Alterman in Context

I didn't see Fred Wilson's keynote at the Widget World Expo, but read about it on Nate Westheimer's Silicon Alley Insider post:  Fred Wilson, Why Widgets Suck, And How to Fix Them

Nate writes:

His talk (you can see the slides at the bottom of this post) was titled “Why Widget Is the Wrong Word and Why it Matters,” but it was really about why widgets aren't working today. ...as widgets started to be used to display other web content...they became 'relegated to the sidebar and increasingly seen as ad units and increasingly ignored.'  ...But they shouldn’t be ignored, Fred argued. They should be integrated into the flow and experience of the page. Developers, he said, need to put more focus on widget user experience.

I believe Fred is more or less on point with his observations, but Nate's point about "context" is even more essential.  In the long term widgets only make economic sense within the context of editorial experiences on websites outside the context of traditional social networking experiences.  In fact the basic building blocks of content-oriented websites will increasingly be "widgets" (e.g. blocks of modular, interactive content informed by social graph data).

As Fred points out in his blog it's all about mashing up web services, and so the components of the widget, itself, must be modular and flow seamlessly with the page.  Therefore a new generation of "widget builders" is necessary for the task, which is something we've been working hard on at KickApps.  Moving forward, a single widget may draw on data from multiple web services and often won't resemble the boxy things we now call "widgets".

But it's not just the definition of "widgets" that needs an overhaul to be relevant outside of the context of traditional social networking experiences.  The "social graph", itself, needs break free from traditional social networking websites, and the reasons go well beyond "profile portability" (which industry people often make way too much of).

Widgets (and all content) increasingly need to be contextually-informed to be relevant, and that transformation of content can only happen with access to contextually relevant social graph data.  There's no doubt that social graph data will be used to inform (socialize, personalize) editorial experiences on sites across the entire web---miles from the nearest social networking portal.  The problem for publishers is that existing uber-social graphs are simply not up to the job of serving individual websites.   Friend Connect and similar efforts may prove to be valuable for certain limited tasks as a kind of mega-phone book (e.g. portability), but the future will belong to web publishers that learn how to organize and make use of their own audience data, collected within the context of their own user experiences.

End Note:  KickApps provides the industry's first Social Graph Engine (tm) for Publishers.

The Social Graph Engine

FAQ of the day: What about Google Connect?

The short answer:

Anytime the large social networks make it easier for us to help our customers (web publishers) promote audience growth, it’s a very good thing.

The long answer:

While few and far between, my blog posts have always been about the opportunity large social networks and traditional portals have to begin serving publishers across the entire web. I’ve used phrases like “open portal”, “anti-portal” and “the distributed web” to describe this opportunity.  In sum, if the major players hope to extend their ad networks to credible publishers across the web, they will have to earn that inventory by helping publishers grow their audiences. After all, Fox and NBC have to earn the right to place ads across their network of independent television stations by providing their affiliates’ programs that grow ratings. The same is true for internet ad networks.

Recent "openness" initiatives by MySpace, Google and Facebook Connect begin to ask the right question: How can we begin providing value to the universe of websites outside our domain? It’s a first step, but only a baby step.

While these initiatives allow website publishers to make limited use of mega-portal social information, they don’t empower publishers to aggregate and own their own user profiles and social graph information.   I believe this limitation is fatal if the major social networks hope to interoperate with high value web publishers in a meaningful way. Moving forward all serious publishers want to contextually inform their advertising experiences and user applications with real-time user data that is unique to their audience. It is therefore essential that publishers own and control their own community profile management, reporting and social graph engine.

Providing publishers their own social graph engine is core to the KickApps product offering.  In fact all KickApps applications (e.g. UGC, social networking, widget building, programmable video players, media management, member management), along with 3rd party OpenSocial and Facebook apps, are fully integrated with the KickApps social graph engine out of the box.    What’s equally important is that we provide a full set of APIs, customizable feeds, widget builder tools and a plug-in architecture such that our publishers can easily build and deploy their own custom applications that make full use of our social graph engine.

The KickApps platform will certainly integrate with Google Connect, Facebook Connect and MySpace because these initiatives may help our website publishers accelerate audience growth by tapping into “friends” on the big social networks. But this value to publishers is modest relative to the benefits of leveraging their own social graph engine. KickApps will continue to earn long-lasting relationships with publishers because our sole mission is to serve them. 

More analysis from around the web:

Google Friend Connect: What’s the Point? Mike Gunderloy, Web Worker Daily, GigaOm Network

Why should I, as a webmaster, set aside part of my page for you to have a conversation in? Why should you, as a user, come to my site to talk with your Facebook friends, rather than using Facebook? Why should I have to choose which identity to share with a site, rather than just logging in with OpenID and interacting with other users of that site? What are we getting in return for pushing another stream of data through Google?

Google Confirms Friend Connect  Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch

But it is not there yet. For instance, it doesn’t work with Google’s Social Graph API, and many more social and identity networks still need to be connected.  …The bigger downside of Friend Connect is that Websites using it cannot mash up the data with their own to make compelling new applications. Glazer confirmed that the data will be sent to third party sites via an iframe rather than directly through a set of APIs (as Michael speculated on Friday). However, Glazer also says that he wouldn’t be surprised if eventually Google or somebody else makes it possible for Websites to combine the Friend Connect data with their own.

Facebook Connect and Google’s Friend Connect Charlene Li, Groundswell

Prying Open the Social Graph Stacey Higginbotham, GigaOM

Hooman on semantic web

I enjoyed Hooman Radfar's post re semantic web at  Widgify.  When semantic web finally rolls out in a meaningful way I doubt consumers will have any idea that they just experienced the "semantic web".  They'll just find that many separate services that they normally use in an ad hoc fashion are suddenly integrated in more interesting ways.  Semantic web will also bring new ways to navigate the internet.  More on that later.

Widgets and Online Portals

By Eric Alterman
Published February 29, 2008 iMedia Connection

Widget providers increasingly are bypassing portals and distributing content directly to user-controlled pages, requiring portals to evolve. KickApps’ founder explains.

The universe of websites has a very long tail, and soon it will be clear that earning real estate on those websites will be the primary mission of every major portal. Widgets will play an ever-increasing role in this evolution.

Prediction: Portals like AOL, MSN and Yahoo will eventually generate more impressions and ad inventory by exporting widgets to third-party websites than by serving retail traffic within their own domains.

Most people are still trying to figure out what widgets really are and their importance, but few are looking at the role traditional internet portals will play in this new ecosystem. The major content portals like AOL and Yahoo used to define “distribution” when it came to web content (as both creators and acquirers of original content). Then widgets came along and increasingly “distributed” that distribution power to individuals and their personal pages (e.g. social networking pages, blogs).

The problem for traditional portals is that content producers and third-party widget providers increasingly have convenient ways to bypass portals by distributing content and other user experiences directly to consumer-controlled pages. While the major portals often own social network traffic (e.g. AIM Pages) and feed aggregators (e.g. MyYahoo), that traffic increasingly is splintered by third-party content and widget providers. In short, the entire web community is aggressively fishing in portal waters, and there are good reasons to expect that trend to accelerate.

The first step in recognizing that future growth lies beyond their portal walls was expressed through a series of multi-billion dollar acquisitions of various advertising platforms: AOL buys Tacoda, Yahoo buys RightMedia, Google buys Doubleclick, Microsoft acquires aQuantive, etc, etc, etc. But how will these ad networks compete for inventory across the ever-expanding universe of independent websites?

CPM guarantees and ad intelligence are ultimately limited product differentiators because hyper-competition can only mean commoditization and profit erosion, and mega agencies like WPP are also entering the advertising network game with their own acquisitions (e.g. 24/7 Real Media). What’s a traditional portal to do?

There are several possibilities, but I believe the winning strategy for traditional portals is to extend the reach of their advertising platforms by offering independent web publishers something portals have produced very well for years within their own domains: compelling content and highly interactive user experiences. To do this, portals must package and deliver these experiences in a highly viral, self-serve fashion. That means widgets.

Portals can evolve into hubs that serve an essential purpose in the evolving widget ecosystem, connecting the creators of content and interactive user experiences with the universe of independent websites. So in addition to inviting third-party content widgets into their own environments, portals that wish to thrive must also become major exporters of content and interactive user experiences. “Open-Portal” or maybe even “Anti-Portal” may be the best way to describe this new beast.

But will marketers, web publishers and content creators willingly submit to portal hegemony once again? The answer is yes, I believe, so long as portals deliver what these players really need. Creating richer media experiences and more audience interaction requires increasingly complex technology. So the kind of portal widget platform I’m talking about must include functions such as easy media management, profile management and administration; consumer experiences now require more technology than most publishers and content creators can reasonably afford.

Portal platforms must also distribute widgets that click to deeper user experiences (e.g. “Deep Widgets”) on landing pages that engage users with both editorial and user-generated content. In that sense, widgets distributed by portals become windows into richer, more engaging user experiences that generate incremental ad inventory, monetized by both portals and their website affiliates. These landing pages must maintain the branding of independent websites with the help of APIs, CSS and customizable templates, and must similarly enable member and profile integration with the existing user base.

The idea of internet portals morphing into “wholesalers” of programming to many thousands of “affiliates” should not be surprising. Wholesale distribution is the driver of nearly every major industry (from manufacturing to major media). The television and film industries have worked that way for decades. NBC earns the right to sell advertising across thousands of independent television stations by providing those stations programming that is often aggregated from many sources. Similarly, internet portals must earn the right to place advertising across the entire internet by leveraging a sophisticated platform to distribute both content and interactive programming.

While portals like Yahoo may capture dominant market share relative to other websites, their audience growth is modest relative to the aggregate audience of large and small websites across the internet. The universe of websites has a very long tail, and soon it will be clear that earning real estate on those websites will be the primary mission of every major portal. Widgets will play an ever-increasing role in this evolution, and marketers, for one, are beginning to take notice.

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KickApps 3.0

It was a pleasure watching the KickApps troops in action over the last few weeks.  Our new release is the result of an amazing team effort, and I'm looking forward to sharing KickApps 3.0 with our customers. 

Stay tuned---we have a few more big surprises on the way.

"Openness is the yin to Jerry Yang's Yahoo"

Yahoo Reaches Out For Ad Partners

By Jessica Guynn, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 13, 2007

The search firm's deal with Bebo is the latest in its push to sell ads beyond its own sites. Openness is the yin to Jerry Yang's Yahoo. For its first decade, Yahoo Inc. grew by attracting more and more people to its stable of websites. Now, with its co-founder and new chief executive at the helm, it's reaching out to find advertising opportunities elsewhere on the Web.

Yahoo and the other major portals are now all working strategies to place ad inventory on the entire web, not just within their own domains.  Their short-term focus appears to be paying lots of money to sites like Bebo in order to “buy” the right to place ad units.  But doesn't that seem like an expensive, non-scalable way to go in the long run?

I'd like to think that the KickApps platform presents a much more cost effective, long-term model for the way Yahoo (and other portals) might “earn” real estate on 3^rd party websites---by providing those sites a range of media functionality and, in turn, helping them build incremental page impressions. 

In an earlier blog I described all this as an “Open Portal” strategy, the idea being that portals need to open up (distribute) their content and functionality to web publishers if they wish to effectively compete for advertising real estate off their domains.

I'll repeat my favorite analogy:  Think of the way NBC earns the right to insert ads on 3^rd party television stations by providing them television shows.  Imagine if NBC provided only ads to television stations (e.g. no television shows).  Clearly the “adsense model” would not work for television networks and it won’t work indefinitely on the Web.  And so it won’t be long before Google (and others) begin to think about packaging hosted applications with their ad programs to earn publisher loyalty.   In a nutshell, that's what KickApps is all about.

Call it "cloud computing" if you like...

I've used the term "Open Portal" to describe  what I believe to be an inevitable transformation of the web portal business to a model which enables the syndication of programming (both hosted software and traditional content) to 3rd party web publishers.  For Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Google or Ask, there are far more incremental impressions (and ad revenue) to be had distributing user experiences outside their four walls then by building new ones within their respective domains.

It's hard to say who among the the major players will be the first to fully embrace an Open Portal model, but it's coming.   And it must be important because I just read about what's next in the NYTimes. :-)  They may call it "Mash-Ups" and "Cloud Computing", but a rose by any other name...

Anne Eisenberg NYT 9-2-07:  “Now mash-ups are poised to hit the mainstream, and to spread well beyond music. Yahoo, I.B.M., Microsoft and others are creating systems to let ordinary people who’ve never been near a Java class create useful computer applications by combining, or “mashing up,” different online information sources.”

John Markov NYT 9-3-07:  "This week, it plans to turn that strategy upside down, making available free software that connects its Windows operating system to software services delivered on the Internet, a practice increasingly referred to as “cloud” computing. The initiative is part of an effort to connect Windows more seamlessly to a growing array of Internet services."

Old schoolers like NBC, CBS and ABC have had the syndication model figured out for a long time (let's leave aside the issue of ITunes distribution for the moment), and AOL finally did a Gorbachev with their own walls.  But there's still a large gap between clouds, pipes and mash-ups...and an Open Portal architecture that would allow the big players an opportunity to earn real estate across the entire internet by partnering with willing web publishers.

Hosted Applications, Google Apps, etc

 

KickApps was designed from the ground up to deliver a suite of hosted applications that developers can call on-demand.  Although different in scope, platforms like Google Apps have a similar agenda.  Over time the promise for developers is a limitless array of hosted tools and experiences that deploy quickly in a cost-effective manner.

KickApps can be different things for web developers with very different needs.  For example, some developers may begin with a few Video Players and later add Widgets and Social Networking.  Others may begin with a UGC contest and later integrate Video Players that present playlists of their own editorial content.

Video Players: KickApps web developers can build any number of individually styled and programmable video players for instant deployment on any web page, all supported by a web accessible media management system.

Widgets:  KickApps web developers can build and deploy any number of individually styled and programmable widgets to display and syndicate their own video, photo or audio content.  Widgets also  deploy and syndicate user contributed content.

UGC:  KickApps provides an easily deployable, highly scalable UGC application that includes, video, photo and audio uploads, transcoding, tagging, search, storage, CDN, flagging, media moderation, video blogs, webcam functionality, video-enabled message boards and member-to-member video messaging.

Social Networking: The KickApps social networking application includes customizable personal pages, personal media management, personal widgets, integrated webcams, RSS, IM alerts, comment management, custom settings, customizable wallpaper, themes, and member management tools.

Context Is King

With KickApps 2.0 now live I figure it’s about time to post some of the blog entries that I’ve been scribbling in my notebook the past few months.  I’ve got a lot of catching up to do, but with the final episode of Rome beckoning on our DVR my wife says I have to keep it brief and type fast…

I’ve received a lot of enthusiastic feedback following my talk at the MIT Enterprise Forum, but the question on the mind of most publishers seems to be: how can they compete effectively with the likes of YouTube and MySpace for audience and revenue?  It’s my favorite question because the answer is easy--it’s not their job to compete with the big general purpose portals!  Publishers have an asset more valuable than low CPM traffic, namely an identifiable audience attracted to specific editorial content.  To thrive, publishers have to convert their audiences into communities, and the most effective way to do that is to encourage participation around every aspect of their content.  In other words, when it comes to building community, context is king.

Publishers can transform their site experiences into something far more compelling by inviting visitors to bring their own opinions, media and friends to the party.  The operative word is “party” because with that perspective publishers can begin to recognize that their role is as much party host (and door bouncer) as it is content provider.  Great editorial content (e.g. videos, photos, text articles) is just the beginning of the user experience, not the end-all.  As publishers embrace the concept of “openness” the purpose of editorial content increasingly will be to get the conversation started by encouraging user participation around specific topics.

But enabling user participation within the context of specific content websites requires a much more flexible and modular implementation than what you might find at general purpose portals like YouTube.  User content (whether videos, photos, blogs, personal pages or forums) must live alongside editorial content, not on remote “community pages.”  An editorial story about World Cup Soccer, for example, might be surrounded by UGC modules containing soccer-related blogs, forums, member lists and videos.  As the distinction between editorial and UGC continues to blur, have no doubt that stand-alone “community pages” (or message boards that live apart from editorial content) will soon be tired vestiges of internet days gone by.

OPWs: The Making of An Open Portal Website

I initially invented the term "Open Portal" to describe how portals like Yahoo! or Ask might evolve a larger strategy to reach all that lies beyond their own destination sites.  But individual websites can take the same cue with surprisingly little effort. 

Open Portal Websites (OPWs) invite members to bring everything they are into the website experience (friends, family, hobbies, thoughts, ideas, videos, photos, blogs) and invite them to take a piece of that experience with them when they leave (widgets, feeds, RSS).  It's not just about reaching people with effective SEO and it goes beyond creating programming for your own URL.  The goal of an OPW is to program the entire web!  And your audience should do most of the hard work for you.

OPWs are living, breathing organisms that swell and grow with user "stuff"; and like living things their children help them duplicate and grow virally as they wander off and connect to other people and places.

To enable major media and other websites to transform their websites into Open Portal experiences,  platforms must provide user-generated content, social networking, video messaging, multi-media discussion boards, widget building, video players and a host of tools that invite meaningful user participation.  But enabling functionality is simply not enough. 

User features must be built upon media management, member management, administration and reporting layers that support fast, safe, customizable deployments (a service-oriented architecture with easy to use UI objects and robust APIs).  It's one thing to enable Open Portals, but it's quite another for traditional media and niche websites to feel safe with all this “openness”.  Without management tools, abuse and offensive material will scare off major brands and advertisers.  So behind the scenes, we must remember to include a measure of both form and structure.

A final thought...  Windows transformed DOS by allowing application developers an easy way to innovate without the necessity of building the same structures (print, file management) over and over again.  It's time for an analogous development for web developers.  A kind of "internet operating system"...a platform that provides developers with more than a language...instead, it will provide a wide range of business components, hosting and services...callable at any time, by anyone at little or no cost.

Check back soon...there's much more to talk about!