Rahul Gaitonde

Over the past fortnight, the social media echo chamber has found three reasons to be up in arms about: Friendfeed’s acquisition by Facebook, the folding of URL shortener tr.im, and the Denial of Service attack on Twitter. Personalities have been apparently outraged, insulted, dismayed and betrayed. Yeah, betrayed by a startup. Imagine.

Most of the brouhaha seems to be about the lack of data ownership. More specifically, about the permanence of the conversations that these social media mavens were increasingly having over the web (and not so much about their online photos and documents). They lament that should a startup like Friendfeed fold, all the stuff they’ve shared, all their comments and likes, all their conversations with fellow Friendfeeders, indeed their entire network would disappear too.

And suggestions for action have included going back to the Age of the Blog (that is, centralizing all your content on a self-hosted server and hosting conversations there) and building distributed social applications (think Google Talk as opposed to Twitter.com and Friendfeed.com).

Of course, the vast majority – and I mean the overwhelming majority – of Internet users didn’t even know about these upheavals. (All right, the Twitter episode might have made its way onto the evening news, with parents turning to their kids with “What’s Twitter again?” and exasperated teenagers beginning, with a deep breath, “For the last time, it’s like this…”) Anyway, this majority doesn’t seem bothered by the prospect of not being able to preserve their conversations and shared stuff for posterity. They’re OK as long as they have email. And Yahoo! Messenger. And now Facebook. Some of them might have a Twitter account. Or one on Google Reader, or even Friendfeed. But if any or all of these new services were to disappear – poof – tomorrow, taking all their data along, Life As We Know It wouldn’t change.

Then why is the social media echo chamber in such a tizzy? What’s with all the frothing and “we can’t trust anyone anymore”ing?

Because for the average Web user, these social applications are distractions, entertainment or casual education. For social media mavens they are quasi-business. They are places where they build their brand, their standing, their reputation, where they gain their legitimacy.

They are influencers of opinion, and Twitter and Friendfeed are their pulpit. Their network is their audience. URL shorteners are how they direct their followers to what they deem noteworthy. No wonder they run contests to see who reaches the most followers and who makes it to the Suggested Users list. And that they get their favorite handles on every shiny new service.

For them, such applications must provide industrial-grade integrity, availability (and data portability). The founders of most social media applications, though, are just not at that stage yet. They’re merely testing new ways of sharing information and connecting users and figuring out how to define their newly popular application. Building a stable, always-on, scalable service that early on is a secondary priority. But social media mavens, by virtue of being early adopters, begin expecting this secondary priority too quickly for the founders to keep up.

Sometimes the startup infrastructure may be too weak to withstand even legitimate peak load. Sometimes the service might fold. Sometimes founders may decide to abandon their startup to take on similar challenges at a larger company.

And for almost everyone out there that’s OK. Because for them it’s not life-and-death. Social media mavens – the so-called A-listers – need to get some perspective. Fast.

Is [old giant] losing out to [hot upstart] over [new trend]?

Did Microsoft miss out on the big search opportunity that Google pounced on? Is Google losing the real-time communication game to Twitter?

Microsoft’s original mission was “a computer on every desk and in every home” [1]. Even with their almost total dominance of the PC industry, that mission remains far from accomplished.

Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. That’s a mouthful. But it’s also nowhere near completion.

Both companies – one over 3 decades old, the other over a decade old – have still only plucked the low-hanging fruit. Urban homes and corporations have computers, but there are still billions of potential Microsoft consumers – who might be well served with a mobile “computer”, for instance. For Google, even with its mind-boggling data center infrastructure and web-crawling, the task is just begun. Books. Space. History. Energy and resource consumption. And more. And that’s just the “organize” bit. Converting all that data to information so that it is “accessible and useful” is another thing altogether.

Companies like these are larger than the “next big thing”. Their own “thing” is so incredibly significant, so humbling. That’s why it’s unfortunate when such an organization changes its very mission to something that can mean absolutely anything (and therefore also nothing): Microsoft’s mission is now “to help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential” [2].

Google isn’t about to kill Microsoft. Not if Microsoft directs all its resources towards what it set out to do. Likewise for Google; Twitter isn’t out to organize everything known to man. So ignore those predictions of doom.

[1] According to Wikipedia the exact words were “to get a workstation running our software onto every desk and eventually in every home”

[2] Although I didn’t find any evidence to suggest Microsoft changed its mission in response to any other company or threat

VasoolNews is an example of a startup with smart intent and an original business model. But VasoolNews threatens to remain a shadow of its true potential because of some serious shortcomings. This review examines what VasoolNews is, the opportunity, flaws, and suggestions for improvement.

What VasoolNews is

[Disclaimer: I was asked to review the startup by a friend of the founder]

VasoolNews is an India-specific content-aggregator service. Its stated intent is to “promote good stories”. Its user community votes for “good stories” (and against poor ones), which impacts the stories’ visibility on the website.

Publishers (folks who want their content to be shown on VN) have to i.) submit their content, ii.) put up VN’s ad widget on the story page. Ad revenue from that page is split between the publisher, the users who’ve promoted the story (by voting for it), and VN itself.

It’s a little more complicated than that. VN envisages a stock market for content. Users are allocated a fixed amount of virtual currency, from which they consume every time they vote for a story. The intent is for users to turn investors and vote for stories they think will garner the most views (and therefore the most potential ad revenue). The revenue potential of a story is the analog of the earnings potential of a company on the stock market. The stock market analogy is taken to the point where ad earnings are called “distributed dividends”.

The model sounds very good, even exciting in theory, but hides critical flaws:

Business Model Flaws

• Only websites that agree to put up VN’s ad widget have any chance of making it to the top content. Why would anyone vote for a piece of content that wasn’t going to earn him/her any money? That severely limits the breadth of VN’s content. [1]
• The “goodness” or even “interestingness” of a story need not be directly correlated with its earning potential. Some categories – travel, entertainment – have more earning potential that say, political news or comedy, especially with context-sensitive ads. The former are more likely to be actively promoted than the latter, even if the latter are more “good”. [2]
• No surprise then, that VN’s potential for success and scale pales in comparison to something like the enormously popular Digg, which is based on the same principle but keeps the model simple.

Lack of Clarity

Several other important questions remain unanswered:

• What is the team behind VN? If this involves money, I need to know whom I’m dealing with; how reliable they are.
• There is on clarity on the kinds of ads that will be displayed on my article, should I agree to put up the ad widget: are ads context-sensitve, image or text based, popups or popunders?
• No clarity again on how ad revenue will be accrued (whether per impression or per click), or on how it will be shared among publishers, voters and VN, or about how it will be disbursed.

Interface Ripoffs

For a team that came up with an interesting and original model (however flawed), their penchant for ripping off website designs is inexplicable and inexcusable:
1. Their sign-up page is straight from Google’s stables

2. As is their category listing and “more” menu
3. And the look of their Welcome, Settings and Logout links
4. And their Techmeme-esque use of the term “leaderboard”:

Other Problems

Confused categories: There is a “Sports News” sub-section under “News”, as well as a top-level “Sports” section. Does that mean the Sports section ought not to cover Sports News?

Out-of-date “News”: Among the top 3 article under “News” was one from the Hindu from January 2008, and one from the BBC from February 2008.

Performance: There are frequent page timeouts, with “some internal error” messages.
When one signs up with VN, one gets a confirmatory email from wisemob.com. It takes a few seconds to realise that this is from VN, since there’s no immediate indication of this connection. Perhaps VN was previously WiseMob? Given their business model, that’s certainly plausible.

In summary

VN could possibly be a Digg for Indian content. Filtering Indian content from the clutter of content on the Web is hard to do automatically, and there is evidence – Desipundit – that human-powered flitering does a stellar job.

But VN’s fundamental problem is that its revenue model – users voting for potential ad-earning content – has little to do with its larger intent of serving up “good” Indian stories. It might be best to retreat to a traditional ad-based/sponsored revenue model, while simultaneously making it easy for the community to vote for/against content of interest – again, to be a Digg clone.

(ends)

[1] In spite of this, some of the top articles are from the Hindu and from the BBC – which haven’t put up VN’s ad widget, of course. You would probably use up virtual currency only for articles that display the ad widget, and cast “free votes” for ad-free articles. But even then that would limit the number of ad-supported articles that make it to the top – a good (ad-free) story from the Hindu on top takes visibility away from some other ad-supported article.

[2] As Nick Carr says:
The most successful articles [online]… are the ones that not only draw a lot of readers but that deal with subjects that attract high-priced ads. And the most successful of all are those that attract a lot of readers who are inclined to click on the high-priced ads. An article about new treatments for depression would, for instance, tend to be especially lucrative… [but not] a long investigative article on government corruption [because] it doesn’t cover a subject that advertisers want to be associated with…

This isn’t related to the theme of this blog, but is worth quoting. From David Ascher’s blog:

In the case of the Think Schools event, it was hard to find people who didn’t appreciate the elegance of an old idea: that our schools shouldn’t be thought of (and budgeted for) as single purpose “teaching boxes”, but instead as multi-purpose community hubs, leveraging precious real estate to provide a variety of civic services (libraries, gyms, meeting spaces, cafeterias, playing fields), with an appropriate funding model.

David Ascher is the head of the new Mozilla Messaging project.

Teaching boxes versus community hubs – I realized instantly that this, more than anything else, is what made two years at IIM Kozhikode more rewarding than four years at Bombay University.

Google has seemingly woken up to the fact that Google Apps was not cutting any ice with businesses.

According to Om Malik , the company “is slowly signing up Internet service providers for a “white label” version of its offerings” by typing up with an ISP named WildBlue. “Today the deal involves GMail, GCal, GTalk and Google Gadgets. Tomorrow it could be the Google Office suite. A few more deals with ISPs and suddenly a lot more people will have heard about Google Office. Think about that.”

I’m surprised it’s taken the company so long to realize that its offerings were never going to appeal to businesses (except perhaps tiny startups). However, they’re just the right fit for home users. And considering these apps run online, who better to serve them to you than your ISP? I’m not sure, though, if too many folks will use either Gadgets or Calendar (and full-scale adoption of Google Docs is kinda dicey too).

Andrew MIller at YourSearchAdvisor attended a Google Apps presentation in Ann Arbor, MI:

Will users be able to edit docs, spreadsheets and presentation offline?
Scott’s answer was yes, and that the Google Gears plugin would handle the offline work. In addition, Google Gears support is in the works for Gmail and Google Calendar.

Well if they’re talking about it in public, chances are it’s closer to release than we suspected.

BusinessWeek interviews Nokia’s CEO on his India strategy:

How important are the emerging markets for Nokia’s growth today?

They are very important. But it’s key to understand here that India is quite a versatile market when it comes to a mobile device. The Nokia N-series and E-series generate 25% of our sales in India, and those are the mid-tier and high-end devices. So you can’t say that it’s an entry market where just low-end phones are sold.

Penetration is important in India, where you get the first-time mobile-phone user. But at the same time, there’s a big replacement and upgrading market moving toward more sophisticated phones. When it comes to software, it depends on what kind of phones are sold here. It’s a different entry market where software is important—for example, Internet browsing through mobile phones. India is an advanced market in many ways, and I can’t classify it as an entry market or an emerging market.

BusinessWeek interviews Nokia’s CEO on his India strategy:

How important are the emerging markets for Nokia’s growth today?

They are very important. But it’s key to understand here that India is quite a versatile market when it comes to a mobile device. The Nokia N-series and E-series generate 25% of our sales in India, and those are the mid-tier and high-end devices. So you can’t say that it’s an entry market where just low-end phones are sold.

Penetration is important in India, where you get the first-time mobile-phone user. But at the same time, there’s a big replacement and upgrading market moving toward more sophisticated phones. When it comes to software, it depends on what kind of phones are sold here. It’s a different entry market where software is important—for example, Internet browsing through mobile phones. India is an advanced market in many ways, and I can’t classify it as an entry market or an emerging market.

Q: Is Facebook’s popularity connected to its focus on authenticity?

Zuckerberg: That’s the critical part of it. Our whole theory is that people have real connections in the world. People communicate most naturally and effectively with their friends and the people around them. What we figured is that if we could model what those connections were, [we could] provide that information to a set of applications through which people want to share information, photos or videos or events. But that only works if those relationships are real. That’s a really big difference between Facebook and a lot of other sites. We’re not thinking about ourselves as a community — we’re not trying to build a community — we’re not trying to make new connections.