Now this is interesting. Scott Sassa, one of the few Hollywood guys who “got it” back in the 90s (we featured him in Wired, for example), once golden boy of Turner, then NBC, has taken the CEO job at Friendster. (WaPost, reg rq’d) .
Sassa is “shaking off comparisons to Semel,” but there they are. He mentions that advertising will be a core revenue source, but that he has many other ideas.
(Thanks, JH)
The idea is to leverage the socnet demographic (so-called ‘young tech elites’) to run marketing as a profit center, a la NBC’s The Apprentice, NBC’s The Restaurant, etc.,
Of course, the ‘Better MySpace TV’ group at MySpace already knew this…
http://profile.myspace.com/users/3748393
on the technical side, they’re apparently going to add some kind of bizarre DHTML interface using the opensource toolkit netwindows and mod_pubsub. i think an IM client was mentioned. there’s evidence on the mailing lists that several contributors now work at or contract for friendster.
You might want to revisit the “got it” assessment of Scott in light of the firing of Joyce Parks aka Troutgirl, which had the blogging world topsy turvy last week. He was well within his rights of course, but it wasn’t the smartest move in terms of Friendster’s rep in the valley and with the digerati.