Kaiyzen - The Art of Continual Improvement

Some interesting news from the last couple weeks on traffic reports in the social network sector.

Hitwise released their traffic report for April and overall traffic was down 16% from April 2007.  Either April was a blip in internet habits or more and more users are seeing subdued interest in the social networks sites.  Average time spent on sites was up however 73%.

With the combo of the traffic decreasing and time spent greatly increasing it appears that the split of users may be increasing that are either all for social network sites and spending TONS of time on them, or passively checking in every so often.  There is also the possibility that the bottom portion of users are dropping off completely causing the skew the larg increase in avg time spent.

I know for myself I rarely use my MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, etc accounts.  I mostly set them up to see what all the hype was about, checking in from time to time to see new features that are reported on, and maybe respond to some alert emails I receive.  I probably visit each site once.., maybe twice a week.., spending a total of about 2-5 mins per session.

In the electronic communication arena I prefer to stick primarily with email and IM since it is so much easier to keep track of all your conversations instead of having to go to three or more sites to follow up on a thread.  Table of top 5 below:

Who the hell is MyYearbook.com, and BlackPlanet?.., and how are they number three and five for social traffic in the U.S.?  MyYearbook is up 475%!!

The only loser in the top five is bebo with a drop of 13%, you know AOL loves to see those kind of numbers after losening the purse strings a bit to add the site to their family.

No matter how you approach the data and what conclusions you want to draw two things are clear..,

1) MySpace is still pretty dominant with visitors and traffic time

2) Facebook is growing like mad in the U.S. and other regions

Been on a long break from the postings.., have waaaaaaaaay too many things going on right now.

Preparing for little trek around Asia starting this weekend.  I will be attending the CRM Expo out in Tokyo and spending a week there with partner meetings.  From there its on to Singapore then Phillipines.

I will be ramping up a bit on the postings in the next few weeks while traveling.  Also, I have started to write for some other sites.  Over the next few months I will be shoving more of my writings on the tech sector to other more maintstream sites so that I can get this site back to more personal musings.

So, hopefully I will power through this mind meltdown I have going and get a bit more rejuvinated during and after the trip.

The lawyers are out in full effect again.  This time it is not the RIAA bringing the pain its the majors.

Nine major record labels have filed suit against Project Playlist to stop it from keeping a searchable index of songs and allowing consumers to stream music directly from the site.

The lawsuit points out that Project Playlist has begun optimizing its site for mobile devices.  This is definitely a move to push the labels over their edge as they are grappling themselves on how to sustain their businesses in the digital world.

Project Playlist appears to be hosting their servers through hosting provider ServerPowered.net which is located out of Florida.  No hiding in international territories for the Playlist fellows.

I was unfamiliar with Project Playlist before this news but after trying out the site I can see.., and agree.., why the labels are taking action.

The Standish Group has released a report stating that Free Open Source Software is responsible for taking away $60 Billion worth of revenue from proprietary vendors.

The study taking place over the last 5 years claims that approximately 6% of the IT sotware market (estimated to be in the trillions) is eatin up by FOSS.

I am a big fan and user of Open Source software and also work in the industry.  That being said.., I am also a fan and user of proprietary software/vendors.  I look forward to the future when FOSS reaches its saturation point and we can start moving away from the “Us vs. Them” mentality.

The study costs $1,000 so I won’t be reading its details so there are a couple things I am wondering.

One, I wonder if they talk about Commercial Open Source and how much of that estimated $60 Billion was not completely removed but spent with Commercial Open Source vendors.

Secondly.., I wonder what math/logic was put into place to figure out the $60 Billion total.  Did they simply look at the installs of MySQL at an Enterprise and estimate some value between Oracle and SQL server?  If that would be the case these numbers do not carry as much weight.

Anyone who got their hands on the actual study feel free fill me in on the details.

Today was the big day for Yahoo! to report earnings.  Unsuprisingly they reported good results. Press release here.

Everyone was holding their breath waiting for Yahoo! to report lower and emplode…, only strenghthening MS’s stance of not raising their bid.

Revenue saw a 9% increase over Q1 last year totaling $1.818 Billion while gross operating income fell 28% from Q1 last year at $121 Million.

Cash flow got a nice bump with help from a one-time AT&T payment of $350 Million and net income got a lift from Alibaba’s IPO to the tune of $401 Million.

These numbers are making Yang and shareholders happy as they help solidify their stance that MS should increase their offer. I think that it is highly likely that an increase in the bid will come sometime soon. MS does not want to go the route of a hostile takeover.

Let’s sick back and watch the insuing press that comes from these earnings.

Picking things back up after a little posting break, I took the weekend off to relax a bit.  Wrapping things up this week with the beta 1 release for my product so will be getting some postings going again.., lots of doins a happenin.

The deadline has come and gone for organizations to leave their comments on the suggested behavioral targeting guidlines put forth by the FTC.

The two key areas that the FTC seems to be most concerned about are disclosure on websites that conduct data collection on their consumers (so every site pretty much), as well at the data retention policies of such sites.

This was a nice follow up to the Ehavioral Event that I attended in D.C. late last year.

Although I am not the biggest believer in regulation the online ad space is somewhere we really need the gov’t to pay more and more attention to.  With the privacy implications and potential market share questions that are rearing their head it is better they start to be involved in this type of active dialouge with companies now rather than later.

Just this past week amidst all of the Yahoo!/MS hoopla Yahoo! announced that they are looking to experiment by giving Google around 3% of their search inventory for about a two/three week period.  It took less than 24 hrs for MS to responsd citing potential hazards by allowing Google to get their hands on 90% of the search ad market.  The following day congressman John Conyers released an announcement calling for need to hold a hearing on the state of competition on the internet and online advertising.