THINK / Musings » Fotolog

Distribution … now

John — Wed, 13 May 2009 21:57:13 +0000

In February 1948, Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to address hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens packed into Old Town Square. It was a crucial moment in Czech history – a fateful moment of the kind that occurs once or twice in a millennium.

Gottwald was flanked by his comrades, with Clementis standing next to him. There were snow flurries, it was cold, and Gottwald was bareheaded. The solicitous Clementis took off his own fur cap and set it on Gottwald’s head.

The Party propaganda section put out hundreds of thousands of copies of a photograph of that balcony with Gottwald, a fur cap on his head and comrades at his side, speaking to the nation. On that balcony the history of Communist Czechoslovakia was born. Every child knew the photograph from posters, schoolbooks, and museums.

Four years later Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately airbrushed him out of history, and obviously, out of all the photographs as well. Ever since, Gottwald has stood on that balcony alone. Where Clementis once stood, there is only bare palace wall. All that remains of Clementis is the cap on Gottwald’s head.

Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera

The rise of social distribution networks

Over the past year there has been a rapid shift in social distribution online. I believe this evolution represents an important change in how people find and use things online. At betaworks I am seeing some of our companies get 15-20% of daily traffic via social distribution — and the percentage is growing. This post outlines some of the aspects of this shift that I think are most interesting. The post itself is somewhat of a collage of media and thinking.

Distribution is one of the oldest parts of the media business. Content is assumed to be king so long as you control the distribution flow to that content. From newspapers to NewsCorp companies have understand this model well. Yet this model has never suited the Internet very well. From the closed network ISP’s to Netcenter. Pathfinder to Active desktop, Excite Lycos, Pointcast to the Network computer. From attempts to differentially price bits to preset bookmarks on your browser — these are all attempts at gate keeping attention and navigation online. Yet the relative flatness of the internet and its hyperlinked structure has offered people the ability to route around these toll gates. Rather than client software or access the nexus of distribution became search. Today there seems to be a new distribution model that is emerging. One that is based on people’s ability to publically syndicate and distribute messages — aka content — in an open manner. This has been a part of the internet since day one — yet now its emerging in a different form — its not pages, its streams, its social and so its syndication. The tools serve to produce, consume, amplify and filter the stream. In the spirit of this new wave of Now Media here is a collage of data about this shift.

Dimensions of the now web and how is it different?

Start with this constant, real time, flowing stream of data getting published, republished, annotated and co-opt’d across a myriad of sites and tools. The social component is complex — consider where its happening. The facile view is to say its Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr or FriendFeed — pick your favorite service. But its much more than that because all these sites are, to varying degrees, becoming open and distributed. Its blogs, media storage sites (ie: twitpic) comment boards or moderation tools (ie: disqus) — a whole site can emerge around an issue — become relevant for week and then resubmerge into the morass of the data stream, even publishers are jumping in, only this week the Times pushed out the Times Wire. The now web — or real time web — is still very much under construction but we are back in the dark room trying to understand the dimensions and contours of something new, or even to how to map and outline its borders. Its exciting stuff.

Think streams …

First and foremost what emerges out of this is a new metaphor — think streams vs. pages. This seems like an abstract difference but I think its very important. Metaphors help us shape and structure our perspective, they serve as a foundation for how we map and what patterns we observe in the world. In the initial design of the web reading and writing (editing) were given equal consideration – yet for fifteen years the primary metaphor of the web has been pages and reading. The metaphors we used to circumscribe this possibility set were mostly drawn from books and architecture (pages, browser, sites etc.). Most of these metaphors were static and one way. The steam metaphor is fundamentally different. Its dynamic, it doesnt live very well within a page and still very much evolving. Figuring out where the stream metaphor came from is hard — my sense is that it emerged out of RSS. RSS introduced us to the concept of the web data as a stream — RSS itself became part of the delivery infrastructure but the metaphor it introduced us to is becoming an important part of our eveyday day lives.

A stream. A real time, flowing, dynamic stream of information — that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe we are are a part of this flow. Stowe Boyd talks about this as the web as flow: “the first glimmers of a web that isnt about pages and browsers” (see this video interview, view section 6 –> 7.50 mins in). This world of flow, of streams, contains a very different possibility set to the world of pages. Among other things it changes how we perceive needs. Overload isnt a problem anymore since we have no choice but to acknowledge that we cant wade through all this information. This isnt an inbox we have to empty, or a page we have to get to the bottom of — its a flow of data that we can dip into at will but we cant attempt to gain an all encompassing view of it. Dave Winer put it this way in a conversation over lunch about a year ago. He said “think about Twitter as a rope of information — at the outset you assume you can hold on to the rope. That you can read all the posts, handle all the replies and use Twitter as a communications tool, similar to IM — then at some point, as the number of people you follow and follow you rises — your hands begin to burn. You realize you cant hold the rope you need to just let go and observe the rope”. Over at Facebook Zuckerberg started by framing the flow of user data as a news feed — a direct reference to RSS — but more recently he shifted to talk about it as a stream: “… a continuous stream of information that delivers a deeper understanding for everyone participating in it. As this happens, people will no longer come to Facebook to consume a particular piece or type of content, but to consume and participate in the stream itself.” I have to finish up this section on the stream metaphor with a quote from Steve Gillmor. He is talking about a new version of Friendfeed, but more generally he is talking about real time streams. The content and the language — this stuff is stirring souls.

We’re seeing a new Beatles emerging in this new morning of creativity, a series of devices and software constructs that empower us with both the personal meaning of our lives and the intuitive combinations of serendipity and found material and the sturdiness that only rigorous practice brings. The ideas and sculpture, the rendering of this supple brine, we’ll stand in awe of it as it is polished to a sparkling sheen. (full article here)

Now, Now, Now

The real time aspect of these streams is essential. At betaworks we are big believers in real time as a disruptive force — it’s an important aspect of many of our companies — it’s why we invested a lot of money into making bit.ly real time. I remember when Jack Dorsey first saw bit.ly’s plus or info page (the page you get to by putting a “+” at the end of any bit.ly URL) – he said this is “great but it updates on 30 min cycles, you need to make it real time”. This was August of ’08 — I registered the thought, but also thought he was nuts. Here we sit in the spring of ’09 and we invested months in making bit.ly real time – it works, and it matters. Jack was right — its what people want to see the effects on how a meme is are spreading — real time. It makes sense — watching a 30 min delay on a stream — is somewhere between weird and useless. You can see an example of the real time bit.ly traffic flow to an URL here. Another betaworks company, Someecards, is getting 20% of daily traffic from Twitter. One of the founders Brook Lundy said the following “real time is now vital to what do. Take the swine flu — within minutes of the news that a pandemic level 5 had been declared — we had an ecard out on Twitter”. Sardonic, ironic, edgy ecards — who would have thought they would go real time. Instead of me waxing on about real time let me pass the baton over to Om — he summarizes the shift as well as one could:

“The web is transitioning from mere interactivity to a more dynamic, real-time web where read-write functions are heading towards balanced synchronicity. The real-time web, as I have argued in the past, is the next logical step in the Internet’s evolution. (read)
The complete disaggregation of the web in parallel with the slow decline of the destination web. (read)
More and more people are publishing more and more “social objects” and sharing them online. That data deluge is creating a new kind of search opportunity. (read)”

Only connect …

The social aspects of this real time stream are clearly a core and emerging property. Real time gives this ambient stream a degree of connectedness that other online media types haven’t. Presence, chat, IRC and instant messaging all gave us glimmers of what was to come but the “one to one” nature of IM meant that we could never truly experience its social value. It was thrilling to know someone else was on the network at the same time as you — and very useful to be able to message them but it was one to one. Similarly IRC and chats rooms were open to one to many and many to many communications but they usually weren’t public. And in instances that they were public the tools to moderate and manage the network of interactions were missing or crude. In contrast the connectedness or density of real time social interactions emerging today is astounding — as the examples in the collage above illustrate. Yet its early days. There are a host of interesting questions on the social front. One of the most interesting is, I think, how willthe different activity streams intersect and combine / recombine or will they simple compete with one another? The two dominant, semi-public, activity streams today are Facebook and Twitter. It is easy to think about them as similar and bound for head on competition — yet the structure of these two networks is fairly different. Whether its possible or desirable to combine these streams is an emerging question — I suspect the answer is that over time they will merge but its worth thinking about the differences when thinking about ways to bring them together. The key difference I observe between them are:

#1. Friending on Facebook is symmetrical — on Twitter it’s asymmetrical. On Facebook if I follow you, you need to follow me, not so on Twitter, on Twitter I can follow you and you can never notice or care. Similarly, I can unfollow you and again you may never notice or care. This is an important difference. When I ran Fotolog I observed the dynamics associated with an asymmetrical friend network — it is, I think, a closer approximation of the way human beings manage social relationships. And I wonder the extent to which the Facebook sysmetrical friend network was / is product of the audience for which Facebook was intially created (students). When I was a student I was happy to have a symmetrical social network, today not so much.

#2. The data on Facebook is assumed to be mostly private, or shared within private groups, Facebook itself has been mostly closed to the open web — and Facebook asserts a level of ownership over the data that passes through its network. In contrast the data on Twitter is assumed to be public and Twitter asserts very few rights over the underlying data. These are broad statements — worth unpacking a bit. Facebook has been called a walled garden — there are real advantages to a walled garden — AOL certainly benefited from been closed to the web for a long long time. Yet the by product of a closed system is that (a) data is not accessible or searchable by the web in general –ie: you need to be inside the garden to navigate it (b) it assumes that the pace innovation inside the garden will match or exceed the rate of innovation outside of the garden and (c) the assertion of rights over the content within the garden means you have to mediate access and rights if and when those assets flow out of the garden. Twitter takes a different approach. The core of Twitter is a simple transport for the flow of data — the media associated with the post is not placed inline — so Twitter doesnt need to assert rights over it. Example — if I post a picture within Facebook, Facebook asserts ownership rights over that picture, they can reuse that picture as they see fit. If i leave Facebook they still have rights to use the image I posted. In contrast if I post a picture within Twitter the picture is hosted on which ever service I decided to use. What appears in Twitter is a simple link to that image. I as the creator of that image can decide whether I want those rights to be broad or narrow.

#3. Defined use case vs. open use case. Facebook is a fantastically well designed set of work-flows or use cases. I arrive on the site and it present me with a myriad of possible paths I can follow to find people, share and post items and receive /measure associated feedback. Yet the paths are defined for the users. If Facebook is the well organized, pre planned town Twitter is more like new urban-ism — its organic and the paths are formed by the users. Twitter is dead simple and the associated work-flows aren’t defined, I can devise them for myself (@replies, RT, hashtags all arose out of user behavior rather than a predefined UI. At Fotolog we had a similar set of emergent, user driven features. ie: groups formed organically and then over time the company integrated the now defined work-flow into the system). There are people who will swear Twitter is a communications platform, like email or IM — other say its micro-blogging — others say its broadcast — and the answer is that its all of the above and more. Its work flows are open available to be defined by users and developers alike. Form and content are separated in way that makes work-flows, or use cases open to interpretation and needs.

As I write this post Facebook is rapidly re-inventing itself on all three of the dimensions above. It is changing at a pace that is remarkable for a company with its size membership. I think its changing because Facebook have understood that they cant attempt to control the stream — they need to turn themselves inside out and become part of the web stream. The next couple of years are going to be pretty interesting. Maybe E.M. Forrester had it nailed in Howard’s End: “Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon … Live in fragments no longer.”

The streams are open and distributed and context is vital

The streams of data that constitute this now web are open, distributed, often appropriated, sometimes filtered, sometimes curated but often raw. The streams make up a composite view of communications and media — one that is almost collage like (see composite media and wholes vs. centers). To varying degrees the streams are open to search / navigation tools and its very often long, long tail stuff. Let me run out some data as an example. I pulled a day of bit.ly data — all the bit.ly links that were clicked on May 6th. The 50 most popular links generated only 4.4% (647,538) of the total number of clicks. The top 10 URL’s were responsible for half (2%) of those 647,538 clicks. 50% of the total clicks (14m) went to links that received 48 clicks or less. A full 37% of the links that day received only 1 click. This is a very very long and flat tail — its more like a pancake. I see this as a very healthy data set that is emerging.

Weeding out context out of this stream of data is vital. Today context is provided mostly via social interactions and gestures. People send out a message — with some context in the message itself and then the network picks up from there. The message is often re-tweeted, favorite’d, liked or re-blogged, its appropriated usually with attribution to creator or the source message — sometimes its categorized with a tag of some form and then curation occurs around that tag — and all this time, around it spins picking up velocity and more context as it swirls. Over time tools will emerge to provide real context to these pile up’s. Semantic extraction services like Calais, Freebase, Zemanta, Glue, kynetx and Twine will offer a windows of context into the stream — as will better trending and search tools. I believe search gets redefined in this world, as it collides with navigation– I blogged at length on the subject last winter. And filtering becomes a critical part of this puzzle. Friendfeed is doing fascinating things with filters — allowing you to navigate and search in ways that a year ago could never have been imagined.

Think chunk
Traffic isnt distributed evenly in this new world. All of a sudden crowds can show up on your site. This breaks with the stream metaphor a little — its easy to think of flows in the stream as steady — but you have to think in bursts — this is where words like swarms become appropriate. Some data to illustrate this shift. The charts below are tracking the number of users simultaneously on a site. The site is a political blog. You can see on the left that the daily traffic flows are fairly predictable — peaking around 40-60 users on the site on an average day, peaks are around mid day. Weekends are slow — the chart is tracking Monday to Monday, from them wednesday seems to be the strongest day of the week — at least it was last week. But then take a look at the chart on the right — tracking the same data for the last 30 days. You can see that on four occasions over the last 30 days all of a sudden the traffic was more than 10x the norm. Digging into these spikes — they were either driven by a pile up on Twitter, Facebook, Digg or a feature on one of the blog aggregation sites. What do you do when out of no where 1000 people show up on your site?

The other week I was sitting in NY on 14th street and 9th Avenue with a colleague talking about this stuff. We were accross the street from the Apple store and it struck me that there was a perfect example of a service that was setup to respond to chunky traffic. If 5,000 people show up at an Apple store in the next 10 minutes — they know what to do. It may not be perfect but they manage the flow of people in and out of the store, start a line outside, bring people standing outside water as they wait. maybe take names so people can leave and come back. I’ve experienced all of the above while waiting in line at that store. Apple has figured out how to manage swarms like a museum or public event would. Most businesses and web sites have no idea how to do this. Traffic in the other iterations of the web was more or less smooth but the future isnt smooth — its chunky. So what to do when a burst takes place? I have no real idea whats going to emerge here but cursory thoughts include making sure the author is present to manage comments etc., build in a dynamic mechanism to alert the crowd to other related items? Beyond that its not clear to me but I think its a question that will be answered — since users are asking it. Where we are starting at betaworks is making sure the tools are in place to at least find out if a swarm has shown up on your site. The example above was tracked using Chartbeat — a service we developed. We dont know what to do yet — but we do know that the first step is making sure you actually know that the tree fell — real time.

Where is Clementis’s hat? Where is the history?

I love that quote from Kundera. The activity streams that are emerging online are all these shards — these ambient shards of people’s lives. How do we map these shards to form and retain a sense of history? Like the hat objects exist and ebb and flow with or without context. The burden to construct and make sense of all of this information flow is placed, today, mostly on people. In contrast to an authoritarian state eliminating history — today history is disappearing given a deluge of flow, a lack of tools to navigate and provide context about the past. The cacophony of the crowd erases the past and affirms the present. It started with search and now its accelerated with the now web. I dont know where it leads but I almost want a remember button — like the like or favorite. Something that registers something as a memory — as an salient fact that I for one can draw out of the stream at a later time. Its strangely compforting to know everything is out there but with little sense of priority of ability to find it it becomes like a mythical library — its there but we cant access it.

Unfinished

This media is unfinished, it evolves, it doesnt get finished or completed. Take the two quotes below — both from Brian Eno, but fifteen years apart — they outline some of the boundaries of this aspect of the stream.

In a blinding flash of inspiration, the other day I realized that “interactive” anything is the wrong word. Interactive makes you imagine people sitting with their hands on controls, some kind of gamelike thing. The right word is “unfinished.” Think of cultural products, or art works, or the people who use them even, as being unfinished. Permanently unfinished. We come from a cultural heritage that says things have a “nature,” and that this nature is fixed and describable. We find more and more that this idea is insupportable – the “nature” of something is not by any means singular, and depends on where and when you find it, and what you want it for. The functional identity of things is a product of our interaction with them. And our own identities are products of our interaction with everything else. Now a lot of cultures far more “primitive” than ours take this entirely for granted – surely it is the whole basis of animism that the universe is a living, changing, changeable place. Does this make clearer why I welcome that African thing? It’s not nostalgia or admiration of the exotic – it’s saying, Here is a bundle of ideas that we would do well to learn from. (Eno, Wired interview, 1995)

In an age of digital perfectability, it takes quite a lot of courage to say, “Leave it alone” and, if you do decide to make changes, [it takes] quite a lot of judgment to know at which point you stop. A lot of technology offers you the chance to make everything completely, wonderfully perfect, and thus to take out whatever residue of human life there was in the work to start with. It would be as though someone approached Cezanne and said, “You know, if you used Photoshop you could get rid of all those annoying brush marks and just have really nice, flat color surfaces.” It’s a misunderstanding to think that the traces of human activity — brushstrokes, tuning drift, arrhythmia — are not part of the work. They are the fundamental texture of the work, the fine grain of it. (Eno, Wired interview, 2008)

The media, these messages, stream — is clearly unfinished and constantly evolving as this post will likely also evolve as we learn more about the now web and the emerging social distribution networks.

Addendum, some new links

First — thank you to Alley Insider for re-posting the essay, and to TechCrunch and GigaOm for extending the discussion. This piece at its heart is all about re-syndication and appropriation – as Om said “its all very meta to see this happen to the essay itself”. There is also an article that I read after posting from Nova Spivack that I should have read in advance — he digs deep into the metaphor of the web as a stream. And Fred Wilson and I did a session at the social media bootcamp last week where he talked about shifts in distribution dynamics — he outlines his thoughts about the emerging social stack here. I do wish there was an easy way to thread all the comments from these different sites into the discussion here — the fragmentation is frustrating, the tools need to get smarter and make it easier to collate comments.

bit.ly now

John — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 23:12:04 +0000

We have had a lot going on at bit.ly over the past few weeks — some highlights — starting with some data.

• bit.ly is now encoding (creating) over 10m URL’s or links a week now — not too shabby for a company that was started last July.

• We picked the winners of the API contest last week after some excellent submissions

• Also last week the bit.ly team started to push out the new real time metrics system. This system offers the ability to watch in real time clicks to a particular bit.ly URL or link The team are still tuning and adjusting the user experience but let me outline how it works.

If you take any bit.ly link and add a “+” to the end of the URL you get the Info Page for that link. Once you are on the info page you can see the clicks to that particular link updated by week, by day or live — a real time stream of the data flow.

An example:

On the 15th of February a bit.ly user shortened a link to an article on The Consumerist about Facebook changing their terms of service. The article was sent around a set of social networks and via email with the following link http://bit.ly/mDwWb. It picked up velocity and two days later the bit.ly info page indicates that the link has been clicked on over 40,000 times — you can see the info page for this link below (or at http://bit.ly/mDwWb+ ).

In the screenshot below

1.) you see a thumbnail image of the page, its title, the source URL and the bit.ly URL. You also see the total number of clicks to that page via bit.ly, the geographical distribution of those clicks, conversations about this link on Twitter, FriendFeed etc and the names of other bit.ly users who shortened the same link.

2.) you see the click data arrayed over time.:

The view selected in the screenshot above is for the past day — in the video below you can see the live data coming in while the social distribution of this page was peaking yesterday.

This exposes intentionality of sharing in its rawest form. People are taking this page and re-distributing it to their friends. The article from the Consumerist is also on Digg — 5800 people found this story interesting enough to Digg it. Yet more than 40,000 people actually shared this story and drove a click through to the item they shared. bit.ly is proving to be an interesting complement to the thumbs up. We also pushed out a Twitter bot last week that publishes the most popular link on bit.ly each hour. The content is pretty interesting. Take a look and tell me what you think — twitter user name: bitlynow.

————–

A brief note re: Dave Winer’s post today on on bit.ly.

Dave is moving on from his day to day involvement with bit.ly — I want to thank him for his ideas, help and participation. It was an amazing experience working with Dave. Dave doesnt pull any punches — he requires you to think — his perspective is grounded in a deep appreciation for practice — the act of using products — understanding workflow and intuiting needs from that understanding. I learnt a lot. From bit.ly and from from me — thank you.

A pleasure and a privildege.

Keep it Chunky, Sticky in 1996

John — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 11:52:54 +0000

Fred Wilson’s keynote this week at the Web 2.0 conference will be interesting. He is doing a review of the history of the internet business in New York, the slides are posted here. History is something we don’t do a lot of in our business we tend to run forward so fast that we barely look back. I shared some pictures with Fred and I am posting a few more things here. I also found a random missive I scribed I think in 1996, its pasted below. I was running what we called a web studio back then — we produced a group of web sites, including äda ’web , Total New York and Spanker.

äda ’web’s first project created in the fall of 1994 — Jenny Holzer’s, Please Change Beliefs. This project is still up and available at adaweb. The project was a collaboration between Jenny, ada and John F. Simon, Jnr. I learnt so much from that one piece of work. I am not putting up more ada pieces since unlike the other sites it is still up and running thanks to the Walker Arts Center.

Total NY sends Greg Elin across country for the Silicon Alley to Silicon Valley tour. Greg and this project taught me the fundamentals of what would become blogging

Man meets bike meets cam … Greg Elin prepares for Silicon Alley to Silicon Valley. Don’t miss the connextix “eye” camera on the handle bar!?!

1995, Total NY’s Cosmic Cavern, my first forway into 2d+ virtual worlds, a collaboration with Kenny Scharf. This was a weird and interesting project. We created a virtual world with Scharf based on the cosmic cavern the artist had created at the tunnel night club. Then within the actual Cosmic Cavern we placed PC’s for people to interact with the virtual cavern. Trying to explain it was like a Borges novel. He is a picture of Scharf in the “real” cavern, feels like the 90′s were a long time ago.

Some other random pictures i found from that era:

Keep it Chunky, Sticky and Open:

As the director of a studio dedicated to creating online content, a question I spend a lot of time thinking about is: what are the salient properties of this medium? Online isn’t print, it isn’t television, isn’t radio, nor telephony–and yet we consistently apply properties of all these mediums to online with varied result. But digging deeper, what are the unique properties of online that make the experience interesting and distinct? Well, there are three that we have worked with here the Studio, and we like to call them: chunky, sticky and open.

Chunky
What is chunky content? It is bite sized, it is discrete and modular, it is quick to understand because it has borders. Suck is chunky, CNET and Spanker (one of our productions) are chunky. Arrive at these sites and within seconds you understand what is going on–the content is simple, its bite sized. Chunkiness is especially relevant in large database-driven sites. Yesterday, my girlfriend and I were looking for hardware on the ZD Net sites (PC Magazine, Net Buyer etc.). She had found a hardware review a day earlier and wanted to show them to me. She typed in the URL for PC Magazine but the whole site had changed. When she looked at the page she had no anchors, she had no bearings to find the review that was featured a day earlier. The experience would have been far less frustrating if the site had been designed with persistent, recursive, chunks. Chunky media offers you a defined pool of content, not a boundless sea. It has clear borders and the parameters are persistent. Bounded content is important; I want to know the borders of the media experience, where it begins and where it ends. What is more, given the distributed, packet-based nature of this medium, both its form and function evokes modularity. Discreet servings of data. Chunks.

Sticky
Some, but not all, content should stick. Stickiness is about creating an immersive experience. It’s content that dives deep into associations and relationships. The opposite of sticky is slippery, take basic online chat rooms: most of them aren’t sticky. You move from one room to another, chatting about this and that, switching costs are low, they are slippery. Contrast this to MUDS and MOO’s which are very sticky: in MUDS the learning curve is steep (view this as a rite of entry into the community), and context is high (they give a very real sense of place). What you get out of these environments is proportional to your participation and involvement, relationship between characters is deep and associative. When content sticks time slows down and the experience becomes immersive– you look up and what you thought was ten minutes was actually half an hour. Stickiness is evoked through association, participation, and involvement. Personalized information gets sticky as does most content that demands participation. Peer to peer communication is sticky. Community and games are sticky. People (especially when they are not filtered) are sticky. My home page is both chunky and sticky.

Open
I want to find space for me in this medium. Content that is open, or unfinished permits association and participation (see Eno’s article in Wired 3.05, where he talks about unfinished media). There is space for me. I often describe building content in this medium as drawing a 260 degrees circle. The arc is sufficient to describe the circle (e.g.: provide the context) but is open to let the member fill in the remainder. We laugh and cry at movies, we associate with characters in books, they move us. We develop and frame our identity with them and through them–to varying degrees they are all open. Cartoons, comedy, and most forms of humor, theatre, especially improvisational theater, are all open. A joke isn’t really finished till someone laughs, this is the closing of the circle, they got it. Abstraction, generalities and stereotypes, all these forms are open, they leave room for association, room for me and for you.

So, chunky, sticky and open. Try them out and tell me what you think (john@dci-studio.com). Lets keep this open, in the first paragraph I said I wanted to discuss the characteristics that make a piece of online content interesting, I did not use the words great or compelling. I don’t think that anything online that has been created to date is great. These are still early days and we still have a lot to learn and a lot to unlearn. No one has produced the Great Train Robbery of online–yet. But when they do, I would bet that pieces of it will be chunky, sticky and open.

Ok enough reminiscing, closing with Jenny Holzer.

Compacting connections

John — Mon, 26 May 2008 16:17:40 +0000

Interesting article by the founder of Meetro about what he learned from his startup experience. Intrigued by the discussion about launch and member growth — he talks about how it first took off in Chicago and then it started spreading into small communities around Chicago. A lesson I leant at Fotolog was the value of compacting social networks — its counter intuitive but it makes sense when you think about it. Communities need to be compact or tightly connected at the outset in order to reach critical mass. Duncan Watts has done a lot of great research on this — Adam Seifer taught me about it in practice. Raw growth is not the right metric to focus on when you start a social network — you need to measure and track the density of those connections – tight, compacted social networks grow faster than thin broadly distributed one's.

Fotolog, lessons learnt

John — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 03:30:27 +0000

The week before last I packed up my office and formally ended my tenure as CEO of Fotolog. I will miss Fotolog and the team, we had an amazing and exhilarating year, what follows is a handful of thoughts on what mattered, what didn't and what I learnt running Fotolog.

#What we accomplished In the space of 12 months we took Fotolog's membership from 5.8 Million members to 14 Million, we grew engagement in terms of time on the site and features, we moved up into the top tier of Alexa's and Comscore's rankings (Alexa ranked us as #13 worldwide last week ), we turned the site into a business and we completed a sale to one Europe's largest advertising and micropayment networks. It was a busy year. When I think about how we accomplished this — the first and last thought I have on the subject are the people.

AdamS AdamL AndrewC AndrewL Andrey Angelo Anna Brian Cynthia Dan Danielle Elke Frank Jason Joseph Linh Luis Mathias Meghan Melissa Michael Olu Rachel Rodrigo Scott Thomas Tom Toshimitsu Warren 'n' Yossi made it happen, it was a privilege to work with you all. The team grew through the year — we lost some and we added a handful — and we figured out how to work as a team, how to set and deliver priorities. When I came on board the company was in a position that was on one hand typical of a start up and on the other unusual. The typical included a somewhat overwhelming list of things to get done with few agreed upon ways to prioritize or assess what should get done when and why. The unusual included the fact that Fotolog was a small team running a hugely popular web site with an audience that was predominantly international. The first job was about prioritization and focussing on scaling the site and reducing latency. We worked to establish a common set of priorities and then establish a process to execute against those priorities. We then shifted attention to monetization, cleaned up some odd contracts, tested partnering with some exotic non US companies and then drove monetization with the ad networks, and the partnership we struck with Google. We worked through up's and downs: outages, breaking 10M member threshold, a membership strike, massive growth in Europe, drowned servers, visits from the FBI, and a good deal of member love. Throughout getting the team to work together as a team was I think our biggest accomplishment — our successes flowed from that. My thanks.

#Active angel, advisor, board member, get a job… My relationship with Fotolog started as an angel investor in 2003. Then in late 2006 Scott Heiferman, Fotolog co-founder and board member, raised the possibility of my coming on board as CEO. I had known Fotolog as an investor for years — but coming in as CEO offered a wholly different perspective of the operational challenges. Thorough the experience, I learnt that you can be as active as you want as an investor, be an advisor, sit on the board, help with product or business development but you wont really have a clear idea about what's going on within a company unless you actually work at the company. You need to be in the flow of everyday decisions, you need to understand workflow, process and — most evidently what are the real challenges a company faces — not the one's they think or you think they face. The lesson here as an early stage investor is to balance the time you spend with companies — it's tempting to think you can help solve operating issues from the outside — but unless you are willing to jump in and take a job much of your backseat driving is as useful as backseat driving.

#Balancing capital raises with audience growth and monetization One of the things the Fotolog team did right since the first day the site was launched was managing the cost base of the company in a way that was appropriate to the audience, monetization and funding. At no point did the Adam, Fotolog's co-founder, misjudge the balance between these drivers. This is hard to do particularly if VC's are offering funding based primarily on audience metrics. There are sites who have audiences growth comparable to Fotolog with 4x or more the headcount. In 2008, I think, striking this balance will be as important as ever — in particular re: businesses who are building audience on the back of platforms like Facebook or Twitter — eg: indirect vs. a direct (non mediated) form end user interaction.

#Fresh matters There is a tremendous amount of value that accrues to coming into a situation fresh and seeing things without the encumbrances or assumptions you inevitably make after been in a role for a while. The Fotolog team had all the answers to the paths we ended up taking there right in front of them, it is just hard to see those paths after you have been in a role for a while. Keeping perspective is always hard to do in life, and the formation pain of becoming an entrepreneur makes it especially hard. Back at AOL, a long time back, Steve Case and Ted Leonsis used to talk about periodically firing one another — in order to keep perspective. The lesson here is that as an entrepreneur you need to flip between fervent passionate belief in your ideas and objective reassessment of your position — those perspectives usually sit at either end of a spectrum — making that flip is hard to do, very hard. Sometimes an outsider can help, sometimes getting away helps. In Fotolog's case, Adam Seifer, gets credit for making those flips. Adam and I had known each other for a long time — going back to the mid/late 90's and six degrees / Total New York — as a co-founder of Fotolog he was open to re-invention and an objective assessment of what we were doing right and what we weren't. Hard to do, not always easy, but necessary.

#Positioning matters When I started at Fotolog one of the early set of discussions we had was about positioning — what is Fotolog? what does the brand represent to our members and what is the relationship our members have to the experience? Fotolog had for a long time been considered as an international version of Flickr. Yet when we looked at the usage data it was radically different to Flickr. Yesterday, to take a random data point — 6% of all the people who ever signed up to Fotolog uploaded a photo to the site, thats a degree of engagement beyond Flickr and many other photo sites (870k pictures, one picture per member, 13.9M members — translates into 6.3% of the total membership). Last month comscore tracked Fotolog users as spending 26 min on the site, per day, Flickr's numbers are less than a quarter of that number. By digging into usage data we concluded that the Fotolog experience was social, social media. Understanding this helped us orientate our positioning for our members, our advertisers and ourselves. The rituals associated with digital images are slowly taking form — and operating from within the perspective of a mature analog market (aka the US) tends to disort one's view of what how digital imagery is going to be used online. The web as a distinct medium is developing indigenous means of interactions. We figured out the positioning, summarized it in a short phrase (share you world with the world), put together a banner with 1.. 3 steps to get going on Fotolog and got to work. Clear positioning helped us, and helped our partners figure out what we were and what we weren't.

#Scalling, speed matters Fotolog is a huge bazaar of user generated content, displayed on a small number of page layouts. The importance of rendering those pages as fast as possible cant be understated. It's always easy to put more things on a page but rendering a page quickly and giving the user what they came for has to remain the top priority. As we go into 2008 Fotolog has steamed passed the 150M daily pageview threshold, we are heading towards 5BN monthly pageviews, we now have more than 350M photos that we host, guest book messages per photo now average almost 12, an increase of more than 30% over the past year, and Alexa ranked us at #10 in the world last wednesday, #10?!@ (the average for last week was 13). This past Christmas period saw records of uploads, pageviews, November to December saw month over month growth of over 10% — a big shift since in past years the holidays have been downtimes for our membership. Its hard to determine what has changed, I think its a combination of the relative growth in Europe (where uploads and activity has continued to grow through the holidays) and the fact that the internet and Fotolog are becoming more and more threaded into people's personal lives, and media experiences. Maybe its also a little bit about Florkey — Fotolog continues to make people feel special — its microfame of a form that Warhol could never have anticipated.

#Saying no is hard It is hard for young organizations to say no. No to possible partnerships, no to business development inquires, no to investors who think they understand your business. Yet saying no is what many small companies need to learn how to do. When you are still figuring out what you do and how you make money opening those questions to third parties can either grind you to a halt (partnerships are complicated), distract you into retrofitting a model that your partner understands but may not be right for you or just confuse you. Bob Pittman taught me how easily a mass of small projects that you leave unfinished or undecided can drown out the one's that matter. When I arrived at Fotolog one of the first thing we did was shut down many of the business development conversations the previous CEO had opened up. We might have missed a gem but shutting them down gave us the space to figure out what we needed to do. What we didn't have a chance to do at Fotolog was the automate the business development process. Once you get to a scale and can standardize your contracts along with your API's you can scale partnerships in a manner that doesn't require saying no to partnerships — everything becomes a test and trial.

#Integrating publishing and distribution into a seamless experience Fotolog taught me the power of melding a publishing capability with distribution. This is what Facebook did when they added the news/mini feed — all of a sudden your updates, activity on site was pushed to your friends — its an important lesson that many other user generated content sites could learn from. Media companies often separate these functions — which in turn skews value towards distribution. Social media networks are using a distributed audience to categorize and rank what is valuable and most interesting. Fotolog started doing this over five years ago — the form that Fotolog uses is simple but effective. When you publish a photo it appears on your page and in thumbnail form on all the pages of your friends. Since the average Fotolog user has 51 friends — each photo you publish is distributed through to 51 people, they in turn re-distribute it. Facebook introduced the news and minifeed structure a year and a half ago as a means to drive and distribute information accross the socialmap they were building. In 2007 the newsfeed became such an important part of the service that people are exploring Newsfeed optimization since only an estimated 0.2% of all submitted items get published into the newsfeed. Fotolog's approach was simple but it was and continues to be groundbreaking and in my opinion a core piece of innovation that is now spreading to the web as a whole.

#Working with an investment bank Several people asked me whether it made sense for Fotolog to engage and work with an investment bank. At Fotolog working with a bank, in our case UBS, was necessary. Interest in Fotolog spanned four industry categories (media, internet, cell phone and traditional photo companies) and three geographies (US, Europe and South America) — organizing inquiries from the matrix of companies that fit into these boxes was complicated to say the least. The UBS team did a fantastic job of putting out a broad net and pulling it in quickly to find out where the legitimate inquires were coming from — they worked tirelessly on our behalf. The transaction we ended up doing was technically a sale but it was also part merger, part recap. Fotolog had been through three meaningful rounds of funding and the cap table was more mature than the business was. The business needed both a direct ad sales capability and a micropayment partner in Europe — Hi Media gave us both. UBS worked with us to navigate our options, mindful of the stage of growth the business was in. Key investors — including myself — continue to hold stock in the acquiring company, not because of a lock up (there was none) but because we believe in the combined value.

# Working with an international audience is challenging This shouldn't be the case, for years the leading web companies in the US have talked about international growth, international commitments but in pretty much all cases international audiences are an afterthought for US companies. I think this is a mistake. The web offers means to reach and monetize audience outside of the US in ways that couldn't have been imagined ten years ago. Think about building a US based company that garners one of the larger audiences online that is pretty much all outside of the US and marketing and monetization are all executed within the platform, nothing needs to be local. Its pretty astounding. Looking forward as global GDP growth outpaces US GDP growth (3.9 percent versus 2.2 percent in 2007), as broadband continues to be available faster and cheaper outside of the US as innovation starts to happen outside of the US (vs. replication which is much of what has happened to date) — as all these things begin to come together international growth has to become a meaningful part of US companies growth.

#Google's scale and reach is astounding … Mid summer '07 we signed a deal for Fotolog with Google to add search to the Fotolog's member pages. The deal had many benefits — among them access to search services and greater transparency into Ad Sense — offering greater control over our our inventory. We learnt a lot doing the deal with Google and we learnt a lot executing on the deal. In doing the deal we learnt how far ahead Google is vis its rivals — I cant offer much more detail but when you dig into it their scale and footprint is astounding. In executing the deal we learnt that despite the improvements in transparency that we gained by entering into a direct relationship the Google platform is still hard to manage as a publisher, it's closed or maybe translucent is a better word — you get the impression that you know what is going on and why, but often its an illusion. This is a problem — as CEO I bet our strategy on Google's platform, applying it to our international audience to get us to break-even and beyond without having to scale up and ad sales team. In hindsight Fotolog needs to have a direct ad-sales capability to complement the networks — the Hi-Media deal gives us that capability in one fell swoop. The deal we did compliments our network capability in a way that we would have had to build if we hadn't decided to work with Hi-Media.

#The future of advertising & social media networks … Is still very much in its infancy. Yet there are indications that display advertising matched with technology that offers adequate cross network targeting could un-tap the value of user generated content sites. Targeting and conversion are real challenges for advertising on social media networks — the more engaged the audience, the more fluid the conversations, the less likely that on page targeting is going to work effectively. Yet companies like Lotame and Lookery are starting to use the data inherent in the structure of the social network to improve targeting and relevancy and hopefully conversion. It is early days but I believe there is promise here — so much so that betaworks has invested in both these companies). Let me offer a detailed example. If you look at Fotolog's PC gaming group over one month in 2007 the group received 500k pageviews. Yet it you look at the "virtual group or channel" — if you target gaming ad's to all the people who visited the gaming group in that past month — even when they are on other areas of the site the reach is extended to 100M pageviews. As Andrew Cohen likes to say "pictures of Aunt Edna might not be so easy to monetize but if you know all the places that people have been who are looking at Aunt Edna you might be able to influence and target where they might want to go next". I believe this holds promise.

Looking to 2008 there is much to do at Fotolog. Integration with Hi-Media is done — we started that back in August and completed much of it before we closed — and the fruits of integration are now coming forth. The team at Fotolog is pretty much as it was — Erik-Marie Bion and Andrew Cohen have taken over leadership (Erik Marie in Paris as CEO and Andrew in NY as the GM). Cyril, Emirik, David and the Hi Media team have been a pleasure to work with, truly. And now they have another great asset on their hands, I am excited to see what they and the team here in NY do. Thank you once again — I learnt a lot from you all.

Florkey

John — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 17:51:15 +0000

Article about Fotolog member florkey — daughter of Argentina's newly elected President, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. Example of a public figure blowing through assumed public / private boundaries — posting intimate and personal pictures rather than what would be expected from a presidential daughter — manicured press handled media.

Fotolog at home

John — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 04:15:51 +0000

V. Nice, from Adam

[youtube NrhRcVj5qks NrhRcVj5qks 300 150]

Facebook Beacon: Not what I signed up for

John — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 03:09:57 +0000

Finally got a taste of beacon yesterday. I bought a ticket at Fandango and it was posted in my Facebook newsfeed — you can see the image to the left here. No opt-in, no notification on Fandango, no notification from Facebook that beacon was enabled — it wasnt what I expected — if you want to see a play by play of what is meant to happen, its here). I felt there was a violation of commercial trust unlike I had experienced in a while. Yes I get spam, targeted behavioral ad's but this is both more explicit and more of a violation of the compact that I thought I had with Facebook. I find it astounding to think that a site believes it has my permission to gather and use this data on a non aggregated basis. Age, sex, location — thats one thing — but a purchase that is then explicitly broadcasted out to a group of people, some of whom i know, some of whom I wish i knew and some of whom wish they knew me? If I hadn't found beacon blocker to be as easy to setup I would have closed my Facebook account.

What's the context here? The Facebook needs to rapidly figure out how it can earn an operating margin that reflects the way it is scaling its audience growth. They need to do this to justify the valuation that MSFT pegged on the company. And if private equity investors are going to invest they are going to need to see the path to torrid margin growth, and cash flow — even if this investment is purely financial (eg: at a valuation that is discounted to the strategic MSFT round). Facebook is supposedly making money today but there are two important caveats that add up to supposidely. First, most of the money Facebook is making is from an advertising agreement that blends rationale economics with MSFT willingness to pay a premium to Facebook to keep them out of Google's arms — in English — the advertising deal they have isn't market priced, the investment demonstrated that fact. Second, even if the advertising deal was made up of rationale / extensible economics — advertising using a third party network, doesn't have the kind of operating margin that Facebook needs to achieve to support a market cap of $15BN+.

Facebook is in experimentation mode — and beacon needs to be placed in that context. Nine months ago Facebook launched its digital asset business — that was meant to be a high operating margin, revenue stream. Digital assets sales didn't take off. Then came F8. F8 and the platform initiative has been a huge boon to web 2.0 companies looking for distribution — but as yet, it is not a business. Now we have social ad's and beacon. Both are meant to lead Facebook to the promised land of Adsense like operating margins. My guess is that they will fail and Facebook will have to try again. Not to say there is anything wrong with testing radical new approaches to monetization. Its very necessary — and its brave and unusual to see a company of this scale figuring out its business in the public eye. I think Facebook's market position is fascinating — not since Netscape have we seen a company with this scale of audience without a scaled business model to match. But unlike Netscape — Facebook has at least $250M – $500 of capital to invest to figure its business model out. They have taken the VC model and turned it upside down. They have sold strategic alignment for cash and a stub of equity — buying them time to figure out where the business is.

My bet is the beacon backlash will be severe. The service is presumptuous at best, it lacks transparency and its poorly executed (ie: Facebook's web privacy setting states "…you will still be notified on affiliate websites when they send stories to Facebook. You will be able to decline individual stories at that time." This is not what I experienced). And even if they navigate the backlash they will likely be forced to make it an opt'in feature – rather than opt'out. As a feature that you need to opt into beacon will fade — users wont be navigating Facebook's frustratingly translucent privacy settings to turn beacons on. I wonder if Facebook's platform effort might have given them to the idea that they have permission to launch beacon. This would be facinating — they seem to have bought into their own marketing pitch that they are a web wide platform, missing the fact that they are a site and the web is the platform. I dont believe they have users implicit consent to collect and explicitly serve up this data — I certainly haven't. The backlash that is brewing online is, I believe, very different to the backlash they experienced when they launched the newsfeed. Along with users, MoveOn is at the helm — they can marshall resources and attention in Washington and the EU — this is very different to the newsfeed.

But to run out a counter point — what if beacon is accepted — everything else aside is beacon actually gathering useful information? Like Facebook itself, beacon, is gathering chad's of people lives in a manner that is machine readable but of unclear relevancy. Facebook needs to broker partnerships with all the retailers who are make up my commercial relationships — my commercial graph – and like Facebook's social graph aspires to, it needs to map how relevant these relationships are to me. This is where I think the Facebook model is most flawed. When I friend someone on Facebook I have to put them into one of 14 categories representing how we connected. This might represent 14 categories that can then be mapped across the social network but its only a few steps more interesting than Friendsters rating of whether you were a friend or not. Its not how human relationships are mapped. The dynamic nature of human relationships is reduced on Facebook to a narrow, stagnant handful of categories in order for them to be fully accessible and managed by the code base. Dumbing human relationships down so that they can be more effectively managed by machines is problematic. Its almost back to the the cathedral and the bazaar — computer centric experiences vs. human one's. And what about the data — these commercial chads of data — two counter perspectives. I was reading an interview with Craig Venter this weekend. He talked about how the six billion letters of his genome are now mapped but that the only useful conclusion thus far is that he should be taking statin drugs (fat lowering drugs) a conclusion that could be reached with far less data — by simply looking at family history. Are these beacon data points actually representative enough to form a data set that will enable behavioral targeting? In discussing behavioral targeting with the founder of Tacoda last week he explained how second order data was often more predictive of behavior — not first order. I wonder how predictive and useful these data points would be anyway. Over to Twitter — compare a Twitter stream to the Facebook news feed. Facebook's news feed feels like media, its processed, organized and polite. Twitter is messy, its all these tiny little specs of people's lives in a stream of data that offers a surprisingly human feel — Facebook has processed, digested and organized — Twitter is a steady stream of chatter, some of it useful, much of it messy, but all of it very human. Similar story with Fotolog — it has none of the computing cetric categorization that dominates Facebook — the site is messy and hard to navigate if you are a machine, but for humans its seemingly a pleasure — average time on the site is now 25 min per user, per day. These are disctinctly human experiences online — I believe we need to foster these experiences and get machines and code to be smarter about us, not the inverse. There will be more — not less — to come on the subject of beacon. Oh, and btw Beowulf was good — worth seeing in 3D.

Flog and Spain and Jesus

John — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 03:00:23 +0000

Quick post: someone asked me yesterday how Fotolog is doing growth wise in Europe and then Scott sent me this chart. Google trend analysis for search terms Jesus, Real Madrid and Fotolog — as you can see Flog is on somewhat of a tear in Spain. Note flagged news items — F was clearly a driver of traffic, but E? ?

Secrets to Fotolog’s Scaling Success

John — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 01:21:52 +0000

Excellent piece on Fotolog and scaling UGC sites from highscalability.com. Lessons learned sections contains a good summary

Secrets to Fotolog's Scaling Success | High Scalability

Lessons Learned

Popularity is driven by a base of active users, not a rich set of cool features.
The web is global and its tail is very long. By courting users outside the US with language and culturally specific design you can compete with the big boys. Some the hardest competition for Google, Yahoo, etc comes from local startups with an ear to what the locals want.· If you want to get a lot of buzz then do what ever alpha geeks want you to do. If you want a lot of happy users do what they want you to do.
Constraints in web sites can, like in poetry, make something unexpectedly better. The rule that users are only allowed to post one photo per day creates an environment where people comment more on each others photos which creates a more engaged community. Who knew? · Protect your website with limits. Limit the size of pictures, comments, etc so your resource usage doesn't grow outrageously.
Have a vision. Have a strong sense of what your site is supposed to be and why, then use that vision to decide what you should build and how you should build it. Their vision of social site built around daily photographs led to a very different site than one where your goal is to store all your photos.
Revenue generation features can be added without destroying the integrity of your site. I really like how they give people a reasonable set of features for free and then charge for the resources they need to have more. Those features also serve to extend and reinforce the social vision of their site. It will be interesting to see how their new monetization strategies play out.

· Making MySQL perform:
– Find the source of the problem.
– Mature systems are mostly disk bound.
– The query cache may be hurting you.
– Add RAM to help dodge the bullet.
– Stripe your disks.
– Restructure tables for optimal performance.
– Use libumem.so to find memory leaks.

Fotolog + Hi Media

John — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 17:08:29 +0000

With mixed emotions – a combination of great excitement and a slight tug at the heartstrings – we announced today the sale of Fotolog to Hi-Media, one of Europe's largest advertising and micro-payment networks. This transaction forms one of Europe’s best positioned Internet companies, with huge audience reach and great monetization tools. Our release lays out key elements of the rationale for this transaction, but here are the high points:

· The opportunity to bring together Fotolog’s rapidly growing audience of more than 10 million members, 15 million visitors – and its top 20 ranking among the world’s most trafficked websites – with Hi-Media’s huge ad-network and great optimization capabilities

· The tools for Fotolog to extend its platform and community services with one of Europe's largest micro-payment networks · The jump-start Fotolog brings to Hi-Media’s Publishing Group

· The strong geographic fit, combining Fotolog's growing strength in European markets like Spain and Italy with the reach Hi-Media will give Fotolog in rich and valuable Internet markets such as France,Germany and Sweden. · The outstanding opportunity the Fotolog team and investors will have to participate in the growth of the combined company.

· And equally important, the matching of two teams of people who know how to run Internet businesses. Cyril Zimmerman and the Hi-Media team have been building one of Europe's foremost online ad networks for more than a decade.

With Adam Seifer, Warren Habib and Scott Heiferman, we have a pedigree that goes back to the earliest days of social networking. The result will be one of the largest publicly traded Internet pure plays in Europe. Without the tangle of cable, DSL or old media properties that so often come with and encumber European online companies, our combined company will be able to focus on the hottest and fastest-growing media segment on the continent, and in some areas, around the world.

Seen from that perspective, it becomes clear why Hi-Media considered Fotolog so valuable and why we considered them the ideal partner, strategically, geographically and philosophically, to accelerate our growth and fully leverage our team and our audience. So those are the deal highlights. Now to some background on both companies, and why they are such a great strategic and geographic fit.

Hi-who?

Hi-Media, based in Paris, is a leading European advertising network and micro-payment aggregation platform listed under HIMD-PA . Hi-Media’s current management team is the same one that started the business ten years ago as an ad network. Over time they added micro-payments to the business and, more recently, a publishing group. The first two businesses are large and growing rapidly – the third is younger but with the acquisition of Fotolog now reaches scale.

We’re encouraged by Hi-Media’s demonstrated ability to grow through successful acquisitions and integration. The micro-payments business (today one of the largest in Europe), the local ad-sales business (today one of the largest in Scandinavia) and their current content business (a leading French gaming site) were all acquisitions. Hi-Media’s geographic center of gravity also gives reason for doing this deal. Hi-Media's roots are European, but they have a growing presence in South America, based out of Brazil.

This represents a great fit given Fotolog's recent growth in Europe, and with the acquisition of Fotolog, the Hi Media South American business should become an even more significant area of growth. Most importantly, Hi-Media is one of a small handful of companies positioned at the epicenter of European internet growth. I have blogged about this before, but broadband penetration today stands at approximately 60MM HH in Europe – and is poised to double in the next 3 years. Overall, Internet penetration in Europe in '07 will surpass 30% — an important number that has in other geographies represented a step function in growth, usage and monetization. Net based advertising, spending and direct micro-payment services are set to grow proportionally even faster, with analysts estimating CAGR's of over 20%.

Finally, macro trends aside – Hi- Media is well positioned to benefit from the growing needs of long-tail publishers to optimize and monetize their customers. The Ad- Network provides a CPM based platform for publishers to advertise through. The micro-payments platform is an aggregation service, one that offers customers the choice of more than 40 payment providers and access to more than 160,000 premium content sites.

Photo-blogging?

Fotolog was created five years ago by Scott Heiferman. Adam Seifer joined him shortly after and, working out of their apartments, the two of them birthed photoblogging … and created a global phenomenon. It’s strange, but here in the US, the rapid growth of the Internet often reduces business to a set of categories, at which point companies tend to retrofit services to fit those categories. Blogging in the US was initially defined as a text-based experience. Moreover, today daily people post photos to Facebook and Myspace – but those sites are defined as social networks – no one would seriously refer to them as a photoblogging platforms. But look at actual usage data.

The primary media types on Facebook are, first text (messages between members of the community) and second, photos. And that’s exactly what we see on Fotolog — where we host close to 300M photos and billions of conversations … all woven together in a complex social network. Myspace is substantially similar. Today, Fotolog is one of the 20 most-trafficked sites in the world, and the simple magic of Scott’s and Adam’s creation is still seducing our members. I first came to the company as an angel investor, and then Scott and Adam asked me to join as CEO late last year. In the space of seven months we have doubled the membership, inked partnerships with AOL, Google and Sun and brought the company close to breakeven. Our audience has grown in Europe such that today we almost 30% of our traffic is coming from Europe — 2.2 of our 15M unique visitors are coming from Spain. In terms of membership growth — last month — Italy, Germany, and France were right behind.

So why do a deal?

While Fotolog has grown at an incredible pace, it’s only now becoming a business. We have expanded our ad revenue base significantly in '07, yet we have done this with a tiny sales team, based in NY. There are limits to what you can do with 25 people based in NY, serving an audience mostly in South America and Europe. We have a worked with the Google team to use their AFC and AFS networks with significant successes – yet for media companies to build large, sustainable businesses, across both established and emerging markets, we have learnt you need to complement the ad networks with direct sales capabilities.

Fotolog needs room to grow … and with access to Hi-Media's ad-network, we will have an instant ad-sales capability in our largest and fastest growing markets. Longer term, I am big believer in the promise of peer-to-peer advertising among our members. Ads are often blunt instruments that fail to offer value to a membership engaged in a dynamic conversation – targeting and metadata only get you so far. Offering our membership the ability to buy and sell real and virtual items is something we are keen to offer at Fotolog, and a necessary capability to that end is access to micro-payment services across our footprint. Allopass, Hi-Media's micro-payment service, could fill that bill. Finally the agreement we struck with Hi-Media is a great return for our investors – many of whom (including me) are opting to hold stock in the combined company.

To close, a personal note …

As I said in the first paragraph, it was with mixed emotions that I recommended to our board that we do this deal. Fotolog is on a tear. Our international audience is coming of age, there is so much promise ahead, and it’s been a lot of fun running and building the company. The company has a group of very dedicated people. Adam's heart and soul is in the community. And since I came on board, we have weathered some fun operational challenges including user strikes, drowned servers, vendors trashing core databases … not to mention and some pretty hairy and exciting product launches.

Adam, Andrew, Warren, Olu, Frank, Elke, Yossi, Rodrigo, Andrew and many others have all pulled together through many a long night to make the company what it is today. I’m well aware that mergers and acquisitions don't always work out the way you hope. But Fotolog is truly poised to take off – and with the right mix from Hi-Media, there is a lot of potential in this merger that I hope we can make real for our membership, our team and our investors.

Alexa whiplash

John — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 10:31:58 +0000

Early in the week Fotolog's Alexa rating nose dived:

And then 2 days later, we were up at #11 worldwide:

Alexa needs to start to operate more like a business. They have a huge lead in terms of toolbar based traffic analysis — they might be a standard but the product hasnt evolved much, the toolbar is considered by many to be sypware and there is little to no customer service for publishers. Quantcast and others are building businesses and Alexa is standing still. There are quirks in there system that just need to be sorted out, like doubleclick is #200 or so — they have to be reading iframes and banners wrong to track that ranking. As for our numbers, I know our geo mix is wrong — there should be a way for publishers and users to interface with Alexa. We have settled back down to #16, a three month average of 21 — #11 was fun for a day.

Customer service story from … heaven

John — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 19:26:02 +0000

Thursday afternoon, August 2nd: Fotolog operations team sent me the following photo of a shipment of a Sun 6540 disk array. Essentially our new backup system:

The equipment on the bottom was damaged, the boxes were stacked (inspite of Sun stickers saying "do not stack") and the entire package was wet, from what I gather not soaked, just wet.

Backup is important to Fotolog — with 280M photos, billions of guest book messages and a vendor mess up a few weeks ago that corrupted our guestbook database, this wasn't what we needed. But what started as a mess turned into a customer service story from the gods. The Sun team went right to work, through the weekend — by 9.24pm on Monday (2 working days) we had this sorted out and the shipping details for the replacement boxes.

Shortly after getting the picture and alert from my CTO I forwarded it to Jonathan Schwartz at Sun, asked for his help in sorting this mess out. Within hours I got the following note back:

—————————–

From: Jonathan Schwartz .

Date: August 3, 2007 12:30:10 AM EDT

To: John Borthwick .

Subject: Re: Contact info

Instantly – stay tuned.

Let me know if there's anything I can do to help out – we will get this right asap.

Jonathan

—————————–

Instantly is a tall order but by Friday morning things were moving, they moved all weekend and by 9.24pm on Monday we had shipment details for the replacement boxes. Great service, no finger pointing, no discussion of why and who let this happen — the organization and everything I saw was focussed on execution and getting the client (us) the drives.

Communication was excellent the team sent frequent updates and Schwartz checked in periodically to make sure things were on track. I know Schwartz from college days, but we haven't spoken since I left Time Warner — this was essentially an email sent into the dark morass of corporate America, which yielded fantastic results, way better than I could have expected. I dont have the time to cull through the emails but I noted one from Schwartz cc'd a core customer service group email — suggests he has setup a mechanism to respond to issues like this, building processes like this is hard, particularly as you transition a huge business.

Good stuff is happening over there at Sun.

Flog laps 10M

John — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 22:47:40 +0000

Just passed 10M member accounts on Fotolog. What a year it has been, some community metrics / data points.

We have almost doubled our membership so far this year
We hit Alexa #17 in the world yesterday (ahead of ebay!), average over the past week is #18, yesterday we were tracking reach of over 2%.
Comscore recently logged us as having 4.5M daily unique visitors on a base of 10M member, and 15M monthly uniques
Over 20% of our pageviews last month were from Europe.

And the adoption of new products has been very strong. When we launched Fotolog Messenger three weeks ago we had 1.5M people try it out in the first 15 hrs. As of Friday we had 3,193,618 members who had enabled the messenger feature, almost a third of everyone, who ever, over the past 5 years opened and used an account with us? ! That's, one engaged membership.

Thank you to our members, thank you to our team in NY and thank you to everyone who helped make this happen — its a privilege to be part of this great social media network. We are figuring out who is member #10M is and do something special. We will also be launching more new features on Fotolog this week than ever before in our history — 10M or not, this was always going to be a big week!

Java time

John — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 10:54:33 +0000

Big changes at Fotolog last week — we shipped the new Fotolog memberpage. It is written in Java, an update from the old PHP code that goes back to the founding of the site. Results are coming in and it looks like significant performance gains across the board.

First the member experience has improved — the new page is cleaner and has a faster response time. But in addition, we are now serving the site on less than half the boxes that we were using.

Registrations are up — over the weekend we are seeing our daily registrations up over 35% given the improved performance and a requirement to register to post a guest book message. Revenue lift from Google is trending up approximately 15% given additional contextual data from the guestbooks.

This new code base will allow us to innovate much more on the member experience — that is why we made this change — we did expect to realize some other benefits. But these across the board immediate gains are far broader than I expected.

Alexa?

John — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 21:32:38 +0000

Now Alexa is tracking Fotolog as #15 in the world, with reach above 2% for the first time??!@? Facebook is at 2.055% and they have had 80% growth in the past 3 months. Yes, yes I know Alexa has its limitations but Comscore, Alexa, Quantcast all pointing to solid growth.

Flog clips, onward …

John — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 18:23:59 +0000

Some clips of recent Fotolog data … ~~next week~~ today we will pass 9 million user accounts. The team has grown our audience by 60% since I came on board in late December and over 150% since June 2006. Flog is currently the 20th most trafficked site in the world according to Alexa. Comscore now ranks us as the largest site in Argentina, measured by total page views (we're doing 3x the page views of Yahoo). In Spain, we're ranked #10, pageview wise we have seen a lot of growth in Europe this year, especially in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Germany.

Also in May the site saw strong growth in the US (60% growth in unique visitors), albeit from a smaller base. The arrival of micro-blogging sites in the US like Tumblr and Twitter is demonstrating how the use cases around blogging or self publishing are fragmenting. Letting people post some combination of text, images, videos, presence and location — mingle that with a social network, shake, don't stir, and you get what Fotolog is about.

Based on usage data Fotolog has become more of a social media network (tracking the usage patterns of MySpace, Mixi, Facebook and Bebo) rather than traditional online media network. Lapping Yahoo in Argentina clearly supports this engagement argument — Fotolog's unique visitors are 1MM less than Yahoo's, yet the total minutes on the site are twice that of Yahoo and pages are 3x. Fotolog's reach on Alexa continues to grow — over the past three months we are up 23% to 1.7% (note, I don't understand what happening with Orkut, both reach and growth seems to be slowing this year).

I will be very interested to see how our launch of point-to-point IM does on Flog. Within the next 10 days we will have Userplane's service up and running so members can message each other with one click (no client, user to user IM). And to boot, Fotolog will have another significant announcement to make in the next few days.

Happy birthday Fotolog

John — Wed, 23 May 2007 14:41:18 +0000

Today is Fotolog's 5th birthday — a few words, and some images to mark the day. It has been an amazing five years for Fotolog. The history of the site is fairly straightforward. Fotolog was started in mid '02 by Scott Heiferman. Adam Seifer came on board soon after and took over the project and Scott focussed on building Meetup.

The vision of the service was to cater to new picture taking behavior — as people were starting to adopt digital cameras the use cases around the capture and processing of images was also evolving. Pictures have always been social – but the digital world was giving images a whole new social dimension. Fotolog was created as a social media network — the genesis was Photo Blogging, the result was a mixture of social networking and user created media sharing. This is what Scott's original Flog looked like:

The layout of Fotolog, was and is intentionally simple. Fotolog has resisted the temptation to add feature after feature — rather it has stuck to offering a handful of features, similar to Craig's list the focus has been on the content and the conversations. From the early days Scott and Adam had the vision that the pages on Fotolog needed to be social. They needed to include not only your images, but also images from across the network, providing a visual navigation that today drives much of the time our members spend on the site, a self formed, organic distribution system, letting members see and be seen. Complementing this social network of images they added comments and guest book entries — making the experience one where media intersects with communications, day in day out, millions of images collide with billions of conversations. The growth of Fotolog has been steady and consistent — but it took 2 years to gather real steam — as the chart below illustrates. In early 2005 we hit a million members — amazing to consider, since we are now adding close to a million a month.

The phenomena started in Brazil. Adam will tell you that in those early days he was concerned that Fotolog might get stuck in Brazil, Portuguese isn't a global language. But Brazilian's have turned out to be a strong early indicator of global internet phenomenas — from ICQ to Hotmail to Okrut to Fotolog, Brazilians seem to have a knack for early adoption of global social platforms. The Fotolog audience started skipping geographies and borders and today we sign up members from approximately 70 different countries everyday. Our audience is still very large in South and Central America and we have complemented that base with strong European growth. The primary language of Fotolog is images, beyond that the chatter around the site includes and mixes many different languages.

This is what the home page looked like when we hit a million members. Its not that different to what the home page looks like today — again, simplicity and consistency has mattered to the history of Fotolog.

Out of interest I checked how many of the 15 members with images above were still active on Fotolog. A quick check of member names and recent posts indicated that nine of them have updated Flogs in the past six months. Four of them have updated their Flog in the past 3 weeks — juju15 , lepadilha, tabata , mash — its amazing that after years members are still coming back and using Fotolog to share their world

Yesterday we had 673,150 uploads to the site — with our regime of one photo a day and 8.3M member accounts that means that yesterday a little over 8% of the people who have ever signed up to the site, uploaded a photo to Fotolog. That doesnt included all the members who just visited friends Flogs — but to have 8 percent of your membership coming back everyday is pretty engaging and pretty amazing. Fotolog also hit #18 on Alexa earlier this week — our highest ranking ever. The traffic on the site continues to surge — our reach continues to grow (see a ranking vs. facebook), and for people who want to relate us to other US photo sites (which I always say is a poor comparison, given that Fotolog is about self publishing and socializing and photo's just happen to be the medium, they aren't the end), see the relative traffic rankings over the past three years, vs. other photo sites, Photobucket is picking up share, Flickr seems to be flatlining, and Shutterfly is still a seasonal processing site. Fotolog is a testament to the creativity the internet has unleashed — millions of people sharing moments of their lives through images and conversations.

A thank you from the team in NY to all of the people and all of our members who have made this global collage of conversations possible.

And read Adam's Birthday post here .

The Photobucket Sale and Fotolog

John — Sun, 13 May 2007 18:45:04 +0000

In the wake of Photobucket's sale last week to News Corp., people have asked me two questions:

(i) How is Fotolog different from Photobucket?
(ii) Why did News Corp. buy photobucket?

With the week now over, let me take a pass at answering both questions.

How is Fotolog different from Photobucket?

Photobucket and Fotolog are both built around media (photos and videos) and they are both related to social networking. And they are both experiencing rapid growth. But that’s where the similarity ends. Photobucket is a tool that is agnostic of destination – while Fotolog is a destination. Photobucket stores image-based media, then distributes it to your page on social networking sites such as Myspace, Bebo, Piczo, Friendster, etc. Fotolog is a destination where you post one image a day which then becomes the center of a social interaction/chat with your friends. It’s intentionally simple – stripped down and focused on the social media experience.

The Photobucket acquisition affirms the importance of user-generated content of any media type — images, video, etc. — and media's emerging relationship with social networking. I often call Fotolog a social media site because it's all about the intersection of media and communications, two things which were once like oil and water — they traveled on separate pipes and represented distinct experiences. But they are now coming together in fascinating ways. It's early days, but I believe that the combination of media and communications — gifting, sharing and transferring social capital, between users/members, via user-generated content or digital assets that represent identity — is a more than a trend.

The first generation of social-networking sites stressed self-publishing over connections (from Geocities, to Tripod to Blogger). The next generation focused mostly on connections (sixdegrees, and friendster are the classic examples here — tools to gather friends and connections, as social capital accrues in theory to the people with the most connections). The third and current generation of sites blends media with connections — each with a different emphasis.

Focusing in on Photobucket and Fotolog — the difference between the two is clear when you look at traffic and usage data. Both sites are on a tear. Alexa (link #1 below) ranks Fotolog as 24th largest in the world — Photobucket is 44th . As CEO of Fotolog, I'm obviously privy to more data, but focussing on proportionate growth — the Alexa link shows rapid growth for both sites. Comscore measures Photobucket with 28M uniques and us with 13M. Comscore is panel-based, and at Fotolog we are working with some other data shops to confirm this data. We recently starting dropping Quantcast pixels on our site and they track us at 26M uniques — data sources aside, the point here is that both sites are large and growing fast.

Site usage patterns tell a different story. See the table below with Comscore data from March — the average minutes per day is hightlighted. Photobucket averages 7 minutes per day while Fotolog averages 23 minutes per day. Fotolog does 261M total visits, compared to 90M for Photobucket. Media-wise Photobucket has 2.5BN photos, Fotolog has about 1/10th that number at 230M – but in order to maximize user response, Fotololg only permits one up load per day. Photobucket also offers video, which Fotolog is targeting for the future. Socially, the sites couldn’t be more different, given Fotolog’s status as a destination with an emphasis on conversations. Our site has more than 2BN conversations posted, approximately 10 per image.

In terms of user profile, Photobucket and Fotolog are both very international. Alexa tracks 29% of Photobucket's audience as US-based (Myspace-related) with a further 5% in the UK (Bebo) and the remainder apparently pretty evenly spread worldwide. I do wonder how accurate this data is — as approx 60% of Photobuckets traffic is tethered to Myspace which in turn is mostly US traffic. I know in Fotolog's case the Alexa geographical ratings are different to our Google analytic ratings. Last month a fifth of our traffic was in Southern Europe (Spain, Italy, Germany), which doesn’t come across clearly on Alexa. Fotolog has members signing up every day from 70 different countries, with the bulk of our audience in South/Central America (where the viral growth first took off) and Europe. The site is growing in some European countries, month over month, at a blistering 28%. Numbers like that compound fast. And the growth is 100% organic, with no marketing or member incentives.

So why did Newscorp buy Photobucket?

The first reason that is much cited for the transaction is defensive — News Corp. / Myspace bought Photobucket to make sure no one else bought them. News Corp. understands that the media on its social network is vital to the experience, and having a third party manage the bulk of the media on MySpace was a risk. This concern can only have been exacerbated with the rise of YouTube and its purchase by Google. Moreover, Photobucket's push into video must be attractive for News Corp. as a foil for its competition with YouTube – it’s no coincidence that since that deal, Myspace has been so aggressively promoting its videos on its homepage and elsewhere. So media matters — but this is more than media or UGC – It’s also the most common form of digital personalization. Taking photos out of their analog construct, they are a very simple form of digital customization, it’s far easier to take a picture of something than to render some customization in photoshop. On Fotolog we have tens of thousands of pictures of people's computer screens while gaming, or desktops, or pictures of people sneekers – Fotolog members have posted over 60,000 pictures of Converse / Chuck Tailor's — or custom images. In other words, this is about personalization, and the camera or a "picture" is just a tool.

Beyond this strategy my guess there is a broader opportunity — Photobucket is a photo and video tool that could become a web-wide locker for the storage of digital media. Just as eBay's acquisition of Pay Pal wasn't meant to just serve just eBay, my guess is that NewsCorp’s purchase of Photobucket isn’t just meant to serve MySpace. The opportunity is to serve the web, I suspect that’s the broad strategy. Granted, there are risks to a broader strategy — eBay didn't effectively execute and while Pay Pal has recently picked up share the first few years after that acquisition amounted to treading water at best. The fact that Google is now driving into the payments business is a testament to that failure — eBay had the running room to be the web payments platform. There is also an audience risk — Photobucket users might not pick it as a the service of choice for other media types, the audience may move on and News Corp. could be faced with a whole new dominant parasite on its host in 18 months. Given all of this the deal once again distinguishes News Corp. as one of the media companies in the world driving headlong into building digital media assets that are indigenous, not extensions of existing franchises.

Lastly, people wonder what the Photobucket deal means in terms of valuation and monetization of social media sites. On this front, the acquisition is good news for Fotolog and our peers. In contrast to You Tube, Photobucket demonstrated that UGC could be effectively monetized, a path that we are following at Fotolog. The market has valued highly a popular tool that facilitates social media networking communities. That only reflects well on both the segment and both the destinations and tools associated with it.