It is a dilemma because in most cases the biggest hits on the web are sites that were not started to make money in the first place. Those that were started with the objective to make money, seldom did. Anybody among us who have tried their hands in building e-commerce sites, would most probably have experienced that bitter discovery. Making money on the web is hard (unless you join the dark side of porn or not-so-honest-MLM).

In Malaysia we’ve seen loads of money been thrown into sites like Catcha.com, Bluehyppo.com, Gua.com.my and innumerable others with negligible commercial success. Before anyone start self-humiliation thrashings, bear in mind that even global names like YouTube and Twitter is finding it hard to monetize the gazillions of traffic on their sites.

I don’t know what is the latest traffic count of YouTube today but you can bet that it’s huge. Now owned by Google that’s flooded with cash, they can afford to sustain but they’ll have to start to contribute to the bottom line soon. As far as I can see, Google is banking on the ad-supported model. You can see plenty of ads appearing on a layer above the YouTube videos nowadays. From what i can tell though, this model has not been bringing in the level of money required.

An interesting service is Twitter which has grown tremendously. Currently, they’re handling 50 million tweets a day, a 2000% increase from 2.5 million tweets per day in 2009.

With only 140 characters per post – certainly no room to squeeze in ad in the post.

Most of the Twitter users seldom visit Twitter websites either, relying on 3rd party apps to read and post their updates. So this make context-relevant Google-style ads on the website less effective.

The industry has been observing Twitter executives, how are they going to make money. And, until recently it seemed that they have no reliable plan in hand.

However, things have changed. Twitter has came up with a novel solution. They signed agreements with search giants Google, Yahoo and Microsoft – so that they have access to all public tweets. In turn, they can then develop whatever tools to process and publish Twitter posts as part of their live search results. Twitter call it ‘firehose’ of tweets (you know like firemen’s hose with unlimited gush of water) as opposed to the rate-limited API being used for free by 50,000+ applications today.

This back room data-mining

licensing arrangement has enabled Twitter to charge and collect money. It’s actually quite a good arrangement since the users are not affected directly. They never see any intrusive messages. Maybe there are privacy issues but public tweets are publicly available anyway.

What does it mean to us, mere mortals, though

The lesson here is – don’t just look for a direct way to make money.

Making money out of selling information has been available for a long time. The value of database has always been known though not utilised by many.

So if you have a popular blog, portal or applications, find out the characteristics of your traffic and think who will be interested in them? Maybe there’s somebody who is willing to pay for it.

Before that Google threw its hat into the OS arena with Google Chrome OS. In my earlier post, I was not so impressed but others seem to be excited with it.

Now listen…. they want to pick a fight with Facebook and Twitter in the social networking business as well. Google is rumored to be set to release new features on Gmail allowing users to update their status for friends to see as part of a move that sees the search giant embrace social media initiatives popularised by other social networking sites (SNS).

The new service is reportedly similar to the status-bar tools seen on Facebook and Twitter, and will further incorporate photo and video sharing.

This new development – which is widely expected to be formally announced sometime this week – comes one week after Facebook marked its sixth birthday by revealing it has more than doubled its number of users in the last year to 400 million.

Google and Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, have recently looked to incorporate social-media services to make their offerings more relevant for users also active on SNS. In October, both Google and Bing announced they would adopt a Twitter function to reflect audiences’ growing interest and trust in social commentary. Microsoft was first to launch its Bing Twitter Search function and further connected with Facebook to offer search results on users’ updated statuses.

Further blurring the lines between search, portals and SNS, Friendster and Yahoo Southeast Asia last month also entered into a multi-year strategic partnership that lets mutual users more efficiently share information.

Now what?

Gmail certainly has a lot of users nowadays because of its simplicity to use. Many users have ditched Yahoo mail because of the clutter of news and other content that Yahoo tried to shove down the users throat. Will this move marked a grave mistake by Google?

As it is, Gmail is already pretty heavy to load with all the complex pageload. On days when the trust-worthy Streamyx typically hit bottleneck speed – one will have to switch to basic-view. Imagine, if status-update and more photo and video is added – can the users cope?

Whatever it is – welcome to the social networking bandwagon, Sir. May I introduce you to your fellow latecomer… Tan Sri Vincent Tan from Malaysia. Please get acquainted!

Update Wed 10 Feb 2010

Here it is! I checked my Gmail account this morning and there’s a new line ‘Buzz’ at the left menu column. Just under the Inbox link. Clicking on the link, it opens up a new Buzz page with a welcoming note that informed me that Gmail has conveniently made me follow 14 other people in my contact list – but for some reason none of them has a reciprocal follow on me. It also tells me that my post on Picasaweb photo services will be automatically posted into my Buzz.

If anyone is concerned about Facebook privacy… by comparison Google has even less care about my say who I want to follow or what I want to share with other people. If earlier, I was saying about how Yahoo shove unwanted content at its Yahoo! mail service… this time Google just shackle me down with forced connections. What if I’m a minor and some of those my contact list is shady characters? (contact list is, by default, automatically added based on your email sent put

)

The cheek and arrogance of them. In fact Google executives were reported at the Buzz launch to say that online social networking has become so widespread and disorganized that only Google, with its massive reach and immense computing power, can make sense of it all.

“It has become a core belief of ours that organizing the social information on the Web is a Google-scale problem,” Todd Jackson, Gmail product manager, said at the launch.

Yes… Gmail may have 176 million users. But not everyone is an active user and as I speak, a few people I checked who are inactive registered users, noted that the Buzz component isn’t in their page.

Related articles:

• Google Takes On Facebook, Twitter With ‘Buzz’ (wired.com)
• Microsoft, Yahoo Diss Google’s Buzz (wired.com)
• Facebook is the new threat to Google (guardian.co.uk)
• Google’s Bad Buzz: Microsoft, Yahoo Mock New Social Product (dailyfinance.com)
• Google flexes muscles against social networks (ubergizmo.com)

Thus was born Social Networking phenom which is closely linked to the popularity of terms such as Web 2.0. A ‘new’ internet is borne.

Then other social networking sites such as MySpace Beauty and the Beast trailer and Friendster were born. They were very popular especially among teenagers and celebrities. However, from a dorm room in Silicon Valley, a newer site Facebook came to prominence. Given its lack of customisation options, it was not the obvious choice for teenagers. However, Facebook’s stroke of genius lies in its decision to open up third party developers to develop plethora of apps for Facebook. Together with its own brand of HTML, anybody can develop their own quizzes and more… very soon Facebook became a household internet name.

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What sets FB apart is its business-friendly approach – they make it very easy for businesses to set up custom pages – for free. And more crucially – the ease for businesses to advertise on Facebook – with complete control on the targeting of viewers, on-the-fly editing of advertising and ability to start, pause or stop a campaign.

Out of the blue (pun not intended), came Twitter to prominence in 2006 and a short 3 years later millions of internet users became addicted to this SMS-like brevity of Twitter. The success of Twitter (which is founded by co-founder of a podcasting company Odeo) surprises many media gurus because Twitter does not offer anything much except updating statuses. Anybody can do that right?

The Cycle (aka The Devil’s Ground) dvdrip Becoming Jane Again much of the success of Twitter is the decision to let third party developers use Twitter and make their own applications. So much so that it was said the majority of Twitter user never actually visited Twitter homepage after registration of account. That is also the problem with Twitter because they have not been able to figure out how to make money out of the service. However, a leaked internal document in Feb 2009 indicated that the company ambition is to have 1 billion users which will then make the service a major internet traffic controller which ‘obviously is a serious business’.

The question now is: which social networking sites that you use? Do you have accounts on all 3 – which admittedly I do. But do you spend your time on all 3? – obviously not a practical approach.

Personally, I spend more time on FB rather than Twitter. However, recent changes by Facebook is alienating users. Somehow when I visited my FB wall recently, I find it swamped with less-useful entries. You know what I mean? Can’t really put my finger to what it was yet though – but that is the feeling I get and that’s enough disincentive to check out the site.

I’ve never been a chatter, so Twitter is not for me. To get the best out of Twitter, you need to check the status regularly or you will miss out on the conversation. Unless of course you are a user of always-on handsets like iPhone or Blackberry.

Blogging? Occassionally yeah.. well I blog here but my entries come in spurts. I will try to write more often though. Sorry boss.

For the FB and Tweet addicts, I wonder… did it feel like the world suddenly has no purpose? Tcshk.. so melodramatic.

Both Facebook and Twitter reported that they suffered waves of cyber attacks on their sites last week that caused their services to be disrupted. Apparently it was of the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack type and it was orchestrated in 2 waves. The first wave was a spam campaign consisting of e-mails with links back to posts by one of its users. The second and more destructive phase consisted of the denial-of-service attack, which attacked the sites’ servers by sending lots of junk requests to that users’ page.

Therein lies the crux of the issue. The attacks were not directed at these sites themselves but rather to one of their users. Apparently it is politically motivated and was targeted at a blogger who goes by “Cyxymu” — Cyrillic spelling of Sukhumi, a city in the breakaway territory of Abkhazia in Georgia. So someone somewhere who hated his (or her) guts attacked his online presence at several Web sites, including Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal. In other words these sites are just collateral damage in this political war.

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For most of us, the damage was minimal – if any. These social networking sites are just casual indulgence. But what about organisations that have chosen to use these sites as crucial part of their business? The outages would have caused them losses – just like the losses incurred when our TNB suffered blackouts a few years back.

Surely many have asked, is it wise to put your business reliance on this fragile online facilities? Will it be safer to do business offline – face-to-face the old way? It is easy to agree with this logic. But this is the same argument faced when one decide whether to embrace new things. Like automation of factory against traditional way of doing things. Like computerising your documentation against pen-and-paper methods. Like travelling on air against using road or sea.

But it still is daunting to think that someone could just bomb you when you have done nothing wrong. The thing is – we live in Malaysia where many of these cyber terrorism and physical terrorism are just things that your read happenings elsewhere. It could not happen to me – you think. But a lot of hatred is being sowed – especially online. We might not be so safe anymore…

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