“The Final Days of Google: It Is Going to Be An Inside Job”

From Robert Cringeley’s post:

“With hundreds — and soon thousands — of Google employees vested and solvent, we’ll shortly see a dribble, then a river, then a flood of former Google employees with time, money, and experience, and some of them will have the drive to realize the dreams of those thousands of ideas that were rejected by their former company”

Video Sites as Platforms

The Facebook platform announcement has me thinking whether video sites can become platforms?

Does the fact that YouTube’s traffic makes it the place people want to put their video make it a “platform” or just a distribution channel? My two cents worth is this is a distribution channel, not a platform.
What will be more interesting, I think, is when 3d party developers start to build apps/services built on top of video and video sharing sites.

Magnify.net is one example I saw recently.  My guess is there will be lots more, and this is where the future of online video will get interesting.

DC

Did a short but sweet day trip to DC this week.

Saw Chris and Hoo from Clearspring, who are continuing to do great stuff and have some exciting developments underway; caught up with Sri Srinivasan, a great friend back from our DC days, who is now at the Solicitor General’s office at DOJ arguing cases in front of the Supreme Court (and whose sister Srinija, or “Ninj,” was employee #5 at Yahoo!); and had lunch with Quigo founders Yaron Galai and Dave Jakabowski.

Bubble Shmubble: Facebook Platform Shows the Way

There has been lots of handwringing over the last 6 months ago about the Web 2.0 bubble and what will happen when it pops.

Even the king of Web 2.0 punditry (if you have to ask…) has bemoaned the current state of affairs — “times are good, money is flowing, and Silicon Valley sucks.“

Sure, there is an Internet bubble, some of the recent acquisitions have been at deliciously ridiculous valuations, and sure lots of the Web 2.0 features getting funded will never be viable businesses (or even nonviable businesses, for that matter).

But none of this changes the fact that, with our without the hype and silliness, there still is a very substantial wave of industry changing stuff building here.

If I had to bet — and I guess that is what I do for a living, after all — I would lay down that over the next 3-5 years there will be a handful of important new “platform” companies - in the true sense of the word - that emerge from the primordial goo we now call Web 2.0. Microsoft, Yahoo, and even Google all will face new challengers.

I only hope that some of my portfolio companies have a crack at this lofty goal.

Facebook clearly does, and its declaration this week that it is launching the Facebook Platform and allowing third party application developers deep access to its service and users, is brilliant. For links to the discussion go here.

Facebook clearly has reached critical mass, not just in terms of breadth of adoption but also in terms of depth of usage. And credit to them that they understand that this gives them the opportunity not just to be a site with massive traffic and therefore ad revenue, but more importantly to become a platform.

Check back in 3 years or so and I bet Facebook is one of those important platform companies.

MySpace will be where you go to watch 24.

New Header

I’ve switched my header in honor of the arrival of spring time here in sunny New England.Better late than never.

WordPress Passes 1 Million — And Flickr!

As expected, WordPress.com surpassed 1 million hosted blogs this week.

Automattic CEO Toni Schneider posts on some fun WordPress.com stats — like now being the no. 39 site in the US with over 44 million unique viewers last month.

And go here for a fun Alexa Chart showing WordPress catching Flickr while Digg and Typepad fade..

Raph Koster on When Games Meet Web

Gamasutra recently interviewed longtime MMO veteran, and founder of Areae, Raph Koster about a talk he had recently given entitled “Where Games Meet Web.” Raph does a great job, I think, of laying out how the games industry is missing the classic disruption happening to that industry from the Web, much like the large media companies in TV, film and music are being disrupted. Here is the core of his point:

“Consider the statistics. Webkinz, 2.5 million uniques in December; you buy a plush toy. Runescape: we still don’t think of Runescape as being part of our industry, but it’s probably the most popular MMO in the world, more popular than WoW.

Toontown is up to more than 2.5 million uniques now. We never talk about Toontown because it’s web deployed. Then of course there’s was Club Penguin, with 4.5 millions uniques in December alone…When you compare the numbers, all of those are larger than the number two MMO in the western world, every single one of them. So yeah, I think people are missing something.

New Horizon Interactive’s popular massively multiplayer online game Club Penguin

Similarly, there’s something up with the ways we do our development practices. The web principles are release often and fail fast. We don’t do that. We plan for two or three years, putting something together and then dumping it out there. With the web guys, it’s just a whole different method of operating. Flickr patches every half hour.

I think we have to look at the current game industry as being a subset of big media, and big media is running into some issues lately. It’s not that they’re going to go away, and it’s not that they’re going to have less power. Well, maybe they will have less power in some ways. But what’s happening in the other industries, like film, TV, music, publishing, is we are seeing a radical redistribution of power–where the money is going and where the eyeballs are going.

Some of the industries have adapted better than others. We’re seeing TV reach a decent accommodation pretty quickly, whereas as music, music just sort of flew head long into a wall and threw up its hands and now it’s cringing in the corner dying, melting like the Wicked Witch of the West. They’re in the position where the industry is suing its own customers because they like its product. Something is completely wrong there.

We shouldn’t kid ourselves; we’re in the exact same boat. The only reason that isn’t happening even more with us is that our industry isn’t relying on proprietary record play. Can you imagine if there was a standardized platform games, if PC were it, what would happen to the games business? The answer is, we’d be screwed.”

Driving Higher Revenue per Visit

Over the last few weeks I’ve spoken with a number of the larger and more sophisticated online publishers and heard a suprisingly consistent thing.

These guys all have put a lot of time, energy and money into more effective customer acquisition strategies, most notable search, which seems to have paid off handsomely.

But what I am hearing is that these publishers all feel they have pretty much done what they can here and are starting to see diminishing returns. What they now are looking more closely at is how they can get more time, attention, and revenue out of the viewers who do come to their site.

Whether it be blog networks, video sites, or large media organizations, I hear virtually the same thing.

Smells like opportunity for startups to me!

Virtual Worlds as “Third Places” II

Last September I wrote about something which has intrigued me for quite a while — the notion of a virtual world as a “third place.”

Michael Arrington just wrote on MyMiniLife, which a great example of what I was thinking about then.

I am going to try reaching out to these guys and see what I can learn.

Will let you know what I find out.

Addendum: also check out this NYT article on the new Barbie-world.

Social Network Enablers

A couple months ago I had a fun conversation with Chris Fralic of First Round Capital, a great guy who is also a smart and thoughtful Web 2.0 investor (hmm, is that an oxymoron?) on the growing wave of  “social networking enablers.” He and I have both seen a number of companies in the sector and are trying to figure out where this space ends up.

My initial gut has been that some of these companies will grow pretty quickly and be succesful ventures for the entrepreneurs, as long as they don’t raise too much capital and price themselves out of the typical Web 2.0 exit ranges. But I am not convinced there is a great venture return here, at least not yet convinced.  So far I have felt that there is much more value in the consumer facing social networks that scale than in generic B2B2C enablers.

But I am still noodling on this.

In particular, I am wondering if there aren’t opportunities around some particular targetted communities which are naturally prone to social networking and are large enough to sustain a particular social network enabler focused on this vertical.  If an enabler is able to become the de facto standard social networking platform by partnering with the major aggregators for a large community, like games, music or sports, for example, it seems to me there could be a large opportunity valuable enough to generate “venture returns.”  The key is that the enablers value would hinge more on the community they have on the platform, rather than on their technology, and so is less prone to commoditization and/or displacement.

I’m working on one of these right now. Stay tuned.