats ambulance chasing.

As much as I like retribution for the shameful lack of oversight on the part of Search Engines since PPC ads took off,  I think Google rather than Yahoo’s been the overwhelming beneficiary of all those ill gotten fraudulent PPC gains in the form of a clicked nickel here and a dime there.   They got off easy with a recent $90 million settlement.

So, on second thought maybe I won’t sue Yahoo! cuz I like those guys.  They are doing great 2.0 stuff  all over the place and opening up data and maps and cool stuff.

On the other hand I sure could use a few of those shiny nickels back ….

First Scoble, then Battelle! Web 2.0, are you bubbling?

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John Battelle, always insightful, is worried about Web 2.0 as a bubble.    Given that he’s one of the great 2.0 enthusiasts this comes as a bit of a surprise.    John writes:

… one of the really cool things about Web 2 is that you can keep making new companies, see if they work, then disassemble them and try again. Only, that won’t happen if the companies are kept falsely alive by a preponderance of venture capital and VC-related spending …

It’s a very provocative point, and I can see this happening during trips to Silicon Valley where some of the efforts simply … suck … yet they have enough funding to keep on trying.   I’m not even convinced some of these folks believe in their companies – they just show up at the trade shows and go through the motions until the money runs out, then head to a new gig.

That said I’m not as worried as Scoble or Battelle about a bubble, because I think this is what is going on right now and I think it’s a healthy and natural, though “new”, model for business development.

* The internet business ecosystem is inherently unstable and ripe with uncertain outcomes.

* This instability and uncertainty leads to an experimental, rather than “sweat equity” approach to  building businesses.

* For the Venture Capital community the best approach is to fund many Web 2.0 startups at modest levels, hoping that perhaps one in ten will become a solid business OR an aquisiton target and yield 10-100x the VC investment.

* For the big players like Google, MSN, Yahoo, the best model is to let the new 2.0 companies shake out on their own and aquire the successful ones as Google did with Keyhole maps, Picasa, etc, etc and Yahoo with Flickr, del.icio.us, etc, etc.

Ummmmm …. but what is the best model for aspiring 2.0 companies?    I think it’s to stay away from the VC fray and build lots of *inexpensive* experiments.     One of the best examples of this approach is the brilliant site PlentyofFish.com by Markus Frind, which started almost as a lark and has become a top tier site in a short time.

Does Web 2.0 success flow from the seven deadly sins?

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Yahoo reports a neat quote by Reid Hoffman who founded LinkedIn.com the business networking site and has invested in many other 2.0 companies. He was asked for investment criteria and replied: “Which of the seven deadly sins does it appeal to?”

Let’s review the seven deadly sins to see if internet success stems from addressing them.
Thanks to deadlysins.com for this summary of the seven deadly sins:
Pride is excessive belief in one’s own abilities, that interferes with the individual’s recognition of the grace of God. It has been called the sin from which all others arise. Pride is also known as Vanity.

Envy is the desire for others’ traits, status, abilities, or situation.

Gluttony is an inordinate desire to consume more than that which one requires.

Lust is an inordinate craving for the pleasures of the body.

Anger is manifested in the individual who spurns love and opts instead for fury. It is also known as Wrath.

Greed is the desire for material wealth or gain, ignoring the realm of the spiritual. It is also called Avarice or Covetousness.

Sloth is the avoidance of physical or spiritual work.

OK, we’ve got a problem. I suppose you could argue that Google and Yahoo are not “2.0” companies, but clearly the big online money is not coming from the sins as much as from *search* which may be indirectly related to the sins as in people searching for sins, but I think the seven sins criteria falls short in favor of simple curiosity, socializing, and habituation (~aka branding) criteria which drive the top sites like Myspace, Google, and Yahoo and can be expected to drive future 2.0 successes.

Yahoo! too much 2.0 can be a … confusing…. thing.

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Awhile back I failed to make my point about Yahoo doing “too good” a job at 2.0 for their own good, but now I see they are back at it again.    Yahoo Photos looks like some really good stuff, and if I remember correctly they have a huge library of pix and a user base  that is something like 10x greater than Flickr.    But I’m already confused.   Yahoo owns Flickr, which is a great application.   Are they expecting Flickr users – and more importantly developers of picture applications – to switch to Yahoo Photos?  Why? Are they rebranding here?   Sure I could spend a little time trying to answer these questions but this is not high on the list.  I know Flickr and love it and I’ll use it until further notice.

My earlier point was that offering people too many choices, or unclear choices, gets in the way of people *accessing* those quality innovations.   One of Google’s virtues has been to offer simple, targeted  solutions.   MSNs vice has been to offer cumbersome, bloated and confusing applications which change names every 6 months.

Yahoo, please follow the Google “instructions for use should be obvious and intuitive” plan.

If Scoble is worried, your 2.0 should worry too.

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Robert’s concerned about potential failures of Web 2.0 companies.   He’s one of the best connected online people and his departure from Microsoft last month to join podtech signalled some *optimism* about the potential of Web 2.0.   Now that he’s in the trenches with other 2.0 startups it makes me nervous to hear him worry, though I think his concerns are legitimate and notable.

To me a key question remains unanswered, and relates to how people will relate to community niches which I predict will dominate the future of online activity, though I’m not sure how search will fit into the mix and it may continue to generate most of the revenues.

Will people primarily:

1) Join online communities as they grow up organically from the ground up ?
(e.g. Myspace, Facebook, PlentyofFish, Flickr)

2) Join communities that they are directed to via advertising and other activities at Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL?
(e.g. Yahoo360)

3) Start with 1 and finish with 2 after the big company aquires the 2.0 company?

There are other possibilities but I think option 3 is going to be the pattern we’ll see for most companies.  FOX’s aquisition of Myspace and Yahoo’s of Flickr suggest that the big guys may just wait to see what creamy companies rise to the top and skim them off.    This experimental approach seems logical given the very high level of uncertainty associated with all things online.

Reason Rules! Not.

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Over at the House of J there’s some discussion about the irrationality of some security measures and about the AOL search results privacy scandal (which I also think is a questionably rational concern).

I’ll put up my comments from over there:

IMHO people are missing the key point about privacy — that cat is out of the bag. We need rules about how to penalize for abuses of information, not the pretense that AOL/Yahoo/Google/MSN will do a great job of keeping information away from Govt or commercialization. People worry about abstract Government abuses even as their search stream is processed to invoke better manipulation of their behavior.

RE screening pilots … sounds logical, but the FAA’s record of identifying flight school terrorists is not … impressive. I think the “answer” is for us all to realize that we can’t lower the risk threshold to zero so we should optimize the costs and benefits, allocating resources to the “low hanging fruit” problems in all sectors that are cheap to solve. Solving terror problems in the current fashion is so expensive it’s breaking the bank which will lead to more vulnerability.

Can the long tail wag the big internet dog?

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Obviously niches of human interests will be a very powerful force in the shaping of the online world, and it would seem the best way to serve niches, especially a small one, is more along the lines of medium or  small business rather than big biz.  However the mega sites seem to be increasing their share of the action, and are shaping the new access and community tools.

I’m wondering which of the following models, if any, will be most prevalent in the future.  How much will the long tail wag the internet dog ?
Big Corporate Website model:  Yahoo, Myspace, Google, MSN as giant info, tools, purchasing portals, community centers.
Medium Website model:  I see this as content aggregator sites like technorati that serve large niche markets and use Web 2.0 sensibilities to help users slice and dice the overwhelming amounts of online content.

Mom and Pop model:  Local or niche specific info-rich sites where users will spend most of their time researching/buying/socializing.

Obviously there will be all of this and more, but I think the trends are important and it *makes intuitive sense* to me that onliners, especially the next generation, will seek niche specific social interaction that is not handled well by anybody right now.   Big sites mostly lack enough of a human element and sites like Myspace that do have a powerful human element fail to deliver a high quality or info rich experience.

With that in mind I’m off to Silicon Valley to hear 1) pitches from the Search Engine Strategies vendors about how they can get me to the top of the search heap (thanks, but I’ll just take the T shirt for now).  2) Google Party!   Always fun to talk to the search and labs teams there.  They be clever folk.

Ringtone Scams and PPC Fraud – why so little outrage?

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One of my most read and commented blog posts relates to Ringtone Scams, a scandalous scourge of the internet, with collusion of most of the major phone companies. I’m confident these ringtone scams will soon be making more mainstream headlines.

Along with Pay Per Click fraud, ringtone scams, unlike some other online frauds and deceptions like phishing, have not quite made the big radar screens because they are harder to understand than traditional deceptive business practices such as bait and switch at a store or salespeople lying. In those “storefront” cases you can often confront the scamming salesperson or store directly, a powerful tool lacking in the online world.

What frustrates me is the level of tolerance for these practices, especially in the online community. Very questionable in scope and scale was the recent slap on the wrist of Google for failing to catch what appears to be massive PPC fraud – perhaps as much as a billion dollars per year. Contrary to the claims of all the PPC players much of the fraud could be eliminated with more careful screening and identification of contracted parties in the online transaction. This would eat into profits and therefore has been a low priority, but when as much as 25% of online advertising revenue may be obtained through fraud it’s time to stop expecting advertisers, often unwitting ones, to paying the price. This means the PPC outlets, especially Google who reaps the lions share of PPC profit (and therefore PPC ill gotten gains), should be paying a LOT more attention.