Yoick - Hightechwire

We finally made the move over to Yoick.tv – please join us there to continue the conversation.

We won’t be posting here again.

Social networking and social destination sites by and for social networking alone just don’t cut it. People get bored with networking  for networking’s sake: there needs to be a focus point or focal points beyond simply socnet.

Om Malik has glommed onto this thought I had way back in the mists of time, circa August 2005 and now asks: Are Social Networks Just a Feature?

In Yoick’s view, successful web communities have at their core, a set of pursuits or strange attractors - these pursuits work best if they deliver some benefit from interactions between members of a community…the higher the usefulness factor, the more compelling an attractor.

To sum up, I agree with Om. Yoick is essentially building an “integrated community entertainment platform”, a term borrowed from Andrew Littlefiled, CEO of Doppelganger. Within this ICEP, the social networking aspects are critical as part of the community journey, but they are not the sole destination.

Benchmark Capital Partner, Michael Eisenberg, has blogged that Google is (rumored to be) working on turning Google Earth into a virtual world a la Second Life.

Benchmark is an investor in Second Life, so one wonders at Michael’s motivation for raising such a rumor into the blogosphere — godzilla just walked past my 24th floor office window heading north?

Michael notes the language on the Google Earth website - one more step to creating a life-like 3-D model of the whole planet….message to the Googleplex - we’ve already got one earth, so why do we need yet another virtual earth… what we need are better ways to connect, interact, create and share and doing so in 3-D is uber-cool.

Matt Marshall sees such a move by Google as an opportunity for them to act as virtual central bankers. A bit of a stretch, but an interesting one nevertheless.

UPDATE: The GigaOM has more to say on this, pointing to the possibility that Google is working with a company in China to build the avatars.

The New York Times has a piece regarding the rise and rise of widgets and points to what we’re calling Widgblogging - blogs that are predominantly made up of widgets and for which the posted content is relatively peripheral. Widgblogs are, like any mashup, the sum of their parts, and - like any mashup, it’s the mix that determines if the sum resonates with the blog’s readers or not.

 Jeremy Liew, over at Lightspeed Venture Partners, has a great post on the NY Times article. We’ve also Techcraunched Jeremy.

We recently caught up with fellow hyper entrepreneur, Evan Williams…and asked him some questions regarding multi-product, sustainable companies (we’ve riffed on this here and here), life, stuff and the future. 

Rand: You’ve done some classic serial entrepreneur stuff, you co-founded Pyra Labs (Blogger) and sold the company to Google, started Odeo, bought your VCs out and founded Obvious - what do you view as your key takeout from your experiences to date?

Ev: Trust your gut. Work hard. Screw up. Get over it. March on.

Rand: Obvious is, from my perspective, an attempt at building a sustainable, multi-product company rather than a single product/app quick flip, or as Ben Barren coins it - a product factory. Tell us a bit about your thought process in deciding to do Obvious, your strategies for success and the landscape you are journeying through.

Ev: Several things led to the thinking behind Obvious. One is that there is now an opportunity to create useful, fun, interesting sites and services that can make money but don’t necessarily require (or, in some cases, deserve) the overhead of a whole company (especially with the expectations of funding and cash-out events).

By building things cheaply and quickly — and sharing overhead, technology, and knowledge where it makes sense — a company that owns many of these sites could be both fun and viable.

Secondly, the web is so crowded these days, some really cool stuff doesn’t get serious attention, because it’s hard to distinguish from other sites and services — or people just don’t know about it. So we hope to create a network of properties, that can both serve as a launchpad for new products and as a way to lower the barrier for new users ( for example, by having their data already available to it, if they so choose).

And third, we wanted to create an environment where wacky ideas could be tried without having to justify or explain them to a board, or investors, or anyone else. Some of them won’t go anywhere. Once in a while, the wacky idea will be just what the people didn’t know they were missing in their lives.

Rand: If we use the film studio analogy, each of your products would presumably have an executive producer. How do you ensure that these folk are imbued with sufficient entrepreneurial fervor so that they embody the best attributes of a startup CEO? 

Ev: I’m not sure yet. I do think the “executive producer” role, as you call it, is key. A lot of people want to pursue lots of ideas, because they can’t constrain themselves to one. The easiest way for us to screw up is to go in too many directions at once and, even if we have good ideas, not be focused enough on them.

Your first assumptions about anything are usually wrong, so you have to find the right balance between throwing things at the wall and seeing if they stick and iterating diligently ’til you get it right. So we want to make sure that the individuals in Obvious, who are leading projects, are able to focus, at least for a significant period of time.

I don’t think a project lead has to have all the same attributes at a startup CEO — they don’t have to worry, for instance, about raising money or many operations issues. But they need to be self-organized, an organizer of others and have excellent product sense.

Rand: How do you see the space playing out over the next 18 months and what will Obvious look like by then? 

Ev: Part of the philosophy behind Obvious is that we have no idea how things are going to play out. No one ever does, really, the difference is we don’t pretend we do.
Rand: Shoot the arrow forward - what’s your view of the future 5 years out? 

Ev: Jet packs and telepathic blogging. Those things are a given. Other than that, I dunno. What seems to stay true is that everything gets more complex and opportunity breeds opportunity. And the things that drive humans to do things don’t change that much: self-expression, convenience, personal gain, human connection (or the approximation thereof) etc. will continue to drive the online world.

There will just be new and more fascinating ways to do everything.

Meebo, which bills itself as a website for instant messaging from absolutely anywhere has raised a Series A funding round of $9 million - anyone recognise a trend in funding we’ve been covering this year — 9 is the number of choice.

This round follows the $3.5 million seed round they raised from Sequoia in December 2005 and Draper Fisher Jurvetson led the round. Venture capitalist extraordinaire, Tim Draper, has joined Meebo’s board.

An experiment conducted by Stephen De Chellis on the effect of bookmarking blog posts across various solutions has produced some revealing results.

First off, Netscape delivered minimal results.

Secondly, and not surprisingly given their marketshare, once the story hit the front page of Digg, digsters flocked to the blog in question.  The third news aggregator used, Stumbleupon, saw healthy initial results, but nothing like the Digg-generated traffic.

The real surprise came a week or so after the blog post when Digg traffic was way down, and Stumbleupon was very healthy.

Stephen concludes….Digg had brought in the highest number of hits, but they were fleeting. A massive wave of people will go from Digg, to your blog and then never return. Netscape? Do I even need to linger on that one? StumbleUpon… there be the long tail for a blogger!

Thanks for all your attention - courtesy of which we’ve come to the attention of WordPress and are now featured on their Growing Blogs list.

Keep it comin’!

Linden Labs has gone and open sourced their Second Life client software. Michael Arrington asks whether they’ve gone far enough -

At current growth trends, SL could be a real economic force in a few years. When things really start to hop, SL will look more like it’s own private Internet. Or a privately held virtual nation. At the point that millions of people spend most or all of their waking hours within the SL world, we’ll know this has happened.I think people (and governments) will start to get a little nervous at that point. It will be impossible for SL to put both its shareholders and users first, and history suggests that users will get the shaft. I can image the most bizarre anti-trust lawsuits in history being fought in courtrooms around the world.What might make more sense in the long run is more of a Wikipedia-like approach to Second Life. A non profit organization running open source software where people can add their own island just by plugging in a server in their living room or the hosting provider of their choice. Whoever builds that and provides a serious alternative to the SL experience could help the world at least as much as Wikipedia has.An interesting take, Michael. Certainly one to be taken seriously.

What we need to be cognizant of is the fact that SL is not about to upset the status quo and allow anyone to plug in a server and create their own real estate in world. This would cause a major issue with SL residents who have invested time and money to build up a real estate portfolio.

So SL has only open sourced its client software, not the actual grid. This means that their viewer is now open source under the GNU Public License, but their underlying infrastructure remains proprietary.

Michael Arrington has released one of his classic posts in which he sums up the current state of Web 2.0 and gives short shrift to the bubblemongers out there - a few failures are direct evidence that we are not in a bubble and that the private venture markets are actually in the process of letting off a little steam to keep things rational.

I agree wholeheartedly with Michael. He sums the situation up perfectly here:

So every time a startup dies, I don’t think it’s evidence of a bubble about to burst. I think it’s evidence of a market that is working exactly as it should. Most companies fail, but enough win to keep the whole ecosystem healthy.

Michael also has a good riff about the network effect:-

The Network Effect is still the most powerful force driving Internet success today. People don’t, for example, go to Digg because it has great software. The original Digg, as launched, cost Kevin Rose less than $2,000 to create. Anyone can create a Digg clone, and many have. The reason Digg is, and will continue to be, successful is because of the community it has created. People go to Digg because everyone else goes to Digg, and every new user who submits stories and/or votes occasionally adds value to the whole network. The Network Effect is also driving Facebook’s success, and YouTube’s. None of these companies have interesting software. All of them have an incredibly valuable community. All of these companies have to work hard to keep their lead, but it is nearly impossible for new entrants to catch up.

Nice article, Michael - this is what we want to see more of.