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MyPlace Analysis

Real Unreal World Copies Sci-Fi Models, But With More 'Chillin' August 22, 2005

Science fiction often becomes science fact, though sometimes the accomplishment isn't recognized for what it is because of the prosaic manner in which it takes place.

Think about one sci-fi set piece: the computer-generated, alternate-reality world, where people spend their time playing and interacting, like the Metaverse in the novel "Snow Crash" or the Holodeck on "Star Trek" or the "Matrix" movies from Hollywood. They create environments so real, so immersive, that users lose themselves in them.

It is becoming clear that the collective Internet is growing into that immersive reality, even if it doesn't have the animated "avatar" guides and realistic 3D graphics that these places have in science fiction.

How else can you explain Web sites like MySpace (www.MySpace.com)? There, untold tens of thousands of young people spend many hours a day wandering around as if in a suburban shopping mall, looking for friends, expressing opinions, acquiring trends and, in general, leading a life that at times seems to have more reality to it than the life they lead when they log off.

MySpace is a "social networking" site. In fact, it's currently the hottest of the scores of such sites on the Web. Last month, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought its parent company for $580 million, bringing unimagined wealth to the group of California twentysomethings who started the operation two years ago, and who are now busy trying to assure their users that nothing about the site will change.

In a social-networking site, users create a home page for themselves, with pictures and descriptions of their interests, and then go off and look for other like-minded people. You ask these other people if they will be your friends. If they say yes, you get to put their picture on your page, along with a link to their page.

Some Internet brands -- Yahoo, Google, eBay, Amazon -- seem to grow only stronger with each passing year. The social-networking sites, though, seem to come and go like boy bands, going from hot to cold on the whim of the crowd. Some of the arrivals at MySpace told me they came there after spending time on TheFacebook. As for social-networking pioneer Friendster, well, that might as well be the Atkins diet. It's so 2003.

Analysts who try to follow this world say they are continually amazed at the apparently random manner in which a site becomes popular. MySpace professes to have a music orientation. It jumped on the blogs trend early, and it makes it easy for users to pile all manner of graphics and multimedia onto their home pages. As a result, many of them come to resemble a scrapbook put together after a long night of drinking, during which everything looked good so everything got added in.

MySpace's technology doesn't explain its success. Instead, some unpredicted perturbation in the cultural atmosphere seems to get a few people interested in a particular site, and that quickly snowballs into a full-fledged viral phenomenon.

Companies like Yahoo see social networks like MySpace as the long-awaited antidote to useless Web sites that have ads but nothing else. That's because they hope that you will go to a social-network site and develop a trusted circle of acquaintances you can turn to for, say, product recommendations.

I am dubious. In a few hours on MySpace, I learned that Jenny Boom, Zolom and Shantastica were all in my Extended Space. I don't think I will be asking them about mortgage refinancing any time soon.

So what are the kids that frequent MySpace like these days?

They are -- stop the presses -- interested in sex and attractive sexual partners. They have exhibitionist tendencies, though in a PG sort of way, at least on MySpace. They claim to spend much of their spare time "chillin." They don't seem to read a lot. Part of the standard MySpace questionnaire asks about favorite books, and a common answer is, "I don't have time to read." Who would with all that time spent chillin?

Much of MySpace is open for all to see, meaning you can read many of the notes that users leave for each other even if you haven't been more formally inducted into their corner of the social network. The most common rhetorical style you'll find here is the sort of MTV-esque feigned inarticulateness that, one fears, only masks the genuine article.

"Me and Jamie going to getz some groceryz ok so your food is in the fridge," writes user Ria to user Ish. "Im leaving the Bambinoz with Chale so youz know."

The male-to-female ratio on MySpace seems three or four to one, so women, especially attractive ones, quickly get attention. (The friend-acquisition process on MySpace is connected to the attractive sexual partner pursuit mentioned above.)

Donna, a 22-year-old New Yorker with Sarah Jessica Parker styling, got hundreds of friends requests within a few days of signing up. She reports to me: "I'd say about half seemed gentlemanly and polite, and the other half was just to say things like, 'You're hot.' I obviously deleted those messages."

If only real life had a delete key.

Cashing in on RSS

Cashing in on RSS
VC Jim Moore is betting that this new technology will usher in a new era of software applications for the web.
Aug 12 2005
By David Kirkpatrick
Fortune.com

You know that blogs are cool, but do you know that blogs, and a related technology called RSS, may hold the future for software? That’s the view of Jim Moore, a longtime friend of mine, whom I talked to earlier this week. Moore and his three business partners caused quite a stir last month, when they announced that they have raised $100 million for the first-ever venture capital fund devoted to these technologies, called RSS Investors.

Moore, author of an important book on business strategy, The Death of Competition (HarperBusiness, 1996), says that blogs and RSS are ushering in "the democratization of web services."

After spending years as a consultant to CEOs of some of the biggest technology companies, like Intel, Hewlett-Packard, and Qualcomm, Moore took time off a few years ago to be a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet & Society. At the center, he encountered Dave Winer, a legendary programmer who played a big role in developing blogs, RSS, and even the latest rage, podcasting. "Having Dave as my office mate for a year is what led me to realize there was a big business opportunity here," says Moore.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, but it’s easier to use than to explain. RSS is just a way to have information regularly sent to you from a website, in what’s called a "feed." Users receive these feeds in special RSS reader software, much as you receive email in your Microsoft Outlook. These feeds can come from any source, large or small. I receive a feed of headlines from The New York Times on my My Yahoo! home page, but I also subscribe to one from Fred Wilson, a New York investor who maintains a blog called A VC. More sophisticated RSS readers can be found on sites such as Bloglines and NewsGator, and on web browsers such as Apple’s Safari. Other companies that have piggybacked on these technologies include Technorati, Feedburner, Feedster, and NewsGator.

Bigger Internet players are now snapping up firms that use these technologies. Flickr, recently bought by Yahoo, lets users share photos, post them to blogs, and send them from their camera-phones. And Bloglines was bought by Ask Jeeves, which is itself now being acquired by Interactive Corp.

New RSS-centric companies are emerging all the time. Rojo is building a new sort of feed subscription site, and Flock is creating what it calls a "social browser." One firm that Moore particularly admires is del.icio.us, which allows you to save websites you like, create labels for them, and share them with your friends. del.icio.us, makes highly creative use of RSS feeds. You can, for example, subscribe to a feed that will only send you links to online videos that at least ten people have labeled "funny."

Moore says RSS and other technologies are poised to vastly expand online automated software programs, or what are called "web services." He thinks that more ways to acquire, share, and benefit from information will emerge. "There are a whole set of things which, taken together, are a new paradigm for software development," says Moore. "The revolution is that a set of elements now allow people, including end users, to very simply knit together powerful "web services."

Until recently, professional software developers have mostly created web services using one of two complex sets of code. Microsoft has .Net (pronounced "dot-net") and Sun, IBM, and others use the competing J2EE. But Moore thinks we are heading to a world of web services built around RSS and other simple web technologies. This will let just about anybody build on to someone else’s software application on the web. "The elements of this programming are very simple instructions, like URLs, RSS, and zip codes," he says.

One example of how technology already lets people build onto other software applications is Google Maps, which allows you to subscribe to a map from its database and then put your own information on top of it. That’s just the kind of service, or simple application, that Moore finds exciting.

Moore believes that even companies like enterprise software giant SAP could find themselves threatened, as pieces of their business become available as much simpler services on the web. He speculates, for example, that companies will begin to figure out how to perform tasks, such as tracking inventory, using RSS feeds.

Jim Moore has always been one of my most visionary friends. I’m not sure this world he describes will emerge. But there’s no question that RSS is one of the most powerful technologies of the Internet age.

Google to Buy Meetroduction

Google to Buy Meetroduction By Susan Kuchinskas

http://www.meetro.com/

Google is expected to announce the acquisition of Meetroduction later this week, a source close to the transaction told internetnews.com.

Chicago-based Meetroduction launched the first version of Meetro, "location-aware social networking software," on Aug. 4. The idea of Meetro is to find people to hang out with in the physical world.

Google (Quote, Chart) has been rumored to be developing instant messaging capabilities, along with its moves into creating a more portal-like experience via My Google, the personalized start page Google introduced in May. A Google spokesman declined to comment for this story.

Meetro combines instant messaging with automatic local buddy finding. Users can log in and browse or search profiles of other members in order to find someone compatible who's nearby and also logged in. The area to be searched can be narrowed to a quarter mile.

"The beauty of Meetro is the direct way in which you connect with people nearby," Paul Bragiel, CEO of Meetroduction, said in a statement about the software release. "Just run Meetro, double-click on a person and begin chatting immediately. It's all real-time, which means you see and communicate with local people who are online right now."

The software is compatible with AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and ICQ, adding the ability to find people outside of one's personal buddy lists. Before the acquisition, the company planned to eventually support MSN Messenger and Jabber as well.

According to a recent report by Majestic Research, Google users spent only 21 percent of their time in search; on Yahoo, users spent only two percent of their time searching. While Google is by far the search leader, archrival Yahoo (Quote, Chart) leads in total traffic and page views. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, Yahoo had 83 million unique visitors in June, and they spent more than two hours apiece on the site. Google had 62.4 million unique visitors, spending slightly more than 22 minutes per person on the site.

John Aiken, the Majestic Research lead analyst in the report, wrote, "In a sense, Yahoo has long had not just one, but two core offerings: mail and search, both of which attracted approximately 55 percent of Yahoo's unique visitors in June. A host of additional features ranging from messenger to music round out Yahoo's roster, creating a heavily populated traffic ecosystem in which users spent nine times as many minutes as they did on Google sites in [the second quarter of 2005]."

While Google saw strong growth from search, according to Majestic's report, adding additional services would increase "stickiness" and provide more kinds of inventory for it to show ads against.