Aggregation and curation are seductive arts - they feel like they're within anyone's reach, they seem limited only by imagination and discerning taste and they can create a magical experience for audiences. The web is filled with people who think they can create new aggregation services that people will love - and in many cases those people are right. Aggregation can be awesome.
Not everyone sees it that way, though - especially among the aggregated. Yesterday the popular but new iPad app Zite, which calls itself a Personalized Magazine, got a nasty Cease and Desist letter from 10 big media companies very unhappy with the way their original content was being aggregated. The companies said Zite is manipulating their content without their permission and stripping out the ads. Zite says it's respecting what's communicated in the code on pages it indexes and that it's willing to change on request. The tone of the industry letter is so noxious that I was immediately sympathetic towards Zite, but looking at the details and talking to the CEO of competitor Flipboard makes me think maybe this trailblazing startup took things a little further than it should have. I don't know, I'd like to know your opinion.
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is back working at the company and made public statements today about how Twitter is focused on making the service more mainstream. Biz Stone said something very similar last week at the CTIA mobile conference - that the number once misconception about Twitter is that people think you need to write Tweets to get value out of it.
Imagine a place where the most famous and fabulous people in the world emit short little pearls of wisdom throughout the day, every day, in a public forum where anyone can enjoy them. Stars of stage and screen stepping right into your living room - 140 characters at a time! That seems to be what Twitter aims to be now, or at least part of it. We asked (on Twitter, of course) what other people thought of the idea that Twitter should be more mainstream and for their suggestions as to how that could be accomplished. Below are my favorite parts of the conversation so far.
Were you tired of free, data-based messaging with apps like Beluga or GroupMe? Were you over quick and easy location sharing? In-line mobile image sharing? Push notifications? Then worry not, because Disco has come along to take away all the frills and leave your group messaging experience without any of the perks of a smartphone with a data plan.
The punchline here is that Slide - the company acquired by Google last summer - has just released an iPhone-only group messaging app that does nothing offered by all of its competition. Even Google doesn't have much to say on the topic, but maybe that's because the company behind the fastest growing mobile OS has something up its sleeve.
That was the question I got asked the most during my time in Austin and San Francisco this month. Perhaps it's become the new ice-breaker at networking events. But also people are genuinely curious and unsure about whether the tech scene has entered another bubble. My answer to that perennial question over the years has never been focused on money and the valuation of companies. That's the way most commenters have addressed it over the past couple of months. Rather, I look at the state of product innovation in startups and big Internet companies. Are we still seeing innovation in web products and across market segments? For the most part, I think the answer to that is yes.
Based on the current state of innovation, I'd argue that we are NOT in a tech bubble at this time. We're seeing a lot of innovation in mobile, especially. Also with evolving trends like Internet of Things and tablets. The 'social media' market is one where we are seeing copycat products and 'me too' features, so that market has perhaps jumped the shark. But overall, I'd argue that we're not in a bubble.
Digg, the one-time king of the user-driven online news sites, saw its founder Kevin Rose announce his departure yesterday and was written up as dead by several leading publications. Top among the requiems was Sarah Lacy's article on TechCrunch, RIP Digg.
Lacy articulates one perspective on the news very well. It really is just one, very rosy, perspective though. "Revisionist history, if there ever was one," Tweeted Guardian-exited media industry scribe Rafat Ali about Lacy's article. Lacy's coverage is good from the perspective she comes from, as a writer of compelling business narratives, but there's more to the whole story of Digg than that. Here's a little more to consider.
This post originally appeared on guest author Jeremiah Owyang's blog. Social Media Management Systems, like CMS systems for websites, help companies manage, maintain, and measure thousands of social media accounts. Although the nascent SMMS space is only one year old, 58% of corporations have adopted at least one of these 28 vendors. Altimeter is conducting a formal research report on the SMMS topic (see research agenda for 2011), However, I wanted to give a year-end state, after coining this category 12 months ago and listing out vendors.
SMMS systems are the next growth market for the social business category. While saturation is at 58% of corporate buyers, the average deal size is a meager $22,000 but will expect to grow to six figure annual deals in coming quarters to meet market demand. This growing space has low barriers to entry, which result in a flood of clones, but expect only a handful to remain after a shakeout to serve enterprise-class buyers.
If 2010 was the year of location-based services, then 2011 is certainly the year of group messaging. With a slew of new group messaging apps dominating this year's SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, the big questions have been why now and why not Facebook or Twitter?
The answer, it seems, could be very simple. Group messaging apps do something that sites like Facebook and Twitter don't - they take away the magic and the guesswork and provide a blunt instrument for communicating with small groups of people using both data and text messaging.
Rovio, the company behind the wildly popular app Angry Birds, has plans to launch a live, multi-player and multi-media version of its mobile game. That new, richer version of the game could be offered at no cost to the data plans of users, through carrier partnerships. If successful, this plan for what to do with the huge Angry Birds market footprint (now with more than 100 million downloads), could cause substantial technical and economic disruptions across the mobile world. Rovio hopes it will, as do a number of other industry players.
We put clues together at South by Southwest this week, based on conversations with several Rovio team members and other industry leaders, and sketched out what I believe is the company's plan. Rovio team members have now confirmed that the following theory is accurate.
The race between tech companies aiming to tell you what to do with your free time will heat up tonight with the midnight launch of version 3.0 of location-based social network Foursquare. According to the company, its long awaited recommendations feature will be included.
It's one thing for Amazon or Netflix to recommend movies or other products you might like (that's a huge business), it's another thing for an automated system to tell you where you should go when you walk out the door of your house, what real-world venues you should patronize. That's something a whole lot of companies are going to try to tackle, including Google and Facebook.
Between LAUNCH and DEMO, this last week has seen more than its fair share of startups. Among these companies, we've seen a number of DIY mobile app creation tools throw their hat into the ring and promise a world where getting your company into someone's hands is as simple as dragging and dropping a couple of buttons.
With all of these democratizing, empowering tools hitting the market, there's just one question - are we about to relive the era of <blink> tag text and marquee side-scrolling banner ads?
