[ This is my personal blog so all opinions expressed here are mine. I am a product, scalability, operations and monetization advisor and currently employed as Director of Business Operations & Technical Strategy for a top 50 website that delivers billions of page views per month. I was a keynote panelist for Scaling Up or Out keynote at MySQL Conference and speak regularly at conferences and user groups.
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Five minutes after entering my office after a week long trip to CA, I learned that Seth MacFarlane, the creator of Family Guy, and Google have struck a deal. Under the deal, Seth MacFarlane will create 50 two-minute episodes exclusively for the web. There will be a number of new characters introduced in this new web-only series which will be distributed through the AdSense network. There will be a four way revenue share.
Dave McClure's painstaking hard work in organizing Startup2Startup dinner paid off very well where Chad Hurley, co-founder and CEO of YouTube, was speaking. The star-studded event was one of the best I ever attended.
After spending the day hanging out with Dave, I arrived at Startup2Startup a little early so we can check on arrangements. Once at Sheraton in Palo Alto, we found that right next door, Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook) was speaking at a Facebook corporate event.
As the Startup2Startup attendees started showing up, discussions started flowing. Facebook's staff wanted participants of Startup2Startup event to quietly socialize :) Dave decided to move the bar to the pool area.
I started hanging out at the bar, talking with the stars of Silicon Valley. Moments after the Facebook event ended, I spotted Zuckerberg talking with Chad Hurley near the pool side entrance. There, a desire lit up in my heart to meet Zuckerberg.
Before I knew it, my wish came true. There was a 2 minute window where Zuckerberg was free and I decided that I am not going to waste this opportunity. So I approached him and we started talking.
Zuckerberg is a very bright guy with deep insight. He was very easy to socialize with, a sign of a great CEO. We briefly discussed Facebook's growth in international markets such as Brazil among other things.
As we were parting, I asked Zuckerberg if I could have his card. He didn't have one but he generously gave me his personal email address.
I am thankful to Dave for inviting me to the event otherwise I'd not have met Mark Zuckerberg.
In the short time that I have known Dave, I have found him to be a perfectionist. So it's no doubt that Dave has been working very hard on organizing this event. It's amazing the level of detail Dave focuses on. Even when he is not working, he is actively thinking about several things related to this event.
I feel honored to be invited to this event. Thanks Dave!
The session I am now waiting for is Harnessing Explosive Growth: Infrastructure Strategies and Tactics. The official description of the session is:
What worked in the garage can rarely be scaled effectively for the boardroom. This panel will bring together some of the biggest names in web infrastructure to share their thoughts, insights and tactics for harnessing explosive growth, with a focus that goes beyond simply which technologies are available but how to best deploy them. This panel is not to be missed
How much of scalability is architecture, and how much is throwing servers at the problem?
SJ: 99% architecture JH: Product is what drives architecture. We have more than 10,000 servers. For chat, they built a separate network. www.facebook.com/eblog.
JR: The biggest consideration is how their servers work with Facebook.
When's it broken? When did you know your first architecture was broken? AG: First million users. Then they started focusing on caching and sharding.
JB: eBay had a few catastrophic issues near 2000. People were very forgiving of availability issues. They give refunds when there is downtime.
JR: They moved a lot of their technology to EDGE.
SJ: Since Meebo is just one page, javascript delivery is a major issue for them. They are not generating pages. Dynamic loading and background computation is really important.
RP: Application and infrastructure is going to break. If you look hard enough you can find where are the scalability issues.
JR: They are very metric driven. It's not often they see outages. They have number of Facebook's ops folks on their IM lists and they talk continously.
JH: We work through problems together.
JH: They have had to turn off some applications because other applications were being affected.
JB: At eBay they have created a central application login system. They can flag and identify problems really quickly. If you don't have it, you're shooting in the dark.
Rolling your own stuff? Off-the-shelf vs. custom: Did you roll your own? Do you regret it?
SJ: For cash restraint startup, off-the-shelf can work. But for scale, you'd want to build yourself. Open Source is awesome. No one can scale your system as well as you can. Off-the-Shelf can be bulky. You have to get your hands dirty.
JR: We built our own caching backend. Invest time in core stuff, anything that's not core, don't focus there.
What also needs to scale as you grow? What non-technology things you had to scale?
JB: Need to scale out your business as well as technology.
AG: Building anti-spam features into the product that are scalable.
JH: Make community part of the process in translations as you grow.
JR; They introduced user moderation for photos. Hard to find what's porn and what's not. It's about a dozen people looking at photos full-time to hunt down porn.
How should we handle the fallout? If you were Twitter what would you have done last month? JB: You have to be transparent. Tell them what's going on. Setup message boards for communication. You've got to communicate.
AG: Setting realistic timelines is very important
JH: We do it often. We roll in small chunk and if things don't look right, we roll back.
JB: You cannot operate a large system without the ability to turn things on and off.
JR: If you have an aggressive competitor, you don't have the luxury of downtime.
RP: You can't roll out something that can't be rolled back.
A star studded panel on The Race to the Next Database: Overclocking and Analytics Augment Your Data Layer is next. Panelists include
* Mayank Bawa Aster Data Systems * Doug Judd Zvents * Luke Lonergan Greenplum * Damian Black SQLstream * Dave Schrader Teradata * Scott Wiener Cloud9Analytics
Nitin Borwankar of TagSchema is moderating the session. He has an impressive background in databases. He used to be a J2EE consultant. He is focusing on what kind of problems are pain points for large scale web applications? In social applications you have many to many relationships.
$6B on SaaS, expectations gap wider and growing fast
deliver end-user analytical applications
BI moving from on-premise to on-demand model
they don't use databases or reporting
Anytime, anyplace analytics
using Flex
How is web disrupting databases? MB: Everytime scale changes, we have to rethink scalability. Web allows for interactivity so feedback loop has to finish very fast.
DJ:Traditional db technology designed to run on a single machine. Web has massive amount of data that must scale. The problem of scaling one machine is exponentially more difficult.
LL: Google is making billions of advertising. Importance of data is more now. They are building 10-20 petabyte warehouse for a customer. It's become more important to solve those problems. They had to re-invent the concept of databases to drive the workload
DB: Real time decision making is built into their business.
SW: Web is speeding up pace of the business. A lot of decision making is being automated. When you automate, you need to be able to detect exceptions. Now technology drives business.
LL One thing they have focused on is data loading. They have a subscription based pricing model.
Now there is a panel, Working the Clouds: NextGen Infrastructure for New Entrepreneurs. Panelists include: * Geva Perry GigaSpaces * Jason Hoffman Joyent * Tony Lucas XCalibre * Lew Moorman Rackspace * Christophe Bisciglia Google * Joe Weinman AT&T
CB: Google App Engine can be called a cloud but it is a little different that allows you to only focus on very high levels.
Q: Are we selling our souls when moving to cloud? Or should we not worry about lock-in? There are no standards yet. To take advantage of cloud you need to embed it into code. It does create some locking issues. Hopefully in future there will be standards. If you're going to scale on EC2 and have scripts to automatically launch instances then moving to a different cloud will create issues. A lot of clouds that are gaining traction have very custom APIs. There is going to be a proprietary stack. On the other hand we will see convergence towards standards based platform. Then we end up with choice where you will then make decision based on your strengths.
There is still value in proprietary technologies. The more value you are going to build for your customers, the more proprietary the technology behind it would be. Both open and proprietary markets have their potential.
Even though App Engine is proprietary, the documentation is very open. If you are using Big Table, you are kind of selling your soul. Until Google open sources BigTable so users can export their data, it is locked-in.
API that Google provides isn't specific to BigTable. One of the criteria is how scalable the platform is. Christophe Bisciglia thinks that Google is a step ahead of Google when it comes to BigTable and their platform.
One shouldn't be locked into proprietary data store, period.
But, CB insists that BigTable performs better. There are things for which relational databases don't perform well. There is a sacrifice but it allows you to scale. What differentiates providers is how low their latency is and how scalable the infrastructure is and how protected the data is.
LM: A lot of companies are not right away ready for cloud.
The dirty little secret model for cloud computing is that if licensing models don't catch up, everything can drop dead.
Application development 5-10 years from now will be focused on the need to scale. The challenge is to move people up to cloud and provide them with tools to develop their applications the right way.
Thought shift is required for enterprises to move to cloud. CB gives an example of how people were hesitant to use banks when they came around as people were nervous of keeping their money with someone else. But then, as people realized the dangers of not keeping money at bank, banking became the norm.
AT&T will be spending $20 billion on their infrastructure.
Enterprises want to sign a contract. They don't want to just go and use credit card to start a relationship like this.
There is a big marketing problem. The word cloud means less and less everyday. Cloud is getting into the enterprise through the backdoor.
Werner Vogels is now giving a keynote. He is the CTO of Amazon.com.
At Structure 10, the whole discussion will be different. We will be talking about different business models. This is a snapshot at the beginning of the movement. He showed an Animoto video presentation created by him.
What's so special about Animoto? They have no server infrastructure, even though what they do is very compute intensive. When they had 25,000 customers they were hovering around 50 instances. They launched a Facebook app that allowed you to import photos, create video and post it back to Facebook. At that point, they started signing up 25,000 customers per hour. They had to increase their instances to more than 5,000. Imagine Animoto going to VC and asking for money for 5k servers.
Cloud computing is moving the world from capital expenditure (CAPEX) to operating expenditure (OPEX). We are moving to a variable cost model.
Amazon is now in 7 countries with more than 79 million active customer accounts.
Bandwidth used by AWS is way higher than Amazon store.
Amazon used to be a technology consumer. Now, there is no third party software left at Amazon because of scale. There are more than 1M+ sellers. They moved from single application to a platform.
First 5-6 years, uptil 2001, Amazon was like a traditional site. The challenge was how do they keep scaling? How will we make it to the next year. Around 2001, Target came to Amazon and asked to be integrated. At the same time, a number of architecture pieces broke. Then they wanted to move to a platform while working on integrating Target.
At times, Amazon was thinking of going back to mainframe. They wanted to create a very agile environment.
They created an infrastructure where no direct database connections were allowed. Everything must go through a business logic layer.
The gateway page on Amazon can use upto 200+ services to be created.
The 70/30 switch
Companies now have to become experts in many areas not related to their business and answer questions like, why is BGP protocol not stable?, why do datacenters go down? etc. These companies are spending upto 70% of time, energy and dollars on undifferentiated heavy lifting.
Only 30% of time, energy and dollars are spent on differentiated value creation.
He is showing a photo of destroyed datacenter. If your data was in that datacenter, it is gone!. Now talking about 365 main which did 'everything right.' 6 of their 8 diesel generators failed and brought Web 2.0 down. At Amazon, the thought is to survive an entire datacenter failure.
Don't depend on Raid-5 to protect your data.
Peak capacity management is a big issue for companies such as Walmart.com and Target.com that experience seasonal spikes in traffic.
They wanted to cover three areas: compute, messaging and storage. EC2 covers compute, S3, Simple DB and EC2 PS (Persistent storage) covers storage and SQS is the fabric that holds everything together. EC2-PS still doesn't has a name.
Most data at Amazon was key-value based. There were secondary key accesses. SimpleDB was a compliment to S3.
It's easy for companies to spend as much as 70% of their intellectual capacity in scaling.
Infrastructure Services Drivers
Security
Scalablity
Availability
Performance
Cost-effective
Next he is showing example of SmugMug who relies heavily on Amazon's EC2 and S3. They currently have 600TB of pictures stored in Amazon S3. In Amazon S3 there are more than 18 billion objects as of March 2008.
SmugMug is now venturing in different businesses where they provide interface to allow you to store anything. The product is called Smugmug Vault.
Addressing Uncertainty
Acquire resources on demand and release them
pay for what you use
leverage other's core competencies
turn fixed cost into variable
What sense does it makes to order a lot of hardware when you don't even have a product? You also aren't sure how many customers you'd get.
Next up at Structure 08 is Jonathan Yarmis AMR Research (VP of Disruptive Technologies). The session is titled, The Platform Revolution: A Look into disruptive technologies.
He has been in technology for more than 30 years. He was a sports broadcaster early in his career.
What is this wave of disruption we see coming?
The industry sometimes forgets its all about the user
Users are figuring out cloud computing faster than enterprise.
Technology Trends
Independent phenomena
Social networks, virtual worlds and other community-based solutions.
Social networking is not a new phenomena, it started with Eve.
Mobility
Cloud computing and stream computing
Alternative business models
Most often advertising supported
Different license, revenue models
Mutually reinforcing
Social Networking:
We improve individual processes but don't think in terms of tasks
How many CRM implementations have failed?
They solved problems of CEO but not of sales people.
Sales people job is inherently social.
Mobility
The platform for the next generation and emerging markets.
PC, Mobile
Size: 200 million units / year, 1.4 billion units per year
Growth: 10% in a good year, 20% in a bad year
Useful life: 3-5 years, 21 months
Intersecting with social networks and location-based services
Reaching new users and new uses.
Even OLPC is not going to be the dominant platform in developing countries.
The growth will be 2 billion units this year.
Cloud Computing:
interesting phenomenon and dominant trend
it won't encourage SaaS but Eaas (everything as a service)
From a PC based, desktop client to services in the cloud
Zero deployment
Click-to-run
Not just Saas but Eaas
Sotware/applications
Storage
Content
Music/video
Data
A real paradigm shift
Exploding the opportunity vs. protecting your base.
Really significant change.
Stream Computing:
Data creation is expanding beyond our ability to store it all
Growth estimates range from 50%/year to an order of magnitude
Everything communicates
Communicates everything
50 million photo uploads per day @ Facebook
Where do we process it?
How do we determine what's interesting
Business Models
What's the value in social networks? It's peers
Advertising changes the customer/vendor/user relationship
Who will pay for end-user software and services?
Moving from a license model to blended advertising-supported model
What des this mean for the market?
Economic value of peer relationships is going to become driving force
Facebook's beacon: the holy grail of adveriting. Giant leap then step back, then go beyond where you were going.
User 2.0
1.0, 2.0
structured, ad-hoc
systems oriented, socially oriented
process defined, user defined
personal, collaborative,
intra-enterprise, interenterprise (enterprise unaware or agnostic)
The New Enterprise Reality
Users have more computing power at home than at work
users are embracing disruptive technologies
social networking
video
He is showing classic innovators dilemma chart from http://web2.wsj2.com.
An economic downturn can accelerate cloud computing and mobile usage. Companies run after protecting their existing revenue base and not after exploring new opportunities.
Google's Android delayed because they are trying to please everyone. Apple wins for moving fast.
Cloud computing is a lot of fog, a little cold. A lot of activity going on in cloud computing world. Companies are spending a lot of money on infrastructure. Few top companies spent over $6 billion in infrastructure. There are so many issues with infrastrcture: scaling out, power etc.
There is a video message from Nick Carr.
- Structure is happening at the same time Bill Gates is retiring - Fundamental unit of computing is shifting from individual computer to datacenter or grid computing. - A lot of technical challenges such as reliability, energy efficiency are becoming center to competitive advantage. - Management of infrastructure is becoming more and more important. - Functioning of data center is becoming very important - Moving from IT provided locally to grid/over the network - We don't know what the ultimate structre of the industry will be. - Structure will be crucial to success. - Electric current didn't have ethical dimension to utility. It was ethically neutral. - Computing involves information, personal information which has a very important ethical component.
Om takes the stage again.
twitter.com/structure08 Official tag for conference is structure08.
Next up is Bill Coleman (Cassatt Corporation) who is responsible for B in BEA. He is also credited for his work on Solaris. Currently he is CEO of Cassatt Corporation. The talk is about Green Data Centers.
What we are doing today in data centers is unsustainable. He calls them 'your father's data center'
Concerns
first is energy cost
second is operations cost. IDC says it has gone from 25% to 75%.
everything is a lot more complex today than it was 15 years ago.
how we got here? this is a consequence of innovation. In 1990, people were putting networks in data centers. Then came storage, followed by software people who wanted multi-tiered applications. Then came DBAs :)
Then came virtualization. Is it end of IT? We are doing things still as it is 1960s. There is no automation involved, everything must be changed physically.
We are at end of sustainability of data centers as we know it today.
Virtualization makes scale a little bit better. All we are doing is pushing back the ends.
1.0 of cloud: i can build a green field application with proprietary
2.0 of cloud: functions of PC now exist in cloud. it will still be proprietary.
Apple invented PC but didn't commoditize it.
Very low utilization rates. The next phase of cloud computing will offer higher utilization rates.
Thanks Bill for a great insight into green data centers.
I arrived here yesterday night afer a very long flight and am sitting with Anthony Lopez and Dan White of Cafe Mom. Steve Souders (Google), Jesse Robbins (O'Reilly Radar) are now on the stage. They are talking about how Velocity got started. They completed a five minute speech in two (hey, it's a performance conference).
If all goes well, I will be blogging about several sessions at Velocity.
Scientists have declared for certain that the white substance found by Phoenix Lander on Mars was ice and not salt. After scientists discovered white substance they thought it was either ice or salt. However, as the substance 'disappeared' they were lead to believe that it was in fact ice.
“"Salt does not behave like that," said Mark Lemmon, a scientist at Texas A&M University who is in charge of Phoenix's stereo surface imager. "We found what we were looking for. This tells us we have water ice within reach of the arm."”Source: Washington Post
LinkedIn has raised $53 million valuing the business social network at over a billion dollars. In the video below, you can watch LinkedIn investors including David Sze (Greylock Partners), Jeffrey Glass (Brain Capital Ventures), David Cowan (Bessemer Venture) and Mark Kvamme (Sequoia Capital). Jeff Glass will join LinkedIn's board.
I got a chance to meet Adam Nash (Sr. Director of Product and Engineering of LinkedIn) at Graphing Social Patterns. What I liked in his presentation was the fact that LinkedIn is not trying to be everything, instead focusing on its core market: business networking.
“My back-of-the-envelope calculations show that if your user the value per subscriber of then LinkedIn’s $1 billion got a market valuation. On per-subscriber revenue basis, LinkedIn seems a tad overvalued, especially considering that their traffic is range bound, and the number of active uniques is showing a slight slump.”- Om Malik (GigaOm)2
Some say we are in a bubble but the bubble is here to stay, at least for some time. If Facebook is valued at $15 billion, why can't LinkedIn, one of the rare breed of social networks in the sense that it is profitable, be valued at a billion. Go LinkedIn!
Patrick Chanezon (API Evangelist) and Paul McDonald (Product Manager for Google App Engine) presented a technical overview of OpenSocial and Google App Engine at Graphing Social Patterns East. If you aren't familiar with OpenSocial see the second presentation below, first.
Adam Lovallo of Inside Facebook was live blogging the session. Introduction to Google OpenSocial
Here's a video of Patrick Chanezon:
If you're interested in building OpenSocial Applications using Google App Engine, you may want to check out the article Building an OpenSocial App with Google AppEngine by Lane LiaBraaten, Google Developer Programs.
From the Graphing Social Patterns conference I blogged about the Open Social: Open for Business session. Following are the slides from the session and covers Google OpenSocial, hi5, imeem, MySpace and my.aol.com
Kevin Barenblat, co-founder of Context Optional uploaded the slides to slideshare.net (Thanks Kevin!). I have embedded them below.
“one of the best [presentations] i've ever seen on this topic”- Dave McClure (500 Hats)
I agree with Dave as it was certainly one of the best and most thought provoking sessions at the conference and I am not alone in thinking that. I heard rave reviews from attendees after Kevin finished his session.
Following presentation is by Jeff Ragovin, VP of Sales for Buddy Media.
Among other things, Benjamin focused on ARFU (average revenue from users), sticky features, business models, page views growth, services, revenues and profits for various social networks. Very interesting presentation.
If you missed Graphing Social Patterns East this year, make sure you go to the next year one. You may also want to check out Graphing Social Patterns West happening in CA later this year. Otherwise, you'll be missing a lot.
Today is Father's day. Happy Father's day to all fathers.
For me Father's day has always been kind of sad as it marks the death anniversary of my dad who died in 1995. He was a good man and though I didn't get to spend a lot of time with him, I miss him.
This year's father's day, however, is a little sweeter too for me. My wife is expecting and so I look forward to the joys of celebrating father day with my son/daughter next year. Yup, we don't know whether it's a boy or girl, but we plan to find out soon :)
Dave McClure, master of 500 hats and the host of Graphing Social Patterns, opened the conference with a brief but thought provoking presentation on top 5 things that fail and win on social networks.
Top 5 things that fail on social networks:
Too many friends
Too many apps
Virality is dead
Ain't no money (targeted advertising fail)
Your privacy isn't
Top 5 things that win on social networks:
Poking
Multiple platforms
News Feeds
"App" - vertising
Data portability
The presentation was quick, simple and brief but had an important message for social networks . Dave is right that having too many friends can fail a social network. You just don't feel connected to your friends if there are too many of them. Virality is also a very crucial component of social networks. If there is no proper platform for viral engagements, it can adversely affect the social network. Finally privacy is something that social network operators just can't ignore. It is much too important today and users are quick to sound their opinions. Just recall what happened in the case of Facebook Beacon, a poorly executed strategy from Facebook that didn't respect privacy. It's no surprise that Facebook took it down after experiencing a major backlash.
Two points I'd like to add to the list of things that cause social networks to fail are scalability and addition of poorly thought features. If your social network isn't scalable and you don't have a high availability strategy then eventually users are going to leave. They may not leave immediately, but they will, especially if a high availability strategy isn't implemented. Addition of poorly thought out features that are primarily there for monetization and don't directly benefit users will hurt user experience causing them to become less engaged on the network.
Overall, this is a very interesting list to remember. Thanks Dave for sharing this.
I got back today around 5 PM from Washington DC. There was a 3 mile backup on the turnpike because of an accident.
DC was very hot and humid. Back in New York, the weather wasn't much cooler either.
Now that I am back, I wanted to take a few moments to recap my experience and thank the incredible people whose hard work made this conference so much fun.
Dave McClure - The awesome host who made it all possible
Graphing Social Patterns East was a lot of fun, definitely invaluable and one of the best ones in terms of networking opportunities and content if you are interested in penetrating or capitalizing social networks. Dave McClure (the very awesome host), the speakers and the O'reilly conference team did an outstanding job overall to make this conference an unforgettable one.
I have already blogged about few of the sessions. My intention was to take notes from every session but I failed to keep up. At times the conversation became so interesting especially during the panels that I wanted to listen in carefully than having to type everything. In my upcoming posts, I will try to find the slides and other blog posts for you. Here are quick links to my summaries:
The video clips Dave had painstakingly gathered fit right in with the presentations that followed them and were a lot of fun. Dave has posted the links to videos from both day 1 and day 2.
Sebastien de Halleux - COO of PlayFish
On Sunday night, as I was about to head to my room, I saw two gentlemen sitting at the bar. As I approached closer, I had to ask, "Are you Dave McClure? You look just like your photo on your blog." To which he made a very friendly reply, "Yes." I ended up sitting with Dave and Sebastien de Halleux of Playfish for a couple of drinks. Very quickly I was impressed by the insights Dave has regarding just about everything. Sebastien's company is growing very fast on Facebook and one of their games, Bowling Buddies, is in fact addicting. I highly recommend checking it out.
Chris Bissell - Chief Software Architect of MySpace
For the first time, I got to meet the MySpace team. Dave introduced them the night before the conference. Really cool and original folks who are not only at the top of their game but also very helpful in lending advice. I had great chats with Allen Hurff (SVP Engineering), Chris Bissell (Chief Software Architect) and Max Newbould (Platform Lead and Product Owner). I was pleasantly surprised by their personalities as I had wrongfully thought that being owned by News Corp., MySpace team would be a lot corporate. But that wasn't the case. Quickly after meeting the team, I was having engaging conversations with them.
Max Newbould - Platform Lead and Product Owner for MySpace
Another thing that pleasantly surprised me was that how much effort MySpace is putting in creating relationships with developers. They have created a dedicated channel on IRC just for developers and are hosting DevDemo days to interact on a more personal basis with developers. In addition, Allen put his friendfeed and twitter streams along with his MySpace and email addresses to give developers multiple ways to connect with him. Watch OpenSocial MySpace Application Demo by Chris Bissell. Immediately after the conference, Max took off to give MySpace presentation in various countries.
Ro Choy of RockYou presented an informative session on viral growth and how users use social networks. His presentation was full of examples on differentiating viral from anti-viral with countless tips on building viral engagement. For anyone wanting to explore marketing opportunities with social applications, this session alone was worth the price paid for conference ticket.
I also met Sachin Rekhi of imeem. Sachin had an incredible story about how he left his very promising job, formed a company, worked very hard to secure licensing contracts, got engaged and sold his company all within a year. A true entrepreneur at heart, Sachin was offering great advice to anyone interested in music startups. He warned about the complexities in negotiating music licensing deals. Sachin used to work at Microsoft creating Visual Studio. He had to go to great lengths to create an Open Social container at imeem since his team wasn't ready to use Shindig. Today, anyone can start creating their application utilizing imeem's Open Social container. Be warned that Sachin is more interested in quality than quantity when it comes to applications. As I learned more about imeem at the conference, I couldn't help but think that Sachin and his team have build an incredible product despite the licensing hurdles they had to face. Thanks, Sachin for great conversations and for building imeem. Adam Ludwig of Give Real is an entrepreneur working on another disruptive idea. I have known Adam for sometime now and it was a great pleasure to catch up with him at the conference. Adam generously invited me and Michelle for a wonderful lunch at the roof top of Hyatt. Thanks Adam!
Adam Ludwig chatting with Benjamin Joffe
After hearing the thoughts of Benjamin Joffe (Plus Eight Star), I wanted to engage in discussion about mobile social networking and monetization with him. Benjamin had unmatched insight into how to monetize social networks and factors behind the success of mobile social networking in Asian markets. His presentation was one of my favorite ones.
At lunch one day, I sat on a table with Chris Sandoval (Director of New Business Initiatives, Enterprise Hosting at NTT). Chris had a great offer for startups to show how dedicated his company is to acquire business. IIRC, Chris' company hosts Twitter. He told us a joke that went something like: if you throw a stone in US, it would hit a lawyer. if you throw a stone in Japan, it would hit someone who works for NTT.
Scott Slack (founder of a100voices) was also at the lunch table. He is working on a very interesting project as well that focuses on social networking and locality to create content. Check out a100voices.org for more details.
Also sitting with me on the table was Durjoy (Ace) Bhattacharjya (VP, Interactive Marketing, Digital Media of Core Performance). Ace's company trains top athletes and they recently signed a deal with Sheraton to provide a custom program to integrate their services with health clubs at Sheraton.
As I stepped out to smoke a cig. (bad me!), I met Sonu Kansal (CTO of Associated Content). Sonu runs a large infrastructure to support the operations of Associated Content which now has an incredible amount of content. We talked about various scalability and high availability challenges among other things.
On another smoke break, I ran into Peter Foley (CTO of Artez Interactive). Peter's company offers online fund raising solutions to non profit organizations including Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation, Children's Miracle Network and National Ovarian Cancer Foundation. We talked on a variety of things ranging from utilizing social networks to technical challenges. Thanks Peter for a great conversation!
Adam Nash - Senior Director of Products, LinkedIn
Adam Nash (Senior Director of LinkedIn) gave a high level overview of his company that was very interesting. Of all the social networks LinkedIn is the one I use the most. LinkedIn is working on opening their platform to developers so we can expect to see some great applications. Adam, did you get my LinkedIn invitation? :)
Michael Lazerow - Buddy Media
Michael Lazerow of Buddy Media is really good at his job too. His presentations and insights were eye opening. His company has been working on disruptive applications. Unfortunately, although I wanted to, I didn't get to chat with him one on one. I can't wait to run into him next time.
I really enjoyed meeting, probably the funniest guy at the conference, Mo Kakwan (of MoBouy) as well. His sense of humor was incredible making everyone laugh and smile. I could see that everyone enjoyed Mo's company very much.
As the presentations ended on the last day, I sat in the lobby with a few friends including Mo. There I had some great conversations with Siqi Chen (CEO of Serious Business). Siqi had to catch a flight so we cut our conversation short. He is a very smart entrepreneur with a great personality who created the Friends for Sale application that is getting rave reviews and has a very impressive number of daily active users (IIRC a million plus). Siqi understands social graphs and social interactions on social networking sites and plans to create more engaging games that are built around these interactions. Read Siqi's blog post on Startupism.com, "How to Not Suck at Facebook Apps."
Also sitting with us in the lobby was Brendan King (CEO of MyFrontSteps). Brendan is a real estate veteran and an entrepreneur working on creating exciting solutions for the real estate market.
While we were sitting, Marc Porcelli (Chief Marketing Officer of SinglesNet) joined us. Marc's company is a leading provider of online dating services and he was interested in buying more impressions for his site. It's impressive how much Marc's company is dominating the online dating market. He provided many usability gems as to why his company is perceived better by online daters than eHarmony or Match.com.
In the session, Geek Metrics, Hiten Shah (CEO of KissMetrics), Albert Lai (Kontangent), Ian Swanson (Sometrics, Inc.) and Roy Pereira (Refresh Analytics) provided intuition on the metrics for applications and widgets. Dave moderated the session and herded the panel to highly unique selling proposition of each of the analytics provider. Later, I had interesting conversations with Albert Lai who is an established serial entrepreneur having sold several companies.
Oh, I almost forgot about Mark Sendo (CEO of Urturn). A very approachable, friendly and smart guy, Mark has a background in Macroeconomics and his new company is creating a promising virtual currency for social networks. Urturn has been covered by TechCrunch and several respected sites.
At the dinner on the last day of conference, Dave introduced me to his long time friend Justin Won (President of JayDub Enterprises, LLC). As I conversed with Justin, who used to be involved with databases years ago, I couldn't help but be impressed by his understanding of what a proper scalable solution would comprise of. Very quickly we covered bottlenecks of most infrastructure related issues. I really loved Justin's quote that "DBAs are a different breed than programmers."
David Recordon (Open Platforms Technical Lead for Six Apart) was also present at the dinner. He had quite a bit of industry knowledge including the challenges that some of the popular websites are facing (no, I won't name the sites). Thanks for your insights David.
I am also thankful to Ahson Wardak (founder & CEO of ShareMeme), John Maver (founder of Thought Labs), Chris Saad (Founder and Chairperson of Data Portability Project), Jared Goralnick (Productivity Evangelist at AwayFind), Keith Schacht (Founder & CEO of 42 Friends) and Erik Giberti (AF-Design) for great conversations and insights that they all generously shared with me.
I am sure I missed out some of the names (sorry for my bad memory!). My apologies and a big thanks to everyone with whom I conversed but didn't list here.
Now, I am definitely looking to the next conference.
On the next panel, Geek Metrics: Using App Analytics to Drive Distribution, Engagement, & Monetization, the panelists are Dave McClure (500 Hats), Hiten Shah (CrazyEgg / KISSmetrics), Ian Swanson (Sometrics, Inc.), Albert Lai (Kontagent) and Roy Pereira (Refresh). Dave McClure is moderating the panel.
Why would I use third party analytics solution? HS: It boils down to resources (experience, scaling problems) and insights.
IS: Resources, relationships and partnerships that developers can't build on their own.
RP: Launched on May 1. App developers should focus on core making it viral and as successful as possible.
AL: We develop viral analytics. Most customers tell him that customers don't have bandwidth (time, retention etc).
Are you shipping currently? AL: Private beta shipping to select customers. Currently not releasing customers. 80% of our time goes into scaling, building infrastructure.
RP: already launched. Their target is application networks (companies that have lots of applications) and ad networks.
IS: Launched in January this year. Currently doing 15 million daily unique active users. He is from Userplane. They have a long tail. 90% facebook, 8% myspace and 2% spread across other networks.
HS: Several large customers lined up. Shipping next week as private beta. Less focused on monetization and more focused on engagement and growth.
Are you currently charging? RP: Free model right now. Plan on introducing value added functionality in coming months. Fundamental functionality will always be free.
IS: free product. last week launched a social ad platform. They have some premium services. Kind of like atlas or DART but for social space.
HS: base analytics will be free but subscription services will cost some.
AL: I am going to pay million dollars to everyone for using :)
How is your product better than say Google Analytics? AL: We are focused on viral channels, enagament and allow easier access to A/B testing methodologies like big guys (Slide etc) do.
What are the risks are going forward and what keeps you awake at night?
HS: Social networks control us and the developers. That's what keeps us up at night.
RP: Social networks changing APIs etc.
Specific example of viral analytics? AL: Very very quickly adapting to traffic that's coming in. Providing the ability to forecast virality based on changes. Framework that allows to test various changes.
HS: Viral growth factor number and equation that's getting standardized. Related to invitations and engaging users. The equation is called k-factor.
Why are you better than other guys? IS: make money HS: great insight. use all analytics you can.
Another great session at the Graphing Social Patterns conference.
Open Social offers a standard for everyone. The IT rights of Open Social are owned by Open Social Foundation. Among Open Social members are hi5, imeem, bebo, ning, Oracle, Yahoo!, six apart, LinkedIn, viadeo, friendster, AOL and many more.
Open Social is 88 days old and reaches 275,000,000 users with 66 million installs of 2000+ apps developed by 20,000 developers. 10 million users use applications on Open Social.
Two client APIs : one for javascript and the other for REST.
Three areas:
people and friends: access friends information programatically.
activities: see what friends are doing
persistence: provide state without a server and share data wth friends.
Some examples follow next.
An Open Social application has 80% code that can be readily implemented on other OS containers.
If you have a social site and want to implement OS you can use Apache Shindig which has PHP and Java version of it. Shindig makes it really easy to implement. There is a very active mailing list for it.
SocialSite by Sun: Open source project that utilizes Shindig and builds on top of it. Dave "Roller" Johnson announced it at JavaOne. Heavy potential at Enterprise.
iGoogle: 50% userbase in US!
Google Friend Connect:
Users... more ways to do more things with my friends
Site owners... more and engaged traffic for site.
MySpace Developer Platform:
7 months old
Supporting REST APIs - over a year old
#1 social network
Why Develop for MySpace?
unique demographics: users you can't find elsewhere
forthcoming metrics / analytics focused on small to medium developers
user base is so large, you just need to get a small portion of MySpace users by popularity not virality.
Some Metrics of MySpace:
60K registered developers
1800+ apps
15 million installations (3 months)
MySpace Developer platform at developer.myspace.com
IRC: irc.freenode.net #myspacedev
Email: developerrelations at myspace.com
Twitter: MySpaceDevTeam
Dev Jams: range from 2-8 hours, devs bring their laptops and get first hand instruction and help from MDP team members
Myspace offers free application press releases apply at myspace at spark.pr.com
MySpace Developer Platform future:
application communication channel
custom notifications
invites - requesShare App
Metrics/analytics to playing field
Sachin (Imeem):
Imeem is social network focused on sharing and discovering all kinds of media.
24m unique users per month and third largest social network based on US traffic.
http://imeem.com/developers
they have made their content licenses to developers allowing them to utilize imeem's legally licensed media.
Types of applications
originally Adobe ActionScript 3 Flex Apps
OpenSocial Javascript APIs (in May)
External iFrame
OpenSocial extensions
immem-specific extensions that allow access to imeem media metadata, including music, videos and photos.
Example:
The Echo Chamber application example built on imeem.
My.Aol.com
newest partner with OpenSocial
4 brands
16 locales
12 languages and more on the way
55 myAOL portals
2-3 new locales per month
My.AOL.com Gadgest
myAOL is an AJAX basde web applciations (uses Dojo)
moving to Google Gadgets
this summer their platform will be completely transformed to work with Google Gadgets and Open Social.
Last session of the day is a panel discussion. Panelists include Benjamin Joffe, Ben Keighran, Gregory Cypes, Craig Dalton and Chris Butler.
BJ: Spent last 8 years in Asia (4 years in Japan, 3 in Korea and 1 in China).
Information Arbitrage: Identifying most successful best practices.
Some history: Mobile SNS (Social network services) are not new. ImaHima ("are you free now"). In 2001, they had 250,000 users.
What changed? numbers and speed of data access. Also, what you can do with phone. Mindset of people using mobile has changed.
It works: Japan is #2 economy, #1 mobile society. 80% penetration of 3G. China is #1 mobile and Internet population. QQ has 500 million users. Cyworld has 35 million and mixi has 90 million compared to 200 million Facebook users.
Mobile users: 50mln for QQ, 3 mln for facebook, cyworld 45 mln,
Revenue: fb: (50 mln), QQ 250 mln
FB is focused on profile page, IM and groups. QQ has avatars, paid games also.
Sticky feature: FB (applications. QQ: IM digital currency, pmt system. Cyworld: real friends, digital currency , pmt systems mixi (footprints)
Business models: FB: ads, QQ (digital goods, paid games, mobile VAS) cyworld (brand pages, digital goods.
Mixi has more page views on mobile than PC. Mobile CPM is half the price of PC.
Community and Social networks are turning into full-fledged media. Cyworld is the nicest mobile application in social networks. These top mobile SNS in Asia won't "invade us" as they are busy in home markets and they lock cross cultural expertise. Cyworld started and closed operation in Europe.
Myspace has started operation in China, Japan and Korea but so far has failed to gain traction revenue wise.
How to make mobile social networks work: 1. high speed network and flat fee: (No one from large mobile network present in the audience.) 2. Proper payment systems: seems a low hanging fruit. 3. Girls: it's not rocket science. 4. Companies and Schools: Because employees and students spend so much time on it that their computer access is blocked and so they turn to using mobile services.
benjamin at plus8star.com
Panel Introduction:
Ben Keighran (BK) ben at bluepulse-inc.com Launched in December 2006. built world's largest social messaging platform.
Gregory Cypes (GC): gregory.cypes at corp.aol.com QQ is trying to break into US market. GC is tech lead for open AIM. Big component of open AIM is mobile. AIM does over a billion IMs a day with 80 million users.
Craig Dalton (CD) (craig.dalton at hookmobile.com) Hookmobile in mobile development for last years. Now in multimedia messaging. Created a platform to integrate messaging with social networks that takes away complexities such as device recognition. Just launched platform in April.
Chris Butler (cbutler at dash.net): They do crowd sourcing. People can do Yahoo! mobile search from their car. Twitter from the car :). Working on facebook apps.
What's view on social network on mobile in US?
CD: XHTML is going to die.
BK: Browser is rapidly getting faster and is faster than it was ever before. iPhones, Android and Safari are fast. Create it as a browser based application.
GC: Every application needs SMS strategy.
BK: SMS gives you a huge touch point and advantage but times are changing.
How do you think operators are positioned? Do they hinder or support initiatives.
Careers are changing, they are opening up more. Interest around the browser is very great as it allows companies to come together and create standards.
Next up at Graphing Social Patterns is Hooman Radfar, CEO of Clearspring Technologies, Inc.
Widgets are the new web page and the building block or social web. They provide high-growth channel to audiences and allow you to deploy software as a service. In addition widgets create active dialog with users.
Widgets are a building block, not a building. - think in context - think through the life-cycle of widget: how do I create it? how do I market it? how do I track it? - data-driven, multi-channel strategy: Think bigger and measure across multiple channels. - focus on user: Widget is another thing in your bag of tricks.
Put a method to the social madness: - start with a real method and real goals. - must know your audience - list channels for distribution - deploy services across each channel - create cross-promo 'bridges' - track each channel and bridge
Long tail: new channels, same audience: - instead of long tail, look at the fat tail. Look at Adonomics. - the best apps on facebook are driven by communication
Let the numbers be your guide: - mantra of web 2.0 - measure channels to goal conversion - starting with highest converting channels - optimize each via A/B tests - lather, rinse, re
