Ampers & Dot

YouTube announced this week that it’s launching a real-time search engine for video comments. Or, as I’m calling it, the worst idea of the week (and, as that post points out, this is Balloon Boy week… so that’s really saying something).

YouTube is likely looking for a way to keep up with the buzzwordiest term of the month, “Real-Time”, and while it already has features to let you see new videos in real-time, giving its users the ability to search through recent comments as soon as they are posted might have been the next logical step. Now I’m not sure if you’ve recently read any YouTube comments, but if there one thing we don’t need immediately it’s incessant trolling.

Comments on YouTube videos represent just about all that is wrong with the internet. There’s constant spamming, derogatory sexism, racism, homophobia, and just awful hate - not to mention worse grammar and spelling than two monkeys playing scrabble… in a foreign language. With letters that somehow only spell swear words. I feel dirty just thinking about some of the comments I’ve seen on YouTube videos.

xkcd, as always, has a great take on the problem:

Why would we need to get to this mess of the web quicker? Take a look at the screenshot from YouTube’s announcement - who would want to see those comments in the first place? Not everything needs to be real-time.

There’s a justified rush to conquer the real-time web - it’s the source of what’s driving most online innovation and I think a lot of good is coming from it. I mean, the reason I like Twitter is because it’s the best source for right-now answers. It’s become my real-time search engine. But YouTube comments that just happened? I can wait…

Of course there is one worthwhile use-case: social media monitoring. Marketers that track their products/brands/campaigns will have an easier time getting live results from YouTube comments - which, let’s face it, probably won’t be positive comments. But this also presents marketers with the new challenge of another real-time channel. Just as quickly as they can discover comments, so can consumers - and as the race to drive the real-time web continues, so does the race to control it.

In the end, I’m excited to see more developments of the real-time web, but this is a classic case of “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should” engineering.

This past winter I ran a series of posts entitled “Things I Like” endorsing geeky things that I actually use every day. This highly successfuly series lasted an entire week (two full posts!) and plugged both TaskBar Shuffle and Google Trends. Well today the Things I Like series makes its triumphant return with: MapMyRun.com!

MapMyRun.com is an appropriately titled site that indeed, maps out your run. For those web-enthusiasts unfamliar with this concept - it’s like walking, but faster, and with an intended purpose of “excercise”.

Fundamentally, MMR is a Google Maps mashup that allows you to simply click to chart out a course, then it tells you how far the distance is. MapMyRun.com is a Freemium site and there are many, many other features, including savable and shareable maps, place markers for rest stops, a workout calculator, as well as an option to import/export to GPS systems. Most (all) of these features are probably better for real runners, but don’t worry, MapMyRun.com isn’t just for fitness freaks - it has many other everyday uses (I mean, why do you think I like it?).

I like MMR because I can plan out the time it will take to walk somewhere, or figure out the most direct way to walk through the Financial District of Boston, an area that has almost no right angles, or the difference between walking and taking the T, or, like last week, when I walk all over town for some stupid reason and I want to figure out exactly how stupid this trip was…

This is a screen cap (in the premium version of MMR you can export - which is good because apparently my lines all shifted about 100 yards west somehow) of the 9.14 miles I walked last week to visit four AT&T stores in search of a pre-release HTC Fuze.

Yes, that is three trips over the Longfellow Bridge. Fortunate moral of this ridiculous story is that I did indeed get my hands on a Fuze before it was released… WELL worth the walk!

But anyway - give MapMyRun a try and let me know what you think.

Over the last decade, we have given a lot to Google. Our personal information for targeted advertising, billions of search terms for data-mining, billions of ad revenue, and our overall privacy. S0, to celebrate its 10th birthday, big Google decided to return the favor and offer us with a gift: the chance to travel back to search the web from 2001 (which is good, because what the hell do you get the company that has everything?).

Enter Google Search 2001, which allows you to go through indexed results from yesteryear. Plus, if you click on the cached link, you can often see what pages were like way-back-when.

Here are a few of my favorite searches so far (and note, some of the results are hilarious to see who ranked well for what back then):

• “Social Media” - Google 2001 /Google Now
• “Gadget Blog” - Google 2001 / Google Now
• “Ruby on Rails” - Google 2001 / Google Now
• “Email” - Google 2001 / Google Now
• “iPhone” - Google 2001 / Google Now
• “Wii” - Google 2001 / Google Now
• “Wikipedia” - Google 2001 / Google Now
• “YouTube” - Google 2001 / Google Now
• “Facebook” - Google 2001 / Google Now
• “MySpace” - Google 2001 / Google Now
• And finally my favorite: “Google” - Google 2001 - Google Now

Obviously, some things that are hugely important now didn’t exist back then, but it’s funny to see zero results for them. Plus, it’s amazing to see what has evolved, what hasn’t, and also, how unlucky some companies must have been (like “MySpace Data Storage”… you don’t hear much from them anymore).

Also, for a little fun: a small collection of “That’s that the web looked like!?”

• Amazon (surprisingly similar)
• Yahoo! (can definitely see the evolution)
• CNet (same design?)
• Microsoft (almost unchanged)

What did you use the web for in 2001? And what other hilarities have you found?

Happy birthday Google. You’ve grown up so fast!

The way I see it, Web 2.0 is more about buzzwords than it is about technology.  The trend of buzzword soup is something I’ve ranted about before and I mean hell, “Web 2.0″ itself is the current reigning champion of buzzwords, so of course people will become sucked into being more interested in the words than the definitions.

So following my post from a few weeks ago about “Interactive Marketing” and how it isn’t necessarily “interactive” by definition, I was excited to read Kimberly Bock’s article on “What is Social Media?” from an SEO blog.  The most interesting thing I notice on this page is that there are in fact many, many definitions for “Social Media” and loads of them are exceptionally vague.

Impressively, Kimberly notes what an important concept that I think is often overlooked: buzzwords are a product of marketing.  (And I’ll link to her link for more great reading on Buzzwords and Marketers.)  Basically, what it comes down to is that buzzwords sell.

What many seem to have forgotten is that social technologies are a salient root for the internet (1.0 and 2.0).  My earliest experiences online were through bulletin boards, instant messaging, and IRC chat.  All of these are fundamentally social experiences.  I mean, it’s difficult to have an online chat with one person and I can’t imagine a bulletin board being too interesting with only a single member… But it’s worthwhile to point out that all of this was over 15 years ago.

In my early days online I developed (crappy) Hypercard games and traded them with other people online for (better) games.  Whoa, that’s so web 2.0!  Note: this was 1992.

So back to the point of buzzwords as sales tools: you take something that has already been successful, shine it up and repackage it with some fancy buzzword branding, and all of a sudden it’s worth millions of dollars (at least to the VC market).  By marketing something with vague buzzwords, consumers become more interested.  It’s like infomercial marketing (one of my favorite things, btw): you might not have ever heard of this thing before, but after seeing this infomercial there is NO WAY you can live without it!  (Side note: this is how I’ve ended up ordering the magic bullet, a set of miracle blades, and I’m still waiting to order my own Mighty Putty…)

Basically, I think there are some truly awesome technologies and websites coming out of the “web 2.0″ world that are valuable and worthwhile, I just think it’s really hard to find the ones that add value in the depths of buzzword soup.  So the next time you see a startup in this space, cut through the marketing and figure out what’s beneath the vague terminology.

What buzzwords bother you? I could go on for hours (or more likely, a few more posts), but am more interested in your annoyances.

In a surprise addition to the running series on Making Money with Web 2.0 (for previous entries, read up on Part 1: Advertising, Part 2: Freemium, and Part 3: Sell T Shirts) I thought it would be fun to add a fourth segment, to actually give hope to some of the startups out there.  See, I’ve been unnecessarily negative about the online economy, because in all actuality there are hundreds of companies out there pulling in hoards of cash because of their new innovative ideas with the interactive web.

Well today I want to talk about a monetization plan that bas been increasingly popular recently. This concept has as many holes in it as any of the other web 2.0 schemes, but interestingly, it actually works. The most plausible way for a startup to make money in the web 2.0 world is site flipping.

The idea behind site flipping is that you don’t need to worry about a monetization scheme, you just need to build something cool enough to draw in a large user-base. The more people you can convince to use your site, the more valuable it becomes because once you have a strong, dedicated, and large community, you sell them to someone bigger for a huge amount of cash. Then, making money is their problem, not yours!

In an attempt to make their money back, the big guy (likely Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, AOL, or whomever) will take your community and try to sell stuff to them (and now we’re back to the advertising model, yippee!). Hell, this even works with blogs now thanks to the likes of Conde Nast buying Ars Technica for $1.8 billion. (Note: Conde Nast- I’m for sale, too!)

The two best ways to optimize the amount you can sell your community for are A) create a specifically segmented community so that targeted advertising is incredibly easy (meaning that if you have a community that is built around music, then it’s easy to advertise music to them(assuming people still paid for music)), or B) get your user base to reveal as much personal information as possible so that they can be targeted even more directly (this is how Bebo is worth anything… I guess).

Really the only trick for site flipping is that you just have to keep enough money in your pockets long enough to get bought out. So as long as you have enough capital up front, you’ll be fine.

Ultimately this model is successful because of the growing conglomerate mega-tech companies out there are constantly battling with each other and need your community as ammo. I mean hell, Microsoft bought a small chunk of Facebook for targeted advertising purposes which valued each user at $300 ($15 billion valuation for 60 million users). AOL bought Bebo for a relative steal at only $21 per user ($850 million for 40 million users). Your users are valuable consumers to someone else. You don’t need to sell to them because they will.

The problem, obviously, is that 1) you’re going to piss off your users and you lose your company and 2) the big guys still rely on advertising to make money.

This model is incredibly similar to the house flipping concept that was so popular for a few years there. Go buy a dilapidated home, fix it up and sell it! It’s just that easy! I mean hell, the housing market did so well with this model, I can’t imagine how the same concept won’t work with the web as well.

So that’s it. That’s the end of my running series on Making Money with Web 2.0. I hope you enjoyed it and didn’t get too discouraged. Until the bubble inevitably bursts there is an incredible amount of opportunity out there to take the big guy’s money. So go get it, they’re pretty much handing it out on the street corner.

Following up on last Friday’s post on advertising (wow Zach, way to stick with the constant posting… jerk), today’s all about the “freemium” model of web 2.0 monetization. Freemium refers to the concept of offering standard services for free but then charging for premium features. The theory being that you attract the masses with the free services, then pull in the power users by offering just enough added functionality to make the product worth some money.

The best example of freemium is Flickr. Most people see Flickr as just another online way to upload and host pictures… for FREE. But, for $25/year the photo-sharing site offers additional image storage and sharing options for “Pro” users. The added features are supposedly good enough that if you’re a Flickr power user, it’s an obvious choice.

Makes sense, I guess. The only problem is that I’m not a power user so I don’t really get it. But what about something for which I am a power user? Say, Firefox (Internet Explorer just doesn’t make sense to me anymore), WordPress, or Twitter?

The concept is that the added features have to be compelling enough to make the free version seem less desirable, BUT while still keeping the free version as valuable as possible to draw users in to begin with. This is a daunting task and one of the main reasons that freemium models are met with skepticism.

But let’s look into the three examples I gave earlier: Firefox. What if you had to pay for extensions? Right now I use about a dozen or so add-ons to enhance my daily browsing (shortlist: New Tab Homepage, Advanced Dork, Quick Restart, SEO for Firefox, ColorZilla, Better GReader, Better Gmail 2, MeasureIt, Send Tab URLS, and about a third of a dozen (4) others). YES: I would pay for this functionality (well, some of it). New Tab Homepage opens new tabs into my homepage- yeah, I’d pay five bucks a year for that. ColorZilla let’s me find the color of anything on a page and returns the Hex code- an absolute necessity for blog designing. YES: I’d pay for it. And same goes for the others.

So what about WordPress (the blog platform that powers this site)- would I pay for add-ons here? Right now I’m using many, many plugins - the ones that you can see are: AJAX Comment Preview (the cool thing that lets you see your comment (go test it out by commenting!)), Get Recent Comments (to show you the active conversations), the AddThis button (little thing that lets you share my posts with others (that you never use…)), and the rest are all behind the scenes things that I would ABSOLUTELY pay for because they help my blog function.

The last example: Twitter. Right now many have argued for making Twitter into a freemium service. With its incessant downtime, why not be able to pay to have the damn thing work? The service makes about $0 a year and has server problems about six times an hour. Let’s change this.

And here’s how: for $20 a year give people the functionality of unlimited friends and unlimited messages per day. The free service would then be throttled down by limited friends to 500 (so Leo Laporte with his 42,000 friends might want to pay for this…) and limit daily messaging to 15 per day. Most people don’t have 500 friends, nor do they Tweet more than 15 times per day. But the power users, who exceed these numbers, would be happy to fork over about $2 a month to be unlimited.

There, I just solved your problems. (Can I have a cut of the premium money? No? Damn.)

But lastly, the real problem with freemium: as soon as one company starts charging, someone else will figure out how to do it for free. The public will get swayed by the freeness which will take your users, and revenue, out the door. And that’s Plurking annoying.

What would you pay for online?

If you came to this blog looking for ways to make money with your web 2.0 product, you’d probably better leave now because this post will only confuse and annoy you.  Also, if you’ve got a web 2.0 product, you probably shouldn’t be Googling “how to make money with web 2.0″ anyway, you probably should have thought about this a while ago.

But, if you’re like me and you’re fascinated by all the startups out there without business plans, then keep reading because we’re gonna have some fun and hopefully help me understand some things.

One of the biggest problems with the “web 2.0″ world right now (aside from an abundance of blogs that make fun of web 2.0) is that there is an abundance of money flowing into startups that will have trouble turning a profit.  This is eerily familiar to the dot com boom, that basically happened due to crazy over-valuations of websites that couldn’t actually make money.

So how do companies make money online right now?  A) Advertising B) The “Freemium” model or C) Selling T-Shirts.  Honestly, that’s pretty much it.  So as an exclusive three part blog post (yes, this easily could be one long blog post, but I’m cheaply splitting it into three sections (first for time, secondly because I really need to shorten my posts…)

So today we’ll be talking about the first market for making money online: Advertising.

Advertising
This is by far and away the biggest revenue stream online.  Google built an empire out of advertising and as ads become increasingly targeted based on all the info you’ve put out on the web (yes, it’s going to get creepy very, very soon - and no, Facebook’s Beacon wasn’t that horrible of an idea, it just came around too soon), we will become inundated with more advertising than we can stand.

But I also don’t think it’s very effective.  Right now there are fundamentally two advertising models; one where advertisers pay when you click on links and other model that charges for every thousand or so times an ad gets displayed on a page.

This model has been successful because it’s easily measurable the way no advertising has been before.  In the print world advertisers would pay insane amounts of money for physical ad space, but have little understanding of their return.  Now with click throughs or pay-per-impression, marketers can know immediately how many people actually clicked on a link, or exactly how many thousands of people saw their banner.

Four problems with this: 1) as the culture becomes more web-savvy (and not that stupid “digital savvy” person who downloads ringtones and watches lots of NFL) we will become increasingly able to avoid paid links.  We’ll be able to see through the ads and get only the content we want- I mean seriously, when was the last time you saw a Google ad along a blog’s sidebar and decided to click on it? Basically this ends up becoming a battle of trying to trick readers into clicking on links- and what does that achieve?  High bounce-rate, that’s all.  Especially for Web 2.0 companies that target the digital crowd- we are less likely to click on links.

Problem 2) We don’t really look at banner ads.  In print media a full page ad might be interesting; it might be artistically cool or have some model in it or something to catch the eye.  But banner ads?  Not interesting.  Maybe they are flashy or have some annoyingly enticing mini-golf game, but again- they’re trying to trick you into clicking, not actually advertise to you.

Problem 3) I’m not looking at your ad.  Yes, I just mentioned the mini-golf one, but aside from that I have completely trained my eyes to avoid ads.  I skim over them at an astoundingly impressive rate.  Maybe this is my superhuman skill, but I think most of the public is able to avoid looking at these ads.  So yes, 1,000,00 people visited a page that had your banner up, but how many actually saw it?

Problem 4) It’s not that much money unless you’re a huge player in the market with millions of page views- you won’t make that much money on it anyway.  This model really only works for a small amount of the web and NOT for small startups with Web 2.0 products.  Building a company and expecting to be ad supported will take a LONG time to reach profitability.

To end my rant on online advertising I’ll throw a twist in: I’m all for better targeted advertising.

If I’m in the market to buy something, let’s say a 2GB SD card, I could go to my favorite places (TigerDirect or NewEgg) or, what I’ll likely do is ask the Google.  And here’s where things get awesome: while writing this I decided to actually Google “2GB SD Card” and low and behold: TigerDirect is the top ad supported option and NewEgg is the Google shopping choice (plus that price is pretty good, should you actually be in the market).

Good work, Google.  I’m actually ok with that.  Did Google know that I like those places? No… but I’d be ok with it if they did.  Strangely enough, better targeted advertising would make online shopping a breeze.

Is it invasive? Yeah, maybe.  But if it helps save you money, would you be all that worried?  Ok, next post (likely Monday) will cover the problems with the “Freemium” model.  Oh, and just so you don’t have to spend the weekend researching, I’ll also explain what that is.  Happy weekend, all!

Short and sweet post today that instead of ranting, I thought would be easier to list out. Also, it’s fair to note that I have blogged (or will blog) about almost every one of these things. And preface: these are in no particular order- I’m unable to prioritize lists. And yes, it was going to be 20, but two of them were stupid. So gimme a break.

So let’s get into it: 18 things I’m sick of hearing in the “web 2.0″ world:

1. “Web 2.0″
2. Facebook: “You have a _______ request” - Anything but “friend” and I’m going to click on “ignore”
3. “Mashup”
4. “Beta” - That’s right Google, I mean you. New products and builds can be beta tested, but you have no right to keep the “beta” tag on Gmail.
5. “Microhoo“
6. “Blog-o-____” - Sphere or verse - both are annoying
7. “Digg Users Revolt” - If something happens every three weeks, is it still really that interesting?
8. “Rickroll” - Purposefully left linkless
9. “Ruby on Rails” - Ok, you’ve picked your startup’s development framework. Have you picked a function yet?
10. “Viral” - You can’t just make a viral video, but you can make a video viral
11. “Social Search” - This just doesn’t sound like it would do anything but be awkward
12. “Melissa Gira Grant“
13. “Facebook is the new AOL” - This is true. Let’s move on
14. “AOL” - I can’t come up with a reason why we still talk about AOL, aside from introductory high school internet history classes (those should exist), or comparing it to Facebook…
15. “Shiny“
16. “Diggbait“
17. “CPM” - We’re not looking at your banner. But keep wasting your money, I don’t mind
18. “Twitter is Down“

The subtitle for this post is: “And other stupid ideas for the startup community”. Boy, I hope people kept reading to this subtitle or you’re really going to get the wrong idea about my blog…

If you’ve been reading this site for a while, you’ll well know that I’m a pretty severe skeptic of the current start-up landscape. The supply well outweighs the demand in a way only the dot-commy boomers can relate to. But, as much as I like to throw my opinions around, I’m also an early adopter who loves new tech and new ideas, so I’m naturally fascinated with new startups.

Last night I attended PopSignal, along with 400 other of Boston’s techy/new media types for an open bar, free food and pretty solid networking. All in all, the event was well done and not remotely as shady as you’d expect considering it was held at Tequila Rain, one of the sleaziest bars near Fenway.

The event was targeted for Boston’s tech people to share ideas and make connections to help get startups going (or at least that’s the interpretation I’ve come up with). So naturally, throughout the night I constantly found myself having the same conversation over and over again: here’s an idea for a startup, what do you think?

Well, as a natural skeptic of the area, here’s what I think: what value does your company add. You’ve got a funny name? Good work. Cool logo? Great. What does your company do that brings value to the end user. This should be the number one question for all startups. Value.

During the night I got into a discussion with the guys from a WPI startup caleed MessageSling. They’re making a free (ad-supported) voicemail-to-text (either text, email, or whatnot) service that, as you might imagine, sends your voicemail to you in a readable format. Seeing as that while talking to them I had two voicemails on my phone that I couldn’t listen to because it was too loud and busy, I remember telling them that their company “adds value”.

To me, there are a ridiculous amount of startups out there, or as Compete’s Max Freiert said: “too much noise”. The VCs are throwing money at anything that moves and has a funny name, which is making anyone with an idea think they can game the market. But what we’re going to see, and I think this will be relatively soon, is the cream rising to the top (or is it bottom… I don’t do much dairy so this analogy is lost on me).

As explained in this venn diagram I just created on MS Paint, there are a lot of VC funded startups, few of which add value (and you can also note that there are a few valuable startups that never receive funding… I can’t name any, but obviously they’re out there).

The purple area represents all of the startups that are getting funding that don’t really do anything valuable. Yeah, that’s a lot. No, this isn’t remotely based on anything by my healthy skepticism, but it’s likely pretty accurate.

This post isn’t meant to discourage the startup community by any means, if anything it should jazz you up that your startup does something valuable. Because if you have a startup, the first person you need to convince of your idea is you. So ask yourself now: what value does my company bring.

Lastly, during the conversation with the MessageSling guys I said that if your company has value then the money will come, to which one of them responded “yeah, but you’ve got to keep the doors long enough for that to happen”. The way I see it, if you are making something worthwhile then someone will be knocking at your door soon enough. If you build value, the money will come.

Although I guess good ideas that don’t work is where the little light blue sliver fits in to my arbitrary diagram…

Oh, and Ken George at The Conversation - please note the horridly poor job of brevity for this post…

Ok, I’ve ranted long enough. What do you think?

As this ridiculous story goes, the URL “Pizza.com” recently sold for $2.6 million - the concept behind the domain investment being that when someone wants a pizza they can just put in “pizza.com” and find an easy slice. And yes, as we’re talking about domain names today I’ve finally decided to link to a story on slashdot - hoping someone will finally get my domain name.

Let me just start off by saying that these people overpaid by about $2.6 million. That’s my stance on this. This was a stupid, stupid move. This seems like an amazingly year 2000 move. I mean, after I heard that Pizza.com sold for that chunk, I expected to read that Britney Spears did something respectable, or that Ross and Rachel were finally getting together… ok, sorry for those.

So let me tell you why I think this was such a stupid investment.

SEO
Frankly, I’m not sure if the person who just ponied up over two and a half million bucks has even heard of Search Engine Optimization, but I can only assume that they haven’t. First off, if you want your site to come up in google when people search for pizza, then for a whole lot less than $2.6 million, I know a good source that could help market your website and improve your search results.

It’s almost as if this person thought that this was actually 2000 and (some) people still used AOL keywords. Or if there weren’t even a search engine market in general- like people just type in random URLs looking for things. In fact, people do search. Google first, then Yahoo, then… well, it really doesn’t matter. People are searching for what they want. And searching for pizza isn’t going to get you pizza.com unless the content behind it is SEOd correctly.

Content

What in the world could the Pizza.com website possibly contain that makes it that valuable? Phone numbers to local pizza places? Google maps does that. Menus to local pizza places? Grubhub or DiningOut do that. All the information on how to make pizza? There are numerous cooking sites out there. The history of pizza? Wikipedia, I guess, but who cares?

My argument here is that there isn’t anything that Pizza.com could host that could be worth that investment. If I want pizza, I will a) go to the website of my favorite chain for delivery (btw, I ordered online from Dominos last weekend and then tracked my cheesy bread through the process. It was life alteringly cool.) b) search for local pizza spots or c) go to Nino’s on Charles St and have a $2 slice in 2 minutes. I won’t go to pizza.com.

Web 2.0 Naming
Here’s where my argument gets fun, as it’s a new twist on one I’ve discussed before: in a world where startup companies have silly names- having a direct and simple URL is no longer relevant. Startups these days have ridiculous names - read my linked post to know my thoughts on this, but what’s important here is that the name doesn’t matter, the content of your site does.

So let’s say that the idea behind pizza.com is awesome. Let’s say it’s actually a functional and cool idea. How about a site that has all localized pizza info, with coupons, delivery and hours, prices and menus, a built in IM system for ordering… and so on. If the idea is that good- why does the name even matter? If the functionality of the site is that good, people will come to it anyway. Quality first, name second. This has to be killing the domain-estate market these days. In a world with Bebos, Yahoos, and Flickrs.

Incidentally, I recently read a funny comment (though I have no idea where) of some news site discussing Twitter- and the first commenter said something like “How can we take the service seriously with a name like ‘twitter’?” and the first response was “yeah, and what about that thing called ‘google’?”

If you site has content or value, then name it whatever the hell you want and it won’t matter. But if all you have is a domain name, then how are you going to become profitable. And more importantly, if all you have is Pizza.com, then how are you going to get your $2.6m back?