The much-anticipated launch of Der Westen, the new web 2.0 local service from the WAZ regional newspaper group in Germany, comes tonight. Martin Stabe has links and background. Here was my blog post with Katarina Borchert, the most impressive blogger-turned-internet-newspaper exec who has led the development. Here‘s Thomas Knüwer’s interview with her. And here‘s a Spiegel feature about it all. (Those last two links in German.) I’ll be in the air when it goes up but will return with reaction (auf Englisch) soon.
Month: October 2007
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Web Zwei
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Departure
I’m off to London for a week and a half today. Flying again on SilverJet so I can sleep (disclosure: I got a comped return thanks to my attendance at a Founders’ Club event; since I bought the ticket late, the net is that I’m paying their regular rate). If I can get a flat-bed seat and sleep on the way over to Europe, it makes all the difference in the world; I gain a day of consciousness. I’ll be working at the Guardian and SkyNews and have lots of other things scheduled: a visit at the BBC, a Yahoo event, a trip to Cambridge, a bonfire. I always leave London energized by the innovation and action there vs. the often Eeyorish moaning I hear here. I’ll also leave London poorer; the dollar is a mess and I’ll be lucky to afford Wimpy burgers. Here’s how bad it is: I’m staying at a Holiday Inn. I think I could be fired from Conde Nast for that if I hadn’t quit. Reports will come as wifi allows.
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Social value
$15 billion for Facebook doesn’t sound so crazy when you consider this: A Deutsche Bank analyst says that a newspaper reader in 2004 was worth $964 a year. Today, that’s $500. Facebook’s 50 million active users translates to $300 per at that valuation. And newspapers are shrinking while Facebook is growing by 200,000 new users a day. A day. And those users spend an average of 20 minutes each day inside the site vs. 41 minutes a month on newspaper sites, says DB.
By the way, the analyst says newspapers will come back into the black in 2012 but I see no rationale in theh E&P story for that prediction.
(Link corrected. Thanks, friends.)
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Yahoo as a platform
We’re finally starting to hear sensible strategic talk out of Yahoo. The Times Bits Blog reported this week that Jerry Yang is talking platform:
Mr. Yang didn’t reveal too much in terms of specific details. But the biggest new thing about Yahoo’s strategy is its plan to open up to others, and Mr. Yang spoke in general terms about his hopes for turning Yahoo into a “platform” where developers, content creators and advertisers could offer services to Yahoo’s audience.
“The ‘platform’ word has been the most overplayed and used,” in the tech industry recently, Mr. Yang said, no doubt referring to the success of Facebook in opening up its social network to third party developers. But clearly, Yahoo wouldn’t mind having similar success.
So what does platform mean to Mr. Yang?
“A business that has a set of standards that allows a set of companies to participate and find benefit from it,” he said. Mr. Yang said achieving platform status for any company is no easy task. But he said it is worth trying, because by empowering other businesses, Yahoo itself would become a more powerful business. Yahoo, he said, has been a great collection of Web sites. “I think we need to think beyond that,” he said.
Here’s what I said Yahoo should do last June:
OK, here’s what I’d do with Yahoo: I’d pull a reverse Facebook, a Zuckerberg with a twist. Facebook opened itself up as a platform for people to come in and do things there. I’d open up Yahoo as a platform for people to export instead. I would turn absolutely every — every — piece of Yahoo into a widget any of us could export and use on our own sites. I’d take all the functionality there and enable people to enrich their own sites, to build on top of it. . . .
There’s still a critical difference there. The Times says Yang wants to open up Yahoo to developers to serve its audience. That’s a platform in the Facebook model. That’s still mediathink: gathering an audience to an address and giving them stuff there. I’m talking about a platform in the Google model: let people use you to build what they want where they want. So I think Yahoo’s thinking is halfway there. But that’s better than nowhere.
: SEE ALSO: Marc Canter.
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The Facebook economy
You know a platform is gaining traction when it spawns an ancillary economy. The Facebook platform has not only supported apps companies that are, in turn, supported by venture capital, but now it yields conferences that can charge $400 at the door. I don’t see why such a conference is needed when Facebook developers have been gathering in hackathons thanks to Meetup, which is a helluva lot cheaper, or thanks to organizing on Facebook itself, which is free. But this is capitalism at work. Next we’ll be seeing the equivalent of SEO: app optimization consultants and conferences and books and new job descriptions and ads for them.