I made quite an interesting observation on Facebook lately. It’s been bothering me for a while that my wall was full of countless quizes, games, and other crap. And up until now I didn’t realize, that the clutter was coming from my European friends, not American ones

The other thing is, that polluters live in different countries in Europe, for instance, I didn’t notice that Germany would be cleaner than Poland or the other way around ;)  So I was just wondering what the reason for this could be. I think it might be the fact that FB is still new in many European countries. (And growing fast!)  It is becoming more trendy, whereas in the U.S. it is a mature tool used for what it was made for. (Stay in touch with friends.) Anyway, it’s interesting to see that user needs on both continents are different…

I’ve been following the very popular 37signals blog for the last few years and I must admit - these guys have influenced my views on what business information should be shared and what should remain undisclosed. When you browse through their posts, you get this feeling, that there is not much, if anything, that these guys wouldn’t actually share with the public. It’s like they weren’t concerned about things like competition at all. (Which is probably true BTW.)

If you follow their blog more closely, you’ll know who they hire, why and what his weaknesses are. You’ll learn how their server farm is built, and how they measure the performance of their applications. Finally, you will find out about how many client accounts they have. You’ll even see them on vacation, sort of…

To me, 37signals has clearly been the example of how communication, openness, and the willingness to share your know-how rather than disclose it can elevate your business. A quick look through Google search shows, that the amount buzz they were able to generate is simply astounding. In fact, I don’t think I know any other business with employee count of 3 or 4 (now a few more) that got more coverage in the new media..

We create audience. A lot of companies will have customers and the really lucky ones will have fans, but the really fortunate companies will have audience.

Jason Fried, 37signals’ owner doesn’t seem to believe in traditional marketing. He claims, that advertising in almost any form is simply too expensive for most small businesses, that only incredibly creative and incredibly rich people can afford to constantly reach reach new people. Instead, he believes in sharing:

Think about ways you can educate the people who might ultimately one day become your customers.

Share everything you possibly can and don’t be afraid, like most businesses are way to paranoid. Businesses are terrified of sharing, because they think their competitors are going to take this information and use it against them.

37signals is a small company that blogs, publishes books & e-books, has their show on justin.tv, does workshops where they show how their business was built. Jason also often speaks in conferences…

Business though, always think that somebody is going to steal their ideas […] and and the end of the day, it’s always execution anyway. All these ideas are out there, all these ideas are free, if you know how to do something, somebody else who knows how to do it as well, so you might be the one who shares it as well.

And if that wasn’t enough, here is an eyes-opening speech on the topic from the owner of the company:
http://www.businessinnovationfactory.com/iss/innovators/jason-fried

We’re trying to be more green in the real life, but maybe it’s time to follow this same approach in our virtual lives? The amount of clutter Facebook is able to serve greatly exceeds the levels I’m able to take. I’m just curious if your requests panel for instance looks the same way mine does (below). I’m not a heavy user but taking part in online pillow fights or mafia wars are probably the last things I’m be willing to do. Why couldn’t they just simply invite me for a beer?

I’ve stumbled across an interesting article where author wonders why Facebook chooses not to make profit on ads from its huge user base. A while ago, I wrote about U.S. social networking sites falling behind their Asian counterparts when it comes to finding ways to monetize on traffic. Now it may seem like Facebook not only does not search for the right business model, but isn’t interested in doing it either. YouTube struggled with the same issue, but at least they spent millions on consulting trying to find it. It’s hard to believe in the conspiracy theory presented in the above article, but while observing such an enormous growth it’s hard not to wonder whether and when we will see more innovation going on in this area…

Twine.com is one of the new Web 3.0 startups. It stores information you are interested in, tags it, analyzes the relationship between the data and ties it up to people, places, organizations, and other things. It promises to provide “a new way to collect content and connect with people who share your interests.” Does it do that effectively? I don’t know. To me, it does not seem that usable at first, but one thing I know - what’s innovative for sure is their ghetto-style product announcement, see below…

I’ve been always reserved when it came to discussions about social networks. Obviously, the reason was their business models being almost exclusively based on ads. Some time ago I started wondering whether this is also the case outside of the U.S., especially in the far East. I did a quick research on how the biggest social networking sites from the far East are doing. Conclusions may be suprising.

China’s biggest social networking portal QQ does not rely on advertising at all. In 2007, 66% of their revenue came from games and virtual currency and 21% from mobile services. That left only 13% for advertising!
Results: 300 million active accounts, $523m in revenues and $224m in operating profit (2007). Not bad, considering the fact that Facebook supposedly ended that same year with a $50m loss!

Another example is Korean #1 SNS called Cyworld. They, in turn, boasted some $300,000 in daily sales of digital items that were used to decorate users’ profiles. “Acorns” (Cyworld’s virtual currency) can be bought conveniently, through micro-transactions. Cyworld is also world’s second-biggest music store behind iTunes.
Results: 20m active accounts, $200m in revenues.

Above: virtual room on Cyworld, page showing items I could buy to decorate it.

Japan’s mixi.com is probably closest to the US-based SNS business model relying almost entirely on ads. But even there, about 20% of their 2007 revenue comes from the paid job posting section (14%) as well as premium membership fees (7%). What’s interesting is that their revenue/member factor is three times more than Facebook’s.
Results: 15m members, $82m in revenues and $19m net profit.

Now, here is what’s most interesting. MySpace & Facebook combined barely made any profit in 2007 - Facebook was negative $50m. MySpace was said to be over the line because NewsCorp publishes their annual numbers for the the whole interactive group.

Lastly, it looks like the U.S. social networking site owners have some homework to do if they want to get profitable. SNSes in America accounted for about 4% of all Internet advertising revenues, based on studies done by eMarketer and IAB. That’s $920m. Not much, considering the fact the Google U.S. revenues were $4 billion only in the first six months of 2007.

I’ve been skeptical about the Google Reader for a long time. I’ve really tried hard to get to like it but it was lacking features present in many popular feed reader programs that were available long before GR came out. OK, I did found some power user functionality that I’m sure you all Google Reader fans love, like for instance using keyboard shortcuts to quickly jump back and forth between the posts as well as to switching between the expanded and list view of the feeds. Obviously, there is also a way to set up folders to categorize feeds. That’s all good, but still, the main issue is, what if you have a few hundred subscriptions and don’t really have time to browse them?

The first desktop-based RSS readers, created a few years ago already contained simple mechanisms allowing to create saved searches, often called “watches”. Watches let you key in the keywords you care for, associate them with a group of feeds, and then quickly scan what’s fresh on topics that interest you. Why did Google forget about such a simple enhancement?

The benefits of having it all online was tempting, so I didn’t give up and tried to find a workaround for this issue. The basic idea was to aggregate content by sharing a folder to the public. (You can set it up in Google Reader’s “Settings”) Then, I wanted to grab its feed and plug it in to Yahoo Pipes, create a set of filters and finally release filtered content as a new feed, which I could then subscribe back to in the Google Reader :).

Unfortunately, there is one major problem. The way Google exports the aggregated feed is by placing only 20 newest items in it. So if you have 1000+ messages in your folder, you end up with a mix of messages from the last few hours! There seems to be another workaround for it (which I won’t describe in this post just to keep it short), but hey, this should be easier that that.

Let’s hope this problem will soon be solved by Google engineers, in the meantime, we’re left with desktop-based tools, such as the popular FeedDemon. This piece of software actually has a free web-based viewer which the main program synchronizes with, but its functionality is limited.

The finalists of this year’s crunchies have been announced. Over 110 thousand internauts voted in 20 categories.

I’ve taken a quick peek at the list and the first impression is that a) it is questionable whether companies like Digg or Facebook should be considered - they’ve been on the market for a long time and are already widely recognizable, b) there are obviously lots of innovative concepts, e.g.:

23andMe
Service that will read & interpret your DNA. All that’s required is sending them a saliva sample and… covering the cost of research. Seems like a bargain: $999 + shipping. Company was funded by Google a while ago with Sergey Brin’s wife being involved since its inception.

WeatherBill
Their tag line says it all: “Get Paid for Bad Weather”. Innovative risk management service allowing to purchase customized contracts to protect businesses against weather changes. Hopefully, they’ll soon expand their offering and allow for online weather change orders.

Attributor
Service that will crawl the web to check whether your copyrighted content might be used by somebody else without permission. Less innovative, but practical!

It’s been over one month since Google announced Google Gears (May 30th), plug-in for IE and FX browsers allowing web applications to go offline. Adobe didn’t even wait two weeks to introduce their Adobe AIR runtime environment. (June 11th) Both tools may at first appear to be similar, but they are not.

Google Gears is a platform enabling websites to operate when Internet connection is not present. It features its own web server that’s installed on user’s local computer, as well as the database. Obviously, the online app must be coded using the Google Gears tools so that it can be served from the the local drive.

Adobe AIR is a runtime environment that makes it possible to build offline apps using well-known web technologies and then launch them on PCs. The difference is significant as AIR is not made to solve the “Offline Problem”. It will rather enable the growing web developers’ community to use their existing skill set so that they tap into the area of desktop-based applications.

While AIR is definitely something to keep an eye on, GG attempts to solve some important problems that the online world is dealing with. The promise is that our applications will not only work offline, but will also run faster and be more reliable. User interface, images and other media will be instantly accessible and users will be able to open up and start using their website while it makes contact with the server to pull down updated/new content.

Yesterday (Jun 5th, 2007), Google announced global strategic alliance with Salesforce.com, the current market leader providing software in an on-demand model. Salesforce.com’s online CRM package was enriched by the integration of Google Adwords, which will now enable the CRM users to create ads and manage them from one place.

Partnership seems to make a lot of sense for a few reasons. One, it will strengthen Google’s #1 position in the SAAS area while their Microsoft is striving to rollout more live.com services. Two, it will open up new distribution channels for their partners’ core services. Finally, it may eventually lead to integration of their platforms and deployment of a common environment, allowing third-party developers to get their piece of the action in the SAAS world.