Category: The Conversation Economy

Help Me Interview Mark Pincus, CEO/Founder, Zynga

Today kicks off my annual postings on folks I'll be in interviewing for the Web 2 Summit. Every year I seek your input, every year you help me get smarter, and I thank you for that. The Web 2 Summit (to which all readers of this site are invited) kicks…

Tpincus.jpegoday kicks off my annual postings on folks I’ll be in interviewing for the Web 2 Summit. Every year I seek your input, every year you help me get smarter, and I thank you for that.

The Web 2 Summit (to which all readers of this site are invited) kicks off Oct. 17th with Mark Pincus, a fellow I’ve known for over a decade, since his days at Freeloader, Support.com, and Tribe. But Zynga has become his signature success, becoming one of the fastest growing companies of the past decade, and shorthand for “games” across the social web. Zynga filed for a much-anticipated IPO earlier this year, though as with nearly every company in the space, the market seems to have cooled since then. In late August, reports circulated that Zynga was delaying its IPO, but those were never confirmed.

I doubt Mark will answer any questions related to the IPO, given he is still in a quiet period, but there’s plenty more to talk about. Pincus got the Vanity Fair treatment in June, and he’s certainly a classic Valley character.

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The Web 2 Summit Data Layer Is Live

Earlier this year I posted about an idea we've come up with to create a new "data layer" on top of last year's popular "Points of Control" map. We created this map to visualize the theme of the Web 2 Summit conference, which is coming up again in a…

http://map.web2summit.com/embed.html

Earlier this year I posted about an idea we’ve come up with to create a new “data layer” on top of last year’s popular “Points of Control” map. We created this map to visualize the theme of the Web 2 Summit conference, which is coming up again in a few weeks.

As you can see from the map, we’ve visualized eight key Internet players as cities, with each of the buildings representing storehouses of key data types. Cities are scaled by the size and engagement of their audiences, with data driven by our partner Nielsen and also company-reported sources. A detailed legend is here.

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The Future of Twitter Ads

Since Jan 1, 2011, this number has already increased 82% Our active users are now growing faster in 2011 than they did in 2010 US growth is neck and neck with overall global growth And, we are on pace to add as many active users in the next 4 months as we added in all of 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009 combined (26M) … Every team in the NFL is on Twitter and more than 50% of NFL players 75% of NBA players 82% of the US Congress and 85% of US Senators 87% of the Billboard Top 100 Musicians of 2010 93% of Food Network chefs 100% of the top 50 Nielsen-rated TV shows

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(image) As I posted earlier, last week I had a chance to sit down with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. We had a pretty focused chat on Twitter’s news of the week, but I also got a number of questions in about Twitter’s next generation of ad products.

As usual, Dick was frank where he could be, and demurred when I pushed too hard. (I’ll be talking to him at length at Web 2 Summit next month.) However, a clear-enough picture emerged such that I might do some “thinking out loud” about where Twitter’s ad platform is going. That, combined with some very well-placed sources who are in a position to know about Twitter’s ad plans, gives me a chance to outline what, to the best of my knowledge, will be the next generation of Twitter’s ad offerings.

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The 2011 Web 2 Summit Program Is Live; My Highlights

August is a month of vacation, of beaches, reading, and leisure….unless you happen to work with me creating the program for the eighth annual Web 2 Summit this October. Each year, my "summer vacation" turns into a "working vacation" as my team and I spend hours massaging more than…

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August is a month of vacation, of beaches, reading, and leisure….unless you happen to work with me creating the program for the eighth annual Web 2 Summit this October. Each year, my “summer vacation” turns into a “working vacation” as my team and I spend hours massaging more than 50 speakers into a tightly choreographed program running over what always turns out to be an extraordinary three days. I must be a masochist. Because I always love how it turns out.

This year, as I wrote earlier, our theme is “The Data Frame.” And this year’s program hews more tightly to our theme than any before it. Just about every speaker will be presenting on some aspect of how data changes the game in our industry. From policy to tech, art to retail, we’ve got one of the most varied lineups ever. You can see it here, but remember, these are extremely volatile times. In other words, the lineup might change a bit in the next six weeks. I’m just glad I didn’t ask Carol Bartz to come back, but then again, that would have been fun, no?

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More on Twitter’s Great Opportunity/Problem

In the comments on this previous post, I promised I'd respond with another post, as my commenting system is archaic (something I'm fixing soon). The comments were varied and interesting, and fell into a few buckets. I also have a few more of my own thoughts to toss out there,…

Itwitter-bird.pngn the comments on this previous post, I promised I’d respond with another post, as my commenting system is archaic (something I’m fixing soon). The comments were varied and interesting, and fell into a few buckets. I also have a few more of my own thoughts to toss out there, given what I’ve heard from you all, as well as some thinking I’ve done in the past day or so.

First, a few of my own thoughts. I wrote the post quickly, but have been thinking about the signal to noise problem, and how solving it addresses Twitter’s advertising scale issues, for a long, long time. More than a year, in fact. I’m not sure why I finally got around to writing that piece on Friday, but I’m glad I did.

What I didn’t get into is some details about how massive the solving of this problem really is. Twitter is more than the sum of its 200 million tweets, it’s also a massive consumer of the web itself. Many of those tweets have within them URLs pointing to the “rest of the web” (an old figure put the percent at 25, I’d wager it’s higher now). Even if it were just 25%, that’s 50 million URLs a day to process, and growing. It’s a very important signal, but it means that Twitter is, in essence, also a web search engine, a directory, and a massive discovery engine. It’s not trivial to unpack, dedupe, analyze, contextualize, crawl, and digest 50 million URLs a day. But if Twitter is going to really exploit its potential, that’s exactly what it has to do.

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Who Am I, According to Google Ads? Who Am I, According to the Web? Who Do I Want to Be?

Over on Hacker News, I noticed this headline: See what Google knows about you. Now that's a pretty compelling promise, so I clicked. It took me to this page: Ah, the Google ad preferences page. It's been a while since I've visited this place. It gives you a limited but…

Over on Hacker News, I noticed this headline: See what Google knows about you. Now that’s a pretty compelling promise, so I clicked. It took me to this page:

Goog Ad pref main.png

Ah, the Google ad preferences page. It’s been a while since I’ve visited this place. It gives you a limited but nonetheless interesting overview of the various categories and demographic information Google believes reflect your interests (and in a way, your identity, or “who you are” in the eyes of an advertising client). This is all based on a cookie Google places on your browser.

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Google+: If, And, Then….Implications for Twitter and Tumblr

It's hard to not voice at least one note into the Morman Tabernacle of commentary coming out of Google's first two weeks as a focused player in the social media space. I haven't read all the commentary, but one observation that seems undervoiced is this: If Google+ really works, Google…

It’s hard to not voice at least one note into the Morman Tabernacle of commentary coming out of Google’s first two weeks as a focused player in the social media space.

I haven’t read all the commentary, but one observation that seems undervoiced is this: If Google+ really works, Google will be creating a massive amount of new “conversational media” inventory, the very kind of marketing territory currently under development over at Tumblr and Twitter. Sure, the same could be said of Facebook, but I think that story has been well told. Google+ is a threat to Facebook, but for other reasons. The threat to Tumbrl and Twitter feels more existential in nature. (Ian remarks on how Google+ feels like content here, for example).

Let’s look at a typical flow for Tumblr, for example. Most of the action on Tumblr is in the creator’s “dashboard.” Mine looks like this:

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We (Will) Live In A Small Big Town

Earlier today I moderated a panel at an energetic and well-attended event called the “Newfront,” produced by Digitas, an innovative agency which counts American Express, Kraft, P&G, and GM as clients. I say energetic because it was highly produced and very considered (and this from a guy who carefully…

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Earlier today I moderated a panel at an energetic and well-attended event called the “Newfront,” produced by Digitas, an innovative agency which counts American Express, Kraft, P&G, and GM as clients.

I say energetic because it was highly produced and very considered (and this from a guy who carefully produces live events for a living, among other things). A lot of flash, and deep consideration of lighting, music, and red carpet treatment of star guests (there were many). In short, the place was lovingly festooned with the kind of attention to detail that makes people feel special, just for being there.

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Web 2 Map: The Data Layer – Visualizing the Big Players in the Internet Economy

On the left hand side are eight major players in the Internet Economy, along with two categories of players who are critical, but who I’ve lumped together – payment players such as Visa, Amex, and Mastercard, and carriers or ISP players such as Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon. … Now, before you rip it apart, which I fully invite (especially those of you who are data quants, because I am clearly not, and I am likely mixing some apples and watermelons here), allow me to continue to narrate what I’m trying to visualize here.

As I wrote last month, I’m working with a team of folks to redesign the Web 2 Points of Control map along the lines of this year’s theme: “The Data Frame.” In the past few weeks I’ve been talking to scores of interesting people, including CEOs of data-driven start ups (TrialPay and Corda, for example), academics in the public dataspace, policy folks, and VCs. Along the way I’ve solidified my thinking about how best to visualize the “data layer” we’ll be adding to the map, and I wanted to bounce it off all of you. So here, in my best narrative voice, is what I’m thinking.

First, of course, some data.

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Facebook’s Carolyn Everson: “We’re one percent done on our ad products.”

When Facebook announced it had convinced Carolyn Everson to leave Microsoft to head sales at the pre-IPO social networking giant, a few eyebrows lifted: Everson had only been at Microsoft for nine months, and was recruited there by CEO Steve Ballmer after he watched her work to integrate an…

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When Facebook announced it had convinced Carolyn Everson to leave Microsoft to head sales at the pre-IPO social networking giant, a few eyebrows lifted: Everson had only been at Microsoft for nine months, and was recruited there by CEO Steve Ballmer after he watched her work to integrate an important deal between Microsoft and MTV, where she previously worked.

While Microsoft could not have been pleased it lost a key sales executive, at least Everson was going to a friend of sorts: Microsoft owns a chunk of Facebook stock, and has been busy leveraging Facebook data into its upstart search engine Bing.

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