Check out the videos of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates — I’m sure it’s interesting stuff (I haven’t watched them yet, but will this weekend).

David Gibbons and myself will be attending Lunch 2.0 tomorrow at WetPaint’s office in Seattle. If you’re attending, make sure to come say “Hi!”

Damn, what a day in the tech world. Lots of big news, including two fairly large acquistions of web 2.0 companies.

1. Last.fm (which is an awesome application by the way) was bought by CBS for $280 million. I agree with Fred that it could prove to be a real bargain a couple years from now as internet radio becomes more popular (right now, it’s just the geeks – but that will change). There are dozens of other posts on this subject at Techmeme if you want more insight.
2. eBay announced the purchase of StumbleUpon (another cool site) for $75 million. I really think this is a great investment for eBay as they get into the social networking space. This gives them another great toolbar application to add to their repitoire.
3. Jason Calacanis launched Mahalo, his new venture that is attempting to use humans to improve search results. The main page has a very clean look – it’ll be interesting to see how this venture goes & if it can be proved that humans produce better search results than super advanced algorithms.

   

4. Google released an open source toolkit for developers to build offline/online applications. I haven’t had enough time to really think about the impacts of this one quite yet, but it’s certainly going to be nice when google applications like gmail and google reader (now working offline) work offline in addition to online.
   1. Here’s a podcast if you’re interested.

And of course, I’m still utterly amazed with what Facebook is doing. I seriously think they are going to challenge Google as the dominant internet property over the next decade. There’s some good insights and links HERE.

If so, please consider answering THIS question on Yahoo Answers.

I’ve been a Facebook fan for a long time (about 6 3 years I think). In a day and age where everything is becoming “open,” their latest release at F8 is simply an unbelievablably smart business move (IMO) that will take advantage of their massive user base. The NYT wrote “facebook expands into myspace’s territory.” I agree completely and cannot wait until the MASSIVE shift of users from myspace to facebook starts to occur (which I really do think will happen – afterall, how many die-hard, passionate myspace users do you run across?). Web 2.0 is turning completely transparent and Facebook is on the cutting edge — truly on it’s way to changing the internet. How? By making “search” LESS important.

Most API’s give you access to data. Facebook’s platform gives you access to people, which makes the platform extremely appealing to companies. User acquisition costs are usually quite high for any business, but facebook is certainly looking to change that by opening up its 20+ million users. Fred Wilson pointed to two posts today regarding the pros and cons of developers building applications on top of the Facebook developer network. Check out this video from the Facebook team about why people should build on the facebook platform. Truthfully, I think the main counter argument, which is that someone else controls your users data, to developing on facebook are ludicrous. Sure, that’s traditional (read – old school) thinking, but since when has anyone given you access to 24 MILLION users (and growing everyday) that are constantly communicating with each other? How long would it take your company to sign up that many people onto your site? A helleva long time I bet. Seriously, if people think the blogosphere is conducive to word of mouth (it is), facebook is truly off the charts — meaning the fb user base is extremely valuable to just about every company.

Since facebook provides a massive distribution opportunity, companies have a strong incentive (or 24 million of them) to build applications, I’m going to assume that numerous developers will build all kinds of applications to add to the facebook platform. Afterall, it’s already started to happen — last.fm, iLike, Obama, Twitter, and Facebook Video.

Seriously, the newsfeed, which I was originally opposed to but have grown to absolutely love, is the 2nd best thing facebook has ever done (the 1st being the F8 release). If you really think about it — the importance of search is dwindling. Your friends are pushing more and more content to you without you asking. You no longer have to “search” for everything. I heard the VP of Media Sales for FB, Mike Murphy, speak at the MIT event last week. He mentioned that friends are the most trusted source of information, which is hard to disagree with. Even more so than last week, I am now thoroughly convinved FB is really gunning for “peer search results,” which could put them on a direct collision course with Google. Afterall, I would love to know what the top search results are from my immediate network of close friends. It’s the same reason all techies use RSS to read their news — it’s more appealing to get news and content from trusted sources than to search for news from unreliable sources (in the blogosphere example – the trusted sources are blogs). I find myself doing fewer and fewer traditional searches as I add interesting blogs to my RSS reader. I believe the same shift will happen internet wide. I certainly agree that facebook is well on its way to becoming an social operating system (ie the Windows of the web). The possibilities are almost endless with the support of the developer community. Look out Google — so, who is going to build the internet search module into Facebook???

And NO, Google will NOT buy facebook — and not because they can’t afford it (they could), but because it seems clear Mark Zuckerberg has his heart set on changing the way people communicate & becoming the next dominate company on the web. He can’t do that by being acquired by Google (or anyone else).

I thought this was an interesting article in the New York Times titled “In Fierce Competition, Google Finds Novel Ways to Feed Hiring Machine.”

This quote by Alice Yu-shan Chang (successfully recruited by Google) was easy for me to relate to:

Being in an environment where you are going to learn a lot is the most important thing to me

As is the case with many young entrepreneurs interested in the tech industry, the most important thing to me is learning and getting the chance to work with great employees, which is exactly the type of environment my employer, Zillow.com, provides.

For those who find RSS and blogging interesting, there’s an interesting interview worth checking out with the CEO of Feedburner Dick Costolo on WallStrip that was published on Friday. H/T to Union Square Ventures.

In the long-short section of the interview, Dick says “short” to Amazon — not sure if I agree.

And yes, I agree with Marshall in that the Feedburner acquisition by Google was an extremely smart move.

MyBlogLog added “tagging” to their feature set tonight. I just tagged about 30 blogs; I wonder if I’m a super user so early in the tagging game?

This is a great addition in my mind and i’m sure Yahoo!/MyBlogLog will find some great ways to surface blogs with similar tags as yours in the near future.

And FYI – I’m humbled that Todd at MyBlogLog tagged my blog “Rock Star.”

Marketing in a web 2.0 world is fundamentally different than traditional marketing — where the emphasis is a 1 way message (I talk, you listen). Marketers have tradionally focused on “controlling” their brand, so “Control is sooo 20th century” is what Derek Gordan, VP of Marketing at Technorati, said last night at the MIT Enterprise forum panel discussion at the Hyatt in Bellevue that I attended. The panel discussion, titled “Marketing successfully in the web 2.0 world,” was a particularly interesting topic to me since I’m fascinated with social media marketing & web 2.0.

The panel was moderated by Jonathan Rosoff, VP Strategy and Consumer insights at Aveneue A | Razorfish (part of the recent aQuantive deal) and featured:

• Mike Murphy – VP Media Sales at Facebook
• Derek Gordan – VP Marketing at Technorati
• Ben Elowitz – CEO of Wetpaint
• Norman Guadagno – CMO of Zaaz

Some other interesting insights from the discussion –

• Web 2.0 is so important to everyone now (meaning everyone wants to “get into web 2.0″) because it has marketed itself through word of mouth
• Half the battle of web 2.0 marketing is to just show up
• Mike at Facebook mentioned that the most valuable source of information is now your peers. He also stated that if search results were based on what your close & most trusted friends deemed useful, that would be extremely valuable to you — this is interesting, I hadn’t thought of this before, but it certainly makes sense to me. Facebook is in a fantastic position to take advantage of showcasing “peer search results” sometime in the future, though I’m guessing it won’t be too soon (they need to find some way to let users reccomend search results).
• Regarding successfully monetizing web 2.0 audiences, sites should aim to make their advertisements extremely relevant (target well) and turn them into part of the “experience”
• Mike Murphy said there are three things Facebook focuses on to help their advertisers succeed:
  • Listen & learn
  • Be part of the experience
  • Give a reason to share
• “I’m Google’s BLANK” – Derek at Technorati after realizing YouTube (most popular content), DoubleClick (largest income stream), and their largest referrer (Google) are all controlled by Google. Kinda scary
• It’s about giving up control
• The largest danger to web 2.0 innovation is government and regulation; one thing that is surprisingly NOT a danger is human nature
• Focus on empowering your strongest supporters
• Facebook has 23 million users & 50 BILLION human connections on their site

Overall, it was an excellent panel — I’ll be thinking even harder than normal about social media marketing over the next couple days.

There’s an interesting article at the Wall Street Journal titled “Facebook Opens Its Pages As a Way to Fuel Growth” (and weird – it’s actually a free article).  The strategy is pretty interesting — let other companies access it’s users directly:

On Thursday, the Palo Alto, Calif., company will announce a new strategy to let other companies provide their services on special pages within its popular Web site. These companies will be able to link into Facebook users’ networks of online friends, according to people familiar with the matter.

For instance, an online retailer could build a service in Facebook to let people recommend music or books to their friends, based on the relationships they’ve already established on the site. Or a media company could let groups of users share news articles with each other on a page inside Facebook.

The strategy is prett contrary to the typeical approach of controlling everything themselves, but hey, that’s what web 2.0 is all about — “opening it up”. Maybe Facebook will remain independent afterall…

There is lots of talk on Techmeme about a possible Salesforce – Google alliance against Microsoft. First of all, let me say that I have no idea whether Google will buy Salesforce or not — I would guess a big part of that would be whether salesforce CEO Marc Benioff would sell the company. However, an alliance between the two companies would be extremely damaging to Microsoft’s position as the leader in business software.

I’m certainly a huge fan of Salesforce and their future growth possibilities. I think every company can benefit from a CRM application to efficiently track their relationships with advertisers, partners, press contacts, and customers. I’ve gotten my hands dirty with Salesforce by serving as Zillow’s “salesforce admin” and I love the capabilities that it has. Additionally, they have thousands of developers building applications on top of salesforce using their robust API. My only real gripe is that it isnt’ a complete e-mail client — I can send e-mails out of salesforce, but it doesn’t accept incoming e-mail messages (at least easily – they do have a e-mail client add-on, but I have’t tried it out yet because it needs to be installed on a server rather than being web-based).

Google would provide just about everything salesforce is missing — IM integration (GoogleTalk),  e-mail (Gmail), wordprocessor and spreadsheets (Docs&Spreadsheets), web analytics (Google Analytics), a power point clone. We all know Google has virtually no limit to the dollars and man power they can throw at any problem they want to tackle.

I can certainly see a day when small businesses can run their entire company using a combination of salesforce and google applications. If I was starting a small business, I would strongly consider not using Microsoft software due to the cost, even without integration of google and salesforce applications.

I’ll definitely be following this rumor to see if it has real legs. Microsoft better hope it fizzles.

So, I’m sad to say that the Suns lost to the Spurs tonight and were eliminated from the NBA play-offs. Let’s be serious — the Spurs – Jazz match-up in the western conference finals is likely going to be the most boring western conference finals EVER. I hate the Jazz. I hate the Spurs. I normally love to root against the Jazz (my least favorite team in the NBA), but I have zero desire to watch this year’s Western Conference Finals if I have to root for the Spurs (probably my 2nd least favorite team).

Ray says “Spurs win….but N.B.A. loses” — I wholeheartedly agree. At least the Cavs – Pistons series should be interesting…

Marshall Kirkpatrick (former TechCrunch writer) posted a fantastic post titled “social media for marketing what weve done at splashcast so far” on his personal blog yesterday. I spend quite a bit of time thinking about Social Media Marketing for Zillow and I think all of his advice is right on the money. We are following a very similar model with Zillow Blog as Marshall is with the Splashcast Blog. This quote really hits the nail on the head as crucial to growing a successful corporate blog –

Finding the balance between marketing and conversation. It’s no secret that the SplashCast blog is trying to convince people to use our product, so we don’t hide that. We do however try to make our posts compelling enough to be interesting on their own merits, regarding general interest topics, whether you care to try SplashCast or not.

Marshall also pointed to another fantastic perspective on social media over at POP! PR Jots, titled “Healthcare PR and Social Media.”

To me, the single most important thing you can do to be successful with Social Media Marketing is “Be REAL.” Personalize everything. CARE about & respect your readers’ time. If you don’t care about those that you are talking to, it will show. Always put yourself in the shoes of those you are trying to reach and ask the question “would this resonate with me?” Every now and then, random companies send me press releases or impersonal “pitches”, but they get deleted within 10 seconds of me opening the e-mail. Sometimes I read them through just so I can chuckle at their stupidity (they don’t understand social media & how to reach bloggers).

So, do you think you are using social media effectively?

This is a little late, but Guy Kawasaki posted a great blog interview with Richard Stearns from World Vision. In particular, I found the following comment refreshing — someone who ditched a 7 figure salary to join the non-profit world:

Question: You had a nearly seven-figure salary, a corporate Jaguar, moved and took a seventy-five percent cut in pay. Why did you leave the corporate sector in 1998 after twenty-three years to run an international Christian humanitarian organization?
Answer: It wasn’t something I planned. At the time, I didn’t even want the job. I had been a donor to World Vision for fifteen years when, through a long series of circumstances, I was approached by World Vision, interviewed and offered the position. As a committed Christian, I felt I couldn’t say no. When God gives you an opportunity to serve, you obey. I had “talked the talk” of being a Christian for many years, now I needed to “walk the walk.” It has turned out to be the greatest privilege of my life to serve the poorest of the poor in Christ’s name.

Head on over and check out the rest.

Watch this video for a good laugh — it’s hysterical!!

MyBlogLog confirmed they are re-branding the service, but didn’t reveal the actual brand name. Anyone have any good guesses as to what it might be?

Along with a new brand name, MyBlogLog users can expect the following:

• A complete site redesign
• A new “Widget 2.0″ is coming with some hover features.
• Yahoo! is hard at work to remove the offensive photos so that MyBlogLog would be palatable to more conservative business blogs.

For the record, I don’t agree with Duncan Riley’s statement that this is “too little, too late” – I’m confident Eric and the crew have some cool stuff in the works. I’m particularly excited about the new widget that is in development. There are tons of potential widgets that could be built from MBL data — show the communities that I visit most often, place my most recent comments on other blogs in a widget, highlight the users who visit my blog the most, etc.

TechCrunch also covered the story.

In mid-April, I mentioned the rumor that Facebook might launch a classifieds product. It’s was announced as fact by the NYT. The service is live already and I just tried it out — very simple and user-friendly (surprise, this is facebook – I wouldn’t expect anything else). I posted a screen shot of the interface below. One suggestion if anyone from Facebook is reading this — add a category for Cars & Trucks, which is a huge category for classified postings.

I bought a 2004 Civic a couple months ago and I’ve been slacking at attempting to sell my 1988 Prelude (which I absolutely love – I’m going to miss it once I actually sell it), but I have posted it on Craigslist and now, on Facebook. If you’re in the Seattle area and interesting in buying a 3rd generation Prelude with a bunch of time and money put into it, take a look at my posting: $2,400 – 1988 Honda Prelude 2.0 Si W/ Alloy Wheels.

Liz Foreman has some interesting predictions about the future of offshoring jobs in journalism. I’m not sure if I agree with all her predictions about which jobs will be offshored. For instance, in my opinion, graphic design is something not easily outsourced by any organization. Jobs which are repetitive and structured are the ones which can be offshored — not the creative ones. One thing I found hilarious was that categorizing user feedback was on the list — not because it’s a job that can’t be outsourced (it is), but because it shows user feedback is currently neglected by journalists. Maybe that’s why their industry is struggling. Wake up journalists — if you don’t listen to your users & change accordingly, someone else will and you’re toast (mainstream blogs are a perfect example of displacing journalists by giving users what they want).

Anyways, it’s an interesting article if you are interested in the future of journalism.

I attended the latest Seattle Tech Startup event last night over at the library in Capitol Hill. There was a good crowd, I’d estimate around 45, that showed up and several cool companies that presented to the group before everyone headed to a local pub for drinks. Here’s my general thoughts on some of the companies that presented:

Amol Jadhav – he’s essentially working on Car Insurance 2.0 (I forgot the actual web address or else I’d add it) and it seems like it has some potential. The goal is to be a place where users can enter a minimal amount of information and look at the current insurance premiums others like them are receiving & from what company. This aims to cut down on the time spent shopping for the best rates. However, a fairly vast database of insurance premium comparables is a necessity to making this useful to consumers, and I’m not sure if enough users will come enter their current insurance rates and variables. In terms of monetization, I do think the lead generation model is dead in about every industry — consumers don’t want to be passed off as leads to companies (or maybe that’s just me). So I think the revenue model has to be some sort of advertising model.

Galen Ward at ShackPrices – I’ve seen Galen in the blogosphere during my extensive reading of Rain City Guide over the past year. However, it’s always nice to meet bloggers face to face. I finally met the co-founder of ShackPrices last night and talked with him quite extensively — both about the real estate industry and the current technology/entrepreneurship scene. Regarding ShackPrices — they are doing some cool stuff such as adding bus stops to their mapping interface.

Mark Maunder and Kerry Boyte at Line Buzz – I do think this is a pretty cool product, but I’m not sure how useful it truly is. As a blogger, I really think the real solution is to integrate MyBlogLog, CoComment, and Line Buzz (maybe Eric at MyBlogLog is listening??). I just don’t see that much incentive to join another site to get a another fun widget on my blog, but doesn’t provide that much value to me in terms of productivity.

Kalid Azad developed InstaCalc – First of all, talk about a great presenter. Second of all, talk about a cool ass site that tackles a specific real world annoyance. Kalid basically realized that Windows Calculator is too simple and that Microsoft Excel is much too complex — and built a killer calculator that is actually useful. There’s lots of cool functionality, including the ability to “share” a calculation by embedding it in your blog or social network.

Mamtha Jakka Banerjee is working on InvestmentYogi – I like the vision of a complete resource center for investors, but there is a lot of work left to do. Someone in the audience suggested catering to the 20-something crowd and becoming a social network of young investors — I 2nd that. There isn’t much in terms of resources aimed at young investors (maybe because not many of them invest money??).

I’m hoping to make the next event — it was a fun night.

TIME recently released the latest TIME 100, who are deemed to be the 100 people that shape our world (the most). Personally, I’m pretty surprised Bono isn’t on the list of “Power Givers” (philanthropists).