Content and services

A new report says that mobile phones are playing a bigger role in Web use, especially with social networking sites. Users are updating their social network information directly from their cellphones, adding commentary, pictures, and video with their phones. The iPhone and other iPhone competitors have much improved Web browsers, allowing fast and easy access to social networking Web sites, and the integrated cameras make it easy to upload multimedia content.

Here is a first person account from someone who just canceled their cable TV service (but kept the Internet connection). They have what is becoming the same old story, "Who needs it?" Almost any show you want to watch can be watched via a broadband Internet connection, so you can save yourself forty or fifty dollars a month by just skipping TV altogether.

This article discusses falling ad revenue for social networking sites. That probably explains why the ads on FaceBook seem sleazier lately. About every other time I log in, I get pummeled with an ad to meet "sexy singles in Blacksburg," along with what is supposed to be an example of a "sexy single" in a bikini. Bottom fishing ads like this one may be helping to pay the bills on these sites, but as the sleaze factor goes up, more parents are going to start declaring the sites off-limits to their kids.

WalMart is the latest company to build a special iPhone-compatible interface to its Web site. As the iPhone becomes more popular, more Web sites (news sites, particularly) are adding content designed to work well with the iPhone Web browser.

The New York Times is taking a mortgage on its office building in Manhattan because it can't pay its bills. The LA Times has filed for bankruptcy. Many local papers are quietly going out of business. The newspaper is a venerable icon, but smearing ink on dead trees is, well, dead. Newspapers have failed utterly to adapt to the Internet, largely because they have been unable to distinguish between their core competency and their historical distribution medium. Newspapers have stubbornly clung to the notion that it is their job to throw wads of paper in driveways every morning.

2008 may be the year that TV died. Lately, I have begun meeting and hearing about people that have simply disconnected their cable TV service. They can get whatever shows they want to watch off the Internet, fee or free, with less effort and with more convenience. If you are willing to pay a buck or two, you can watch a one hour TV show in forty minutes because the commercials have been removed--is twenty minutes of your time worth $2?

With the downturn in the economy, we are likely to see many more weak social networking business ventures fail. It Died is likely to do very well for the next year or so as it documents flops like People Connection, Flip.com, and Pownce. It's like the remake of an old horror movie--The Return of the Dot.Com Swamp Thing.

Michael Smerconish, a newspaper columnist, writes today about the Martin Eisenstadt hoax. Eisenstadt was the source of the rumor that Sarah Palin had mis-identified Africa as a "country," not a continent. The problem was that Eisenstadt was an entirely fictitious person, or as Smerconish puts it, the "Borat" of the news business. Both Eisenstadt and the Africa quote were entirely made up.

Enough poorly thought out and/or underfunded online services are dying that someone has started a death watch blog. This is a market where too many startups thought they were going to capture 10% of the market and make gazillions with their wizzy Web 2.0 service (file storage, online collaboration, etc.).

It may be benign and even mildly useful, but SEEMS creepy. Google has announced it now tracking the flu by using searches for keywords like "flu," "fever," "thermometer," and so on. It uses information gleaned from your browser and computer (IP address, MAC address, service provider) to identify an approximate location. The data will then be passed on to the Center for Disease Control. A test last year was apparently good enough that they are doing it again this year.

It is a bit difficult to take any article seriously that claims in the title that "this technology will change your life." But Twitter, a strange cross between blogging and text messaging, may "a href="http://www.macworld.com/article/136443/2008/10/twitter.html">finally be growing up. Twitter may actually have some real value with respect to public safety, because you can have lots of people subscribed to a Twitter feed that can then quickly send a message to a lot of cellphones all at once.

YouTube has inked deals to start offering full length TV shows. The Google-backed company intends to go head to head with Hulu, which has several deals with networks to carry TV shows.

Google now has its own satellite, or at least exclusive access to one. The firm made a deal with the U.S. government to help finance a new image mapping satellite in return for exclusive commercial rights to the images. It was probably cheaper than paying for images from other commercial and government satellites.

Verizon and AT&T deserve congratulations for endorsing an opt-in approach to tracking online behavior. This means they won't try to build dossiers of where you go online unless they get your permission. The online dossier information can be valuable, as data can be mined and sold to advertisers.

Back in 1995, I foolishly proposed a project for the Blacksburg Electronic Village that would have us partner with the local public radio station to begin broadcasting over the new Internet thingy that was just beginning to take off. It was very modest, and involved streaming audio news reports over the Internet--5 to 10 minutes of mostly local news a day, but in four languages, because of the large international population in Blacksburg.

No one believed anyone would ever be interested in listening to audio over the Internet.

FaceBook and MySpace have been interesting experiments in the social uses of the Internet. As the use of these social networking sites evolves, a better understanding of the effects of those uses also evolves. Not only are employers using the sites to evaluate potential employees, it turns out that a significant number of colleges are also using the sites to evaluate potential students.

The debate over the terms of Google End User License Agreements (EULAs) continues. Last week there was much discussion online about the EULA for Chrome, the new Google Web browser, which resulted in a change to the EULA that no longer gave Google the right to use anything you uploaded with the browser.

NBC, which has exclusive rights to broadcast the 2008 Olympics in the United States, is apparently upset that people are simply not bothering to wait for prime time to watch NBC's repackaged broadcasts. Instead, viewers are simply going to the Internet and watching the Olympics on the Web sites of media outlets in other countries.

The new search engine Cuil (pronounced 'cool') aims to take on Google, like a bunch of other search engines that have tried and failed to dislodge Google. But Cuil is designed and owned by a former Google staffer and her husband who just may pull it off if they have the financial staying power to slug it out over the next couple of years.

This analysis of the current state of Internet ads suggests that some of the big ad brokers on the Internet (e.g. Google, among others) may be near an inflection point with respect to ad demand. Lookery, a firm that sells ads on sites like FaceBook and MySpace, just lowered the cost of its ads by 40%, suggesting very soft demand. And Google's AdWord system, according to the article, seems to be propped up financially by Google's practice of setting very high minimum cost per click fees.