Ross Mayfield's Weblog

There is no Supply Side

This one is for Doc.  What happens when the demand side supplies itself?  You have a commodity market.

What Doc usually means switching choice and the ability to build upon.  But consider Sun's creation of a Computing Commodity Market.  Buyers can sell excess capacity.  This option, provided contracts allow (this is where the details matter), reduces the risk of buying too much in the spot market, and can increase liquidity.  If Sun overprices the spot market, the buy side can sell instead of use.  Volume will bring leverage in this market, but even the smallest buyers benefit from this option, even more than selling their extra servers on eBay. 

Many will value different options and not take the risk of volatility -- but there is a risk management product that will be available for them -- the next opportunity.

First Bloglines Presentation After AskJeeves

Impressionistic transcript of Mark Fletcher's first public talk after AskJeeves acquired Bloglines, at the Media Center's Etech.

First slide is out of date, "one of the worst kept secrets on the web," now part of AskJeeves.  Bloglines is where users meet RSS: search, subscribe, share and publish.  Hide the technology as much as possible from users.  Used to have his own bookmark list and going to 100 sites a day needed a better way.  At the same time RSS began to get popular.  Bloglines is my solution to this problem.  Main screen is modeled after email, it does the work of tracking changes for you.  Average number of subcriptions is 20, but that's skewed with some people having hundreds and they need a tool like Bloglines to deal with information overload.  Three audiences:

1. Consumers: managable access, spam free, web based, free
2. Publishers: solution for building maintaining and measuring audiences; prevents "distributed denial of service attacks" from desktop news readers (they bear the burden of traffic as a proxy)
3. Advertisers: a new venue, interesing info: subscribed to, read before, generates profiles which can be used in one scenario for advertisers.  They have not focused on revenue (they have none), and will continue to build out the service with AskJeeves.  Must be beneficial to users, content providers and advertisers.

Future developments: Convergence with web search, Mutimedia, functional RSS feeds for more than just news, Richer blogging tools, more sharing and social networking features.  3.6 repeat visits per day on average.  Sticky vital part of their online experiences.  Share your information and feeds with other people in your network.

Bob Wyman asks if he is the friend or foe of the publisher.  We can't be the enemy, it won't work for our business, we have to be friends.  Then asked about friendliness to readers.  RSS is a friend of the user, our viral growth and addictiveness is a proof point.  Business model hasn't been figured out yet for publishers.

Then Bob asked about content click through (as opposed to ad click through).  Have not measured that at this point, have not been focused on a revenue model.

Steve Gillmor: you say you haven't figured out your business model, but I suggest you have. 

Our business model is volume (kidding)... we have a lot of options, doesn't take imagination to slap ads on it or use profile data, or charging subscriptions, or PayPal for RSS feeds.  Tons of possibilities, haven't figured out the right model for us.  AskJeeves sees this as a way of driving search traffic.  Still early, when you say syndication they think Seinfeld re-runs.

Make it easier by not saying RSS and hiding tech, it is an education issue and will take time.  It is an iterative process to make it easier, a journey, no end point.  Raising awareness with AskJeeves, which will integrate links.

So it seems that the merger means traffic and link sharing between Bloglines and AskJeeves, plus further funding of development.  What I haven't heard is the user benefit from the combination of search and aggregation.  Finding new feeds is not a big user problem, IMHO.  Finding archive value has yet to happen.  Finding each other in ways we can't socially process is a fascinating frontier.

Some end of the session discussion outtakes:

• Susan Mernit points out the erosion of brand value for news sources and the creation of services by users by subscribing to Craigs List as her personal early adoption story.
• A publisher: We play a key role in moving adoption forward in an easier way
• A publisher: Need for this to work at scale, which hasn't happened yet
• Wyman plugging his category: Two kinds of feeds: site specific or amalgamated
• How does this translate from fringe behavior to other more rational forms of behavior
• Steve Gillmor: Fletcher and Scoble are fringe, but solving their own overload problems.  Scoble is the second most recognizable person at Microsoft

Some thoughts of mine about branding, prompted by this discussion...  Which promise do you trust more?  Promises you make to yourself, or promises a media brand makes to you?  My guess is the former.  They may end as broken New Years resolutions.  But if you gain confidence in your own ability to produce, or at least manage your own consumption, you regain a lost sense of control. Then what happens when you gain affirmation beyond Stuart Smalley -- from your friends, your network.  This is a core disruption to brand value.  How value of self and social networks is a promise we want to believe.

UPDATE: Video interview with Mark on what's the big deal with RSS?

Nokia Using Socialtext

Just announced that Nokia is a customer of Socialtext.  Actually, they have been for a long time now.  Great group to work with. 

This helps explain my trip to Helsinki and Stockholm last November.

New Socialtext Release

We just released Socialtext Workspace 1.5, a nice mix of boring behind-the-scenes stuff that enterprises care about like directory integration and fun new toys like including RSS within wiki pages.

UPDATE: Matt Hicks at eWeek has the details.  Just for fun, we issued a press release, afterwards.

Sun Opens the Computing Commodity Market

The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee and I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun. -- John D. Rockefeller

A banker is a fellow who lends his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain. -- Mark Twain

Sun's move is more than openly asking $1/cpu-hr. -- they are forcing the commoditization of computing by making a market.

A friend of mine from the RateXchange days (B2B Bandwidth Commodity Exchange) forwarded a press release about a MIPS Exchange fostered by Sun foray into Grid Computing, pointing out the similarity to our old business plan.   The Over-The-Counter exchange is hosted by Archipelago, giving it level of neutral positioning and real trading infrastructure. Some short term impact:

• Price transparency begets more transparency
• Price setting shifts negotiation to service level, credit and settlement terms
• Setting a standing offer to sell at a given price is half of the role of a market maker, expect them to offer a price they will buy at as well
• Fostering a Secondary market for your own product pools some customer risk and should increase initial sales
• The creation of a Forward market is where it really gets interesting

IBM is offering cycles at half the price of Sun and HP has a grid barter plan called Tycoon.  Jonathan Schwartz challenges IBM for not having a standard offering.  When market debate shifts to standards, commoditization is settling in.  Analyst Michael Dortch puts it well:

"The ability to acquire compute cycles economically as they are needed is incredibly compelling. However, questions about how requests for those cycles will be prioritized, and whether or not priorities will be governed by service agreements, auctions or other mechanisms are just the beginning for interested IT decision-makers," he added. "The fact that these questions are being raised is good for all concerned, but actual, specific business benefits will have to wait until at least some of these questions are asked -- and answered -- by Sun, its partners and at least some of its competitors."

Jonathan offers this table as a commodity definition:

Elements	Sun's Grid	IBM's Grid
Industry Standard Server	V20Z Opteron (2.4 GHz), V210 SPARC	?
RAM per CPU	4 Gig	?
Cache storage per CPU	20 Gig	?
Operating System	Solaris 10	?
Is OS open source?	Yes	?
Is OS Protected by ALL* corporate patents?	Yes	?
Minimum Commitment	4 hrs.	?
Price per hour	$1 US	?

While this is an admirable stack, and is significant progress in a consistent redefinition of Sun's strategy, it has little to do with the commoditization of computing.  How the commodity is produced is irrelevant except as a temporary source of advantage for one actor.  What matters is defining price, quantity, quality and delivery mechanisms.  What Sun has defined is price and quantity, and now its time to hire some lawyers into the marketing department.

It is in Sun, IBM and HP's interest to come to a common table and pool risk.  This will not happen anytime soon, and first there will be alternative definitions and markets.  Sun's initial asking price is a ceiling, not a floor or a table.  Expect for them to trade in and out of the market leveraging information arbitrage (the real reason you want to be a first mover in commoditization).  Watch for when a second seller enters (Google?), an agreement is standardized by early movers, volatility ensues and liquidity explodes.

Gold like the sun, which melts wax, but hardens clay, expands great souls. -- Antoine Rivarol

Socialtext Did Not Invent Tagging

Good article in the Guardian about Tagging.  Except this statement:

But, extending an idea developed by SocialText for its wikis, del.icio.us also encourages users to "tag" bookmarks...

This implies that Socialtext invented tagging, which is, uh, categorically false.

Socialtext Categories share similar properties to tags, and was implemented two years ago, but takes a different approach.  Its a flat namespace, anyone can add/delete/modify a category with a simple interface, very wiki-like.  We also added rel tags to Categories to support Technorati's tag search.  You can play with it here.

On the other hand, we did invent metadata ;-)

Customer Generated Demo

How cool is this?  One of our customers, inspired by Jon Udell's Wikipedia screencast (the best illustration I have seen on how wiki pages evolve over time), created his own Socialtext demo screencast and shared it in the Socialtext Customer Exchange.

The Socialtext screencast isn't a polished demo, but a great way to look over the shoulder of Raymond Kristiansen from the Norwegian Liberal Youth party (yeah, we have some very cool customers) as he builds a Workspace from scratch.