Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

The question will be gaining importance over the coming months (for the digerati) and years (for normal people ;)). With the other shoe having dropped, and now Facebook banning Google Access for Friend Connect, things are hotting up. The short version, Facebook says that they do not allow Google access because people will loose control over their personal data when they do that. This has been proven to be untrue, with the simple fact being that there is no Facebook API through which Google can tell Facebook to add a new option to people can change their sharing preferences for Friend Connect connected sites within Facebook. People can do that on the site they shared their info on or within Friend Connect, but not on Facebook, which is a Facebook problem though. Scoble adds a few more things which are relevant though, coming back to the age old problem of syncing your data across several services, something that needs to be settled once and for all and probably never will. The problem is that Facebook descided for me that it is a problem for me, which I might not agree with. (Update: Later somebody from Google comments that even that is wrong. )

The problem comes down to the fact that Facebook does not want to loose control. Share your friends with Google Friend Connect and Google knows your friend and you can theoretically leave Facebook and take your friends with you. It’s not quiet there and but that’s what this might end up in. Michael has a great post about Data Portability on Techcrunch entitled “Data Portability: It’s The New Walled Garden” and he is very right. Let me quote one bit from Michael’s article:

Let me put this another way. How dare Facebook tell ME that I cannot give Google access to this data!

I am starting to wonder if there really isn’t a huge opportunity here, but still in the wondering phase.

There is one thing I would like to add though. I personally entrust my social network to Xing for example, and I will most likely entrust it to Google and there is one simple reason for it. Motivation on the side of the service I am entrusting it to.

Xing has a clear revenue model. I pay them a monthly fee to get a few extra services and with that model they get a wonderful EBIT margin. They are doing fine and I sure hope that Lars keeps his head on straight and doesn’t do anything irrational that removes the clarity from that mission, but I am pretty sure he will do the right thing. Xing’s motivation is in getting my data, getting my connections, having my friends on there, and getting me to sign up for more services. Great. Making it more freely available is something that Xing will have to deal with because when I can access it from anywhere, I will be happy to put everyone on there, also my non-member contacts while I am at it, making it my address book, but I wrote about that before. Huge opportunities.

For Google, they are an advertising company and they want information. But beyond that, they really do want all information to be freely available because that means that they will be able to run ads again that information, find it, give people better answers, … you know what I mean. that means that my social network is just a means to an end, not the end in itself for them, as the monetization sits somewhere else. That’s the beauty of Friend Connect. They help more social networks blossom and more content being created and content will win. Freeing up my data is in their best interest, or rather making it available.

For Facebook, there is no business model. I am not sure if making the data available to me is something that they will do because the only thing they have is that data. They have no business relationship with me, or do not have some other use for that data other than mining it and at some time coming up with an idea.

So who would you entrust your data with? Nobody (aka something like Noserub) or Google, or Xing, or … .

Over the last few days and even weeks a few things clogged up my bookmarks folder entitled “To Blog” which I haven’t done up till now. It’s about time that I finally get them out of here, be it as a summary of sorts.

Ingmar pointed me to Zattoo, which is giving you TV on your computer and it seems to be working really well and they already have 46 channels in Germany as well as many in several other countries. I am still waiting for TV/Computer/Streaming/… to be fully integrated. I think Podcasting will fully take off once we have nocat of 3G enabled car radios with clients, and Videocasting will take off once my TV can effortlessly let me subscribe to Diggnation, News, Whatever. Zattoo might help to keep live shows available.

Dropbox is something I am starting to really love as a startup. They are using Amazon’s S3 as a storage solution and have built a nice little tool for windows and os x that will automatically sync everything you put into a special folder with your cloud based storage. Due to the fact that you can install your app on two computers you can sync several gigs of storage between two computers, and the fun thing is that you can share a special folder with another person all together. So if I put something in my “Shared with Henning” folder (could have chosen a wiser name, but this makes it easy to understand ;)) it is moved into the cloud, and when Henning turns on his computer, it will appear in his folder and everything is dandy. I really love the system they build. The opportunities are endless and that I love Amazon’s system is clear. This is a very clever way to use the service and the syncing part with revisions is great!

Friendfeed is something that is making the rounds at the moment and the Twitterati are signing up in big numbers. As I had discussions with Dirk about Noserub for ages, it all felt very familiar. The thing is that it is build by ex-Googlers and there are some things weird about it. I for one do not really feel like adding friends on the system but just people of whom I want to have access to all their feeds. As the feeds are managed by each individual user, I am always up to date on what these “friends” wright about. Then Friendfeed added search and I started adding “Friends” like crazy, choosing people that I respect and like. I have the slight feeling that it might become a form of search engine for me in the future. Using Friendfeed to follow your friends is a totally nutcase idea anyway. There are a gazillion filters missing and Friendfeed is actually not focussed enough to allow it from a mindset of the users I think.

Then there was this story on Techcrunch about MyBlogLog launching a Bluetooth type network. I am still wondering if this is a joke. The thing is that this makes MyBlogLog even more scary as a data gathering system, but mot of all I am wondering if people are nuts again. Bluetooth is not there to create a social network, something some people seem to be thinking at the moment. Aka-Aki in Germany seems to be one of those. The thing is that the amount of people you need in the network is way too high, leaving bluetooth on is a major security hazard waiting to happen, and once you are in my bluetooth range i can probably see you! People, get real! It’s a fun toy, but this is not and should not happen.

Then we had the launch of the Google App Engine. I got an account for our hosted system for Ormigo and we might be playing with it some time. Feld has a few good links about it and Tim O’Reilly is thinking whether Google App Engine is nothing more than a lock-in play. I do love the general idea of the App Engine, in that you do not have to worry about anything other than writing your code. But you do have to write it within the Google App Engine and write it in Python. So it is a kind of lock-in. But then comes Andy Baio writing about Chris Anderson launching AddDrop. AddDrop is a container for apps written with Google’s AppEngine SDK to be run directly on Amazon’s EC2. Now how cool is that!

And this brings us back to one of my favorite topics, Amazon, who announced a persistent storage feature for EC2. Before I blabber along on how cool that is, just read this from RightScale’s Thorsten vok Eiken.

That concludes my little summary for today. Have a great weekend.

This is what an article on MediaPost (my source) talks about. In the article Google’s President of Advertising and Commerce for North America, Tim Armstrong talks about Google’s future Ads Dashboard at the American Association of Advertising Agencies Media Conference. And that’s a cool crowd to talk about what the biggest threat to Agencies will be doing, especially when they really want the agencies on their side … at least until they don’t need them anymore.

What they want to bring out is a kind of dashboard that helps Agencies to plan, buy and manage all their advertising, be it search, display, radio, tv or anything other that comes. The integration helps show agencies how different parts of the mix influence each other. That is actually what GroupM from WPP is working on. Of course Google is saying that they want to help agencies, and GroupM is obviously mostly helping it’s connected agencies. I need to write a bit about GroupM in the future, seems to be an amazing place!

While I do believe that Google has nothing against the agencies because they will not be able to hire enough sales guys to do it alone, they will not be needed in the end. You might need a Creative Agency, but that will be the only ones still making a margin and not being replacable. Now already, the big clients will milk an agency for it’s last cent, knowing exactly what they pay for advertising, and being a hard bargainer. When all the agencies out there use one Dashboard to manage the ads, management, buying, and so on becomes a no brainer. They can only distinguish themselves via being more creative and being more knowledgeable to build a great integrated campaign. Trafficking is an art form (it is what GroupM does) and the thing is that the big publishers will not let a Google rid them of their direct access to the agencies and customers.

But if you will not be able to use Google’s tool to directly bid on big publishers (you might be able to use it to track them due to their Doubleclick ownership, think Doubleclick for Agencies which they already use anyway, now it will be free) where do you book? Google needs somewhere for automatic booking, especially for image ads.

That is really a threat for all the networks forming at the moment. I am talking about an AdJug, AdScale, AdBrite and so on. Either they need to develop an API to hook themselves up to the Google Dashboard, or they will have a real problem. Because Google does need all the same small to mid publishers to fill their booking engine. And with all the Agencies connected, they will be able to pay better. One thing that Google AdSense is missing now is an option to say “only accept ads with CPM over X”, which things like AdScale do. Of course, nobody has yet been able to explain to me how they do it with CPC Ads, but ok, I think it is something Google could do if they do want to reach beyond being the back fill.

Of course continuing down that line of thinking, the next extension then might mean that the big publishers will need to open up for Google’s Dashboard. And then suddenly it is all automated and then you don’t need Agencies anymore. Creative Agencies yes, but that might be it.

Yes, Google does need the agencies, but they will make sure that their tools are so easy that the agencies are easily replaced and ad management is not a margin business … not for anyone but Google that is.

Or it just stays a wining-and-dining business for a long time to come.

I wrote about the ad market needing a change in July of last year, and now Emre Sokullu explained the idea very well in his post entitled Plan B for Microsoft: Split up the Advertising Atom.

He take the Microhoo deal as a starting point, thinking about how Microsoft can beat Google, but it’s not really something that is unique to Microhoo. The suggestion he has is something that is bigger than Google, bigger than any advertising system out there. Think VISA for advertising.

His idea is best explained via the picture below from his post:

The idea is that you split everything up, and create it around a standard so that the different silos can interact. The cool thing is that this is how our AdServer at Ormigo is structured, first because it makes for an amazingly efficient ad server that runs on Amazon’s Web Services Infrastructure, and it provides for some interesting new possibilities.

Our products that we advertise are within different objects stored on S3 (inventory silo) and the Placement Silo is really our AdServer that holds all the information about the Placements. The very cool thing about the above model is that you can have different inventories fill the same placement, or add on top of that different parameter silos that take care of optimization. Thing content match or behavioural targeting.

The cool thing is that you would enable Open Innovation. Of course there are lots of things still to be thought out to make it really open, meaning you make it a VISA model in which everybody can use everything and can do what they want with it but they will need to adhere to a set of rules and standards. This might make prices more transparent, and open up for real competition, which will not be good for everyone. But the thing is that it enables is a really open market place where different people can write a Placement Silo for TV ads that suddenly grab the right Ads from the Inventory Silo, optimized through a Facebook Parameter Silo to only show ads my Friends like. Who gets what? Who pays what? What about the wining and dining part of advertising? Lots of things not settled, but worth thinking about.

The cries are going back and forth and it’s fun to watch. Of course we all know the offer done by Microsoft, being close to $45 billion for Yahoo! Google obviously couldn’t let it rest and now has an official response entitled: Yahoo! and the future of the internet.

Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC?

Like Michael I can more or less smile at that because with Google having a 40% market share of internet advertising revenues, something like Microhoo would only be good competition against Google, which they of course don’t like. The bigger question really is how to integrate all of them and there I am with John Battelle with the idea that Microsoft should become more like GE. They are already on their way but they can push it. Let’s see how this one will continue.

Of course now Microsoft already did their counterpounch just if you care