Who's The Boss? Yahoo!'s Move Into Social Search

At some point last night, my Twitter account blew up with links to ReadWriteWeb's story about Yahoo!'s move into the social search space with their B.O.S.S. (Build Your Own Search Service) application. This really is exciting news, as it marks a move into a space that's ripe for expansion. The problem that so many others in the social search space have faced has been a scalability issue. They need more traffic to hit that critical mass where their tools can reach their full potential. Until they hit that point, those search tools don't seem as good (and some of them aren't as good until they get enough usage).

But Yahoo! has got the traffic. For June, Compete.com reports that Yahoo! had nearly 133 million unique visits. Granted not all of those or probably even half of those people will be the developer type to create their own search engines, but enough will be that the BOSS tools should get a good amount of dissemination. With dissemination, more people will come in contact with the concept of social search and being able to influence results as opposed to the predominant what-you-see-is-what-you-get search methodology. This also can position Yahoo! for a much firmer foothold for the future of search.

I've long said and will continue to say that the future of the Internet is in niche topics. Lots of people call it the long-tail of the Internet, although that term is more specific to SEO stuff. When I say niche, I mean that when people want to know about dog-grooming, they want to find dog-grooming topics for their specific dogs. A chihuahua needs something different than a sheep dog. Google may bring up a lot of relevant topics around dog grooming, but oftentimes, a social search engine can be trained and honed more easily to get to a specific granularity.

Of course, enough people have to be using the social search engine to train it this way. I'm making a number of assumptions here, and I'm not entirely sure how Yahoo!'s BOSS application will work. The developers will play big roles in deciding how "social" their search engines will be. So it remains to be seen how exactly this move manifests and how great the adoption rate is. But from a strategic point of view, it's a heck of a move. And after all the furor over Microsoft, perhaps Yahoo! has shown that it still has a few tricks in the bag to turn the search tide to its favor.

Move, Counter Move: Mixx and Digg Rivalry Growing

June has been a particularly interesting month as both Digg and Mixx have come out with fairly big upgrades. Digg just put their beta recommendation engine out for use and feedback, and Mixx added a whole new level of community building tools to the site. They're addressing slightly different immediate needs, but they are still dealing with the main need: getting people the info they want to read.

Let's start with Digg. This is still pretty new, and admittedly, I'm just getting started working with it. So far, I'm not really impressed. Perhaps I haven't cultivated my interests closely enough or the "friends" that I have in my Digg network. I can't say that the recommended stories and videos that come up are really matching my interests that well, although it is nice to have the amount of information that I'm looking at cut down (it knocks out the hot upcoming section). I'll be honest; I read a ton of stuff during a day, and it's easy to get overloaded. So in the vein of making a page a little less cluttered with stuff that is aimed at being closer to my interests, I applaud Digg. They have the good fortune to have tons of submissions, and now they're working with this "problem" to help people cull through all those submissions in a more meaningful way. I think the compatibility percentage with other Diggers pretty much blows at this time (I don't care if someone matches my interests at 18%; show me someone with a 50% and above match), but that's why they call it a beta.

Mixx doesn't have the good fortune to have an overload of submissions. I don't generally feel overwhelmed by information on Mixx, although perhaps that suggests a better UI. No, what Mixx is doing is building the for the future. They've taken a page out of Ning's book and given users the means to create their own communities around topics of their choosing. Personally, I think this is a brilliant move, and down the road, this can be one way to help let the community cull through massive amounts of information, which Digg is now doing. Of course, the current problem with the community system is the lack of users and submissions. My Boston Sports News community gets pretty quiet in there if I'm not doing anything with it. But as Mixx grows its user base (check out the month by month growth on Compete), the social news site is primed to be able to give the users a better experience that's flexible to their needs.

Now I'm not going to tell you that this is a marque match up yet, but given Mixx's innovation and rapidly growing user base, I'm telling you that you need to keep an eye on it. You can check out compete.com's metrics to see just how far apart the two really are. And some of you may be wondering why I haven't talked about Reddit, Propeller, or Yahoo Buzz. Well, I'm not impressed by any of them. Reddit seems to have sat on its hands for some time, and it's recent open source code move doesn't really change anything in what it offers users. Innovation that creates a better and more fulfilling experience for the user is the key to the Internet. Because today you may be the toast of the town, but tomorrow Microsoft is trying to make a hostile take over of your company and everyone talking about how you lost your way. Digg's recommendation engine is a nice move in the right direction, but I'm not sure that it significantly alters what they offer users just yet. Certainly, it doesn't give users the kind of flexibility Mixx's new communities section does.

At the end of the day though, it's about visits and eyeballs, and Digg has got those in spades. At least for today. Tomorrow? Well, we're all just going to have to wait and see.

Ning: The Next Big Thing In Social Networking

Maybe some of you haven't heard of Ning.com. I expect that you will be hearing about it soon enough. According to Compete.com, they had over 2M unique visits for May 08. They've got that hockey stick graph curve that execs everywhere drool over because numbers keep going up and up, and quite frankly, if you're looking to lay money on the next big thing in social networking, I'd put it on Ning.

What is Ning? For those of you just getting up to speed, they're a social networking Web site that allows you the freedom to develop a community around any topic. I'm in about six different ning groups from social media to wine tasting (don't ask me how I got in this one, I don't even drink wine). While MySpace and Facebook give you the ability to join up with everybody and their dog, Ning gives you the flexibility to develop communities around niche topics. And it's not just a crappy forum; I've seen and had my fill of crappy, poorly designed forums, although you can add a forum to your Ning group if you absolutely have to have one. Each individual ning group is different and it may ask for different details from you, depending on how the Ning creator set it up. You also get your own page within each group. Some of the design won't knock your socks off, but then, you also have quite a bit of control over editing and changing the design.

Ning understands that its about niche topics on the Web. They've created an agile platform that puts more control in individual users' hands and allows them to create the communities that they want to create. Essentially, Ning allows thousands of mini-facebooks and mini-myspaces.

At this point, I'm not sure that there will be another huge social networking site until there are bigger changes in the knowledge base of Internet users. For instance, maybe a second life type social network would eventually replace a facebook or myspace, but only after enough Internet users had the skills to use it or they'd made it more user-friendly.

Niche, specific topics (communities dedicated to lawns, dark beer, firefox, etc.) are going to be the driving forces in the Web as so many large, catch-all portals have become established. The real opportunities down the road for Internet visionaries will be to create platforms and sites that allow people to tailor them even more closely to their interests and the interests of their communities.

Imagining a Twitter and MySpace or Facebook Merger

If you live in the San Francisco bay area, you've probably heard plenty about Twitter. One of my friends from back in Reno has noted that most of the SF bay is "totally hooked" on it. I can't disagree with him. As a stand alone product, it's done pretty well simply allowing people to update a circle of friends about what they are currently doing. For people following me, they know that as of this moment, I'm blogging in the Grove cafe on Fillmore St. Many of you out there may wonder what in the world difference does that make. And honstely, I'm not entirely sure, but there definitely are a lot of people doing it.

On a socio-political level, it makes it very easy for people to disseminate happening news quickly. As technology continues to grow out into the world, I think the technology and concept of Twitter becomes very interesting in spreading news quickly out of places where the current regime may not want news to get out (imagine Myanmar residents twittering). It also can run the other way spreading misinformation and panic in tense situations if people aren't careful.

But since we don't really have any heavy-handed regimes in the bay area (pause to allow comments about Bush presidency--yes, yes, people don't like him; he's almost out of office), I'm more interested in how Twitter might meld in with the current social networking landscape. More specifically, what if Facebook or MySpace acquired it.

Both of the two social networking giants already have more than enough users, and more than likely, there's plenty of user overlap. However, especially in MySpace's case, it's easy to fall out of the "conversation" on the Internet. Twitter is the center talking point these days, and acquiring it would put MySpace back into people's minds in a positive way. With the right controls, users could opt in to receiving twitters in their comments section from different friends. It could really boost time spent on either of the two sites. I know that MySpace has already partnered with Twitter, but really, I think acquisition would be a more dynamic and interesting move to add value to the site and re-energize people about MySpace.

What does Twitter get: Twitter gets lots of money from one of the two sites, and it then no longer has to worry about that pesky long term issue of creating a revenue model (that VC funding only lasts so long). Personally, I think this makes a lot of sense, and since Internet popularity doesn't last either, I think now is the time to be doing it.

So what do you think? Would that merge make sense to you? Let me know.

Is StumbleUpon the Next Big Thing in Search?

All you industry people out there already know the literal answer to this question. No. That's not because StumbleUpon isn't a big deal; it's because in industry terms it's not technically "search." Instead we have another new term for many of you: social discovery. Social discovery is essentially finding things through a network of friends and social contacts. With StumbleUpon, you also submit things you find so that other people in your social network can discover sites and pages through you. It's fairly simple, and that's why I think it's growing so rapidly.

StumbleUpon has been around since 2001 when some crazy college kids in Calgary came up with the idea, and last year eBay realized that they wanted to get in on the action. It will be interesting to see if and how eBay integrates the technology into their other properties. Perhaps, they'll use the Stumble technology to offer auction bidders other interesting items associated with their recent bid/buy. Who knows really, but I think that eBay could find a lot of potential uses for this technology in addition to how it's currently functioning.

StumbleUpon is also having a bang up year. They've grown from 1 million registered users to 5 million, and that's a nice chunk of Internet traffic to have. If any of you have ever watched your analytics reports when a wave of StumbleUpon traffic washes through, you can already guess that if you get that much, then they're probably getting quite a bit more. I think the real challenge for StumbleUpon is in making their interface easier to navigate. I've found myself confused at times as I've navigated through StumbleUpon, and I'd like to think that with all my Internet savvy, that I'm a reasonably able person. Now, let's consider who SU will have to draw in to continue their rapid growth. Well, it's not people like me. It's going to be my mom and even my grandma who really only use the Internet for some basic news stuff and email. Downloading toolbars really isn't their schtick. So, developing an even easier interface and possibly doing some placement deals with other major Internet hubs like a Yahoo--who badly needs to get something positive going in the public eye--might be a good way to go.

I think they're poised for success, but it's going to take a little bit of creativity to manifest that proverbial next step. Finding stuff through "friends" (although they're not friends in the same sense as other more robust social networks) is a great idea, and the functionality to recommend stuff is very easy to use once you've got the toolbar. And the stumble video is way too much like channel surfing (which means it's both really fun and really addictive). It doesn't replace Google, but if you don't know what you want to find and you want to roam through the Internet, pulling up a chair to StumbleUpon is a pretty good way to go.

Yahoo Still Standing, But Needing to Innovate

Yahoo has been in my mind as of late, and if you've been keeping up with the MicroSoft and Yahoo discussions, Yahoo may have been in your mind as well. It seems that they've fended off Redmond, WA at the time of this blog post, but I wonder if they'll be able to regain their financial footing. Everyone seems to be pointing at a need for the Internet company to innovate and really push things to the next level. Everytime I'm at Yahoo.com (which is often because I use their email service) it seems like I see something new. The buzz.yahoo.com is a belated answer to the really popular Digg concept. I haven't spent too much time with it, but I like how they're integrating the content that gets popular onto the main page. I think it's a nice gesture of acknowledgment (a small one) to the masses and their interests, which may curry some favor with users and build up some general good PR. Plus, if a bunch of people are willing to make popular a video about a ball launcher for a dog to play fetch with, then there probably will be plenty more people who'll find it just as interesting.

Buzz aside, I think they should really push some of their core stuff that got them to where they are. I think a lot of Internet companies can get caught up chasing the latest and greatest and let their core stuff suffer. Google isn't going anywhere because it's still a great search engine for the masses; sure they're doing lots of innovating, but they know where their bread and butter is.

For Yahoo, I think that their Yahoo mail service is moving in the right direction, but it's not there yet. I recently heard complaints (and I share them) with a friend about how slow that mail service is now since the new version. However, I feel like they've got the right idea to continue to integrate diverse pieces of the Internet into one main interface. Perhaps, they can get in on the open social thing to somehow more completely integrate Facebook and MySpace into that email interface. I'm just brainstorming, but I know that if I can pull more disparate pieces of the Internet into one place the happier I'll be (Yes, I know about RSS, but let's go even further with it). The Yahoo Mail already allows for texting, messaging, and getting RSS feeds. Personally, I really like the integration of my contacts with the messaging tool. I didn't immediately start using it, but I've come to enjoy having that program built in with email as opposed to having a separate program running to message people. Plus, I can text from it. How cool is that?

But if Yahoo could do one thing for me tomorrow, it would be to speed up load time on the mail service. I have a decent Internet speed, and it can be a bit sluggish. For others out there who don't live in the home of high speed Internet known as the Bay area, I can imagine a good deal of frustration. And Yahoo doesn't need that kind of frustration around one of its core apps. Sure people can go back to the old version of mail, but that's not moving your business forward. And really, at this junction, Yahoo needs to go forward, and using one of its keystones will go a long way in rebuilding its image to users and investors. Because if things don't turn up, then MicroSoft may be knocking on their door again in the not too distant future.