Jerry Yang, David Filo. That is a count of two. No wonder they got beat by Google. But if the count were not two but a billion, or even 200 million like Facebook which is what Twitter will have to hit on its way to the magic billion? Then what? Then are we talking some serious competition? I think so.
Twitter does not pay anybody to tweet. Twitter is the ultimate crowdsourcing application. I think humans are going to take over the world. Unless machines fundamentally innovate.
If I were to take a really long view, I think this thing is going to be cyclical. Humans 2, Machines 1.
Jerry Yang and David Filo camped in some trailer park on Stanford property and started creating a directory of all the interesting websites they came across. Jerry is human, so is David. This was when there were only a few hundred, then a few thousand websites on the web.
Then the whole thing exploded. Enter Sergei Brin and Larry Page. Larry once scared an Advisor by saying he wanted to download the internet, not one webpage, or website, or some data across the internet, but the whole damn thing. Sergei and Larry said humans can't, let machines do the search thing. And they won big.
But Twitter has all the buzz now. And Twitter is not exactly a search engine. But then it does something that Google does not do, and that is real time search. Their little search engine - the little engine that could - is still a machine, but it only bothers to search these little itty bitty tweets that get created by humans. The internet is more huge, and more explosive than ever before. And I am curious as ever. But I have only 24 hours in a day. So I guess I will let my circle of contacts act as a filter. JP Rangaswami out there in London has used the firehose metaphor to describe the internet. You are thirsty, but the internet is a firehose. How do you drink? Well, you use Twitter.
Twitter is not out to replace Google. But what if the power users end up spending more time on Twitter than on Google? Then Google has a problem on its hand.
I did a google search on "sites that pay you to blog" and these are the first 10 results that showed up. Before that I had visited result number one on my own. But it felt to me like it was hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. And I did not want to have to visit every suggested site and see for myself. How do you see for yourself? Do you register and participate and see if it works? So this is what I proceeded to do. I made a list of all the sites mentioned in these 10 blog posts/articles. The more often a site has been mentioned, the higher its ranking. Then I visited all the sites to weed out three dead links I found. These are in alphabetical order.
Mind you, I have not had the chance to cross check them. I took them at their word as to what they were offering. And I have shared. If a few of these are scams, don't blame me. If some of them do no better for you than if you ran AdSense ads on your own, don't blame me. If some of them work wonders for you, don't give me credit.
And this popularity contest is flawed. I visited only a few of those, but the best so far to my mind was:
It is very hard to get in, but I went ahead and applied. They take four to eight weeks to get back with you. Their top earners make over $100,000 a year. About.com is a New York Times company.
You blog, you post ads, and you go engage with other like-minded bloggers in their comments sections.
Don't get fooled. Blogging for a living is kind of like doing stand-up comedy for a living. It is very hard. Most people who try don't make it. Many people are happy just being able to do it on the side as part timers.
Think about it. All these sites are businesses. They are in it to make money. And you are going to help them make money. Most of them are out to act middle people between bloggers and advertisers.
How time flies! Gmail is five years old already. That is ages in internet time. I was an immediate convert and an evangelist. It is more than extra space, it is different, I would rant and rave. There still are people around who have email but who are not on Gmail. I try not to judge. But I will have to admit, it's hard not to.
Begs the question, what will Gmail be like in five years? It is hard to predict. I will give the Steve Jobs answer. When asked what the iPhone will look like in five years, he said, I don't know. He said he could not have predicted five years earlier there would be maps on the iPhone, but you got maps. So it is not easy to predict what technological breakthroughs we will see over the next few years that will make new, exciting features possible.
But I do have a wish list.
(1) More Space
That was Gmail's first selling point. The least it could do is stay up with the hunger of the power users. Say if you offer 50 GB, and only 1% of your users use 10 GB or more, you still get to boast that you are offering 50 GB, right?
If the internet were to end up with a trillion websites, Google should not be complaining, right? More pages, more searches, more ads, more revenue. Gmail is the same way. More email inside that Gmail account, more ads you get to serve. So why complain?
I am especially thinking of my friend Sree here. I read his piece in Forbes earlier, and I am unhappy that Gmail has been bleeding his wallet.
(2) Two Inboxes
One for people I have emailed at least once, and one for the rest. I should not have to create a new, private email account just because I became famous, right? This arrangement would also add to Gmail's already great spam filter. I mean, if I have never emailed you before.
(3) My Gmail Should Be My Phone Number
One global phone number. I hope all the hype about Google Voice is true. There is talk Google Voice is to be integrated with Gmail. Swell.
(4) Video Mail
Video chat is great, but so is text chat. There is text chat, and there is text email. So there needs to be video mail.
(5) Social
Keep adding social elements to the service.
(6) Better Integration
I should be able to go from my Gmail account straight to my Google Reader account, and why not? Maybe there are a few other services to integrate.
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