I keep saying that the web follows the pattern of the fashion industry. It’s about image, it’s about fun, it’s about entertaining. Sure, you can also buy stuff and do useful things. But that’s what you have to do, not what you want to do.
That’s why facebook is popular - it’s fun, it’s about image, it’s about entertainment.
And now, to prove it, a nice chart for the breakout of Facebook applications.
Sun is changing its ticker symbol from SUNW to JAVA, as announced in Sun’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s Weblog on Thursday 23rd August. There has been a lot of mixed feedback. Most techies and engineers inside and outside Sun are criticizing the decision, as they see it narrowing Sun to Java technology. However, Wall Street did not seem to care much.
The stock went up 1.62%, while the Nasdaq index recovered 1.38% so one can possibly assume the market was insensitive to the change. While the volume was double the average, so was the market’s, so again no change.
This seems to be a change purely driven by brand awarenes. As Schwart’s puts it in his blog:
What’s that distribution and awareness worth to us? It’s hard to say - brands, like employees, aren’t expenses, they’re investments. Measuring their value is more art than science. But there’s no doubt in my mind more people know Java than Sun Microsystems. There’s similarly no doubt they know Java more than nearly any other brand on the internet.
It strikes me that as much as this change might help Sun’s marketing strategy, it will likely damage its ability to hire and retain smart engineers. Time will tell.
LinkedIn’s CEO Reid Hoffman promised at the end of June to open the LinkedIn platform, very much aligned with Facebook’s publishing its developer APIs, and surely trying to experience some of the same growth Facebook is receiving thanks to opening their APIs. I hope however that LinkedIn is thinking about all the risks associated with opening up a business community.
LinkedIn will need to review and approve every single application out there consuming their services. The last thing you want is a pile a lawsuits on your desk because of misapproprated data, especially personal data covered by the EU/95 Privacy Directive, also implemented in the UK via the Data Protection Act, and somehow applicable to US companies under the Safe Harbor Agreements.
LinkedIn should focus on opening the APIs for its users. One of my main complains with LinkedIn is that it is very good at sucking my data, but it’s very hard to get some of that data back, let’s say synchronizing with my phone’s address book or even the more simple operation of importing my contacts into my Outlook calendar. That’s where I would like to see LinkedIn going, allowing developers to write such plugins, for us to access our own data. Anything beyond this very personal use of the data might end up hurting LinkedIn, and what is worse from a business perspective, possibly dillute it into another, smaller, does-it-all, Facebook.
In July, Nielsen’s NetRatings changed its web traffic measurements to focus on time spent at a given site rather than the traditional page views, and page views per user (PV/UU). Since then, many web 2.0 sites, including communities, gaming, video, etc. have received this change as the Holy Grail of web ratings, even those whose ranking went down.
While it is true that time spent at a site increases exposure to ad display, and possibly CPM, the time-based measurement paradigm is only applicable to countries with deep internet and broadbrand penetration. In countries in Eastern Europe, Russia, South America, Africa and South-East Asia, much of the population still connects via dial-up modems and hits are a much better metric. The ability to watch streamed audio and video in these markets is very limited; gaming is not responsive enough; and the engagement in social networking is rather limited. Or as Yahoo Peter Daboll put it: “You’re never going to have one metric that’s the holy grail of Internet measurement.”
The sad thing about Nielsen’s NetRatings change from hits to time spent has not been the change itself, but all the FUD around it. This is one of the things about the internet, and an annoying one, evil viral marketing takes over is significantly less time than on the non virtual world where the power of scrutiny stops the FUD.