Disqus - Latest Comments for Stanley Wong

Re: Rory Sutherland: Life lessons from an ad man, TED Talks

Stanley Wong — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:42:05 -0000

great stuff

Re: Yahoo just needs to fix one thing: Monetization

Stanley Wong — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 13:12:07 -0000

Great article. One correction here. CPM actually refers to Cost Per Thousand or Cost Per Mil. It is a term that originated in the traditional media circles (print & broadcast) to refer to the cost of a thousand impressions or viewings.

Keep up the good work!

Re: The next revolution in advertising? Peer39 thinks it’s semantics

Stanley Wong — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 14:12:50 -0000

There isn't any rules based algos to make this type of thing work today. Keywords are not sufficient.

Re: Facebook viral marketing: When and why do apps “jump the shark?”

Stanley Wong — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 18:23:14 -0000

Love this great post.

The logistic curve you refer to is actually also known as a Sigmoid function (aka S-Curve).

On Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function

There is also an Excel spreadsheet floating around for the S-Curve here:

http://jcandkimmita.info/jc/2007/04/business/modeling-market-adoption-in-excel-with-a-simplified-s-curve/

I've used this to model pretty closely Facebook application growth of some pretty popular apps.

Best,

Stanley

Re: Has the Facebook platform hit its peak?

Stanley Wong — Tue, 06 May 2008 22:39:04 -0000

All the low hanging fruit easy stuff on Facebook has mostly been done. The potential to build a big audience still hasn't changed. The thing that people are realizing is they need to build all the real company stuff such as a sustainable competitive advantage, monetization strategy, etc.

@Dave MacClure: The pony may be the ability for social apps to attract and aggregate targeted audiences via the social graph. Attract the wrong audience and you have crappy CPMs ($0.10-0.30). Attract the right audience plus build the right context and you have the potential to command higher CPMs ($2-10 CPM).

This is nothing new and is very much like the early days of the web where the companies that stuck to the fundamentals and focused on building real business rather than a massive land grab made the most money.

Re: Mirror mirror on the wall, which blog search is best of them all?

Stanley Wong — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 12:30:29 -0000

When looking at who is best I think one must look at two things.

* Quality of Results (i.e. SPAM is huge problem)
* Quantity of Results (i.e. Up to date, coverage)

To me the quantity of results don't mean a whole lot especially if I have thousands of results returned and a good majority of it are SPAM. So quality is more important, than quantity in my book.

For example, I frequently (once per week) like to do blog searches to find out what is happening in real estate for a particular area (search: "real estate austin").

http://technorati.com/search/real+estate+austin

For this search, on the first page the 3rd, 5th - 10th are all SPAM. There are 10 search results on the first page, so 70% of the results are SPAM. I the 1st, 2nd, and 4th result contain the words "real" , "estate", and "austin" but have nothing to do with what I am looking for.

The same search on Google Blogs don't contain any Spam on the first page.
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&a...

The first result is a blog post about Hyde Park real estate in Austin. Highly relevant to what I am looking for.

Some more competitive areas are ripe with SPAM. Check out the following:
http://technorati.com/search/phentermine
http://technorati.com/search/ringtones

Given that a recent Microsoft research study mentioned that Blogspot contained more than 70% Spam Blogs I am not surprised by the results that I am seeing. Google seems to be doing a much better job at filtering SPAM than Technorati.

Re: Microsoft Hires Yahoo Veteran As Live Search's Chief Scientist

Stanley Wong — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 07:46:44 -0000

Not surprising... Jan Pedersen worked closely with Qi Lu when he was at Yahoo!

Re: Kara Interviews Jason Calacanis

Stanley Wong — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 16:34:18 -0000

For the life of me I still don't see how Mahalo will scale. Yahoo!'s original directory started off with a team of Surfers (editors) who created and organized and ontology. Yahoo! ended up decommissioning the directory because it didn't scale. Yahoo! was overwhelmed by the number of submissions.

Fast forward to what eventually became Open Directory Project (aka DMOZ) which eventually amassed over 70,000 editors. The current DMOZ is rife with SPAM, dead links, neglect, and accusations of graft.

Other things such as Social Bookmarking (i.e. Del.icio.us, Reddit, etc) have shown problems as well due to the lack of depth.

Mahalo, to me, is more like Answers.com than a competitor to Google, Yahoo!, & Microsoft's search engines.

The bottom line is the Internet, growing at an exponential rate, just can't scale with linear approaches to organize the information. One must employ algorithmic techniques that can scale with the growth of information on the web and understand concepts from a fundamental relationship level.

Re: Day 73: The (Sleepy) Attack of the Yahoo Vice Presidents

Stanley Wong — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 14:09:16 -0000

Yahoo! has:
* Huge consumer audience - check
* Large advertising base/reach - check
* Number of branded websites - check
* Recognizable Brand Name - check

In short, Yahoo! has all the assets stacked in their favor to succeed. In the end it really boils down to:
Execution, execution, execution!

That's about it. The only "sacred cow" that needs to be sacrificed is Yahoo!'s is the slow moving stagnant execution killing company culture.

Yahoo! reminds me of the classic movie Rocky 3 where Rocky Balboa has become complacent surrounded by yes men. Mickey dies and can no longer protect Rocky. Clubber Lang (Google) beats the living crap out of Rocky. Rocky, through the help of Apollo, regains his confidence and the "Eye of the Tiger" to learn to fight on his own two feet.

Reinventing (or rediscovering) the company's killer instinct (Ey e of the Tiger) begins and ends with the people @ Yahoo! End of story.

Re: Kara Interviews RockYou Co-Founders Jia Shen and Lance Tokuda

Stanley Wong — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 00:51:17 -0000

Jia had the most insightful comment about how these basic games on Facebook are going to evolve along the lines of virtual gaming. Especially his comment about Facebook (& others) eventually creating a virtual payment system. I'm sure this will unlock micropayments for different things.