Mercury News: Facebook's plans For Menlo Park HQ: 9,400 Workers In Next 6 Years: The fast-growing social networking company, which currently employs about 1,400 people in Palo Alto, expects to reach full capacity at the Sun campus and nearby buildings on Constitution Drive by 2017. ...... Menlo Park is inviting the public to suggest what environmental impacts should be studied. The deadline for comments is May 26.
You read about Facebook's new location, and you end up appreciating New York City so much more. You appreciate the subway, you appreciate the endless number and variety of bars and cafes in the city. You appreciate the whole damn package deal. NYC is the place to be. The banks imploded, and all of a sudden the tech sector in the city was flush with talent. By now there is even flush money.
Yahoo wins on the sticky factor. Yahoo visitors linger around longer. And so the Yahoo properties are better suited for ads that are dedicated to building brand names rather than pay per click text ads. Image ads are the answer for Yahoo. It might even have an edge for video ads. And video ads will be big money.
Yahoo is not anywhere near to beating Google on search. Google's search is an invention. Yahoo should keep at it, but it might be wiser to augment its strengths, and it does have those.
Semel is and has been an old media guy. He had a wonderful career during the pre dot com era. The guy is outstanding. But he did dampen innovation. He just did not "get it."
Jerry Yang might not be an MBA, but he has the instincts of a pioneer. He knows what it means to keep sniffing at the cutting edge.
Yahoo was hot property when Google was a non entity. Yahoo was so big and Google so small, Yahoo actually invested in a startup called Google. Yahoo back then did not foresee the Google potential, or they would not have passed on the opportunity to buy Google. That was years before Google offered text ads that have been minting gobbles of money.
In short, Yahoo is better suited for image and video ads. Google will continue with its edge on text ads.
And Yahoo Mail, that needs a major facelift. Make it easier to fight spam, danggoneit.
Google
Google needs to do two things fast it can.
One, figure out a way to add a two second ad at the end of the video clips on YouTube. It is like when you blog at Google's Blogger, placing text ads on the property is so easy. It should be that easy for users to monetize their original videos. But the ads should not distract. They should not be a 30 second video in the middle. Rather an image ad at the end.
Marry Blogger to mathematics. Make it possible to put down equations easily. Do calculations. The property will go up in value for that.
In The News
How Yahoo can catch GoogleSan Jose Mercury News Compared with most companies, Yahoo is in good shape. But Yahoo's problem is that it's compared with Google, one of the fastest-growing and most profitable companies in the world. ..... more popular products that keep people on its site longer than any other property on the Web ....... Yahoo shouldn't try to out-Google Google ..... collection of highly popular Web sites and services ..... his company's uncanny ability to identify Internet services that resonate with ordinary Americans ..... Google has been earning 12 cents a search, compared with 8 cents for Yahoo. ..... uses math to figure out which ads are likely to get clicked on by Internet users, and it places them in the most prominent positions ....... Yahoo grew revenue a respectable 22 percent from 2005 to 2006, from $5.3 billion to $6.4 billion. But Google grew 73 percent from $6.1 billion to $10.6 billion. ..... he said Yahoo could still be No. 1 in search. "We need to figure out how to differentiate, and the way the current search game is being defined is not being defined by us." ...... average Internet users spend more than 11 minutes each time they visit Yahoo, compared with less than six minutes for Google and less than four minutes for Microsoft. ..... "They have the strongest reach and engagement on the Internet" ...... Yahoo's data on users could bring success during the next phase of the Internet, which he believes will include highly targeted, individualized advertising. ...... "Just like any other company, Google is going to mature and decline," Rafer said. "What comes after search advertising? You can beat your head against the wall. Or you can plan for the future for when Google is a one-trick pony." Google's Iowa arrival should bring investment, jobsUI The Daily Iowan (subscription) create 200 jobs ..... an average salary of $50,000 each .... will pay the state an estimated $65 million in property taxes over the next 15 years. ..... combat Iowa's brain drain issue.
Now you can call from the Yahoo Messenger to a traditional phone for real cheap. That is quite an improvement. And you can give your Messenger a number so people can call you, and it costs you $25 a year.
I hope Google comes swinging to offer the same for free. Until down the road the idea of having a phone number sounds ridiculous. Don't you yave a messenger ID? Like your name? Or some version of it? And with broadband wireless, you have a cellphone with the same.
Google has acquired a company that makes it look like it is now going to try and offer "Office" online. Hey, I talked about that prospect a long time back. This was but inevitable. Sergei, Larry, read this blog. I got vision alright. (Google's To Do List Keeps Growing)
Of course word processing has to go online. So has everything else.
Help Users Create Content
Email, search and news are great and seamless at Google. But user created content has so many glitches. That is another growth area for Google.
Blogger has too many template problems too often. Next you know, your template has truncated, and your blog looks like Egyptian calligraphy.
And give many more template options.
Also Google Pages is not as easy to use as advertised. Make it easier. Much easier.
Google Video pay per view has been postponed, looks like forever. If they could make this possible, that would be an attack on traditional TV. Google Video has the potential to become a disruptive technology. But instead of empowering the individual, Google is too busy empowering the fat companies.
Offer an audio version of Google Video. Make it easy to create audio files and host them and publish them.
Audio, video, text. That's a finity.
The utter lack of anything close to seamlessness for user created content is Google's number one weakness right now.
Yahoo is not a direct Microsoft competitor, Google is. Google is also a direct Yahoo comptetitor. That is why Google's market cap is so much larger than that of Yahoo. Visitors
Kosmix plans to take on Google in the search domain. There are two Indians at the helm. They are only starting out, but they got a track record. They are in the same league as the Google founders, only a few years behind, which is not a setback at all. All four went to Stanford together.
Google never really had a competitor, imitators in Yahoo and Microsoft yes, but this is the first true competition for them. We are all better of for it. Google only looks at how many other websites link to a website. Kosmix goes further. It makes sense of the content of a site, and categorizes them.
But Kosmix is just starting out. And it has a lot of work ahead. I wish it all the best.
If you think about it, when you do a search on Google, how often do you go beyond the first page of results, or the second or third? Most people do not go beyond the first. So showing 500 relevant and categorized results might be "stickier" than 500,000 so so results. But Kosmix got to prove itself.
That is what most surfers spend time on, in that order. And Google leads Yahoo by a wide margin in search, 46 to 23 per cent. Yahoo still leads on email, but then Gmail is still in beta, and you can't get an account just like that, you have to be invited in by someone who already has one. Both compete on news, although I think Yahoo leads, but I personally prefer Google, although I also use Yahoo heavily. I could not imagine doing my political work without the help of Google News.
As for search, I have always preferred Google. Search is central to the whole idea of the internet itself, and Google is one company organized around search. That is what makes them the premier internet company.
If I were Google, I would closely integrate the top three services. So I sign into my Gmail account and stay signed in while I do other things on or near my computer, and it should feel like I have access to the main Google search page and the Google News page at the same time. And when I am on the Googe News page, it should feel like I am in my Gmail account, it should be that easy to forward stories to others: only the link gets sent, just the web address.
Such integration would spike up the use of all three. Many people would literally never log out. They would stay glued.
I think blogging is going to catch on also. So Google ought to integrate not three, but four of its properties. And within blogging itself, it needs to integrate text, audio and video. Right now they act like three separate properties. And whatever happened to MathML?
Email, search, news, and text-audio-video-MathML blogging. Integrate the four.
Wait, there is a fifth. The idea of offering all books, fiction, non-fiction, and textbooks, free, ad-based. Integrate all five. And Google would zoom off. I think the books idea is very doable. Say you approach people who write college textbooks. And you offer them the option. Boom, they are all going to end up making big bucks. College students would stop buying textbooks. And the rest of the industry would follow.
Email, search, news, blog, books. In one seamless offering.
It would be flat out wrong to get in the way of technological breakthroughs that bring the cost of books down. And make their reaches wider. It is just that a way has to be found to ensure the authors do make money in the process.
I think Google should consider becoming a publisher itself. So you publish your book on Google property. Revenue is generated through ads. You and Google split the money made. For the reader it is free books. For the author there is money.
The library concept hit the snag. Because the money part was not handled well. On the other hand, if it is okay to read a book at some library for free, why is it not okay to read that same book in digital format?
The publishing industry feels the threat, and rightly so. Because of the web, the barrier to entry to getting published is literally zero. As to whether or not you get read is another thing. As to whether or not you make money is another thing.
I think this free for consumer revenue through ads model would work also for other media, audio and video. Prices come down to zero, but volume goes up, way up. You could have consumers all over the planet.
Image via CrunchBaseFacebook Location
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