yumio.net

Reading about Mowser’s demise (I sat in on a few mobile search meetings with Russell Beattie at Yahoo! a couple years ago), it reminded me that everytime smart people try to invent ways to deal with hardware limitations with software (like Mowser tried to do by smartly converting regular web pages into mobile web pages), they are burned in the end by hardware making the Moore’s Law jumps in capacity/capability that make the software solution moot.  One example is all those data archiving software solutions in the 90’s which are totally useless now that you can store tetrabytes of data for $50/month.  Another may be the way scaling “search” used to be trying to come up with ever-sophisticated algos for that one Sun server - while Google was just scaling with thousands and thousands of ever-more cheap Linux boxes.

Given that Y! will probably soon be part of Microsoft, it may not be such a good tip any more, but I noticed that in the last 30 days, I have been getting an inordinate amount of people from my former company (Yahoo!) signing up for Twitter and telling me that they are “following me”. 

This happened 3 times before in the last 2 years - where I saw a big surge in people from my Yahoo! network asking me to join their “network” - and especially people you would not have expected to be interested in social networks - once for Flickr, then for del.icio.us and finally for Facebook.  First 2 were bought by Yahoo!, and a billion dollar offer was made for the last one.

Is this the last gasp of Yahoo!’s bid to stay independent? Twitter????? (next may be justin.tv.

There’s a lot of buzz about Facebook these days, and the stats point to a still dominant MySpace. http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/11/myspace-still-the-king/

One factor in their differences that I think is critical to their product direction is that Facebook avoided getting swallowed up by Yahoo! whereas MySpace became part of the Fox-NewsCorp empire.  And I think in small but strategic ways, you see that in the product updates and directions of these two companies. 

Whereas Facebook still operates like a startup and makes major strategic bets like opening membership up to the public and this whole apps platform direction, MySpace has certainly stagnated in the product strategy and features department.  Having been at Yahoo! I can just imagine the “product leaders” at MySpace having to go thru endless committee meetings, research, and bureacracy to change anything in their product, and certainly any major risky bets getting quashed since the main business is such a cash-cow. 

You can also see in MySpace’s international sites (I read Japanese & Chinese) that their “globalization” efforts are purely functional - as they just machine translated the UI and launched it without any real consideration for cultural/social dynamics in those countries.  I am willing to bet lots of yen that some ”not in the target demographic” exec at NewsCorp gave some strategic decision to enter those large Asian markets, without any consideration for the product aspects of entering those markets.

Anyhoo - hats off to Facebook & the Zuck machine for “just doing it” and a very wise decision not to get bought by Yahoo!

As I was buying a digital “gift” (aka icons) on Facebook for Caterina who just had her baby, I saw that the one I wanted to buy was a limited edition (100,000 only! Buy now!) and it cost $1.  I don’t know how many of these Facebook sells each month, but it is easily a side business with the highest margins since all you need is to hire a cheap graphic designer in China, and then some social network where giving this stuff is easy.  Then I remembered my Econ 101 days when I taught the undergrads the golden principle of modern economics P=MC (price = marginal cost).  Obviously this is in a perfect market, but its still interesting to think about the marginal cost of digital goods, since you’d think its close to 0.  Once you’ve uploaded that icon, it pretty much just requires that the servers continue to run so that 2 people can buy - send - receive.  So at $1 an icon - that’s a pretty nice profit margin, as long as you got that social network - of course. 

I came to South by Southwest 2007/Interactive, not knowing what to expect.  The only information I had was that there were good parties at night.  So I was pleasantly surprised when I can honestly say that I learned a thing or two about web design, as well as the story behind Lonelygirl15 from its creators, Miles Beckett, Greg Goodfried, and Mesh Flinders (med-school drop out, lawyer, and film director wannabe) and how Genghis Khan obliterated the Russian knights in the 13th century (”The Ten Ways to Run a Startup like Genghis Khan“) from an Asian American dude named “Kevin Hale“.  

All in all, the people were normal folks (as normal as Web designers from the Bay Area can be considered normal), not snooty NYC design types, and mostly very friendly. I heard the attendance numbers were 5000+ (up 60% from last year) so that may have something to do with the normalization of the attendees.  Maybe not as edgy as it once was, and certainly not as entertaining as its Film and Music cousins, but it was certainly a worthwhile professional conference.

Good times…