Our current poll asks which 'personalized homepage' do you use? After a false start, the current results are very interesting. Google Personalized Homepage is most popular with 31%, followed by two of the innovative startups - Pageflakes 21% and Netvibes 20%. Interesting that two of the bigcos are lagging - My Yahoo 6% and Live.com with a paltry 2%. Yourminis actually has slightly more votes right now than Live.com.
It's not too late to add your vote...final results will be tallied up tomorrow.
The big news today is News Corporation and NBC Universal launching what they claim will be "the largest Internet video distribution network ever assembled", with AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo! as the site’s initial distribution partners. It will launch this summer (US). The benefits obviously work both ways - News Corp and NBC get 4 heavyweight Internet distribution partners (all of the big companies, except for Google) and the likes of AOL and Yahoo! get 'premium' TV and movie content from the entertainment bigcos.
Note that Google owns 5% of AOL, so it's not quite as cut and dried as being a 'GooTube killer' - Internet media is a very complex ecosystem. However it is a little bit like the situation with Enterprise web 2.0, where the smaller companies are partnering and consolidating in order to compete with the incumbents. Except in this case it's not so much 'smaller', as 'less popular' - because Google/YouTube dominates the online video market right now.
Another angle to think about here is that it gives the Internet companies in this partnership (AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo!) much more protection against copyright lawsuits. Take for example this recent report from Forbes, which notes that Yahoo is actively avoiding copyright lawsuits in regards to online video:
One of the big pieces of news this week was Google announcing their CPA (Cost-Per-Action) product, or as they're calling it - PPA (Pay-Per-Action). There are good analysis posts about the news from Techcrunch and Microsoft's Don Dodge. It's been expected for some time now that Google will move into CPA, as a lot of people in the industry view CPA as the holy grail of online advertising. But to step back a bit -- what is CPA? As Ebrahim Ezzy wrote on Read/WriteWeb last August:
"In contrast to the CPC Model, which seeks to drive a high volume of traffic to the advertiser, the still-emerging CPA model provides action/acquisition opportunities by offering financial incentives - usually in the form of a revenue share percentage - to publishers. Incentives are solely based on actions such as acquiring qualified database entrants (e.g. opt-in email), driving sign-ups, downloads, inquiries or ultimately acquiring paying customers."
Ebrahim also noted that CPA is optimal for advertisers, but it is a risky proposition for publishers. Therefore Google will be able to charge a lot more to advertisers for CPA. It's also important to note that Google is far from the first to move into this space - affiliate advertising networks like Commission Junction and LinkShare have enjoyed good revenues from it, plus web companies like Snap and Turn. However Google’s presence validates CPA in a big way.
To my mind, the big question (apart from will CPA actually work?) is how will Google's main competitors in online advertising respond? As Ebrahim wrote back in August, Google's competitive advantage is its network size. So really the only companies capable of competing with Google in CPA are Microsoft and Yahoo.
The "wisdom of crowds" is a popular web 2.0 buzzword, popularized by James Surowiecki’s book of the same name. At its most basic, the term means that two heads are better than one, and that still more heads will yield even better results.
The wisdom of crowds is all around us these days. Wikipedia is one of the best known examples of the concept at work. Thousands of Wikipedia users have created an encyclopedia that studies have shown is as accurate as traditional volumes like Britannica. Another well-known project is the Yahoo! Buzz Game, which is a prediction market for "high-tech products, concepts, and trends." Their memetracker market, for example, has predicted the state of the market in line with Alexa data. Note: Read/WriteWeb covered a Yahoo! event about prediction markets here.
Perhaps the best exponent so far of Web 'wisdom of crowds' is Google, which organizes websites based on how they link to each other. Google sees links as votes for the relevance of a page. It is of course more complicated than that, but one can make the argument that Google works by utilizing the wisdom of crowds to determine which websites are the most relevant.
So after 1 year of fund-raising, planning and development, your shiny new beta web app is finally ready... and now you think it's marketing time. You want to reach thousands of users as quickly as possible. Aha, you think, the cheapest and shortest path is viral marketing - via blogs and social news sites. So you turn to your favorite sites like digg, del.icio.us, TechCrunch and (of course) Read/WriteWeb. Somehow your email to Michael Arrington or Richard MacManus gets noticed above the hundreds of others, so your site gets featured and then other blog coverage follows! Yippee, this is the fame you were waiting for! But a few days later....absolute silence. No one is talking about you anymore, the activity on your site diminishes to nearly zero, and the new 'poster child' web 2.0 app is something else.
Like a nightmare, isn't it? But unfortunately, this horrible peak-then-slump scenario is very common in the web 2.0 era. The Alexa graph below illustrates this with a well known example, in this case following a TechCrunch write-up:
The reasons for this very common pattern are simple to guess. The web 2.0 savvy audience is overloaded with all these fancy new sites that come up everyday; and this audience will try a lot of apps, but not necessarily become a permanent user. That's why you are very vulnerable to get quickly forgotten, if you don't offer them something very useful and enduring.
The upshot is that timing your app/site promotion is very important. Even though popular blogs and news sites are a great way to attract community and VC attention, you should know when to show yourself. Below is a categorization that we suggest all upcomers consider before any marketing push...
After
the tremendous build-up and response
to Adobe's Apollo platform, which aims to integrate desktop apps with the Web,
we must also remember there are other products trying for the same thing. Dekoh
is one such competitor and, like Adobe's Apollo, it is in the business of
bringing the browser to the desktop.
Launched in private beta at the end of February, Dekoh is a cross-platform development framework for deploying Java, Flash, and Ajax applications. Dekoh itself was built using Java. The public alpha launch of Dekoh is April 15th at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.
While Apollo has the benefit of huge financial backing and pre-existing developer support, Dekoh is aiming to attract developers by providing more features. Which actually makes it hard to describe what Dekoh is in a sentence. When Ryan Stewart covered the private beta release of Dekoh, he implied it was like the WebOS products that we've profiled before on R/WW. Anyway here's a table showing the main differences between Dekoh and Apollo (courtesy of the Dekoh blog):
Forrester Research has just released two reports concerning 'web 2.0' in the enterprise. Forrester recently surveyed 119 CIOs on the topic and their answers illustrate what IT honchos want – and don't want – from social software technologies such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, social networking, and content tagging.
According to the report entitled CIOs Want Suites For Web 2.0, the enterprise Web 2.0 market "is beginning to consolidate". Apparently CIOs have a strong desire to purchase web 2.0 products "as a suite, as well as an equally strong desire to purchase these technologies from large, incumbent software vendors." 61% of respondents indicated that they would prefer both a suite solution and a large, incumbent vendor. According to the report, "integration issues, longevity concerns, and the occasional lack of polish" are counting against small vendors.
Source: Forrester
Earlier
this week we gave away a free ticket to Office 2.0 and today we have a a
free ticket to next week's ETech
to offer as a prize. ETech is O'Reilly's Emerging
Technology conference and it'll be held next week, March 26-29, in San
Diego. An important note about the prize - the Etech pass is good for sessions
only at ETech (Tuesday-Thursday). The workshops and the Executive Briefing
on Monday are not included. Also of course you need to make your own way
to San Diego and cover your accommodation. But still, the value
of the ticket is $1390.00 - so it's a great prize and thanks O'Reilly Media for
offering it to Read/WriteWeb.
I was hoping to be at ETech, but unfortunately I now can't make it. However Read/WriteWeb's Alex Iskold will be there, so if you're going to ETech and would like to meet up with Alex, send him an email at alex [dot] iskold [at] gmail [dot] com.
We picked on Google in the previous caption contest, so it's only fair we turn our attention to Microsoft this time ;-) Here is a photo from the recent Windows Vista launch in New York. I'm sure you can come up with some imaginative captions to this! Put your entries in the comments below. The winner will be picked by Friday morning PST time.
Lately
I have been discussing the vertical segments that old media companies are losing to new media,
with a focus on Personal Finance as an important category.
Previously on Read/WriteWeb I covered Yahoo
Personal Finance and in this post I will take a look at Microsoft’s
offering, using my framework.
MSN Money is the Personal Finance and Investing site of Microsoft. The site is an excellent resource for news and information and provides consumers with a number of financial services tools. The site is powered by Microsoft Money 2007 and it gets content from CNBC, a leading financial news channel. The main sub-categories of MSN Money are:
NOTE: Please see important update about this week's R/WW Poll below, on the topic of Personalized Homepages. We had to re-set it and so are asking for you to re-submit your vote.
Today Google launched 6 new themes for its Google Personalized Homepage. The themes to choose from include: a beach, a city, a sweet dreams theme, a teahouse, a winter hills theme, and a bus stop. It seems like an attempt to re-create the PC desktop background theme experience, but for personalized homepages. Plus the 6 new themes by Google are all interactive, similar to Microsoft Vista's new desktop backgrounds. Each Google theme changes dynamically, based either on the user’s time of day or local weather conditions.
