I made the trek down to Stanford tonight to catch the VLAB Lifestreaming Panel. My trip was an epic fail - a 19 minute wait for a Bart train, followed by a jam packed Cal-Train, followed by a Stanford University bus driver who had never heard of the Stanford Business School.
I arrived 15 minutes late, did not get a seat, and as such, was just not able to get into comfortable blogging position.
I do have some reactions though. First, here’s the background:
The panel was made up Leah Culver (Pownce), Bret Taylor (FriendFeed), Loic Le Meur (Seesmic), and Jeff Clavier (SoftTech VC). The moderator was Kara Swisher from AllThingsD.
I was there to hear what Bret Taylor had to say. Whenever I start to think hard about what I see the defining trends of this mini era of the web; feeds, rivers of content, ambient awareness, and cross domain features, I get back to…. FriendFeed. The aggregation layer that sits on top. The service that can achieve an impossible level of activity (100M entries!) without even need to build its own community….while paradoxically, being able to build its own community on top of the activity streams of other services.
So I was really interested in what Bret had to say. Here were the things that stood out:
FriendFeed’s traffic pattern was an initial burst driven by some early press coverage, immediately followed by months of flatness (and soul searching by the founders). It wasn’t until a few things happened that FriendFeed saw its traffic start to blow up:
- They released an API
- They made the site stable and lighting fast
- They started to make users out of (and get favorable coverage from) the social media / tech press
Bret also talked pretty eloquently about the fragmentation of web services (what I call cross domain features), and how it doesn’t make sense for any one service to try and do everything. And how this phenomenon opens the door for lots of specialized services to do one or a few things really, really well. Flickr should not build IM, and Google Talk should not try and recreate Flickr. This vision, of course, fits nicely into the need for a service like FriendFeed to aggregate all of these activity streams into a single river.
Finally, Bret stated explicitly that ads need to be in the river of content, and not relegated to the sidebar. I could not agree more.
A couple of other observations:
Loic Le Meur has confidence, charm, and charisma to spare. He probably could have been up there pitching a 1996 Yahoo! style directory and been well received. However, I’m not completely sold on video comments because there’s no way to scan them. With a written blog comment, you can scan your way right past the 8 out of 10 that suck on say TechCrunch. No way to do that with video.
I thought Leah Culver mailed in the Pownce demo a bit, but I liked her backbone on the panel. When Kara Swisher kept trying to get the panelists to admit that there would only be one or three winners and every other company would go under, it was Leah that got visibly pissed and quite logically pointed to the diversity of the web as a whole, the low cost of building software, and how ridiculous it is to suggest that an entrepreneur should despair that the odds are against them.
In terms of the moderation, I would have liked to see more questions about things like privacy, granular control of what’s included in your lifestream, the effort each big SNS is making to keep the lifestream within their respective walled gardens, best practices in journaling related items, the algorithms behind showing what’s relevant, patterns in how folks are consuming rivers of content, and so forth. I thought there was way, way, WAY too much emphasis on business models and exits and stuff.
Whether it be lifestreaming or consuming content in a river format – this stuff is pretty exciting. From where I’m standing, this format has the potential to replace the search box as the primary way folks consume content online. I found the moderator’s obsession with bringing the conversation back to revenue models, consolidation, and exits to be completely inappropriate premature.
For a more in depth look at Bret's presentation, check out Louis Gray's write-up.
