The Roof Party

Way back in the day, my old company had a lot of beer blasts on Fridays, up on the roof of our building in the city. Lots of folks came, and it got to be expensive, so we brought in sponsors. Then they got really big - and very good for my company's business. Lots of ad deals were closed, lots of new folks were hired in a very competitive market, and our conference business, which ran the parties, made lots of dough. Of course that's not how history remembers them - the parties became symbolic of the excess of the dot com era.

Well, that's OK. You live with history, and learn from it. Today my current company, FM, is having a party on a roof, and I couldn't be more happy about it. It's our fourth annual Author Salon, and we're doing it atop the Hotel Vitale in the city. I'm posting this from the party, and I'm proud to say that as with the last go round, this party is sponsored - by Searchblog. I've not taken money for the ads that run on the site for over a year, and the balance has really piled up. So I decided to use a portion of it to thank our staff, our authors, and our pals and partners by supporting an afternoon celebrating our second anniversary. In a very real way, all of you as readers have made this company and this celebration possible. Thanks! If you're in the neighborhood, come on by!

• Posted by John Battelle at 5:17 PM
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WSJ On Google Employees: It Can't Last Forever...

The Journal covers the inevitable "the grass is greener" story of Google employees leaving to join new startups...(public link).

• Posted by John Battelle at 12:54 PM
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Walt Likes Ask

Wow, the benediction of Walt Mossberg:

Google and Ask each have rolled out new ways of presenting search results. Google's approach, which it calls "universal search," is a modest thing, a first step in what it says will be a long effort to break down barriers between different types of information a user may be seeking, such as Web links, images and news.

But Ask's new system, called "Ask3D," is a much bolder and better advance in unifying different kinds of results and presenting them in a more effective manner. It shows, once again, that Ask places a higher priority than its competitors do on making search results easy to navigate and use.

• Posted by John Battelle at 12:53 PM
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Marchex Moves in A Hot Market

Domains. Content. AdSense/Affiliate models. There's tons of gold in them thar hills. Marchex is panning....or rather, working some hydraulic strip mines...

SEATTLE, WA - June 27, 2007 - In the largest-scale Web site launch of its kind, Marchex, Inc. (NASDAQ: MCHX, MCHXP) today announced that it has launched more than 100,000 of its local and vertical Web sites, publishing more than one billion Web pages of content, features and functionality for consumers looking for local services and information online, along with highly targeted local advertising inventory.

The newly launched sites now feature more than 15 million business listings across all major yellow pages categories, a deep refinement system, user-generated reviews and ratings, and third-party expert reviews aggregated by Marchex's Open List local content publishing engine.

Watch Demand Media in this space as well. And Name Media...here's a NYT blog on it...

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:18 AM
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NBC/NewCorp Announce Leader of YouTube Competitor

From a release emailed to me:

News Corporation and NBC Universal have appointed Jason Kilar, a key executive at Amazon.com for nearly a decade, to Chief Executive Officer of the online video joint venture the companies formed in March, 2007, it was announced today by Peter Chernin, President and Chief Operating Officer of News Corporation and Jeff Zucker, President and Chief Executive Officer of NBC Universal. Mr. Kilar will join the new company on July 9 and will report to its Board of Directors, which include Mr. Chernin and Mr. Zucker.

The company's video-rich site will debut later this year with thousands of hours of full-length programming, movies and clips from myriad networks and two major film studios and with an unparalleled reach. With distribution partners AOL, CNET, Comcast, MSN, MySpace, and Yahoo!, the new venture will have access to 98 percent of the monthly U.S. unique users on the Internet.
......
Mr. Kilar, 36, spent nearly a decade (1997 – 2006) at Amazon.com, where he quickly rose to help expand the company's core business beyond bookselling. Mr. Kilar originally wrote the business plan for Amazon's entry into the video and DVD businesses and ultimately led that unit as General Manager and Vice President. The video and DVD business grew to several hundred million in revenue under Mr. Kilar's leadership. Mr. Kilar went on to become Vice President and General Manager of Amazon's North American media businesses, which included the company's books, music, video, and DVD categories.

He later served as Senior Vice President, Worldwide Application Software, where his responsibilities included Amazon's Marketplace business and ownership of a significant number of the applications which can be found throughout Amazon's global websites. He reported directly to CEO Jeff Bezos and his organization included hundreds of world-class technologists that innovated the customer experience within the areas of community, media storage and serving, item metadata, automated merchandising and more.

More here and here and here (Paid Content)

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:04 AM
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Google Funds Gadgets

Never hurts to put cash in the system, eh?

From an email from Google PR:

Today, Google announced a new pilot initiative called Google Gadget Ventures aimed at bootstrapping an economic ecosystem around gadgets. Since the launch of Google Gadgets more than a year ago, we've seen an increasing opportunity for individuals and companies to build successful businesses around this technology and are piloting this program to help support additional growth.

Google Gadget Ventures will offer third-party gadget development and gadget-related businesses two types of funding:

Grants of $5,000 to developers who've built gadgets in our directory that already receive at least 250,000 weekly page views. To apply, qualified Gadget developers will be asked to submit a one-page proposal.
Seed investments of $100,000 to previous Google Gadget Ventures grant recipients who'd like to build a business around the Google Gadgets platform. Qualified developers will be asked to submit a business plan.
The developer community is an extremely important part of our development ecosystem. Our hope for Google Gadget Ventures is to enable developers to grow and diversify the universe of gadgets in a profitable and sustainable way. Ultimately this will result in a wider variety of engaging and useful online content, which is a win for our users.

The release says more info can be found at http://www.google.com/gadgetventures/ but that URL is not resolving....

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:03 PM
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Ad OutLook Not Good?

That's the quote from an advertising study released yesterday.

U.S. advertising spending is predicted to grow a mere 3.1% to $290.3 billion this year, Robert J. Coen, senior VP-director of forecasting at Universal McCann, said in a media briefing Tuesday.

“The outlook for advertising this year is not very good,” Coen said in presenting Universal McCann’s Advertising and Media Outlook Mid-Year Update.

But wait....

Online advertising and search marketing have “violently” impacted established media as the appeal for marketing tactics closely tied to transactions grows.

In terms of national advertising by medium, Internet and direct mail were the biggest gainers in the first quarter, growing 16.7% and 4.5%, respectively, over the same period last year. Spending on TV, spot TV, syndicated TV, spot radio and newspapers decreased in the first quarter.

Ahhh, I see. The outlook is not good *for packaged goods approaches to advertising.* Important distinction...

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:24 AM
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More Road

I'm traveling for the next three days. Posting will be sporadic...

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:29 PM
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Flickr Part of Yahoo Image Search

Thomas has the news.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:52 AM
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Special WebGuild Discount for SearchBlog Readers

If you'd like to got Searchnomics, have I got a deal for you. OK, Webguild, the organizer, does.

Head here and use the code "fmpub".

You'll get hundreds off! The cost to you is just $100. Wow, thanks Webguild.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:02 AM
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The LarryCopter

Larry Page made a splash at Foo this past weekend by arriving in his personal helicopter. The folks at Make, via Laughing Squid, show the landing and then have some fun with it.

I was in a session at Foo inside the O'Reilly building when Larry landed not 100 yards away. The amazing thing was none of us heard anything. The copter must be super quiet. And fast, I bet.

• Posted by John Battelle at 12:05 PM
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Patent and Local

Interesting:

Local.com Corporation (NASDAQ: LOCM), a leading local search engine, today announced that the company has been awarded patent number 7,231,405 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for the process of indexing and retrieving web-related information by geographical location.
The patent covers local search technology related to identifying location information from web documents, indexing that information and making it searchable geographically. In Local.com’s commercial implementation of the technology, the search results are ranked by search term, LocalRank score, location prominence, among other factors. The system then extracts, matches and indexes web pages from the Internet and generates web references where applicable on more than 16 million local businesses listed nationwide on Local.com.

Patents are a real hot button issue in our industry. What do you all make of this? I've sent emails for response from the majors...

Udpate: Donna has a conversation with craigslist CEO here...

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:26 AM
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Time Inks With Quigo

For competitive or perhaps even lizard-brain-driven reasons, I think traditional publishers continue to look for viable alternatives to giving their business to Google. Latest example is this deal between Time Inc. and Quigo. The angle here is this, from the Quigo blog:

Unlike the blind ad networks used previously on many of these sites, Time Inc will be able to sell directly to its advertisers text-based, pay-for-performance ads on an individual property, or across a collection of sites. Accordingly, marketers will finally be able to buy ads with full transparency and control on Time Inc properties. As a marketer, this gives you full confidence that you're reaching the high-quality, highly-targeted audience of specific Time Inc properties, and are not wasting ad dollars on questionable sites that are a big part of a blind ad network

Well....AdSense is no longer a blind network, it has site specific ads, and advertisers can check the performance of their ads on a per site basis and optimize. I'm pretty sure Time Inc. could have cut a pretty sweet deal with Google had it wanted to. I sense more is going on here.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:58 AM
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NYT on Secrecy, Privacy

It took a long time, but the NYT has one heckuva editorial on the Bush Administration today. Very strongly worded, it's clear to me that the papers are no longer concerned about playing nice with the White House.

President Bush has turned the executive branch into a two-way mirror. They get to see everything Americans do: our telephone calls, e-mail, and all manner of personal information. And we get to see nothing about what they do.

Everyone knows this administration has disdained openness and accountability since its first days. That is about the only thing it does not hide. But recent weeks have produced disturbing disclosures about just how far Mr. Bush’s team is willing to go to keep lawmakers and the public in the dark.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:45 AM
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Google and GrandCentral

Mike has the scoop...

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:35 PM
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Yahoo ReOrgs Sales

Wenda Harris Millard, former head of sales, is leaving for Martha Stewart, and Yahoo is unifying search and CPM sales under David Karnstedt. More from PC.

• Posted by John Battelle at 12:35 PM
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FaceBook

At Foo this weekend and with folks I've been talking to over the past few weeks, FaceBook is often topic #1. The speed with which FaceBook became the presumptive Next Big Thing is awesome. Now, the questions begin. This piece, from Mark Evans, outlines Five Things That Could Kill Facebook.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:55 AM
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Cutts on NYT Human Search Story

Matt posts on the role of humans in Google search, prodded by a NYT story on the topic:

If you ask an average techie about Google, you’ll hear that we use lots of computers and algorithms. Indeed, the title of the New York Times article is “The Human Touch That May Loosen Google’s Grip.” But (in my opinion), it would be a mistake to think “Google is nothing but cold algorithms and computers; there’s no room for humans at all.” I’ll give you a few examples of the role of people over the years at Google:

- PageRank is fundamentally about the hyperlinks that people on the web create. All those people creating links help Google formulate an opinion of how important a page is.
- Google News looks at a wide variety of news sources; the decisions of human editors at thousands of news sites help Google estimate whether a particular story is significant.
- Google introduced voting buttons on the toolbar back in 2001. They look like happy/frowny faces and they let regular people send thumbs-up or thumbs-down votes to Google.
- Google has allowed users to remove results that they don’t like from Google.
- For more than five years, we’ve allowed users to report spam to Google. We’ve said for years that we reserve the right to take manual action on spam (e.g. if someone types in their name and gets off-topic porn as a result).

And of course, it’s not as if Google’s search engineers drive into the Googleplex in the morning and then spend the whole day sitting around doing nothing while the computers do all the work. :) Instead, Google researchers and engineers spend our days looking for deeper insights that will let us create the next generation of search. I believe Google’s approach to search has always been pragmatic: if an approach will improve the quality of our search, we’re open to it.

He also refers to the interview we did together last year.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:54 AM
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Conversational Marketing Gets a Rousing Conversation

At FM we've stepped into a blogstorm, and I'm very sorry for those we've upset.

I've posted a lengthy thinking out loud piece over here on the FM blog....

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:23 PM
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eBay Back to Using AdWords...But...

Just got this email from eBay communications, announcing that eBay is using AdWords again, but read on:

The test we began last week was successful. We found that we were not as dependent on Google AdWords as some may have thought. By re-allocating our marketing dollars to our other partners, such as Yahoo!, AOL and MSN, we were able to increase traffic and find efficiencies that will enable us to drive more value to our sellers and partners going forward. We are now slowly turning AdWords back on, in a much more limited way than before. We will continue to work with Google, Yahoo!, AOL, MSN and other partners to reach more potential buyers and accelerate business for our community of sellers.

Wow, that's not exactly makeup sex, is it?!

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:24 PM
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YahooBay

The rumors are heating up. I've had them in my email inbox, and they're on the threads. Hmmmm.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:42 AM
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Friday Updates

Microsoft alters its approach to desktop search in Vista, but Google says it's not enough. (WaPo, Ars)

Blinkx tries a video Adsense. (b2)

More steps in the development of a cultural grammar for video. (ars)

Business.com in play? My sources say it's just rumors, but those tend to push into reality.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:19 AM
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Memphis 2: The Studio

(previously)

I'll admit that my first measure of the place was unfavorable. Coming from a land where building costs can top $1000 a square foot, the Zebra Ranch seemed to my eyes a mistake of sorts - a tar-paper and tin-roof sugar shack wrapped in chain link and topped by razor wire - not promising as a refuge for creativity, to say the least. The second story was set up on mortar blocks, and it was .... shit, was it really a single wide? Yes, I do believe it was.

But that isn't accounting for the setting. As I described in my last Memphis post, just about everything resting on that North Mississippi farmland felt as it belonged there - somehow it made sense that this building - as improbable as it looked - would be there as well. Kudzu, wasps, and grasshoppers multiplied in the glory of a rusting sun. Why not this impossible building?

The chain link gate was open and presented Dallas and I with a choice - to the left of the studio, the path was clear but uncertain, one couldn't see around the corner. To the right a boardwalk of sorts promised continuance, but the headway was clogged with wisteria vines. I chose left, and I chose wrong - a dead end. But as we came closer to the building we could hear music; honest, familiar, unpretentious music, and we knew at least we were in the right place.

Doubling back to the wisteria-laden boardwalk we came to a door, then a brief hallway heavy with Southern humidity and a stronger pulse from the music inside. Now a second door. Through that door we found friends ....

The music dominated the space, so much so that words were unnecessary. Martin leapt up and grinned his salutations, we were in a common room, dominated by a soundboard to the right, a central living room of sorts in the middle, a steep set of stairs leading up to an unknown loft above. Past Martin to the left, the pounding of drums - where Cody was playing; this was no typical studio - Cody had a drum room!

Leading off the back of the commons was a hallway, and to the right of it lay darkness (I later learned that led to Jim's keyboard room), and to the left was Luther's guitar room, but as the music gathered, both doors were closed and the family focused on the jam.

In the center of the commons, to the right, the sound board man nodded in time. On a couch to my left, Allenby, the band manager, focused on the progression, but he looked up to smile and hail me. The music was working toward something, the product of a conversation Dallas and I had just missed, but we were learning as we listened. And everyone, including the musicians, was anticipating its arrival.

This was not the time to raise one's voice. It was time to drop in, to listen, to join. And as Martin passed me a social, I realized that beyond the time I spent with my children, or the moments I steal with my wife, I had found a place where the incessant question we all seem driven by was answered. What else might I be doing? Nothing else but this, my friend, nothing else at all.

For the next 72 hours, I was - happily - on Bonnaroo time.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:46 PM
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Google Expands Pay Per Action, Cautiously

Notice how and where (bolded):

Starting today, advertisers in the beta will see an alert in their AdWords account informing them that they can now create pay-per-action campaigns. Going forward, advertisers who have enabled AdWords conversion tracking and received more than 500 conversions from their CPC and CPM-based campaigns in the past 30 days will be automatically added to the beta on a rolling basis.

Pay-per-action ads are only shown on publisher sites in the Google content network, also known as Google AdSense™ for content sites.

....here is the release.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:18 AM
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Discovering the Web's Edge: Web 2 Summit This October

Earlier this month we quietly added the first slate of speakers to the Web 2 Summit website.

Our theme this year is "Discovering the Web's Edge." This doesn't mean we're avoiding "mainstream" web companies - far from it, but rather we will be asking the CEOs of those companies where their edge is, and where they might see new, unexplored continents looming.

Along those lines, coming for the first time (we'll have folks from Google and Yahoo as well) are:

Meg Whitman, CEO, eBay
Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft
Philippe Dauman, CEO, Viacom
Eric Nicoli, CEO EMI

Vyomesh Joshi, EVP, HP (runs their Imaging business)

Robert Kotick, CEO, Activision
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook

The full list includes some curveballs too, like Adam Bosworth of Google, talking about health, Evan Williams on Twitter, Reed Hundt of Frontline, Danny Hillis of MetaWeb, Martin Varsavsky of Fon, and many more.

I'm nowhere finished lining up speakers, expect a lot more soon. Meanwhile, if you were planning on coming, you might want to register asap. We're already closing in on our fourth sellout. If you'd like to come and did not get an invitation, please request one here. In the form, you might mention Searchblog, as I'm the fellow who reviews all the requests and decides who comes. I can't promise anything - we have already had 4000 requests and can only take 1000 or so. But I'll do my best.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:00 AM
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Do You Trust Your Search Engine With Your Data?

Hakia, a sponsor of this site, is asking that question on its landing page. I thought the results so far are interesting, given the ongoing conversation around the Web about privacy.

The question:

Do you trust your search engine with your information?

The results:

PS, if you really don't trust the engine, SEL covers a plugin you can use to insure your info is not stored...I tend to not believe these kinds of approaches will work.

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:30 AM
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Compete: FaceBook is Growing 3x Faster than MySpace, Some Big Digg Numbers

From the Compete blog:

There is certainly something magical about reaching 20 million. Web 2.0 darlings, also prime acquisition targets – Digg and Facebook both crossed this milestone last month.

* Digg edged out Facebook, with 2.3 million additional unique visitors
* Facebook is growing 3x faster than MySpace (on a percentage basis)

For what it's worth, Quantcast says Digg has 6.9mm in the US...

• Posted by John Battelle at 7:10 AM
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Gigaom:Who Yahoo?

Is Yahoo for sale? GigaOm wonders who might buy it, from AT&T to NewsCorp. My money's on private equity.

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:57 AM
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Leave Google for....VC??

My my. This from VentureBeat is interesting.

Two more high-level Google engineers have left the Googleplex — this time to join well-known venture capital firm Benchmark Capital.

Bret Taylor (left) and Jim Norris (right), two of the masterminds behind Google Maps and several other Google products, have joined the firm as “Entrepreneurs in Residence.” This gives them paid positions to hang out at Benchmark’s offices on Silicon Valley’s Sand Hill Road and think through starting a business. They have a specific idea in mind, but are secretive about it, telling VentureBeat only that it’s a “consumer Internet” company.

• Posted by John Battelle at 4:47 AM
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Reprise Report on Panama

Reprise is a leading SEO/SEM firm, and it was recently purchased by InterPublic Group, a large advertising agency. (My company FM is working with Reprise). One of its founders, Peter Hershberg, recently sent me a report on its early interactions with Panama, and I thought I'd post some of the company's findings. If you want the full report, I will have uploaded it soon (here is the link to the PDF).

Here's the nut of the Executive Summary:

In short, while it was found to be a significant upgrade over the previous Yahoo DTC (Direct Traffic Center) system (especially for enterprise-grade clients), there are several challenging aspects of the Panama upgrade that may impede Yahoo’s ability to access the long tail of the market.

Reprise evaluates Panama along many lines of inquiry: Campaign Management (including Perfomance), User Interface, and Technology.

Reprise Media undertook an internal cross-functional study of Yahoo's new paid system from a search marketer's perspective, the findings of which are detailed here. This study examines the change that Panama brought about in day-to-day campaign production, optimization and reporting, from both front-end and back-end process perspectives. While we will mention similarities to MSN’s adCenter program, most comparisons in this report center around Google AdWords, given its position as the dominant player in the market and de facto industry standard.

On performance, Yahoo's CPCs went down, and click through rates went up. The explanations:

Yahoo was the only engine whose CPCs decreased over the time surrounding the launch of Panama. These results confirm the conclusion that quality based bidding along with more sophisticated and granular campaign structure is allowing us to improve the Yahoo account performance which ultimately results in lower CPCs.

Yahoo Search Marketing enjoyed a much higher increase in clickthrough rate, bringing it in line with our average Google CTRs. These results demonstrate that the ability to better target our audience through more direct creative, geo-targeting and a separation of search and contextual campaigns are providing us with more qualified ads which are driving the higher click through rates.

Also, conversions were down. The explanation:

While campaign conversion rates were improved on both Google and MSN, Yahoo's conversion dropped off 5%. In other words, while perceived ad relevance may have improved, the truly important metric in the campaign suffered somewhat. This may be due, in part, to the fact that with improved targeting and ad matching/ranking the distribution profiles of these sites has changed somewhat. In this situation, sites that had been converting at a high level no longer make the relevance cut off as defined by the engines. However, at a 5% variance, there is the possibility that this data is just noise - the normal variance that occurs based on a host of other external factors.

On other campaign management, Reprise does not mince words:

By imitating Google’s organization of data, Panama helps establish industry-wide campaign management standards that will benefit agencies and enterprise-level search marketers. Many of Panama’s most useful new features, such as bulk uploading, dynamic keyword insertion, flexible editorial guidelines, geo-targeting, contextual tracking and remote campaign management, are intended to alleviate scalability issues that arise with large-scale campaigns. These efficiencies, however, make Panama complex, and consequently time consuming. In many ways Panama falls short of Google in terms of ease of use, degree of flexibility and reporting options. In general, we find Panama’s handling of data vastly better than Yahoo’s previous Direct Traffic Center (DTC) platform, but still inferior to Google AdWords.

And on UI:

In order to create a platform that would scale with Panama's back-end updates, Yahoo overhauled their user interface. By implementing new organizational systems, new terminology, and new production sheets, Panama created a platform better suited to enterprise-level campaigns. Though the new UI doesn't fully streamline campaign management, it does a good job of establishing more intuitive processes. Furthermore, because Panama's UI structure mimics Google in many ways, it creates operational standards for the search marketing industry.

On Technology:

Panama's technology gives large-scale marketers the ability to more easily request and move around massive amounts of data. For that reason, Yahoo’s new API protocols may have the most significant impact of any changes made....Panama brings Yahoo in line with Google’s standardizing tools, system, structure and meta data, to create an industry standard where it was previously lacking.

Overall:

While the launch of Project Panama represents a significant step forward for the Yahoo Search Marketing platform, it does not yet address all of the
requirements of the market. Though the system makes strides towards establishing industry standard campaign structure, terminology and API
access, it often finds itself under-delivering on the actual execution of these new features.

That said, Panama is brand new. Like any enterprise-level software product, it needs time to find its footing and refine its offering. We are confident
that, with time, Yahoo’s new system will represent a very positive change for paid search advertisers.

There is a lot more in the report. If you're interested, let me know, and I'll do my best to get permission to upload it here.

• Posted by John Battelle at 1:13 PM
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Your Email Safer Today

Ed Felten reports on a case decided by Federal Courts today:

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday, in Warshak v. U.S., that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their email, so that the government needs a search warrant or similar process to access it. The Court’s decision was swayed by amicus briefs submitted by EFF and a group of law professors.

However:

This is not a general ruling that warrants are required to access electronic records held by third parties. The Court’s reasoning depended on the particular attributes of email, and even on the way these particular ISPs handled email. If the ISP’s employees regularly looked at customer email in the ordinary course of business, or if there was a written agreement giving the ISP broad latitude to look at email, the Court might have found differently. Warshak had a reasonable expectation of privacy in his email, but you might not.

• Posted by John Battelle at 12:45 PM
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Google And Politics

Google has a new policy blog (check out last weekend's NN post), and I love the opening line of this post:

This year we've invited all the presidential candidates to come visit Google...

I know they stole that plan from FM, of course. We've invited them all to come to Sausalito for sushi and a drink at the local dive. I wonder which invite they'll accept...

• Posted by John Battelle at 12:45 PM
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Yahoo and MySpace

I dunno. At first blush, it makes no sense to me (TC). If it happens, I hope they put someone in who can really lead....

Why give away 25% of your company to get something when you have a new CEO, an embattled image, and freaked out senior staff? It would smack of desperation, would it not? And I thought Murdoch viewed MySpace as critical to Newscorp's future?

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:11 AM
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More Traveling

I'm headed to Washington for a day to join the IAB, I am on the board there now. Let me know if you all have any issues the IAB might address....

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:45 AM
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Happy Birthday, FM

Wow. Two years. And hey, it did start in a garage....

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:14 PM
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More G Acquisitions in OfficeLand

From the Google blog:

We're pleased to announce that we've acquired the assets of Zenter, a company that provides software for creating online slide presentations.

You've heard us talk a lot about using the web to improve group collaboration and information sharing. These days, when you create a document -- whether it's a text document, a spreadsheet, or a presentation -- you usually want to share it, collect feedback, or communicate about it in some way. We on the Google Docs & Spreadsheets team focus on making this experience easier and more powerful for you. In particular, we're working to add presentation-sharing capabilities to Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and we're excited about the addition of Zenter's technology and team to that effort.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:54 PM
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Fighting the Power?!

Now really, Wired. I'm so proud of being part of the founding of this great brand, but honestly, guys, I'm not "fighting the power." I'm asking a question.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:13 PM
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Startups

Marc is writing up a storm on startups. This post really resonated (why not to do a startup) and in particular, this passage:

You will flip rapidly from a day in which you are euphorically convinced you are going to own the world, to a day in which doom seems only weeks away and you feel completely ruined, and back again.

Over and over and over.

Oh man, yes.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:21 AM
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Just Asking...

I've found myself more and more wary of doing things that I'd like to do with Google applications simply out of some primal, lizard brain fear of giving too much control of my data to one source. It's not that I don't trust Google, it's not that I don't like the applications, it's that I'm worried they might fall to some ill use, out of the control of the current brand as I've come to understand it today. Or perhaps it's deeper than that - I simply can't let too much of my online life run through any one control point, regardless of who it is.

Already, Google has my feed (through Feedburner), a portion of my business( through Doubleclick, which serves some of our ads at FM), most of my search history (I use Google more than any other engine), and another portion of my business (we use Google for backfill ads at FM). But yesterday I decided not to run Google Calendar for something business related, even though it would have been perfect for us, and earlier we decided to not run Google spreadsheets, because we didn't want "Google" to have access to sensitive competitive information. I still use some Google services for other portions of the work I do - like planning conferences, for example.

But I have noticed that I've hit, perhaps, my "Google saturation point."

How about all of you? Has this issue crossed your mind?

Update: Matt writes: given Google's strict privacy policies, I wouldn't worry about something like using Google Calendar or Gmail. I'll check if someone at Google can talk a bit somewhere about the protections we have in place for data like that.

I would love to see the text applying directly to that, Matt. I recall the overall TOS for an account, but they include text like this:

11.1....By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

11.2 You agree that this licence includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.

And I recall Google's privacy policy, which includes this:

# We may use personal information to provide the services you've requested, including services that display customized content and advertising.
# We may also use personal information for auditing, research and analysis to operate and improve Google technologies and services.

Well, that's pretty broad, Matt. What if you use the data an entrepreneur gives you about his new startup, say through Analytics or Calendar, to make your competing service better?

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:50 AM
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FaceBook as the New Google

Well, perhaps really, the new (anti) portal. Paul posts a portion of an email from an ex-Googler who left for Facebook.

A couple of months ago, after three years as a Google product manager, I decided to leave for Facebook. I am writing this note to spread Good News to all the friends I haven't already overwhelmed with my enthusiasm: Facebook really is That company.

Which company? That one. That company that shows up once in a very long while -- the Google of yesterday, the Microsoft of long ago. That company where large numbers of stunningly-brilliant people congregate and feed off each other's genius. That company that's doing with 60 engineers what teams of 600 can't pull off. That company that's on the cusp of Changing The World, that's still small enough where each employee has a huge impact on the organization, where you think about working now and again, and where you know you'll kick yourself in three years if you don't jump on the bandwagon now, even after someone had told you that it was rolling toward the promised land. That company where everyone seems to be having the time of their life.

I'm serious. I have drunk from the kool-aid, and it is delicious.

The fellow goes on to ask folks to join him at Facebook.

We've all been thinking about Facebook a lot lately, and many of us have been using it, as it's impossible not to thanks to the onslaught of industry folk who are giving it a whirl and inviting you in. It's a slick application and the open approach to plugins is brilliant in its simplicity. But the real question, if the future of the site is as a next generation "anti-portal" is to address th