Yes, Google Should Buy Twitter
I agree wholeheartedly with this post by Henry Blodget, suggesting that Google should buy Twitter.
He says nearly everything I'd say. I'll only add that:
1. My "Twitter + payments" thesis would flourish at Google, and help Google Checkout compete against Paypal.
2. Google's biggest asset is searching all of the history of the web; their achillies heel in search (if they have one) is most likely the "real time" element that Twitter provides and is land-grabbing right now.
3. I don't think Twitter would sell for only $1 billion. After a first quarter of 2009 as good as theirs, they are going to over value themselves, and if $1 billion makes sense to Henry -- even though they've more than tripled in size after receiving an offer half the size -- then their strike point in this deal is likely much closer to $2 billion.
Would a Google Antitrust Suit be Good for Startups?
Yesterday, Silicon Alley Insider wrote that Obama's pick to head the Justice Department's antitrust unit is decidedly and publicly anti-Google.
Now, as Henry Blodget put it, this in no way means a certain antitrust movement against Big Rainbow (Google):
Hard to view this as anything but negative for Google. A strident government attack on the company seems unlikely (and ill-advised), but Google's future moves will almost certainly be more scrutinized and restricted than they have been to date. That's not good for shareholders.
However, I wonder if we as startupers -- rather than shareholders -- should encourage or discourage such an action.
In the past, of course, startupers and VCs have rushed to Google's defense (see my Google Antitrust articles from 2007). Not only has Google maintained relatively good Karma among the early stage community (awesome APIs will do that), but also Google has been seen as an attractive exit option for startups ever since they went public in 2004 and began a buying spree.
However, an analysis of this list of Google acquisitions (graphed below) reveals a suppressed appetite in Mountain View, leading me to wonder if keeping Google as a monolith is such a great thing for startups and VCs, who -- in a SOX environment -- increasingly rely on acquisitions as a way to realize the value of their company or investment.
If Google's status as a monopoly were taken on by the Justice Department (and if the DoJ prevailed), Google would likely split itself into several smaller companies, leaving the world with several powerful, cash-rich micro-Googles, in turn leaving with world with that many more exit or business development opportunies for startups.
On the flipside, if Google isn't split up, its obvious that Google's appetite for acquisitons will continue to slow, if not halt altogether, in fear of inducing futher scrutiny from the DoJ.
So, disregarding any political beliefs, corporate loyalties or grudges, I wonder: Should those of us in the startup market hope for a Google shakedown? Would an antitrust suit do us well?
The answer may be surprising.
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AppEngine is GOOG’s Web 3.0, Takes Aim at Facebook, not Amazon
"Web 3.0 will ultimately be seen as web applications which are pieced together."
- Eric Schmidt
In the wake of Google's AppEngine announcement, I want to remind you of this video I've posted before: Eric Schmidt talking about Google's vision for the Web 3.0 computing era.
To me, AppEngine seems like the most logical evolution of Google Gadgets! (This is what everyone thought Eric was talking about back in that video.)
The Real Story
However, every story written about Google's newly launched AppEngine has incorrectly correlated this new service to Amazon's EC2 and S3 services.
I think these people are way wrong and that if the Silicon Valley echo chamber wants to make up a competitor for AppEngine, its proper correlate (by a whisker) is Facebook's F8 platform. If you must cram this new service into a pigeon hole, think of AppEngine as the Facebook Platform for the grown-up web.
Why isn't AppEngine like EC2 & S3? Constraints, constraints, constraints.
- Google is going the run-time environment route, not the scalable, "put anything you want in a box and we'll scale it" route that EC2 provides. Case in point: we could run the BricaBox Platform on EC2 by tailoring our own environment (the LAMP stack) and booting it up on Amazon's servers. We could not get BricaBox running on AppEngine without re-writing in Python, ditching functionality which needed outside libraries or languages, or relational databases.
- Google is not trying to provide pure utility here, they are trying to provide utility tethered to their infrastructure. While EC2's initial investor pitch was "we have this scale and want to monetize unused portions of it," many smart people called them out for what they were really doing: creating a new business based on the concept of utility computing, which had nothing at all to do with their core infrastructure at Amazon.com (i.e. they weren't using EC2 or S3 for their needs).
The point about tying it into their infrastructure, however, is an important one. Google is clearly looking to have as much of these apps tie into existing pieces of Google's infrastructure: everything from the authentication systems (Google Accounts only!) to code libraries (most open source or API accessible code from Google is written in Python and ready to run in their environment) is based around this infrastructure and will be based around this going forward
So, why is AppEngine more like the Facebook Platform 3.0?
- AppEngine is designed for lightweight apps
- AppEngine apps are wrapped around Google's existing userbase and communication infrastructure (Gmail), creating a more organic Social Ecosystem for Google
- AppEngine is way more inter-operable with the rest of the web than Facebook apps, though still built around a proprietary stack (Google's runtime env is the equivalent of FBML)
- The first AppEngine apps will be huge! The next ones will have just as much trouble emerging from the murky waters of the web as any other apps
New GDocs UI + Features
Looks like some users, including me, got a Google Docs upgrade today.
The look/feel is much more like a desktop app, which makes sense.
Check out this screenshot (click to make bigger)!
By the way, I'll also note that Google Docs was a hot topic of conversation at dinner last night. My dad -- a forward trending businessman who uses Excel at its limits -- was in town and he told me, Michael Galpert, and Kristian Hansen that he found the possibilities of Google Spreadsheets incredible, but then got very turned off when he hit certain limits, such as the number of rows and equations you can have in a given sheet. Leave it to him to find those limits!
What really turned him off was the fact that he couldn't pay to remove those limits -- something he'd happily do, if asked.
The Social Graph API and Why Google Kills Semantic Web Companies
Google announced its Social Graph API late last week.
To many of us, Google's new API may not seem that important. Watch the video at the end of this post to hear more about what the API does from a practical perspective. But, for those companies engaged in semantic (data) parsing of the web, I'd like to point out that Google has just reminded you of something very important:
Google's Social Graph API reminds everyone that Google is Great. That it can reach into its vast database at any moment, and make hundreds of hours of other developers' work seem irrelevant; that big problems are small, when they tackle them; and the you can lead the way all you want in the world of the Semantic Web, but as soon as there's a lead anywhere in the industry, Google can come in and clean house by turning on a light switch.
You see, the Social Graph API, like several other Google-provided APIs, allows developers to dive into Google's rich index of hyperlinks -- an index they already have, and an index which is updated more frequently than anyone else can -- and pull out valuable meaning.
So, while you could go and build a service which analyzes links to people on webpages and then connects those links to other links about those people (similar to new features rolled out by Union Square Ventures-backed Adaptive Blue), you can now turn to Google's Social Graph API and build a similar service with nearly no heavy lifting.
For another example, look at what happened today: Google, who is already culling thousands of news sources and publishing them in their News section, just announced a local news feature, basically taking the content they already have, doing some analysis on it, and outputting something that will compete with fine folks like Outside.in, which had been work on the issue for quite some time. Once again, Google shows that with a flick of the switch they move head-on into a space powered by semantic analysis.
Another example here with with blogs search. Google Blog Search passed Technorati in short order, because at the end of the day, Google's search is going to be faster and better than anyone's, and all the GOOG had to do was create a service around data that was already flowing through their databases.
Data flow is actually an interesting part of this:
Umair Haque, who writes the Bubble Generation blog, recently wrote about Google and this issue of data flow. He said,
Google isn't revolutionizing media because it "owns the data". Rather, it's because Google uses markets and networks to massively amplify the flow of data relative to competitors. Even when Google opens up more and more data - and make no mistake, it will - it will still realize an advantage.
Is this the "semantic network effect"? Sounds like it. And what should we do with a well networked data source? Build on top of it, not against it. Against it -- trying to collect and analyze the same data -- you won't win. Prettying it up, you may.
Wikia Search, Knol, an API for Wikipedia, and Decentralization
Google is too powerful and Wikipedia should save itself (and the world) by introducing fully open API.
Introduction
For much of the past month, the tech press has been consumed by two things: the introduction of the Google Knol and the release of Wikia Search (see Allen Stern's excellent coverage here). If there's one thing that's clear from these two events, it's that we may be moving towards a cataclysmic collision between the Monolith-of-Search (Google) and the Monolith-of-Knowledge (Jimmy Wales and his Wikipedia/Wikia empire).
Before we examine these two groups, let's look back to at least August of 2007 for beginning of the collision:
In August, Answers.com, a publicly traded company, announced to its shareholders that, due to a slight change in Google's ranking algorithm, traffic and revenue for the company would decline by over 25%.
This caused many to raise questions about Google's power, including usually calming folks like Om Malik. Google's move sent a clear signal: you may have the information, but we have the gateway to that information, and in this relationship, you're the one who's vulnerable.
Knol and the Coming Threat to Wikipedia
Fast forward now to early December, when Google announced a new community knowledge project called "Knol." Knol squares off directly against Wikipedia in the war over human edited information centralization, and places itself at the source (Google Search) of at least 50% of traffic to the World's 9th most visited website (Wikipedia supposedly get 40-something percent directly from Google, but one has to assume that the search engine's ranking of the website increases links from other sources as well).
So here Google is, taking advantage of the centralization of Search, and wedging itself between its Search and "knowledge content." Taking the Answers.com issues into account, it's clear that Wikipedia could have a major drop in traffic sometime in the near future, with the combination of new Google Knol content and an always-possible change in the PageRank algorithm.
Search and Diversity
What's Jimmy Wales to do? What's the World to do, if the free, open knowledge base starts to lose power to a private, proprietary knowledge base run by the Internet's greatest superpower?
To start, Wikia (Jimmy's private but very-related company) has just released a search engine called Wikia Search. Besides the independent imperative to "make money" (see Valley Wag's Nick Carlson confused about this concept here), Jimmy and Company are surely realizing that a world with a more open Search market is a world better for Wikipedia itself.
With so much traffic coming into Wikipedia from one source, they're right to think that diversifying the source of traffic will be the only way for Wikipedia, and its wonderful ideals, to remain the #9 website in the World.
But Wikia Search is the wrong way to make Wikipedia better -- the products are disconnected and there's too small of chance of success -- so Wikipedia needs to save itself by diversifying where its knowledge lives, rather than diversifying the direct source of traffic to that knowledge.
How to diversify where Wikipedia lives
This all leads me back to what I state in the first sentence of this post: Wikipedia needs to introduce a full API to its content, editing, and moderation systems. Using today's technology, there's no reason why developers shouldn't be able to integrate Wikipedia into their own sites; and if developers are willing to abide by the standards of Wikipedia, there's no reason not to allow editing and moderation to occur in a distributed fashion either.
When you think of it, the fact that Wikipedia's content is not easily distributable through an API, and editable too, is surprising. Newer, Wikipedia-type products -- like Freebase -- have extensive APIs for the greater community. Even BricaBox will have an API for public content within its first year after launch.
And so I say it's time -- and with the Knol soon to come out, there's no better time:
Open Wikipedia. Give us an API. Allow us to display content easily and anywhere. And allow the beauty of Wikipedia to exist throughout the rest of the Internet.
Why Google needs to integrate Orkut and Groups, now
Yet another post inspired by a most excellent conversation going on within the nextNY community. The top half is important back story and theory, while the second half is the punch-line to validate the title of this post.
In a recent discussion on the nextNY listserv, Phil Dupré asked a "philosophical question:"
What is the distinct value between a wiki and a social networking site?
Adam Quirk was quick to point out that wikis are about information and social networks are about people. That's true, simple and clear. But I took the queue to bring up the fact there's a magical middle ground here. I said,
Look at Yelp. That's a site that's about the content -- and collaborating on that content -- but it is also about the people who are doing the collaboration. Yelp is not a wiki, but it does have many of the same benefits.
. . .
What's the relationship between information and the people building the content? We have a name for this (it used to be on our cards): Social Knitting.
Now, "Social Knitting" is a term I've used in the past to describe the process by which groups of people develop content and social bonds simultaneously. You can read more about my early thinking on the matter here; it's actually really fun for me to read that, because it was written before any code was written for BricaBox, and while a lot has changed and we know more today than before, it still rings true.
Back to the conversation on the nextNY list, Dan Lewis, of ArmchairGM, jumped in and talked about his site had a lot of "social knitting" like characteristics. He hit a lot of points right on the head, so I responded,
You're spot on with the ArmchairGM example. Again, it's about the content, but with good infrastructure for facilitating the natural social bonds and channels which come with collaborating on the information.
And then that statement lead to this question directed at me (from Donald Schwartz):
What in your view constitutes a "good" infrastructure and "how" does that contribute to "facilitating the natural social bonds and channels which come with collaborating on the information?" . . . Do you consider this Google infrastructure discussion facilitator a good one? If "no" how would you improve it?
And this is where Google Groups, as a product, enters the picture. In my pitch for BricaBox, I usually start by saying, "Currently, there are three mainstream web publishing tools for consumers: blogs, wikis, and forums." Indeed, a Google Group is a type of a forum, and it is one of the best places to find content (people don't search forums enough). The fact that this post was inspired by content on the Google Group is no coincidence. If you go back over Charlie's or Darren's posts, many of the are "inspired by" a conversation on the listserv, just like many of everyone's posts are inspired by conversations off the listserv.
The point is, that Google Groups is a great content creation platform, but it has zero infrastructure to promote the important social bonds that vitalize an information/content community. Right now, there's no room for social knitting.
Staying on the nextNY example, and as I've posted before, I find it to be my most valuable social network, but only because it's a local group and I've been able to create offline relationships with the people on the list. This is actually the Meetup model. But many groups are not based around an area, and are based around a topic instead. Members of these groups are from all over the place, so the only bond they have is through the threads on the forum.
That being said, this was my response to the last question asked above:
Good social infrastructure on a content sites allows people to be as interested in people as they are in content. Twitter started a great model, which has been picked up by Digg, The Huffington Post, and which we'll follow at BricaBox, which is the concept of
"following." Really it's the RSS model, but I think Twitter was the first service I used which used it as the social back-end of a content platform.
An example I left out is Facebook, which implicitly and algorithmically does the following for you, thus your News Feed.
And this is why Google needs to integrate Google Groups with Orkut, the social networking platform that (seemingly) every person with a Google ID now has access to.
With Groups merged with Orkut (where there is already a groups feature, by the way), the product would still be one of the most robust, enjoyable to use forums on the net. Then, with social infrastructure attached to it, and some really easy to implement news feed and "following" systems in place, I think Google Groups would have the social infrastructure in place to be a "social knitting" application, and a much more effective resource for finding, sharing and discovering information.
Of course it would also be a boost to Orkut membership too. And we all know Google could use a little help on this in the States.
Orkut is open to everyone(?)
I was under the impression that Orkut, the Google-owned and popular-only-in-Brazil online social network, was still invite only.
At least I thought that until tonight. Logged into Google/Gmail, I went into the "more" menu at the top of my screen, looking for Google Blog Search. However, I saw, for the first time, Orkut featured in the list of Google Products presumably available to me. This veered me off my search and over to Orkut.
Sure enough, two clicks later I had my own Orkut account.
Anyway, here are my first impressions:
1. Another site to build a network on?! Damn, yo.
2. Nice, clean interface. Very Google. Easy to find my friends, which is nice since I have to all over again. Certainly better than Yahoo!'s latest attempt.
3. Where's the "Sandbox" I've heard about? I want to play with OpenSocial apps.
4. If this is truly open now, I expect a ton of my friends to be on here soon.
5. I effin love the GTalk integration. I expect the Google Phone to be integrated with this.
I think this is exciting and will most more thoughts later, after playing with the app a little more. But am I crazy here? Has this been open? Was I sleeping? Or did I just break a story? Who knows. It's late and time for bed :-)
Hey Facebook: Focus on the Ad Platform, Give us the Social Graph
As a lover of an open future for the web, I'd like to make a deal with Facebook: go focus on your super sophisticated ad platform, and give us your social graph.
First background: I've written a few times in the past on how I feel about The Facebook Platform and the problems I see with it, but it's not because I'm against the idea of a social graph. In fact, there are some amazing points made in Brad Fitzpatrick's manifesto for an open source social graph -- points I, as the producer of a socially enhanced platform, can actually feel good about.
The problem with Brad's post, as I mentioned on Charlie O'Donnell's blog, is that it can't be done. Hate to say it, but it really can't. It's too complicated a project and too many self-interested parties are too far ahead. Getting it built and adopted would be a monumental task. However, recent news that Facebook is in the process of building a killer ad platform to match its social graph leaves us an opening.
Riffing off of Darren Herman's analysis of the ad platform, I commented that while there's real brilliance in this plan, I don't think Facebook can be both a graph and an ad platform: they'll end up in a Google-like quagmire, where the balance between being a personal information bank, public information bank, and advertising platform becomes nearly as tough as keeping everyone satisfied in a bona-fide thrupple.
So, which does Facebook want to be? If I was in their position, which would I bank on for the long-term? Graph or ad platform for the graph?
I'd take the ad platform, for sure (and I think I know which one Friendster would take too). If Facebook want's to be "the next Google," then they need to see that their real future is in being the AdSense for the next generation, making that silly $10 billion valuation look like peanuts.
And where does this leave us? With the graph part of the equation being jettisoned out to the open source community of course! Jettisoning the graph starts to accomplish the things Fitzpatrick calls for without the adoption and development problems starting from scratch would pose. And, if we've learned anything about the Internets, an open source graph jump-started with Facebook would undoubtedly have a longer, more wonderful future than the private company could possibly manage itself. Lastly, an open source social graph would enhance my favorite application development platform: the Internet.
Down with the Walled Garden! Up with the open source social graph! Long live Facebook the social graph-powered Ad Platform!
Who is Nate?
You've found Nate Westheimer's blog. Nate wears many hats. He's the EVP Product & Technology and Co-founder of AnyClip, the Organizer of the NY Tech Meetup, and Advisor to Flybridge Capital Partners.
More about Nate can be read on his Bio page and you can follow his thoughts on Twitter
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