The biggest news of the week–well, besides the governor-erect (hat tip to the New York Post)–was not AOL’s purchase of Bebo or Yahoo’s embrace of the semantic Web (about which I remain skeptical) or certainly Lacygate. No, the biggest, most game-changing news went by without a great deal of notice, and that was Google’s announcement of a free ad-serving platform.
Poor Bebo. I feel for the residents of their hip and convivial apartment block. It has just been bought by a slumlord.
AOL–which is paying $850 million for the social-networking site, the other Facebook–is where innovations go to die. Remember Netscape? Bought for $4.2 billion and now dead. AOL bought a mess of advertising platforms–Advertising.com, Quigo, Tacoda–and can’t make them to get along.
When I first used the microblogging platform Twitter–which enables users to publish 140-character-long messages via the Web and mobile phones–I thought it was silly. Or rather, the uses to which it was being put were silly: people announcing that they’d just woken up or what they’d had for breakfast. I couldn’t have cared less. But then I should confess that when I first used blogs and podcasts, I didn’t fully comprehend their impact either. So, when my son and Webmaster told me I should take another stab at Twitter, I did. And I now see it is an important evolutionary step in the rise of blogging.
There’s nothing new at all in today’s New York Times story about the failing newspaper industry. It’s a basic roundup with a few more depressing quotes from the likes of Brian Tierney, who surely must regret his purchase of the Philadelphia Inquirer now.
Yahoo, I’ve long argued, is the last old media company, for it operates on the old-media model: It owns or controls content, markets to bring audience in, then bombards us with ads until we leave. Contrast that with Google, which comes to us with its ads and content and tools, all of which I can distribute on my blog. Yahoo, like media before it, is centralized. Google is distributed.
We natter on these days about how people are becoming social online. But we have always been social; the Internet merely provides more ways for us to connect with each other. What’s truly new is the opportunity for companies, especially media companies, to be social.
I never cease to be amazed anew at how cable companies think it is their job to make their customers’ lives difficult.
I challenge any cable executive to publicly go through the experience of being a customer at their own companies and tell me straight-faced that it’s pleasant and efficient and worth the money and effort.
Polls are as discredited as they should be. So I’m thinking about writing my Guardian column next week about all the new metrics we have to take the pulse of the nation on the Internet. Please help me out with numbers you follow.
None of these is representative or certainly scientific. And many of them can be manipulated–which is just the point of them; they put metrics in the hands of movements that use them to make themselves known: witness Ron Paul’s devoted cult and how they played YouTube like an organ. I speculated after Iowa that one reason for Obama’s success there was the campaign’s ability to organize a critical mass of young supporters in the social services.
The new Internet campaign metrics also let us sense trends that aren’t so manipulable, if we know where to look.
What if a plane flight were networked and became a social experience with its own economy?
For part of a book I’m finally starting to work on, I’ve been thinking about how companies and industries can be remade with Googlethink and social smarts (note how I’m not saying Web 2.0). It’s harder to reimagine some than others. The benefits of tearing apart and rebuilding cable companies are obvious. But I just about gave up on airlines, dooming them to their status as the new buses. What can one do with such a commodity service, and one that has deteriorated so badly?
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