Running With Foxes

MySpace recently announced that developers can pay for promotion of their applications on MySpace’s platform (Rumored cost of $100,000 a week). I can’t say I’m surprised. MySpace has always been savvy as a media property. There are ads everywhere. Every one of those ads places a visual tax on their users. My question is it getting to be too much?

With a finger to the sky, I’m getting the feeling that users are getting restless and looking elsewhere. I recently looked at the Alexa stats for Facebook and MySpace and noticed an interesting cross over. At the beginning of April, Facebook surpassed MySpace in the rankings. Anecdotally, one of my best friends, who clearly fell in the MySpace camp (cool musician), joined Facebook and apparently abandoned his MySpace profile.

These services exist in a marketplace, and with the rise of Facebook and advent of OpenSocial / DataPortability, switching behavior will become easier. Social technology will also permeate a whole new set of properties (friendfeed, socialthing) that give users what they want, the chance to connect with old and new friends.

Users will vote with their clicks and take their business somewhere less cluttered. Users want to connect with old friends. Seeing the latest trailer or band is only incidental. Developers will also trickle away from the site if they’re not given a fair shake to make a profit, as Facebook is doing. MySpace may be making a dollar today, only to lose two in a year.

A little stale news this time in the day, but it’s great to see Mike in the Time’s 100. He’s fittingly in the “Builders & Titans” category. I remember Mike’s original promise that by joining TechCrunch with it’s (now meager) 20,000 subscribers I’d have the opportunity to be at the center of everything happening in the valley. Over the next year and a half, it was definitely the case as new web startups were born in Mike’s backyard (featured in the photo along with his shoddy lawn furniture).

TechCrunch was really at the center of two turning points, the growth of blogging as a business and the next growth spurt of the web. TechCrunch fostered the growth and attention on startups unlike any other site on the web. It also gave rise to the idea that readers could get more value from reading a blog by an entrenched industry expert(s) instead of the business section of their paper. I look at the attention Mike’s getting as not only his personal validation, but also validation of the community the site’s fostered over the years.

Congrats.

So, I recently finished a workshop at web 2.0 that covered some best practices about blogging (slides). A lot of questions from the audience centered around how businesses or organizations could improve their blogs. We looked at a couple live blogs, including Perket PR, Monterey Bay Aquarium, and The Next Web (from the makers of Fleck).

We gave some substantial advice to each of these blogs about how to improve. However, that avoided the larger question of why you should have a blog. The answer is that not every company should.

Blogging is one of many publishing tools for disseminating your company’s message, not a panacea for customer acquisition. Jason Calacanis just had a great post on other social media methods. And since they take a lot of time to maintain and do well, you need to think of what ROI you can get out of it.

Blogs are good for businesses with a focused user base. SocialMedia’s target audience isn’t in the millions, it’s in the thousands, so maintaining a blog makes sense. But the blog is only one part of the strategy of reaching those people. We can get our message out by attending events and engaging with several blogs already in the space. So, I’m currently going to a lot of social networking related events and doing some guest posting for some of the stellar blogs in the space. Granted, from my time at TechCrunch it’s a bit easier for me.

However, a lot of other interest categories are filled with part time bloggers that could use a coordinating force. The conservationist category seems like an ideal example. There are many passionate part time or amateur bloggers out there, but they don’t have a unifying node to centralize the conversation in that space. This opens an opportunity for a great organization like the Monterey Bay Aquarium to come along and give those part timers a place to contribute and have their voices heard.

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Here are the slides from my workshop yesterday with Eric and Trish.

So, Web 2.0 is in town, and I’m having the pleasure of speaking at a workshop during the event. Tomorrow, I’ll be taking the stage with Eric Eldon of Venturebeat and Trish Okubo to speak about how to use blogging for social media marketing. The workshop is at 1pm. Eric and I will be covering the blogging for dollars portion of the content based on our experience at tech blogs, while Trish will tackle blogging for personal reputation and networking. Anyone have any suggestions about specific topics they’d like covered, drop me an email or comment.

Otherwise, after the talk, I’ll be heading back to SocialMedia HQ for a quick bar stop from 5-7pm before the night’s festivities. RSVP if you’d like to stop by.

Probably the most interesting result I found while playing around with Facebook’s answer to Zeitgeist, Lexicon.

Interesting that people enjoy talking about hangovers more than partying. Also looks like there are lot of hungover college students wandering around on Sunday.

Joost launched last year to quite a bit of fanfare. Heck, even I was excited. I once thought they had it in the bag. They had a slick player, were nearing a million users (a tough number to hit for a download), and were even backed by Viacom, CBS, and Sequoia.

However, the market’s changed considerably. First, Hulu launched and was a lot better than expected. Second, Adobe announced plans to incorporate a slicker codec. Now Joost is finding content deals harder to come by.

These kinds of difficulties are nothing new. We’ve seen them before in online music amongst deals between the large record labels and online vendors. In that case, as in the case of online video, it appears that publishers are calling the shots. However, they haven’t been in complete control. In a large part, pirates have forced their hands. Piracy has in large part been democratized by the arrival of user friendly media distribution channels like YouTube, Deezer, or any number of other streaming media services.

In fact, I’d argue that online, media publishers are more in competition with pirates than each other. There’s plenty of demand for high quality media content online and pirates have no qualms in supplying it. Comedy Central had its own fight with YouTube over Daily Show clips until it finally put everything online on its own site. The same has played out for a multitude of other shows including South Park, which also finally got it’s online counterpart.

While publishers can’t beat pirates on price, they can win the audience back with quality and user experience. But make the ads too annoying or obnoxious and users will flee back to pirates. Publishers can make large libraries of their content easily searched and in high definition. I get a sense that all online media will move toward points of aggregation. For music, Steve Jobs hopes it’s iTunes. Hulu has the potential to be the same for television. There will likely be a few other syndication partners as well.

At about 2am PST, the much anticipated Facebook chat went online for me. While a blow to many developers on the application platform, it’s really a no brainer for Facebook. Chat will undoubtedly increase time spent on the site for a lot of the “13-22 nothing better to do demographic”. But it will also make it a lot easier for me to connect with people I only know through Facebook, sans email.

Still playing around with the privacy controls.

One of the things I felt hurt me when I was writing or analyzing search engines was that I was soooooo incredibly used to Google search. I started using Google back in 2000 or so when my brother introduced me to them and haven’t really changed since. I’m sure everyone else in the tech industry has a similar story.

So, to broaden my horizons and see if the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, I’m going a week without Google search (as opposed to just a day). Every time I get the impulse to run a query, I’ll go to Yahoo, Ask, or Live. I hope running real queries as opposed to the canned ones you use while testing a new engine will give me a better understanding of the search landscape.

Here’s a list of some of the engines:
Yahoo.com
Ask.com
Live.com
Quintura.com
Powerset.com (private beta)
Hakia.com
SurfCanyon.com

SocialMedia is holding a “Business School” event that will be stuffed with all sorts of practical information about building a business through social applications and take a look into the future. Find out more information here. We’re still in the early days and a lot has changed over the last couple of months. If you’re already operating a social site or looking to get on one of the platforms, it’s a must.

I’m also going to be hosting a panel on advertising at SNAP summit tomorrow. It’ll be a great opportunity to hear about what’s going on in the future of social advertising from some highly qualified panelists (Yeildbuild, Blue Lithium, Chirp, Circos).

The event is free for SocialMedia developers. Get tickets here.