Monthly Archives: February 2010

Internet

Future of SMS, MMS, IM, Email, Tweets

February 28, 2010 –

The last decade the number of types of messages we can send has exploded. We have email, SMS, MMS, IM and, the newest kid on the block, Tweets. All these message types are linked to specific communication media. SMS is typically send via a mobile network like GSM, same for MMS, IMs and Tweets use the internet and email is available on a wide variety networks.

Twitter, Facebook, Instant Message, email

In the end it is all about the communication and each message type has its specific purpose. You do not write a newsletter in SMS and at the same time you do not Tweet personal messages. The purposes of each message type can be summarized as follows:

* long and short messages
* instant or non-instant
* targeted or broadcast

The purpose demands the selection of message type and network. Instant messages are better delivered to a always-on mobile platform but non-instant long messages can be delivered to a sometimes-on non- or semi-mobile platform. A message can be targeted to a person or a group of people. Another option is to broadcast it like a “What are you doing” message on social networks.

To communicate we have a myriad of choices of applications and networks. These networks are non-coupled effectively creating closed ecosystems. Skype users cannot reach MSN users or the other way around. At the same time you cannot SMS Skype users. These boundaries are the biggest threat to any network. Without internetwork messaging users will select one platform as a winner. All others will lead a niche life.

Services like Twitter are completely useless in the future. Their role will be taken over by others. There is really no compelling reason to use Twitter except their large userbase. But the user base of Facebook or Gmail is larger. It is no problem for them to move into this type of services and Twitter becomes the Netscape of messaging.

It is in all networks interest to work on internetworking and focus on standardizing message types. Then they can compete on user interface, quality of service and delivery platforms.

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Internet

Power of the long tail in advertising

February 20, 2010 –


A perfect example of the power of the long tail is the change Google brought in advertising. Their AdWords system brings advertising power to everybody. Advertising was only reserved for big coorporations and huge ad budgets. Google’s system enables anybody to advertise and small coorporations or even individuals are able to advertise on big brand new media sites like Amazon or Google.com itself.

For this reason I created a shameless self promotion ad. Not because I want to advertise myself but just because I can. With a budget of only $5 / month I could advertise myself using my name as keywords. Of course the ad is not shown very often (who searches on Robert Schouwenburg at Google.com or Amazon.com?) but still it works brilliantly.

It feels like advertising on a major TV channel or major subscription magazine. I think it is a great example of the Long Tail. Internet enables niche advertising because you can target very precise target groups with tiny budget.

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Internet

Tuning content to reader frequency

February 14, 2010 –

Most of websites and especially news or magazine types of sites have their own rhythm in updating their content. In general these sites are updated daily. Some only have minor updates on a daily basis and release major feature articles ones a week.

This behavior mandates readers to follow the same rhythm to keep up to date with the content. But with growth of the internet and the huge increases in available content this is impossible to keep up. Even narrowing down the number of sites and content with highest interest the reader cannot keep up.

This poses a real problem for these sites. To attract regular visitors and create the most ad value a loyal readership is important. For this reason website should better adapt themselves to the interest of the individual reader. On how to do this let us take a look at traditional media.

Traditional media come almost exclusively in three flavors:

1. daily media – newspapers
2. weekly media – low cost magazines
3. monhly media – high cost magazines

There are good reasons why publishers have chosen these rhythms. In the end it is about maximizing revenue. But these rhythm are not one size fits all. It is a tradeoff between reach and content.

The advantage of online media is that they can adapt their content to the individual reader. A monthly reader can get the feature articles and an overview of the news of last month. A weekly reader can get a feature article, the most important news articles and an overview of the news. The daily reader gets the items as they are released.

The situation today is that most online media only cater for the daily or maybe the bi-daily reader. All other readers need to plow their way through more content they would like. Therefor the attractiveness of these media is lower than it can be. The potential of gaining more — although less frequent but maybe more valuable — readers is there. There is an opportunity for online media to improve on this. Especially for professional run media this should not be a big challenge to implement. And for non-professional media there is a business opportunity for others to make those digests through cross-licensing deals with these sites.

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Internet

Future of online identification

February 6, 2010 –

Identification in the online world is still a mess in 2010. The average internet user manages more than 10 online identities. Each identity is disconnected from the other. The management of these online identities and especially the associated user accounts is getting a nightmare. Users use the same passwords for the same identities or write them down in agendas or digital textfiles. They simply are not capable of remembering so many username / password combination and worse the requirements for these identifications are different for many sites. Some sites take your email address as the username and others take any alphanumeric sequence. But you cannot always use your email address because the username is often also the online nickname and publicly visible to others. And some users would like to keep their email address private.

Some companies have tried or are trying to push their identification system to others. The most prominent example is Microsoft and their Microsoft Passport service. By tightly integrating this into their own services (think Hotmail.com) and at the same time delivering integration solutions with their IIS webserver software they tried to open this market.
Of course this failed for the several good reasons. The most important reason is that not one company in the world should maintain the major identification system. A commercial company can simply be not trusted to own and maintain that information.

At this moment Facebook is trying the same. You see their identification system being used on other sites like Digg.com. And although their push is less visible and maybe even more driven by a pull market strategy the reasons why it will not be omnipresent are the same.

There are also legal implications. Private information about people is protected by country laws. These laws are not designed to cope with this situation. Companies who use an external identification system which is located in a different country than their own service create a problem when legal issues arise around a user. Especially when commercial transactions are involved or (very) private information is leaked. When this is the case there is no other option for these services to build and use their own identification system.

The only solution is public governed system of online identification. A public governed system has the advantage of trust and public governance. At the same time privacy laws can be designed and maintained in line with the identification system since they are governed by the same entity. The system can be designed in the same way internet domains are governed. The responsibility to maintain the local internet domains like .nl for The Netherlands is delegated to a local Dutch institution. Through this delegation countries can implement and enforce local privacy laws and protect their citizens data. At the same time all citizens in the world only have to maintain one indentity and identification. Through a standardized system users can release information to commercial entities when they desire but at the same time also retract that information again when they want to.

Of course such a solution requires the cooperation of a major number of countries to gather enough strength in the market to push this solution to all internet service companies. The only option would be to involve a major alliance of countries like the European Union or United Nations to make an initiative like this happen. Up until now this has never an agenda topic. But such a system makes sense and it is only matter of time it will happen. It can of course take a decade or two.

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