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Content Tagged buzz
Propeller 2.0 Launches: Ditching The Vote Count, Adding A Mascot
Propeller, AOL’s Digg-like news site, launches version 2.0 later this morning. The site sports a new design and logo and now has a mascot - described as “part professor, part citizen journalist” (see image below).
But the biggest feature change is the removal of a pure Digg-like vote count. In its place is an algorithm based popularity ranking of 1-10, which takes into account “many more aspects of participation” when determining popularity. Voting on a story is now called the more nebulous “prop it.” The service has also cut down the number of news categories. Those remaining include Arts & Entertainment, Business & Finance, Family, Humor, News, Science & Technology, Sports and Style.
Taking a page from the Yahoo Buzz playbook, headlines from the service will also be integrated directly into AOL and AOL News.
Propeller has had a rocky history. It first launched in June 2006 under the Netscape.com domain as “a better Digg” in that paid editors chose the top stories from user-submitted and voted links. Soon the site was paying top Digg users to move to them.
In August 2007 rumors circulated that the site was going to be shut down. We called it “Kaput” last September, but we were wrong: the site would live on under a new domain, Propeller.com.
Netscape traffic promptly spiked downward, but Propeller, led by general manager Tom Drapeau, filled the gap and has had steady growth since then.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Miro Buzz: July 21st
Articles you might have missed in a convenient, click-able format:
- Miro Chat:
- Team Miro will be hosting a live chat interview tomorrow with Chris Lyes from AncientPlaces.TV
-
News:
- Miro was recently featured by a leading German News Show
- Dean gave us an update on uploading to Archive.org, which just receive a major overhaul
- Nicholas and Holmes published their findings on Sustainable Public Media Infrastructure
-
From the Devs:
- Last week Will Guaraldi celebrated his 1 year anniversary as a software developer for Miro
- More news on the latest version of Miro
Nails on a Chalkboard: The Google Chat Notification Sound
There’s a scene in the movie “Dumb and Dumber” in which Jim Carrey asks, “Do you want to hear the most annoying sound in the world?” And then he screeches at the top of his lungs. If that movie was made today you could easily substitute Carrey’s screaming for the notification sound Google Chat makes.
You are feverishly working on deadline, concentrating to craft the perfect sent-
Dunk!…
-ence, when that noise cuts through your mind as your-
Dunk!…
mental train goes careening off its rails.
DUNK!DUNK!DUNK!
Arrrgh. Who is it, and what the @*&#$ do you want?!
Om’s talked about Gmail sucking, but this is a bigger threat to productivity, since at some point it will drive me insane and I’ll take everyone with me.
Does it have to be such an unpleasant, angry, sound? Especially since it repeats the noise until you switch windows and read the damn message? A jackhammer would be less obnoxious. And the only option in the settings menu is to turn the sound off, which really isn’t helpful when someone is trying to urgently reach you.
Why not a few options, Google? I don’t need the sound of puppies making rainbows or bunny rabbits blowing kisses, but there has to be a less harsh noise than the one you dumped into such an important communication tool for the modern worker. Heck, you could even slip in the biddy-biddy sound from 411-GOOG.
DUNK!
What Getting Buzzed Says About Yahoo
The battle over Yahoo’s search business as witnessed over the last few days seems both ridiculous and petty. And it takes the attention away from what is Yahoo’s true value: a media aggregation platform. Yahoo is the place a lot of people — some 400 million — visit to get their news, sports scores and email. I have always liked that business, and yesterday I experienced, first-hand, the enormous strength of Yahoo.
A story by Judi Sohn, who edits WebWorkerDaily, one of our growing portfolio of blogs, was featured on the home page of Yahoo last night. The story got voted up via Yahoo’s Buzz, a service akin to Digg, except much more powerful.
In a few hours, the story about what to expect when switching from a BlackBerry to an iPhone was viewed over 200,000 times and attracted over 350 comments. Now that’s a lot of traffic — but more importantly, a gigantic amount of engagement displayed by Yahoo visitors. The traffic sent our way by Yahoo was many times the traffic we get from, say, Digg or StumbleUpon.
At the risk of repeating myself, Yahoo’s core business now is “audience.” The company, instead of trying to out-Google Google, needs to beat itself by figuring out new ways to keep the audience growing. The first step is, of course, acknowledging that it is a content company. The next one: figuring out new engagement and audience-grabbing ways.
iPhone 3G Buzzing - Nielsen Online, Hitwise Issue Stats
Bisogna riconquistare il Target: il quarto spot tartago Crazy Marketing Network
Credits:
Agency: Socialware
Players: Filippo Giardina e Mauro Fratini (NonRassegnataStampa.it)
Director: Luca Mobilio
Guest Star: Katia
Bisogna riconquistare il Target: il quarto spot tartago Crazy Marketing Network
Credits:
Agency: Socialware
Players: Filippo Giardina e Mauro Fratini (NonRassegnataStampa.it)
Director: Luca Mobilio
Guest Star: Katia
spai: spai lab di marketing, comunicazione, web & nuovi media
Does Facebook’s Overseas Growth Matter?
Earlier this month, I shared with you my post that called for a big wake-up call for Social Networking sector, thanks to the presence of too many me-too players at a time when recent traffic trends are showing signs of hitting a plateau. Hitwise recently reported that in the US, MySpace and Facebook ranked 1st and 2nd had 95% and 93% repeat visitors for the month.
The May 2008 traffic data from comScore furthers that argument. Another interesting finding of the May 2008 data – Facebook is doing much better than MySpace in the overseas markets.
Nevertheless, of late, I have stopped taking traffic on face value, and instead almost always juxtapose it to how much money you make off those page views. (Dave McClure recently chastised me for thinking too much in the short term.)
Matt Brezina, co-founder of Xobni earlier pointed out that Facebook will take in $265 million and MySpace will bring in $755 million in 2008. So unless the overseas (and overall page view) growth translate into real big dollars, our friends at Facebook (and MySpace) have problems. Experts believe that the answer is in better relevance in display advertising – still the dominant form of advertising on the social networks.
Facebook vs Others
The traffic trends have to be troubling for for geographic hits such as Orkut and Friendster. The overseas growth of Facebook also calls into question the veracity of the decision by AOL to pay $850 million for Bebo. Some data crunching by Andrew Chen (using the newly announced Google Trends) shows that Facebook is making big headway in markets such as UK, France, China, and India. Orkut is very popular in India, while as the map shows Bebo is big in UK and other European countries.
I think it is these guys who need to worry the most with Facebook’s march & MySpace’s rear guard action. I suspect, if Facebook continues to grow, MySpace could opt for buying market share.
But if you take a larger view, Chen’s conclusion, that “Social networks have weaker network effects than previously speculated,” is quite prescient. As someone once noted, social networks are like night clubs – there is always a cooler, hipper, funkier joint being planned by someone.
Over past few years, generally described as the golden years of social networking have led to the sector’s giants resting on their laurels. The fundamental nature (and utility) of social networks hasn’t really changed. The platform-ization of social networks has led to the rise of social apps that are best described as time wasters. You can be fascinated by vampire bites and what not but in the end, there is a finite amount of time you can waste.
In other words, Social Networks need to find new purposes for people to come back every day and be loyal. I had argued in my previous post that the world of social networks is going to be divided into two – the big players (MySpace, Facebook) and niche players (Dogster, Dopplr etc.)
In a recent chat, Ning CEO Gina Bianchini pointed out that they are adding 2000 new niche social networks every day and are now upto 315,000 networks. The niche is allowing the company to get even good non-optimized, straight-up average eCPMs from AdSense. She pointed out that they are about 3 to 4 times better than the average for general one-size-fits-all social networks. “This is because the social networks on Ning are organized around well-defined topics and interests – skiing, smart cars, diabetes, etc. As a result, contextual advertising works more effectively for Ning than it does for other general social networks,” she said.
Photo Courtesy of comScore via C/Net News.com’s The Social.
The Commoditization of GPS & the Golden Age of Location-based Services
Updated: A few months ago I speculated that location-based services and the infrastructure they require were headed for a major upswing in 2008. My optimism was based on a sharp increase in the number of mergers and acquisitions taking place in the sector. But lately I’ve been feeling like I may have been too conservative with my outlook for the location-based services revolution.
The main reason is the ubiquitousness of mobile phones; the sheer number of them that get shipped each year guarantees LBS a huge audience. Of course, in order for LBS to be on mobile phones, we need applications, which is where I believe the iPhone plays a vital role. Its large screen and built-in GPS (and now its 3G speeds) enable and encourage truly interesting LBS applications. The subsequent success of independent applications makers — Pelagao and Sense Networks, for instance — will in turn push other platform owners to find interesting LBS applications, too.
Along with the iPhone, some of the newer devices like the LG Vue, the Samsung Instinct and about half a dozen others will serve to radically increase interest in LBS services. That will force the current device makers — namely Garmin and TomTom — to consider opening up their ecosystems to applications that offer more than just maps and traffic services.
As if the rise of cell phones-as-personal navigation devices weren’t enough, Microsoft yesterday announced plans to offer an embedded operating systems for PNDs, aka Windows for GPS devices. Welcome to the first day of the rapid commoditization of the GPS device business. And while it may look like Microsoft’s just trying to get traction for its mapping service, I think this is a bit more disruptive than that. It’s the culmination of the three major technology trends of our times: cheap computing, inevitable connectivity and the easy development of software to put it all to work.
For car makers desperate to add value to their vehicles, Microsoft is providing yet another way to offer a navigation system on the cheap. Beyond the auto market, however, the new operating system is going to prompt dozens of Asian manufacturers to build cheaper PNDs, which will hurt the volumes of the market’s two biggest players quite drastically.
Indeed, Garmin and TomTom need to figure out a way to add more intelligence to their systems. Custom versions of their devices aren’t enough — they need to embrace the concept of connectedness. One way would be to buy Silicon Valley-based Dash Navigation, which has a connected device that puts Internet data to very good use. Here’s what I wrote about them back in December 2007:
The Internet is not just about the browser, but rather it is about data and how one can use it to build clever products. I think Dash, much like Amazon’s Kindle and RCA’s Small Wonder video camera, is part of a movement that is breaking Web 2.0’s browser shackles.
Yesterday, I asked the company if they were worried about Microsoft’s foray. CEO Paul Lego responded to me via email, saying:
“As you know, with the Dash Express we are already delivering all of these kinds of connected features and more in a very integrated way. In fact, with our new API, we have an open platform for the car today…We welcome innovation and look forward to seeing how these features get expressed by other PND vendors, including those that adopt this new Microsoft platform.”
Those are fighting words, but I’m sure even he knows that despite having raised $42 million from well-known VCs, his startup can’t play the hardware game and may need to partner with the bigger device makers. After all, Dash needs to worry about the cell phones-as-PND platforms, too. One way or another, this is going to be a market to watch, one that promises lots of innovation. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
