I’m sure many people are on top of this, but isn’t there a big difference between different kinds of links in the social network based on their quality?

I’m thinking about this because I’m gearing up on Google+, which features the idea of circles, discrete collections of contacts with different characteristics: friends, colleagues, running buddies, frenemies.  And a lot of the discussion in the service about circles revolves around what to do with low-quality links.

In finance, margin is a measure of the quality of a business’s income.  If it costs a lot of money to earn your revenue, it’s not as high-quality as higher-margin revenue.  High margins inhere to businesses that create differentiation.  Low margins are the h**l into which weak, aging, or commoditized businesses descend.

So with links.  We all have 80-20 rules with our link forests, where some few are priceless to us and most are almost worthless.  Should be a weighting in measuring social network influence or the like.  Probably someone is doing it already.

Thoughts?  Want an invite to Google+?

I’ve been pleasantly absorbed getting an iPad up and running the last few weeks, and I’ve learned something that is applicable to any client device: apps gain most of their power from interacting with other apps.

Case in point: I use Tripit, and got another travel-oriented app called FlightTrack (in fact I paid for FlightTrack Pro, as much because I believe in paying for software as because I like the Pro features (although I do)).

Well you can type flight numbers into FlightTrack, and it’ll give you vital info about them, like mainly whether or not they’ll be on time. But if you integrate FlightTrack with TripIt you get automatic lists of all the flights in your TripIt trips, without lifting a finger. Power of integration.

So now, on the mobile, I get a flight itinerary from the travel agent, forward it to TripIt, who parses it and turns it into flight, calendar, and other relevant info, then feeds the flight info to FlightTrack.

This is the future of apps, this is the future of app-driven programming from the cloud.  Workflows of app(let)s dynamically assembled to accomplish a one-time or recurring task.

(Now in this case the apps were statically assembled, a big hassle with manually typed-in passwords and all kinds of other (shudder) legacy stuff.  But you get the idea.)

Incidentally, this is one place where Android shines.  The operating system embeds connectivity through a “publish and subscribe” facility exposed to users via the “Share” menu.  iOS jumps through hoops to accomplish the same thing, generally on a one-off app-by-app scheme that is, frankly, flakey.  (I’m not especially an Android zealot, but this is one case where it’s clearly ahead to my mind.)

How do you chain together or connect apps to accomplish tasks?

My friend @drbobschu sent this my way: http://www.linkedin.com/share?viewLink=&sid=s452149609&url=http%3A%2F…

Gist?  LinkedIn sends more traffic than Twitter to TechCrunch because of LinkedIn’s hot new LinkedIn Today, which caused LinkedIn’s 250,000 TechCrunch fans (as well as others) to smoke Twitter’s 1.7 million TC followers.

Product matters.

I heard the figure of $100M in AWS (Amazon Web Services) revenues bandied about lately.  Not too shabby for a business that started out as a spare-time as-is reuse of Amazon’s infrastructure.  By far the healthiest supplier of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)

Compare them to Google and Microsoft, who started PaaS (Platform-as-a-service) businesses instead of IaaS.  PaaS (if I understand it right) tries to get developers to develop applications for the platform, whereas IaaS “just” provides a run-time environment for applications built elsewhere.

Microsoft of advertising the bajeezus out of Azure, but I’m not hearing much about great results.  Certainly no $100M in revenues (yet?).  And Google seems to be flailing about with its various cloud and app-dev platforms.

Makes IaaS look like the right bet, at least so far.

Thoughts?

At one time AOL was bigger than the Web.

I went to AOL from Compuserve in the late ’80’s or early ’90’s because AOL gave you a user name instead of a pair of user numbers.  At AOL, I was Smilesburg.  I was somebody.

The big pitch of AOL in those days was Community: they pioneered chat rooms for the masses.  They had common-interest groups for parenting, for dating, for everything.  I don’t recall that people could upload their photos, but at 56.5 Kb that would have been an unpleasant experience anyhow.

And they were a walled garden.  It was hard to get from AOL to the ‘net.  AOL vigorously offered alternatives to keep the inmates within.  They wanted us to stay put.

Sounds a lot like Facebook today.  It may get bigger than the rest of the Web (although not likely).  It features Community.  And it vigorously tries to keep the inmates within.

What happened to AOL?  Well, the inmates slowly and then rapidly escaped.  ISPs killed AOL.  gmail killed AOL.  The sheer wealth of content and interactivity growing in the rest of the Web killed AOL.  A walled garden can’t keep up.

Thoughts?

I don’t think I invented the “flash fad” meme (or, as I prefer to call it, “flashfad” in the “down-with-the-space-character” mode that’s sweeping the world in the 21st Century), but I think it’s a huge idea.

Years ago, I read a science fiction story where businesses rose during the early part of the evening, were indispensable by 10 pm, and were forgotten by 2 am.  I forget the story — does anyone remember this theme? — but at the time I found it intriguing but silly.

Guess what?  It’s become true.  You get a flashfad like “planking” (see the excellent YouTube video on planking, and the coverage, of course, in Wikipedia) where, as far as I can see, it’s a dumb thing you can do with pictures and UGC, but it’s novel and kind of silly and endearing all at the same time, so it catches on… for the first part of the evening.

As I said elsewhere, the thing is to be the platform for flashfads, and Twitter has that sown up I’m pretty sure.

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Valhalla has a small annual Video Summit for our digital-media companies and some outsiders.  A half-day discussion on a series of topics.  Always interesting.

I was reviewing predictions made last year by the attendees for discussion this year.  Here are some which come due in 2011:

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·         DVD sales are dead with post-theatrical movie business becoming 80% rental by 2011

·         Content will start unbundling and challenge the traditional business model in 2011 

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·         Hulu doubles ad-weight from 2 to 4 ads per video, making it more like TV in 2011

·         Comcast/NBCU merger will usher in a new wave of consolidation of content + distribution players, starting in 2011

Anybody care to comment on how these will turn out by year-end?  Anyone care to weigh in on predictions for 2012??