Category: Joints After Midnight & Rants

Time Warner: Get Over AOL Already

As I watch the internet business really gain traction, I am reminded of a key player which, to my mind, remains unacceptably hobbled. Yup, it's my AOL hobbyhorse, and I'm in a mood to saddle up. Maybe it was the MSN trip, I dunno. But I've written this before, and…

As I watch the internet business really gain traction, I am reminded of a key player which, to my mind, remains unacceptably hobbled. Yup, it’s my AOL hobbyhorse, and I’m in a mood to saddle up. Maybe it was the MSN trip, I dunno. But I’ve written this before, and I will say it again. The people running Time Warner, who lost their company to AOL in 2001, then won it back in bitter street fighting during 2002, need to stop punishing AOL for the damage the deal did to their net worth (don’t think business is personal? Talk to Time Warner folks. Trust me, it’s personal. And it ain’t just the execs. It’s the whole Time Warner establishment…). My prescription? Cut AOL loose to be the mammoth success it could be, if only its management didn’t have to cowtow to Time Warner’s rear view mirror approach to the world. I mean, could you imagine Google, Yahoo, or even IAC run by Dick Parsons?

Here’s the lead to a recent Washington Post piece on AOL:

When AOL Chief Executive Jonathan Miller strides into the 10th floor boardroom at the Time Warner Center in New York tomorrow, he will face a difficult challenge: persuading board members that America Online can return to growth, even as its core dial-up subscription business continues to rapidly shrink.

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Search Engine Loyalty, A9 Prognostications…

Mediapost reports fresh search engine loyalty numbers, concluding that "Google gets the gold again" – 65 percent of Google users use only Google, as opposed to just 55 percent of Yahoo users. I'm not sure I buy the whole search engine loyalty thing. I think folks aren't loyal, they're lazy….

Mediapost reports fresh search engine loyalty numbers, concluding that “Google gets the gold again” – 65 percent of Google users use only Google, as opposed to just 55 percent of Yahoo users. I’m not sure I buy the whole search engine loyalty thing. I think folks aren’t loyal, they’re lazy. As Yoda might say, not until a compelling choice they have, switch will they.

Which brings me to A9. Over at his blog, Rex points out I missed the most compelling potential A9 feature, that of collaborative filtering.

To me, A9 is not designed as an Internet search engine, but as a knowledge-searching tool to end all knowledge searching tools…..As you look for information, Amazon will provide you the results that “people like you” have found most helpful when searching for the same information, product, place, answer, etc

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More on A9

The blogosphere continues to chew away on A9, and I think it will take some time for the new service to fully reveal its more interesting features. Gary, for example, gives it a less-than-rave response here, and summarizes many of its features in the process. I wrote about the implications…

beta-a9-logo.gifThe blogosphere continues to chew away on A9, and I think it will take some time for the new service to fully reveal its more interesting features. Gary, for example, gives it a less-than-rave response here, and summarizes many of its features in the process.

I wrote about the implications of A9 w/r/t business models in my last post, but I wanted to say a short bit about why I’m so interested in its approach.

To me, the core feature that makes A9 interesting is what Udi Manber calls a “history server” – the technologies behind A9’s search history and personalization features. Having your entire search and click history, and if you use the Toolbar, your entire browsing history as well, available on a server side application opens up all sorts of new approaches to solving search, research, and recall problems. Combining that history with what Amazon already knows about you (no, A9 does not do that…yet) creates even more powerful possibilities. Yes, it brings up massive privacy issues, but then, we’ve seen this movie a few times. Those who don’t want to watch can opt out.

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The Web Time Axis

One of my largest gripes about the web is that it has no memory. But I think this will soon change – at some point in the not too distant future we'll have live and continuous historical copies of the web that will be searchable – creating, if you will,…

daliclockOne of my largest gripes about the web is that it has no memory. But I think this will soon change – at some point in the not too distant future we’ll have live and continuous historical copies of the web that will be searchable – creating, if you will, a time axis for the web, a real-time Wayback Machine (only there’ll be no broken links). In other words, in our lifetimes we’ll see our cultural digital memory – as we understand it through the web and engines like Google – become contiguous, available, always there. And barring a revival of the Luddites or total nuclear war, this chain will most likely be unbroken, forever, into the future. Historians looking back to this era will mark it as a watershed. At some definable point in the early 21st century, the web will gain a memory of itself, one that will never be lost again. Most likely, this will start as a feature of a massively scaled company like Yahoo or Google, much like Gmail or search itself is now. But it’s coming, and the implications are rather expansive.

If the web had a time axis, you could search constrained by webdate. You could ask questions like “show me all results for my query from this time period…” or “Tell me what was the most popular results for XYZ during the 3rd of May in 20XX.” How about “show me every reference to my great grandfather, born in 2050,” asked by a great grandson in 2150? Impossible? Yeah, seems that way, but…so did a free gig of mail and the concept of the entire Internet in RAM. Thanks to the dramatic decrease in the cost of storage, 64-bit computing, abundant memory (jesus, there’s an entendre), and the scalable business model of paid search, I think this day is not far off. The web is just ten years old, for the most part, but think what it might be like when it’s 100 years old. That’s a lot of data to search.

I was reminded of this idea (I had written it down a while back while musing for the book) when Gary sent word that Daypop is archiving its Top 40 back to 2002. It’s fascinating to see what was the buzz, say, two years ago today.

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The Other Shoe Finally Drops: Google Files S-1

If Google published its S-1 in book form, it'd be #1 on Amazon for weeks. But you can read it for free here, because today, Google filed for the IPO of the decade. The details: – Big News: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and VCs Sequoia and KPCB together own 95%…

IPOIf Google published its S-1 in book form, it’d be #1 on Amazon for weeks. But you can read it for free here, because today, Google filed for the IPO of the decade. The details:

– Big News: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and VCs Sequoia and KPCB together own 95% of the company. The remaining 5% is split between early angels and a lava lamp wholesaler who “management admits got a pretty good barter deal back in 1998.”

– The employee stock option plan, long believed to be the impetus to a public filing, has been dumped in favor of a private shadow equity plan modeled after the Economist magazine. “It’s the only magazine we read that hasn’t put us on the cover,” Page explained. “We kind of hoped this hat tip might change that.”

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Yippee! Jeremy Rants Again!

This time, it's his employer's travel service (that'd be Yahoo) that gets the honors…who hasn't had this experience online?…

This time, it’s his employer’s travel service (that’d be Yahoo) that gets the honors…who hasn’t had this experience online?

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Silverstein Hits the Bong, Orlowski Hits the Roof

OK, now I really have taken a shine to Google Director of Technology Craig Silverstein. I always liked him, what with his oft-repeated quip that search engines ought to be like the computer on Star Trek, but in a SES speech this morning, apparently in a bid to outdo himself,…

OK, now I really have taken a shine to Google Director of Technology Craig Silverstein. I always liked him, what with his oft-repeated quip that search engines ought to be like the computer on Star Trek, but in a SES speech this morning, apparently in a bid to outdo himself, he conjured up the idea of “search pets.” Damn, I wish I had stayed for this! From WebProNews, Silverstein speaks of a future some hundreds of years from now in which:

These search pets would not necessarily be like a pet dog, but more like “a genetically engineered beast.”

Adding to the science fiction, he believes search pets will be able to understand emotions and allow people to search for things that aren’t necessarily facts. For example, searchers can ask search pets, “What did Bob mean when he said that?”

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Initial Resistance to Yahoo’s CAP…Ask Cancels Its Paid Inclusion…

According to Beal, Yahoo's new CAP (paid inclusion) program is not going over that well at the SES show. I can't imagine it would – after all, Yahoo is asking folks to pay where before they didn't feel they had to. The boards are negative on the move, though at…

According to Beal, Yahoo’s new CAP (paid inclusion) program is not going over that well at the SES show. I can’t imagine it would – after all, Yahoo is asking folks to pay where before they didn’t feel they had to. The boards are negative on the move, though at least Yahoo is out there explaining itself (and Jeremy adds his two cents here). This might all blow over as the market adjusts to the realities of capitalism, but…

…before Yahoo made this move, I suspect that many marketers could get by on organic Google crawls and targeted AdWords/Overture buys. Now, because Yahoo is in a duopoly position, the stakes are raised, and marketers feel like they *have* to be part of the Yahoo club. They fear, I am sure, that if they do not pay, somehow they will be treated as second class citizens by Yahoo’s Slurp! crawler. Yahoo insists that its organic crawler is going to be “aggressive” and that paid inclusion is an add on of sorts, it insures that your site is crawled thoroughly and in the manner you choose (in particular, you can specify dynamic content, get fresher crawls, get reports, etc.).

But the company seems a bit tone deaf to the more primal forces at work here. First, the timing. Yahoo got a lot of mojo for the new engine it rolled out recently. Why taint that credibility so quickly with this announcement? The company could have waited a month or so, prepared the market for this in stages (for example, it might have cultivated an influencer network prior to the announcement, as I point out in my current 2.0 column). Secondly, it’s predictable that marketers would feel like they have no choice, that they are being forced to enlist in CAP. That is not good for a company’s reputation long term. If I were Yahoo, I’d monitor this closely, and adjust a bit if need be. Perhaps soothing words and assurances will be enough while the market swallows this new dose of medicine. But Google can and will make a PR killing portraying Yahoo as the Big Evil Biased Bully. Ask Jeeves already has: yesterday it cancelled its paid inclusion program …. I am sure the timing was pure coincidence.

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And Your Point Is?

A soft-shouldered editorial in the NYT today from Verlyn Klinkenborg, an author who is also on the editorial board of the New York Times, and writes the occasional "editorial observer" column for the paper. As I was recently reminded by a good friend, it's wise to step back and remember…

nytlogoleft_article.gifA soft-shouldered editorial in the NYT today from Verlyn Klinkenborg, an author who is also on the editorial board of the New York Times, and writes the occasional “editorial observer” column for the paper. As I was recently reminded by a good friend, it’s wise to step back and remember who the audience is for these kinds of things, as opposed to jumping all over the Times every chance that comes up. So, having done that, I still don’t quite get what this editorial adds…in the end, it says that Google is really important and that it won’t go away, and summarizes all the things Times readers already know about the company. He concludes that the Internet is, contrary to what he thought some years ago, quite useful, in large part thanks to Google. Well, welcome to the party, Verlyn. Glad you’re aboard.

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