Usually, the coffee consumptions at startups is huge. In this case, however, SnipClip is really an exceptional case. Sebastian and Oliver drink no coffee at all and I have coffee very rarely. But we all love tea. Lots of tea.
So, it seems obvious that we should publish a tea collection. And – trombone please – here it is!
This so called Teabook is sponsored by allmyTea, a German website that allows you to mix and order your custom tea. The first page of the Teabook shows the seven basic tea ingredients, each collectible provides a brief description.
Get your own Teabook on Facebook or MySpace. Everyone completing the Teabook by July 31th, automatically participates when allmyTea is raffling off five “Luftige Erfrischung” teablends.
If something is going wrong it is and it always was popular to blame a technology for it (mostly because a technology can not response to it). The church did it for example when printing was invented and Andrew Keen is doing so in his blog post The Great Seduction: Confessions of an Internet iconoclast. He is blaming the Web 2.0 for destroying our culture and business. He is right in his analysis, but wrong in his conclusions:
The biggest financial problem is that the supposedly new media economy of blogs and YouTube videos isn’t making the content creators much money. That’s because today’s digital technology has made almost all content free, thereby undermining media’s historically successful business model of selling content to consumers. [...] The greatest losers, then, in this great cultural transformation are our traditional creative class – professional musicians, journalists, film-makers, photographers and animators — who are now struggling to monetize their talent in an advertising saturated economy where all the serious cash is being channeled to technology providers like Google, YouTube and MySpace.
Yes, people are not willing to pay for content, because the content does not provide an added value to them! In the past, information was restricted. It provided a competitive advantage or it gave you social status. In the Internet age, information is available everywhere and everytime. Thus our old business models fail and companies that relied on these old business models will fail too! That’s economy. That’s evolution. Don’t blame technology for it!
I do not agree with Andrew Keen that the creative class is suffering from these changes. The opposite is true. Never in history there have been such possibilities for creative persons to show and to monetize their work without the need of large corporations. The Internet democratizes the media distribution. Thus more people will profit, but in less quantity. It’s bad for a few, but good for many.
I agree with Andrew Keen that technology providers like Google, YouTube and MySpace profit most from the new business paradigm, but only because the existing market players are not willing to invest in new market ideas. The media companies have to overcome their fear and to reconquer their markets. They know better how to serve the consumers’ needs than a technology provider like Google. They have the content that consumers are urging for, but they have to unclose their content.
Sorry Facebook guys, but establishing a headquarter in Dublin is not enough to conquer Europe and the Middle East and Africa:
This morning the Irish Times reported that Facebook has confirmed its plans to establish one of its international headquarters in Dublin. The headquarters will be responsible for activities taking place within the company “across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.†Last week I wrote about Facebook hiring people in India, Hong Kong, Syndney, and the U.K.
Europe is a diverse social network market and Germany in particular is a complicated one with strong competitors. If you want to succeed in Germany you have to open a headquarter in Germany. Take MySpace for example, they have a headquarter in Berlin, a very beautiful by the way.
So Facebook come to Germany! My suggestion for your headquarter is Munich – you will like it! And have a good time!
I’m a lazy person – I don’t want to update my status on Facebook, XING & Co. seperately so I searched for solutions. Here is my provisionally solution:
Installed the Twitter-Tools WordPress plug-in on this blog to include my status updates in the sidebar (see right side).
However, I did not found any solution to update my XING status too. Do you know a solution?
PS: The solution isn’t perfect. A perfect solution would be: I could update all my messengers, social networks etc. via Twitter, because there are a plenty of useful tools for Twitter, e.g. sending tweets from a Firefox plugin without browsing to twitter.com respectively hellotxt.com. However, I did not find any public solution …
The symptoms are obvious now, but the causes still remain unclear (users get bored, get concerned about privacy, get frustrated by complexity …):
The latest stats from Nielsen Online show a significant decline in month-over-month unique visitors to Facebook in the US. In April, traffic fell to 22.4M uniques, down from the 24.9M reported in March. Year-over-year traffic growth decelerated from 98% to a much more modest 56%. MySpace also saw a modest decline (from 60.3M to 58.7M), while LinkedIn continued its torrid growth from 7.8M uniques in March to 8.6M in April.
O’Reilly Radar published a comparison of the MySpace vs. the Facebook application ecosystem:
Within a few months, Myspace has quietly built an application platform with over twelve hundred applications. I previously posted a graph for Facebook app categories, in which I compared the categories using the number of active users. Unlike the older Facebook platform, Myspace only provides the number of installs:
For our German readers, here is an analysis of the Facebook launch in Germany and an interesting chart of the growth in visitors for various social networks in Germany (by the Financial Times Deutschland):
Das soziale Netzwerk Facebook hat den erhofften Katapultstart in Deutschland mit der Einführung einer deutschen Sprachversion Anfang März nicht geschafft. Für das gesamte erste Quartal weist das Marktforschungsunternehmen Nielsen Online für Facebook lediglich 1,2 Millionen Besucher und damit 26 Prozent mehr als im Vorjahreszeitraum aus, als Facebook nur mit einer englischen Version vertreten war und außerhalb der Internet-Szene noch weitgehend unbekannt war.
I’m dizzy – exciting and important news come in too fast. The major internet and tech companies fight for the next big thing on the Internet: Platform-as-a-Service, in short PaaS. In other terms: who will provide the standard for an “Internet Operating System” (for consumer applications; business applications are a different battleground)?
Some interesting thoughts about revenue streams from social networks:
As some of you may know I have been building web games for different social networks with some friends for the past few months. I have noticed a downward trend in revenue with apps and wanted to highlight it here. To generate a discussion, ideas and possible solutions:
