Michal Bohanes' blog

Delver goes deep. Very deep

What I have seen may be the future of social media monetization. But I’m too cautious to use it.

Let me give you some background. As we all know, Facebook and other social networking sites have trouble making money. But at the same time it is clear that our networks are a source of information that even Google search results have a tough time to match.

Let’s say you want to go to Madrid over the weekend and look for a good value hotel and good restaurants to go to. You could of course use tripadvisor or similar services. But what if someone you know recently went to Madrid? Wouldn’t it be great to tap her for information? For sure you would trust her judgment more than some random dude on tripadvisor! But - how would you find out? You could of course send out a message to everyone you know “hey guys, anyone been to Madrid recently?”. And quickly become an annoyance for everyone around you.

But what if there were a service that would allow you to search among your networks, ALL your networks, not just the one on facebook, if someone you know recently mentioned the word Madrid? Now that would be pretty cool. It turns out that such a service exists and is called delver. It calls itself a social search engine and it allows you to search for anything within your social graph.

I just wanted to give it a try but honestly, I’m a bit worried. This thing wants access to my facebook, friendfeed, linkedin, youtube profile, wants to know my email address, the schools I went to and the company I work for. All for the benefit of broadening my social graph and delivering relevant search results. They want to hold all of the ends of the various threads that exist about me online. And quite frankly, I’m a bit worried about this. I’m bailing.

It is probably irrational. I lead my online life as impeccably as I can, knowing that nothing I ever do online can be kept secret. It would only be consequential to reap the benefits from my clean online presence. But the thought that a no-name company has access to my entire social graph and can draw connections that I’m not even aware of (“wow, I didn’t know that Bob from high school wound up working with my ex-colleague from company XY!”). I mean, they could probably deliver an even better service if they had access to my outlook list of contacts, search within the notes I have about them, look into THEIR social graphs and give me search results (“Michal, noone from your network has recently been to Madrid, but Joe, who is one degree of separation away from you through your friend Frank, has been there in January”). That sounds pretty big-brotherish.

I might change my mind. That is, if Delver let me change my mind and leave them one day. Now, it doesn’t seem so. This is what I found in their terms of service

“You give Delver a irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, fully-paid and royalty-free, license (with the right to sublicense) to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which You submit, post, display on or through the Services.” (highlighted by me)

What do you think?

If I knew that, I wouldn’t be here

I have heard those words on many occasions. For example, a company executive comes to present at Business School, and when asked a question on the future of their industry, they say “If I knew that, I wouldn’t be standing here today.”

To me, this is remarkable for many reasons:

1. Usually, the business world is a place of repressed emotion. But here, in a very formal situation, an executive gives us a very open glipse of his inner world by saying “I actually don’t like my job. If I knew the answer to that question, I’d be doing something else.”

2. The blunt candour with which the executive, who previously droned on about how exciting the company is as a workplace (you know, those fascinating colleagues, the dynamic environment), suddenly implicitly says “actually, it sucks. If you know the answer to that question, don’t come working at my company.”

3. The fine sprinkling of impoliteness with which he/she peppers their audience: Because basically what he says is: “…I wouldn’t be here with YOU guys. I don’t like you and if I knew the answer to the question, I wouldn’t be talking to YOU, YOU and YOU over here, either.”

It happens over and over. During the last 5 years of professional life, I’m sure I heard that phrase at least 20 times, in meetings, lectures, conversations.

I marvel at such cognitive dissonance. To all the frustrated professionals out there: If you don’t like your job, change it. If you don’t want to change it, stop complaining. And if you are representing your company, don’t embarrass yourselves by publicly deriding it.

A new classroom experience

I remember one high school class particularly well. Our history teacher used to have us open the book on page 9, someone had to read out loud and like this we got to page 15, punctuated by occasional discussions. Several of us dozed off or made fun of the reader if he or she was a stutterer or made mistakes.

My high school education was not as much about memorizing useless facts as Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, told Charlie Rose in this interview.The flaw of my generation’s classroom experience was less about learning things by heart, it was more about one-directional preaching: The teacher simply told us facts which we then duly forgot.

In contrast, I am extremely upbeat about the educational possibilities that are open to kids and teenagers through the internet, most notably via Google and Wikipedia.

Today, a teacher’s role can be much more of a moderator. For example, a history teacher can decide on the topic of the day/week, e.g. the Victorian era. He can assign different students (in groups of 2-3) to look for different aspects of the topic (“Fred and Betty, you will tell us about the factors that drove the rise of the British empire overseas”.) The students will have to present to the class.

By this, students will learn several vital skills that are essential in our society: Information gathering and structuring, succinct presentation of complex issues, public speaking, creativity (how many ways are there to make a lively and compelling presentation?) and more in-depth interaction with the issues - you have much more time to actually do some independent thinking, e.g. comparing 19th century British colonial zeal to Soviet imperialism if you don’t have to tediously search for the underlying facts like I had to.

In many descriptive subjects such as biology, history, economics and geography, entire curricula could be designed this way - researched and presented by the students, while the teacher acts as a moderator, timekeeper and quality assurer.

I absolutely love this and am very excited that my kids (no I don’t have any, in case you’re wondering) will be part of such a classroom experience. There is absolutely no excuse any more for any teacher to solely focus on the old, one-way sermon format. These days are thankfully over.

A little rant

Ok, I’m super happy to live in the place and time I live in. But here’s a few aspects of the information economy that really bother me.

1. it takes me 15 minutes to find a way how to buy movie tickets online - I look for the film, get the show times but there’s no one-stop shop where I could get all times for all movie theaters AND buy the tickets

2. I have had a T-Mobile account for 18 months, and because I have a loan to repay, I got locked in for another 18 at half the price. But that means I can’t get an iPhone without engaging in illegal activities.

3. It takes Internet Explorer 20 seconds, counted from clicking on the icon to being fully open and ready to go.

4. No matter what you tell me, broadband is still slow. Regularly, I have to wait in the order of 3-5 seconds before a page loads. Sometimes, there’s a hickup and the page freezes and I have to re-load.

5. Being able to use the iPhone (my old model) on the go is a crapshoot. Almost half the time Google Maps doesn’t load (“no data available”)

6. There’s so much noise out there that it’s virtually impossible to promote a worthy cause…

But otherwise I’m really glad to live in the world we live in.

By the way, anyone knows how to disable the alt-tab function? :-)

Facebook does it again

Facebook had quite an embarassing moment this week: After quietly introducing a clause in their new terms of service that would have them own ALL the data their users create for all eternity, they faced massive protest from their users and had to backpedal, reinstating the previous terms of service.

After the Beacon disaster and this most recent episode, I start to have the impression that Facebook is continuously trying to test the limits of what is possible, without being weighed down too much by ethical concerns.

Both decisions completely seem to disregard common sense. How could Facebook execs assume that users, by default, would agree to have all their online purchases displayed to their entire network? How could they assume that users would accept to never be able to erase their content?

Being at the forefront of innovation has helped Facebook become the No.1 social network in the world. But the more powerful Facebook becomes (and they have just started), the more sensitive they need to be to their users’ privacy concerns.

Who is the next Google killer? Give me a break…

So once again, I’m reading about the next Google killer. Facebook, after still not finding the right business model, is out of fashion, so now it’s Twitter (who also don’t have a business model but it’s a NEW service that doesn’t have a business model so it seems to get the benefit of the doubt). The argument put forward is that we are witnessing a fragmentation of search: For one, there’s Video search (which Google luckily owns via youtube) and there’s real-time search, dominated by Twitter. The point being made is that Google is slow to pick up events as they unfold. For example, the Hudson river plane crash was covered by Twitter users long before news groups covered it which then could have been picked up by Google. Tracking a new product launch might have the equal effect - you can pick up consumers’ reactions much faster on Twitter than on Google.

Although it’s laudable to think outside the box and to try to predict trends, I’d be grateful if commentators of this space gave a compelling argument how the heck a new fad will monetize before declaring it the next Google killer.

Upon this, I usually hear the argument - “hey, back in 2000, noone knew how to monetize Google, either!” but that is not the point. The point is that if someone in 2000 had told you “Google will make money by selling keywords which will trigger text ads that will bring you to an advertiser’s homepage” it would have been a perfectly understandable proposition and you would have had to admit that it’s a great idea. The genius lay in FIGURING THIS OUT!

I’m the first one who would admit that a new trend is evolving that is threatening Google. Twitter, no doubt, is useful and it’s one more step towards creating the perfectly informed 21st century person. But ask yourself how many of the Google searches you perform on a daily basis have to do with the most current events where Twitter, admittedly has the edge. And how many of those searches are actually of commercial relevance. Probably not many.

I think this decade will, in retrospect, be viewed as the decade of false alarms.  The next couple of years will finally convince us that while user-generated content is very useful, it can never replace a well-designed search engine that gives structure to the vast ocean of information out there.

PS. Don’t forget to buy your books at www.offsetbooks.com :-)

Marginal value = 1 tree Marginal cost = zero

There’s different types of environmentalists. There’s the moralizing ideologists who eschew supermarkets and walk for miles to get to the nearest organic food shop where the grain is sold out of jute bags and the sweets sections consists of dried plums and wet raisins.

And then there’s those with whom you really wouldn’t tell. They let their actions speak for themselves. One of them, Emmanuel Coucke, has started a great project called offsetbooks. On his website, for every book you buy, a tree will be planted. Offsetbooks is partnering with Amazon who pays a small commission on every book sold. It won’t cost you more than if you bought the book with Amazon directly and you do a good thing.

The founder says that despite the name, offsetbooks is not really aimed at offsetting 100% of the carbon emissions caused by book production and shipping. “My thinking is rather: If you buy on Amazon, you won’t do anything. If you buy on offsetbooks, you make a small difference.”

The project is partnering with an established organization called Trees for the Future that engages in sustainable agroforestry, as they call it. All of the offsetbooks proceeds are donated to the non-profit organization.

“I’m primarily using my skills for my own personal success. But I always thought that I should be giving something back to society so part of my time is and will always be devoted to those types of projects”, says Emmanuel.

Have a look.

Buy a book.

And spread the word.

It’s INSIDE the video

Thousands of smart brains are being wrecked on a daily basis figuring out the magic formula for monetization of interesting online content. When it comes to video, this problem is particularly pressing – storage and bandwidth cost are so high that a video hosting service that is not backed by a pay-for business model or a powerful parent with deep pockets can’t survive.

Youtube is a striking example of a company still trying to figure out how to monetize video content while being able to run the service at a loss (which is assumed).

There is one main problem with video hosting sites – because of the highly unpredictable user-generated content (in almost every discussion about the topic it is exemplified with the famous “dog on a skateboard” type of content).

Advertisers are cautious when it comes to associating their brand with this highly unpredictable content and therefore have to buy on a per-video basis and can’t simply buy x million impressions across youtube.

The conceptual response to this would be: Either advertise only on “safe” content or – and that’s the point I’d like to make here – advertise INSIDE the actual video.

There’s two interesting twists to this: One is the ever growing trend of placing in-video ads.

MySpace is doing very well in monetizing its in-video ads in music videos by linking to Amazon to purchase the relevant song (a TechCrunch article speaks of CTRs of over 1% which is very good). Youtube has a similar deal with itunes – one click on this Killers video  opens up itunes and with the next click you have bought the song.

The other interesting development is to place brand logos in videos. A couple of Stanford students have developed a technology how to place inserts in videos and people in the video can still walk in front of it, thus creating a realistic impression that a real billboard is there.

But obviously, this only makes sense if you produce videos that are likely to be watched by many viewers. So once again, we’re back at square one. Volume sells. Niche doesn’t.

Turning into an Alt-Tab zombie

Yeah, so we all are multi-taskers. We have 6 windows and 8 tabs open and blog and check facebook and view youtube and email and twitter all at the same time. Underneath the clutter there’s the open word document with the occasional assignment.

Recently, I’ve spent a lot of time in front of my screen. Blame the electives. Anyway, I’ve seen that all that darn multi-tasking has turned me into a veritable Alt-Tab zombie. It seems like I can’t focus on anything for more than 10 minutes. After 10 minutes I start to feel giddy and fidgety and check if I got new mail. (I’ve disabled push email so that I’m not distracted in my work *insert bitter laugh here*) I see that someone has sent me a youtube link I should check out. So I click on it, feeling like I deserve a break. But because of my slooooooow internet connection at home, the video stutters and I’ll have to wait for it to load.

Ok, so I’ll return to my work for a while. After 2 minutes (I produced a half sentence in this time BECAUSE IT TOOK ME A MINUTE TO GET A GRIP ON WHAT THE HECK I WAS WRITING ABOUT BEFORE) I check in again on youtube. I watch a funny video. But then I hear this “clopf” sound that facebook chat makes. Dammit, I didn’t close the window where I was facebooking. Someone writes me “whassup” and I reply “not much” and then we start chatting.

15 minutes later I’m staring sadly at my half sentence. Then my phone rings. A friend is catching up. I can’t really tell him that I can’t talk to him right now, on a SATURDAY afternoon, right? 30 minutes later there’s still this pitiful half sentence.

We need to de-glorify multitasking. Multitasking is BAD, BAD, BAD!!! Big slabs of time doing just one thing are GOOD GOOD GOOD. Shut off push email, ignore your private calls, get invisible on skype, don’t even open facebook.

I came to this line of thinking while I stumbled upon this article that mentions the story of a Goldman trader who was fired because he spent 4 hours a day on Facebook. And I was thinking – Would I, being a big fan of Facebook, allow my employees to access it during working hours? In the end, it’s just another networking tool – there is the occasional professional contact among the clutter of casual buddies, right?

The answer is a big NO. No way. The few professional benefits that come out of Facebook can be reaped easily after working hours. 99% of your time on Facebook is private stuff. And you are at work. Moreover, Facebook encourages Alt-Tabbing, the greatest scourge of productivity since short skirts.

A surgeon does not get interrupted while performing brain surgery by a friend saying “Hey old fruit, howsit going?” An assembly line worker does not interrupt his work only because someone tagged him in a picture. White-collar Dilberts like us need to do the same and make ourselves more and more unavailable to the non-essential interruptions. All the more enjoyable will evenings with friends in a pub or at Facebook be.

A missed opportunity

Some heavy Facebook addicts among you may have come across “Scrabulous”, a Scrabble knockoff developed by two brothers from India. Shortly after it was uploaded as an app to Facebook in 2007, it became the most popular game and the guys made some serious dough on advertising revenues (estimates vary between $18k and $25k per month).

But then came Hasbro and Mattel, the IP owners of Scrabble. They filed a law suit against the two chaps and forced them to change the name and the rules. The game can be found in its new form as “lexulous” on Facebook.

Shame. The result is bad publicity for the two toy giants and a minor revenue dip for the two brothers. There could have been much more!

I’d like to collect a few ideas on what Hasbro and Mattel could have done instead that would have been less old-school-20th-century-big-corporation-bullying.

Some ideas come to mind immediately:

• co-marketing with Scrabulous, holding worldwide Scrabulous tournaments and inviting the winners to the Hasbro/Mattel headquarters with some PR-heavy ka-ching
• sell limited editions of the board game with the Scrabulous logo and position it as “the real deal - the offline version of Scrabulous”
• or, at least, politely remind Scrabulous of their breach of law and ask them to hand over part of their advertising revenue/inventory

I think that many of the Scrabulous enthusiasts of almost 1 million could have been converted into Scrabble buyers with some smart marketing. Now, the two companies have made many of them their enemies.

Any other ideas anyone? Or do you think that Hasbro/Mattel made the right decision?