Read/Write Web writes: “Google makes $1 per internet user. But not all of the revenues come from Google Search – they control only 50% of the search market, but the whole web is organically getting covered by Google ads via AdSense and AdWords. Therefore, even if you perform your searches from Yahoo or Live, you may end up being directed to a long tail web page powered by Google AdSense. Another way to look at it – if you use Google as your favourite search engine, you may be giving them $2 per month. But even if you you use a different search engine, you may still give ~$0.5 via Adsense and the Long Tail.”
Month: May 2007
TECH TALK: Facebook: The Early Days
Wikipedia has this about the early days of Facebook: In early February of 2004, Harvard University sophomore Mark Zuckerberg founded “The Facebook”, with support from Andrew McCollum and Eduardo Saverin. By the end of the month, more than half of the undergraduate population at Harvard were registered on the service. Additionally at that time, Zuckerberg was joined by Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes for site promotion and Facebook expanded to MIT, Boston University, and Boston College. This expansion continued in April of 2004, when it expanded to the rest of Ivy League and a few other schools. The following month, Zuckerberg, McCollum, Hughes, and Moscovitz moved to Palo Alto, California to continue work on Facebook’s development with additional help from Adam D’Angelo and Sean Parker….Facebook received approximately $500,000 from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel in an angel round. By December , Facebook’s user base had exceeded one million.
Mashable put together a timeline of the key events in Facebook’s history:
2004
February – Mark Zuckerberg and co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes launch Facebook from their Harvard dorm room
March – Facebook expands from Harvard to Stanford, Columbia and Yale
June – Facebook moves its base of operations to Palo Alto, Calif.
September – Groups application is added; the Wall is added as a Profile feature
December – Facebook reaches nearly 1 million active users2005
May – Facebook raises $12.7 million in venture capital from Accel Partners;
Facebook grows to support more than 800 college networks
August – The Company officially changes its name to Facebook from thefacebook.com
September – Facebook expands to add high school networks
October – Photos is added as an application
Facebook begins to add international school networks
December – Facebook reaches more than 5.5 million active users2006
April – Facebook raises $25 million from Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital Partners;
Facebook Mobile feature launches
May – Facebook expands to add work networks
August – Facebook development platform launches;
Notes application is introduced;
Facebook and Microsoft form strategic relationship for banner ad syndication
September – News Feed and Mini-Feed are introduced with additional privacy controls;
Facebook expands registration so anyone can join
November – Share feature added on Facebook, simultaneously launched on over 20 partner sites
December Facebook reaches more than 12 million active users2007
February – Virtual gift shop launches as a feature
March – Facebook reaches over 2 million active Canadian users and 1 million active UK users
April – Facebook reaches 20 million active users;
Facebook updates site design and adds network portals
May – Facebook launches Marketplace application for classified listings
Mashable has an earlier article profiling Facebook.
Tomorrow: The Vision
China WAP Stats
China Web2.0 Review summarises:
# As of March 2007, there were about 39 million active wap users in China, they used mobile handsets to access WAP sites in last six months. About 90% among them are internet users as well, they access internet via PC in last six months.
# Most of the WAP users (over 60%) live in east of China, the concentration rate of WAP users are higher than that of internet users and mobile subscribers.
# About 9.7 million, or about one forth of total WAP users, live in Guangdong Province.
# 57% users will use WAP at least once a week.
# 26% users pay RMB 11-20 yuan per month for WAP usage, 23% users pay 21-50 yuan and 20% users pay 6-10 yuan.
Webification of Advertising
Phil Wainewright writes:
Today, were starting to understand that the Internet is going to fundamentally alter the way businesses promote their wares to prospective customers. So the entire online ad business is getting snapped up at (literally) any price. Even though the buyers have no clue what it is theyre trying to buy. All they know is that if they dont buy it, someone else will.
What theyre really trying to buy into is the webification of advertising. The same way that the internal combustion engine took the horseless carriage and turned it into something no one had ever anticipated, the Web is turning advertising into something we could never previously have imagined. Before the Web came along, advertising was a totally disconnected activity. Advertisers never had any certainty that their ads would be seen by any of their prospective customers, and even if they were, it was virtually impossible to assess how effectively they grabbed their attention.
Helio’s Ocean Design
Technology Review writes about the design of the new mobile phone from Helio: “The Ocean is hefty by today’s sleek standards, pill-shaped in a market of rectangular things. The company’s future will hinge on how much the intended audience appreciates those departures from conventional design. It will hinge on the layout of the device’s QWERTY keyboard. It will hinge on the simplicity of the messaging and search interface (for instance, the way it allows users to start typing from idle mode). And it will hinge on–the hinges. The Ocean (which will sell for $295, plus a monthly fee of $65 to $135 for rich-media subscriptions and varying allotments of voice minutes) sports a pair of them; operated by a novel three-way spring, they enable a keyboard to slide out from one side of the device and a numerical keypad to slide out from another.”
Popfly
John Montgomery writes about Microsoft’s Popfly service for mashups:
# It’s easy to get. All you really need is Firefox 2 or IE 6 or 7. Oh, and Silverlight, but that’s pretty easy to get.
# It’s easy to use. People have talked about wanting programming to be like connecting Lego blocks; Popfly gets pretty close.
# You can create mashups with it. This is kind of its purpose, but it’s neat nonetheless.
# You can create web pages with it. We “borrowed” the Office Live team’s page editor technology.
# You can use it with Visual Studio. If you’re a VS user, you can get Popfly Explorer and start to share projects with your friends on Popfly.
Micro-Blogging and Twitter
Mark Glaser has an excellent tutorial: “Micro-blogging allows you to write brief text updates about your life on the go, and send them to friends and interested observers via text messaging, instant messaging, email or the web. The most popular service is called Twitter , which was developed last year and became popular among techno-gurus at the 2007 South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas. Part of the magic of Twitter is that it limits you to 140 characters per post, forcing you to make pithy statements on the fly.”
TECH TALK: Facebook: The Platform (Part 2)
Splashcast Media, one of the companies creating applications for Facebook, had this to say about the platform: Facebook is announcing the opening of what its calling The Platform a system for 3rd party companies to program their services for use inside of Facebook user pages. As part of the announcement, about 30 preselected companies that have integrated with The Platform ahead of time are being showcased to demonstrate what kinds of things are being made possible. This goes beyond the ability to post media from outside into Facebook and it goes beyond the previous Facebook API (also called The Platform) – outside companies are now being allowed to deploy advanced functionality inside the Facebook site…Some monetization in Facebook will be permitted, so long as its not done on the same pages where Microsoft ads are being run. More may be possible in the future. That is a remarkable differentiator compared to other, similar websites that maintain tight control over monetization in their ecosystems. This is one of the big unknowns in regards to Facebook opening up but there is every indication that this will be a real game changer. When companies cant monetize their presence in larger ecosystems, then innovation becomes far less affordable. If Facebook does allow meaningful monetization to occur, they could serve as a lifeline to hundreds of small companies that will then take risks, develop innovative new products and change the face of the web.
Fortune added:
From here on it will be wide open. Anyone will have access to Facebook’s so-called “markup language,” which is intended to be usable even by those with rudimentary programming skills. So kids in dorm rooms will be able to create simple applications to coordinate TV-watching or trips to the cafeteria with their friends. And some creative amateur coders are likely to come up with amazing new things to do inside Facebook. Companies, too, will find many ways that Facebook applications can improve productivity and collaboration.
The company will impose no limitations on what kinds of applications others can create, except that they be legal. Says Zuckerberg: “They can sell sponsorships, they can have ads, they can sell things, they can link off to another site – we are just agnostic.” He promises that Facebook will not give its own applications any special privileges or exclusive access to its members.
TechCrunch thinks of Facebook’s approach as the opposite of MySpace: The payoff is two way. Not only do developers get deep access to Facebooks twenty million users, Facebook also becomes a rich platform for third party applications…Facebooks strategy is almost the polar opposite from MySpace. While MySpace frets over third party widgets, alternatively shutting them down or acquiring them, Facebook is now opening up its core functions to all outside developers.
GigaOM had this to say: This move is more than catching up with MySpace and Bebo and what have you by adding outside widgets; Facebook has become a primary relationship and identity broker for millions of people. Now outsiders can capitalize on that information in a safe way, pulling from users expressed interests in their profiles, building on their stated intention to attend events, or simply giving them more dedicated tools for expressing themselves. The outside apps will be woven into a structure thats already been built and is utilized every day…Admittedly, there is some reinventing the wheel going on. Wasnt the browser declared to be the new OS just, like, two years ago?
Tomorrow: The Early Days
Ad Markets
Tim Oren writes:
One is the collapse of the notion that users’ means of access would control where they spend their time and do their searches on the net. Whether your strategy hoped to influence the outcome via control of the user’s browser and PC (MSFT), dial-up (AOL) or broadband access (YHOO, via AT&T partnership), this chart shows you losing. Anyone just hitting the nets now is a self-proclaimed late adopter. Everyone else, from the pioneers to the late majority, have been out there long enough to find their own way around. The ‘control the user’ notion was probably bogus from the start, but it’s visibly dead now. (Wireless providers might profit from the lesson.)
Another conclusion is how a market has been beating a traditional sales model. Advertising is of course the payload of the ‘search’ marketplace.
GooglePhone Fact and Fiction
DailyWireless analyses all the statements and theories.
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