Dave Winer Throws Down the Gauntlet
16.10.07Filed Under: Marketing, Perspective, Tag Team with 0 Comments
Dave is absolutely, 100% right.
Today on Scripting News, Dave Winer encouraged Web 2.0 companies to “observe how Loic rolls out his product,” Seesmic. He accurately writes:
It’s done personally. Not with a big bang, but with nurturing, one user at a time, at first, then it will fan out, but it will always have the personal touch, because it began that way…
Most PR firms show you how to do the big bang rollout, because that’s all they know. But even the greatest promoters, with the most press credit (I’m thinking of Steve Jobs) won’t rely exclusively on the press to carry their product. They guide it, they put their personal signature on it, they create an experience.
We’re going to take your advice, Mr. Winer. As much as our ideas and work have been guided by our perspective, our messaging thus far, even if brief, has not expressed the same personal touch Loic indeed expresses with Seesmic. And the human relationships we so highly value are all about personality. Thank you for throwing down the gauntlet. For throwing a little water in our face and telling us to wake up.
In addition to adding more of a personal touch to our messaging and rollouts, I believe this personal touch you encourage also predicates a deeper level of transparency. Specifically, that we (and all other Web 2.0 companies who choose to respond to your encouragement) would be certain of our uncertainties. What’s that mean? It means that as much as we believe we’re heading in the right direction, we must acknowledge that we could be wrong, admit it when we mess up, and respond like we should - take blame, make it right, and move on. Starting a business is (or at least should be) fun, but it sure ain’t easy. There are a whole bunch of unknowns and we surely don’t have everything figured out just yet. We admit it. We’ll keep on admitting it. And we’ll try our best to be honest about the good, the bad, and the ugly of it all. If we seem at all fake, cold, insipid, corporate, stupid, whatever, call us on it. We’re listening.
Social Application Monetization
15.10.07Filed Under: Apps, Perspective with 7 Comments
VentureBeat has an interesting article reviewing Google’s Sneak Attack into advertising on Facebook. Obviously, this poses a threat to some of the smaller Facebook-specific Ad Networks out there already. However, I firmly believe this will have little to no effect upon the networks that are building solid “Social Media Businesses” (as Jeremy Liew refers to them) atop the social networks following Facebook’s opening lead. There are two major reasons why.
Contextual Advertising Doesn’t Suit Current Apps
Many, if not most, of the successful Facebook apps do not have the type of content that contextual advertising fits well, which ultimately results in developers and app-creators making far less than they could partnering with other networks. Our very own Judge-O-Rama suffers from this issue, in fact. While Google AdSense offered us a simple way to (try and) monetize judgeorama.com from the get-go, the content on Judge-O-Rama just doesn’t suit the contextual ad model. With most of our words relating to judges, judgment, contests, conflicts, and the like, the ads being served on our site absolutely suck. But Judge-O-Rama wasn’t built with contextual advertising in mind; it’s a page view machine and an entertainment site. While there are some Facebook apps that would well suit Google ads, most of them are similar to our model in that they’re time-wasting entertainers. (Kara Swisher would argue they’re for toddlers.) If you look at the top ten Facebook apps alone, of them, maybe iLike and Flixster would serve the AdSense model well, but even those are iffy. Look at VentureBeat’s SouthPark application example of the new AdSense test, even: why would someone who enjoys South Park enough to download a related Facebook app click on a Google ad to “Learn about a treatment option with Enbrel”???
Google’s Banner Ads Suck
So let’s say Google eventually realizes that their Facebook-specific AdSense ads perform poorly (which we expect they will). There’s no denying Google’s superiority at monetizing the long-tail contextually, however, there’s a reason dozens of other Ad Networks (and many of them, very successful) still exist: they offer CPM rates. This somewhat ties into the first issue. CPC banners just don’t monetize applications as handsomely as CPM-based ads, especially when it’s a media-related app. Are display ads annoying? They can be. But it’s a way for publishers to monetize their efforts and users would find it far more annoying paying for the entertainment content they want.
Ultimately, venturing into Facebook advertising won’t hurt Google one bit, it just probably won’t help them much, either. If you ask us, networks like RockYou, Slide, Social Media, and others, will still do just fine.
Update: Rodney Rumford, author of FaceReviews.com, is thinking along the same lines as us. In his exact, not-so-subtle words… “Seriously; this is crap and it makes me vomit.”
Thank You, Mr. Scoble!
11.10.07Filed Under: Apps, Judge-O-Rama, Perspective with 1 Comment
So, like we said a couple days ago, Robert Scoble was going to blog about our win at the Graphing Social Patterns AppNite. Today he did, and you can find the post on the very popular Scobleizer. He doesn’t have much to say about us, other than call our app “great” and provide a link. And at least he didn’t include us in the “stupider apps” category.
Robert also brings up a good point in reference to Kara Swisher’s recent blog post, The Children’s Hour: Facebook Apps Are for Toddlers (There, We Said It). This point was brought up in one of the business and marketing workshops the first day of the GSP conference, as well. A gentleman asked Lee Lorenzen and Rodney Rumford if there were any “useful” apps available, citing his opinion that all the ones we discussed to that point were ”silly.” As silly as most apps may seem (even our Judge-O-Rama app is a little silly, to be frank), what many of them do well is address the highest levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. As Wikipedia explains:
Though the deficiency needs may be seen as “basic”, and can be met and neutralized (i.e. they stop being motivators in one’s life), self-actualization and transcendence are “being” or “growth needs”… i.e. they are enduring motivations or drivers of behavior.
So, as “silly” as most apps are (and we agree, they are), there exist many apps that do an excellent job at fulfilling these “being needs” of people, such as creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, and acceptance of others. Additionally, I would say that most apps are very good at also meeting “Esteem” needs, including helping people feel more confident, respected, and increasing their levels of self-esteem. So, yes, apps have a long way to go and there will surely be an evolution, even a maturing of the apps that are soon made available. But for now, apps are just another way for you to express yourself online, and they’re doing that quite well.
Oh, and don’t worry. This isn’t the only app you’ll see from us.
Distribution vs. Reliance Upon Social Platforms
11.10.07Filed Under: Apps, Perspective, Tag Team with 4 Comments
Jeremy Liew posted a very insightful piece about valuing widgets (er, “social media companies”) from the perspective of a VC. He writes in his post that:
…I now think it makes little sense to talk in the abstract about what “an app” is worth. It’s better to apply the same principles to think about what a company is worth. A company will have various distribution channels through which it reaches its users; this can include its own website, a Facebook App, a Myspace widget, a distribution deal with AOL, SEM on Google, email virality, and others. Viewed this way, open platforms, and distribution, are opposite sides of the same coin.
In the late 90s, some companies pinned their futures to a single distribution deal with a single portal, and paid up for the privilege. Others, wisely, diversified their dependency on any single channel. A company that defines itself solely as a Facebook app runs the risk of relying on a single distribution channel.
Companies like iLike and Flixster (a Lightspeed company) have built their systems as a single database; their users can access the same data regardless of if they come in from their Facebook app or from their website. As the other social networks open up their platforms, these too will become alternative channels to reach users with the same system. It’s like one kitchen serving multiple restaurants.
We believe this just further confirms that the route we are taking as a company is the right one. As I wrote in a post earlier this week:
Is it worth investing in your own destination, or only investing in the social web? It’s a question we have been asking ourselves at Tag Team lately. While we firmly believe we’ve made the right decision in investing our time into the creation of our stand-alone apps Judge-O-Rama and blippr, we do foresee the opportunity to utilize Facebook not only as a marketing and complementary channel for our current sites, but as a breeding ground for new ideas…
RockYou isn’t just betting on Facebook [for their company's valuation]. They’re betting on networks like MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, and a long list of other sites to follow Facebook’s lead in opening up their platforms. From my perspective, that’s not just a good bet, that’s a sure bet. So while 10 million users may be one thing, what type of valuation could RockYou get for that single application if their SuperWall audience doubled, tripled, even quadrupled?
We’re betting on the same thing. While we have a ways to go in terms of user and visitor growth, we have clear plan to achieve our goals and ultimately, we aren’t in this for the fast buck. We are building a portfolio of socially-driven applications that inform, entertain, and enrich our users. Those applications will not be reliant upon other channels, such as Facebook, or MySpace, or iGoogle/Orkut, but merely complements of these networks and methods by which we can further distribute and grow our applications to an extremely active and social audience. There’s always risk in any venture, of course, but we agree with Jeremy’s final conclusion:
As Myspace, iGoogle/Orkut, Hi5, LinkedIn, Bebo, Tagged and others open up APIs to their platforms, I think the companies that treat each social network as a distribution channel, rather than defining themselves as an application on a single platform, will create the most value.
We’re glad to know we’re not alone in our thinking.
Semantic, Cross-Browser, Pure CSS Progress Bars
10.10.07Filed Under: CSS, Tag Team with 5 Comments
Progress bars are one of those things that are horribly useful, but which always seem to be more complex to actually pull off than they should be. Fortunately, they don’t have to be hard.
I tend to enjoy dabbling in elegant CSS, and figured this might be of some use to some of you out there.
If you’re lazy and just want the code, grab it here.
Continues after the jump »
Tag Team Labs produces its first Facebook offerings!
10.10.07Filed Under: Apps, Judge-O-Rama, Tag Team with 0 Comments
This past weekend, we attended the Graphing Social Patterns conference in San Jose, and while there, we started playing with the Facebook platform. We actually ended up with not one, but two apps for your consumption and enjoyment!
The first started as a little test app, but actually turned out to be pretty awesome. It’s called FriendThumbs and basically puts a grid of your friends on your profile page. Hover over them to see a larger picture of them with their latest status. Simple, but surprisingly effective.
The second is an extension of Judge-O-Rama onto Facebook. The idea is simple. Pose a question to your friends - Who’s hotter? Who’s most likely to cripple themselves in a hilarious freak accident? Whose picture most reminds you of a dog? Whatever you want - and it’ll create a bracketed, single-elimination tournament with your friends as the contestants. Anyone can then judge the contest and the results are tallied for all to see. This app was actually one of the three winners in the conference’s AppNite contest, so we must have gotten something right.
Anyhow, take a gander at them, and send feedback our way!
Man, what a ride.
09.10.07Filed Under: Apps, Judge-O-Rama, Tag Team, blippr with 0 Comments
Tuesday, Jonathan IM’d me and said “Hey, check this out, you should go to this.” Four days later, we found ourselves on a plane to San Jose and the Graphing Social Patterns conference. Jonathan and I talked ideas on the way, but one thing we agreed on: We needed a Facebook app, and we needed one fast. We’d been planning on doing a Judge-O-Rama app for a while, but one thing about the conference kicked the need into high gear: AppNite, and the opportunity to show off what we could do.
Saturday night, we worked on some JOR polish, some blippr design work, and while I was waiting on the MySQL server software to download to my laptop, I started perusing the Facebook API docs. The following morning, we attended pre-conference workshops - Jon’s covered business and marketing on Facebook apps; my workshops covered the anatomy of a Facebook app and the construction thereof.
I started hacking - somewhat apart from the direction provided by the speakers - and produced a quick little app called “FriendThumbs“. It shows your last 49-updated friends (why not 50? 49 is a square!) and when you hover over them, a bigger picture with their last status. Simple stuff, but surprisingly useful. Off of that, I started building a Judge-O-Rama app. It turned out really well. You can start a contest with as little as one click and pit all of your friends against each other in a battle royale. It notifies your friend network that they are in the contest, and invites them to come participate… and perhaps start their own contest. From the first line of code I’d ever written for Facebook to demo time was about 34 hours. It took a half dozen Red Bulls, a case of Pepsi, and a metric crapload of coffee (and coding feverishly through every seminar today), but come demo time, I had an app. I showed it off, and the judges liked it (appropriate for an app that relies on people being judgmental, huh?). We took a win for the AppNite! I couldn’t believe it - every waking moment since that first line of code had been spent coding; I barely took time to eat, but it paid off. This is what it’s all about. This is hacking at its finest, carving an app out of code and ideas, fueled by adrenaline and caffeine, and seeing it pay off big. I’m having a hard time even blogging - I can’t wait to get back to code.
The future excites me. Going into this conference, I was skeptical about Facebook as a business platform. Now I’m completely sold, and having written not just one, but two apps this weekend, I’m sold on the platform from a technical perspective, too. What I was basically able to do is just write alternate views and some interface code for what we already had in Judge-O-Rama. I was able to just write the app once and then just…plug it into Facebook, immediately launching the app from obscure curiosity to a product that can - and will - be used by millions of people. I can’t wait to do this with blippr and other projects to come. I don’t have to choose between blippr and Facebook. I don’t have to decide if I’m going to do a Facebook app or a new Tag Team app. I can do them both, multiple facets of the same idea, fully integrated, each feeding, growing, benefiting, and strengthening the other.
The speed and ease with which it’s possible to build quality Facebook apps is amazing, and I am really looking forward to leveraging it as a parallel publishing platform in the future. This is what the social web is about - not giving people who they want, but enabling them to get who they want, what they want, where and when they want it. Facebook is one such location, and we’re going to be able to do some amazing things with it.
See you all there. I can’t wait.
AppNite Winners!
08.10.07Filed Under: Judge-O-Rama with 0 Comments
Wow. What a follow-up to an already great day. While I had to leave the Graphing Social Patterns conference early this morning, my partner Chris stayed on and represented our team well. I was just informed that Judge-O-Rama’s first Facebook application won in the AppNite contest.
We’ll have more to post soon, including a link to the app once it is approved by Facebook. Also, we were told that Robert Scoble would be blogging about the winners on Scobleizer. For now, I’m just going to sit back and relish this moment. Thank you, Dave McClure. This truly has been an excellent opportunity for us and others like us. We appreciate all the hard work you put into this conference.
Graphing Social Patterns: Day One
07.10.07Filed Under: Judge-O-Rama, Perspective, Tag Team, blippr with 827 Comments
I’m only here through tomorrow morning at 6:00am, but I have to say that the first day of Dave McClure’s Graphing Social Patterns was a success.
In the first session of the Business and Marketing workshop, Lee Lorenzen of Altura Ventures and Rodney Rumford of FaceReviews were supposed to merely provide a Facebook 101 overview. However, given the knowledge level of the audience (though limited in some cases), they decided it would be better to discuss the economics and potential of the platform. This proved far more fruitful.
Lee began by providing his take on why Facebook has “staying power” compared to the other networks: “It’s built on trust.” Lorenzen also went on to state that, from a long-term perspective, he believes Facebook is going to be “as dominant as Windows” in terms of it being a platform. Some other highlights from his perspective included:
- The feature to organize your friends into different categories marks “the nail in the coffin of LinkedIn.” (Good thing Reid Hoffman hadn’t arrived at the conference yet.)
- Social networks are “like a country’s native language” in that, once they’re adopted, they’re there to stay. He believes that you will see few other social networks become dominant players after they have proliferated a particular community.
- In relation to his company’s valuations of various Facebook apps, he said that he believes developers “own an asset they’re undervaluing.” That asset, he believes, is the portion of user profile pages each application consumes.
- The best way to “jumpstart your app” is paying for an initial number of installs at a Cost Per Install (CPI) rate. Obviously he’s a little biased as his own adonomics offers this service, but for the most part, he’s right: the most successful apps must reach a critical mass before taking off and the fastest way to reach that mass is paying for the users. This point was recently proven further by Tim O’Reilly’s Facebook research.
Rodney Rumford took the stage next and provided his additional opinions on the platform. Highlights included:
- “Facebook is a WOM marketing machine with every friction point removed.”
- “If you want evangelists out there to spread the word and engage with your brand, there is no better place online than Facebook for this. We believe entire businesses will be built on Facebook.”
- When he joined Facebook, “Candidly, it wasn’t compelling to me because none of my friends were there.”
- From his perspective, it’s no wonder Top Friends became the number one app on Facebook. According to Rumford, Slide had a dedicated Customer Service person, treating Facebookers like customers, just like any business.
- In his tips to developers, he made the observation that “Users inherently trust anything that looks like Facebook.” So make it look that way.
After a brief lunch, Rogelio (Ro, for short) Choy of RockYou began with his take on the Facebook application craze. With his experience in the space and RockYou being one of the top two widget providers, his candor proved quite insightful. While some may view RockYou as one of the more spammy widget creators, there’s no denying RockYou’s phenomenal success. Based upon the success RockYou, Slide, and others like them, he posed a very good question during his time on stage:
Is it worth investing in your own destination, or only investing in the social web?
It’s a question we have been asking ourselves at Tag Team lately. While we firmly believe we’ve made the right decision in investing our time into the creation of our stand-alone apps Judge-O-Rama and blippr, we do foresee the opportunity to utilize Facebook not only as a marketing and complementary channel for our current sites, but as a breeding ground for new ideas. Imagine the possibilities if all companies were going about testing the viability of their ideas across a userbase the size of Facebook’s, minus the costs commonly associated with such development. Companies would have the opportunity to see exactly how people use their service and gather feedback from customers before ever developing something that, in the end, might not work out (or could at least use some tweaking to work better). That’s exactly what Facebook affords the development and business community and I can tell you assuredly that Tag Team looks forward to using it in this effort.
One last interesting note I want to point out about Ro’s message. Without any prompting, he brought up the recent blog bashing RockYou’s CEO, Lance Tokuda received as a result of his comment to the New York Times: ”If you told me you were going to write me a check for $10 million, I’d say, ‘Forget it.’” I agreed with Ro’s perspective on this matter. All the bashing came from bloggers because, as Terrence Russell of Epicenter put it, “Facebook has recently added rich media capabilities to its own Wall, and despite Super Wall’s 10 million user adds, the app has ultimately put itself in the path of the site’s natural progression… his high valuation will be on shaky ground if Facebook continues to expand its features.” This would be absolutely true if Facebook were the only player. But as Ro so insightfully and even casually pointed out, RockYou isn’t just betting on Facebook. They’re betting on networks like MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, and a long list of other sites to follow Facebook’s lead in opening up their platforms. From my perspective, that’s not just a good bet, that’s a sure bet. So while 10 million users may be one thing, what type of valuation could RockYou get for that single application if their SuperWall audience doubled, tripled, even quadrupled?
It’ll be interesting to see how everything plays out on the app market, but one thing is certain: you can stay tuned for some entertaining and useful apps coming from us very soon.
Let the Blogging Begin
06.10.07Filed Under: Tag Team with 0 Comments
This marks the perfect occasion for us to start blogging. Chris and I just arrived in San Jose for Dave McClure’s Graphing Social Patterns. The conference officially begins tomorrow, but we’re both excited about the speaker lineup and the opportunity (hopefully) to meet a long list of people we admire. People like Mike Arrington, Tim O’Reilly, Robert Scoble, and a plethora of others.
The conference will also give us the opportunity to develop our first Facebook application. While we’ve planned on developing one since launching Judge-O-Rama, our focus has needed to remain on the development of blippr given our self-imposed, but nevertheless aggressive schedule. This trip was somewhat of a last-minute decision, but we believe it was the right one and we look forward to blogging about our happenings over the coming days.
At this moment, we’re sitting in our room at the Holiday Inn, closing in on blippr’s beta (t-minus one week and counting) while simultaneously watching an American Gladiator marathon. Be sure to check back here or grab our feed for our GSP and company updates, but for now we’ll bid you adieu. We’re about to head out for some dinner… and we’re fascinated watching Turbo pummel his contenders in the joust.
