Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

By now most of you probably have heard about Google's latest assault on the social network front: Google Friend Connect. It promises every Webmaster and site designer the addition of social features to his or her website with minimal effort. No server software to install, zero configuration, and no programming required, all one has to do is to embed snippets of code provided by Google on the target webpages. Once the Google Friend Connect becomes part of your site, users of Facebook, Orkut, Google Talk and other compatible social networks can start interacting on your site engaging in various social activities.
 
This is indeed a great boost to small/independent site developers. It is also an exciting time to many social network observers: No one is too surprised that Google, being an uncharacteristic underdog in this realm, attempts to disrupt the marketplace with an open strategy. But considering that MySpace also announced its Data Availability, followed by the Facebook Connect revelation, the data portability movement seems finally gaining steam and heading toward realization. So what would be the implications of meta social networking?
 
The "Long Tail" phenomenon may become even more pronounced
Chris Anderson's The Long Tail article on Wired Magazine illustrated the power of niche communications tailored to personal tastes and interests. Ubiquitous social networking features have the potential to penetrate each and every imaginable niche markets. The "tail" would only get longer and fatter.
 
Social networks may gradually turn into a commodity
The long decline of the PC industry is well-documented. Over the years, the PC market has transformed from one filled with unique products to a low-margin business selling undifferentiated generics. Should the personal data on social networks become fully (or close to) fully interchangeable, it'd be very difficult to prevent the eventual commoditization.
 
Valuations of social network companies may start to deflate
While no one took it seriously when the MySpace's ousted founder Brad Greenspan declared the valuation of his creation to be $20 billion, YouTube was indeed sold for $1.65 billion and Rupert Murdoch also said MySpace might be worth $6 billion. The climax came when Microsoft paid $240 million for only 1.6% share of Facebook, effectively giving it a jaw-dropping $15 billion valuation. If the aforementioned commoditization of social networks starts to take place... watch out.
 
Fang-Yu Lin

Last night Google launched their cloud computing suite to compete with Amazon's S3/EC2/SimpleDB stack of utilities. The SDK is aimed at giving developers a way to leverage the big iron of a company as large as Google on the cheap.

Things of note - some good, some bad, some both:

- Only Python is currently supported (more languages to come)
- You must have a Google account to access any apps with authentication
- You only need a Google account to access any apps with authentication
- Only 10,000 developers invited into the beta
 -The SDK contains a staging server so you can test apps locally without having to push them into the cloud
- Your source goes into the cloud - but not for public viewing
- It appears to connect to, and utilize MapReduce and BigTable
- The toolkit launched without any flashy demos (much like FireEagle from Yahoo!)

Once the system comes out of beta, applications will have a fairly large free usage cap, so in theory, your application should be well on the way to self-funded before you start getting bills from Google.

In short, Google released a set of tools that allow you to build web applications specifically tuned to run in, and benefit from, Google's huge infrastructure. Currently only a single, pretty nuts and bolts, language is supported and there aren't a bunch of cool demos to pass around. I am excited.

James Vreeland

http://code.google.com/appengine/kb/

It’s been a long time coming, from its first days as code name Apollo, to the gradual adoption by big players like eBay and Nasdaq, Adobe AIR hit its 1.0 release on Monday. For those unfamiliar with it, AIR is a cross platform runtime that allows web developers to create true desktop applications using HTML/JavaScript/Flash & Flex or any mix thereof.

http://www.adobe.com/products/air/

Max Zabramny

While it looks well… ugly, to be frank, this little baby was all the rage at this week’s Mobile World Congress. That’s right, it’s an Android phone. Or at least, it will be.

A full write up can be found at last100, but I will summarize the highlights of what everyone is getting so excited about:

1. A benefit no longer reserved to desktop computers, Android will allow for the integration of different applications. Texas Instruments gave this example: “a real estate agent could combine information from a database with mapping software to let customers easily locate properties on the go.”

2. One of the first applications finally brings multi-player gaming to the US market, but in an interesting twist, combines real world activity. It is a called WiFi Army and allows players to meet on the street using Google Maps and use their phone cameras to “shoot” at each other.

3. With so many manufacturers on board, people feel that means an almost sure success rate for adoption.

Android fans should also look out for an upcoming application called ZERO. It is Organic's first effort developing on the Android platform and is based on the winning concept from a recent Camp Organic.

Marta Strickland

Photo Credit: Engadget

A great deal of speculation on the direction of mobile marketing in 2008 has centered on delivery of location based services (LBS).  Industry observers are questioning whether this will be the year when this holy grail of mobile applications finally sees significant adoption.

Few deny the appeal of the convenience and targeting capabilities promised by LBS, yet, until recently, efforts to deliver such services to the mainstream have been hindered by cross-platform and technical limitations.

This year GPS will become a standard feature in new smartphones and Google Maps for Mobile's My Location service will be made available to millions of non-smart phone users. As a result, the technical limitations of LBS will no longer a major obstacle to development.

While mobile phones are seen as the principal platform for LBS delivery they are not the only contender. Recent widespread adoption of personal and in-vehicle navigation units have given the race to deliver LBS a new dimension. Navigation units have always been designed to deliver GPS location information and, when considered in combination with comparatively larger screens and two-way data transmission, the devices are ideally suited for LBS.

Personal navigation units are being scooped up at a tremendous rate and, while their market penetration is nowhere near that of mobile phones, there will soon be enough of them on the street to put them in the category of “viable content delivery platform.”

A further indicator that nav units are coming of age is the recent revelation that one of the first units capable of two-way data transmission, the Dash, runs on an open source embedded version of Linux, OpenMoko. If more manufactures follow their lead we may see some truly exceptional native and web-based applications for two-way nav units very soon.

Dan Neumann

In order to propel the popularity of its already well-hyped web services program, Amazon has launched the Web Services Start-Up Challenge. The rules are simple, seven finalists have a limited amount of time to produce their start-up site using only Amazon web services, which are a set of tools to allow scalable storage and hosting of web sites and applications. The winner receives $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in Amazon Web Services Credits, and an investment offer from Amazon themselves – not too shabby.

Over the last year, numerous big names in the industry have been offloading all or some of their processing to Amazon’s new kid on the (web hosting) block.

Max Zabramny

Skyrails is a crazy 3D visualization of graphs/data. It looks like something from a movie.

Skyrails was designed to create visualizations of social networks, but it could be applicable to any kind of graph.  The system has a built-in programming language  to customize the graph and its attributes, designed for experts as well as novice users.

You can download it and try it out (on Windows).

Semi-unrelated, here is a reel from a Visual Designer who creates a lot of the interfaces you see in movies.

http://www.coleran.com/

Todd Fraser

Built in Flash and Flex, another web2.0 application for creating quality presentations.

You can sign up for the private beta here: http://www.sliderocket.com/index.html

Some of the buzz

http://www.sliderocket.com/buzz.html

Jim Bachalo

Time Inc announced today that Business 2.0 magazine will be shut down.  The final publication will be the October issue. The reason given is declining ad revenue.  Time had the opportunity to sell the magazine to a number of suitors but decided instead to shut it down and reassign the editor and nine other editorial staff to work within Fortune magazine.

As a veteran of the digital age, I feel like one of my best friends just passed away. I initially viewed this as a sign that the days of innovation in the online space are over.  I was one of 2,342 faithful readers who participated in a Facebook group called "I read Business 2.0 - and I want to keep reading!". 

 

Time Inc didn't listen to us, or maybe they did ...

We've witnessed several trends over the past two or three years that show that digital has grown up and has gone mass.  Marketers have embraced the entire paradigm and digital is now increasingly at the center of marketing - just look at the way agencies are evolving, look at the way brands are evolving.  Customers led the way by embracing and integrating all things "interactive" into their daily lives.

Digital innovation is not dead - it just morphed into something new ...

What do you think?

David Feldt

The unprecedented hype and buzz surrounding the impending iPhone launch continues ... MSN is hosting a roundtable of authentic iPhone reviews from the following "anointed" journalists:

Newsweek's Steven Levy, the New York Times' David Pogue, Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret of the Wall Street Journal and USA Today's Ed Baig.

Read their collective reviews here.

For a contrarian point-of-view, watch the Ries Report where Al Ries "proves" that the iPhone (a convergence technology) will ultimately fail - He compares the current hype for the iPhone to that of the Ford Edsel in the last century, a product that never lived up to the hype. His thesis is that successful products are divergent by nature (iPod, for example), not convergent. 

As a born contrarian, my head says Al Ries is correct. However, my heart WANTS an iPhone!

Thanks to Laura McGowan for the link.

David Feldt