Stickybits is Google Sidewiki for the Real World

On March 16, 2010, In New, By Tac Anderson

The Internet of things is the one of the next big side effects of our always on, always mobile lifestyles. McKinsey recently released a report on the implications of the Internet of things. I saw this coming to life this weekend.

At SXSW everyone was given a little packet of stickers. Actually everyone was given a lot of stickers. There was also a proliferation of QR codes (they were a sponsor) and Microsoft TAG codes (TAG is a client). But the previously mentioned pack of stickers were filled with little barcodes.

barcode
Image by Status Frustration via Flickr

If you own an iPhone you can download the stickybits iPhone app, scan the barcode and add “content” like pics, vids, text or audio and send that sticker to someone. If they have the stickybits app they can scan the barcode and see all that content you associated with the code.

Anyone who’s familiar with QR and TAG codes is thinking, so what, they can do that too in various types of ways.

BUT (here’s the kicker) you can scan and associate content to ANY barcode. Like all those barcodes on all the shelves in all the stores all over the World.

There’s a lot of cool things people could do with this. Leave favorite recipes, or shopping trips. But there’s another side. Maybe I’ve just been hanging around PR people too long but I see more fragmentation of communication that brands have to be a little worried about.

Many of you are familiar with Google Sidewiki, the Google Toolbar extension that lets you add notes to the side of any Web page on the Internet. This concept, and all the potential nightmares that came with it, may sound familiar.

Stickybits is a new product so not many people would ever see the content you associate with a barcode (yet). But what if it did take off? Imagine being a product manager at Product & Gamble and trying to monitor all those conversations across all your products.

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Geeks Tolerate Apple Hypocrisy Until They Mess with Porn

On February 24, 2010, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

I’ve posted  several times about Apple’s continued hypocrisy and my love/hate relationship with their products. Like most people, I love their design and I’m glad they’re pushing the industry but I have always hated their closed culture and hyper controlling attitude.

Full disclosure I used to work at HP (who is now a client). Microsoft, T-Mobile (who sells Google’s Android phones) and HTC are all clients. But my wary feelings towards Apple have been around long before I worked in tech. I’ll take choice and glitches over design and limitations.

MG Seigler, TechCrunch’s editor and self proclaimed Apple fanboi, has a post about Apple’s latest move to block porn from the app store. I think this is a fascinating move by Apple. My personal stance on morality is that first I believe everyone has their own free agency to do as they see fit and it’s not my business. Second I personally dislike anything that’s addicting. This goes for drugs, alcohol and pornography. (Yes porn’s addicting). So while I want to applaud Apple for this move, it’s not any type of moral victory, as MG points out.

Problem number one is that while Apple is removing most of these sexy apps from the App Store, it’s not removing all of them. So who gets to stay? Big publishers like Sports Illustrated and Playboy. In fact, not only is Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit 2010 app not being removed, it’s being featured in the App Store. Both it and the Playboy app clearly violate the new rules of the more prudish App Store, yet they get to stay.

The TechCrunch post has well over 100 comments as I write this and is trending on many news aggregation sites. Apple has struck a nerve. Now anyone who has studied technology adoption understands tech’s dirty little secret: Porn

VHS, BluRay, broadband adoption (what pictures and videos do you think people so desperately wanted to look at in the late 90’s), and search can all thank their success, in very large part, to the porn industry. That’s why Apple’s stance against porn seemed so interesting.

Google and Android have no such qualms about porn and several commenters to the opportunity to proclaim their “love” for Android. I also have to doubt Microsoft’s Windows Phone Marketplace will follow Apple’s lead here. It is still in it’s infancy and won’t really see it’s potential until Windows Phone 7 comes out and Microsoft typically takes a hands off approach to content and partner development.

Ultimately I have to think this is a move towards Apple to placate publishers. As MG points out Apple hasn’t removed Apps with similar types of content from Sports Illustrated and Playboy.  Again from TechCrunch we see a hint at the future in Apple’s response?

As Apple VP of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller explained earlier to the New York Times, it’s because they’re well-known companies known for that content. Yet, he also cited women being upset about feeling degraded and parents being upset about kids having access to sexy apps as the main reason Apple is cracking down on them. The omission of the fact that parents probably also don’t want their kids downloading the Playboy app, or that some women might also find the Swimsuit app degrading is laughable.

I imagine that Apple users will get their porn, especially with the iPad coming out. It’s just going to come from established (and struggling) publishers.I just wonder how much longer developers and users will put up with Apple?

[UPDATE] Yep, thought so:  New “Explicit” Category in App Store Could Herald Return of Sexy Apps

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Search, Discovery and Curation

On January 28, 2010, In New, By Tac Anderson

While @gearheadgal may never speak to me again my post from earlier this week, 3 Reasons Why Social Media is Killing Search, sparked some healthy debate. (BTW debate is a good thing, it’s healthy, respectful and we should all do it more.)

In my post I pointed to some recently reported trends that social media engagement is nearing search levels and given that many people use social networks to “find” recommendations, this will be very disruptive for search.

Google knows this and is responding: “Google Forming Social Web Team”

But Jeremy Meyers, Joe McCarthy and others helped qualify my claims in context of user behavior.

Joe McCarthy had a great response I thought was worth bringing to the surface of people who missed the comment thread.

I like your elevation of “curation”, and agree that social recommendation is an increasingly important component of discovering interesting and useful things online (very much in line with Jeremy Meyers’ distinction between search and discovery).

However, I hope that in the quest for innovation, search does not become overly influenced by social media usage. danah boyd posted an insightful piece a while back about valuing inefficiency and unreliability, in which she emphasized the value conferred by effort. It seems to me that many Twitter users tweet (or retweet) a link to a long article or story without reading it (completely), or tweet a link to a short summary of a longer essay … possibly drawn in by a catchy headline and/or an engaging first paragraph (and no, I won’t say anything more about headlines, given another thread in these comments :) .

My concern is that Twitter and other social media services are promoting a “snack culture”, and without search algorithms that are not [as heavily] influenced by the memes of the moment, our ability to find original sources – or insights and experiences that may not be currently trendy – may suffer.

As a potential analogy, I’m reminded of a study, Voting With Your Feet: An Investigative Study of the Relationship Between Place Visit Behavior and Preference, where Jon Froehlich and his colleagues found that the restaurants people visit most often do not correlate well with the restaurants they actually like or value the most … they are simply most convenient. There’s a place for convenience – online and offline – but I hope search innovations will not sacrifice breadth and depth for radical immediacy.

[Update] Joe left this comment with a link to additional thoughts on the original post:

…the commoditization of Twitter followers, where it provided a missing piece to tie together a few loose ends at the conclusion

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Is Bitly Bigger than Google?

On January 20, 2010, In New, By Tac Anderson

That’s the question I had to ask after seeing this post by John Borthwick with this chart.

I recently wrote a post on Bitly’s new search feature. It turns out that’s a bigger deal I thought initially.

The chart is about impossible to read but if you look in the upper right hand corner you’ll see where a yellow line intersects a dashed line. That’s Bitly’s decodes (clicks) and traffic data John gave for Google. By the looks of this chart you could get the impression that Bitly is bigger than Google.

That obviously didn’t seem right so I did a little digging. What I present bellow is a series of apples to oranges comparisons and really bad math.

The number for Google must be the traffic for Google.com. I got these numbers which are similar from Compete. (Click for larger image.)146 unique visitor a month.

But we all know that unique visits to Google.com don’t equate to number of searches on all of Google’s properties, which is the real number that matters.

But this number is really interesting:

bit.ly: last week was the largest week ever for clicks on bit.ly links. 564m were clicked on in total. On the Jan 6th there were a record of 98m decodes.    1100 clicks every second.

That was the week of January 11th, the same week that Twitter had it’s highest usage day. So knowing that this was a peak usage number but assuming that Bit.ly will continue to grow we’ll use that number: 98 million decodes (clicks) in one day. That’s 3 billion clicks in one month (again Bit.ly’s not there yet but humor me).

What about Google? The most recent data I could find was from Search Engine Watch from the summer of 2009 (I’m sure there’s better data but again, humor me). This claims that in Aug of 2009 Google had 6.9 Billion searches. Way more than Bit.ly clicks.

But wait. How big is Bit.ly? About 6 people and they’ve only been around a few years. How big is Google? ~20,000 employees and they have about a 12 year head start on Bitly.

Yeah big deal, I know. Let’s get really funny with the math.

That 6.9 Billion number is for all of Google’s properties. What if you separate the second largest search engine? (which Google also owns), YouTube.

Over a year ago YouTube was generating 2.7 Billion searches a month and with YouTube’s explosive growth this last year we’ll conservatively round up to 3 Billion. Subtracting those number you end up with

  • Google – 3.9 Billion
  • YouTube – 3 Billion
  • Bitly – 3 Billion

Not so funny anymore is it? So in one way (yes this is non-statistically accurate and apples to oranges but it’s fun) Bitly is as big as YouTube and almost as big as the rest of Google. This also explains why Bitly launched Bitly.tv and Google and YouTube both launched their own URL shorteners.

But wait, there’s more Bitly only has about 55% market share. That means the total market of clicks from URL shorteners could be nearing 5.5 Billion a month. But then we’d have to compare that to the total search market which is double that.

So no Bitly isn’t bigger than Google and even stretching the number as much as I did, it’s still not even as big but I think it’s a sign of things to come.

All funny number aside I only have one question? Why the hell hasn’t Google or Microsoft bought Bitly yet? Besides the clicks all that data is a gold mine.

Twitter and Facebook aren’t the threat to Google, we are. We would rather share links than search. Social networks are just the pipes we use to share but this puts a lot of power in the hands of the URL shorteners as they are the carriers of that information.

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PR Needs to Tell More Stories and Pitch Less

On January 5, 2010, In Comm, By Tac Anderson
Statue of a newspaper vendor at the Texas Pres...
Image via Wikipedia

There’s a brewing problem. Reporters are strapped an under increasing pressure to compete with bloggers. This results in reporters writing re-tweetable headlines which are sometimes misleading or stories being written with unchecked facts and inaccuracies. The solution, of course, is good journalism. But until the market sorts out the news business there’s a void that needs to be filled.

In the tech space that’s almost completely being filled by bloggers. Some bloggers are stepping up to fill that gap but most aren’t and don’t want to be burdened with the title: “journalists.”

Remember the whole TechCrunch and Last.fm blog-storm? It was really fascinating to watch. Paul Carr then of the Guardian has a great story on the whole thing and why he thinks TechCrunch got duped. (Funny that he then went to write for TechCrunch.)

The big tech blogs like TechCrunch regularly race to market with sketchy information with an inflammatory headline knowing that Mashable, NextWeb, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOm, etc will all run follow on posts with even less facts. This results in the 1st article racing up Techmeme, Tweetmeme, trending topics, Digg etc and massive link juice and traffic.
We’ve even started to see traditional media take similar “Digg bait” approaches and as their revenue and staff get even thinner you will see more of it.

The point of Carr’s article is that even if bloggers and media lead with a story they believe is true it has never been easier to dupe them.

When you read TechCrunch (especially Arrington’s) posts about Last.fm or Google buying Twitter or Apple’s iSlate rumors or any other exclusive/leaked story you usually find a line similar to “a source close to the deal said…” That could imply the guy in the office across the hall who saw Google execs on the elevator on their way up. Which happens to be in the direction of Twitter or some other company, therefore Twitter’s being bought by Google. Said informant thinks, “I’ll tell Arrington and be famous, kind of. Or at least maybe Arrington will like me and get me tickets to TechCrunch 50″.

Companies need good journalism as much as democracy does. The problem is that neither blogs or traditional media will provide this at the level companies need (at least not in the short term). The solution is that companies need to tell their own story and not rely on journalists to do it for you. Invite the media to come along but don’t wait for them to catch up.

The idea isn’t so far fetched.

Neil Benson, editorial director of the U.K. Trinity Mirror regionals is calling for newspapers to become PR agencies: “The best of PR agencies are often run by ex-editorial people. People who worked in regional press know what it takes to hit the spot in terms of press releases and they know how to package it. So why don’t regional publishers think about launching an arm’s length PR agency?”

He went on to explain that newspapers could offer SEO, microsites, and video productions services to advertisers. Essentially, certain advertisers could team up with journalists to create sites dedicated to one topic and go beyond the advertorial as we know it

This is one area where PR agencies need to evolve and offer real reporting (they have the skills), but companies can even go so far as to hire their own internal journalists.

Now the purists who read this will be quick to point out the conflict of interest and ethical issues with this approach. I would argue that they are no more compromised that journalists who can’t run a story because a company will pull their advertising.

Companies need to tell their story. Journalists don’t have the time to tell some of the best stories inside companies, both because of access and time. Corporate press sites need to evolve into news sites. (This is something we’ve been working with our clients on see here for a client example.)

I’m not talking about traditional journalism. These new journalists need to be separate from Marketing and PR. These new journalists will be able to do the deep reporting you don’t get from a press release or a marketing campaign. And while you won’t stop the inaccurate stories that flame up out of control, it will give you a way to respond with better reporting.

I would also argue a company that knows it has journalists walking around it’s halls would be less likely to do things that would get them in trouble. While these journalists won’t be writing the scandalous behind the scenes whistle-blowing articles, they need to be free enough to go off message and call a spade a spade.

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Bloggers Love Self Reflection

On January 4, 2010, In Comm, By Tac Anderson
FriendFeed vs Twitter

I do so enjoy self-reflection. I’d promise this is my last reflective look of 2009 but I’m afraid I’d make a liar out of myself.

Off to the right of this blog you’ll see the Top 10 posts according to the WordPress Popularity Contest widget as well as the Top 10 posts according to PostRank. PostRank puts a premium on recent activity while Popularity Contest puts a premium on overall activity which is why you see the discrepancy between the two.  Here are my top 10 posts of 2009 based solely on Traffic:

  1. This is Why Google Scares the Sh*t Out of Companies
  2. There is NOT too much information
  3. My GTD Moleskine Hacks
  4. Forget, Unfriend. The new put down is the Un-Retweet.
  5. Posterous Overtakes FriendFeed, Set to Overtake Delicious.
  6. Leaving HP. Back to Agency Life.
  7. On Being an Influencer and Marketing as Media
  8. Wikipedia is the best thing ever!
  9. You Do Not Have to be Social Media Famous.
  10. Top 5 Predictions for the Next 5 Years in Business Social Media

[UPDATE] Melanie over at PostRank sent this for me as well. Thanks.

While you’re waiting with bated breath for the Top Blogs, to equalize out the post rankings between WordPress and PostRank a bit, I took a quick look at your analytics in our system and pulled up your top posts for the year according to PostRank. (The widget only looks at the last 50 posts, so this is for the whole year, based on total engagement points per post, which I’ve noted in brackets at the end of each title.)

  • Posterous Overtakes FriendFeed, Set to Overtake Delicious. – Nov. 4 (643)
  • Leaving HP. Back to Agency Life. – Apr. 20 (641)
  • You are Crazy not to Measure the ROI of Social Media! – Aug. 27 (435)
  • This is Why Google Scares the Sh*t Out of Companies – Oct. 29 (411)
  • On Being an Influencer and Marketing as Media – Sept. 25 (324)
  • You Do Not Have to be Social Media Famous. – Aug. 10 (284)
  • Brizzly is Funny. Obviously Wants to Be More than a Twitter Client. – Oct. 3 (270)
  • Top 5 Predictions for the Next 5 Years in Business Social Media – Dec. 21 (262)
  • Twitter for News and Facebook for Tech? – Oct. 17 (259)
  • So Shut the Tweet Up! – Aug. 7 (249)
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PubSub Finally Rises From the Dead [Kind of]

On December 30, 2009, In New, By Tac Anderson

[UPDATE: Bob Wyman, founder of PubSub, left several comments to this post clarifying many of my questions and assumptions in this post.]

If you know PubSub (not to be confused with Google’s PubSubHubub) you’re an old timer in this space. PubSub was what Google Alerts was before Google Alerts existed. PubSub was the first example of the Power of Real Time Web back when @ev and @biz were still building Blogger.

Here’s the Wikipedia info describing what the original product was:

PubSub (website) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

PubSub was a prospective search engine for searching blogs, press releases, Usenet, USGS earthquake alerts, SEC filings and FAA Flight Delay information.

The site, founded in 2002 by Bob Wyman and Salim Ismail, operated by storing a user’s search term, making it a subscription, and checking it against posts on blogs which ping the search engine. When a new match was found, the user was notified, even if it occurred months after the initial search. This feature led PubSub to call itself a matching engine. It also checks incoming Usenet posts, USGS earthquake alerts, press release via NITF, SEC filings and FAA flight delay information.

Results could be read on the service’s website, or on an optional sidebar, available for both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, written by Malcolm Pollack and Duncan A. Werner respectively, or via RSS. Results could also be delivered to remote systems via Restful APIs, email or XMPP

I’ve always had a soft spot and fond memories of PubSub. Richard MacManus has a good post from 2006 detailing the final days of PubSub

The Sad Decline of PubSub

It’s a shame to hear from Bob Wyman that PubSub is in trouble and in big danger of shutting its doors. Bob says that “internal political issues” are behind PubSub’s demise and implies that this has deflected resources from actually improving the product. It’s not my place to comment on the politics, but I do think PubSub has dropped the ball on the product front.

PubSub once held so much promise… It was the first real ‘future search’ product to gain traction and it was an innovator in the area of custom RSS feeds. The somewhat clumsy term I’ve used for that is Topic/Tag/Remix Feeds and here’s what I said about it back in January 2005:

I was heart broken when Google ripped them off and then when they couldn’t continue to innovate, again when they went under (I’ve always suspected that Google’s PubSubHubub was somehow paying homage to the original PubSub they helped kill).

But now they’re back. And no surprise it’s a real time search engine that searches, blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed or anything with an RSS feed. But it just seems to be displaying sports results so far.

So far the site isn’t anything to get excited about yet but as far as I can tell they haven’t officially launched. I’m also willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

The CrunchBase posting hasn’t been updated yet and still says that Something Simpler (the new Vancouver , CA  parent company) will be launching a new search engine in the winter of 2008. Well they only missed that mark be one year.  Their own site has this to say:

Something Simpler Systems

In fact we’re burning the candle at both ends to deliver you services that up the signal and stomp out the noise, allowing you to read less and know more, and to never miss out on the events you truly would have enjoyed.

We’re a leading-edge company charting a new course in the next-generation of the Web: a web that is personalized just for you; a web that understands your needs and wants; and a web that allows the things you’re interested in to find you, rather than the other way round.

They’ve given PubSub the tagline “Find the Future” You can see their real time results page here http://pubsub.com/realtime

PubSub Matching Engine | Something Simpler

Our Publish/Subscribe engine supports advanced, context-based filtering, matching, and sorting of realtime web-based content. Later in 2008, we’ll be releasing an API so that you, too can enjoy the benefits of this powerful capability. In the meantime, keep checking back here for details or subscribe to our email notification list.

Besides PubSub they also have another product Pul.se which they say is only available in Facebook but the site just points to the same place as the PubSub site.

Pulse apparently has its own history:

Facebook Pulse Killed
Facebook Pulse To Return
Pulse, a Facebook App, is Alive! | Something Simpler

By the sounds of the description of the Facebook app it seems to be a recommendation engine but I’m not personally familiar with it. There is a Fan Page but the actual application doesn’t seem to exist. Here’s the description from the Something Simpler site:

Keep your finger on the Pulse of Music, Movies, and more.. | Something Simpler

Keep your finger on the Pulse of Music, Movies, and more..

Pulse is an application (currently only available within Facebook) that learns about you and the things you like, and allows you to use a simple, fun compatibility test to determine which of your friends you have likes and dislikes in common with. Once Pulse knows enough about you, it begins to send you ideas about new music, movies, books, and other things which it thinks you might be interested in.

I can’t find anything on the blogs about their relaunch so this may be a stealth launch but there doesn’t seem to be much information available yet. Hopefully we’ll learn more soon and I look forward to PubSub finally living up to its potential.

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Top 10 2010 Social Media Predictions

On December 22, 2009, In Biz, By Tac Anderson
Got really bored tonight and started playing w...

My Best Guess

Following yesterdays post on 5 Predictions for the Next 5 Years here’s my Top 10 2010 Social Media Predictions. Unlike yesterday’s post where I was looking at the bigger trends that would shape our space this is a little more like playing fantasy football. I’m really just guessing.

  1. Facebook goes public at the end of the year.
  2. Twitter reaches profitability but does not go public.
  3. There’s a huge developer backlash against Twitter because they keep building functionality several apps have pioneered.
  4. Murdoch delists Newscorp sites from Google (actually I doubt he’s ever going to do this but I want him to, just to see what happens).
  5. Dozens of new journalism startups spring up and quickly garner attention as they hire armies of laid of journalists.
  6. Murdoch relists Newscorp sites in Google before the years over.
  7. Phone apps loose their appeal in favor of mobile optimized web pages.
  8. Google Chrome OS does only slightly better than Ubuntu and fails to draw mainstream support.
  9. The iPhone looses major market share in 2010 to Android.
  10. Hyper local journalism fails to gain a sustainable business model beyond individual bloggers.

What are your predictions for 2010?

Join the New Comm Biz Facebook Page or follow the Twitter account.

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Googles Real Time Twitter Search Stream

On December 13, 2009, In New, By Tac Anderson

On my phone I noticed a comment from David Armano about him heading over to Edelman. I flipped open my laptop and did a quick search when what do I see? Real time Twitter results scrolling by on Google.

Wow, that’s new. So I asked on Twitter if others were seeing this. I got a few replies mentioning that some started to see this feature Friday, others yesterday. Google may have pushed this out Friday or it may be rolling out little by little.

I of course tried to replicate this with other searches. The only way I got this feature was when I searched for people by there Twitter handle. I searched for my Twitter handle and didn’t get a stream but just a few results. I only received standard results when searching for my name. This just added new importance to your Twitter handle.

Then I tried a trending topic: Tiger Woods. That did it. It wasn’t the first result but ended up right above the images results. Also interesting to note is that it’s not just Twitter results but recent blog posts as well.

Right now the results seem to based chronologically, not by any weighting (although I may just not being seeing that). But based on what I saw in Google’s results there was no spam. This is obviously a huge a deal as it’s Google’s response to the perceived threat of Twitter and it shows that Google can do a better job at returning results (if it really is able to weed out the spam and still keep the good stuff).

As this is still an early version, I’m sure we’ll be saying major improvements over time.

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Will 2010 be the Death of Free and Open?

On November 30, 2009, In New, By Tac Anderson
2012 (film)
Image via Wikipedia

Arrington, I’m really sorry, this seriously sucks.

Mike Arrington can’t get a break. His Last startup, before TechCrunch became his full-time gig, Edgio, DeadPooled 2 years ago and now the CrunchPad joins it’s much older sibling in that same grave almost exactly 2 years later.

This is disconcerting to me for a few reasons:

But what really, really concerns me is what this could be an indicator of.

Open Collaboration

Arrington’s approach with the CrunchPad mirrors very closely the model laid out in the book Collaborative Entrepreneurship. From Amazon:

Collaborative Entrepreneurship: How Communities of Networked Firms Use Continuous Innovation to Create Economic Wealth: Today, the ability of firms to innovate is restricted by barriers both inside the firm and within their existing markets—barriers that produce limited knowledge utilization and incremental innovations. “Collaborative Entrepreneurship” describes how these barriers can be overcome so that shared knowledge can drive continuous, sustained innovation across a network of firms and markets.

The book is very theoretical but prophetic at the same time. I know that the scenarios they lay out in the book won’t come to fruition exactly the way they predict but I do believe they’ll come about in some form.

I loved the blog, hardware crossover Arrington was taking. Hardware is tough. Really, really tough. I always stayed away from business plans that required hardware. Too many hard costs, too many headaches. Arrington’s trials are proof of that.

Cross company collaboration is probably even harder. Even the poster child for open collaboration, Wikipedia seems to be cracking under the pressure:

Free vs IP

What about Cris Anderson and the promise we were given in his book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price? The real irony is that even Chris struggles to reinvent Wired and their business.

I’m also a big fan of Cory Doctorow and his new book Makers which may be more accurate than any non-fiction business book:

  • The decline and fall of America and the boundless optimism of open source/hacker culture
  • Brilliant geeks in a garage, are trash-hackers who find inspiration in the growing pile of technical junk
  • Cheap and easy 3D printing, a cure for obesity and crowd-sourced theme parks

Both Chris and Cory support open/mixed/free (whatever you want to call it) business models. The CrunchPad is the counterpoint to their argument. Greed is the reason we have lawyers and IP laws. It’s a sad reality we have been trying to fight since Gen X started taking corporate jobs.

Content Ownership and Advertising

2010 could be the year that Murdoch pulls his content from Google and hundreds of publishers could follow suit if he’s at all successful. I firmly believe that a publisher should be allowed to do whatever they want with their content but it does move counter to this free and open trend we’ve been living off of.

Hulu’s been great but they are slowly adding more and more ads to their programming, negating half the reason so many of us have flocked to it.

Apple (which made the opposite move Arrington was shooting for, from hardware to content) has recently filed patents for unskippable ads on their devices: Apple Files Patent for Un-skip-able Ads on iPhones, iPods

Even Google, the original purveyors of this free and open movement have been slowly adding more adds to their content to the point that some worry about the lines they may be crossing. Google Experiments With Paid Inclusion & Does “Promoted” Meet FTC Guidelines?

Where’s the Money?

Finally what really worries me is the lack of sustainable revenue from the big social media companies we rely on. Twitter is finally taking the easy fix with advertising and away from their promised premium and value add revenue models.

LinkedIn, Digg, Technorati and Facebook have gotten so huge and taken in so much VC money that the only reasonable exit strategy is an IPO. But none of them have the revenue to support that strategy yet. As this recession plods on and some begin to talk about a possible second dip, despite this “jobless recovery,” You have to wonder what will the big social networks do? How desperate to monetize will they be? Will they be able to deliver on the promise we all bought off on?

Or have the last 5 years been a departure from reality and the fact of the matter is that advertising is the only option and you should never openly collaborate and any collaboration joint venture should only be done with legions of lawyers at your side?

I believe in the open nature of the Internet. I have always believed that open is better than closed. I truly believe that open collaboration is the greatest approach to creating value and economic wealth. But for the first time I have doubts that it’s an unstoppable force.

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