metarand

Jason Calacanis: Twitter’s Man In Tehran

Andrew Keen has penned a wonderful post about the follow versus followed aspects of social media, how this proves out the 80/20 or Pareto Rule and the Law of the Vital Few.

Well worth the read.

[via Dennis Howlett, picture courtesy of Lucie Debelkova]

Is Facebook Desperately Seeking Monetization?

Do we need a new business model for monetizing on the Internet?

Barry Diller, while being interviewed by the WSJ on the break up of IAC, pointed out that social-networking advertising is currently a big headache and methods are yet to be found to make it effective -

“will that get figured out? I absolutely believe it will. What form will it take? Absolutely unknown.“

It seems Facebook is still grappling with the right algorithm as well. The company’s COO and ex-Googler, Sheryl Sandberg stated at the American Magazine Conference in San Francisco yesterday -

“The monetization question on the web is a very big and open one.”

The holy grail, according to her, is “demand generation” and she’s calling for a new model and metrics.

John Furrier believes Sheryl needs to focus more on being a product leader and landing key business development deals – both things that MySpace has excelled at – rather than worrying now about monetizing.

I’m not quite with John yet. I believe that Facebook, and others in the industry, should be starting to think very seriously about what business model they follow.

We are definitely entering a phase when advertising growth slows. I’ve had this view corroborated by a number of very smart people on Sand Hill Road, including folks like Jeremy Liew at Lightspeed Venture Partners, and companies who totally rely on advertising for revenue are going to do it tougher for a while.

Flickr Panda’s To The Feed Generation

Mashable alerted us to Flickr’s new front page feature: a giant panda spewing a feed of popularly rated pictures.

There seems to be general uncertainty as to why the panda is vomiting pictures, but one thing’s for certain – this new “explore” feature is getting attention.

Social Network Leaders Crossover Into Mobile

The two leaders in the online social networking space, MySpace and Facebook, are emerging as the clear leaders in the mobile social space as well.

According to research carried out in Q2’08 by ABI Research, as high as 46% of the people who visited online social networks also visited mobile socnets. Of this nearly 70% visited MySpace and 67% Facebook. No other online social networks came near these figures.

What this shows is that firstly, there is a big gap between the market leaders in this space and anyone else, and secondly the hurdle for consumers to jump to specialist mobile socnets versus crossing over their online networks onto the mobile platform is very high.

I wonder how the adoption curve is trending for mobile socnets at the moment? Silicon Valley VCs have made bets on players like Bluepulse and Mig33, both of whom I’ve covered extensively. Combined with the excellent web browsing capabilities on handsets like the iPhone, is there a place for mobile only social networks?

Market-Induced Hiatus, Time To Get My Blog On

I’ve been wanting to get back to blogging, but the past few weeks have been crazy for me and every time I want to dive in, there is sooo much that’s happened it gets overwhelming.

Expect to see more from me soon, but in the meantime this screenshot by Paul Kedrosky poignantly sums things up at the moment: