Dan shared the story of how at a dinner with a top technologist from Google on the night before the Summit, he was told that Google was about ready to be VERY OPEN with key parts of their API’s, data and platform including access to whatever subset of the World’s Social Graph that Orkut might represent. The contrast Dan Farber was trying to draw here was that Facebook was being VERY CLOSED about their much more significant subset of the World’’s Social Graph and that it was clear that Google understood and supported open web standards better than Facebook, and well, “Go Google, Boo Facebook!”
I considered asking Dan’s panel the question about how likely it would be for Google to open up something that actually made them money (e.g., their AdSense inventory that exists out on millions of individual web sites or the right hand Sponsored Link area of Google.com for which Microsoft and/or Yahoo would love to compete to serve the most lucrative ads for the web site owner’s benefit). I knew the answer to this was, ”About as likely as iTunes opening up and supporting other music players besides the iPod — that is NOT AT ALL LIKELY.”
My actual question to Dan was about: “What dominant business had ever opened up to its competitors the core of their monetization engine?” was met with stumped silence from the panel. One comment came about how Firefox (the ghost of Netscape’s proprietary browser) was openned up by AOL and it now has 200+ million users but this was a case of the losing browser opening up as a final act of desperation to somehow stay relevent.
So, it is the weak competitors who want an open standard not the strong competitors whose definition of OPEN is you are free to write to our OPEN platform. In a related comment, Robert Scoble finally said that it was really just bloggers in the tech world (and competitors of facebook) that really want to have a WEB-WIDE OPEN ID STANDARD for accessing the user profile data inside of Facebook (and not end users who really don’t care that other companies who want to access Facebook’s data will have to do so by writing facebook apps).
Lookery’s Big Idea and Facebook’s Nov. 6 Announcement
This got me thinking about what Facebook and/or Microsoft might be announcing on Nov. 6, 2007 in terms of their “Advertising Play.”
I had heard Scott Rafer at VideoEgg’s App-Camp and Todd Sawicki at the SNAP Summitt make the following points:
1. Facebook has great demographic data and horrible click-thru on their ads — because their users like to stay on Facebook, no matter how well targeted the ad is
2. Most web sites have no demographic data and nice click-thru on their ads — because their anonymous users are just passing through as they browse for information
3. Nirvana would be facebook’s demographic knowledge with a web publisher’s low site stickiness.
