I clicked on a web ad today! June 12, 2008
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It's probably been over two years, but I actually clicked on one today. Because Gmail thinks I'm a spammer, I've been getting tons of delivery failure messages. Gmail served up an ad for help (for a price) for getting email accounts off spamming blacklists. Geez, talk about a perfect revenue scheme for Google. Practically shut down a user's account and then serve an ad for a vendor to help you fix it. Righteous business model. Not evil?
Despite Google's AdSense victory over me today, it has been a very, very long time since I clicked on an ad. Honestly, when was the last time you clicked on AdSense or a banner ad with the intention of possibly buying something? Seems to me that today's web ads (read adwords/adsense) could be built on a house of cards. I worked at Ask Jeeves when the banner ad business collapsed. It wasn't pretty — and it wasn't until Google devised contextual ads (with a large enough base of ads to allow specific targeting) that online ads became (a very good) business again. However, revenue for online ads is declining again, signaling the need for a disruptive ad model to spur new and robust growth.
The next generation of ad products will not only need to be contextual and targeted, but will need to be interactive. I need more than relevant hyper-linked text to get me motivated to look further. I need marketers to understand the social media I use and communicate with me the way I do. Use Twitter, FriendFeed, MessageDance, and even TiVo. Have my friends opt-in to show me what they liked. Engage in a conversation with me, if I choose. I know this is controversial and not fully-baked, but main-stream web users are quickly becoming desensitized to the current way of delivering ads.
Google believes it is their "moral" duty to help fix online ads; it's also 98% of their revenue. Hurry up because Web 2.0 is counting on you!
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Will FriendFeed be as kind as Twitter? May 13, 2008
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Just read this piece about FriendFeedLinks on TechCrunch and the first thought I had was — will FriendFeed have a problem with this? After all, could you imagine a MicrosoftLinks or GoogleLinks?
Corporate lawyers live for this kind of stuff. But that was before Twitter.
Twitter really changed things by not going after 3rd-party services and the companies who used their name or likeness. Twittermail, Twitterrific, TwitterSecret — the list goes on and on. I believe the jury is still out on this trademarkless strategy as they can never reign it back in. True, they have allowed an incredible Twitter ecosystem to be created with so many tools and services they could have never built, but if the time comes where they need to expand their footprint, can they do it without squashing a friendly complementary service? I suppose they can buy out the good ones, but they can’t buy everything around them. And they clearly can’t put the genie back in the bottle and try to protect their trademark.
So, I’m intrigued to see if Twitter started a trend here by encouraging (or maybe it was just dumb-luck ignoring) unaffiliated hackers to use their name — or are the lawyers at FriendFeed just getting warmed up? The founders are from Google after all, and the company had a lot of experience in trademark law, albeit, defending their own trademark violations.
The Dark-Side, Dick Cheney equivalent is Facebook. If you’ve developed an application on Facebook or even tried running an ad, you know what I mean. They are the anti-Twitter where you can’t even use the word “face” in your app name or ad text. They allowed RockYou’s SuperWall and Slide’s FunWall as an application, but you can’t use the word “wall” in an ad. WTH?
I’ll give FriendFeed a couple of weeks to respond to FriendFeedLinks and if they do nothing, I call dibs on FriendFeederrific.
UPDATE: Saw Louis Gray had a mention about FriendFeedMachine today (and he wrote about them last month), so I guess FriendFeed is letting the trademark go and going the way of Twitter.
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I sense a disruption in The Force! May 9, 2008
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Nokia’s CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo says he will reinvent Nokia into an Internet company as detailed by Anders Bylund of Ars Technica. It’s a clear reaction to the success of the iPhone (with the frenzy of activity around jailbreaking it and the new SDK), the poorly kept rumor about the Google Phone along with the Android platform, and of course the decreasing margins that always come with hardware. I disagree a bit with Nokia’s intention to not innovate in hardware design and Anders’ thought that mobile devices will converge to basically the same feature set because there is a lot to be done in the area of usability and power consumption that a device maker could still differentiate itself greatly. The iPhone is an incredible step forward but there is obvious room for improvements such as data input and power usage.
ALL mobile phones are fast becoming mobile computers (not limited to “smart phones”) with incredible power, storage, and Internet capabilities. While I believe you can still set yourself apart as a manufacturer, it will be the services and software native to the phone that will be an even stronger selling point. For web companies, why build an app or user interface specific to each device when a really good Internet browser is all you need? Safari on the iPhone proves this. Why build a special mobile data integration layer for each device when you can just use the email client native to the phone? Web companies should build their site and services with this in mind and the device/platform companies should optimize their native apps and OS for these simple requirements.
At MessageDance, we recognize that the browser and email are the apps found on virtually every PC and soon on every mobile device. We’re not too keen on being device-specific so we use the ubiquitous tools already available and everyone knows. Using the “Share” feature found on many social sites like YouTube and Digg (and probably on all sites sooner rather than later), our users can send their favorite content to their favorite social destination or their friends’ by using their MessageDance email address. They can create a blog post from their iPhone or Facebook Messages section by simply emailing it to “blog @ messagedance.com“. The blog post also can go automatically to Twitter. All of this is done by a simple yet powerful email address.
Nokia senses the disruption caused by the iPhone and Google. They believe the higher margin business will come from the platform and services built on top of their devices. This is a natural evolution as witnessed in the PC business as well with IBM focusing more on software and services. I hope they will continue to innovate on the devices as well as make the platform and native apps stronger so companies like MessageDance can innovate and develop their offerings to be useful anywhere and from any device.
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