Nic Brisbourne’s view from London on venture capital and exploiting change in technology and media
From Mashable yesterday:
The so-called social Web just became legitimately open, as MySpace has launched the two first implementations of its Data Availability initiative on Flixster and Eventful. Simultaneously, the company is announcing that it will support OpenID, allowing its users to sign into any OpenID-enabled website using their MySpace credentials.
yahoo-google-and-myspace-versus-facebook Mar-25-2008 I think [...]
Techcrunch reports today on Yahoo!’s facelift for MyYahoo, and in the article they give user numbers for both MyYahoo and iGoogle. Neither company is going to be overjoyed with this performance:
The interface has been in need of a facelift for some time, as Yahoo has watched its userbase dwindle from 56.9 million users last November [...]
As reported on Techcrunch yesterday Myspace fully luanched Data Availability service. Going forward developers will be able to access a livefeed of Myspace profile information for use in their own third party services. Reading the Myspace Developer Team blog it looks to me like this will include friend lists.
What developers won’t be able [...]
There has been a lot of chat in the blogosphere recently about Facebook overtaking Myspace, then on the value of international traffic compared with US domestic traffic - both on Techcrunch and GigaOM, and finally asking if the implication of Facebook over-taking Myspace is that network effects for social networks have been overstated (this is [...]
From eMarketer, via VentureBeat.
In summary still rising fast, but not quite as quickly as they had thought previously. $920m last year.
And Myspace is the premier destination, although Facebook is taking market share.
Note also that widgets only accounted for $15m last year, and will still be small this year.
Finally, as Venturebeat points out social networks [...]
Facebook is open sourcing its application platform and calling it FBOpen. From Techcrunch:
Facebook will turn the year-old Facebook Platform into an open source project, multiple sources have told us. The immediate effect will be to allow any social network to become Facebook Platform compatible - meaning application developers can easily take their Facebook applications [...]
Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote an interesting post yesterday on ReadWriteWeb entitled Towards a Value-Added User Data Economy. He applies network theory to data portability to show that all companies will be better off if they all allow data to be ported in and out. Essentially each social application will add value to the data [...]
The web is abuzz this morning with news of Facebook’s traffic, with most headlines focusing on the 10% decline in US unique visitors from March to April.
However, as the chart below shows, year on year traffic still grew at 56%.
The interesting question therefore is whether the decline in uniques is being covered by the increase [...]
There has been a flurry of announcements recently on the theme of data portability and making the web more social - Google yesterday announced Friend Connect, and that is on top of Facebook’s Connect and MySpace Data Availability launch, and Yahoo!’s move to a single profile.
These are all steps in the right direction, for me [...]
News Corp reported it’s results yesterday and is becoming more cautious on the outlook for Myspace. The results statement was a mix of good and bad news for the world’s leading socnet.
First the bad news (all the following data and more can be found on Silicon Alley Insider).
Revenues at Fox Interactive Media (FIM) of [...]
