#ihatewhengirlssay "that didn't take long"

Interesting to watch "tweetalanches" happen... and where/when they get started. For example, today at 10am, "#ihatewhengirlssay" was not a hashtag with any tweets. At the moment .... a few hundred. It should be interesting to see how much "damage" it causes before the dust settles. The whole things reminds of Scott Adams' "Avatar" concept/character in his most excellent books: God's Debris and Religion War (no relation to James Cameron's upcoming movie).

Also of recent note: Twitter's going to start making money.

#ihatewhengirlsay "Twitter's going to make tons of money."

It will... for the founders.

No one else will make anything....

Comcast, Time Warner, and TVEverywhere

Comcast and Time Warner jointly announced the "TV Everywhere" initiative - much to the very vocal derision of blogs, pundits, and digital heads everywhere :)

The root of the announcement is, of course, that premium programming content will be available online, at no incremental cost to consumers (what marketers like to call "free" :)).

Hard to see why this is a bad thing - but there are lots of big words, like "anti-competitive" and "anti-consumer", being bandied about, so let's try to deconstruct the questions being asked a bit. Note that opinions expressed here, as always, are strictly my own.

1) Should content producers allowed to charge for access to their content?

I think the answer to that is "yes". There are some fair questions about who they charge, and how, and is there pricing collusion, etc. - but I don't think anyone means to imply that advertising is the ONLY model that content producers should be able to use?

2) Doesn't "TV Everywhere" depart from the Hulu model?

So... broadcasters (NBC, ABC, Fox, et al) ALREADY make the content available for free (over-the-air) - and they monetize with advertising. The "Hulu model" was to take the same business model, and make it available online. I don't mean to parse semantics here, but... kinda sounds like the same idea here: make content available wherever consumers are, using a model that is already working for consumers. Like Hulu, this isn't a new business - its a new distribution channel.

3) Doesn't this "violate the open nature of the Internet"?

Hmm - not sure I follow this one. "TV Everywhere" is not exclusive in any way - its simply a way for premium TV producers to get their content to consumers online, and helps identify those who are already paying for the content offline. If the content producers want to make their stuff free - well, it is their content; they're welcome to do so - not sure how this initiative impedes that idea. Yes, NBC, Fox, et al, already make their content available free to consumers (for a limited time window) - but also did so before Hulu.

The Internet is an "all bits are equal" data pipe into the home - and nothing about offering subscription video over the Internet with "TV Everywhere" changes that?

The irony, to me, of posts like Om Malik's (about the "inefficent business model" being propagated here, etc.) is that it sits on the site the same day as a post that reads "Is there a future for original web video shows?"....

There is a fair question here - will the price to consumers of content trend towards zero? And if it does, how will that impact quality (i.e. who's going to want to pay to make the good stuff)?

This program doesn't purport to answer that - mostly its just trying to get more people more convenient access to something they're already paying for.

How horrible! :)

Comscore v. Hulu: garbage in---garbage out?

Interesting. The New York Times is reporting that Hulu is disputing audience count with Nielsen, stating "While Nielsen reported 8.9 million visitors to Hulu in March, another measurement firm,comScore, counted 42 million. "

Wow.

Slightly embarassing, but I think that the Times is confusing "Unique Visitors" (how many unique cookies are counted by a site - a reasonable proxy for people visiting the site) with "Unique Viewers" (a syndicated video player concept - how many unique cookies were counted by the syndicated player; a reasonable proxy for the number of viewers who were served video by the site).

In layman's terms, the first number would represent, in our example, the number of people who visited Hulu.com (unique visitors), while the second (unique viewers) would represent how many people watched a Hulu sourced video, whether on Hulu, a third party site (like Fancast), or embedded elsewhere (like on somebody's blog).

A visit to alexa or compete shows the number of "unique visitors" to be comparable to what Nielsen reported (a fact others have noted). And guess what? Even Comscore doesn't put Hulu in the top 50 for April 2009 - which means even Comscore suggests that the number of unique visistors to Hulu is less than 19M (if someone has the actual number, I'd appreciate it).

So... move along... nothing to see here...

Boxee v. Hulu: Endgame

For those of you who haven't been following - In this corner: Boxee's a very nice media center type "10 foot" UI for watching video content (local and internet) using your PC/Mac. In the red trunks: Hulu's a "free" browser based video service backed by NBC/Universal and Fox.

Round 1: Boxee's supports Hulu in Boxee and goes from "nice" to "useful/interesting"
Round 2: Hulu asks Boxee to drop Hulu support. Boxee complies.
Round 3: Sort of.  Its not supported out of the box(ee :)), but Boxee lets users manually add Hulu support.

Round 4: Hulu blocks Boxee.

Round 5: Boxee adds a browser.  (Mozilla/Firefox - read through the post)

Now it gets interesting...

So... much like the machinations of ESPN, the real question is why? 

It's not entirely clear to me - and Boxee's end run should bring it to a head;  If I connect a browser to my TV, why shouldn't I be able to play content that works on my PC?  As a practical matter, there's no good way to differentiate (in the medium term - short term hacks might work)

I kind of get the point for the content guys - they want to decide how and where their content gets consumed.  Here's the thing - they may not get that choice: free is free.

(Incidentally this is less of an issue for folks like us than you may think: either way its over our connectivity, and content aqcuisition is a big part of our costs - think it through.  For example, note that Netflix likes streaming - because they charge you a subscription.)

It seems like the issue is that, ultimately, the Internet will erase a huge amount of value (valuation?  perhaps not quite the same thing) from the world.  I'm not arguing about whether that's a good thing or a bad thing - arguably, this was artificial value.  Just saying its so... question is how you adjust.

Twitter, really? You're surprised?

I'm always a bit surprised at the media's surprise of media darlings (to wit: "Twitter's Risk of Ubiquity"). First, we're all lemmings - where "all" especially includes anybody who thinks they are a subject matter expert, analyst, or pundit.

Secondly (specific to this instance), Twitter is Second Life for the "cool" geeks (what's the emoticon for sarcasm?). Which is to say, though not as nerdy as 3D, it is an interesting indicator of future interaction patterns ("follow the alpha geek"). But, its never going to be a interesting business, and the early pioneers will likely not stand the test of time.

An ex-VP of Business Development of one of my endeavors once said "Our goal is to have a business model that you can't disprove in a finite amount of time." (I probably should have listened to him - but that's a story for another day)

So here's my new axiom for the new economy (I'll warn you in advance that its not as pithy as my former colleague's):

If you have a Chief Revenue Officer, you might be a jack-ass.

The business of EVERY business is to make money. Seriously. Its right there in the definition and everything.

Best Deal of 2007: Microsoft-Facebook?

Much has been written on the terms of the deal between Microsoft and Facebook. The gist of it is this: Microsoft paid Facebook $240M for 1.6% of the company, and the exclusive rights to sell online advertising for the site.

This being the year-end, all pundit types have got their best and worst lists coming out, and this deal seems omnipresent on worst deals of the year lists.

Its not hard to see why this argument is made: "worst" is really a proxy for "stupidly lopsided value creation", and is Facebook remotely worth that much (remember that MySpace went for $500M and YouTube for $1.6B)? It creates an implied valuation on their user base (figure 50M users or so) of, like, $300 a head... that's some big math... hard to see how Microsoft ever really recoups its investment.

But of course, that's to focus on the value with regard to public markets and value cap - the *wrong* metric here. That implied valuation of $15B, is pretty much (forgive my language) bull$#!t because this deal was, in reality, a barter deal.

Let's look at the deal another way, very simply, in terms of cash:

1) Facebook gets a $240M cash infusion while giving up very little control or equity,
2) Microsoft gets a significant destination outside its network in which to build the value of its recent, very large acquistion of aQuantive (4% of the $6B that's already "sunk"),
3) Microsoft has to generate incremental ARPU of only $5 a user *in total* to break even,
4) Facebook is valued at $15B, which means...
5) Facebook is either (depending on where you think this ends): (a) off the market for some time at that price (so no Google, Yahoo, et al spoilers), or (b) tied to Microsoft and hardening/creating value in their online ad platform

Win, win, win, win, win - at least for Microsoft and Facebook: you know, the parties actually doing the deal?

Isn't that the definition of "best"? Lopsided value creation for *both* sides?

Any "investment" dollar$ back from the deal is pure upside for Microsoft. That means that they, more or less, let Facebook fill in the denominator: $240M of $XX - Microsoft doesn''t/didn't *really* care what that number was...

I don't know about you, but it leaves me with a funny taste in my mouth... is this the "revenue exchange" program of the new bubble - a variation of the old: "I'll buy from you if you buy from me and both our revenues go up, but we're not spending any money trick?"

Dunno - but it also smells suspiciously similar to another "equity for exclusivity" deal...

ES4: The Javascript 2.0 Blaze

Updated: Now on Slashdot.

A bit of a flame war going on in the ECMAScript working group (which spices up an otherwise reasonably boring mailing list).

This blog post (from Mozilla Foundation CTO and Javascript creator Brendan Eich) is really only tip of the iceberg - you should follow some of the links from his post, or check out the mailing list archive.

Javascript 2.0, or more formally ECMAScript Edition 4 (or simply ES4) has been in the works for a good, oh.... 8 years now. With the ES4-in-motion work from Adobe (nee Macromedia) in the form of ActionScript 3 (AS3), and the rise of Firefox, Safari, et al. its been getting a serious push to completion over the last year and a half, especially in the face of Microsoft's C#, Silverlight, and (though no one said it directly), I think even Adobe's Flex and AIR.

The battlelines are pretty clearly drawn, with Microsoft and Yahoo on one side, and the Mozilla team, Opera, Adobe (interesting, eh? "Enemy of my Enemy" anyone?), and oh, pretty much everybody else on the other side. Or, as you might first opine from that cast, Evil v. Good.

MS and Yahoo think the language is changing too much, whilst the others think that it needs to in order to be competitive for the larger scale programming projects the web is increasingly requiring.

My opinion? As is usually the case, they're both right - you only have to look at the Flash community's response to ActionScript 3 .

In short: They like it - a lot, but its very different than AS2 development.

And, oh, from an implementor's perspective, AVM1 and AVM2 (which, roughly, correspond to ES3/AS2 and ES4/AS3) are two completely different VMs. Is it possible to make one that does both? Sure... but there's no denying ES4 requires *substantially* more effort and complexity to implement (note I'm *not* making an argument about code size here....)

An so, in a deliciously Shakespearean turn, Doug Crockford of Microsoft of Yahoo asserts (correctly I think) that the issue is fundamentally one of nomenclature.

Of marketing.

If its not called Javascript, would anyone use it? And if it is, how similar should it be?

Quite frankly, Brendan's probably right in that, whatever justifications the opposition might even believe, there is a bias to keep Javascript "ghetto-ized" to a degree - because of existing investments and strategy considerations.

That doesn't, however, make it wrong to push in that direction.

Personally, I do wish there were less emphasis on the "compiler/VM" split that Java brought into vogue - it seems to be at the the heart of a lot of the design decisions that make AS3 and ES4 feel less "Javascript-y" to me.... but that's both good and bad - ECMAScript 3 is forgiving of errors well past the point of stupidity.

And so, lightweight stuff really is harder, but its also a lot easier to write stuff well...

Flash rulez

Courtesy of Corey.
Fairly impressive set of announcements from Adobe's MAX conference this year.

Most notably (for me):

• Aformentioned Flash player support for H.264/MPEG-4 should be released in the next few weeks (though media streaming is still tied to their Media Server, which kinda sucks),
  
• 2D Shading language for Flash code-named Hydra; you can check out a HW accelerated only version here,
• C/C++ compiler for Actionscript; not sure if this will be productized, but the demo of Quake I software rendering compiled to the AS3 VM is pretty cool (end of the second video, here),
• Substantially expanded text control: flow, wrap-around, tables, etc.,
• 2.5 rendering, e.g. a perspective display system.

Get (slightly) more detailed info at Adobe Labs.

With some significant focus of the developer productivity/debugging chain, Adobe could make things very interesting for the current generation of incumbents (Sun, Microsoft, etc.).

Certainly it turns up the heat intensely for the Silverlight team... and even moreso for the future of Java on the desktop for RIA.

Facebook, baby

(First: Sorry for the post dearth - its August, what can I say?)

It started a bit slowly, but since Facebook opened up its doors to all comers, its become quite the deluge from my social circles (way behind on friend approvals still) - it took LinkedIn many years to achieve any critical mass for me.

Zero to hero very quickly... obviously curiosity and, quite frankly, a well thought out product with a positive developer eco-system have been rewarded (remember this idea?). In fact, no coincidence, I think, that developer APIs coincide with Facebook's recent rapid rise beyond the college crowd... this is how you go from narrow to general: by letting your application become a platform.

That is, you succeed best by letting others success feed you.

So, I'd been meaning to blog about this upswing for a few weeks now... and then I ran into this today:
Ick, old married guys on Facebook

It speaks for itself: Perspective is everything :)

Unique Vistors are not users

Being at a Cable/Media giant now, as you might imagine, we discuss advertising a fair amount, and in particular, exploring the strengths, weaknesses, and, really, differences in how the advertisers, content creators, and distributors think about the eyeball value chain on the web vs broadcast media.

One of the obvious but interesting observations for web metrics is that the commonly used measure for audience is not actually people. That is to say, the "visitors" referred to by "unique visitors" isn't people at all, but devices. And even that's a bit of a misnomer, because its really, for PC users, a per computer per OS user account metric. Whether its a browser cookie, Flash local shared object, or Google Gears data store (the latter two don't get cleared when you delete browser history in your browser, btw) - nevertheless, they are all at the same level of "user" granularity. I'm going to suggest that OS user account is really a poor man's device and data virtualization technology, much in the same way that Multifinder was a poor man's multitasking technology back in the days of the original MacOS, and thus, we're talking about a device metric.

Unique visitors (UVs) really is a direct measure of how many devices connect to a given site. And it is correlated, of course, but not identical to the number of actual users visiting that property. Some sites you may use only at home or at work (one UV per user), while some may be used at work and home (two UVs per user), or, in cases where many users share the device (home computers, or set top boxes, for example) it may be one UV for many actual users.

Magazines will often refer to the "pass along" index of a magazine: that is, how many people might actually read it, but may not have purchased it (House&Garden magazine has a pass along readership of 14 or 15 people per sold copy, whilst National Geographic is around 5 or 6).

In this area, the Internet is surprisingly immature, given the promise (and increasing reality) of behavioural, demographic, and metric oriented targeting of the world's many-to-many publishing medium. This kind of thing becomes important not just for CPM advertising (that is, impression and brand based advertising), but even more so when considering the efficacy of CPA advertising (so called "Cost-Per-Action" advertising).

I mentioned magazines rather specifically, because it appears that Internet advertising growth is coming most directly from print and publishing, and not at all at the expense of broadcast (its shrunk nationally, but more than compensated in other channels). Perhaps we need to extend UV's to be UV/U's (Unique Visitors/Users), much as Nielsen's does for TV ratings/share to extend more actionable transparency to advertisers and targetting technologies?

IT and the Edge of the Network

My new work situation brought up an old debate with a good friend (perhaps good debate with an old friend? Works either way I suppose... but I digress): future topology of data and computing models on the network.

Or to put it another way: where do the leaf nodes connect to the edge of the network? Locally, in the home as a gateway for experience (or CPE in my new lingua franca) or remotely, that is, "directly" to remote applications and data stores.

This was/is partially a "client side computing" debate - where and how are performance, security, and storage best optimized.

But the observation at the end of it was this: The world only needs 6 servers arguments are currently in vogue (with consumers, who speak with their time), because, well, IT management sucks. To wit, allow me to posit: It is easier (i.e. better) to use remote applications with remote data for most users because it pushes the information management pain to professionals.

In order of "pain in the ass to maintain": Windows, Mac, Cell phone... not un-coincendentally, also a measure of how closed the software and hardware eco-systems are, in practice. Game consoles are particularly interesting in this regard (I'm rating them as easier than cel even), as everything but the VERY top layers of the stack are single sourced - sounds suspiciously like the RIA platform arguments, no?

(And all the User Access Controls in Vista, and installation hurdles for Apollo only argue against the edge being at the desktop for most applications...)

Adobe's online applications play

Adobe seems to be throwing their hat into the "software-as-service" market: first they announced (and released into beta) an online video editing application ("Remix"), and now they've announced an online version of Photoshop in the next few months.

It'll be interesting to see what direction this takes... re-bundling applications with some online metering (ala GameTap or the like) will get some small traction in the short term, or maybe work for some niche markets or legacy application environments. But this is at best a bridging strategy - its a goofy "web" experience that doesn't embrace any of the real values (other than raw pricing) of software-as-services, and in the medium to long term.

Everyone's been experimenting with this for years and years, and it's just not workable... unfortunately the paradigm doesn't "feel" right.

Of course, that's not what Adobe's doing - Remix is a completely, ground up, brand new web application. That's good, though the problem is that, being brand new, its really not particularly more feature rich or capable than any other web video editor (like Jumpcut or EyeSpot). The only really "edge" Adobe has is brand value - and web users are pretty fickle.

So - I'm curious to see what "online Photoshop" looks like. One the one hand, a real web app is the right way to go, and what I'd like to see - and I think its important they start this now before someone else does it first (it'll happen). On the other hand, I think if its a true web app, version 1.0 will likely not be a real Photoshop replacement in any meaningful way... and it'll get dinged pretty good for that.

This has to be a commitment for the long term.

Cracking the right design patterns for "offline" web applications will also make a big difference for moving them beyond casual users, I think, among other things...

Amazon Web Services Strategy

Amazon's got an interesting new strategy they're pursuing: to become an infrastructure provider for the web-at-large. I'd mentioned this before - and its one of the places I had been trying to drag AOL for some time.

As this blurb in Tech Crunch mentions, its not without its substantial risks, but ultimately I think you want people rowing the boat with you, not against you. I think its why Yahoo still struggles, and Apple, despite flashes of brilliance, will always be (end up? :P) an underdog.

I think the biggest risk, in this area, is that your utilities get commoditized. Without some sustainable differentiated value, either in data services, user base, functionality, etc., its very tough over even the medium haul. Its great that Amazon is providing cheap storage for example, but more unique value propositions will be needed to create dependencies - otherwise their margins will get crushed.

Got to say this for Bezos - he rides the edge of the curve...