Bickel Blog

Facebook came out swinging yesterday to defend their users and their turf. http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=111 . They have basically shut down Google’s use of their API to collect user profile and social graph information on the new Friend Connect service. Here’s my take on the background and what is going on… Google has made a nice business out of an open Internet. Facebook carved out a nice little corner of the Internet with a social network that does not give Google the type of visibility they would like into that little corner. In addition, that little corner looks like it might be kind of valuable. Google makes a few moves like buying Orkut and amassing all the other social networking vendors and creating Open Social. Those things are OK, but not really opening up that corner that Google now has become to covet. Well, the world of social network walled gardens kind of exploded last week . MySpace, Facebook and Google all seemed to rush announcement...

We have a bit of March Madness at Ringside getting ready to launch tomorrow . But for the rest of the country, it is the NCAA college basketball tournament - and of course CBS Sports big deal with Facebook . CBS has provided this year's bracket system on Facebook (a Facebook application). Hundreds of thousands of Facebook users (including my 11th grade daughter) have made their choices and anxiously compare themselves to the rest of their friends, or within their high school or across the world. CBS is going to make $25 Million this year from on-line advertising of the tournament, and the Facebook crowd is a big channel for them. It also engenders the type of engagement and virality we have been talking about in this blog. Come tomorrow when Ringside Networks launches our Beta open source project, folks like CBS will have a common platform that they can build applications like this on. A platform that will enable them to build one application that runs on both Facebook and t...

Good blog by Henry Blodget giving data on the continuing shift of advertising revenue to on-line. Last year on-line was $18B out of the total $58B according to this market data. Again, I ask if there is real return on this that creates a competitive advantage?

On-line Advertising is a big business. Actually, it is a HUGE business. And the big and small Social Networks are trying to take their cut of the pie. There are many estimates of On-Line advertising: - Rayport estimates the US market to be $28 Billion, with the Big Three (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) commanding 85% of that market. ( Business Week ) - Jerry Yang estimated the worldwide on-line advertising market to be $45 Billion this year and growing teo $75 Billion by 2011 in his recent letter to Yahoo! stockholders. - Google had revenue of nearly $5 Billion last Quarter – so a $20 Billion run rate by themselves that is mostly advertising based. Yahoo is at a nearly $7 Billion run rate. - "Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL each regularly see a minimum of 100 (sic) million unique visitors each month, according to research firm comScore (SCOR). Advertisers that want to reach a big audience are still likely to gravitate toward an established portal.” ( Business Week ) Advertise...

A lot of people in the social networking space talk about the need for only one social network ( Metcalf's Law ), or that we should all have one user profile ( OpenID ). They talk about how this is limiting social networking because if a site gets too big and powerful because of the network effect, then it loses what originally brought people there, becomes too commercial, etc. This of course gives rise to lots of "mini" social networks ( Ning hosts 160,000 of these!). I think there is another phase to social networking that is coming - social applications, not social networks. Facebook unlocked this first with the open API that allows developers to develop "social apps" that cooperate with the social network. The next limit to bust thru is to federate the social networks more. Open Social's promise is to do that - of course that is still very new and the social networks supporting it are still developing it. So the developer community building social appli...