Martin Gordon's Blog

Rumors has it that Facebook is on the block and looking to get $2B.

I just heard a Knowledge@Wharton podcast by my former professor and Supernova founder, Kevin Werbach, entitled, "What Makes An Online Community Tick?" featuring Craig Newmark of Craig's List, Julie Herendeen of Yahoo, and Bill Flitter of Pheedo.

Scoble and others are raving about Second Life. They're going as far as claiming its an OS.

Social networks are on everyone's minds these days. Can they last? I'm not too sure.

Amazon believes it had a sound business model. They make money by selling stuff. If people can find things more easily they are more likely to make a purchase. So Amazon released an API. Take the load off the company's shoulders and let others make Amazon better.

Google: same thing. AdWords is a solid business model. It helps everyone make money! Advertisers don't waste ads on people they can't reach; Google takes a bit off the top. All this is funded by people buying things from the ads they see. AdWords has an API. It's in advertisers' best interests for AdWords to be as good as possible. "Fine, do it yourself", says Google. Google provides an excellent service, and advertisers make it even better for themselves. Most of the products Google puts out has an API. They say, "we don't need you to come to our site to make money, we do just fine on other people's sites."

MMORPGs are a different kind of social network. They have some bonus activity attached that only makes the network stronger. Blizzard/Linden can and do charge for this value-added. They also allow scripting of the game. They let others make their software better, driving more people to pay for the service.

What about Facebook and MySpace? They have no APIs. The "software" is closed off to tinkerers for fear that an API could do away with the need to visit the site and feast our eyes upon lovely banner and click-thru ads. Pretty much anything I could imagine wanting from a Facebook API would bring me alternate ways of getting information available on the site, ways that are far away from ads. Tom Carden's brainstorm of uses for a MySpace API mostly deal with getting data off of the network in a different way. He wants podcasts, RSS feeds, etc, just like I do. And I'm sure many others do also.

So will a lack of an API drive Facebook and MySpace into the ground? Probably not. MySpace is already owned by News Corp and Facebook will get bought out any day now. But the lack of an API does signal that these networks are scared and that their revenue models may be a bit flimsy.

Technorati Tags: MySpace, Facebook, social network, Wharton, Knowledge@Wharton, Kevin Werbach, Supernova, podcast, Craig's List, Yahoo, Pheedo, WoW, World of Warcraft, Second Life, API, programming, development, web services, Amazon, Google

I realized my grandmother is an old-school, real-world blogger. She came over today with several newspaper articles for me to read, offering her input on them and expecting my comments in return. In blogosphere-speak, she posted a link to a news item, offered her input and left comments open. If I was her age and used to that form of communication, I'd have passed the clipping on to another friend of mine offering and expecting the same thing.

Old people have a desire to share opinions and information, and they have had this desire before email was around, much less blogs. The old-school way and the Web 2.0 way are analogous, with both the old school and the new school grabbing ahold of whatever technology they feel comfortable with in order to fulfill this desire. The difference lies in that the advent of blogging has made it become possible to do share with a much larger group of people all over the world in a quick, easy and cheap fashion. This is why blogging is that much more powerful than anything we've ever seen before.

Imagine 6 generations down the line when our grandkids' grandkids scoff at their grandparents for sending them a link to a post on our crusty old blogs about something they find interesting. "Get with the program, grandpa. I don't want to read a stupid old webpage; why don't you just send me the page straight to my brain on the worldwide neural net that's been around for 50 years?"

Technorati Tags: blogging, newspaper, media, sharing, information, future, communication

Let the lock-in begin!

News came today that Skype will begin to offer some features, such as 10-way conference calls, to users of Intel's latest dual-core processors.

I have to say that I'm a bit disappointed with this news. There's really no good reason for these features to not work on AMD's dual-core chips and I think Skype is being a bit short-sighted in their partnership with Intel. The primary reason for AMD's market share gain over Intel is due to enthusiasts who have overcome the MHz myth and prefer AMD's slower-clocked, cooler-running, but faster chips. I'd also venture to say that a majority of Skype's users are also enthusiasts. While the app is simple to use, the real barrier is that it just hasn't really had the exposure yet to be taken up by the mainstream. The end result is that the large subset of Skype users who run AMD chips will continue to do so.

Simply put, Skype doesn't have that killer-app status that would make many people switch to Intel chips if they don't have to, especially die-hard AMD fanboys. So what do Skype and Intel gain from this partnership? Not much. Joe Keyboard may not necessarily be more likely to use Skype even though his Dell has dual Intel cores. If Skype really wanted to reach the average consumer, they would be better off partnering directly with Dell and have Skype be one of the many icons plaguing a default Dell installation. Intel, on the other hand, believes that it could get a lock on die-hard Skype users who are willing to switch to their chips.

Though there is something to be said about network effects, if an AMD user absolutely needed an Intel-only feature, they would look for an alternate piece of software to serve their needs instead of upgrading their entire machine. Given that these Intel-only features are targeting the long tail of Skype users (how many actually need 10-way calling?) and that you need to have Intel chips on all ends for the feature to work, its very easy for a small group to switch to a different application if they absolutely need a feature and so network effects, if any, are diminished by how much easier it is to switch software over hardware.

Technorati Tags: Skype, Intel, AMD, dual core, Core Duo, Pentium, VoIP, IM, networks, web 2.0, telephony

The other day I sent an e-mail off to Adam Curry about the Google Maps of aviation charts and he read my email on DSC 316! Man, was I excited when I heard him mention my email. Later on in the show, he talked about how podcasting is opening the channels of communication between podcasters/artists and their listeners and I'm thrilled to have just experienced that first-hand.

Today, I happened to pick up Robert Scoble and Shel Israel's new book, Naked Conversations and even though I've only read the first chapter already, I'm already excited about reading the rest of it. The first chapter details the story of how blogging got started at Microsoft and how it has helped Microsoft turn its public image around.

An interesting little anecdote mentioned is how they came up with the name Channel 9:

The name is derived from the United Airlines (UA) open audio channel, on which passengers can listen to pilots during take-offs, flights and landing.

It was this channel 9 that helped Lenn Pryor, former tech evangelist of Microsoft, overcome his fear of flying. In the same sense, Microsoft hopes to make people less afraid (or less hostile?) towards them by letting customers "listen in" on the company.

After spending all of last week attending presentations for internships in the financial services industry, these two events brought me real voices from inside companies after having to deal with all the garbage "corpspeak" that comes with those corporate presentations. A bit disturbing was that a quick search last week (which was by no means extensive) didn't produce any results for bloggers who work in financial services. Is the industry that competitive that no one is willing to give up any information that would take away their edge over their co-workers? Or am I just being antagonistic and the real reason is that blogging doesn't really have a place in B2B businesses?

Technorati Tags: Naked Conversations, Scoble, Shel Israel, blogging, blogs, communication, Adam Curry, Daily Source Code, podcasts, podcasting, marketing, finance, banking, B2B

I love Wikipedia. It is so much better than any other encyclopedias. Since each entry can contain inline links to other Wikipedia articles and so you end up jumping from entry to entry and end up at a topic completely unrelated to the one you started on. It would be interesting to see some network statistics of the relationships between entries.

Anyway, the other day I was reading the entry on hurricanes and through various links I ended up reading the "request for deletion" pages regarding some of the schools I went to. Here's just a few things I've learned from Wikipedia in the past couple of days:

• After the list of names for hurricanes is exhausted, the Greek alphabet is used. (What happens if a Greek-lettered hurricane has to be retired?)
• There are six lists of names that are used on a rotating basis, with particularly damaging hurricane names being retired and replaced.
• Southern hemisphere hurricanes are rare (only three cyclones have been observed there) and spin in the other direction.
• Global warming has little to no effect on hurricane creation.
• Cincinnati Bengals Wide Receiver Chad Johnson went to my high school, as did Sin City star Mickey Rourke.
• Adam Curry was the first owner of mtv.com, but when he left his VJing job there, MTV sued him for it (they settled out of court).

Technorati Tags: hurricanes, wikipedia, wiki, web 2.0, Adam Curry, MTV, Chad Johnson, Cincinnati Bengals, football, alumni, Miami Beach