Delicious, Foursquare, OneTrueFan and the Founders Dilemma

This week two very interrelated tech news stories broke.  The first: Yahoo may be closing Delicious; the second: Former MyBlogLog founder launched the public beta of his new product OneTrueFan.  Why are these related?  Delicious and MyBlogLog were two incredibly popular web 2.0 social products that were acquired by Yahoo! aggressively when their stock was rising.  Both were poorly assimilated, rarely updated and for the most part left to squander to the dismay of their loyal fanbases. Oh and despite it all I've used and enjoyed both of these services almost to the bitter end, so this Yahoo's failure is personal.

While the founders of MyBlogLog and Delicious did very well financially through their acquisitions I imagine they were incredibly pained seeing their vision go mainly unrealized and their dedicated users left unfulfilled.  Now years after web giants like Yahoo swallowed up hot startups we're seeing the founders try for success again with their ideas again.  OneTrueFan is in a way MyBlogLog 2.0 - the founder's attempt to create independently what  couldn't be done within Yahoo.  It's the same story as Foursquare, which was launched by Dennis Crowley years after Google acquired his first company Dodgeball and drove it into the ground.  Now Foursquare is one of the most popular mobile social networks around at the dismay of Google; will OneTrueFan achieve similar success?

I for one am happy to see founders go back and try to make a second run at their idea.  It shows passion and dedication, and proves they really cared about the product, not just the money.  It shows if you care about your product you need to think hard whether it can possibly achieve its potential when you have to play by someone else's rules.  Personally I hope like Dennis Crowley before him Delicious founder Josh Schachter tries for round two with his dream with a new version of social bookmarking; I would be much happier using his product than the one Yahoo! is embarrassingly choking to death.  I think there's a huge amount of potential to build upon Josh's original vision (and I know I'm not the only one).

In the mean time, I hope founders of great companies try to make it on their own, or at least look for better matches in their suiters.  Those of us who come to love and rely on your great work want to see what you're cable of doing with your great idea.

(But then, part of me wonders if it sometimes takes the disappointments early on for success to happen.  In other words, was Dodgeball too early for its time, was it destined to fail either way, and did the manor in which it failed drive Crowley to a new, better idea that he wouldn't have been capable of achieving otherwise?  Or maybe it takes the added flexibility and confidence of having some money under your belt, as this article suggests.)

Riya - Please sell your facial recognition technology to someone who will use it

Riya, the photo-sharing website with facial recognition capability that I've obsessed over and written often about, is looking to sell their facial recognition technology. They transitioned over all of their efforts to a visual shopping search engine which is apparently very lucrative for them, although not nearly as exciting or fun. Apparently they never got over the hump in making the facial recognition software as accurate as they wanted, and any talks with buyers of Riya in that incarnation died long ago. Now they will officially rename their company Like.com, and sell off the Riya technology. I am hoping that Google or Yahoo purchases them and implements the technology immediately into Picasa or Flickr respectively - it would be an invaluable asset in tagging the thousands of photos I now have in each service (my wish list also includes those two companies allowing inter-operability & sync'ing). But now I'm thinking more likely someone like Facebook buys the technology and uses it to help its users tags the faces of their friends, a practice that Facebook users are already doing and are used to, and probably wouldn't mind the help.

How much would Google help Yahoo if they worked together

You've probably lost interest by now in the Yahoo-Microsoft-AOL-Google dealings (if you were following it at all), but here's an interesting projection - look at the financial estimates of increased revenue of Yahoo outsourcing their search advertising to Google - 25%...50%...100%... that's how much better everyone thinks Google does search advertising than the rest of the market - give them your inventory, and you will make your money back in multiples. Personally, I hope no one buys or merges with Yahoo- its more fun to have several players in the market vying for market share, more products come out, more interesting moves get made. Now Yahoo and AOL just have to start committing to some of their products, improving and supporting them, and we'll be getting somewhere.

Yahoo Puts All The Chips On The Table. Time For Somebody To Fold: "Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney previously said that a Yahoo-Google search deal could boost cash flows by 25%. Experts we talked to estimated that could boost Yahoo’s market valuation by $7 billion or so, less than half the premium Microsoft offered on February 1.

That Mahaney estimate of increased cash flow from a Yahoo-Google deal is now “more than $1 billion a year,” a 50% gain in cash flow from 2007. That puts the offers roughly on par, give or take a few billion. And it gives Yahoo a potentially viable alternative to the Microsoft deal."

CES Trend #1: Open Platforms

This is first of my posts on trends that were illustrated by announcements at CES 2008:

1. Open platforms - everything is opening up and everyone wants to own the platform.

At Yahoo's keynote talk, Jerry Yang (who just this year returned to serve as the CEO of Yahoo after years away) showed off two new open platforms - one just launched and one as a concept for the future.

Yahoo! Go 3.0 - Yahoo! has offered a rich visual interface for download onto mobile devices and easy access to Yahoo's most popular tools for a while now.  With Yahoo! Go 3.0 Yahoo has standardized the mobile widgets on an open platform, and allowed other brands to build widgets for download and integration directly into the mobile platform.  Advertisers will also be able leverage the platform by designing ads that utilize the Yahoo! features such as maps.  Yahoo opening their mobile platform is a direct response to Google's announcement of Android, the open mobile platform that was announced in 2007 and we'll likely here  more about at the Mobile World Congress next month.  Verizon Wireless has also announced that they'll open up their famously closed network by the end of the year.

Yahoo! Social Mail (concept) - Yahoo! also showed a conceptual design for a new Social Mail  program built out of their popular online mail client.  The Social Mail concept would be turning Yahoo! Mail into an open platform for communication, allowing other companies like MySpace and eVite to integrate directly with Yahoo! Mail, as well as all of the other Yahoo! properties that would not be integregated, such as Maps and Flickr.  It would start by turning the Mail startpage into a life-stream of all of your contacts, letting you know when you friends updated flickr, facebook, sent you a text message, IM, or e-mail.  All of your contacts across all of your properties would be integrated, sync'd, and ranked based on your overall communication levels.  Then you would be able to leverage all of the integrated programs. 

For example, say you were IMing friends via Yahoo! Messenger inside your Yahoo! Mail program, and everyone decided to go out to dinner tonight.  You'd be able to click the Yahoo! Maps tab and see everyone's favorite restaurants ranked via Yelp!  Then you'd be able to send out an eVite with the names of the people you are IMing, the highest ranked restaurant across all of your friends preferences already added on, and the event assigned to your calendar.  Afterwards, all of the pictures your friends took at the dinner would show up in your life-stream in-box.  Google, again, is expected to reveal a similar integrated email program in the near future, at the very least leveraging more Google properties.  Mail is the most social application we have, regardless of the spread of MySpace and Facebook, and both Yahoo! and Google are expected to leverage this into a more powerful social application in 2008.

Here is a small portion of video footage I took of the talk where Jerry Yang shows the friend rating, mapping, and eVite features.

Technorati Tags: CES,consumer electronics show,CES 2008,Yahoo,Yahoo! Go 3.0,Google,Android,open platforms,mobile

Google Spurs Change

Google Operating System has an interesting post called "winning even when you lose" where they discuss how Google spurs change in industries regardless of if it loses the apparent arms race.  The few examples given, of which there are likely many more, are:

Email - 2004 - Gmail launches with 1GB of free storage compared to Yahoo's 4MB of free storage.  In response, Yahoo grew to 100MB, then 1GB a year later, and finally, is now uncapped, while Google is only at 6GB for free (although it's growing at all times)

Instant Messaging - 2005 - Google Talk launches as an open standards chat program meant to exchange IMs with all open IM clients (although at the time that meant none of the big 3 competitors - AIM, Y! Messenger, or MSN Messenger).  In response Yahoo and Microsoft teamed up to link their IM services later that year.

Mobile Phones - 2007 - Google announced that it would bid for the 700MHz spectrum in the US, declaring four conditions of open applications and devices.  Later that year Verizon Wireless finally announces that it will open its wireless network to 3rd party devices and software.

Social Networks - 2007 - Google launches OpenSocial, an open widget application platform, and a month later Facebook announces it will open it's widget application platform for use on other social networks.

If you want to try Y!Mash, Yahoo!'s new social network

I just signed up for Y!Mash, the new Yahoo! Social network.  It has features from just about all of the other social networks, which you would expect from any entrant into the field at this point- News feeds from Facebook, modules from Bebo, etc.  I'm not really looking for another social network right now so the benefit is really how well this ties together yahoo features (and my existing blogs) easly - flickr, del.icio.us, y! music, etc.  If someone is interested in testing it out, let me know and I'll send an invite.  The site is in early stages, and nothing overwhelming, but it can't hurt to play around with.

Google is rumored to be coming out with a social stream that ties together the work you're doing on everything that Google owns - YouTube, Blogger, Google Docs, Picasa, etc.  If only Picasa was as strong as Flickr...

I'm not sure why Google or Yahoo! hasn't bought Twitter, either, and rolled that into a powerful blogging platform.  Right now I'm posting to Flickr, Twitter, Del.icio.us, and Blogger regularly, with other tools scattered in.  These are the best tools to chronicle day to day life, and Twitter still and leveraged.

By the way - I got my invite to Y!Mash from InviteShare, the web 2.0 beta invite sharing tool now owned by TechCrunch.  It took all of 30 seconds between me signing up and receiving the invite I wanted.

Technorati Tags: social networking , y!mash , yahoo! , techcrunch , inviteshare , bebo , facebook

Planning a Boston Trip With Yahoo! Travel

boston with angela 041
Originally uploaded by kskobac.

I was planning a trip to Boston last weekend and I decided to give Yahoo! Travel a shot - I was looking to plan a trip covering the highlights of the whole Boston / Cambridge for someone who had never seen any of the city at all. Yahoo! Travel it turns out makes things very easy - you can view top rated restaurants, hotels, events, entertainment, and more. You can view other people's trip itineraries. And anywhere you see something you like, it's a simple click to ad to your own itinerary. Then you can easily schedule when you want to do something, view all locations on maps, get print outs of location and description of all trip elements, driving directions, and more. Afterwards, you can import pictures directly from your Flickr account. Yahoo! Travel shows the value of social media, so much so that I came home and added the restuarants and events I went to that weren't in the tool yet because of how many benefits I got out of using it. I will definitely look here to start when planning my next trip.

See my Boston trip here:
http://travel.yahoo.com/trip-view-1114737-boston_trip_with_angela

Technorati Tags: yahoo, yahoo travel, flickr, cambridge, massachusetts, boston, social, event planning