Web X.0

Best press release ever

I generally hate press releases. They all seem to come out of the same cookie cutter, watered down by the same lawyers, etc.  In short - it seems like all press releases are a result of something like the Bullshitr - "The Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator™"

So reading this press release really knocked me off my chair. Wow - excellent!

eBay's decision machine

Took me some time, but I think I figured it out! It seems like eBay has acquired a state-of-the-art 'buy-vs-build decision mixer' (sold used for $19 by a user named 'netscape'):

This is how it works:

• Write smart decisions like 'build own ad network', or 'license VoIP phone' on a piece of paper.
• Tear down the middle, and throw all the pieces into the mixer.
• Take out two random halves and voila - you have the decisions needed to run your company.

'Buy VoIP phone with no revenues for $2B+'?

'Hand over biggest ad asset to your biggest competitor'?!

'Pull from the gutter the VoIP system of that same biggest competitor and make it a viable alternative for your $2B+ system'?!?!?!

Yup - must be that decision mixer in action. No other way to explain any of this...

Coverage of the eBay-Google mystery deal TechCrunch, paidContent and GigaOm.
 

Fodor's now uses AdSonar

This morning we announced the addition of Fodor's to our AdSonar publisher family. I posted about it here.

Fodor's definitely gets it. In any blind network in which a single keyword gets you on thousands of sites, there are bound to be bad publishers piggybacking on the good publishers.

Advertisers don't bid 50c for the word 'paris' on Google because they're so eager to get on that post on Joe's Blog ranting about how bad his delayed flight to France was. They're bidding 50c to be on sites like Fodor's where people are actually looking for useful travel info on Paris. Heck, they'd probably bid way more than 50c if they just knew their ads were all going to great sites like Fodor's.

If you're a premium publisher that has the brand and/or the sales force and/or the traffic that gets advertisers interested in advertising directly on your site, there is no reason for you to be carrying that long tail of questionable publishers on your back. Unless you're into a 'spreading your wealth' type of thing, that is...

RSS relevancy experiment - NewsGator now supported

Today we're expanding the RSS relevancy experiment to support NewsGator readers as well. 

In a nutshell, we're looking for folks like you to help us vote on feeds you read and find interesting.

In addition, we support Bloglines, Rojo and Sage:
 

If you use any of these to read your feeds, and want to help us out in the relevancy project, shoot me an email and I'll set you up. Thanks!

yaron (at) galai (dot) com

Is Microsoft acquiring Facebook?

There's something a little weird about last week's announcement that Microsoft has won the exclusive 3-year deal for managing display and text ads on Facebook. Here's why:

• To the best of my knowledge, Microsoft has no contextual product as of yet, and has never run any text ads on 3rd party content sites on any significant scale. As a result, it's impossible for Microsoft to have any significant advertiser base or ad coverage for content or experience in yield optimization.
• What this means, is that either Facebook or Microsoft are betting the farm on Microsoft's ability to build a successful product, to fill it with advertisers and get bid levels up extremely quickly. This is a pretty big bet[1]. 
• Question is - Who's making the bet? I think it's safe to say that Facebook ain't it. Thanks to Google writing checks to publishers quicker than they can take them, the online ad space is now an absolute seller's market. No reason for Facebook to assume any risk on this deal, let alone with a company that has no real product yet, has no advertisers yet, and has little experience in monetizing 3rd party content pages.
• Which means that if anyone is making a bet here, it must be Microsoft. And that's where things are getting a little suspicious. For what's gotta be a material deal, it's pretty strange that: a) "Facebook and Microsoft executives said they began their talks late last week", and b) that Microsoft, a public company, is not disclosing the terms of the deal.

Multi-hundred-million-dollar deals, especially when Microsoft is the one laying down the money don't normally close within less than a week, and once they are closed, they usually are disclosed.

Which leads me to speculate that maybe neither party has assumed any material risk with this announcement?...

How is that possible? Could the following *speculative* scenario be the answer?:

• Microsoft were in the final stages of acquiring Facebook.
• The MSN executives saw the MySpace-Google announcement, making them cringe in their seats about Google getting all the press and Wall St love again.
• Microsoft, wanting some badly needed PR wins, pushes Facebook to make an announcement about winning an "exclusive deal", noting that within a couple of weeks Facebook will be part of MSN anyway so they have nothing to lose.
• Facebook, eager to close their $1B+ acquisition while they are still in vogue and run to the hills, make nice to Microsoft and agree to a vague announcement.

This could definitely explain the suspicious announcement from last week. But does it make sense for Microsoft to acquire Facebook, which has reportedly declined offers to be acquired for $750M recently? I'll try to look into that in a separate post in a couple of days.

[1] How big of a bet? In normal times, this could be estimated by multiplying reasonable CPM's by traffic numbers. But thanks to Google, these are far from normal times and therefore the best way to estimate the size of the bet is by comparing it to the $900M MySpace deal. Considering that the MySpace-Google deal is almost a 4 year deal, while the Facebook-MS deal is a 3-year deal, we can adjust from $900M to $720M. The next discount can be made for user sizes (~100M for MySpace, ~10M for Facebook), so we can further adjust to $72M.

However, it is widely reported that Facebook users login to the site waaay more than MySpace users do (GigaOm reports that over 2/3rds of Facebook users login *daily*... pretty amazing...). And the Facebook users have credit cards, while most of the MySpacers don't. So how valuable is that traffic for advertisers? Facebook would probably claim that $720M or even more is the magic number. Microsoft would probably shoot for the $72M range. The real number, if there is a real deal here (and that's a big IF), is probably somewhere in the middle, and most probably in the multi-hundred-million-dollar range. 

RSS relevancy experiment - Rojo and Sage supported

I recently posted about an experiment I'm running around relevancy in RSS. In a nutshell, we're looking for folks like you to help us vote on feeds you read and find interesting.

We initially supported Bloglines only (on Firefox). Today we're adding support for Rojo and Sage (thanks Rogel!).

If you use Rojo or Sage (or Bloglines of course) to read your feeds, and want to help us out in the relevancy project, shoot me an email and I'll set you up:

yaron (at) galai (dot) com

[UPDATE] We are now supporting NewsGator too.

Techmeme trackback badges

Techmeme (which I also wrote about here) is a great service for tracking emerging memes on the blogosphere. What's really cool about it is that it does a great job of identifying the significant participants in the discussion around each particular topic. It finds the most legit, prominent and to some extent - even the most interesting - blog posts and associates them automatically to each story.

Trouble is, very few people know about Techmeme.

So I was thinking - given that this 'related discussion' piece is really solid and valuable, why not offer bloggers to add to the footer of each blog post a Techmeme badge that will automatically show links to the most relevant/interesting posts around that topic? Sort of an automation of the trackback mechanism, making it 10x more useful and easier to maintain with the most relevant links.

I will definitely put the 'Techmeme Auto-Trackback Badge' on this blog as soon as it's available.

[UPDATE] - Great post by Tom on the trackback spam problem. One of the byproducts of the excellent Techmeme service is that I have never ever ever encountered a spam link on it. And I hit Techmeme probably 5 times a day.

So I'm wondering about some variation on the theme above - Maybe the solution to trackback spam is some reputation score assigned to each blogger  which would be used for easier (or automated) trackback filtering?

It sure seems like Techmeme has some magical way to avoid spam and show only legit posts. Maybe extracting some "reputation score" and letting the blog publishing tools poll it for each trackback is an even better idea than the one I started with. As eBay has shown us, having a great reputation system in place is an amazing asset to own.

Looking for feed readers

Do you read blogs like this one via a feed? Do you use Bloglines on Firefox[1]? If yes, then Uncle Yaron Needs YOU!

For an experiment I'm involved in relating to relevancy and blogs, we're looking for folks like you to help us vote on feeds you read and find interesting.

What's in it for you?... Hmmm - to be perfectly honest - not much for now... Well, except for the great privilege of helping me out, of course!... ;-)

I can say that this is an extremely interesting project, especially if you're a regular feed reader. And by helping us now, you will get permanent priority access to any new features before anyone else. I think you'll appreciate these a lot once we make them available.

Interested? Shoot me an email and I'll give you more details:
yaron (at) galai (dot) com

[UPDATE] - we added support for Rojo and Sage, as well as Bloglines (all on Firefox).

[UPDATE2] We are now supporting NewsGator too.

[1] Or, of course, willing to convert to Bloglines + Firefox.

My Way, The Entrepreneur Network

I was recently honored to be invited by Tom Evslin[1] to join My Way - The Entrepreneur Network.

MyWay is one of the first FeedBurner Networks to be launched. It's an interesting experiment, and here's why:

• If you're a reader of this blog, you can subscribe to the MyWay feed (click here for the RSS feed), and receive more great content from the participating blogs. Tom says it better than I:
  "Participants in this network are experienced company founders who post about the joys, pains, and hard-earned lessons of startups - and whatever else is on their mind."

• If you're an advertiser, MyWay is an opportunity for you to get in front of a pretty targeted audience that's not too big to be a useless blind ad network, yet not too granular to be a hassle to manage. If you want to advertise on the blogs in the MyWay network, go here for more details.

It'll be interesting to see how this evolution of RSS pans out. Will a few great networks emerge out of it, providing real value to readers and advertisers? Or will there be so many networks that we'll all eventually prefer going back to the current Chinese menu paradigm of reading specific blogs?

More on all this over at Tom's blog, which I would otherwise recommend subscribing to, but there is no need now that you are subscribed to MyWay!

Comments with your thoughts on MyWay (as well as the FeedBurner Networks idea in general) will be most welcome.

[1] Tom is, among many other things, the author of the excellent book - Hackoff. I warmly recommended it on my post here. Or - just take my word on it, and order the book at Amazon here.

FrieNDA

Every entrepreneur (or woulda-coulda-shoulda entrepreneur...) knows this feeling:

The idea you have is so fundamentally amazing, that it will most probably be stolen and copied by the first person you talk to about it.

Now you have to start building your team and getting investors, but you don't want to tell people about the idea without an NDA, because they will steal it of course.

And that sucks big time. NDA's are terrible for many reasons, but the biggest is that it makes the signer of the NDA take a pretty big risk without knowing what he's about to hear. It's hardly a smart way to get the trust and passion from someone you really want on your team. Instead you get fear ("am I now forever in risk of getting sued just for listening to this stupid idea?") and resentment ("well - obviously I am a suspected idea thief around this table...").

Therefore my suggestion to all entrepreneurs is - dump your NDA's and rely on the FrieNDA[1]. The execution of the FrieNDA is extremely simple - it is basically a handshake accompanied by a request to keep the discussion confidential and not go and steal the ideas. That's it. Not only does this ensure better karma between the two of you, it is also much cheaper than an NDA!

Because these are the truths:

1. No one is going to steal your idea[2]. In fact, if your company is eventually successful, your original idea will only be one tiny contributing factor. And the guy you're talking to can't steal the 99,999 other reasons that will make your company a success (persistence, luck, people you hire, etc, etc, etc).
2. The NDA Paradox: An NDA is useless if the guy you're talking to cannot be trusted, and is needless if the guy you're talking to can be. So instead of asking people to sign an NDA that is either useless or needless, try to talk only to people you trust and handshake a FrieNDA with them.

The idea is the only thing you've got to try to get good people excited about your vision. You have to spread it around if you want to get stuff moving. And the best way to do that is by creating mutual trust through the wonderful tool that is the FrieNDA[3] .

I hope my lawyer ain't reading this blog... ;-)

[1] NDA's have their time and place of course. After trust has been achieved and the person you're talking to is excited about the idea and wants to dive into the nuts & bolts, it's a good time to cover the bases with an NDA. But for initial discussions about your grand idea, an NDA is bad bad bad.

[2] OK - there are exceptions. I would NOT recommend pitching your idea to a room full of hawking Google engineers, for example.

[3] I'm not sure who I should give credit to for this word, but I'm pretty sure I heard it from someone rather than invented it myself (whoever deserves credit - feel free to claim it in the comments below!)