We dealt with only a couple of topics today. Cuil came out yesterday, a new search engine, started by former employees of Google. It supposedly indexes more pages than Google. I tried it, wasn’t impressed with the presentation or the design. Then, blog posts started piling up with criticisms.
And, not getting too far astray from all things Google, we read the TechCrunch piece spreading the unconfirmed story that Google had walked away from the Digg acquisition. The article has a list of other failed attempts to sell Digg. Wonder what will happen next. Will Kevin Rose ever get his payday?
Google is negotiating to buy Digg for around $200 mil. Why? Because they can. Let’s see if this deal goes through, as Digg has been an acquisition holdout for years.
At the beginning of class today, I relayed the story of one of my students from last semester and her quest for a job. I hope she’ll be blogging about it soon on WebPubNET, but basically she was successful in securing employment for working a personal network. She made a point to come to a guest speaker engagement (consisting of one of my former students and her employer), asked questions during the session, introduced herself afterward, traded contact info. Had a few followup conversations, received an invite to a lovely party, and then ultimately found herself getting called in for an interview. She is now gainfully employed by Trademark Media as a Design Technologist! Participating in a community really works. And, this isn’t a random situation or one-shot deal. I have been constantly impressed with the power of tapping my former students to place my current students.
We talked about the frenzy for the new iPhone and Apple’s processes to handle the demand come the release of the 3G version on Friday.
Google just announced its own entry in the virtual space with Lively. It’s sort of a Second Life competitor, but right now, it is different in that it is not one cohesive “world.” Here’s the YouTube video we looked at for Bobcat Village, TX State’s Second Life island.
We looked at an article on Microsoft’s Vista, the much criticized operating system. Apparently, Microsoft is going to take a harder line, not letting customers purchase new hardware with XP on it, the old, reliable OS. This looks more like a PR move, in combating criticisms from competitiors (read “Apple”). Good luck with that. Anyone I know that has used Vista thinks it is a piece of junk, a big step backward. Now that Bill Gates is gone, I think you will see more of this hard line approach to customer issues via the management style of Steve Ballmer.
Finally, we discussed YouTube’s strategy for adding pre-roll and post-roll ads to some of their videos. Most of my students felt that it was something that was bound to happen eventually, the free ride was going to be over sooner or later. As we know, Google owns YouTube. They are only going to be placing ads on a small percentage of videos that are preapproved by advertisers. That does two things, insures advertisers that their products/services won’t be associated with potentially questionable material in some YouTube videos and it limits their liability for potentially generating revenue on copyrighted material.
Josh Quittner writes in Time on the future of the Internet, what will be the next great platform? He identifies three major parties, Apple, Google, and Facebook, all approaching the industry in a slightly different manner. I like the Marc Andreessen quote, “Trying to decide which will win is kind of like debating whether beef, chicken or lobster is going to win the market for food.” This isn’t a horse race, so I wish we’d stop treating it like one. There’s probably room for elements of all three strategies. But, it is interesting to study the diffusion of technologies and try to predict the “next big thing.”
Gee, I hate that Microsoft is one of my most prominent tags, but they are just in the news so much lately. They announced yesterday a cash back plan for purchases made via their Live Search site. Paying people is a nice idea. I’ll take any money Microsoft has to give me, but is that really a meaningful substitute for innovative products? Google continues to not only dominate the search space, but their share continues to grow. According to this article, Google’s share of search queries is 61.6%, Yahoo’s 20.4%, and Microsoft a piddling 9.1%. Interesting quote from Citigroup analyst “As Google continues to take share, we continue to believe a deal between Yahoo and Microsoft would be necessary — though not sufficient — to compete effectively with Google.” Agreed.
Business Week has a special section on the Future of Social Networking. Definitely in my current interest area, as I look at the diffusion of social networks. There are several parts in this section, but the study that talks about the gender gap is fascinating. Apparently, women dominant the social networking space, and women ages 35-50 are the fastest growing segment. It’s the social aspect that made these “killer apps” for women.
As I discussed previously, one of the future strategies and important steps for social network companies will be in how they provide tools to help people manage their online activities. Tech Crunch does a good job describing a “Centralized Me” concept versus something more portable, an “aggregated me” so to speak. Everyone’s been talking about FriendFeed, some are even migrating from the once dominant Twitter. Now, the big social networks are opening things up in hopes of having a piece of the information as users manage their schizophrenic online identities.
