Monthly Archive for May, 2008

Yahoo makes a deal with Google for Google search results and revenue. Realizes that they are a portal and should stay as one.  Identity crisis, solved.

Microsoft keeps wooing Facebook in an attempt to overcompensate for its incompetent innovation.  Facebook, ahem: Zuckerberg, can’t detach from his “baby,” resulting in a souring deal.

Microsoft says Facebook isn’t worth it, Facebook gets devalued, Facebook never has an offer like I’m sure they’re receiving now.

Zuckerberg realizes that the big picture he sees is like a Monet: It looks great from a distance, but once you get close to it, it’s just a bunch of thick, heavy brushstrokes.

Zuckerberg, at the age of 80, reminisces about “the old days”….from his cardboard box on the corner of Emerson and University.

Microsoft keeps “hanging in there.”  Like a champ.  Kiddo.

Google buys Facebook in 3 years for less than MySpace’s $580m.

I had the pleasure today to meet with Jason Peck today, who runs the local Raleigh community blog, North Hills Buzz.  With a journalism major under his belt, Jason does a great job with the site and bringing together the North Hills community.  Despite being being less than a year old (the blog, not him), I was surprised at how much traffic the site was getting.

Community blogging is something that has been coming up more and more on my radar lately.  In the past two weeks, I’ve discovered several Raleigh blogs, and expect to find many more on my travels.

Despite my focus usually being on corporate blogging, making the step of bringing the blogging platform to local communities makes complete sense.  It’s easy to understand, easy to update, content-rich, focused, and highly relevant.

One of the big topics we discussed was monetization, and the question of what local businesses would be willing to invest their marketing dollars in. It’s an exciting position for him to be in, paving the way for new service offerings that, for the most part, don’t yet exist.

Expect to see more local community blogs like Jason’s coming up in the near future.

When I try and explain what Twitter is to people, a blank stare usually follows. Next is: So how do they make money?

The best response that I can come up with (ie: it ends that thread of the conversation) is that it’s a proof of concept and that they’re still trying to figure out their model and their users are still trying to figure out the value offering.

I keep seeing the value proposition of Twitter coming up here and there.

At Blog Carolinas, Andy Beal gave a great example of how a family could use a private account to send text messages to everyone at once with updates/questions like “I’m at the grocery store. Does anyone need anything?”

When I was on a road trip last fall, we Twittered (with almost no followers) for recommendations of what to do in Seattle. 20 minutes later, we were told exactly where to go and what places to see. Without that type of connectivity, that night would have been one of the more average nights, rather than one of the craziest nights we had on the entire trip.

BrightKite seems to have potential at giving new value to Twitter’s base functionality. By utilizing text messaging and online messaging at the same time to distribute real-world locations, it’s certain to add a whole new dimension of functionality to Twitter’s offering. I’m already seeing Twitter messages scroll by of random meetups that wouldn’t have happened if BrightKite hadn’t been used. (Speaking of, anyone have an extra invite they want to send my way?)

Today, an earthquake at 7.8 on the Richter Scale hit China and Beijing today, in what has already killed thousands, and is sure to be even more devastating than we currently know. Robert Scoble points out (still waiting on a source for this) that the USGS was three minutes behind the first Twitters of the earthquake, which you can see here.

It will be interesting to see what pieces of the Twitter puzzle get brought together and what comes of it in the next couple of years. It obviously has a significant value proposition. Hopefully, we’ll see a revenue-generating model that suits users, developers, and companies.