Posts from June 2006

I spent some time on Digg and beta.netscape.com this weekend to see how well Jason Calacanis his crew at AOL had replicated and/or improved upon Digg.

I am not a Digg fanatic, I visit it a couple times a week, vote sometimes, and submit stories at times.  I have a "Digg this" flare at the bottom of the posts on this blog. But Digg is not the first place I go for news on the Net, so I am not ideally suited to contrast and compare the two services, but I am going to make a few comments and then throw out the real point of this post.

Let me start with Digg. It is a proven model.  It works. When we funded delicious, Digg was about half the users and traffic of delicious. They are not the same service, but the delicious popular page and Digg are both places you can go see what’s "hot" on the Internet. Since that time, Digg has grown to 1.3mm unique visitors a month compared to only 350k for delicious. These are Comscore Media Metrix numbers. Clearly Digg has a more mainstream user experience. Further, Digg’s audience has doubled in the past three months, so it’s growing fast.

But let’s put this in perspective. Digg’s reach (UVs) puts it 735th on Media Metrix’ top 1000 sites list, between upromise and taleo. So in the grand scheme of things Digg isn’t necessarily the next big thing on the Internet.

To the extent that AOL is trying to take the Digg concept mainstream, they have done a few things that I like. First, they are starting with a fairly low-tech audience, the Netscape user base. So maybe they’ll get a more balanced view of what is "hot" than the Digg crowd, which like the delicious crowd is very geeky.

Second, Netsscape has added an editorial layer which is most obvious in the selection of the top story. This editorial function may serve to create a more balanced feel to the service.

And third, Netscape is emphasizing the channels a bit more than Digg emphasizes their categories.

I spent a bunch of time on the Netscape music channel and the Digg music category yesterday and even though Digg had way more users voting and submiting stories, Netscape’s stories were more interesting to me. They were about music instead of music gadgets and technology issues. So that kind of proves that Netscape has the opportunity to create a less geeky, possibly more mainstream audience.

But the thing that really impresses me is the way Jason Calacanis is using his blog to do real time customer feedback and product improvement. This is what Jason does best. He is like Bill Gates in that he is a great knockoff artist and takes customer feedback to heart and gets the product right. In Jason’s case he uses the native interactivity of the web to improve the product quickly and if you read his weblog, you’ll see him doing that right now.

Ok, that’s it for now on Digg versus Netscape. These services and many others are called "meta" services. They aggregate content and the wisdom of the crowd to create a "meta" view of what is going on. Delicous popular does that too.  And so does memeorandum and its sister sites.

But is "meta" better?  Does aggregating lots of content and audience produce a better result? Than what?

I am not entirely sure. I’ve gone through my digg phase, my memeorandum phase, and I am back to using myyahoo and the New York Times. In the first case, I am using my own choices of what’s important to me. In the second case, I am using the editorial judgement of the New York TImes. Neither of those is very good either. I have to manually change myyahoo and that takes work. The New York Times represents an editorial view that is by no means perfect for me. Plus I don’t like to be told what to think by any company or institution.

I am wondering if social networking is the answer. I find that my family, friends, colleagues, and readers emailing me links, tagging them for me in delicious, and leaving them in the comments is the single most useful way to stay on top of what’s important.

If you look at the bottom of the left sidebar, you’ll see that there is the beginnings of a social network, like those that exist on myspace and friendster, developing around this blog. If there was a way to apply that network, my network, to news and information, that would create the "meta" service I would love.

I’ve got it already, but it’s fragmented, in my email, in delicious, on this blog. Using my social network to aggregate this info, Digg style, seems like a great idea.

Also, Jeff Jarvis has an excellent short piece on Bill Gates and how to think about him as the news of this departure from day to day operations comes out.

Why do I look so confused in this photo?

Because it was taken during our second Union Square Sessions event on Thursday along with a ton of other photos which are now up on Flickr.

The event was about public policy and its impact on innovation. We covered net neutrality, the broadcast flag, the Digital Millenium Copywright Act, patents, creative commons, and a host of other topics.

I found the policy dicussion a bit daunting to process. The arguments on both sides of the issues are complex.

Add to that the fact that the entrepreneurs and VCs in the room took a particularly "doesn’t matter" point of view flush with optimism that they can innovate or invest around bad public policy.

Nevertheless, I am glad we hosted the event which is described in more detail on the Union Square Ventures weblog.

We’ll be putting up the transcript to the entire six hour session sometime next week so those of you with an interest in this discussion can participate.

I love The Eels and seeing them on Tuesday reminded me how amazing their first record is. Beautiful Freak describes Mark Oliver Everertt (aka E) so well.

The songs on this record are some of his best, even though he’s put out six wonderful records plus a live record and the B-sides record which is also worth owning. We’ve got them all.

Beatiful Freak, Susan’s House, Novacaine For The Soul, Spunky, and the absolutely amazing My Beloved Monster are all on this record.

If you’ve never heard the Eels, start with this record and then just keep going. It will take some time to fall in love with them, but its worth it.

Jackson put up pictures of every guitar he’s ever owned.

It’s a cool post.

I like the Rocket and think he should get it repaired.

That guitar looks too good to be gathering dust.

We have not invested in a teen oriented social networking business. Clearly a missed opportunity with the MySpace and Facebook phenomenons staring us in the face. Here are the stats on these two juggernauts from May’s Media Metrix:

My Space    51mm unique visitors (#7 in the US)        29.4bn page views (#2 in the US)

Facebook    14mm unique visitors (#49 in the US)      6.5bn page views (#7 in the US)

That’s mindblowing to be honest.  Two of the top ten page view generators in the US were built in the past two years on the backs of teen/youth social networking.

We were not offered the opportunity to invest in either company so they won’t make our "anti portfolio", but my hat is off to the VCs who did invest in these two companies. Very well done.

So the question is what to do now? I can’t help but watch my two teenagers as I think about this sector. Both are active page view generators on MySpace and my older daughter is doing her part generating page views at Facebook’s high school service as well.

These kids are fickle. My older daughter has mostly moved her activity to Facebook because she likes the affiliation with her school and the other schools in the city where she knows kids. She thinks it better looking (and so does Ben Barren).

So I expect to see churn in this market. But it certainly doesn’t appear to be hurting MySpace or Facebook right now. The question is can a new entrant capture significant share, taking advantage of that churn. And can they keep it?

Take MyYearbook, which is trying to compete with the high school part of Facebook. According to Media Metrix, MyYearbook had 3mm unique visitors and did 69mm page views in May.

Is that "traction" to use an overused word?  Or is that noise? The UVs represent almost 25% of Facebook’s UVs, so it’s something to notice. But the number of PVs is only 1% of Facebook’s.

So I am not sure. What do you all think? I’d be particularly interested to know how many high school profiles Facebook has compared to MyYearbook or anyone else in the high school social networking sector.

My sense is this space is too fickle for us, but it’s fascinating to me nonetheless.

Well the news is out. AOL’s new Netscape is launching sometime today according to this piece in MediaPost.

It doesn’t sound as much like a portal as I thought it would be. More like a newfangled web news site, inspired by Digg, Delicious, and blogging.

I’ll have to check it out. I’ll let you know what I think.

My partner in the Flatiron business, Jerry Colonna, commented on my post on Craigslist yesterday.  As always, Jerry says it very well.

One man’s spam is another man’s treasure. So it goes to prove that intention and context are more important than content.

Posted by: Jerry | Jun 14, 2006 11:31:30 AM

I am not sure if there has ever been a medium in which intent and context is more important than it is on the internet.

The record I’ve listened to the most this year so far is unquestionably the Arctic Monkey’s debut record. That’s true for most of the members of my family too. So we were pumped last night to go up to the Roseland Ballroom to see the boys. It was the Gotham Gal, her sister Sue, our three kids, and me. And we had a blast.

We split up early on with the Gotham Gal, Sue, and Josh up by the stage on the far left and me, Jessica, and Emily on the right by the elevated platform. By the start of the show, we’d gotten up on the platform but it almost got me tossed out of the show. Thankfully the security guards took mercy on a 45 year old father who may have been the oldest guy in the room.

As a result, the three of us had an awesome view of the show and the boys put on a good one. Alex Turner, the lead singer, guitar player, and I assume the guy who writes the amazing lyrics, is not the most dynamic frontman, but he kept the audience mesmerized with songs coming as fast as the band’s signature machine gun guitar riffs.

My favorite song was their rendition of Who The ***** Are The Arctic Monkeys, off the new EP. The finish was particularly great; Mardy Bum, Fake Tales, and Certain Romance.

There was no encore. They threw their drumsticks, picks, and towels into the crowd and waved goodbye and that was it. I was expecting it since that’s what they’ve done at every show I’ve read about, but I must say it was disappointing nonetheless.

But we had a blast anyway. The girls said it was tied with Coldplay and the Rolling Stones for the best shows they’ve been to. We sang the songs in the cab all the way home.