Google Knol, Google's latest offering, is designed to encourage volunteer content contributors to publish authoritative articles (called "knols") on any subject. Knol publishers have the option of inserting Google AdSense ads on their knols, thus earning a revenue share.
I can summarize the business model in three letters:
S E O - Volunteers creating long tail content, in the hopes that it ranks in Google, and can then be monetized via ads.
Don't believe me that this is an SEO play? Check out Google's promotional placard for Knol:
My favorite part about the placard is the "searchable through popular search engines" part. According to my site's logs, there is only one popular search engine.
I believe that Google Knol will thrive or die based on how well its Knols do in the organic search results. So my questions is, if you take a Google Knol about "Mesothelioma" and compare it to a Squidoo lens about "Mesothelioma" - and all other factors are equal - who will rank better on Google? The Google Knol page, or the Squidoo Lens?
Check out Widgetbox's crafty campaign to become FriendFeed's widget provider. I like it - looks like a clear arbitrage opportunity to me. While FriendFeed does offer an RSS feed that you can plug into a number of service providers and make your own widget, they don't seem to offer an off the shelf widget. Hence Widgetbox's opportunistic campaign.
**Correction** FriendFeed supposedly does have an official widget (thanks to Avatar at Widgetslab for the catch). Use this URL, replacing my user name with yours: http://friendfeed.com/embed?user=lawrencecoburn
Widgetslab covers a number of areas in which these companies are trying to differentiate themselves. Profile, seo-ability, and synchronization with a native blog commenting system (like Typepad or Wordpress) are three of the primary battlegrounds.
I believe that the blog commenting space has some serious network effects - the more blogs that adopt a certain, distributed blog comment provider, the more pressure there is on other blogs to switch over as not to silo themselves (and their commenters). I recently left a long comment on TechCrunch and found myself pissed off that the comment would now just slide down the river to obscurity, with no easy way for me to archive it. Until TechCrunch adopts a networked commenting system, I will be unlikely to post more comments there.
Because of these network effects, we may very well see a winner take all scenario emerge at some point in this space. For this reason, today's skirmishes between the blog commenting contenders are worth following.
Sligo, Ireland is located in the upper Northeast corner of Ireland (about 135 miles from Dublin), and has a population of about 17K. Says Wikipedia, “Sligo's Irish name ‘Sligeach’ - meaning shelly place - originates in the abundance of shellfish found in the river and its estuary, and from the extensive 'shell middens' or Stone Age food preparation areas in the vicinity. The river (now known as the Garavogue) was originally also called the Sligeach.”
More relevantly to Sexy Widget readers, Sligo is home to to PollDaddy – the bootstrapped, profitable, widget powered, distributed polling service founded by David Lenehan.
I first met David (aka “Lenny”) at a Netvibes party about 18 months ago. At that time, PollDaddy was most known for having a mildly sexually explicit logo – a very young girl, licking a lollipop.
Since then, PollDaddy has come a long way. They’ve toned down their logo. They’ve successfully powered high profile polls for big traffic sites like TechCrunch and CNET. And they are putting up monster numbers:
100,000 polls are generated each month on PollDaddy
PollDaddy widgets are viewed about 100M per month
11M votes are submitted via PollDaddy per month
A few weeks ago, I noticed a PollDaddy module showing up in SproutBuilder’s widget publishing tool. This turned out to be a precursor to what PollDaddy announced today – an exposed API that lets developers build on top of the PollDaddy polling tools.
And that wasn’t the only announcement made by PollDaddy – they also announced PollDaddy Jr., a mini app that contains all the features of PollDaddy.com, but that can be installed onto any site. It will live initially as an OpenSocial app for social networking sites.
Says Lenny:
This is all part of a grander plan to increase distribution and get our application in front of more people. Partners can now choose to use our API, or if that's not suitable then we can deploy PollDaddy JR into their site with little work needed on their side. This lets them offer poll services to their own userbase. In a sense we are trying to widgetize our whole platform.
I think these are fantastic moves. Since I’ve been following PollDaddy, they seem to have done everything right. The fact that they are bootsrapped AND coming from a part of the world not exactly known for social media startups makes it even more impressive.
When polling company Sodahead announced that they had raised an $8M round bringing their total funding to $12M, my immediate thought was something to the tune of: “Imagine what PollDaddy could do with some resources.”
I'm working on a 90's Music Rating Game for RateItAll's MySpace App. The premise is pretty simple - you rate 20 popular songs from the 90's, your friends rate those same songs, and the app tells you how 90's music compatible you are with your friends (and lets you meet new ones).
As part of this app, I'm embedding song tracks into each page, so that the user can listen to the track as they play the game. I started using the Imeem song track widget (which I wrote about here). In theory, it's fantastic. You can get complete or partial song streaming for just about any song. It also shows a picture of the artist. This would seem to be perfect for our app.
But unfortunately, the Imeem track widget takes about 10 seconds to load. And for a rapid fire rating game, this just won't cut it. Most users would be on to the next track before even realizing there was a music widget in there.
So what did I do? I embedded YouTube videos instead.... these consistently load in three seconds or less.
So this was the first lesson I noted while building this little rating game - that slow widgets will lose out to fast widgets in the widget to app market, just as they tend to be ripped out of blogs by end users.
The second note to self that I made while making this game is that artists, like Sublime, that request that embeds be disabled from YouTube, will be ignored by remixers, perhaps negatively affecting their place in history. Sublime deserves to be included in our 90's Music rating game - they had a big influence on the decade, and are one of my favorite bands. But because embeds are turned off, they are being left out.
It's as if they never existed.
Click through if you want to check your 90's music compatibility with me on MySpace.
Wow. I didn't see this one coming. Google has launched a distributed, widget powered virtual world called Lively. I'm still digesting this one, but it appears to be a fairly radical move - the decentralization of a service / environment that previously had primarily existed as a destination play. Off the top of my head, Google Lively reminds me of what Tangler is trying to do with forums - to allow interaction and community to exist over multiple domains. It appears as if the entire world and all the accessories for this world will be build by volunteers, but may be sold for real money. Here's a (minimalist) room that I set up for Sexy Widget:
You may have noticed that my company, RateItAll, closed an $800K round of funding a few weeks ago. We have some great investors on board including Eric Di Benedetto, Accelerator Ventures, JAIC America, and a number of others.
Also participating in our round was a guy named Mehrdad Piroozram - one of the top widget guys in Europe. If you live in Europe and are working on a widget related business, I would definitely recommend getting in touch with Mehrdad and his widget focused fund, iSteps.
My friend Brad Thompson, who writes the incredibly awesome San Francisco food blog Food Crusader, recently approached me for some help in building a widget for an upcoming Slow Food event.
Not too long ago, I probably would have put him in touch with a developer who could help him build his widget. Brad would have spec'ed out the project, negotiated a price, specified the sites where the widget would need to show up, and probably iterated over a few weeks.
No longer - I just pointed to him to Sproutbuilder. His response?
Whoa - what a great tool! I just made a mockup in like 5 minutes. That's a
brilliant site.
There really is demand for the self promotion tools that companies like Sproutbuilder, Gydget, and iWidgets offer. I've long said that an important aspect of Web 3.0 is going to be about tools that allow non-developers to do developer like things - I think this is a piece of that.
You may have noticed that comments have returned to Sexy Widget after a few weeks' disappearance. This has been the result of on ongoing struggle for me to get Disqus to work with Typepad.
When I originally installed Disqus on this blog, I couldn't get it to work. I provided my credentials to Disqus founder Jason Yan who was nice enough to try and help me out, and he couldn't get it to work. We opened up a ticket with Typepad who changed some mysterious setting that allowed Disqus comments to show up.
When they changed this setting, pagination disappeared. Try as I might, I couldn't get pagination to reappear. I opened up a trouble ticket with Typepad, and they flipped back the setting that turned off Disqus and turned on pagination.
Apparently it's not possible to have both pagination and Disqus.
When forced to choose between the two, I chose Disqus.
However, in returning to the setting that allowed me to use Disqus, the TypePad customer service rep wrote this:
Thanks for the note. We've switched your account back to our Static
platform temporarily. Please keep in mind that soon all our subscribers
will be migrated to the new Dynamic platform and there will not be an
option to convert back.
Does this mean that Disqus will not be able to exist on TypePad blogs when they make this switch? I've heard rumors that TypePad is planning their own new and improved commenting system which would hint that perhaps they may be trying to block Disqus.
Any company trying to build a service off of blogging platforms should probably take note - just because social networks decided to go (relatively) open, doesn't mean that blogging platforms can't decide to close up.
