Truly a “watershed event” if it happens.

Kids today literally laugh when someone talks about the bloat at Yahoo’s portal (better now than it was a little while ago, I feel) –it’s just so old school to us, I guess, it feels like a dinosaur. It’s a little obnoxious that people are mocked and ostracized for using anything besides Google, but I suppose that’s a testament to a strong brand.

I’m just speaking for younger people though, ha! Oh well… pull a bunny out of the hat.

Google has Blogger, MSN has Spaces. altho either could use it, neither needs it. Yahoo has bupkus, and MyWeb / 360 was a nice try but has zero traction.

if Yahoo bought 6A, they could offer Vox and/or TypePad and/or LJ to all their users.

in fact, i’m again curious why either this deal or FB acquisition hasn’t happened already.

Terry Semel needs to move faster, or hit the road. he did a fine job from 2001-2004, and they saved their bacon buying Overture. but he hasn’t been much of an overachiever in the past 2 years.

the Yahoo board is doing a grave disservice to their shareholders not pushing them to make more acquisitions to broaden their product line and thereby increase page views & advertising monetization.

that said, Yahoo should damn well buy one of the two — they have a very large audience and no substantial blogging / page creation products to throw at them… aside from YahooGroups (and while i’m a big fan of YG, they’ve done nothing with the product in 5 years). Yahoo could likely dramatically increase page views and user visits with a strong social networking and/or blogging platform, not to mention move their demographic a lot younger than they currently are.

note that with a few slight twists, FB could very well start eating into YahooGroups market share. or if acquired, they could very easily become YahooGroups 2.0.

definitely think Yahoo has to make a move here. Google might force the price higher than Yahoo would like, but if they don’t buy one of those 2 properties in the next 6-12 months i think they’re missing a big opportunity to move the needle.

• dave mcclure
  (link)

If AOL would have changed to an advertising based revenue model 2 years ago - they would be able to buy Time Warner in an all stock deal!

Thanks…whew, for a minute there I was afraid I was over the hill…seriously though, and all patronizing aside…I appreciate your insightful input. You are clearly one smart guy, and your “on the ground” perspective is in many ways more important to me than that of business moguls or media giants.

That said, social networking is a business, and must be looked at as such…at least by those who build and fund social networks. And all businesses are idiocynratic…none more so than those that involve a “cool” factor. Hence, I understand your concern that we tread carefully among the land mines of teenage fickleness.

But what I wrote about is what I perceive as an opportunity for a true, pure-play “social media” entity to do something remarkable in a capitalist economy…go public/IPO. And that, to me, is a watershed event…because it will open the door for all the social media entreprenuers of the future and put to bed the notion that social media is a fad.

I know you ‘get it’ generally–you understand how it works, how it should work, so forth. Here it’s just a matter of perspective. Social networking is part of a modern digital lifestyle that teens find intuitive. Do you have kids? It’s difficult to keep up with teenagers–not even teenagers can do so consistently.

When Facebook debuted its ‘facebook blog,’ they didn’t have RSS. Huh? That’s what I’m talking about when I say disconnected from its user base. Little touches. I’m just saying facebook needs to tread carefully, is all–moreso than MySpace might.

You’re not too old to get ‘it,’ whatever ‘it’ you mean. I don’t know if you are in a situation where you deal with huge numbers and penetration of facebook and sixapart product users, but I am… and I’m just saying that I see things differently from the analysts on wall street, and those analysts might want to look around a little bit before they start recommending anything. Wash-post piece of myspace attrition would have me worried. So would the people in my grade who have committed ‘facebook suicide’ –and the reasons they do so.

BTW, isn’t about time people remember 1999 and the bubble. Great companies are built by passionate, super-smart hard-driving entreprenuers. The Dotcom survivors where companies founded by Brin, Page, Yang etc. These are exceptional people who built exceptional places. So when I see mediocre 30year olds like the Digg founder who got lucky, on the cover of ever newspaper…i get “petopia” syndrome..

Sam,
I’m sorry you think I’m already too old to “get it”. But I would encourage you to read some of my previous posts on social networks, especially this one (link) . I think you’ll conclude that we’re on the same page.

I’m not going to prevaricate on about social networking trends in general, but I will say that when I talk to my friends, when I talk to our friends who are already in college, and when I talk to my sister who is three years younger than me (just now in high school) I see some interesting behavior when it comes to these social networking sites… sometimes things that would make me question a long-term investment in them, sometimes things that make me want to liquidate any savings and invest it into hypothetical facebook-dollars.

MySpace, as many have been chattering about recently, has some shifting demographics when it comes to young people. Facebook doesn’t have the adult users that MySpace does, and it can’t merge demographics myspace-style without damaging and perverting much of its appeal to some people. It has already done that in many sectors. This year particularly I’ve seen a big shift at times in people using FB more for stalking and less for social networking.

I really feel Facebook doesn’t consider its user experience enough. I think they’re on an ego-trip and they need to get back in touch, or they’re going to be in serious trouble.

I feel a lot more confidence in SixApart than I do in Facebook. Facebook traffics personal information, first and foremost–that’s where its value lies. SixApart can do that and more. A few wrong turns in public opinion–a few more missteps, some tighter competition–and facebook could very quickly become dead weight on any such new animal. Then again the cash from the IPO could be used to resuscitate its corpse, or something, but still.

My end-all point is that social networking anythings are about PEOPLE and USERS and all these business writers are FORGETTING that fact. So are some of the companies. It’s dangerous. Don’t tempt teenagers’ fickle natures.