Posts from the ‘MySpace’ Category
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.
So, yesterday I posted about the YouTube-MySpace competition heating up. Which it is.
But, apparently, I missed another YouTube rivalry from within my own portfolio!
According to the multinational media publisher VNU :
… YouTube had to fend off strong competition in the video traffic space from Heavy.com during the week ending 8 October.
Website traffic analysis firm Hitwise reported that Heavy.com, the largest independent broadband network in the US, is the second largest entertainment video site on the web with a 17 per cent market share
This compares with YouTube’s 35 per cent market share for the same week in October.
Heavy.com outranked MySpace, Google Video and Metacafe for video traffic based on visits.
I’ll try not to sandbag my own portfolio companies in the future! I’ve actually gotten ahold of the Hitwise data, and will post once I figure out how to…
This hardly comes as a surprise, but it sure seems as if the rivalry between MySpace and YouTube is turning up a notch after the Goo-Tube deal.
Search engine watch reports that MySpace has quietly added a “Video Space” that is likely to drive more traffic to member videos.
An idea that my partner Steve Arnold and I have been brewing for a while is the emerging opportunity for “virtual worlds.”
What the heck is a virtual world? Think MySpace meets World of Warcraft (or, in other words, a mix between a social network and a massively multiplayer online game, or MMOG).
The meteoric rise of social networks shows that a heck of a lot of people out there like to connect and commune online. And the MMOG phenomenon shows that there are some significant audiences out there who are willing to spend a ton of time immersed in online roleplaying games.
Where this seems to us to be pointing is the emergence of “virtual worlds” which on the one hand have the 3D representations of MMOGS, but need not be “games” as typically conceived (ie, “men in tights” role playing/quest based games). Rather they are online communities where people can interact in a much more graphically represented, real-world like environment than the static profiles of the current social networks.
A good example of this is Second Life.
“Tasty Research” has a good post on this, suggesting that MMOGs are, in effect, a “Third Place,” described as “somewhere besides home or work where people can socialize and feel comfortable.”
Jeff Jarvis has a great response to the discussion of Metcalfe’s Law & Web 2.0.
You absolutely should read it if you have any interest in all this stuff.
I was just playing around with the newly released “Tagsurfing” feature on WordPress.com.
I like it quite a bit. I think it will be most useful once I go through and pare down the particular tags I want to see “surfed.”
The jewel for me, though, was finding a beautifully done post, integrating some really thoughtful questions regarding the MySpace generation with a really tastefully selected collage of photos.
“Chartreuse” has elevated Web 2.0 blogging to a new level, virtually an art form. I strongly recommend you check it out!
Fred Wilson offers an interesting and provocative post on blogs as the ultimate start page:
Blogs are the endgame for social networking. MySpace is the AOL of blogging. It’s where you go when you don’t know how to do it yourself. But with MySpace starting to rein in what people can do with their pages (for a host of good and bad reasons), they are seeding their own decline. A decline that will take a decade if AOL is a good proxy. In the next ten years, most people who want an online home will have a blog, it will be their online identity and their start page and much more.
I haven’t done it yet, but I should change my start page to my blog. That’s where I go to start my day and end my day. And I am hell bent to configure my blog with enough functionality that it can be my newspaper, my inbox, my tv, my radio, and my social network. It’s pretty damn close already.
That’s where all of this is going. We’ll program our online world and others will too. And we’ll start our day there instead of the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. My best is many of you reading this are already there.
MediaPost has an interesting interview with MySpace's senior ad sales exec on how they are seeking to sell advertising. It is a quick, worthwhile read.
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