Netizen

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Skype: Hub

AOL Time Warner could not build the promised synergy. Now looks like eBay and Skype are a repeat history case. Could this perhaps been predicted at the outset? Is a Microsoft going into hardware losing direction? Or is it reinventing itself? Nokia has reinvented itself many, many times over the decades.

eBay and PayPal were synergistic. Skype was stretching it.

But then will the Skype spinoff make enough money for eBay that the original deal will have been worth it? At 405 million, Skype has twice the community size as Facebook. When Skype got bought a lot of people were like, oh no, they overpaid. But looks like not. The founders of Skype would be happy to buy it back. The brand made half a billion last year. The two and a half billion price tag could be recouped in a matter of years.

Skype is a hub, it is a community, it is the iPhone of that big rectangle. And it is capable of doign iPhone like things. Yes, I am talking about applications. I have a feeling Skype will really take off when we enter the ubiquitous wimax era in a few short years. Now is the time to do the homework for the best possible positioning.

Image via CrunchBase

In The News

eBay to launch a Skype IPO in 2010 CNet
Next Office will come in 32-bit, 64-bit versions
Big media leads Webby Awards nominations
OutlookDeck brings Twitter concepts to e-mail
Analyst: Microsoft deal could save Yahoo $1 billion
Just how sexist is nudity in gaming?
Sun Microsystems debuts new x64 servers
Should Sun buy Novell?
Server start-up taps IBM-Intel tech, eyes Web 2.0
Google touts Android 1.5 features to coders
BoostCam does instant two-way video chat
iPhone to become a home systems OpenRemote
Microsoft fills Excel, Windows, Word holes
The final frontier: Solar power from space
Zune phone ad campaign coming?
MC builds up to 3 petabytes of virtual storage

The Depth Of Your Friendships At Twitter

Sex and the City

Image by hawaii via Flickr

I must admit there have been times when I have struggled with doing a Guy Kawasaki on Twitter: follow everyone who follows you. Should I? Should I not? I decided against the idea. For Guy Twitter is a broadcast medium. Noone else does that part better than him. His tweets get retweeted more times than that of any other. He is numero uno.

And there is Bhupendra Khanal, the top tweet in Bangalore, as in the one with the most followers:

Business Analytics: Twitter : Why unfollow who dont follow you?

He is a software guy, a CEO, who has come up with this program that allows you to follow or unfollow people about 50 at a time. He is brutal. He sees no point in following those who don't follow him. His following shot up to over 20,000 in a matter of months.

I decided I am biased towards an organic growth of my following, so I did not go down the Bhupendra route either, although we were and are good friends.

I found at Twitter what I did not find at Facebook. After I signed up at Facebook I realized my number one urge was to say hello to people I had never met before. Next thing you know I had about 1500 friends there. Then I signed up for this Facebook group that shall stay unnamed, and started emailing people in that group. Facebook deleted my account. 1500 friends gone. That was unfollow Facebook style.

I got another account, and now I have 500 friends, almost all of whom I personally know. Some are online friends I have never met in person, but we have interacted online enough that it feels like friendship. And I have over 40 friend requests and counting that I have decided to not accept, not decline either. If I end up chatting some of those and becoming online friends, I might still accept some of them.

At Twitter not only do you get to follow absolutely anyone you wish to follow, my number one dig has been this idea of being able to follow luminaries in the tech industry. Once in a while you come across this blog post or that which has recommendations of the people you get tempted to follow.

And clicking on the follow button is not enough. How well do you know them? Could you recognize them in your stream two months later? Could you name the company they might be associated with? Can you remember at least one blog post of theirs you have read?

How do you do all that? You spend some time on the profile pages of the people you follow. You read their intro. You reply to some of their tweets. You go read a few posts on their blog. You get to know them well enough that the next time they show up in your stream, their tweets look extra interesting to you. Each tweet by that person helps you know them a little better.

If you do that well enough, you just might strike a two way friendship, or rather followship, with a person who until recently was a distant celebrity to you. Like Craig Newmark, or Darren Rowse.

Goal: A Billion People On Twitter
Search Come Full Circle: That Human Element
The Search Results, The Links, The Inbox, The Stream
Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter
I Talked To Google Through Twitter And It Worked Like Magic
Twitter And The Time Dimension
What Should Facebook Do
TweetDeck, Power Twitter, Twitter Globe, Better Than Facebook
TCC: Twitter Community College
Twitter Tips: It's A Bird, It's A Bird
Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter
I Get Twitter

Advanced Global Materials

Advanced Global Materials is a supplier of specialty raw materials and products from around the world. The company is based out of Brookhaven, NY. It supplies to major industries like defense, electronic, and power generation. Metal processing is its specialty.

Some of its offerings: hardware, fasteners, valves, flanges, plates, sheets, rod, bar, tubing, pipe, lugs, pins, inserts, hinges, fasteners, valves, etc. They deal with a wide variety of materials. "Services include milling, cutting, heat treating, export boxing, packing, welding, shearing, custom grinding, forging, flame cutting & saw cutting."

You can go here to take a look at its offerings and initiate online conversation with a real person on their end right away to start placing an order, or to place queries.

(This is an advertisement.)

Goal: A Billion People On Twitter

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.

Search Come Full Circle: That Human Element
The Search Results, The Links, The Inbox, The Stream
Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter
I Talked To Google Through Twitter And It Worked Like Magic
Twitter And The Time Dimension
What Should Facebook Do
TweetDeck, Power Twitter, Twitter Globe, Better Than Facebook
TCC: Twitter Community College
Twitter Tips: It's A Bird, It's A Bird
Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter
I Get Twitter

Search: Much Is Lacking
The Next Search Engine
Email, Search, News

Search Come Full Circle: That Human Element

Image via CrunchBase

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.

The Search Results, The Links, The Inbox, The Stream
Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter
I Talked To Google Through Twitter And It Worked Like Magic
Twitter And The Time Dimension
What Should Facebook Do
TweetDeck, Power Twitter, Twitter Globe, Better Than Facebook
TCC: Twitter Community College
Twitter Tips: It's A Bird, It's A Bird
Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter
I Get Twitter

Search: Much Is Lacking
The Next Search Engine
Email, Search, News

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Sites That Pay You To Blog

Image via CrunchBase

26 Sites That Pay You to Blog | How-To
Sites That Pay You to Blog
5 sites that pay you to blog! | Senserely Yours, | AdSense community
26 Sites That Pay You to Blog - Blog Forum - Bloggeries
Blog Sponsored Reviews - 5 Sites That Pay You To Blog Through Blog ...
Million Blog: Blog Advertising and Websites that pay you to blog
Sites That Pay You To Blog | Blogging, SEO and Online Marketing Tips
10 Sites that pay you to blog! | Black Hat CEO
best sites that pay you to blog | Tycoon Blogger
List Of Sites That Pay You To Blog

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.

http://451press.com 3 Mentions
http://www.associatedcontent.com 1 Mention
http://www.b5media.com 4 Mentions
http://beaguide.about.com 2 Mentions
http://www.blogburner.com 4 Mentions

http://bloggertizer.com 3 Mentions
http://bloggerwave.com 5 Mentions
http://www.bloggingads.com 3 Mentions
http://www.blogcharm.com 1 Mention
http://www.blogitive.com 7 Mentions
http://blogpayz.com 1 Mention
http://www.blogsvertise.com 8 Mentions
http://www.blogtoprofit.com 4 Mentions
http://botwmedia.com 1 Mention
http://www.buyablogger.com 1 Mention
http://www.buyblogreviews.com 2 Mentions
http://www.cashtalk.org 1 Mention
http://www.ciao.co.uk/reg.php 1 Mention
http://contextual.v7n.com/join.php 1 Mention

http://bloggerwave.com 5 Mentions

http://www.blogitive.com 7 Mentions

http://www.blogsvertise.com 8 Mentions

http://loudlaunch.com 6 Mentions

http://payperpost.com 10 Mentions

http://www.reviewme.com 8 Mentions

http://www.smorty.com 7 Mentions

http://sponsoredreviews.com 6 Mentions

http://www.weblogsinc.com 5 Mentions

Top 5

http://payperpost.com 10 Mentions

http://www.blogsvertise.com 8 Mentions

http://www.reviewme.com 8 Mentions

http://www.blogitive.com 7 Mentions
http://www.smorty.com 7 Mentions

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:

http://beaguide.about.com 2 Mentions

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.

How do you do well at blogging?

You have to be a good writer.
You have to have expertise.
You have to be passionate about your expertise.
You have to be able to attract readers.

Some will argue if you are a really good blogger, all you need is these three Google properties.

http://www.blogger.com
https://www.google.com/adsense
http://blogsearch.google.com

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.

The top authority on how to make money blogging is this guy in Australia:

http://www.problogger.net

He makes big money blogging. His tip: Adsense alone will not cut it, although it will end up your top earner.

And then there are those who say forget ads. Your blog is your business card. It helps you sell you if you have a skill to sell:

How I made over $2 million with this blog (Scripting News)

Also see: Home Based Business Opportunities Favorite, Find Out What Is The Best Program To Help You Make Blogging Money

How to Make Money Online for Beginners
Make Money Online
Make Money Online | Make Money At Home With A 13-Year Old
Make Money Online (Without Spending a Dime)
make money online Tag Page
2 Sure-fire Ways to Make Money Online — Pearsonified
How To Make Money Online - Forbes.com Fifteen billion smackers: That's the value Microsoft recently slapped on Facebook when the computer giant invested $240 million for a 1.6% stake in Mark Zuckerberg's online social-networking site. You could seethe with envy--or you could chase your own fortune on the Web. ....... Craigslist is another take on this model: The 25-person company, worth a reported $2 billion ....... Total page views per month: about 5 billion. ..... every pajama-clad blogger's dream: producing content supported by advertising dollars ........ To have any prayer of attracting large advertisers, sites need to attract at least 500,000 unique visitors per month ...... even if you do generate enough traffic, the "click-through" rates on ads tend to be quite low--in the neighborhood of one half of 1%. ...... Sure, you can make money online. But no one said it was easy.
Internet Marketing and Making Money Online | Dosh Dosh
Make Money Online
Make Money Online

Friday, April 03, 2009

Five Years Of Gmail: What Would Gsus Do?

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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