Google versus Twitter versus Facebook (and Friendfeed)

Facebook, then is on a roll after a whopping $50 million acquisition of Friendfeed in cash and stocks. World’s largest social network just boosted their technology in real-time updates, conversations and search.
And right after the acquisition news came the update from Facebook that they are rolling out the new Facebook Search which will enable users to search for status updates, photos, notes, images and links. Facebook has effectively nipped one of its major shortcomings in the bud: to somehow index and arrange the millions of data flowing through the social network.
Let’s have a showdown between the three giants on the web right now.

Facebook vs. Twitter
Twitter has been the leader in real time search till now, but by making Facebook real time searchable they have challenged what Twitter wants to do: to be the pulse of the planet. And the FriendFeed technology and interface has always been acknowledged as the best; combine this with the content of 250+ million members from Facebook and you have got yourself a fast, accurate and huge search engine; the true pulse of the planet.
Arranging real time information has always been difficult because it is hard to differentiate the conversations from the chatter. There are times when the relevant talk just gets buried in a flood of useless chatter. The new Facebook will crawl the last 30 days of news feed and bring you results.
Of course, it’s not as if Twitter is going to shut down just because Facebook added some new features. Users have spent months in building relationships and networks there; they won’t shift easily. And I still stand by the idea of using @twitter_handle for calling users and connecting them in 140 words.
Can Facebook duplicate this too?

Facebook vs. Google
You think it’s a co-incidence that the Facebook acquisition and new real-time search engine news were announced on the same day? Entirely wrong, my friends.
I have been a long time believer in the simple fact that if there’s any potential in the future of search, it is in real time. And Google has just been backslapped by Facebook. As I said, the real time search capabilities of FriendFeed combined with the huge mass of Facebook is a power to reckon. The data was always flowing in the Facebook pipes, someone just needed to mine it.
Does the fact that Google also announced new tweaks in the search engine change tilt the showdown in their favor? Well, maybe slightly. But you can keep making search load faster or even give more results; if you can’t tell me what’s happening 5 secs ago then I am not interested. We are all impatient by nature.
Money wise, if the Facebook and FriendFeed brains can crack the real time code, then they can convert the millions of comments and links sharing into billions of keyword searches. And there in lies the business model.
If you look over at Google’s court you will see Google Wave coming soon which promises to be the new definition of web communications. And they are still the forerunners in indexing data accurately (though Bing might be catching up, especially after the Yahoo! deal). Google Android and Chrome in them hold high stakes in transforming how our future generations will see the web, mobile or otherwise.

Google vs. Twitter
I don’t think there are many debates here. Unless Twitter learns how to index the links that flow around in their pipes, most of the talk on Twitter is just chatter. They are definitely the winners here in real time search, while Google leads in quality. And let’s not forget that Twitter still hasn’t found out a monetization plan.
So, this was it; a complete breakdown of the what-is-what of internet. Facebook and Friendfeed will be the beginning of very exciting times on the social media and internet scenes around. Watch this space!

Gartner:Worldwide Q2,2009: Devices and Smartphone Market shares

Inventory Destocking Continues with 13.9 Million Units Shed by the Channel

Worldwide mobile phone sales totalled 286.1 million units in the second quarter of 2009, a 6.1 per cent decrease from the second quarter of 2008, according to Gartner, Inc. Smartphone sales surpassed 40 million units, a 27 per cent increase from the same period last year, representing the fastest-growing segment of the mobile-devices market

Gartner Findings

Despite the challenging market, some devices sold well as consumers who would usually have purchased standard midrange devices either cut back to less expensive handsets or moved up the range to get more features for their money

Touch-screen and QWERTY devices remained a major driver for replacement sales and benefited manufacturers with strong, touch-focused mid-tier devices.

The decline in average selling price (ASP) accelerated in the first half of the year and particularly affected manufacturers that focus on mid-tier and low-end devices, where margins are already slim.

The recession continued to suppress replacement sales in both mature and emerging markets.
The distribution channel has dealt with lower demand and financial pressure by using up 13.9 million units of existing stock before ordering more.

The gap between sell-in to the channel and sell-through to customers will reduce in the second half of 2009 as the channel starts to restock.

Nokia maintained its leadership position, but its portfolio remained heavily skewed toward low-end devices. Its flagship high-end N97 smartphone met little enthusiasm at its launch in the second quarter of 2009 and has sold just 500,000 units in the channel since it started to ship in June, compared to Apple’s iPhone 3G S, which sold 1 million units in its first weekend.

The right high-end product and an increased focus on services and content are vital for Nokia if it wants to both revamp its brand and please investors with a more promising outlook in ASPs and margins.

Samsung and LG both had a very strong second quarter of 2009 with sales of 55 million units and 30.5 million units, respectively. Samsung’s touchscreen devices, qwerty phones and smartphones drove sales in mature markets, and Gartner expects it will continue to gain market share in the second half of 2009 to close the gap with Nokia. Gartner expects LG to keep moving into lower-tier devices to drive growth in emerging markets and be well-positioned to take advantage of China’s 3G rollout as it can deliver good-value-for-money devices.

Motorola’s sales of 15.9 million units were slightly better than expected, but its presence has rapidly concentrated on the Americas, and it has lost most of its share of the Western European market, where it sold fewer than 1 million units in the second quarter of 2009. Most operators and customers will be waiting for Motorola’s new Android-based products planned for the fourth quarter of 2009.

Sony Ericsson’s market share dropped 2.8 percentage points year-on-year in the second quarter of 2009 but its volume dropped 41 per cent. Although the market environment was challenging, Gartner attributes Sony Ericsson’s poor performance to its uncompetitive range of handsets.Sony Ericsson has neglected to exploit key trends such as qwerty products for messaging and e-mail, internet browsing and navigation.

If SE wants to build the presence of its three new products announced this quarter in the channel and capture Christmas sales, the products need to come to market early in the fourth quarter of 2009,

Smartphone sales were strong during the second quarter of 2009, with sales of 40.9 million units in line with Gartner’s forecast of 27 per cent year-on-year sales growth for 2009
Given the higher margins, smartphones offer the biggest opportunity for manufacturers. It is the fastest-growing market segment and the most resistant to declining ASPs.

Apple’s expansion into a larger number of countries in the past year has produced a clear effect on sales volumes, as have the recent price adjustments on the 8GB 3G iPhone. Sales of 5.4 million units in the second quarter of 2009 indicated a 509 per cent growth in shipments and helped Apple maintain the No. 3 position in the smartphone market, where it has stayed since the third quarter of 2008. Apple brought its much-anticipated new device — the iPhone 3G S — to market at the end of the second quarter of 2009, but its full potential will only start to show in the sales figures in the second half of 2009.

At the high end of the smartphone market, HTC remained in the No. 4 position behind Apple, where it has been since the third quarter of 2008. It reported lower expectations for the second half of 2009 due to product delays and now expects 2009 revenue to decline by low- to mid-single digits year-on-year, far below its previous outlook of 10 per cent annual growth.

In the smartphone operating system (OS) market, Symbian held 51 per cent share, down from 57 per cent a year ago, while RIM and Apple grew their shares year-on-year. Android’s share was just under 2 per cent of the market and more Android-based devices will come to market in the fourth quarter of 2009, intensifying competition in the smartphone OS market, particularly for Symbian and Windows Mobile. Microsoft’s share continued to drop year-on-year to account for 9 per cent of the market in the second quarter of 2009.

Microsoft licensees HTC and Samsung continued to add features to their own interfaces, on top of Windows Mobile, to create more competitive products and make up for the usability constraints of the Microsoft platform.

This quarter also saw the debut of the long-awaited Palm Pre based on the new web operating system.

This device attracted a lot of media attention but showed mixed results at the cash register as sales only reached 205,000 units. Palm currently ranks tenth in the smartphone market and Gartner remains concerned about its ability to gain traction outside the US market, where its brand is less strong.

For the remainder of 2009, manufacturers must offer products with the features that consumers and operators are demanding most strongly — like touchscreens, focus on user interfaces and application/content ecosystems — and work hard to keep operators loyal.Competition is expected to intensify in the second half of 2009. Mobile operators are likely to drive competition among manufacturers as they start selling e-book readers and mini-notebooks from other manufacturers to foster mobile broadband subscriptions. Operators are also starting to subsidise e-book readers and mini notebooks on contract and this means that there will be less subsidy available to drive sales of mobile phones and smartphones. In turn, operators will demand lower prices from phone manufacturers, which will be under even more pressure to deliver strong feature sets at the lowest possible price.

Reactions on Facebook-Friendfeed: Robert Scoble

Robert Scoble, American blogger, technical evangelist, and author, profiled the Facebook’s acquisition of Friendfeed and was one of the first people to interview Friendfeed’s founders post the acquisition event. Here’s presenting his reaction and comments to the acquisition:

1. This is Facebook firing a shot at Google, not at Twitter. Twitter is mere collateral damage but Facebook knows the real money in real time is in search. FriendFeed has real time search. Google does not (although it’s bootstrapping there very fast, some of my FriendFeed items are showing up in Google within seconds now). Facebook has 300 million users. FriendFeed and Twitter do not. Google has Wave coming, along with some other things this fall and that forced a shotgun marriage between FriendFeed and Facebook.

2. FriendFeed is dead. I will keep using it until Paul unplugs the last server, which could be years, but let’s be honest, the FriendFeed engineering team will make a MUCH BIGGER impact if it gets real time search working for 300 million people.

3. FriendFeed’s social graph? Unknown what happens to that. Facebook doesn’t allow me to have more than 5,000 friends unless I move them all over to my Facebook Group, which I guess I’ll start doing now.

4. Facebook’s news feed? If I were Zuckerberg I’d keep the one they have but roll in some of the nice FriendFeed features like real time comments.

5. Places that this marriage is great?+ Profiles. FriendFeed doesn’t have them, Facebook does, so this makes everyone on both sides of the fence better off.+ Applications. FriendFeed doesn’t have them, Facebook does.+ Friend management. Facebook’s management and privacy features are lots better than FriendFeed’s were.+ Photos and videos. These are things that FriendFeed didn’t do much of, and relied on other services for.

6. Things I’m sad about?+ FriendFeed’s groups were better for me than Facebook’s were.+ FriendFeed’s community was geekier and more fun, for me. No (or almost no) celebrities, very few jerks, lots of engagement that I don’t get on Facebook, and no spammers.+ FriendFeed’s rules were much looser and I’ve never heard of someone legitimate getting kicked off of FriendFeed. If there’s one part of Facebook that scares me, it’s this one.+ This guarantees that no developers will jump into the FriendFeed pool, at least not now. Too many uncertainties. So, if you were waiting for a great iPhone app, or for Seesmic to get FriendFeed capability, I doubt that will happen.

7. What does this mean for Twitter? Well, Twitter’s search really sucks compared to FriendFeed’s, so Twitter will hunker down, I’m sure, and get its search up to par. On FriendFeed you could do far better filtering and you can look back to the beginning of FriendFeed, while Twitter only shows you the last few days. On FriendFeed the search was also true real time.

8. What would I do if I were at Facebook? I would get real time search done as fast as possible for all users. I would find a way to get FriendFeed users into Facebook (and bring their social graph’s with them, we’ve worked hard to build those graphs and they are different than the ones I’ve built in Facebook already). I would look at building FriendFeed as an R&D garden for Facebook. Let the FriendFeed team iterate and build fun stuff, but then have the 800 employees at Facebook take the innovations and roll them into FriendFeed.

The future of social media (in context of the Facebook - Friendfeed marriage)

The Facebook and the Friendfeed marriage could have much larger future implications on social networking, content indexing and real time search. In the triangulur contest between Google, Facebook and Twitter, each of these players had one big speciality. Facebook has bad search for the vast quantity of content generated by its users worldwide. Google has good search but is not optimized for breaking news or user generated content. Twitter has adequate search for its content, generated by a small percentage of its users generating to keep the rest of the world up to date on breaking news; however, at 45M users it’s dwarfed by Facebook’s 250M users.FriendFeed has a powerful search engine on status and aggregates from multiple sources, including Twitter and Facebook, but doesn’t have the cache of any of the aforementioned players.

So Facebook + FriendFeed combination becomes interesting because 1) it allows Facebook to tap into the real-time stream of consciousness that Twitter does so well, and 2) it acquires a real-time search engine to further support its efforts to improve search (which has been in beta testing since June), including the recent incorporation of Microsoft’s Bing. This, on the surface, would seem as though the “Face-Feed” combination is taking direct aim at Twitter (#1) and Google (#2). (or is it the other way around?)

It’s clear that social media is becoming a core asset that the big players want to protect and cultivate. Once the dust settles, it will have a fundamental impact on how brands communicate with consumers.

Enter Blue Ray

Having lost the video format war, Toshiba Corp is now getting into manufacturing of Blu-Ray disc products. The Japanese electronics maker had backed the high definition video format, HD DVD against the Blue Ray Disc association. The Blue ray association is backed by Japanese rivals Sony Corp and Panasonic Corp. This move is reminiscent of Sony’s strategy after its Betamax videotape standard lost to Panasonic in the 1980’ss and Sony then ended up making VHS products.

It was speculated that Toshiba may skip making Blue Ray products and instead try and develop an even more sophisticated video technology. This move could also have been because of the fact that Toshiba has registered its biggest loss ever (444 billion yen, around $3.5 billion) in the last financial year. Given the economic sluggishness Toshiba may not be keen on investing into a higher order video format standard and has taken to the Blu Ray instead.

State of Social Networking Sites in India

According to Internet market research firm comScore Inc., the country had 34.6 million Internet users (who access the Web from their homes/offices) in June, of which at least 65%, or 22.61 million, accessed social networking sites. This is a trend that is in line with the global trend,where social networks and blogging sites have dislodged personal email in the hierarchy of the online world (Nielsen 2009).

Social networking sites started gaining traction in India some three years back with the rising popularity of global sites Facebook and Orkut.Soon, Indian sites caught on; Ibibo.com, Indyarocks.com, Bharatstudent.com and Bigadda.com emerged.Today a dozen and more Indian websites exist. The Indian Social Networking scene is suddenly a hot cake and everyone wants a piece of it.There are atleast 12 or more websites in the mrket.

However,the two global first-movers —Orkut and Facebook—account for at least 90% of the market, according Gartner India. That leaves very little headroom for the “others” to partake their audience and advertisers. The Social media story is likely to pan out into a lot more fringe players in the next 1 or 2 years before the ineviatble shake out happens. Everyone is experimenting with different things (to make money from advertising). Some things will work; some things won’t.

“A big percentage (of these networks) will not survive.” says Ashish Kashyap, CEO at Ibibo, a social networking site that has positioned itself as a talent-showcasing platform. “There is no space for ‘me toos’…you have got to differentiate and solve a problem.”

From the first estimate of a user myself, Differentiation and Stickiness would be based on the following factors:

1. Site Followers: Users and Content beget more users and better content. While the threshold for a site business model would vary on many factors, it is important that target volume users are met within a optimum time frame.

2. Rich user experience at the site which would include real time communication, Chat, Applications,Video, Audio, Games,Blogs, User generated contents and reviews and more.

3. Site USP: The age old paradigm of positioning the platform will be crucial in establishing the site audience and stickines.

4. Relevant content and user discussion/interaction on subjects.

5. Accessibility through Mobile Texting / internet mediums: The best exmaple of this is the Facebook mobile which allows users to access a lite version of Facebook for the mobile phones. Better still are user updates through SMS texting on their mobile phones, which is also being used as a key service proposition by a few Telecom operators.

6. Content localization/Vernacularization: While most of the internet users are urban and the medium of communication is thus English, India being India, the importance of vernacular content would be an important volume builder in times to come.

7. Celebrity endorsers: When BigAdda had to launch, all it did was to sign up Amitabh Bachchan as a blogger on its network. Traffic on the site multiplies (though most of the ecelebrity blogs are actually quite unreadable and narcissist in my opinion.

8. Building Communities around the content and the website

9. Content co-creation with the user

Facebook buys out Friendfeed

Facebook, the largest networking site in the world is all set to buy Friendfeed, an up-and-coming social media startup, lets people share content online in real time across various social networks and blogs. The deal is worth $50 million with $15 million in cash and $35 million in Facebook stocks. Facebook had in 2008, tried to snap Twitter for $500 million.This is yet another major partnership deal after the recent Microsoft-Yahoo search deal.

What Facebook gains in this acquisition is the engineering talent at FriendFeed, rather than the actual product, which has won critical praise, but lagged in popularity compared to Twitter.FriendFeed was looked upon as close competitor of Twitter, microblogging service for the same task – sharing information online.FriendFeed’s 12-employee team will join Facebook family. The four founders of FriendFeed – Paul Buchheit, Bret Taylor, Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh, will take senior positions in Facebook’s Engineering and Product teams.FriendFeed’s four founders are former Google Inc employees who count well known products like Gmail and Google Maps among their accomplishments.

Commenting on the post-acquisition process, Marc Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, stated that in the present FriendFeed will work as it is as long as the founders lay out future plans for integration of both services. Facebook’s FriendFeed acquisition is buzzed as directly challenging Google and leap frogs Twitter

Commenting on the acquisition, Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang said that the having the founders of Friendfeed on the Facebook team would be beneficial for Facebook in the long run, because the 4 founders were very competenet in building scalable, social applications. Owang also commented that Facebook must make the content generated within Friendfeed more accessible to the public instead of only to closed networks of Facebook friends, so that Facebook can sell more ads.

This is in line with Facebook’s policy.Earlier this year, Facebook announced changes to its privacy controls to allow people to make their status messages and posts viewable to a broader Internet audience.

Where does that put Google and Twitter?

Twitter has been facing some problems like the recent worm and DDoS Attack, database upscaling issues. People cannot see their tweets older than two days or to a week if they don’t tweet frequently. So having that glittering five figure updates is pointless since you’ll never get to see your first update.

In May 2009, Google was eyeing to acquire Twitter since the search giant was interested to venture into real-time search. However, the indexing of old Twitter updates for real-time search results has been quite an issue lately. If Google buys Twitter then all the search excellence can be used for tweaking Twitter’s search code.

Facebook will now make use of ex-Google’s excellence in expanding Facebook platform to the next paradigm: Real-time search. Google and Twitter could quickly need to tie up for mutual partnership on Twitter’s search technology. Else, Facebook and Friendfeed could prove to be a more formidable threat than Microsoft and Yahoo Combine!

Ref: http://www.techtree.com/India/News/Facebook_Acquires_Friendfeed_To_Fight_Google/551-105429-643.html;
http://in.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idINTRE5794Q420090811?sp=true