Archive for April, 2008

Silicon Valley was taken over last week by the Web2.0 Expo happening in San Francisco.

I attended the Keynotes, visited the Expo and Web2Open sessions on thurs and friday.

Web2.0 being the Social Web seems an accepted notion among everyone now. All focus was on how to build out real social web beyond the social networks.

Many announcements focused on opening developer APIs to create platforms. I personally think this is going to be the future in the coming year to create interoperable sites with exchange of data across the platforms.

Y! and AOL had announcements about opening up as a platform. AIM is now the most open platform on the Web now! If you are a developer anywhere in the world, you have to check it out!

Mitchel Baker of Mozilla Foundation spoke eloquontly about opening Firefox as a platform for mobile social.

Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs was soooo funny but had nuggets of wisdom we cannot miss.

Social Media is becoming pervasive today without many of us stopping to realize how we are part of the change happening around us.

We as consumers lead online by sharing reviews online for every product like movies, restaurants, hotels, travel experiences and our perceived decision uncertainties of retail brands. Some of us are active writing reviews and comments in online sites like yelp, movie sites, travel sites etc, while others are making it a habit to consume this information as word-of-mouth referrals and contributing to brand perceptions by our innocent questions comparing brands and the real product match behind the brands.

Facebook has introduced the concept of Social Ads where they will embed the ads as part of a social action of a user. From a business standpoint what I like about Facebook’s Social Ads is that we can actually find out how many users are available who fit our targeted profile before we sign up for an Ad. The disadvantage is that it is not well entrenched like a Google Ad so we do not have any market support on whether to select a PPC or a CPM model and what price is appropriate.

Joshua Porter has an excellent post on why he thinks Social Ads do now work

Amy Jo Kim started me thinking differently on the difference between the Google and the Facebook models. Google attracts users who further in the product cycle looking for something eg travel, product search etc and wants super short time-per-visit while Facebook wants super long time-per-visit with users being exposed to Social endorsements from trusted circle of friends.