The Next Net

The Race to Become the Next AOL

  Being in a hurry 
  Originally uploaded by Andreas Reinhold

Responding to the initial surge of interest among Web startups to create to create customized applications for Facebook, MySpace is hinting that it is gong to pursue a similar platform strategy.  In other words, it will open up the database that keeps track of everyone's social connections to outside developers so that they too can build social apps inside MySpace.  Now every social network from Bebo to Last.fm is going to try to do the same thing.  Jason Kottke and others point out that this is no different than AOL in the 1990s, when outside companies had to develop to AOL's proprietary platform.  As Kottke puts it:

What happens when Flickr and LinkedIn and Google and Microsoft and MySpace and YouTube and MetaFilter and Vimeo and Last.fm launch their platforms that you need to develop apps for in some proprietary language that's different for each platform? That gets expensive, time-consuming, and irritating.

As it happens, we already have a platform on which anyone can communicate and collaborate with anyone else, individuals and companies can develop applications which can interoperate with one another through open and freely available tools, protocols, and interfaces. It's called the internet and it's more compelling than AOL was in 1994 and Facebook in 2007. Eventually, someone will come along and turn Facebook inside-out, so that instead of custom applications running on a platform in a walled garden, applications run on the internet, out in the open, and people can tie their social network into it if they want, with privacy controls, access levels, and alter-egos galore.

There's a constant tug between open applications that can go anywhere, like we see with widgets today, and more deeply integrated apps that are cleaner and more consistent within any given Website's environment.  That is what Facebook is trying to do with it's platform.  There are trade-offs with both approaches.

The battle is not so much the Internet versus proprietary platforms.  It's hard to argue that Facebook is as closed a walled garden as AOL was in 1994.  But it is still a walled garden of sorts.  The bigger the garden, though, the more people that will want to visit it.  The question is: How many gardens can you visit?  In the end, the platform that is the most open and for which it is easiest to develop cutting-edge features will attract the best gardeners, and more visitors will follow.

Why I am Going To Wait to Buy an iPhone

While many people are saying "TGiPhone" today, I'm not so sure that I really must have the must-have device of the moment.  Maybe it's just iPhone fatigue, with the non-stop media barrage masterfully orchestrated by Steve Jobs. (Disclosure: I too will be priming that pump as a guest on ABCNews Now today to comment on the madness as the phones finally go on sale).

Maybe it's the gnawing feeling I get that no matter how cool the iPhone may seem right now, it will soon seem as quaint and clunky as the very first iPod.  You remember, the one with only 5 gigabytes of memory, a black-and-white screen, and those protruding buttons around the scroll-wheel. 

Maybe it's the fact that the iPhone right now is a tease, hinting at what a broadband mobile computing device should be, but hampered by AT&T's worse-than-dial-up data network.  (Okay, it's a bit better than dial-up, but not much, since AT&T "boosted" its network speeds over the past few weeks).   Steve Jobs says he opted not to go with AT&T's faster, next-generation, 3G network because such phones would be too battery-hungry right now.  Fair enough.  That's just another reason to wait.

And don't tell me that the WiFi crutch is a good substitute for now.  WiFi is not everywhere, and even where there are networks, they are not always open or free.  And connecting to them can be a real bitch.  In the real world, WiFi phones still have a long way to go (see my recent experience with T-Mobile's Why Phone).  These networks are not controlled by Apple (AAPL) or by AT&T (T), so there is only so much they can do to try to make those connections work.

What good is a broadband phone if you can't get a broadband connection?  All the Web-surfing and video-streaming capabilities of the iPhone will be intermittent pleasures at best.

There are a litany of other deficiencies as well, including the inability to buy iTunes songs over the air, a camera that cannot record video, Word or Excel files that can be read but not edited, the inability to download contacts from your current phone, poor search functions, no support for instant messaging clients, and no GPS, to name a few.  I'm confident that many of these features will be added, improved, or corrected over time.  I can wait.

Then there's the price: $500 to $600, plus $60 to $100 a month for the wireless service.  If you go all out and get the best phone with the best plan, that will knock you back $1,800 in the first year alone.  You know what?  I'd rather get a pimped-out MacBook and still save $300.

Update: Glad I waited.  My boss just returned his.

Flickr Photo of the Day: Behind the Green Door

Mesh, originally uploaded by Rickydavid.

Will Dow Jones Ruin Murdoch's MySpace Premium?

As Rupert Murdoch moves in to buy Dow Jones (DJ) for $5 billion, shareholders might want to ask themselves what effect the deal will have on News Corp. (NWS) stock.  At a PriceWaterhouseCoopers media panel I attended aerier this week, Media Metrics CEO Laura Martin raised a good point.  News Corp's stock price gets a bit of a shine from the fact that it owns MySpace, the largest social network on the planet. 

What happens to that premium if News Corp's digital business all of a sudden contributes a smaller percentage of overall revenues and profits?

Martin thinks MySpace accounts for $2 billion of News Corp's total market capitalization (far less than the $10 billion valuation it was looking for in a deal to swap MySpace for a quarter of Yahoo's stock).  But adding Dow Jones  to its mix of media properties would significantly increase the percentage of News Corp's cash flow coming from no-growth print businesses, and at the same time dilute the percentage of cash flow coming from its faster-growing digital businesses (i.e., MySpace). 

But then, the reasons for this deal might have more to do with ego than with financial logic.

Martin feels that the proposed Yahoo-MySpace deal also made no sense.  As she put it to me:

Why would News Corp. give up the thing that is giving their stock a premium to somebody where they don't even know will be running it, with all of the management turnover there.  And why would Yahoo give up 25 percent of their company for MySpace?. 

On thing about Murdoch is he always knows who is going to run the business before he does a deal.  It is usually some loyal manager back in Australia or somewhere else in his global media empire.  So swapping MySpace for Yahoo right now is probably dead in the water

But what no one has been asking in the Dow Jones deal is: Who does Murdoch have in mind to run it.  You can bet he's already hand-picked the whole management team. Why don't the Bancrofts ask him that?  His attitude is pretty clear, as you can tell from this outburst of his captured by Time:

They're taking five billion dollars out of me and want to keep control, in an industry in crisis! They can't sell their company and still control it — that's not how it works. I'm sorry!

He also threw out the idea of getting rid of the print version of the Wall Street Journal and making it a completely online entity (after knocking down the online subscription wall).  It might happen some day, but online ad revenues could not support the staff of the newespaper at current levels.

 

Disruptors Video: Eco-condos of the Future (Greenbridge)

This August, ground will break for what will be one of the most eco-friendly residential buildings in the country: Chapel Hill, North Carolina's Greenbridge Developments.  When I was in Chapel Hill this spring, I caught up with the managing partner Tim Toben, and shot this video, which just went up on CNNMoney. (Full transcript after the break).

Greenbridge is a 99-unit building that is LEED-certified. Solar thermal heaters will heat its water, roof gardens will provide insulation to keep the whole building cool, runoff rainwater will be captured for irrigation, hybrid Zipcars will be available for residents in the garage (to offset the one-parking-spot-per-family rule).  Designed by architect William McDonough, whose Cradle to Cradle philosophy eschews using materials that might end up in a landfill, the building uses locally-sourced and recyclable materials instead and is expected to consume half as much energy as a more conventional building. 

Residential buildings consume one fifth of all the energy in this country.  If more of them go green, we could reduce our dependence on foreign fossil fuels, lower our electricity bills, and help fight global warming.

Google Injects Cash Into the Widget Economy

Google is a big believer in widgets, or what it calls gadgets, those little applications and pieces of other Websites you can embed on your Google personal homepage or on your desktop.   In an effort to encourage outsiders to develop even more widgets, it is now offering $5,000 no-strings-attached grants to software developers who want to improve their already-popular widgets.  And it is starting an investment fund called Google Gadget Ventures to sprinkle $100,000 seed money into the very best of these ideas.

What we are seeing is a variety of platforms—Google, MySpace, Facebook, Pageflakes, Netvibes—competing to attract the best widgets, which in turn will keep people on their sites longer.  The problem is that a widget that works on Google will work pretty much everywhere else.  So it's not clear that Google (GOOG) is creating any competitive advantage here, unless there are some Google-exclusive hooks that would prevent the widget makers from distributing their Google-funded apps elsewhere.

Maybe that seed money, though, will move the widget industry forward from making cool features to creating real widget-based businesses.  The business models here, though, are far from clear.

Pageflakes: The Social Network (Scoop)

In July, Pageflakes plans to unveil the latest version of its personalized home page (the release is dubbed Blizzard).  Along with the 120,000 public Pagecasts members have already created (here is mine), Pageflakes will be adding Pagecasts from media partners including CBS, The Washington Post, Time, and People (the latter two are sister publications of Business 2.0.).  A Pagecast is simply a programmed Webpage with news feeds, photo feeds, video and other widgets that the creator decides to place there.

What's most exciting, though, about Blizzard is that it takes the first step towards turning Pageflakes into a social network.  For the first time, members will be able to establish a public profile and there will be a "People" tab added to the site.  Members will be able to subscribe to other people's Pagecasts.  In other words, the will be able to subscribe to all the feeds and widgets that person is paying attention to.  Pageflakes CEO Dan Cohen, who used to run MyYahoo and Google's personalized page, tells me:

It is a basic version of a social network.  We are doing social networking through shared interests.  You can even let certain people edit your page.  So you can use it as a wiki of widgets.

What Cohen is doing with Pageflakes is combining two powerful online tools: the personalized page with the social network.  Personalized pages like Pageflakes and Netvibes are the ultimate expression of the movable Web, where every piece of content and every little Web app becomes a widget you can place anywhere else on the Web.  It allows people to program their own pages by remixing the Web.  But the next step is sharing those pages with others.

Social networks like Facebook are approaching this from the other end.  They already have the social connections, but they are opening up their platforms to make it easier for their members to import other parts of the Web onto their personal pages.  Destination sites that ignore either of these trends do so at their peril.

MySpace and Yahoo Gunning For YouTube

  what did u say? 
  Originally uploaded by dhammza

Everyone from MySpace to Yahoo to NBC-Fox has YouTube in their sites these days.  MySpace, which helped popularize YouTube in the early days, tomorrow is expected to launch MySpaceTV, a separate video-sharing site that will highlight licensed videos snippets from major media companies along with audience-uploaded clips.  NBC and Fox are working on their own destination video site that will lean more towards professionally-produced video.  And so is Yahoo (which, like MySpace, has a deal with NBC-Fox to show their videos).

Mike Folgner, the founder of video-editing site Jumpcut which Yahoo (YHOO) bought last year, is now the head of Yahoo Video.  When he visited me earlier this week, he told me:

What we are working on is the deep video experience.  Yahoo has so much video content.  What we need to do is surface that content in a central way.  We are working on that central destination.  It will be at Yahoo Video by the end of the year.

Yahoo and MySpace are battling it out for No. 2 behind YouTube.  MySpace has more viewers, but Yahoo actually streams more videos.  Along with NBC and Fox, they all seem to be ganging up on YouTube.  (Watch this Disruptors video to see some of the tensions surfacing).  Folgner is also concentrating on improving video search across the Web and bringing up relevant videos depending on what part of Yahoo people happen to be on (news videos in Yahoo News, sports videos in Yahoo Sports, music videos in Yahoo Music, etc.).

Call It the Why Phone.

This is not a post about Apple's iPhone (except that it is).  It's more specifically about T-Mobile's new WiFi phones, which some marketing genius there decided to launch two days before the iPhone hits the shelves.  Chalk it up to an attempt to steal some thunder from Apple by being first to launch a phone in the U.S. with WiFi capabilities. 

T-Mobile is offering two different WiFi phones, a Samsung t409 and a Nokia 6086, along with a free WiFi router, which they are calling HotSpot @Home.  (Another brilliant marketing move—the @Home moniker calls up memories of one of the biggest Internet failures of the 1990s).  These phones are completely unremarkable, other than the fact that they purport to be able to switch seamlessly from the cell phone network to a WiFi network in mid-call, letting you take advantage of whichever network is strongest. 

It sounds great, but here's the problem with WiFi phones.  Connecting to a WiFi network is not always so easy to do, especially with a phone.  Especially with T-Mobile's phones.  At least that was my experience.  (Others, like Om, had no such problems.  But then, he's a telecom geek).  T-Mobile sent me one of their WiFi phones and an @Home router to check out a couple weeks ago.  I took them home.  The phone was unable to connect to my existing, open WiFi network at home.  But I had been warned that might happen, which is why T-Mobile provides its own router loaded with software to help make the connection happen. 

Video: Watch James Dyson Dry His Hands

No, I'm not joking.  James Dyson, the one-man brand who brought us the vacuum cleaner that "doesn't lose suction," decided that automatic hand dryers need a rethink.  He gave me a private demo of his new "Airblade" hand dryer Tuesday afternoon at a theater in Times Square.  I brought my camera along to capture the magic.  Here's the video.

Click To Play

The basic idea behind his new hand dryer is that instead of using heat to evaporate the water on your hands, it uses a "blade" of air pushed through two eyelash-thin slits to, in effect, wipe your hands dry.  What makes it work is a new electric motor Dyson invented that rotates at nearly 100,000 RPMs, and has done away with the brushes and coiled wires of conventional electric motors.  It's hard to explain, just watch the video.