on discovery path

The Core of the Blogosphere

I’ve been busy lately but I wanted to share a couple of changes to my reading pattern over the last few months you may find interesting…

First, I now rely heavily on WSJ Mobile Reader to keep up with latest news. This makes me officially a Crackberryhead.

Second, over the last couple of months I’ve paid less visits to Google Reader - let alone blogging - partly because of the busyness, but also because the the 1000+ unread feeds is such a turnoff.  Clicking on “Mark all as read” button multiple times has not helped me feel good.

So I decided to make some changes to cut down on the number of feeds - I began limiting feeds from TechCrunch to only those from two of its many authors, unsubscribed from news sources like GigaOM and Xconomy, and eliminated entire feeds in categories like market facts and green tech.

Now I’m focused once again on the core of it all that I care about the most… the individual bloggers.  Imagine that!!

Some Links to Share...

A good story about YouSendIt’s transition from ads-supported business model to subscriptions. Free to Freemium: 5 lessons learned from YouSendIt.com | Futuristic Play by @Andrew_Chen

Good advice, Joel-style. But sounds like a product owner in Agile? How to be a program manager - Joel on Software

A short historical perspective on the Internet law pendulum. Technology & Marketing Law Blog: The Third Wave of Internet Exceptionalism

The corporate escapee, now that’s a persona. Startup Marketing Isn’t Rocket Science, So Don’t Hire the Ph.D Too Soon - O’Reilly Radar

You know Friendster is near the end when...

… its Southeast Asian users are moving en masse to Facebook.  Proof? I’ve got a lot of new friend requests from my Indonesian buddies as well as my teenage sister on FB in the last couple of weeks.

Friendster, as you know, has just moved headquarters to Bay Area and opened new offices in Singapore and Sydney last month.  The management finally came to terms with the fact that their strongest user bases are located in markets where, unfortunately, online advertising isn’t as mature or large as in the USA.

The move may be too little, too late… social networks may be sticky but once users leave, they don’t often come back.  I for one haven’t logged into Friendster for ages…

Google App Engine's pricing: progress or throwback to pay-for-peak-usage?

Google App Engine is going to offer Adwords-style pricing - 
my first question was: if an additional 1000 people want to visit your website and as a result you go over the limit, what happens?

I found Google’s answer in one of the preview screenshots:

“As this budget represents the maximum you will be charged in one day, we recommend setting it higher than expected to buffer against sudden traffic surges.”

Translation: we turn those overflow visitors away.

Google may be thinking it can make more money with the Adwords model. SEO marketers know this very well.

As in the Adwords model where you don’t pay until impressions convert into clicks, I understand that you don’t pay until the storage/bandwidth/compute is consumed.

I also understand once you use up your budget limit in Adwords, your ads won’t compete in the auction for the rest of the day, resulting in a lost opportunity to advertise. That seems fair enough.

But what I don’t understand is how Google will tell users to willingly deny visitors each time they’re over-the-limit in App Engine. That goes against one of the key tenets of cloud computing: consumption-based pricing model.

One of the main reasons cloud computing ala Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure is so attractive is because customers only pay for what they consume, eliminating the need to plan and purchase for peak usage.

It would be interesting to see how this plays out.  What’s next, an Adwords minimum bid-like requirement?

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