Monday, May 28, 2007
Ad Markets

Tim Oren writes:


One is the collapse of the notion that users' means of access would control where they spend their time and do their searches on the net. Whether your strategy hoped to influence the outcome via control of the user's browser and PC (MSFT), dial-up (AOL) or broadband access (YHOO, via AT&T partnership), this chart shows you losing. Anyone just hitting the nets now is a self-proclaimed late adopter. Everyone else, from the pioneers to the late majority, have been out there long enough to find their own way around. The 'control the user' notion was probably bogus from the start, but it's visibly dead now. (Wireless providers might profit from the lesson.)

Another conclusion is how a market has been beating a traditional sales model. Advertising is of course the payload of the 'search' marketplace.

GooglePhone Fact and Fiction

DailyWireless analyses all the statements and theories.

Creators, Curators, Consumers

Jeremy Liew writes about the three groups who interact with content. "Creators use the keyboard - they write, cut, copy and paste. In most cases, creators do what they do for passion, not for money. They need to be celebrated and highlighted on your site to give them the adulation that they seek, and to keep them creating content...Consumers use the screen - they merely navigate around your site, and do little or nothing to add to it. But because they outnumber the other groups so significantly, they dominate your monetization opportunity...Curators use the mouse. They click to vote/digg/rate. These actions are what give the Creators the attention and affirmation that they are looking for."

7 C's of Cellphones

Tomi Ahonen discusses Communication, Consumption, Creation, Commerce, Community, Commercials and Control.

A View on India

Jorge Frayer writes about the good and the bad from his recent India trip:


The internal airline service is superb. Hot meals, a smiling crew, on time, new and clean planes, and a large choice of airlines. The other is the relatively few number of beggars that can be seen in Mumbai. It is as if people are too busy making money and begging is no longer lucrative.
...
For the majority of people, life in India continues to be very harsh with few material rewards. Today 5% of India can afford to do just about anything, 25% can get by comfortably and the rest live in material poverty. Their high tolerance, low expectations, plenty of great food and rich social structures lets the majority of India continue to live in peaceful coexistence.

However, it is this general sense of tolerance and low expectations that may be working against India in rebuilding its grossly inadequate infrastructure, virtually untouched since the British left after the second war. Inefficiencies in local governments add to the lack of progress and modernization. There is little sense of planning of public works and no sense of scheduling. Things begin and are left incomplete, to hopefully get restarted in the near future. India seems to lack the standards and practices to rebuild and expand its infrastructure.

TECH TALK: Facebook: The Platform

Last week, Facebook launched its Platform, effectively positioning itself as a social utility. Facebook's rise has been as astonishing as MySpace was over the past couple years. It is, arguably, as interesting a company as Google in terms of the innovations that it is coming up with. In this week's Tech Talk, we will take a closer look at what various people have been saying about Facebook. Let's begin by taking a look at the Facebook numbers.

Read/Write Web has some stats on Facebook:


Facebook is growing 3% per week (100,000 new users per day) and the fastest growing demographic is the 25 and up age group. Active users have doubled since Facebook expanded registration in Sept 2006. The international user base is still at an early stage, but obviously has room for large growth. Currently Canada has the most users outside of the United States, with more than 2.5 million active users; followed by the U.K. with more than 1.4 million active users.
As well as quantity, Facebook has on its side that it is a very sticky site - 50% of registered users come back to the site every day. Facebook is generating more than 40 billion page views per month, from 24 million "active" users - 50 pages per user every day, which is very very high. In comparative terms, Facebook is now the 6th most trafficked site in the U.S. and gets more page views than eBay.

Facebook also has an impressive range of social software apps - it claims it has the no. 1 photo sharing application on the web and it has just released a video app to take on YouTube.


The New York Times wrote about the launch of Facebook's platform:

Facebook...is inviting thousands of technology companies and programmers to contribute features to its service. They can even make money from the site’s users by doing so, and, at least for now, Facebook will not take a cut.
Some of the new features, demonstrated by software developers at a Facebook event on Thursday, will allow members to recommend and listen to music, insert Amazon book reviews onto their pages, play games and join charity drives, all without leaving the site.
...
Facebook is thinking big. In the parlance of its 23-year-old chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, the company is positioning itself as a “social operating system” for the Internet. It wants to sit at the center of its users’ online lives in the same way that Windows dominates their experience on a PC.

Dan Farber puts the announcements in a broader context:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls this latest interation of the service a “social utility,” which is an apt term.

It’s a utility in terms of a tool for the 24 million Facebook users, but it also reflects Facebook’s desire to become a utility, like an power company, in which potentially billions of people use the service in their personal and professional lives. Facebook, MySpace, and other growing colonies of linked communities with semi-permeable walls represent the rise of the social Web and Web utility companies.

Zuckerberg describes the Facebook core function that the new third-party applications can tap into as a “social graph,” the network of connections and relationships between people on the service.


Tomorrow: The Platform (continued)

Tech Talk | PermaLink | Comments (1)

Facebook is indeed hugely popular here- but again it's a very North American phenomenon and hence attracts huge press and blog entries worldwide. For the rest - or more appropriately " the immigrant community" here in the US, it is Orkut. Call it Facebook's poor cousin run by Google.

The two are strikingly similar in terms of features/ functionality but it is the culture that divides the two. That is, technology-enabled social networking does have its culture/ ethno-based segmentation.

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