Facebook are stuck between a rock and a hard place. After you’ve faffed about with the applications, added your photos and replied to those friend requests how do you keep the users hooked?
For the networks, it’s a tricky balancing act to achieve, you’ve gotta keep the cash rolling in and keep the user happy at the same time.
In the UK it’s more common today to have a Facebook application than it is to have a dog. But it’s into the global arena that its expansion plans have now moved.
With 65 billion page views per month, on average people spend 20 minutes a day on the site, plus it’s the number one photo-sharing site on the web.
You will no doubt have seen the launch of Cuil last week, but have you seen the volume and intensity of [mainly negative] commentary surrounding it? I published an article on the Cheeze blog, outlining five reasons why Cuil could be the future of search. Within minutes we had many comments, all berating Cuil for its lack of size, its struggle with uptime and it's look and feel.
Other bloggers went as far as calling Cuil 'liars' [the bloggers' words not mine] whilst many articles covered the negatives.
‘BANK CRASH PROFIT FEARS’ yelled the headline on the Evening Standard news-stand as I passed by the newsagents at lunchtime today.
The Protein Forum event last night, in uber trendy Shoreditch was not your usual pretentious Hoxton affair. Below 54, the venue for the evening, was very 70s kitch – lots of pod chairs and shiny, shiny surfaces. Hell, at the end everyone was dancing like they’d been friends for years.
Like any good web project, it always takes a fraction longer than you think it's going to.
The judging process is now over and the team are beavering away contacting the successful companies. With a bit of luck, a following wind and some fast and furious email activity the official list of successful Digital Mission companies will be released tomorrow.
Knol, Google's Wikipedia beater has been in beta since December 2007. Last week we saw the wrapping come off and Knol opening up to accept new content entries. Knol, short for Knowledge, is on a steep slope to compete with Wikipedia. With 9.2 million UK users [according to Nielson], even with Google's size, trying to achieve over 8bn articles [and counting at Wikipedia] will take some time.
OK, so it's probably time I caged my inner drama queen, but that shouldn't detract from a very important day in the build-up to the Digital Mission to NYC. Judgement day, of sorts.
Yahoo recently launched their open source search tools, under the name BOSS ( Build Your Own Search Service ). The published aim of BOSS is to grow the breadth of search offerings using the Yahoo technology. Use of the Yahoo technology is free in return for Yahoo selling ads against the search results. There are plans for Yahoo to start sharing [what little] revenue they achieve from these new search tools.
