Social Blogging

 

 

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Social Blogging

via A VC : Venture Capital and Technology by Fred on 12/7/07

I came across this highly reblogged quote about tumblr last night:

I think it needs a new classification. "Blog" is misleading and doesn't describe the experience of using it. Maybe something like "sharing community" or "facebook but with stuff."

It stuck in my brain and woke me up at 4:30 in the morning. Because I've been thinking the same thing. Yesterday I drew this chart on our whiteboard in the USV conference room for Bijan and Albert.

Blogging and Social Networking are different. Blogging is a new form of publishing and increasingly it means serious publishing. If you look at the top blogs on techmeme, most are not  personal blogs, they are for profit money making entities.

Social networking, as defined by Facebook and myspace, is largely person to person communications without much blogging going on. Both services offer blogging capabilities but they are not used that often as far as I can tell. Leaving comments, writing on a wall, poking, posting and tagging photos, and that kind of person to person communications is the staple of the big social nets.

There's an emerging category in the middle that takes from both blogging and social networking and we at Union Square Ventures are heavily invested in it with our investments in Twitter and Tumblr. I'll call it social blogging but I'd sure love a better name for it. Some call it microblogging. Tumblr users call it tumblogging. I am not sure either name is ideal.  If you have a better name idea, please leave it in the comments.

The essence of social blogging systems are;

• lightweight - you can post in less than a minute
• social - you follow people via some form of dashboard which is like the news feed in FB
• interactivity - you reblog, favorite, or reply to the post

I am sure there are a lot of people reading this who think "how is this different than blogging?" I'd like to suggest that everyone try this

1. go to tumblr
2. enter your email address, a password, and a URL at tumblr (don't worry about that too much)
3. click on the icon in the upper right with the head/shoulders and a plus sign
4. add the following URLs:

• http://fredwilson.vc/
• http://nevver.tumblr.com/
• http://joelaz.com/
• http://soxiam.com/
• http://didyouevernotice.tumblr.com/
• http://bijansabet.com/

1. then click on "dashboard" on the top of the page (i know this should be #5)

If you do these five steps, the whole thing should take less than a couple minutes, you'll get to see what a tumblr dashboard experience is like. I realize it should be easier than that and I am sure that it will be soon. You don't have to be a blogger to see how awesome tumblr is. And as you read through the dashboard, look for the reblog icon. It looks like this

Click on that when you see a post you like and slowly but surely you can create a tumblog of your very own without ever posting anything directly to tumblr.  That's why Ricky called it a "sharing community".

Of course, over time, I bet you'll start wanting to post stuff there. It's just so easy and so fun.

Twitter and Vox are similarly social. Twitter's a bit different because the posts are kept to 140 characters or less and it's not a visual experience like Tumblr. I use Twitter to share stuff I am doing with everyone and Tumblr to share stuff I am seeing and hearing with everyone. I pull all my twitters into tumblr and I've seen a few of them get reblogged which is pretty cool.

Right now, this social blogging category is nascent. Here is an alexa chart on the category:

According to Comscore, about 6mm unique visitors worldwide come to Twitter, Vox, and Tumblr combined. That's nothing near the14mm worldwide uniques who come to wordpress.com or the 8mm worldwide uniques that come to typepad.com.

Nor is it anywhere near the  40mm worldwide uniques that come to Facebook or the 70mm  worldwide uniques who come to myspace.

But my gut tells me that combining the personal expression elements of blogging with the emotional aspects of social networking in a lightweight manner that allows anyone to be a blogger with ease and not much commitment (think iphone walking down the street and seeing something cool), will yield a very large market of people who both consume and contribute content in these social blogging systems.

That's the bet and we've made it twice now. And I am feeling pretty good about it.

 

 

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Indian Bloggers!

Blogging buzzword among fresh grads

New Delhi, Hyderabad, Agra

Tuesday, December 11, 2007 (Neha Kirpal, V Satish, Naseem Moin)

Blogging is now the buzzword among fresh graduates who are keen to make it a career.

''I started blogging just as a hobby when Google was giving free blogger accounts. But slowly as traffic started building up, I got more and more interested in my blog,'' said Amit Aggarwal, Blogger.

''Three years back, I got seriously into it. I basically blog about things I love - technology, Internet services and consumer technology like ipods. I get traffic from all across the globe - US, UK and India,'' he added.

So a competitive blogger is a headhunters' delight and an interesting weblog holds key to numerous money-spinning options.

''I make a small amount of money out of primarily two things - contextual advertising served by Google's programme. Then there are people who bid their ads to be displayed on my site, so through those Text ad links,'' said Gautam Ghosh, Blogger.

By one estimate everyday there are close to 60,000 blogs being added to the blogosphere internationally, but there are some who feel it's still early days for Indian bloggers.

''Many companies that realise that the Internet is a mainstream area have started hiring bloggers. Those bloggers are acting as a face for those organisations for the internet audience,'' said Daksh Sharma, Blogger.

''Serious bloggers can approach companies and consult them on safe blogging strategies - potentially helpful for the company. So you could work as a blogging consultant,'' he added.

So all of you who have that unfinished book in the lowest drawer, there's one place you can get cracking and expect much faster and wider readership, the Internet. So, blog away with a bang.

Voice over IP India

India on the VoIP Wagon

VoIP short for Voice over Internet Protocol is coming on fast in India. A growing IT services and BPO sector, followed by banking and financial services, logistics and manufacturing enterprises combined with end use consumers of IP telephony and India has a growing VoIP market which could touch almost 60-110 billion minutes if things work out right.

The Growing VoIP Tribe

According to a report by iLocus there were estimated 1,079 billion minutes of VoIP traffic carried by service providers worldwide last year. Of these minutes, 382.3 billion was local call volume, 614.4 billion was national long distance (NLD) call volume, and 82.6 billion was the international long distance (ILD) call volume. According to another report in India about 70 per cent of all long distance calls would be made through Internet telephony or Voice over Internet Protocol.

Considering the growing tribe of VoIP users companies such as Phonewala.com, the recent entrant Tringme.com and calling card company Worldphone are growing too.

Talk more pay less

The growth mantra in telecom has always been volumes whether in hardware or service. Same is the case with VoIP. Consider the offerings by one of the oldest players in the industry Net4 through their VoIP product Phonewala. For a SME unlimited calls to US/Canada @ Rs 3999 per month may make sense. Or a home user 500 minutes of calls to US/UK/Canada for Rs 599 only make it less around Rs.1.20 paisa per minute. On the other hand Tringme.com takes forward the Push and Talk concept. Says Tringme.com's founder Yusuf Motiwala says "TringMe's core premise was to provide a simple click-and-call telephony service. We have and will continue to add capabilities around this seemingly simple concept."   Tringme.com also lets the user place widgets on any website - Blogger, eBay, Facebook, Myspace, Typepad, wordpress etc

The growth in VoIP companies is evident from the fact Phonewala's promoter Net4 recently got listed at BSE. While Phonewala has been in the market for a few years, Tringme.com is already embarking onto expansion plans. Says Yusuf Motiwala "We are soon going to add two key products in our portfolio, one of which will be in private beta next week and following that will be a first of it's own kind video product."

The Industry boom

Consider the fact that CISCO alone has already shipped in excess of 200,000 IP phones to India. Also it recently set up a pilot facility through their global manufacturing partner Foxconn for the production of internet protocol (IP) phones in Chennai. CISCO chairman John Chambers had recently reportedly said "The Enterprise IP Telephony market has been growing at a very strong pace for Cisco."

According to research by iLocus the carrier VoIP equipment market, softswitch and media gateways generated combined revenues of $2.2 billion last year, which represents about 24 percent growth over previous year.  Sonus, UTStarcom, Cisco and Comverse platforms emerged as leading traffic handlers in various different categories.

The Government angle

Perhaps the biggest misconception about VoIP is that it is illegal in India. Says Yusuf "It is legal to use VoIP in India. TRAI has recently recommended removing earlier restrictions by appropriate licensing fees or service tax as captured in the following document (TRAI recommendations)." According to the TRAI document by 2010 India will have 20 million broadband users. This may give VoIP just get the right boost it requires.

Puneet Mehrotra writes on business and technology issues www.thebusinessedition.com You can email him on puneet@tbe.in

GPRS India

From Mobile Pundit

From Mobile Pundit

18 lakh GPRS users in Gujarat

If this report from Business Standard is to be believed, there are 18 lakh GPRS users in Gujarat alone! So what would be the total number 0f GPRS users in India?

GSM subscriber base crossed the mark of 50 lakh recently in the state. Operators have witnessed a growth on an average of around 200% of GPRS subscribers in Gujarat.

Nearly all handsets above Rs. 4000 in the market are GPRS capable. What would be interesting to know is if these GPRS connections are being used for internet connectivity (mobile as a modem for PC), since availability of even dial-up internet is a question mark in rural India. Brough Turner had pointed out this in his comment on why Reliance Infocomm is seeing surging demand for data in non-urban India.

Hutch:

"We have seen a jump of around 300 per cent in the number of GPRS subscribers across the state within a year," said Sunil Sood, operations director of Hutch.

Airtel:

B P Singh, COO, Bharti-Airtel in Gujarat,said, "Airtel witnessed a ten fold growth in GPRS subscribers here."

Idea:

Gururaj Kulkarni, circle head and VP of Idea Cellular, said, "After Idea launched GPRS in August 2004, we have GPRS enabled sites across the circle today covering every small city within its coverage. "We have seen a growth of more than 100 per cent in the GPRS subscriber in the state," Kulkarni added.

BSNL:

BSNL is also providing GPRS and EDGE services. "Currently, we are offering the services in 18 cities and 64 villages. We have recently started the service so it would be difficult to judge the growth but we have seen a tremendous demand for GPRS even in the rural area," said Piyush Khare, DGM mobile, Gujarat, BSNL.

April saw the GSM user additions in India go below 3 million users mark for the first time in 2006.

According to the subscriber figures released by the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), the GSM user base touched 72.12 million in April, up from 69.2 million in March.

Bharti = 20.68 million
BSNL = 17.59 million
Hutch = 16.06 million
Idea = 7.64 million
Aircel = 2.83 million
Reliance = 2.01 million
Spice = 1.98 million
MTNL = 2.02 million
BPL = 1.31 million

GSM user growth in this year:

April 2006 = 2.93 million
March 2006 = 3.78 million
February 2006 = 3.17 million
January 2006 = 3.50 million

Facebook : privacy : tracking users

Original Article in the TOI

SAN FRANCISCO: Seeking to keep the peace in its popular online hangout, Facebook has overhauled a new advertising system that sparked privacy complaints by turning its users into marketing tools for other companies. Under the changes outlined late on Thursday, Facebook's 55 million users will be given greater control over whether they want to participate in a three-week-old programme that circulates potentially sensitive information about their online purchases and other activities.

Facebook provided two different opportunities to block the details from being shared, but many users said they never saw the "opt-out" notices before they disappeared from the screen.

With the reforms, Facebook promised its users will now have to give their explicit consent, or "opt-in", before any information is passed along. The concessions were made after more than 50,000 Facebook users signed an online petition blasting the system, called Beacon, as a galling intrusion that put the Palo Alto-based startup's pursuit of profit ahead of its members' privacy interests.

More than 40 different web sites, including Fandango.com, Overstock.com and Blockbuster.com, had embedded Beacon in their pages to track transactions made by Facebook users. Unless instructed otherwise, the participating sites alerted Facebook, which then notified a user's friends within the social network about items that had been bought or products that had been reviewed. Facebook thought the marketing feeds would help its users keep their friends better informed about their interests while also serving as "trusted referrals" that would help drive more sales to the sites using the Beacon system.

But thousands of Facebook users viewed the Beacon referrals as a betrayal of trust. Critics blasted the advertising tool as an unwelcome nuisance with flimsy privacy protections that had already exasperated and embarrassed some users. Some users have already complained about inadvertently finding out about gifts bought for them for Christmas and Hanukkah after Beacon shared information from Overstock.com. Other users say they were unnerved when they discovered their friends had found out what movies they were watching through purchases made on Fandango.

If Facebook adheres to the new "opt-in" standard, "it would be a significant step in the right direction," said Adam Green, a spokesman for MoveOn.org, which launched the petition drive to revamp Beacon just nine days ago. "It also says a lot about the ability of Internet user to band together to make a difference."

The backlash against Beacon illustrated the delicate balancing act that Facebook must negotiate as the company tries to cash in on its popularity without alienating the users fueling its success.

Beacon is a key component in Facebook's "Social Ads" programme, which is vying to make more money from the rapidly growing audience that uses the social network's free services as a place to flirt, gossip and share personal passions.

This isn't the first time that Facebook has done an about-face after introducing a feature that raised privacy concerns. Last year, Facebook rolled out a "news feeds" tool that tracked changes to users' profiles. After thousands of users rebelled, Zuckerberg issued a contrite apology and added a way to turn off the news feeds.
This time around, a customer support representative expressed Facebook's regrets in a Wednesday night note that foreshadowed the changes made on Thursday.

Five cool things you can do with your GPRS phone

Original article in Hindustan Times

Ruchi Hajela , Hindustan Times

Email Author

November 30, 2007

Get started with a browser
Any web surfing experience can be awesome or awful depending on what browser your phone has. Hence, it would be good to download a decent browser to begin with. Opera Mini is one such browser that can be installed on any Java phone. It basically converts and compresses web pages to suit your phone screen.

Often, the browsing experience on mid and lower mid-end phones can be quite uncomfortable and having Opera Mini browser can help. Opera Mini is fast and hence reduces your GPRS consumption. You can download Opera Mini free of cost from www.operamini.com and occupies as little as a 50-60 KB space on your handset.

 Instant messaging on the go
Why waste money on SMS when you already have a GPRS connection? Just download a free Internet messenger on to your handset and keep chatting away with your friends to glory. Check out Nimbuzz (www.nimbuzz.com), a free messenger that integrates your Yahoo!, Google Talk, Skype and MSN messengers all in one. This chat messenger also allows you to make mobile to PC calls.

Another option is MovaMessenger, yet another free messenger that even allows you to see avatars or picture profiles of your contacts. Here also you can chat with MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ and Google Talk contacts. MovaMessenger, however, is a bit more heavier and lazier than Nimbuzz, experts say. The application works on any GPRS enabled Java handset. The application is also expected to allow file transfers in a later version. MovaMessenger does not work on Windows mobile handsets.

WidSets
Stay updated about what's the latest on your favourite websites using WidSets. A WidSet is like an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed that alerts you and pushes information on to your website as soon as it is updated on the website. Go to www.widsets.com and there is an entire library of the WidSets available today. The library currently has WidSets for BBC News, Reuters, Accuweather and Wikipedia amongst others.

To download the software, go to www.widsets.com. You will be prompted to download WidSets on your phone. After you have downloaded and installed the software then simply launch it. On launching it, you will see a number of balloon-like structures containing the names of different websites and publications. From these, just pick the one you are looking for.

WidSets are free of cost. Unlike RSS feeds that list updates on one side of the webpage, each WidSet gives you information from a different site.

 Maps
So what if you don't have an expensive GPS (geographical positioning system)-enabled device? You can view a street map of your neighbourhood and maybe even try to spot your own house in there. Try downloading GMaps or Google Maps on your mobile phone and you can view street level maps of places from all over the world.

However, in order to get directions and plot routes, you will have to have a GPS service on the handset. Until then, only viewing is possible.

Some freeware
If you are looking for some free entertainment, try out www.gamejump.com. In exchange for watching a couple of advertisements of two three seconds, you get to play a game that would otherwise cost you some money. The quality of the games is excellent. You can also download some free applications like calendars and e-mail clients among others.

We suggest you get an unlimited GPRS connection for your cellphone and make the best of mobile on Internet. Happy surfing!

Online Ad - Holes and Gaps

Original Article by Matt Mcalister

Somehow I keep expecting some company to break through and solve the problems with the Google AdSense model. As advertisers, buyers and media vehicles get smarter about efficiency, the holes in the system get bigger and bigger.

AdSense revenues help a lot of mid to large-sized web sites, but really more as incremental revenue. By the time you're big enough for AdSense to support your business there are several other revenue opportunities with larger payouts avaiable to you.

And there's no doubt that AdSense (and most Internet advertising) is failing to help people find and buy the things that matter to them. How can it be that we have an ad model that is considered wildly successful when a campaign or ad unit gets a click-through rate of 1%? And the reality is that it's much much worse than that on average.

Why are click through rates so low? Because the ads don't matter to people. They aren't relevant. They don't help people identify products or brands that matter to them. They don't help people locate the right deal at the right time.

Yes, some people get lucky if they're paying attention. There wouldn't have been $5B in search ad revenue in the market in 2005 if nobody was clicking on the ads. But the click performance and subsequent conversion rates suggest this kind of ad network is just a spray hose of wasteful bits showering the Internet with clutter.

It doesn't work for advertisers, either. Advertisers want more control over their ads, where they appear and to whom they are shown. Blanketing text links blindly across the Internet does not necessarily result in paying customers. They know they're wasting money, but they can't afford not to be present in the network.

The AdSense model does much more to help Google and the Google shareholders than it does to help any of the customers it is supposed to serve.

I think the Amazon affiliate program is much closer to a more sustainable ad model for the future. When you can track clicks all the way to a sale then everybody wins. The weakest link in the Amazon affiliate chain is the media vehicle which has to work a lot harder to drive clicks that convert to sale. But the buyer and the seller are both happy, and that's ultimately what matters most.

I'd love to see an ad network that is able to let media vehicles optimize the ad content and display rules for the ads. The look and feel of an ad is not going to crank up the conversion rates. Media vehicles need to help the right ad get to the right person.

For example, when I post on my blog, I should be able to flag a stream of ad content and define the type of algorhythm that makes the most sense for that post and the users who are most likely to read it. This post should probably link to lead generation service providers even though I haven't explicitly used the term "lead generation" anywhere in the post…uh, well, you get the idea.

Likewise, users should be able to self-identify as buyers. I haven't yet setup a wifi network in my home, so I'd love for every tech-related web site I visit to show me the latest deals and setup guides and retailers for wifi gear. I'd actually like the content on all those sites to adjust, as well. I want to see what's new and interesting at these sites, but they should be able to surface content from deep in their archives that is relevant to the things I'm actively pursuing. My intent should edit the home page for me.

I guess I'm saying that somebody needs to build a service that on one side connects directly into an advertiser's sales conversion or transaction systems and on the other side distributes marketing links and images for media vehicles to take and optimize. The system should track performance across the chain and offer optimization options at all points along that chain.

Pieces of this exist and some of it is very complicated, I know, but I don't see why efficiencies can't be improved. And if enough advertisers are able to offer affiliate programs to track impression-to-click-to-sale, then they may even start competing with eachother and offer better incentives to media vehicles that find customers for them.

Users would see ads for things they want to buy. Advertisers would sell more product. And media vehicles would earn more from the revenue share.  Where's the down-side?