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DeWolfe: We’re More Focused on Creating a Business Posted: 07 Nov 2008 12:52 PM CST In the last session of the day at Web 2.0 Summit Thursday, MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe and Edgar Bronfman, CEO of Warner Music, sat down with John Battelle for a conversation about the future of music. At one point during their conversation, John Battelle stated some ballpark estimates about Facebook and inaccurately claimed that the site had eclipsed MySpace domestically. It was a moment which clearly frustrated DeWolfe and he was quick to respond that according to comScore, the company is beating Facebook by over 30 million monthly unique visitors in the United States. He also was quick to underscore the company’s focus on generating a real business, which contrasts Zuckerberg’s much buzzed about statement that the company isn’t heavily focused on monetization. According to one person I spoke with at the MySpace party last night in San Francisco, the company is now actively pursuing publishers to partner with on the MySpace ad platform. Just as I wrote this morning on AllFacebook, users will be cookied and targeted based on profile information they provided on MySpace. This emphasizes that MySpace is not sitting by and waiting for the open web to take place, they are trying to take advantage of it now. When it comes to making money from MySpace Music, the company remains focused on an ad-supported model. DeWolfe stated, “The main difference with our model is that we have the largest music community in the world.” This emphasis on community is what DeWolfe believes will give them a leg up. As to whether or not he’s concerned about Facebook entering the music arena? “There are significant barriers to entry,” DeWolfe told John Battelle. He proceeded to list out the four business components necessary to succeed and suggested that it would be very challenging for Facebook to enter the space. It’s clear that MySpace is focused on building a business and while Facebook may be rapidly gaining traction, the company will continue to focus on monetization and growth opportunities. For Chris DeWolfe, it’s all business.

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CurrentTV: “We’re Profitable”, Twitter: “We’re Not” Posted: 06 Nov 2008 02:34 PM CST Sporting the standard geek suit (jeans, blazer, black shoes, and collar shirt) Evan Williams, CEO of Twiter, told Ken Auletta of the New Yorker, that he doesn’t think making money is that big of a dilemma. In response to a question about how Twitter plans on making money he said, “Ummm”, followed by silence and laughter in the crowd. He continued, “I don’t think it’s that big of a dilemma.” Later in the conversation, Evan made suggestions of what their future business model would be. “Our revenue is not advertising per say, Twitter’s model is very different. Our system is entirely opt-in.” He continued to state that if users want commercial content, they’ll opt-in for it, if they don’t, they won’t. We can provide a very valuable communication channel for these groups and charge for it. Evan Williams statements provided a stark contrast to Joel Hyatt, CEO of Current TV, who proclaimed, “We’re profitable.” Hyatt stated that the company has been operating profitably on an EBITDA basis since their first year of operations. They have a traditional business model in which revenue is generated from cable company licensing fees and advertising fees. There are user-generated advertisements that are being created for CurrentTV and most advertisers prefer these ads over agency created advertisements. The discussion eventually turned to the transformation of media but what struck me the most was the contrast between the two companies: one a revenue-less startup and the other a rapidly growing (and profitable) media company. There has been a never-ending discussion about Twitter’s revenue model and it increasingly clear that the company plans on providing a premium version for corporate clients. While it has been rumored to be rolled out next year, Evan Williams provided no guidance. For now, speculators will have to wait and see what the company comes up with.

LinkedIn Isn’t Recession Proof Either Posted: 06 Nov 2008 11:58 AM CST Last night Techcrunch posted that LinkedIn was laying off 10 percent of their staff. Just a couple weeks ago the company announced that they had raised $22.7 million in a round of funding from SAP Ventures, Goldman Sachs, and McGraw-Hill. At the time it wasn’t clear that the company wasn’t laying people off, simply that they were slowing their hiring process. Now 10 percent is being chopped. While we may have a new President-Elect, the economic conditions still appear to be worsening for the time being. As such startups are tightening up, cutting back on hiring, and an increasing percentage are reportedly firing anywhere from 5 to 20 percent of their staff. We have no reason to believe that this trend won’t continue. Just this morning Peter Kafka reported that News Corp is experiencing a softening in their display advertising on MySpace. They are expecting that to continue into the first two quarters of next year. Also this morning, while being interviewed by John Battelle at Web 2.0 Summit, Paul Otellini of Intel suggested that general consensus is the first two or three quarters next year will be hard. It’s clear that no companies, including social networks, are immune to recessionary pressure. As companies push through the next three quarters, there is a very good chance that we’ll see cutbacks continue.

MySpace Music CEO Announced Tomorrow Posted: 05 Nov 2008 06:33 PM CST Peter Kafka is reporting that the MySpace Music CEO is being announced tomorrow. Mike Arrington also just claimed to me that that the report is confirmed. MySpace will be announcing Courtney Holt,who’s currently the head of digital music at Viacom, as the new CEO of MySpace Music. The service which debuted only a few weeks ago (see our posting here), was without a leader. The service has been successful as the company streamed over 1 billion songs in just the first few weeks after launch. I question what that number really mens though considering that MySpace has offered streaming music via user profiles and band profile pages for years now. This new service is focused on distributing licensed music in an ad supported environment. Currently those songs are available via Amazon’s MP3 service. Ultimately MySpace Music appears to be a large scale experiment as music industry executives struggle to find a successful business model dues to widespread pirating and sharing of content. Earlier this week MySpace announced a partnership with Auditudewhich enables video content owners to monetize the audience-uploaded content. Unfortunately that model cannot be as easily converted to their music service. This news also comes as rumors of a Facebook Music revival have been sprouting up. While we’ve occasionally heard chatter about Facebook speaking with music industry executives, so far it has been little more than that. We’ll keep an eye on the MySpace Music and will make updates as news occurs.

MySpace Posts Impressive Election Stats Posted: 05 Nov 2008 04:36 PM CST Today MySpace released statistics that revealed a surge in traffic on election day. One of the most impressive statistics is the number of new voters registered via the site leading up to Election Day. According to MySpace, over 300,000 new voters registered via the site. That dwarfs still impressive statistics posted by Facebook (over 50,000 new voters registered via Facebook). MySpace had over 300,000 more pageviews over the previous week. Unfortunately we don’t have statistics that reveal the number of users. Less than an hour ago I posted Facebook election statistics which were also impressive. One thing that has become clear is that social networks have become an integral component of the U.S. election process. As social networks and politics becomes further entwined, politicians are paying significant attention to this space. Additionally, ignoring the space can significantly damage campaigns. People want to communicate about politics and social networks are helping them do that. It will be interesting to watch how the relationship between politics and social networks become more entangled.

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D.C. Based Thummit Launches Mobile Food Recommendations Posted: 04 Nov 2008 04:45 PM CST If you are like me, there’s a good chance you are frequently looking for a great place to eat but don’t want to spend much time searching. You may also want to have an easy way to review sites in a simple manner right after you finish eating at a restaurant. If you are knowledgeable of all things web then you are probably aware of other services offering similar services. Numerous Competitors Yelp, for example offers a robust iPhone application for finding restaurants, bars, banks, drugstores, and more. You can then filter each of the stores or restaurants based on their rating, price, and distance from you. It’s a pretty useful application aside from one thing: you can’t review restaurants after you’ve visited them from the application. A couple weeks ago I also wrote about the LivingSocial iPhone application. One of the many features that the application is the ability to write reviews on the go. This was immediately an open void in the market as Yelp has yet to fix reviews on the go. The additional benefit of LivingSocial is their integration into all the existing social networks which offer developer platforms. The social recommendation space is rapidly getting crowded and as we rush to fill data into the system, there are going to be some serious challenges. One of those challenges includes consistency of recommendation engines within your personal networks. If half your friends are on one network and half on another, it’s difficult to determine which one to use. Thummit and Simplicity While numerous competitors exist in the mobile food recommendation space, Thummit is attempting to simplify things by limiting users to 140 characters, the same way Twitter does. The focus is to build out a robust SMS service and then extend the service to support as many communication platforms as possible. You can tweet your Thummit recommendation, text it to text it to the service, or update it from the Thummit website. While the initial beta test is focused on the D.C. area, you can currently use the service anywhere in the country. For example I just ate at “The House” in San Francisco for lunch and was able to post a review directly to the site. The service then pulls in other reviews from around the web so that no sites appear to have a lack of content. When I saw the demo at the LaunchBox Digital offices in D.C. last week, Sean Greene, the brain behind this new product, emphasized that the company is working to integrate many more features that make it easier to review restaurants. That includes automatically determining whether or not someone likes a place automatically via sentiment analysis. It also appears that they want to take recommendations and simple voting beyond just restaurants. Food is simply the first place to test it out. For now the service is limited to restaurants but they may expand beyond that in the near future. I think keeping the service as simple as possible will be their key to success. What services to you use for social recommendations and social voting? Also, if you’d like to register for the site, visit the Thummit site and use the invite code “hamburger”. Let us know what you think!

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Glue: Connecting Friends Through Objects Semantically Posted: 31 Oct 2008 03:50 PM CDT Last night I had an opportunity to take a look at Glue, self-described as “a contextual network that uses semantic technology to automatically connect people around everyday things - books, music, movies, stars, artists, stocks, wine, restaurants, and more.” When I looked at it, my initial thought was that this is a similar in some regards to LivingSocial. After I looked at it more I realized that the application connects the activities of users around various objects on the web. What’s interesting is that if you view a movie on Netflix and your friend goes to view the same movie on IMDB, the engine can tell your friend about your related activity. This is pretty interesting and it appears to be more about the intelligence of the engine than a feature heavy product. At first glance the application doesn’t wow users with limitless features. As you begin to dig and use the product, the benefits rapidly become apparent. While the company has not stated their intention to integrate into Facebook or other social networks, you can rapidly see the value of this tool integrated into your existing networks. Given the individuals behind this project, I’d imagine that they have this in mind for expansion purposes. Ultimately the key is building a highly intelligent engine and then plugging it into a larger network of individuals. The AdaptiveBlue team focuses on building smart products and this is definitely one of them. I’ll be interested to see how this product evolves over the coming months. For now, this is another great product to add to the team’s portfolio. The more exciting part will be watching what types of smart services and tools the company can roll out as the semantic engine behind their separate products becomes more intelligent. If you want to try out an intelligent way to connect with your friends based on the objects their interacting with, go download the Glue application for Firefox.

The Average Person Can’t Figure Out Twitter Posted: 31 Oct 2008 03:08 PM CDT I’ve been taking a look at the usage of many Twitter users over the past few weeks and I’ve also noticed that a lot more of my friends have been joining recently. While Twitter can be an extremely valuable tool, there is a serious hurdle for it. I’ve seen many users join the site, add 10 or 20 friends and start tweeting. Within a matter of weeks their tweeting frequency dies down and eventually they stop using it. The biggest problem for these individuals? The 10 or 20 people that they follow need to be interesting enough for them to return to the site regularly. While a small segment of these individuals enjoy getting text message updates from their close friends, at a certain point receiving mundane updates from the average Joe simply fails to excite. Then again, perhaps following the average Joe (or should I say “Joe the plumber”?) will not provide a lot of value. The real value comes out of following those individuals that can create the most engaging media within 140 characters. Many of my friends don’t understand why I tweet and they don’t have the same virtual friends that I do. There’s an extremely engaging group of individuals on the site that understand its power and take advantage of it. Maybe I’m simply over analyzing the act of engaging with other people on Twitter. Any individual who isn’t “hyperconnected” is not going to benefit equally and I would argue is much more likely to eventually leave the site. Do you think the average person gets the same benefit from Twitter as the hyperconnected social media people do? Is there a simple way to explain the benefits of Twitter to someone who doesn’t understand what the purpose is? Personally, I didn’t get a huge benefit until I travelled around and began to witness the benefit of following the behind the scenes chatter.

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