web2.0 ridiculosity

We are already in the bubble and it is just a matter of when and not if; if the latest post in TechCrunch is anything to go by.

Ads are intrusive, period. Unsolicited ads are spam. And I would definitely be happy to pay a marginal premium for seeing adfree content. TiVo is profitable not for nothing. And I am yet to see a hugely successful service other than Google that runs only on ads – And I think ads as a way to sell anywhere and anytime is overblown. C’mon, there is no two ways about it.

Putting ads in search engines has an intent, the user is already looking for the product/service. The ads enhance this value to the intent.  The search engine already has her complete attention as she is already searching for new services/products. But not everywhere. A chat is not a place where I want to learn about new services/products; a conversation is already in place and that already has my attention. I am yet to see a IM conversation with intrusive ads which enhance the experience.

Not that ads don’t work; they do, for long we have seen TV channels, newspapers staying alive because of that. But they are not completely free either, they still charge some cost to cover the gaps. But to give an advice that any direct B2C product/service be free and supported by ads is just plain ridiculous. Good software design costs bucks, its development and maintenance costs too. Advising a (every) company to give a product for free and live by using ads is just plain BS. And users are definitely not going to be thrilled to see a (irrelevant) ad pop while in the middle of some conversation.

If this is the way things are, its just a matter of when the bubble bursts. Oh and btw just have look at the comments in the TechCrunch posts. Lots of voices of sanity in this already noisy business. Gems abound though…

Yet Another Social Networking Site? Go! Yaar?

Was not very surprised to see this article in the CIOL newsletter that a new social network site called Go!Yaar is up which is aimed at the Indian community. I have been looking at Rent-A-Coder to see if there are projects worth working on and I observed that almost every 10th website project is a facebook or a myspace clone.

As I see it, until now the Indian online social community has been pretty much polarised – either you are on Orkut or you arent. And the Indian subcontinent contributes to one of the biggest ethnic and geographical social networks online in Orkut barring otherwise the Brazilians(?). Its almost 4 years that Orkut came online and its now that the Indian social networking sites are waking up to the smell of fresh coffee. No wonder Rajan says India is on average 3 years behind the valley.

Now back to Go! Yaar. Two of the biggest points is about the strategy itself. Its interesting to find what they write about building Go!Yaar on the existing social networks – universities, colleges and corporates; which is to say puzzling. Other than the premier institures in India, say the IITs, IIITs, BITS, etc no other college or university boasts of a email address! So its puzzling which email addresses they are going to leverage. Early adopters cannot exist in isolation in a social network.

Also, though India is slowly picking up on the ecommerce front, it is nowhere near the position where we can monetize the tremendous value in the online ad marketing or sales as did MySpace.

As I see it, Go!Yaar has its tasks very well cut out:

1. Getting people to first migrate to their site from Orkut. i.e build the intial critical mass of early adopters
2. Once they reach the critical mass, the other friends would not wait long to join the Go!Yaar site. But how? I dont have a college email id?!!!
3. Change its name. Too ABCDish/NRIsh name. The target audience because of the name is very very niche, looks like it targets the urban hip hop crowd.
4. Find ways to monetize the social network. Google Ads or any of the Ad Affiliate programs might not be of much help. We are fools to click the ad once, but twice? Remeber, we as yet dont buy my new camera by seeing the ad.
5. Think of better ways to get people faster onto their site: Migration must be very easy. Make that migration automatic for me will ya? That is precisely why we see mass migrations to WordPress.
6. Try to win where others lost out badly. sms.co.in, fropper (have stopped seeing the fropper ads on TV long since, what happened?), friendster, hi5… You are the entrepreneur, you find out.
7. Tries to be too good at too many things. Make each one as seamlessly and perfect apeice as possible.
8. Get the early adopters (premier educational institutions, corporates) to adopt it with gusto and stay on the site. Find methods to get these early adopters hooked to the site.

The plusses however are it aims to be a very tightly integrated set of online services, blogs, video, email video, photo album, IM. But this one looks like it can be poised to strike big if it can stay afloat without taking that financial hit and also not to speak of the steady migration of the early adopters into the site. Promise of mobile integration is interesting but unless until the features are compelling enough to solve one main pain point of offline social networking aspect, there is no way I will waste my 1 rupee on sms.

It will be interesting to see how this one fares. I have tried to go to Fropper but its too much of a fad to be of really much value to me. As of now, inspite of its crappy server, its Orkut that I am on, all my friends are there only

FaceBank – Killer of BillMonk ?

BillMonk a social money site which helps you to track the expenses sharing with your friends was profiled on TechCrunch and Arrington was quite much taken by the Idea. You might want to have a look at the links in the bottomt to know what im talking about. And now Facebook has Launched its FaceBank, which seems to be a killer of BillMonk.

The big bullies are turning out to be quite the killers. MySpace nuking singlestat.us and now FaceBank all poised up to nuke out billmonk. Even though MySpace nuked SingleStat.us because it was adding load onto the MySpace servers; FaceBank is very clearly a direct competitor [killer ?] of BillMonk.

Monetization or Feature Bloat

I have always been thinking of how FaceBook would be monetizing its tremendous social network. Now with FaceBank we seem to be already moving in that direction. This actually seems to be a very logical move to me, considering that your social money is tied up with your friends are your pals are all actually inside the FaceBook! This is one simple addition to FaceBook but seems like the move is going to have some really bad repurcussions on other startups in this area.

But whats getting me to think is : Is this direction of a Facebank a clear indication that FaceBook is running out of ideas. By making its API open, it has definitely chosen to tap into the minds of brilliant geeks around the world to build them interesting apps for Free. And with FaceBank coming in, I seriously doubt if really this act is an act of desperation? Clearly this could be one of those shooting-the-gum-on-the-wall-and-see-if-it-works ideas, an act which Google has mastered recently. Putting in everything to just hope that atleast one of them works!

Consolidation as a method of tying up consumers ?

Consolidating the apps is a very common undercurrent here and this looks very similar to the Google myth about atleast one team of 10 engineers working on one very interesting idea in the world. And Im already wondering that if any of the other products or applications with requirements for a network to be present can already use the existing networks: More succintly put will FaceBook be that monster that is going to put its network to use by just churning out new cooler applications thought out by entrepereneurs and just use its network to nuke them out.

I wont however pay my obituaries to BillMonk as yet. It looks like an excellent service and not sure how many people are comfortable mixing up fun with serious money! I mean I never know when FaceBook will suddenly turn out to be my Life Manager?! And moreso who hasnt heard that Bulk slows you down; FaceBooks heading in that direction perhaps?

Links:

• Bill Monk profiled on TechCrunch
• BillMonk on TechCrunch again