Recently in Internet Category

Google Browser Sync was my favorite Google product.  It syncs browser data between your computers.  In my case, I use it to move between my main Desktop and laptop seamlessly.  My bookmarks, passwords, history, and even my most recently opened tabs were just right there.

I've used online bookmark services in the past all the way back to backflip (remember them?), but Google Browser Sync really took it to a new level for me.  It syncs much more than bookmarks and even more importantly I didn't have to go anywhere--it just worked.  And it worked fast and well.

I recently delayed upgrading to FireFox 3 because it kept saying that Google Browser Sync wasn't updated for it yet.  So I finally searched for why, and found this post from Google saying they are discontinuing my favorite Google product!

Yes, I get there are alternatives.  Yes, I get Google is a private company and can do whatever they want.  Yes, they are releasing code.  But I still just don't get it.  Why?  Why, Google, why?

How much resources does it really take to continue supporting Google Browser Sync?  Why does Mozilla think this is a huge opportunity and you don't?  And even if you don't think it is *as huge*, you can't make a bet on it with one FTE or even a partial FTE out of your 19K+ employees?  What about just to enable its use for FireFox 3?

And how much of a chance did you really give it anyway?  I didn't notice any real promotion, and everyone I've explained it to (yes, non-tech people too) love it, just like me.  Is there anything I can do to change your mind?

Lame! (cut from South Park's AWESOM-O)

After encouraging feedback about WatrCoolr on Hacker News and Proggit, I created Hacker WatrCoolr, which is a hacker oriented version of the original site.

What does that mean?  A lot of little tweaks to make the site more amenable to hackers.  And one big change: the general interest feeds are replaced with hacker interest feeds on Hacker WatrCoolr.  Here are the current ones:

• Hacker News of course (stories that reach the top)
• Techmeme (stories that reach the top)
• RSSmeme, English 12 hours (stories that reach the top)
• reddit, programming (stories that reach the top)
• Digg popular: software, programming, design, tech news & gadgets, aggregated
• Slashdot: developers, books, ask, bsd & it, aggregated
• Yahoo! Technology News Most Emailed (stories that reach the top)
• del.icio.us popular: programming, webdesign, startups, design, tools, software, web2.0, css, reference & development, aggregated
• ReadBurner (stories that reach the top)
  

(And no xkcd.)

These feeds are subject to change based on their continued usefulness and your feedback.  I've been tweaking them for a week or so (as you may guess from reading them).

This is the second post that examines one valuable asset Facebook definitely has--the daily attention of a large group of people--by looking at other analogous things this user base's attention is yielding in the marketplace.  The last post considered TV advertising, and concluded (albeit roughly) that the time spent by FB users online might be worth $3B/year to FB in TV-like advertising on the Web.

This post considers mobile phone use.  Let's say there are 10M FB users in their core demographic (young people on college campuses).  Note that FB apparently has 30M users total.  The average cell phone bill is about $50, which may be on the low end for college students.  Let's go with it for now.

10M users * $50/month * 12 months/year = $6B/year in revenue.

Now, of course this mobile phone comparison is quite different than the TV advertising comparison.  FB has a shot at actually creating TV-like brand awareness advertising on its site, but doesn't have a prayer of capturing any of the mobile phone market's revenue.  Or does it?

On the one hand, FB's core demographic arguably uses FB to communicate as much as they do with their mobile phones.  And consequently, surveyed, this demographic might say they derive just as much value from FB as they do from their mobile phones.  Although the same might be said for email and IM, both of which are free of course.

On the other hand, people pay for mobile phone service, because they want to be...duh...mobile.  But that isn't the whole story either.  If you have a wi-fi device on a college campus, then you could connect with your friends via FB outside the mobile phone network.  And they could add voice pretty easily...

So I don't think it is totally clear cut.  Granted, if FB charged $50/month, that probably wouldn't fly.  But what about $10/month for some useful feature subset?  Some might say well then people would just switch to X, but I'm not so sure.  Just because people can switch without monetary cost, doesn't mean people will switch.  And they would presumably still have the free version.

Anyway, at $10/month on average, that's roughly $1B/year in revenue.  Now I realize that not *everyone* would pay.  That average # could be chopped up a number of ways.  Maybe , because of the way it is offered (in some network effect way), the vast majority of the core demographic does sign up.  Or, maybe it is a heavily skewed distribution with a bunch at a few $ and some at $100.  The latter might be realized if the offering was more in a la carte services.

Now, FB has a ton of employees (for who knows what reason), but their profit margins are probably still way way higher than mobile phone companies.  After all, they have no cell towers, customer service, stores, etc.  So in effect, that $1B might be equivalent in earnings.

Of course, there are in-betweens as well.  There could be cell phone plan add-ons for exclusive FB services.  FB could launch a MVNO.

All in all, I suppose I just find it amusing that college kids spend $6B/year on their cell phones (probably more) and not a penny on FB.  Now I realize their are valid economic reasons for this.  It might cost that much to actually provide the mobile phone service (not sure what their margins are exactly).  And the cost of providing FB might be so low it pushes it down to being free. 

But, at the same time, I think these markets are colliding and FB has significant market power.  So every day this gets closer to market collision and FB gets more market power, is a day where FB is giving valuable surplus to consumers.  How much?  I don't know.  What do you think?

This recent comment on this Hacker News thread about the validity of FB's $15B valuation inspired me to do some quick back of the envelope calculations.  The relevant part of the comment said:

If it can convince major brands that Facebook eyeballs are worth the same as traditional advertising (in effect sell them CPM, not CPC - "Facebook is the new TV"), then Facebook will do quite well. That's a very tough sell for smaller players, but it might not be impossible for Facebook.

The comment's author cites compete's FB #s at about 30M users with 350M visits/month at an average stay of 15 min each.  That gives us:

350M visits/month * 15 min/vis * 1 hr/60 min * 12 months/year ~ 1B hrs/yr

At 30M users that is around 33 hours per year for each user.

American Idol apparently sells a 30 sec spot for ~$750K with about a 30M audience.  That is about same size audience and demographic of FB, so let's just go with it for now. 

$0.750M/30sec * 60sec/min * 60min/hr = $90M/hr

At 30M viewers, that is around $3/hr per viewer.

If we put that together we get:

$3/hr * 33hr/year ~ $100/year per user.

And then with $30M users, we get our answer: $3B/year.


Please let me qualify that I am not trying to imply any of the following:

• That FB's real value lies in its ability to deliver TV-like advertising.
• That FB could even get this kind of money for TV-like (brand awareness) ads, although this recent article about CBS online ads vs TV ads is interesting in that respect.
• That FB should even go in this direction.

All I'm trying to do here is examine one valuable asset FB definitely has--the daily attention of a large group of people--from one angle.  This one angle is to look at another thing the FB user base's attention is yielding in the marketplace. 

Btw, I did a second calculation, but this post is already too long, so I'll write it up tomorrow.

Update: additional comments can be found here.

Google says:

Network neutrality is the principle that Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet.

This translates, in Google's opinion, to:

In [Google's] view, the broadband carriers should not be permitted to use their market power to discriminate against competing applications or content.

A couple years ago (in 2006), Amnesty International accused the major search engines of hypocrisy on net neutrality because of their activities censoring content in China.  At least one telecom exec repeated the accusation.

But that's just the tip of the hypocrisy iceberg, in my opinion.  Google has about 60% of search traffic.  Some significant percentage of people use Google exclusively as their gateway to the Internet.  If a Web site is not in the Google index, that content is literally invisible to these people.  In that case, Google has effectively used "their market power to discriminate against competing applications or content."

I presume Google might say to that, "well, anyone can switch search engine providers."  Yet by the same token, most people can switch broadband providers.  I realize not everyone can, but the % of people who can is high and increasing.  I have 4 independent choices now (cable, dsl, fiber, and wireless) at my house.

Additionally, the argument that anyone can switch search engine providers easily has issues.  First off, a lot of people still don't really understand what a search engine is, that there are multiple providers, who they are, and how to switch.  And I would presume that a lot of these people are the same people that use Google exclusively.  Someone set up Google as their homepage some years ago, and it hasn't budged since.  To some of these people, Google is their access to the Internet even more so in their minds than their broadband provider.

Furthermore, Google has zero transparency when it comes to why parts of a domain or even an entire domain is in or out of their index.  Plenty of small businesses have just woken up one day to find their search traffic from Google gone, for a completely unknown reason.  Plenty of others have had to wait months or years to be included in the index at all, even though Google has crawled their pages countless times.

Now I am not suggesting that Google should be forced to include every domain and page in their index.  Nor am I suggesting they become more transparent, or be forced to do anything for that matter.  I am simply pointing out that IMHO their insistence that broadband carriers do not content discriminate and allow people to get to all sites seems very hypocritical when they themselves content discriminate and do not let people get to all sites.

Does this suggest net neutrality is unworkable?  No, I don't think so.  (I still don't have a strong opinion on net neutrality btw.)  I just think if Google is going to argue in favor of it, they should do it themselves.  What would that entail?  For starters:

• Don't delete domains from your index.  You already use penalization schemes that rank things to the bottom of search results.  That should be enough.  Actually deleting it really does make it like the site doesn't exist for some non-negligible amount of people.
• Be more transparent about why things got deleted from your index, or are still not in it.  A simple response code would be a good start.
• If you type whatever.com into Google, and there are no results but you know it exists, put a link to that domain up.

Again, I'm not suggesting Google do these things, should do these things, or should be forced to do these things.  I just think that doing them would make them seem less hypocritical on net neutrality.

What do you think?  Is Google hypocritical on net neutrality?

For the fourth time in a year, I set up a new domain (for a Web project), sent a personal message from it to my Gmail account, and it got marked as spam.  For the skeptical, let's just say I am not a noob when it comes to the intricacies of email and the spam problem in general...

• Yes, I have correct SPF records, reverse-DNS entries, etc.
• These data points contain different IPs, networks, MTAs, etc.
• The messages were different and not "spammy."
• This was repeatable, i.e. the second message went to spam too.
  

First off, despite the above, I am open to the possibility that is this just happening to me for reasons I don't understand yet.  Has anyone out there had a similar experience?

Secondly, I'm not saying they are doing this on purpose, but I wouldn't be surprised either.  Probably a lot of new domains are registered by spammers.  But not all!

Another reason I think they might be doing this on purpose is that after the first three times this happened, Gmail support fixed the problem for me.  By the way, getting them to fix it was particularly annoying, mainly because they did not read my email.  I wrote up a very detailed support ticket, and I just kept getting canned responses saying something like: "here are our guidelines and common problems, if it is not one of these, please reply to this message."  Well, if you had actually read my message, you would know that it wasn't one of those!  So after replying with basically the same message multiple times, it was fixed.

This fourth time was a little different, however.  I wrote up the same ticket, got the same canned responses.  And then finally I got this (new to me) canned response:

Hello,

Thank you for your reply.

 If you are adhering to our guidelines and are not sending unwanted mail,
the classification of your messages could be influenced by other factors.
The problem may resolve itself, but if the issue persists for more than a
month, please contact your Internet Service Provider's customer support
department to learn whether any spam is being sent by your or a
neighboring IP address.

Sincerely,

The Google Team

This response is annoying on so many levels.  I won't get into all of them, but here are a few.

1. I already told them I am running my own server on my own IP.
2. Punishing IP blocks (and even single IPs because of shared hosting) is irresponsible IMHO (see below).
3. A month!  Are they really serious!?!?
   

Anyway, if they are doing this (sending new domains to spam) on purpose, I think it is just simply irresponsible.  Spam false positives degrade email as a communications medium by creating a large negative externality.  Gmail false positives -> Domains can't communicate effectively via email -> Domains stop using email as much across all their customers.  (For a graphical representation of this, see pg 44 in my Master's Thesis.)

Lame! (cut from South Park's AWESOM-O)

While I'm on Gmail annoyances...I've been waiting years for an option to NOT add everyone I communicate with to my contacts.  I know I am not alone on this one...

Yes, I get it Gmail--if you keep everyone you can do cool things like auto-populate the chat list.  And yes, I gave up using folders in a similar way.  But here's the problem.  You use all these people to auto-complete addresses when I am composing email. 

As time goes on, the random emails addresses with which I have communicated dwarf in number the ones I regularly communicate with.  But yet, you don't give the latter ones preference.  And this defeats the purpose of the auto-complete feature IMHO, and is additionally quite annoying.  So I find myself ever so often going through and cleaning out my contacts list.  I want that time back!

Another problem with auto-add to contacts.  I get really hesitant using those "import your contacts from Gmail" features on other sites.  I don't want to risk spamming a billion people.  All in all...

Lame! (cut from South Park's AWESOM-O)

I get it Gmail--it seems more personal to display only first names in the chat window.  Problem is, I regularly talk with three people whose first name is Dan.  I can't be alone here...

Yes, I know the full name is at the top of the window.  So what--I hardly ever look there.  My eye is drawn to the bottom where the conversation is actually happening and where the first name is bolded. 

Yes, I've mixed up who I've been talking to, especially when one Dan writes an IM right after I've just talked to another Dan.  C'mon, at least give me a full name display option...

Lame! (cut from South Park's AWESOM-O)

I happened on Facebook's "People You May Know Feature" today, which is pretty self-explanatory.  In theory, love the idea.  In practice, Lame!

I can't figure out how to hide the section or block individual people from showing.  For reasons I won't get into here, there are just some people I don't want to see, and Facebook keeps showing me their faces every time I log in!

Lame! (cut from South Park's AWESOM-O)

Update: I logged into Facebook this morning, and they appear to have added the ability to block people on this feature!  I doubt they were listening to me, but thank you nonetheless. 

For years now I have been expecting a viable AdSense competitor, from Microsoft, Yahoo, or a then yet unknown startup.  By viable competitor, I mean publishers (like myself) could easily switch to the competitor and expect to make at least as much money on average.  Yet the years go by, and there is nothing appealing to try out.  I just don't get it...

Google's latest 10-K says their AdSense type products still account for 34% of their advertising revenue, of which advertising revenue is 99% of their total revenue (search for "Google Network web sites as % of advertising revenues").  You would think that if you were Microsoft or Yahoo and you wanted to compete with to Google for the long-term, then you would start trying to grab away this ever expanding AdSense revenue. 

I've heard rumblings about Microsoft's, Yahoo's, Ask's and others' attempts.  However, to date there has been apparently no viability according to my above definition.

I appreciate that Google probably has a larger advertising base.  However, Microsoft and Yahoo seem to both have the same order of magnitude of traffic across their sites, which should in theory translate into the capability of getting the same order of magnitude of advertising dollars.

Additionally, Google keeps a lot of the money from AdSense (in a rather opaque way IMHO).  A competitor (Microsoft especially) could potentially subsidize the platform for a long time in order to help get publishers to switch.

So...

• Why the interminable delay?
• Will a combined Microsoft/Yahoo deliver something better?
• Am I just wrong and there actually is a viable AdSense competitor out there today (because I'm willing to try it right now)?
• Is it the fact that the big deals totally swamp out the small publishers and they are therefore somehow a waste of time?
• Is the coding and infrastructure of a contextual advertising platform really that hard (I really really doubt the answer to this is yes btw)?

Update: additional comments can be found here.