Tag: Yahoo

  • More delicious stuff on the horizon?

    Social Median has been a pending site in my things-to-do list for such a long time that guilt no longer describes the feeling enough 🙁

    I’ve liked the concept of the site a lot, and while I’ve been following developments there, and have added the bookmarklet to the browser, and though I’ve started several groups (example) I’ve just not managed to become a regular user. The SM bookmarklet has been idle. But more importantly, while the site sends me updates every single day, I rarely manage more than a cursory look at the shared items.

    Why am I so bothered about my non usage? To put it as simply as possibly – it brings together the link sharing capabilities of Delicious, the voting of Digg, topic based groups in which you can add sources and stories get pulled automatically, commenting on shared stories, ranking keywords and topics, and most importantly uses collaborative filtering through people with similar interests to serve you content you should read. A compelling proposition and I don’t have a logical explanation for my non usage.

    So, what’s the context? A few days back, I got a mail stating that Social Median has implemented Facebook Connect, and I feel that’s really big news. It essentially means that you can sign up for Social Median with your Facebook account and share the stuff with your Facebook contacts!! While I do admit that the newsfeed is a complete mess after the redesign, I’m also looking at the enormous data of user preferences that Facebook will now gain, and how Facebook can leverage itself as a news sharing source much more now. In future, this could reveal tons of data on news consumption patterns and interests. Facebook Connect’s importance is something I’ve been stressing on for quite sometime now, and this strengthens that thought. I wonder what this does to Digg’s Facebook Connect plans though.

    Another ‘link’ based service – Google Reader (okay, feed based), one which I use a lot,  has also done a small tweaking and added a commenting feature, though its utility The debate on that is still on. There is a feeling that it will become the place of conversation and take comments away from the source (blog/site). Also, as The Inquisitr mentions rightly, the implementation is quite clunky, and if a full feed is published it takes away most of the reasons for the reader to visit the site. I hope that at least a plugin similar to the Friendfeed one (where the conversation is synicated back to the original source) will be developed soon, but since there’s been no API release, they’d have to do it themselves. Doubtful.

    Friendfeed has been around for sometime now, and though its a perfect place to have threaded conversations based on links shared from practically anywhere on the social web, it is still deemed to be a geek service. I wonder if a tags feature to categorise all imported data makes sense. Speaking of Friendfeed, I also read about a new service launched recently called Streamy. According to TechCrunch, “Streamy is a personalized news service and social network that combines elements of Google Reader with FriendFeed.” Streamy does boast of an extremely good interface and suggests interesting stories to you, which you can then share with friends on supporting networks from Streamy itself. And its implementing Facebook Connect. So, a package with potential. (RWW has a comprehensive post on the service)

    Now the social bookmarking service I use regularly is Delicious, though its via the browser add on, and its been ages since I visited the site. But while they were one of the pioneers of social bookmarking, they really haven’t developed further. They could easily build conversations around the links shared by different people, make it easier to create communities around topics of interest – all the stuff that Social Median is doing, and definitely make it easier to share the links on say, Twitter – the reverse traffic of Twitticious, like what Krumlr is doing. I think enabling BOSS to pull stuff (history and top tags) from Delicious is a good step in the right direction. I have just started using a Firefox plugin called tweecious. What it does is go through your tweets, find those with links and post them to your delicious account. Pretty neat, though it would help if it gave me more control over what data needs to be transferred to delicious. (eg: I tweet a lot of posts from my blog,  and perhaps some topical news from news sites, I wouldn’t want that on delicious, so a feature to ignore links from a particular domain?)

    Reports indicate that Twine, another service which i have not used much, (despite L Bhat sending me an invite and taking pains to explain it 🙁 ) could soon challenge Delicious, in terms of unique visitors, and with the kind of work it seems to be doing in the semantic web space, would easily become a more useful tool. I also got a mail a few days back announcing a Twine bookmarklet, with which you add content to Twine as well as tweet it to Twitter!!

    until next time, linking in

    PS. While on links, check out the following too

    BackTweets, a very useful resource to see who’s tweeted links to a site

    OneRiot, a new Twitter search engine which shows the links shared on a particular keyword (instead of tweets)

    Twazzup – another Twitter search engine which shows the regular search results as well as trends , popular tweets and links, with more visual appeal

    Fleck, a social bookmarking service, which has a bookmarklet for FF and IE, it also allows you to import bookmarks from browsers and delicious, and gives you the option to share links on twitter

    ambiently, which calls itself the web’s first discovery engine.  – it’s a search mechanism with a bookmarklet, which you can add to your browser. Now, when you’re on a particular page, and you click the bookmarklet, it opens up an ambient page that lists web links related to the page you’re currently in.

    PPS. The post feels a bit incomplete without Digg. Since I’m not a regular user of the service, I have not attempted to draw comparisons. However I do know that the latest on that front is the Diggbar. You can catch the action here.

  • “What will you do when the money goes?”

    Even as stories abound about a Google acquisition of Twitter, Adage had a story on how Google is already making money out of tweets. According to the article, Google is offering ad units that display the client’s five most recent tweets across the AdSense network. The link leads straight to the client’s twitter account, and the campaign is measurable by the increase in follower count. One could say that Twitter gets some publicity out of this, but its obviously not getting any money.

    The ad network Federated Media recently launched ExecTweets, a site that aggregates tweets from business executives. The site is sponsored by Microsoft. With a twitter account, you can join the conversation, receive tweets from the community and vote for tweets and execs. At least on this one, Twitter will make some money.

    Since we have mentioned two biggies, might as well mention the third too, though what they’re doing is different from the above. Sideline is the desktop app from Yahoo, that runs via the AdobeAIR platform. It can do custom search groups, advanced queries and auto refreshes by pulling in data from tweets. There are other services that offer similar features, but maybe there’s more coming. And it does promise 20% more awesomeness. 🙂 On a tangent, a service called Say Tweet, which I have used in my personal blog to display my Twitter status, does give a sense of what Yahoo could do with Flickr and Twitter.

    In addition to the biggies above who’re using Twitter, there are numerous applications and services being built based on Twitter, and several others inspired by Twitter. A few examples. Tinker, from advertising and publishing network Glam Media, allows users to track real time conversations (from facebook and Twitter) happening around TV shows, entertainment events, conferences, and so on. It gives information on events by showing most followed and most discussed streams, popular events, and on trends with charts and historical data.  It also has embeddable widgets, which can be used to view a feed as well as update. They already have advertising and featured events and have further monetisation plans. iList Micro, from the iList service that alllows you to broadcast your listing to friends across networks, is the Twitter version and uses the hashtags #ihave and #iwant to create a simple process of classifieds. I have already mentoned Yammer (which now offers integration with Twitter), and Blellow in earlier posts, which are renditions of Twitter for more niche/enterprise uses, there’s also status.net arriving in a couple of months time.

    In spite of the several ways in which business are using Twitter, and the potential, I actually get worried when such services pop up on a regular basis, because I fear that when each service figures out a revenue model, one door could possibly be closing for Twitter itself. For instance, recently Jeremiah Owyang had a good post on social CRM being the future of Twitter, and within a few days, I read about Salesforce adding Twitter analytics to its CRM offering, and about CoTweet, a part marketing-part CRM tool.

    Twitter hasn’t been idle. From experimenting with advertising on profile pages (for third party and own apps, free for now) to tweaking title tags for better Google results, to hiring a concierge for celebrities (yes, really!) a lot is being done. And there’s also a new homepage design (limited roll out) which gives more prominence for the search function and increases homepage stickiness. It will also display popular trending topics (like in the current search homepage). (Hmm, perhaps one ad every 5 items, I wouldn’t mind that when i search)

    With the new funding, perhaps they have enough money in the bank to wait, watch new services, and incorporate the popular ones into their own functionality, in order to provide a diverse and robust service to all kinds of users.  Twitter is so open ended that it is different things to different people, but I wonder if identifying a few areas that they’d want to develop for revenues is of prime importance now. What I’m worried about is other services staking out potential revenue models, and whether addition of features towards no particular intent might result in everyone else but them making money out of these very features. But hey, maybe they have a plan. 🙂

    until next time, tweet dreams

    PS. the lyrics of the song mentioned in the title 🙂

  • Don’t shoot the messenger….yet

    A few weeks back, I’d written about Yahoo India’s TVC for Search. I was not impressed, because I felt that the ‘need for speed’ in search could easily be portrayed without making fun of a speech impediment. A few days back, I happened to see another TVC, this one for Yahoo Messenger.

    To its credit, it does manage to create some suspense with the one eyed character, and you wonder where all this is leading to, especially since there are things that suggest a certain line of thought. The ending, however falls flat when it turns out that there is nothing more than a  ‘It pays to know people better’ positioning communication. It plugs the revamped Messenger, with picture, music and video sharing, and friends’ activity updates.

    I also read a couple of days back that Yahoo profiles was being evolved into a social network. You can read about more of their plans here.  If Yahoo is serious about social networking, then I wonder if Yahoo will link some of its very popular properties, which together could create a formidable entity. A social network that utilises photo sharing flickr communities, the delicious link sharing communities, Messenger, Yahoo Launch for music sharing communities, and upcoming for geographical connect. The potential is enormous since all these are extremely popular in their own right, but yes, a star studded team need not be the best. What do you think?

    until next time, some greater than sum..

  • Yodel Tales

    I’ve always wanted to catch a big web entity’s brand campaign. No, Zapak and Rediff are not included because those were more product feature led campaigns, mail or to a lesser extent-gaming (because that was more a concept). I did find a few instances of ambient advertising from Zapak interesting though. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of any rediff ads. It is disappointing because given Rediff’s eminent status among Indian sites, it would be great to see it create some brand ads based on the Indian internet scene, and to cement its position. Having said that, Rediff has created a lot of this equity already, so maybe they don’t feel a necessity.

    So, I was happy to note that Yahoo is planning a campaign in India (via Ideasmarkit), though again, its product centric- Yahoo Search. You can catch the TVC here. The idea is to show that sometimes every second matters, and Yahoo Search gets you results faster. Taking this further, Yahoo hopes this will make the audience choose them as the start page. This move is understandable, in a market dominated by Google’s search. But I’d say that Yahoo could’ve thought of a much more creative way to say this, than making fun of a man’s speech defect (stammering)

    That being said, Yahoo seems to be taking India very seriously, since they have even launched (in limited beta) a social network targeted at the college going audience in India – SpotM (via TechCrunch). It has SMS integration with anonymous chat that will let users correspond via SMS without revealing their phone number. The other key development is the testing (again limited beta) of a new front page. (via Contentsutra) I like the fact that Yahoo is acknowledging user needs – the fact that they are emphasising apps from Yahoo and from third parties, including a dashboard with a way to view email from multiple providers, also gives me a perspective on confidence in their own content and services. 

    So I’ll have to wait to see that brand campaign. I would’ve loved to see the Yahoo purple campaign in India. The idea lends itself to a variety of activities, most notably on Flickr. I wonder though what’s the status on the city specific sites that Yahoo came up with sometime back. I, for one, thought it was a pretty neat idea. Let’s hope Yahoo hits a purple patch in India soon. 🙂

    until next time, Y!

  • In the news

    Sometime back, I’d written about the need for newspapers to give the digital medium a bit more consideration in their strategy. While India claims to buck the trend of falling newspaper subscriptions, I wonder how many economies have a thriving newspaper ‘raddi‘ market, the process through which the Indian household gains money by selling old newspapers as scrap.

    A few days back, Google announced its efforts to bring old newspapers onto the internet. The Google News Archive is being expanded and will let you search newspaper archives from decades back. I did a few searches, and for now it only has the already digitized versions of newspapers (in India), its a long and arduous task, but well worthwhile for Google. Over time, they plan to blend these into Google search results also. 

    Meanwhile, the latest group to join the anti Google-Yahoo bandwagon happen to be WAN (World Association of Newspapers) Their concern is that advertisers will increasingly migrate to Google from Yahoo when they see diminishing price advantages on the latter. (via Startup Meme) So the deal will give Google ‘super powers’ and weaken the competition in the search-ad market, since the two players had so far forced each other to give the best possible terms to publishers, like newspapers who offer display and search ads on their websites – a consortium of 200 US newspapers run Yahoo ads. 

    So newspapers are afraid that their revenue from third party ads served by Google/Yahoo would reduce? To me, it looks like if they had developed better ways of selling their own ad space, maybe they wouldn’t be looking like a bunch of whining kids. It adds to my belief that newspapers refuse to treat the online medium with the respect it deserves, and only react when their turf/revenue gets affected. I recently read this post, which explains how, many newspapers and magazines employ their regular ‘interruption advertising model’ even on their websites. 

    However, some top newspapers, are showing exactly why they are where they are. The NYT has an offer of a ‘print ad free with an online ad’. A daring reversal, that is perhaps aimed at switching the relative positions of print and digital, from a revenue perspective? The WSJ, has changed its design recently, and that includes adding a social network, the big deviation from normal procedure being that this one has paid access. While this might be considered not-so-smart in the era of free Facebook and LinkedIn networks, I think Mashable’s argument in favor of WSJ’s move has merit. The Time article also states that this might become available to non paying users as well, and there are plans to integrate it with existing social networks.  I think that if WSJ can back this move with some really good content that is flitered for its elite paying subscribers, this could be a long term winner.

    And while all that’s been happening across the seas, Google’s relationship with local newspapers is different. It has come up with Google News in Malayalam, which indexes news from almost all leading offline and online sources, with Malayala Manorama conspicuous by its absence. Other languages are coming soon. (via Medianama) 

    With digitising newspaers and local language news Google seems to be pushing from different directions. But, as these sites have shown in search, it is possible to best Google. For newspapers, its not just Google, there are different threats. For example, GateHouse Media is starting an online-only daily in Batavia, NY. They see tremendous opportunity for a local news and community site, since the leading local newspaper does not have content on its website. (via Publishing 2.0) This opportunity could exist in any place with good internet penetration and where the local newspaper hasn’t capitalised on that. On a sidenote, here’s a good post on how the traditional syndication means used by newspapers might expect a reversal soon. 

    Newspapers really need to pull up their socks and figure out how the digital media figure in their strategy. Now, though I might get lynched for this, already Web18’s consolidated reach has beaten that of the Times Group (India’s largest media entity), on the internet. And in.com, the portal which I think would be their flagship property on the internet, is still in beta. Why is the Times Group, with the #1 selling English daily, #1 finance daily, several language dailies, TV channels, radio stations etc not India’s #1 website. I think its a mindset issue.  

    I wonder, whether, with rising newsprint costs, and environmental concerns ( trees geting cut for newsprint), it might be a good idea for newspapers to start work on a Kindle like thing to distribute content, especially after I read this recent story on Kindle.

    until next time, print this?