Category Archives: Internet

May 04 2013
Leave a comment
Internet

It Ain’t Always a Problem You’re Solving

Twice this week I’ve seen posts advising entrepreneurs to “be very clear about what the problem is that you’re trying to solve.”

And yet, that framework often simply does not apply. What problem did Twitter solve? What about Instagram? Or YouTube? Or Facebook?

More broadly, what problem does TV solve? Or radio? Or the movies?

Things that entertain us, or allow us to communicate in novel ways, or that give us new forms of self-expression don’t really solve problems. They satisfy needs.

Building something that satisfies a need is quite different from making something that solves a problem. If you’re an entrepreneur, it’ll help if you know which of these things you’re trying to do.

Apr 25 2013
Leave a comment
Digital Media, Internet, Social Networks

This Explains Everything

number-of-friends-vs-age3

Stephen Wolfram unleashed a motherlode of data in a post yesterday: Data Science of the Facebook World. If you’re in the social media business don’t just read it, study it; there are some incredible insights here and helpful visualizations of the data.

I particularly like the chart above: it explains almost everything. Why photo-sharing apps and networks are so very viral. Why Facebook had to buy Instagram. Why Twitter and Pinterest (and interest-graph services) may be better long-term businesses than Facebook. Why many social networks explode then wither. Why companies that build graphs more slowly, methodically (i.e., LinkedIn) may in fact be more durable long-term.

Our online graphs and networks are most dense when we’re in our late teens and early twenties. Apps and services that tap into these particular rich, dense networks can explode. They can also die off quickly as people get older, tastes change, or better alternatives come on the scene.

If I were a VC investing in these areas, I’d commit this chart to memory.

Apr 18 2013
4 Comments
Internet, Media Business, Video

99 Problems, Video Discovery Ain’t One

This post is part of a conversation-by-blog with Hunter Walk about this question: “Is video discovery a scalable business?” Read Hunter’s post first.

Dear Hunter-

You had me at “video discovery.”

That may sound odd coming from me. After all our startup launched Vodpod in 2007 — “Pinterest for video” long before Pinterest ever launched! — and Showyou in 2011, and both services frequently get lumped into the “video discovery” category.

I find it hard to argue with any of your points given both personal experience with the services we’ve built and close observation of the online video world going all the way back to 1997 (I think you were in college then, right?). Pair up almost any form of media — music, video, news, blogs, events, concerts — with the word “discovery” and you’ve got trouble. For all the reasons you point out, and more.

Take “music discovery.” Remember all those “music discovery” startups? Of course not. Turns out no one wanted music discovery. We just wanted to listen to some music. We wanted a better radio. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

I think that lesson is this: that by framing a service as “media discovery” you unwittingly adopt the framework and mentality of “utlity” services and apps: “What is the pain-point for the user?” And that framework almost never works when it comes to media. I’ve got 99 problems, “media discovery” ain’t one.

That doesn’t mean, however, that the future is dim for new video services and apps. Just the opposite, I think. As Chauncey Gardner wisely observed, we “like to watch.” We want to be entertained. And informed. And nothing is as entertaining as video. I mean, my God, did you see that Trolololo video?

Devices like the iPad (and to a lesser extent the smartphone) demand we rethink where and how we’re entertained. When we talk about tablets we talk about how they’re a replacement for PCs. But they’re also replacing televisions. They’re portable screens we can carry around the house, from a comfy chair to our beds. We use our tablets in the evenings and the weekends, sometimes alongside our TV, sometimes as a replacement for it. And when we tune in on these devices, we don’t want to snack, we want to gorge.

And while YouTube is a colossus that stands astride the web, it hasn’t cracked the code here. We ask people who have just downloaded Showyou about how they use the YouTube app. You won’t be surprised, I suspect, to learn that the main reasons they launch the YouTube app are (1) to search for a video, or (2) when they’ve tapped a link on a web page which in turn spawns the YouTube app. People generally don’t (yet) think: “Oh, it’s 9PM, I’m tuning into YouTube.”

So, I see a bigger, more expansive opportunity for startups here. A chance to build a new kind of entertainment platform for the 21st century. One that plays to the strengths of the Internet, that taps into its architecture of abundance, its use as a “communication” (i.e., social) platform, its openess; but that does so within the context of how and why we use our tablets.  That’s a huge opportunity; but it’s something very different, and more profound, than “video discovery.”

Aug 02 2012
Leave a comment
Internet, Startups

Of Mercenaries and Missionaries

Right at the end of my time at college I discovered the Mac. I remember being astounded at just how much better it was than anything else I had tried to use. I was struck by the care taken with the whole user experience. I had a sense of connection via the object with the designers. I started to learn more about the company, how it had been founded, its values and its structure. The more I learnt about this cheeky almost rebellious company the more it appealed to me, as it unapologetically pointed to an alternative in a complacent and creatively bankrupt industry. Apple stood for something and had a reason for being that wasn’t just about making money.

Jony Ive, talking about why he joined Apple

If you had to pick a company in Silicon Valley (and maybe the US) with the strongest culture, Apple would have to be at the top. Really, who is better? The loyalty of their top executives is astonishing. Jony Ive, 20 years (he joined in 1992). Eddy Cue, 23 years. Phil Schiller, 17 years at Apple all together, 15 of them in his latest run. Scott Forstall, 15 years. Tim Cook, 14 years. Bob Mansfield, 13 years.

For each of them I suspect Apple is their life’s work. Ive’s quote is telling; it succinctly sums up why people come to Apple and why they stay. I have friends who work at Apple and almost all of have said something similar to me over the years. By all accounts, it’s not an easy place to work. It is full of stress. But people go, and stay, because they feel like they’re part of a larger mission and cause. It’s why this video was so incredibly important when Steve Jobs returned in 1997.

But Apple, alas, is not the norm. A more mercenary culture is pretty pervasive in Silicon Valley, and indeed in the tech world. I saw it throughout the late 1990s, and you see it very much in evidence today. People latching on to a rising startup for a year, two, three or four; looking for riches through that IPO or the acquisition. Then ditching out and on to the next thing.It’s accepted practice among the career-minded and ambitious. But it can have a devastating effect on the startups those folks join; when times get tough, or even a little uncomfortable, the mercenaries are always the first to flee.

If I were an active investor, this would be one of the key ares where I’d focus. Is the company full of mercenaries? Or missionaries?

And as someone hiring people at a startup, it’s one of the first things I try to understand. Are you just another mercenary? Or do you want to help us change the world, through thick and (a lot of) thin?

Jul 20 2012
14 Comments
Apple, Digital Media, Internet

Where A Photo Is Worth 10 Words

Content was never king. Contact was always king.Douglas Rushkoff (h/t @aweissman)

This line from Rushkoff has been my mantra the past few months. It’s a simple but sublime observation about the Internet, and it came to mind again today while reading about Instagram.

In case you missed it: some people are hopping mad about Instagram because it “debases photography.”

Where these critics go wrong is they think that Instagram is about photography and photo-sharing.

I’ve been on Instagram for a while, from when it launched, but it wasn’t until I saw how my 13-year-old daughter and her friends use it that I truly understood it. For them, it’s a replacement for Facebook. They share photos, but those are just points of entry, a way to a conversation. They are status updates, expressed visually.

They tart up their photos and comments using an array of 3rd party apps like Versagram, PicFrame, Emoji. It’s a ping to let your friends know you exist, and what your doing; and you hope for a “like” (a ping back) to let you know you’re not alone on the network.

Of course, this is what we’ve all been doing with Instagram. We’ve just been under the illusion we were sharing photos. Seeing the behavior of these 13-year-olds made that clear to me.

We’re not using Instagram to make art. Or to hone our craft as photographers. It ain’t Flickr.

We’re just trying to connect with our friends, to start a conversation. Instagram is really a communications platform disguised as a photo app.

This is true for almost all successful social media services. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr — they work because they help us to communicate. What we think of as acts of self-expression are really just opening lines.

Which brings me to video, and to “social video apps.” The real way to gauge these apps, to judge them, is to ask whether they help you craft a great opening line; a way to start a conversation.

The photos you uploaded to Facebook from your birthday, the picture of the sunset with a high contrast filter you made with Instagram, that song you soundtracked, the precious cat-cuddling-with-warthog video from  YouTube you tweeted — they all might be great opening lines.

But sharing that blurry, grainy, shaky video you took with your phone where you can’t really make out what’s happening? Well, the jury is out on that. And so we have the founder of Socialcam admitting (after the sale of his app to Autodesk) “that the comparison to Instagram was a fallacy from the beginning.” The two apps launched today (Ptch and Vyclone) are exciting because it’s possible to imagine a way to craft a video using your phone that might be compelling.

But here’s the other thing — it helps if it’s easy and fast to craft that opening line. Instagram works because we can take and make a fun cool photo in a few seconds. Same with sharing a link to an article, or a song, or a video. Making a video takes so much more time and effort.

To beat this metaphor into submission, it’s hard to craft an opening line with a video you’ve taken. It’s much easier to do with a video you’ve found and loved.  Most of us are good at judging if a video is funny, interesting, beautiful, worth sharing. Few of us are good at making a video worth sharing.

Why did YouTube succeed on the web?  Because they gave us a place where we could always find something great that we could share; and they allowed us to take those videos and talk about them wherever we liked; our blogs, our Myspace pages, and more recently on Facebook and Twitter.

In this new world, where we spend more of our time on mobile and tablet devices and where apps reign supreme, we need something different. My hunch is that the social video apps that succeed will be the ones that give us those great opening lines; that make it easy for us to find videos that are cool, amusing, incredible with just a few taps or swipes.

But Instagram shows us, if nothing else, those apps will need to do one more thing; provide us a place to talk with our friends about the videos we find.

Instagram could have been a photo app, and outsourced the conversation to our existing social networks. They won in the photo space because they figured out that we all really wanted to connect and talk, and they gave us a fun and new way to do that.

 

Jul 19 2012
Leave a comment
Facebook, Internet

Fun with Statistics

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics, Mark Twain or Benjamin Disraeli

You know that feeling that’s both amusing and depressing? Is there a word for it? “Demusing?”

Nothing is more demusing than reading a breathless blog post that some new app has gotten “millions of users” in a few weeks time.

This is happening with increased frequency, as more services use the “frictionless” sharing and signup tools offered by Facebook to drive what looks like spectacular growth, which really isn’t. This is not to blame Facebook for their platform; instead, I’m asserting that it’s trivially easy to twist some of the data based on their platform to mislead people; or, more commonly and more innocently, to allow people to mislead themselves using that data.

The canonical demusing blog post used to go like this: “Look at this, this app got 42 million users in 3 weeks. They’re crushing it!” You’d dig and find out that what happened is 42 million people clicked a dialog on Facebook providing authorization to an app. With blogs posts like this one, most readers and writers alike have gotten more sophisticated, and properly skeptical, of these claims.

The newer form of these bemusing posts goes like this: “I now know that what matters is engagement, not signups. But look at this app! I checked out AppData and 50% of their MAUs are DAUs. They’re crushing it!”

Not really.

You see, the way that the Facebook API works, it can appear that a service or app has a lot of daily active users. But in almost every single case where you see a breathless, too-good-to-be-true claim about users or usage, it’s a result of the quirks of how the Facebook API works. What appears to happen is this: if your app or services asks for offline permission to read your stream, or asks for permission to access your news feed, it can appear that you are “active on a daily basis” even if you haven’t touched that app for a week or a month.

For example, a service might ask for permission to check your Facebook newsfeed in order to grab stories being shared by your friends on Facebook. If that service checks your newsfeed every day to see if there are new stories on your behalf, it will appear that you are active every day when you look at the data presented on services like AppData. Even if you haven’t opened up the app. That’s because to Facebook’s API, it looks like you’re active.

I follow a really simple rule: do the stats look better than Instagram’s at a similar point in its history? Instagram is the fastest growing, most successful app or service I’ve seen the last two years. People use it, and people love it. It has taken Instagram two years to get to 20 million monthly users (as reported by AppData). It has taken them two years to get to 7 million daily active users (a phenomenal number).  For those of us who have been following, the growth has really exploded the past 5 months.

If the stats from the too-good-to-be-true app or service are half, or even a tenth, as good as Instagram’s but the service is only a few months old, take a breath and step back. Check out the signup process, look to see if the app or service has asked to access the news feed or for other similar permissions. Do a Twitter search for the app or site URL to see if there is real, frequent use. Look at your own feeds to see if your friends or people you know use the app.

You just can’t and shouldn’t rely on the publicly reported DAUs or MAUs most apps and services using the Facebook; you’ll need to dig deeper to find out it’s as good as Instagram or instead a mirage like this.

Jul 17 2012
Leave a comment
Internet

Hey Yahoo: Remember You’re an Internet Company

Is Yahoo a media company? Or a tech company?

That was how many framed the debate yesterday after Yahoo announced Marissa Mayer would be its next CEO, and I’ve personally found that puzzling. Why would anyone think Yahoo is — or ought to be — a media company?

Media companies do one thing primarily: make media. They create or buy magazine and newspaper journalism, radio programming, television shows, and movies. They distribute the media they create or buy across multiple platforms: print, broadcast radio and television, cable & satellite television, satellite radio, and the Internet. They make it available for free (supported by advertising) in some cases, or require you to pay for it in others.

The talents and muscles that media companies develop are distinct and different. They invest in people who make media, or people who are good at dealing with people who make media: writers, editors, producers, artists, photographers, directors, actors, talent agents. The best and strongest media companies develop institutional ways to know when a story is good or how to report it; whether a TV show is compelling and well-written; if a comedian is funny; or what directors or actors would best suit a specific show or movie.

ABC, HBO, Time magazine, the NY Times, ESPN — these are media brands owned and run by media companies. And on the Internet we now have new media companies like Gawker, the new new AOL (with strong media brands like TechCrunch, Engadget), Vox (with SportsNation and The Verge), Maker Studios, and GigaOm.

It’s true that Yahoo does have people who create media, and they have some media properties:OMG, Shine, Yahoo News, and the new Yahoo Originals videos. And perhaps it has, or has had, aspirations to do more of that.

But at it’s vital core, Yahoo is not a media company. This traffic analysis from Hitwise (it’s from spring 2011, but I’m pretty sure it hasn’t changed much) shows what Yahoo really is:

Yahoo started in a trailer at Stanford by two students in the Computer Science program and did one thing very well: help us to find things on the Internet by categorizing and cataloging web sites. That evolved into web-based email services, then search (outsourced but made available on Yahoo), then other informational services like Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Sports.

The bulk of its traffic, its expertise, its institutional knowledge, and its value to consumers revolves around helping people to communicate and helping them to find information via the Internet.

Yahoo is is an Internet company, not a media company.

Internet companies are distinct from tech and media companies. Absent the Internet they would not exist. They have different muscles; they invent software to do one or more of the following four things:

1. Help people find information on the Internet

2. Enable people to communicate on the Internet

3. Provide platforms for anyone to make content and to distribute it on the Internet

4. Make it easy to buy and sell goods and services on the Internet

Google, Amazon, eBay, Skype, Craigslist, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, Foursquare, Yelp, Linkedin: all do one or more of these things, and all are Internet companies. None of them could exist without the Internet.

Yes, some of these companies sell advertising to generate revenue; but selling advertising does not make you a media company.

Making great software is critical for each of these companies. Because of Moore’s law, it is possible to constantly improve the ways people find information, communicate, express themselves, or buy things on the Internet. Failure to innovate, to constantly improve your software, provides an opening for others to take your place.

I don’t know if Marissa Mayer will be able to turn Yahoo around, or if anyone is capable of doing that. Yahoo has had great software inventors and engineers over its relatively long history, but its many of those muscles have withered and the institutional knowledge has dissipated.

Looking at that traffic chart and thinking about what Internet companies have to do to be relevant and to grow, Mayer’s hiring makes sense to me. Yahoo has to get back in the game of making the best ways for people to communicate. And they have to reclaim the ability to help people find information. Email, search and the Yahoo front page are the reasons why 700 million people still come to Yahoo each month; if they don’t restore the health of those assets, they lose. Yahoo has to reclaim its ability to make great software in these areas again. Mayer’s background and skills would seem to align with those urgent priorities.

On the bright side for Mayer and her team, mobile truly has changed everything and that creates opportunities for Yahoo. Google and Facebook are behind on mobile, and with some smart acquisitions Yahoo might be able to reclaim leadership in some of these areas. Gmail has become a mess. More targeted, vertical search is more useful and important on mobile devices.

And, there is this final irony about Mayer’s hiring. Google was once the grand Internet partner of Apple, before the great schism. Maybe there is an opportunity for Yahoo, under Mayer, to fill that role.

Apr 13 2011
Leave a comment
Apple, Digital Media, Internet, Television, Video

A New Way to Watch

Today our startup launched a new app for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch — Showyou. I’ve worked in digital media for almost 20 years now — shocking, that — and of the many products I’ve worked on, I can say without hesitation this is the one I’m the most excited to have helped create.

I love our new Showyou app most of all because it’s a joy to use. But I’m also excited about Showyou because it and other similar apps that are sure to follow have the potential to change how we watch TV — and what we watch.

We spend more time watching television than consuming any other form of media. Kids 8-18 years old watch television nearly 4 and a half hours a day — far more than they spend with any other kind of media.

And yet television has remained the most shackled platform, with the least range of choice.  With books, music, magazines and more recently the internet we’ve become accustomed to an abundance of choice. The television, on the other hand, has been locked down for most of the last 50 years, limited (for most people) to a set of channels chosen and delivered by their cable companies, and with programming on those channels determined by a small, select group. Maybe 1000 people, total, determine what most of us watch — or can watch. They’ve offered up some great stuff, to be sure — The Wire, Mad Men, The Daily Show and Colbert Report. But we’ve also gotten a lot of this.  And this. And this.

Despite the growing power of the Internet and social media, television has continued to reign supreme from 8-11PM in most homes. But cracks are starting to show. Data just released this week from the makers of the ReadItLater app shows that the heaviest usage of the iPad during the prime time hours. And we know that streaming from Netflix now accounts for a huge percentage of bandwidth consumed in the evenings.

And now, with Apple TV and  Airplay, your iPad or iPhone or iPod Touch just turned into a new remote control for your TV. New apps like Showyou have the potential to change where we get programming for our televisions, and indeed what we watch.  Now available: tens of millions of hours of programming from the internet, chosen by our friends, or people we follow on social networks like Twitter or Vodpod who have tastes or interests similar to ours. Other platforms from other companies  — Android, Windows, and more — will surely give us more options and more choice still over time.

History shows us what happens when these kinds of disruptions occur. In 1985, when cable TV was still in its infancy, the viewers watched broadcast networks 45% of the time. By 2009, that had dropped to 25%, and basic cable has risen 10-fold, from  a 3.5% share to a 36% share.

Even though online video has had explosive growth the past five years, it accounts for just a small fraction of the time we spending watching television or video. Just like cable in 1984. There is a now an opportunity for entrepreneurs to change all that.

And so a pitched battle is going to be waged for how we get programming for our televisions — and that will be a good thing for consumers.

Sep 01 2010
Leave a comment
Current Affairs, Internet, Politics

The Bogus Speech by Paul Otellini to the Aspen Institute

I read about a speech Paul Otellini gave last week and this lead from CNET caught my attention:

Intel Chief Executive Officer Paul Otellini offered a depressing set of observations about the economy and the Obama administration Monday evening, coupled with a dark commentary on the future of the technology industry if nothing changes.

Rather than rely on the CNET report I first read (which was somewhat confusing), I decided to do some primary research and try to find his speech. There is a video here and a transcript here provide so helpfully by Intel.

Otellini spends several minutes bemoaning the current situation particularly in education:

The trends are worrisome.

At one time, the US could boast about the best students in math, science, and engineering.  Our research centers were without peer.  No country was more attractive for start-up capital or global investors.  We seemed a generation ahead of the rest of the world in information technology.

That simply is no longer the case.  Over the past decade, our competitors have focused on the very things that made America’s innovative economy the strongest in the world.

A study released last month by the college board noted that the US has dropped from first to twelfth in the world for people ages 25-34 with college degrees over the past 30 years.

I thought this was all a buildup to some praise for the work done by the Obama administration and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to fix this state of affairs. After all, initiatives like the “Race to the Top” have garnered praise from the Left and Right (and even Republicans who are convinced Obama is a Muslim) and have done more to reform the public education system in America than all other federal efforts combined over the last 40 years.

But nary a word about that. Instead, Otellini, in an ominous tone, said this (which is what got such attention from folks who reported on his speech):

Unless government and business take firm actions to improve education, create a culture of investment and job creation in this country, then the next Intel or the next big thing will not be invented here. Jobs will not be created here. And wealth will not accrue here. Ultimately, we will face an inevitable erosion and shift of wealth — much like we are witnessing today in Europe.

(I guess he didn’t notice that Germany is kicking our ass right now economically).

Turns out all this fear-mongering was really just a set up for Otellini’s central plea — America is in jeopardy because our corporate tax rate is too high. And like a petulant baseball owner who threatens to move his team to another city unless the public builds him a new stadium, Otellini essentially says Intel will take its toys and move abroad if the corporate tax rate isn’t lowered.

(As an aside, I’m inevitably stunned that folks like Bill O’Reilly and other dime store patriots never jump on corporate yellow-bellied traitors like Otellini who’d stab their country in the back, throw their countrymen overboard, and move their companies to China to increase their profits by a few pennies per share. I’ll have to come back to that sometime).

Otellini could have noted for balance and context that the United States has the one of the lowest overall tax burdens in the world (and the lowest among developed nations) as a percentage of GDP. And that our corporate tax rates are high because we have insisted on absurdly low individual tax rates and aren’t willing to contemplate other ways of raising revenue through things like a consumption tax. All policies lobbied for by folks like Otellini and his peers. But that would have required intellectually honesty.

It was the lack of logic, of intellectual cohesiveness, that was so striking in the end.  Otellini argues (1) that government ought to do more, particularly with regard to education; (2) fails to acknowledge the stunning achievements in just the last 18 months by the Obama administration on this front; then (3) says his taxes are too high and Intel shouldn’t have to pay for anything or they’ll move.

Why all this hyperventilating about one speech by some guy who is the CEO of Intel? Because people who know better seem to take him seriously, even though they ought to know better. For it’s pretty clear he’s just a hack and a shill for the Republican party and not some Sage of San Joe — at least when it comes to public policy pronouncements.

One last note: folks like CNET ought to learn to do a little reporting and provide some context next time. Even a simple sentence like “Republican and Carly Fiorina supporter Paul Otellini said in Aspen…”

Jul 23 2010
4 Comments
Digital Media, Facebook, Internet

It’s What You Node

Chris Dixon has an excellent blog post up about social graphs — a must read if you’re in the social media or social apps space (Mathew Ingram wrote a nice follow up here on Gigaom).

Chris says:

In social graphs, the nodes are people and the edges friendship. <emphasis is mine>

And he goes on to suggest that we’ll see, in the coming months and years, new types of graphs around taste, endorsements, payments (“financial trust”), and local data. I think that’s right, but just partly.

The starting point for this discussion really ought to start with the node — that is, how and where we represent ourselves digitally.  Given  the gigantic success of Facebook, there is an implicit assumption that all our nodes are belong to Facebook — that it will be the primary place we express ourselves digitally —  and Facebook will thus own all the graphs that matter as a result (I think this is, essentially, the argument Mathew makes on Gigaom).

But for most of us, one node to rule all graphs just won’t do. Think about your interests, what you like doing, how you spend your free time, what your passions are, what music you like. Can you really express your full sense of self — all those things you both love and do — on and through Facebook, with your contacts on Facebook? Are your Facebook friends truly interested in all of the details of all the things you do and like?

For most, I suspect, the answer is no. In fact, one of the biggest complaints I hear from people about Facebook is how “noisy” it is — that we’re subjected to a flood of information from friends and acquaintances we really don’t care about. I care about my friends and their families and where they went on vacation. But I might not care as much about my friend’s obsession with, say, fly fishing. Or how much they just loved that Rush song. I suspect this is a large part of Facebook’s poor consumer satisfaction results compared to other services. Their rush to facilitate sharing of everything, instead of sharing by and between friends of things related to their friendships, has come at a cost.

We need different nodes to express all the things we like, all the things we do. Ironically, though we mock Google’s cluelessness  when it comes to social, the best research I’ve seen on this comes from a Google employee. Each of us has different interests and passions which we in turn want to share with different groups of people. It’s why many of us share some things on Facebook, others on Twitter, and more still on our blogs or other sites and services. We each need to express ourselves through many nodes, on many different graphs.

Indeed, we’ve already see plenty of examples of this: communities on Flickr for those into photography; or last.fm for people passionate about their music; or flixster for movies. Big opportunities still exist to create services that allow for distinct and specific expression of self combined with the right graph. And these opportunities don’t play to Facebook’s strengths, because so much of this is about expression and publishing — not just the graph mapping the nodes. Indeed, this may be where Google still has a few very strong cards to play with assets like Blogger and Buzz and YouTube.

We’re increasingly focused on building a very particular graph at Vodpod, based on our unique type of nodes — collections of videos, many of them very deep, many of them very focused.  For the first couple of years, we concentrated just on the utility of our service — making it dead simple to build a video collection, using your favorite videos from any site on the web, and to share it on your blog or elsewhere.

But now that we have attained significant scale (nearly 6M videos, nearly a million members with many thousands with very deep collections, 10M unique visitors each month, videos from over 17,000 sites) we have the opportunity to build one of these more specialized graphs. In our case, it’s about connecting you with the right collector so that you can get a video feed tailored to your interests and tastes. Whether you’re interested in soccer, politics, viral videos, technology, or electronica.

We’re now able to do this with increasing sophistication at Vodpod. For example, if you visit my collection and sign up from that page, we’ll recommend other, similar collectors for you to follow:

While we’ve enabled “following” on Vodpod for years, we’ve not focused on building out a graph between and around our video-centric nodes until now. The data represented in these nodes  – these video collections — enables us to do this in ways other cannot.

We started this effort in just the last week, and are beginning to see very profound results. Will we build a graph as big and as important as Facebook’s? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean the opportunity isn’t huge — we think we’re in a unique position to provide the best way for people to find and watch videos, via our members’ extraordinary collections and the graphs we’re building around those nodes. That’s nothing to sneeze at, and I suspect there are other, similar opportunities out there.

← Older posts
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 32 other followers