BrianBreslin.com

After my blitz trip through lima this past weekend it came to my attention that there is huge amount of underlying potential for the web in this part of the world, but its missing key components needed to grow. I spoke with a number of very intelligent and very in touch people who understand many of the changes going on in the social media and web2.0 sphere, and frankly came away with mixed emotions.

At my first South American Twitter meetup ever, over 40 people were there! Lots of people in this crowd were what we would call the early adopters here. Whereas in the US an early adopter of something like twitter is typically 6 months to a year ahead, there they are 2-3 years ahead of mainstream adoption. The main reason being that the infrastructure (SMS, Telecom, Internet) isn’t there for the majority of the population, and is still prohibitively expensive for many.

But here is what I see that made me really glad to have gone down to peru (from a developer/strategist perspective). There is a large group of people who are genuinely interested in these new emerging technologies, who have great skills in programming and development, and are really just waiting for a great project to come along. There isn’t the same entrepreneurial mindset there is here in the US, but there is a spirit of creativity. I spent hours talking to the talented team behind Prezentit about how to make the greatest twitter experience possible. How we could extend something as simple as the 140 characters of twitter and build a robust community around that social object.

Some of the things that Peru lacks from a web perspective: capital (not that much is needed, things are relatively cheap), someone with the balls to experiment on a number of things and put their $ where their mouth is, and people talking about the community as much as possible. The local paper El Comercio is doing a great job on this last part already (my visit is even mentioned here ) There are also a number of cultural issues that can be corrected, especially at the youth level (the same point where much of this development can occur).

I’ll write more in the future about south america and its role in this emerging global network of web development, software, and online culture. But for now I’d like to thank all my new twitter + facebook friends down there. Saludos a todos.

So this friday I will be meeting up with twitter users in Lima, Peru for BeerTwit. The concept of meeting up with virtual friends in real life is one that intrigues me, and I see it gaining lots and lots of steam in the near future. Its really amazed me that users are finding each other and connecting across disparate regions of the world and using the social bond that twitter provides them to connect in real life.

Apparently this trend is happening all around the world according to my friend Diego. Twitter meetups are sprouting up everywhere from Madrid, Mexico, Sevilla, Barcelona, Argentina, and tons of other places. Those are just the spanish speaking places too!

There is even a Tokyo twitter group! 2 seconds of quick searching also revealed meetups in Los Angeles, Indianapolis, Huntsville, Buffalo,  and Venice, Italy!

So if you know of a tweetup occuring, post them in the comments.

So you might be thinking, why on earth would this be a good deal for either party? How can two also-rans of the internet fit well together? How can they compete against the all mighty goog? Well this harks back to my theory on the evolution of advertising and the shift to behavioral advertising.

At the moment, Yahoo is probably the number one player in this field. AOL is distant second, but the two are definitely the leaders in this market. With a combined effort on their part, they can merge the patents and IP advantages they each posses and come out with some amazing ad solutions. AOL’s Platform A initiative is already strong, but what it really needs is the massive pageviews Yahoo! has. Yahoo’s behavioral targeting is good, but could benefit from some of the stuff AOL has + AOL’s extra pageviews, the social network they just bought (Bebo), and more.

What would Yahoo get out of buying/merging with AOL?

• Bebo - 3rd largest social network in the US and Europe
• Platform A/Advertising.com - One of the largest behavioral and display ad businesses on the net. Reach to millions of sites, which Yahoo! publisher network never was able to do (probably because they never accepted anyone!)
• Netscape - Still millions of browsers out there, tons of traffic.
• AOL Mail - LOTS of additional users to be migrated into the Y! Mail platform
• AOL dialup business - something they could quickly sell off to recoup some cash
• AOL Blog Network - these are a great fit for Y! content offerings. Esp. Y! Finance

What does AOL get from this deal?

• No more Time Warner! This has been a deal that dragged them down so far, its embarassing
• Stability - Y! has lots of cash on hand and TONS of traffic, and is less fickle than TW
• More reach - again Y! traffic
• LOTS of cost savings - data centers alone would be consolidated
• Cross promotion
• More data for their ad programs.

So to me this seems like a great fit, even if Microsoft does buy Yahoo, it would cost them another $20 Billion to get it done after an AOL merger. To me this seems like a great move, even if Y! does outsource the monetization of some of its search traffic to Google. I see them as a better fit together than Y! + MS.

What? Twitter can be a feature in my app? How can a web service like twitter be a function of my app?  If you look below the surface of twitter, it is a pure web service, and I mean service from an API perspective.  Lets keep that in mind as we explore this further.

So how can twitter the web service serve me in building my applications/sites/widgets? Well quite simply twitter gives us a truly portable social communications tool that is really, really flexible. Twitter should be seen as a support for your services to make them more portable and accessible.

So what do I mean by portable and accessible? Well first you need to cast away the notion that a website is only to be seen through one container (www.yourdomain.com for example). RSS, APIs, and a litany of other platforms should have changed your mind years ago.  Twitter gives you access to a number of things that are potentially useful for your endeavor:
Mobile Integration: A solid mobile platform (let them leverage the costs, last thing you need to do is pay $2k/month for an sms number + thousands in sms fees)
Jabber/IM Integration: Instant messaging based commands and controls (bots?)
Social Graph: A very flexible social graph and the ability to leverage relationships
Users: Roughly a million of them

The key to this is the ability to quickly and cheaply integrate mobile controls for your application, something no other platform is really offering at the moment.  Why not let your users post to and retrieve data from your site using their mobile phones? Why not let them interact with your application through instant messenger?  The possibilities are endless folks, you just have to look for them.

I’ve been following Garyvee’s posts and videos a lot lately and have decided to heed his advice and start building my personal brand.

So what does that mean?
It means I’ll be posting all my content here on BrianBreslin.com, it means I will no longer be posting on my webpl.us blog or on any other blogs I may have started. Why spread the effort when it can be concentrated here and put to better use.

I will also be posting more videos and multi media content here, so keep your eyes peeled for that stuff.  I also intend on tweaking what we think of as a personal homepage.

Let me preface this post by saying I dislike the versioning of the web, especially the “Web2.0” term, however I do feel the web has gone through evolutionary stages. Also for all intents and purposes, this historical analysis starts in 1995.  This post is inspired by a chat that Alex and I had last fall, and which was brought back up a few days ago

So where did it all start?
The first iteration of the web was all about the connecting of documents to each other. This was the basis of the hyperlink. Hyperlinks were designed to interlink files and documents by specifying their locations.  Think Yahoo directories, and Netscape 1.0.

So now we’re building things
The second iteration or evolution of the web was all about building tools for people to create these documents. One could argue that started with geocities, tripod, angelfire, and all the other personal homepage tools of the mid nineties.  This is the user generated phase of the web. This is what I think of when I think of “Web2.0.”

But how do we socialize?
The third generation/iteration/evolution was less about creating content, but more about linking the content creators together (previous generations tools were by now commoditized to the point they were functions, not the focus). So this was the social network phase if you like.  Users were now being connected directly to each other, and the finding/discovery of new content was shifted from a machine controlled aspect to a social function.

They’re my friends, not yours
The fourth stage is where we see the tools to let us create our own links between people and take these links wherever we choose.  This is the advent of portable social networks and personal social networks.  Of all the “graphs” we have interconnecting us today, email is quite possibly the easiest system of connections we have to port.  This is a big huge play on the parts of Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo, the three kings of email.

So what does this all mean?
Well in a nutshell, it means that we’ll be seeing a number of players adopt or propose their own standards for data portability. Either true data portability, email portability, ID portability, or something else will get a likely boost in the near future.  The prize it seems is in controlling the creation of these networks and tracking them all (think observing how swarms of insects or schools of fish behave).

I waited a week before writing this, why? Well I was busy, and I wanted things to settle a  bit before I kicked up the dust again. But the AOL buy of Bebo is a much bigger deal than we are all realizing or giving AOL credit for. So the $850 Million might seem like an obscene price to some (lest we forget some other large purchases of the last few years make this pale in comparison), and to others it is simply confusing. How could AOL plunk down the equivalent of $20/user on what is ultimately a 3rd place network in the US?

Why the numbers make sense.
AOL’s mostly cash deal gives them an instant boost on the social network scene where their AIM pages project died after not receiving much if any fanfare (AOL seemingly didn’t bother informing their AIM users about it).  It gives AOL a big foothold overseas, where it is still weak compared to its competitors. It also gives it a big chance to cross promote its newly acquired service via AIM, AOL.com, netscape.com and the hundreds of other content properties they own.  For AOL it might be a challenge to recoup the initial investment fast, but they have a much better ability to monetize those page views than most of the players.

Remember AOL owns advertising.com and its whole PlatformA initiative encompasses many advanced ad targeting services that were just waiting for access to billions more in page views to data mine.

What you are all missing.
So AOL now owns 40 million user profiles, now what? Well one thing that people are forgetting is that Bebo has built a fairly robust representation of the social graph on their site. This data which is a goldmine for marketers is probably the second best set of social graph data on the web behind Facebook’s.  So if you think about it, they got a data set about half the size of Facebook’s for about 1/15th the cost.

Stop looking at the battle, and focus on the war.
Folks, the issue isn’t about social networks directly, its about behavioral advertising. Understanding what people want by observing them and then serving both contextual and targeted advertising to them as they search/surf through their properties.  We as a collective whole keep forgetting this about Yahoo (don’t forget they have 400million user profiles, maybe more) being one of the kings at this, but thats another story entirely.  The behavioral battle is being waged on all fronts, but what it ultimately needs is enough  page view inventory to be truly useful to the data crunchers, and thats what a few billion page views a day will give you if you’re AOL/Bebo.

So where do we go from here?
Well I really see AOL trying to promote the heck out of Bebo, and hopefully working on improving their infrastructure substantially. But the first thing we’ll see is Bebo beating the 2008 earnings estimates they had set forth simply by having AOL up their CPM rates from $.50 to $2.  If Time Warner wasn’t such a bad fit with AOL, I would almost recommend buying AOL right now, but then again, maybe AOL + Platform A will be spun off, which would definitely change the game.

This week is a busy one for tech in Miami, so I won’t waste your time explaining how Miami is growing, etc. I’ll just let you know where all the fun is this week.

First up we have WeMedia Miami thats going on NOW. You can see the live streaming here.

Next up is FutureOfWebApps that starts tomorrow/thursday Feb 28 at 9am. Workshops are going on all day, and the conference begins friday morning. This is being held at the Carnival Center/Arsht Center in downtown Miami.

On thursday we will be hosting BarcampMiami at the Arsht Center.Please register in advance if you can. Barcamp will be ongoing from 3PM-8PM.

Thursday night nokia s60 is hosting a dinner.

Friday night there is a party at Nikki Beach for FOWA guests sponsored by Scrapblog

Saturday AOL is hosting a beach party from 4pm-1AM at Nikki Beach.

Saturday I am organizing a Geek Dinner at Taverna Opa! on South Beach at 7:30PM.

15 minutes ago Myspace pulled the wraps off of their developer platform website. Apparently they eschewed the conventions previously set forth by Bebo and Facebook and are letting everyone in. Its a free for all folks!

Basics:

• Built on a combination of opensocial and myspace “Action Scripts”
• Myspace is hosting the apps (for now)
• You can run advertising on your canvas pages
• You have to apply for developer credentials
• You also have to submit your app for approval.
• Uses a REST API

So happy hacking folks. We’ll post more later as we get to play around with it. But this could be an exciting new platform to develop on.

The last 2 days have been filled with talk about Yahoo, and why it is losing the race against google. I have what I think is the defacto reason. Period. No questions. Only answer. Ever. It all comes down to ad dollars. Let’s start with a bit of history first.

Yahoo started in this ad game in the mid 90s, before there was a critical mass on the internet as far as consumers and corporations. So Y! started by targeting the large ad buys on their properties. It only made sense to do it this way from Y! perspective, as they had the largest inventory, and didn’t have any other reasonable way of selling that inventory in a cost effective manner. So Yahoo focused on doing a couple hundred or thousand really big ad buys every year for big brand advertisers, Coke, Toyota, Nike, etc. These brand advertisers sustained the Y! bottom line quite well for years. Essentially Yahoo built itself a non-scalable sales channel, as every big name customer required a large amount of resources to support.

Conversely Google looked at the long tail approach, and realized that with such a massively varied inventory of pages to sell ads on they couldn’t do the same model of ads. They HAD to move towards a self-serve system, it was the only logical way. So with that in mind google went after the 5 Million small businesses and the long tail of advertising and hasn’t looked back since. It is much easier to sell 1 million ads at $5 a piece than 5 ads at $1 million a piece. By keeping the barrier to entry so low ($50), google has made it affordable and not risky for a small business unfamiliar with the web to try it out.

So fast forward to now, Yahoo has spent a lot of money on revamping their self-serve tools with Panama, but they have failed to expand their inventory. They could have done this by targeting publishers through their Adsense competitor ( but so far its limited in size, and very few sites support it or have been invited to join). Adsense contributed over $1.6B to Google’s bottomline in the last quarter, half that business and Yahoo could have been sitting in a different position right now.

So ultimately its up to Yahoo to step up their game. They aren’t down and out yet, they just need to realize what their assets are, and open them up. Once they improve their sales channel, and make it less dependent on brand advertisers, they can better monetize their search and their pages. Yahoo’s Achilles heel right now is its non-scalable ad sales channel. Remember, Yahoo still commands a huge % of internet traffic and is still a top-5 web destination.
I’ll be posting more on Y! in the coming days.

Disclosure: I own a limited amount of Y! stock.