The new Robert Scoble Services agenda

November 2, 2005 By

Oh, Dave, I couldn’t say “clone the Google API” in public! But you did. So I’ll riff on it. I agree with it. I’ll even repeat it. Clone the Google API. Clone the Google API. Clone the Google API. Without the limits. Without the limits. Without the limits.

Here’s my riff:

See, there are two diseases at Microsoft:

1) We look at the world only through a businessperson’s eyes.
2) We have no clue about the power of influentials.

The first one makes us look like greedy, rapacious, businesspeople. And, generally, we are. ;-) Let’s just get that on the table here, OK? We would like to see our stock price go up. We would love to make a boat load of money. And be able to do even more to change the world. I don’t know why we try to run away from that, but the more we try to run away from the fact that we’re trying to make a profit here the less credible we’ll be.

The thing is, if we want to be in the advertising world, we need to be in the audience thrilling business. That’s not going to be easy for us. Why? Cause thrilling an audience is a different skill than identifying, strategizing, and executing a business plan (er, making a boatload of money). That’s why when you’re at a baseball game they try to hide the business guys off in some box somewhere. Or, why, during a rock concert they don’t let executives who wear ties out on stage. Unless it’s to write a check to some charity.

So, if we want to gather an audience together, we must think differently. We must do things that thrill audiences. We CAN NOT chase Google’s tailpipes. Audiences NEVER go for copies. Ever see all those copies of Star Wars? I saw a few. They all sucked. Not because they did anything wrong, but they were copies and we all knew it.

We need to go in new directions that Google isn’t going in.

And, in fact, that’s what Google is doing to us. Larry Page told me last week that teams inside Google often try to create projects to copy Microsoft. And he kills them. Why? Cause he knows that he will never get a big audience by copying something we do.

We also need to get out of the greedy mode. We need to share. Why will someone put Virtual Earth on their Web site? Well, let’s look at why Chris Pirillo puts a Google AdSense component on his site. THEY PAY HIM.

That tells Chris that, while Google might be a greedy group of businesspeople too who are trying to make a boatload of money, they SHARE WITH HIM some of that money!!!

We’ve gotta get that. That’s the whole key to having a successfull Internet advertising business.

This leads me to the second point.

2) We don’t know how to thrill influentials. Google does. Maybe by accident. Maybe by plan. I don’t care anymore. They found a way to bring us a little better search with advertising that sucked a lot less. That’s really why they are on fire.

How did they do it? They didn’t do it by doing committee meetings. By doing focus groups. By studying millions of users. They did it by understanding the leading edge of users and serving them well. They did NOT serve my dad well in the early days. It took me two years to switch my dad from AltaVista to Google. They DID serve ME well, though. On every user study I’ve seen I’m way off the end of the bell curve. But Google groks people like me. They serve people like me. And they romance people like me in a way that no other company does.

Hint: Google is still not doing things for my dad. They are doing things like Google Talk. For me. Things like Google video. For me. Not for the mass markets, but for the influentials.

So, when you see Microsoft not supporting Firefox out of the gate, you are seeing that we don’t get the role of influentials in gathering audiences.

Now, we’re not out of this game yet. It might be the end of the third quarter. Or the beginning of the fourth. We might be down 48-3. But, if we play a different game than Google we have a shot.

It’ll take doing things that Google can’t do. 1) Being transparent. 2) Supporting an open attention system. 3) Changing the search game by opening up its APIs. 4) Investing in gadgets and services that don’t have any monetization strategy other than to thrill audiences (er, influentials first).

If we do those four things then you’ll know we’ve really gotten this services thing. If not, well, I don’t want to even consider the possibility that we won’t. Those are my four agenda items for the next year.

And, yes, this little technical evangelist seven levels down from the CEO who makes less than $100,000, will bet his career on these four things. They are that important.

Oh, anyone see that Robert Scoble Services spells RSS? Heh!

Filed Under: Blog Tips, Google Calendar, learning, Microsoft Office, streaming, Web

Media Battle conference tomorrow in London

November 1, 2005 By

Heh, this free conference’s title caught my eye: The Media Battle: Why is it Google vs Rest of the World, 2nd November, 2005. In Central London.

Sounds interesting.

Filed Under: Geeks, Google Calendar

Does Rick have a Web 2.0 bug in my office?

October 31, 2005 By

I’ve been talking to coworkers about what I learned in Silicon Valley last week and I swear that venture capitalist Rick Segal is listening in. Particularly his second observation. That’s going to be the hardest for Microsoft to compete with because of how we setup our business units internally (and because we hire lots of entrepreneurial people from other companies that think deeply about how to build businesses). We don’t grok Google’s ability to ship stuff that won’t make them any money (or why they’d do that). Like Orkut, or even Google’s Maps (they don’t yet have any advertising on them). Microsoft is up against a brilliant Google strategy — one that’s aimed at disrupting all sorts of things that came before and one that’s aimed at our weaknesses (and at others too, all at the same time). Internally here at Microsoft each team has its own business interests to look after and considers itself accountable to shareholders to show same. We’re very decentralized. Google looks at its business holistically, not part by part like Microsoft does - it is very centralized compared to how Microsoft is run. Google tells its engineers to go and come up with cool services without thinking about monetization strategies — they say they’ll figure that out later. That’s disruptive.

Filed Under: entrepreneurs, Google Calendar, Microsoft Office, Web

How are people finding blogs? It’s not blog search engines

October 31, 2005 By

Inside Microsoft we have interesting discussions about our blogs. Today Michael Rys sent around his stats. 72.86% of his traffic (about 2500 visits today) came from search engines. 25.84% came from Web sites, including other blogs, .89% came from email. .41% came from news groups. Of the traffic that came from search engines, 94.56% came from Google. 2.49% came from Yahoo. 1.83% came from MSN Search. Does Google have a monopoly in search? I’ll let you answer that question, cause I’m not a lawyer.

Oh, and he also has a blog on http://blogs.msdn.com but that one gets far less of its traffic from search engines, which tells him that not all blog URLs are being rated the same.

Also, blog search engines like Technorati aren’t bringing him any noticeable traffic. That matches what I’m seeing in my referer logs too. I wonder if Google’s blog search is going to change that much. I doubt it. Time-based search isn’t as easy to use as link-based-relevancy-search like what Google’s main engine gives us.

Filed Under: Blog Tips, Google Calendar, music, Second Life

Silicon Valley got my attention: the future of Web businesses

October 29, 2005 By

It all crystalized earlier this week when Ethan Stock, CEO of Zvents showed me his new Web-based business. See, I’m pretty slow. It took me four years to get blogging after Dave Winer first started his. It took me two more years to really get RSS’s relationship power. I still haven’t gotten OPML totally (although, I’m working on a directory of my blogs that’ll be pretty cool, so I’m fairly far along getting that).

On Monday night Steve Gillmor explained what he meant by attention (he started AttentionTrust.org). See, I thought what he meant was that attention was all about gathering the clicking behavior of people like you in a central database. Imagine when you go to Bloglines. Thousands of people visit that every day. They all click on links. Bloglines tracks those clicks. I thought that was attention data that Gillmor was talking about.

I was wrong.

And it took me seeing Zvents (and hanging out later with the smart folks from the content and advertising industries) for me to get it.

So, let’s dive in. Zvents is an event page. You tell it that you want to see a football game this weekend. It gives you a result back. So far, pretty basic stuff. But, click on an event. See the Google Map? Forget that it’s Google for now. Let’s call that a Web Buzz Building Gadget.

Now, see the Google Ads over to the right? Let’s call that a Web Monetization Gadget.

So, here’s the new Silicon Valley business plan. You build a service. Add a Buzz Gadget (Google/MSN/Yahoo are working on more to come). Add a Monetization Gadget (Google calls that their Web Advertising Platform — MSN and Yahoo are working on their own). Mix and mash and we have a business. Guess what? This business will be very profitable. Why? You develop it cheaply and if you did your job right, a boatload of people come and visit your service, like it, keep coming back, and hopefully they click on the ads (the more they click on the ads, the more money you make).

Now, that sounds cool, right? But here’s where attention could come in.

What is Zvents capturing? Well, they know you like football. They know you probably are in San Francisco this weekend. And, if you click on one or two of the events, they know you’re interested in them. Now, what if you see an ad for a pair of Nikon binoculars. If you click on that, then Zvents would be able to capture that as well.

Now, what other kinds of things might football fans, who are interested in binoculars, who are in San Francisco, want to do this weekend? Hmmm, Amazon sure knows how to figure that kind of problem out, right? (Ever buy a Harry Potter book on Amazon? They suggest other books for you to buy based on past customer behavior!!!)

It goes further. Let’s say this is 2007. Let’s say that Google (or Yahoo or MSN) has a calendar “branding” gadget out. Let’s say they have a video “monetization” gadget out. Zvents could build the calendar “branding” gadget into their page. What would they get out of that? Lots of great PR, and a Google (or MSN or Yahoo) logo in everyone’s face. But, they would also know where you’d be this weekend. Why? Cause you would have added the 49ers football game to your calendar. So, they would know where you are gonna be on Sunday. And, that you just bought binoculars. Over time Google/MSN/Yahoo would be able to learn even more about you and bring you even more ads. How?

Well, let’s say you’re Starbucks. Let’s say you make a deal with Google to put Starbucks ads on Google Maps. Let’s say the ads say “$.50 off of your next latte if you give this code: XZP1.” So, you go into Starbucks and give them the code. They punch that into the register. It reports back to Starbucks headquarters that you bought a latte because of the Google ad. Then, they report back to Google that you bought something (Starbucks will get a discount on their ads for this kind of reporting).

Now, Google knows you like coffee too. Oh, what Google knows!

It’s all attention. So, now, what if Zvents and Google shared their attention with everyone through an API. Now, let’s say I start a new Web business. Let’s call it “Scoble’s tickets and travel.” You come to my site to book a trip to London, let’s say. Well, now, what do I know about you? I know you were in San Francisco, that you like coffee, that you just bought some binoculars, that you like football. So, now I can suggest hotels near Starbucks and I can suggest places where you’ll be able to use your binoculars (like, say, that big wheel that’s in the middle of London). Even the football angle might come in handy. Imagine I made a deal with the local soccer team. Wouldn’t it be useful to put on my page “49ers fans get $10 off European football tickets.”

But, it gets even better. Now that the system is capturing my attention, and sharing it, my Web Gadgets (both branding and advertising) get better over time. They start to thrill me at some point. And, when I go to a search engine, it can see ALL my attention data and start suggesting things it thinks I’d like (sorta like Amazon suggests things to me).

Now, imagine my blog hooked into this attention system. Wouldn’t I get better ads along the right? Damn straight you would. And, let’s say I had a weather gadget on the right. Wouldn’t that show you YOUR city? Yes.

Wouldn’t it be able to see changes in your behavior over time and bring you even cooler stuff? Let’s say this system watched you for three years and then you started searching on pregnancy. Or “best price on diapers.” Or buying books on Amazon with titles like “Parenting.” And, Flickr could report to the system that you wrote “our new baby.” Oh, and it could watch everything you type on your blog.

Couldn’t the system know that you are likely a new parent? Couldn’t it bring up new kinds of advertising targeted at a new parent?

When I ran a camera store we sold diapers in our store. Why? So that we could get new parents into the store. Turns out that new parents buy a TON of camera gear.

My mind is racing from what you could do with this kind of data. I’m sitting with Buzz Bruggeman, CEO of ActiveWords. I bet that even ActiveWords could make use of such attention data.

Now I’m starting to get scared by this kind of world.

Filed Under: entrepreneurs, Google Calendar, Web

Sitting here with Buzz talking about Google’s Zeitgeist conference

October 28, 2005 By

I’m sitting here with Buzz Bruggeman, CEO of ActiveWords. He picked me up from the airport tonight. I have spent the last few hours telling him all about the Google Zeitgeist conference.

They asked me not to blog about it, mostly because some of the executives that spoke there from Google competitors asked to have it be off the record and not for blogging. The speakers were pretty open and I could see why they might not want to be quoted.

I just wanted to send a public message to Larry, Sergey, Eric and the rest of the Google team: thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

I have to say that everyone at Google treated me extremely well. They didn’t tell me any secrets (although I picked up a few hints) but they were, to a person, nice, smart, and fun to be around. I felt like I was at Microsoft. In fact, if it weren’t for the color logo on the building, I wouldn’t know that I had left Redmond. My head hurt. Being around 450 smart people for two days does that to you.

When I presented to them this morning I stepped off the stage and into the audience. Why? You should have seen who was in the audience. Folks who run the world’s greatest media properties in the world. The librarian of congress was sitting in the first row. Many of the world’s top CEOs and VPs (a VP from GE followed my talk). I was struck by how much better the conversations I was having around the event were than the presentations (and there were some awesome presentations - the kind you’d see keynoting at the SXSW or PopTech! or “D” conferences). If I had a suggestion for the Google’ers it’d be to make the format more conversational. This thing needed an unconference format in the worst way. The expertise that was sitting in the audience was awe inspiring.

I’m very honored that Eric Schmidt (and Gary Boles, who was the planner) invited me to speak to this audience. We might be hard core competitors, but I certainly admire Google a lot and have ever since that day in 1998 when I did my first search on Google (it was for the word “NetMeeting” and the result set that came back was so much better than all the other engines out there that I switched immediately).

Having Vint Cerf come up to me after my speech and say “great speech” is one of the highlights of my life. I will never forget that. I hope I get to return the favor someday.

It’s actually a good thing they asked me not to blog because if they didn’t limit me from talking here I would have added onto the Google hype pile. Some of the relationships I made, though, will definitely show up on my blog in the future.

Filed Under: Blog Tips, Geeks, Google Calendar
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