Bought 3 new books this weekend. Just popped out to get a book as a Christmas Present for a friend and walked out with two for myself:
The World is Flat - Thomas Friedman
We Are Smarter Than Me - Barry Libert & Jon Spector
Small Is the New Big: And 183 Other Riffs,… - Seth Godin
See other books on my bookshelf
Saw this on Techcrunch today…
Bebo Snubs Google With Facebook Platform Clone
Erick Schonfeld
Let’s call a spade a spade here. When the third largest social network in the U.S. announces a platform for social applications that mirrors Facebook’s and appeals to Facebook developers, it is a snub to Google. For all the promise of Google’s competing OpenSocial platform (which Bebo is also supporting), it is just not ready yet. Bebo’s embrace of Facebook says a lot about the true state of competition between Google and Facebook. The fact that Bebo will have Facebook apps running on Bebo before OpenSocial apps indicates where its priorities lie.
When OpenSocial launched, we suggested that Facebook might have no choice but to join it as well, given all the initial support from other Websites and application developers that Google was able to muster. But this move suggests otherwise. Facebook is not going to join OpenSocial unless it has to. In fact, Facebook actually helped Bebo with this effort, and for good reason.
How does Facebook crush OpenSocial? By helping to make Facebook applications easily portable to other social networks. It would rather open up its own application platform to other social networks and compete head-to-head with OpenSocial. That’s the game plan. Facebook already has all the developers anyway. This is Facebook’s game to lose. Round Two goes to Facebook. But can it get LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, and others—some of whom have opened up their own platforms to outside developers—to also play ball?
(Read our on-the-scene coverage with full details about Bebo’s platform here).
Update: In fact, what I suggested above is exactly what Facebook is doing. (See this post on the Facebook developers blog). And this was just added to its wiki for developers:
In the next step of opening up Facebook Platform, Facebook is now making its platform architecture available as a model for other social sites. Facebook will even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags for use by other platforms, which means that the 100,000 developers currently building Facebook applications can make their applications available on other social sites with no extra work.
It is mano-a-mano, folks.
Figures released by eMarketer show that growth in online advertising will slow, but there’s no need to panic. According to the report, online advertising growth will slow in 2008 to…wait for it…only 29% and worse still by 2012 online advertising will only grow by 12% compared to 2010.
Now I’ve got the sarcasm out of the way the figures are quite remarkable, particularly at a time where many economists are predicting the United States may well slip into recession, unprecedented Government intervention aside.
The numbers look great for Google, with paid search advertising expected to hover at around 40% of the total online ad spend through to 2012, increasing as a whole from $8.6 billion in 2007 to $16.59 billion in 2012, a 92.9% increase over 5 years.
The are some lower figures, for example the two expected white knights in new media advertising won’t grow to levels many were hoping for, with advertising on social networking sites only expected to be 6% of the overall online ad spend in 2012, and rich media/ video rising to 13.1%; all in all it sounds like an internet in 5 years time that isn’t that much different to now, only with more money in the pot to go around.
According to the NY Times, online advertising will rise from 9.3% of the total ad spend in the United States now to 13.3 percent in 2011.
Facebook privacy anyone?
Paypal Launches Storefront Widget
Paypal has launched the Paypal Storefront Widget, a web based widget that allows anyone to embed a store widget on a web site.
The Storefront widget offers a seamless e-commerce platform for those wishing to sell anything on their site, such as t-shirts, CD’s or other items
The widget (see pic right) includes:
- An Index page that shows thumbnail images of all the items for sale through the widget
- A product page that shows a larger view of the items/ products for sale
- A shopping cart directly within the widget
- About and policy pages mean that any conditions are also contained with the widget
More info here in this Techcrunch article
Here’s a point of view to which I can subscribe, but for which I cannot take credit. Social networks will die. This was one of the assertions put to me by Sam Sethi of Blognation last week over a coffee. But how will they die, you ask? Let me elaborate.
Social networking is as old as time, ever since our primitive ancestors formed the first social circles we’ve been social networking. In fact the term wasn’t coined until 1954, but we’d been at it for thousands of years by then.
Social Networking Services (SNS) are characterized by the well-known sites like MySpace, FaceBook, Bebo, etc, etc (wikipedia’s growing list is here), and so far most of us, if we have wanted to develop our own computer-based social networks, have had no choice but to use one or more of these. But here is the rub, which one do you choose, most likely you’ll need to be in several because your friends are all on different ones. Personally I use Facebook and LinkedIn, the others I’ve just played with and its really just FB and LI that keep my attention and keep me investing time in updating my stuff. OK, so I also use Blogger, and that as a social media platform you might also say that blogger has some SN elements (but its not a SNS). Anyway I digress, back to the original point, why will these services die.
Well, lets look at what they do for us shall we. My SNS generally allows me to:
- create a network, or several distinct networks, of friends (the definition of ‘friends’ in today’s online social world tends to be wider than our parents may have employed)
- exchange messages and updates with those friends of groups of friends
- share content (photos, videos, music, stories, etc) with them
- get recommendations to and discover places, content and services that may interest me
- be entertained and engage in conversation, discussion, games, debate, abuse - yes even a little mutual abuse and poking is fun
- develop my personal and professional reputation
- find new potential employments
- get connected with new friends, who are friends of friends
- maintain contact with more distant friends despite separation of distance of time
- …
Now, consider if there is another way to do these things. Well, most of the information that I have to re-enter into my chosen SNS already exists in applications on my desktop, think about your email client (PIM) or your IM/VoIP client. Perhaps the only reason that SNS exist as separate services is that your existing tools have been slow to offer these features.
What will happen is that there will be a convergence of communications tools and SNS. Either we’ll all give up standalone email and IM/VoIP and do it all through SNS, which would mean that SNS need to adopt a set of open standards to allow messaging and exchange of data between them (perhaps OpenID and OpenSocial are a start). Or we’ll start to leave behind silo SNS as the social tools start to appear in our PIMs and IMs.
Of course you also have to consider that more and more of us are mobile these days, and the number is growing. I don’t really want to have to log in to a special website (especially multiple of them) to catch up with my friends, use a separate calendar for my meetings, use a separate email client for my email, and a separate IM client for my IM. I want it all to be right there on my Treo (or whatever mobile device you use). So far My Treo does all my appointments, all my email, and IM is just about doable. But it also already has all my contacts in, most of them already organized by category (or as a SNS may call them ‘networks’). So, how about a mobile app, with a PC/MAC based partner that gives me a larger UI (and replicates all my data) when I am sitting down.
Now there is of course the alternate view, that my local apps will disappear and all this will migrate online. You know what? I actually don’t care which way it goes, and it almost doesn’t matter, what’s important is that we will see a convergence and we’ll tend to come down on one side or the other, but the notion of a SNS as distinct from other services will start to die - it will all just be about the natural way I communicate and organize myself with my friends.
I blogged about OpenID before. Its a single signon solution thats starting to get traction in the web2.0 world. The latest news is that Google and Microsoft will start to roll out support for it.
Here is the article from techcrunch that discussed Googles test adoption on blogger.
Google’s “Blogger in Draft” program that tests functionality for Google’s popular Blogger blogging platform has rolled out OpenID support for comments.
The new service will allow anyone with an OpenID account, including LiveJournal and TypeKey services to log in and validate a comment on blogs running under the Blogger in Draft service. Google notes that the feature is a test and that they will seek user feedback, but all things being equal this will end up being provided on Blogger itself.
The bigger news, particularly for rabid OpenID advocates is a suggestion from Google that they are “working on functionality to let Blogger’s URLs (both Blog*Spot and custom domains) be used for commenting elsewhere on the web,” which sounds a lot like code for Google is looking at turning Blogger logins into OpenID log ins in a similar way that AOL did with its user base.
It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to know who is driving this, and Google even drops a hint in the example link: “http://brad.livejournal.com/”; LiveJournal founder and former SixApart employee Brad Fitzpatrick joined Google in August and is credited as the founder of OpenID.
OpenID advocates are passionate about the potential of the idea, but despite the noise and companies such as Digg, Yahoo and even to some extent Microsoft adopting OpenID it has failed to capture the broader public’s imagination. If the 1000 pound Gorilla in the room decides to adopt OpenID across its range of products, presumably with Blogger being only the first step of a broader rollout, OpenID may finally take off outside of the first adopter and tech communities.
zopa, the UK-based peer lending service is about to launch in the US.
Techcrunch reports here.
Flux Launches Self Service Product; Full On Ning Competitor
Flux, a new social network joint venture between Viacom and SocialProject, had a limited launch in September.
The platform is the cornerstone of Viacom’s social network strategy. Instead of building independent networks for MTV and its hundreds of other brands, they’ve built a distributed platform that shares users, infrastructure and content, but allows for distinct branding and community building around each property (like Ning). And Flux isn’t just for Viacom - third parties are using it as well.
When Flux launched it had only a few hand picked non-Viacom partners. Today they are opening up the platform for anyone that wants to join.
Like Ning, it’s fairly easy to create a Flux social network. The look and feel can be customized via templates or by uploading your own CSS, and the network can be mapped to your domain name.
Once created any Flux member can join your network with a single click. Since Flux is already gaining users via their launched Viacom and other properties, this gives young communities a deeper pool of users to draw from. And the fact that new users do not need to create a new profile, friends list or login credentials gives them a greater incentive to join. User data is exportable, Flux says, if the partner creates a privacy policy stating that.
Partners have three integration choices:
- fShare, the basic integration, allows users to take content from the site and easily embed it into other social networks.
- Flux Lite allows partners to create a basic social network.
- Flux custom gives nearly full control over the look and feel and has additional features. Partners can choose any integration, it just takes a little more work to use the custom features. Flux will add new developer features over time as well. The chart to the right (click for larger view) shows the various options.
Flux partners can choose to show Flux ads on the site, or use their own. Flux says they are currently selling at a $1.50 CPM and will split that 50/50 with partners. If a partner chooses to display their own ads instead, they must split revenue with Flux 50/50 as well.
Flux v. Ning
Flux and Ning have very similar features and will compete for communities looking to build a social network (and there are lots of other choices as well). Ning has an established platform, lots of money, and 130,000 existing communities (including Playboy). Flux also has a great platform, and the leverage of all the Viacom properties to promote it. Ning sees the threat from Flux. CEO Gina Bianchini wrote a fiery point-by-point comparison of the two services earlier this week - Flux disputes some of the facts.
Ning is currently supporting Google’s Open Social platform. Flux says they will fully support Open Social beginning in January.
Via techcrunch
New figures released by comScore show that YouTube remains the outright leader in online video.
Based on videos viewed, Google owned sites (YouTube + Google Video, but mostly YouTube) commanded a 28.3% market share in the United States in September with Fox Interactive Media (FIM) sites (MySpace and others) on 4.2%. The figures (see chart) demonstrate that YouTube doesn’t dominate video viewing as much as would be expected, suggesting that the long tail is alive and well in the sector given the top ten video sites only hold 45.2% of all videos viewed online.
The unique viewer numbers for video destinations also show Google leading, but by a smaller margin of 39.4% vs 22.6% for FIM sites. These figures are for people visiting the actual video sites themselves suggesting that much of YouTube’s dominance comes not from YouTube.com itself, but from people embedding YouTube videos (28.3% of all videos viewed vs 4.2% for FIM).
Via techncrunch here
