RSS

Category Archives: Product

Is Path (2.0) Mobile’s Path?

07 Feb

One feature of the recently announced Nike+ FuelBand, Nike’s new activity measuring wristband, is its social integrations that enable users to share their activity data on Facebook, Foursquare and Path. With over 800 million and 15 million people using Facebook and Foursquare respectively these tie-ins make sense for Nike. For Path though, which re-launched its app a mere 2 months ago, this represents a big coup considering it just passed the 2 million user mark. It also highlights the early stages of a user experience in mobile that mimics the content creation and consumption cycle on the wired web.

Path 2.0 incorporates a set of activities- Photos, People, Places, Music, Thoughts and Sleep/Awake status- that users can post to their timeline and share with their network. By initially focusing on these social services, Path’s mobile functionality either super-sets (in the case of Places and Thoughts) or competes with (for Photos and Music) some of the most popular mobile apps available:

  • Photos: The basis for the original Path app, Photos, which incorporates image-filters as well, competes with many other photo-sharing apps including the wildly successful Instagram.
  • Places: Popularized by location-based social networks, Path also offers check-in services inside its app and allows the location data to be posted to a user’s Foursquare account.
  • Music: Giving users the ability to insert song clips into their Path timeline competes directly with the relatively new but popular SoundTracking app.
  • Thoughts: Like any social network, commenting is a core functionality which Path supports and allows to be shared to both a user’s Facebook and Twitter accounts.

By leveraging design, for which the company has received rave reviews, Path has created a differentiated mobile user experience that consolidates these services into a single app. While competition between content creators and aggregators for audience attention is a relatively new phenomenon in mobile, it has played out over several cycles on the wired web already. Yahoo became a very popular web 1.0 destination by providing an online directory through which the initial content creators on the web could be found. Over time Yahoo evolved from being just an aggregator to a creator of content as well- launching successful finance and sports content verticals in the process. As the web matured, traditional media (magazines, newspapers and television networks) began bringing its offline content online, shifting consumer attention back towards these properties. Then came Google who re-aggregated the content experience for audiences by providing a better way to discover exactly what people were looking for through its search engine. Google has also tried leveraging its audience by acquiring (i.e. YouTube) or launching (i.e. Gmail) content and services that keep these consumers engaged with Google’s properties. When web 2.0 came along the balance of attention started to shift to socially oriented sites like MySpace and Photobucket where the users became the content creators. As last week’s S-1 filing reminds us, Facebook won the battle for social networking supremacy as they created a platform that not only aggregates individual content creation but enables professional content to be curated in the same experience as well. In the process Facebook took the aggregation idea one step further than in previous cycles by allowing other companies (such as Zynga) to build applications directly on the platform, thus ensuring users continued to engage with Facebook.

The ushering in of the mobile app economy by Apple has led to the development of hundreds of thousands of task-specific apps- from games and content apps to personal utilities and social networking services. Relatively few of these though have been built to aggregate individual app experiences. Path is attempting to do this, and take it a step further at the same time, by creating its own set of services (Photos, Music, Sleep/Awake status) alongside super-setting such well-established apps as Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter and now Nike+ through the use of APIs. A consistent, mobile-only experience throughout Path’s app allows users to still participate in these underlying networks but aggregates the engagement within its own app, which if successful, would allow Path to eventually drop their connection to these underlying social networks.

How valuable consumers find the aggregated experience versus using activity-specific apps will determine Path’s success ultimately. And while design may very well continue to win over users from competing web and mobile services, Path will need to grow beyond the Valley’s A-List of users and connect with the average American already using Facebook if it’s going to win the first wave of mobile app aggregation. If not, which companies stand to benefit in this cycle?

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on February 7, 2012 in Product, Social Media

 

Tags: , , , ,

Time for Television Ratings to Get Social

25 Oct

The start of the current fall television season has highlighted the importance of social media in driving awareness and tune-in for new and established TV series as audience consumption habits continue to fragment across device and social platforms. With multiple apps being promoted by shows, networks and even TV service providers for checking-in to these broadcasts as well as fan pages and hashtags used to centralize the conversation around each episode, there is a growing need for audience measurement beyond the traditional Nielsen ratings.

The Nielsen Company is the de facto provider of the ratings system used to determine how the 60 billion in television advertising dollars are allocated amongst broadcast and cable network line-ups. The company relies on the behavior of 50,000 Americans across its sample of 25,000 households to extrapolate ratings for the nearly 115 million households with television sets in the U.S.  The resulting ‘share’ of audience Nielsen attributes to each TV episode on a nightly basis ultimately effects which series get renewed or cancelled (for a great primer on how Nielsen’s TV ratings system works, check out this ESPN-style animated video on the topic from local Washington, DC creative agency JESS3).

Though with the number of households with television sets dropping for the first time in 20 years, on-demand video platforms taking viewing time away from traditional television and multi-tasking across multiple screens a growing reality, traditional means of measurement are failing to capture this evolving consumer behavior. While Nielsen is working on ways to aggregate this distributed viewing audience through its ‘extended screen’ initiative, the company isn’t measuring the actual activity on the social web occurring around the episodes being watched. This represents an opportunity for services that provide a platform for social engagement as well as companies that aggregate TV show-related conversations from across the internet to address this information gap. While both Facebook and Twitter have their own media-related initiatives that allow fans to interact with one another as well as with the shows and their stars, neither network focuses on quantifying this engagement on an industry-wide basis.

Services like BuddyTV, GetGlue, Miso and Tunerfish, on the other hand, have been built in a manner that can address this need. Having ridden the check-in wave popularized by location-based service Foursquare, these event-based social networks (EBSNs) capture when consumers are tuning in to watch television and aggregating the activity being generated around each show within their respective apps and websites. GetGlue, the largest of these services, already has more users checking-in to the most popular shows on its platform than the size of Nielsen’s entire sample audience, making it statistically valuable to the ratings conversation.

Even though the demographic make-up of EBSN users is not representative of the overall U.S. population (which Nielsen does try to mirror in selecting its households), check-in services make up for this by highlighting the actual activity of the most desirable audience to advertisers (18 to 49 year-olds) and not just projections. For advertisers this represents a unique opportunity to target these consumers in a highly engaged environment by extending their TV advertising for particular shows to the equivalent social web channels and mobile devices. To bring the desired scale to this type of opportunity though, these social environments need to be aggregated somehow.

That’s where companies like Bluefin Labs, General Sentiment, Social Guide and Trendrr come into play by not only aggregating publicly available social commentary but filtering and normalizing this data from disparate sources (EBSNs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to identify the underlying sentiment of a broader range of web users. This provides a more complete view of the engagement associated with shows across the social web in real-time as well as beyond the initial airing time slot of each episode. The resulting findings might be just the data set necessary to become the de facto social television rating to rival Nielsen.

Even with Nielsen’s recent ratings calculation glitch, it’s unlikely that the company will be replaced as the ratings system for the television advertisers industry in the near future. But as audiences for traditional TV continue to disperse across more mediums and content experiences, the need to compliment the ratings discussion, and ultimately how advertising dollars are allocated, with additional data will only continue to increase. This creates an opportunity for actual engagement-related metrics to gain equal footing with passive stream and tune-in projections over time.

So how do we get there?

While results from a recent NM Incite (a Nielsen/McKinsey company) study confirms the correlation between social activity and TV ratings, the opportunity for social television start-ups is in identifying and explaining the variations in popularity between Nielsen’s most highly rated shows and those series being discussed online and how to benefit from it.

The combination of tune-in and conversation activity make EBSNs the most compelling data set for social television ratings. The challenge is that the company that popularized the check-in, Foursquare, only recently passed 10 million users worldwide itself, a far cry from Facebook’s 150 million users in the U.S. alone. For EBSNs to reach Facebook-like adoption, they need distribution and a more automated process for socializing around TV shows (beyond the manual download of apps and checking-in to services). While BuddyTV and Miso have partnered with AT&T’s television service offering U-verse, GetGlue and Miso have integrations underway with satellite television provider DirecTV that enables subscribers to check-in to shows through DirecTV’s remote control. Other companies, such as Dijit, are by-passing traditional TV service providers entirely and competing for consumers with their own universal remote that layers in check-in functionality.

What social analytic companies lacks in proprietary data, they make-up for in business model by already working with advertisers and media companies to help them understand the volume and sentiment of chatter occurring online about their brands and shows across the social web. Gaining access to data on an exclusive basis from EBSNs and other social communities would be a key differentiator in winning the battle for advertising and media clients- the same companies that subscribe to Nielsen’s television ratings data. With so many companies vying for client dollars and mind share, the social analytics provider that can get the right media outlets partnerships to adopt and distribute their version of social television ratings can become the industry standard through sheer perception and market momentum.

Based on these factors, Trendrr, which launched a TV industry-specific real-time dashboard before the start of the fall television season could be that company. Considering Trendrr’s breadth of data sources (Facebook, GetGlue, Miso and Twitter) and how well they’ve embedded themselves into the online media landscape (partnering with the likes of AdAge, Lost Remote and Mashable to distribute their data and findings), the company is best positioned to become the social television ratings provider of the future.

What are the most likely outcomes?

Absent Trendrr or another one of these start-ups gaining the necessary client or user clout to grow into the de facto social TV ratings provider, the most likely outcome for the companies with the most traction in this market is an acquisition.

If either Facebook or Twitter decided to focus on providing analytics as a value-add to their advertiser and media clients, they would make ideal acquirers of these types of companies. For Facebook, adding a media-oriented check-in service to their massive user base would fit nicely with Facebook’s recent overturns towards the television industry and turn the acquired ESBN into the immediate and undisputed winner in the social television data game. Twitter on the other hand would benefit from acquiring one of the leading social analytics companies, as it would fill a large analytics hole in their offering. Even though the company recently stated its intentions to stay out of the enterprise market, the opportunity might prove to be too lucrative to stay out.

Beyond Twitter, The Nielsen Company is a natural acquirer of a social analytics company since it compliments Nielsen’s existing ratings and research business. With the company having held an initial public offering at the beginning of this year, Nielsen also has the necessary capital to do this.

Beyond these entities, media companies and television platform could benefit from owning one of the EBSNs by leveraging these services to gain insight into user activity and drive additional tune-in for themselves or partners. Yahoo was the first to act on this, acquiring 12-week old IntoNow earlier this year and releasing an iPad app last week that integrates into Yahoo’s Connected TV framework. For GetGlue and Miso, who have raised capital from Time Warner and Google’s venture arm respectively, they already have likely acquirers in the fold. That being said, with the variety of relationships GetGlue (most recently with FX) and Miso (most recently with Showtime) have established with different broadcast and cable networks it’s not out of the question that one of these media partners tries to acquire either company to be their underlying social TV platform. The engagement data would be very valuable to any company negotiating with advertisers during the ‘upfront’ season as a way to justify advertising rates (beyond Nielsen’s rating data) for the next television season or provide brands with a new way to advertise to their intended audiences (for an additional cost or as a make-good).

Stay tuned. This market will only get more interesting.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on October 25, 2011 in Product, Social Media, Video

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apple’s Game of “Heads I Win, Tails You Lose”

24 Feb

Remember as kids when you were given the know-how to always win at coin-flips? By uttering those 6 simple words “heads I win, tails you lose” you were able to set-up the rules of the game in a manner that seemed fair, in that it provided an outcome for both participants, but always resulted in you being the winner of the coin-flip and your opponent the loser (until of course they realized what was going on).

This is essentially the game Apple is playing in the tablet market right now. The company, which launched the industry with the unveiling of the iPad last April, has yet to see a truly competitive offering after selling 15 million iPad units in 2010. The only notable rival last year was Samsung’s Galaxy Tab. This Android-based tablet, which launched in November at a slightly lower price point than the iPad but at the expense of comparable features (smaller touchscreen display and less internal memory though it does include front and rear-facing cameras), has not met sales expectations.

The Motorola Xoom, which gets released today, is expected to be the first viable alternative to the iPad after winning Best of Show at CES in January. This device comes equipped with Android’s tablet-specific Honeycomb operating system and hardware specs to match current versions of the iPad, with the addition of memory expansion capabilities and front and rear-facing cameras, but accomplishes this at the expense of price (higher compared to iPads) and app offering (a handful versus the iPad’s 60,000).

In both of these instances, a trade-off between product and price had to be made by the manufacturer. To compete on price, Samsung had to sacrifice on product (i.e. screen size and memory). To compete on product, Motorola had to give on price (i.e. be more expensive). Throw in research that shows the iPad has 90% awareness among consumers, and you can see why tablet manufacturers must beat Apple on both product and price to beat the iPad.

Heads Apple wins, tails tablet manufacturers lose.

While Apple competitors might be able to match, or even exceed the design and hardware capabilities of the iPad at some point in the future, doing so at a lower price point would be challenging. Apple understands their strategic price advantage and is continuously looking to expand on it.

Case in point- based on iSuppli’s research, the single most expensive component in the iPad’s manufacturing process is the touchscreen display. So it’s no surprise that Apple revealed on its most recent earnings call that it has made long-term financial commitments of $3.9 billion dollars with three suppliers believed to be display providers. If correct, this means Apple would control 60% of the global touch panel capacity according to Taiwanese industry website DigitTimes. Controlling this amount of supply would have two major effects on the tablet market as (1) it would lock in favorable pricing and predictable supply for Apple going forward in manufacturing future versions of the iPad and (2) create supply constraints and pricing pressure on tablet manufacturers.

Once again, heads Apple wins, tails tablet manufacturers lose.

The concept of vertical integration is nothing new to Apple which acquired Intrinsity last year, a semiconductor chip design firm responsible for developing the iPad’s original A4 processor, in an effort to bring the skills and development costs in-house. This became another component cost advantage over the Motorola Xoom which leverages NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 for its processor.

With Apple’s event next week expected to showcase the next iteration of the iPad, which should once again place the product’s feature set ahead of its competitors, the question to Android, Tablet OS and WebOS tablet makers is: want to flip again?

Photo credit: Algie Moncrief/Flickr

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on February 24, 2011 in Mobile, Product

 

Tags: , , ,

Mobile Video: The Final Frontier for Ad Networks?

23 Feb

Earlier this month TechCrunch broke the news that mobile video ad platform Transpera had been acquired by online video ad network Tremor Media. The deal came almost exactly three months after Tremor’s last transaction, the purchase of video ad network ScanScout. The Tremor-ScanScout merger was part of a string of announcements in the online video ad space last fall which began with top 10 online display advertising network Specific Media acquiring video ad platform BBE and ending with another leading ad network, Undertone, buying Jambo Media, a video solutions company.

With advertising a major theme at last week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona could this latest Tremor news set off the next round of capabilities expansion and provider consolidation amongst ad networks?

With online video projected to grow 55% annually through 2014, making it the fastest growing online ad format worldwide, it’s easy to see why there’s interest from both traditional display and pure play video ad networks in acquiring online video market share. Looking at recent industry trends and projections, mobile video might be poised to follow this same type of growth trajectory, creating a similar opportunity for ad networks looking to provide cross-platform digital ad solutions to agencies and advertisers.

  • Devices: Worldwide smartphone shipments passed PCs in total volume for the first time in the 4th quarter of last year while tablet shipments, led by Apple’s iPad, are expected to reach nearly 56 million this year and 172 million by 2014.
  • Network Traffic: In Cisco’s Visual Networking Index Forecast, updated this month, the company predicted that, by 2015, two-thirds of all global mobile data traffic would be video.
  • Advertising: Mobile ad spending is projected to exceed $18 billion worldwide by 2015, representing over 15% of digital advertising’s spend. While in the U.S. video is expected to continue growing faster than any other mobile segment through 2014.

Together, these data points confirm that the PC-based era of the web has been officially replaced by the mobile web, which consumers are already taking advantage of through the proliferation of mobile device types. According to The Nielsen Company, Americans, led by teens and young adults, watch an average of 3 ½ hours of video a month on their mobile devices. To understand just how quickly video consumption habits are evolving look at YouTube’s announcement last month that it has reached 200 million video views per day on mobile devices- an increase of 300% over the beginning of 2010.

Media companies and marketers are looking at ways to quantify this audience in aggregate in an effort to bring advertising economics to parity across all “three screens” (television, web and mobile). This represents a big opportunity for ad networks willing to put forth the technical and execution effort to target mobile audiences fragmented by app-type (mobile web versus native apps), device (smartphones versus tablets), operating system (Android, BlackBerry, iOS, etc.) and ad unit interactivity (passive versus touch-screen).

Because ad guidelines and standards for the mobile web are still maturing in comparison to display and online video, ad networks interested in entering the mobile video space would benefit from acquiring video delivery expertise and an embedded distribution network. Any M&A activity would involve one of these three types of acquisition strategies:

  1. Buy capabilities and market share: This tact was used by Specific Media to enter the online video market by acquiring a top 10 video ad provider and instantly gaining reach. If leading online video advertising networks BrightRoll and YuMe, which launched their respective mobile advertising solutions last fall, don’t see adoption of their offerings, they might be forced to take this route in order to match Tremor Media’s cross-platform scale in video. From the display advertising perspective, only Microsoft and Yahoo as well as the largest ad networks will be able to afford this type of acquisition due to lofty valuations in mobile and video.
  2. Buy capabilities, leverage market share in current business: Undertone took this route by leveraging its own scale on the display advertising side with its video technology purchase to become a top 10 online video ad provider of its own within a couple of months of the acquisition. This is the most capital efficient way for any ad networks to enter the mobile video business, though acting quickly will be the key to successfully executing this strategy due to the limited number of acquisition options and venture capital being invested in the segment.
  3. Extend capabilities and market share: As for Tremor Media, already a leader in the online video advertising space, its deal allowed the company to add product expertise (video overlay ads) while growing its reach and video ad volume. Millennial Media, the largest independent mobile ad network which raised $27.5 million earlier this year, and has raised $65 million overall, is the best positioned mobile ad network to take advantage of this strategy due to its profitability, exit options and capital on hand.

While Google bought its way into a dominate position in the U.S. mobile advertising market (including interactive video ad capabilities) with its purchase of AdMob last year, the growth of YouTube’s mobile website has allowed Google to become a cross-platform provider of mobile video monetization solutions. Apple on the other hand used its acquisition of AdMob competitor Quattro Wireless to build the iAd Network solely for its own mobile operating system (iOS). With two of the largest ad networks having been acquired by the two leading mobile operating platforms what merger opportunities still exist in mobile video advertising?

  • JumpTap: The company added video to its suite of mobile ad formats last year in an effort to broaden its appeal to clients. JumpTap, which delivers ads across all major smartphone platforms (Android, BlackBerry and iOS) as well as the iPad, is considered the largest independent mobile ad network in the U.S. after Millennial Media. As such, the company will most likely have to wait and see what happens with Millennial (which will either go public or get acquired) before drawing interest from the likes of Microsoft, Yahoo and potentially Research in Motion (maker of BlackBerry) who have all been rumored acquirers of a mobile ad network and the only companies large enough to digest JumpTap’s $69 million in capital raised.
  • Mogreet: The company provides mobile video advertising solutions through SMS and MMS mobile messaging services, allowing Mogreet to address the feature phone audience as well. Considering the limitation of their offering, especially when you consider the growth of the smartphone and tablet markets, and the $7 million invested in the company thus far, an acquisition of this company would be a stretch for a U.S.-based ad network but maybe not for a network in a large developing market such as Brazil, India, Indonesia or Russia where feature phones dominate the market.
  • Rhythm NewMedia: From a pure play mobile video ad network perspective, Rhythm NewMedia has built the most envious, cross-platform network out there of the remaining independent players. The company, which recently raised $10 million, only works with premium brand advertisers and publishers across Android and iOS mobile platforms covering both smartphones and iPads. Having raised $37 million in total funding makes Rhythm a pricey acquisition for anyone not named Microsoft or Yahoo at this point though.
  • Vdopia: While the company is an online video ad network with extensive operations and market share in India, it also operates iVdopia, a mobile video ad network. Its mobile offering covers both Android and iOS platforms (including iPads) as well as mobile websites. Claiming it has reached profitability, and with only $4 million raised, Vdopia would be a prudent acquisition for an online global ad network.

Beyond these mobile video ad companies there are several other start-ups that focus on providing rich media advertising solutions for smartphones, tablets and the mobile web that could provide the framework for a video offering for ad networks interested in getting into mobile video. Greystripe which focuses on rich media banner ads primarily for the iPhone, while supporting Android  and Java feature phones as well, has raised the most venture capital of the group ($18 million), followed by Medialets ($10 million) and Crisp Media (at least $5 million). Greystripe’s strength is in its ability to transcode Flash ads into HTML5 in order to support Apple’s Flash-restriction on iOS devices. Both Crisp Media and Medialets, neither of which are an ad network but instead earn revenue from serving rich media ads to mobile devices, do provide video ad solutions for both smartphones and tablets. The biggest challenge facing these companies will be potentially pricing themselves out of the M&A market if they continue to raise capital. Based on this, Crisp Media might be an ideal technology pick-up for an ad network with a strong client-base and distribution network.

With the display inventory component of mobile advertising already being automated through demand side platforms like DataXu and real-time bidding exchanges like Mobclix, mobile video might be the last digital ad segment where ad networks can extract additional margin out of the industry through ad effectiveness and audience scale. Perfecting the online and app video experience will be important beyond just mobile as internet television, the next great digital ad opportunity, will leverage these advertising frameworks for its own platform monetization. As agencies begin to provide digital services at global scale to their advertising clients, ad networks that can deliver audiences across devices and digital formats, at scale, will garner the lion’s share of ad campaign dollars coming from these agencies going forward. To accomplish this ad network’s need to boldly go where most networks haven’t gone before.

Photo credit: fdecomite/Flickr

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on February 23, 2011 in Advertising, Mobile, Product, Video

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Rise of the Event-Based Social Networks

07 Jul

With interest in location-based social networks (LBSNs) hitting an all-time high with Foursquare’s recent funding announcement valuing the company at $115 million, a new type of social networking has emerged that borrows some of the mechanics and incentives from location-based services: event-based social networks (EBSNs). While LBSN users notify their personal networks where they are physically located by “checking-in” to the service, earning virtual badges in the process, EBSN users earn their virtual rewards by identifying themselves to other attendees and participants by also using check-in mechanics, but without having to actually be physically present at the event.

We see from studies and personal experiences that recommendations from social networks do influence our television viewing habits. Combined with the abundant, on-demand nature of information available on the internet today, it’s easy to understand how the changing content consumption habits, from the ‘day after’ to the ‘day of”, have affected the media industry. While much of the demise of print news media can be attributed to these changing habits (and nowhere better explained than on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart), it has actually had the opposite effect on live television event broadcasts.  Here is audience data from some of the most widely-known sports and entertainment events from this year that were broadcast live:

  • Golden Globes (January): This year’s television audience was 17 million, 14% higher than in 2009;
  • Grammy Awards January): Almost 27 million viewers tuned in, a 35% increase over last year’s broadcast and the highest TV ratings for the event since 2004;
  • Super Bowl XLIV (February): Became the most watched television program in U.S. history, beating the finale of the TV show ‘M-A-S-H’ with a total audience of over 150 million and an average of over 106 million viewers;
  • Academy Awards (March): Had over 41 million viewers, up 14% over the 2009 Oscars;
  • NBA Finals Game 7 (June): The deciding game between the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics pulled in a viewership of over 28 million, the largest basketball audience in 12 years (when Michael Jordan won his last of six NBA championships);
  • World Cup Final (July): The finals between Spain and Netherlands became the most-watched soccer game in U.S. history with over 24 million viewers, topping the previous record of 19 million viewers from United States’ match against Ghana in the elimination round only weeks earlier.

While some might argue that the economy (i.e. people staying home more often for entertainment purposes) or content quality (i.e. offensive-minded Super Bowl match-up, the popularity of Lady Gaga and Avatar for the Grammys and Golden Globes/Oscars respectively, deciding game of a classic NBA Finals match-up and final of the most-followed sporting event in the world, the World Cup) are better explanations for this renewed interest in live television programming, the fact is that most of these events are leveraging social media hubs like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube more and more as part of their tune-in marketing campaigns to engage with fans and would-be viewers.

And it’s working. The network effect caused by the interest of the most engaged fans is bringing indifferent audiences on the sideline that are connected to these fans into the viewing experience. The real-time nature of information flow on the web and the ability to extended social connections through Facebook and Twitter has made it increasingly difficult for people to avoid watching or hearing about live television event broadcasts or even attempting to try to watch them in a non-linear, time-shifted manner without having the outcome spoiled by social media channels. Combined with the social pressures around participation, additional audiences are being influenced to engage with these events via social networks.

Some recent engagement figures from Facebook and Twitter seem to confirm this. Facebook has shared that about 30% of all status updates on the site during the U.S. versus England match included a World Cup-related term. More impressively Twitter saw the number of Tweets-per-second (TPS) it handles cross 3,000 as a result of the Lakers beating the Celtics in the NBA Finals. This record was broken a week later on the heels of two World Cup matches that generated almost 3,300 TPS.  To put this into context Twitter’s normal activity is 750 TPS, which is big reason why the service has experienced over 6 hours of downtime since the beginning of the World Cup.

With live television event broadcasting benefiting greatly from social networking, can EBSNs become the next big opportunity in social media?

Even though the most well-known companies in this segment of social networking have positioned themselves in a slightly different manner from one another, at the most basic level Fanvibe, formerly known as FanPulse (sporting events), GetGlue by AdaptiveBlue (home entertainment such as movies, books and music), Hot Potato (general events), Miso by Bazaar Labs (TV shows and movies) and Tunerfish from Comcast (online video and TV shows), among others, all address some type of live event participation through their services. As ReadWriteWeb points out in its recent coverage of some of these apps, their current lack of users adversely affects the social value of their respective networks. With Facebook and Twitter already driving the lion’s share of social media status updates, and check-in functionality becoming a commodity, these EBSNs will need more than virtual badges and threaded conversation capabilities around events to drive adoption.

The “more than” is partnering with the leagues and organizations behind these events as well as the television networks with the broadcast rights. Being promoted by the events or built into the digital experiences of the broadcasts is the ideal way to drive mind share and user growth.  For this reason Tunerfish is best positioned of the group to succeed since it comes out of Comcast, which has the largest television subscriber base, and is in the process of acquiring one of the biggest TV network broadcasters, in the U.S. Being part of Comcast helped Tunerfish land its first promotional partnership with HBO when the service went live last month. Owning NBC could bring a lot more of these types of opportunities to Tunerfish. With an iPad app also in the works from Comcast, adding Tunerfish’s functionality to the application could automate the check-in process for millions of TV viewers across every television show and network available in the U.S.,creating an enviable interest graph.

There is hope for some of the other services as well. AdaptiveBlue, which has been around the longest, probably has the most robust underlying platform. The company leverages semantic technologies to generate social recommendations for its users based on their check-ins and ratings. By covering a broader range of interests than just TV shows and movies and strong platform usage resulting from its recently launched GetGlue iPhone app, AdaptiveBlue can create a much deeper interest graph than some of its competitors. Hot Potato could find early success amongst sports leagues as its founding team comes from MLBAM, the digital media arm of Major League Baseball. That being said, MLB, which is the most tech-savvy of all the major sports leagues, did announce it has integrated its own check-in functionality into its iPhone app just last week. Miso’s best opportunity for success is tied to the investment it took from Google Ventures last month. With the announcement of GoogleTV earlier this year, Miso should have the inside track in doing for GoogleTV what Tunerfish could do for Comcast- to be integrated directly into the television guide and discovery experience for set-top boxes.

What’s at stake in becoming the real-time conversation service and recommendation engine for television?

Over $400 billion in television advertising and on-demand video revenues worldwide according to a recent report published by media researcher Futurescape. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts and tweets, live TV event programming such as sports championships and entertainment award shows will only increase in value to broadcasters as produced, series-based programming becomes even more accessible on-demand in a non-linear viewing experience. Live television represents the best opportunity for advertisers to find and connect with an engaged audience in the present. Combined with real-time status updates, event producers and advertisers can receive immediate feedback from users on their TV viewing experience. This social feedback loop will be critical in delivering better television programming and advertising in the future.

With nearly half of Facebook users simultaneously watching television while on the site and Twitter showing its impact during the recently concluded NBA Finals and World Cup, it’s their game to lose at the moment as each brings a respective interest and sentiment data set that can add tangible value to traditional TV audience metrics. For EBSNs to succeed they will need to leverage Facebook and Twitter’s platforms as distribution channels, much like Foursquare did initially, in order to drive utility for its users and interest for their own services. By becoming the interface between users and their Facebook and Twitter accounts, ESBNs have an opportunity to get users to build sub-networks within their respective platforms that are unique and more valuable to those on Facebook and Twitter- once again, something Foursquare is starting to do with its own LBSN. The ultimate benefit in evolving a platform in this manner is that an event-based social network can become the audience and data provider to event creators and distributors as well as advertisers while delivering better programming recommendations and socially targeting advertising to its users in the process.

Whatever the eventual outcome, it will unfold live.

Bookmark and Share
 
2 Comments

Posted by on July 7, 2010 in Product, Social Media, Video

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Nevermind the iPad, What’s Next for Apple?

02 Feb

Now that the long-rumored Apple tablet has finally been unveiled as the iPad, we can turn our attention towards figuring out what Apple’s next big product launch might be. Based on the evolution of the company’s devices, software and recent business discussions the answer actually seems pretty clear: Apple should build a true web-enabled home entertainment television experience- the iTV. Here’s why:

Apple TV has been a failure. For a company that loves to reference stats regarding the success of its products, Apple has been very reticent about the sales performance of Apple TV, repeatedly referring to the product as “still a hobby.” The device, which competes with over-the-top (video delivering over a broadband network and not through a cable box) offerings from the likes of Boxee and Roku, has not met with nearly the same success as other Apple products since its launch 2 ½ years ago- primarily because it functions as a peripheral device and not as an end-to-end Apple experience.

Apple’s corporate success has been built upon its desire to create elegant and simple user experiences around its products. The development of the iPad, iPhone/iTouch, iPod and Mac is entirely controlled by Apple from the moment a user turns them on to when the device is powered down. This allows the company to design products that tightly integrate the aesthetic design and functionality of the hardware with the software and services, making it intuitive and easy for consumers to use. All that users have to do is connect the device to a network (broadband or mobile- if even that) to get going. Apple TV on the other hand functions as a peripheral device within a broader television viewing experience that Apple does not have complete control over. This leaves consumers to deal with separate controls for Apple TV, the television set and potentially their cable set-top box, creating a very un-Apple-like experience from the integration of the hardware’s aesthetics, to the rendering of content on the display, to delivering additional value through applications.

iTunes has a robust video content offering. What started out as a music catalog for the iPod has grown to include podcasts, audio books and, most importantly, video content from television networks and movie studios. While the iTunes store has successfully been selling access to televisions shows and movies on a per unit basis over the years, there are persistent rumors that Apple is in discussions with these same video content providers to offer a subscription-based service through iTunes, mimicking cable’s content offering, but at a lower price point. Since the iTunes software is integrated with Apple’s operating system already, connecting it to an iTV device becomes trivial.

The AppStore already competes with TV and gaming consoles. One of the big trends at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year was web-enabled televisions that offer not only video streaming services over the internet but access to widgets through the likes of Yahoo’s Connected TV. With 140,000 apps on its platform, Apple has a massive head-start on potential competitive offerings from television manufacturers. With the iPad now expanding the opportunity for game developers while also providing a scaling solution for  apps currently in the App Store, Apple has become an even greater threat to traditional gaming consoles from Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft. By also leveraging apps or hardware, iPhones and iTouches can be turned into remote controls, enabling these apps to work in a more traditional television viewing experience as well as allowing for multi-user games to be played on a single screen, a capability that has been an exclusive feature of gaming consoles to date.

The iPad is a personal entertainment experience. While the iPad offers a great medium through which to consume a variety of content (apps, books, photos, magazines, movies, websites, etc.), because the display is only 9.7 inches it doesn’t make for a great experience when more than one person wants to participate. For an entire family to enjoy watching television or playing games together there needs to be a larger screen.

The iMac’s monitor is already big enough. Even though Steve Jobs referred to Apple as the largest mobile device company during the iPad’s launch event, the company still sells a fair amount of Macs. The current 27 inch display is large enough to already compete with smaller LCD and plasma television displays on the market today. The iMac also offers a great example of how Apple would approach designing-away the clutter associated with today’s television and gaming console cords and cables, creating a much more  aesthetic and desirable device for display at home.

With a complete line of mobile devices now available to consumers as well as content and app catalogs that render across Apple’s entire portfolio of hardware products, Apple will need to find new growth opportunities beyond its current line of ‘iProducts’ in the future. With internet-enabled televisions expected to be a $29 billion worldwide business by the end of next year, and with an average of almost 3 television sets in the over 110 million households in the U.S. alone, Apple can make a multi-billion dollar business out of home entertainment-enabled televisions- especially when you take into account the recurring revenue opportunity provided by video subscription services.

Considering Steve Jobs’ almost maniacal, hands-on approach to launching products, it’s doubtful that we would see a version of the iTV before January 2012. Until then Apple fans can enjoy the launch of the iPad and the evolution of Apple’s content offering in (hopeful) anticipation of a better home entertainment experience.

Bookmark and Share
 
1 Comment

Posted by on February 2, 2010 in Product, Video

 

Tags: , ,

Even with Android, and now Nexus One, Google Still has Apple Envy

19 Jan

While the media has enjoyed positioning the recent launch of Google’s Android-based Nexus One “superphone” manufactured by HTC as a direct competitive threat to Apple’s iPhone, I agree with Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital that this is the wrong question to try to answer as Apple and Google are taking very different approaches to the mobile market. Apple, as in the personal computer market, has focused on developing the most well designed, highest grossing margin, products they can imagine at the expense of market share. Google on the other hand, by open-sourcing the Android operating system to handset and device manufacturers for free, is aiming to become the most widely used mobile operating system at the expense of Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and, to a lesser extent, Nokia’s Symbian (which is more widely used internationally) platforms. As Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures alludes to, by leveraging its ability to tightly integrate its applications (Calendar, Gmail, Maps, etc.) into Android, Google can extend the operating system to provide a solution for not only consumers, but the small/medium business market as well, right out of the box. Having also signaled their intent to develop an enterprise version of Nexus One, Google will be able to challenge Research In Motion’s Blackberry platform for larger, more lucrative business clients as well this year. Combined with a strong pipeline of Android-based handsets being released by device manufacturers over the course of the year, it’s more a question of when rather than if Android will become the largest mobile operating system in terms of market share in the United States.

With such a bright outlook in mobile, why would Google be envious of Apple? Because Google wants to be more than just a search company.

Google’s mission has always been associated with organizing the world’s information and making it accessible, which enables users to more easily find content to consume. Apple, whose mission statement has evolved to include spearheading the digital media revolution, focuses on delivering this content in the form of applications, music and videos to consumers through its own devices and services. It’s this difference in how content is discovered and where it is consumed that has enabled Apple to establish a more direct relationship with both consumers and content owners than Google has achieved and, in the process, extract more economic value from both by way of hardware sales to consumers (iPhone, iPods, etc.) and distribution fees (through iTunes sales) from content owners.

Google is attempting to eliminate this relationship discrepancy primarily through acquisition. DoubleClick and, most recently, AdMob were acquired to provide Google with online and mobile display ad monetization capabilities, respectively, wherever the content is, regardless of device. In an effort to keep a larger revenue share, and further bridge the relationship gap it has with consumers who use Google to search but consume content elsewhere, Google has also entered the content business by, most notably, acquiring YouTube to help keep consumers within its network. Combined with the company’s recently failed attempt to acquire Yelp, I agree with Simon Dumenco’s assertion in his Advertising Age article that Google is attempting to become a media company in the process. Because Google’s content efforts have focused on user generated content though, the company has entered into partnerships to match Apple’s content offering- cutting deals with television networks and movie studios for premium content for YouTube, supporting an open app ecosystem on the Android platform and exploring partnership opportunities in the music space (though an acquisition of an iTunes competitor such as MOG or Spotify would make sense for Google and Android at this point).

Regardless of the number of phones that are eventually sold with the Android operating system and applications that are added to the platform, the truth is Google will never be able to replicate what Apple does, as the two organizations have completely different cultures which is evidenced in their respective approaches to mobile. Google’s left-brain, quantitative, engineering-driven approach to business isn’t organized to compete with Apple’s right-brain, qualitative, design-driven model. It’s in the design process Apple is able to foster an emotional connection between its products and consumers, something Google is unable to achieve because it provides software-based services. And because Apple design approach integrates both the hardware and software components of its devices, content providers, including Google, must work directly with Apple in order to reach these consumers. Apple’s design prowess will be on display again next week when they finally unveil the long-rumored tablet device which is expected to bring additional types of premium content from print publishers directly to consumers through these devices- adding more fire to Google’s Apple envy.

Bookmark and Share
 
Leave a comment

Posted by on January 19, 2010 in Mobile, Product

 

Tags: , , , ,

Television Programming Will Require Better Discovery in the Future

29 Sep

The ability to access any television program or motion picture on demand is more of a question of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’’ as internet-based delivery of digital television (known as Internet TV or IPTV) is enabling a variety of companies to already offer converged video viewing experiences to consumers.

  • Cable & Satellite Companies. While digital television services have traditionally been delivered by cable and satellite providers, these companies have also been at the forefront of providing non-linear television and movie watching capabilities through digital video recording (DVR) and video on demand (VOD) services. Now the likes of Comcast, DirecTV and Time Warner Cable are joining forces to launch TV Everywhere, a service that will enable their respective subscribers to access their television content on the web.
  • Telecom Providers. AT&T and Verizon are leveraging IPTV to build the most direct competitive offering to that of cable and satellite television. These subscription services include DVR and VOD functionality while also leveraging internet connectivity to allow users to access social networking services and video content from web aggregators through their set-top boxes.
  • Device Manufacturers. Television sets, Blu-ray disc players, video game consoles and digital media boxes are all incorporating Internet TV into their devices to offer consumers alternatives to traditional subscription-based linear programming. LG is producing TVs and Blu-ray players with internet capabilities to enable access to certain video websites and services. Microsoft’s Xbox system is repurposing its broadband connection used for multi-player gaming to deliver a similar video experience while also extending the social nature of the console to allow gamers to watch shows and movies with other Xbox users. Devices from Apple, Roku and Vudu offer dedicated alternatives to traditional cable and satellite boxes, providing their own content catalog to consumers in some cases or partnering with other video service providers in others.
  • Internet Properties. Sites such as Amazon, Boxee, Hulu and Netflix are also leveraging the internet to provide consumers PC-based options for streaming and downloading video content as well as partnering with device manufacturers to extend their respective web offerings.

As set-top boxes and other devices become more powerful and broadband connections get faster, business models will be forced to evolve to address the control consumers have in a converged video experience. So what could slow down the adoption of on demand television by consumers? The actual user experience of finding and discovering programming.

Think about how people discover what to watch on TV today. We know what day of the week, time slot and channel a particular show is broadcast primarily through television marketing. During the airing of any show on TV the network providing the programming for that channel will advertise other shows within its portfolio along with the appropriate tune-in information (typically the show being promoted will be broadcast on the same channel on the same evening or in the same genre as the show you are watching but on another night). Word of mouth marketing from friends, coworkers, etc. fill in the rest of our content discovery needs. Now fast forward 10 years when channels and time slots in a converged video experience give way to on demand programming- how do we discover what shows and movies to watch and recommend?

Current discovery options, available primarily on video websites, are basic filters (find by name, genre, latest and most popular) associated with each site’s content catalog. Clicker, runner-up for audience favorite at TechCrunch50 recently, is trying to enhance this type of discovery by structuring the underlying data associated with video content across websites to make it easier for users to search for content as well as build their own playlists to watch.

TVGuideFiltering only provides a partial solution though. Recommendation engines that offer video suggestions to users based on particular attributes completes the discovery equation. Netflix believes in the power of recommendations enough to award $1 million to a team that was able to improve Netflix’s current movie recommendation results by 10%. While user preferences are the key to Netflix’s recommendation results, other attributes do exist. Word of mouth discovery through friends can be equally, if not more, effective. Based on the homophily principle that “birds of a feather flock together”, if your friends highlight certain shows and movies as favorites then you might be inclined to watch them as well. TV Guide, the original provider of television programming information before the internet existed, offers a web-based solution for discovery through association by leveraging Facebook Connect to allow users to access their social graph on Facebook to see what shows are their friends’ favorites.

Interestingly enough I’ve yet to see anyone combine the power of push and pull (recommendations and search filters) discovery into a single solution. The company that creates an intuitive user interface that incorporates both types of discovery mechanisms to enable the programming of a television has a tremendous opportunity to own the converged video experience across multiple providers or directly with the consumer. An internet company such as Netflix, which has distribution partnerships with video service providers, a large subscriber base and a recommendation engine, is best positioned to provide this type of solution. Some might consider Hulu an option, but it has focused its efforts on being a technology and web distribution platform up to this point. From a start-up perspective, Boxee, a favorite of the early-adopter community still lacks the service distribution partnership, established media relationships and easy set-up to be considered a serious threat in the short-term.

In an on demand environment television networks and movie studios face an equally daunting task regarding discovery- how to promote their content to subscribers. Recently launched Simulmedia is attempting to address this problem for media companies by better targeting users with on-air promotions through data mining. This methodology could easily be applied to a non-linear viewing experience that could really benefit networks and studios. Services that can leverage subscriber data to target users with the appropriate programming promotion will be important as audiences are only willing to tolerate so many interruptions while watching television. Each pre-roll, mid-roll or overlay that is used for marketing television shows takes away from potential advertising dollars that could be placed there instead.

Where networks will have leverage with audiences and advertisers is in broadcasting live events. Securing rights to sporting events, award shows and the like can mitigate some of the effects of non-linear viewership. Knowing the day and time when an audience will be watching television opens up a tremendous opportunity for timing the release of shows, movies and advertising campaigns around the event.

Regardless of whether a discovery solution being implemented for consumers or provides, in a converged video experience both parties have the benefit of leveraging various user and content data sets to create a more efficient discovery process than is available to us today.

Now if I could just figure out my remote.

Bookmark and Share
 
1 Comment

Posted by on September 29, 2009 in Product, Video

 

Tags: , , , , ,

Making User Profiles Public: The Case Against Facebook’s Acquisition of FriendFeed

12 Aug

friendfeed-facebookBefore I play devil’s advocate, I will state that I am a fan of Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed from both a business and strategic perspective. Most tech journalists have already provided great coverage on the value of the deal from an acquisition of talent, feature capabilities and search functionality perspective- so I won’t rehash it here. That being said, only Marshal Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb commented on the potential downside of the acquisition as it relates to Facebook’s other big move from the same day- launching improved search functionality across its website. With these two announcements, Facebook officially entered the fray in the battle with Google and Twitter over real-time, socially relevant search.

In the process Facebook also signaled its intent to make user profiles and associated content more public- and therein lies the potential problem. Facebook’s success as a social networking platform has been built on the philosophy of having users connect with one another using their real digital identities, which is in contrast to MySpace and many other social networks that allow users to create anonymous identities. This has led to Facebook evolving into a platform where people connect and share their personal interests and experiences with actual friends and family. This creates a sense of privacy within and beyond Facebook’s walled garden (Google can’t index the site’s content for search purposes) that isn’t found on MySpace, Twitter or FriendFeed where user profiles and content are publicly accessible.

By introducing ways for strangers to initiate and participate in conversations with other users in real-time and enabling search along these same lines, both core strengths of FriendFeed’s service, Facebook risks alienating the core audience that has made it the largest social network in the world. We’ve already witnessed the privacy backlash Facebook faced over Beacon, which attempted to push users’ activity from across the web into Facebook. So it’s not a reach to think users might react similarly to their data being made available outside of their social graph on Facebook.

Since Facebook’s core audience of college-aged users are more interested in extending their current relationships online than meeting new people outside of their school and personal social circles, the company is left with a data set problem. Facebook needs its users to expand their social graphs to include casual connections as well as enable consumption of additional content channels (creating additional link value) to better position its social search results with a richer and larger data set than is available today (just do a keyword search on Facebook and compare the results to that of Twitter’s to see the current data set disparity).  As Facebook attempts to broaden its reach and associated monetization opportunities, it risks compromising what has made it so popular and differentiated from other social networks. The worst case scenario for Facebook is that the push to make users and profiles more public creates the larger, richer data set to compete with Google and Twitter but in the process drives Facebook’s core, more private, users off the platform, neutralizing the growth of its public data set.

Luckily for Facebook there isn’t a viable alternative to the site that could capitalize on this potential opportunity in the near-term (we know teens and college kids are under-represented on Twitter due to the same identity and trust issues present on MySpace). That doesn’t mean Facebook can’t or won’t be overtaken someday as Friendster and MySpace were before them. It will be interesting though to watch the timeline for rolling out FriendFeed features on Facebook and whether the next generation of social network users (high school and junior high school students) flock to Facebook or look for alternatives. At the end of the day though, maybe Facebook doesn’t care about these younger users as it becomes large enough to focus its efforts on the older portion of its audience that controls the discretionary spending advertisers are so eager to reach. Time will tell how this case is resolved.

Bookmark and Share
 
Leave a comment

Posted by on August 12, 2009 in Product, Social Media

 

Tags: ,

Why Twitter Needs an Official #HashtagPolicy

03 Jun

Hasgtag logoOne of the main utilities I get out of Twitter is being able to follow conferences that I can’t attend, but am interested in, via TweetDeck. Last week I got my fill by following 140|The Twitter Conference, D: All Things Digital conference and Google I/O Developer Conference at the same time. While the real-time commentary from attendees and participants was exactly what I was looking for, the process I witnessed for getting to each information stream left something to be desired. In each instance, official feature support for hashtags, in some capacity, by Twitter could have led to a better, more seamless, user experience and, in the process, enhanced Twitter’s business opportunity around real-time search through metadata.

Hashtags, like @replies (originally) and retweets, are a community-driven feature on Twitter. It is used to track and organize keywords in tweets around abstract concepts, breaking news and planned events. Since hashtags can be created on an ad hoc basis there is no central repository for registering or finding out about what particular hashtags represent (Mashable does a good job of highlighting options for identifying and tracking hashtags in a recent article). This has led to process laziness by organizers in setting up hashtags for their events in advance or, in many cases, leaving it up to attendees to decide on how best to track events. The result is confusion leading up to, and inconsistencies during, a conference. The most glaring example of this last week was during the All Things Digital conference, which coincidentally enough had Twitter’s co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone as its opening guests.

Follow D: All Things Digital conferenceThis tweet was from the morning of the event. As you can see one of the conference hosts offered up 3 different hashtag options for interested followers, one of which had a completely different spelling. If you happened to be following #allthingsd you would have missed out on all the #d7 and #d7conference hashtag streams. By not proposing one “official” hashtag, a lot of trending topic momentum was lost by the conference and, as a result, potential followers of the event.

What is #140tc tweetOn the other end of the spectrum, The Twitter Conference did a great job of highlighting the hashtag for its event right on their website (in addition to incorporating a Twitter feed of #140tc-related tweets by which to follow the conference). While this did help #140tc become a top trending topic on Twitter, there was still an information gap for Twitter users who didn’t know about the event but had seen the hashtag trending (one of many examples shown above), as there wasn’t an easy way to determine what the hashtag stood for.

Clicking on the #140tc hashtag only generates a Twitter search page with other tweets using the same hashtag. It doesn’t provide any background or meaning to the keyword to help someone decide whether or not to follow the topic- unless it is described in a tweet. Another lost opportunity, through no fault of the conference organizers, for users to find something of interest on Twitter.

Finally, in the case of Google’s Developer Conference, Google did call out their own Twitter account for people to follow at the event (@googleio), but the actual attendee discussion stream appeared under the #io2009 hashtag (among others). Because there were a lot of topics covered at Google I/O, Twazzup was used to aggregate information on related hashtags for the event, which was very helpful- if you knew to look for it, as there was no link or mention of the Twazzup page on the conference website.

Now imagine a world where Twitter supported hashtagging as a native feature. Gone would be confusion over what hashtag to use or follow or what specific hashtags meant for planned events, as Twitter could allow event organizers to own or rent a hashtag (product idea number 301) and provide the associated metadata for their event as part of the registration process (TwitterDaddy.com here we come!). By going through a sign-up process, and paying to secure a hashtag, conferences will be more likely to promote their hashtag as part of their event marketing, which inevitably would help Twitter grow its audience and usage of its platform. Twitter might also consider leaving the hash sign for abstract concepts and breaking news and provide planned events with a new symbol (maybe the ampersand or asterisk) that would still be captured in trending topics- much like StockTwits uses the $ sign for discussions around the stock market.

For abstract concepts (my car broke down) and breaking news (the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court) Twitter could auto-suggest hashtags to users (based on similarly spelled trending hashtags for instance) to help group tweets on specific topics more effectively. This would not only help the trending velocity of topics, but provide a metadata layer to tweets. If Twitter could influence users to increase the use of hashtags in their tweets, maybe by taking hashtags out of the character limit, and enable better grouping of topic-related tweets, the search and discovery value from a user experience and monetization perspective would increase exponentially. Maybe then we might get over our intense fascination over Twitter’s business model.

Bookmark and Share
 
Leave a comment

Posted by on June 3, 2009 in Product, Social Media

 

Tags: ,

← Older posts
 
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.