There's been a lot of talk recently about Josh Kopelman's post, in which he wrote:
"As more and more entrepreneurs start building what Fred Wilson referred to as second derivative companies, I think they run a big risk of designing a product/service that is targeted at too small of an audience. Too many companies are targeting an audience of 53,651. That’s how many people subscribe to Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch blog feed. I’m a big fan of Techcrunch – and read it every day. However, the Techcrunch audience is NOT a mainstream America audience."
Paul Kedrosky and Om Malik have great follow-up posts. All of this talk actually coincided with my own review of Read/WriteWeb. I've been delving into my server and Measure Map stats in an effort to identify what's been popular on my blog this year - and what topics my readers like the best. Also recently I got the results of the FM Publishing survey I had on my blog -- and turned out my results were pretty similar to those of Techcrunch. Here are Techcrunch's results, with mine in brackets:
Audience:
· 89% male (RWW = 84%)
· 81% 18-39 (RWW = 71%)
· 50% HHI [household income] above $75k (RWW = 45%)
· 39% Director level or above (RWW = 39%; with 60% being manager level or
above!)
· 55% IT professionals, developers, engineers, or consultants (RWW = 63%)
· 60% publish their own blog (RWW = 68%)
I can tell you that most of the FM blogs have similar stats. Some of them have a more broader audience (e.g. BoingBoing), but there are a subset of FM blogs that have an overwhelmingly male, Gen Y/X, rich, manageriel/executive, IT-based and geeky audience. They include Techcrunch, GigaOm, A VC, Buzzmachine, Read/WriteWeb. The predominance of male readers (and writers) for these blogs is actually pretty worrying and probably sums up how narrow a niche audience this is.
Here are the main summary stats for Read/WriteWeb, from my FM survey:
- 60% of my readers are decision-makers (manager level or above)
- 92% are early adopters of technology
- 60% are computer professionals or consultants
I take that as meaning Read/WriteWeb is successful in providing the information it sets out to: web/media product analysis, market positioning, industry trends and insights. That's the kind of information that decision-making early adopting, IT professionals need. So I'm glad I'm providing it. Indeed my challenge now is to get the full 53,651 people who need it, to subscribe to Read/WriteWeb as well as Techcrunch :-)
OK I do wish that the group of '53,651' people was more inclusive (more women, more over 40's, more non-IT people, etc). That's something we as an industry need to look more closely at. I know Susan Mernit, Dave Winer and others have been keen to have a more inclusive audience, so it's not as if we're ignoring the issue.
Any suggestions on what I can do at Read/WriteWeb to get a broader and more inclusive subscriber base? Tone down the geek-techie talk perhaps? More market research-based posts?
I just noticed that MSN has a new project called MSN Originals, in which MSN will partner with content creators to deliver a "new generation of storytelling online". It's described as:
"MSN Originals will expand the ways that top brands can tell their stories beyond standard media through in-content integration, and even have a seat at the table in the early stages of content creation and production."
Together with the media industry, we can create unique, made-for-broadband experiences that use video, interactive editorial, online community, and more to take storytelling to the next level."
Advertising is one of the main pitches for this, as it is with anything Yahoo does these days (Y! CEO Terry Semel said recently: "Our fundamental business is selling advertising..."). So that disturbs me a little - is MSN Originals just going to be another vehicle for media to assail us with their adverts? Or is it really about creating new forms of storytelling for the Web?
MSN Originals has already struck up partnerships with Hollywood production studio and distribution company Reveille (which has produced tv shows like NBC's The Office and The Biggest Loser, FX's 30 Days, MTV's Date My Mom) and with Be Jane Inc., a multimedia content producer and web community for women's home improvement.
But is anyone else disturbed by this statement?
"We're excited to team up with the media industry to drive new innovation in online advertising and branded content integration. Together we will push the boundaries of what interactive means for consumers and marketers by bringing together the best of Hollywood, Madison Avenue and Redmond," said Microsoft senior director of the MSN Branded Entertainment and Experiences Team Gayle Troberman.
Call me artsy-fartsy, but MSN Originals seems to be more focused on advertising and marketing -- than on storytelling. Indeed it seems very much like a Web version of a television network - the network (MSN) gets original programming from content producers, wraps it up in advertising and then broadcasts it to consumers.
DataMashups.com is the latest Ajax-based web app development service to be released. It's a hosted service for developers and offers an integrated development environment "to rapidly create mashups and web applications with limited or no need for server side code". The service is based on the open source AppliBuilder - a AJAX builder tool. The product blog explains more and notes that they took their cue from Ning, Zoho Creator and others.
When I first heard about DataMashups.com, I immediately wondered if they are targeting non-technical users as well as developers - given that Ning has had problems gaining traction amongst non-developers (who Ning targeted). Tony Thomas from DataMashups.com explained:
"We're clearly targeting the developer market. We're relatively recent to the online development idea, having been quietly working on distributed data and data integration. But once we got into the model of doing the development online, we see a lot of potential for this technology in the enterprise. Having such tools setup in the enterprise could open the door to interesting new applications with enterprise data, since enterprise developers can try out new applications with no setup required, and small investments of their time."
So the enterprise is a key market for DataMashups.com. Is there a consumer market aspect to their plans too? Tony said:
"We're not as sure about the online service, and whether there is a viable business there. It should serve as an easy way for new prospects to try the product, and expose us to new ideas and requirements. But we do not expect it to be a significant revenue opportunity for us. Would be great to be surprised on the upside there, but we're not expecting that."
Check out DataMashups.com and let me know how it compares to Ning, Zoho
Creator and the recently launched Dabble DB
(my write-up of that is on
ZDNet).
Stowe Boyd and Mike Arrington reported today that AOL’s new social networking product AIM Pages is now live. I'm told by my sources that it's still in the testing phase, nevertheless it *is* live on the Web. There is a lot more functionality to come though. For example PaidContent wrote recently:
"Unlike walled-garden Classic AOL, AIM Pages is built on giving users ways to collect and connect to various parts of the web — and each other — from one base. For instance, users can add a flickr module. “Our approach is not to get you to leave flickr but to super-set your stuff from flickr,” explained Parkins. Other modules focus on AOL content, like the Top 11 list from AOL Music; options will be limited at first with more modules being introduced on a rolling basis."
As Mike said, the design is very modular - and that extends not only to internal AIM Pages functionality, but also to external web services modules. From the AIM Pages homepage, click on 'Create your profle'. You will be taken to your profile page, click 'Add Modules' and then you will see a 'Module Gallery' at the top-left. The most interesting part in that gallery is the 'Under Construction' selection. It currently features modules like delicious, netflix and youtube - but there's a whole lot more to come!
Check out AOL's test 'playground' I Am Alpha to see what I mean. In there you'll see modules for popular web services such as: MySpace, YouTube, del.icio.us, Flickr, Amazon, eBay, MapQuest, Netflix, AOL apps, RSS feeds, plus plenty of other test modules. Now admittedly these are all very alpha quality modules (as the name implies), but it shows that AOL is ahead of the curve in integrating external services into its social networking offering. Note that I'm somewhat biased here, as Broadband Mechanics (who I do work for) was contracted by AOL to build the following external modules: NetFlix, Amazon, eBay, MySpace, Network for Good and Delicious. But still, I think you'll agree that AOL's willingness to hook into external web services is a very encouraging (and forward-thinking) break from the past for them. Tearing down those 90's Walled Gardens!
p.s. note that despite all the 'MySpace killer' theories out there, AIM Pages actually works *with* MySpace - in terms of having a module for it (in testing on I Am Alpha).
To try it out go to the I Am Alpha frontpage and click the 'playground!!' tab. You need to log in using your AOL id in order to play around - and this is the kind of page you can then create:
Below is a closer look at one of the modules, the Amazon one. As you can see, it shows your Wish List and you can click the tab to see your Amazon reviews.
You can then publish your page into a pretty basic-looking 'homepage', which is a test for AIM Pages. This is all very alpha right now and indeed what you see currently on AIM Pages is just a slice of the real goodies. But given more development and the inevitable marketing push, I think this will be a compelling product. It's a taste of what Internet portal homepages will be like in the future. As well as having social networking functionality, portals will integrate modules for popular web services and be able to communicate (and eventually transact) with those external services.
Pageflakes, one of the little startups in the
'personalized start page' market, has come out with a page publishing feature that
nicely connects with my post the other day: Web 2.0 market segment
mashups. In that post I noted that we're seeing a lot of market segment cross-over
nowadays, in terms of functionality and feature sets. I also made the point that
'personalized start pages' (such as Pageflakes) are designed to be a user's private homepage on
the Web for their content subscriptions and web apps. But at the time I thought they
didn't have much in common with the 'Microcontent Aggregators' I'd been reviewing (such
as Peoplefeeds and Suprglu), which are more focused on aggregating and publishing a
user's personal content onto one page.
However this new feature by Pageflakes puts those definitions to the test, because it enables you to publish your Pageflakes homepage so that others may view it - perhaps just friends, or even make it totally public. As explained by Ole Brandenburg:
"It's a good way to quickly setup a readonly site of yours on the web. Put notes, todo list, some feeds, a clock on your public page and you have a nice site of yours!"
So in a way, this publishing feature intersects with the content management functionality of the likes of Peoplefeeds and Suprglu. Or as Ian Kennedy from Yahoo! put it so well, in a comment on my market segment mashups post:
"The line between what you read and what you (re)publish is, as you point out, becoming blurred. This is a complex design problem but everyone's thinking about it so we should see some interesting solutions in the next couple of months."
Currently I think this feature by Pageflakes is 'read only' [update - correction, shared pages can in fact be edited] - but what if they went
even further and enabled other people to (re)write the site (subject to some security or
approval mechanism perhaps by the start page owner). That would add another layer onto
web services. Because if you publish your personal homepage so that others may read/write
it too, well then essentially you're creating a new web service. Or does that get too
confusing? :-)
At any rate, Pageflakes has around 70 widgets now (they call them flakes) and is one of the best start pages on the market currently. Both Pageflakes and Netvibes are doing some unique things and pushing the boundaries. I get the feeling there is room for more than a few 'little guys' in a market which also features Microsoft (live.com), Google, AOL and Yahoo widgets.
Late last week it was surprisingly revealed that Microsoft now aims to be a media company, rather than a software company. This was in the context of Microsoft's launch of its adCenter product, a direct competitor to Google's Adsense and Adwords. But there it was in black and white, in a Microsoft press release:
""Ad-supported software services are an integral part of Microsoft's plans to give consumers access to a broader variety of digital media, whenever they want and on whatever device they prefer," said Ballmer. "Our close partnership with the ad community is extremely important to us as we evolve Microsoft from a software company into the world's largest, most attractive provider of online media through MSN, Windows Live(TM) and adCenter."
(emphasis mine)
When the world's biggest and most successful software company ever proclaims itself to be a media company, you know the times they are a changin'.
Then I saw this MediaShift interview with I Want Media editor Patrick Phillips, who is also an adjunct professor of digital journalism at New York University. 'I Want Media' has been going since 2000 and it offers an excellent daily email - a comprehensive daily list of links to media/tech stories (thanks Scott Karp for telling me about it).
Phillips is in a better position than most to comment on how the media world is being changed by technology. When asked "How has your coverage at I Want Media changed over that time?", he responded:
"[...] If anything, though, it’s probably more that Net and technology companies are encroaching steadily into the traditional media world.
When I launched IWM in July 2000, Google was just a young search engine. There was no Google Adwords. Google News was still two years off in the future. Now, of course, Google is taking steps into several traditional media strongholds, taking more and more advertising dollars away from “old” media. Yahoo is also moving aggressively into many traditional media areas. In addition, blogs and social networks like MySpace have emerged in recent years as legitimate alternative forms of media.
Traditional media companies are now eyeing them as possible acquisition targets — and as rivals. The concept of “media” itself has broadened beyond print and over-the-air to include digital and search. So, naturally, IWM covers the activities of these kinds of companies as well. Google is now a media company just as much as Time Warner."
(emphasis mine)
This incidentally is why I changed the focus of Read/WriteWeb at the beginning of 2006 to be about tech/media, rather than specifically 'web 2.0' (although in reality I'm still more tech focused than media).
So talk about convergence, the tech and media worlds are pretty much one and the same these days!
As a Web (2.0) consultant and analyst (about me), I track a variety of market segments and products. Luckily for me, nowadays I don't have to do as much grunt work on gathering high level product data as I used to. There are a plethora of product lists and data about web 2.0 companies on the Web now, unlike 12-18 months ago when I had to track it all down myself. Of course my job as a researcher and analyst is to go much deeper than the high level product data - I then need to turn it into practical insights, recommendations, knowledge, etc.
Anyway here is (in no particular order) a list of the web 2.0 lists and other helpful product data that I've found on the Web. I encourage you to add other sources in the comments.
I'm sure there are more web 2.0 lists out there which I've forgotten to mention, so please add in the comments and I'll update this post as they come in.
Update 7 May 06: Added more lists based on comments. Will do more updates as required.
Mike Riversdale asked an interesting question
in the comments of my previous
post:
"What, in your (and others) opinion, is the difference (if any) between the "online desktop" (A) (I'm thinking Netvibes and the like) and the "Personal Content Network" (B)."
Actually I'm seeing a lot of crossover and cross-pollination in the market segments I'm tracking these days. The Web Office theme I'm exploring over on my ZDNet blog is very closely aligned to the WebOS (i.e. web-based OS services) market. Goowy is an example of a product that is both an office suite and an OS/desktop type application. I also noted a few posts ago that PeopleFeeds, 43Things and Suprglu could be classified as anything from a Content Management system, to a Social Networking Service or an RSS Reader.
Another example: the increasingly hard-to-tell difference between a modern RSS Reader and a Personalized News service like Tech.memeorandum. RSS Readers like Rojo and the Newsgator family are adding more filtering and social recommendation functionality - taking their cue from successful services like Digg and Memeorandum. Meanwhile the likes of Tailrank and Megite are attempting to make their News aggregators increasingly personalized (like an RSS Reader).
So there is a lot of cross-pollination going on, which gives industry analysts like me something to chew on! ;-)
But back to Mike's specific question: what's the difference between Ajax Homepages (e.g. Netvibes, Pageflakes, Live.com) and Microcontent Aggregators (e.g. Peoplefeeds, Suprglu)? Peter Cooper followed up with this comment:
"Mike: The primary difference from my POV is that you don't really share entire Netvibes pages, but Superglu is something that other people can look at and use rather than just you."
I'd add that Ajax Homepages are designed to be a home for your external content sources and web services (aka widgets, gadgets, modules -- whatever you want to call them). So an Ajax Homepage like Netvibes or Pageflakes is more focused on being a central place to store your favourite content (news, RSS feeds, etc), plus a place to access all of your web apps and personalized services (like for example access to your Writely account, or your tv schedule -- i.e. much more than just the weather and clock apps you mostly see today).
The Personal Content Network services (to use Dick Costolo's great phrase) are much more about organizing the content you created - and as Peter noted, making it easier for other people to subscribe to and/or filter your content.
But we're certainly seeing a lot of interbreeding of functionality and features between web 2.0 market segments, which is an encouraging sign that developers and startups are paying attention to the landscape and trying new things in order to evolve.
Pollination pic: libraryman
In part 3 of my
look at mc aggregators [here are parts 1 and 2], I get stuck
into Suprglu. In this post I ask the question: how
sticky is this site? But enough puns, let's get down to business. SuprGlu, a production
of New York design studio Iridesco, is another product that
enables users to collect their content from various services (flickr, delicious,
etc) and put it in one place.
Of the 3 such products I've profiled so far - 43Things, PeopleFeeds and Suprglu - the easiest one to use is Suprglu. The step-by-step set-up process is user-friendly and includes a long list of possible content sources:
43 Things
All Consuming
Blogger
Clipmarks
del.icio.us
Digg
Flickr
Last.fm
LiveJournal
Simpy
Wordpress.com
If anything, it made me feel guilty for not having enough content sources! :-) It did seem to take a while for Suprglu to fetch the feeds, but it was a relatively minor issue. All in all, Suprglu has a nicely designed and helpful user interface.
The other feature that stands out about Suprglu is the ability to not only choose from a range of default page designs, but you can also customize your CSS and create your own design. I haven't had time to do that myself, but a good example is Emily Chang's Suprglu page. So in effect, you can create a brand new blog based on all of your content sources - and you can style it just as you would a Movable Type or Wordpress blog. I can see this becoming increasingly appealing, as more and more content 'buckets' appear on the Web for users to create content in. An aggregate blog to be a home for all that content would be very handy.
It also strikes me that commercial websites like Edgeio and Amazon should be rapt with services like Suprglu and PeopleFeeds. Because it's so easy to aggregate using Suprglu, it encourages consumers to collect and 'own' the content they input into edgeio or Amazon - and that theoretically encourages people to input content into many places. Of course, that behoves commercial companies to offer RSS feeds for user-generated content (I know edgeio does, but not Amazon to my knowledge).
Suprglu is made out of open source technologies, including Ruby on Rails. Emily Chang interviewed the founders back in December and got this neat quote from them about what it does:
"SuprGlu is about allowing people to pick up the bits and pieces of themselves scattered around the web and being able to put it all together in the form of a digital scrapbook."
As far as my Suprglu page goes, I found the tags to be useful but minimalist (nowhere near as impressive as PeopleFeeds). It also only has one single RSS feed - for the whole page. No RSS feeds for tags/categories (that I could see) and no filtering options. So both 43Things and PeopleFeeds offer much more functionality in that respect. The main attraction to Suprglu is the ability to style your page - and in effect use it as your main blog.
Finally I want to highlight a comment that Dick Costolo from Feedburner left on my previous post, about PeopleFeeds. Dick wrote:
"I love this concept. Let all the focused applications that are the best in their domains be the content management systems for that kind of content and then provide a framework for me to pull it all together. These kinds of Personal Content Networks will be a bigger and bigger part of the landscape. Very cool."
Personal Content Networks is a great term and neatly captures the value that services like 43Things, PeopleFeeds and Suprglu offer for users. Every day on the Web a new website turns up that wants "user-generated content" added to it - Flickr, delicious, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Digg, blogs of course, social networks like MySpace and Facebook, edgeio, Nooked, BBC - the list goes on. I have a feeling we'll be needing more of these personal Microcontent Aggregators before long.
- Talkin' bout a media
revolution (BBC article on, er, BBC media. And they chose the worst possible Murdoch
photo to use :-) Anyway, it's an interesting article on how media is coping with web
2.0)
- BW on News Corp Web strategy ("Fox Interactive Media has picked up two small Web companies to complement earlier Internet acquisitions such as MySpace" -- Newroo and kSolo hardly earth-shattering buys... haven't seen a solid Web strategy yet from News Corp)
- Yahoo Tech Is Tech For the Rest of Us (Scott Karp responds to criticism of Yahoo Tech by myself and Om Malik, amongst other geeks. Om responds. I'll certainly be interested to see if/how Yahoo Tech gathers a passionate user base around their site...)
- Yahoo's New Reality (Newsweek report on Yahoo Tech and Y!'s general strategy -- positions it as a battle against Google. Hmmm, I'm not necessarily buying that...)
- Microsoft Expected To Invest Another $2 Billion On Web Services, Xbox (Microsoft making all the right moves, but the stock market and its analysts didn't like the extra spending...)
- Always-On upgrades to its new social networking site, GoingOn (this has Marc Canter's DLA stamp all over it - disclaimer: I did a bit of work on the initial specs as part of BBM)
- Is the pace of change really such a shock? (Reality check from Tom Coates, who argues correctly that broadcast media is slowly but surely being usurped due to technology -- it hasn't been a sudden change...)
- BBC Programme Catalogue (prototype of tv catalogue database holding over 900,000 entries -- more from Ben Metcalfe, who calls it "IMDB for BBC programmes".)
- A Firefox versus IE7 smackdown (Ed Bott compares IE7 betas to Firefox and concludes that Microsoft has effectively caught up, from technical pov.)
- Web 2.0 meets the enterprise (Well-written CNET article on a trend that I'm tracking closely...)
