Yumiko and I are moving to Austin Texas this month. I’ve accepted a job with a dotcom there. I want to send out all our love and appreciation to everyone we’ve met while here in The Lou. For what it’s worth, I’ll be one closer to the Alamo.

We’ve got some things that we’re not going to take with us. Some bookshelves, a glass computer desk, some books. Please let us know if you’d like them.

and another:

Good luck with the epistomological questions, Siri-chan. source: siricrazy.com

The second thing pundits exclaimed about Siri, the voice-controlled search bot on iPhone 4s, was that it poses a real threat to Google’s business model, and puts Apple as the company that could possibly unseat the Emperor. (the first thing everyone said was “Squee! New Apple thingy!”)

Pish-posh.  Apple’s Siri is no more threat to Google as the iPhone itself, a Kinect, or a new keyboard.  Siri is an input device, that’s it.  Yes, it’s “smarter” than just a keyboard, and possibly more nuanced than a Kinect, but it’s still an interface point.  “Ah!” they say, “Siri doesn’t pull from Google results, only Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, and Yelp“, and therein lies the perceived threat to Google.  This is premature, and backwards.  Those sources for Siri are all curated (I don’t like how that word is starting to get overused, but it’s accurate here) query results.  Wikipedia, WA, and Yelp have all been personally tuned in to the “correct” result by some crowd or learned scholars or something.  Google is just spitting up whatever it’s robots think is a best fit.  Siri, as a product of Apple’s obsessive devotion to quality, would only want to touch curated sources.  Fair enough.

That misses the point, however.  There’s nothing stopping Google from introducing some sort of curation process.  They certainly have the data to start something– they just need the editors to straighten things out for them.  I would submit that Google hasn’t been successful in this crowdsourcing recruitment because either: (a) they haven’t felt the need because their robots were smart enough, or (b) crowds wouldn’t feel to jazzed up about helping a company with a stock price of over $600/share.  For point (a) Siri now shows them that there may be a need to introduce humans alongside the robots.  For point (b) Google could easily part with some of all that GoogleAd money to an army of curators through some sort of affiliate micropayment scheme.  Think DMOZ, but now actually getting paid for all those slavish hours you devoted to sorting out Land of the Lost episodes.

As those data improves those results, why wouldn’t Siri start including Google in her decision-making?  Siri is not a threat to Google– she’s just a bit of a reminder they need a new suit and tie while she patiently waits for them.  Eventually, Siri will need Google just as much as the rest of us.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I own, like, 50 shares of GOOG, or something, so I’m rolling in money.

Continuing on my earlier model of viewing these different social networks as strata (or layers) that  build on top of each other, I would agree with Mr Evans’ point that the identity layer is largely established now, and we are beginning to move up into a new reputation layer.  It’s not enough to simply evaluate someone by the company he/she keeps, it’s now how and where they demonstrate their answers to a barrage of questions.  This used to be what blogs were for, but no one has time to read  those anymore, or at least the format is switching from blowhards like me pushing answers in a blog like this, to answers getting pulled by responding to specific questions from the masses.

Back in the day, we only had our Slashdot scores and loginIDs to go by, but the world quickly moved beyond simple geekery, and that doesn’t hold much wight anymore.  Klout is a naked popularity contest– but on the Internet, what else is there?

Yahoo, you know I love you...

Yahoo! is in play, again.  Microsoft has been rumored to renew it’s offer, Google may be lurking around, and Alibaba, the China ecommerce marketplace / payment method / sourcing B2B giant, has also been very public about it’s wanting to buy Yahoo!.  In my opinion, Alibaba may offer the best path forward for Yahoo.  My take on the reasons why:

Microsoft – Meh. Microsoft has been desperate to get something to counteract Google’s rise.  As the world moves ever closer to full-cloud operations, the desktop apps become more and more irrelevant.  Yes, people will be using Outlook and MSWord for years to come, but that’s just inertia, it’s not growth.  Bing was a good shot, but it’s still getting 3rd place behind Google and Yahoo for keyword buys from companies.  If MS could acquire Yahoo, they would increase their share of keyword revenue, and might get enough core revenue to start making something.  However, this doesn’t really do anything for Yahoo– it just gets them bought out and assimilated into Redmond.  Meh.

Google – Nope. I doubt the Federales would allow this one: Google already controls possibly 80% of the online advertising revenue out there– if they bought Yahoo, that share could surge up to 90%.  Monopoly (funny how companies are getting to that status faster and faster…).  Here again, Yahoo would just become a brand within Google, and probably quietly left to ebb away into nothing as users were migrated over to GMail, G+, and Google Apps.

Alibaba – Interesting. Yahoo already owns 46% of Alibaba.  There’s a certain I Ching symmetry/irony that could come if Alibaba were to buy out their own “father”.  If Alibaba were to get Yahoo, it would give them a solid beachhead to take all their platforms developed in China to bring to international markets: Tmall, Taobao, Alipay, and Alibaba B2B would gain a US-based staff and org in one fell swoop.  But the important piece that Jerry Yang should consider, IMHO, is how Yahoo! might survive and grow into something sustainable: Yahoo! would likely disappear inside Microsoft or Google, but it stands a good chance of staying on– and perhaps thriving– as a branded portal inside the Alibaba group: as a company, Jack Ma (CEO of Alibaba) tends to segment out new markets, pour money in as needed, and then interconnect companies as much as possible.  Yahoo! enjoys strong portal loyalty with its users.  It’s a decent news aggregator for people, it’s got a kick-ass web mail client (Zimbra).  With all of these, Alibaba could suddenly gain a portal face for it’s considerable marketplace engine in Tmall and Taobao, as well as an ability to link Alipay’s payment services for micropayment content delivery as ipads and tablets push more and more rich content behind paid firewalls.

What are the takeaways here? Let’s riff for a second:

• TMall’s move is obvious, and probably overdue. They have a reputation of very arms-length client management, probably because they have so many clients and it’s essentially a self-service model. If anything, the yearly fees for being on the site might have been too low. Chalk it up to artificially lowering prices in order to gain early mover position and long-term marketshare. TMall has an estimated 1/3rd of all ecommerce, if not higher.
• The backlash from the vendors was to be expected: what was TMall thinking by jumping for at least a 5x in price? There are a lot of small businesses that really shouldn’t be on TMall in terms of sheer profit/loss. Good online marketing talent is tough to find in China, and a lot of these small businesses would probably have left over the next year or so anyway– more so if TMall had ratcheted up prices like any other service offering in a rational market.
• TMall was intended from the start to be a step or two up from the counterfeit wonderland that is Taobao.com: where anyone can simply open up an online store with little or no requirements or proof of legitimate access to goods (think Yahoo stores but in a land where all the stuff is made in factories down the street and the grey market is chugging along at a nice clip). All the competing marketplaces are aiming higher and higher in the luxury chain. Online shoppers like the bling.
• The government of China, which has welcomed ecommerce with open arms, doesn’t seem to want to get too dirty on this one. Their statements have been admonishments to both sides: TMall must respect the small business owner; people should voice their concerns through legal channels. Taken at face value, that’s a victory for TMall, as these people sending false orders and jamming websites are (technically) committing fraud. I don’t think anyone will go to jail over this, but both sides have been handed a yellow card.

We’ll see what plays out over the next few weeks on this one. Stay tuned

UPDATE: Tmall has announced a 9 month grace period in the new fees, along with US$282M investments to help small biz. It seems the threat of government intervention worked…

Jeff Bezos Sees All! (From illuminatiwiki)

Rob Malda (aka CmdrTaco) recently posted his skepticism over the Amazon Tablet because of its Silk web browser.  His quick (and insightful) analysis zeros in on the way that the Silk browser functions as a direct window to the Amazon Cloud.  Silk isn’t actually downloading all those webpages, it’s showing you a proxy of every webpage that exists over on the Amazon proxy servers.  So what?

It’s not done for speed, as Rob points out, any CPU on the market holds its own for speed.  It’s not to save bandwidth– there’s no 3G on the tablet, just WiFi (where packets are “free”).  Here’s the speculation: Amazon wants to control (and track) all those packets.  Essentially, Amazon is parking a set of eyeballs over your shoulder and seeing exactly which webpages you look at, how long you look at them, and what you do on them.  So what?

Because this is the Holy Grail for targeted advertising, that’s what.  If Amazon knows that you spend all your time looking at motorcycle bits or frilly dresses or garden equipment, or biker dudes wearing frilly dresses holding garden equipment, then guess what you’ll see next time you click on the Amazon store that is ever so conveniently at your fingertips now.

Amazon is going Google one better: Google knows what you like, and serves up the appropriate advertisement and search results.  Amazon is now taking you one step closer: not only can they show you what you like, they actually have some shit for sale, and all you have to do is “one click”.

wine on the roof

Facebook has announced that it will be adding filters for photos, so people can retro-wash their pics with that synthetic polaroid saturation, or get all poignant with some black and white pics of their kids putting peanut butter on the cat. This is being billed as a direct response to instagram. I would assume it’s positioned as a defense, and the people prefer instagram because of all the filters.

This misses the true point of instagram, IMHO: instragram is cool not only because of the filters (which are fun), but because it boils down the social interaction to just the photo. There’s no goofy update about the kids’ schooling, no mafia wars, no idiot lolcat videos. Just the photos. There’s a certain artsy-like austerity to it, which communicates on a different (deeper?) level for people.

I like instragram because it’s clean, not because people have dorked with the colors on their pics. It’s my own personal gallery walk: quiet, reflective, and ultimately more communicative than words.

It’s always the unintended consequences that cause the pain.  In this case, all those Chinese middle-class investors who had been buying 2nd and 3rd apartments as “investments” may now find a tighter market, or worse, start to dump their properties in the secondary and tertiary cities (the ones that would have been benefiting from the high speed rail).

I’m not going as far to say this will “pop” the bubble, but I am saying it’s a pinprick.  If the Chinese government suffers a confidence hit from the poor handling (and it looks like they’re well under way of doing just that), it will be another pinprick.

How many can they suffer?

I agree.  However, LinkedIn may not like where things wind up.

We all seem to understand that LinkedIn was the serious older brother to Facebook.  LinkedIn carried your full CV and business contacts, while Facebook had your college buddies and pictures of body parts usually wrapped in cotton.  LinkedIn allowed us to form groups and networks for the various facets of our careers, while Facebook let us to simply ‘hang out’.  Unfortunately, LinkedIn may have overplayed its hand: the groups were so loose, the email notifications so prevalent, and the questions so inane, that I just don’t read them anymore.  LinkedIn has a Spam problem: when every possible service vendor out there can figure out that I’m a stakeholder and decision-maker, the spam goes way up.  When service vendors start to troll questions in the groups just to get possible sales leads, the spam goes way up.

Let’s face it: if anyone spends serious time on LinkedIn, it’s likely because they’re in between jobs or trolling for a new job.  That means they’ve got a lot of time on their hands, and likely aren’t on their game as much as they should.  As a result, the discussion topics come across a bit stale, a bit desperate, a bit pumped up.  In short, quality of content suffers.  LinkedIn discussion groups are like soup in a hotel buffet line: looks good, but you have no idea what’s in there, or who’s been putting their spoon in that.

Google+, on the other hand, got the privacy part correct: people can add me all day long (and I’m already starting to see the vendors showing up when they add me to their circles), but it’s up to me whom I add.  In other words, I get to choose who sees the content I publish, and I get to choose who’s content I see.  This is the big difference that G+ learned from Twitter, and it’s just the right amount of inoculation that LinkedIn doesn’t have.

So, Weiner’s correct: my time is limited.  I want professional updates from my peers and people I admire in the business.  I want to connect with them professionally.  But guess what, it likely won’t be on LinkedIn anymore…

It's all part of a cosmic unconsciousness.

All of the techno “stars” came out in that first 24 hours of Google+.  There was Joi Itoh, Robert Scoble, Seth Godin, Harry Joiner, etc.  Most of them seemed to keep it cool, poking around and commenting here and there.  One of them charged ahead, posting something every 5 minutes, often with some half-baiting question that subsequently invoked a huge chain of follow-on comments.   Because of the way that Google+ is structured, these posts came in real-time, and the page text would automatically scroll down.  It made things very difficult to follow anything else.  In short, we had a blabbermouth on our hands.

This person acknowledged that he was being a blabbermouth, and simply invited people to add him to a “blabbermouths” circle in order to clean up their feed.  Done, and done.  Ah, much better.

Soon after, I found other blabbermouths.  These were people that I had considered “friends” at first (and placed them accordingly), but when their posts came in too often, too self-promotional, and too meta, into the “blabbermouths” they went.  It’s like a garden with weeds, or a party with loud drunks, or a restaurant buffet with someone bogarting all the shrimp cocktail: you’re ruining it for the rest of us.

Tangentially, I went to Klout for the firsts time a couple weeks ago.  From what I can tell (and please let me know if I’m missing something), it’s just a “score”, with the supposed goal of getting a higher score– some sort of substitute for social influence, I guess.  Klout seems to be struggling for legitimacy, but maybe I’m just not seeing it.  I do see one helpful thing they announced this morning: Klout will now count Foursquare check-ins as part of the score.

Excellent.  Here’s why: In my mind, there are two types of online social interaction.

1. Group-Centric Social Media– is collaborative, centered on contribution to a whole, and serves the overall group. Examples include wikipedia, quora, flickr, instagram, turntable, or any other social network where people’s contributions are shared freely and allow others to manipulate, build, alter or improve as they see fit.  Facebook and g+ likely qualify here, as any contribution by a single individual goes out to all their friends, who can then comment (improve knowledge or clarify a point) as they see fit.  No one is keeping “score” publicly.  Twitter may be in this group, but maybe not.
2. Self-Centric Social Media– is promotional, centered on contribution to a personal record, and is centered on the self.  Examples include Foursquare, klout, and farmville.  The goals in these are to achieve a higher “score”, a wider farm, or a bunch of badges (that are really just little digital icons, Yeaaay!).  All of these are centered around gratifying the specific user, not the collective whole.  Twitter is in this group if you’re obsessed with number of followers or if you think you’re “promoting” something, and not “sharing” something.

Before you go labeling me a communist, hear me out: I’m not saying one is better than the other (okay, maybe a little bit).  What I’m trying to say is that it seems to me that the users who are rooted firmly in the self-centric models seem to be the ones that end up being the blabbermouths in the group-centric networks.  These are the ones that we tend to turn off, to unfriend, or to relegate to our ‘blabbermouths’ circle.  I welcome Klout now counting foursquare checkins.  If I could only figure out a way to get a script that would automatically filter those high klout score people into my blabbermouth circle.