ShareThis

Posted using ShareThis

ShareThis

Posted using ShareThis

Here it goes: I wanted to get an account at Flickr, so I headed to flickr.com, and this is what the front page looks like:

Flickr Main Page

Ok, now I want to create an account, so I clicked on the button that says “Create Your Account”, and this is what happened:

What da F**?

Now, I am not stupid, and I do know that Flickr was acquired by Yahoo. But from a user’s perspective, why the hell do I need to sign up with Yahoo when all I needed to do was just take a look at the flickr service and upload some of my pictures? Ok, anyway, I decided to give Yahoo some credit. After all, they do own Flickr. So I proceeded. I clicked sign up, and this is what I got:

O…K…. Now I can’t forgive them anymore. Yahoo: did you think I was really going to fall for that booby trap and sign up, so that I’ll get your email address and receive tons of spam emails through it? And why would I want to give away my name when all I wanted to do was just upload my picture? I might as well go to some other smaller site and hang around there.

For reference, I checked delicious.com–another startup Yahoo acquired–to see how they handle this issue. Surprisingly, this is what I saw:

Is the delicious team more politically influential than flickr team inside Yahoo or what? How come delicious gets its own signup page while Flickr redirects it to Yahoo signup page?

Conclusion: No wonder Yahoo is failing. It is not leveraging its acquired assets correctly. Flickr would have enjoyed much faster growth and just might have provided them some chance to innovate, and they blew it. All Yahoo did was to acquire innovative startups like crazy–just like collecting stamps, and put them in a scrapbook. Way to go.

Microsoft says tailoring search results based on query history will beat google. IMO, no. Let’s say MS found a way to figure out the real intention of people by leveraging the query history. Will I leave google? No. Why? Because I simply don’t want to be left out. And I don’t think this feeling applies only to me. Here’s a scenario: Paris hilton shoots another sex video and it *somehow* gets released to the Internet. Do I need a personalized search here? I don’t want to be directed to the paris hilton hotel website just because I have been searching for tripadvisor to plan for for my upcoming vacation. I just want the freakin’ video. I don’t want to be left out. That’s what mainstream thinks. Same goes for services like netvibes. I want to see what other people are seeing, and the best place to find that information is probably Yahoo

People don’t want to be left out. Personalization may be powerful when the personalized content or whatever is delivered to you directly because you are receiving a pleasant surprise. But when you are actively searching for something, you don’t want a surprise. You don’t want to find out that you have been somehow blocked from information to which others are able to access, just because you typed in some queries that affected the search results.

Personalized service? Yes. But Personalized search? No.

I came across this while reading Jeff Jarvis’s blog

It doesn’t appear at the top URL, but you can see the displayed ad when you visit any permalink(for example, here)
Notice the top right side of the blog. I was quite surprised to find this image on his blog at first because I thought this was his profile image. Then I saw the captions attached below the picture that said: “Buy Buzzmachine blogads now!”.
Oh, it was an ad.
But you know, whether it’s an ad or not, it did hurt his image a little at least. I wonder if he’s aware of this. That ad is apparently transmitting a sexual message, and not many people who read his blog should appreciate it.

So this is why targeting advertisements is important, not just for the advertisers but also for the publishers.

Facebook opened up commenting functionality to their minifeed section a while ago, but I guess it’s not catching on well.

Let’s face it. There are two types of people who comment on your friendfeed:
1. your close friends who are early adopters just like yourself
2. all others who want attention–that is, who just want to be friends with you or at least acquire new friends through you

When it comes to facebook,
1. The category 1 people do not use the feature because they’re already using friendfeed for the same purpose.
2. The entry barrier for the category 2 is higher: you first need to be added as as her/his friend to do that sort of stuff to the minifeed, while friendfeed doesn’t require it.

I think most of the conversations occuring on friendfeed now is very much leaned towards the category 2 type, and while it does spawn many useful instant conversations, is in fact not actual “friend”feed, because the real value in “friend”feeding is supposed to be in feeding your actual friends, instead of just another guy who’s trying to get some attention juice by sticking around other influential people online.

If the action you’re making is of the type 1, it really doesn’t matter because what you want to do is just let the guy know that you are responding. However if the action is of the type 2, you must optimize it so that YOU can leverage that other guy to become a little bit more famous.

Conclusion: the facebook approach is more ideal than friendfeed’s–in that it actually lets you comment on your mutual friends’ feeds, but it lacks traction because the people who are most likely to actively make comments are not your friends in your facebook account. They’re two different products. facebook minifeed commenting lets you comment on your friend’s lifestream while friendfeed lets you comment on everyone’s lifestream, increasing the participation rate but decreasing the actual intimacy and meaningfulness that exists in the former case.

A few days ago, an open source microblog named “Identi.ca” came out of nowhere and suddenly grabbed the attention of many twitter users who are tired of the frequent server outages. People are already starting to say that identi.ca may replace twitter because of its decentralizedness, which is great for scalability.
While it may seem very plausible that the decentralized approach will win over the centralized, you must note that microblogs are quite different from blogs, and this makes all the difference.

Twitter means nothing as a standalone.
Let’s say you are a node in a network of people online. If you’re a blogger, the value of the node–yourself–is very crucial. If you just keep on writing good stuff, you will become famous sooner or later. However microblogs does not allow you to do that. It cannot be meaningful as a standalone because it does not allow you to write a meaningful standalone post. It’s just a communication method. It’s not a media. That’s why many bloggers utilize twitter as a medium to promote their blog posts. You cannot write a twitter post that is valuable on its own. You either need to refer to a post elsewhere or reply to someone else’s twitter. The value is in the “social” network, not the content itself. And twitter owns the network. A robust administration of a network requires a central server, which may be compared to what google is doing to the whole web.

This business is not just a simple messaging business
You may point out that there are actually very successful network architectures that do not take the centralized approach, for example the Internet protocol. You know, Internet itself is decentralized but turned out to be very successful. In fact, it is THE platform on which everything we are talking about here is based.

Now, then how is Internet protocol different from twitter? Internet was designed to send messages. It wasn’t designed to store it somewhere for later usage. On the other hand, twitter is not just a communication method. Each post is saved in the centralized twitter server so that it can be accessed later. Again, the value is in the network.

Identi.ca or its likes will just grow the twitter pie
So, it is possible that tools such as Identi.ca will gain traction and many people switch from twitter to identi.ca. This will not hurt twitter. In fact I don’t think twitter will be foolish enough to let that happen. Instead they may opensource itself just like identi.ca and store only the important administrative data on
its server so that it can still have control over its users.

Conclusion
Twitter is the telecommunications company of the web2 era. identi.ca or anything like them will eventually play the role of phones which operate over the twitter telecom network. This is how I see it. What will happen? We shall see.

Alex Iskold mentioned in his post that the new communication methods such as Twitter, Blogs, Forums, ToDo, Events, and CRM may be replacing e-mail. While this may seem true in some sense, I have a different view. I don’t think they will ever replace e-mail.

E-mail was designed to transmit and receive messages between two people. It wasn’t designed for broadcasting. The reason? They didn’t need to broadcast messages to unknown people because at that time it was meaningless. Very few people were online, and broadcasting messages that may interest only certain group of people would not mean much. You wouldn’t be able to find that many people. However things are different now. People are actually online, and broadcasting just became really meaningful. That’s why so many startups focusing on broadcasting messages are springing up.

However, broadcasting is different from communication.
Just as radio didn’t replace phones,
twitter, blog, and forum cannot replace e-mails.

Rather, if e-mail is to be replaced by something, it would be IM or SMS, and I think they are doing a pretty good job on it. I use IM(or SMS when I’m outside) to casually communicate with people that I know.

Likewise, ToDo’s, Events, or CRMs cannot replace e-mail. They are simply not the products in the same layer as e-mail. Just look at what’s happening. Let’s say you just updated your ToDo list, Events, or whatever on your CRM page. Every update is delivered to you via e-mail. Without e-mail. How do you expect to be notified? Again, this is where IM or SMS may replace e-mail also. It’s not the job of twitter, blog, and the all others mentioned above.

So, my point is clear. Twitter, Blogs, Forums, ToDo lists, Events, and CRM are not competing with e-mail. They are media. Media do not compete with communication devices. They compete with other media like radio and TV. Those who do not realize this will fall into the trap of wrong positioning.