I saw a Google blog post about their new profiles product and thought it was interesting. I immediately went and created my profile and had some thoughts on why Google might want to release this product and what it means for the web more generally. Google spends a lot of time analyzing what people do […]
Read More “Google Profiles – Not For Early Adopters, but Potentially Useful for Everyone Else”
Last Thursday I had the privilege of hanging out with some really famous bloggers and FriendFeed personalities including Robert Scoble, Michael Arrington, Eric Eldon, Thomas Hawke, Louis Gray, Hutch Carpenter and the FriendFeed team (among many others) to get a good look at the new FriendFeed UI. If you want a more detailed treatment of […]
Read More “The New FriendFeed UI – More About Content, Less About Sources”
This is more of an open thread than a blurb. I’ve been looking at the dismal data on venture capital exits and the growing swirl of rumors about Twitter getting acquired. One thing I’ve always wondered is whether a situation where a big company buys a small company for a large sum (say north of […]
Read More “Can Large Companies Help Small Companies Find Business Models (An Open M&A Question)”
I’ve been playing with a lot of really interesting iPhone apps lately (mostly games) and one thing I’m finally beginning to see is a more concerted effort by iPhone application developers to start to think about viral distribution. As far as I can tell, the best two ways to get distribution for your app are […]
Read More “Making the iPhone More Social and Viral – We Need a Social Graph”
In the last few days I’ve talked to three people who’ve been debating setting up Facebook Fan Pages for some cause / group they like or support. They’ve also asked about Twitter. I saw this post about the pending re-launch of the Facebook Pages with a new-and-improved experience for brands. I’ve been using Twitter a […]
Read More “The Hard Road Ahead for Facebook Fan Pages – The Self-Promoters are on Twitter”
I was reading Justin Smith’s good post on Faecbook’s delayed payment system and I thought I’d share a slightly longer version of what I left in the comments on his blog: I do think most of the major social networks have looked at payments and decided it’s a tricky business for them to tackle for […]
Over the past week or so, a number of people have asked me if there is any good data that one could use to estimate the size of the virtual goods market in the United States for 2008. I haven’t seen too many published estimates that make sense to me, so I thought I would […]
Read More “My Best Estimate for the Size of the Virtual Goods Market in the United States”
I was reading a post on AllThingsD about the Twitter+Facebook tie-up that wasn’t. I have been scratching my head since reading that post – it’s good reporting but I still can’t figure out why Facebook would want to buy Twitter. Twitter is building a very interesting community of users with very different norms from Facebook. […]
I’ve been thinking a fair amount about what Facebook Connect might mean for social games developers, particularly those who are building games that reside primarily on social networks and leverage the social graph provided by Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and others. I’ve read a few articles of late, including this good one by Bret Terrill and […]
Read More “Is Facebook Connect a Big Deal for Social Games Developers?”
A lot of times I read things that say that LinkedIn is a better business because they cater to professionals while Facebook focuses on personal relationships. I think that’s a really superficial way to look at what is, in fact, a much more nuanced difference. At the end of the day, my impression is that […]
Read More “Why a LinkedIn Connection is Worth More than a Facebook Friend”
