Open Social by Google has the largest Networks joining forces
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
I'm just going to repost the key info....
Open Social is an open web API that can be supported by two kinds of developers:
"Containers" -- social networking systems like Ning, Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, and Friendster, and...
"Apps" -- applications that want to be embedded within containers -- for example, the kinds of applications built by iLike, Flixster, Rockyou, and Slide.
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With the Facebook platform, only Facebook itself can be a "container" -- "apps" can only run within Facebook itself. In contrast, with Open Social, any social network can be an Open Social container and allow Open Social apps to run within it.
With the Facebook platform, app developers build to Facebook-proprietary languages and APIs such as FBML (Facebook Markup Language) and FQL (Facebook Query Language) -- those languages and APIs don't work anywhere other than Facebook -- and then the apps can only run within Facebook. In contrast, with Open Social, app developers can build to standard HTML and Javascript, and their apps can then run in any Open Social container.
Technically, Open Social is implemented as what I call a "plug-in API", or a "Level 2 platform". In other words, it's not a web services API -- rather, it's a way for external applications to "plug into" a host environment (or "container"). And then, in addition to literally showing up inside the pages of a container, the external app can make Javascript calls to retrieve all kinds of useful information from the container and perform all kinds of useful functions within the container, such as "give me a list of all of this user's friends" or "inject this event into this user's activity feed".
Open Social is very practical. Many standards die an early death because they are too complicated and hard to implement. Open Social is what you want in a standard -- it's expansive enough to do useful things, but limited enough to be very easy to implement, both for containers and for apps.
With estimated revenues of $150 million, Facebook would normally be valued at between one times its revenue to perhaps 10 times revenues, if it was growing like crazy. With a valuation of $15 billion, this would be 100 times revenues. If you owned a company with total revenues of $50,000, then Microsoft Corporation (MSFT: would value your business at $5 million.
Facebook's already grown like crazy and perhaps has a few more years to go, but it can't get too much bigger.
Microsoft is going to place ads, sell ads, broker ads and do some sort of revenue split with Facebook. For that, Microsoft pays $240 million and gets 1.6% of the company. When you extrapolate the valuation of Facebook and run the figures against the user base of around 50 million, it means that each and every user is tallied at $300 a head.
I thought valuing registered users of Web sites got expensive back in 1999, when they were as high as $100 a head; $300 is sky-high.
But this is $300 a head for what are essentially bloggers, duds, poor students and hangers-on. What are these people constantly buying that makes them worth that much?
Well, its a good thing your not a trader John. Because you would probably loose some hedge fund a ton of money...
Online social networking sites are now among the most popular web sites on the internet. Facebook is the seventh most trafficked site in the U.S., and millions of young trendsetters have made MySpace and Second Life the most disruptive forces to hit pop culture since MTV. LinkedIn is at the forefront of an emerging networking frontier focused on business and boasting a network of more than 7 million professionals. In a world of IMers, bloggers, podcasters, burners, P2P buccaneers, mashup artists and phonecam paparazzi, people have entirely new ways of expressing and reinventing themselves, and fact can blend with fiction. The founders of the most successful and innovative web sites allowing people to interact, trade, meet and network will explore how their sites are evolving to keep up with the future of online networking.
The idea of INFORUM began with the basic tenet that young people not only deserve but desire unbiased, trustworthy information from a full range of stances, and that they want their sources qualified. The Commonwealth Club has a 103 year tradition of civic debate, and INFORUM honors and continues this tradition by providing a forum for young people to access the best informed, most involved, and brightest minds - be they politicians, business gurus, policy workers, thought leaders, trendsetters or culture-jammers.
So Microsoft is taking the leading Nasdaq index to new highs, on what technicians might term a flag pole formation. It looks very bullish here (charts). But forget all that for a moment. The real story here is Facebook.
It was just at web 2.0 that Microsoft's Ballmer talked about acquisitions,
Ballmer half-jokingly said the purchases will range between 50 or 100 million to a couple hundred million each. He also offered up his e-mail address (steveb@microsoft.com), inviting entrepreneurs to pitch him any products they may want to sell.
The problem... Microsoft has a real challenge to find 20 companies a year that match their .NET religion. Most of the web world is not .NET.
"We will buy smaller companies. We will buy smaller companies that make some use of open source software," he said. "We don't want to discourage people who would talk with us just because they do some open source."
Facebook expects this year to break even on a cash-flow basis, with revenue of $150 million, according to people familiar with the matter. It plans in coming weeks to unveil its own online-advertising system that would let advertisers place targeted ads based on the personal information posted by Facebook users.
The high valuation increases the worth of the stakes held by Facebook's current investors. According to people familiar with the matter, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg owns roughly 20% of Facebook, while, among its investors, Accel Partners owns about 11%, Founders Fund owns about 5%, and Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital Partners own about 1.7% apiece.
That makes Mark worth 3 Billion, a billion for every year he's worked on this project.
What is the theme I'm coming away with from Web 2.0 San Fran... Well let me quote a reinvented company chairman's thoughts... (CEO Viacom) - "We believe in fragmentation going forward on the Internet."
Yahoo: Flickr and such - The much cooler feature however is the new "Places Pages". As you might expect these are pages that focus on one particular area and pull all the image and tag information for pictures geotagged to that area.
TWITTER: Evan Williams ... co-founded Twitter ... He talked about how Twitter succeeded by taking away capabilities ... adding constraints can help your product ... we need to ask what can we take away to make something new ... because SMS was the primary platform, it made some difference. The interface is one field and a button. That gives it a "low cognitive load."
Google just released earnings. What is the moral of the story. DO ONE THING, DO IT RIGHT, and dominate. Search still leads the the marvel of this wall street story.
Why am i posting something about godaddy? Well, not only do we own all our domains through the service, but i think that Bob Parsons has some great information to share with would be webprenuers. Here is a link to an article from last years presentation (2006)
To me operating cash flow is far and away more important than accounting or paper profits. You can actually use cash flow to make payroll and buy equipment. Imagine that! Somehow financial writers don't seem to understand that. With the exception of a mortgage on one of our data centers, GoDaddy has no debt and has never had any debt. We are entirely self-funded and have held healthy cash reserves. This year we'll have cash receipts of 340 million dollars and positive cash flow from operations of 52 million. That's a million bucks a week.
I think if you do that, you've wasted your advertising dollars. You've got to be different, and often to be different and effective, you've got to be polarizing. One of the problems with marketing is that everybody, bar none - even market analysts and financial writers - they all think that they can do it.
I pushed back and insisted we hire a well-endowed female brunette with the GoDaddy name emblazoned across her chest because I knew that's where every guy that was watching that game would be looking.
Then when we filmed the commercial and submitted it to Fox, it was rejected several times. Eventually, a few days before the game, it got the go ahead. When they finally approved it, Fox came back and said, [laughs] "Hey Bob, your ad is approved. By the way, you want to buy another spot?"
I thought about it for about half an hour and said, "Yes." The rest is history. I was lucky enough to have the first running of the ad offend somebody that had a lot of pull. To this day I don't know who it was, God bless them. But it got the second showing of the ad canceled and this has never happened in the history of television, much less on the Super Bowl and our business shot through the ceiling because of the controversy that happened. We were lucky indeed. That ad is now included in college textbooks and is being used as an example as one of the most effective TV ads ever.
I think it's much better to alienate 10% of your audience and have the other 90% take sharp notice. (CATER TO THE PENGUIN )
Many people dislike or disagree with Bob Parsons, but most dont have a company doing as well as his. I suppose it all depends on your objectives.
It is crucial for new media/technology startups to focus efforts and energy on results that will pay off. Over the past month, IPMM management has started various online and off line campaigns to test a roll out expectation of new brands. We are also evaluating mashup systems to work with our core open source solutions to keep up with future scaling issues we see coming. We have had faculty changes in the spring but have taken a new perspective in how to handle the HR department as well. In keeping with the updates that we should be putting out, I wanted to share a great article from one of the pioneers who is reinventing itself and assessing where it needs to place critical resources.. YAHOO.
Yahoo also needs to decide whether it wants to be a media company that does original programming or not. They've been dabbling in original content for years with mixed results. If they are not going to really go for it and do it right, they should scrap it and not be distracted
Executives also say they plan to de-emphasize original entertainment programming and do more with social media and user-generated content. All right then. Let's see it happen.
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