Msn @ MindSay 
[ Msn Slideshow | Browse Tags ]
messenger
Initial Experience of Widget's Profit Model
( 2008/05/04 - By Digitalwall.com - Way to China Internet/Telecom )
Each time the Widget site receives a "delivery call", it is expected to generate revenue.
[+]A new term: Widget
Widget is another popular new term after Blog and SNS. So far, there seems to be no proper Chinese equivalent to it. Literally, it can be translated into something like "small tool", or "fancy things", which somehow sound weird and cannot explain its functionality and impact.
On the sidebars of many blogs, particularly independent blogs, we can often see many fancy things, like a beautiful clock, or a weather forecast column, or news headline updates. These fancy things, which occupy small spaces on the web page and offer a variety of functions, are one kind of Widgets.
Of course, there are Widgets that can be downloaded and installed into your PC or cell phone. You also can download Widgets from many portals, including Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! and install them onto MSN Space, Google Personal or My Yahoo. These, however, are beyond the scope of this article, which only focuses on independent sites to offer Widget service like http://Widgetbox.com.
Why, then, do most of Widgets used by independent Blogs, rather than those empowered by large blog service providers (e.g., MSN Space)? The reason is most blog service providers do not allow bloggers to add Javascript into their blogs, while most Widgets were written by Javascprit code to be embedded into blog web pages.
In addition, it takes considerable expertise to insert Widgets. An ordinary Internet user would have to do a lot of learning before being able to put Widgets on his/her Blog. Most individuals who build their own Blog sites are familiar with such expertise. However, such difficulty is not yet to become an obstacle to the infiltration of Widgets across the Internet in many countries. There have emerged a lot of sites that offer Widget services.
In China, however, Widget is not so popular, mainly for two reasons: 1) given the Internet environment in the country, it is hard for an ordinary Internet user to build his/her own Blog site. In the United States, from applying for the domain name to leasing a host to activating the blog system to making the payment, everything can be done online. 2) Many international Blog service providers begin to allow embedded Javascript, which increases the possibility of Widgets being used.
[+]Operation model of Widget service
Widget service operators provide Widgets with diversified functions. To embed the Widgets onto their own Blogs, Internet users need to copy the corresponding Javascript onto their own Blogs. When the web page of a Blog is viewed, the Javascript code was triggered to retrieve the corresponding Widget from the service provider site and send it back to the web page where embedded.
This is the underlying mechanism of Widgets. A site offering Widget services is like a large warehouse, which sends a shipment whenever it receives a delivery call. Eventually, the goods are displayed in stores around the street. The problem is that nobody is going to visit the warehouse itself. Hence there appears a paradox of business operation: the sites of Widget service providers themselves do not have high traffic.
The traffic have gone to thousands of Blogs. The bandwidth budgets of the Widget service providers are used entirely for the transmission of Widgets to Blogs. According to my own experience in Widget service provision, Blogs that rank top 30% in terms of the total "deliveries" consumes 90% of the delivery calls, which is close to the proportion of the traditional 80:20 rule.
The website I build to offer Widget service is: http://www.rankwidget.com.
The function of this particular Widget is to show the Alexa ranking or the Google Pagerank of the Blog web page where it is put. I have operated the site for half a year now. At its peak, my site provided services to about 50,000 websites, delivering 200,000 times each day. (because advertisement was introduced later, the volume dropped to one third of the original level, with about 60,000 times delivered each day.)
Such niche market-targeted Widget cannot expect to have a lot of users, so 200,000 delivery times per day is a fairly satisfactory figure. The problem is that the site (rankwidget.com) has very low traffic itself - with less than 1,000 page views each day. We cannot expect to have many visitors to the "warehouse". The question is: how do operators of such an emerging application make money? After all, the bandwidth cost is a tangible expenditure every month.
[+]How do Widget operators make money?
You can take a look at a real operation of the Widget on: http://english.digitalwall.com. Open the web page and move to the bottom left corner, where your browser would bring out a pop up ad window behind your browser. When you move your mouse onto the Widget, a "bubble ad" appears. These are the operation models of the Widget I have tried. (Now the site no longer has bubble ads.)
With the 60,000 page views of the Widget site, the pop-under ad window ads would be displayed 2,500 times (most browsers have default pop-up ad blockers, which would significantly reduce the number of display time), resulting in a click rate as low as 0.2%. With the CPM or CPC-based billing approach widely adopted in the United States, I, as the operator of the Widget site, will end up in starvation.
The mindset is simple: each time a Widget site receives a "delivery call", it is expected to generate revenue, as each time there's a bandwidth cost. Hence advertising becomes a model worth trying. However, as the Widget brings disturbing ads, many Blogger prefer not to use it.
The Internet is really an unreasonable business environment. Users don't care about what operation cost you have. When I used pop-under ad windows, I had to face tides of fury of many Bloggers. Later on, I replaced it with a milder model: bubble ad, which was a big innovation (it seemed that nobody had tried it before), but the income was far away from satisfaction.
I am still exploring profit models for the Widget. In this field, I can be counted as one of the pioneers worldwide. With the thriving of SNS, many sites are following the lead of Facebook along a path toward Open API. In the future, the focus of the Widget is expected to extend from Blog to SNS. How to help this emerging service to find a profit model has become an interesting topic.
- Read More
Prev : Great Changes in Wireless Internet Industry (4) Apple's Strategy
Next : Glimpse into Profit Model of SNS-based Advertising
- Today in History
Initial Experience of Widget's Profit Model - 2008/05/04
Web 2.0 Finale (3) Finally blended in Web 1.0
( 2008/01/06 - By Digitalwall.com - Way to China Internet/Telecom )
A gradual blending of old and new.
[+] Web 2.0 is direct marketing
In the traditional business world, it may not be difficult for start-ups to innovate or produce good products, but it surely takes much more efforts for them to channel products to end-users. Finding a channel may not be very hard, but it would cost you dearly. Capitalist who own channels are tough guys to deal with.
Ten years ago the emergence of the Internet brought some changes for the first time. For Internet start-ups, their products are websites, and their services can reach end users directly. They don't need other channels. This was how the advantage of the capital-intensive newspaper industry, which controlled the distribution channel, gradually dissolved. The Web 1.0 world has taken its place.
This new channel of the Internet has impacted on traditional media, traditional business models and also traditional communications. Generally, in the Web 1.0 era, there are a lot of people with only a small capital starting their businesses. They can do so because they've found a low-cost marketing channel to break the blockade set by traditional capitalists.
Yet after 10 years, some startups, such as Yahoo!, have become new capitalists. They control the distribution channels and suffocate the chances of new Internet startups, which have to buy expensive advertisements from "traditional" channels - Web 1.0 websites - to draw visitors to their websites.
Many years ago in the traditional business world, there was a new channel called direct marketing. It was about bypassing the traditional distribution channel by marketing through social networks. Today with so many tycoons in the Internet, how can we avoid them and do business in a low cost way?
The answer lies in social networks. Web 2.0 startups make ingenious use of social networks or interpersonal relationship to do low-cost marketing. To market through social networks is a very smart strategy. Without this, we won't see significant growth in these new websites' user-base and traffic.
[+] Back to the basics is the key to growth
Many people have the experience of buying products via direct marketing, but they don't have much confidence in it. People who participate in the direct marketing system constantly come and go, making it not very stable. Web 2.0 services attract new users through interpersonal relationship in a similar way. Moreover, a brilliant marketing strategy still cannot solve the inherent problems of products.
The first article of this series talks about two problems of Web 2.0 websites. The first is high user churn rate, and the second is that once users decide to leave, they won't turn to other competitors but will quit all websites/services of similar kind for good.
For a website operator, this has two implications. Firstly, users who leave your competing websites won't go to yours, which means you have to target at first-timers. Think about those users who are still new to the market, and they are the ones your products should be designed for.
Secondly, users will leave sooner or later, so most importantly you should strive to capture heavy users. Only heavy users would migrate among Web 2.0 websites of similar kind or try new websites. An important step for your website to succeed is to seize this group of users.
Once a website can control a certain group of heavy users, it can then start to think about how to either make profits or stay small and survive gracefully, like all successful community websites. However, is there any way to expand the user-base by drawing in less-active users?
My suggestion is, get rid of the strong community atmosphere and cultural ambiance! They are incompatible with things that can meet people's basic needs, such as storage, tools and content.
These things, simply put, are products of Web 1.0.
[+] Next step: storage, tools and content
The founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerbery once said that Facebook is not a social network but a social tool. His words are often interpreted as "Facebook as an operating system or platform," and Facebook's open API implies such possibilities.
His words are impressive because he points out concisely that the key to get big is to serve as a "platform." My understanding of his words is that platforms and tools are things that have little to do with culture. They can be used by anyone and don't require users to change their habits.
You use Gmail to write emails and MSN to send messages very easily. These tools don't have much to do with culture (at least not as much as online community websites.) Operators who have been focused on developing a vibrant online community to retain active users need to think about what are the tools that are not so hot but can be used by all.
Instant messaging (IM), a tool that is highly related to social activities, is one example. For the past ten years, the IM market has been very stable. If a social networking service (SNS) provider with several hundred million users launches a new IM tool, it may have the potential to change the market dynamics.
In addition, people get tired of social activities once in a while. Maybe a user just needs a space to store their photos, documents and bookmarks. S/he doesn't want anyone to know the URL of his/her homepage or to bother her/him with status alerts. Is it possible that a SNS website can provide such functions?
Storage is one of such basic needs. Some active users may be happily busy with various social activities all day long, but there are still more people who need only basic services. What will make a user to keep on visiting a website once s/he gets tired of online social activities? Maybe s/he just needs a space to store pictures.
Active users visit a website because they need the social network there; other users do so simply because this is where they store their stuff.
[+] Web 2.0 evolution is about to complete
The third thing is content. This is easier to understand, and many Web 2.0 websites are doing it. For those who are not keen on social activities, let's give them some content. Using tags to aggregate content is a common method.
So at the end you'll find that Web 2.0 is still about the four pillars of the Internet, which I mentioned years ago: content, community, communication, and commerce.
In Web 1.0, a website operator would start from providing content and then functions of online community, communications and commerce. In Web 2.0, an operator would start from developing communities and then content and communications tools and lastly commerce.
We finally get a clear picture of Web 2.0 in the context of our time. It's about a grand evolution of websites all over the world. The result will not be about replacing old websites with new ones, but a gradual blending of old and new.
Whatever it is in Web x.0, it is all to be used by people. And the humanity of people do not change.
- Read More
Prev : Web 2.0 Finale (2) Websites With a Specific Culture Can't Grow Big
Next : Great Changes in Wireless Internet Industry (1) Google's Strategy
- Today in History
Web 2.0 Finale (3) Finally blended in Web 1.0 - 2008/01/06
The Fourth Generation of Internet Marketing (3) IM Marketing - 2007/01/07
Web 2.0 Finale (1) An Inherent Problem Unsolved
( 2007/12/23 - By Digitalwall.com - Way to China Internet/Telecom )
Why the user churn rate of Web 2.0 websites is so high?
[+] Users' typical Web 2.0 experience
Mr. X is an ordinary white-collar worker. He uses the Internet to search information and contact customers at work, and after work he may spend some time on the Internet for leisure. The Internet is a medium he uses frequently in his daily life, but it is not particularly important in his life. At least he is not a person who hangs on the Internet everyday.
Recently though he has been getting emails with subjects like "you have been added to somebody's friend list" and the like. Clicking the hyperlink he found that it's by a friend on MSN. How could you decline a friend's invitation? So he signed up that social networking service.
By this way, Mr. X has joined Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, LinkedIn and a bunch of local Chinese language websites. Registering at these websites is a lot of pains. Every website asked him to fill in his profile, upload photos and even contribute his MSN contact list.
At first he was worried that if these friends would visit his personal blog, and it would be impolite if he didn't call at theirs in return. Such relationship pressure was such that he spent two hours after work to reply these messages online for a period of time.
(Interestingly, he didn't know that his friends were tied up on the Internet for the same reason.)
First it was acquaintances, then a bunch of strangers, who added him to their friends list. In the beginning it was fun and nice to socialize with these people online, checking out their newly updated blogs and photos and leaving messages to each other.
After about three months, Mr. X started to get bored socializing with these people online. As the number of friends kept growing, he could not but spend more time on the Internet visiting these websites. At the end two hours a day was not even enough.
He finally decided to quit such Internet services that he had been addicted to when he had almost reached the verge of breakdown. What was the meaning to spend so much time on this stuff? Life should not be like this, and he had to get things back under control.
[+] Typical experience of Web 2.0 website operators
All Web 2.0 websites operators are asking why the user churn rate is so high, and there is seemingly no way to remedy this problem as if it is inherent in Web 2.0 websites. New businesses planning to ride on the force of social networking, which continues to wane, are declining.
These Web 2.0 websites are like a big sieve, trying to capture a large number of users at a time; yet after three months, it always turns out that only half of them remain as effective users, and the rest simply disappear. The size of users may seem big but it is not substantial at all.
For a Web 2.0 website to enjoy growth, its social networking expansion needs to be faster than its user churn, so that, overall, its scale would be increasing. Yet what about when the growth of user numbers slow down?
Social networking websites MySpace and Facebook have shown strong performance and they are yet to hit the growth ceiling with the whole world as their market. (MySpace should reach its growth limit sooner than Facebook as the former has more users.) Therefore, seeking to expand foreign markets seems to be a solution to sustain growth.
Nevertheless, an inherent problem remains unsolved.
Another amazing effect of Web 2.0 websites is that, heavy users are very committed. They are very active and they remain so for a very long period. They visit the websites and stay there everyday.
From registered users to effective users to active users, the number of users continues to get smaller. Is it normal? I would say yes. In terms of online community, it's just the way it is. Just as I mentioned years ago, online communities are where "people of similar attributes gather to warm each other. And these people are the so-called "heavy users," such as active bloggers.
The characteristic of Web 2.0 is high interactivity, which means highly demanding for users. Those who are willing to interact with others and write blog articles are not normal people. They have stronger achievement motive and desire to express themselves, and they find their stage at some community website and feel a sense of belonging.
The question is, while these heavy users are having fun, what are the ordinary netizens doing?
[+] People can get sick of Web 2.0
As to those who quit some Web 2.0 website, do they turn to similar services of competing websites? Some of them (well, the heavy users) do, but for most people who leave, they just won't touch such kind of services and they leave forever.
Only a few people who, after quitting Facebook, would turn to MySpace. Most people would just quit social networking services (SNS) for good. It's the same for blogging. Only a limited number of people would migrate from one blog service provider to another and continue writing. Most would simply stop blogging.
Quitting a website is totally different from quitting a kind of service. For example, we know very clearly the difference between "turning to sohu.com from sina.com because of getting tired of the latter" and "quitting new websites for good."
Woops! It turns out that people can lose interest in Web 2.0 services.
Woops! So what's next when all netizens have become users of my Web 2.0 website?
If market development is like a chess game, then Web 2.0 websites that have been so popular for the past couple of years are entering the endgame phase. These websites operators may appear successful, but in fact they are getting uneasy. How to get away from the doomed path of Web 2.0 websites is an inevitable challenge.
Surprisingly, you may find the solution in Web 1.0.
- Read More
Prev : Mobile TV Market (3) Terminal Manufacturers & Content Providers
Next : Web 2.0 Finale (2) Websites With a Specific Culture Can't Grow Big
- Today in History
Web 2.0 Finale (1) An Inherent Problem Unsolved - 2007/12/23
The Fourth Generation of Internet Marketing (2) RSS Tracking - 2006/12/24
Dream of "Digital Furniture" Store - 2003/12/28
From Idea to Business (1) How to Estimate Your User Number?
( 2007/07/15 - By Digitalwall.com - Way to China Internet/Telecom )
What's important is the process of estimation. You will get a clear picture about whether the business is worth your money, whether its outlook is as promising as you have thought and what's the right pace.
[+] Estimation is for real war
Amid the tide of Web 2.0-driven online businesses, many young players can no longer sit tight. Weird ideas and comments on cliches of traditional online companies and new tricks of startups in the cyber space are emerging on Blogs across the Internet.
Making a comment is always the easiest thing to do. We can marvel the brilliant interface design of a website, or their understanding to the behavior of a user. Yet we have no way to understand the real thinking of an website operator, not to mention the compromise that he has to make.
It's easy to "have an idea", or even to set up a team to start your business right now. However, to turn your idea into real business, you need to make the right estimate. Particularly, in the Internet industry, where there's still not a definite answer to whether user number is a reflection of revenue or of cost, such an estimate could be not so easy to make.
Lately, a friend of mine, who's a member of a leading Internet company in the United States posed to enter the China market, asked me over MSN: "how should I estimate my user number right from zero?" Indeed, this is the right question for anyone planning to start a business on the Internet.
He showed me the user number growth curve of a few listed U.S. Internet company and said that he wanted to follow suit in China. What he failed to mention was that, none of those companies were more than 10 years, and they had particular backgrounds that could never recur. In fact, he was not able to find a company with a background similar enough for him to copy its business mode.
He used all his knowledge about statistics, including Bezier Curves and regression, which puzzled me even more. Finally, I had to let him know that such a purely academic approach might be good for the calculation of an accurate figure in theory, but would never work in field practice. For people engaged in field work - like me - there's another way.
[+] No marketing ads, no user
To prepare a budget for an Internet business, one has to have in mind a few key points. First of all, it need not and cannot be clock accurate. Then you need to know what's important is the process of estimation. You will get a clear picture about whether the business is worth your money or not, whether its outlook is as promising as you have thought and what's the right pace.
For the estimation of your user number, there are a few key aspects: 1) you cannot expect to have your first customers without an investment; 2) you might get your first customers without spending a cent, but you will be much slower than your rivals; 3) if you have an advertising budget, you should spend it in the first 3, instead of 12 months.
I was personally involved in the building of many websites. A terrible experience I got was that you got practically zero page view without advertising. Unlike the situation 10 years ago, in today's Internet world, users have numerous options. It is unpractical to expect them to just bump into your site.
With advertising, the cost of acquiring a user is much easier to estimate. For the simplest cases of some Internet ad network or Google Adwords, you can easily get the normal ad click-through rate, or conversion rate, or even the average cost of acquiring a user. Therefore, you would have a clear picture of how many users you would have - just look at your initial budget.
If you don't want to spend the money, you can attract a user group quickly through a PR event, too. In additions, there're cases in the market to attract visitors to a website through PR press coverage, or a TV report or a headline in Sina News, or the recommendation of a popular Blogger.
Therefore, the number of new users each month you get depends on your marketing activities in the month. Isn't this a burning of your money or merely a hype show? Fortunately, there's one unique feature about Internet businesses that could provide you a touch of comfort: Network Effect.
[+] Identities of Network Effect
Existing users of yours might strongly recommend your site to their friends, or bring them there by casually clicking the "send to a friend" button. They can also be mere victims of the trap you have prepared and promote your site without knowing it, the way they are caught in the transmission chain of a "viral marketing".
I define the factor that helps you to attract new users without advertising "Network Effect Coefficient (NEC)". For example, with an NEC of 1.1 and 100,000 users at the end of this month, you can expect to increase 10,000 new users by the end of next month without advertising.
Therefore, by the end of next month, you will have 110,000 users plus the new users you have secured with marketing/advertising efforts. Multiplying the sum by the NEC, you could estimate the number of new users by the end of the month after next.
See? The more users you have, and the earlier you have them, the stronger the momentum of your business development would be - thanks to the exponential growth enabled by the NEC each month. This is just like the way your money grows in the bank: you deposit 100,000 and you get 10,000 in interest; you put 20,000, and you get only 2,000.
Now you understand why I say if you have an advertising budget, try to spend it in 3 months! The faster you get your users, the better. In fact, for two similar websites, the one with more users has higher NEC. In other words, the more money you have, the more you earn.
Generally, the NECs of content sites, e.g., news portals, and tool sites, e.g., search engines are estimated to range between 1.0 to 1.1, while those of online communities (as most Web2.0 sites are) could be anywhere from 1.2 to 1.4, depending on the ability of viral marketing of your site.
[+] Estimation, the gap between ideas and businesses
When you have only a few users, your NEC is practically 1. For most sites, an explosive growth (steep rise in user number curve) comes only after their user numbers break a critical point, which is also the start point for the sharp rise of their NECs.
For a saturated market or a reverend Internet company, the change in NEC could be stable and minor, which, however, is beyond the scope of this article, as its focus is how to estimate the increase of user numbers for Internet startups.
If you, having read all above, can't help opening your Excel spreadsheet to see how much you need to spend to secure one million users in the next 12 months, believe me, you will faint at the result. The reality is to start a business on the Internet, you need some extraordinary means.
Is securing users something to be happy for? As a matter of fact, user number is an underlying factor of both revenue and cost. I am not writing this series to scare you. In fact, anyone preparing a budget for a new business would become more realistic.
- Read More
Prev : Web 2.0 Think Again (5) Unearth the Value of "People"
Next : From Idea to Business (2) How to Estimate Your Income and Cost?
- Today in History
New Landscape in China's Telecom Market (5) Fee Rates of 3G Services - 2008/07/13
From Idea to Business (1) How to Estimate Your User Number? - 2007/07/15
New Era of Online Advertising (1) from Media to Channels - 2006/07/16
Ultimate Mobile Device (4) Email Service Anywhere Anytime - 2005/07/10
Web 2.0 Think Again (5) Unearth the Value of "People"
( 2007/06/24 - By Digitalwall.com - Way to China Internet/Telecom )
The Web 2.0 websites know more about you than yourself.
[+] You are putting labels on yourself for everyone to see
In the first article of this series, I already mentioned that people are the only thing that Web 2.0 is trying to sell. Yet how people can become a product for sale, or, to put it in a simpler way, how information about people can produce values, which ultimately can be attached with a price?
When we realize that the core of Web 2.0 services is relation building, the way we describe people will become more diversified. For example, you may be asked to provide information such as sex, age, residence area or even annual income when you register at some websites.
Such statistics can be employed by website operators in running their businesses. For instance, content websites can analyze the age distribution of their users of different content channels, and e-commerce websites can examine the shopping frequency and expenses of users of different sexes.
Yet very often website operators would feel unsatisfied with the clarity of such information. They would only wish that users would put labels on themselves, declaring: "I am interested in whitening skincare products," "I am a fan of some pop singer," "I am obsessed with Nike sneakers." Nice and clear, and no wild guess any more.
Actually, all of us can find quite a few of these labels to describe ourselves. You can give a try as well, and I assure you that you'll end up with a lot of labels. Yet you probably don't know that these labels are very valuable and craved by many people.
Now you may want to keep these labels to yourself. Unfortunately they are already exposed. I once said that the bookmarks you collected online and the tags you attach to your Blog articles are all descriptions about yourself instead of the "subjects" concerned. You are putting labels on yourself for everyone to see.
[+] Web 2.0 is a huge miner for personal data
Through content and tags contributed by every Web 2.0 user, it is easy to find "potential buyers for Nike sneakers" through preliminary analysis. So what would you think whether sports shoes suppliers would want such information? In a word, Web 2.0 is a huge miner for personal data.
You may say it sounds like Google's Adsense. If a Blog article contains key phrases, say, "sports shoes," then advertisements related to sports shoes would appear at the side. However, Adsense targets at Blog visitors, but what we are talking about here is Bloggers.
It's very likely that you do not know who these Blog visitors are. You show them the advertisement simply because they are viewing an article about sports shoes. Because of this correlation, you can still expect a click-through rate of above 1% over the advertisement.
Yet, the Blogger may have written 10 articles about sports shoes, which can be known from his tags. Why not target on this Blogger as well as many others, or to set up a Nike fan club specifically for this group of Bloggers?
Big Blog service providers have huge database of Blog tags or the like. In fact, you can find similar things in any Web 2.0 services such as sharing of photo albums or bookmarks or social networking websites. The deeper you dig into the data, the higher value you'll find in the data.
In addition to user data statistics in Web 1.0 and tag analysis in Web 2.0, there are still two critical factors that lead us into an even higher level in mining the value of personal data: psychological qualities and behavioral qualities.
[+] Psychological quality indexes will soon play an important role
Birds of a feather flock together. We can tell what kind of person one is from the friends one makes. Furthermore, one's activities in a Web 2.0 website, including the number of Blogs one visits in a month, the number of messages one leaves in those Blogs and the types of tags one uses, also reveal how active one is as well as other psychological qualities.
Therefore, website operator can put a label on you accordingly, like "activity index: 8," "positiveness index: 6," "anxiety index: 3," "pressure index: 10" and so on. Here I have to point out that these psychological quality indexes will soon play an important role in Web 2.0, which develops on the basis of sociology.
Web 2.0 website operators have been managing online communities by predicting how user would interact with each other. Psychological quality indexes however are a different thing. Firstly, it's about how to quantify behaviors; secondly it needs to employ sociology to, for instance, define anxiety index.
Finally, it requires a brand new algorithm. In other words, the PageRank algorithm currently applied in search engines (to generate the importance index of a web page) can not be used to calculate complex psychological and behavioral qualities of people.
Why research on this subject? One reason is to provide a superior guidance for promoting user interaction in Web 2.0 communities; the other is to enable better targeted advertising. For example, users of a high pressure index may be a good target for "relaxing music."
[+] High precision marketing enabled by people search engines
All the top Internet companies in the world have noticed this development, but how to address it is a question. The most challenging part is the huge quantity - we are talking about tagging 100 million users with their psychological qualities and analyzing these tags. How many servers will be required to run the calculation?
Before there is any technical breakthrough, we've seen some Internet companies make their move by adopting the simplest yet most practical solution - the people search engine I mentioned earlier. Among them, Ucloo.com, the only one of the kind in China, has been running for almost three years.
The founder of Ucloo.com set up this technology-centric company because he sees the value of personal data. The company uses a program to search through web pages, collect personal data scattered everywhere and sort out the data belong to the same person.
Did you post messages on some forums? Was your name on some university recruits lists before? Have you left your mobile number or bank account number at action websites? Although you are anonymous, Ucloo.com can somehow figure out that these sets of data all refer to you.
Data such as companies you worked for, schools you studied at, classmates and colleagues you've had, stars you like, children, properties and so on, would all be collected under your name. According to the data you have made public online, Ucloo.com has put various labels on you all over.
Ucloo.com does not sell data; instead it uses data as the basis for advertising delivery. For example, if some advertiser wishes to deliver advertisements to young college grads, Ucloo.com can identify this group of targets and deliver advertisement. It has been proven that the response rate of Ucloo.com is much higher than that of traditional online advertisement.
[+] Privacy concern vs. desire to peek
People search engines have been a reality for years, with at least ten of them. Every one of them is making profits except for Spock.com, which has got funded by venture capital since last year. In addition to language, the biggest difference between Spock.com and Ucloo.com is where they think the data should come from.
Spock.com requires users to register and at the same time provide information of your account names and passwords at MSN, Yahoo!, MySpace, Facebook, Friendster and other social networking websites. Its intention is to associate these accounts and consolidate the data that belongs to you.
I was very hesitant when registering at that website and wondered why I should provide all this information. Spock.com asked me my email accounts at Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo!, which I thought was outrageous.
On the other hand, Ucloo.com uses search engine technology to look for you, including photos and video files online. It is difficult to say which is better or worse, but apparently, users would feel reluctant to give away their personal data.
Users are very strange: none of them wants to be exposed by people search engine, yet each of them would try to search his name online and see what would come out. (I bet you would go to Ucloo.com to search your name quietly before finishing reading this article.)
Is there any technical obstacle that prevents Google or Microsoft from doing the same thing? In fact anyone with deep pockets can do it. However, there is critical difference between people search engine and PageRank algorithm. Moreover, it has been years since any people search engine started to accumulate personal data. It takes time to catch up.
[+] Summary of the series
The series of "Web 2.0, think again," which one of my good friends described as groundbreaking, has come to a period here. It has been exactly a year since I published the article confessing that I had neglected Web 2.0.
Over the year I have been groping after Web 2.0 and making up for what I had missed. The five articles in the series are the crystallization of my efforts, which I hope you find satisfactory and helpful in pointing out the trend.
Meanwhile I would like pose a question not necessarily related to business: with Web 2.0, the cost of interpersonal communication has been declining, yet are people getting closer to one other? Maybe people are still living within their small circles and, like I said before, getting together sharing feelings with others of similar attributes?
Is the world we know growing more open or closed? Are we getting clearer about ourselves, or quite the opposite? Will there be one day when marketers know better about you than yourself?
- Read More
Prev : Web 2.0 Think Again (4) "Private Property" and "Class Inequality"
Next : From Idea to Business (1) How to Estimate Your User Number?
- Today in History
New Landscape in China's Telecom Market (3) Who's Gonna Be the Price Killer? - 2008/06/29
New Landscape in China's Telecom Market (2) Opportunities and Burdens for New China Mobile - 2008/06/22
Web 2.0 Think Again (5) Unearth the Value of "People" - 2007/06/24
Ultimate Mobile Device (2) Competition of Handheld Game Console - 2005/06/26
Showing 1 - 5. [ Next ]
Quick Links
Latest Comment
Re: - having a hard time dealing with everything like what hon?
| Terms of Service
| Privacy Policy