facebook « Serendipity 2010

What’s to come in 2010

Some thoughts and predictions for 2010:

Computers/OS:

Google’s OS and Google’s Browser Chrome will further erode Microsoft’s OS dominance.

Phones:

Google’s Nexus One is not an iPhone killer but what would be much more powerful and meaningful would be for Google to offer a ‘subsidized’ cell phone service through a carrier in exchange for watching ads – no more cell bills. That MIGHT make me give-up my iPhone habit.

TV/Cable:

TV Everywhere will dominate as cable subscribers will WANT to get what they see at home on their PC’s, phones, etc. They will want this because its only a matter of time before Hulu (and other online content aggregators) lose their premium content or require a subscription fee. (Smell Comcast here?). Boxee, Roku, Sezmi and Zillion TV will have tough sledding IF Apple TV hopefully syncs a (rumored) TV subscription service with their upcoming iTablet/iSlate. Apple MIGHT offer consumers an a-la-carte menu of the best of cable and network TV on their televisions through the AppleTV box, iphones and the iTablet (along with several newspaper/magazine subscriptions) for a single monthly fee. Their version of a cable ‘triple-play’ subscription. Do you remember when cable TV was “sold” as a way to escape the ads on free, OTA broadcast TV? Those were the days…

Movies/Music/Web:

iTunes will announce an iTunes web service, thanks to the Lala acquisition. Disney will move forward with their Keychest initiative and so will the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem, or DECE. However, only one system will survive this year to avoid consumer confusion.

‘Live’ streaming video and UGV will replace the jpg /gif as the dominant content format of visual sharing online.

Facebook, Hulu, YouTube , Twitter, and other ‘weapons of mass distraction’ these days will be increasingly ‘filtered’ out from the workplace due to too much time by employees during work hours spent on ‘social media’ causing a huge traffic shift in several social networks most notably, Facebook.

Facebook will go public and the IPO will be a huge financial success until Facebook becomes the Borg unless it allows data portability. Its number of users will continue to climb until the network is as large as Google and people will confuse Facebook with “the Internet” like days of old when the internet was ‘AOL’ to many people.

And then one day…

A new social network will rise to join the big ones. It may offer the privacy that Facebook is moving away from; it may be mobile and location-centric; it may focus on personal content recommendations, but it will come and the minnows will swim like fishes to the next ‘big’ new network to be seen and heard on.

We are all ‘Paparazzi’s’ and ‘Jimmy Olsen’s’ now…with the Advent of ‘live’ broadcasting apps on the iphone and android makes paparazzi’s and Jimmy Olsen’s (instant news ‘scoops’) out of us all further diluting the worth of major news org’s that can’t be expected to be everywhere at all times.

Cloud computing heats up. AWS, Google, Microsoft and others begin price wars to compete for customers.

MySpace will try to become as important to online viewers as MTV was to cable subscribers in the 80’s.

MOG and Spotify will invade the US and give iTunes(lala) and MySpace a run for their money.

And hopefully:

Data portability will become more real, standard, expected and viable. Why isnt’ there a way for me to make 1 Avatar, use 1 password and login to store all this info in a central location that my ‘social networks’ and other internet related service use and fetch each time I access these services? Here is where I’d place all my photos and videos and then simply choose which services get access to which photos and videos. So, when I leave a social network, my ID and photos and videos LEAVE too. Go ahead and just try moving or populating another social network again with all of your pictures, comments and videos that you’ve uploaded at one time or another. Hard to do and time consuming beyond belief. It would be nice to able to take MY STUFF (and data preferences) with ME with 1 click.

Comments welcome.

January 7, 2010 Posted by William Sager | android, apple, browsers, cable television, cell phones, cloud computing, digital media, future computing, google phone, microsoft, money, online TV and Movies, the web, tv | google, facebook, iphone, apple, myspace, microsoft, YouTube, Lala, Add new tag | Leave a Comment

Interesting bitsandbytes – celebrity data, new search engines, Disney’s views on content

Interesting bitsandbytes:

Celebrity Data:

*Ken Sonenclar, managing director of DeSilva+Phillips, opened the media investment bank’s Future of Celebrity Media conference, by pointing out that entertainment mags are down 18 percent, not as bad as magazines in general. And as more bloggers create their one celeb-focused sites and media stars like Ashton Kutcher and Martha Stewart are reaching to fans directly via Twitter, bypassing the traditional avenues. It’s getting so bad, Sonenclar said, “Even paparazzi aren’t being paid well anymore. They’re competing with too many so-called amateurs.”

As for online, Yahoo’s OMG leads by far when it comes to uniques, Sonenclar said, showing a bar chart of celeb sites. OMG is distantly followed by TMZ and People, and Microsoft’s Wonderwall, which has come out of nowhere. However, 90 percent of Wonderwall’s traffic comes from people clicking on the “celebrity” channel on MSN’s homepage. The same is true for OMG’s success. While that may skew those sites popularity, versus celeb mag sites run by People and Entertainment Weekly, advertisers don’t really care, Sonenclar said. Still, whether those sites can create brands as well known as People and EW, remains a very open question. Ultimately, the power of celebrity brands still make it possible for established media to hold their own in terms of attracting users and sponsors.

A Studio head that gets it:

*Less than a week after the announcement that Disney (NYSE: DIS) was taking an equity stake in the News Corp-NBC Universal (NYSE: GE) joint venture. Iger told analysts: “We believe that broader distribution of our content makes sense given the growth in online viewing,” adding, “New media isn’t going away.

“We absolutely must be where our consumers are going.” One reason: if Disney and others don’t make programming available on a well-timed, well-priced basis, consumers will find it anyway. Iger said going with a service like Hulu helps fight piracy by offering better alternatives.

But avoiding piracy isn’t the only rationale. Iger wants to be where the audience is and, so far, the demographics for Hulu are younger than those for broadcast television. Just as he has with iTunes sales and ABC.com VOD, Iger stressed that cannibalization isn’t a concern. Instead, Disney sees a way to expand its reach to views.

Search Engines –2 NEW TYPES:

# 1- Systemic Knowledge – meaning its not searching but computing the answer (think Spock from Star Trek). Visit : http://www.wolframalpha.com/
# 2- And Real-Time search – is the second. They are: one from OneRiot and one from Tweetmeme . Real-time search also can be found here: Twitter Search, , FriendFeed and the recently launched Scoopler. But for the most part, oneriot, tweetmeme and scoopler all are designed from the get-go as ‘real-time’ engines.

*Wolfram Alpha is a search engine that you can use to compute systematic knowledge immediately. You can put in anything you would like to know and you can compare multiple results with each other. There is no need to know how to search; just type in what you want to know.

This is significant in that real-time search s now becoming more important from a ‘social’ perspective than before. First and foremost what emerges out of this is a new metaphor — think streams vs. pages. John Bothwick describes it like this:

“In the initial design of the web reading and writing (editing) were given equal consideration – yet for fifteen years the primary metaphor of the web has been pages and reading. The metaphors we used to circumscribe this possibility set were mostly drawn from books and architecture (pages, browser, sites etc.). Most of these metaphors were static and one way. The steam metaphor is fundamentally different. It’s dynamic, it doesn’t live very well within a page and still very much evolving.

A stream. A real time, flowing, dynamic stream of information — that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe we are a part of this flow. “

May 18, 2009 Posted by William Sager | Uncategorized | celebrity, disney, facebook, google, real-time search, search engine, social networks, systemic knowledge | Leave a Comment

Passed links vs. search..which gets more traffic? The answer might surprise you!

Fred Wilson had an interesting post this week about traffic, social nets and Google. The basic question was this: Has the time come where suggesting a link to your friends in a social network or a blog (Facebook, MySpace, Linked in, etc) actually registers more traffic to that particular page rather than a google search would? Are visits from Facebook greater than visits from Google overall? Is the ‘social ‘ discovery of links and pages on the web more powerful than simple searches? It seems that depending where you are and what you are pointing people to, traffic flows differently. If its on a content site (games, etc) those links and suggestions result in about 25% more traffic than those sites and links having nothing to do with content (i.e. B2B sites). So, if you’ve got good content, it wants to be shared by all.

They ‘tracked the passing-along of links pointing to two campaigns running concurrently for the same product (different micro-sites). One of them had a good offer but so-so content while the other campaign had great (funny) content with no offer. The % of unique visitors generated by the pass-along of links to the good offer was under 10% while the traffic from the pass-along of the links to the good content was over 40%. The campaign with good content also got significantly more traffic overall. What data like this suggests is that the prediction you make in your deck about dollars shifting from media to content is a really good one in my opinion. As marketers compete for the attention and interest of their audience, the best way to do this is through content that’s delivered to them via their social graph. This already happens if the content’s good. There just isn’t enough of it.’

Over the course of the last 6 months or so I realize that I’m getting more and more information from my friends, IM, twitter, email, RSS, and Facebook than I am from searches. And the way I search and what I search for has changed. I’ve gotten most of the links for content from my friends through one messaging tool or another. Yes, I got the link for the workprint of ‘X-Men Origins’ just about the same time I read the story about it. And I never searched for it – it came via a socially passed links. And more to the point, when I looked specifically on google for that link, I had a tough time finding it.

Overall, The most popular mode of sharing is email (25% of visits from passed links come from links shared through email), followed by blogs (18% of visits from passed links come from links shared through blogs), video sharing sites (14% of visits from passed links come from links shared through video sharing sites like YouTube), and forums/message boards (11% of visits from passed links come from links shared through forums and message boards). Social networks account for around 9% of the traffic from shared links. These stats are courtesy of Meteor Solution ( http://www.meteorsolutions.com/)

April 29, 2009 Posted by William Sager | google | blogs, email, facebook, shared, social networks | Leave a Comment

Email is the ultimate ‘beacon’ for FaceBook and all the other soc-nets too!

When eBay shelled out $4.1 billion for Skype, it paid about $52 per user. In July 2005, News Corp. purchased the parent of MySpace for $580 million. At the time, MySpace had about 21 million users, costing $27.62 per user. Bebo sold to AOL for $850 million and has about 40 million users, costing $21.25 per user. It is entirely conceivable that social networking, like web-mail, will never make tons of money. Because lofty valuations require each site maximizing its page views, they are focused on getting users to keep coming back to the site. They are all closed, walled-in gardens.

AOL tried this, but it didn’t work. So did Compuserve and Prodigy. It didn’t work for them either. And despite some of the sites pleas for outside developers to make fun software for their sites, (like Facebook, MyspaceTV, Googles Open Social and Friendster), each site still requires us to come back. And that begins to become a bore. Its been argued that the ultimate ‘social’ network is email. Why? Because with email, you have your address book, photo’s are mailed, dates are made and placed in a calendar indicating certain personal social ‘activities’. In other words, your email knows more about what you do than ANY social network can.

“We will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to be social,” says Charlene Li at Forrester Research, a consultancy. Future social networks, she thinks, “will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be.” No more logging on to Facebook just to see the “news feed” of updates from your friends; instead it will come straight to your e-mail inbox, RSS reader or instant messenger. No need to upload photos to Facebook to show them to friends, since those with privacy permissions in your electronic address book can automatically get them. Personal referrals and word-of-mouth still and will always be more effective than advertising. This ‘essence’ of personal suggestions from friends permeates every single email we get in our inbox. In theory, email knows everything about us. And email is decades old. There maybe more money in knowing what we like to do, than in delivering banner ads on a web page. That is, more money can be made by simply knowing my habits, spending and otherwise and then interacting and crossing those habits with services I use on the internet. Its not the ads I see but ultimately, but what I end up doing that results in my purchasing of a service (buying movie tickets online) or renting a car on weekends if I live in a big city where transportation (NYC) isn’t an issue (for example, renting a car to get away to the Hamptons in the summer). When I plan a weekend away in the Hamptons with my friends, I’ll need to rent a car. With one email to my friends about this, I’m a potential car rental customer. And my email knew it before anyone else did.

March 23, 2008 Posted by William Sager | email | AOL, beacon, bebo, facebook, myspace, News Corp., web site valuations | Leave a Comment

Privacy – Part 2

I’ve written about this before (11-25-2007) and now Alec Sunders, co-founder and CEO of iotum wrote a great privacy manifesto for the web. Someday, someone will start a service on the net that will allow one to control these aspects of our privacy . This is a service I’d pay for in a heart beat. Here is what Alec sees as the 4 basic prongs of web ‘privacy’ guidelines:

Every customer has the right to know what private information is being collected. That rules out any secret data collection schemes, as well as monitoring regimes that the customer hasn’t agreed to in advance. It also rules out any advertising scheme that relies on leaving cookies on a customer’s hard disk without the customer’s consent.
Every customer has the right to know the purpose for which the data is being collected, in advance. Corporations must spell out their intent, in advance, and not deviate from that intent. Reasonable limits must be imposed on the collection of personal information that are consistent with the purpose for which it is being collected. Furthermore, the common practice of inserting language into privacy policies stating that the terms may be modified without notice should be banned. If the corporation collecting data wishes to change its policy then it’s incumbent upon the corporation to obtain the consent of customers in advance.
Each customer owns his or her personal information. Corporations may not sell that information to others without the customer’s consent. Customers may ask, at any time, to review the personal information collected; to have the information corrected, if that information is in error; and to have the information removed from the corporation’s database.
Customers have a right to expect that those collecting their personal information will store it securely. Employees and other individuals who have access to that data must treat it with the same level of care as the organization collecting it is expected to.

In many parts of the world, governments are now creating legislation embodying the four principles of this Privacy Manifesto. Citizens of those countries have responded favorably, rewarding businesses that assure their privacy, and penalizing those that don’t. In Canada, for example, personal information is protected by something known as the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and as a result, it’s not unheard of for customers to patronize businesses that store their data locally. Many Europeans are equally sensitive.

Not only are the four principles of the Privacy Manifesto good for individuals, they’re good for business.

January 8, 2008 Posted by William Sager | privacy | facebook, information, personal data, robert scoble | 1 Comment

My data = ‘invisible advertising’

There’s a discussion that’s been going on for some time now about data ownership. Dave Winer at Scripting.com has probably said it the best on his blog for some time now – he’s right on target concerning data ownership. Huh? What does this mean? Read on….I belong to Facebook (and other social networks as well, but I’m using Facebook as an example for today’s post). I filled out the answers to many questions, identified some people as friends or acquaintances, have used some of their plug-ins/3rd party apps. and participated in a few polls. Facebook has this (my) data and is in complete control of it and owns it right now – my preferences, opinions, friends, and even some of my buying habits. I also use Amazon and eBay – they too have my data and they know which books and items I’ve bought or bid on, they even built a profile of items I’ve looked for for future ‘recommendations’ (OR what I call, ‘invisible advertising’). The same for Netflix and iTunes. Now, think about all of this for a minute. Collectively, these services by virtue of the fact I have used their websites know more about my own real interests, likes and dislikes and specifically what I’d prefer to watch (Netflix), read (Amazon), who I talk to (Facebook), what I listen to (iTunes) and buy (Amazon & eBay ) better than anyone else other than myself. What if this cumulative profile of me was something I could use and take with me and ‘offer’ to a prospective website retailer that might like to ‘sell’ me something because that ‘something’ is very likely something I’d want to buy from them? Would my profile and data be worth something to this retailer? There is something of value I can offer them and in return I can get something of value to me, from them (i.e. a discount or other services). Could I use my profile then to negotiate a better deal for myself for that item if I purchased that item at their website? Conversely, why not let several web retailers offer me big discounts on certain items I am most likely to buy? And finally, when do advertisements no longer resemble advertisements? When they appear as ‘information’. The ‘ad’ part becomes invisible when I am properly targeted using my own data. I’ll no longer see an advertisement but rather some information I want to know about because I’m already interested in receiving that information (hence the term ‘invisible’ advertising). But, I want to control my own data. I want to be able to use this information about myself that OTHERS collect and use it for me, after all, I created it. I gave it up voluntarily to these web sites but I still want control of it – where it goes and to whom. If I had a simple XML file that resided on my own hard drive collecting this information, then I’d have my bargaining chip! And ultimately this will lead to less advertisements and more information being given to me. A better web experience all around. A win-win for me and the retailer. Thoughts?