April 08, 2005
Memory Maps — Why Yahoo! Bought Flickr Reason #126
03:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1) ~ Biz - Internet
I was reading the Flickr Blog today and came across this post about “memory maps.” The idea is that you post a screen shot of an area you are familiar with (from a service like Google Maps), and annotate the screen shot with your memories. Wild!
Here’s part of a picture from the Memory Maps Flickr group showing an example of the annotations.
Just make sure you have a browser that has Flash enabled so you can view the annotations.
Google Maps Satellite View vs. TerraServer
09:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
This is probably not news to anyone but me, but I just noticed that Google Maps now has a “satellite” view. This displays an aerial photo of the area you are looking at.
However, if you’re looking to zoom in further than Google allows, it’s worth checking Microsoft’s TerraServer. For areas that they have recently updated (such as Palo Alto, CA), you can zoom in much further than Google. In addition, the TerraServer offers older aerial shots and topo map overlays.
Here’s a screen shot of 500 University in Palo Alto, CA from Google at maximum zoom:
And here’s one of the same area from the TerraServer dated 2/2004 at maximum zoom:
And another from the TerraServer dated 10/91 at maximum zoom:
And finally a topo map view from the TerraServer dated 7/98:
(I zoomed out one level to show a bit more of the region… of course this part of Palo Alto is pan flat, so not much to show regarding topology.)
Hopefully, Microsoft will update their UI a bit, since Google’s UI is clearly superior. I can’t wait until Yahoo! offers this type of service. That is, the more competition the better (for the users anyway!).
April 07, 2005
How "Good" Are RSS Ads?
12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
By “good” I mean would I actually click on one, and is the click-on result relevant to the content.
In my post on why RSS ads are important, I wrote about how this article discussing MobileTracker.net’s use of Feedburner’s feed-serving technology. This allows Feedburner to serve ads within MobileTracker’s RSS feed.
To try some RSS ads out, I used Bloglines to set up a RSS feed from Mobile.net. The first ad within the feed was attached to a post entitled Virgin Mobile launches K10 Royale . The ad was for Ring Tones and Wallpapers from Jamster which points to here. Here’s a screenshot this post and ad.
Ok, I might not be their target, but I could see people clicking on that.
The second ad was for Liquid Lense - $13.95 which points here. It’s a little off topic from the post’s content, but you can see the “match.” Heck, they might even sell some of the stuff. Liquid Lense, that is. Liquid Lense “Repairs Scratched & Cloudy Glasses“… oh, and for the quality seal of approval… “As Seen on TV”.
And finally, this one.
Which leads to YourMobileDesk.com’s page offering all times of retractable-cable products (like a mini travel mouse). Pretty good.
Man, these are all better than the old days on the GlobalHyperMegaNet with endless ads for ImGonnaFailRealSoon.bomb.
April 06, 2005
Ads within RSS Feeds... Important Stuff
07:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
So… some random surfing led me to Scoble’s post about why Google might be syndication shy.
This lead me to Steve Rubel’s post on that subject which, in turn, lead me to an article on how Overature is working with Feedburner to deliver ads within RSS feeds.
That’s the important point.
Feedburner… Yahoo! or Google should either re-create this service (unlikely) or purchase Feedburner (more likely). Since Feedburner’s business model places it as an intermediary between blogs and their readers (readers that use RSS anyway) Yahoo!/Google would be buying reach into blogs. Oh, and they get a little thing called reach into RSS feeds. Clearly RSS is looking like it will be a mass-medium… ie, everyone will use it in the future.
Perhaps in a few years RSS becomes a big part of how users interact with the web. Heck, you can already get a Gmail RSS feed, do package tracking via RSS, so why not? Being stuck in the “old school” of browsing-only ad serving — ie, not offering RSS reach and ad-serving technologies — could be a huge shortcoming for web media companies.
The Feedburner model is pretty cool… publishers get ad revenue from their RSS feeds by merely letting Feedburner serve the feed, and advertisers get reach into RSS via a targeted, contextual ad-serving technology. Right on!
History Flow — How Wikipedia Pages Evolve
07:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
History Flow is a tool created by IBM’s reseach team to study the history of collaborative documents. Specifically, they study how subjects on Wikipedia evolve over time. I found out about History Flow over at Nate Koechley’s blog. As the IBM folks say…
history flow provides answers at a glance to questions like, Has a community contributed to the text or has it been mostly written by a single author? How much has a particular contributor influenced the current version of the document? Is the text’s evolution marked by spurts of intense revision activity or does it reflect a smooth transition from its beginning to the present?
Here’s a screen shot of one of the History Flow displays for term Islam.
This and Jon Udell’s screencast looking at how the the heavy-metal umlaut page on Wikipedia evolved give a good overview on how the Wikipedia community is working.
Alexa and Intelliseek — Roll Your Own Metrics
04:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
I used to work at a company that had access to all sorts of marketing and metric reports from the likes of Jupiter Research, Forrester Research, etc. These types of companies can supply you with just about any metric that you’d like in areas that they cover, which is great to get a “feel” for a market. Now, I have access to none of these reports.
However, not all is lost thanks to the power of the web. There are a couple of sites out there (and probably more) that let you roll your own metrics: Alexa and Intelliseek.
Alexa, which is owned by Amazon, has a service called Alexa Traffic History Graph found here. This allows you to create traffic graphs in various time domains for any URL on the web. I created one in a previous post for WordPress.org to show their rapid growth over the past few months. Below I’ve created one showing Flickr’s reach over the past six months.
With Intelliseek’s BlogPulse you can create a graph that illustrates the percentage of blogs that include your search term vs. various time periods. For example, here’s one showing the percentage of blogs that mentioned “Flickr” over the past six months.
Together these two graphs help illustrates why Yahoo! acquired Flickr.
April 03, 2005
Package Tracking by RSS
10:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
Bloglines an online RSS reader (recently purchased by Ask Jeeves which in turn is being aquired by Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp) announced last week that Bloglines is First to Go Beyond the Blog with Unique-to-Me Info Updates. What does that mean?
Starting today, people can track the shipping progress of package deliveries from some of the world’s largest parcel shipping companies—FedEx, UPS, and the United States Postal Service within their Bloglines MyFeeds page. Package tracking in Bloglines encompasses international shipments, in English. Bloglines readers can look forward to collecting more kinds of unique-to-me information on Bloglines in the near future, such as neighborhood weather updates and stock portfolio tracking.
You can check out the package tracking here.
With IE7 rumored to have a built-in RSS reader, services like Blogline’s package tracking and My Yahoo!’s RSS integration, RSS (or some type of syndication… why do we have RSS, Atom, et al.?) sure seems like it will be mainstream pretty soon.
April 02, 2005
Flickr — What was Google Thinking??
10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
I’m sure that everyone has heard that Yahoo! recently acquired Flickr. In my opinion, this was a brilliant, strategic move. Flickr has the “feel” of an early Hotmail or Paypal and maybe even Ebay (hey, with those tags you can definitely see some network effects going on).
Sure Flickr’s not making money now, but who cares when you are acquiring users like mad? It’s like homesteading right now. Land, that is users, will never, ever be this inexpensive to acquire, so “Internet companies” better make the most of it RFN.
It’s interesting that Yahoo! would buy Flickr in that Yahoo! already has Yahoo! Photos. Yahoo!’s been in the online photo business for many years now, and is probably doing pretty well. However, the Flickr acquisition could end up making them the online image archive of choice.
Google’s Picasa is a fine little application, but that’s it. It’s not an online image store (yet?), and doesn’t have any network effects (yet?).
So WTF was Google thinking in letting Yahoo! snatch up Flickr? You go IPO to generate a pile of cash that you use to grow the company (oh, and to make a bunch of insiders rich). With Google’s P/E ratio, investors want to see that IPO cash working… not sitting in some bank earning a negative real interest rate (heard of inflation lately?).
In other words, Google needed Flickr more than Yahoo!. And more along that line of math: everyone will own a cellphone in the future + every cellphone will have a camera + everyone loves photos + everyone loves sharing photos = a really, really big, strategic market.
Acqusitions are like movies. Out of 10, 7 will be duds, 2 will break even and 1 will be mega-hit. I’d say there’s a better than 10% chance that Flickr will be a hit, and make Yahoo! a pile of cash in the future.
Google, what where you thinking???
March 28, 2005
Clear Channel to Start Podcasting
02:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
Also in the WSJ on Friday was a story about Clear Channel’s plans to start podcasting.
Clear Channel ‘s podcasting initiative will begin by May. The company will allow listeners to download programming such as comedy skits by popular morning show hosts. But music programming, which involves complicated licensing and royalty issues, won’t be included in the podcasts. Podcasting in general is focused mostly on talk-radio formats.
Well, I guess podcasting is finally going mainstream.
Blogging Ad Revenue
02:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
The WSJ had ran an article last Friday which gave an overview of the ad market for blogs. In general, they noted that some brands (such as Audi and Sony) where experimenting with running ads on blogs. However, there is a general fear on the advertisers part about how their brands will be perceived, written about and commented on in blogs due to the more chaotic nature of blogs — especially when compared to mainstream media. This is definitely holding back ad revenue. However, there are some success stories.
…Weblogs Inc., which now operates 76 blogs, including its own high-traffic gadget and car titles, Engadget and Autoblog. Weblogs has taken in $925,000 in advertising revenue over the last four months.
Not a bad chunk of change, but still just a fraction of the $9.6 billion 2004 web advertising market.
March 26, 2005
Yahoo! Offically Doesn't Support Firefox
06:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
Brilliant! As reported on ZDNet here.
“In the grand scheme of things Firefox is still a new technology. I’m not saying we are not going to be developing and exploring other areas — we are. But there are so many different products on the Yahoo network that there may be some products that are, perhaps, not appropriate for that browser,” the representative said.
Better to rely on your biggest competitor’s technology (yes, it’s Microsoft, not Google). In fact, it’s better to ignore the fact that a very large percentage of the power users on the web (the users you really want), are using Firefox (look at BoingBoing’s stats for example).
I guess Yahoo! really doesn’t understand strategy. Browser competition is good. Firefox’s success is good for everyone (except Microsoft). Yaho0!, get with the program and start really supporting and promoting Firefox.
March 23, 2005
The Flickr Massage — Not!
06:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
How many times have you seen this message?
Flickr is not having a “massage” — it’s having a melt down. Let’s hope that the folks at Yahoo! can fix this.
I suspect that scaling problems like this helped the folks at Flickr choose Door Number One (a pile of cash from Yahoo!) vs. Door Number Two (a pile of cash from some VC conditional on becoming a “real” company — e.g., one that can scale, handle all the legal issues, start marketing, etc. Basically, a lot of work).
Update: 2005_03_25
This massage parody is a crack up. Replace the “www” in the address for fun.
March 22, 2005
Skype DUALphone Cordless Phone — from Square7
05:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
Speaking of Skype, the techAddiction podcast number three also had a little bit on Square7’s DUALphone. It’s “dual” in that you can make normal PSTN phone calls and Skype calls from the handset. It has two input lines — one for your phone line and a USB connection for your PC. The software that comes with the phone allows you to scroll through your Skype contacts from the handset. Pretty cool.
Of course, only available in Europe for now.
March 16, 2005
Technorati's State of The Blogosphere
05:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
David Sifry founder and CEO of Technorati has put together his take on the growth of the blogosphere in a two day post. The first post discusses the growth in the number of blogs, while the second post discusses the growth in posts.
In a nutshell, the number of blogs is doubling approximately every five months, and the number of posts is also growing, but not as consistently as the number of blogs. The posting frequency also shows huge swings apparently tied to major news events (e.g., the US presidential election, the Indian Ocean tsunami, etc.).
Update: 2005_03_16
From Greg Linden’s post regarding blogging spam (blam?) in the comments of David’s first post:
The spam has become increasingly sophisticated over the last several months. For example, we often see blogs that appear to be real with several articles posted. Careful inspection shows the articles are copied from elsewhere with shill links inserted to some website that’s trying to increase its PageRank.
And jkottke notes that:
I think it’s important to keep in mind that the number of weblogs added to the Technorati database and the number of weblogs being created are not the same, nor are the trends necessarily the same. In particular, I’m very skeptical about the huge jump in blogs created per day that happened in the last two months of 2004. It seems likely to me that could be more an artifact of how Technorati is finding blogs (found a previously undiscovered vein of blogs or something) or some other explanation.
benjamin’s suggests trying a search on Technorati for a Sony DSC-V3 to see how much blam there really is (it’s A LOT).
Is Microsoft Starting to "Get" the Web?
09:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
Could it be after years of not getting the web (i.e., Active Channels, Smart Tags, ActiveX’s massive security holes, etc.) that Microsoft is starting to “get” the web. As evidence…
Mr Scoble seems to be worth his salary. He has become a minor celebrity among geeks worldwide, who read his blog religiously. Impressively, he has also succeeded where small armies of more conventional public-relations types have been failing abjectly for years: he has made Microsoft, with its history of monopolistic bullying, appear marginally but noticeably less evil to the outside world, and especially to the independent software developers that are his core audience. Bosses and PR people at other companies are taking note.
Sources say that IE 7.0 – which is code-named “Rincon,” they hear – will be a tabbed browser.
IE 7.0 will feature international domain name (IDN) support; transparent Portable Network Graphics (PNG) support, which will allow for the display of overlayed images in the browser; and new functionality that will simplify printing from inside IE 7.0, partner sources said. The new browser also will likely include a built-in news aggregator (emphisis mine).
We’ve been live now for less than six weeks, but the rate at which people have signed up and started their own Space has been phenomenal. We just found out that we hit the 1.5 million Spaces mark earlier today. You can imagine how excited we are that we’ve had that many people sign up in that short of a time, with people still signing on at an explosive rate.
Keyword Searching (WSJ Article)
For now, the new functions Microsoft is testing appear to be more advanced than those offered by its lead competitors. Today most services charge fees based on the number of “clicks” on a specific advertisement but provide little information about people who searched on a specific term.
An advertiser linked to “NCAA basketball,” for instance, on MSN adCenter could view graphs showing that mostly males age 16 to 60 searched for the term. Such information can be sued by Microsoft to tailor its fees based on the audience and move online advertisers from “buying keywords to buying an audience,” Microsoft Vice President Yusuf Mehdi said.
Pretty impressive especially considering that companies such as Yahoo! whose bread and butter is online services don’t even have a blogging offering yet… at least not until March 29th.
February 27, 2005
Wikipedia — The Heavy Metal Umlaut (or How Wikipedia Pages Evolve)
07:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
Jon Udell (writer for both InfoWorld and O’Reilly Network) talks about the evolution of Wikipedia pages here — erhhh, more specifically he talks about the origin of the heavy metal Umlaut page. Paracelsus Rambles did a little writeup on Jon’s work here.
So how cool is Wikipedia?
P.S. Jon talks about the making of his screencast here. This (you’ll need a flash-enabled browser to view the screencast) is a direct link to Jon’s screencast on the Wikipedia heavy metal umlaut page.
P.S.S. More on screencasting soon.
Jotspot — A Wiki Application Platform
05:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
I first heard about Jotspot when I listened to the IT Conversations podcast of their presentation from the Web 2.0 conference. Here’s a few words from JotSpot’s FAQ:
What is a wiki?
A wiki is a website which can be edited by anyone, without knowing HTML. See also Wikipedia’s definition.What is JotSpot?
JotSpot makes simple web applications simple to build by combining wikis and web applications in an easy-to-use hosted service for workgroups. Take the Intro Tour.What is an application wiki?
Most wikis are great at organizing unstructured text: create and edit pages, create links and establish hierarchy, add attachments and comments and basic search. But they quickly reach their limits when you try to add structure. For example, a lot of folks use wikis for a shared task list. How would you assign a due date for a particular item? Can you assign priority? Could you assign a task to a group, not just a single person? Can you flag items for discussion? All of these are possible using our service because JotSpot allows you to easily add structure to unstructured data. JotSpot makes simple applications simple to build using wikis. Take our Advanced Tour to learn more.How would I use JotSpot?
Use JotSpot for all of your wiki needs. In addition, build lightweight collaborative applications using our platform.The JotSpot Application Gallery contains applications you can load into your JotSpot including:
* Event Calendar
* Recruiting
* Task Manager
* Customer Relationship Manager
* Help Desk
* Company Directory
* Issue Tracker
It’s a pretty impressive application… something that makes writing niche, department-level applications possible. To find out how, listen and watch Jon Udell’s screencast (a word so new it isn’t even in Wikipedia yet) of a Jotspot demo (this is a link to a SWF file which playable if you open it in a Flash-enabled browser).
February 23, 2005
Now Is the Time to Promote Firefox
03:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet & Firefox
Hello leading websites (except MSN, of course). Get a clue. NOW is the time to start encouraging your users to switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox. Where are the ‘Get Firefox Now’ buttons on your homepages? Where’s the customized Firefox browsers? Come on!!
Why aren’t Yahoo!, Google, Amazon, Ebay, et al. doing this? I donno. I guess they must really like having Microsoft control the key piece of Internet client software.
In a perfect world, these companies would get together and start creating some more mind share for Firefox — especially in the minds of the general public. How about a big PR event announcing their ‘partnership’ to promote Firefox? How about each company kicking in some bucks to buy some advertising talking about the benefits of Firefox? How about a ‘Download Firefox’ day where each site dedicates a big chunk of their homepage to encourage downloads?
Do the math. Longhorn isn’t shipping for years, Bill Gates is scared and Firefox has momentum. If Microsoft maintains its hegemony in browser share, you know who to blame.
February 20, 2005
Improved del.icio.us Posting Interface
03:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
I found this on a random link on del.icio.us. If you input your user name, it will generate a bookmarklet that greatly improves on del.icio.us’ bookmarklets. It adds a list of your existing tags and some recommended tags to the pop-up ‘add to del.icio.us’ interface.
Click on the thumbnail below to see what this improved interface looks like.
It’s nice to have a list of all of your tags when added a new site. You can also click on a tag in the interface window, and it will add that tag to the new bookmark’s tag list. The site says that it’s experimental, but it seems to work. Sweetness.
February 17, 2005
A New Spin on Blogging (and launching a blog)
12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
The New York Times has an article today on ThinkEquity Partners’, a boutique investment bank, launching of its ‘research’ blog. It seems likely that ThinkEquity pitched the Times on this story to get some PR — just another sign that blogging is the real deal.
Mr. Moe (ThinkEquity’s co-founder) said he did not see an immediate way to make money from the blog, but viewed it as a way to generate ideas - the lifeblood of research and investment banking.
“Our mission is to identify and partner with the stars of tomorrow, today,” he said.
He said he got the idea from Tony Perkins, a founder and former editor of Red Herring magazine who has started AlwaysOn, which is using blogs to discuss business and technology issues.
Generically, blogging could be a way to make investment banking research more relevant especially after the recent stock market crash where it was found that many investment banking firms were guilty (hey, the top investment banking firms coughed up $1.4 billion in fines) of writing research statements solely to win investment banking business — just a slight conflict of interest.
I’ve read a little of the ThinkEquity blog, and it’s got some good stuff.
February 15, 2005
Podcasting Will Be Everywhere
02:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
I’ve obviously been looking at the MSMobiles site lately since 3GSM (one of the larger mobile conferences) is going on.
So, how cool is it that you can be spun directly by the spin masters these days? What am I talking about? Well, MSMobiles has a podcast of Microsoft’s press conference at 3GSM. The audio quality is not that great, but it portends to how pervasive podcasting will be in the future.
February 14, 2005
Online Bookmarks — Where are the Majors?
07:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
Services like del.icio.us and Spurl.net (and a lot of others) are trying to capture user’s bookmarks online, so where are the majors (e.g., Google, Yahoo!, MSN) in this? The only one that has any such service is Yahoo!. Their Yahoo! Toolbar — formally Yahoo! Companion — has a online bookmark feature (hey, they have a new Firefox version of the toolbar in beta). However, I doubt that Yahoo! has enough users of this feature to really do anything meaningful with the data.
When you think about it, bookmarks are a huge repository of preference information. It’s like PageRank except that the majority of the data are opaque… locked up in a client. Making these data more transparent could increase the relevancy of search and add new functionality to search — like if you added some folksonomy to it, and got this.
So where are the majors?
February 08, 2005
Google Maps — Wow!
02:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
Check out Google Maps. It’s in beta, but it works really well right now. Maps, driving directions… all the usual suspects. The application rocks because the UI doesn’t change as it reloads data, just like Gmail. Very nice, and how web applications should work.
Update: 2005_16_02
Check this post out for details on how Google coded their maps application.
February 03, 2005
Del.icio.us — Testing Tagging Schemes
12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
del.icio.us I still haven’t moved my bookmarks to del.icio.us as I talked about here. I have added a bunch of new bookmarks exclusively to del.icio.us in order to try and figure out what the best tagging scheme is. I’m still not sure what the optimal number of tags is per bookmark, but at a minimum the tags should allow you to create a logical directory structure using Firefox’s Live Bookmarks. However, even if you use Firefox’s Live Bookmarks to synchronize with del.icio.us, you still have to backup the Live Bookmarks (which are kind of like the directory structure without the files).
Doesn’t it seem like del.icio.us is missing something? If you could add the ability to create and save a directory structure (the tree) to the existing bookmarks (the leaves) you would have a much more powerful product.
February 02, 2005
C-Span
03:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
C-SPAN has a great web site with lots of archived material going back a few months to many years. So, if you miss something important, you can catch it later on C-SPAN. Here’s their mission statement,
C-SPAN is a public service created by the American cable television industry:
To provide C-SPAN’s audience access to the live gavel-to-gavel proceedings of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and to other forums where public policy is discussed, debated and decided—all without editing, commentary or analysis and with a balanced presentation of points of view;
To provide elected and appointed officials and others who would influence public policy a direct conduit to the audience without filtering or otherwise distorting their points of view;
To provide the audience, through the call-in program, direct access to elected officials, other decision makers and journalists on a frequent and open basis;
To employ production values that accurately convey the business of government rather than distract from it; and to conduct all other aspects of its operations consistent with these principles.
And some interesting statistics,
Number of U.S. homes with cable and satellite that receive MTV: 83,400,000
Number of U.S. homes that receive C-SPAN: 85,000,000
MSNBC’s rank among U.S. cable television networks, based on distribution: 34
C-SPAN’s rank, based on distribution: 8
Average weekly audience for West Wing, 2000-2001 season: 17,012,000
Estimated number of people watching C-SPAN each week: 28,500,000
Check it out.
February 01, 2005
RSS — The New Product Registration
02:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
Product registration… what a joke. Do you EVER register any of the products you buy these days? Hell no (unless you have to, to take advantage of a product rebate or something)!
The reason why nobody registers, is that it’s a one-way street. You send the manufacturer a bunch of personal information, and what do you get? In the case of a car purchase, it’s a notification in the mail about a recall (or more likely, just some junk mail trying to get you back in the dealership). And if you are like me, you’ve moved eight jillion times since you bought your car, so you’re never going to get a recall notice anyway. Well, that’s all going to change. And soon.
In the future, “product registration” will primarily consist of subscribing to an RSS feed. In this paradigm, the consumer wins because you don’t need to give the manufacturer a bunch of personal information, and it will be trivial to stay up-to-date on your purchase even if you move.
Can you imaging buying something like a computer, reading the manual (ok, you never do that either) and discovering that there are a series of RSS feeds specific to the model you just purchased? For example, there would be a firmware feed, a driver feed, a “tips” feed, etc. So when your computer eventually melts down and you are forced to reload the OS, you can find all the current drivers with a couple of clicks. No more painful searching through lame-ass UIs just to find some drivers.
All companies should make this mandatory STAT. As the Harvard Business Review says,
What sort of information should companies syndicate? The better question is perhaps, What sort shouldn’t they syndicate? (link to full article, subscription required).
January 31, 2005
Stop the Presses: GET THE FUTURE OF FILE SYSTEMS TODAY!!
08:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet & Firefox
del.icio.us My bookmarks are going to del.icio.us STAT1. They are going to the-land-of-how-file-systems-should-work. If you want a preview of the future, read this post, and join the chosen before the rush crushes their (his?) service. In a very short time it is almost guaranteed that whomever owns del.icio.us will be very, very well off.
You did read the whole post linked to above before continuing, now didn’t you? I thought so.
Can you imagine combining this functionality (a term which belies the power of this new paradigm) with something like Flickr?
Add the notion of “group” and some file permissioning, and you have the future of file systems2. Game, set and match.
Calling Google’s, Yahoo!’s and Microsoft’s corporate development departments (I didn’t have enough minutes on my plan to waste calling Time-Warner-not-AOL-anymore)… I’ve done your homework. Now get to work.
—————
1 I will say that for the majority of my bookmarks, I really don’t care that everyone can browse them. Whatever. Bookmarks that I use to access really personal websites, I’ll just keep local, and not load them into del.icio.us.
2 With del.icio.us (i.e., bookmarks), it rocks to have no real file permissioning. It facilitates the free sharing of preference. Like peer-to-peer where everyone shares their files as well as downloads files. All are consumers and contributors.
Online Search Market Share
05:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
It looks like Yahoo! and Google are gaining market share worldwide, while MSN and AOL are the losers. In addition, Yahoo! is gaining ground on Google in the US. All this in the New York Times business section today in an article entitled, Search Sites Play a Game of Constant Catch-Up. Worldwide search market share for the “biggies” is listed as:
| Company | Nov. ‘03 (%) | Nov. ‘04 (%) |
| 44 | 47 | |
| Yahoo! | 25 | 27 |
| MSN | 14 | 12 |
| AOL | 9 | 5 |
| Source: comScore Networks | ||
In the US, Yahoo! is gaining ground…
In the United States, Yahoo is gaining on Google. Yahoo’s share rose to 35 percent of searches in November from 29 percent a year earlier, according to ComScore. During the same period, Google rose to 38 percent from 37 percent.
Danny Sullivan, editor of the Search Engine Watch, is heavily quoted throughout the article, and speaks very favorably of Yahoo!, while being fairly negative about Google. Mr. Sullivan implies that Google has not been adding features as quickly as Yahoo! which he thinks is a result of Google’s IPO in 2004.
Last year Yahoo! acquired MusicMatch, Kelkoo and Oddpost. Perhaps in 2005, Yahoo! will become a verb?
January 28, 2005
Snappy Answers
09:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
In the Wall Street Journal on Thursday on the 27th, Walter Mossberg reviewed Answers.com. His final sentence was, “I urge you to try it.” The gist of the story was the Answers is a search company that strives to actually answer your questions as opposed to just giving you links related to query. I’ve tried it out, and it’s not bad for certain forms of querys. However, it is not nearly as extensive as searching the web.
Snap is back in business again (or still if it never left) as an Idealab company. Idealab is the group that backed GoTo.com which became Overture which in turn was acquired by Yahoo!. So, sometimes they get it right… especially considering that Google ended up licensing the rights to paid search to Yahoo! (who had obviously also acquired Overture’s patent portfolio).
But… whatever. A bunch of new search companies. You’d expect it now that search companies can’t get out of the way of money being thrown at them. The interesting thing is that Google sometimes links to Answer.com in the “definitions” field (located at the upper right hand corner of a search result page). Try searching on “earnings,” then clicking on the underlined “earnings” in the definition field. Goes to Answers (at least it did for me). So regardless of whether or not Answers is actually paying Google, Google is helping to build Answers’s brand… just like Yahoo! did when Google first started out. Interesting.
Open Source Apps on My Windows PC
08:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
I've just noticed how much open-source software I am now using on my Windows XP machine. I use Firefox for browsing almost exclusively. I do use IE primarily because I have its cookies set differently than I do in Firefox - so, for example, between IE and Firefox I can easily log into two different Yahoo! Mail accounts. But if there was an extension that allowed you to manage and quickly switch between different Yahoo! Mail accounts, I won't need IE for this... a quick account switching extension for Yahoo! Mail... that'd be cool he dreams.
But back to the point. Firefox for browsing and Filezilla for FTP (so much better than FTP Voyager which I had purchased previously). I use VirtualDub for video format conversion and resizing. Just check out the OpenCD Project for other open-source applications of note. Heck, I'm using MovableType like a word processor to create this blog.
I use NASA's World Wind program to download LandStat maps of the world, satellite images, weather data. I don't know if the application is open source, but the data is open to the world. Neat.
Even more interesting is that I use open source on top of open source. What do I mean? Well, I use an extension called Spellbound in Firefox to check spelling when posting in MovableType. When I was using TypePad, I also used Spellbound instead of the default TypePad spell checker. Spellbound is a much richer spell checker, since it lets you store custom words like "Google" and "Bay." Words I'm using all the time.
Just noticing all of these cool applications that have snuck onto my PC over the past seven years or so... but really in the past three or four years. All brought to you by the Internet. Just think what is to come. I'm sure Microsoft is thinking about that.
January 21, 2005
Amazon - More Web Services
04:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
CNet has a story about Amazon creating versions of its web services for foreign markets.
"This release is a direct response to feedback from our growing
developer community," Andy Jassy, vice president of Web services at
Amazon, said in a statement.
Amazon out of any of the major web companies, has been the most aggressive in pushing web services. eBay and Google have them too, but they have not been aggressively marketing them. In some ways, Amazon is lucky since they have a built-in profit model for their web services.
This is the kind of innovation that I like. Sure, developing, supporting and promoting web services carries some opportunity-cost risks, but the upside of becoming the commerce backend for a big portion of the web is huge. Jeff Bezos at Web 2.0 spoke about the next version of the web - the one making it easier for computers to use. That's big thinking, but more importantly, Amazon is acting on that big thinking.
Have Some French Fries Google
04:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
In the New York Times week in review
In other Google news, the search giant was dealt a setback when a French court ruled that it must refrain from using the trademarks of European resort chain Le Meridien Hotels and Resorts to trigger keyword ads. A Nanterre court in France ruled that Google infringed on the trademarks of Le Meridien by allowing the hotel chain's rivals to bid on keywords of its name and appear prominently in related search results.
This just sounds wrong to me. For example, when you look in the Yellow Pages for a specific store, you see competitive ads. I go into Safeway to buy Tide, and it's side-by-side with every other brand of detergent. Let's hope the rest of the world is not so shortsighted as the French. In the meantime, pass the ketchup please.
January 18, 2005
Charter Noband
09:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
Lovely. No net access for almost two days due to "technical difficulties" at Charter my high-speed provider. Yes, I tried calling their circular-loop phone system only to get some lame-ass recorded-at-12kps-by-some-virgin-engineer voice prompt telling me that they didn't know what the heck was wrong, and hell no, they didn't know when they would get around to fixing it. Thanks you, and have a happy day.
The situation on their website this morning was not much better. Plausible deniability? Ignorance is bliss? I want my triage report about what went wrong, how it will never happen again, who got fired and how the CEO won't get that new Maybach this year 'cause he lost his bonus. Not even a peep about any sort of outage. Whatthefuckever. These idiotic cable companies think they can offer VoIP. Hello... it's called availability.
Rest assured, no ClueTrain going on here. On the bright side of broadband, Comcast is upping the speed of their service with no price increase. Charter... you listening?? Bueller... Bueller... Bueller...
Update 2005_18_01:
six apart has a clue. New world order.
January 11, 2005
Flickr - Online Picture Sharing Done Right?
05:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) ~ Biz - Internet
The Flickr blog posts this about a recent Salon article. In the article they say...
Posting photos on Flickr is like personal reporting.
All cool, but my one big problem with the site is that it is very Flash intensive. Since I use Firefox (see my post below), and don't have Flash installed on it, it can be a problem. Jeezz, Typepad can create a site in DHTML, or whatever, that's pretty feature rich. Seems like there has to be a better way than an evil Flash U.I. Granted, it's not so super-evil as to not work at all without Flash installed, but you can't take advantage of some of the more advanced features like little pop-up dealios used to annotate an image.
Update: 2005_18_01
I've been uploading photos over the past few days, and have noticed that when re-naming the photo using their Flash application in IE it "crashes" all the time. Ugh. Keep it simple. Another thing is that the ads look like part of their UI. Very confusing. Oh, and I just now noticed (since it doesn't show up in the UI unless you mouse over the area), is that you can add a description to the photo instead of just commenting on it like I have been doing. Doh! Make the UI elements obvious.. not some sort of treasure hunt. That said, pretty cool.
Update: 2005_18_01 later in the day
Late breaking new... don't use Flash (or at least IE with Flash). Use Firefox with no Flash plug-in installed, and the site works fine with the exception of the more advanced features.
I've noticed that one of the things that Flickr does so well is design. They make your photo layout look pro. So you've got MoveableType, Flickr and Apple doing some cool design these days. More on this later.