My Blog beginning to come alive again?

Now that Friendfeed is not that active anymore I had decided in the beginning of the year to devote more time to this blog. Unfortunately that has not been happening. I have been really busy with MyLikes

Our current challenges include

• Determining the best pricing model for the platform. There are a number of alternatives including CPC, CPA and CPM.
• Trying to figure out the best way to scale advertisers - self-serve / google adwords, telesales, direct sales to ad agencies
• Payment integration with credit cards/bill me later
• Potential partnerships with other ad agencies/ad networks

If you are into advertising and have feedback about some of this drop me a line or comment...

The Whatever - Sponsored Post

The Whatever - www.thewhatever.com

Great blog... I read through some of the stuff yesterday and laughed out loud at the picture of the person in the plane. Reminds me of the times when I have been on a plane and want to put a hood on like that :)

sponsored like

Bindu Reddy's profile on MyLikes

Elance - Sponsored Post

Elance - www.elance.com

I worked at and helped build Elance from 2000 - 2003. Elance is a professional services marketplace where freelancers bid for projects posted by buyers of services such as web design, logo design and writing. It is an ideal place for start-ups to outsource and get programming or logo design work done. I have posted 60 projects in programming, writing and logo design done. The only downside is that the buyer has to spend a lot of time picking the right provider and managing the project

sponsored like

Bindu Reddy's profile on MyLikes

Scary DoubleClick's Like.com ad that is following me everywhere

Recently I went to Like.com to browse the site and check out some of their handbags and shoes. After that where-ever I go on the internet this ad seems to follow me. I have seen this ad on more than 10 websites including YouTube. Check out the screenshots below....

Here is what is happening

• It seems like most of the web uses one display ad-network - DoubleClick
• Like.com dropped a DoubleClick cookie on my browser when I visited Like.com
• DoubleClick's ad servers detect this cookie and serve me a Like.com ad
• Creepily the ad follows me everywhere I go...

What should Google do? - big original ideas vs. slightly better me-too products

For obvious reasons I am a big fan of Google. Like many others I have always been impressed with their bold approach to big problems. Of late, however I am becoming less and less impressed. Instead of focussing on core innovation my sense is they are becoming more focused on fighting their competition.

A few years ago Google was as innovative as any another small start-up. As an example the Google Video product came out at about the same same time as YouTube's. Even though it did not succeed, it was an original big idea. Same goes for projects like Google Books and Google News.

However lately it seems like all Google can do is to come up with a me-too product in markets that already have established leaders. Google's products still follow the Google mantra of being fast-loading but their products are not that much more innovative. Example of products like this would include Google Checkout, Google Chrome and to some extent Android. Don't get me wrong I am a fan of Google Chrome as well but it's not really a game-changer like Google Search/Maps was.

The only exception to the rule has been Google Wave. However Google Wave seems to be half-baked and released too early. Many people find it confusing and slow-loading. There is also the issue of Google having way too many products in the collaboration space - Google Docs, Google Wave, Gmail etc. This reminds me of enterprise software companies that have 15 products that pretty much do the same thing.

If I were Google I would spend more resources and time on making new original big ideas work. Instead of working on 60 products work on 6 big original ideas.

MSFT-Yahoo Deal

I was wondering last night what I would do if I were Google give the new MSFT-Yahoo deal.

The first question to probably ask is should Google worry about this in the 1st place? Short answer is Yes. Search is not a very sticky product and anyone with a better product and decent distribution can easily start taking marketshare from the leader. MSFT definitely has the money to pay for distribution and even though Bing's "search quality" is pretty bad (i.e Search results on Bing for most queries is much worse than that of Google's . Good example is the query - "How to do Good Seo" on Bing vs. Google ), Bing clearly does a decent job of the UX and latency. They are also doing a FANTASTIC job of marketing to the press and the world in general resulting in largely great coverage for the product. Now with the Yahoo search deal, there is some chance that GOOG might start seeing Bing taking some marketshare.

So what than should Google do? My answer, Google should adopt an extremely aggressive strategy against Microsoft

Innovate more on Search - All said and done. Google's search improvements are subtle and timid at best. It's amazing that Twitter launched real time search before Google did :). Google is hardly in the news for it's innovative search improvements. I would set an aggressive goal of one major improvement per month

Put more resources on Chrome, Promote it more - Chrome is gaining market share but where is the Mac version? Use the Google home page and the search results page to promote Chrome. Every Google page should have a promo for Chrome. Chrome is a good browser so Google should be able use it's massive distribution to market the hell out of this product.

Start taking the fight to Microsoft - The Chrome OS is still vaporware but Google Apps is a real tangible product. Google should spend a lot more time/money/resources getting large companies to adopt Google apps. Get 10% of the Fortune 500 to switch and MSFT is going to really start worrying. Google can actually offer to pay for the cost of switching and deploy IT resources to actually do some of the hard work that IT departments might have to do to switch. Also spend more engineering resources in developing the features these companies want. End of the day MSFT gets a lot of money from these large organizations. If you can cut of some key revenue streams MSFT is going to start to worry.

Develop on OS and open source it ASAP - These things take a long time to happen. This means Chrome OS should be high priority

Advertise - While Google is still very cool to the geeks. The masses don't find it all that cool anymore. It's Facebook, YouTube and Twitter that are the cool kids on the block. Big companies can be cool as well... Apple and Nintendo are good examples. Having an equivalent of a "I am a Mac" campaign won't hurt Google.

Anyways nothing like some good competition to spur some innovation. Let the games begin :))

My friendfeed wish list - 5 features/product improvements that would make me happy :)

I have been addicted to Friendfeed lately and find it far more entertaining than TV :) These five features/product improvements would make me friendfeed a LOT more. FriendFeeders, I hope you are listening :)

• Ability to address specific people in my posts/comments. Ability to say @paul or @spidra would be great. Especially if I want to draw that user's attention to my post. The @ posts could all show up in a separate tab or something. So I could click through to see all the @bindureddy posts and respond to them
  
• Ability to read a blog post directly on FriendFeed.  Clicking to the blog and reading takes time and energy.  It would be much nicer if I could just click a zippy to read the blog post. This would be very much like Reader/iGoogle. 
  
• An easy way to scans 100s of posts/read state.  Right now, the constant next page clicking is giving me RSI.  I have also divided my FF into lists which actually doesn't work all that well for me. I hardly ever scan anything but my home feed. Read my ff post on this here
• Power-user feature: If you comment and like stuff a lot, you end up spamming all your friends on FriendFeed. It would be really nice if I could turn that stuff off. I want my friends to only see my posts not my likes and comments. 
• This one has more to do with feel of the site than with any particular product improvement. Right now FriendFeed seems pretty much more for geeks/power-users than for normal people.  Sometime ago, I got my cousin to try it and she wasn't sure what to do other than than to like a couple of people she knew.  She has no feeds that she can import so she imported nothing. She left to go back and hang out at Facebook where she is on pretty much all the time. Part of the issue is the "liking technology" which makes FF seem like one large loosely-coupled community vs. small groups of people hanging out with each other.