Total BS

I’ve been waiting for Google to update JotSpot for a very long time. Finally, they released an updated. It was a completely and utter failure to innovate and improve.

It is indeed JAW - just another wiki. Or just another @$!%ing wiki if you want some extra emphasis.

Actually it’s really just JotSpot, the themed edition.

Besides the fact that there’s some loose Google app integration (and it is indeed loose, as it doesn’t automatically connect to your google docs list, Picasa account, etc., you have to copy and paste an embed URL - gee, thanks for nothing), it hasn’t changed a bit.

I can’t believe it took them 16 months to put out this piece of garbage. JotSpot could be on version 3, if they were never bought out by Google.

Clearly, Google cobbled Google Sites together in a weekend, when they realized they let it languish and suck over 16 months of inactivity. You may have forgotten, but JotSpot 1.0 was pretty hot for a wiki. Back in summer 2006.

However that hasn’t stopped some from dubbing it a “Sharepoint killer.” Ok, Google said it first, but that hasn’t stopped others from jumping on that bandwagon.

Google has been working on Google Apps for over a year (two years?). It’s still nowhere near Enterprise ready. In fact, they’re getting lapped by other online office developers like Zoho.

So after a year and a half of inactivity, a weekend’s worth of work suddenly makes JotSpot, Skinned Edition a Sharepoint killer (one of the more legitimately enterprise-level MS products - you’re not going to see any mom & pop’s running Sharepoint).

That is face-punchingly stupid.

Guy Kawasaki wrote that you should only ask women to provide feedback and help develop a business model, because it was useless to ask men about business models, because of a “killer” gene within their DNA. This gene made men want to kill people, animals and plants. But now, the only socially acceptable outlet for this killer gene was through “killing” another organization. For example, Zune the iPod killer, OS X the Windows killer, Google Docs the Office killer and now Google Sites the Sharepoint killer. Now he may have been slightly facetious, but as I’ve followed the industry (and the requisite stupidity as well), I’ve realized that the above statement was the most astute business insight I’ve ever come across. We may as well make it law.

We have now hit a point in time in which advertising is positioned as a value-add, not to marketers, but to users. I can’t say I’m not intrigued by the concept, if only to see if people will buy the shtick or see through it as total BS (ah yes, my first BS-related pun ever).Facebook notes:

Advertising doesn’t have to be about interrupting what you’re doing, but getting the right information about the purchases you make when you want it.

Much appreciated, I guess. And it makes perfect logical sense. This is why the contextual Google ads are such a success. But it fits better on Google, because “searching” has a much more natural bridge to buying. “Socializing,” however, doesn’t have that. Consequently, the ad model feels unnaturally shoehorned into Facebook. Never have I visited Facebook with a product or purchase intent in mind. Not to say it won’t work - at worst, it’ll provide better results compared to the randomizer ads they put out now - but the opportunities for it to work will be much more limited compared to Google, IMO.Also on a separate note, there’s been some recent buzz about Facebook replacing Yahoo as part of the “big 3,” along with Google and Microsoft. That’s the most retarded thing I’ve heard this week. And anyone who thinks so, is by extension, a moron. Facebook gets to be in the big 3 when it stops having its traffic quintupled by Yahoo or when its real market cap hits $37B+, not when internet geeks play chutes and ladders with imaginary numbers.

Gmail has upped the ante by offering IMAP access. At least for me. It’s probable that this is inconsequential for most people, but this is something I’ve been hoping for a very long time now. Lack of IMAP was the major reason I held off on making gmail my primary email service.This also ups the ante on Yahoo and Microsoft, both of whom offer only limited pop3 access (Yahoo, if you pay. Hotmail if you use Windows Mail Live or pay.). Again, for the common user, not a big deal. But for the hardcore user, IMAP is pretty huge.

I get the impression that every new startup’s business model is based on the assumption that they’ll get enough traffic to become profitable via advertising. In fact, Facebook’s whole multi-billion dollar valuation seems to be based on the assumption that they’re going to become the next Google. Note to world, there’s only one Google. Even Yahoo and Microsoft are screwing it up. If advertising is your business model and you’re not an ad server, ad network or technology/media power, then you don’t have a business model.People still hate adsContextual ads doesn’t buy you love. They’re more tolerable, because they’re more useful. But as they become more ubiquitous, they’ll become less effective, simply because of the general dilution that occurs when the entire category shifts to the same model.There’s just one GoogleAdSense as an advertising platform means your advertising-based business model is just as good as your competitor’s, and no better. Google has a continuously evolving ad serving algorithm that helps them adapt and innovate. Unless you also have a continuously evolving advertising technology, I highly doubt your business will be buoyed by advertising dominance, unless…You have massive reachEven dumb ads work fine. Ask the major TV networks, ask ClearChannel. This is where efficiencies of scale can pay off, in that if you’re able to leverage the efficiency of contextual ads and get it to scale with massive traffic then you can have a fraction of the relative “traffic” that HBO gets and still be as profitable. However, sites that get this much traffic are of a select few. The long tail means 99% of everyone out there still sucks. So if you’re one of the 99% of the tail that sucks, you probably shouldn’t be banking on advertising building your millions.

I’m sure there were a few business and communications goals when Ask.com launched their new “algorithm” ad campaign in March/April (I think).

• Increase share of searches (ideally stealing from Google, since the whole algorithm campaign seems tailor made for targeting Google)
• Increase first time traffic
• Impact ad revenue
• Improve Ask.com brand awareness
• Improve/change Ask.com brand perception

And for the past couple months, there’s been a pretty healthy amount of buzz around the campaign. But mostly because the campaign has sucked.The accepted belief is that any publicity is good publicity. That if people are talking about your ad, you’re getting the word out one way or the other, so it’s all good. To some degree this is true. But it really depends on the circumstance. For a flash in the pan, yeah anything’s good. For a company that’s planning to stick around for the long haul… well, if you had a choice, you’d much prefer the publicity for the right reasons.All the mystery around the Ask.com is driving traffic. According to Alexa, traffic’s up 24% in the past 3 months. Google traffic’s down 7%.So traffic is up. Revenue’s probably up. Share of searches has probably increased. People are talking. Empirically, you’d guess that Ask.com’s brand awareness is up. Perception is probably not changed, or probably has worsened, but that’s always spinnable. So from an ad agency perspective all this is great news. Another win for CP+B.Except this campaign has no legs. It’s built no affinity with users. And the only reason anyone’s talking about the ad campaign is because everyone’s confused and pissed off at the inanity of it.For the technically in-the-know, no one’s buying that Ask’s algorithm is better than Google’s. And for the layman, no one knows what the funk, an algorithm even is. So ultimately, their campaign’s built on a pretty baseless reason to believe.So statistically, the Ask campaign’s been a huge success to date, for all the wrong reasons. An unbelievable reason to believe. A nebulous ad campaign. Word of mouth that’s spread for the same reason Snakes on a Plane word of mouth spread, i.e., the suckiness.Six months later, everyone stops talking about how retarded the ad campaign is, the buzz dies down, and Ask’s traffic drops to about pre-campaign levels. Except now they’re tens of millions of dollars out with no measurable impact on their brand perception. But whatever. They had their 15 minutes of fame.To be frank, I really haven’t been impressed by anything CP+B’s done, from a strategic standpoint, since Mini (although I’m not claiming to have seen everything). And I felt Mini was really just a ripoff of the 70’s Volkswagen campaign. Ironically, I did enjoy CP+B’s VW campaign from an entertainment perspective. But it seems like everything I see from them is based on some completely jacked up concept. It’s great from a buzz perspective, but it’s easy to throw wack ideas out there just to get people talking.

The Facebook platform is pretty frigging smart. Actually, the notion of creating an open environment in order to extend and accommodate to your user’s world is fairly obvious, but kudos to them for pushing through with it. It seems like as soon as sites get successful, they get greedy and build walled gardens to prevent users from escaping. Well, at least Facebook realizes that they are not the center of their users’ world. It’d really only take one misstep (though it’d have to be a huge misstep), for their users to ditch FB and head off to another network. But the value add provided by the FB platform gives more reason for people to stick around. It also dilutes the impact of a misstep (although it’ll end up diluting the fervor of the diehards, but alas that’s the price of success and getting big).I’d still like to see FB open up more and adopt Open ID and making it easier to interface with FB outside of facebook.com, but this is a good first step.Now when I say Facebook, the new Google, I’m referring to the platform environment, the dangers of the open API. This is somewhat of a trojan horse godsend for a lot of these smaller SNSes like Pickspal or Flixter, because in a snap of a finger, suddenly the big, hairy issue of reaching network effects has been seemingly solved. From a traffic and user engagement standpoint, it’s great. I would guess that the business goal for most of these guys is to get exposure and try to bring back traffic back onto its main site. Theoretically this would also enable them to focus on site features that are more contextual to the behavior and purpose of the site and offload the broader social networking basics to FB.In the short to medium term, I think this is fine. But eventually there’s going to be conflicts of interests for some of these guys (I’m going to call them mini-SNSes to try to avoid ambiguous pronouns). A lot of the mini-SNS’ brand engagement is going to happen on FB, so it’s going to dilute the mini-SNS’ brand image and user loyalty. Getting on the FB platform may help these mini-SNSes get a million users quicker, but it’s not going to make it any easier to keep those million users loyal.I’m also curious about how it impacts the profit model. All everyone has at this point is just advertising. And I have a thought or two about that in general that I’ve been meaning to share, but that’s neither here nor there. But if 95% of a mini-SNS’ user engagement happens on FB, that might help the mini-SNS’ user and engagement numbers, but it’s not going to bring revenue in. And FB isn’t going to allow these mini-SNSes to reap advertising dollars on FB either. But I’ve only thought about it for about 5 minutes, so who knows. I would guess (or more likely hope) these guys have a much better plan moving forward.My last point is really the whole reason for why I wrote this post. I guess I could’ve been more brief, but whatever. Google rolled out features to Google Maps earlier this year that killed off about 600 little Google-Map API based startups. This is the danger of relying completely on another’s API. If the sugar mama decides to cut you off, you get screwed. And if the sugar mama decides to move into your space, you get killed. The platform is great for the users, all the buzz is well-deserved (even though it’s not like they cured cancer, it’s just an obviously solid business decision. This is the problem when everyone keeps making stupid decisions, it makes the good decisions seem like mind-blowing, world-changing decisions.), and for FB, this is going to catapult their growth even moreso. But I can’t help but think that a year from now, we’ll be seeing a Google Maps redux.