Category: Random, But Interesting

File Under: Metaservices, The Rise Of

I'm beta testing a new service called Memolane, which collects the breadcrumbs we drop around the web (from Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, RSS, etc) and visualizes them as a timeline. It's not fair for me to review the service at this point – I'll save that for later. Rather,…

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I’m beta testing a new service called Memolane, which collects the breadcrumbs we drop around the web (from Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, RSS, etc) and visualizes them as a timeline. It’s not fair for me to review the service at this point – I’ll save that for later. Rather, I’m interested in what it augurs: The rise of metaservices.

The problem/opportunity addressed by metaservices has been worked to death by folks far smarter than I – in particular by well-intentioned developers looking to create better standards for services to share data. But so far solutions have failed to address the market opportunity. I think this is going to change, in the main, because we’ll demand it does.

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The Call of the Filed

I've noticed that the number of folks who are networking with me via LinkeIn has really increased lately. Anyone else noticed this? Might it be related to the publicity around LinkedIn's recent IPO filing? The company today announced "Skills" – a way to find people with certain skillsets. It's…

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I’ve noticed that the number of folks who are networking with me via LinkeIn has really increased lately. Anyone else noticed this? Might it be related to the publicity around LinkedIn’s recent IPO filing?

The company today announced “Skills” – a way to find people with certain skillsets. It’s been on a tear recently in terms of new features – Swarms, a visualization of search terms, InMaps, a visualization of your network, OpenGroups, a new groups feature, and Signal, more sophisticated search in general. I’m sure I’ve missed something.

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The Next iPhone Test

I've been watching the overwhelmingly positive "reviews" of the new Verizon iPhone bounce around the blogosphere today, and I have to say, it's hard to not get caught up on the excitement: Hey! I can actually MAKE A PHONE CALL! Well, perhaps we've all forgotten, but until the iPhone hit…

I’ve been watching the overwhelmingly positive “reviews” of the new Verizon iPhone bounce around the blogosphere today, and I have to say, it’s hard to not get caught up on the excitement: Hey! I can actually MAKE A PHONE CALL!

Well, perhaps we’ve all forgotten, but until the iPhone hit AT&T’s network and slammed it to the ground, phone calls were pretty much the same on either network. IE, they both had their issues, depending on where you were in the world. And it’s sort of not fair to compare Verizon’s pre-iPhone network to AT&T’s currently overwhelmed one. Remember, all those reviewers are getting clear reception *now*, before the Verizon iPhone even comes out. Let’s wait and see what happens when there are millions of the data hungry buggers on Verizon’s network. That will be the true test of whether it can continue to be the best carrier for voice.

This piece:  Verizon Wireless to begin throttling data speeds of heaviest users from BGR seems to indicate that Verizon knows it’s in for some serious stress testing, and is preparing for battle.

3 Comments on The Next iPhone Test

The InterDependent Web

When I wrote Identity and The Independent Web last Fall, I was sketching out the beginnings of what I sense was an important distinction in how we consume the web. This distinction turned on one simple concept: Dependency.

Of course, the post itself was nearly 2500 words in length and wandered into all sorts of poorly lit alleys, so one could be forgiven for not easily drawing that conclusion. But since that Thinking Out Loud session, I’ve continued to ponder this distinction, and I’ve found it’s become a quite useful framing tool for understanding the web.

So here’s another attempt at defining one corner of the “Independent Web,” as distinct from the “Dependent Web.” In my original piece, I state:

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Me On Google Change

I did a short bit on Bloomberg (they have some amazing studios in SF on the water, had not been there, good to see my old pal Cory, who is now working there). Here's the video:…

I did a short bit on Bloomberg (they have some amazing studios in SF on the water, had not been there, good to see my old pal Cory, who is now working there). Here’s the video:

http://cdn.gotraffic.net/flash/BloombergMediaPlayer.swf

6 Comments on Me On Google Change

Does Google Favor Its Own Services?

Seems so. I've written about this a lot, so much that I won't bother to link to all the stuff I've posted. It was the basis of a chapter in the book, where I pointed out that (at the time) Google claimed algorithmic innocence, and Yahoo, on the other hand,…

Seems so. I’ve written about this a lot, so much that I won’t bother to link to all the stuff I’ve posted. It was the basis of a chapter in the book, where I pointed out that (at the time) Google claimed algorithmic innocence, and Yahoo, on the other hand, was cheerful in its presumption that Yahoo services were the best answer to certain high value searches (like “mail”).

Now comes this study, from Harvard professors no less, which pretty much states the obvious. Check this graph:

search favorites 1.png

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Make My Baby – Is The Baby Facebook? Updated: No, It’s Myspace…

Over the weekend, as I pondered an eMarketer report estimating Facebook's advertising revenue at $1.86 billion (seems low), I wondered to myself: When will Facebook start to drive the kind of widespread graymarket activity which proved Google's immense worth? Or will it ever? Allow me to explain. Back in…

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Over the weekend, as I pondered an eMarketer report estimating Facebook’s advertising revenue at $1.86 billion (seems low), I wondered to myself: When will Facebook start to drive the kind of widespread graymarket activity which proved Google’s immense worth? Or will it ever?

Allow me to explain. Back in the days when Google and its rival Overture were on the rise (this would be pre-IPO for Google, so around 2002-3), an army of small time arbitragers were gathering, leveraging Adwords (and in 2003, Adsense) to make money in any number of ways. But the basics were pretty easy to grok: Say you could purchase a click on Adwords for the term “cute kitty” for fifty cents. And say further that when someone clicked on your Adword, they’d show up at a third-party site, and 10 percent of the time, they’d follow instructions to fill out a mortgage application. And say that further, you could sell that filled-out application to a lender for $15.

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No, In Fact, We Haven’t Seen This Movie Before

Thanks to monster private financings from Groupon and Facebook, as well as the promise of major IPOs from Demand, LinkedIn, Zynga and others, the predictable "watch out, here we go again" buzz is rising up in the press. This article from Ad Age, subtitled "With Billion-Dollar Dot-com Valuations Back…

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Thanks to monster private financings from Groupon and Facebook, as well as the promise of major IPOs from Demand, LinkedIn, Zynga and others, the predictable “watch out, here we go again” buzz is rising up in the press. This article from Ad Age, subtitled “With Billion-Dollar Dot-com Valuations Back in a Big Way, It’s Time for Alarm Bells to Start Ringing,” is typical of the bunch. With a “we’ve seen this movie before” tone, it points out that most of the successful companies of today had models that were tried ten years ago, and in the main they failed.

But I’d like to point out a couple pretty obvious differences between the dot com busts of a decade ago, and the companies that are now earning billion dollar valuations. To wit:

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Yahoo IPO vs. Facebook IPO

From Paid Content, a tale of two very different eras: Yahoo In 1996 Age: 1 year Annual sales: $1.3 million Net loss: $0.6 million Total raised in IPO: $33.8 million Market value at close: $848 million Employees: 49 Facebook In 2012 Age: 8 years Annual sales: $1.2 billion-plus Net income:…

From Paid Content, a tale of two very different eras:

Yahoo In 1996

Age: 1 year

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What Everyone Seems to Miss In Facebook’s Private or Public Debate…

…is the core reason it makes sense for Facebook to be public: Accountability to its customers. The rest of this debate is simply financial folks arguing amongst themselves. Facebook is the greatest repository of data about people's intentions, relationships, and utterances that ever has been created. Period. And a…

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…is the core reason it makes sense for Facebook to be public: Accountability to its customers. The rest of this debate is simply financial folks arguing amongst themselves.

Facebook is the greatest repository of data about people’s intentions, relationships, and utterances that ever has been created. Period. And a company that owns that much private data should be accountable to the public. The public should be able to review its practices, its financials, and question its intentions in a manner backed by our collective and legally codified will. That’s the point of a public company – accountability, transparency, and thorough reporting.

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