Archive for August, 2008

No doubt, Google is the largest internet giant that determines exactly how the market operates and how other players behave online. What’s more, acquisition by Google is certainly one of the most appealing exit strategies for many of the newly-launched startups - this exit strategy is often the most financially rewarding one and it offers a huge opportunity for further growth of a product with the help of Google’s engineers, servers and money. And even though many startups have been [...]

Back in my university years when I studied philosophy I once wrote a paper on crowd thinking and behavior. That experience taught me that crowd is a very dangerous phenomenon because a crowd rarely can be reasonable and people can be easily manipulated to follow guidance from any leader clever enough to issue orders a crowd will understand.
Unfortunately now that I watch web 2.0 as an industry I often notice classical examples of crowd thinking here where people who are [...]

Last Thursday Twitter officially announced its war on spam on the microblogging service and provided some details on what measures would be implemented. Basically they hired a dedicated person to track accounts engaging in suspicious activities, suspending and reviewing these accounts to either completely remove or restore if the account owner is found to be not guilty. One of the metrics used is the number of Twitter users blocking this or that particular users (I suggested that Twitter should have [...]

Today we have a very peculiar piece of news from Ukraine - both funny and at the same time very sad. Same as the rest of the world Ukraine is getting ready for the back to school day. In the meanwhile teachers in the region of Dnepropetrovsk participated in a conference of educators on Wednesday.
The questions discussed at the conference included equipping schools with computers and teaching children the basics of computer science in schools. The results of the discussion [...]

Microsoft has just announced that the software giant is buying Greenfield Online, owner of European network of price comparison, shopping and consumer review websites Ciao. The acquisition is for approximately $486 million so this makes it the most expensive purchase for Microsoft.
What Ciao offers to its users is comprehensive search for products and prices based on up-to-date price information from thousands of online merchants along with reviews of the products by other users. A total number of reviews generated to [...]

Now we hear the news that Yahoo Mash will be closed some time today. It has been announced by Yahoo! in an email all the users of the social network have received. In the email Yahoo! Team thanks everyone for participating in the beta test of the social network and invites to copy all the content we may want to keep to a separate document. I don’t have any content over there anyway and I don’t really think many users [...]

We have already seen enough competition (I think) between services intended to help blog readers easier authenticate themselves to leave a comment on a blog and have all the comments from blogs supporting this or that service aggregated into one account: Disqus, SezWho, JS-Kit, IntenseDebate all work in the same field with slight variations of approaches. But unfortunately as blog owners choose different services to install on their blogs, readers end up creating accounts with each of the services.
Today we [...]

Right after we were shown the upcoming FriendFeed beta featuring friend lists and some other interesting tweaks of the interface, people started sharing what else could make our experience of FriendFeed closer to perfect in the special room for discussions the team set up for everyone to share their feedback on the redesign. I believe that the team actually hoped to hear feedback only on how the latest version works and what people actually think about this version in the [...]

I am sure that every Twitter user has already seen this or that example of marketing or promotion on Twitter. We have also seen ideas that popular users can monetize their accounts with huge numbers of followers by using some brand’s logo for their avatars and skinning for their entire pages. Today we finally see what should have been expected: marketing professionals offering their services to officially promote brands on Twitter (well, actually they seem to offer consulting services to [...]