31. Baskin Robbins. Ice Cream. But a cold played spoilsport.
Said he, “So, no ice cream on my birthday?”
Said she, “Nope”
Said he “Hmmph!! You’re acting pricey because I’m not carrying my wallet”
Said she “Let’s put it this way. There are some things that Manu CAN’T buy, for everything else, there’s my MasterCard”
until next time, to my credit, I let the swipe pass 😐
The last time I’d written about Bebo was a year back, in the context of AOL buying it, and a tongue-in-cheek suggestion of getting Kareena Kapoor (whose nickname is Bebo) to be the brand ambassador when they launch in india. Recently,Medianama reported that they were launching this month. According to ContentSutra, they will be talking to content producers in India to further their strategy of ‘conversations around media content’. The Social Inbox also sounded interesting – “a utility that combines Yahoo Mail, Gmail, AOL Mail and Twitter feeds, and also helps users discover content they’re interested in”. I can’t help but remember Rediff’s attempts at Orkut and Facebook integration.
AOL recently said that it was confident about Bebo doing well in the long run, and was for now, concentrating on getting users, more than revenue. In an interview with Paid Content, Joanna Shields, President, AOL People Networks, talked about the AIM client based strategy that gives it a wider reach than say, a Facebook. By aggregating feeds from various networks onto AIM, AOL allows people to be connected with friends’ activities in sites like Flickr, Twitter etc, even without them being on it. Bebo has been busy with quite a few things recently – Lifestream – a basic Friendfeed like aggregator; Social Discovery Engine – which leverages profile data to recommend related music, videos and people; Lifestory – puts uploaded photos, events, and (soon) videos into a scrollable, chronological series of postage stamp icons at the top of members’ profile pages. In the long run, Bebo is also planning to allow its users to subscribe to updates from other users, brands, bands, and celebrities, whose updates will then appear in their LifeStory timelines. (via TechCrunch) This could provide revenue opportunities.
In the US, AOL has migrated all its AIM user profiles to Bebo, thereby doubling Bebo’s presence in the US, thanks to AIM’s massive popularity. The Lifestream is now one gigantic feed that will have updates from you and all your friends on Flickr, Twitter and Delicious, Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, and the moment you link a service to Bebo, it keeps track of your new friends there too. And with Social Inbox, the lifestream updates, AIM updates and emails can all land up there.
Now, how good are bebo’s chances in India? The last Comscore report on social networking in India shows that Orkut is far ahead of Facebook, which has BharatStudent, hi5 and Ibibo following it relatively closely. I’m a bit familiar with Ibibo, thanks to their properties that are heavily publicised on TV, but since I’ve never been the target audience of any of those properties, I have never tried out the site. I don’t know about their revenues, but I am not sure if building properties which are quite tactical in nature is a good way to build long term equity for the site. During the tenure of the property, there will be heightened interest and traffic surges, but sustainability is a big question. I also read recently that Bixee, owned by Ibibo has ventured into several verticals – finance, shopping and auto. I’m really not sure where this is heading especially with web 18’s presence in these spaces and several other independent entities who are strong in these verticals. The way Ibibo’s traffic is declining (-50%) I think they need to relook.
There’s definitely a space for another social network, even in what some would call a cluttered space, provided it differentiates from the existing ones, and gives the user a reason to try it out. I’m really not sure how random invites like the ones from hi5 work. They don’t, for me. While the AIM strategy for Bebo works well for the US market, I don’t think it can work that well in India, (inspite of the GMail connection) though it will give Bebo a start, along with the existing AOL users.
From a product standpoint, the lifestream goes where Facebook still really hasn’t (despite having copied commenting on status messages and the ‘Like’ feature from Friendfeed, and the real time stream from Twitter) – updating friends’ activities on other services in your lifestream. Will that be too much of a deluge for users, we”ll have to see., the Facebook redesign response will give a clue. It also remains to be seen whether Facebook will tear down the ‘walled garden’ and integrate these services quickly, or will only pursue the internal activities+ Facebook Connect way of adding activity feeds. If it does not, the more social version of Friendfeed could prove an irritant for Facebook. The difference maker, however, could be the content tie-ups (Medianama reports this to be the start) and what Bebo will do to ensure that conversations happen around it.
until next time, a new socialite 🙂
There are some days when I feel incredibly old.. or older. Its usually a landmark of some sort. Today is such a day, when I see that ‘Published Posts’ tab on my blog dashboard – 600. Oh, okay, who am I kidding? It isn’t only the blog, its that Baskin Robbins like feeling. 31!! Me!! Meh?
until next time, born jovial 🙂
The question I posed on the Digital Marketing India group in LinkedIn, on whether advertisers would consider Facebook a better place to spend than Twitter, post the FB redesign, yielded a good discussion. Inevitably, the discussion entered the territory of whether the redesign would alter the status of the differentiated audience that each provides, and therefore the monetisation opportunities that both could develop.
My post last week dealt more with my usage patterns on both services. I think that usage patterns would drive the kind of conversations and the context, and therefore be a major factor in deciding revenue streams. While on Facebook, we start with known friends, and then add layers to the relationship, the opposite happens on Twitter – you discover people with common interests and then the conversations evolve. It makes me wonder what really is the magic of Twitter – real time interactions, the discovery of people, or the ability to have conversations without revealing a lot of one’s profile. While most of the Facebook redesign conversation is happening around real time, and upgraded fan pages, the upgraded privacy settings which allow ‘follow’ without friending could be the feature that gives FB the most commonality with Twitter.
Mark Zuck had this to say about real time – “the pace of updates accelerates. This creates a continuous stream of information that delivers a deeper understanding for everyone participating in it. As this happens, people will no longer come to Facebook to consume a particular piece or type of content, but to consume and participate in the stream itself.” Facebook might be trying to equalise Twitter’s advantages, and as per Erick Schonfeld on TechCrunch. “Facebook doesn’t want Twitter to become the way large companies and public figures connect to fans.”. (via Adage)
But I have a few concerns on this. Will the crowd be able to handle the deluge of items on their newsfeed, even with the filters being provided? In Twitter, the stream is everyone’s base (it differs based on the people one is following, but there is a public stream too) When conversations happen simultaneously in various ‘crowds’, they are connected by devices such as hashtags and RTs. In Facebook, the individual’s profile/home page is the base, so how does the connection of conversations happen? On the fan page, but there seem to be a few issues there? Groups could help in providing this base for a lot of conversations, but there are no updates as far as groups go. Lastly, as a user of both networks, I wonder if I can have the impromptu conversations that I have on Twitter, on Facebook. The third party clients that have been developed for Twitter have made sure that users have a wide array of options for their interface. Is that a major factor in boosting these conversations. Perhaps. (via Sampad)
During the discussion, Sanjay pointed out that Facebook provides multiple engagement spots , and with the redesign, it could integrate the large user profile it already has with the real time stream to offer more accurate brands/ads placement. I’d like to add one more data component in this mix- Facebook Connect. According to TechCrunch, work is already happening on the “Facebook ads + Facebook Connect = Social Ad Network” concept.
Facebook has, as part of the new design also brought in location and language based targeting capabilities for advertisers. RWW also notes that, thanks to the Facebook Connect integration with Brightkite (a mobile social networking service), there are possibilities of hyperlocal targeting in the near future. The other market that would open up in the future could be based on the language versions. (Facebook is working on five Indian languages, for example) While Facebook has been making changes, basis features from Twitter and Friendfeed, it might also be to their benefit to look at an old adversary – MySpace. Though, at 236 million users, Facebook is rapidly leaving MySpace behind, the latter seems to have pipped Facebook as far as time spent on the site goes. It needs to be seen whether the new design will change that statistic too. Mashable has a post on the challenges and opportunities that the Facebook redesign throws up for brands. A consolidation, like streamlining the search function to aid easy tracking of conversations, might have to be done soon, to enable brands to utilise the service’s redesign better.
In the discussion at LinkedIn, I had also brought up Stuart’s very interesting post on Twitter emerging as a personal advertising medium, which led me to wonder if large brands would gravitate towards Facebook, since they give a more structured way of interaction and small brands/individuals would use Twitter for promotions/advertising. But as Sanjay pointed out, Twitter would then, still have a revenue problem. 🙂
Twitter is growing..and fast. Going forward, Twitter would need to watch Facebook carefully and choose a course that uses a different set of parameters for clustering users, and so deliver a differentiated audience, by usage or some other criterion, to create revenue streams. This could mean buying out a few services that complement the simple proposition that Twitter offers or helps measure brands’ activity on the service. Though I had mentioned that the big brands might want to look at Facebook because of the more structured approach,there are several brands already active on twitter. Like I said earlier, different user behaviour and contexts might mean that brands have different uses for Facebook and Twitter. While on the subject, check out Mashable’s cool sociable ads concept, and the debate about paying to be in the list of suggested accounts to follow. (a list of 100 provided by Twitter to new users to start them off on the service) It opens up a new line of thought. What if Twitter could find a way to serve real time contextual tweets on blogs, websites etc, perhaps as a (Twitter combination version of Google Search + Sponsored ads- if a brand wishes to be seen in a particular keyword context, for starters) widget. Let me think a bit more on that.
Meanwhile, what brands should think about, is that in all this real time information overload on various services, they should not lose focus of what they are, and what their objectives are. Like I’ve said earlier, tools cannot replace strategy.
until next time, some real time comments? 🙂
PS. Must Read: A great Twitter FAQ list from Jeremiah
Murzban F Shroff
Breathless in Bombay is Mumbai..completely, teeming with characters that gives Mumbai its current character. Shroff uses characters from many walks of life and across age bands to describe the lives that make up the city. And these are not just the Mumbaikars, but also those who come from different parts of the country and end up being absorbed by the city and its machinations for love, money, power and everything else that makes it tick. With 14 stories, each of which showcases different Mumbais/Bombays – from dhobighat to Bollywood and from victoriawallas to Page 3 socialites, it shows the struggle of humanity, the aspirations that give the city its rhythm, the ability of its citizens to pick up the pieces and move on, and their eternal elixir – hope.
I’d loved Pinki Virani’s ‘Once was Bombay’ for showing the transition of a city brilliantly, and I’d put Shroff’s work at the same level, for bringing out so well, the dynamics of Mumbai.
