I'm at the Graphing Social Patterns conference in San Jose again today. I'm covering the event for Read/WriteWeb and doing a few interviews for Read/WriteTalk. This morning, Tim O'Reilly gave the 'developer keynote' for the conference. The presentation hit on three basic themes:
Tim started off by talking about the idea that "new technologies first exploited by hackers, then entrepreneurs, then platform players." A few good examples were the move toward adoption of universal WiFi access or webservices from network wifi groups and screen scraping hacks respectively.
According to comScore, social network Hi5 gets around 35 million uniques per month, putting it at a roughly similar size to Facebook. Alexa ranks Facebook 8th in the world -- Hi5 is 10th. However, Facebook gets all the ink. Hi5 barely registers on Google Trends -- especially for news references, and a search for "Hi5" on Technorati generates only about 1/4th of the posts that a search for "Facebook" returns. So what gives?
The answer is that much of Hi5's traffic originates outside of North America. While Alexa pegs Facebook 5th in the US, Hi5 doesn't crack the top 50. Much of Hi5's traffic comes from Latin America -- Alexa has the site ranked first in the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Ecuador, and Honduras, and second in Guatemala and Peru. The site is also popular in many other non-English speaking countries -- first in Portugal, third in Romania and Thailand, for example.
It is with that in mind that we can understand why news last week that Hi5 is planning the launch of its own developer platform caused just a small reaction on Techmeme. Hi5 actually launched a developer API in August to very little fanfare. With 35 million users, though, Hi5 is the 3rd largest social networking site on the web, so perhaps we should take a bit more notice.
BitTorrent today announced their content delivery network acceleration service, BitTorrent DNA. DNA will add their peer-to-peer file sharing technology to any CDN to speed up download and streaming services for videos and files.
BitTorrent essentially works by harnessing unused network capacity on end-user computers. Anyone downloading or streaming a file also distributes the file to other users, which is broken into smaller chunks and reassembled upon delivery. BitTorrent has long used the distributed peer-to-peer approach for file sharing, and the same idea is employed by companies like Joost for streaming media.
DNA's first client is Brightcove, a CDN that powers video streaming for companies like CBS, Fox, the Discovery Channel, Buena Vista (Disney), Reuters, Warner Music Group, Sony-BMG and others. It's mildly amusing that BitTorrent, thought by many in the music and film industry to be an enabler of illegal file sharing, should now be providing a technology backbone for the legit delivery of industry content.
Finnish short messaging and microblogging service Jaiku has been acquired by Google, the company says. That Google bought this competitor of Twitter, the service founded by Blogger founder Evan Williams, instead of Twitter is notable. Jaiku may be stronger on the mobile platform than Twitter and probably came at a much lower price.
Google has been rolling up no end of very young mobile services; while the comparison with the Dodgeball acquisition, which ended up going nowhere, is inevitable - I think there's a lot more going on this time around. For one thing, Jaiku will now have access to scaling that Twitter could desperately use.
For background on Jaiku, I recommend this video interview by the new European outfit Intruders.tv with company founder Jyri Engestrom, trained as a sociologist and formerly from Nokia.
RedMonk analyst James Governor, who has blogged extensively about the business value of Jaiku competitor Twitter and whose Twitter feed I learned about the acquisition from, has some interesting thoughts on the news. Governor says he'd like to see RIM buy Twitter but thinks Yahoo! is much more likely. He says the Jaiku mobile download could be a key addition to the Google Phone kernel but fears that all the leading microblogging services will be quickly overrun with commercial messages. I think that's a valid concern and worry that ads could drown out the links I Twitter promoting my blog posts. (Joking.) All of Twitter is lit up with conversation on the acquisition, according the the tracking service Twitterverse, the hottest word across Twitter in the last hour is Jaiku. There's more good discussion there than I can post here.
With easy group creation, RSS import and threaded conversation, amongst other features, Jaiku is probably a superior service to Twitter. Twitter's API and large US community offers its own advantages for some users. Unfortunately, new accounts have been throttled at Jaiku with news of the announcement. That seems like a move that's a bit hostile to the early adopter types who are following this news now and a real lost opportunity.
Update: Here's the official Google statement about this exciting news.
Sharon Brogan has been publishing the Watermark blog
for the past four years. She keeps a page, aptly titled "Here Are the Women Bloggers," which
features other blogs written by women. In an email exchange with Sharon, she told me that she feels that the blogosphere is often unfair.
Sharon thinks that male bloggers are more likely to link to other male bloggers rather than to blogs written by women.
Could this be true? My gut feeling was no, but I was not sure. Perhaps that was the case with tech blogs simply because there are more men writing about technology? Intrigued by this question, I also wondered who blogs more: men or women? If tech is dominated by men, perhaps other types of blogs are written predominantly by women. Politics, food, entertainment -- the blogosphere covers more than just technology, does it have a gender?
I'm at the Graphing Social Patterns conference in San Jose for the next two days. I'll be covering the event for Read/WriteWeb and doing a few interviews on Read/WriteTalk. This morning Seth Goldstein, Co-Founder & CEO of SocialMedia.com, gave a presentation etitled Appvertising: The Future of Social Advertising. I also sat down with Seth after his presentation and recorded a quick interview for Read/WriteTalk.
Seth Goldstein is a serial entrepreneur, who has been in the Internet business since 1995 - when he created SiteSpecific, one of the early Internet advertising agencies. Seth was also a Co-Founder of AttentionTrust.org, a non-profit group that explores and explains many of the issues around the attention economy. (For more information on the Attention Economy, check out our coverage here). He also helped start a company called Root Markets, that focused on commercializing many of the Attention Trust themes.
Seth's slides are available on SlideShare and embedded at the end of this post. The issue I want to focus on in this post is his vision for SocialMedia.com, which Seth described as an 'app network'. The slide below explains:
I'm at the Graphing Social Patterns conference in San Jose for the next two days. I'll covering the event for Read/WriteWeb and doing a few interviews on Read/WriteTalk.
This morning Charlene Li from Forrester Research gave a presentation entitled 'Big Brands & Facebook: Marketing Case Studies & Best Practices.' The theme that she came back to a few times was: Facebook marketing requires communication not advertising.
Assuming that advertising means 'interruption', I think anyone who has been using Facebook for anytime would agree with that assumption. Some of the implications around best practices were quite interesting, so in this post we'll explore those.
MoFuse is a new service that many publishers today have a need for. MoFuse stands for "Mobile Fusion" and it enables you to create a mobile version of your website. It's similar to Winksite, a mobile conversion and community service that counts BoingBoing among its customers. However MoFuse is simpler, in that it doesn't offer community features. If anything it's like "Feedburner for mobile", because all you need to do is provide your RSS feed and then MoFuse automatically converts it to a mobile version. Also like Feedburner, MoFuse is starting off by targeting blogs.
MoFuse is currently invite-only, but Read/WriteWeb has exclusive access to invites. Simply go to http://snapple.mofuse.com/register/RWWEB and enter your details. There are 200 invitations available, on a first-come first-serve basis.
Here is the mobile version of Read/WriteWeb: http://m.readwriteweb.com/. The screenshots below shows how it looks:
According to early reports from the Associated Press and Variety, Google is set to make a major announcement tomorrow concerning YouTube integration with AdSense. Selected YouTube videos will be available to AdSense publishers and will appear wrapped in banner ads.
The AP offers auto websites selecting topical videos from YouTube about cars to run along with AdSense banner ads on their sites. If the report is correct, there's a whole lot of potential here. Though cynics have said that there's little hope for video outside YouTube, small video ad networks insist that there's a growing, thriving ecosystem of niche video sites just waiting for more and better content and ads.
Monetization of YouTube has always been the big question since Google Acquired the site. While other video hosting companies sought content first and then tried to build out their ad networks, it's only logical that the biggest online ad network in the world would fold the best content from the biggest video site in the world into its offerings. For more industry background see Liz Gannes's post at NewTeeVee.
Ads have been run along side a very select few user channels on the YouTube site for a handful of months but these reports indicate that the program will be made much wider and be taken off of the site all around the web. Google has run very limited video advertising already but nothing like what it could do with YouTube's huge catalog. The ads will be persistent banners outside the frame and fading in-frame overlays.
It's a simple story, but if it is true it is going to blow the world of online video and advertising wide open.
Facebook has contacted all the application developers that have applied for a new grant program announced at the TechCrunch40 conference, called the fbFund, and told them they all submissions have been deleted and must be resubmitted. The first attempt at this unusual financial plan to support the most over-hyped online phenomenon of the year (the FB platform) had to be reset and tried again. Applications were originally accepted by email, which quickly proved to be an unworkable solution. Allen Stern has posted the full email from Facebook at CenterNetworks.
