Skype will prove to be a wise acquisition for eBay. The VOIP service is in the process of being expanded to the third most important Internet-based communication tool behind email and web browsing.

Instant messaging has that title now, but an integrated Skype featuring Yahoo's Instant Messenger, PayPal payments, video conferencing and voice mail will become even more indispensable and ubiquitous.

The new "Skype Me" service announced this week by eBay gives bargain hunters an effective means of staying abreast of auctions, and similar services will put the "real time' into real estate services.

In the future look for eBay to add Yahoo Mail to the Skype services, although Skype should allow users to transparently connect any email address to their Skype account, enabling you to communicate or leave messages in every convenient format.

Unless Google also gets into the VOIP/IM game, the new Gbuy payment system won't be competitive with Paypay.

Found via BetaNews.

It's days like today (cable line gets cut, no internet, missed 3 meetings, phones down, etc...) that send me dreaming about our annual family summer vacation. We typically go to either the Gulf Coast of Florida (Captiva Island, North Island of Captiva or Sanibel) or we go to North Carolina. One of my favorite N.C. beaches is Pine Island in Corolla, which is in the Northern Outer Banks. It's got that small town community, great people, great waves, beautiful beaches and some of the best beach homes around. Oh how I wish I was in Pine Island, NC today... soon and very soon, I'm going to see the King!

Since it's that time of year again, the vacationing time of year that is, where are all of you going on your summer vacation? Wouldn't it be great to just have a site dedicated to the joys of summer vacations?

Yesterday I had a refreshingly interesting conversation with Jason Fried of 37Signals. Jason, not that you need this explanation, has reluctantly become a poster boy for Web 2.0. Jason has transformed his company from a consulting firm to a production factory (they make simple web apps people find useful - over 500,000 people in fact). Taking a company that started out doing consulting and shifting it into a company that sells products is no small task, but one Fried and the 37 Signals crew has executed beautifully.

Instead of regurgitating the contents of the call I'll give you a few high points and bait you to come back tomorrow and Monday for the question and answer session. I think I might call is Jason Dowdell vs Jason Fried or Jason v Jason or right coast vs lake coast... well, I'll figure out the title if you promise to read the post, it's a deal then.

Benefits of Keeping Applications Simple
+ Jason Fried currently handles the support requests for ALL products.

+ Support takes him 1.5 - 2 hours a day.

+ 60 - 70 emails a day are all the support requests they receive.

+ That means they get support requests from .014% of their half a million users on a daily basis. Can you imagine what would happen if Enterprise Software vendors like Oracle did that?

+ Sunrise is their latest product (still in dev). They completely scrapped it and started over cause it was too hard to get data into it and now, 3 weeks after the restructuring, they're liking what they have built. Look for it in a couple months.

+ He thinks Google has done a great thing by keeping blogger simple but that doesn't mean I'm giving Shellen props for not implementing my feature requests, but I do understand Fried's point.

+ He has strong opinions on chefs and waiters, as does his whole crew.

+ Says fame hasn't made them less productive, but it has saved on marketing costs.

Closing Thoughts and Shout Outs
Stay tuned for even more pointed questions (now with answers) in the Q and A of my phone call with Jason Fried.

Thank you Sprint for sending that phone my way. Today a worker severed my cable line and my internet connection has been down all day, but thanks to the Sprint Ambassador Program, I'm connected and able to give mshift readers a post on an inspirational entrepreneur. If only Sprint would send a Treo 700p to me and each Labitat employee, now that would be something to get really excited about.

A free program organizes "long tail" data about how people found your site through natural search and suggests keywords to use for search engine optimization. The theory is that by aggregating all of the infrequently used long tail terms that were used to find your site, you can increase your natural search traffic more than by buying popular keywords. The underlying message is that natural search is cheaper and of a higher quality than paid search, which makes sense, although mining all of the keywords can be time consuming, even with help of this analytics software. PR Firm Connors Communications, which wrote the MyLongTail software (now located at HitTail.com), is also touting the merits of blogging and public relations to create content that is effective in garnering natural search instead of over paying for paid search. Many companies don't have the expertise in SEO and writing to make this work, so paid search can be an easier path of least resistance. I haven't played with MyLongTail yet so I can't comment on its effectiveness, but a review will be forthcoming from someone here at MarketingShift.

AOL has transformed its also-ran Netscape portal into a Digg wannabe. I'll give them credit for leaping headlong into Web 2.0, but I'm not sure the Netscape audience is ready for it.

AOL customers like to be spoon-fed information, so getting them to take the initiative and become meta-journalists rating and commenting on stories may not be easy. The site launched today, and the early results show that users are heavy on the frothy entertainment news, which won't distinguish the site from the E or the other paparazzi-fueled junk.

The interface is a bit overwhelming with two columns featuring a clutter of images, mixed in with advertisements. Netscape emphasizes links to video content, trying to tap into a bit of the YouTube phenomenon as well.

In a democratic society, allowing the "news" channels to be controlled by the masses bypasses the media filter, but then again, it relies on the audience to make decisions at least as good as professional editors. Theoretically it is good that the idea has been copied by a mass publisher, but I'm skeptical that the strategy will vault Netscape.com back into the limelight.

According to the
Financial Times
, MySpace is looking to acquire ad serving technology as well as find a search partner.

Of the big three, Google is the most likely partner because it is the least likely to directly compete with MySpace with its own social network. Yahoo and MSN relationships would be messy as both will likely offer competing services.

Zedo would be a good fit as an ad-serving technology acquisition as the company has been at it for a long time, and they already have an office in London, which would make Rupe happy.

A friend of mine just sent me this message that we can now chat with the Google Girls Live. It seems that all of the account reps are female and now they have added an option to email or chat with an Adwords Rep to see if they can help you spend some more of your money.




a / s / L ?

Blue Lithium has rolled out AdRoll, a video ad network that tracks user movements around the Web in order to deliver targeted ads. According to the press release, ads from websites that users have visited previously will be delivered during their subsequent surfing.

Blue Lithium says it has 1,000 publishers in its network that will deliver its ads. For example, if you go to Sprint, later you could see a Sprint ad. Even more effective and desirable would be if the company tracked the categories of product, so if I'm Sprint and someone went to Virgin Mobile before, my ad would still be shown. Ads for companies that you haven't seen recently would probably lead to more clicks.

Behavioral targeting has great promis in video and static ads, and companies like Blue Lithium should offer a bounty to consumers in exchange for their willingness to be tracked online (would a box of cookies be appropriate?), and users must be able to toggle on and off the tracking too.

Found via Adotas.

Social networking is now, and will continue to be bigger than portals in the future, according to Piper Jaffray investment analyst Safa Rashtchy.

MySpace now gets more monthly page views than AOL or MSN, according to Rashtchy (as quoted by News.com). I'll have to look for the numbers, but I'm guessing that the portals still get more visitors, while MySpace has a smaller and more dedicated audience.

The billon dollar questions of course are, are these fads or not, and how do you make money from people writing about themselves and reading about their new friends?

The social networking fad isn't something all that new, it's an updated version of things we already had (Geocities, blogging, Amazon recomendations, newsgroups). It is a different packaging for a new generation, and Yahoo, MSN etc. will soon offer slightly different twists that add commerce to the mix, finding ways that MySpace hasn't dreamed of to turn those eyeballs into transactions. Social networking will be absorbed into portals, not vice versa.

The urge for people to share more and more of their lives and likes on line is here to stay, until a privacy disaster prompts people to think twice about opening their diaries online. We've heard many cases about stalkers and law enforcement using social networking data to target individuals, and an increase in these incidents will turn the tide before long. It is ironic that will all the talk of privacy and snooping fears, people are happy to tell the world where they live, where they hang out, and who their buddies are.

Yahoo's gravitational pull of eBay seems to be too strong for the auction site to maintain its relationship with Google.

Hot on the heels of a pact with Yahoo, eBay released an AdSense competing ad network called AdContext. The company has enhanced the context-sensing software used on its website and opened it up to affiliates. According to eBay the system scans the text of a Web site for keywords and returns relevant eBay listings, search results and categories.

The company will split the revenue from any resulting sales with affiliates, which theoretically could produce much larger returns than PPC ads. AdContext won't be as pervasive as AdSense, but don't underestimate impact of eBay buyers and sellers.

Google's biggest advertiser for AdWords is eBay, but my magic eight ball tells me that that will change before the next Olympiad as Yahoo and eBay continue to integrate products and services.