broadstuff

Following on from funders exiting the scene (see earlier post) I was saddened today to hear that Blogfriends has closed its doors for now.

For those who don't know it, it was a Facebook App that took your social network of friends, and their friends, and fed blogs to you from those people. From my point of view it was probably the most useful (eventually the only) Facebook App I used.

However, it ran into 2 common problems with "Web 2.0" apps on Facebook

(i) The Facebook API and Platform has high friction on system maintenance and scalability
(ii) The App therefore couldn't scale easily above the 27,000 users it go to without significant redesign

(See Luke Razzell's description of the issues in his notice of mothballing over here)

Issue they had was raising funding to restructure the service (i) to scale and (ii) to go outside of Facebook, was more than the resources they had.

Looking at all the hoopla and the money thrown at apps like FriendFeed though, it makes me scratch my head - if I compare what Blogfriends does vis a vis say Friendfeed, it does basically the same thing behind the scenes:

(i) Connects you to feeds via a social network
(ii) Aggregates data feeds from the nodes in that social network

One of them starts up in early 2007 in the UK and, despite proving its utility on Facebook, gets no funding. The other gets $5m to spend on Tech and PR from a standing start in late 2007 in the US.

Now I understand the issues from a funder's point of view - plateau in numbers due to scaling problems means lack of traction means less desirable for funding, and the "alpha" system design hit scale issues - but that is normal in small startups like this, and Friendfeed - as far as I understand - took its $5m before it even got to this stage. I don't blame the UK VC's, Blogfriends is still small stuff. What I want to know is where are the UK Angels and Seed Investors who can bridge that "equity gap" - who can put in the £100k or so that companies like these need to get to the next stage, never mind putting in the c £2.5m ($5k) that Friendfeed got?

There is a lesson there somewhere................

...article yesterday in the Torygraph (I don't read it, so thanks to Anthony Mayfield for link). Intereresting that its the Torygraph and not the Grauniad, which has been more New-media-ey so far, that has covered it.

Anyway, fairly standard Ode to the Scene, but there was this interesting line:

But for every success story, there will be hundreds of also-rans in the web race, warns Mike Reid, director of venture capital at 3i.

"Everybody wants to sell for Bebo-style multiples, but there are not many companies with that kind of scale," he says. "The numbers do the talking and there are not many businesses around that could do another Bebo - but there are a lot of wannabes."

Interesting that 3i was quoted, given that last week they officially announced they were pulling out of funding the sector. He went on to say:

"In the US you have Silicon Valley with all the techies, and all the ad agencies in New York," he says. "In London, you have a very good blend of advertisers, techies and online marketeers all in the same place, so London, in terms of an ecosystem, has been a tremendous place for dotcoms second time around."

But clearly not an ecosystem that 3i thinks is worth funding anymore...... so has the Torygraph come in at that delicious point where shark slides back into the water, or are 3i just reflecting the reality here?

Dave Winer thinks the End is Near (referring to the race to be big media by the Big Tech Blogs)

I pulled out of the tech industry and started blogging in 1994 or 1997 depending on what you count as the start so I could get away from the crap. Now Mike Arrington is talking about turning TechCrunch into CNET. That's a sure sell signal. Get me the f*ck outta here. Beam me up Scotty. This isn't Kansas anymore Auntie Em.

His chief ire is raised because he feel all the main blogs, and smaller ones that comment in this space, are an echo chamber - pointing to this piece why there is Little Original Thought on blogs:

1. Writing original thought-provoking blog content is a challenge. It takes time, thought and effort. The problem, however, is many bloggers are often short of time, which means it is difficult to come up with insightful thoughts. As Louis Gray talked about in a recent post, many bloggers are time-strapped what with blogging and being on other social/content vehicles such as Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, RSS readers, etc. If you’re doing all that, when do you have time to think Big Thoughts?

Is it dreadfully unoriginal to comment on a post? Broadstuff has been going for c 18 months now, and I have a few thoughts on this. In our case, time strapping comes from client work - but this also yields original thoughts and analysis - but that is not a daily occurrence - so we post that stuff when it comes. But quite often you see someone writing something, and you can see you can add something to the story, or you have an angle - and that imho is vaild.

2. Many bloggers just want to be part of the conversation before it moves on. Here’s what happens in many cases. You see a hot story and you’re keen to jump in but not willing to simply leave a comment on someone else’s blog. Solution: Pound out a quick, no-frills post that makes you feel good about being on top of the hot story even if it’s piling on. I’m willing to guess that 50% of the posts about a red-hot story on Techmeme (e.g. Microsoft making a bid for Yahoo) were posts that just parroted the news reports.

As noted above, I think if you have a point of view on a story, then it is valid to blog. If you are just noting something without moving the story on, why not just post a link? When to blog vs when to leave a note is interesting - if its more than a paragraph, I blog it. There are also a number of "blogs" where you can't comment, so thats fair game for blogging.

3. Writing original content often provides a low return on investment. Let’s face it, traffic is what drives many bloggers, which explains why checking your stats on a regular basis is a key part of blogging. When you write original content that falls outside the hot news of the day, there’s a good chance it’s not going to get much love or traffic.

How come? The biggest reason is everyone is spending so much time reading or writing about the big news of the day, your original, thought-provoking post gets buried. As a result, it’s easy to think “Why put so much effort into writing quality content when there’s instant gratification (and traffic) by jumping on the bandwagon”.

Yes and no - what I've found is that original content doesn't have a quick burn, but over the months those posts garner traffic and are a large source of links - and the occasional pickup and re-hash by the odd A - List blog even

4. Unless you blog for living like Mike Arrington or Erick Schonfeld, or you’re a tech reporter like Mathew Ingram or a conference junkie like Robert Scoble, you don’t have steady access to people and new ideas that often spawn original blog posts.

Actually, the blogosphere has a lot of original stuff coming out of it - if you don't just look on Techmeme . I do find an increasing amount of interesting links also come from my Twitter community now.

I also think that Dave et al are guilty a bit of bemoaning the passing of the older days.....and the rise of new names, new blogs etc. And it seems commenting on others has been around awhile...

Back in the old days before any of you were blogging, we (the olde skool bloggers) used to write about them watching us watching them watch us watch them. Permalink to this paragraph

It's happening again...

Nothing wrong with it, it's human nature.

Ecclesiastes Law strikes again

From TechCrunch:

Loopt, a mobile social network that can be used to see where your friends are currently located, has partnered with Verizon to put its software on that carrier’s phones. It’s a big win for Loopt since Verizon has more location-aware handsets than any other carrier.

If you don’t know anyone who uses Loopt yet, that’s because the company is still working on getting its technology into more phones across more carriers. Loopt’s primary capability, which the company prefers to call “location sharing” (not user tracking), requires the ability to run location detection software, preferably in the background of a phone so it works while in your pocket. Since location detection is a privileged feature for most carriers, Loopt has needed to work with them one-by-one to reach their users.

Sadly, Location based services have been the Next Big Thing in mobile for as long as "Next Year will be the Year of Mobile Internet" has been around. And every year it moves to next year....so, what might make it this time round? It needs GPS handsets, which are more common - but still fairly rare, and it needs a use case - tracking is still tracking, and the reason these services have failed in the past is that in much (most?) customer research to date anyway, many people just do not want other people to have an expectation of knowing where they are at all times. (recalls total failure a few years ago of child tracking device, when parents realised it could be used for spouse tracking )

Also, consider the "good enoughs" - is it really critical that I do this on my mobile, rather than on a laptop via all those free web apps around - especially as the plan is to charge $4 a month for this single service, rather than on a per-use basis

So - good luck, but I suspect its a few years and iterations away - still, with $17m of VC funding in pocket, they can wait a few cycles out I assume

Smart move by Verizon though, however I would expect that their overall strategy will be to add ever more such applications onto their mobile ecosystem - its hard to tell which will stick, but being a broker never hurts. But $4 pm per service in my opinion won't work, a better model is $5 / mo for a range of user self-provisioned services - in my opinion, of course

Update - In the comments, Phil Bradley said it better than me:

Location is an auxiliary piece of data, not the justification for YASN!

ie its something I'd expect the Verizon ecosystem to expose for all apps to include / mash up - and I'd expect it to be opt-in to work!

Steve Rubel wrote a post last Sunday about 3 professions that may disappear.....well, the warning shots are being fired on another one - A List Tech Blogger;

There have been rumblings on this from last week, with Mr Arrington of TechCrunch bemoaning the fact that other Tech Blogs are looking for funding (rather than letting him roll them up, it would seem). And this week came a post on ridiculous valuations - which, I note, none of them moved to question, some even letting it pass unchallenged

However, last night paidContent threw the gauntlet down bigtime, showing a switch to a "pro" organisation structure. This isn't prosumer blogging or citizen journalism no more, this is the starter gun for a straight race for market leadership of a media game.

And the issue at the core is simple - the only reason there are c 10 or so "A List, cover most everything in tech" blogs is because by and large they are using offset economics, ie they are publishing at under a sustainable economic cost. However, that means there is just a glut of people covering the same small set of stories to the same small, geeky audience - i.e. there is oversupply, and that means consolidation - there are very few commodity industries where more than 3 majors can make a living. So one thing is for sure, in a few years there will be far less of them.

And they won't be "bloggers" anymore either - one of the noticeable features of the big blogs is that they look less and less like blogs, and more like broadcast media they grew up to be an alternative to - the whole collaboration thing is winding down - linking is now strategic, there is less negative analysis, more PR stuff is going through to pimp up da volume, more journo staffers rather than tech idealists, etc etc

So not only will there be less, but those remaining won't look like the A list bloggers of yore anyway.

The issue they will face, though, is if they look like big media, talk like big media etc etc - will they be able to keep their audiences longer term?

One of the interesting lessons I took away from "Flat Earth News", Nick Davis' analysis of the failure of mainstream media over the last 20 years or so, is that its not a "single transaction" game - ie winning the battle of getting mo' content out there fastest, day after day, actually slowly leads to a drop in usage over time - you just can't fool all the people all the time with subpar content, and thats what you get with volume and low cost.

In fact, that's what gave blogging its "in" originally over Olde Media - it was seen as more authentic, because by and large it was written by enthusiasts with expertise and a genuine desire to tell it as it is - and talk to their audiences.

And those sorts of people are still out there, so the issue the New New Media may find, as they start to look more like Old New Media, is in this long tailed, low transaction cost world (Also, the arrival of aggregators of all sorts means that that "B, C and D list" blogs are increasingly easy to find and package), all that happens is that the fickle readership just follows the (socially mediated) crowd to the next tranche of genuine voices...

Update - as well as their comments below, Mike Butcher and Adam Tinworth pinged me on two other points:

- Mike thinks that the professional blogs are 'freer' as they end up hiring ad sales people so they don't have to run editorial and ads

- Adam thinks that my assumption that the tech market is near-saturated is wrong.

I'm not sure I'm disagreeing with Mike so much, more that I'm saying the blog media will have to differentiate themselves from the existing web 1.0 tech comment sites...and that sort of leads into Adam's points - ie is there a market that the existing tech websites don't occupy, and what will the A-List blogs have to do to differentiate themselves from the incumbents. Mike also brought up the intersting thought of Co-Opetition, which may occur (sparks thoughts of a post on Free-conomics) - though my bet would be on consolidation via acquistion after a shakeout, as that is a more common pattern.

Update 2 - an article in the NYT which is not saying things a million miles away from this post, albeit with a more tactical rather than strategic angle. Two quotes:

Mr. Arrington suggests he may well try to play the John D. Rockefeller of the blogging world (without the thugs and arsonists, presumably). “A lot of things will happen this year,” he said declining to offer more detail.

I think that's pretty much what my post is saying...and this from paidContent:

“Our focus is not page views,” Mr. Ali said. “Our focus has been laserlike on the C-level executives in the industry. That’s why we get triple-digit CPMs. That’s nearly unheard of in the industry.”

Now is that $100 CPM or $1.00 CPM

It looks like your friendly neighbourhood music industry has come up with yet another scam (sorry, scheme) to keep itself in business - a flat monthly tax on ISPs to cover them for all the music you or I may be listening to for free, added to your monthly bill. It is quite an attractive thought for an ISP, as it de-risks them from an increasingly desperate industry, and no doubt a small premium could be added.

However, it has a fundamental flaw in that it penalises all including non music downloaders, and so is probably a non starter for that reason. Also, there is a large amount of moral hazard, as you are guaranteeing revenue to an industry without any sales needing to occur (or any music being published either...) - the game theory after that will not drive the industry in directions that are good for artist or customer.

My other initial reaction was that it will also make every other industry want to do it as well, as number of amusing commentators on slashdot also noted:

This is quite possibly the worst idea the record companies have ever come up with. I would be very surprised if any ISPs ever give in. I can see it now:

Monthly internet bill:
50.00 - connection fee
5.00 - music extortion fee
5.50 - movies extortion fee
8.25 - television extortion fee
3.00 - print media extortion fee
4.00 - software warez extortion fee
2.00 - images possibly out of copyright
4.00 - independent music fee
3.00 - documentaries fee
2.50 - guitar tabs/sheet music
3.00 - song lyrics
2.00 - spambot fee (just in case I'm a node)
7.00 - fee for everyone else wanting my pound of flesh

total: $100 per month, and I think I'm being quite generous

Where will this stop? If the record labels get their fee, I want my fee for everyone that downloaded that one picture from my blog that I told you that you shouldn't save but you did anyways. You can just send me those $.02 per subscriber per month, or I'll take a flat fee of $3,000,000 - thanks.

The other thing that I noted is that the guy who came up with the scheme has been hired to make it happen, ie the industry is hiring people whose message they are comfortable with (To be fair, he has come up with a wide range of thoughts, but the industry knows what it likes it would seem). However, this is not the way forward, the industry should be hiring smart people who understand new media and are interested in thinking through new, workable options.

Like us for example

That there needs to be a way to pay musicians is clear, free is just not sustainable - but I would prefer to see them paid in some way that is linked to usage. I don't think its impossible or impractical to do that either.

PS if you can just send the fee for Broadstuff reading before you go.....

Robert Scoble on Dataportability, being fed a hook, line and sinker from Facebook:

So, what’s the problem, beyond the politics of some of this stuff (will Facebook join the Dataportability.org? Who cares? Has the Dataportability.org actually shipped anything yet beyond PR?)

WHAT IS THE HOLDUP?

It’s not easy to do any of this stuff. On Saturday I talked with Dave Morin, head of Facebook’s application platform.

He brought up use case after use case that I hadn’t really thought through.

For instance, what if a user wants to delete his or her info off of Facebook. Today that’s possible. But what about in a really data portable world? After all, in such a world Facebook might have sprayed your email and other data to other social networks. What if those other social networks don’t want to delete your data after you asked Facebook to?

Well, for a starters the UK had to threaten Facebook re the im-possibility of deleting data off Facebook. But the rest of the story is more a lesson in Facebook et al not wanting to let go of the Social Graph, as that is their main value proposition.

Its very simple conceptually - just let the user own their own Social Graph, in some open format, with API's and sufficient control of intimacy layers, and they take the risks. Its also non-trivial, but very do-able - we've done the conceptual architecture (we did one 2 years ago) and I know others have too - as one of the commentators, Tom Morris notes:

Dave Morin sounds like he’s spreading FUD. There are existing implementations - like the ability to import your contacts into Dopplr from Twitter and from any page with hCards. That works fine, and nobody is bitching about the privacy concerns of this.

A lot of people are bringing up “policy” reasons why this kind of thing can’t happen. The fact is that they are already happening. I’m sceptical that it’ll be groups like DataPortability.org that’ll push this - it’s more likely it’ll be hackers working together in an ad-hoc way will solve the problems. Then the vendors will jump in front of the parade and start preaching openness when it becomes inevitable.

Couldn't have said it better......

Update - there is clearly a Zeitgeist at work here - at about the same time I wrote this, Chris Pirillo launched a very ambitious plan for people to collaborate to write a simple social front-end based on Drupal. (Cough! Drupal? I hear those of you who have wrestled with it ask....

24/7 Media has written an article valuing the 25 largest blogs, which are (summarised by Susan Mernit):

The Gawker Media: $150 million. 30 million monthly unique visitors.
MacRumors: $85 million. 544,000 visitors.
Huffington Post: $70 million. 4 million unique visitors per month.
PerezHilton: $48 million. 10.1 million uniques.
TechCrunch: $36 million. 3.2 million unique visitors and 14.6 million page views.
(tied): Ars Technica $15 million. Over 800,000 visitors.
(tied): Seeking Alpha $15 million. 400,000 visitors.
(tied): Drudge Report $10 million.1.1 million visitors.
(tied): Mashable $10 million. 5 million page views.
GigaOm: $8.4 million. 225,000 visitors.
Boing Boing: $8 million. 8.7 million page views.
Silicon Alley Insider: $5.4 million. 200,000 unique visitors.
ReadWriteWeb: $5 million. 300,000 visits but growing extremely fast.
Paidcontent.org: $3.5 million. 134,000 unique visitors and growing quickly.
(tied) Search Engine Land: $2.7 million. 225,000 unique visitors.
(tied) Smashing Magazine: $2.7 million. 325,000 visitors.
DListed: $2 million. 350,000 visits.
Daily Blog Tips: $1.8 million. 20,000 visitors.
(tied) Techdirt: $1.5 million. 400,000 unique visitors.
(tied): Neatorama: $1.5 million. 300,000 visits and growing very fast.
(tied): BuddyTV $1 million is too much about television. 800,000 visitors.
(tied):The Superficial $1 million. 522,000 visits last month, but dropping sharply.
Talking Points Memo: $860,000. 233,000 visitors and rising fast.

So far so good, but I was drawn to the assumed CPM's (ranging from $10 to $30 per page), which, as Susan also notes, are just a tad high:

I have some problems accepting these valuations when I know how much trouble many blogs have in getting decent advertising revenues--and how much run of network gets sold for a dollar or less in CPM, and even less in CPC.

Susan is too polite... I just don't believe them, based on my experiece of CPM rates over a number of web assets and blogs. Divide it all by 10 and you are probably closer to reality, after taking unsold inventory into account - and thats probably being generous.

Quite how the original writers came up with those numbers they don't say, but what is more interesting is how some ostensibly erstwhile blogs are picking it up and running it uncritically, which says to me that some of the commentators in this game are not that familiar with the basic economics

(By the way, GigaOm is valued at $8.4m on 1.4m pageviews/month - now we get a bit over 1/5th of that traffic (according to our logs, not Alexa I hasten to add), so if anyone wants to hand over c $1.6 m right now, we're all ears )

We noted in October 2007 that Ofcom was considering use of mobiles on planes, now its given the thumbs up, says the BBC:

The use of mobiles on planes flying in European airspace has been given approval by UK regulator Ofcom.
It has issued plans that will allow airlines to offer mobile services on UK-registered aircraft.

The decision means that mobiles could be used once a plane has reached an altitude of 3,000m or more.

But airlines keen to offer the services must still satisfy other regulators about how the hardware will be used.

Heck - I want to know how the hardware will be used - I am filled with dread at the thought of sitting next to some Bizplonker who yaks at full volume for 2 hours in the air. You can see on trains that when this happens people around get more and more cross and frustrated, and the railways eventually created "quiet coaches" due to all the complaints.

What, one wonders, will the airlines do - they clearly want the loot from a (no doubt very premium) service, but I suspect it will really p*ss off a lot of their customers.

This story on TechCrunch about a Craigslist classifieds cheat event is indicative of the "Dark Side" of Social Networking (assuming that it is reported correctly, of course - it has a sense of the absurd about it):

Someone placed an ad on Craigslist saying that anything at a home in Jacksonville, Oregon was up for grabs. People responded, and carted away most of the belongings of resident Robert Salisbury. He arrived home to thirty people picking over the last of his stuff. Even the man’s horse was taken.

And this isn't the first time its happened, either. Also, clearly the people ransacking his home weren't exactly pure either - on remonstarting with one looter:

"I informed them I was the owner, but they refused to give the stuff back," Salisbury said. "They showed me the Craigslist printout and told me they had the right to do what they did."

The driver sped away after rebuking Salisbury. On his way home he spotted other cars filled with his belongings.

Once home he was greeted by close to 30 people rummaging through his barn and front porch.

The trespassers, armed with printouts of the ad, tried to brush him off. "They honestly thought that because it appeared on the Internet it was true," Salisbury said. "It boggles the mind."

Hmmm...if I was of honest intent and true, and the owner returned in such a situation, I'd be inclined to believe him and desist, non?

So what now? Craigslist advertisers are anonymous right now, so finding the scammers will be very difficult. And as the comments on TC note, once it is clear this sort of behaviour can go unpunished, it can only proliferate and possibly worse things can happen. The game theory implies this quite clearly, as there is no recourse for the victim via the perpetrator (who we can assume to be nearly untraceable in future), nor via Craigslist, nor those who (probably) knew it was a scam but benefited from it - so no-one is motivated to fix it.

(Addendum - Some believe that Craiglist is just a pass-through service so will have no liability, but as TC notes, its not clear and some lawyers are bound to have a go. Craiglist's risk is if (i) something far worse in scale than this happens and (ii) they get nailed for it, as I suspect no one will insure them, as they have taken no precautions to prevent it.)

Realistically, the only answer is for Craigslist to insist on authentication by advertisers of goods, as that is the only way that the perpetrators will know they have a chance of being found. Or is that too Olde Media a plan.....