Well, I knew this day would come. I've been ignoring friend requests on Facebook for a month or so because, well, my longstanding friending policy has backfired, and I'm now at my "friend limit" of 5000 (well, 5003, to be exact). This limit has been much discussed, and I'm not sure I can add anything to what has become a timeworn dialog. It is what it is, and to be honest, I think 5000, upon reflection, is way too high a number. It probably should be around 500, if not 256 or something. Because, let's be frank. No one has more than about 100 real friends. The rest are...well...possible friends. Colleagues. Strangers and interesting looking people you might want to meet someday if you ever travel to Bangalore. And...in my case...

Well, my case is certainly not unique, but I'll tell the story anyway, if only to have a record of it in the Database of Intentions so my great great grandchildren can chuckle about it someday. (OK, so my three kids can chuckle at it now).

So back in 2005 or 6, I'm not sure when, I joined Facebook. And a bunch of folks starting friending me, folks I might have met at some point or other, I wasn't always sure. Every so often - say every 25th or so 'friend' - I'd see someone I recognized instantly. An elementary school buddy or a work colleague. But due to my somewhat unique profile in the web space - I have been lurking around these particular parts for nearly 25 years now - any number of people who I didn't know asked me to be pals.

Now, I don't think too hard about what it means to be a semi-public person in the rather small pond that is the web space, but I do have one pretty hard and fast rule: If you can avoid being an asshole, what's the point of the doing the opposite?

So from Day 1 on Facebook, my policy was pretty simple: I accepted every friend request that came my way. I figured it was quite kind of these real people to seek me out and ask to connect, and who knew where this platform might go? By 2005, nearly 50K folks had signed up for my RSS feed, and wasn't Facebook sort of a similar platform? Well, not exactly, but I think with Twitter my point has been made, somewhat. But I digress.

My "don't be a dick" policy served me well for several years. Folks friended me, some of them turned out to be pretty cool (they'd show up at events I promoted, they bought and critiqued my book, they cheered me on as I tried to make FM a success, they visited Searchblog when I had a new post). Sure, I recognized I was not your typical Facebook user - I was leveraging the service more as a platform for my work than a network of real friends, but that was OK. The service would figure out what to do with me at some point, right? After all, I wasn't alone.

But upon reflection, I totally screwed up in how I use Facebook. Buried in there somewhere are groups of folks I really do want to connect with in the way Zuck and co. meant for me to connect. And I Just Didn't Deal.

And now, by all anecdotal accounts, I have to migrate my friends to a "Fan Page." Like I'm Budweiser, or Coke, or MIA. Which I'm not.

No wonder I like Twitter so much.

But I'm resigned to fixing my Facebook world. At some point. Really.

Meanwhile, I'm really sorry to the folks I couldn't friend before I got cut off. I promise to figure it out. But honestly, it'll take me a few days to do it. And I'm a little short on a few open days.

What do you all think I should do? Facebook doesn't exactly make it easy to figure out how to migrate to the world of "Fan Pages" from the world of "5000 Friends."

I may have been "on vacation" over much of the past month, but as usual, I was working, and part of my work was framing out and filling in the program for the sixth annual Web 2 Summit. Tim O'Reilly and I had a very hard job trying to top last year's program, given it featured Lance Armstrong, Al Gore, Edgar Bronfman, John Doerr, Jerry Yang, and so many more.  

But I think we've managed to top it. Pasted below is a note we sent out recently with an overview of the program. But even since then, we've had a couple of pretty major new additions, both from the world of government and policy:

- Aneesh Chopra -  America's first ever appointed CTO will join us this year, in conversation with Tim O'Reilly (for Tim's take and a video of Chopra, click here). A charasmatic figure and proven leader, Chopra is charged with developing national strategies for technology investments - overseeing the U.S. Government's $150 billion R&D budget.

- Austan Goolsbee - Chief U.S. Economist, member of the Council of Economic Advisers, serving the executive office as staff director on the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board (PERAB) - an outfit established within the Department of Treasury charged with analyzing and understanding the state of our financial markets, banking and commerce systems in order to inform decision making around economic policy. Between the CEA and PERAB, Austan is working to fix America's economic standing both domestically and internationally. No small feat. (See his interview with Jon Stewart here).

More on the rest of the program:

Day one covers broad ground — opening with an in-depth conversation with Brian Roberts, Chairman and CEO of Comcast — and moving into a series of powerful High Order Bits and discussions around government policy and healthcare. Then Jeff Immelt, Chairman and CEO of GE, will share his thoughts before our dinner Q&A session with maverick Mark Cuban, hosted by ModernMom CEO and Dancing with the Stars champion Brooke Burke (Mark had his own stint on Dancing With the Stars, as you may recall...).

After kicking off with morning workshops, day two features insightful one-on-one conversations with Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo!, and Qi Lu, President at Microsoft, who's leading the recently announced partnership between the two companies. Later in the day, media gurus will discuss the future of their industry, including Chairman Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. of the New York Times, CEO Dan Rosensweig of RedOctane, and CEO Richard Rosenblatt of Demand Media.

Mid-day we'll check in with Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg, then launch our new High Order Ignite program — a session of dynamic, rapid-fire presentations that highlight ground-breaking and viable technologies that may well change the world. After a focused session on sensor and augmented reality applications, we'll wrap up the day with Twitter CEO Evan Williams.

Last, but definitely not least, our third day will include conversations with the CEOs of Intel, Adobe, AOL, and Jon Miller, head of digital for Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. We're also bringing back our famed Teen Panel, where we'll hear from the generation that will most shape the future success or failure of our industry's efforts. And in a manner more fitting than we could have planned, we'll close our conference with the man who started it all — Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.

And those are just the highlights. Let's not forget the slew of new speakers we've added including:

Erin McKean, CEO of Wordnik. (An API for language? Why not?!)

Sundar Pichai, VP at Google. (Responsible for Chrome OS, Google's pointed response to Windows.)

Steve Schneider, Program Director at WestEd. (Walking the talk, Steve has plans to launch the first-ever standard for technology literacy across the U.S. by 2012.)

Cynthia Warner, President of Sapphire Energy. (If Sapphire's biofuel plans scale, we have reason for hope in the world of energy.)

If you'd like to come to the Web 2.0 Summit, let us know by requesting an invite. I have discounts for Searchblog and Twitter readers (ping me here or jbat at battellemedia dot com), and I really look forward to seeing you October 20-22 at the Westin San Francisco!

I'm getting psyched up for Outside Lands' second year, and the return of CrowdFire, an FM/Intel/Outside Lands joint back and better than ever. CrowdFire is a service that aggregates fan photos, videos, tweets, and more, and lets anyone play with the database we all create as we experience great live music.   

The cool thing is, the best stuff we upload or make will end up all over the main stages and video panels all over the festival and featured on the site itself.

To stay in touch with what's up at Outside Lands and CrowdFire, follow @crowdfire and @osl on Twitter, and Here's the details from the team that built the site:

The NYT asks today: "Is Google Entering the Mortgage Quote Business?"

The story notes that in a lawsuit between two mortgage-lead businesses, Lending Tree and MorTech, Lending Tree claims that MorTech is providing its technology to Google, so that Google can compete with Lending Tree.

Does this mean Google is getting into the mortgage business?

Of course it does. And ... of course it doesn't. Because Google already owns the market.

Google is in the lead generation and arbitrage business. It has been since the birth of the auction on AdWords and the spread of syndication through Adsense. Google makes billions on arbitraging leads. And very few markets are as rich in lead generation cash as the mortgage business.

So, in a way, Google already is in the business. And always will be. The company admitted to the Times that it is testing a new approach to this lucrative market that optimizes returns, and why not? Do a search for Home Mortgage. There's a lot of demand out there for leads. Google smells an opportunity to cut out a middle man, and increase margins.

Reminds me of a certain company back in the early 1990s...

It feels a bit odd to be writing that headline - "Yahoo's New Search" - given the company's deal with Bing/Microsoft. But Yahoo seems intent on declaring its independence with regard to search, even as it sells its asset and audience away to its newfound partner.

Yahoo does retain, in the deal, the right to innovate on top of Bing results, and I guess that's where this announcement is pointing - noting that Yahoo has been innovating in search UI and plans to continue to do so. I'm talking with the Yahoo folks next week and will have more on their plans then. But it strikes me as potentially conflicting to the deal for Yahoo to be innovating in UI on top of Bing, as one of Bing's strengths is its innovation in UI....

(image)

Very interesting news yesterday about Google Adsense and competing ad networks. From ClickZ:

Google plans to open its AdSense network to other ad networks, potentially giving the already huge ad net access to display ads flowing through countless other networks. The firm yesterday said it will allow networks to bid via auction to have their ads appear on AdSense partner sites, like an exchange. Google is vetting several ad networks for certification, but would not name any of the networks. If accepted into the program, the networks would receive payment if their ads win the auction to appear on AdSense sites. The firm said networks will be able to target contextually or by placement. The company suggested the offering will help boost publisher revenues by increasing competition for ad placements.

Now this can be seen a number of ways. First, is this an admission by Google that they do not have good enough display advertising inventory and/or relationships? Maybe, maybe not. Seems to me more of a statement that Google considers Adsense more of a platform for advertising, rather than a network into itself. Second, if you ran an ad network, would you want to do this? Well, ad networks tend to optimize for the most money. If Adsense gives them more money, they just might want to do this. Third, what about the data? Google will learn an awful lot about what is going on with each network once they plus themselves into the Adsense hivemind.

And in the end, isn't that what it's all about? Remember what happened with search? AOL, Netscape, Yahoo, and many others fed the Google search beast until Google had all the data and therefore the best search engine. When it came time for renegotiation of those search deals, who had the upper hand?

It's all about the data, to my mind.

Regarding this story in the New York Times:

With Bloggers in the Bleachers, Leagues See a Threat to Profits

(and related, my post on "Don't Be a Player Platform Hater"):

I have such a rant in me on this topic but I simply cannot write it now, I'm way too Supposed to Be On Vacation. But suffice to say, you can do two things if you "own content" - like, say, football games (yep, that's content). One, you can cut it all off and hoard it. Or two, you can be the oxygen in the ecosystem. The first allows you to profit but it kills your long-term community ecosystem and prevents, entirely, your product from growing as your supporting community wants it to grow - because in essence, you are refusing to allow your community to have a voice and point of view about your product. It's YOURS, and you'll LIKE IT THE WAY I WANT TO GIVE IT TO YOU!

The second makes you a crucial, life giving element of an ecosystem, but one that is as dependent on that ecosystem as it is upon you. Yes, air is unbreathable without oxygen, but then again, it ain't air if it's ONLY oxygen.

Anyway. Read this piece, and really think about it. Cutting fans off from blogging (or Tweeting, since there are ads there now and will be more*) about the games they go to because they might be getting paid by SBN, or AdSense, or whoever? Are you F'ING NUTS?

Pull your head out, sports guys. It's way better to be the oxygen in the ecosystem. It's a bigger profit opportunity, for one. And it's just a way more fun approach to business, one that feeds more than just your bottom line.

OK, back to vacation.   

*PS, oh yeah, and Facebooking, because, shit, Water Cooler is on Facebook, isn't it?! Yikes, thousands of people talking about football AND WE'RE NOT MAKING MONEY ON IT DAMNIT! And doesn't Facebook show ads next to fans' personal pages? Time to get me a cut of that revenue too, I hear Facebook is making hundreds of millions!

** PPS I am NOT saying that businesses who make it their business to cover and profit from covering sports should not have a revenue model that pays content owners, far from it. I AM saying that content should have an API - and a set of business rules around use of that API. Duh.

Today I was on my way back to our house after dropping my kids off to camp, and I decided to stop by a local cafe for a quick coffee-n-chat. Now, in August, "our house" means a century-old family place on an island, an island that rather pugnaciously refuses to allow large chain stores to set down roots. So it's fair to say that this island is sort of a Galapagos of small business. There are no Mickey D's, no Safeways, and no Starbucks. It's all locally owned - nearly every single "year rounder" who lives here is a small business person.  

The local cafe I stopped by is a hangout - a place where the community comes to eat and drink coffee, to gossip and share information, to learn the latest, to connect. It's a social network in its truest sense. It's driven by content - the conversations and knowledge of the staff and customers, and it's driven by community. Commerce is a by product of the two.

But the commerce is not limited to just the coffee and egg sandwiches on the menu. Not by a long shot. Like nearly every other cafe and community restaurant on the island, there's a bulletin board, and everyone who has something to promote puts up their business card or their flyer. And you know what? It works.

I love this picture. If you really think about it, it tells you just about everything you need to know to succeed as a business in the digital age.

Hey, I really like the soundtrack. And it's f*ing true as well.

My beef with this is this simple statement, about 3:42 in. "Social Media isn't a fad, it's a fundamental shift in how we communicate."

True, to a point. What it really is, is the release of how we already communicate, but now at scale. It's not a shift in *how* we communicate, it's a step function in our *ability* to communicate. There's an important difference there. One could argue that means a fundamental shift, but such a statement can be easily misinterpreted as meaning "something totally new in how humans think/work/communicate", and I think that's not quite right. It's us, squared.

I'm not going to grok this tonight, I'm too sea-addled (on vacation). But it seems a worthy read:

On the Predictability of Search Trends by Google Research.

For the best few days, I've been trying to edit the settings in my Feedburner account - the RSS feeds service that was once so useful, but since its purchase by Google, seems to have languished. Unfortunately, it seems I've forgotten my password (though I used the same one for Feedburner as many other similar services), and the user name I thought I always used is getting bounced back to me as not recognized. I've tried nearly every single variation of a user name, password, and email address I've ever had, and none work. Without user name or email, I can't retrieve my password.  

Now the fun begins.

Searchblog's feed was moved, I think, to Google by the deadline of late Feb. of this year. My engineering group at FM did it for me, which was very kind. Given that the user name and passwords they used to do the move seem to not work anymore, we started looking for some kind of help - it's sort of odd that while my feeds seem to work, no one can log in to manage them. I read through the FAQ, and it said that if I was an AdSense publisher, my feed would be there. I am, so I logged in, but there was no feed I could find. Odd.

SO I asked my crack engineering team to try and make sense of it. They couldn't. Here's Ivan's response:

This is wild, the Feedburner site is like a labyrinth, I don't see any way to contact a human. People in the forums are also complaining about inability to find any type of contact form. Dozens of recent posts in the support group of people saying they can't recover their password to migrate to Google Account -- no response from anyone.

It feels like a dead product.

Anyone have any ideas on how to fix this issue?

Beyond the irritation of a broken or non-communicative service, I've come to realize that Feedburner simply isn't very useful to me anymore. Two years ago, when Google bought the company for $100 million, it was a crucial and growing service. I'd log in nearly every day. What value is it providing to them - or any of you - now?

UPDATE: A nice fellow from Google pinged me this morning offering to help. Thanks!

As part of BingTweets, an FM/Microsoft promotion blending the two services, I was asked to opine on the idea of how we use the web to make decisions. My first post has been up for a while but I managed to lose track of time and forgot to let you all know about it. I wrote a piece called "Decisions are Never Easy - So Far" - and have already written a followup piece, though that one is yet to be published. (And yes, I've asked them to make that picture smaller. Migod.)

From the first post:

If what you are looking for is a hotel room, a plane ticket, or something else in the “head end” of search results, plenty of sites aggregate tons of results for you. But as soon as you go a bit down the tail - like my example for classic cars - search becomes a pivot point for an ongoing and often taxing decision process. The opportunity, I think, is to figure out a way to support that process down the tail - saving us time, clicks, and frustration along the way. I see two paths toward that goal: one is creating applications on top of “ten blue links” which help me organize and aggregate the knowledge I process while pursuing a search query, and the second is making my searches social, so I can share the process of learning and learn from those who have shared - not unlike Vannevar Bush’s “Memex” concept.

When the second piece is up, I'll post an excerpt here as well.

Back when I predicted this in January, I recall worrying I was calling it too early. Now it appears the timing was about right. From Mashable:

...while Google grew from June to July, it still lost market share to its competitors – from 66.1% in June to 64.8% in July, a 1.3 percentage point drop.

From my prediction: 3. Google will see search share decline significantly for the first time ever. It will also struggle to find an answer to the question of how it diversifies its revenue in 2009.

There's more to be said on that second point, revenue diversification. More on that after the summer break I'm supposedly on.

Matt Cutts points to a video interview (embedded above) on Google's Caffeine infrastructure update.

"It's a pretty fundamentally big change" Matt says. What I'd like to know is why and in response to what changes on the web. Of course, the major changes in how the web works are clear: Real Time Search.

In this post (and/or this one) I said:

In short, Google represents a remarkable achievement: the ability to query the static web. But it remains to be seen if it can shift into a new phase: querying the realtime web.

It's inarguable that the web is shifting into a new time axis. Blogging was the first real indication of this, but blogging, while much faster than the traditional HTML-driven web, is, in the end, still the HTML-driven web.

Part and parcel to this shift is the web's adoption of Flash/Silverlight/Ajax - a shift to assuming the web works in real time, like an application on your desktop. That makes it damn hard to index stuff, because pages are not static, they are created in real time in response to user demand. This is a new framework for how the web works, and if Google doesn't respond to it, Google basically will become relegated to a card catalog archive of static HTML pages. No way will Google let that happen...

(By the way, one of the reasons I was impressed with Wowd was exactly because of its ability to, at scale, track a new signal in the web - the signal of what we are actually doing in real time...as opposed to the signal of the link...but more on that later.

Matt was asked if Caffeine was specifically about Real Time, and he was not totally specific about this but it's pretty obvious it is all about this shift.

Oh, and Matt says it's not because of Bing. In one way, I agree. But let's be real. Microsoft and Yahoo did this deal because Yahoo alone could never sustain the infrastructure costs associated with indexing and processing the Real Time Web. So in truth, Google did this because it had to, just like Microsoft and Yahoo did what they did because they have to. If you want to play, you have to get the infrastructure right.

Google's new iGoogle upgrades smacks of Facebook. Read this:

we're excited to introduce social gadgets for iGoogle. Social gadgets let you share, collaborate and play games with your friends on top of all the things you can already do on your homepage. The 19 social gadgets we're debuting today offer many new ways to make your homepage more useful and fun. If you're a gaming fanatic, compete with others in Who has the biggest brain? or challenge your fellow Chess or Scrabble enthusiasts to a quick match. Stay tuned in to the latest buzz with media-sharing gadgets from NPR, The Huffington Post, and YouTube. To manage your day-to-day more efficiently, check things off alongside your friends with the social To-Do list gadget. Your friends are able to see what you share or do in your social gadgets either by having the same gadgets on their homepages, or through a new feed called Updates. Updates can include your recently shared photo albums, your favorite comics strips, your travel plans for the weekend and more.

Updates, Status Updates, Tweets....whathaveya. It's all the same play - a social platform for connecting to others. More:

It's developers who have really made iGoogle into the rich experience it is — growing our gadget directory to over 60,000 gadgets today — and we know iGoogle developers will help us quickly expand our collection of social gadgets. You can get information about how to build social gadgets for iGoogle on our developer site: code.google.com/igoogle. We introduced these new social features recently to Australia users and are gradually rolling them out to users in the U.S. over the next week.

Developers developers developers developers....

A month ago I posted that Twitter was back to strong growth after a weak month of June. I just took at look at the numbers for August, which you can see in the screen shot here (I'm using Compete's data, but you can check out Quantcast, which is a "rough estimate" and has not posted any July data yet.)

Twitter is still growing, according to this data, but not at the breakneck pace of the past. Compete has it at 23.2mm US uniques, up just 1.25% from the month before. Visits are up 1.64% month to month. Most interesting to me is the breakdown of referral traffic: 11.44% is from Facebook (see below). Now that Facebook Lite move is starting to make sense....

Multiple sources are reporting Facebook is testing "Facebook Lite" - what some are calling a Twitter version of Facebook. Mashable, RWW have more, TC got an official response from Facebook, which makes it sound like it's not a Twitter competitor. Interesting. Reminds me of my prediction on the two companies back in January:

Facebook will build a Twitter competitor, but it will never leave beta and will ultimately be abandoned as not worth the time. Instead, Facebook will "friend" Twitter and the two companies will become strong partners.

There's still time for this one to come true. If this is indeed a response to Twitter, it strikes me as a bit of an overreaction.

Update: Or maybe it's not, given that Facebook delivers 11.44% of traffic to Twitter...

Facebook's previously announced realtime engine has been released, coverage from Mashable:

Fast forward to today: Facebook just announced that it is rolling out the new Facebook search. With realtime search and FriendFeed in its pocket, Facebook is gunning directly for Twitter.

Also for Mashable, a story on Google's "major revision" of its engine. I plan to dig into this one, as I sense it has a lot to do with crossing the infrastructure chasm to real time:

Secretly, they’ve been working on a new project:the next generation of Google Search. This isn’t just some minor upgrade, but an entire new infrastructure for the world’s largest search engine. In other words: it’s a new version of Google.

The project’s still under construction, but Google’s now confident enough in the new version of its search engine that it has released the development version for public consumption.

I've been meaning to post a long-ish rant on the importance of celebrities taking control of their own platforms, but never gotten to it, in part because I'm not that enamored with the incessant selling of celebrity that occurs in our culture. Yeah, I sound like a grumpy old man, but I can't help myself. It bums me out - not because I don't like celebrities, but because the current approach strikes me as driven by short term thinking.  

If, instead, more celebrities actually used their fame to take control of their own destiny and build a platform for themselves, they'd last longer, be happier, and make more money - perhaps not as much all at once, but more over the long term. And what do I mean by "taking control of their own destiny"? Well, in a phrase, I mean "building themselves a platform through which they effectively communicate with, build, and deliver value to their fan base."

Until recently, those platforms were controlled by others. But now, celebrities can roll their own. And that changes the game, if they chose to play.

Before I explain what I mean by that, let me state for the record that I believe the same is true for all marketing brands. But I get ahead of myself (more on what it means to build a platform for brands in a future post.)

Let's start at the beginning. What, after all, is a celebrity? Well, if you do a Google Image search for the term, you're bound to believe a celebrity is an attractive, well endowed woman. Wikipedia defines the concept thusly: "A celebrity is a person who is famously recognized in a society....There are degrees of celebrity status which vary based on an individual's region or field of notoriety. While someone might be a celebrity to some people, to others he may be completely unknown."

That last part is important when it comes to social media. I've noticed that the class of folks we might call "minor celebrities" have taken to social media far more quickly than those who Wikipedia calls "global celebrities." In fact, the extraordinary embrace of Twitter by A-lister Ashton Kutcher (there, I wrote his name for the first time ever) serves as the rule proving exception - big time celebrities don't often expose themselves in an honest dialog with their fans. Instead, they are handled. They are managed, marketed and controlled like packaged goods, sold through the supermarket aisle distribution outlets of sports arenas, movie theatres, network television, and arena tours.

And because they are treated as product by their managers, they are discouraged to do anything that might smack of honest dialog with their fan base - anything that might feel like "routing around" the manicured image laid out by the business of celebrity.

Case in point is the approach major sports leagues have taken toward both Facebook and Twitter. Recently the NFL and ESPN have banned or curtailed use of either Twitter or blogging or both. (As much as I appreciate ESPN's product, I consider it to be a product of the leagues, not an independent platform for players. From their policy: "The first and only priority is to serve ESPN sanctioned efforts..." Follow the money, after all...).

Following that money explains why these new policies are being put in place. Leagues like the NFL and distribution outlets like ESPN make their money by controlling the output of the product on the field. If that product starts to have a conversation outside of those lines, money, connection, and reputation might be made on those conversations, value that is not being harvested by the NFL or ESPN. That's a threat, and they are treating it as such.

It's no coincidence that the most prolific and natural celebrity users of social media platforms exist outside those manicured boundaries - in sports like tennis (Roger Federer) and cycling (Lance Armstrong, who started tweeting around the time of his appearance at last year's Web 2 conference). These are celebrities who are not handcuffed by powerful leagues or networks, and who naturally gravitate toward platforms that allow them to connect directly to their fanbase.

Does this sound familiar? It should if you're a marketer struggling with how to take your brand online. After decades of manicuring your brands through one-way mass media platforms like television, it turns out millions of people are now talking about your prized possessions online, and you can't directly control the conversation. But a new set of brands have sprung up who seem agile in this environment, and they feel threatening: Think JetBlue and Virgin, over American and Delta. Whole Foods over Lucky. Comcast over AT&T. These "new" brands have taken to social media and are embracing it, warts and all.

I think when it comes to celebrity, the same is also be true. The celebrities who are "minor" now are swarming to Twitter and Facebook, much as unknown bands swarmed to MySpace. Those who have direct, honest connections with their fans will endure. Those who don't might catch the flame of fame briefly, but they will not endure as brands. Why? Because no matter what, the "packaged goods" platforms of movies, networks, and sports leagues are still important, and it will soon be the players and celebrities with a guaranteed base of hard core fans - or followers - who can call the shots with those powers that be. You think Brooke Burke won't get a better deal now that she's in dialog with over a million fans on Twitter? Owning and cultivating your own platform means you no longer are in thrall to "star makers" - together with your community, you make your own star. That's a kind of celebrity I can get behind.

Sorry, it's late, and I just saw this piece in the NYT. But for Bartz to say that Yahoo was never a search company is simply not true.

Yahoo was the original search destination, and a place folks first learned to "search" for stuff on the Web. As the original directory of things worth paying attention on the Web, Yahoo was - and remains for many - the definitive place to start a search query. And also, in the history of Yahoo, let us not forget the entire homepage was redesigned around search just three years ago.

Feh.

Google yesterday announced it is adding more information to Google Maps:

"(We've added) icons and labels of prominent businesses and places of interest directly on the map itself. We've found it super useful for checking out what's nearby a hotel we'll be staying at, orienting ourselves, getting the feel for a neighborhood, or just browsing around for fun."

Wait a minute, let me rewrite that for you, with a business model attached:

"(We've added) icons and labels of prominent businesses and places of interest directly on the map itself. We've found it super useful for  leveraging our Adwords algorithm!"

There ya go! Actually, I think this is a great move by Google, and in line with the concept of AdWords being useful to the information ecosystem.

For instance, if you're looking to check out Martha's Vineyard, the hotels link up on the left might be a link you are actually interested in.  

Flickr has upgraded its search, and I like the results. Funny how we are all talking about Yahoo ceding search to Microsoft, but we all forget there's a lot of other search to be done on Yahoo - like Flickr search. I wonder who Flickr will be integrated into Bing, by the way? Anyway, from the post announcing the news:

Note the new “View” controls at the top of the page, these allow you to display the results in different sizes and formats. Both small and medium views have an ‘i’ icon on every thumbnail — click it to see more detailed information about a particular photo. We’re also doing some whiz bang stuff in the small view to take advantage of as much space as you have on your screen, just try resizing your browser to see.

On the right side of the page we try to provide a new perspective on your search. Based upon how our members are tagging their photos and participating in the Flickrverse, you’ll see links to the groups, photographers, tag clusters and places that are most closely related what you’re looking for. We hope these will occasionally provide a little extra inspiration for your search.

Lastly, we’re exposing simple summary information on the page as you refine your search.

Early this year, well, January 1, to be exact, I made this prediction about our friends at Apple:

Apple will see a significant reversal of recent fortunes. I sense this will happen for a number of reasons ... but I think the main one will be brand related - a brand based on being cooler than the other guy simply does not scale past a certain point. I sense Apple has hit that point.

Now, "brand" is a very tricky concept. A brand lives or dies by how others speak of it. And lately, in the circles of folks who I'd call "brand influencers" in the digital space, the conversation has turned negative.

Not only has Apple taken a major hit from both observers and the FCC for its hamhanded rejection of Google's iPhone application (among others), the company's ongoing refusal to engage in a dialog with its customers (no Twitter account, no participation in industry conferences) is starting to wear thin. For more than a few folks I talk to on a daily basis, the Apple brand means "great products, but the company really couldn't care less about you as a person, and frankly, is smarter than you, better looking than you, and above your station."

Call it a gut feeling, but my favorite maker of computer products is starting to feel, well, out of touch. Am I off here?

What a total surprise (kidding!).

In a statement, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that "as Google enters more of Apple's core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric's effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest."

That Chrome OS was the last straw, I'd warrant. From my earlier coverage:

" At the very least, it feels like it's time for Eric Schmidt to leave Apple's board."

The NYT has a good background piece from Carol Bartz's POV. Carol will be at Web 2 this Fall, so will Qi Lu, the man who will own the deal and the search fight with Google.