Yes, there is a future for the content industry in media and enterprise markets, and the Software and Information Industry Association Content Division has been charting it for several years now at its Information Industry Summit events in New York City. This year's IIS is drawing more than 300 executives from leading content and technology companies, a good crowd in the middle of a dismal economy. No surprise, given the star-studded line-up of speakers that was assembled by the Content Division this year. You might say that these people are documenting a future that people have been talking about for many years and that finally arrived - a future in which the Web dominates the dialog on profits and products on a daily basis, even as high-value premium products punch through to define new opportunities for value in enterprise and media publishing. Key to that trend is the rise of technology companies that are driving change in major publishing organizations, which enable publishers to define new relationships with their clients. Are all of these publishers ready for this ever-present "future?" Let's see what these experts have to say. I will be posting on our events blog throughout the day and linking the posts to this entry. You may also find my conference Twitter messages (and retweets) here.

Labels: authors, books, conference, content, enterprise, events, First Research, information industry summit 2010, media, Publishing, SIIA, Social Media, speakers, Technology

Let's face it, for an enormous company Microsoft is not lining up many hits today. Its Vista operating system has had tepid reception at best, the EU has brought it to its knees on monopolistic practices, its Zune portable is praying for a second life this holiday season and the Xbox's shaky quality record makes a win for the new Halo 3 game a must to be kept in contention with competitive platforms. Ouch. But with oodles of cash and a well-focused online advertising strategy Microsoft is gearing up to exploit the gaps in Google's game plan that will give it a leg up in online content markets.

One of Google's key gaps to date has been social networking. While its Orkut platform has been successful in Brazil and certain other countries and rumblings of a greater social networking plan for Google grow larger, it's Facebook that's attracting both college-age folks and seasoned professionals who are willing to hang their hats up online on Facebook's increasingly robust social media platform. As noted by The New York Times and others, then, Microsoft's USD 240 million investment for a mere 1.6 percent of Facebook ownership is a significant win for Facebook and an opportunity for Microsoft to regain some sorely needed lost ground. The transaction scales Facebook's ultimate market value to a breathtaking but highly speculative USD 15 billion, making Rupert Murdoch's USD 583 million investment in MySpace seem like a bargain basement transaction in retrospect.

The New York Times article notes that the initial investment will secure Microsoft a platform for its ad network's growth, which is certainly a key component of making sure that it can leverage the highly valuable contexts available in social media. With the high level of personal endorsement and interaction available in Facebook Microsoft advertisers will be very pleased to find an alternative to search engine results and typical media outlets through which to build relationships with their markets. But the real underlying move by Microsoft is to have a dibs on Facebook's evolving social media-oriented computer operating system environment, a must-have for Microsoft in light of Google's evolving plans to have a Web-oriented OS of its own that will help drive its social media plans.

With more people than ever using the Web as their primary repository for both personal content and their own publishing endeavors Microsoft is at a dangerous juncture in its evolution, perhaps even more dangerous than when Netscape's browser began to threaten the supremacy of Microsoft's PC platform as a staging ground for content applications. Facebook has demonstrated with its rapidly growing array of embeddable applications that whole classes of content infrastructre that are at the heart of Microsoft's long-term cash flow may be rendered moot by social media environments such as Facebook's that enable people to build and share highly personalized portals with no or limited technical expertise. Applications such as its Business 3.0 module enable B2B communication that may provide a new way for businesses to develop 1-to-1 relationships via Facebook in ways that will make today's B2B advertising and supply chain management seem very ill targeted over time. All in all, Microsoft needs to get a revenue stream from social media badly - far moreso than either Google or Yahoo.

Will Facebook wind up being the dominant social media platform for both personal and business personal publishing? Once people set up shop in a social media environment there's a certain entropy that sets in which is likely to discourage any radical shifts: you want to keep your "peeps" around you as much as possible, and Facebook offers an increasingly compelling environment to enable open publishing and content integration. Most importantly unlike some other social media environments Facebook is designed for people's true identity as opposed to any number of avatars or pseudonyms that they may use in other social media environments. The emphaisis in Facebook is on knowing who you know, not gaming them for PR or other ulterior motives. This makes environments such as Facebook and LinkedIn that enable people to present their real selves the hottest marketing environments available in social media. By contrast, what's the value of selling to someone wearing green wings and fishnet stockings in Second Life? Good for a quick buck, but not relationship selling by any degree.

Realistically Facebook is by far the greater winner in this deal, having established an awesome figure for its market value and strong leverage for any other subsequent deals to help it gain market momentum. It's perhaps not as one-sided as the deal that Bill Gates cut with IBM to get rights to sell Mircosoft's PC operating systems on other platforms, but it's about equally clear who's behind the curve and who is able to help them get back in the game. And like that earlier deal this may be a sign that Microsoft is waning in its ability to influence electronic publishing effectively. But with an advertising strategy that is well-adapted to playing on multiple platforms to service multiple ad networks the Facebook deal is as good a shot a any that Microsoft is likely to have to use social media as a leverage point for future revenues. Don't expect miracles from either partner as a result of this alliance, but to expect their competitors to sweat it a little harder to get a foot in the door of compelling online communities.

Labels: Deals Partnerships and Sales, facebook, media, Microsoft, Social Media, Technology

The New York Times covers some of the recent surges in Silicon Valley startups getting massive amounts of funding and, in some instances, handsome rewards for private investors backing online content plays. RightMedia's acquisition by Yahoo for a cool USD 850 million and microscopic startup Ning's USD 214 million valuation on USD 44 million of private equity investment are just some of the highlights in today's parade of bets by investors who seem to have the pocketbooks of major media companies at their disposal on a regular basis.

It's easy to see why many are saying that the bubble fever of the dot-com era is beginning to surge again, and in some ways the bubble doubters have a lot of credible evidence that points to many more losers than winners in the push to come up with valuable contexts for content. First and foremost is the inventory problem: with social media helping to multiply the outlets available for advertising at a nearly Malthusian rate there is way too much available inventory for advertisers trying to tap into online audiences. Just as advertising was supposed to float every business plan in 2000 regardless of the available demand there's sure to be a shakeout as reality begins to catch up with the inventory issue. Also having a familiar feel is the availability of interesting but all-too-similar technology plays that have little chance at building audiences at a rate that could justify reasonable returns. How many it's-like-Facebook-with-Skype-and-who-knows-what-else ideas can the marketplace absorb? The pocketbooks of major media companies, the presumed exit points for most of these plays, are not going to support these types of tools endlessly.

But there are some major differences this time around that might help to make more of today's bubbles a little longer lasting:

• Contextual advertising. While there's an abundance of inventory generated in part by social media there is not an abundance of specific audiences for specific goods and services. The dot-com bubble burst largely before contextual advertising had begun to take off to enable a different kind of economics for the long tail of content that can benefit from high-margin goods and services that match up with niche interests. While contextual ads still place a lot of pressure on online publishers to come up with the goods that attract the best ads, their ability to service lucrative niche markets very cost-effectively will make the landing for many online publishers a little softer as the economy cools off.
  
• Finite mainstream media. Even as social media has expanded rapidly the ability of mainstream media companies to create inventory has not changed significantly over the past seven years. While content management, mining and other production tools have enabled publishers to develop more engaging content, with the exception of video there's not a lot more out there. In fact, with cutbacks, consolidations and increased competition from social media outlets one could say that there's less mainstream text inventory online than ever to absorb the advertising budgets of major corporations that crave their content. What has increased, though, are the syndication efforts of publishers to get their content out into new contexts via embedded content services such as Voxant, user feeds and via new mobile platform partners. The need for more usable inventory will keep demand for new content sources high - and multiples relatively lofty - until overall advertising demand softens.
• The creativity factor. While media companies on both the consumer and enterprise side of the content business are great at managing tightly defined content products they have proven time and again that the corporate cultures that thrive off of control-oriented values are very poor at coming up with new ideas for online content products that thrive on today's softer concepts of value created through collaboration and contextualization. Many so-so ideas will still come and go in Silicon Valley but as a whole the price that media companies are paying for failing to re-invent their own cultures to encourage more risk-taking with new ventures will be regular trips down Highway 101 to fill their needs for innovation with maturing venture-backed companies. You'd think that after seven years it would be different, but we're probably at least five years away from media companies having made enough of a transition into more innovative internal cultures to make those trips less frequent for those who survive the shift.
• The impending return of premium content. While advertising gains the spotlight in most business plans the push of services such as Near-Time to build profits from private communities of social media and the repositioning of print magazines as community-building tools are increasing the promise of online publishers to build new streams of revenue from relatively small amounts of content. People are also willing to paystill for events - and more content is likely to be positioned as premium event content online in ways that will complement ad-supported channels rather than conflict with them. Look for a broadening array of business models that include new premium elements that could soften the downturn of ad cycles.
  

Mind you there are just about as many technologists as there ever were with the ability to code and not a clue as to how to be real publishers who will keep the winds of blarney blowing up from the Bay as fresh as ever. Fools will come and fools will go, but as a whole the frontiers of online publishing are still raw enough to warrant independent investments along the scale of today's efforts for several years to come. Probably the biggest factor for determining how healthy that growth curve stays is the ability to get more people more access to electronic content. We're at the beginning of a growth gap in which mobile access to Web content is hobbled by poor network access and costly access plans while land-based access is stalling in U.S. markets.

At the same time high-speed access in overseas markets is exploding, creating more opportunities for new non-U.S. players to carve their own segments out of the global content pie very rapidly. The sooner that publishers can recognize that there's more to be gained globally by pushing more open online publishing models the more opportunities they will have to get their fair share of global online markets. With contextual content and advertising breaking down traditional boundaries for monetization publishers need to think more aggressively as to how to profit from content that knows no borders.

With so much of today's content under development being funded privately it's hard for any exit to the doorways to get a stampede effect going in the same way that IPO-oriented investments in the dot-com era got out of hand. But until mainstream investments begin to offer more attractive returns there is likely to be a steady stream of private investors willing to dabble a bit of their fortunes in potentially high-yield content plays that will put them in an even richer gravy train. As many of these people have already made at least one round of successful investments there's always the chance that smart money can follow smart money indefinitely. Then again, most of us are only as smart as our last good decision. Perhaps Mr. Darwin will be taking on Lord Malthus' math sooner than we think.

Labels: bubble, media, Social Media, Technology, Trends

Kudos to David Pogue at The New York Times for a great review of the new iPhone from Apple. David's general view is that the appliance lives up to its hype, but he points out a number of key shortcomings, such as inferior text input (keys appears on the flat glass display), downright awkward phone call initiation, the need to ship it back to Apple after a year or so to get the battery replaced (a la iPod) and inferior network performance from AT&T. But while the iPhone may turn out to be the worst of both worlds for people already attuned to sophisticated mobile devices such as Blackberries (no coincidence that the splash ad for this article was for their new sleek model) the key to the iPhone's appeal centers around its ability to be a content-serving device like no other. GPS-keyed maps make the device a traveler's godsend for navigating unfamiliar territories and coming up with nearby services. The intuitive interface enables a user to shift to Web content seamlessly in a full-featured browser that comes with a very affordable (USD 20/month) internet access plan that may yet knock the legs out from underneath many an online content deal.

Ah, but with limitations there, as well. Flash and Java are not enabled in the browser, so the tons 0f online video and animated content available online is out of bounds. Of course there's video and audio from the iTunes store, which is most probably the point: after years of platform ju-jitsu from Microsoft to frustrate publishers it's Apple's turn to make it that much harder to come up with a platform-independent distribution strategy. But common file formats such as PDF, Word and Excel are accessible via iPhone so it will at least be useful for serious reading to some degree. And unless you're in an AT&T wireless hotspot broadband performance isn't going to be an option in most instances.

I think of the iPhone as a very portable Microsoft Surface - an appliance that is ahead of many technologies' ability to sustain a very compelling product vision but that nevertheless gets people jazzed about the possibilities of a new way of looking at computing. Unlike Microsoft's table-bound Surface, though, the iPhone is perfect for a younger, mobile generation not interested in plunking down thousands of dollars for a major piece of...furniture? But iPhone's most important impact on the content marketplace is likely to be its ability to create demand for broadband wireless on a mass scale, demand that's likely to fire up competition from other wireless carriers to deliver both more coverage and more effectively enabled interfaces to the Web. AT&T wins this round for Web access, but what will happen when Verizon enables YouTube access? Consider this iPhone debut the launch of the real mobile Web - with some frenetic developments yet to come.

Labels: iPhone, mobile, Technology, Trends

When Techobabble 2.0 ranked information and communications technolgy (ICT) industry analyst weblogs recently I was pleased to discover our own ContentBlogger in the top ten of all ICT weblogs. More specifically, sandwiched in between Forrester and Jupiter's top weblogs and several notches above Charlene Li. The blog acknowledges that heavies such as Charlene came in low in some objective criteria such as Technorati rankings, but still, this is a very cool thing. Especially cool is that ContentBlogger was tying the very top analyst weblogs in TB2.0's own ranking criteria.

Wow.

Our heartfelt thanks go out to Jonny Bentwood over at Edelman for his analysis and for his recognition of our efforts. It's rewarding to see how our efforts rank amongst the leaders in the industry. Our heartfelt thanks go out also to everyone who tunes in to ContentBlogger online or via our ShoreLines newsletter. It's a privilege to be of service to you and an honor to be amongst such talented peers in this recognition. We'll just keep on doing our thing here at Shore, and make it only better as we go along.

Labels: analysts, ContentBlogger, ICT, Technobabble 2.0, Technology, weblogs

Read/Write Web notes the following comments by Tapan Bhat, Yahoo's vice president of Front Doors, at the recent NextWeb conference in Amsterdam. Tapan told attendees that search would not dominate the web in the future:

"The future of the web is about personalization. Where search was dominant, now the web is about 'me.' It's about weaving the web together in a way that is smart and personalized for the user."

Well, yes and no, Tapan. Yahoo's personalization plays are exploiting the trend towards audiences aggregating their own content from various sources, including feeds, widgets, bookmarking services and other social media tools. User-defined aggregation plays a key role in defining where and how people look for and find content. But where is most of that content coming from? Search engines power many of the mashup and widget-oriented aggregation plays that are touted as the leading edge of social media. Be it through Google or more enterprise- and media-oriented services such as MuseGlobal, Mark Logic, Nstein or Really Strategies search services are evolving into the back ends for value-add content services that place valuable content in customized contexts well beyond traditional search results. So there's no escaping the importance of search and its ability to return the most relevant and useful content.

Where Tapan may have a point is that people aren't really looking towards new search engines to solve their problems. paidContent.org noted the arrival of Ask3D, a refreshed version of the Ask.com interface that, well, looks pretty much like the old interface but a little prettier. Ask.com is a good search engine, but I think that the personalization movement is a little bit off target. It's not so much about "let me personalize my search results" as it is "tell me what I want to know." If user-defined personalization accomplishes this, great, but Google's emphasis on anticipating what users need on a more personalized basis is probably closer to what will succeed for the 80-percent crowd. As noted by Information Today the new "Universal Search" interface does a lot to customize search results to a specific context automatically, a concept that Google will expand upon as it integrates content from its wide array of search-based services even further over the past several months. For the 20 percent or less who will demand more control and features sooner there's now Google Experimental, which includes early-stage features that may make their way into the Universal toolkit soon enough.

So is search really "done" at this point? As the hottest problem to solve perhaps search is indeed past its peak, even though search engines will still continue to be refined. But the new generation of content services have search at their core and will add in feeds, Web mining and other capabilities to aggregate content on the fly far more effectively than information services have done to date. We all applaud Factiva's new integration of audio and video content into its search capability, for example, but the real proof of the pudding will be the applications that Factiva's clients choose to build off of such content. Consider search at this point the ad hoc database building tool of choice for millions of users that is only beginning to be used to its fullest extent to create highly valuable content services.

Labels: Ask..com, Google, NextWeb, personalization, search, Social Media, Technology, Trends, Yahoo

The native language of Hawaii has given us words like "aloha" that have slipped into general use as well as more other terms like "wiki" that have been appropriated for new uses. Add to that list of appropriations the Hawaiian word "mahalo," which means "Thank you" in everyday conversations and now refers also to Mahalo, the new user-driven search portal under development by Jason Calacanis. "Mahalo's goal is to hand-write the top 10,000 search terms," goes the boilerplate on its page templates, an objective that's being lead by ex-Anchors from Netscape and like-skilled guides. Visitors to Mahalo can suggest links for inclusion in the service. How does this all work? As an alpha-level product you have to give Jason some slack but in truth it's not something that you're going to figure out as a user in a few seconds. Thank goodness for the FAQ.

On one level Mahalo is quite simple: type in a search term, get either a page of information and links that's been largely edited by a Mahalo guide or something that's been generated automatically for terms that they haven't populated as of yet. Being day two there are lots more pages that are misses than hits, but a listing of the top 20 searches appears on each search results page to give Mahalo visitors a sense of who's looking at what. You can also enter questions in a natural language style, which will provide results that look a bit like an amateur's version of Answers.com (partnership, anyone?). An example of a topic page more fully populated by Mahalo guides is Apple, which lists a "Mahalo Top 7" links for the term, disambiguation (Did you mean: "Apple, the fruit? Apple, the Beatles' record label?"), financial information, products, news, blogs and fansites, information and reviews, upgrades and support, photos and videos, competitors, and "culture". Items that Mahalo guides really dig get a little icon. In theory users can make comments on Mahalo pages, but in my short tour I haven't seen any yet.

Well, this is certainly...innovative. Or utterly derivative, depending on your point of view. I know from personal experience that there is one huge brain between Jason's ears and it seems as if every idea he ever had or absorbed about the content industry exploded all at once from his noggin onto the pages of Mahalo. From one angle what we have here is About.com with user input: docents put together some light content that surrounds links. Okay,we know that works. Kind of. From another angle we have a dot-com era version of Hoovers, a light assemblage of business and product info to guide the initially curious. Interesting, but who is this aimed at? From yet another angle we have Wikipedia, a catch-all encyclopedia format that tries to catch a wide variety of facets about a given topic. Digg and other social bookmarking services enter into the picture with Mahalo Top 7 bookmarks, but there's not a strong sense of how useful the first seven results will be: social bookmarking services don't rank relevance all that well. And of course there's the analogy to Answers.com, one-stop answers to questions from the best sources available. Except we really have to trust someone called a "guide" as to his or her judgment on sources.

Finally, there's the question of when I will know when to go to Mahalo. Will it be when I have a question that's one of the top 10,000 search terms? Oooh, is what I want to find maybe number 15,000? I dunno. Try "most popular," Jason, people will be able to get their heads around that more easily. Do I go there to get the latest news? Hmm, they have news feeds from Fox and other partners but but why would I get them here rather than other places - and why aren't the guides lending a hand with filtering and updating the news? While Wikipedia may be in the hands of "those darn users" I have a fairly high level of confidence that information on almost any popular topic will be updated within minutes, if not seconds, of something happening in the real world across a huge array of topics. I also know that Google will insert hot news at the top of my search results and that user-generated sites will help me to find the really cool news pretty quickly. I don't know how true that's going to be of any well-intended editorial staff covering tens of thousands of topics every day - even with help from users. Will I go there for shopping? Probably not, services like eBay and Google will scrape together the information that I need more effectively. Will I go there for reference information? Maybe, but with such a generic approach to content organization I'd probably prefer to type in a term on Google and branch off to Wikipedia, Answers.com, Hoovers or other key sources that it finds so easily. Will I go there to browse their taxonomy? Probably not, I've gotten too used to getting information on any topic level with one phrase and a click.

So, when DO I go to Mahalo? That's something that Jason needs to work on a little more. There are a lot of very interesting individual features and there's definitely a need out there for something between algorithmic search engines and the chaos of social bookmarking, but I am wondering whether this is more about a product vision or more about what to do with all of those ex-Netscapers who were inspired by Jason. If it's more the latter then it's not clear that a fairly limited and relatively anonymous editorial staff is going to have the horsepower or the respect within a given topic arena to build relevance creds. It gives Jason the control over writers that he desires, but in specific topic domains it may take more editorial talent to pull this off than he can afford.

There are so many ideas forming at once in Mahalo that it's far too early to write it off as a mish-mosh of interesting concepts - especially since people are growing tired of the "gaming" of search results. Calacanis could put initial feedback to good use, form more useful partnerships and come up with a tool that really stands out for an increasingly sophisticated online audience. But at this point my bet's against it. With Google's "Universal Search" capabilities beginning to phase in and more pure user-generated content plays becoming more disciplined and deep it's not clear that the features in Mahalo will ever mature to the point where they'll gel into a useful product in comparison to more established search and reference plays. At the same time there's far too little a sense of online community in Mahalo to make people passionate about online content feel that this product is really "theirs" in any strong way. In between these approaches there's probably room for a product that combines the best of search, editorial skills and user input to create marketable context for popular topics. But for now I don't think that people will be saying "thank you" to Mahala for its attempts at filling that need.

Labels: Business Information, Calacanis, Google, Mahalo, Netscape, reference, search, Social Media, Technology, Trends

Inxight has provided content organization and visualization tools for many years and picked up federated search tools along the way to provide more content value to enterprise and publishing clients. But like many content technology companies Inxight has had a very difficult time differentiating its capabilities from a broad pack of similar services aimed at similar clients. So after several reorgs and repositionings it's probably a good thing that Business Objects has announced its acquisition of Inxight to round out its broad portfolio of enterprise business information services. As enterprises focus more on solutions that deliver measurable results for specific business functions they have had to view unstructured content assets from inside and outside their own organization as key inputs for their business intelligence efforts. Inxight's ability to process and organize unstructured content adds enables Business Objects to compete more effectively with business information vendors focused on building insights from news, social media and other unstructured content.

Coming on the heels of Reuters' acquisition of ClearForest this signals a ramp-up of the battle between content technology providers and traditional publishers and aggregators for the lead in providing value to enterprise accounts. The content side of this equation prides itself in understanding the business objectives of their clients more clearly, but if the history of financial content vendors is at all instructive it's the enterprises equipped with the technology tools to give them proprietary advantages in market insight that will win the majority of budgets spent on content services. Will content vendors become more adept at delivering technology solutions more quickly than technology companies will become more aware of how those solutions add value to business information? This is going to be a race to the finish - with enterprises wanting to get more value for their content investments the clear winners.

The only losers will be publishers and technology providers that fail to see that their futures depend on them putting on both content and technology hats to deliver high-value solutions to their clients. The era of stand-alone technology features and stand-alone content services is coming to a close rather quickly as businesses try to leapfrog over the inefficiencies of both traditional I.T. solutions and traditional subscription database solutions to gain insight from wherever it's available.

Labels: Business Intelligence, Business Objects, Deals Partnerships and Sales, Inxight, search, Technology

The EconSM event is living up expectations for a great networking environment, including bumping into a new company called Edgeio, which provides classified ad systems on a white label basis for publishers of all kinds. The concept behind Edgeio is fairly simple but compelling: use their technology to build up easy-to-track classified ads from individuals and get them placed contextually in appropriate content. You can use just the technology to build your own ad service or syndicate in content from publishing partners using Edgeio. The publishers are in complete control of how ads are priced (or not) with Edgeio taking a percentage of revenues, typically 20 percent. This has good use for publishers in general, but it appears to be especially well positioned for social media, especially Wiki-based microcommunities. As communities grow they can spawn of new microcommunities that can use Edgeio to exchange ads with the parent community and to draw in other highly related communities. There's a lot of talk about scalability in online advertising and marketing at EconSM today but not much talk yet about how classifieds are the perfect one-to-one marketing medium for social media. Expect tools like this to thrive for highly targeted social media content - and to form the base for tools that help higher-powered marketers to reach customers on a one-to-one basis.

Labels: advertising, business models, econSM, media, Social Media, Technology, Trends

I was prone to thinking that Twitter was "yet another social media login" that would fast become another time-waster, but the buzz is becoming rather deafening so I finally broke down and set up an account. Twitter is basically a SMS-compatible messaging tool that allows one to broadcast text messages to networks of selected friends and, by default, the world. A Twitter profile allows one to get messages on any popular instant messaging service as well as on a mobile phone or online via a Web site, an embedded widget or an RSS feed. This uber-framework allows people to catch their network of contacts wherever they may be - and to shoot them little live observations.

Twitter messages can pack a fair amount of insight into a short space so some have begun to look at it as a "microblogging" service. As with blogs the medium is only as good as the message: do people really want to know every little twist of your day? Or, on the other hand, you can get over-enthusiastic about the medium and let go on a topic that gets broadcast a little too soon for its own good - as Steve Rubel noted recently. From this standpoint Twitter is more than a messaging service - it's a publishing medium that allows people to reach both micro-communities and the world as a whole. For people on the go who are shifting constantly between mobile devices and computer keyboards Twitter allows micropublishers to keep up with their social network more efficiently than either platform alone could manage.

Probably the most compelling aspect of Twitter from a publishing standpoint is its ability to onpass key URLs very quickly to people on the go. The next logical step would be to use Twitter as a service that will pop up content automatically for connected friends to share simultaneously via a browser. Instead of just social bookmarking we would then have social viewing - like having sixty people in the living room all playing with the TV remote at the same time. Twitter has its moment in the sun for now but if it cannot keep up the pace of development to stay abreast of people who want to share more than just little text messages effectively it may see its time come and go fairly rapidly. In the meantime, though, it's a convenient way to let people when you're off to the airport, down to the store for a jug of milk, sealing a deal or snapping up an award. Getting ahead of the real-time content curve will be all that more difficult as a result.

Labels: Technology, Trends, Twitter

Leave it to Google to come up with some ideas which make for good April Fool's jokes - but that carry a grain of...something. Google TiSP is a nifty kit that you can use to tune in broadband wireless services from your nearby water closet - yes, your toilet. A send-up of Google's oft-rumored plans for new networks via everything from broadband wireless to electrical utility lines, it is reminiscent of the tongue-in-cheek whiteboard snapshots from the Googleplex circulated now and again online. The other 1 April send-up is Google Paper, a handy service that lets you get crates of email printouts with which to paper your home - complete with "relevant, targeted, unobtrusive advertisements, which will appear on the back of your Gmail Paper prints in red, bold, 36 pt Helvetica," as well as glossy photo prints for graphics files. As far as environmental consciousness, "Gmail Paper is made out of 96% post-consumer organic soybean sputum, and thus, actually helps the environment. For every Gmail Paper we produce, the environment gets incrementally healthier."

Good fun, of course, but one wonders whether these are altogether just pranks or handy smoke screens for tossing curious people off the scent of related projects a little more connected to the reality-based community. With a highly fragmented U.S. marketplace a Google broadband wireless service would be problematic but that's not to say that Google may not be willing to be a networking pioneer elsewhere in the world. At the same time Google's numerous initiatives to provide advertising in traditional media outlets would not make an ad-supported custom print service in the next few years far-fetched. Take a look at these send-ups to get a good chuckle but keep a keen nose about as the scent of these little jokes begins to wear off a bit. As Google extends its services to include office automation, ecommerce services and, perhaps, its own computer operating system, stranger things could happen.

Labels: Google, Technology, Trends