Sexy Widget

On MyBlogLog, Cookies, and Resource Allocation

MyBlogLog is all over the tech blogs today due to their announcement of a new lifestreaming feature that aggregates your activity from various social networking sites on MyBlogLog.com.

I like the feature – as I’ve said a few times on this blog when covering Plaxo Pulse (here and here), a universal news feed that aggregates your friends’ activity from all over the web adds a lot of value.  I would imagine that these services will continue to propagate and thrive as long as FB chooses not to offer it themselves.

But what I find really interesting here is MyBlogLog’s choice of resource allocation.  There are a lot of things they could be working on now.  They could be working on a Facebook App.  They could be working on an OpenSocial / MySpace App.  They could be adding to their stable of blog widgets.  They could be focusing on their API.

As a backdrop, this is a company that has always prioritized its presence on the open web over its destination site community.  Indeed, the fact that MyBlogLog.com is light on traffic didn’t get in the way of a nice exit for the company.

So why this sudden interest in their destination site?  It could be due to a couple of factors.  Maybe they stumbled across my post on Hub & Spoke and saw the light :)   Maybe there’s corporate Yahoo! pressure to deliver ad revenue, which as we know, is easier to do on a destination site than with a sidebar widget. 

Or maybe it’s a cookie problem.  I don’t know about anybody else, but somewhere along the way, I lost my MyBlogLog cookie and just haven’t gone back to MyBlogLog.com to activate it again.  How do you make people go login again?  You give them a reason to go to the destination site.

The promise of cross domain features with a single login is one of the most compelling aspects of the new generation of cross platform, cross domain web services.  MyBlogLog is a “presence” feature – one that could be considered a spinoff of the popular “who’s online” feature on social networks.  It works anywhere, and if you’re logged in to this feature on one domain with a MyBlogLog widget, you’re logged into all of them. 

The problem for service like MyBlogLog without a very active destination site is that once that cookie is lost, it’s difficult to get their users to log back in again.  If you provide them a reason to login to the destination site, you’re more likely to retain that cookie, thus making your distributed footprint reach its full potential.

Yet another example of how a sturdy home base community can enhance a distributed footprint.

Widgets in Space

A company called Yuzoz has released an API that allows you power your widgets and apps with data gleaned from outer space.

Says the site:

Power your games, widgets, web applications or just about any project with Yuzoz's unique live connection to space.

Yuzoz's open API can be easily configured to bring life into a wide range of entertaining projects. There's a crazy world of possibilities. Let astronomical events power everything from games to selecting musical tracks, to finding new friends on social networks all using Yuzoz's Live connection to space.

Apparently the service translates activity from solar flares, northern lights, and shooting stars into data, which is then exposed via an API.

Lilia at Mobile Buzz suggested a horoscope app that selects predictions based on data from the stars.... sounds like a good idea to me.

Some Notes from the Multi Platform Social Networks Event

I made an epic trek down to Stanford from San Francisco last night in the pouring rain to go to Shaking the Money Tree of Multi Platform Social Networks last night.  And when I say epic, I mean epic.  I took the 22 bus from The Grove in Pac Heights where I had a meeting, to a Bart Train to Daily City to a Bart Train to Millbrae, to a Caltrain train to Palo Alto, to the Stanford Marguerite shuttle.

It was a solid event - the focus was more on monetization than growth strategy (I guess the "shaking the money tree" should have clued me in), but I did walk away with a few nuggets.

In no particular order, here are my notes from the event:

• Jeremiah Owyang is a solid moderator - he brings energy and knowledge, and doesn't let panelists get away with dodging questions.   If you can get him for your event, get him.
• Social Network sites are facing a number of challenges currently: monetization, sns fatigue, workplaces blocking their employees, privacy
• According to a recent survey, here is what people do on social networks in order of frequency: Connect with Friends, Communicate, Update Profile, Browse Profiles, Stalk / Peep (e.g. check up on that ex girlfriend), Send Friend Requests, Listen to Music, Read Blog Posts, Write on Walls.  Note: No mention of anything having to do with "shopping" here.
• On MySpace, four out 1000 people click on an ad.  Less than a quarter of the Internet average.   Hello monetization problems.
• Jia Shen cites recent RockYou numbers; 105M monthly uniques, 1.5B monthly pageviews, 150M widget views per day, on 18% of all myspace profiles and 60% of all fb profiles.  Interesting to note how much more traction they have on FB than MS, despite a longer history with MS - it speaks to the impact of exposing the social graph on getting a widget /app to go viral.
• RockYou defines a platform as having three attributes: 1) The ability to add functionality; 2) the ability to distribute; 3) the ability to monetize
• Jia says that Multi Platform environments is not a new thing - cites examples of Mac / PC, Games (Nintendo, xBox, PS, etc.)
• Jia says that the scary time for RockYou as a company was when it was dependent on MySpace.  Now it's diversified.
• Both Bebo and Friendster's traffic spiked when they became platforms
• Sourabh Niyogi from sns ad network Social Media gave some of their stats: 2200 appas on fb, 22M uniques per month, 150M + impressions per day
• And then gave some examples of how much Social Media's network of app devs are making: they have 165 apps doing more than $100 per day, 35 apps more than $500 per day, 950 apps doing higher than $1 cpm, 40 devs making $10K per month
• Sourabh estimates that porting a simple app from FB to Bebo is a four hour project.   From FB to OpenSocial is a 5 day project.
• Kevin Marks from OpenSocial says that the value in OpenSocial is that it abstracts three behaviors that span all social networks; people and friends, data persistence, activity streams
• The most popular app on Bebo is the Make a Baby App - two people get together to make a baby, then they have to care for it, feed it, spank it, etc.  Says the Bebo platform head, "making babies is fun."
• SocialMedia believes that real money will start being made on the social networks when the need of individual, big budget verticals (travel, mortgages) start being met.
• VC Ken Gullicksen is not concerned so much about monetization - he says the dollars will follow the eyeballs.  Furthermore, Yahoo does $1 CPM network wide, but embedded in that are some very vertical segments.  SNS are not that different.
• Open Platforms should help monetization.  Because developers don't have to worry about collecting registration and social graph info, they can focus on making better apps.
• Jia Shen: The lack of a FB micropayment system is a barrier to ecommerce apps.  Another barrier is that folks don't come to FB to shop.
• Jia Shen: Bebo has run a very tight ship in terms of clear rules for developers.  They manage user privacy very well.
• Consolidation will happen among SNS.  In other words, eventually all of your personal data will eventually end up at one of the big data shops (Google, Microsoft, etc.)
• Gullicksen: rules are the same on SNS as they are anywhere else - if you deliver value, the monetization will follow.
• Jia: Ratio of success is higher for apps on platforms, than for websites on the open web.   This, I think, says it all.
• Open Platforms will enable the running of the same app in different social contexts - for example, an app run among your FB friends might have very different implications when run with your LinkedIn friends.

Anybody else who attended that took away other things, please feel free to chime in.

Bradley Horowitz Leaves Yahoo, Goes to Google

This is a bummer. While I never met him personally, Bradley seemed to be one of the really inspirational guys over at Yahoo.  Folks at Y! always seemed to bring him up as a an example of the talent level, and as somebody they were really proud worked for them (and not for Google).

Now he works for Google.

For fans of Yahoo like myself, this is as depressing as any news to come out of Sunnyvale over the last few weeks.

Widget / Platform Event Tonight at Stanford

I'll be heading down to Shaking the Money Tree of Multi Platform Social Networks tonight.

At this point, I'm way more interested in multi platform widget and app strategy than shaking any money trees, but hey, hopefully the two themes will go hand in hand eventually.

The moderator is Jeremiah Owyang, and the panelists are:

Kevin Marks (Open Social)
Keith Rabois (Slide)
Steve Cohen (Bebo)
Ken Gullicksen (Morganthaler Ventures)

Tangler’s Distributed Forums

At times, it seems as if the whole Web 2.0 movement has completely bypassed the forum world.  The forums that I frequent still run the same software they were running in 2000.  They are walled gardens, with clunky interfaces, and a surprising lack of features.

This is shocking on a number of levels.  Forums were in many respects, the original Web 2.0 sites, allowing members to post and share content long before the term Web 2.0 even existed.  Additionally, forums still do MASSIVE traffic – the fact that forum software still looks very much the same as it did a few years ago is a mystery. 

From an entrepreneurial perspective, I look at a vertical with fat and happy incumbents with old software, and I see an opportunity.

Apparently, I'm not the only one.  Enter Tangler.

Yesterday, Tangler announced an embeddable version of their forums that lets folks inject community (in forum format) into any web page.

Why is this a big deal?  It’s a big deal because it frees up forum discussion to happen on a distributed basis.  As opposed to forcing potential forum participants to go to a single domain to join a discussion, they can do so in flow, on the domains that they frequent.

For example, any blogger that wants to allow their readers to discuss Tangler’s embeddable forums could just click the “share” link on the forum discussion below and embed the same discussion on their own site.  It’s neat, it’s easy, and the forum embeds are easy on the eyes.

From an end user perspective, the biggest benefit is the potential for a single login (and post history) to span domains.  If a site is using the Tangler forum embed, I’ll never have to login, and I’ll never have to worry about diluting my forum reputation (in this case, post history), across multiple systems.  Theoretically, this could lower the barrier to participation.

Could this be a rival to blog commenting services like Discus, Intense Debate, and CoComment?  I don’t see why not.

This concept of cross domain web services, with a single login, and a single user reputation system, and perhaps backed by a sturdy home base community…. Well, I think this is a nice model, and one that applies to all sorts of features – forums, reviews, gaming, communication, etc.  Another thing that is interesting about Tangler’s implementation here is that it is a good old fashioned widget powered implementation, as opposed to Facebook / OpenSocial driven.

See below for a sample Tangler embed.

The Baby and the Bath Water

This blows me away. Have these people lost their minds?

How can user reviews have any meaning if you filter out the negative ones?

Hub and Spoke: Building a Web Service in a Distributed World

With the expected opening of MySpace in about a month to third party developed applications, the atomization of the Web that began with widgets and was supercharged by the Facebook platform, is hitting its next major milestone.

Widgeteers have long talked about the importance of “fishing where the fish are” – putting your web content and web service in front of users where they are, as opposed to making them find your domain. 

Cut and paste Flash widgets offered an early look at how this distributed strategy can enable people can help spread your content around the Web.  Then Facebook came along, and instead of widgets spreading one by one from one MySpace profile to another, they started spreading from one profile to twenty (or more) via Facebook’s newly exposed social graph.  Not only that, but instead of small badges displaying content, there was the possibility of tacking on full, multi page, web applications to Facebook.com, a development that has important implications on monetization.  Widget publisher RockYou estimates that apps on Facebook spread seven times as quickly as widgets on MySpace, all things considered and all other things being equal.  I would guess that the monetization rates are similarly skewed towards apps.

It would appear that the financial markets are starting to notice that there might be a new model with which Internet publishers can thrive – social gaming company Zynga was recently funded without even having a destination website, Slide just got a half a billion dollar valuation (and not from intra industry kool aid drinkers), the Venture world’s heavy hitters continue to re-up on their widget investments, and even AOL is getting into the act by buying widget platform YourMinis.

So what does this new distributed model look like? 

Different companies are trying different things.  The aforementioned Zynga is entirely distributed.  Gaming happens within the networks of friends that exist on the host social network.  What I find interesting is the cross domain aspect.  Says the Union Square Ventures blog:

Building and supporting games across all of the major social net apis is a costly endeavor but one that we all believe will pay off as game players can access their friends wherever they are at that moment in time.

Yelp is keeping the focus on its brand and destination site.  Via Beacon, notifications of a new review posted on Yelp.com can be shared on Facebook – however, to see the good stuff – in this case local business reviews - you have to click through to Yelp.com.

Renkoo launched a Facebook App called BoozeMail that was only mildly related to its core business of event planning.  When BoozeMail took off, they launched a destination site to support it.

Flixster and iLike were able to port functionality and content from what were healthy destination sites.  As Facebook growth soon dwarfed traffic to their respective destination sites, these companies began focusing almost exclusively on their SNS apps.  These companies have stayed focused on their respective verticals however; movies and music respectively.

Companies like Slide, RockYou, and Hungry Machine are taking a more hedged approach.   These companies are less about ownership of an application / feature niche, and more about doing whatever it takes to expand reach.  In the world of ad networks, those with the largest reach can command the highest rates.  As Slide and RockYou battle to build a next generation advertising network, they are firing out a diverse set of seemingly unrelated apps – supporting the ones that grow, and abandoning the ones that don’t.

And the smart guys over at Chipin / Sprout decided to lay off the “drug” that is unrelated Facebook apps completely, and focus on their core business – a multimedia presentation widget that can be pushed out to any social net.

So what’s the right model?  Fully distributed like Zynga or a focus on a core community with only marginal outreach to the SNS like Yelp?  And how should you manage your various user bases?  Should a user on one SNS be able to interact with a user of another SNS via your app (Zynga)?  Or should the user bases be kept separate (iLike and Flixster)?  And what should be the ultimate goal of your distributed business?  Reach or feature ownership?  And what brings a higher chance of success – porting an existing web service to the social networks (Flixster), or building something native (Renkoo)?

It’s unlikely that one size will fit all.  But I have come to some conclusions in regards to my own company.

It’s called Hub and Spoke.

Hub and Spoke

The hub and spoke model for user generated content web services is one in which a home base destination site works in tandem with the distributed apps and widgets associated with the service.

A single login is maintained across the entire web service’s footprint.  Logging into the destination web site automatically logs you into all of the web service’s widgets and apps and vice versa.  Content contributions and reputation points are preserved across domains.  If you post content via a MySpace app, the default scenario would make that content available on the related Facebook app. 

Reputation points accumulated on one domain would translate through to another.  For example, a user earning points on one domain (helpful votes, pokes, hugs, coins, post totals, thumbs’ up, etc.) gets the benefit of those points on the service’s destination site, and on any of the service’s other spokes which they participate.

Just like a Facebook App offers publishers more functionality and monetization options than a Flash badge, ownership of a core domain offers additional advantages not available via either apps or widgets.

The way I see it, both the hub (destination site) and the spokes (widgets, apps) provide complementary benefits to the publisher.

The Hub (yourdomain.com)

The core roles that should be provided by the Hub of your distributed Web service are as follows:

Monetization

Social network traffic is notoriously hard to monetize.  Whether it’s because SNS users tend to be cash poor and time rich, or whether the ad networks have just not found the right technique to reach these sorts of users is inconsequential.  Presumably, if you have a destination site, you have some way to monetize it that is better than the industry averages for social network traffic.

Furthermore, maintaining a functioning revenue model at home base protects you from rule changes on the SNS.  Just a few days ago, Google missed revenue due to lower than expected performance from its SNS inventory.  Isn’t it possible that as FB and other mega properties start to enter a realm of higher financial expectations that they might need to feel the need to tax the higher performing apps – especially if they are unsure about their own ability to monetize?

Community / Brand

Experience has taught me to never underestimate the importance of community in building (or harming) a web business.  When I saw the Yelp founders speak at the Commonwealth Club a few months back, their explanation for why they don’t have a more sophisticated Facebook app was that they have a small dev team, and they just hadn’t gotten to it yet.

I don’t buy it.

I think the real reason that’s Yelp’s focus has remained on its destination site is that Yelp is a formidable community in its own right, and that the company worries that making its content and functionality fully available on Facebook would serve to undermine their hard earned community, and build Facebook’s.

Whether or not they could maintain their strong community while providing a more robust app remains an unanswered question.

And Yelp is not alone in thinking like this – I haven’t seen a Craigslist App for Facebook, a MySpace App for Facebook, or a WebmasterWorld App for Facebook.

Furthermore, if valuation is at all important to you – either for raising funding or selling your business – it pays to invest in your brand.  Branding is a lot more straightforward on your own domain than it is on those that belong to other people.  I wouldn’t be surprised if a significant percentage of Facebook app users believe that everything they interact with on Facebook is owned by Facebook.

Staging

Another benefit of maintaining a home base for your web service is the ability to test the effectiveness of features on your own community before rolling them out to Facebook, Bebo, or MySpace.  Flixster founder Joe Greenstein said on a panel that this was exactly the way they prioritized which features to port from Flixster.com to Facebook.  Those that do well on Flixster.com get on the fast track to showing up on the Flixster Facebook app.

Widget / App Distribution

App distribution on Facebook is very fluid.  In effort to combat app spam, Facebook is continuously tightening the rules and changing the feeds required to distribute an app.

It’s a bit more straightforward on your own domain.  If you have an active community and good destination site traffic, it should be fairly easy to seed your SNS apps with users from your own site – and, you can be as aggressive as you’d like in encouraging your users to install SNS apps.   

SEO: Unique Content

If your SNS apps and widgets are collecting content, it is most likely hidden from the Search Engines inside Flash (on blogs), or behind a login (on SNS).

This is good news.

It means that for the purposes of SEO, this content remains “unique.”  You can display it back at home base, and have it serve as search engine fodder.  This is a pretty big deal.

So this covers the hub of your distributed web service.  Now we move on to...

The Spokes

The core aspects of the Spokes are:

User Acquisition

Dropping your Web service into millions of existing networks of people can supercharge its distribution.  This has been written about ad nauseam.  It’s beyond debate.

Content Acquisition

If monetization is a weak point of SNS traffic, content generation is a strength.  When RateItAll ran a trial push of its FB app, we saw massive engagement numbers – 3X ratings per user and pv’s per user than what we saw on our destination site.

This, is the “time rich” factor coming into play again.  Hub and Spoke allows you to use each node to its potential – content and user acquisition from the SNS, and monetization and brand at your domain.

SEO: Inbound Links

This is pretty much restricted to blog widgets (although the FB App landing page is exposed to the SE’s).  As discussed earlier on this blog, a bare HTML link below a Flash widget that pulls dynamic, relevant anchor text is a beautiful thing in the world of SEO.  Link dev tends to be a painful and mind numbing process – if you can trade inbound links for cool functionality via a blog widget, you’re on to something.

There you have it – Hub & Spoke.  If folks have interesting examples of companies pursuing related, distributed web service strategies, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Photo Credit: Hofstra

Reason # 619 to Blog: Recruiting

About a month ago, I formally launched a search for a CTO for RateItAll.  I posted the job req on LinkedIn, and on Sexy Widget.

I received more than a hundred pretty good resumes from LinkedIn.  I received one great resume via a referral from a Sexy Widget reader (thanks Peter Yared).

That referral is now RateItAll's CTO.

I guess it figures - you write about what's strategic for your business.  You attract a readership of folks that are passionate about and expert in your niche. And if a job comes up, what better network to circulate the job description to?

Auren Hoffman on Hiring Great People

Here's a thorough post on why start-ups can't settle for hiring good people - they have to find the great ones.