DISQUS

I don't know why people think these are similar companies -- they're not. Twitter is a one-faceted stream of your life; FriendFeed is typically greater than one (often about five or six).

I agree, though -- if Twitter can solve its issues it will be on its way to attract more users.

It's very early days for this end of the market, even though the Scobles of the world make us feel like we're in the midst of a completely mature market.

Other than Smugmug (are there others?), I wonder why nobody has offered the video user base a higher-res option with unlimited uploading. Assuming everyone wants crappy quality, YouTube is a fine option for the masses. But someone will figure out that there could be more that the community would be willing to pay for.

I know Google gives most everything away for free, but that doesn't mean it's the smartest move.

Agreed, Eric. What measurement creates is accountability. What accountability creates (often, at least in my perspective) is a winners-only environment. Unfortunately sometimes that means the more branding-focused (and sometimes) creative and fun ads won't deliver. But they could still be valuable.

I still loved Where's The Beef? when it came out 20 years ago and never clicked on an ad. I never even ate at Wendy's, really. Can Where's The Beef - level advertising exist when measurement rules? Who knows. But I think overall the quality of ads are on the rise due to accountability, if that makes sense.

Eric,
It's interesting that content and advertising isn't really a separation that most people care about now. One of the greatest things to happen to the quality of advertising was measurement. Essentially, what matters is response, to content and advertising. Or, as Henry Luce Gossage once said, "People read what interests them. Occasionally that will be advertising." We can now modify that and say "Occasionally that will be content, advertising, etc..."

I wonder if the Twitter problems will lead to it going on the block soon, for a discount?

Good point. At some point there's just detritus overload.

I agree with the notion that social news sites should become more vertical, but some of the early attempts at that have been slow going. I happen to like cars a lot and most of the social news sites for cars have been useless. Other than Digg/Reddit (which are somewhat horizontal, but as we know basically internet culture stuff), are there any truly vertical news sites?

I think they are useful in that they curate the detritus of our internet fetishes and turn a spotlight on things that historically only existed by word of mouth or in small groups. What would be great interesting is if a major news network took some of these tools and created new perspectives on this -- sort of like Diggnation but with a MEet the Press perspective.

Another thing: content networks just figure throwing out a bunch of stories on a given topic has an evergreen benefit for search. Down the road when someone searches for this, they're betting they will be better off to have the story as opposed to not having it. Oversaturating is a problem they're willing to have today given the benefits of tomorrow.

Yes, but I'd like to be able to do so from a reader's perspective, as well. I think Google and HBX do a good job of this on the publisher side, but because of cookie limitations it's never really completely accurate. On the reader side, nobody is doing this besides Google that I know of -- and I think some people get a little freaked out by this, too.

In the print world, a lot of magazines are judged by how many pages go unread by their audience (a lower number is better, obviously). This isn't something that non-direct response environment can handle, but editors get a good idea of what people are reading and not reading.

The web is somewhat similar. I've read (I think) at least 40% of all Seth Godin posts on his site. That's a lot.

It would be interesting if this was a useful metric for users and site owners. I guess Google already knows this (knows everything about my search history), but it's not useful info between forms. In other words, what if onlinemediacultist could map:

- X return uniques, who have on average consumed (_) amount of all OMC pages, over (_) days

And what if me, as a web person, could map:

- where I've visited, (_)% of (_)site, when

This is probably way more complicated than it appears in my head, but your post seemed to trigger something in me that I think would be valuable: a better way to understand usage on both sides of the equation.

If it's not below your waist, though, it doesn't count. Nice shirt, but I always played the technicalities with this game. For instance if you broke the cicle without looking at it, you could hit the person instead.

Nice -- hopefully we can get some outtakes from this at some point!