A Decade of Chatter

The year 1997 marked the introduction of a tiny little instant messenger called AIM.  Ask anyone who came of age in America during the turn of the century: this was the beginning of an online generation.

Before the introduction of chat engines such as AIM, children would run home and pick up the phone to call their friends – online chatting changed this forever.  In my personal opinion it is the chat world that opened the doors for online interactions on mega-sites such as Myspace, Xanga, Facebook and Twitter.

From early on AIM allowed users to post brief profiles linked to their user names, places where they could describe themselves, post favorite quotes or write shout outs to friends.  These profiles were the first step toward an online culture that would take America by storm.  As soon as AIM took off, corporations such as Yahoo, MSN and Google followed suit, fully aware that online communication was the way of the future.  As soon as users could begin forming online identities, sites like Myspace, Friendster and Xanga began to take off.  As the years went by it didn’t take long for these sites to begin incorporating chats, photo albums and walls on which users could post.  These were all baby steps toward what we know as social media today.

These other companies were merely testing the waters of what was to come in the 21st Century, but no one could have imagined the storm that Facebook would begin.

Once Facebook entered the scene all other interfaces quickly plateaued, and once Facebook added a chat function – well, the world was his (Zuckerberg’s, I mean).  The funny thing is how the culture of online chatting has remained steady.  Sure, the mode of doing so has changed, but think about what you’re doing every time you update your status: posting a statement and waiting for a reply.  Status updates became such a part of our online culture that Twitter emerged as one giant status site.  Now users are communicating in posts containing less than 140 characters, waiting patiently for someone to reply, re-post, or rebuff.  Are these brief posts much different from the tentative messages sent to seventh grade crushes via AIM?

Humans are social animals by nature, and with technology increasing on a daily basis we find ourselves with more and more outlets in which to be social.  Basic communication via chat services such as AIM lit a fire beneath Americans, a fire that raised demand for more and more social media.  Today clients such as Jabber and Tweetdeck profit because they consolidate some of the numerous ways in which we communicate with one another, ways that date back to the advent of instant messaging in the late nineties.

Beginning in 1997 and harpooning into 2011 social media has evolved from the early throws of instant messages.  We now get notifications instantly sent to our phones when someone comments on our Facebook wall, and we reply just as quickly.  Every Tweet is matched with a reply or a re-post, every upload warrants a comment.  We are a messaging nation that is constantly exploring new ways to communicate, I cannot even begin to imagine what will happen in the next ten years.

Rock You acquires Playdemic

Last week, Rock You acquired Playdemic, a social gaming company based in England with 16 employees. What makes this acquisition interesting is that Playdemic has only created one game with about 500,000 active users. Gourmet Ranch is a hybrid game that combines cooking and farming, much like FarmVille. The strategy behind the acquisition appears to be to add active gamers to the stable of applications that Rock You launches.
Most Rock You apps are not games, however, which brings the overall strategy into question. Social gaming has proven to be very profitable at firms like Zynga and Playfish. Apps such as Super Wall and MyGifts for Facebook have hundreds of thousands of users, but little to no revenue. Rock You might be better served by developing its own games from scratch. While the purchase price was not disclosed, it makes little sense to step into the overbuilt farming genre at this point, unless the company was able to get a very favorable price (terms of the acquisition were not disclosed), or unless there are multiple games with huge potential that Playdemic is prepared to launch. Barring these scenarios, it doesn’t make much sense to acquire a tiny company with one minor hit.

The Goldman Sachs – Facebook deal

Goldman Sachs upped the ante for Facebook earlier this month with its investment of $450 million for 0.9% of the company, giving Facebook a notional value of $50 billion.  A Russian investment, Sky Digital, chipped in another $50 million for 0.1% of Facebook, giving the rapidly growing social networking company a total of $500 million to use for growth.  The consensus revenue estimate for Facebook for 2011 is $4.05 billion, giving it a revenue multiple of 12.3x.  (For comparison, the most valuable tech company in the world is Apple, trading at about 3x revenue.)  12.3x is mighty steep, and brings back memories of the tech bubble in 1999 and 2000, but it may be justified, given that nearly all of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertising, and the company has not even begun to tap into other, more lucrative sources.

The Home Page: Three Tips for Success

Over the last decade, Web designers and Internet consultants have preached that the most vital page on a website is the home page.  It was once thought that users will land on the home page, and from there, they will pilot their way to information.  This may have been true ten years ago, but not today.

Modern search engines have become quite savvy at locating relevant pages within a site.  Users are beginning to land on websites through a deeper, more applicable page related to their search; thus, the home page now falls short of its navigational duty.

However, the home page still remains an informational surrogate for most websites, so it should not be ignored.

Here are three home page tips you should consider when striving for maximum home page usage.

Home Page Goals
To first understand the home page, you must recognize the purpose of the page: to attract, to allure, and to entice a visitor to explore a site.  If landing on a home page, a visitor will be searching for a product or service, or information related to the site.  Remembering this, it is important to provide relevant information on the home page and in the navigation tabs.  Online marketing expert Nick Usborne compares a visitor’s relationship with the home page to a blind date.  People meet and get to know one another slowly on a blind date, just as when landing on a home page.

Visitor Questions When Viewing a Home Page
Seventy-five percent of Web users associate the design of a website with the credibility of the organization.  Sixty-eight percent of American online shoppers say they will distrust a website that does not have a professional appearance.  And because the home page can be, and often times is, the first page a user lands on, it’s extremely important to display a design with a subtle elegance.  Here are some questions to think about when thinking about the home page design:  Is this site credible?  Can I trust this site?  What does this company do?  How do I learn more?

User Procedures
The best way to think about what a visitor wants on a home page is to become the visitor.  Consider how you react when landing on a page and become aware of your conscious, and even your subconscious, mental processes.  Consider this rule of thumb: Reaction, Relevance, and Ready-to-go. A user tends to react to a home page quickly.  He or she makes subconscious judgments about the images and color scheme.  Next, a user considers whether the site is relevant.  He or she will ask, “Does this site have what I want?”  If the user is satisfied, he or she will be ready-to-go to the next page.  This means that navigation tabs should contain appropriate keywords and those tabs should direct a user to the pages he or she desires.

Top Five Tech Trends for 2011

Before you strap on your party hat, pop open your Korbel brand Champagne, and pucker-up for your stroke-of-midnight smooch, you and your friends may discuss the best and worst parts of 2010.

This conversation could include topics such as the Winter Olympics, World Cup, Republicans conquering the House of Representatives, and Gulf Oil Spill.  As with most “Year in Review” analyses, it will likely culminate into a Nostradamus-like prognosis of the year to come.

With this article, I hope to pass on my own technological wisdom in order to assist you with the technology portion of your 2011 Prophecy with my own Top Five Tech Predictions for 2011.

A Fluffier Government

The cloud, which is a fluffed-up word for Internet, looks to accumulate a public sector following in 2011. With Microsoft winning a bid to implement a cloud-based system for the Department of Agriculture, and Google and Microsoft competing to transform federal, state, and local governments into collaboration central, the cloud appears as though it will drift into Uncle Sam’s house—and he’ll have open arms.

Prediction: President Obama uses a digital signature to sign a bill into a law, which exists as a Google Doc.

Cyberwar Goes Public

2010’s Cyberwarfare implications will shoot into 2011 like a speeding bullet. Noting such 2010 attacks January’s Google China security breach and the recent WikiLeaks fiasco, hackers likely will infiltrate servers in 2011 with full force.

Also in 2011, become aware of the information that is stored in your browser’s cookie, which is a piece of text used to automatically authenticate log-ins for sites such as Facebook and Gmail.  HTML5 supported browsers already flaunt sensitive cookie information, and user-friendly hacker programs such as Firefox’s Firesheep extension make it simple to use this information to hijack your Facebook, Twitter, or Gmail account.

Prediction: Pajamas become the new standard uniform for the armed forces.

Tablet-tastic Retail Sales

The tablet takeover appears on track for 2011.  The technology research firm Gartner projects that tablet sales will hit approximately 55 million units next year, triple the number for 2010.  Gartner also states that in 2011, all-in-one tablets, such as Apple’s iPad or Dell’s Streak, will “cannibalize” their reader-focused counterparts, such as Amazon’s Kindle or Barnes and Noble’s nook. As Apple rolls out the iPad version 2 in Spring (although last week Technorati reported the Chinese manufacturer said it could be out this winter) and Google enters the tablet game, Gartner’s forecast could reign true in 2011.

Prediction: The tablet replaces the dog as man’s new best friend.

Internet TV Takes Control

In 2010, Google released Google TV, a zombifiying box that brings the experience of the Web to your home television set, setting the standard for Web-based TV.  Also, online television platforms such as Netflix and Hulu turned profits, convincing more and more people that the scheduled-TV model is dying.  With Time-Warner reporting a 150,000 subscriber loss during the months of July to September 2010, and Comcast citing a 275,000 subscriber loss during the third quarter, Internet TV looks to continue to crumble cable service in 2011.

Prediction: Mirroring the concept of the “couch potato,”  the “streamer” becomes the 2011 hip word, which is defined by those who stream TV from multiple locations.

4G Mobile Internet Makes an Impact

4G, or the fourth generation of mobile Internet, showed its face in 2010, but didn’t make much of a public impression.  Available only in major cities, 4G is accessible through a handful of mobile products such as Sprint’s HTC EVO 4G and myTouch 4G.  But because AT&T is rumored to expand the 4G network in mid-2011, and as people begin to adapt to the superior speed, 4G Internet is sure to become a 2011 mobile necessity.

Prediction: The iPhone 4G that supports 3G Internet begins to work with 4G Internet and Apple renames the phone, “The iPhone 4G squared.”