I was away in Orlando with the family last week on vacation. Which explains the very light posting. I had some time to think about the Facebook, Myspace and Google (OpenSocial & Social Graph and GPhone) announcements.

One thing struck me as odd. Why was there SO much around the Nov 5th time frame. Its certainly slow news month.

Then I learned that Facebook actually “ pre-announced” that it would preview its new social ads and platform a few weeks ago. Google had enough time to respond and attempt to one-up them.

Actually thanks to Facebook, Google had over 3 weeks to plan and execute their announcements so they could “steal the thunder”.

I am positive Google was working on the Gphone and OpenSocial announcements long before they got to know about the Facebook announcement, but it begs the question, did they time it just before so they could reduce the limelight from Facebook?

Most cases announcements such as the one Facebook did are kept under the wraps for a long time so as to not “tip the hat” to the competition. The counterpoint is that you build a sense of excitement – a la Apple with the iPhone, but even Apple’s very good about managing their announcements.

This is probably a very good lesson in making sure you dont give anything away for your competition to steal your thunder.

Very short blog since I am “supposed” to be on vacation in Orlando with the family. Community 101 states be happy for your community and celebrate all events. Two great events to celebrate:

1. Eric’s a friend I met at BarCamp a few months ago and we’ve been chatting about a bunch of different things and I was pleased to hear he joined SocialText. Congratulations Eric, its a great company.

2. Speaking of SocialText, its new Chairman is also another great guy and good friend Ross Mayfield, who just this week raised a good $9.5 Million series C and hired a new CEO.

So what’s this got to do with community 101? This blog itself is a community of mostly good friends, that I have made over the years and I just realized they matter a lot more to me now.

Great content one of the critical needs of any community. And good blogging takes time, patience and inspiration. Here are 3 stories I ran into last week, they were pretty inspiring so I wanted to share.

Scott Adams writes the Dilbert cartoon and a great blog. He has been giving away pieces of his books for free and has had mixed success. In a piece for the WSJ ( Excerpted) he said:
“putting Dilbert online for free years ago has yielded mixed though
mostly positive results. It gave a huge boost to the newspaper sales
and licensing. The ad income was good too. Giving away the Dilbert
comic for free continues to work well, although it cannibalizes my
reprint book sales to some extent, and a fast-growing percentage of
readers bypass the online ads with widgets, unauthorized RSS feeds and
other workarounds.”

But what about books? How did blogging help Scott?
“Over time, I noticed something unexpected and wonderful was
happening with the blog. I had an army of volunteer editors, and they
never slept. The readers were changing the course of my writing in real
time. I would post my thoughts on a topic, and the masses told me what
they thought of the day’s offering without holding anything back….At
some point I realized we were collectively writing a book, or at least
the guts of one.“

Lois Kelly points us to what language tells you about a person. “Plenty, especially if you learn how to use the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program developed by James Pennebaker and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin.”

Please give the online edition a try (you have to put in one of your blog posts to get results). I scored better at self references, positive emotion, & overall cognitive words. Love to hear from you on your words.

Finally Greg Makinw pointed me to Mark Sellers speech. Here’s a summary. Bottom line: “To be a good investor be a good writer. If you can’t write clearly, it is my opinion that you don’t think very clearly.”

Read a speech by Mark Sellers (oobackground). I quote to summarize: Emphasis mine:

“The way I see it, there are really only four sources of economic moats that are hard to duplicate, and thus, long-lasting.

1. One source would be economies of scale and scope. Wal-Mart is an example of this, as is Cintas in the uniform rental business or Procter & Gamble or Home Depot and Lowe’s.
2. Another source is the network affect, ala eBay or Mastercard or Visa or American Express.
3. A third would be intellectual property rights, such as patents, trademarks, regulatory approvals, or customer goodwill. Disney, Nike, or Genentech would be good examples here.
4. A fourth and final type of moat would be high customer switching costs. Paychex and Microsoft are great examples of companies that benefit from high customer switching costs.”

“These are the only four types of competitive advantages that are durable, because they are very difficult for competitors to duplicate. And just like a company needs to develop a moat or suffer from mediocrity, an investor needs some sort of edge over the competition or he’ll suffer from mediocrity.”

What are not sources of competitive advantages:

“Well, one thing that is not a source is reading a lot of books and magazines and newspapers. Anyone can read a book. Reading is incredibly important, but it won’t give you a big advantage over others. It will just allow you to keep up. Everyone reads a lot in this business. Some read more than others, but I don’t necessarily think there’s a correlation between investment performance and number of books read. Once you reach a certain point in your knowledge base, there are diminishing returns to reading more. And in fact, reading too much news can actually be detrimental to performance because you start to believe all the crap the journalists pump out to sell more papers.”

“Another thing that won’t make you a great investor is an MBA from a top school or a CFA or PhD or CPA or MS or any of the other dozens of possible degrees and designations you can obtain.”

“Experience is another over-rated thing. I mean, it’s incredibly important, but it’s not a source of competitive advantage.”

“So what are the sources of competitive advantage for an investor? Just as with a company or an industry, the moats for investors are structural. They have to do with psychology, and psychology is hard wired into your brain.”

Seven traits great investors share
1. Trait #1 is the ability to buy stocks while others are panicking and sell stocks while others are euphoric.

2. The second character trait of a great investor is that he is obsessive about playing the game and wanting to win.

3. A third trait is the willingness to learn from past mistakes.

4. A fourth trait is an inherent sense of risk based on common sense.

5. Trait #5: Great investors have confidence in their own convictions and stick with them, even when facing criticism.

6. Sixth, it’s important to have both sides of your brain working, not just the left side (the side that’s good at math and organization.) In business school, I met a lot of people who were incredibly smart. But those who were majoring in finance couldn’t write worth a damn and had a hard time coming up with inventive ways to look at a problem.

7. And most important, I believe you need to be a good writer. If you can’t write clearly, it is my opinion that you don’t
think very clearly. And if you don’t think clearly, you’re in trouble.
    

Since Google launched Android, there’s been lots of speak native applications built for a platform versus applications built for the web that can be leveraged anywhere, regardless of device.

As a developer its much easier to have one code base and not have to worry about the “backberry source safe branch” versus “iphone Javascript Clearcase VOB branch” – these are a pain.

But, its the necessary evil, since many people prefer platform native applications (for good reasons) are:
a) faster in most cases because you dont have layers of “abstraction” to go through
b) better, since they leverage specific API and calls that makes them better “integrated” into their platform (e.g. If you have facebook for Blackberry, notice how much easier it is to look up profile for someone that adds you as a friend versus doing the same on the web browser version of Facebook on your Blackberry explorer)
c) seamless since they can leverage other native calls written to leverage what the platform was intended for

Lets revisit some of the basic needs for creating native mobile applications on the platform versus creating web applications for the browser (PC, computer, etc.)

1. Form factor (Much smaller size of screen): this means you have lesser space. In an average PC (more laptops these days are getting bought) you can get enough “over the fold” real estate, to have a left navigation, right navigation and a central area. On a mobile device your options are much more limited. Navigations appear useless (unless its the iPhone) so you are focused on the “central” area. In a laptop for example you can have a video on the left and an ad on the right. In a mobile device, nothing but the video fits in. In the blackberry 8800 for example when I search on google, I get paid search listings first, which wastes real estate since I dont usually get ads for what I am looking for.

2. Smaller keyboard / input options: Although mobile devices have mostly numeric options, smart phones (over 80%) have a keyboard or a simulated keyboard). Again, your options are very limited in most cases.

3. Usually much slower bandwidth into your phone versus computer / laptop: Without iPhone Wifi you are stuck with EDGE or the Sprint / Verizon network – which for most parts are awful. So as a “designer” you have to sacrifice form over style or design.

4. Attention span of the user: usually mobile users are “on the go”. On your laptop you tend to have a lot more focussed attention span of the user. On the mobile device, they are talking, listening to music, looking for directions, drinking a latte while using the phone with one hand. They dont have time.

I may have missed others.

Where as with the web there’s an increasing push from Google and Ning to build generic (HTML plus Javascript, etc) instead of FBML, why are they still pushing developers to build native platform applications?

One answer might be “ lock in“. There has to be a better answer.

Wont the problems of speed and keyboard mostly go away with time? Also if you look at the iPhone, the Safari browser is just as good as any PC based browser.

You will remain with form factor and attention span, but you can address those without building native applications.

I am hoping Dare, Dharmesh and others can shed more light.

Google announced today its “offering free software to
anyone who wants it under the relaxed terms of an open-source license,
which will allow developers to view the source code for that software.
This also means there will not be a “gPhone,” or any sort of phone with
the Google brand on it.”

“ The approach has already
been endorsed by 33 companies who make up the new Open Handset
Alliance, including some of the world’s largest wireless carriers and
cell-phone manufacturers.”

“ Rubin said Google hopes to
make money by increasing the number of people who are exposed to its
Internet advertising. Currently there are about 1.5 billion people in
the world who can see Google’s advertising on personal computers. In
comparison, an estimated 3 billion people use mobile phones”

“ Finally, there are tools
for individual developers. On Nov. 12, Google will release a free
software development kit that will help programmers write applications.”

Related: Look at the mobile OS and smartphone market segmentation analysis.

Interesting they talk about this being better than anything Microsoft offers. I think they know that Symbian “owns” the smartphone OS market at about 67%+ share, and Microsoft is a bit player, but they still want this to be them vs. Microsoft.

From the horses mouth.

Here’s a case study about my blog I learned the hard way. I lost 50% of my RSS feed subscribers in one day. 50% – ONE day. For absolute numbers that was a loss of about 197 subscribers. But at the same time my site visits are up 30% from a month ago. Go figure. I am getting a lot of new visitors and my existing audience (community centric) is probably leaving is my guess at this point.

What changed and some possible explanations (still digging for details)

1. Focus on the audience: This blog primarily use to cater to community managers and interested observers in social networks when I started. Over the last 2 months it has tried to expand too quickly to people in marketing, social networking and about anyone in technology for that matter. I think I forgot I was writing for an audience as opposed to writing for myself and a few very good friends.

2. Lack of strong editorial oversight: Since I control the blog, I pretty much talked about what ever I wanted to. Not sure when my subscribers decided that was not they signed up for originally. Posts on marketing, Google phone and other things that interested me were all game for me. My audience probably felt otherwise.

3. Frequency of posting: Has increased significantly since when I find good information and I post it. That has meant the # of posts went from one a day to close to 2-3 including del.icio.us tags. For a lot of people that’s too much to digest in a day. I used to think this is a positive (frequent posting), but you can use this reason both ways is what I learned.

4. Lack of “attention span” among readers: There are way too many options now: facebook, twitter, other very good and well written blogs, so I really doubt anyone is able to keep up. Something’s gotta give.

5. Not good enough content: I hate to admit this to myself, but I may have to look at it again. At the end of the day I firmly believe that if you have great content, you win. If not, people will ignore it. Compared to some of the excellent content that exists on other blogs, I may have to admit, this blog is a nice to have.

6. Turned off comments: Not sure if this had an impact, but I turned off then on again comments a week ago. I have heard from several folks that a “blog” is not a blog without comments. So for the record, comments are back on.

Not sure of other reasons, but I’m sure there are others. Drop me a line if you unsubscribed so I could learn why. mukund@bestengagingcommunities.com

Update Nov 4: 8:30 PM Pacific. Here’s why  my subscriber count went down. Thanks for all the email’s of support BTW.

Aaron gave me a pre-release copy of the book “ We are smarter than me” a couple of weeks ago at the Office 2.0 conference. Its a quick read and filled with many examples.

The most unique part of this book:

The entire book was community written – by members of the community. In their own words:

“In
a time where community and social networks are starting to infiltrate
every aspect of our personal and professional lives, WE decided to test
the notion that a book of business best practices could be written by
“the crowd,” and we are excited to have participated in this
groundbreaking experiment.”

With strong backing from MIT, SharedInsights (Barry Libert), Prentice Hall and Wharton, this book was written in wiki style with hundreds of contributors.

Here’s what I really liked about the book:
1. Lots of examples. From P&G to Brewtopia, this book has a lot of “real world” examples of how companies have been able to successfully tap into the power of the community to create value.

2. Tangible case studies: Since there are many examples, you can get practical tips on how to start a community, grow and let your community thrive.

Who’s this book for?
1. If you are in  marketing, customer service, or product development in any large organization and are looking to present a case to your management team about the value of building a community, this book is a must read. It will give you a great set of case studies to present.

2. If you are interested in learning more about crowdsourcing and themes around community driven businesses this book is a good read.

3. If you are looking to write a book about social networks and communities and social media or the User generated content theme / metaphor, pick up a copy of this book as a reference or citation.

What I thought the book missed the mark on:
1. The main points were lost because of so many examples. It was not easy at all to connect the main points, key assumptions and supporting facts. Since there were many examples how customers use communities it tends to be just a lot of case studies but leaves the reader to connect the dots. Maybe there’s a sense of discovery you might get from this as a counterpoint.

2. The value of editing. I am always amazed when I see final copies of a book especially after I saw the author’s pre-release copy. Editors rock. This book would have benefited from a stronger editorial influence.

3. There’s a place for online connection, and this book missed that. I prefer books that are “living” to ones that are written once and done with. What I mean by that is when book authors continue the conversation and provide relevant links on a website that makes the book a living project. I think the website wearesmarter makes an attempt at that, but the examples could be brought to live with interviews, podcasts and updates from the companies that were featured in the examples.

Overall a very quick (2 hour or less) read. Recommend you get a copy.

Digging deeper on Who has the most to lose because of the Google Phone or Gphone story.

First there are several numbers and they are all different:

Total number of smart phones shipped: (114 Million) ~10% of the total mobile handset market. Growing at ~50% annually through 2010. – IDC

ABI Research forecasts that the
whole smartphone market segment will grow from 218 million units in
2007 to 426 million units in 2012. – ABI research.

Gartner (see below): 48 Million in 2006, 64 Million in 2007 and expected to be 100+ Million by 2007

Zelos research: Sales of full-feature handsets
will grow to about 290 million in 2008, or 42.5 percent of all
handsets, from about 10 million in 2003


Annual Growth of Smart Phones.

2005: ~40+ Milllion

2006 64 Million (Canaly’s)

2007: 114 Million (NYTimes)

Market Segments:

1. By geography (From Gartner and Telephia)
a) Japan 31%
b) Europe 27%
c) North America 19%

d) Other

2) By device vendor (From Canaly’s)
a) Nokia ~40%
b) RIM (Blackberry) 6.5%
c) Motorola 5.3%
d) Palm 5%
e) Microsoft < 5%
f) Other

3) By operating system ( IDC) and ( Canaly’s)
a) Symbian ~60%
b) Microsoft ~12%
c) RIM (Blackberry) ~7%
d) Linux ~6%
e) Palm ~5%

4) By user demographic of all mobile (not just smart phones)
a) Communication (phone & camera, text message) centric
b) Entertainment (music, video, games) centric
c) Information (email, internet, applications*) centric

Looking now at this analysis, I would say the biggest losers because of GPhone would be Motorola, Palm & from an OS perspective I think Google will eat into some of the Linux and Symbian leadership.

We all read, view and find great things on the web, and sharing that is the best part of it all. I use many mechanisms to share stuff I find and wanted to do a quick review of those tools and the “effectiveness” of those tools.

There are 4 primary criteria that I use for my sharing:
1. How easy is it to share? If its too cumbersome, (like cutting and pasting, sending email is) then it has a barrier to my own adoption of it.

2. What is the timeliness of the information? Keep it in the research area? Or news that has a half life of a firefly? The more permanent something is I tend to keep it in my own sharing area (like del.icio.us) and the more ephemeral, I tend to use mechanisms that are here and now (like Twitter)

3. What is the reach? How many people can I get to share it with? Put another way, if I want a few people to view this will they do it using the medium I sent it to them.

4. What item I want to share? Most cases its a cool article of web page or a blog post. In other cases its a photo (still on a web page). The most difficult items to share have been files and documents and of course calendar items.

Here are my results:
1. For the most easy way & blog posts to share web pages: del.icio.us, Google Share and Share on facebook are the best, in that order. I say in that order, because they are all the same in terms of ease of use, but effectiveness to my audience, del.icio.us is the best. Google reader sharing is also good, but it is not as effective in terms of reach. Maybe because I have not publicized it enough.

2. For timeliness of information, nothing beats Twitter. My del.icio.us tags lag in terms of the people that view them but the results of sharing in Twitter are great. If I have something that is very topical and good for about half a day or 10 hours, and useless after that, I use twitter.

3. Nothing beats email for reach though. One because its personal, two because of its smaller audience set and three because it “comes to you” instead of you “going to get” it. It does have some “lack of timeliness” to it was my perception, but I am surprised by how many people email back within 1 hour of me sending something to share.

4. For Blog posts I get best results from Google reader share. For web pages its Stumble Upon followed by del.icio.us. For documents and PowerPoint (I know a few people that will hate me for this, but email’s still preferred by the people I want to share it with).

Here are more details:

1. Share on Facebook:

Pros: Quick, easy and fast. Plus all your “friends” get a mini-feed subscription, so its non intrusive. Most of the items I want to share are with people that I care about anyway, so this “ closed wall“. To get this just log into facebook.com. On the right nav you will see “Post on facebook” or “share on facebook”. If you drag and drop it to your browser tool bar,, it makes it easy to click on that link each time you see a page you want to share. You can add your notes to it also.

Cons: “Closed wall” – this is also a negative. If you are not my “friend” you dont get my feeds. Most new blog readers are not my friends yet. Its also not very timely. Finally it has a tendency to “overload” my friends with stuff. You dont also get RSS feeds out to your shared items easily.

2. Google Share & Google Feed Share

Pros: Similar to Share on facebook, Google Share allows you to click on a link (on the toolbar) and immediately add comments as needed. Its simple and a BIG plus is that you can give an RSS feed to your shared items. Google Reader feed sharing (or link blog as Scoble calls it) is simple and it has a keystroke (Shift S) on my blog reader to share with other folks. Google Feed reader also provides a “widget” ( see on my blog) which makes it easy to share with people I dont know yet.

Cons: Still not adopted by most of the people I want to share with., probably because I have not promoted it well. Also because its not integrated into my blog feed (which is what I’ve done with my del.icio.us feeds). Google Share also has far fewer people (people on my Google shared list is very minimal) using it (with del.icio.us there are over 500 people that “tag” things they want to share with me).

3. del.icio.us:

Pros: For sharing with great presence, nothing beats del.icio.us. Lots of users, many items to discover and social tagging makes it easy to share and also get shared items. Its also among the easiest – like Google Share and Share on facebook I have a tag icon on my toolbar.

Cons: Not very timely (but that’s expected) and the number of people sometimes overwhelms you. Too many items to view so I tend to ignore a great many.

4. Tumblr: To be honest I am new to sharing on Tumblr but I have a sense this will get some traction. Most of my venture capital friends are beginning to use this.

Pros: Photos, images, Video, blog posts – this is the best way if you share different media formats.

Cons: Very few people that use it still, but the early adopters still maintain their blogs, so this is yet another thing to update.

5. StumbleUpon: I like it to find new items and new websites. Its apparently the fastest growing and is doing well since the eBay acquisition.

Pros: Great to find stuff that others have shared.

Cons: Its not as socially adept – meaning that I get more things from random folks, and certainly not “targeted” to meet my specific needs.

6. Twitter

Pros: Quick and timely. Its the fastest to share and easiest. It has about 10% of the audience I want to reach so I get the initial reaction quickly.

Cons: I hate to have to cut and paste it the website / blog site. Guy Kawasaki has apparently used the Twitter API to setup automatic feeds into his twitter channel, which is cool. Very few of the folks I really share these items are on twitter.

7. Good old fashioned Email

Pros: Gets the best results for actually people viewing stuff. I have been surprised by its timeliness especially with the people I send it to. Its easier also to attach stuff like PowerPoint, other files, etc.

Cons: I have to enter the name (email) of every person I want to share with – which wastes time. Very difficult for me to go back and review what I sent to whom.

8. Weekly aggregation post: Jeremiah does this weekly for Social Media news. The basic concept is to review all items for the week and read over 100’s of items and put them in a single post and give them context. The best I have seen doing this
is Ritholtz.

Pros: Single way to share lots of items.

Cons: Takes too much time to do and also is not very timely for both the people receiving it or me to gather it over the week.

If I had only one way to share I would still choose email though. Followed by del.icio.us