The Beeb notes that Amazon has entered the lists to joust with Apple for Music Downloads in the UK.

Amazon MP3 will sell tracks from 59p and albums from £3.

The new music store will offer more than 3 million songs that will work on any digital music player, including Apple's iPod.

The move puts Amazon in direct competition with Apple for a stake in the growing market of online music sales, which in Britain alone was worth an estimated £163m in 2007.

With Apple at a gouging 79p in the UK, its great to see competition - especially with a DRM free model - and its interesting to see Amazon taking the "Microsoft" role to Apple in the music game. The real shame is on Planet Mobile, whose market this should have been before Apple, and who could still have played the Amazon hand 3 years ago.

Ball, dropped......... I wonder whether Planet Video will drop the same balls today?

As to how useful it is - I use the "Roderick Falconer Long Tail Test", which Amazon passes with flying colours*.

To explain - Roderick Falconer is a little known today (micro-cult?) late Glam/early new wave 70's musician who had a brief bit of fame in my Uni days (alt.disco.thank_god). If a system is mining the long tail as far as him, then it is likely to be interesting enough to be worth bothering with as a source of music (Napster got to him in about late 2000).

Now I happen to like some of his stuff (ie if you like Bowie, Roxy, Talking Heads etc ), but pick your own Roderick if you don't - be fascinated to know who you would test for as your micro-cult....

* and 79p a song.....premium for the micro cult customers

From the NYT:

Serious talks between the Facebook social network and the Twitter microblogging service started soon after Mr. Williams took over as chief executive on Oct. 16. Twitter reportedly rejected Facebook’s $500 million, mostly stock offer several weeks ago.

“We explored it, as we should. We took it seriously,” Mr. Williams said. “It definitely made sense — the strategy we talked about with them — but it wasn’t the right time.”

At $500 in $15bn valued stock....no definitely not the right time, because Facebook isn't likely to be worth much more than $3bn in our view, so thats $100bn in Real Money for Facebook which is about what it was valued at last round (and its still in stock, not even cash). (Nic Brisbourne did a good analysis last week).

When is the right time - well, after Facebook has been devalued of course - But we reckon in 2 years time Twitter may well be buying Facebook - they could have a real revenue model

Techmeme is moving more to blended curation via algorithm and human input. Its an interesting area, one thats been much on our minds since looking at how Video Aggregation would be done, and also since listening to the BBC talk on Social Media Moderation at Amplified 08, and also looking at my how we blend Algorithms and Human input:

The exact impacts Techmeme predicts are:

Humans have always edited Techmeme of course, just implicitly. For instance, when a blogger links to a story, the headline might move higher on Techmeme. What's different now is that an additional human editor will carry out changes explicitly to directly improve the mix of headlines on Techmeme. Though the implicit edits conveyed via algorithm outnumber the explicit edits perhaps by 1000 to 1 or more, the impact of the human editor is nonetheless pronounced. What will that effect be?

The news will just get faster and more interesting. Obsolete stories will be eliminated sooner while breaking stories will be expedited. Related grouping will improve. Most of this will happen only on Techmeme, though other sites (like memeorandum and WeSmirch) will increasingly benefit from the direct human touch as well.

And gaming will be easier to spot...question of course is, is it scalable? Techmeme seems to imply it thinks so:

I should note that the experience of introducing direct editing has been a revelation even for us, despite the fact that we planned it. Interacting directly with an automated news engine makes it clear that the human+algorithm combo can curate news far more effectively that the individual human or algorithmic parts. It really feels like the age of the news cyborg has arrived. Our goal is to apply this new capability to producing the clearest and most useful tech news overview available.

Though effective here may not mean efficiency. I also hope that it trades some laterality, ie keeps a bit of deviation around the standard mainstream signals - serendipty among the datastreams. Also, one suspects a rapid rise in attempts at PR seduction of the human interface to the Algorithms - enjoy

Still, this is, I suspect, one of the emerging props of the foundations of the New Media Industry. Long term we suspect bit by bit the human bits of curation will be replaced by better and more intelligent automation. We are in the spinning jenny phase of automated aggregation.... just starting to pick up the threads, as it were

Yet another dance of the seven veils for the Twitter Business model:

At a Churchill Club event in San Francisco on Tuesday, Twitter co-founder and CEO Evan Williams brushed off--again--criticisms that the company is slow to turn on its revenue-generating engines.

At first, it sounded like Williams was a bit lost on the revenue front. "We will make money, and I can't say exactly how because...we can't predict how the businesses we're in will work." As he has before, he hinted at generating fees from sales-related Twitter content and from corporate users.

I would do it another way, which is to replicate the Freemium model that chatrooms have used for a decade - a "Silver", "Gold" and "Platinum" levels that allow deeper visibility of other members' data, and more services (search etc).

I would also broker SMS services - I can't believe its not possible to do attractive bulk deals to allow people to take Twitter as an SMS service and Twitter takes a cut. That imho could be the really big number, in fact you may bundle deals and add services in that way as well.

In addition, I think they have a few other levers:

(i) Add payment plans if one has above a certain number of follows - say 1,000. At least the serious spammers would pay.

(ii) Follow the CyWorld, Habbo, Flirtomatic models and sell little things in bulk that people can give each other

(iii) Have a "give us some love" option so people can donate to Twitter at times of extreme delight.

(iv) Sell Ads on the user landing page - I don't think anyone would object to a Pagetop Ad where the Home etc are now, and on maintenance pages if they knew it was in a good cause (ie their free service). easy on the intrusive datamining, just general stuff for the demographics.

The trick is to not put any friction on the comms flow for the vast majority of users.

No doubt they have thought of these and more, but the point is that one can look to use cases where these do work and users are not p*ssed off by them.

Also, it is clear that making money is a bit more "piquant" than it was:

Williams said, "We're looking at Q1 for revenues." This is a change from the original, pre-economic meltdown plan. "The original plan was to focus on revenues in 2010. That's no longer the case, since I don't want to raise money in 2009."

Here's a hint - Execution is 9/10ths of the law, to mix metaforce - or JFDI as it is known. The loyal audience has stayed with Twitter through multiple fail whale sightings, they realise the world has changed, in my view they will stay with them now.

PS Twitter, if this is of any value, feel free to contribute to our coffers in the best ShareWare tradition

Interesting post re Adult sites on Ning, a sort of Yahoo Groups for SocNets:

As of January 1, 2009, we’ll no longer support adult social networks on the Ning Platform.

We’re not discontinuing the Red Light District because we no longer believe in the freedom to create your own social network for anything as long as it’s legal. We do. Practically though, supporting adult networks no longer makes sense. Here is what we’ve seen in practice to date with respect to adult social networks on Ning:

- Adult social networks don’t pull their own weight. Specifically, they require other social networks to work harder because they don’t generate enough advertising or premium service revenue to cover their costs. Plus, our ad partners aren’t big fans of the adult networks and therefore require us to identify adult networks or risk our healthy advertising revenue. We don’t want to be in the policing business and, unchecked, that’s where this is heading.

- By having legal adult social networks on Ning, we’ve seen a rise in volume of illegal adult social networks. We are always going to do the right thing as it pertains to social networks that are illegal or violate our Terms of Service. That’s non-negotiable. However, the time involved in reporting and assisting the authorities on illegal adult social networks is simply too time and cost intensive for the benefits derived by having adult social networks on Ning.

- Adult social networks on Ning receive a disproportionate number of DMCA take down notices creating additional work for our team. We respect intellectual property rights and comply with the DMCA. Compared to our other social networks on the Ning Platform, the additional work created by adult networks alleged to have violated the copyrights of others is enough for us to discontinue adult networks in favor of investing time and energy in growing the Ning Platform from here.

Whats interesting is that Ning feel that the economics no longer stack up. Or were they doing it on ethical grounds?

It would also be interesting to know what % of their service is impacted - one of the other interesting trends is that its less and less of the traffic, so less important.

One of the big problems they face in these days of enthusiastic amateur user (de)generated content (like Youporn) is that to titillate they have to be more extreme, and no one wants to host that. Secondly, no one wants to advertise against it.

Look like porn can't survive without subscription, but Youporn et al are dropping that market. Seems like porn is not immune to the travails of the media overall. It will be interesting to see what arises next (as it were) in the porn industry.

Update - fascinating comment from one of the sites impacted in the comments section.

Sarah Perez has an interesting post on RWW, on the "end of online anonymity":

Firstly, repercussions of the Lori Drew case:

A precedent-setting case, the Lori Drew MySpace trial, has just come to an end. If you're unfamiliar, this was a case where an overprotective mom established a fake online identity to bully her daughter's [13 y/o] rival [who then committed suicide]. The judge's ruling has now criminalized the act of creating a fake persona online. In the case of Drew, most would agree she deserves the punishment she received. However, the aftershocks of the ruling could very well impact the online identity creation process for years to come if it's not overturned.

I wonder what a fake persona counts as - is a nom de plume ok if its clear who you are on investigation? And how is this going to be enforced across chatrooms and social nets everywhere? I suspect a rash of "real sounding" names will emerge unless people are forced to hand over credit card details or similar, which will break a huge amount of the internet "good guy" stuff (the spammers will carry on relentlessly regardless....)

And this, of course, is what the Big Boys want - as Sarah notes:

Here, companies like Facebook, Google, and others are already in position to offer a solution for making sure people are who they say they are. Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, and Yahoo's Open Strategy, have all been busy trying to grab land on the new frontier of identity management. All of them want to be your de facto online identity provider.

Because for them, the scary alternative is that YOU may do it themselves - see the diagram below:



We first started alerting y'all to the coming metadata war 18 months ago, when we had to look at the Federation vs Aggregation isues for a client. You see, there is no real reason why Facebook or any of the others have to be your MetaData aggregator - but of course, they all desperately want to be, because therein lies your digital footprint, that can (so the theory goes) be monetsied - especially if you have to hand over that gold standard, a credit card billing address. Now Sarah notes that:

No matter who wins, though, it's anonymity that loses. For the sites that move to these types of authentication methods, no longer will their users be able to create disposable usernames and passwords so they can troll around harassing others and leaving juvenile comments. Instead, all participants are themselves online - and subject to the same standards for behavior that you would expect to see if you encountered them in a real-life public situation.

That is a 2 edged sword though - some people note that its only via anonymity that they can get personal data into healing situations online. Others argue that all you do is replace virtual with real world trolls.

We think its not a straight jump from authentication to loss of anonymity, in that it is perfectly possible to be authenticated but be a pseudonym - all you need is a trusted authentication party. This can be structured in ways where it can be owned by its users, or a subset, or nobody rather than by a corporate entity. Of course, the corporates know this which is why they have sought to get (very) close to Open ID, Open Source etc, under the "Keep your friends close but your enemies closer" rule - and the SocNets all want to muscle in on Google's act here - as Sarah notes:

The reality is that we have, in fact, turned over vast amounts of our personal identity to this company in exchange for free webmail with pretty themes, snappy web browsing experiences, free analytics tools, more. As Allen Stern noted this weekend, "Google Knows Where I Am and Everything I Do." (If you want to jump even deeper down that rabbit hole, take a closer look at Google's User Data Empire)

But is the resultant Puritan State of affairs sustainable? (hmmm...no affairs in a nonanonymous world - that's a non starter or starters ):

The only way to prevent reputations from being damaged in the process is to always "be on your best behavior" in public. Frankly, that's no fun. No more wild boys nights out? No more getting silly and stupid with your friends? No - not unless you're willing to live with the consequences of having it plastered online in the morning.

Ain't human nature, won't happen methinks. Who wants to live ina Global Village where everyone knows your business (in fact is prdicting it before you do it). People will not trade that for the supposed (and as yet unproven long term) utility of social connectedness. We will muddle through.... I suspect the real growth business going forward is identity scramblers and anonymisers.

The Mobile TV market is moribund - too many standards chasing too few users. And the non standardisation of standards makes the end to end video content production for most mobile phone types totally uneconomic.

However, we think this is about to change. One of the impacts of the iPhone is that it creates a set of de facto standards for online video services to design to – so, for example the Web TV service Joost released an iPhone version of its service on the 29th November 2008. This lets users stream and watch any of Joost's 46,000-plus videos for free.

As one reviewer commented:

“When you load up Men in Black on Joost, it just feels like a whole different ballgame. This isn't a video of a dog on a skateboard anymore. This is real, Hollywood-produced content, delivered to your phone, for free.”

Just add surround sound via stereo headphones (we've heard it trialled, it is stunning what a difference it makes to a small screen picture's "believability"), and I suspect its a game changing experience

TechCrunch reckons Netbooks aren't up to the job of being a "real" laptop, for 3 main reasons:

- Too Little Horsepower

- Then There’s The Screen

- The Keyboard

Hmmm....I was around when luggable PC's appeared, and I recall similar criticisms then. Lesson of history is you can never be too light or too mobile, and Moore's Law is remorseless.

Our view is that these devices will more be used as big smartphones in the future anyway - TechCrunch demurs...

There is a big fat hole in the market between mobile devices like the iPhone and regular laptops. But smaller, underpowered laptops aren’t the answer for the mass market. Most of the Netbooks aren’t much cheaper than very low end laptops (and those laptops have normal keyboard and much bigger screens).

....but people will pay a premium for convenience of conveyance.

For what its worth, most of the people I've spoken to who have one say they won't go back to a standard laptop again - and this is just 1st generation! I'd be interested if anyone has views on their use of smartphones vs netbooks.

Nice post by Broadcom's Rags Gupta on surviving dot.bomb 2.0 from experience of dot.bomb 1.0 (props Deirdre Molloy for link). Its also on GigaOm over here. I was on a panel on the Chinwag Web TV Takeover event with him a few months ago, very sensible chap)

1. Be as transparent with your employees and other stakeholders as you can be. At one point, we had to tell everyone in the company that coming to work was optional and that the next payroll was in doubt because of our cash issues. Even though it was bad news, they appreciated the transparency. In hindsight, I would have been much more communicative than I had been.

2. Cultivate a trusted adviser or mentor outside of the workplace. I think people should do this anyway but it helped me a great deal to have someone I could talk to about the issues I was facing and dispassionately help me evaluate the scenarios and available options.

3. Remember whom you work for and where your fiduciary duties lie. Yes, you ultimately work for yourself. But, as a founder or management team member, you may have fiduciary duties to shareholders, both common and preferred, to employees, creditors and customers. Their interests can diverge even in the best of times and especially so when things start going pear-shaped. I made some painful decisions that ruined a friendship but were for the ultimate good of the company and satisfied my fiduciary and ethical obligations — and, to reiterate No. 2 above, I’m glad I had a trusted adviser to help me make sense of things during such an emotionally fraught period.

4. Accelerate non-advertising revenue models. This is a more practical recommendation. Even if your usage and advertising metrics are growing nicely, now is the time to accelerate development of non ad-based models and prioritize the other revenue streams more highly. Your investors and potential investors and acquirers will appreciate this. Not only that but they are likely to discount your ad-based revenues anyway, so any momentum you can show outside of ads will bolster your story.

5. What doesn’t kill you will only make you stronger. Easy to say, hard to live through. But just keep telling yourself this when things really, really suck.

6. Pray! Seriously, luck plays a big role. Do whatever you can to make your own luck.

Point 3 is a biggie in turbulent times. See his note on Ad revenues as well.

If only the young 'uns had listened when the old hands said here comes another Bubble, eh

I was thinking about Social Capital and Social Capitalism (its been on my mind a lot since I went to Berlin) when I saw this on Seth Godin's blog:

In a world where consumers have so much power, we now have two responsibilities:

- If you don't like what an organization stands for, work actively to spread the word and force them to change

and

- If you will miss a product, a service, a book, a site or a professional when they close up shop, stand up, speak up and bring them masses of new business.

We get what we promote.

You get what you vote for with your attention, money, karma etc.

I was set to thinking about how this applies to the things that money doesn't buy, that, as Joni Mitchell noted, you don't know what you've got till its gone. And I was thinking that Amplified 08 - great that it was - is only the starting point in rebuilding the sort of Social Capital that previous generations took for granted.

The problem with a lot of Social Capital infrastructure is you can't actually buy it, you have to build it, and you have to do that in collaboration with others. And the only way that really occurs is to agitate and campaign, and put up a structure that a community can vote for.

And the one thing, the one new tool we have, is Social Networks. Which is why I was so exasperated by the way Twitter was abused in reporting the Mumbai attacks, and also so energised by the way we used it at Amplified 08. Same time, same service, different usages.

Still, its early days - and if you believe, as I do, that Social Media is the next major comms tool to create non-zero-sum behaviour in our world - and that it will be essential given the crises we face, then there is still so much to do!