DISQUS

in twenty seconds you have provided me three links that will change my life. now THAT'S good blogging mister scoble. thank you !
- srini

happy new year !!! nobody cares about your privacy unless it's you, and advertising pays for everything, so caveat registror. i have been rendered immune to caring about this by the parade of throwaway facebook apps + the news feed - this simply seems like an "i got bit by a vampire ! do you want to get bit too ?" for the twitter crowd.

this service at least strikes me as useful. someone was apparently trying to do something helpful for others, and if the final payoff was $1200 i mean that sounds pretty coder-altruistic to me. i don't see a ponzi scheme brewing inside this guy's head. this simply seems like a case study in contagion, and quite likely will become a "best practice" for a certain class of projects - as Eric Rice points out, it's Qik and Brightkite and such which proclaimed to the world "hey coders, you can program robots to talk into twitter, it's cool, no biggie". so this twply coder just did that too, which was adapt a best practice from inane fb apps and qik et al to his intentions (which apparently started with "i want a truck of people to use this" and ended when he got his wish).

is a tweet saying "hey i'm live streaming on _service_, come chat" automatically any better than this ? frankly, it's worse, isn't it? if you're a qik user do you see how annoying this "feature" makes you on twitter? whereas new signups to a service - at least that only happens once....

Argh, I have been selling REBOOT AMERICA stickers since 1996.

I wonder what other UNAMERICAN.COM stickers are going to be re-"applied" by the punditocracy. hey, "leggo my ego" :)

Google's a giant middleman.

Let the advertisers pay the publishers directly. Sounds good to me !!! Especially if the publishers have an audience that listens to them or really uses the heck out of their service in a CONTEXT-RICH AND SEGMENT-TARGETED way (like our friends at dogster for instance)

Google AdSense is neat because of the context targeting at all, but you can do that yourself (or let the users do it like Ning).

The macroeconomic picture is that United States residents have certain advantages in creating and profiting from intellectual property as is generated from places like the blogosphere. Our country is perhaps headed for a weak dollar, so foreigners will suddenly find their pockets bulging with undeserved money. Providing information products is a no-brainer, and American exporters should definitely sponsor these publishers - who should be working hard on translating their pages into other languages.

Luckily, the METANOTES interface will be a snap to internationalize - it like has fifty words, all the rest is UGC. And hey sponsors - Japanese internet users would love to learn about your company as they take to our platform, they really would :)

- Srini Kumar
CEO
METANOTES.COM

The big Web 2.0 successes, ugly as they may be, succeeded because of marketing built into the platform as part of the product. YouTube and Flickr were POSITIONED as the solution to a key USAGE that grew directly out of entirely obvious NEW DEMAND generated by technologies they didn't even need to create (the PLATFORM PARADIGM SHIFT to cheap and eventually ubiquitous digital video and photo devices). Facebook lucked into SERENDIPITIOUS SEGMENTATION - they were for students, by students, for a few years, totally dominating that niche before moving on.

And myspace definitely marketed - they handed out stickers to kids at the Warped Tour for instance. Straight across the chasm, under the radar of any web blogosphere (not that it was so robust back then but still), and right into the heart of generation Y. Their product didn't need to rule; they had reached into a market that needed them with a solution that did the trick.

There are tons of potential users that will never see many amazing Web 2.0 applications because they didn't bother to advertise. Such firms essentially wind up providing "proof of concept" for future firms who actually understand the business of marketing. These potential users don't read TechMeme, but that's all you've been socialized to care about if you exist within the blogosphere bubble.

If your product succeeds in the tiny Web2.0geek market, you will tend to focus on that tiny market (even if it goes "viral" it's tiny) while someone else crosses your chasm because they actually know how to talk to mainstream users. Take a great product and actually MARKET it to a new user segment that's much bigger - that is marketing innovation, and it can trump product innovation and it isn't passive as Andreesen's paradigm implies.

It's OK, nothing to cry over, just the natural wash of disruptive innovation, like waves crashing on the shore.

I think the financial picture doesn't take into account the strategic picture.

What Ballmer and Murdoch and Zuckerberg are considering is that happy social network and web application users are basically locked in. API's mean that these users won't even get quite so bored over time because third party developers and content creators will continue to keep their platforms fresh. Finally, someday the "cost-per-click" business model innovation that saved Google will be echoed with social networks. Someone's going to figure out how to monetize these things. Souls locked into platforms - that is the strategic significance of social networking.

It is also close to a zero-sum game - users probably have a certain number of web 2.0 type sites they'll bother to use frequently - and that's it. There may be some evolution or disruption of this order someday, but there is also a great likelihood that it'll be like TV before cable - there will be a Big Three, and then a few independent successes, and then the long tail. Who those Big Three will turn out to be is the subject of the MS bid for Yahoo - MS will not be locked out of that brandspace, and without Yahoo it does not look good for them.

the future of social media is a tiered subscription model, tied with deep affiliate product placement as well as CPC advertising.

successful free apps can generate a large social network, and then you convert 1-5% of them into paid subscriptions while selling the rest of them one-off products, trying to create a marketplace between them where you extract a fee (craigslist/ebay style), internal advertising and context-sensitive CPC advertising, and maybe even a link to a tangible product that can be sold in retail stores.

there are so many ways to launch a new social network with an eye to the above, but that's not to say you could monetize FACEBOOK in all of these ways. Facebook is "kid stuff" but good for them, if the kids are united they will never be divided (that's an old punk rock lyric there)

Record companies should clone (or even innovate on) an old-school iPod and then give it away by the millions. This clone should have integrated wi-fi and be able to download music without connecting to a PC. You shouldn't be able to easily use it as an external hard drive. This would create a second market for digital content. Freebies could be given away to each one every day to keep people using it as well as provide the majors with a way to break new bands. People could subscribe to download bundles or buy them by the bundle.

Actually what if it was an iPod-combination-cd-burner ? Labels could control the digital rights, users could make mix cd's easily (labels should concede users the right to make a reasonable number of copies for this usage), and it'd be different enough from the iPod to possibly trump it. Sony is looking for a hit in portable music to counter the iPod, and their brand name would make the units very popular. The labels however, should buy and distribute the units, as they are closer to the end consumer and they want to control the final music sales mechanism. Think of it as a "one laptop per child" for digital music.

I feel so psychic - I wrote a paper during my MBA about how Terry Semel and missteps with their few M&A wins have ruined Yahoo!'s brand. Let me know if you'd like to see it :)

I brought up in the paper two things from an EARLIER era that pointed out Yahoo!'s basic incompetence with M&A:
* GeoCities SHOULD HAVE BECOME MYSPACE.
* Broadcast.com SHOULD HAVE BECOME YOUTUBE.

Yahoo! buys Web 2.0 companies and sits on them. It is clear that their top engineers are working on yet another iteration of Overture rather than creating stellar user experiences and functionality. De.licio.us in particular is a tragedy - barely upgraded since the merger, only now showing up integrated into Yahoo Search results, etc.

Oh well, plenty more lunch for us to eat :)

- Srini Kumar
CEO
MetaNotes.com

@ #18

you said "facebook's a profit seeking business therefore why the ruckus".

the ruckus is composed of these facts:
* not just some users, but ADVERTISERS are withdrawing in disgust
* no serious response at all by executive management - at ALL - to the extent that friggin MOVEON has to get involved - truly a marvel of leadership ignorance
* when you are throwing a party, you know the party is winding down when people start heading for the exits
* this is still a nascent field, and Facebook "dominating" it is seen by new entrants as a silly, silly perspective (e.g. their invulnerability is nothing compared to a Google) - sub-point, new entrants have a great window of opportunity to steal angered FB users

The problem is no longer that Facebook "doesn't have a business model" - it is that Facebook probably will never have one, if this is the best they could come up with. 45 million users and no idea how to make money. it's astonishing.

it's a slippery slope heading down towards Google X-Ray Vision, Google Remote Hypnotic Suggestion, Google's Invisible Hand and Google Time Stop/Rewind...

it's all right there in the Advanced Dungeons And Dragons Dungeon Masters' Guide...

-srini

More RE/SEARCH, SubGenius and Acme Novelty Library books need to be purchased in this world !!! BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY !!!

I love the SF local bookstores, so if they want to sell more of such titles, they should put them in the damn windows or something.

Sounds like Scott is simply being parsimonious. Connecting his website with the books that influence him is a public service. aStores is a simple way to get this done fast.

I haven't heard about Amazon using slave labor in the third world to manufacture its products, or their use of synthetics and petroleum by-products in contradiction to their "brand promise". If and when Amazon's ethics level drops to the level of M&M/Mars or the Body Shop, I'll lead the damn boycott. Right now I live in the heart of North Carolina and Amazon.com is a bloody lifeline.

I also like the Powell's affiliate program, in case you're thinking of dropping Amazon... I wonder if we could get AK Press to set something up, if we just offered some free coding to them...

- Srini

hi there! i own a sticker factory:

http://www.stickernation.com

and i want to help print stickers to support your movie. if you are interested let me know; you're doing awesome work & i just want to help!!!

-srini
http://www.stickernation.com