Master of 500 Hats

Yang & Decker on Yahoo biz "focus": 1) homepage, 2) search, 3) mail, 4) mobile... or 5) none of the above?

(so admittedly this is a rather rough post that came out of some comments i was writing up over on a TechCrunch post about the Jerry Yang intvw at D conf... thought i'd just them up here as well)

first, let me start by noting i think the Yahoo SearchMonkey initiative is generally a good direction to be heading towards.  however, i also think there is a lack of executive cluefulness on tech strategy at Yahoo, as evidenced by the conversation with Kara @ D conf.  maybe Jerry just hasn't had enough time to cleanup from Terry's previous "strategy", but regardless i think neither he nor Sue have succeeded in setting a clear direction forward that is game-changing enough to give board members / shareholders reasonable fiduciary leeway to let them continue [mis-]leading the company.

maybe it's time for others with more cogent strategy to step in & give it a shot.

in particular, there was a telling quote from Decker about what the "focus" of the business is (or lack of one, really) that i think reveals the heart of the matter...

Sue Decker, on Yahoo core biz focus: 

"we focus on homepage, search, mail & mobile".

i guess Jerry & Sue would argue 4 priority areas isn't a lack of focus, but sure feels like that's at least 1 too many, if not 3 too many.  and curiously there's no mention of a transactional focus area, which given all their traffic & content properties & brand familiarity seems like a big missed opportunity -- one that others like eBay, Amazon, & Apple are taking advantage of.

anyway, here's my take on those 4 areas...

1) HOMEPAGE aka "sell the shit out of [limited] premium web portal real estate".  not really a great long-term business, imho.  short-term monetization is good, but long-term control is limited & therefore not likely good strategic bet.  the "home page" will fragment, become personalized, distributed.  switching costs are low.  Feeds & distributed news flow will be the model.  not sure if Yahoo's display advertising biz also fits in this box, but if so that might also be significant... sounds like what Ballmer wants.  still not sure it's most valuable asset long-term.

2) SEARCH: barely keeping significant #2 market share in search, but still pretty darn good monetization compared to the rest of their biz.  on absolute basis, great biz to be in.. tons of cashflow, even their declining market share in overall growing market probably not bad biz.  just sucks on a relative basis to look over at GOOG and think what could have been.   good near- to medium-term asset, if they don't keep losing too much share to the GOOG.

3) MAIL: tons of usage, but crappy monetization.  see my earlier posts for how to monetize the social graph data in the inbox.  imho, this is one of the more interesting assets that currently hasn't been realized in revenue. YahooGroups fits in here as well, which is just a travesty that there hasn't been more attention in past few years.  i have a friend there who may pull the bacon out of the fire, but it's a big task given how much they've squandered over past few years.  long-term, this has significant potential, but only if they really use it for something that creates user / 3rd-party value.

4) MOBILE: i don't really understand this part of their biz.  maybe some traction here outside US i'm not aware of.  (i'll refrain from commentary here, since i'm clueless)

anyway, just feels like there could be more being done with using Y! Platform as distribution play to get to all their users.  we'll see...

Boy Ajar

Boy Ajar
Originally uploaded by davemc500hats

Curiosity:
a boy, a cat, or a door.
all mind wide Open.

Chris Messina is Making Things Better.

Chris "Factory Joe" Messina lays it down in a recent post called "The Battle for the Future of the Social Web".

While i don't always agree with Chris, his perspectives are always insightful.  In regard to the recent Facebook Connect vs. Google Friend Connect
wars, i appreciate his recognition that *both* companies (not just one) are self-interested, even if they posture otherwise. 

[and note, i'm not saying either is Good or Evil... simply that they choose to create user benefit for their own purposes, not for some misplaced sense of altruism or a new network effect about "goodness"].

Regardless he is correct there's a war going on.  It caught everyone's attention last week, and it's not likely to die down anytime soon. 

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Personally i tend to opt for market competition over standards as the optimal way to improve our lives -- technical or otherwise, but i respect that Chris & others like Chris Saad put their money time where their mouths are on stuff like the DiSo Project & Data Portability.

In any case, i suggest you give Chris's post a good read... he's smart, and it's excellent.

Memo to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, & AOL: How to Turn 500M email logins into Facebook Platform & a Crapload of Revenue.

ok, so even after all these announcements about data portability, no one seems to understand what the hell i keep talking about re: using email & IM messaging data stores to improve targeting & make friend lists work better.  i admit it's a bit inside-baseball, but it's actually pretty simple.

[UPDATE: Yahoo just joined Microsoft (via Windows Live Contacts API) & Google (via Google Contacts Data API) in enabling 3rd-party programmatic access to contacts in the Yahoo mail address book accessible via API.  now all 3 just need to enable filtered access using messaging frequency & keyword relevance, and we'll finally be getting somewhere... who's gonna step up first?]

the thing is, i actually DO believe we're on the verge of something game-changing here.  i DO believe that the social gestures & interactions pioneered on Live Journal & then Facebook & now Google & MySpace are slowly going to migrate over to the rest of the web, and energize all of our normally boring websites with social cues & viral behaviors. 

HOWEVER: i'm really friggin' tired of a popup with 50 of my 1000 friends (whose names all seem to begin with 'A') or being asked to upload my address book (over 2000 contacts, many of whom are email lists or people i don't know) to use as a viral distribution method. 

so here's the skinny homeboy:

I HAVE WAAAAAAY TOO MANY DAMN "FRIENDS" IN MY SOCIAL NETWORK.  I GOTZ THOUSANDS OF DONT-GIVE-A-F*#K "CONTACTS" IN MY ADDRESS BOOK.  BUT DON'T ASSUME I'M GOING TO SPAM / UPLOAD / INVITE ALL OF THEM TO CHECK OUT YOUR CHEAP-ASS, NON-MONETIZING, PRIVACY-RAPING, BUTT-UGLY DESIGNED, RETARDED UX, PO-DUNK WEBSITE OR FACEBOOK APP.

In other words, i don't trust [most of] you.

in fact, i don't trust ANY of you -- friends or websites or apps -- any further than i can throw [a sheep at] you.

just cause i've accepted an invite to be your friend, or happened to find you on a website, or in a forum or group i've passed by in the online version of a wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am-for-the-one-night-stand, DOES NOT MEAN i want to know what you had for dinner last night, who you knocked boots with lately, or if your new social networking startup for Retired Dread Pirate Roberts or website for exterminating Rodents Of Unusual Size is worth bazillions.

on the other hand, there probably IS a small subset of crazy peeps who i DO want to share your shit with, but it's probably only ~10 people in my potential network of 1000.  and i want to figure out how to choose 10 targeted people quickly & easily out of my random network of 1000.  (and probably only 1-3 of those folks will really take a look, but those are the ones you want).

so let me state that more clearly.

PROBLEM: when i'm on a website or social network or social app, it wants me to help refer other people / help with some lame-o viral marketing scheme.  however, i'm only gonna do that for a select few who really share my context / insanity, not everyone in my network (unless my name is Robert Scoble).

what I DO NOT WANT:

• select from a god-awful list of 100 faces in your pop-up face listbox
• upload my entire address book of 2000+ contacts for you to spam the world
  
• wait for your data-loading / selection function to crash horribly, after taking forever to load

what I DO WANT:

• popup the MOST RELEVANT 5-10 peeps who meet certain key criteria
  
• use an intelligent combination of shared interests & messaging frequency to figure out who these "TOP" friends are (for the given context)
• let me select 1-3 of them to invite & checkout an awesome [video game | baby stroller | new book | really good pr0n] i just found

SOLUTION: let's see now.  WHERE? can i find an easily accessible data store with info on how frequently i contact other people, already-indexed relevant keywords for conversations i've had with those folks, and provides a built-in distribution method for sharing further information & content?

ANSWER: why, it's EMAIL! you stupid mofo.  and also your IM client, and your SMS history on your cellphone, and nowadays your photostream & Facebook wall & tweetstream & everything else related to the Centralized ME.

Now, WHO has the largest collection of email / IM data on the web?  Well i'm guessing the order looks something like this:

1. Yahoo (~400-500M email users, ~10 years of data)
2. Microsoft (~300-400M email users, ~10 years of data)
3. AOL  (~100-150M email users, ~15 years of data)
4. Google (~100-150M email users, ~5 years of data)

note for the record, MySpace & Facebook also have a shitload of this data, as do other social networks, altho like Google they're a bit newer to the game than Yahoo, Microsoft, & AOL who've been collecting all that data for over a decade.

ditto for cellphone carriers, especially in geographies where text messaging is more prevalent (= non-US, altho we're finally catching up).  except you don't really have to worry about these guys, since they're even more clueless than the big web platform dinosaurs.

so now recently, Facebook & MySpace & Google have all rolled out offerings to demonstrate off-network profile access, friends list, & other social network platform services infrastructure to enable any other 3rd-party website to provide Facebook Platform-style services & apps.   previously Microsoft, Google,  Yahoo, & AOL have created authentication & contact APIs to enable use of login infrastructure & address book services on 3rd-party sites. 

NOW i'm not sure what this is so damn hard for people to figure out, or why it's taken over a decade for Microsoft, Yahoo, or AOL to get their ass in gear, or why Google didn't do it in the last 5 years, and why Facebook Platform (which was built in barely a year?!?) blew past them all to become the first legitimate Web OS (walled garden or not). 

But now that everyone has FINALLY woken up, the next step is to put all this shit together & make it useful for everyone else OUTSIDE the walled garden.  In short, that means:

1. Use 3rd-party acct infrastructure to provide "no login rqd" single sign-on
2. Use profile data for landing page customization & campaign targeting
3. Use email data for friend lists, filtered by msg frequency & keywords
4. Use all of the above to enable viral distribution on the non-social web
5. Use payment info (after MSFT/GOOG buy AMZN/EBAY) to buy stuff

Platform vendors -- at the very least Google & Microsoft, hopefully Yahoo & AOL too -- should be offering these enhanced services for any 3rd-party sites that utilize the above infrastructure.  Perhaps it will take further consolidation to make this happen.  My guess is one camp eventually is Microsoft + Yahoo + Facebook + Amazon, and another is Google + AOL + MySpace + eBay, but those parts could fit together slightly differently.  Regardless, once you combine portals + search + social networks + messaging + commerce, you get a very very interesting & quite lucrative combination of assets.

Those assets SHOULD be utilized to create a Web Operating System which in turn drives the implicit web that accelerates user acquisition, improves activation & retention, energizes referral, and eventually drives substantial increases in revenue for a whole new wave of web 3.0 startups.

Of course i've already covered all of that in Startup Metrics 101.

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Customer Lifecycle

Customer Lifecycle
Originally uploaded by davemc500hats

great post by Josh Kopelman, great concept & picture by Sunny, found via Andrew Chen (thanks guys!)

love this picture.

great way to think about different ways to interact with customers as they go through a standard lifecycle with your website / app / business. 

some similarites to the 5-step "AARRR" startup metrics model that i beat like a drum, but i like this model a lot too :)

SlideShare Kicks Ass, Picks Up $3M From Venrock & Friends (+ me!)

Congrats to Rashmi, Jon, Amit & team... SlideShare just raised $3M from Venrock :)

I can't begin to say how proud i am of the SlideShare team, and what an honor it is to be an advisor & small angel investor in their venture.   it's also a terrific product that i was fan of long before i became an advisor or investor.  but most of all, it's just been a real pleasure to get to know Rashmi & Jon as friends & fellow geeks over the past year (in fact i just got back from dinner with them in SF, and we had a blast :).

I first came across the company in fall 2006 by reading a SlideShare review on TechCrunch, and later started using it to host some of the early presentations on startup metrics i created last summer.  I became so enamored of the service that i wanted to meet the folks behind it, and lo & behold i discovered the company was right in my own backyard!  i had even met one of the founders a few times, and she was a regular at Dana Street Coffee in Mountain View, right around the corner from Mint, another startup i had been working with. (btw, Dana Street has great karma... it was a popular hangout back when i was at PayPal and we were briefly in Mt View in 2002-3.  Jim & James from HotorNot also used to hang out there before they moved to the city, as well as a bunch of the ex-PayPal engineering braintrust who went on to help create YouTube)

I really got to know SlideShare better when i ran the first Graphing Social Patterns 2007 conference last fall in San Jose, and used it to host / post most of the GSP slides.  I think it was soon after Charlene Li had posted her presentation on "Big Brands & Facebook", and got over 10,000 views in less than one week that i woke up and smelled more than just the Dana Street coffee!  At first i thought all those views were because Charlene was hosting the preso on her blog, or that Forrester was pointing to it, or other notable bloggers.  But the interesting thing i found out is that more than 80% of the total views came from the slideshare community, not from the widget embed (currently that presentation has over 35K views, with only 5-6K coming from the original embed). 

This was rather astonishing. SlideShare wasn't just a productivity tool.

SlideShare was a resource for driving traffic!

At that point, i got reeeeeeeeal interested.  I was a viewer, i was a publisher.  I was a conference organizer.  I was an evangelist.  I was a fan.  Then i became an advisor, to help them work on product & marketing startegy, and of course metrics.  Lastly i became an investor, because i really believed in the product, the customer need, and the team :)

Congrats again to the team... and i want to apologize profusely for the ugly mug they chose to use in their recent investor announcement presentation, posted below:

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While we're at it, here are the profile thumbnails on SlideShare, from Crunchbase and Tradevibes respectively:

CrunchBase Information

SlideShare

Information provided by CrunchBase

Happy 5th Anniversary LinkedIn (& congrats Reid, Dan & team :)

  LinkedIn 1.0, May 2003 
  Originally uploaded by Chris

Congrats to Reid, Dan & the entire LinkedIn team (past & present)

You've come a long way baby.

(& you look like a billion bucks :)

ps - for those who may not be aware, LinkedIn celebrated profitability about a year ago (after being profitable since early 2006)

MicroHooFreude! (Memo to Jerry: Prepare to be Sued)

"I still believe even today that our offer remains the only alternative put forward that provides your stockholders full and fair value for their shares. By failing to reach an agreement with us, you and your stockholders have left significant value on the table."
- Steve Ballmer

(from MSFT press release where Steve says his boots are made for walking)

Jerry, time to find a good lawyer... cuz your shareholders are gonna
sue your ass six ways to sunday.

(srlsly: where was all this chutzpah when your company needed it?  absolutely mind-bottling)

for the record -- i still think this deal will happen, but now it might be at $27 instead of $37-38 Yahoo was asking for.

only one thing is certain: Steve Jobs & Eric Schmidt exult in geek ecstasy / drunken stupor, singing: MicroHooFreude Uber Alles!

Q: How in Holy Hell are Facebook, Slide, Ning, & "Toy Apps" worth Billions? A: Social Commerce.

hey Kara: want to know why Facebook, Slide, RockYou, Ning, & all those other Facebook toy apps (& MySpace, etc) are worth $15B or $500M +?

well if they're worth anywhere near that much, it's not obvious 100M+ widgets, walls, & installs are what generates revenue... however, it MAY be because of the social graph data-mined from those users & apps & widgets, and what that means for the future of Social Commerce.

besides Kara, you've said it yourself...

VentureBeat Digital Media Party - Hot Hot HOT!

  VentureBeat Digital Media Party 
  Originally uploaded by b_d_solis

I had a great time at the VentureBeat party up in SF last night (and from the looks of this picture, the VentureBeat team did too ;)

congrats on the launch of VentureBeat DigitalMedia Matt & team!

more party pix by Brian Solis & Renee Blodgett.