Tim Marman's Loosely Coupled

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• What exactly is "User Generated Content"?

  There's an interesting discussion going on over at CenterNetworks , with Allen calling out Mike Arrington and co. for giving Digg the award for "best user-generated content". Allen says that Digg doesn't belong in that category (which he includes Wikipedia, your blog, and Flickr), but rather as a "UGC aggregator". Obviously, this is all semantics, but I think saying that there's no "content" being generated on Digg, del.icio.us and similar sites misses the point a little. Digg does more than aggregate content - it also filters and ranks the content. As Steve Gillmor would say, there's a lot of attention metadata generated by the users of the site. It is this "content" which separates Digg from being indistinguishable from a set of links, and I would argue that there's a lot of value in that information. Some of the discussion there also focused around the amount of effort put into the generation of content. For example, one commenter... Posted Jan 22 2008, 04:02 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Web 2.0, Business, Blogging, Social Behavior

• Distinguishing between a platform and a destination

  Charlie says that "the whole idea that you have a main site is dead". I couldn't agree more - I strongly believe that platforms are the future of the Internet. One clarification I'd like to make in this whole discussion is Facebook is both a destination and a platform. It's important to understand that these are discrete things - something can be a platform without being a destination and vice versa. Clearly, Facebook offers a nice API for integrating your code into theirs, but this to me is not what makes Facebook a platform. MySpace, iGoogle, and a plethora of Web 2.0 portals allow you to "embed" your code - Facebook just allows you to do it more seamlessly. If anything, these are all simply platforms - or rather, vehicles - for traffic. Of course, as Charlie and myself and countless others have said, traffic does not give you a business model. On the other hand, Facebook is getting flak for not being open enough with their data . As Fred says, being open... Posted Aug 21 2007, 06:15 AM by Tim with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Software Development, Web 2.0, Business, Blogging, Entrepreneurship, Startup, NextNY, Notches

• Twitter is, or will be, a Messaging Platform

  Charlie discusses the future of Twitter and touches on what I think are two key points: corporate twitter and content subscription. The key as Charlie discusses is the opt-in and one-way nature of Twitter. That is, I only get updates from someone if I explicitly choose to receive them, and the party I subscribe to doesn't necessarily need to listen to me. That sure sounds a lot like an RSS aggregator, doesn't it? To me, Twitter is exactly that: a messaging aggregator. The future of Twitter is a messaging platform . Twitter has a number of ways to deliver updates - you can get them on your phone (via SMS), from IM, or on the web. And of course, you can get them as RSS and bring them anywhere you want. You can also send the updates from any of those mediums. Ever better, Twitter has an API for putting data in and getting messages out, which means I can update Twitter and have this "status update" sent out to Facebook , my blog , and so on. Delivery based on context and priority The key feature... Posted Jun 18 2007, 03:05 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Web 2.0, Innovation, Business, Blogging

• Advertising in RSS

  Mike Gunderloy (Larkware News) points to an ad brokerage for RSS feeds . Interesting idea. How effective it is depends. I still think that, especially when it comes to personal weblogs, a personal endorsement is going to be infinitely more effective than a canned ad. I think the only way this is going to be effective is to have ads that are carefully selected based on the content of your weblog. Even if automated, the ads need to be something that, if given the choice, you might actually endorse. Actually, what would be ideal would be avoiding any automatic ad injection and instead buying placement. This, of course, requires more effort on the part of the author - but it helps the author's opinion come through a bit better, and still generates the same or better buzz for the product. After all, I subscribed to the feed to read the author's opinion, not a canned advertisement. I want the ad to reflect that. Of course, there should be some disclosure and the ad should be clearly marked as... Posted Jan 26 2004, 07:49 AM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Web 2.0, Business, Blogging, Advertising