Web Strategy by Jeremiah

I’m respecting your limited time by publishing this weekly summary, read the summary, then quickly scan headlines, read the bullet, then click to learn even more.

I’ve created a category called Digest where you can start to track and access these going forward. Quickly scan the succinct and categorized headlines, read summary for analysis, and click link to dive in for more. You can subscribe to this digest tag only, which filters only these posts tagged digest.

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Web Strategy Summary
Investments continue to flow into this space, primarily with Slide and Badoo getting funding. Expect more money to drop at the door steps of widget networks over the coming months, the distributed web is a marketing opportunity.

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Investment: Slide raises $50 million, will grow
Slide gets huge valuation at $500 million after raising $50 million dollars this week. This really nods to the power of the network of applications that will flow on top of social networks. watch this space carefully.

Investment: Russian Social Network gets $30million
Badoo, a russian social network with heavy video and image sharing features has received funding, and is expected to grow in Russia.

Index: List of companies that measure widgets
I created a list of different services that allow measurement of widgets, you can track them as this space grows. I expect this list to double within 3 months.

Teens: Use Social Networking
Apophenia has some analysis on how teens use social networks, key findings include: email is less relevant, girls appear more active, teens are more sensitive about what is public and what’s not, and most importantly she points out how those that are active online are just as active offline.

Measurement: MySpace Dominates Traffic over all others
Owning 72% of market share for traffic in the social networking industry, MySpace owns the vertical. Of course this doesn’t mean much, as true engagement, interaction, and attention isn’t being measured. So have some context in this measurement.

Measurement: MyYearbook has 400% growth in 2007
This is linking to the exact same post as above, but it’s worth noticing that the chart indicates that MyYearbook has 407% growth rate. This is clearly amazing growth, we’ll have to explore deeper to see what’s happening.

Scale: Social Networks’ not robust for for Emergency Communications
A great move by Google, they’ve called upon the two other popular social tools (where’s MySpace?) to start planning to be involved in disaster communications. As you may know, Twitter was used extensively in the recent southern California fires to give critical alerts. Sadly, the service went down and died due to Steve Jobs keynote. We can’t rely on these tools at the moment. That’s why a decentralized version owned and managed by many, may have many more fail safes.

Privacy: Personal and Public lives Collide
The information housed and contained within social networks continues to be a concern, some critics, according to this article by BBC, discuss how some Facebook members are trying to understand how their profiles are being used even after they delete their account. For one woman who married another woman, she found about her sexual and public lives colliding in a way she never expected.

Growth: MySpace growth and expansion
This high level article from WSJ covers the growth and future expansion that MySpace will have in the coming years. This new media network, yes I called it a media network, is changing how the youth interact, self-express their fandom.

History: Evolution of Social Networks
Where did people first start connecting with others online? It started in the 80s and GigaOm looks at the different tools from bulletin boards, usenet, online services and other areas before this space really started to explode.. .

I’m covering this space as an analyst, leave a comment if I missed any, or email with any things to include in next week’s digest.

Recently, I met a developer who was frustrated. This web developer had been programming and developing websites for nearly 10 years, but admitted he was having a very hard time keeping up with the younger faster developers that knew the new languages.

It’s not really about age, but about the ability to constantly learn new languages and skills in order to stay competitive in the environment. The last thing he wanted to do as a web developer is get stuck doing production work, or maintaining a system someone else had already built for him.

I suggested that he should probably look at expanding his business skills, to grow beyond being a ‘code monkey’ which would lead him beyond tech lead, into program management and eventually strategy.

What specific steps did I tell him to take?

Start reading books on web management and process management

Understand how the software fits into the greater scheme of the business, department, or company

Expand and learn more about user experience research

Grow a network by adopting social media to learn, discuss, and market oneself

Lead projects: develop needs, do research, develop plans, create feature function reports, and feasibility reports, learn cost/benefit analysis

Lead programs: manage a business program (where software is the core) and manage it like a profit and loss, become an integrated part of the business.

Practice presentation to business managers and stakeholders

Engage business teams in meetings, training, and lunch

Ultimately, he should be able to move into a more business role, where business and customer needs are always present (and hopefully, with greater compensation and opportunities). Since strategy is always needed, and armed with a strong technology background, he should be able to move into a position that requires less time to re-invent a new language every other year.

Do you have suggestions for him? What should he do to avoid the developer recycle shuffle and move up the food chain?

I’m watching more closely the movement within the widget industry, it’s growing quickly, and we expect 2008 to have some serious growth from this market. Expect widget advertising networks to appear this year, and as a result, the need to measure and watch this distributed industry is important. Here’s a list of companies that measure widget network growth.

How is widget measurement different than traditional web analytics? Widgets spread (velocity = distance/time) over networks, and are distributed. Users will embed them, interact with them and share with them with others. Also, you can identify unique nodes where applications have spread, these are influencer nodes, and should be treated with extra care. When deploying your widget, since it’s managed by a host, demand that you’ve access to metrics so you can see how it performs, and more importantly, who it works well with.

List of companies that provide widget measurement or metrics

Appsaholic from Social Media
“SocialMedia developed Appsaholic, an analytics suite that allows you to track the success of your application and see how it compares to others”

Clearspring
“Clearspring is the leading provider of cross-platform widget services. Our goal is to make it easy to use content and services from across the Internet to weave personalized experiences. With our flagship service, digital content and service providers can easily package, distribute, and analyze the performance of widgets via a single platform. Clearspring is a privately funded company based in McLean, Virginia.”

Gigya
“Gigya serves the world’s largest brands with a full-service widget advertising model covering design, development, hosting, distribution, viral promotion and tracking.”

Widgetbox’s Syndication Metrics
“Widgetbox’s Widget Syndication Metrics is an analytics dashboard for widget developers. It is free and comes with every widget on Widgetbox.”

If you want to learn more about widget strategy, this podcast with Clearspring is very helpful.

Know of others? Please leave a comment.