Twitter officially launched @Anywhere at the Chirp conference.  The program is basically a contextual integration of Twitter within publisher sites.  Chloe Sladden, Dir of Media Partnerships at Twitter, described it as a way to shift a page view into a relationship.  Users can immediately follow people or learn more about the person seamlessly from a destination site (when that person is mentioned).

Dick Costolo, the COO, gave some background on why this makes sense for Twitter.

He mentioned Twitter.com has 180mm unique visitors.  Yet a lot more people say “yes I’m a Twitter user” than are registered users. So people seeing are consuming tweets and getting value from them across the web on places like HuffPo etc.  Using this syndication of Tweets to capture more registered users is the driving objective for Twitter.

For users, @Anywhere is about removing any friction in the process of consumption and following.  With a few lines of JavaScript, publishers can bring Twitter into their own experiences.  The program has few components including:

1. Sign-in and Sign-up: connecting to Twitter from the publisher site (like OAuth)

2. Hover Cards: Twitter profile for people contextually related to pages; ability to follow

3. Tweet Box: to Tweet from the destination site

Yahoo, The NYTimes and MSNBC all presented various implementations of the program. 

@Anywhere could be more useful to publishers if the Hover Cards could be customized and curated to promote the overall presence of our sites on Twitter.  For example, if an editor from Yahoo News has a hover card, that would be a good place to also list our other Twitter accounts like @YahooNews or our topical accounts like Haiti Earthquake.  It would also be great to surface a particularly useful or popular tweet of the day from one of these accounts.  There are several extensions like this which would grow engagement.  From a publisher standpoint, @Anywhere will connect channels for distribution of your content.   That’s good.

That said, there are so many entities in a typical content page (people, places, businesses and brands mentioned in articles), so a publisher will not want to overdue it.  Having too many contextual integrations within a page could be a distraction and impact engagement metrics.  Overall, this is a great step forward to bring real-time streams into core content experiences.  We’ll see a blending of the two and @Anywhere may be at the center of all of that.  Aside from being a really cool name, this initiative is one step that furthers Twitter’s chances of mainstream adoption.

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• We Just Tested Twitter's @anywhere
• Twitter's @Anywhere platform is now live
• If you want to follow @Anywhere
• Twitter Makes Itself More Useful

Filed under: Events, Web Apps, Yahoo!, Twitter | 1 Comment »

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You walk into a store or business and are presented a compelling offer.  The restaurant wants you to order appetizers and will sell those at half price if you buy one today.   You get a good deal and the restaurant gets you exposed to more of its menu.  Loss-leaders are not a new concept in retail but location-based services are extending and enriching this tactic considerably.  

Apps like Foursquare and Gowalla run over iPhone and leverage location, making it easy to present these offers to you instead of someone having to approach you, which can be kind of awkward.  But there’s a lot more to it.  Making the loss leader (aka, the offer) a digital activity is now advantageous because they can be linked to social networks.  Your digital activity has more legs to it because the word can easily be spread to people you know, and this deserves a premium.  The gaming dynamic is a separate lever in the mix too.  Even if you had no word of mouth capability, merchants are finding it valuable to provide incentive around the frequency of your engagement with them.  You need only show-up a lot (aka check-in) to earn benefits like prizes and discounts.  That’s different than actually buying stuff, but pretty similar conceptually to the idea of Loyalty Card (get this card stamped 10 times and your next sandwich is free).  

Finally, there’s the actual intent you have when visiting a store or taking advantage of a certain discounted item.  CPG companies know this landscape well – they’ve been pumping custom coupons at the grocery store cash registers using analytical firms like Catalina Marketing for years.  You like organic milk and all-natural cake mix, so no coupons for Doritos and Oreos will appear on your receipt.  Then there’s brand new territory like throwing an event for you and people like you – affinity groups.  Maybe this is a spin on the retail concept of catering, except more ad-hoc and less structured.   

Foursquare CEO, Dennis Crowley, hinted at examples of this at the Where 2.0 event last week (restaurants pushing offers to Foursquare users to gather at specific times or user self-organizing).  This could be extended considerably down the line – all the people who have certain status, ranking or badges get to experience something special and unique at a certain time at the venue.  Influencers will gather to be specially treated and then happily spread the word (mashing-up the event and loss-leader).

Yes, social media is throwing a tizzy into stale concepts with Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt leading the way.  The potential to re-architect existing retail consumer engagement is already happening and the new possibilities are just as inviting.  Get ready to be consumerized in new and interesting ways. 

Tell me what you want to hear about next.  Tweet @atifatif and vote for one (or more of the following):

1. Will offers and incentives vary depending on the strength or size of your social network?

2. What’s the best way to determine mayorship?

3. Will we be gamed to consumer oblivion?

4. Is there value in the Foursquare / Gowalla VISA card?

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• Pixels And Salsa: Adobe And Chipotle Play Gowalla's Game
• What Did The Location War Look Like At SXSW?

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Yahoo held a subtle yet classy birthday celebration for employees this afternoon at HQ in Sunnyvale.  We got to hear Carol, Jerry and David share their thoughts in a really fun and spirited way.  Oh, and there, was plenty of cake too.

Over the years, Y has contributed a lot to the web including innovations in product, culture and the workplace.

Way back when the company started, the largest web sites and networks (AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve) had like 4mm members and that was big.  Yahoo’s audience has grown to over 500mm since then.

Just recently, a BBC survey revealed that 4 out of 5 people in across the globe consider the web to a fundamental human right.  Things have come a long way.

Here are some my favorite things that I think Y has had a big hand in making pioneering around the workplace and Internet culture:

-  A Hint of Crazy: puts our unique touch and flavor around our market-facing activities whether those be launches, PR campaigns or the look-and-feel of the products.  Web products need to bring a touch of fun to whatever they do.

-  Individualism: web companies aren’t very command and control; individuals can have a voice and it’s important to be open in the culture and sharing of ideas.

-  Energy:  walking around the campus of a web company has often been compared to the lively environment of the college campus. When things are going really well, this energy can lead to exhuberence.

It’s no secret that web companies are pretty crazy places for some of these reasons.  Many people wonder how rules and organization can be put around such fast-paced, ever-churning, murky visibility environments.  Let’s just say it’s much easier to define how conventions will be broken (i.e., innovation) and chaos will be generated for others than to put rules around how you’ll react to it.   All web companies need to ask themselves - how much chaos are we delivering (good chaos) vs. responding too (bad chaos).

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• Internet Access is a Fundamental Right

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Kelsey Group puts on the Interactive Local Media conference every December.  While I’ve spoken at these events for Yahoo! in prior years, this time around I was happy to sit back and attend a few sessions.

It’s clear that local, mobile and social are coming together in very interesting ways.

Some takeaways from some of the panels and side conversations at the event:

• Facebook has over 900K fan pages for local merchants according to Backyard, a Facebook app provider that is set to launch.  While there are over 15mm local merchants domestically, many of these Fan Pages are concentrated in categories like restaurants and nightlife - so that coverage is actually pretty decent.  These pages are potentially disruptive to traditional “directory style” merchant profile pages.

• Kelsey Group estimates 9% of local businesses have a Twitter account.  It will be interesting to see what differences emerge for businesses as they build followers on Twitter and fans on Facebook.  One potential differentiation - Twitter for truly real-time updates (something happening now - like open late today, perishable inventory, big crowd watching the game here now). Meanwhile, Facebook might be more on the community building side of things - what do my friends think and recommend, who’s planning to go there when, etc.   Building a direct marketing channel to customers is different than playing in a community-based sandbox that happens to be about your business.  Facebook already allows admins for Pages to cross-post to Twitter.

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  Related Links
  
  • Yahoo and Facebook Connect
  • ILM '09 Overview
  • SMB's Embracing Twitter

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I spoke about Maps and Local Search at SMX in early October.  SMX is the largest and highest profile event covering search marketing.  During the talk, I had a chance to discuss how Y! is driving more integrated consumer experiences between web search, local and maps.  In the past these  products acted like separate products.  In recent months, we have made some improvements towards converged experiences. 

A key example of this is the ability to see a map when you do a local search on Y! and then interact with business listings on that map.  For example, the user can select a business through the map markers and navigate through all the profile information, photos and reviews on the Map interface.  This happens without firing off a separate page or re-loading it.  On top of this, we add some powerful filtering options such as radial search, which allows a user to drag or alter the size of the search radius on a Map to sort results. 

There we some additional announcements in and around SMX like Google’s launch of fixed priced sponsored listings for Local queries.  Overall, this is a good development fo the market.  It reflects the simplicity that local and small businesses require in online marketing, as dynamic pricing and bidding are currently barriers for many local merchants.

Google spoke of its Local Business Center, which allow businesses to list their profiles on Google Maps at no cost — a service we’ve had for many years at Y!  Google also demonstrated Google Places, a way for users to add locations and POI’s.  Microsoft, which is making significant technical investment in the Maps area showed some bling bling - including high-res satellite imagery and 3D modeling on top of Maps.   Overall, the companies showed different but useful developments in location-based marketing and services.  We had everything from a consumer experience focus (Yahoo!) to real technology innovation (Microsoft) and user-generated content programs (Google).

There is indeed alot of ground still to cover in this sector of the web.  Some of our ideas at Y! at presented below.

Maps and Local Prezo at SMX

View more presentations from atifrafiq.

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• Google Local Business Center dashboard opens its doors
• Place Pages for Google Maps

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TC50 has been going on these last few days.  I attended on the final day of presentation which covered new apps in the Social Stream, News & Discovery and Commerce Marketplaces areas.

I love this event for the unbridled, youthful energy of the entrepreneurs and their followers.  For that rare and exciting idea, the momentum generating potential of success at the conference is huge.  Everyone here is networked and more important, willing to shout it out.  If something is compelling, it can catch fire quickly.

The hit rate on quality ideas appeared fairly low.  Are we nearing a trough for high impact web 2.0 ideas?  I think it’s a period for creating tactical businesses.  Those which fill a targeted need and do it well.  Ideas that leverage, or live within, the existing tidal waves — Twitter, Facebook and iPhone/mobile.  No game changers or companies who become verbs.   There are endless and growing number of opportunities in that domain.  I like concepts that package convenience around existing and emerging user behavior.  For example, there was a company that had a mobile app for ordering from concession stands in stadiums and venues.  The conference winner, Red Beacon, a referral and matching service for local services (plumber, personal trainer, contractor) intends to do exactly this albeit in a crowded space.  A related company that is launching which I think will do very well because of its market focus in Save Energy 123.  This site advises homeowners on energy-saving projects and matches them with local products and service providers.

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• TC50 Winners
• Participating Companies

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Yesterday I appeared on Jason Calacanis’s web TV show, This Week in Start-ups.  You may already know Jason from his current gig as Founder of Mahalo and his successful start-up Weblogs, which AOL purchased. 

TWiT is a recent project by Jason and yesterday was Episode 8.  Last week his guest was a Microsoft exec discussing Bing.   

Our interview was focused on both my efforts at Yahoo as well my previous background in start-ups.  There were a few natural questions about the Local space like how we compare to Yelp and more broadly how Yahoo viewed Bing (short answer: it innovates and that’s good for industry).   We also touched on my experience as Founder and CEO of Covigna, an content mgmt start-up earlier in the decade (whew, time flies).   I enjoyed the few budding entrepreneurs who called in to ask questions.   People often ask me about working in a big company setting (I’ve spent time at AOL and Yahoo!) in comparison to start-ups.  Like I said on the show, entrepreneurship is a journey that might include various stops along the way.  It’s not a career path as much as it is a calling.  Besides that, you can find opportunity to innovate in big settings too. 

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It was great to attend the Kelsey Marketplaces Conference in L.A. earlier in March, where I presented for Yahoo! on a panel about Local Verticals.  Kelsey is the definitive conference for all things Local.  It’s a tremendous place to soak in sector knowledge and get networking done.

In the words of the conference organizers:  “Much of the opportunity in local marketplaces lies with the verticals that extend and energize traditional media.”  They’re referring to categories such as entertainment, news, auto, real estate, etc. where local content is important.

My take has long been that we need to put the “L” into the local market opportunity.  Think “L” versus the lower-case “l” that defines this category today.  User needs in the local market extend beyond the traditional scope of business listing and point-of-interest information (e.g., looking-up restaurant information and reviews).

Y! Local (the business I manage) is intended for this core use case and it’s a sizable in and of itself (one of Y!’s largest properties, BTW).  But it’s only part of the wider local opportunity.  We need to think about the horizontal opportunity and the cross-programming model behind it.  No portal has a done a good job of that yet.

In terms of serving vertical needs within the current scope of Y! Local, we make some attempt of that today.  But we don’t think the answer is to add more web sites to our product portfolio to enable this.  My primary message is that users don’t need more destination sites to visit.  The more convenient alternative is to add vertical content to existing services based on user intent.  Alot of what we do in Y! Local is focused on local search so to the extent we can understand what the user is searching for, we can add vertical content on a category by category basis.

Examples can include:

• Adding menu information when we know it’s a restaurant query
• Adding service records and reports when we know the search is for a plumber or contractor
• Adding reservation or booking information when we know it’s a search for a doctor / dentist, etc.

This takes a good understanding of explicit and implicit user intent, something Y! has unique capabilities to address given our search capabilities.

The presentation I gave is below.

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• Conference Overview
• Conference Blog
• Some press coverage

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If you’re an investor in Apple or just one of the many admirers of this iconic business, you may be closely following news about the health of Steve Jobs.  The cliché that people are a company’s greatest asset was literally demonstrated as this news surfaced — AAPL lost 5.7% of its value after his medical leave was announced.  Is this the beginning of the end for the company or just a period of transition during a time of continued leadership?  An opinion on the matter is vital to investors - should you be buying on unnecessary weakness or be gradually reducing your exposure?   To develop an informed opinion you’re going to have to do some diligence.

I’m going to offer an approach toward diligence that uses web connections to define key topics for your assessment.  Web connections are links between a story you’re following and the endless number of topics that exist in the world.  It may sound quite broad and unwieldy but there is a manageable structure we can put around the information possibilities.

Web connections allow us to explore these topics by the degree of their relatedness.  Think of it as swinging from vine to vine in a jungle of information.  You can build upon a topic of interest by knowing what else is connected to it rather than limit exploration by direct coverage of what you’re reading.”

What’s useful about these connections is they transcend the obvious information you will find collected in most articles or coverage about a story you’re following.   As I’ll explain later on, that’s not a knock on reporters but instead a natural limitation of what’s possible for any writer to cover in a single story.  Put another way, web connections extend our journey into and behind the story.

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They sent Yankee Stadium off with a great tribute to the team, it’s players and legacy. The greatest sports franchise of the 20th century - the Yankees - saying goodbye to the Cathedral they’ve called home for over 85 years. Why can’t a corporation evoke loyalty and following like a sports team? There are many great companies with a history of performance and amazing achievement. People drive this success. No doubt it’s hard to compare the glamour of sports achievements (e.g., clutch homeruns) with making big things happen in business. Knowledge work is not very visible and rarely public. But let’s not under-estimate the strong appeal and mystique of accomplishments in industry related to inventions, patents, product ideas, customer insights, sales, deals, etc.

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• Farewell to the Cathedral
• Massive Legacy and an Emotional Ending
• It's Gone! Goodbye!

Filed under: Management | 2 Comments »

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