SpectatorBytes

Since writing the last post, it has become increasingly evident to me that while “social” experiences have become synonymous with services that include networks of friends, people or interests, the impact of these services on the Web will extend well beyond that. The main contribution of social products will be establishing the foundation for the [...]

Social networks have established a new “social paradigm” on how users can consume information on the Web. Content consumption in social networks has been mainly organized around friends or people you know. The primary tools provided by “social” experiences have proven to be highly addictive and engaging: -  People  or entity-specific data feeds provide an [...]

In recent weeks, I’ve been increasingly impressed by the attractiveness of the “application reader” experiences on the iPad / iPhone. Flipboard, FLUD and Pulse are good examples. After several weeks of using them, I believe these news readers are ushering in a new era in content aggregation. These application readers are designed to allow users [...]

At Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg’s D8 conference a couple of months back, the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, stated that one of Facebook’s objectives was to “rethink the web stack around people.” This statement echoed the thoughts I shared in a recent post concerning the way social networks are poised to change all types [...]

This past Monday, Apple announced that they had sold two million iPads worldwide in less than 2 months. I am not surprised. When the device first came out, many tech reviewers were disappointed that it did not include many of the features of the iPhone, such as a camera or USB port. Others complained that [...]

There are two major forces poised to significantly simplify the way we interact with the Web over the next few years. In the process, the drastic simplification will anoint the Web as King of All Media (sorry, Howard).  The first one is mobile applications and the second one is the social graph.  A“simpler, easier-to-use” Web [...]

Digital media organizations that think in terms of “building vs. buying” will struggle to compete in the marketplace going forward, especially when the answer tends to be “build.” Over the past couple of years, it’s clear that one of the reasons why large digital businesses struggle to sustain growth is that they fail to maintain [...]

Upon learning of Facebook’s acquisition of Friendfeed, very few industry people (myself included) were surprised that Facebook needed to acquire a company to bring in talent to compete with Twitter. However, if one takes a step back, this news should have at least raised an eyebrow. Currently, Facebook is one of the hottest digital media [...]

Recent events such as the Microsoft and Yahoo search deal, Facebook’s efforts to move from a private network to one that is public, and AOL’s imminent spin-off illustrate the challenging nature of consumer digital businesses. The constantly evolving nature of Web businesses continues to challenge most business leaders and corporations. The lack of “rules of [...]

Over the past few months, I have noticed a rise in large images are increasingly dominating the user interface of content websites, particularly news sites.  The Huffington Post front page illustrates this trend. Here is a comparison of the current front page (below left) versus the version when the site was launched in 2006 (below [...]

Last week, I attended Techcrunch’s Real-Time Crunchup. The event brought together many members of the Twitter ecosystem to showcase their products and several key investors to discuss their views of the Twitter phenomenon. This event helped me crystallize my view on Twitter, which is that Twitter is facilitating the creation of a new database of [...]

Starting in early 2004 during my tenure at AOL, I with others began to advocate opening up the AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) platform. The goal was to accelerate product development by using third party developers who could work with the open platform. We had seen the valuable ecosystem of third party applications and sites Amazon [...]

A few months back, I wrote about the emergence of the real-time Web and the impact it would have on content publishing. In recent weeks, the news coverage on the Web of the fallout from the election in Iran and the death of Michael Jackson have crystallized for me the impact of the real-time Web [...]

Other than the interesting presentations by current industry newsmakers and catching up with industry friends, one of the most valuable things that I took away from Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg’s D7 conference was a Flip Mino HD camera that I received as part of my gift bag. This simple yet  sophisticated video camera has [...]

While ownership of digital content in recent years has been en vogue thanks to the likes of iTunes and Amazon, the increasing ubiquity of full or “quasi-broadband” wireless access is likely to make streaming content more dominant over time. The recent aggressive push by cable and wireless operators to provide fast Internet access to the [...]