More on the maturing web- and the decline of banner ads
Uno as Future Studies, Ideas, Products, Web2.0
Jun|30|2008
Friday drinks are great, drinks in general are great, but drinks with great minds are especially great. Last Friday we moze’d on down to Firemans Arms in Green Point for Beer ‘O Clock with Leezl, Tiaan, Herman and Clint. All people who I love working with.
I wanted to chat about how the web is maturing, how we’re seeing different apps coming from different players, and luckily Clint had already spotted what I was trying to articulate.
The web is maturing, and advertising is changing with that. Read this post by Jackson Fish Market on where they see the web going. The gist of the post is that display advertising is disruptive - placing an ad next to content is the print way of thinking about monetization, branding and advertising. Not only that, but it’s also disruptive. Users are on the site because they want to view the content, not the ad, and you are disrupting them with your popup, overlay, onionskin ad.
Enter the webapp. Web apps are places that people want to be, I want to be on tumblr, I love Slideshare and Last.Fm gets more eyeball time from me than books do. Not only those, but I was devastated when Mymilemarker.com shut down, how else will I track my ridiculous consumption patterns? (I just checked and it’s back up again).
So what that means is that people spending time on web apps want to be there, even if it is a branded environment. You have higher engagement levels, people want to be there, in fact, they even come back! What that means for an agency is that they need to rethink they way that they do branding online. Banner ads are actually really boring. Agency’s need to build web apps that are engaging, that fit with their brand, and offer productivity and utility to the user.
We’ve seen a few webapps already, but mostly not really thinking about “web apps” but still riding the “Social Networking is the be-all-and-end-all” mantra. It’s not about social networks, it’s about utility. Locally, the YoungBlood5 network was an example in a way (it had touches of being an app), but we haven’t seen anything that’s a solid application.
The future of agencies will probably see them building webapps and engaging environments, more so than creating banners, trafficking and managing e-mail campaigns.
It’s also why I get irritated by people wanting to “build social networks for everything”. It’s not about social networks, it’s about social applications. All applications need to be social in some way, but they need to be applications and offer utility.
Some examples of branded web applications (some/most border on Social Networks):
Specialised riders club (built on Rails apparently)
Nike Plus
Youngblood5
MTV Think:
StandardBank ATM locator
Why doesn’t Sasol bring out a MyMileMarker type app? Or VirginActive a health app (they already have the LifeZone stuff, but they can do more)? Rama doesn’t need a food social network, they need a web app that people can use to find recipes.
And finally, just because I know most people won’t read the article, here are Jackson Fish Market’s predictions:
- even the biggest brand advertisers will realize that creating and maintaining high quality web apps is not a simple proposition
- they will turn to their ad agencies and their interactive retinue to build these experiences
- more often than not, these folks will build sites oriented around expensive content, video, and the like
- brand advertisers will realize that they need the traditional creatives combined with deeper software expertise to make great online experiences
- some advertisers will bring this in house and in effect become software companies themselves
- some advertisers will work with companies (like ours) to deliver online experiences that have depth, quality, and utility (some of the agencies over time will build deeper expertise in this area — it’s harder than it looks)
- and whichever tactical choice a marketer makes, the bulk of online consumer software will be funded directly by brand advertisers
Signs of a maturing web?
Uno as Online, Products, Web2.0
Jun|20|2008
I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve been getting that the days of garage web-startups are over.
My sense of the web is that we’ve reached some level of maturity where most of the apps we’re seeing coming out now are from established houses. Pownce came from the Digg stable, Twitter wasn’t an idea cooked up in a dormroom, it came from Biz Stone (read his history) and Evan Williams, established people in the web industry. Ning has had backing from Marc Andreessen from day 1. Sure that’s only 3 companys, but KickApps isn’t a small basement outfit either. Last.fm started out as being small app, but they’ve grown in stature and are now owned by CBS. If you wanted to compete with Last.fm, you needed to do that 2 years ago, but you need to be a bigger player to do that now.
Whether I’m right or wrong, I get the feeling that there is a myth that shit hot new startups come from a bunch of guys tinkering away at a project in a garage. The reason I’m saying it’s a myth is because I believe the real big web apps will come from large established companies, or at least established minds. I think we’ve matured to a certain level now, where you can just smack out a quick web-app, your app needs to have some level of maturity. I obviously still believe that we’ll see lot’s of smaller apps coming from garage startups, but the ones that will be more successful will come from larger groups, with funding already baked in. I don’t think that we’re in the Wild West days anymore. Maybe in emerging markets there is more scope, but then again websites are international…
This also of course means that if you want to invest in “building the next big thing” you need to start off with a pretty sizable group of people, more than 2 or 3 for example.
I’d love to bounce some ideas around on this, so please comment below.
24.com launches Answer.it, gets deeper into the social web
Uno as Online, Products, Social Networks, South Africa
Apr|22|2008
As part of our recent foray in social services (not the welfare kind, the web kind) at 24.com, we’ve launched Answerit - a site where you can ask and questions and get human answers.
It’s a very well thought out product - you can thumbs-up answers, follow commentators and sections, view rankings and a whole bunch of other nice user features.
A question you might ask is “Why? Isn’t there something like metafilter or Ask.Yahoo?” Well, yes there is. But there’s also relevancy in being local (how do you like this one), as well as fostering the community that has been built up by 24 (we have one of the largest blogging audiences/platforms in South Africa).
Slowly but surely we’re builing up a good suite of social products - Laaik.it, Answer.it, Play as well as a number of communities in our other sections like Entertainment, Wheels and Health. We’re going to be doing some even more useful and exciting things in the short space coming up 
Other people mentioning Answer.it:
Pre-release Vincent Maher.
Stii.
Matthew Buckland.
Socialthing: winning
Uno as Identity, Online, Products, Web2.0
Mar|11|2008
I’m trying out Socialthing and I’m really impressed with the “adding your services” task. It’s pretty quick and easy and uses a really cool interface.
One of the most interesting pieces is that they grab your Facebook news Feed, or a part of it. You’ll see that you Socialthing stream is different from your Facebook stream (the FB part). I’m also quite interested in how they do this - there is not API hook for your newsfeed (remember, it’s the juice that keeps you on FB) and it’s against the Facebook ToC’s. So Socialthing, how are you doing it?
All this got me thinking: The best Authentication pattern for me was the Flickr one - Their OAuth pattern is the way all services should work. Why does Flickr support OAuth, as well as FireEagle, but not Delicious? Hrm…
Regarding FriendFeed - I was expecting SocialThing to work in a similar way. While I might not be friends with people like Chris Messina, Brian Oberkirch or Chris Saad, I still want to follow what they are doing - which is why I use FriendFeed. I thought Socialthing would do this, but at the moment there isn’t the ability to add “people who aren’t really my friends”. I like being able to do that. While I think there are similarities between Socialthing and Friendfeed as both are Lifestreaming apps, they serve different purposes. So there might be a little bit of a gap in there, somewhere that both these apps are missing?
Socialthing also has grouping (for e.g. Twitter Messages) - something that FriendFeed guys put out as a major thang - I think that’s like… Basics. Otherwise you can use RSS, no?
Either way, a cool service. Check out some of the design patterns here below.
DiSo project: Taking a page from Facebook
Uno as Facebook Friday's, Ideas, Products, Social Networks, Web2.0
Feb|28|2008
If you take a look at the structure of Facebook you can see 2 main navigation sections (disregarding the rest of the site).
- Profile data at the top (Profile, Friends, Networks, Inbox)
- You have apps and other things on the left.
The way we’ve been thinking about the way Facebook works in terms of architecture and find it incredibly interesting, from an innovation perspective and also because the products we’re building rely on similar kind of systems.
We follow the standards or thoughts in the DiSo project, as well as the concepts in the Social Network Portability (really the same thing), so we’re trying to look at how your profile can be more portable, and follow you around the web.
In Facebook, your top profile is the one that really counts, it’s the one that follows you through all the apps you’ve installed, and brings you back to your data, the one on the left is basically all the different “sites” you’re on. It’s like FriendFeed or Plaxo or whatever, but the relationship between data-owner and application is much more skewed.
This post is pretty half-arsed and pretty obvious, but sometimes you need to state the obvious!
Opera mobile released: Boring.
Feb|8|2008
The Opera Mobile browser launched a short while back. But it fails to deliver on the one thing that I really wanted. And what is really important.
While Opera packs a great set of features:
- Speed Increase
- Flash-Ready
- ZoomT
- Offline Browsing
- Productivity Tools
- Tabbed Browsing
- Opera Widgets
It fails to deliver on what we really want from a mobile device.
Location Based Services
That’s it. If Opera had included only that ONE single feature it would have been miles ahead of any competition. But instead they’ve decided to focus on incremental product innovation, not fundamental game-changing innovation.
Think of the possibilities. At the moment websites require you to input your location data through the site. If you could have the browser automatically send the site your GPS settings you’d be saved so much hassle. What if you don’t know where you are? Any wap site could be able to read the GPS data and play with that in a number of ways.
Recently Google launched the My Location feature on their Google Maps mobile product. So you load up the Google Maps Java application and then it starts pinging all the systems it needs to etc etc. You then press “0″ on your phone and it locates you on the map. That’s fantastic, but now you only know where you are, but can you use that feature on MyMileMarker.com to pin point the petrol station that you just filled up at? Unfortunately not. Wouldn’t it be great if the browser sends MyMileMarker the GPS coordinates?
It seems as if Opera is treating their product like a web-browser, for mobile. It’s not. It’s much more than that. You can’t try and mimic a desktop experience on a mobile. It’s a totally different feature set. I love the way that they’ve translated some of the user experience to mobile. Zooming in, double tabs, dragging the screen etc etc. Those are brilliant examples of accomplishing a transfer of desktop to mobile experience. But the one fundamental thing that sets mobile apart from desktop is that you are MOBILE. And I don’t think Opera has taken full advantage of that.
All that being said, the demo of Opera looks great. I love the new features. I use Opera Mini now and I’ll probably switch to this new release when it comes out. I love that you can now view flash and ajax and all the other web2.0 bits. Now give us LBS!!
The problem with dataportability is with the providers, not services (duh)
Uno as Ideas, Products, Social Networks, Web2.0
Jan|21|2008
Going through my feeds this morning I once again came across the “bad user design” meme. A lot of people have been talking about it. Jeremy Keith, Josh Morgan, Brian Oberkirch, Dare Obasanjo, also even Paul Buchheit (the guy behind Gmail) and it was particularly explicit and loud when Robert Scoble went through that whole Plaxo/Facebook screenscraping episode.
Basically what people are saying is that it’s a bad idea to give sites your usernames/passwords when you sign up. This creates a bad anti-pattern and sets a horrible precedent for users who simply give their email user/pass to hundreds of different startups with dismal security standards making it very easy for hackers to get to your sensitive data. It’s called the “password anti-pattern”.
It’s not a new meme I’m proposing, seems like Simon Willison has wrote a bit about it as well, and it does seem like most people are proposing a similar solution - using OAuth to facilitate the authentication process. It’s exactly what I’m thinking, and I also think that we’re pointing fingers at the wrong people. At the moment we’re pointing fingers to a bunch of services, or new apps like Plaxo, Twitter, Spock, etc etc. It’s something we see in almost every new web app: “Import your friends!” And then we cry foul, blasting the service.
But, if the providers made that data accessable, through a properly secure API, would it not be possible to get around this? In my mind Flickr provides probably the best page-flow pattern. So I’m saying the PROVIDERS are making this anti-pattern possible. Facebook must make it VERY easy to export users, so must Gmail and so must Yahoo etc. This must be standardized so that containers (using Open Social terminology) can provide that data using some kind of token system, and it must also happen in a process that doesn’t ask for you user/pass. I believe that because it’s not possible, networks are leaving developers with no other option but to do screen scraping.
Hopefully now that pretty much every network has joined Dataportability.org we’ll see some of this stuff actually happening.
I realise that I must be missing the boat and that the tech is probably there. But being a non-tech I don’t know what’s possible. I’m just thinking that seeing all these services still asking for my user/pass is bad design, and that if all the sites haven’t adopted the token/authentication system, then there is something wrong.
Go OAuth! Go OpenID!
Technorati Tags: dataportability, portable social networks, password, anti-pattern
Pretty cool lifestreaming app for Wordpress
Uno as Products
Dec|5|2007
If you’re big into lifestreaming, check this little app out:
I recently got word from Kieran Delaney about his new Lifestreaming plugin for Wordpress called Simplelife. It’s based on the Simplepie
RSS parser instead of the built-in MagpieRSS one that has issues and is
used by some of the other Wordpress Lifestreaming plugins out there.
It’s currently an Alpha version and although I haven’t tried it yet,
it appears to offer some good functionality and have a nice layout. I’m
hoping that a future version will make the addition (and editing) of
the feeds easier. Perhaps from the admin dashboard as opposed to having
to add / edit them in a php file.
Technorati Tags: wordpress, lifestream, plugin
Google Maps mobile disappoints
Nov|29|2007
I’ve been checking out the Google Maps LBS feature on my mobile and I’m a tad bit let down.
Vodacom is launching The Grid soonish, and that also uses LBS to pinpoint your position. I haven’t been able to get either of these to work properly on my phone (Sony Ericsson M600i) but have played a bit. The Grid is a case study in bad user experience - although they are working on it and it seems like each iteration is getting a bit better.
While the new Maps feature is of course groundbreaking for the GoogleMaps app, it does leave one lacking. I can’t use any of my other apps with LBS. I want Opera to build this into their next release. Opera will then send my location (permission based of course) to the webservice.
That’ll be cool. I hope Android will be able to solve this.
Technorati Tags: mobile, maps, location, gpps, lbs, vodacom
New Updates to linkedIn
Nov|27|2007
Ooh, what’s this I spotted?
A new update to LinkedIn:
What does this show?
Is this on all the LinkedIn profiles?
It looks like LinkedIn is launching some kind of news clipping service