Content Matters

ReadWriteWeb has an interesting post on acquisition of Facebook applications.

The latest this week was the acquisition of Favorite Peeps by slideshow creator Slide.  Favorite peeps is a fairly simple apps that lets users display their favorite friends, providing their own details about them.  It's a nice complement to Slide's TopFriends app.

With Facebook's new platform, thousands of applications are being developed.  There will be a bit of a land rush as people strive to gain exposure to their apps.

The confusion of what apps are worth installing creates opportunities, particularly for companies who can package together bundles of apps.  Going forward, I think there will be a need for a site to emerge (think Tucows or CWS Apps List) which will help users navigate and select Facebook apps.

What's most interesting to me is the speed at which this new Facebook ecosystem is emerging.

I'll be speaking at the NFAIS (National Federation of Abstracting and Information Services) User-Generated Content and Social Media conference this Friday.


I am on the panel "Blogging as Professional Practice in the Information Community", along with Rafael Sidi, of Elsevier Engineering and Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian for Research & Instructional Services at Temple University.

The focus of the panel will be on the value of blogging as a communications tool.  I will be focusing on some of the drivers behind blogging (and how the three blogs I'm involved with - Content Matters, Alacra Blog and Research Recap, differ in this area), the challenges of blogging and some of the benefits I've seen.

If you're planning to attend, drop me a note at barry-at-graubart-dot-com.

Via ZDNet comes word that LinkedIn plans to open up its platform to developers, seemingly in response to the recently launched Facebook platform.   According to LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman, the site will enable third party apps in about nine months.  That's quite a long gestation period in the world of Internet development, so this clearly sounds like a defensive counter to Facebook.

It's apparent that Facebook is positioning itself to become a social networking platform for the business community.  LinkedIn has held that position to-date, but have not been able to leverage it to become part of their user's every day workflow.  Only a third of their users login once per quarter, while 60% of Facebook users login at least once per day.

The new Facebook platform is generating many new applications.  That's both a blessing and a curse, as it's incredibly difficult to assess what's worth installing and which of your friends have what apps.  However, I expect a small ecosystem to emerge surrounding the Facebook platform.  Third party tools will be developed which will organize, rate and manage the new Facebook apps.  And, of course, there will be blogs to provide commentary, much as they do today for TypePad widgets.

In order to become relevant to business users, Facebook will also have to make minor UI modifications to become more businesslike.  When defining a relationship between two business associates, you need to have better choices than "lived together", "took a course together" or "we hooked up".  While "worked together" is a start, it's much too broad to define the many business relationships like "client-vendor", "biz dev partner" or others.

Yet those seem like modest changes to make, whereas LinkedIn will need to move beyond its current connections lookup functionality to get users to visit regularly.  I wouldn't rule LinkedIn out yet, though.  While I find myself turning more and more to Facebook, I still use LinkedIn for business critical functions like recruiting.  I have many more contacts on LinkedIn and find it better for recruitment and biz dev.  However, that gap could easily be closed in less than the nine months it will take before this new platform is launched.

Page 3 article in today's Sunday Times profiles Mahalo and the opportunities for human-assisted search.

Nothing new in the article; just a quick review of how valuable the search market is and that, despite its current position, there are still companies looking to challenge Google. 

I'm still not sure how Mahalo will scale, but it's a pretty interesting experiment and is worth watching.

Alacra launched its first vertical search engine, Portal B, almost eight years ago.  That was before Google became a household name and a time when Alta Vista was considered the best search engine.

While Google has driven great advancements in general search, it's still largely a consumer search engine.  For business users, there are many searches which Google can not easily handle, for example:

• What have UK consultancies written about backdating stock options?
• Which law firms are involved in asbestos litigation
• Which VCs have portfolio companies involved in social networks?

To help business users address these and other searches for which consumer search engines like Google are less effective, Alacra has created AlacraSearch, a vertical search engine which leverages Google Co-op's Custom Search Engines.  AlacraSearch is a free web search engine and is also included within Alacra Premium.

To access AlacraSearch, visit www.alacra.com/AlacraSearch.

For more information on AlacraSearch, read Steve's post on the Alacra Blog.

Dow Jones' hopes for a merger with the FT and CNBC were dashed earlier today as the FT reports that parent companies Pearson and General Electric have ruled out a joint bid. 

That news may relieve some Dow Jones employees, who, while happy about the journalistic integrity such a deal might bring, were concerned about the likely downsizing that would come with the integration.  The choice between Murdoch and Pearson was described in today's NY TImes as "trash or slash", neither sounding very appealing.

According to reports, Pearson CEO Marjorie Scardino sent an email to staff indicating that they had “kicked around some ideas about what a combination of CNBC, the FT Group and Dow Jones might look like”, but “we didn’t see that combination stacking up for our shareholders.”

Both CNBC and the FT have a lot at risk should Murdoch succeed in acquiring Dow Jones.  While the joint deal may be history, I wouldn't be surprised to see either company taking another run at Dow Jones with another partner.

Music continues to be one of the leading categories for emerging technologies.

This week marked the launch of mashup BandsInTown.

BandsInTown is an online community that lets users track concerts for their favorite bands.  BandsInTown imports your music preferences from last.fm, then matches that to concert schedules from your geographic region.  The resulting concert cloud helps you find upcoming shows you might not be aware of.

While the cloud can include acts you don't listen to, the larger items match to the ones that show up higher in your last.fm rankings.  You can mouse over a link to see their upcoming shows in your area.

Clicking any of the bands brings you to a wiki-styled landing page which shows the upcoming show(s) but also has links to an artist page, maps to the venue and space for additional images or band info.  All of these pages are designed for user-generated content.

The event awareness space is attracting attention with sites like eventful, Oodle's Bandtracker and others.  What  separates BandsInTown is its ability to import your last.fm preferences, its easy-to-navigate tag cloud and its focus on wiki-like features.  I'd like to see them add a Facebook plugin to make it easier to share events with friends.

Thanks to Frank Gruber for the heads up on BandsInTown.

After the bell comes word that Terry Semel has stepped down as Yahoo CEO, to be replaced by original "Chief Yahoo" Jerry Yang.

WSJ's Deal Journal, parsing the language of Semel's statement asks whether this means that he was aiming to have Yahoo acquired, but that the Board may not have agreed.  Countering their own point, they also suggest that a return to Yang might mean that this is a temporary management team and an acquisition could still be on the horizon.

Either way, it should create a short-term bounce in the stock, as investors have lost patience with Semel.

UPDATE: Sue Decker has been elevated to President in the move.  This may (or may not) suggest Yang's position is interim, until Decker has the chance to prove herself.  Kara Swisher has the inside details on  Yang, Decker and other possible changes to the team.

Alacra has an immediate opening for a Quality Assurance Analyst with experience in the software and/or content industry.

Candidates should have a strong understanding of software development methodologies and the flexibility to succeed in a fast-paced environment.  This position is based in our downtown NYC headquarters.  The full position description is available here.  If interested, you can email me at barry-dot-graubart-at-Alacra-dot-com.

Alacra is also seeking an Account Manager and a Senior Software Developer, both in our Manhattan headquarters.  Details on all open positions are available on the Alacra jobs page.

With the Bancroft Family continuing to seek alternatives to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, rumors have been stirring about involvement from General Electric and Pearson PLC.

FT Mergermarket reports that GE will decide within days whether to team with Pearson on a deal that would include the Bancroft Family as minority investors, allowing them to remain involved with the family-owned business.  The same article indicates that Barry Diller's InterActive Corp and Hearst have also been approached by Pearson as potential partners. 

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that under a GE-Pearson deal, Dow Jones, the FT and CNBC would be combined into a privately held joint venture with Pearson and GE owning equal shares, again with a minority stake for the Bancrofts.  The Journal article points out some of the difficulties of such a three-way venture, including how to generate cash to pay out Dow Jones shareholders.

Regardless of the complexity, it appears clear that Pearson is eager to make a deal happen and that the Bancrofts are eager to find an alternative to Murdoch and would likely leave cash on the table if they could find a more palatable partner.

More interesting posts this week on the potential and implications of the Facebook platform.

Marc Andreesen describes how, despite the failures of the walled gardens of AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy, few  web properties have focused on the need to develop  platforms. Yes, some have API's, enabling interaction from the outside, while others support basic widgets, but not the full development platform needed to foster a development ecosystem.

Andreesen also delves deeply into the pros and cons of the Facebook architecture.  Interestingly, he points to what may soon be known as the Facebook Syndrome (a variation of the TechCrunch Effect), where when  your application goes up on Facebook you are very happy because you have lots of users, and you are very sad because your servers blow up.

Meanwhile, in advance of her Web 2.0 presentation, Esther Dyson explores the non-technical  implications of the growth of social networks.  Esther points out that the new Facebook model:

• Mirrors the social relationships of the real world, which will require tools and applications to manage interruptions and to provide gradations of levels between "friend" and "stranger".
• Changes the business model online, allowing businesses to tap into existing social networks, rather than simply opening up a website in a vacuum.
• Supports the attention economy, where you establish a presence and gain attention back

It seems at all the recent conferences, there's been discussion of the need for businesses to establish a presence in Second Life.  For those in the content and technology space, I'd put that on the back burner and begin to focus on their Facebook strategy.

There’s little doubt that search has improved over the past ten years.  The jump from Alta Vista to Google in the late 90’s represented a seismic improvement.  Yet, in recent years, the rate of improvement has slowed and with spam sites, affiliate marketing and improved SEO, you could make a strong argument that the quality of search has declined.

Many are awaiting the semantic web as the next major shift in search.  But while semantic search holds promise, today its deployment remains limited to niche applications.  Having worked with semantic technologies for years, I believe that they are many years away impacting mainstream use.

Jason Calacanis has released an alpha version of Mahalo, a new search engine designed to bridge the gap.  Mahalo is a search engine that combines the best of search, user-generated content and old-fashioned editing.  To bootstrap Mahalo, the first 10,000 search terms are being hand-written by guides.  Mahalo result pages look more like a wiki than a Google search engine results page.  These landing pages are designed to help you navigate content, rather than just listing the pages that scored the highest.  Like wikipedia, search terms with multiple meanings are presented with options to help the user disambiguate the results.  Mahalo adds social software capabilities to the mix.  Users can comment on each page and Mahalo also offers a Digg-like “Top 7 bookmark” feature. 

Whether or not Mahalo ultimately succeeds, the human-assist model makes a lot of sense.  Tagging providers, like ClearForest, found much of their value came in combining human judgment with technology.

Using guides to build results pages is not a new concept; it was the basis of some of the earliest web search applications such as LookSmart.  The challenge of this model is to build the pages on a cost-effective basis.  Only time will tell if Mahalo can achieve that for the broad set of topics and search terms required for a general search engine.  But for content providers with strong presence in niche markets, the Mahalo model could be a compelling one.  While a general search engine will need to define results for hundreds of thousands of terms, within a vertical market, you may cover all the common searches with a fraction of that.  I have long argued that vertical search is a great fit for content companies, who typically understand niche markets and have editorial skills which can be used to gather and organize information.

Internet search, driven by semantic analysis may be the holy grail of information retrieval.  In the meantime, human-assisted search may provide a compelling user experience.

UPDATE: To accelerate Mahalo's expansion, Jason has created the Mahalo Greenhouse, which allows users to get paid for development of new terms.  Further details are available on Jason's blog.  SearchEngineLand adds their thoughts, including whether or not Mahalo is comparable to Seth Godin's Squidoo (along with Jason's compelling retort in the comments).

If you haven't already seen it, Marc Andreesen launched a blog a couple of weeks ago.  This weekend, he posted an interesting series of thoughts on venture capital investing.  Fred Wilson posted a comment objecting to Marc's comment that "You actually don't want a VC who provides too much help without being asked.  I leave the why as an exercise for the reader."

I agree with Fred.  In my experience, VC's don't come with a "meddle/don't meddle" radio button.  Instead, I've found that they are either engaged or passive.  The passive VC provides you with cash which is what you came to them for.  But the relationship pretty much ends there.  Meanwhile, the engaged investor is thinking about your company regularly.  When they see some interesting technology or meet a company which could be a potential partner for you, they drop you a note or call you.  No, not all of their ideas make sense for your business (nor do your own, most likely).  But it's good to know that you're on their radar.  I've worked with passive VCs (tier I firms) who, even when you call them for help, are frequently too busy or disinterested.  They don't help you recruit, nor do they broker introductions that might help your business.  In essence, they provide you with cash and otherwise stay clear unless things fall apart.

There are stages in a business where all you need is cash to keep the lights on.  But more often, a startup can use the guidance, ideas and support that an engaged investor provides. 

UPDATE: Danny Gillespie at PE Hub provides an overview of a "day in the life of a VC-backed CEO".  I guess an active VC isn't always a good thing, depending upon your investors...

3:45 am – Wake up in cold sweat, pray that the rising star CFO that VC1 brought to the company doesn’t mis-forecast $3MM in cash like he did last quarter.

4:14 am – Wake up in cold sweat, pray that the rising star VP Sales that VC2 brought to the table doesn’t confuse the saying “Under Promise and Over Deliver” again. If he does, prepare for the revolt in Engineering. Note To Self (NTS) maybe show Gandhi @movie night so the notion of peaceful demonstrations are fresh in their head.

5:47 am – Wake up for good, blackberry is buzzing with an email from the “rising star” partner @ VC3. Little puke probably had a developer write an app to auto-send every morning @ 5:45. NTS – find out if his testicles have dropped yet.

5:48 am – Crawl out from under desk, roll up futon, join head of engineering in break room to start water for French press. Shoulda thought long and hard about this job when every bathroom in the building had a shower.

6:23 am – Latest Wired RSS feed must be out  ‘cause I just got a voicemail from partner @ VC4 asking if we are considering genomics in the strategic plan.  I remind him that we market Chia pets (www.chiasforu.com), he tells me to call him later once I’ve socialized the idea with my staff.

6:30 am – Still pondering how the f%^& my predecessor managed to screw up the cap sheet and get 8 VCs in this deal.  Might be worth it to take a haircut and reduce the “counseling” churn.

7:00 am – Call home, ask wife what day it is, asked her to remind me how old the kids were and reminded her that we’re in this together and it’ll all be worthwhile. Hang up phone and do best Stuart Smalley in the mirror… need a cardigan. Call wife back and tell her “Happy Anniversary”…damn cell signal dropped the call.

7:03 am – Begin prep for upcoming board meeting. Feels like we are having one of these every three weeks… oh wait, we are.

1:00 pm – Rev 9 of board pitch done, stomach churning, ponder whether the stomach can actually digest itself, shrug shoulders and pop another Prilosec and score a Pop Tart from the break room vending machine.

1:15 pm – Call from partner @ VC5 asking me if I knew that genomics was hot. Notify him that he has the wrong guy on the line and that he needs to call Rob at his other portfolio company, NanoBioGenomicBlogwerks. He tells me “Sorry, man it has been go, go, go, so gotta go.”  NTS – contact Kauffman and find out if they have been giving out grants to VCs hiring kids from the short bus.

1:30 pm – Meet with new VP of Operations. He asks when he gets to meet his staff, I tell him to go look in the mirror. He asks about an admin, I inform him that VC5 has a portfolio company that does outsourced administrative duties and no, they can’t take your clothes to the cleaners but sure can screw the living sh*t out of a plane, car and hotel reservation. I didn’t know there were flights into Austin, MN but now I do. Remind him to specify state and country when booking.

3:00 pm – Sit down to answer email… 250 new since this morning… support pharm industry and pop Ibuprofen, Sudafed and chase it with a cold cup of French roast.

5:00 pm – Shower and put on something with a collar. Off to VC6’s portfolio CEO networking event otherwise known as “Dead Men Walking.” 3 in 5 of us won’t be around at the next one and not because we attained a liquidity event.

7:00 pm – Slip out of networking event. Receive call from VC7 asking if we can find value in looking at a niche marketing play they have. Remind him that he is calling me about using our company’s product. Apologizes saying, “man, it’s been just go, go, go lately. Hey, what about using an outsourced administrative play?” I tell him that we are considering genomics and he gives me a “Hell Yeah”.  NTS – find out if that guy was in banking or consulting before… probably both.

9:00 pm – Remember to thank the vending company for populating the machine with Pop Tarts, Chex Mix and Ding Dongs… one day I might ingest something other than carbohydrates.

11:00 pm – Call from VC8, wants to check on how I am holding up. “Wow” I think, “nice to see some humanity in this madness.” Check that, bad cell signal, he asks me why I am holding up the board pitch for his review. Reminds me to setup the hotel for the board meeting. I tell him I’ll use our outsourced admin to handle it. Hope he likes Holiday Inns, Geo Metros and flying on AirTran. Remind myself that passive-aggressive behavior has served many in my chain well.

Midnight – Collapse in a pool of drool on my desk.

As social networks take hold, the site that gets the most attention (and the most traffic) is MySpace.  For the business community, however, the social networking site to watch is Facebook.

Facebook, founded in 2004 by Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg and a few classmates, was initially oriented towards college students.  The basic premise was to automate the printed "facebooks" or  directories used by all students.  Last year Facebook opened up its network to non-students.  You can join a network for your company or simply for a city or geographic area.

Recently, Facebook became an open platform, allowing applications to be created to add functionality to your Facebook page.  Applications for Facebook today include a Flickr interface, a last.fm widget and Flixster, for movie reviews.  Rather than simply allowing embedded scripts (in the way that a blog or MySpace permits), Facebook has provided an open API, which should enable more sophisticated applications than typical script-based widgets could support.

Facebook today has more than 21 million registered users and is the 17th most visited site in the world (according to Alexa).  While that number is impressive, what's even more impressive is that more than 90% of those users are "active" users who visit Facebook at least once per month and 60% login on a daily basis.  For comparison, LinkedIn reports that roughly a third of its 10 million users log on at least once per quarter.  Even more compelling is that the 21 million users currently generate more than 1.5 billion page views per month.  That translates to more than 2,300 page views per month per registered user.  Meanwhile, more than eight million photos are uploaded to Facebook each day.  Talk about sticky!!

Facebook seems well-positioned to transition from the college market to a broad and diverse user base.  As more plugins are added, the service will increase its utility and provide compelling reasons for business professionals and others to join.  A more diversified user base will also give Facebook greater staying power, while MySpace faces the risk of the fickle teen market falling in love with a new entry.

Today there are only a handful of business-oriented applications for Facebook, but that should change, particularly with their opening up the platform.  Traditional content providers should certainly be exploring ways to integrate with the Facebook platform.  To-date, the only one who's done that is Forbes, but I'd expect others to follow soon.  Facebook also needs to tweak their app to recognize the needs of business users.  Today, linking to friends is very school-oriented and doesn't support relationships like client-vendor, business partners, etc.  Even the concept of "friend" doesn't really capture typical business relationships.  Those are pretty easy changes for Facebook to make though.

It was well-reported that Yahoo last year attempted to acquire Facebook for $1 - $1.6 billion.  Every few weeks the rumors of a Yahoo acquisition heat up again.  But in the meantime, Facebook has demonstrated spectacular growth and a strong vision.  If Yahoo does succeed with an offer, you can be sure it will be for more than $1.6 billion.

Social networking is still in its infancy and the current applications have yet to deliver strong value for the business community.  But that's beginning to change.   And Facebook seems well positioned to become the leader in social networking for business.  And they are clearly one of the Fifty Content Companies that Matter.

You can visit my Facebook page here.

Ask.com, the perennial 3rd runner up in the search wars, has launched a completely new search interface today. 

Called Ask3D, the results page is split into three main panels.  The primary (center) panel lists traditional search results.  The left panel provides contextual links, based upon the type of search you've done.  For example, a search for singer Amy Winehouse offers links to narrow your search to Amy Winehouse Lyrics on the left panel, while a search for  Balkans lets you narrow your search to  Balkans countries, Balkans  Map and Balkans History; expand your search to the Triple Alliance or Triple Entente; or find related names such as Archduke Franz Ferdinand (the Austrian leader, not the indie band).  The right panel provides contextual links to images, news images, wikipedia entries, music clips (from iLike) and more.

In the new UI, Ask also moves the search box from the traditional center position to the top of the left panel.  This has a few benefits: first, you get more results above the fold, as you don't have a search box taking up a third of the space; more importantly, this enables them to use the left panel for the navigational links described above. 

Ask 3D also provides strong autocomplete capabilities, so when you type in a search term, you get relevant potential searches each time.  These autocomplete entries provide context, not simply a list of keywords.  For example, when I type "Franz Ferdin", I see options for Franz Ferdinand the band, Franz Ferdinand lyrics, Franz Ferdinand assassination and more.

Multi-paneled SERPs are not new.  A9 and others have offered these for a while.  But Ask 3D really embraces the idea of a new UI, providing unique functionality by type of content.  You can roll over images to see them enlarged or listen to a music clip directly on the results page.  While Google, Yahoo, Technorati and others have released recent changes, Ask's effort is clearly the most revolutionary.  Of course, as John Battelle points out, it's easier to take risks when you're #4 than when you're the leader.

With 5% of the search market, Ask has a long climb ahead of it.  While it will take more than a new UI to move up in the pack, the new interface may make Ask more suited for specific types of searches, such as entertainment.  Time will tell if this new interface helps Ask make more inroads.

During the next 30 days, the FCC will likely issue final regulations regarding the auction of 700 Mhz spectrum.  Net Neutrality is one of those big issues that seems like it's way too technical to dig into the details.  Luckily for us, Tom Evslin has done most of the digging and makes the issue easy to understand.

Tom has a new post with a call to action for all of us to email the FCC to voice our support for policies that ensure that there will be multiple competitors providing high speed access to all parts of the country.  For those of us who don't follow the issue closely, Tom provides a copy & paste email which you can send to the FCC (he also provides email addresses of the right people).

Net Neutrality is one of those issues that seems easy to ignore until one day we read the news and have a "they did what???" moment.  There's a lot of lobbyist money that could result in unfavorable regulations.  I'd encourage everyone to take a minute out to email the FCC using Tom's outline.

I wrote about this deal and why I thought it was great for RSS last week when it was still a rumor.  It's now official; Google has acquired Feedburner.

More details are available from Union Square Ventures and the Feedburner blog.

For anyone involved in content delivery, this deal should be a good thing.  Google's business is all about monetization and if anyone can figure out how to monetize RSS, they'll be the ones to do it.  Congratulations to Dick Costolo and the Feedburner team.

Alacra will be exhibiting at the Special Libraries Conference which kicks off this Sunday in Denver.  The keynote speakers will be Al Gore and Dilbert creator Scott Adams.

I won't be there, but plenty of my colleagues will be at the Alacra booth (booth 312).  If you're planning to attend, also be sure to see the "Vendor Speed Dating" session Monday at 4pm, where Alacra CEO Steve Goldstein will make a few new product announcements.