MySpace cleans up act; PVRs move upstream; Jobs kills Apple's marketshare; Battelle to Facebook: SELL NOW!
- On the heals of YouTube cleaning up its act, MySpace will delete 200,000 objectionable profiles. Ross comments on making the Space more advertiser friendly–very, very smart move.
- The PVR is the network–wow.
- Apple *desktop* marketshare has been cut in half since Jobs became CEO… misleading headline since Apple is doing better than ever in terms of the overall health of the company. In related note, how would you like to be the CEO of Disney and have Steve Jobs show up at the next board meeting?!?! Oh to be a fly on that wall.
- John Battelle begs the founders of Facebook to take the money–spoken like a true vet who got hit hard when the bubbles popped. JBAT was at WIRED which had an IPO killed twice, and at the Industry Standard which he says turned down a similar offer (so that means the Standard got a ~1B offer and they didn’t take it…. ouch!). I hear ya buddy… I’ve had three phone calls with entrepreneurs who’ve been offered 5-30M for their startups in the past month. My advice to all of them: sell now, Internet winter is coming. Here is how the conversation went with one of my friends:
Me: “Have you ever sold a company?”
Friend with offer: “No.”
Me: “Do you TKTK million in you bank account right now?”
FWO: “No.”
Me: “Are your parents going to put TKTK million in your bank account any time soon? Do you have a trust fund?”
FWO: “Uhhh… no.”
Me: “Take the money.”
FWO: “But what if I sell to early?”
Me: “Then you’ve done your job. You have three options in life: sell too early, sell exactly at the right moment, or sell too late. You want to be part of the first two groups–not the last group. And, history is the only thing that can tell you if you’re in group 1 or 2. Trust me, I spent my life in group 3, now I’m part of group 1, and maybe some day I’ll be able to join Mark Cuban in group 2. Heck, folks may look back at the blogging movement and say that we were in group #2. It’s a process, and if you’re a first time entrepreneur you take the money and hope the distance between group 1 and 2 isn’t that big. Risk, reward.”
Me (still going): “Trust me, get one under your belt–it changes everything. I get 10 calls a week from VCs asking me to invest in my next company… it’s like the movie business: once you’ve made one movie your chances of doing a second movie go up exponentially.”
[ Note: Mark had a solid sale before he had Broadcast.com, so when Microsoft offered him ~$100 for Broadcast.com he could walk away from it. That's the position you want to be in. Having a win under your belt changes *everything.* ]
Newsvine UFG Wrap up; Today's UFG: Ma.gnolia.com.
Yesterday we had a good time playing with Newsvine. What did we learn?
- Newsvine’s interface is really complicated–it takes a good hour or two of playing to figure it out.
- It takes 3-5 votes to get a story to land on a category page.
- It takes 5-10 votes to get on the TOS page (TOS = top of service for those of you who don’t work for a major portal
- You don’t add friends on Newsvine, you “watch” people. Not sure I like that term–feels like being a stalker.
- The fact that they have a license to the AP is really cool because they can run really nice, big photos–DIGG/Delicious ain’t got no photos
- The Conversation Tracker (image one, right) is a neat feature that allows you to quickly popup an AJAX box that shows you activity on stories you’ve submitted (i.e. if someone comments or votes on your story).
- The Read Article button is a good innovation since most folks on DIGG don’t know when they click on a headline or comment link if they are leaving the site or not. On Newsvine you’re not leaving the site *unless* you hit that button.
- Featured Writers is a good box because it rewards folks for being active, and let’s face it people are driven by two things in this space: recognition and affiliation (their ain’t no compensation).
- Newsvine has a really bizarre MLM (multi-level marketing) scheme where they will split revenue with you for your articles and your friends articles. It’s really complicated and it will never work. They will drop it I’m sure.
Overall I give the site a B. They’ve added some nice features to the socail bookmarking space, and if they can clean up the site a little bit they will have a real winner on their hands.
Questions to folks in yesterday’s Newsvine UFG (Unauthorized Focus Group):
- How long do you think it will take an average user to understand what is going on at the site?
- What do you think are the best 2-3 features of the site?
- How would you compare the Newsvine experience to DIGG, Delicious, and/or Ma.gnolia.com?
- What would you change about the site?
- What are the worst features/biggest issues with the site?
OK, today’s UFG is Ma.gnolia.com. My user account is:
Denton calls out SixApart; Micropayments still DOA; Ross with the checkbook says "wha-wha-what?!?!" to Facebook for $2B; more on Newsvine
- Denton calls out SixApart. I’m so glad I trusted Brian when he insisted that we create Blogsmith as the foundation of Weblogs, Inc. If we had put our faith in those guys we would still be on blog number 10 or 15–like Nick is!
- OMG people are still talking about Micropayments 12 years later. It’s not gonna happen people… let it go! Step away from the .01 for this blog post button. The problem with micropayments has always been, and will always be, the psychological torture of making a purchasing decision. It’s hard enough for folks to decided to subscribe to a site or not, you’re gonna have them make a decision on a story by story basis?!?! Get real.
- My pal Ross says “hello!??!!?” to the “Facebook for $2B” meme. This image says it all.
- Respek!
- Everyone has a Bastards of Blogging Card but me.
- The always insightful Tristan on Virtual Law… these Second Life folks are a bunch of losers (now, CoH people… well, they’re brilliant).
- Mark thinks Newsvine is interesting, but way too complicated.
- Really stupid rule on Newsvine: You can’t link to your own blog posts. Discussion here. Of course, you can take your blog post down from your blog and post it to your Newsvine blog. Yeah… nice try guys, but I don’t think so. It’s my content and it lives on my blog. If my content sucks the community on Newsvine won’t vote for it, so stop with the heavy handed stuff. Also, on a totally pragmatic basis, I could just have my friends link to my content or create an alias and post my stuff. Bad call.
Open Mike Night: Anyone have a topic, question, etc?
Anyone have topics they want to talk about? The comments are open…
Squidoo joins Newsvine in the MLM social news model…
Got the note below from Squidoo today. I hate this MLM (multi-level marketing)/referrer program stuff. I know it works, but it feels icky to me. We thought about all these models when we started WIN and found that you’re better off finding the best of the best and paying them well to make a “lens” of the web.
Quality folks don’t do the MLM stuff. MLM stuff draws the low-rent, scammers of the world (think: the folks you know who join those viatim cults).
I love Seth (I would invest in NASDAQ: SGOD), and I think Squidoo has About.com potential, but I think it’s not gonna work as it is structured today because there will be too many “experts” in each vertical, and the truth is that most folks are not really experts. Less is more. No one on Squidoo will do a better job covering gadgets than Engadget, stocks than TheStreet.com, or Hollywood gossip than Defamer. Real experts command real money, contingent money draws the weak experts.
[ Note: I know Seth's response will be that the best lens creators will be voted up, but the truth is that the best lens creators will never *show* up because they will be getting paid by folks like About.com, Weblogs, Inc. and MSM publications. ]
Here is the note from Squidoo today:
Great news!
Every penny earned so far in the Squidoo public beta test has been donated to charity. That’s thousands of dollars for three
great organizations: The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, Room to Read, and The Acumen Fund. Congratulations.
But now… it’s time to start paying YOU. From this point forward any royalties your lenses earn are well and truly yours. (And we’re
backdating the start of the first pay period to March 1, 2006). Find out more about how you get paid.
So now what? Three things you should know:
1. We just introduced a powerful new eBay module. Highlight relevant products. Promote your own auctions. Share items you’re bidding on. Get a commission on every item sold.
2. Refer a friend, get $5. When someone you’ve referred earns her first $15, you and she BOTH get an extra $5. Find out more here: http://www.squidoo.com/lensmaster/refer
3. Our new partnership with CafePress brings lensmasters and shopkeepers together. Get unique new lens content from the popular CafePress module.
Thanks, and let us know what you think!
The SquidTeam
Seth, Corey, Megan, Heath and Gil
Austin BBQ, MySpace Killers, YouTube cleans up its act, Best BBQ in L.A.
- Fixing Time Warner… according to Business 2.0 (a TimeWarner publication
- Was in Austin yesterday for three huge sales/partner meetings.. they all went very well. Of course, the big news is that we grabbed lunch at Pok-e-Jo’s and for dinner (four hours later) I grabbed a brisket sandwich at the Salt Lick at the airport. Thanks to everyone who made the recommendations in the comments.
- In the real world people die. In the real world people kill other people. Some of those folks have MySpace pages that are now memoralized at http://www.mydeathspace.com/deaths.aspx. I give give it 30 days before some reporter says “The MySpace deathcount is at 137″ or “There are now 34 murderers on MySpace.” In a related story: there have been “72 New York deaths” this week, and there are “57 Los Angeles Murderers” so far this year.
- Google/AOL deal is done, but Google isn’t done raising money.
- YouTube is cleaning up its act: “we’re constantly trying to balance the rights of copyright owners with the rights of our users.” Smart move for them to limit the length of videos… now, how about they do a search for SNL and Chappelle and just turn off the videos they know are not thier property? Why don’t they let ABC and NBC executives go into the system and turn off content they know is being stolen? That is the ultimate solution… that is what I would do. Also, if you let someone at NBC turn off stuff themselves they can’t complain about you not doing it fast enough, and you can track what they turn off so they don’t do something fishy (like turn off competitors shows). If they abuse this abiity to turn off stuff you take away their account.
- Question: What are the best BBQ joints in Los Angeles?
Good panel on April 18th in NYC
Some of my good friends are putting together a great panel on the 18th in NYC with some great panelists including Shawn Gold (formerly of WIN, now with MySpace) and Internet legend Jeremy Allaire.
details below:
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Death of the Producer? The Rise of User Generated Content & Community
7pm – 9pm
The New School
Shawn Gold on creative advertising solutions on MySpace
My pal Shawn Gold gave a keynote yesterday explaining the complicated, yet effective, advertising marketing on social networks. As we’ve discussed here a couple of times, it’s gonna take a lot of work to get these networks optimized to produce results, but the folks who do take the time will see some nice results.
My favorite nugget: SoaP is doing a user-generated commerical contest. Wow…
Go vote on my Newsvine stories…
OK, anyone playing with Newsvine.com today please do me a favor and vote for each of my stories and add a comment: http://jmc.newsvine.com/
I want to see how many votes it takes to get your story to the top level of the site (right now it seems that 5-10 votes makes you a top story… wow, compare that to the 50 it takes to get on DIGGS home page).
I’ve only gotten like 10-25 visitors from the stories that are making it to the top level, so while it is easier to get to the top level the payoff is nothing–right now.
Newsvine update…
OK, a bunch of us are hanging out in the Tech and Entertainment sections of Newsvine right now. I added my YouTube story and it has five votes and I’ve been promoted to the featured Writers box.
Here are the folks I’ve found in the system already:
http://alexander.newsvine.com
http://jmc.newsvine.com
http://cafemama.newsvine.com
http://nonsensor.newsvine.com
http://modulo26.newsvine.com
http://meskill.newsvine.com
http://toddwc.newsvine.com
http://wilwheaton.newsvine.com
http://jairob.newsvine.com/
http://albertob.newsvine.com/
http://peterrojas.newsvine.com/
http://jandrade.newsvine.com/
http://dcharti.newsvine.com/
http://willyvolk.newsvine.com/
http://doctorparadox.newsvine.com/
http://joannelutynec.newsvine.com/
