Social Media Now: Photobucket, Scrapblog and the New Hype

There are many ways to measure a bubble economy. As a journalist, I look at media coverage of companies as one indicator. The more gee whiz stories that appear covering little-known companies with little skepticism quoting executives gushing unabashedly about the most obvious facts, the more inflated the bubble.

Yesterday’s orgy of coverage regarding image hosting service Photobucket rang my bubble bells big time. “The Biggest Website You’ve Never Heard Of” gushed Fortune.com in a headline that would have made a publicist blush. “How Much is Photobucket Worth?”  the Techcrunch headline asked, begging the answer: “A lot.”

I expect a lot better from guys like David Kirkpatrick and Michael Arrington. The Kirkpatrick piece read like ad copy: It’s bigger than Facebook! An audience growing by 80,000 a day! Kirkpatrick let ridiculous assertions by CEO Alex Welch go unchallenged: “We’re fad proof,” he proclaimed (yeah, and the Titanic was unsinkable).  And the day’s Ted Stevens Series-of-Tubes award goes to Jerry Murdock, a Photobucket investor who Kirkpatrick quoted as saying: “Linking is the new currency of the Web.”  Um, didn’t Tim Berners-Lee design the Web in the first place so that linking would be the currency?

The Techcrunch story at least placed the sudden publicity for Photobucket in context: Lehman Brothers is beating the bushes for buyers interested in purchasing Photobucket. But Arrington’s tone was just as promotional. “Basically, Photobucket is kicking butt,” he wrote.

Arrington, it appears, was working off the Photobucket roadshow Powerpoint. He published Lehman’s asking price (upwards of $300 million on $6.3 million trailing 12 months revenue). He published the company’s financial projection tables. He even published the blind comment that “our sources indicate that a number of acquirors are very interested in the company at this price.” All he needed to add was a tag line saying: “Act now before it’s too late!”

A dozen years ago, when Tom Watson and I launched @NY (the first media business to cover New York’s new media industry and darn near the first e-mail publishing venture anywhere), our avowed mission to deflate the the hype in press coverage of the initial commercial Internet boom. Thankfully, today, there are blogs galore with the same spirit.

Valleywag, of all things, struck a very considered, skeptical tone suggesting in an analysis that Photobucket doesn’t have anywhere near the consumer loyalty it claims and raising a red flag about the cost of hosting all those photos–a red flag that neither Techcrunch nor Fortune.com paused to consider.

Hipmojo.com called Photobucket out for it’s questionable growth predictions and attendant valuation goals:

Judging by the numbers, the company grew 116% in revenue from 2005 to 2006, but now expects to grow 255% from 2006 to 2007.  Is this normal, reasonable?
 ….

MySpace, the largest social networking site, will double in revenue over the next 12 months.  That means 100% growth.  Usually the outliers experience above average growth.  Can someone explain to me why Photobucket will experience 2.55 times, or 255%, growth in the same period?

Lehman Bros. is good, darn good.  But do they believe this or do they think we lost our calculators?

I can tell you from the time I spent analyzing investments for Primedia Ventures, hyper-inflated growth projections for the year in which a company is looking to sell itself or raise capital is par for the course, and something all investors consider with a grain of salt. That’s a grain more than we got from Kirkpatrick and Arrington.

Meanwhile the latest social media property be shown some love from the meme-makers is Scrapblog, a multi-media scrapbooking web service built around a Flash-based editor application. Earlier this month the company, based in Coral Gables, FL, announced that it had raised an undisclosed amount of first round venture capital from Longworth Venture Partners in Boston. At the heart of Scrapblog’s services is a photo slide show function, putting the start-up in the midst of a crowded space that includes, yes, Photobucket.

Link Love:

NewTube Is Just The Beginning
More details on the in-house thinking at NBCU and News Corp about the nascent view sharing service

T9space Reports 4 Million Pageviews a Month

Matador is Grass Roots for Travel

 

 

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Social Media Now: MOG Music

Good reviews across the blogosphere for the 2.0 revision of social music recommendation site MOG. Kristen Nicole at Mashable has the best recap of the features of the relaunched site   : 

This free service offers a personalized channel of streaming music videos, all based on your tastes. MOG cross references music from your computer and your iPod along with your site activity and the preferences of like-minded users to give you content you’ll want to see. Also taken into consideration are the preferences of your trusted Moggers, which extends beyond your friends to include users whose taste you admire, and even the artists you like.

In addition, MOG has added a “Magic Button.” No matter where you are on their site, clicking the “Magic Button” will give you a comprehensive page of recommendations based on everything MOG knows about you. And MOG’s new features don’t stop there. MOG has added personalized music news, as well as album reviews and concert reviews, found in the “Read” section of their editorial, which is overseen by Michael Goldberg, MOG’s new editor in chief. MOG is also launching an improved Artist page which will feature Wikipedia-powered bios, user-uploaded photos, external links to fan sites, and a compilation of all posts tagged with that artist’s information. Additionally, you’ll see who on MOG is listening most to that artist.

Phwew….It’s taken nearly two years but today’s MOG sounds like a potential category killer, at least that’s obviously the intention of the impressive management team led by founder David Hyman, former CEO of Gracenote and editor Michael Goldberg, who have reportedly raised $1.4 million in seed money.

Eliot Van Buskirk at Wired News’ Listening Post calls MOG 2.0 everything MTV should have become, particularly hailing the ease of use and integration of the new features.

At Techcrunch Nick Gonzalez notes that although directing users towards new music remains MOG’s raison d’etre, its focus is on user generated blog posts not music recommendation algorithms making it more of a destination site than strictly a service like Pandora or Last.FM.

I am certain that social music recommendation is THE future of music marketing. Traditional channels through which music used to be marketed have completely collapsed. Radio is increasingly driven by talk, not music programming, and what music radio does program doesn’t reach buyers of music very effectively, particularly with respect to new music of any genre. And, of course, MTV barely airs music programming at all anymore.

But enormous challenges abound. For one thing the business sector is already enormously crowded. For another thing the ways in which users listen to music today is so multidimensional and personal that it’s hard to create a single service which can reach users across platforms (from iPods to in-dash CD players, from Sonos to Rhapsody), never mind trying to connect users to one another across platforms. Finally, a service like MOG–built as it is around user generated content more than algorithms and automated tracking–will need to lean heavily on those most musically involved users. That’s good I guess, it’s the uber music dweebs of the High Fidelity variety who are always the ones button holing you to tell you about something you just HAVE to hear. But there is a line somewhere between social networking that’s fun and social networking that is a burden. And for most listeners music remains a purely decorative aspect of their lives.

 Link Love:

 CosmoTV Relaunches with a MySpace Player

Iminlikewithyou: Love in the time of Facebook

German media Firm Burda Buys Stake In Multimedia Sharing Site Sevenload

How Much is Photobucket Worth?

Zaadz Funded by Whole Foods CEO

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Social Media Club, NYC, 3/27/07

A fascinating Social Media Club meeting in NYC last night, covered well by Jason who led the discussion after Jay Rosen’s discussion of NewAssignment.net. Thanks to Jay for coming and for sharing what’s going on in this groundbreaking experiment.

I don’t have much time to do a full recap, but thanks to posts by Joshua Mack and Rachel Clarke  you don’t have to read what I thought about it.

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Social Media Now: Teaching Citizen Journalists, Social Nets Underrated?

Who Knows What’s Best for Citizen Journalists? ….I was fortunate yesterday to help lead a fascinating discussion about trust, journalism and pro am media at the New York Social Media Club meeting. NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen provided the jumping off point by presenting and discussing his mini-empire of experimental, participatory journalism. That empire includes his own NewAssignment.Net and it’s two recently announced joint ventures–AssignmentZero, an experiment in crowdsourced journalism conducted with Wired; and a participatory journalism joint venture with HuffingtonPost designed to organize semi-pro coverage of everyone running for president.

I remain skeptical about the value of attempting to harness citizen journalism by encouraging professional editors to saddle it up and ride it in one particular direction or another. Just as it can replace the traditional reporters’ functions, the community can replace the editors’ functions setting the agenda, calling attention to stories, copyediting and correcting. The fact that the Internet community does this organically, applying tools like blogging, tagging and aggregating, is part of what makes citizen journalism different.

Still it’s interesting to see the pros wrestling with a DIY future, even if much of that wrestling is taking place in the academic realm. Yesterday the Knight Foundation and The Institute for Interactive Journalism (itself a venture of the University of Maryland and the Pew Center for Civic Journalism) took the wraps off The Knight Citizen News Network.

The Network isn’t the ambitious attempt to practice new journalism that AssignmentZero is, instead it is intended as a resource for citizen journalists including a searchable database of US citizen journalism sites, a best-practices feature called “Things We Like,” a multimedia primer in what the Institute sees as “the principles of citizen journalism,” as well as links to the Institute’s case studies and other research.

The site was designed with input from some of the big boys in the formalizing citizen journalism JD Lascia, Dan Gillmor’s Center for Citizen Media and I, Reporter.

There’s something presumptuous and out of whack about professionals and academics telling citizen journalists how to do amateur journalism better,  particularly in an era when pro journalism has been so damaged by a credibility crisis (just this week The New York Times owned up to running a false rape allegation from a former US service woman and to one of it’s reporters cutting a $2000 check to a source). But as we watch big media wrestle with the changing DIY media landscape, efforts like KCNN are worth watching.

It’s Twitter’s World, We Just Live in It….Word out yesterday from Steve Poland at Techcrunch that changes to Twitter’s API may help turn the messaging service into a Web services platform, or more accurately a SMS-services platform. We love the idea of Twitter, or any kind of cross platform anywhere messaging service, becoming something other than a party line for the digerati but let’s not get crazy. To Nik Cubrilovic who writes that there will be a business in Twitter IDs akin to the mid 1990s business in domain squatting I suggest a reality check of the sort Fred Wilson writes about here.

Social Networking Under-hyped? …According to Pali Research’s Richard Greenfield (as reported at Barron’s Online by Eric Savitz)

MySpace is now generating “in excess of $30 million” a month in revenue, with about $24 million in domestic revenue and $6 million internationally. He adds that monthly revenues should more than double over the next 12 months, and “at very high incremental revenue margins.” So in 12 months, he’s saying, MySpace should be doing more than $60 million a month in revenue, for an annual run rate in the neighborhood of $750 million a year.

Quoth Valleywag:

…as one News Corporation exec says: “You know, it may turn out that social networks have been, not overhyped, but underhyped.”

Link Love:

Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection: TiVo Home Movie SharingJamendo Goes Platinum! 1.5 Million Albums Downloaded
Zoolit Launches Social Network Profile Link Aggregator

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Social Media Club, Philadelphia

Last night I got the chance to help Annie Heckenberger of the
Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation and the team from the Bravo Group kick off the Social Media Club. I know Annie is going to blog more, but I wanted to acknowledge the close to 30 folks who showed up from sites like Phawker, Phillyist, UWishUNu, the guy from 700 level (who’s up for a top Philly’s fan site nod from Sports Illustrated) and many more. Screw W.C. Fields, Philly is happening. Check the Popped Music festival if you’re not sure.

Photos on Flickr.
More from Annie soon.

(Disclosure, I’m doing some freelance work for Bravo Group separate from Social Media Club - this was mentioned at the meeting).

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Social Media Now: Widgets, TV and Money

Bits and pieces this morning from the world of social media….At Mashable Pete Cashmore tells us about the launch of Spinlets, a service that offers an API to allow users to widgetize social websites. The service is the first product from a company called urSpin. Cashmore cites a number of already launched or soon to launch competitors like Webwag, which offers service it calls widgets on demand.

I am increasingly convinced that the future of social media is a decentralized one. The, dare I say it, Web 3.0 cosmology won’t revolve around fixed hubs like MySpace and Facebook but around user created hubs built on white label private networking platforms like Ning or mutated version of current Ajax homepage platforms like Netvibes.  In that universe widgets will be the new platform for web services and its worth watching all the companies who make widgets, support widget making, track widgets, and collect metadata from widgets that have been distributed

Will Google sue? Yesterday Broadcasting & Cable reported  that the CW network is working on a show with the working title of Viewser that will be built around user content posted to the Web at large. The user-generated or semi-pro content model for TV hardly radical or new. Shows like America’s Funniest Home Videos have long been built around user generated content. From American Idol to the Arthur Godfrey show, amateur hour talent contests have been a mainstay of traditional media programming. And of course MTV’s The Real World predates the Netscape IPO by nearly three years. According to B&C producers are considering ways to make Viewser interactive. But  successes for interactive television remain few and far between (I vote for the NFL’s instant replay rule as interactive TVs only real success, at least other than home shopping TV). TV networks and producers can build entertaining programming around user-generated content. But also long as they are locked into the traditional television platform they can’t turn user TV into true social media in which contribution, participation and tagging are the entertainment, not the content.

From the Duh Department….Steve Rubel commented yesterday on a Market Watch story that said that Rocketboom, the pioneering vlog, is looking at new revenue models—including possible paid programming–because, as it turns out, TV advertisers prefer mega audiences to niche ones. So much for all the buzz last year about Rocketboom’s stratospheric CPMs. We all know niche TV can survive with small audiences, but even low rated cable talk shows like Larry King’s or Nancy Grace’s reach four times as many people as Rocketboom, which reaches 200,000 according to Market Watch. The problem for properties like Rocketboom, as well as for almost all podcasts, is that the compete in areas where traditional media already does a good job. Rocketboom is a general interest, traditional-TV style property that is merely distributed differently. Its producers have to convince advertisers not to spend elsewhere but to spend on Rocketboom instead. In that scenario size matters. If you want to make it with ad-supported media that reaches small audiences you better serve a high value audience (billionaires or people with specialty interests) with critical information that audience members can’t get elsewhere.

What’s disturbing about the Rocketboom story is the lack of innovation in business models it reveals. Its the same old, same old: If you can’t make it selling ads then try to charge for content or you sell services (the Rocketboom team is making corporate videos and doing client work for John Edwards). If you want to sell advertising in niche properties you need to assemble a network of niche properties. User generated and semi pro media continues to dismantle the programming paradigms and distribution networks of traditional media without creating new business models to support the alternative.

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Kathy Sierra’s death threats

Has anyone seen what is happening to Kathy Sierra? (http://www.headrush.typepad.com)   It turns my stomach not only for her, but for the entire social media movement. How can we spawn a citizen journalism society, or, indeed, any kind of civilized society, if people continue to threaten bloggers with death?

This is not “social,” nor is it useful.  If it’s a prank, apologize and let Kathy go on about her life. If it’s not, get help. I’ve been a woman in a man’s work world for forty years, and I’ve never seen anything as egregious as this.

Should we be discussing this in SMC meetings? Is this why we exist?

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Social Media Now: What Porn Can Teach NewTube

Yesterday’s reaction to the News Corp/NBC NewTube announcement ran the gamut from typical big media hating (Thomas Hawk’s headline: NBC Universal, News Corp YouTube Killer Will Fail) to typical big media cheerleading (Mark Cuban’s headline: Why the NBC/Newscorp Video Venture is a Great Idea).

Sure, there are plenty of reasons for any 50/50 JV between competitors to fail–from competing corporate interests to anti-trust question that may arise (since the consent decree in the 1940s that first tried to separate movie making from movie exhibiting there’s always been a tension that arises when the makers of entertainment content collude to control distribution).

But I don’t see any inherent reason why YouTube and NewTube can’t succeed side-by-side. After all, new media technologies rarely entirely obsolete old ones. Yeah, talkies made silent movies obsolete and color consigned black-and-white movie-making to an arty niche. But books, magazines, movies, radio and television are all still with us 15 years into the commercial Internet era. And the
filmed entertainment business has a pretty successful track record in adapting to changes in signal distribution technology. When VCRs first hit the market in the 1980s the filmed entertainment business resisted, pricing pre-recorded movies at nearly $100 to try to damp consumer demand and protect old business models. Today the so-called secondary markets–television licensing and DVD sales and rentals–are worth twice as much money annually to a company like Time Warner compared with movies in theatrical release.

The dollar volume of the online advertising business today dwarfs the dollar volume of other sectors of the entertainment business (recorded music sales, for example). If NewTube does nothing more than capture a fraction of that for the producers of Heroes, Family Guy or 24, it will be a smashing success. And that success will have no impact on the growth of social media properties like
YouTube.

It seemed yesterday like people were mostly talking past each other with NewTube skeptics wondering out loud about the venture’s functionality, and NewTube believers wondering out loud about YouTube’s ability to compete for ad dollars.

But given what has been announced so far it seems to me that YouTube and NewTube are designed to scratch different itches.
NewTube is all about distribution. YouTube is all about participation. NewTube is Internet media. YouTube is social media. The difference is a question of focus. The entertainment value of TV, however it is distributed, comes from the content itself. People enjoy the leisure activity of watching well-written, slickly produced stuff.  The entertainment value of social media comes from a sense of community involvement. The people enjoy the leisure activity of making, contributing and tagging.

Yesterday I raised Fred Wilson’s question about social media authenticity. Slapping social-enabled functionality onto traditional media won’t in itself transform traditional media into authentic social media. But it may help open new, hybrid distribution platforms for traditional media. The presence on the Internet of traditional media with social functionality won’t undermine the appeal of authentic social media which focuses not on content but on people.

In an otherwise excellent analysis on Techcrunch, Michael Arrington wrote:

I think a better approach would have been to focus on the user experience, but this was hardly mentioned (except at one point when Zucker said “we are shocked at the willingness of the consumer to sit through the whole show with ads on NBC.com”). It’s either arrogance or it’s blindness to the reality of this Bittorent and YouTube world. Either way, it suggests they are in over their head.

Arrington would be right if NewTube was all about creating an authentic social media property. But that doesn’t seem to be the intention.

In the discussion of how user-generated content and user-generated distribution will transform traditional media the Net is full of parties with dogs in the fight and the discussion perpetually devolves into absolutes: “We Get It!” shouts one side. “No you don’t,” shouts the other. But for the truly fearless I offer the recent history of the pornography business as proof that professional product, social re-distribution, and user-generated content can live happily side-by-side.

From the days when papyrus was the cutting edge “signal distribution technology,” pornography has been at the forefront of media innovation. In the earliest days of the home video boom, it was the porn business that led the way with semi-pro and amateur content (Ed Powers’ Dirty Debutantes series of videotapes remains a landmark in the development of prosumer media).  In the earliest days of the commercial Internet, it was the porn business that did pioneering work in online payment systems. Today the pornography industry is larger in dollar volume than the so-called legitimate filmed entertainment business despite the fact that its leading corporate commercial producers face a volume of online file sharing that embarrasses the volume confronting the music business (try a Morpheus search for Jenna Jameson). And an entire economy exists to support user-generated content–from the personal
websites of amateurs to properties like Homeclips which aggregate amateur content.

If only News Corp and NBC can come up with content as compelling as MILF Money or Baby Doll Naughty Confessions, NewTube would really be on to something.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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SMC London goes videoblogging

The London experiment with weekly media-making meetups continued this evening with another member getting his first taste of videoblogging. Guy West has been a regular at our discussion groups and kindly recorded some audio at one of the meetings.

We sat in the brand new foyer of the British Film Institute/National Film Theatre which only opened last week and chatted about our social use of the internet. I was showing off a bit pointing the camera in my general direction which results in the people standing behind me being beautifully in focus, but my face (some will no doubt say this is a blessing) is a bit blurry.

No Palme D’or for this one, but at least we had some footage - and it wasn’t just of me! I showed Guy how to transfer from the camera to PC and then do some simple editing tasks and then we topped and tailed it with some titles and credits. We’d stood around for long enough, occasionally getting odd stares from the patrons of the Lesbian & Gay film festival that’s currently running there so I didn’t make Guy watch while we uploaded it to YouTube - he knew how to do that bit anyway.Next week the clocks will have gone forward, we’ll be into British Summer Time, and hopefully it will be a bit warmer for our first Blogwalk.

Watch Lloyd & Guy chat about teh internets in the BFI foyer

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Bum Rush the Charts

Today, March 22, 2007, Podcasters, podcast listeners and independent music enthusiasts are going to do something new. They’re all buying one song, for $.99, at the iTunes Music Store. The intent? Show the major labels and main stream media that podcast listeners, netizens, the rest-of-us, are an audience that wants something different than what is being pushed by the major labels. It also is intended to show that podcasting, where primarly independent music is played, has a serious audience.

From their site:
We can match and exceed the reach of big media, corporate media, labels, and the entrenched interests. On March 22nd, we are going to take an indie podsafe music artist to number one on the iTunes singles charts as a demonstration of our reach to Main Street and our purchasing power to Wall Street. The track we’ve chosen is “Mine Again” by the band Black Lab. A band that was dropped from not just one, but two major record labels (Geffen and Sony/Epic) and in the process forced them to fight to get their own music back. We picked them because making them number one, even for just one day, will remind the RIAA record labels of what they turned their backs on - and who they ignore at their peril.

The song is a pretty good tune, and Black Lab is donating 50% of everything they make on this campaign to a scholarship fund. If the song is purchased through this afflilate link at Chris Penn’s Financial Aid Podcast site, the additional iTunes affiliate fees are also being donated to the scholarship.

This is an interesting case study. It will be useful to see how many people purchase the song via the affiliate link, what the band learns about how many people bought the song, and how that relates to their eventual rank on the iTunes music charts. So far the chart hasn’t moved today, but it is unclear when Apple updates it.

So, citizens of the social internet, if this campaign appeals to you, click on the link below and bum rush the charts.

powered by performancing firefox

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Social Media Now: YouTube v. NewTube–Can Big Media Keep it Real?

Last November VC Fred Wilson asked an interesting question of the blogosphere: Can you fake authenticity?

It’s an enormous question of course–the stuff of a thousand dissertation–particularly for Americans. After all, our culture is based on the artificial invention of identities that project authenticity.

But Fred was asking specifically about social media businesses–can the sense of community that inspires the viral growth of companies like del.icio.us, Digg, craigslist, and, yes, YouTube, be intentionally replicated through corporate planning?

Well, it looks like we’re about to get a text-book test case with impending announcement  that NBC Universal and News Corp’s Fox will launch a YouTube competitor this summer.

The effort is hardly a surprise. For months Big Media’s war on YouTube has been shadowed by talk of looming corporate competitors. Staci Kramer at paidContent had the latest chapter nailed on Tuesday — that the JV was coming together, and that Fox and NBC were soliciting Google’s online and tech competitors like Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo with Viacom an on-again, off-again possible collaborator.

PaidContent reports that Fox and NBC video, including material from shows like Heroes and Family Guy, will be distributed on MySpace, Yahoo and MSN.

Also, Terry Semel told an AdAge conference that the new service will be chock-a-block with YouTube-like sharing tools.

Pre-announcement commentary abounds on the Net this morning following the publication an LA Times piece which included this locker room bulletin board fodder:

Google executives’ disdain for the project is evident in their nickname for the consortium: Clown Co.

24/7 Wall Street picks up on the LAT’s comment that big media JVs have a checkered history:

The plan is cumbersome and complex making it unlikely to work. Sites like Yahoo! already have a large store of video content and a huge number of other channels, so making content from major media companies stand out will be very difficult. The same holds true for the other large web portals that the venture will target for distribution.

Mike at Techdirt hedges obliquely:

There are plenty of ways the networks can (and probably will) screw this up, but at least they’re doing something.

Whether or not the JV succeeds will, of course, depend on how cooperative the big media powers can be. It may also depend on legal matters–if the big media companies collaborate on exclusive online distribution, it that illegal, anti-competitive collusion? I also suspect that companies in the traditional distribution channels for TV content–MSOs, TV station owners–will offer some push back.

But most of all the success or failure of the JV will depend on the answer to Fred’s question about authenticity. There’s no doubt that users will show up wherever popular content is posted, especially if it is posted at sites with big traffic like Yahoo and MySpace. But will users confer on this new effort the vibe of Internet authenticity? Will users think NBC and Fox are keeping it real?

That will depend on how much Fox and NBC give to users. Success in social media depends on following the Beatles’ dictum: the love you take is equal to the love you make. Will sharing be limited to the friendly confines of approved destination sites? How intrusive will advertising be? Will users be able to make mash-ups even across ownership (say a Heroes/24 hybrid)? If so there’s a good chance that NewTube will be the feel good hit of the summer.

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Howard Greenstein’s talk at Business Wire in NY

People who attended the Business Wire Breakfast in New York this morning may find slides of Howard Greenstein’s talk linked here as a pdf.

The event covered mostly Search Engine Optimzation and Search Engine Marketing from the PR and News perspective, and I learned a lot from my fellow panelists Rebecca Lieb of ClickZ, Greg Jarboe, and Melanie Mitchell of AOL, and our host Laura Sturaitis from Business Wire.

If you didn’t get to speak with me after the panel, you can email me at Howard [at] socialmediaclub -dot- com.

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Social Media Now: Widget World

Let’s assume that the future of social media is all about widgets and places where people can put them. Let’s assume a universe where all media is distributed by users to other users through widgets that stream audio,
video, text, conversations, personal messages, everything.

We already live in a universe in which every Internet user is also a producer and often a piecemeal distributor, but now let’s assume a universe where everyone is an MSO, everyone is a Clear Channel, everyone is a Cineplex Odeon; a universe where new channels for distribution spring up quickly, spread fast, and, possibly, disappear just as suddenly.

You can see where this might be scary for big media companies which are heavily invested in distribution channels, companies like News Corp which has big money invested in satellite TV, or Time Warner which operates the nation’s biggest cable TV operator.

In this light it’s easy to understand MySpace’s attempt to cut off widgets it can’t control (which broke into the mainstream press yesterday). Sure, News Corp wants to have its hands around all revenues coming into MySpace. But maybe the company is also concerned about how widgets stand to unwind traditional media distribution channels. After all, the widget they pulled the plug on yesterday was a music player.

News Corp of course is hedging its bets, promoting it’s platform for user created widgets, Spring Widgets. But Fred Wilson followed up all the discussion about widgets yesterday with post about how many Spring
Widgets are incompatible with MySpace. Intentional? Who knows.

One new, potentially disruptive widget launched yesterday in a public beta (public beta is the new official launch). Jaxtr is an IP telephony widget that allows users to connect with other phone callers without revealing
their phone numbers. The company also offers web to phone and phone to web voice mail and text messaging as well as a service which allows widget subscribers to phone in to their widgets loading voice messages.

Sounds pretty complex to me although CEO Konstantin Guericke (co-founder of LinkedIn) showed up yesterday on Techcrunch to try to illuminate.

Jaxtr has raised an undisclosed amount of money from a passel of Silicon Valley heavy hitters led by Mayfield Fund’s Chamath Palihapitiya, former VP/GM of AOL’s Instant Messenger division and David Ladd, former Octel CTO and early pioneer of voicemail.

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Social Media Now: The Global War on Widgets

The global war on widgets launched by MySpace since its acquisition by News Corp made the New York Times today in a piece about MySpace blocking the Hooka music player a few days it was put to use by MySpace’s most visible user, a singer named Tila Nguyen, whose professional name is Tila Tequila.

Ok, so Hooka, a recently launched project of online music consultancy indie911 wasn’t really “blocked.”  A MySpace spokeswoman told the NYT:

A MySpace representative contacted [Nguyen] and told her that she had violated our terms of service in regards to commercial activity. She removed the material herself, after realizing it was not appropriate for MySpace.

The TOS element that Nguyen apparently violated was loading a potentially commercial widget whose maker doesn’t have a revenue sharing deal with MySpace (the MySpace music player is powered by Snocap).

At Mashable Pete Cashmore has been tracking the GWOW for a year noting today that News Corp has also killed Revver, VideoCodeZone, Stickam, Imeem and ProjectPlaylist.

Suggests Cashmore:

…maybe MySpace has realized that the value being created by exponential growth (YouTube, for instance), is far higher than a license fee would cover. Perhaps the more intelligent move would be an “acquire or die” strategy: snap up the best widgets on the way up.

That’s fine, but what happens if the widget war escalates? Say MySpace buys Hooka, and Facebook retaliates blocking Hooka and driving its users into a proprietary music player widget? Will users abandon widgets that aren’t supported by their social nets of choice? Or will they abandon the social nets who limit widgets in favor of open platforms?

After widget makers the people most interested in the answers to those questions are the VCs who invest in widget businesses.

These guys have been having a great conversation about the monetization of the business. David Cohen started it all proclaiming that no matter what widgets will be big business because users love them.

Brad Feld responded with the opinion that widgets which function as application containers for publishers will work, but widget management systems don’t make sense to Brad.

Mike Hirschland issued an open call for thoughts about how to monetize widgets and got a lot of interesting responses.

Chris Fralic offered the opinion that widget management will work as a business offering a variety of functions:

I think we’ll see features like multiple levels of control and customization, automatic updating across the installed base, and tracking of how widgets spread and their “parent/child” relationships

It seems to me that user-chosen widgets freely attachable to all sorts of platforms–from blogs to white label social nets–are the inevitable future and will constitute a new set of networks that will carry ads, messages, and other sorts of media and information. In the long run the social nets most open to innovative add-ons will survive the transition away from social networking hubs towards private -abeled social nets. Why? Because the Internet industry always develops from a more restrictive environment to a less restrictive one.

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Social Media Bay Area Events Update!

I am really looking forward to tomorrow’s Social Media Club meeting here in San Francisco. Raines Cohen will be leading a conversation around the topic he just wrote about on DailyKos:

“how do blogs, vlogs, petitions, podcasts, bulletin boards, email lists and forwards, chat, Content-Management Systems (CMS), and even Twitter help us communicate, organize, inspire, and fight rumor, despair, and malicious campaigns.”

Saving the Earth through Social Media: Blogging the Global Climate Crisis

From my perspective, this is a very interesting opportunity to discuss how people participating in the Global Climate debate engage with each other. Which tools they are using and why? To better understand from practical examples how social media tools are being used by passionate people, in a debate on an issue that affects us all.

Given that this is San Francisco, I think it is important to note here that we are trying to focus on how respectful disagreement is handled, and how flat out untruths are spun by people on all sides of the issue to the detriment of everyone else involved. The point is not to engage in the debate around Climate Change, but to focus on new ways that people connect with each other around shared interests and how those people communicate and collaborate with each other in that context.

There is a lot to be learned by all…

San Francisco Leadership Team

With all of the travel and other commitments, I am finding it difficult to put enough attention into getting this together in the way I would like each month. So I am hoping a few of you might consider joining the local leadership team for San Francisco. This will help to ensure the key pieces come together each month for a great conversation and we can also find ways to work together and support our community. Immediately following the San Francisco discussion in San Francisco, we will meet briefly to discuss and plan for next months discussion and review other logistics. Please comment here if you are interested.

Silicon Valley Group Starts!

I am really greateful for the support of Meredith Smith from NBC11 and Mike McGrath of Tacit Partners in getting Silicon Valley started. Meredith has been working hard at trying to put something real together for different types of media producers to come together and talk with each other. She really ‘gets it’ and I have been very happy to have been working with her on this. Mike popped up out of thin air it seems, with a lot of great insights on what is happening today and a wealth of experience in technology driven media innovation.

This sort of event is right in line with our thinking about how we all have something to learn from each other - the people I have spoken with at NBC sincerely want to be part of the conversation, to listen and learn, and to share what they know so we can all produce better quality media. From my perspective this is a great opportunity for a serious discussion between traditional and citizen journalists, as well as the media technologists of the Valley. I hope you will join us for a great evening - the first event will be a World Cafe at the NBC11 Studios in San Jose discussing “The Future of Local News”. Due to the format, there is a limited number of seats - see the Silicon Valley page and register at EventBrite to attend. We will also be meeting briefly after this event to talk about the next Silicon Valley conversation topic and to see what we might be able to do to support the needs of the community.

If this topic is interesting to you, you are probably interested in hearing Dan Gilmore and JD Lassica speak this Wednesday in Palo Alto on “Citizen Media“. We are very forunate to have some of the brightest thinkers around on this important topic - I hope to see you there.

MeshWalk!!!

If you are in the mood for inspiration tomorrow, join up with our friend’s Pascale Diaine of Orange and Shannon Clark of Never Eat Lunch Alone for Mobile Meshwalk. This is a great way to have fun, while exploring the city and talking with some really smart folks. When I helped Shannon with his first MeshWalk in Seattle, great podcasts and exceptional insights were found, along with some great friendships amongst us all (special props out to Dallas’ own Giovanni Galluci who has recently decided not to blog (text) any longer).

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