Online Media Cultist

Social networking has entered an interesting phase. There’s a ton of them, for starters. The launch of a new social networking website with “awesome web 2.0 features” and “media sharing capabilities” won’t even illicit a slow, drawling yawn anymore. There’s simply too many of them out there already, with titans MySpace, Facebook, and a handful of others soaking up market share.

This state of being has prompted entrepreneurs and web companies to therefore bring social networking features to people rather than create a destination social networking website presence. Ning allows people to create their “own” social network “for free in seconds.” Ning’s easy-to-use DIY social networking platform is doing hot business – it’s rocking a sub-500 rank on Alexa these days.

So of course our good friends at Google have been watching this with great interest. And as of tonight, a “preview release” of Google Friend Connect will be available here.

What they’re doing is intriguing: allow website publishers to easily add social networking features to their existing website by adding a few lines of code. The hope is that the lure of “user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community” will let publishers do what they do best while providing low maintenance “social features” to their sites.

A Washington Post piece uses musician Ingrid Michaelson’s site as an example, and this is where I finally get around to trying to answer the question I asked as the title to this story.

If a musician like Michaelson can easily promote herself on her own website, provide information about shows and CDs, and provide places for fans to chat, interact, post reviews and pictures… why would she need MySpace again?

The mountain that is MySpace was and is built on the backs of people just like Michaelson, let’s remember. Musicians signed up there because of the ease and lack of expense to set up a site with social networking tools. And to be sure, there’s plenty of reason for musicians to maintain a presence there for some time to come because of its huge and worldwide audience.

But if fans of Ingrid Michaelson have the choice of participating in her community at her MySpace page or her own site with equivalent social networking features, I think many will end up choosing the latter.

And as Mashable notes: “In practice, this means that anyone will be able to log in, for example, with their OpenID on some blog, and converse with their Gtalk, Facbeook, or Plaxo friends. The web as a platform, it’s finally happening, folks.”

This makes a number of assumptions, of course. Will publishers adopt and stick with Google Friend Connect? Will the features be equal or better than those available at a MySpace or Facebook? Will interacting with Google’s social features be easy and intuitive for the average user?

Ifs aside, Google Friend Connect has the potential to take social networking to a new and more “distributed phase” and potentially put some scare into the existing kings of the MySpace mountain.

This video exploring new features on Google Earth 4.3 is pretty cool, and gets cooler the deeper in you go. The 3D buildings layer is amazing. Baltimore was used as the example, and it had me wishing for more episodes of The Wire!

It hit home for me this morning – not enormously revelatory of course to anyone paying attention – that we’re in the midst of a great and sweeping period of mergers and acquisitions right now in the tech and Internet space. We’re probably in something like the “latter web 2.0 days” of the Internet’s evolution, a time where big players are swallowing littler ones in an effort to grab market share, where the companies who produced the best ideas and services and were lucky enough to grab eyeballs and users and customers along the way are now setting themselves up for the long haul, and the sad shakeout of those companies who didn’t make it will continue to play out as spaces continue to become better defined.

Just taking a look at the news this morning, we see that Microsoft announced the acquisition of Rapt, a company involved with online advertising technology. Technology companies are now advertising companies, and Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and so on have been gobbling up companies and technology left-and-right for the last year or two now in an effort to gain an edge.

We also see Microsoft still trying to strategize its way toward a merger with Yahoo. The argument goes that Microsoft + Yahoo > Google. We’ll see how that goes.

Moving on, we see AOL making great strides to propel itself back into the elite tech companies pantheon. Just this week the acquisition of Bebo was announced, and now rumors say that the acquisition of “out of the box” social networking platform Kickapps could be next.

As the economy overall remains jittery, I think we’ll see this overall trend continue. Soon enough though new-fangled semantic web services will appear, social networking will evolve to its next phase, online video advertising models and companies will mature, website traffic metrics will improve, and overall Internet usage will shift.

And then we’ll be in a new place, and it’ll be fascinating to see how it all plays out then as well.

There’s a great article by Andy Beard and fascinating subsequent conversation between Beard and TechMeme founder Gabe Rivera here.

In short, Beard discovered that TechMeme’s Google PageRank had mysteriously dropped from a 6 or 7 to a 4 in a short period of time. Mysterious is the word, by the way, as TechMeme has always been and continues to be a high quality aggregator of tech news conversations and there is seemingly no reason for Google to hammer it in its search listings in such a significant and terrifying way.

I say significant because if any person on the planet started a new blog on Blogger right now, you’d get assigned a PR 4 in all likelihood. And I say terrifying because when Google hammers your relative search rank, it has the potential to cripple your business and there’s normally very little you can do about it aside from praying, hoping, and tweaking your page content and then praying/hoping that a month or two or three in the future your ranking will be magically restored.

If any of this interests you in the slightest – and it should if you’re a web publisher, interested in search, or wonder how people on the Internet end up driving traffic and making money – head over and check out Andy’s post and its comments.

The first sentence of the third paragraph of a New York Times story covering Google’s launch of video ad units to its Adsense members that include YouTube videos says it all: “The service, which represents the first major combination of a Google product with YouTube, will give video creators wide distribution beyond YouTube via Google’s network, known as AdSense.”

We also know that Google will share revenue from the ads with web publishers and video content creators. So beyond that, what does it all mean?

Mathew Ingram frames the big picture question: “Whether this is a breakthrough use of YouTube as an advertising platform, or a lame scramble by Google to justify the billions it spent for the video-sharing site, depends on who you believe.”

Andy Beal provides some detail on video content providers that will be launched with the program, such as TV Guide Broadband and lonelygirl15.

A significant question will surely be whether or not Google/YouTube can provide compelling video content that a) web publishers will be willing to run on their sites and b) whether said content will be interesting enough for audiences to sit through to make money for three parties: web publishers, video content creators, and Google/YouTube.

A bunch of websites, including Lost Remote, are quoting Brightcove’s CEO as saying that getting high traffic sites to run “arbitrary content” is a difficult proposition. Which may well be true, but something tells me that Google will have more success at this than Brightcove.

Overall, I see this as an interesting experiment and strategy, but whether or not it will be successful remains to be seen. It’s certainly a side-run around the big question stemming from Google’s purchase of YouTube: how will they make money on a massively popular video site fueled by user contributed video content? We’re starting to see the answer: carefully selected commercial and “amateur” video will have some form of advertising, some of which will run on YouTube, and now we see that some will run on websites that already are part of the Google Adsense program.

Which is one of the places where Google makes real money.

There’s been some chitty-chatter through the weekend about alleged leaked reports that Google has plans to deploy a “Facebook-killer” social networking platform that will allow users and developers to tinker and manipulate a new web platform to their heart’s delights.

Tony Hung makes the great point that the real killer app is the ability to get lots and lots of people to congregate on a site, and then figure out ways to keep them around while getting new hordes to come by. That’s what Facebook is doing particularly well these days.

Technology is great, fantastic, amazing. But in terms of web platforms, everyone is playing with pretty much the same toolkit. A new social network based upon fancy technology – even with Google’s overwhelming presence on the web – will have a hard time breaking through if there’s not more “there” there than that.

And that’s that.

Can you imagine living in a society where one day the government decides it’s not so into that whole “Google thing” and decides to up and block it for the whole country? Well, that’s what happened in Iran.

It’s commonplace and even fun in the United States to complain about Google. They’re too big, have too much power over user information, make silly acquisitions with the billions of dollars that they find in the couch cushions of their luxuriant Mountain View, California offices, and so forth.

Personally, as a web publisher, I have had frustrating experiences dealing with Google. Finding a human being who will listen to a legitimate query with regard to Google’s famously mysterious search algorithm and Page Rank system can be an exercise in masochism (though to their credit they have improved at this over the last year or two).

But really Google is an extraordinary search engine, a ubiquitous term that means being able to sort through millions upon millions of web pages and find information nearly instantly – from the entertaining to educational to profane – that only a few short years back would require tedious hours of research.

Clearly, Iran’s government is afraid of what its people would do with such a powerful window upon the world. While it claims to be concerned about moral corruption and foreign influence, it’s not hard to believe that the real concern is to maintain its grip on power.

To quote the great Tenacious D: the government totally sucks.

When Google News announced that it was going to add “participant comments” last month, I had a lot of questions, such as:

* How are “participants” found, invited to comment, and verified as participants?
* Will participant comments be able to be commented upon by “non-participants” i.e. regular folk?

One month in, it’s been reported that “so far only about one hundred people have bothered to e-mail Google News and go through the complicated hassle of commenting on a story.”

Maybe Google News will have more luck with its bold move to publish wire stories on its own site, as opposed to linking out to the hundreds of websites who have deals with wire services.

In any event, Google is clearly looking to up the ante in content publishing, moving past its search and tools core to publishing (or republishing) content, inviting user interaction, and so on. This all equates to more people spending more time on Google media properties.

But in the case of participant comments, it’s not finding wide adoption as yet. It’s very interesting to see Google struggle with editorial activities that require close human interaction, as opposed to its dominance over algorithmic-driven services.

YouTube’s announcement that it is finally going to start running video ads along with some “media partner” videos is causing all kinds of reactions across the blogospheric Milky Way.

In my view, the biggest takeaway is that we’re finally seeing how Google – which purchased YouTube for about $1.6 billion – thinks it can make money from online video, which will surely be massively influential on how the rest of the industry attempts to do the same for some time to come. The basics are: run an overlay ad that pops up on part of the video a short time after the video starts playing, and allow users to either click an “x” to “opt out” of the ad or click a play button to pause the original video and play the video ad. The key in the case of YouTube is to only run the ads on “approved” videos, which avoids the sticky issue of placing advertising on top of content that may not be copyright protected or may include content of questionable standards.

Personally, I’m surprised to see a major shift away from a 15-second or so pre-roll and post-roll method of video advertising, which seemed poised to become something of a standard. Doing it this way does a few things: guarantees that eyeballs will view the ad, which satisfies advertisers who are paying to get their wares seen. The big question is which form of advertising is less obtrusive: pre-roll or overlay during the video? Again, personally, I’m happy to get the short pre-roll ad out of the way straight off so that I can then simply enjoy the video without worrying about taking action to opt-out of advertising. But this form of advertising is so new that Google/YouTube likely has the power to create an industry standard.

Meanwhile, the conversation in the blogosphere is focused on who invented the video ad overlay concept first. VideoEgg seemed poised to claim the title, though this morning Mike Arrington at TechCrunch seems overwhelmed in explaining that “everyone” invented video ads “first” (YouTube, VideoEgg, Brightcove, and Adbrite all argue that they either were “thinking about it” or doing it first!).

Jim Kukral closes off the debate nicely by writing: “The fact is, it doesn’t matter who did it first. YouTube is the biggest shark in the pond, and they did it before everyone else.” I’ll just extrapolate that to mean “they did it in a big way before everyone else.”

Around my office, we like to say that when you come up with a good idea, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Someone else has already come up with it, or is thinking about it at the same time!

The Internet may still very nearly spin around the axis (matrix?) of Google search, but people like Yahoo’s content and services at least a little bit better, according to a new study from the University of Michigan American Consumer Satisfaction Index.

The relaunch of Yahoo’s portal is cited as a reason why Yahoo’s customer satisfaction is on the rise, as well as its e-mail, “social networks and other features.” Meanwhile, Google’s applications and services are not as visible to the average user.

In my view, GMail is superior to Yahoo e-mail, though I’ve heard that people like improvements that have been made to the latter. In terms of social networks, I can’t believe that either Yahoo 360 or Orkut could have made much of a difference in peoples’ responses. I can definitely see the difference if Yahoo’s “web 2.0″ acquisitions such as del.icio.us, Flickr, and MyBlogLog were cited. That’s a pretty great trio of efficient, elegant, and popular web services right there.

I wonder if Google cares very much about this study. As long as it continues to own search and make zillions through its Adsense and Adwords services, they will continue to laugh all the way to the e-bank. Internet Marketing Monitor rightly notes that, “The article suggests that Google’s relatively unchanged interface and dismal marketing of its non-search services give users the impression that little has changed at the site. Those of us who look beyond the interface realize that this is not the case. But most users don’t go much deeper than the outside.”

That said, Yahoo has smartly improved in areas that it needed to – recognizing Google’s dominance in search – and it’s paying off. Another four-year study, produced by Nielsen/NetRatings, proves the old Internet axiom that content is still king.

According to the study, people are consuming online content like never before, watching videos and reading news and entertainment content, “surpassing activities such as sending e-mails, shopping or searching for information.”

While at first glance, these seem to be fairly obvious “revelations,” they are pretty stunning when looking at the short history of the web. E-mail, for instance, is one of the first “killer apps” of the online world. It’s something that grandparents do everyday as part of their lives. People who can barely turn on a computer know how to “Google” search terms to find relevant information.

But the increase in broadband penetration, coupled with the serious and massive effort to increase the quality and quantity of online media and entertainment offerings, has fundamentally shifted the way in which people consume content overall.

People spend more time online today than they do watching television. As recently as four or five years ago, this would have seemed like a farfetched notion.

In other words, the Internet is not just a place to write to friends and family and find relevant information. It’s a place where people can immerse themselves in deep social networks, create and share media, and watch (and interact with!) videos and other forms of entertainment.

So, both surveys show that Yahoo is looking at the long run and improving in areas that reflect where people are spending increasing amounts of time.