The Blog of Burgher Jon

Yesterday I talked about how Facebook and Amazon have started dating with a little gimmick related to figuring out what to buy your friends for their birthday.  This morning another thought occurred to me.  How much do you think Amazon would pay Facebook to integrate a link to Facebook in to every fan page that depicts a product that they sell and to create a new page for those things that they don’t.  It would essentially turn Facebook in to a social front-end for Amazon.  I’ll bet it’d erase any concerns that Facebook can monetize with all the efficiency of AdWords.

“Oh look, Mike liked that book Fred told me about, I meant to read that… click, click, click, Amazon, click, click.”  <Begins reading off iPad or Kindle>

I originally had the title, Facebook friends Amazon but I bet between that and Amazon likes Facebook, you’re all about ready to kill every tech blog out there.  I am saying a little different then most of them though, I’m going a step or two lower then the press release.  First though, the basics of the gimmick.  Essentially the new option only allows the following things:

1. Alerts you of your friends birthdays on Facebook.
2. Allows you to see your friend’s wishlists (which you could already do, it just wasn’t easy to guess who had one or go looking for it).
3. Amazon pulls in your information from Facebook for recommendations (movies, music, etc… that you’ve like on your profile).

These are relatively minor things, and much to everyones’ relief the service is “opt-in” not “opt-out”.  Most people saw that much and walked away thinking it was only a trivial news story.  That’s not nearly a deep enough look for someone (me) who believes the current social web will change commerce as we know it (I can think of a half dozen places I’ve said so but perhaps this and this are most relevant).  The bottom line is this, the world’s BEST database about people and social connections is co-mingling with the world’s BEST database about products and personal desires.

I can think of several valuable queries that a facebook or amazon programmer can write without violating the current promised privacy:

• Facebook could allow an advertiser to advertise rafting trips to any group of five male friends between the age of 20 and 30 who all have adventure books on their Amazon wishlists.
• Offer a bulk discount to any group of 5 friends who all have the same book on their wishlist.
• Sort search results based on items other friends have added to their wish list.
• Sort search results in Amazon Music based on artists that you’re a “fan” of on facebook or that your friends are a fan of.

I can think of a ridiculous number of potential implications with only very minor changes to the current privacy setup:

• Follow up on your advertisement in Men’s Health by advertising on the facebook pages of all of the men who subscribe to Men’s Health.
• Suggest a book club based on people’s similar book selections.  Even recommend friends of friends that could join the club.
• Recommend something on Amazon (without saying why) because someone with an exceptionally similar Facebook profile bought it.
• When someone buys something on Amazon with gift wrapping and mails it to a friend, increase their relevance in the Facebook news feed.
• Every product on facebook should have a like button and a little box so I can see which friends have liked it.

Am I missing any good ones?  Particularly in the former category… I’d love to do a follow-up post with ideas from the comment stream.

YouTube (owned by Google) announced yesterday that they would be backing their most promising video creators financially (NYT).  Essentially, if you’ve been working in your spare time to build videos and people (as well as advertisers) have liked these videos, then YouTube might be willing to finance your next movie.  One interesting note is that according to the NY Times the grants will range in size from a few thousand to a few hundred thousand dollars.  This means that they’re not talking about buying a new flip camera for the guy who broke his when he wrecked his skateboard in to it; they’re talking about letting the guy who does skits with his friends lease a studio and hire a couple other actors.

Last week I wrote fairly disparagingly about Twitter’s @EarlyBird account.  My central contention with @EarlyBird is that Twitter is attempting to profit as a user of their own service.  This will hurt their service because it will destroy (since Twitter won’t allow it) a competitive landscape that might have yielded more intelligent ways to place advertisements.  So, when I thought about Google’s investment in YouTube auteurs, I asked myself, “is this the same thing?  Isn’t Google messing with the product that sits on the platform instead of restraining itself to the platform?”  The answer, in short, is no.

By way of an explanation, I’d like to use an analogy.  As I mentioned, both Twitter and YouTube have become valuable because they create platforms.  They are infrastructure, and others provide the content that leverages that infrastructure.  If they’re infrastructure, let’s make them the Pennsylvania Turnpike for the sake of this analogy.

What Twitter did by starting @EarlyBird and other such advertising users that will sit on their platform is open up a trucking company and disallow other trucking companies on the turnpike.  This sounds like a logical decision and in the short-term it may be very profitable.  It’s not a good idea though, imagine what will happen in the long run: Innovative new shipping concepts won’t be applied on the turnpike, people seeking to leverage these techniques will build a competing transportation method, business with the turnpike’s shipping company will decline until they would have been making more money with just tolls.  It will be too late at that point though; the alternative transportation that’s been set up will be superior to the reopened turnpike.

What YouTube is doing by funding content creators is opening up new roads.  YouTube is looking at the exits on the turnpike that are most used by truckers and saying, “What’s out there?  Would our customers benefit from creating an extension out in that direction?”  While this is not quite as bad as what Twitter is doing it still carries its dangers.  It’s still getting the infrastructure company in to the content creation business; YouTube will have to pick the content creators that get grants rather than letting the market do it.  I don’t think Google should do this unless they feel that YouTube as a platform is perfect and there are no additional infrastructure investments that need to be made.  This way, if the plan fails it won’t do so at the expense of other YouTube customers.

Twitter announced today that they will be monetizing in another new way.  They have started the @earlybird account.  This account, will (for a small price) tweet about the time bound deals your company is offering.  The concept is pretty creative and should result in some serious revenue for Twitter, especially if they can get influential people to follow @earlybird and retweet the message to their followers.

I am sure the good folks at Twitter have done their research, but it does leave me a bit concerned.  The problem, as I see it, is that Twitter is monetizing on top of their platform rather then monetizing the platform itself.  If you’re monetizing on top of the platform you don’t really have a competitive advantage, unless you disallow competition (which they have).  Disallowing competition though, means that the platform won’t benefit from competition amongst ad providers, which in and of itself hurts the platform.  How much do you think Alexander Graham Bell made off the telephone?

So do I have an alternative?  I’m glad you asked.  What if they required all companies that serve commercials to use a particular hash tag or URL shortener.  Then you tax those per display.  In this manner you’re monetizing the platform itself rather than trying to monetize on top of it (and either losing competitive advantage or stifling the kind of competition that would be good for your platform).

Lincolnish!!!

Fox News this morning exposed how Wikipedia and schools have combined to convince school children that pedophilia is not a bad thing.  If you can’t smell the sarcasm on that statement, you should stick around the blog and get to know me better.  Here’s the second paragraph of the article:

Chat room posts show a clear effort by pedophiles to use Wikipedia, which can be accessed unfiltered in public schools across the country, to further their agenda.

This is blatant scare tactics against one of the greatest innovations of the information age (Wikipedia).  I find two things wrong with this ONE sentence.

1. “Chat room posts show a clear effort by pedophiles” – what does that mean?  I can find at least 3 or 4 chatroom posts that suggest just about anything.
2. “can be accessed unfiltered in public schools across the country”  Do you know how many sites kids have access to where people can place their opinions?  This sentence implies that pedophiles are regularly modifying the entry on pedophilia (not true) and that children are regularly accessing the entry (I highly doubt it, do teachers often assign projects that require doing google searches for pedophilia?) and that a child smart enough to search on wikipedia for “pedophilia” would just readily believe some clown that says pedophilia is cool.

If anything Wikipedia is the ultimate way to stop opinionated people from biasing reference materials.  For anything to be considered “fact” on wikipedia, a vast majority of the editors must agree that it is fact.  This effort to slander one of the (inherently) least bias sources of information on the planet is ridiculous.  What I wrote up in the title of this post was ACTUALLY the title of the fox news report, fair and balanced.