Power of Passed Links
Fred Wilson, a VC and blogger and investor in Twitter, talks about the power of Twitter to drive traffic.
He says that among their portfolio companies, traffic from Twitter and Facebook is now about 20% the amount of traffic driven by Google; that it is growing about 3-40% per month; and that if that growth rate continues, Facebook and Twitter will drive more traffic to their portfolio companies (excluding Twitter, obviously) than Google within a year or two.
As I wrote two months ago, I get that the potential for traffic growth is very attractive. The question for me remains is there some fundamental benefit that will allow this to happen, or are we just seeing a bubble inflate right now:
So why the hype? Traffic. People — bloggers especially, those in Silicon Valley or the tech industry even more particularly — have realized that Twittering can send traffic. This is why Jason Calacanis offered $250,000 for one of the 20 recommended user slots on Twitter. It’s why so many top twitterers include links in their tweets, usually to their own properties. And why so many in the SEO/SEM business have flocked to use Twitter.
So it’s all good, right? Twitter is the new Google, a new fountain of traffic for web properties? That depends on how you look at it, and whether you think Twitter provides some essential, fundamental value. If you question whether it provides much value other than the potential to drive you traffic, the Florida real estate cum ponzi scheme analogy goes like this: people are flocking to Twitter mostly because they believe it has the potential to drive traffic, and as long as people flock in that perception is fulfilled.
The problems start occuring when the growth slows down, or stops.
And this movie, we’ve seen it before. Digg and Facebook got the same (ok, not quite the same) levels of hype in their days of ascendancy, for the same reasons. People thought they could be tamed, harnessed, used as traffic hoses. As growth (or the perception of growth) in traffic from those services decreased, so to did the hype attendant on them decrease, at least among the digerati. But unlike Twitter, one could argue Facebook, and to a lesser extent Digg, provided some more meaningful, underlying value to their end users.
I still think that the jury is out.
Documenting the Protests in Iran
One of the interesting things about being totally off the grid these past three days is that I was oblivious to what was happening in Iran. I would probably have followed the news obsessively if I had been in town, and connected.
Today, I made up for that a bit and out of purely personal interest put together a quick collection of videos from around the web covering the protests. The Channel 4 UK coverage is particularly worthy. I’ll try to update my particular collection over the coming days.
But short of that, you’ll find the videos being collected by the larger Vodpod community are really comprehensive and good and interesting. I’ve listed some other resources here on the Vodpod blog if you’re interested. A great example of crowdsourcing at work, where people collecting individually and independently, driven by their owns needs and desires, produce a worthy and timely news product.
Interesting Graph
I think Compete’s numbers are horses*#@. I usually prefer to look at Quantcast to compare sites when both are “quantified.”
But I thought this was interesting for the trendline. One site is written about extensively by the trade blogs, the other not at all. I’ll leave you guess which is which.
Del.icio.us for Video? Yes, We Have That
I like Fred Wilson’s blog. Read it regularly. Also follow him on Twitter.
On Friday, Fred posted an interview with Robert Scoble where he asked for a “del.icio.us for video.” Real-time maven that I am, I would have seen Fred’s note, it would have caught my attention, and I would have tweeted him right away. For I know of such a service!
But, very happily for me, I was very off the grid for three days here:
Now I’m back, refreshed, and should update the record. Del.icio.us for video? Already done. Called Vodpod. Been around for over 2 years. And indeed already pretty popular! You can see my video bookmarks on the right. Heck, you can even watch them there!
- Provides a handy browser bookmarklet (or extension if you prefer) so you can bookmark a video from any site that offers Flash video + an embed code (9500+ sites and counting)
- Makes it easy to share the videos you bookmark in an infinite number of ways through our widgets, RSS feeds, API, hosted video sites, applications for Facebook and Twitter and FriendFeed, and more
- Normalizes the video playback across thousands of different Flash player types, with consistent sizing and handling of auto-play (as best we can, anyway)
- Makes lovely thumbnails for the videos you collect
- Provides handy Flickr-like organizer, so you can order your collection as it grows
And more. The team gets an A for building an awesome service; I get a more critical mark when it comes to evangelizing the product among the technorati.
So @Fred — check it out! It’ll even work on your Boxee:-)
Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis from Between Two Ferns, Zach Galifianakis, Comedy Deathray, and Bradley Cooper
AVC on Conferences
Fred Wilson has a good post up on conferences, here’s the key line:
… the idea of travel to get together with the same old group, the tech biz insider club, doesn’t appeal to me at all.
I think that’s completely right. Someone really ought to do a survey of the top conferences to look at the overlap in speakers and attendees. Let’s face it, there are a lot of conference whores out there in the tech world.
The notion one has to go to conferences for “biz dev” or “PR” is misplaced. I think the unspoken reason so many of the same people go to the same conferences is their purely personal need for approbation and ego-stroking. People like being recognized by their peers, and that can happen in a conference setting.
My personal experience is that I get a lot more out of meeting with people who use our service, or might use it– 1-on-1, online, in-person, or on the phone — than I get going to conferences. Much more valuable, useful insights come from those conversations.
All this said, there have been some exceptions. eTech ‘05 (O’Reilly) was good and useful for me personally – timely themes, great speakers who were still fresh presences and voices at that point (before the Web 2.0 idea had become mainstream). More specific, tailored conferences for platforms or programming languages can be interesting, too (I spent the morning at WordCamp yesterday, and it’s an interesting way to get deep into what’s happening with a particular service and community).
But the more general, better known conferences I’ve attended the past two-to-three years proved to be big wastes of time and money. Same people, saying the same stuff, with pointless schmoozing and gossip in-between.
London Mayor Nearly Killed While Cycling – The Lede Blog – NYTimes.com
Coming Soon — My Real Time Web Jeremiad
The frothiness around the real-time web is starting to devolve into silliness, and I want to write about this in greater depth over the long weekend.
But here are three initial thoughts:
1. Twitter and FriendFeed and other real-time tools could go away tomorrow, and most of us could still use the web just fine. If Google went away tomorrow, it would be a major inconvenience and potentially a disaster. We’re just not dependent on these things the way we’re dependent on Google, and we’re not likely to ever be dependent on them.
I think that says something.
2. I think one useful analogy is the relationship between online chat and e-mail. Chat is real time, e-mail is latent.
Chat of course is important, and useful. But it didn’t kill e-mail. Not even close — read the latest Pew studies and e-mail is as critical and important as ever.
The real-time web technologies are important, and might be useful. But to claim that this is the next great wave, that it might replace search, that Google is imperiled by it in some way, is more or less horseshit.
3. The big revolution — one we’re still in — started in 2002-3 with the creation and mass-market adoption of tools and services that allow us all to publish our own content, and to share content with each other. I mean the advent of easy-to-use publishing tools (blogs, flickr, YouTube, etc), social networks, services like Digg, feed readers. Twitter is a part of this wave, and an important part.
It is this revolution that most challenges Google — a proliferation of tools and services that allow us to find good content through other people. Some of these services and tools have real-time web components, some don’t — that’s an aspect of the revolution, not the center of it.
Cities and Scale
One of the obvious things about cities, especially those of the dense and very urban variety, is that they scale. It’s such an obvious point I wonder if it’s even worth pointing out; but then, we haven’t really learned that lesson yet in America.
I’m just wrapping up my fourth trip to New York in an equal number of months. As I’ve gotten older, and have travelled more and have more cities to compare it to, it has become more obvious that the city just works. Particularly the subway and train systems (some resident New Yorkers would surely grumble in hearty disagreement with me).
Compared to other cities, it’s a breeze to get around. In the last five days, I got in a cab just once. The rest of the time was on subways and trains. And it all just worked (it delighted, even). The #2 or #3 express uptown and your at your Midtown meeting from Tribeca in 10 minutes. The combination of express trains and locals. The LIRR train and AirTrain combo that gets you to JFK in 50 minutes, with trains leaving every 10 minutes from Penn. Station. All of this possible because of the sheer scale of the city.
London (where I lived for 3 years) has this, too (without the brutal and awe-inspiring efficiency of New York). Tokyo and Paris as well. These cities are a delight to visit because they’re easy to get around. They operate at scale, taking advantage of their densities and burgeoning populations. Cities like San Francisco (and I include the Bay Area), Chicago, Washington and Berlin are the next level down — good, but not yet great, because they dont’ quite have the scale of these bigger cities.
Contrast those to LA, Atlanta, Houston — all horrible places to get around, and which diffuse the power of scale through their sprawl. Do our urban planners and transportation planners think of it this way — the advantages of scale? Are there books that push this theme? If you know of any, would love tips in the comments.
Lists
I have a rant all queued up about the ridiculous hype over “real time” on the Web. I think this note from Dave Winer — on FriendFeed, about FriendFeed! — gets at some of the silliness being peddled.
But before I get to my rant, I’ve been doing a mental inventory of sites that matter, to me at least(excluding hardware, OS’s, and work-focused apps). It’s useful, as I think it starts to drive at what is really important.
Sites or web services I use everyday and love:
Google
Google Maps
Netvibes (so ignored now, I have a whole post to write about it)
Wikipedia
Vodpod 
YouTube
Sites or web services I use less frequently, but love:
Craigslist
Flickr
Last.fm
WordPress
del.icio.us
Chow
Sites or web services I use everyday, but with ambivalence:
Gmail
Twitter
Sites or services I use, but with teeth gritted:
Facebook
FriendFeed (new version)
Outright failures (tried and abandoned):
Google Reader
Myspace
Countless others I’ve since forgotten.
