Month: October 2007

Kara Swisher, who writes for All Things D, had a couple of posts on Facebook recently that got me thinking again about the social-networking site. In the first one, Kara said that using Facebook often seems like “children’s hour,” because of all the goofy applications and widgets that your friends and acquaintances are constantly adding (and trying to get you to add as well).

Sometimes it’s the Fun Wall widget or the Super-Poke app or the Top Friends feature, and sometimes it’s an invitation to take a quiz, or have a vampire fight, or even to pop someone’s (virtual) zits. As Kara says in her post:

“What [founder Mark] Zuckerberg and the widget-makers have wrought is mostly silly, useless and time-wasting and the kazillion users of these widgets are pretty much just acting like little children.”

In her second post on the topic, Kara talks about how easy it is to do silly things with your friends or members of a Facebook group, but how surprisingly difficult it is to do some of the more serious things you might want to do — such as create interactive features just for that group, or email everyone.

In a lot of ways, Facebook.com is in a kind of awkward teenage phase at the moment. It started as a network for university and high-school students, and a lot of those users continue to be devoted to it, so a lot of the goofier apps and widgets probably appeal to (and are designed to appeal to) them. To the growing numbers of older, professional users however, those widgets are just irritating and silly, and they get in the way of making more serious use of the site.

It’s a bit like a club that used to be an after-hours hangout for teenagers suddenly deciding to open itself up to the general public, and then all kinds of forty-somethings start showing up, complaining about how the lights are too dim, or the orange shag carpeting is irritating, and then get all shirty when some club kid comes up and offers them some E or starts dancing on the table.

Whether Facebook can manage the transition remains to be seen — and it’s worth remembering that the Facebook f8 platform, which caused the explosion of widgets, is only a few months old. It’s possible that some of the goofier ones will die off, as the site evolves into something a little more useful than the Saturday afternoon yuk-fest it occasionally seems to be.

Of course, the site has to figure out what to do about getting more funding too, not to mention the little traffic dip that Om Malik seems to have noticed in the latest comScore numbers. And Jason Calacanis has a reality check for those who think Facebook is a) going to crush Google, b) is worth $100-billion, etc.

Update:

Mike Arrington has a different take on the Facebook traffic numbers at TechCrunch. And Kara says that sources have told her Google could swoop in to make some kind of deal with Facebook involving ads and possibly an ownership stake — and they also say it could come soon, possibly in the next 24 hours. Om says that the traffic dip is just seasonal, which a number of commenters on various posts (including Mike’s) have mentioned as well.

I’ve had some negative comments from readers on my new blog theme (which is called Lorem Ipsum, after the famous Latin text that designers use when they want to fill out a page with random words) so I thought I would do a poll. For those of you who read me through an RSS reader and never actually see the design, you may not realize that anything has changed (or you may not care). In any case, click through and take the poll and let me know what you think. If enough people don’t like it I will bring the old one back (that one was the excellent Cutline theme by Chris Pearson).

http://www.polldaddy.com/p/118596.js MySpace Polls – Take Our Poll

Dotspotter. Ever heard of it? Me neither — and I make it my business to keep track of as many Web 2.0-type new media sites as I can. Unheard of or not, the site has reportedly been acquired by CBS for $10-million (PaidContent has apparently confirmed this as well). How long has the site been around? Less than a year.

So, Dotspotter — which appears to be a kind of Digg for celebrity stories, with a user interface and site design that seems to have been designed by colour-blind gerbils — is worth $1-million for every month it has been alive. By that measure, a site like TMZ.com or PerezHilton (or Gabe Rivera’s WeSmirch.com) should be worth about $100-million — which, of course, would be insane (no offense, Gabe). And what kind of name is Dotspotter anyway?

According to the PaidContent piece, a source said the acquisition price wasn’t so much for the actual site but for the team, which includes a former Yahoo vice-president named Anthony Soohoo. So all of a sudden a crap idea is worth $10-million just because some Yahoo VP was involved? That’s genius. Maybe there’s hope for Guy Kawasaki’s Truemors.com after all.

Update:

My friend Om Malik says that (unlike me) he has heard of Dotspotter, and that they have an awesome development team. He also says his sources tell him the price was much less than $10-million. And if Om says it, I know it must be true 🙂

It sure was inspirational when Time magazine editor Rick Stengel sent out that “all hands on deck” memo to the magazine’s writers back in June, telling them that they had better write for the Web or else. As Stengel put it in the memo:

“Let me make this explicit: evaluations of every Time writer, correspondent, and reporter will be based on the quality and quantity of the contributions each of you makes to both the magazine and to TIME.com.”

Bravo, I thought. Lay all the cards on the table — Time is one media entity, with both a printed magazine and a website. Well done.

It may have been rather poor timing for a call to arms, however, considering the writers’ union was in the process of negotiating a new contract with the publisher of Time, People, Fortune, Sports Illustrated and Money magazines. I expect the idea of tying job evaluations to web writing was like red meat.

The upshot: in return for other concessions, according to Women’s Wear Daily (which seems to have been the best source of coverage for this particular story, oddly enough), the management at Time agreed to a clause that says while employees will be “encouraged” to write for the Web, “there will no negative impact on any employee for not volunteering to do Web site work.”

In a new memo on the policy, Time said that no one will be penalized for not doing it, but hinted strongly that the “best and brightest” at the magazine do so. Oh well — it was fun while it lasted.

Update:

According to this piece in PRWeek, the union actually supported the idea of making Web and print reporters interchangeable, but that would have meant extending the union benefits enjoyed by print reporters to those who just worked on the Web, and Time didn’t want to do that.

Lest anyone think that it is totally clueless when it comes to the whole social-networking thing, eBay has launched eBay Neighbourhoods, a kind of mashup of MySpace and Digg-style features that has been grafted onto the shopping site. Not surprisingly, perhaps, these social features are all mixed up with the main focus of the site — which is, after all, shopping. That’s part of the problem (along with the fact that it’s about two years late, of course).

So when you go to the “Coffee Lovers” neighbourhood, for example, — which eBay suggested I might be interested in, despite the fact that I wasn’t logged in with my eBay user name — the URL is actually “espresso machines.” The implication is clear: come here to our beautiful neighbourhood and chat about coffee… and then please buy one of our lovely espresso machines. Is that the kind of basis for a social network that will have any kind of traction? I’m not sure (neither are GigaOm or Techdirt). I’m not a big shopper, really, and I don’t like to spend a lot of time talking about my prospective purchases. But maybe that’s just me.

It reminds me a little of a social network that Chapters Indigo — a large Canadian bookseller — recently launched. It has all the requisite features, with recommendations and friends and links and so on, but it appears to be a bit of a ghost town so far. Maybe that will change, I don’t know. But as I keep saying, I don’t think you can just create a community (not a real one, anyway) by just building something and then flicking a switch. That’s not how real-world communities are formed, and it’s not how online ones are formed either.

eBay has lots of users who have signed up to buy or sell things — but is that the kind of community that will translate into a big user base for its “neighbourhoods?” I’m not sure it will. Does it mean anything to me that when I look at comments, it shows that person’s eBay feedback score? That means people enjoyed buying things from them, but I’m not sure that means their comments on the Coffee Lovers chat forum should be given any more weight than anyone else’s. Maybe they should be given less.

Even if eBay does just want to use social-networking to facilitate more shopping — which it is free to do, of course — Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch says it is pretty much missing that boat too.

Bobbie Johnson wrote a Techmeme leaderboard roundup post in which he divulged that being on Techmeme — gasp! — doesn’t drive a whole pile of traffic, and both Robert Scoble and Nick Carr have jumped into the fray, talking about what Scobleizer calls the “dirty little truth” about Techmeme. Carr says the site has a “fairly modest, if rabid, audience.” Does this really come as news to anyone?

I would have thought that by now we would be past the whole addiction to raw pageviews and hits and eyeballs, but apparently not. To me — and to others like Frederic at The Last Podcast — the benefit of being on Techmeme.com is the kinds of readers I reach, and in most cases they are the ones who are passionate about the Web and technology, the ones who are thinking about things that others haven’t yet — the bleeding edge.

I’ve had Digg-storms and Reddit pile-ons and the traffic that they bring is usually fleeting. I’ll take a few thousand Techmeme readers over that any day (no offence intended to my many close friends on Digg and Reddit — you know I love you guys). Todd Ziegler at The Bivings Report says that Techmeme is like one of those bands that few people known about, but musicians and critics love. Loren Feldman at 1938media, meanwhile, argues (not surprisingly) that only he is truly influential.

Update:

Bobbie Johnson responds in the comments below.

Thanks to Mike Arrington of TechCrunch for pointing me to a post by Yahoo vice-president of product development Ian Rogers. In the post — entitled “Convenience Wins, Hubris Loses” — Rogers recaps a recent presentation he made about the business of digital music, and as Mike notes it is well worth reading.

The Yahoo VP — who used to run the pioneering music company Winamp, after dropping out of university for a year in 1995 to tour with the Beastie Boys — describes the early days of the digital music game, and his surprise at the combination of fear, ignorance and loathing with which the music industry greeted the arrival of mp3s and services such as Napster:

“We were naive to be sure, but we were genuinely surprised by the approach. Suing Napster without offering an alternative just seemed like a denial of fact. Napster didn’t invent the ability to do P2P, it was inherent in TCP/IP. It was like throwing Newton in jail for popularizing the concept of gravity.”

Fast-forward to today, and Rogers talks about how Amazon has finally created a music-download service that is actually as easy to use as a p2p network — in fact, easier. Unfortunately, he says, it has taken eight years of wasted effort and millions of dollars in legal fees:

“8 years. How much opportunity have we lost in those 8 years? How much naivety and hubris did we have when we said, “if we build it they will come”? What did we spend? And what did we gain? We certainly didn’t gain mass user adoption or trust, two prerequisites to success on the Internet.”

As Rogers puts it — before describing the ridiculously convoluted process you have to go through to buy a track and download it through Yahoo Music — “Inconvenience doesn’t scale.” If there is one lesson the music business needs to learn, it is that. It’s true that Apple’s iTunes service has grown to a phenomenal size despite the use of proprietary DRM controls, but think of how much larger the audience for that music could be. As Rogers puts it:

“Platforms which monetize the gigantic scale of the Web are the only way to compete with the control you’ve lost, the only way to reclaim value in the music industry. If your consultants are telling you anything else, they are wrong.”

The New York Times is reporting that the much-hyped “Google phone” isn’t going to be a dedicated device, but a mobile Linux-based operating system and suite of software that will run on phones made by others. This is more or less what many Google-watchers expected (including me — I wrote a column about the speculation for the Globe awhile back, which is here).

The idea of Google actually getting into the hardware game never made any sense to me, and still doesn’t. The idea of a compact, cross-platform mobile OS with Google software like a free (ad-supported) browser built in, however, makes a huge amount of sense to me. That would pretty much take the war to Microsoft’s doorstep, since it would compete head-on with Windows Mobile — and it’s about time that someone did, since Windows Mobile is still miles away from what it could be.

If Google’s mobile OS is free, light and fast, it could make a serious dent in the mobile market.