Toluu

Alexander van Elsas's Weblog on new media & technologies and their effect on social behavior

new media, social behavior, Internet, TV, mobile, social networks, human behavior, family, friends

The loss of control separates the men from the boysOctober 9

I have been following the stream of news and blog posts on the current financial crisis. Om Malik has just written a good one here. I wasn’t sure if I should be writing about it since I am not a financial expert (I spend and save money on a futile scale ). Like everyone I am busy with this financial crisis, both privately and within my responsibilities at my startup company. One thing that strikes me is that the “keeping up appearances” act of many people seems to be blown away by panic and uncertainty.

These are difficult times, no doubt about it. People are going to get hit hard by this crisis. And that’s a terrible thing. But in difficult times there seems very little leadership. Silicon Valley startups and the ecology that surrounds it lives with certain air of self confidence bordering to arrogance. If you are in that game you need to be a bit arrogant, self assured, and acting like you’ve been there and done that before. It’s an attitude that gets you everywhere in good times. It’s an attitude any CEO or investor expects and lives up to him or herself. It gives everyone the comfortable feeling of control.

But things have changed radically. And the panic and desperateness we see now isn’t just a result of financial loss. It’

Ignorance is bliss, a new privacy nightmare is bornOctober 8

Facebook announces that they have just integrated Microsoft Live Search into Facebook. Undoubtedly to generate some cash revenues next to the advertisement business they are in.

Am I the only one that finds that they get scarier every day. Facebook not only builds walls that ensure it’s nearly impossible to get out of, but now they also track and trace me while I am searching the web? With Google at least the search results are anonymous and adding to some greater good and benefit of the user while leading to revenues for Google. With Facebook I am not anonymous while I’m searching. Facebook gets into my profile, my friends, my interactions and now search. And it is all for the user of course as they note in the announcement:

Along with your search results, you may also begin to see ads for products, services or other things that are relevant to your query.

It obviously won’t take long before Facebook starts messing with your search actions to provide you and your Facebook friends a “better”  experience within Facebook, as Leah Pearlman from Facebook notes when she finishes her exciting announcement:

Leah is searching on Facebook for a good place to eat tonight with her friends.

I’m sorry, but the giving you a better user experience just doesn’t cut it for me. Facebook provides interesting social net

A shakeout of unhealthy advertisement sponsored web 2.0 businessesOctober 7

There is some talk this morning on the possibility of on-line advertisement collapsing due to the current financial crisis. Svetlana Gladkova notes that when looking back at the Great Depression advertisement spent remained healthy and asks herself if we are sure there is going to be an advertisement collapse.

Mathew Ingram writes a good post on it too. He notes that the web advertisement business was one of the few in the ad sector that has show growth this year.

Are ad-dependent businesses going to sail through the economic turmoil without a care? Hardly. But an online-advertising apocalypse doesn’t seem terribly likely either. If anything, it seems as though traditional media should be the one feeling twitchy at this point. The competition could be intensifying.

In my opinion the on-line advertisement spent has been misused as unhealthy sponsoring of crappy web 2.0 startups. Anyone with a “web 2.0″-ish idea has taken the easy route to success. Use the FREE advertisement based business model to grow the business and try to get advertisement dollars to hide the fact that no one was really waiting for that service in the first place.

The “old-school” media and advertisement companies ended up paying for thi

The best business models focus on user valueOctober 6

Fred Wilson just wrote a post called Free versus Paid. In it he says:

It’s much better, in my opinion, to go with the freemium model, give a version of the service away for free to all comers, get a lot of users, get good market feedback, then develop a premium version of the product/service for sale to enterprise customers. If your free version is popular with a lot of users, your customer base is the target for the upsell and you might be able to live without an expensive sales force initially. And, of course, keep your costs really low until you start to get revenues.

In summary, freemium is far from dead, in fact it may be the business model de rigueur.

Fred’s look on Freemium works in the consumer market too.

In my opinion FREE work best when it is not mixed with advertisement, especially if you are in the social media or social networking business. FREE is just a cleverly concealed trap. It doesn’t focus on user value. It focuses on having a large user base and ensuring the value is monetized on size. It’s an indirect business model that by default makes it hard for the service provider to provide

The Sound Byte EconomyOctober 6

The web has unleashed unlimited amounts of information to us. There is more information than we can possibly consume so the question is always how to find the most valuable information. If you look at this from a business or advertisement point of view instead of a consumer view then the value of information is not the issue. Instead the scarcity is attention. Kevin Kelly wrote a good post on this and summarizes the new rule for this new economy:

Where ever attention flows, money will follow.

In the attention economy it is all about attention. Getting a user/consumer to pay attention to you, your product, service or advertisement is very difficult.

There are several ways to draw the attention of a user. You could provide valuable service or information. That might get attention, but competition is fierce. You can take a shortcut and instead work on your findability. Google Juice, Self-linking, SEO strategy to get your site higher ranked than others can draw attention. You can engage with users, become part of social communities, build up trust, reputation or whuffie.

No matter what you do, it seems everyone else is doing it too. The web has brought us democracy. Anyone can do what anyone else can do. You don’t need to be an expert or professional. The web brings you all the tool