Techmeme Leaderboard pokes Technorati in the face
Techmeme Leaderboard pokes Technorati in the face
Techmeme (previously known as Tech Memeorandum) by Gabe Rivera has been one of my favorite sites out there for a very long time - and my browser’s homepage. Although I may be a little biased because Gabe is a personal friend, I believe Techmeme is the de facto way to catch up on technology news […]
Cold call me if you have started a company and need help: nivi at alum.mit.edu
Cold calls work for me:
Songbird cold called me, I joined the company as a VP, we did some cool stuff which we haven’t announced yet, and the company continues to rock.
Newroo cold called me, I joined them as an Advisor, and […]
This week at Omnidrive we have been discussing the impending launch of the new Apple iPhone, and what our response as a company should be in terms of support. As some developers know, targeting mobile platforms at the moment is difficult for two reasons. The first is that the development environments are so fragmented between […]
Bunch of losers and Google gang up on Facebook [The Chart]
Google couldn’t get a piece of Facebook or its hot apps platform, so now it’s building its own. Not that it would like people to call it Google’s platform; it’s trying to persuade people that this is an open platform. It’s called OpenSocial, and it’s supposed to force developers to reconsider writing apps solely in FBML, the Facebook platform’s proprietary language. The idea is that Google will gather a gang of websites whose users combined, will offer an audience as large as Facebook’s. It’s a fine theory, but let’s see the real numbers behind the Google Gang.
Or, rather, pretty charts. They’re easier, right?
Here’s the U.S. monthly visits for Facebook vs. destination social networks Orkut, Friendster, Plaxo and LinkedIn — all Google partners:
Here’s the U.S. monthly visits for Facebook vs. some of Google’s other varied new partners, Newsgator, Xing, Ning, and Salesforce.com. For the record, Xing and Ning are not related.
If I’m a developer, I’m still going to Facebook first. Google says these partners reach an audience of over 100 million users globally. But the problem is that all those users are in different networks. Viral success in one network won’t necessarily spill over into another.
A better solution for Google? Rework its MySpace search and advertising contract on more favorable terms for News Corp., and in return, get MySpace to sign up for OpenSocial.
Look at what happens when you drop bottomfeeder Plaxo from the list of social networks and add MySpace instead:
The incentive for MySpace, of course, is that this solution would save News Corp. execs the hassle of looking up exactly what an open platform is, exactly. Or having to figure out how to look up definitions on the Internet. Or the Internet.