Category: Internet/Web Companies

iPhone will take down Blackberry eventually

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I had a Blackberry Pearl and loved it.  I was planning to keep it – until i saw a friend’s iPhone.  It was just so frackin’ slick that i couldn’t stay away.  Does Blackberry do email better?  Yes.  Does Blackberry have some better/smaller sizes that are better for a cell phone?  Yes, definitely.  But is it as cool or fun to use an iPhone?  Not even close.

However, i always hear about people going back to their Blackberry’s b/c of the email capability.  I can understand that.  I don’t use my iPhone email for work everyday and it is harder to type.  But the other advantages heavily outweigh this one feature.

I then read this blog post by Tim O’Reilly about “Why the iPhone Will Beat the Blackberry.”  He write that Blackberry users are cell phone power users and:

power users are a minority, and while they point the way to the future, they tend to be disappointed when the rest of the market catches up with an inferior product that has a lower barrier to new users. So, my prediction: the Blackberry will become more like the iPhone, or the iPhone and its imitators will eventually eat its lunch, relegating it to a niche player. The iPhone is now the communications device to beat. 

I couldn’t agree more.  The iPhone is only getting better going at email and the Blackberry will never come close to the iPhone in slickness of features – including the iPod.   It’s only a matter of time before Blackberry goes down.

I heard a rumor that Microsoft was going to purchase Blackberry.  I don’t hear it anymore, but i think that’d be a great move for both companies.

MySpace vs. FB & the Top Social Network Sites

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As with most people, i’m obsessed with Facebook these days.  But is it the best?

From a numbers perspective, MySpace is still the big dog. I read an article yesterday from danah about how Facebook is attracting more affluent, middle-class users whereas MySpace indexes higher for less privileged users.  It’s a good read (article is here)

I also read today that Friendster is still hanging around.  The top social networks in the world are:

  1. MySpace
  2. Facebook
  3. Hi5
  4. Friendster
  5. Bebo

Hi5 is a huge social network in Europe.  I’ve heard from my Romanian friends that this is the go-to place for them.  From what i can tell, it’s a pretty standard site.   Bebo is a UK site that focuses on music, similar to how MySpace does. I think they’re a little more sophisticated in terms of functionality but they definitely haven’t hit it out of the park the way facebook has.

Friendster is a strange one though. It’s functionality is nothing special but it has been around for a long time and has lots of users.  The problem is that it doesn’t have anything unique or special about it and there’s no reason to go back every day.  It is less sketchy than MySpace but less cool than facebook.  It rides somewhere in the middle.  Social networking is such a large phenomenon that there is probably room for a player like this.

What do you think?  What has been your experience with these sites?

It's All About the Product – Yahoo! Makes a Change

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Yahoo! announced a change of CEO yesterday.  I love some of Yahoo! products like Flickr, MyBlogLog, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Maps, and Delicious.   When they bought Delicious, Google and Yahoo were neck in neck in terms of who had better products and a better vision.  Delicious opted to sell to Yahoo as they were better in social applications at the time.  Since then – for about a year now –  they’ve been getting their ass handed to them by Google on every front: Mail, Search, Calendar, Maps, etc.. They are just getting dusted.  Their products are no longer innovative nor even best of class.  I see this move as general frustration about this fact.  Jason Calacanis, an entrepreneur who speaks it like it is and is generally correct has a similar statement, saying:

“What this move shows is that–like Facebook, Apple, and Google–the founders are often times the best folks to run the business. Wall Street and investors are too caught up in the ‘professional CEO’ who knows how to ‘talk to Wall Street’ and get deals done. The fact is our business is about one thing: product.”

Facebook Will Take Over The Web

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I’ve been a long-time facebook user. Dartmouth was one of the first 10 schools on the service in 2000-2001 and you could tell even back then that it was a special service. I’ve always thought it was the best social network – even as MySpace and others came around.

Facebook is a better services than other social networks simply because it has better features. Sure they have the same as a lot of sites, but they’re engineered better and they resonate with users MUCH more. Facebook features provide feedback, they portray status and most importantly, they’re social. Two of my favorite features on the facebook service are:

  • picture-4.pngPhotos. Supposedly this was the feature that spurned The Platform (see below). This feature is very similar to other services like Yahoo Photos, Photobucket, etc. except with one exception – it’s social. You can tag people in your photos and when you do it – that photo shows up in that user’s profile. In the past, if a friend of yours had a photo of you, this was never identified and you would never know.  Or if you see a person in a picture with your friend, you can see who that person is and click through to their profile. Facebook made photo viewing easy and made it social feature instead of just a way to enhance your profile. This caused the facebook photo sharing to be the most popular photo network on the web (or at least a close #2). Check out this article for details
  • News Feed. RSS is a simple concept. It is publish/subscribe. You subscribe to get information from certain sources and updates to those sources are published to you. RSS readers are doing this for the web such as Netvibes, iGoogle, MyYahoo, and the Google Reader (which is what i use). Just as your email inbox is a place for receiving mail messages, RSS readers are a place to receive messages from the web that you’ve signed up for whether it is a blog or a website. Facebook has an activity RSS reader called “News Feed” which displays any activity of a friend of yours on your home page. Most people don’t realize it’s RSS, but that’s essentially what it is and instead of delivering web messages, it delivers your friends’ activity. That is social and this feature alone is what makes facebook better than any other social network. It is great at telling you what your friends and network is doing and that is always relevant.  I also wrote about this a few weeks ago here.

Last week facebook came out with a new feature called F8 and also known as The Platform. This is a huge deal and it will change the web for millions of users. This feature allows any company to develop an application to live inside Facebook and makes it easy for any facebook user to install, share and use. With this feature, facebook is now a platform of users and friends available for any application or company to access. I repeat, this is huge. It has always been my thought that going forward social networking is a foundational attribute of the web. Any activity you do online – shopping, reading, watching videos – is enhanced if you can see what your friends are doing (or have done) and can easily share it with them. For any traditional site (BestBuy.com, Google Maps, Fandango, etc.), it could be much better if it was built into facebook and showed you what your friends had purchased, or had done, or what their opinion is. I already love using the flickr, netflix, delicious, and other facebook applications that have been created in the first week and i’m positive the quality will only get better.

To summarize – Facebook is a great site and similar to how Google went from building a great search product to building just great products (gmail, docs, calendar, maps, etc.), facebook is now on the path to go from a great social network to being an integral aspect of the internet. Also similar to Google, they are winning not just because of their vision but also because they are better at the subtle differences in their features and the overall simplicity of their site which makes the experience usable and enjoyable. Little things like auto-complete textboxes, slick javascript, and empty whitespace is why the site is so usable. Facebook is primetime now and it’s only the beginning.

Twitter: Facebook's News Feed for People over 25

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picture-6.pngThe technorati are going insane about the website Twitter these days. It’s all people can talk about. It’s driving me nuts! One thing that i keep asking myself is, isn’t Twitter is just the same as Facebook’s status indicator and news feed? If you don’t know about this feature in Facebook, here’s what it is…

When you log on to Facebook, there’s a little window where you can write what you’re doing. The home page for each user is something called a “news feed” which displays what all your friends are doing. This could be their status that they’ve typed in, a change in their profile, a new message, etc.

picture-8.png

Kids on facebook have been using this feature A TON, everyday, all the time. Twitter does the exact same thing – except that it is ONLY the status description as you can’t do anything else on the site. Facebook is mostly used by people under 25 and it is used frequently. So basically Twitter took one (of the hundreds) of features of facebook and made a site around it for people over the age of 25. Not a bad idea, but doesn’t seem worthy of all the hubbub.

What do you think?

Technology Incantation for Muggles

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My friend danah boyd gave a talk at the Etech conference last month (link is here). I just got around to reading the speech which i thought was fantastic. She begins it….

Isn’t there something magical about how fast the Internet went from a defense project to a key part of social infrastructure? Isn’t there something magical about how grandparents are blogging and activists are remixing popular TV shows to make social commentary? It is my belief that if we stare solely at the technology, we lose track of the true magic that exists around us.

What she does in the speech is break down how startups, corporations and almost anyone thinks

if you want to think about people, you need to understand how technological and corporate decisions interface with people’s lives and practices…

danah breaks down America’s society into stages and then describes the top 5 priorities of each stage, which are:

Life Stage #1 Life Stage #2 Life Stage #3 Life Stage #4
* Friends * Sex * Labor * Family
* Attention * Friends * Family * Health
* Play/Leisure * Money * Money * Religion
* Sex * Play/Leisure * Power * Hobbies
* Consumption * Labor * Property * Friends

As someone who is moving from stage 2 to stage 3 (damn that’s scary) i see this switch happening. Friends are harder to get access to as work and relationships/marriage take a more important role in everyone’s life.

I like how she can switch from looking at behavior patterns to how corporations and startups behave and deliver products:

Startups typically are naive about people’s practices but utterly passionate about technology. If they’re lucky, their technology will reach the hands of a population for whom it will make complete sense. This population will morph their product to meet their needs. And if the startup is not stupid, it will support this morphing, learn from it, and seek to make more and more happy users. Companies typically try to model out demographics and design for the market that they think is most monetizable. They go straight for mass adoption based on need, not love. Even more so than startups, they tend to blow through their early adopters so that they can get to the cash-cow as fast as possible. Warning: once you destroy the trust of your early adopters, you’re on the greed path.

All in all, it’s a great speech and worth checking out if you’re at all interested in technology (even if you’re not technical).

EMI Tracks on iTunes – Not mp3's

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I’ve heard a bunch of stuff today about all of EMI’s tracks being available on iTunes without DRM. At first i was really happy, but 2 things kept me from being REALLY impressed.

First, these tracks are not mp3’s. Everyone is assuming they are, but they’re not. They are in a format called “unprotected AAC. ” For those of you who don’t know, AAC is a similar format to mp3 but to-date it is only used by MPEg4 players and Apple (it was partially developed by Apple).  The format is understood by iPods and iTunes, but really nothing else. If you buy an unprotected AAC track, you can email it to whoever you want and listen to it on unlimited amount of computers. But, can you listen to it on the an iRiver player, the slick Samsung players or the nice Sandisk Sansa player? NOPE!

This is very clever strategic move by Apple. They have 2 objectives in mind by only offering AAC: 1) Get out of the legislation trouble they’re having in Europe which is asking them to open up thier DRM technology so other people can make iPod-like devices. 2) Try to keep the iPod as the go-to device for music. If they sold mp3’s they would solve problem 1 but then any player could be used with iTunes music. By making the tracks AAC, none of the competing players in the market today will work. Of course, new players can add AAC format compatibility in the future. But they have to license it. From who? – you guessed it: Apple!

The second thing that struck me as strange is that unprotected music is more expensive than protected. This is dumb. Sooner or later the labels will realize that people want convenience and value. There is a group of people who use the iTunes store. By making the unprotected tracks more expensive you’ll earn a few extra dollars from those users (and only those users) as they will prefer to have un-tethered music. But they won’t get the P2P fanatics. They won’t get anyone under the age of 25 to go to iTunes and buy a track. I’m not sure if 99 cents is low enough for an mp3, but i know that $1.30 is too expensive. It’s a shame. Sooner or later they’ll realize they aren’t going far enough, they aren’t getting new users with this model.

All this being said, it’s a step in the right direction and i can’t wait to see what the other labels do when they see that EMI unprotected tracks are MUCH more popular than the regular iTunes tracks.

Features for Google Reader

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I love my Google Reader.  I like being able to stay in one “web inbox” and cruise through a stream of web clips.

One thing I don’t like is hassle of placing a comment on a blog.  To leave a comment, i have to leave Google Reader and go to the blog, then type in the comment (usually have to signMyBlogLog Image-in first).  i’d like to have is a universal comment field that’s part of Google Reader and interfaces with many different types of blogs.  It has all the necessary fields and the Reader communicates with the blog.  That’d be helpful.

Another thing i’d like is to get MyBlogLog working with the reader.  MyBlogLog is a great little service that puts you into communities if you travel to those blogs frequently.  However it only works if you actually visit the site.  I rarely go to the site but rather visit all my sites via the Reader.  It’d be good if they could work together.

Those are my 2 little suggestions.  Get going Google.