- Core MySpace Executive Team “Definitely Out.” Expect Announcement Soon.
An update to my post earlier today that News Corp., under new CEO of Digital Media Jonathan Miller, is looking to replace MySpace CEO and cofounder Chris DeWolfe. We’ve confirmed that things are actually moving much faster than we first understood, and that a decision has already been made to terminate Chris DeWolfe’s employment with MySpace. We’ve also been told that the core MySpace executive team will follow.
MySpace has a dozen or so “execs,” but our guess is that it’s the very senior team that will be terminated: cofounders Chris DeWolfe (CEO), Tom Anderson (President) and Aber Whitcomb (CTO). Removing any more of the team would be much more than a morale blow to the company - it would also bring operations to a screaming halt.
Our understanding is that a new CEO has already been recruited and is in the final stages of contract negotiations. An announcement could come as soon as this week or next. We’ll be posting a shortlist of who we believe are the likely candidates for the CEO position shortly.
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- Social Profiling
Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Yahoo and now Google. What does these have in common? If you’re reading this blog, you probably have a profile on all of them. And those are just the obvious ones, you probably have a bunch of other profiles on a series of other networks too. The situation has become untenable.
Imagine if you wanted to update one piece of information on all of them — like I recently had to do with a job change. That’s a lot of work for such a minor tweak. But if you don’t do it across the board, there will be incorrect information about you out there on the web. Information that is always just a search away.
Sure, there are calls for profile standards, and even some services that promise to update your information across multiple networks in one fell swoop — but let’s be honest, the only way you’re ever going to get a unified profile, is if one of the aforementioned services gets so big that it becomes the de-facto standard. Facebook is getting closer to that than anyone else with over 250 million users and rising, but Google may have well as have taken a crowbar to its knees today.
By adding its own profiles to search results on Google for names, Google has created yet another profile that we need to maintain. While that’s good for Google — Google Profiles have been around for a while, but no one used them — it’s more work for us, and seems to all but ensure that one network will not rule them all.
And we can all say that we’re going to drop all networks besides the one we use the most, but we won’t. For most people, the social graph is different on each of them, and there’s some reason to stick around there. If nothing else, it’s more of a pain to remove yourself from a service than it is just not to update your profile anymore. I can’t even begin to imagine how many profiles I have out there that haven’t been updated in a year or more.
And even if we did drop all our networks but one, another hot new network would rise up and we’d all sign up for it, renewing the cycle. Just look at Twitter. Everyone is now signing up for it, and while it doesn’t have a robust profile right now, it probably will at some point.
And services like Facebook Connect offer the promise of transferring your profile information to other services, but do you think Google is going to use that? I don’t think so. Why would it? It has a competing product it’s trying to push with Google Friend Connect. And it can act as nice at it wants, say the right things in public, and add links to Facebook under your Google Profile result, but do you really think Google wants Facebook winding up as the one profile you maintain? No. And vice versa.
And so we remain at a stand still. It’s one of those situations where, while competition may not be a bad thing, it can be a frustrating thing. I wonder how long until we see Yahoo add profiles to its search results? And maybe Microsoft will further its relationship with Facebook to add limited profile information from there to its queries. It’s already a mess, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better — if it ever does.
Update: As Google’s Kevin Marks notes in the comments, Google did try to use Facebook data with Friend Connect, before it was blocked almost a year ago. Of course, Friend Connect would basically negate the need for a lot of what Facebook Connect does, so what we have here are competing platforms, and a stand-off — like I said above.
[photo: flickr/andrew mason]
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- MiVitals Can’t Find Pulse For Online Health Records
Online health records is a rapidly growing segment of the health 2.0 world—Google Health, Microsoft’s HealthVault, WebMD, Aetna’s SmartSource (via a partnership with Healthline), and Revolution Health (now part of Waterfront Media), are just a few of the many online platforms that let consumers organize their health records online in a secure portal.
In a space where you are competing with prestigious medical institutions and platforms backed by the largest tech companies in the world, there’s not much room for the small, bootstrapped startup. Unfortunately, miVitals, an Australia-based startup that provides an online storage platform for consumer health records, will be shutting its doors in mid-May due to lack of funding. miVitals, which was primarily financed by angel investors, is a free service that let you store medical records, manage accounts for your family, schedule appointments, and share this information with your health care professionals.
It seems that in the online medical records sector, partnerships with pharmacies, medical professionals, and institutions are key to making the platform efficient and more consumer-friendly. At some point in everyone’s lives, you realize the difficulty (and inefficiency) of getting your records faxed from a health care provider to an insurance company or another doctor. One of the primary virtues of an online database is that it streamlines the sharing process of medical records, and partnerships are key to making this process work. miVitals was lacking in this area; the startup had only developed partnerships with Australia-based medical companies and institutions despite the site’s aim to be an international resource for consumers across the world. Google Health has partnerships with pharmacies (Google Health recently struck a deal with CVS), insurance companies, hospitals and labs to integrate data from medical professionals with consumer information.
HealthVault’s online platform has been integrated with several large medical institutions over the country, including The Mayo Clinic, The Cleveland Clinic, and New York-Presbyterian Hospital. And Microsoft has been able to sign in insurance companies-last year, Microsoft struck a deal with Kaiser to offer HealthVault’s health record site service to Kaiser’s members.
With competition coming from Google, Microsoft, WebMD, and more, it can be tough for a smaller competitor to find footing in the space. And the current economic crisis and lack of available funding isn’t helping. Perhaps the death of miVitals a sign that there isn’t room for small startups in the already crowded online medical records market.
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- Apple Will Hit A Billion Apps At 1:24:06 AM PST On April 23 (As Of Right Now)
We all know that Apple is closing in on a billion app downloads in the App Store. Currently, the counter on the main Apple.com claims it’s about 10 million away from the major number. But, Apple apparently already knows when the billion mark is going to be passed, because the billion celebration page is ready to go and can easily be accessed, right now.
And we know the exact time Apple is predicting when it will cross the mark — at least, right now (more below): 1:24:06 AM PST on April 23. Simply go to your system settings and set the date and time to anytime after that mark, and reload the main Apple page. You’ll be greeted by big picture on the landing page reading, “Thanks a billion. Over a billion downloads in just nine months. Only on the App Store.”
And actually, if you change to a before the mark Apple has set, you can see the counter advance closer and closer towards the billion mark.
Of course, this means that the number is at least somewhat tied (update below) to your computer’s clock rather than an actual billion app sales mark being triggered. Not that it’s all that surprising. After all, with so many apps being sold every second, can you really expect Apple to do anything other than estimate? This would be an issue though if said it was giving away a prize to the person who specifically downloaded the billionth app (it’s not).
Update: It looks like Apple is constantly tweaking the exact timing based on the following text file, as commenter Robert notes below. As of right now, the rate of Apps being sold appears to be slowing down, pushing the time out a bit.
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- News Corp. Exploring MySpace CEO Options (Updated)
Update: More information here.
MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe has been with the company since its August 2003 launch, seeing it through a 2005 $580 million sale to News Corp. and growing revenue to something approaching a billion dollars a year. 130 million people around the world visit MySpace every month, making it one of the largest sites on the Internet.
And now it may be time for him to step down.
He and co-founder Tom Anderson are reportedly making an aggregate of $30 million/year under a contract signed in 2007. That contract terminates this October and must be renegotiated soon. But MySpace is under a new boss, Jonathan Miller, who joined News Corp. last month as CEO of Digital Media. MySpace is one of his assets, and he may be inclined to make a change in management.
DeWolfe is also dealing with the recent departure of three of his top executives, and more may be on the way.
A top headhunting firm is starting to scour for possible replacements. We’ve spoken directly with one person who was contacted by the firm and asked to give recommendations for possible candidates. One source close to News Corp. says that no firm has been officially retained to do a search, but won’t comment further or make any explanation as to why calls are being made.
One thing DeWolfe has always had is a close working relationship with News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, who has protected him in past conflicts with other News Corp. execs. But that very relationship has been a thorn in the side of his various managers over the years. There are people at News Corp. gunning to knock DeWolfe out of the company. The question is whether Murdoch and Miller will protect him. And, of course, there is always the chance that DeWolfe will simply leave the company. Its high growth days are likely behind it, a new type of manager may be better suited to running the company going forward.
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- Carol Bartz Still Looking For Wow, Drops F-Word During First Quarter Earnings Call.
After spending a lot of time speaking with Yahoo employees, partners, and customers, new CEO Carol Bartz has come to realize the importance of giving consumers a “Wow experience,” she told investors in the first quarter conference call. But they have yet to experience that from owning the stock. Yahoo reported a 13 percent decline in revenues for the first quarter of 2009 to $1.6 billion, while net income dropped 78 percent to $118 million.
Google, in comparison, last week reported a 3 percent decline in first quarter, but was able to manage a 9 percent increase in net income. Update: As a comment points out, Google saw a 3% decrease in revenue from Q42008 to Q12009, but saw a 6% growth year over year for Q1. Yahoo saw losses for both metrics.
Diving into the numbers, search advertising revenues on Yahoo sites declined 3 percent to $399 million, while display advertising on Yahoo sites declined 13 percent to $371 million. The biggest decline, however, was from affiliate ad network revenues, which were down 16 percent to $511 million.
Page view growth also slowed down to 8 percent from 20 percent growth a year ago and 15 percent growth during the fourth quarter. On the search side, query volume grew but revenue-per-search declined as commercial queries and click-through rates saw weakness. Bartz puts a positive spin on Yahoo’s results and claims that it is actually gaining share of advertising dollars compared to the overall industry:
I think our search results, . . . it is like online window shopping, people are grazing around, just not clicking to buy. Marketing budgets have been slashed a heck of a lot more than any declines in these metrics. It is my belief that we must be gaining share.
Bartz announced another round of layoffs, which will affect 5 percent of the workforce, or about 675 people (out of 13,500). The cuts will take place within the next two weeks. Bartz also indicated during the conference call that she is focusing on the products and properties which drive the bulk of Yahoo’s traffic and revenues, including the homepage, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Mail, and Yahoo Mobile. Her three-pronged strategy is to globalize the platform, build “fantastic products to deeply engage users, and to improve the return from its advertising platforms.
Asked about discussions with Microsoft, Bartz had no comment. Later on she did manage to drop the F-word, though (but quickly apologized for the slip).
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- Amazon Jumps Into The HD Stream As Well. Doesn’t Really Make A Splash.
With all of the online video services now offering much of the same (sometimes lousy) content, the new differentiating factor seems to be high definition quality. Microsoft has been there for a while (with videos over Xbox Live), as has Apple (over the Apple TV), and now Amazon is joining the gang.
The new HD option for Amazon Video On Demand is available starting today for some 500 movies and television shows. And the HD content will work with the set-top boxes Amazon streams to including the Roku and TiVo Series 3 devices. In addition, Amazon is launching On Demand on select Panasonic televisions today as well.
So Amazon is getting into the same HD streaming market that everyone else is. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any real differentiating factor from the other services. Sure, it’s nice for people who already use Amazon On Demand, but there is no real reason to switch to use it if you are already using one of the other services. Though, it is nice that the service is available on more devices than say, iTunes or Xbox Live.
But the prices, for example, are the same as iTunes ($3.99 to $4.99 to rent an HD movie — and $2.99 to buy an HD show). And the content looks to be pretty much the same as well. Amazon, in its press release, is touting the availability of the newly released Frost/Nixon. Well, I just watched it last night, in HD, on my Apple TV.
And it’s content that’s the main problem for all of these services. Apple has been expanding its HD offerings, but still only has a few hundred, several months after launching. Xbox Live’s content is the same way. Apple just rolled out the ability to buy (rather than rent) HD movies, and that is so far restricted to just a handful of movies. 500 HD titles is a good number for Amazon to launch with, but it’s a drop in the bucket of the 40,000 On Demand titles it offers.
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- Google Analytics API Now In Public Beta, Desktop Reporting Takes Stats Offline
Moments ago, Google released the public beta version of the Google Analytics API after running a private beta program with hundreds of developers for about a year.
When Google announced a great deal of updates to Google Analytics last October, the company already said the API was ‘coming soon’, but obviously it took them another 6 months to effectively start rolling out.
With the Google Analytics data API, developers can develop client applications that access Google Analytics data and subsequently present it in new, innovative ways. By combining a wide variety of metrics and dimensions, an API-based client application can deliver custom reports, more refined data or new visualizations that in turn provide new ways to analyze the performance of websites and web applications.
From the blog post announcing the release:
The Analytics API is a Google Data API. This is the same API protocol for Google Calendar, Finance and Webmaster Tools. If you’ve used any of these APIs, the Google Analytics Data Export API will look very familiar to you.
For the JavaScript and Java programming languages, we’ve provided client libraries to abstract and simplify the process. We’re also working on supporting more programming languages. In the meantime, for any programming language you want to use you can make requests directly to the API over HTTP and access the data in XML.
One of the applications that was built using the API and which is being featured on the launch website is Polaris, one of the products built by Desktop Reporting, which aims to bring Google Analytics to the desktop. The full suite, a full-featured Adobe AIR-powered GA reporting tool called Dopac, is still a couple of weeks away from launching, but Polaris already brings some of the data to the desktop in the form of cross-platform widgets and is definitely worth checking out. There are 8 standard reports available, and the app is completely free if used for only one website (an annual $15 fee is required to extend it to more websites). It’s targeted to marketers, project and account managers who are looking for an intuitive way to check out basic stats for a website they’re tracking from their desktops.
Desktop Reporting was pioneered by just one guy, Nicolas Lierman from Belgium. (Disclosure: the startup was one of the presenting finalists at my conference Plugg, held last month in Brussels)
Lierman has been working on bringing Google Analytics offline for quite a while (in fact, we covered one of the first iterations of his desktop application back in September 2007), and besides the full reporting suite and the now launched Polaris, he also has two other GA-related products in the pipeline (check his website for more info).
Also worth chekcing out is Actual Metrics’ Android application for Google Analytics.
It will be interesting to see what other third-party developers come up with now that the API is finally out there. Google already put some examples online in this gallery, but if you have anything cool to announce in the future, you know where to find us.
The company also set up a Google Analytics API Notify email group so you can get the key announcements on feature updates, code changes and other service related news that relate to the API that way, and / or you can join the Google Analytics APIs Group.
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- Google Profiles Finally Have A (Big) Purpose: Appearing In Google Search Results
After over a year of sitting in relative obscurity, Google Profiles are finally getting their due. Beginning today Google search queries for names will now feature a section dedicated to Google Profile results at the bottom of every page. These profiles allow people to fill out their basic information, like current employer and links to various web presences, without having to maintain a personal website and try to struggle to maintain a high page-rank.
This is huge news for several reasons. For one, Google is beginning to encroach on a territory long dominated by LinkedIn. For years, when I’ve wanted to learn about someone’s basic information and web presences (assuming they weren’t in CrunchBase), I’ve generally looked at LinkedIn, where many people have at least filled out their basic background info, a website, and some contact information. Google Profiles may not have LinkedIn’s social graph, but as a web directory they’ll work just fine, and they’ll have the benefit of appearing on the front page of search results every time.
It’s also obviously huge news to the countless people who happen to share the same name as a popular athlete, celebrity, or business person. Take former TechCrunch writer Mark Hendrickson for example, who happens to share a name with Mark Hendrickson, a pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles who dominates most of the front page of search results for the name. Under the new system, both Marks would be listed as thumbnails toward the bottom of the first page of results. Maybe.
Google is allocating four thumbnail spots to these profiles at the bottom of search results - anyone who doesn’t appear in those four spots can be found by clicking a link to show more results. Obviously, nabbing one of these four thumbnail spots is going to very desirable to some people. But true to Google form, the choices for the thumbnails are driven by a mysterious algorithm. Google wouldn’t offer too many details on how the algorithm works, other than that it will heavily favor profiles that are ‘complete’ - in fact, when you fill out your profile it will indicate if Google has deemed it ‘complete’ enough to appear as a thumbnail. But even if you get the OK, there’s no guarantee that you’ll ever get one of the four spots.
Unfortunately, there are some issues with the way Google profiles are named that may deter some users from taking advantage of them. Google is intent on using the same ‘name space’ as Gmail - that is to say, if my Gmail account was jason@gmail.com, my Google Profile would be found at http://www.google.com/profiles/Jason. This is primarily to prevent confusion, but it raises privacy concerns for anyone who isn’t too keen on having their Email address publicly available on the internet (you can always opt out, but then you’re forced to create a new account if you want to appear in the listings). Update: You can also choose to substitute a string of numbers for your profile URL instead of your account name, though this obviously wouldn’t be ideal for business cards or other methods of sharing.
You can register a new account and get a recently-launched vanity listing , but nearly all of the ‘good’ names have been registered by Gmail users over the years so your profile will likely wind up looking something like jason83472.
Despite these frustrations, this is a new feature that I suspect will prove immensely popular - and important. To help promote it, Google is going to start routing any queries for the name ‘me’ (a play on the phrase “Google me..”) to a link to create a new Google profile.
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- Should Ad Networks Pay Publishers For Stolen Content? The Fair Syndication Consortium Thinks So.
As newspapers and other publishers watch their revenues diminish, one common refrain among them is that maybe they should somehow go after Google or Yahoo for aiding and abetting the destruction of their businesses and sometimes the wholesale theft of their content. We’ve seen how the Associated Press wants to handle this: by aggressively going after anyone who even borrows a headline. Today, a consortium of other publishers including Reuters, the Magazine Publishers of America, and Politico are taking a more measured approach, but one which will no doubt still be controversial. They are forming the Fair Syndication Consortium, which is the brainchild of Attributor, the startup which tracks the reuse of text and images across the Web for many of these same publishers.
The Fair Syndication Consortium is initially trying to address a legitimate problem on the Web: the proliferation of splogs (spam blogs) and other sites which do nothing more than republish the entire feed of news sites and blogs, often without attribution or links. There are tens of thousands of these sites, perhaps more. Rather than go after these sites one at a time, the Fair Syndication Consortium wants to negotiate directly with the ad networks which serve ads on these sites: DoubleClick, Google’s AdSense, and Yahoo primarily. For any post or page which takes a full copy of a publisher’s work, the Fair Syndication Consortium thinks the ad networks should pay a portion of the ad revenues being generated by those sites.
I know a little bit about this because in January I was invited to a meeting at the A.P.’s headquarters with about two dozen other publishers, most of them from the print world, to discuss the formation of the consortium. TechCrunch has not joined at this time. Ironically, neither has the A.P., which has apparently decided to go its own way and fight the encroachments of the Web more aggressively (although, to my knowledge, it still uses Attributor’s technology). But at that meeting, which was organized by Attributor, a couple slides were shown that really brought home the point to everyone in the room. One showed a series of bar graphs estimating how much ad revenues splogs were making simply from the feeds of everyone in the room. (Note that this was just for sites taking extensive copies of articles, not simply quoting). The numbers ranged from $13 million (assuming a $.25 effective CPM) to $51 million (assuming a $1.00 eCPM).
Then they put up a slide with a pie chart showing which ad networks were serving ads on all of the abusive sites. It turns out a full 94 percent of the sites in question were serving ads from three ad networks: DoubleClick (45 percent), Google AdSense (24 percent), and Yahoo (24 percent).
Go after those three ad networks, and the majority of the problem could be solved. There is certainly precedent for this type of approach. Look at YouTube’s Content ID program, which splits revenues between YouTube and the media companies whose videos are being reused online. Except this proposal would take money that would otherwise be distributed to the splog sites themselves, and give a portion of it to the publisher as an automatic syndication fee without the consent of the site owner.
How would the ad networks know that the content in question belongs to the publisher? Attributor would keep track of it all and manage the requests for payment. The consortium is open to any publisher to join, including bloggers. (Attributor runs a free version of its service called FairShare to give publishers a sense of how much of their stuff is being copied without attribution). It is certainly better than sending out thousands of takedown notices, but many issues still need to be worked out.
I’ve seen some of the data for TechCrunch, and there is no doubt that Attributor catches a lot of abuse, not fair use. But some of the sites that fall within Attributors net might still fall within fair use. For instance, I can imagine, a short post two or three paragraphs long being copied in its entirety and being surrounded by commentary. (Although, a minimum 125-word-count limit and exclusion of content clearly in quotes is meant to address such a scenario). Also, I am not sure that demanding payment is the way to go. For the most part, a link and attribution is good enough for us. But if the Fair Syndication consortium gets the ad networks on board and they take a conservative approach to asserting copyright, we might take another look. What do you think, should we join?
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