• Pricing options for additional App Engine resources
• Two new App Engine APIs
• Opening up the waiting list

According to Pete and Paul, one of the largest feature requests for Google App Engine was the ability to purchase additional computing resources. If you aren't aware, currently App Engine (a developer tool that enables you to run your web applications on Google's infrastructure) provides free access to persistent storage of up to 500 MB and enough bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month.

Currently there is no ability for developers to purchase additional resources. But towards the end of the year, developers will be able to purchase more resources at the following pricing:

* $0.10 - $0.12 per CPU core-hour
* $0.15 - $0.18 per GB-month of storage
* $0.11 - $0.13 per GB outgoing bandwidth
* $0.09 - $0.11 per GB incoming bandwidth

This pricing does seem competitive with similar offerings from Amazon Web Services.

Two New APIs

The Google App Engine team is also releasing two new APIs. The first will allow web developers to easily do image manipulation - i.e. to scale, rotate, and crop images on the server. The second API allows App Engine applications to take advantage of memcached - a high-performance caching layer designed to make page rendering faster for developers.

Removing Waiting Lists

Another announcement tomorrow will be the elimination of all waiting lists for access to the App Engine. Paul and Pete indicated that currently about 75,000 users have received access. However more than 150,000 developers have joined the product's waiting list over the past 6 weeks alone! But on Wednesday, Google App Engine will be available to everyone.

However, note that until the turn of the year when you can purchase additional computing resources, apps will probably be limited to small test apps.

Still No Support for Languages Outside Python

While all of this is great progress, we're sure that many will be disappointed that App Engine is still limited to Python Apps. Shortly after launching Google App Engine, we created an interactive game that asked you to both predict what Google (and others) would do next and voice your opinion about what should happen. Not surprisingly, 55% of you anticipated Google would begin supporting other languages beyond Python.

It appears this is not going to be the case. While Pete and Paul indicated that this is on the roadmap, they wouldn't provide timelines or indications on which languages would be next. They did provide some insight however into the process necessary to support additional languages - listen to the podcast for those details.

Conclusion

As we commented yesterday, it's nice to see Google wooing web developers. If App Engine is ultimately successful, they'll need those engineers to choose it over Amazon's offerings or future competition from Microsoft and startups. It will be interesting to read the reaction to the announcements at I/O tomorrow. Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Over the past month, we've continued to think a lot about the process of picking a platform on top of which to build an application. We've had a few interesting interviews on ReadWriteTalk that have touched on these issues. Specifically, we interviewed David Glazer, an Engineering Director at Google and one of the champions inside Google of the OpenSocial project. We also interviewed Lance Tokuda, the CEO and Co-Founder of RockYou, a social software company that builds apps on top of OpenSocial and the Facebook platform.

Though the interviews with Lance and David focused on the issues related to platforms for social applications, it struck us that the same dynamics now exist across a number of platforms. For example, in the mobile space there are a number of platforms on which you can currently release a mobile app. We actually covered some of this in our interview with Adam Taggart from Yahoo!'s Mobile Platform. Obviously, with Apple opening up the iPhone platform, the alternatives are growing. Another industry with similar dynamics is the video game market. In fact, Lance actually referenced Electronic Arts as a model for the type of company he is building.

In this post, we'll highlight five common dynamics that software companies need to take into consideration when deciding which platforms to focus on.

Audience Issues

A platform will only be of use to you if the type of user who will find your application valuable is actually using it. Therefore, the first three issues to be considered when picking a platform center around the dynamics of reaching those users and making sure they are the right users for you. Specifically, these are:

• Issue 1: Reach of the Platform
• Issue 2: Growth of Audience
• Issue 3: Value of that Audience

Issue 1: Reach of Platform

Reach is simply another term for the size of an audience. When looking at reach, it's important to consider how many users specifically have the problem you're trying to solve. If a platform doesn't reach your target audience (and you don't anticipate that changing), it is a non-starter to even consider building on top of the platform. However, platforms that efficiently allow you to reach your target audience are very desirable.

For example, at all the tech conferences I've attended over the last year it has been striking that a high percentage of the audience are iPhone users. In one session at SXSW this year, the panelist asked the audience to raise their hand if they owned an iPhone and probably 75% of the crowd raised their hand. If you had an idea to build a mobile application that was targeted at innovators and early adopters in the technology industry, the iPhone market might actually be the audience with the greatest reach for your app. I would argue this is true even if other platforms have more total users right now.

On the other hand, if an application had a broader target market then other platforms might make more sense. That is clearly the type of application that Yahoo!'s mobile platform is targeting. Adam Taggart shared the following statistics in our interview:

We are now in the process of developing a mobile ecosystem that is intended to serve eventually billions of mobile consumers. And I had to use the word "billions" there very specifically because it differentiates our strategy versus other people in the industry. Most of the people who are taking a very highly optimized approach around the specific device type or a specific operating system, which is great ... So if we'll take the iPhone for example, you know, a phenomenal, fantastic device and very, very popular. They will probably sell in the middle of this year their two millionth iPhone ... So while you're promoting a very good experience, you're providing really just a very thin sliver of the total market of consumers out there with phones.

Issue 2: Growth of Audience

One of hockey great Wayne Gretsky's most famous quotes is, "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been." In many ways, the art of choosing a platform is very much the same. Companies need to be more focused on the platform that will be most valuable in the future, instead of picking what is most popular at the time of development.

In social applications right now, an interesting aspect of this will be web based email clients. In our interview, Lance Takuda expected that major services would end up leveraging OpenSocial versus using the Facebook Platform or building another platform. Listening to Lance talk about the 250 million users that web based email clients represent, it was clear that RockYou has aspirations to dominate this space. I would guess that rival web app maker Slide is targeting it as well. However, I also anticipate companies focused on improving the email experience, such as Xobni to compete aggressively once the web based email clients go live.

Of course, while web based email platforms serve as a good example, the overarching point is that if you are designing and developing software on a platform, make sure you're building for where the users are going to be, not where they have been, to give your application the best chance of long term success.

If you're really good at anticipating where users are going, you can end up with what is often called the "first mover advantage." RockYou is a great example of this. They were one of the early companies to recognize the significance of the Facebook platform and released numerous social applications as soon as it opened up. They were thus able to leverage that quick response to become 'the fastest growing company in the world in terms of user acquisition ... basically hav[ing] grown to 60 million users in about 26 months.'

Issue 3: Value of that Audience

Interestingly, 'value' can be looked at in a number of different ways. For example, RockYou focuses on an audience's value to advertisers - specifically, in their case, looking at the geography of where users live. To an advertiser, a teenager in the United States is high value demographic, so that is one of the reasons they are specifically building apps for US teen heavy social networks.

However, as we recently pointed out free to end users is sometimes a dangerous approach. You might want to think about the service fees different audiences on different platforms might be willing to pay directly. If you do, it's important to consider how efficient the payment mechanism is. For example, Facebook is building a payment system as an integrated part of their platform.

Technology Issues

In addition to the issues around the audience, you can't overlook the pragmatic issues around technology. Specifically, there are two technology factors you need to take into account:

• Issue 4: Capability to Support Desired User Experience
• Issue 5: Efficiency of Developing on Platform

Issue 4: Capability to Support Desired User Experience

When you build on top of a platform, you often inherit a set of limitations that are either business decisions by the creators or simply technical limitations based on the way it was developed. While we are very excited about the applications coming out with the upcoming iPhone SDK, it is interesting to look at some of the limitations that SDK imposes upon developers.

For example, according to Wired, developers are not able to create programs that continuously run as a background thread. This clearly limits the functionality a group creating an instant messenger tool might be able to create. In this case, I believe it's unclear whether that is simply a technical limitation or a business restriction. It could be a business limitation if Apple were planning on releasing their own chat application, as some have speculated.

On the other hand, the iPhone also has certain capabilities that previous mobile platforms did not, which is why we believe that Apple will dominate next generation computing.

Issue 5: Efficiency of Developing on Platform

Another important issue to take into consideration is how efficiently your team is able to develop its application. Specifically, this takes into account things like how well documented the platform is and what tools have been created to make development more efficient. David Glazer pointed out there is an interesting effect of having a compelling audience (the three issues above) on these tools and documentation being created:

There's a virtuous cycle that goes on where as a particular environment has high reach, it attracts a lot of developers. When it attracts a lot of developers, there's a lot of value in creating the tools to make it more efficient to develop for that platform.

It is also important to take into consideration any situation where there may be slightly different deployments of a general platform. For example, the OpenSocial platform is slightly different on MySpace than Hi5 and the Facebook platform being leveraged by Bebo is also slightly different. Lance Takuda commented:

For example, between MySpace and Hi5, there's only about 20% overhead in supporting both. Whereas from Facebook to MySpace, there's almost a rewrite involved.

He also confirmed that it is a similar 20% overhead in supporting an application across the Facebook and Bebo platforms.

Conclusion

When you look at RockYou's rapid user growth over the past 26 months, it's obvious that people can build successful businesses on top of different platforms. However, it is critical that developers evaluate the right platform for their application. We've laid out a list of 5 critical dynamics to consider. What factors did we overlook or which dynamics should we have highlighted? Please let us know in the comments below!

[Note: This post drew heavily on three recent interviews on our podcast, ReadWriteTalk. If you'd like to listen in on future interviews, please consider subscribing in iTunes or via your favorite RSS client.

Image credits: Audience Photo & Technology Perspective & The Great One

If you agree that a viable alternative is important to the marketplace, an interesting question is: what will OpenX's business model ultimately be? We'll focus on this question for the rest of this post.

OpenX Business Model

In our ReadWriteTalk interview, Scott mentioned two high-level revenue streams they think about regularly at OpenX:

• Providing Paid Customer Support
• Helping Publisher's Maximize their Ad Revenue

While it seems that customer support is a pretty obvious revenue stream for most open source projects, the 'maximising revenue' idea gives some interesting indications of the future business model for OpenX. Specifically, Scott highlighted three methods:

"I think that the next thing that we think about in terms of the business model is finding the best way for publishers to monetize their site ... we can help them by trying to build efficiency inside the advertising marketplace, which isn’t very efficient today. And that manifests itself in a couple of different ways.

One by getting our publishers better rates for ad networks than they could by themselves.

Another could be for our publishers to be able to take direct ads and build a workflow, so that advertising can be purchased directly from them without having to go through multiple emails and a IO process and payment process and that type of thing.

And another could be for ad networks to be able to take particular parts of inventory packaged up by publishers in a way that’s attractive for advertisers, ad networks. Those are three very specific things that we’re looking at."

Conclusion: Ultimately an Ad Exchange

This line of questioning started with me asking Scott if OpenX ultimately will become an ad exchange. While he wouldn't confirm this, when OpenX talks about "build[ing] efficiency inside the advertising marketplace" it leads me to believe that they will ultimately become an ad network. Scott did point out that they are also trying to be open and integrate with a lot of the traditional networks, such as Right Media - which is certainly a point of differentiation.

While I understand that perspective, according to Scott OpenX is "serv[ing] in the hundreds of billions of ads per month." This is in the same neighborhood as Double Click. And with the recent announcement that OpenX is launching a hosted solution (ultimately giving them even more visibility and becoming closer to publishers) an ad exchange seems inevitable at some point. In the meantime, we'll be testing the hosted ad server on ReadWriteTalk and may eventually use it on ReadWriteWeb as well.

What do you think OpenX will ultimately become? An ad exchange, or do you see another obvious business model? Also, what are your thoughts on Google launching AdManager - is it a threat to publishers?

hCard: Providing Your Contact Information

Users are tired of repeatedly entering profile information over and over again. This problem is solved by the microformat hCard. Leslie Chicoine, an Experience Designer at Get Satisfaction, talked about how her company had created a sign up process for their web application using hCard. (see screen shot below)

XFN & FOAF: Who are your contacts

Another microformat, XFN, and the FOAF project are techniques for embedding relationships in links. This allows social networks to recommend contacts that should be shared, without scraping web based email clients. Recently, Google introduced a Social Graph API, which "index[es] the public Web for XHTML Friends Network (XFN), Friend of a Friend (FOAF) markup and other publicly declared connections".

Something very interesting that I wasn't aware of until today's panel was that both Plaxo & Six Apart were working on something similar before Google announced OpenSocial, according to Joe Smarr and David Recordon. However, once Google started focusing on this they were happy to hand it over to them - because Google "has the web on a hard drive", so it makes the crawling component of this far less difficult. For a good overview on Google's Social Graph API, check out the following introductory video:

OpenID: Authenticating Individuals

OpenID is a decentralized framework for allowing social networks (and other web applications) to authenticate users. In other words, it lets users login using shared credentials across different services. It also allows individuals to decide what information they want to share with each application. For example, a user might decide not to provide their postal or email address.

OAuth: Authorizing Access

The final protocol discussed was OAuth. It is a protocol that is less about authentication (OpenID) and more about authorization. The protocol has been developed over the last year. The specification was released in December 2007 and modeled off a number of authorization protocols, including the Flickr Authorization protocol. According to Chris Messina, a number of services have already started using it including:

• Fireeagle
• Open Social
• Pownce
• Get Satisfcation, and
• Magnolia
• (and Twitter support will be coming soon)

Chris also pointed to a comment in a recent post of ours about email passwords, that highlighted the need for tools like these. Also there was a comment on RWW from Oren Michels at Mashery, indicating it is the most requested feature for them right now.

Conclusion

Securely moving your data around the web has increasingly become an important concept on the web. Arguably, it was the most discussed meme at this year's SXSW. While not an application, you could say it has been 'this year's Twitter'.

The Data Portability group deserves credit for educating the market. Beyond that, it is also an idea whose time has clearly come. It is interesting to think what applications will be built on top of these portability standards - they might be popular by next year's SXSW!

Lesson 1: Ignore The Great Unknown

Jason started his presentation talking about "the great unknown," which he defined as the things that hang over every entrepreneur's head when they are starting a company. For example, "what about when we have 1M customers or 100 employees." Jason encouraged people to ignore these concerns and focus on the now. He pointed out that often as entrepreneurs, we worry about the impact of our decisions rather than just making the right decision. He asserted that this is crazy, because decisions made today don't have to last forever - we "must optimize for today."

Lesson 2: Watch Out for Red Flags

The next point was about interpersonal dynamics in the workplace and watching out for what he called 'red flags.' Red flags are basically words or phrases that end up causing problems in communications. For example, at 37 Signals they learned to be careful with the words: need, can't, easy, only, and fast. For example saying, how easy someone else's job is or that they can't ship a product without one feature.

Lesson 3: Be Successful and Make Money by Helping Other People be Successful and Make Money

He talked about the powerful reaction people had to Basecamp when they first released it (Basecamp is a very lightweight project management tool). They realized this was because the tool was helping other people do their job better. This has become part of their philosophy, looking for opportunities in the marketplace to "spot chain reactions and be the catalyst" around helping others.

Lesson 4: Target Nonconsumers and Nonconsumption

This is actually a concept that Jason borrowed from Clayton Christensen (a famous professor at Harvard Business School) in the books Innovators Dilemma and Innovators Solution. The idea is that there exists an entire market of nonconsumers, or people who have a need but existing players aren't targeting these people. The advantage of targeting this segment is that you minimize the chance for competition from entrenched players.

Lesson 5: Question Your Work Regularly

At 37 Signals, Jason reported they are always asking questions to make sure they are doing the right things. Internally, this list of questions includes:

• why are we doing this?
• what problem are we solving?
• is this actually useful?
• are we adding value?
• will this change behavior?
• is there an easier way?
• what's the opportunity cost?
• is it really worth it?

Lesson 6: Read your Product

Given the firm's background, this was a lesson I found particularly interesting. Jason claimed that the "Biggest sin on the internet right now is bad copywriting ... paying too much attention to pixels and not enough attention to words." Beyond this he pointed out that words are actually less expensive to correct and improved copy will make doing the design second result in a stronger design.

Lesson 7: Err on the Side of Simple

As surprising as I found the last lesson, this one was probably the most obvious given 37 Signal's business. Jason pointed out that you should always "start with the easy way." The interesting and non-obvious point was that he extended this beyond product issues. For example, he recommended people start a company by setting up an LLC, until they need a C Corp.

Lesson 8: Invest in What Doesn't Change

Jason said that this is the "best business advice he's gotten in some time." It interesting because this isn't something that is intuitive, when you think about tech companies which tend to be focused on what is new and upcoming. However, Jason pointed out that principals can last. For example at 37 Signals, he said they anticipate in 10 years "simple, affordable software" will still be worth investing in.

Lesson 9: Follow the Chefs

Jason called chefs the smartest business professionals. He explained this is because they are aware that you become famous and successful by giving knowledge away. For example, chefs have cooking shows and write cook books. Yet it doesn't stop their restaurants from being successful. In fact, he claimed they are probably more successful because of their sharing.

Lesson 10: Interruption is the Enemy of Productivity

Originally David Heinemeier Hansson (Jason's partner) and Jason didn't live in the same city. They eagerly awaited David moving to Chicago and being able to get even more done. Interestingly, when David arrived they actually found productivity decreasing. At 37 Signals, they have come to believe that this was due to the increased interruptions; and so they ended up favoring passive communication like email versus things that are more instantaneous but also interrupt your workflow.

Lesson 11: Road Maps Send You in the Wrong Direction

When talking about business plans, financial projections, or features for products 37Signals believes road maps are bad, because "they lock you into the past." The only exception is APIs, because people are counting on it. Instead he said your expectation should be "do the right thing at the right time."

Lesson 12: Be Clear in Crisis

At the beginning of this year, 37 Signals had some infrastructure problems that resulted in a few hours of unscheduled downtime. This was widely discussed on the internet. They quickly posted about what had happened and during the technical problems kept they the homepage updated with status messages. Through this experience, it reinforced their belief that people love you even more if you are open, honest, public and responsive during a crisis.

Lesson 13: Make Tiny Decisions

Rather than trying to make major decisions, when possible, Jason encouraged entrepreneurs to break problems down to the atomic level. In web properties, this is especially powerful because they've been able to break features down to the atomic level and then launch them one at a time. This is good because the team can gain momentum and celebrate little launches. However, it's also good because "when you make tiny decisions, you can't make big mistakes."

Lesson 14: Make it Matter

Jason ended his presentation by encouraging the audience to make sure their work was significant. He talked about how meaningful he felt the products they were creating were for individuals. Before opening it up for questions, he said that "everything you do should matter."

Conclusion

One of the things I love most about SXSW is the transparency with which so many leaders share about their business. At last year's festival, two of my favorite panels were: Web App Autopsy and The Figures Behind the Top Web Apps.

We'd love to hear any good case studies or lessons you've learned running startups or in business. Please share them in the comments below.

Who Has the Biggest Brain

The first application during App Nite was the Facebook Game "Who Has the Biggest Brain" a game by the company Playfish. The concept behind the facebook application is a series of 4 minute games that lets you compare intelligence against your friends in Facebook. The game has 600k installs this week and 100k active users per day who play over 500k games per day. It's actually quite impressive that the average 'active user' is playing 5 games per day, especially when you consider according to the presenter it took 4 weeks to develop. It also doesn't require adding friends to be able to play the game (friend spam).

Just 3 Words

The next game was created by Scoob & Geko and is actually based on the parlor game where patrons would pass a paper around the bar each adding 3 words to a collective story. In this case, the application "Just 3 Words" has brought that game to Facebook. Interestingly, the average user spends 7 minutes per day on the site and a "statistically significant portion of the audience" spends more than 2 hours per day. So far over 60 thousand stories have been created across 3 million entries. All of the stories are licensed under creative commons.

Puzzle Messages

The next application "Puzzle Messages" was created by The Broth. The presenter admitted this was a very simple application, basically it allows users to create a jigsaw puzzle that encodes a message and send to the recipient who has to solve the puzzle to read the message.

Ski & Snowboard

The next application Ski & Snowboard is an application that allows Facebook users to identify, track and report on visits to ski resorts around the world. The application has a very nice map drive interface. There were two very interesting points from the demonstration. First, they came up with a really interesting (somehow feels less spamy) way to get users to invite their friends. They allow each user to state their skiing level, but requires 3 friends to confirm that level. The other interesting thing is that they actually started with 1000 resorts in their system, but through their users had about 200 more added and some of the geocoding corrected on the first 1000 resorts.

Dipity

Dipity is a startup focused on 'organizing the web using time.' In other words, they want to pull in data from Facebook. Currently 17,000 timelines have been created. At Graphing Social, they announced a new feature that allows their users to add other services' content streams to the timeline (such as Twitter Feeds.) Beyond creating personal timelines, users can create public pages on Facebook around other events such as this public page on the Federal Reserve.

Developer Analytics

The last presentation was by Developer Analytics. They have created a suite of tools for developers. These include a set of analytics for Facebook developers around revenue, virality and engagement. They also are displaying leader boards for the top applications and top ad networks. However, the thing I personally found most interesting (probably because I haven't created an app) is the fact they are also creating content - specifically case studies and interviews around Facebook applications.

Open Social Apps

Know Your Neighbor

The Know Your Neighbor app was positioned as "Twitter for your community & neighbors ... on steriods." Basically, the idea is that users can organize their friends list based on geographic location. Currently the version demonstrated automatically picks the most 10 closest friends, but when this launches it will let users pick how many users they want to group together. Then they can post messages to groups of friends. While this application is clearly very rough, I have already predicted hyperlocal will be a big theme in 2008 and it would be great to see some social apps try to tap into this.

Living Social

Hungary Machine presented next on their application Reading Social, which seems to have evolved from their Facebook app Visual Bookshelf. Bsically, the book allows user of a social network to share their reviews on books they read but now it works across social networks. Interestingly, they have more book reviews than Amazon today. They have also created a number of similar applications -- Drinking Social for Beer, Dining Social for restaurants, and Tune Social for music.

Trip Wiser

Trip Wiser is an application that works across social networks to discover things to do. The basic idea is that they have developed a 8 question compatibility quiz to try and determine your travel preferences. Once filling this out you can review different places you've visited and get recommendations of new places to visit. Currently, they have about 400 thousand locations reviewed across their network.

Chirp Screen

The final presentation of App Nite was Chirp Screen an interactive screen saver that shows activity across sites like Flickr, Facebook and Twitter. It also allows users to link back or post comments. Unfortunately, the screen saver only works in Windows right now but a OS/X version is on the way.

Conclusion

And the winner is .... First place - Developer Analytics, Second Place - LivingSocial , and third place Chirp.

• Profiles
• Relationships
• Activities
• Business Models

Profiles: A Universal Identity

Like most of us, Charlene has literally dozens of identities online (see slide below).

Moving forward she'd like to see a universal identity. Her specific proposal centers on either email and/or mobile phones, since this would be an identity she controls. Thankfully, Charlene also anticipates a federated approach (such as OpenID.) Also, she anticipates a few major players will probably serve as major federation focus points. We have already seen this happen begin to happen with both AOL and Yahoo! supporting OpenID.

Charlene also talked about the "Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web," a document created by a number of thought leaders in the social web: Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble & Michael Arrington. The document states:

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

• Ownership of their own personal information, including:
• their own profile data
• the list of people they are connected to
• the activity stream of content they create;
• Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

I imagine there will be more conversation on this in the afternoon panel Dan Farber is moderating on Data Portability.

Relationships: A Single Social Graph

Over the next few years, Charlene pointed out that a unified social graph will develop. She showed her current social graph as it exists inside Facebook, and then pointed out what it was missing: colleagues, parents, extended family, school parents, neighbors (see slide below). I think this is something we all realize intuitively - so the overriding point is that our real social graph is far more complex.

New 'Entrants' Will Be Portals

I actually found this one of the more interesting points from Charlene's presentation. She proposed that the a number of 'new entrants' will emerge, except that they won't be startups at all. Instead, she predicts that a number of the major portals (Google, Microsoft Live, Yahoo!, and AOL) will actually fill the the relationship mapping gap. She pointed to 4 reasons why they are natural entrants:

1. Millions of Regular Users
2. Search & Deep Content
3. Ad & Content Networks
4. Relationship Maps

Activities: Social Context for Activities

Going back to 'social networks being like air', not surprisingly Charlene projects that social context will be important for most online activities. As an example of how this might happen, she used shopping. She talked about Amazon integrating with Facebook (or any other repository of social graph info) such that they could highlight book reviews from her friends. Charlene also pointed out that any portal could easily incorporate social data into their site. She used Yahoo! as an example saying they could:

1. Search based on what my friends find relevant
2. Elevate stories tagged by my friends -- anywhere (maybe multiple social graphs web 2.0 & shopping)
3. Compare daily portfolio performance to friends
4. In terms of advertising, which of my friends owns a Focus & what do they think of it?

Business Models: Social Influence Defines Marketing Value

When talking about business models, her basic point was that we have yet to properly value networks based on their social value. She pointed to Marian Salzman's (of JWT) concept of personal CPMs. The basic idea being that an individual's authority on specific topics plus their network's interest and authority on the topic, results in a value of reaching that user. If this is true then "social networks will have to compete to have the best experience for high influence people."

Conclusion

Based on the vision she laid out, Charlene ended with a map of how open she anticipated these open platforms evolving.

To realize this vision of ubiquitous social networks, Charlene pointed out 2 things that must happen:

1. We need the technology to evolve, which she wasn't that worried about
2. We need to increase trust, which she challenged the industry to think about

You can view all of Charlene's Slides here.

| View | Upload your own

We would love to hear any other tips, from those of you who have created your own Facebook apps. Please leave a comment below.

While Facebook certainly led the adoption of this 'feed paradigm' in social networks, in the area of integrating external web services, Facebook clearly has lagged. Startups like Plaxo Pulse, FriendFeed, and Iminta are integrating content streams from other services and Facebook may well be doing this to compete with those offerings.

I think FriendFeed has a slightly unique approach (see the differentiators section of our coverage on FriendFeed & my interview with two of the founders on Read/WriteTalk.) Regardless, the point is that Facebook is clearly playing catch up in this area. Also, it's worth noting that earlier this week FriendFeed announced that they had closed a $5 million series A round and have officially launched the service (it was previously in closed beta).

Not Enough ... Enable Sharing

Unfortunately, I don't believe that what Facebook is planning will be enough. Until Facebook allows users to take their Mini Feed and News Feed with them to other services, the sharing is all one way (to Facebook) and not compelling relative to these other services. Users should be able to share their Mini Feed and News Feed data back out of Facebook.

Conceptually: Attention Should be Portable

We've covered the attention economy regularly at ReadWriteWeb and encouraged these Attention Silos to open up. Interestingly, in the post on Attention Silos, Alex Iskold commented:

"Modern services like del.icio.us and Flickr recognize the importance and the benefits of being good citizens and letting other services access their information, but among older web players opening up this way is a taboo."

I find it amazing to say, but Facebook is still behaving like the 'older web players' in this area. This is especially remarkable, because Facebook has joined Data Portability Working Group. A group whose purpose is to:

"...put existing data portability technologies, techniques, policies and initiatives in context in order to facilitate translation, education, advocacy and ultimately implementation. Portability is defined as both physically moving data or simply porting the context in which the data is used."

Ultimately, these feeds are a reflection of my attention and my network's attention and conceptually I should be able to share this with any other services I choose.

Pragmatically: User Benefits

A few times I've heard Dave McClure point out that 'open isn't better nor is closed better ... better is better.' I completely agree with this. Therefore, while I think there is a solid conceptual argument for Facebook to allow users to share their News and Mini Feed, ultimately the best reasons are that both users and Facebook would benefit. Specifically, I see three benefits:

• Display Facebook activities across the web
• Accelerate learning on other web services
• Stay up to date in my feed reader / start page

Display Facebook Activities Across the Web

If Facebook was the only place on the web to interact with content, this wouldn't be meaningful. However, obviously many of us maintain other digital identities on the web such as blogs, Tumblr pages, and even other social network profiles. On these other sites, it would be great to create dynamic Facebook badges, similar to what I can do with my Twitter Badges.

Facebook would also benefit from this by increased exposure and reminders to visit the site. While they certainly aren't struggling from a lack of awareness (they're even featured in the latest iPhone ad), I'm pretty confident that these dynamic widgets would not only be valuable to users but increase engagement with Facebook.

Accelerate Learning in Other Web Services

As data flows more and more freely across the web, it's interesting to see how other web services are able to leverage interactions. The most common example, is discovering friends on one service and adding them to another service. Facebook even does this by allowing you to discover friends based on people you email with. While finding friends is a great, simple use case, the News Feed and Mini Feed are a reflection of the activities and interests of my friends and me personally. I imagine a whole ecosystem of entirely new and creative services built off interpreting these attention streams, such as product recommendations based on your behavior in Facebook.

Stay Up to Date in My Feed Reader / Start Page

I'm sure this one would be more controversial inside Facebook, but one of the reasons I log into Facebook is to check my News Feed. I would love to be able to subscribe to the News Feed in my Feed Reader so I didn't have to login exclusively for this purpose.

While this would certainly decrease the number of times I visit Facebook just to check that feed. I actually think it would increase my engagement with Facebook, because the number of meaningful visits I make to the site would increase. My reasoning is that the significant visits are when I see a friend's action that I'm interested in learning more about. I'd still see these activities and be driven to Facebook to do this investigation.

There is no doubt this would be valuable to me as a user, I actually think it also would be valuable to Facebook as well, since engagement is ultimately what matters as long as their advertising is primarily based on cost-per-action metrics.

One Challenge: Filtering

Creating filters that appropriately share the correct information is obviously going to be an important issue to work through. This is especially true with the News Feed (more than Mini Feed), because it includes other people's behavior.

The Problem with Current News Feed Filters

I highlight this because I don't find the current News Feed preferences very empowering for filtering. Only some percentage of my actions actually show up in my friend's feed and more importantly only some percentage of my friend's actions show up in my feed. The current empowerment is limited to tweaking parameters by which certain actions are chosen and others are not (see the screen shot below).

Beyond manually adjusting these preferences, Facebook also empowers their users to 'thumbs up' certain activities from their friends to indicate an interest in receiving more similar items (see the screen shot below).

I'd specifically like the ability to do at least three things:

1. see all my friend's actions that could have shown up in my feed
2. apply my own filters to the feed
3. understand why one specific item was delivered to my feed

I appreciate that the interactions are a tough to get right, however, Facebook has a lot of smart engineers and designers and I'm confident they can tackle this. Plus, I'm sure I speak for entrepreneurs everywhere when I say that any number of startups and would be happy to help.

Conclusion

Even acknowledging that the appropriate method of filtering is a difficult problem to tackle, I think Facebook has to move to completely open up the Mini Feed and News Feed for sharing across the web. This is a topic I'm sure that will come up in my upcoming panel at Graphing Social Patterns - Social Networks and the NEED for FEEDS. However, I thought it would be appropriate to attack this lack of functionality Facebook style. Therefore, I've created a group in Facebook to request it. Please consider joining the group and I look forward to your feedback in the comments below.

Full disclosure: Sean Ammirati is the co-founder of mSpoke, which makes a product called FeedHub that filters aggregated sets of content feeds. Therefore, this is an area he has a vested interest in.

Overview of FriendFeed

First of all, for those of you not familiar with FriendFeed. In our interview, Bret Taylor described it as:

"...a tool that lets you see what your friends and family and co-workers are up to on the web. You could see an aggregated news feed all of the blog post that they share from Google Reader, the photos that they’ve published on Flickr, the Twitter messages that they’ve posted and a variety of other sharing activity aggregated from the most popular social websites on the web and through the integrated feed. And then it promotes Water Cooler discussed around those items ... Right now our user base is primarily using it as a collaborative news stream where they find interesting news post and discuss it and post related news items. It has become a really fun dynamic."

Here's a screenshot showing the service in action:

After describing the range of techniques for aggregating 25+ sources of content, Bret commented:

"In many ways, FriendFeed is really riding the trend of people supporting open syndication format[s] and APIs and it’s something we’re really appreciative of. But there’s a time out of work to make that really genuinely useful where it doesn’t feel like you’re getting the output of a dumb machine. You actually do something useful so there is a fair amount of work to make that the right experience."
(emphasis ours)

Differentiators

Based on the fact that syndication is such a big trend, you might anticipate a number of companies (including social networks directly) being competitive with FriendFeed. Therefore, Paul's answer to who they compete with was quite interesting:

"Well there are a lot of products out there that are kind of superficially similar ... But at the same time there aren’t really any products that have quite the same user experience. And I think that’s something that we all learn at Google and that a lot of times it’s the subtle details can make a big difference. And so there’s a lot of products that are focused more on the just the aggregation aspect of it. But we’re really trying to go beyond simply aggregating to actually creating a pleasant social experience around the content."
(emphasis ours)

FriendFeed Value Add to the Experience

The challenge is obviously determining the right set of features to create this pleasant social experience. For example, through discussions and personally using the product, some of the useful things I've found FriendFeed doing on top of the aggregating the content include:

• Filtering and grouping items together where they make sense. For example, if you upload a set of 50 photographs into Flickr, FriendFeed will group these together and choose a relevant thumb-nail image instead of inundating your friends with 50 photographs.
• Mapping usernames from the services being aggregated back to FriendFeed users. For example if you write a message in Twitter to @SeanAmmirat, it would link to my Friend Feed account.
• Recommending content from connections one degree away in your network, and commented on by friends. For example, if Paul & I are connected on Friend Feed and he comments on one of the items that his friend shares, it may be highlighted for me.

Conclusion

While FriendFeed has found one way to add value on top of syndicated content, I believe entrepreneurs have a ripe set of opportunities to create other value added experiences on top of these feeds too. Indeed, a few days after the interview I was approached by Dave McClure to moderate a panel at Graphing Social Patterns, on Social Networks and the Needs for Feeds. Bret will be joining me, along with Ian Kennedy from MyBlogLog, David Recordon from Six Apart and Kevin Marks from Open Social (see our interview with Kevin Marks here). If you have any questions or ideas that we could explore on the panel, please note them in the comments.

Disclosure: Sean Ammirati works for mSpoke, which has a feed management product called FeedHub.

Mark Zuckerberg's decision to make a wall street style news feed the central feature of the home page and the profile page at Facebook has been a huge reason for its recent success (and might also be the source of its growing pains)... And its been imitated all over the place these days.

Here at Read/WriteWeb, Marshall's year in review post on RSS included:

Facebook Introduced Millions of People to Syndication - No single event probably came close to the impact of Facebook's explosion in popularity in terms of popularizing the concept of syndication and feeds..."

In this post, I'll highlight why I find this so significant.

Significant Feeds in Marketplace

Facebook did lead the social networks with their News Feed. Initially, this was met by some resistance from the community (see these three Facebook Blog posts). However, eventually Facebook users did seem to calm down about this and the News Feed became one of the site's most oft-copied features. Followers include:

• Google Open Social Attention Streams (already included in Plaxo Pulse)
• MySpace Friends Updates
• Netvibes Activities (part of Ginger Release - see video below)


• LinkedIn Network Updates

Why is this significant?

In the introduction, I stated how bullish I was on the trend toward more and more applications using this feed style around users' activity. I'd like to highlight three of the reasons I believe this is such a good trend:

1. Improves Efficiency Using the Social Network
2. Increases Engagement with Site
3. Increases Awareness of Attention Silos

Improves Efficiency Using the Social Network

If you've used RSS to read content, you're certainly aware how efficient it can make you when consuming a lot of information. The paradigm lends itself to scanning a lot of information quickly and focusing on the most important content. I believe these feeds actually allow social network users to see the same benefit.

Increases Engagement with Site

Research has shown RSS are more engaged then other website visitors. It certainly would be interesting to repeat the research with feeds from social sites, but intuitively I believe these feeds have also increased engagement with these social networks. This theory is also validated by the importance thought leaders are placing on news feed optimization, such as Justin Smith and Dave McClure.

Increases Awareness of Attention Silos

The attention economy has been a big issue on the web for some time, but currently the data is still locked up in attention silos. (See an overview here by Alex Iskold.) Interestingly, the feeds these applications create do a great job educating users on the information being stored about them. All you have to do is look at the initial reaction the Facebook community had to the news feed introduction. It will be interesting to see if users ask to take their personal mini-feeds (attention) with them.

Conclusion

There certainly are features I'd like to see each of these feeds adopt. However, I believe the paradigm is a good one and the trend toward more social networks applying it is positive. Let me know if the comments below if you are equally optimistic.

"Really, it’s about giving people the freedom to move around the web with their identity. Just like we move about the world with our bodies. Now I’d see you in one context and then you show up in another place I go “Oh! That’s the same person because they’re walking around in the same body.” So on the web, we just have handles and there has been no standard until very recently where I could move from one context to another context and take that identity that handle with me and would prove that I’m the same person. Of course, giving people the freedom to aggregate across the network of sites. Instead of having a username and password that’s different at every single place you go."

With standards like OpenId, it's great to see user centric identity moving from a concept to a reality. In the rest of this post, we'll explore:

• Why user centric identity is important
• How it fits into some themes we discuss regularly on RWW
• Finally, opportunities for you to get involved

Why is this important? ... Startup Fatigue

I am included in the group of writers at RWW who receive pitches via our email address tips@readwriteweb.com. I've been amazed at the number of innovative web apps being developed to solve real problems. It seems like at least once a week I come across something that I'd be interested in trying out. The problem is that if a site doesn't accept OpenID, it ends up being one more handle and password I need to remember. Keeping track of all these accounts is exhausting. Over time, it has raised the bar for when I'm willing to actually try out a service. I call this effect sign up fatigue. Interestingly, many of the people I talk to seem to be experiencing the same thing.

Important Emerging Issues

In addition to the role Open ID can play as simply a core component of any web application, user centric identity is conceptually a foundation for many of the emerging themes we discuss regularly at ReadWriteWeb, including:

• Opening Up the Social Graph: One of the interesting challenges right now for Open Social is that the authentication is still being handled by the container. It will be critical to adopt OAuth or some other open standard for the true opportunity to be realized. As I reported from the Defrag Conference, Kevin Marks from Google was honest about this not being a sufficient solution.
• Vendor Relationship Management (VRM): Doc Searls has been a thought leader in the user centric identity community for some time. He is currently working with the Berkman Center at Harvard on developing the next step called VRM. Bernard Lunn recently summarized VRM on ReadWriteWeb as "Turning Attention into Intention."
• Attention Economy: Beyond VRM, many of the concepts behind the attention economy require users to be empowered to authenticate across sites.

Getting Involved

If you are interested in learning more about user centric identity, there is an (un)conference at the Computer History Museum next week you should consider attending - The Internet Identity Workshop. I've attended in the past and will be there for at least part of the conference this year. If you are interested in learning more and participating in the community, please consider signing up and joining the conversation.

Note that Charles Knight live blogged most of the Defrag conference at AltSearchEngines. So if you want the play-by-play, I'd encourage you to check out his posts.

Alex Iskold has been covering the attention economy for some time here on Read/WriteWeb. At Defrag, he gave a presentation on structured attention. This is the subset of attention that is about physical things. Popular examples on the web include books, music, and movies. Alex explained that this is easier for a computer to process and therefore to derive recommendations from, because it has specific metadata. For example, a book has attributes like an author, title, and number of pages. Alex encouraged the audience to start focusing on structured attention.

Doc Searls also talked about leveraging attention. For those not familiar with his research at Harvard's Berkman Center, Doc is currently focused on Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) - which is focused on turning attention into intentions (see also our own Bernard Lunn's recent post on VRM). Following Doc's presentation, Esther Dyson presented some of her thoughts on attention as well during her keynote. Specifically, she focused on how to educate and engage individuals about the attention economy.

My Take: I've been thinking about digital attention for some time. There are a lot of issues to work out, as the presenters discussed, such as ownership of data and ways to articulate that to users. However, the benefits some websites have already seen (Amazon and Tacoda jump to mind) are going to continue to encourage sites to leverage users attention streams.

I'm also really glad to have leaders like Esther and Doc focused on the user's perspective and rights. Empowering and educating users is clearly very important. Unfortunately, I don't think the 'average' website visitor is that concerned about this today, but with the do-not-track proposal starting to get some coverage, and thought leaders exploring the issues, that could change soon.

Theme 2: Next-Level Discovery

Bradley Horowitz from Yahoo moderated a panel on "Next-Level Discovery." The panelist included both academics (Marti Hearst at UC Berkley) and practitioners (Lou Paglia from Factiva/Dow Jones, Jeremie Miller from Search Wikia and Steve Larsen at Krugle). In Bradley's opening remarks, he noted that each panelist had a unique vision for the next-level of discovery. The one thing there was consensus on was the importance of marrying implicit and explicit user behavior. However, there are very different opinions in the appropriate blend of implicit and explicit.

My Take: I believe that the appropriate blend of implict and explicit is not the same for every individual. Some visitors will want to be completely dependent on implicit gestures, while others will want to provide a lot of explicit feedback as well. The key then is creating a system that is flexible enough to create a great experience both exclusively from implicit gestures, while still giving users as much control as they desire if and when they choose to be explicit.

For full disclosure: I co-founded a company called mSpoke, which has technology that allows individuals to do exactly what I'm describing. In my view it is a superior approach to helping individual's discover and filter content.

Theme 3: Social Graph

Between Kevin Marks giving an overview of Open Social, Brad Feld and Alex Iskold launching Closed Private, and Facebook announcing their advertising system, the conversations around leveraging an individual's social graph were inevitable. While there seemed to be optimism about the long-term impact of an individual's social graph data, the conversation consistently noted how poorly our online social networks are at reflecting our actual real life social networks. Specifically, there were two components to this:

• The amount of data in other systems such as our cell phone and email that may reflect parts of our social network better;
• The desire for multiple levels, or some type of hierarchy, of different contacts which better reflect the relationships.

My Take:

One specific concern I have is that it will be important for Facebook to continue evolving to support more than a network of my college friends. For example, I attend a number of conferences - and after each conference people I've met add me to their Facebook network. Interestingly, a few conferences ago one 40+ year old man tried to get me to confirm the detail request that "we hooked up." I know what he meant, but I'm happily married to a beautiful wife and assure you that we didn't hook up! If Facebook is becoming another professional network, then the options you can choose just don't mirror reality right now. Just look at the screen shot below:

Theme 4: User Centric Identity

During the the first day, conference organizer Eric Norlan said something quite profound: "the individual is always the point of integration." Many of the conversations at the conference seemed to assume that user centric identity was solved online or would be solved.

Dick Hardt gave a presentation at the conference etitled "Defragging Identity." If you don't know Dick, he is probably most famous for his keynote at OSCON. The presentation here was delivered in the same style. His key point was that 'trust defrags identity', because in an online world you can't use the intuition you do offline to determine if someone is who they say they are.

My Take: User centric identity is an important topic for us as an industry to be talking about. I expected Eric to include it as a theme on the agenda and I'm glad he did. It's critical infrastructure for the three themes already discussed. I actually have another expert in user centric identity as my next interview on Read/WriteTalk, so if you want to learn more subscribe in iTunes now.

Theme 5: Enterprise Customers Arrive

Eric had tipped his hat to this in a post on the Defrag blog, where he said:

"I see a lot of the companies in the “defrag space” (including a lot of our sponsors) starting on the consumer-side of things. I also see nearly all of them making the shift toward the enterprise."

My Take: I spent two years selling enterprise software as an entrepreneur. I was actually quite good at it signing up a number of blue chip customers. However, I can't imagine going back and focusing on it again. That said, I think my reaction is more towards enterprise sales, versus seeing enterprises adopt these tools. It's great that a lot of web tools can be purchased now with a credit card, or even better are ad supported. In those cases, individuals can get started with the tool almost immediately and with limited overhead. Those types of opportunities are exciting.

Conclusion

So those are the big themes I left Defrag thinking about. I'm still processing each of then. Therefore, I'd love to hear your thoughts and reactions. I also know many of you were in attendance, so were there any big themes I left out?

Kevin's speech wasn't on the Defrag agenda, but it was squeezed in due to the timeliness of the topic. Plus, tongue in cheek, it was suggested that Brad Feld and our own Alex Iskold's launch of ClosedPrivate the day before may have compelled Kevin to get OpenSocial on the agenda!

While a lot of the material was repurposed from Campfire, Kevin also sat down with Jerry Michalski and the conversation turned very interesting. There were a few nuggets I wanted to share with the Read/WriteWeb audience.

Jerry asked Kevin: "what stage is Open Social App at?". Kevin was very clear that this is a true alpha - and he contrasted this with Google's typical perpetual beta. He explained that the leaders at Google felt it was important to get this out early, because of the need for developers outside of Google to participate.

User Authentication Model

One of the things I've been very interested in when looking at OpenSocial is how they plan to handle user authentication. According to Kevin: "At the moment, it is delegated to the containers. Clearly this needs to work better. We are looking at oAuth."

This was actually very encouraging to hear. I was afraid that Google would require users to authenticate using Google. I believe it will be important for OpenSocial to ultimately leverage an open authentication method, not depend on a single proprietary Google standard. In the meantime, given the alpha stage, using the container's authentication makes sense.

Kevin Marks at Defrag; Photo: Graeme Thickins

Sharing Data Between Services

One of the concerns that Marshall raised on Friday here on Read/WriteWeb was:

"While most APIs tend to be read-only, the OpenSocial APIs might be capable only of allowing widgets to be published from one network to another. Will one network be able to pull in bio, friend and interest data from another? That's not being discussed at all."

Kevin said that indeed this functionality is on its way. However, the authentication is important, because you don't want widgets to start pulling in data from friends of friends.

Jerry also asked about the ability to add users from one system to another. For example, can I add my LinkedIn contacts to another network? Kevin said that "at the moment it is just a query mechanism, but it is in development."

Conclusion

One of Marshall's questions in the post I mentioned earlier was: Is Google Exercising Leadership or Control? Obviously, only time will tell. However, I did find Kevin's transparency at Defrag encouraging. He answered questions directly and he was clear that OpenSocial is in alpha mode and so there is much more to come.

A variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, this format is frequently used to share the author's creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary. One of the many tumblelog sevices is tumblr.

Tumblr is announcing a number of new features today. We touch briefly on these features in the podcast, but also discuss David's vision for Tumblr. We also discuss how his service is specifically different than two competitors (Twitter and FriendFeed). In this post, I'll quickly cover how Tumblr is different, as well as put the spotlight on the new features being announced for Tumblr.

It has been six months since David and his colleague released Tumblr 2.0 and at that point they were still only working on it part time. (Beyond Tumblr, David was providing digital media consulting services in the New York area.) This is the first release since they started working on the project full time -- and they've been busy. David explained that it includes over 400 new features, fixes, and improvements. Beyond fixes, the features seem to cluster around four important themes for this release:

• Supporting Audio Posts
• Upgrades to Video Posting
• Private Communication: Channels
• Easier Integration Points (APIs)

Audio Posts

According to David, one of the most requested features was to support audio posts. The new version of Tumblr allows you to create an MP3 audio file or use your phone to create one and post up to one audio file per day. It will then play within a flash player on the post.

Upgrades to Video Posting

Before this release, Tumblr only recognized embed codes from major video sites. Now, they are supporting any video or Flash embed code.

They also have partnered with Vimeo to allow, from phone or browser, posting videos directly to your Tumblelog. It should be noted that Jakob Lodwick, founder and CEO of Vimeo, participated as an angel in the funding round that Union Square and Spark Capital led a few months ago - so I'm sure the partnership between Tumblr and Vimeo is deep.

Private Communication

When I was interviewing David, he was very excited about the ability to support private group communication from Tumblr's posting tools. They are calling this capability "channels." Obviously, there are a lot of tools that are trying to make it easy for groups to collaborate, but to the extent a group is comfortable with the Tumblr posting UI, I could see this proving effective.

Easier Integration - APIs

The Vimeo integration is clearly a good example of a traditional partnership with Tumblr. However, they also have expanded their API and now support JSON. This is allowing applications to be built on top of the Tumblr API. Some of the companies that have taken advantage of the APIs already include Jott and Disqus.

The importance of this is clear when you look at the value other companies have gotten from opening up their APIs. For example, when interviewing Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter, on an earlier episode of Read/WriteTalk and he emphasized the importance of Twitter's APIs saying, "the API has easily 10 times more traffic than the website."

Competition

It is important to point out that there are a number of other companies that are operating either in adjacent areas or are direct competitors to Tumblr.

Twitter

When I first learned about Tumblr, the first service that jumped to my mind as competitive was Twitter. I asked David how he felt Tumblr was different than Twitter. His response was:

Twitter is a service you use to tell people what you are doing. We look at Tumblr as a service to share those experiences ...

It's also interesting that Union Square Ventures has actually invested in both Twitter and Tumblr. When Union Square announced the Tumblr investment on their blog, they proactively responded to the question of whether they are competitive services:

We don't think so. As you can read in our post on investing in Twitter, we see Twitter as a communication platform ... By contrast, Tumblr strives to be the easiest place to express yourself online, to create your web presence simply and beautifully. In the designing the best service to tackle their respective missions, both Twitter and Tumblr have become services that enable short-form expression. That's why many people see Tumblr and Twitter as competitive services. But, this comparison is superficial and does not grasp the goals of each service. If Twitter succeeds in fulfilling its mobile communications goals, all the problems that Tumblr addresses will still exist; and vice-versa for Tumblr. So, in our opinion, these two investments are not competitive.

FriendFeed

In the area of aggregating other web-services, FriendFeed seems like the most natural competitor to Tumblr. In our interview, David also contrasts Tumblr to his understanding of FriendFeed, but acknowledges he hasn't tried the service yet. This is understandable as the service is still in a private beta.

It's probably worth noting that Bret Taylor and Jim Norris founded FriendFeed as Entrepreneurs in Residence at Benchmark Capital after leaving Google. They have a great track record for developing innovative web applications while at Google including Google Maps, Gmail and Google Groups. While right now they seem more focused on aggregating different feeds from your life (such as Flickr, Twitter, YouTube) and letting you publish them in places like your blog or Facebook profile, it is a very early service so time will tell how they compete in the long run.

Other Competitors

Beyond Twitter & FriendFeed, there are other companies you could perceive as competitive to Tumblr. For example, Jaiku which was recently acquired by Google and Pownce which was founded by Kevin Rose. However, both of these really seem like direct competitors to Twitter. Therefore, they are probably only as competitive with Tumblr as Twitter is.

Conclusion

To learn more about Tumblr, I'd encourage you to listen to my interview with David. I'd love to hear what you think of Tumblr in the comments below. Are they competitive with Twitter and FriendFeed? What do you think of the new features released today?