The Ten Spot: Apr 26, 2010
Back to the basics of the the Ten Spot – quick, relevant New Medici reads with an exact dose of interpretation.
1. For Web’s New Wave, Sharing Details Is the Point – NYT DealBook
The transparency brought about by Google search and Facebook community/beacon/(end of) privacy has created a slew of startups who cater to ripping open the social graph and letting everyone peek in, follow and link to your daily activities and habits.
From the likes of DailyBooth.com, Blippy.com and Groupon.com, the concept of “socially challenging” others to share interests in online creation and consumption is trending. The next logical step will be a return to a new and improved Facebook Beacon that extends the group mentality while providing multi-level marketing incentives to the individuals who create interest in new items, i.e., transactions (think ThisNext.com meets Groupon). This allows group rewards and either revshare or ranking points for the individual curators or arbiters of taste.
Blippy, which opened last fall, was the first site to introduce the notion of publishing credit card and other purchases. Last month it attracted around 125,000 visitors and closed an investment round of $11 million from venture capitalists. It hopes to one day to make money by, among other things, taking a commission when people are inspired to imitate their friends’ purchases posted on the site.
To Silicon Valley’s deep thinkers, this is all part of one big trend: People are becoming more relaxed about privacy, having come to recognize that publicizing little pieces of information about themselves can result in serendipitous conversations — and little jolts of ego gratification.
Steve Jobs defies the odds (recovering Apple), the gods (surviving cancer) and yet his consumer design “sculpting” and management fearlessness are really the two definitions he will be known by. In this above must-read link, an insider opens up about the mindset and fearset of the leading Designer CEO out there.
From secrecy to ordering the best-of-the-brainstorms (in terms of his managed teams), Jobs is building a line of devices that separate the chaos, the noise and the hacks of more open systems to bring its users a little hardware clarity (and style)…
It’s easy to talk about Steve’s paranoia and how that forces him to keep the project small, but, in truth, the secrecy is more of a useful by-product of the way he manages new projects, rather than the central goal. Steve assembles and motivates a small team of young geniuses, then sets them to work for “90 hours a week and loving it.” The results are highly-integrated designs that far outpace the competition. It is this small-team approach that, of necessity, results in important capabilities being left out of the first release. The payoff, though, is that Steve ends up with a central core of perfectly-integrated functionality instead of a rambling labyrinth of disjointed “features.” This design framework is so well conceived that it can be built upon for years, even decades, without being stripped out and restarted.
Probably the strongest character trait of Steve Jobs is his absolute lack of fear. While every other CEO in America, it seems, shakes in his boots at the very thought of not having a good next quarter, my experience in knowing Steve Jobs is that, frankly, he could care less about the next quarter. He’s much more focused on the next five years, rather than the next 90 days. But even more than that, it is his quest to change the world, and he’s willing to do whatever it takes to accomplish that end even if he risks failure in the process.
3. On Google’s Brand – John Battelle’s Searchblog
Although Battelle may have his soda metaphors slightly off, his thinking on how Google organizes its brand(s) is prescient thinking for one of the newest of the most well-known brands.
As Google subscribes to search, which may lead to better knowledge, artificial intelligence and other big category pursuits, it also has to contend with how it’s understood by consumers.
With so many products linked up in their individual ways to contextual search, are they in any danger of overfilling the brand? Do the individual Google Apps ever put risk on their most successful AdWords model; or, in a game-changer model, create a new/higher opportunity that will be missed because it doesn’t easily fit into the “search” mold?
Think about that for a second. Up until a few years ago, it was quite simple to say what the Google brand meant. Put simply, Google = Search. Or, to add a few words, Google = The Best Search Service On Earth. Now, is that true today?
Well, certainly you could argue that Google still means a great search environment. But the brand also means far more. It’s the brand which stands in opposition to the iPhone – the Android Pepsi to Apple’s Coke. The same is true in the office suite – Google Docs are the Pepsi to the Coke of Microsoft’s Office. Google Chrome? The Pepsi to Internet Explorer’s Coke. And there’s a ton more – photo sharing, blogging platforms, social networking, ecommerce solutions, enterprise platforms, media (YouTube, Knol, etc.)….well you get the picture.
4. Demand Media Will Be The First $1 Billion Tech IPO Since Google
We’ve written a lot about Demand Media, and its content mills or farming models tied to algorithms. Serial-E Richard Rosenblatt has done a great job at creating value in new companies, and being at the vanguard of new scalable businesses. However, with search optimization and LTV (lifetime value) content development, how would a curated or smartly aggregated model – beyond Google’s one-stop search model – realize similar results with less backend copywriting/filming?
I’m not talking HuffingtonPost theater, but a new company that learned to really create POV around the ginormous mass of content being created every second. A company that would index Demand Media content, Associated Content content and AOL content … times xxxxx). POV content ordering, per se.
I will be glad to see Richard and his top level team IPO this year, given the opportunity, but isn’t there a position just south of Google that gets this on a tech/transaction level more than HuffPo, Demand and Mahalo, etc.? Sure, original, LTV content will be interesting, but how contextual to my life will it be? Think contextual content POV meets lifestyle design.
Demand accomplishes this through Demand Studios, which counts over 10,000 “qualified” contributors that Demand pays very modest fees ($5, $10, $30 plus potential revenue share) to produce the content. While some deride this production technique as a content farm (a topic well covered in this recent Time article about Demand where the author says he can make $60/hr) , why argue with success? In fact, smart people like Tim Armstrong at AOL are trying to copy Demand’s “farming” technique. The third part of the value chain is the search optimization that lands the content near the top of many long tail search queries (e.g. “how to raise earth day awareness”).
5. How Facebook’s Newest Feature Could Change the Internet – The Atlantic
Back to Beacon (e.g., When will Facebook bring home the Beacon” – alternate blog post…), where Facebook continues to open up the connected world of information sharing, but almost using a Craigslist “charge selectively” model – i.e., “we still don’t need all of the revenues/money on the social table that we have access to now, but when we have 500M-1B users we can start to open up transactions in limited or focused markets.”
What this means is that the more privacy can be opened, the more user interactions, content flow and discovery can take place. The more content consumption and sharing, the eventual consumer need to filter all of this hyperkinetic information into more exclusive (aka “paid”) funnels. Power-users won’t want access to everything and everyone, but access to limited or highly recommended interest points – which Facebook knows they can charge for.
Their targeting will, in effect, know what you want and what you’ll pay for. Build a community, open up its scalable growth and remove its privacy walls, then let users individualize themselves on a micro-payment level. Interestingly, this remaking of the social graph – making it more productive or focused – is the exact opposite of MySpace’s “put everything and the kitchen sink up to make yourself original” platforming. Freemium meets its next evolution.
What does this mean for privacy? Open Graph initially sounds pretty invasive. But remember that everything that flows into this reservoir of content is already public. Facebook’s new policy doesn’t make your private information public. It makes your public information a lot more public. Content that was once between you and your pal’s news feed is now playing all your friends’ CNN Facebook plug-ins and sloshing around in a matrix of information. “Public no longer means public on Facebook,” says Mashable’s Christina Warren. “It means public in the Facebook ecosystem. My advice to you: Be aware of your privacy settings.”