Lifestreaming: The Real-time Web at VLab
Last night, the Stanford VLab organization held a great talk on what they called lifestreaming. The rest of us might call it “how social networks and Web 2.0 are changing out lives”. It was my first event from VLab, but it was excellent.
Kara Swisher, Co-Executive Editor, All Things Digital, Wall Street Journal was the moderator, but she was the least moderate on the panel. She did not pull any punches, especially with Loic Le Meur, Founder, Seesmic and Twitter junkie extraordinare. Even he admitted he twittered a little too much when he let people know when he was going to the bathroom.
An awkward question that she brought up was with so many social sites who are all focused on advertising, is there really any room for more and how can they make themselves different. The panel did agree that web sites seem to add feature after feature until they all start to do the same things. Yahoo was mentioned as a prime example of a company that adds feature after feature until no one uses anything. It was also used to point out the other big problem with tech sites. They may listen too much to the tech press (or as Kara described it “14 slightly overweight white guys) and not enough to the customer and Main St.
Leah Culver, Co-Founder at Pownce described the Pownce service as built by the her and the other co-founders to keep in touch with their friends. They have the smallest amount of advertising on the site, but what has been important to Pownce is charging users for a year-long premium memberships, also called pro accounts. Users with pro accounts can upload larger files and a few other services. She said that new services would be rolled out shortly. Her company managed to get $20k in the first few weeks that the site was launched thanks to these pro account. Her best advice is to figure out a way to monetize by some sort of addition feature that you can offer to premium users without alienating the basic users.
Culver’s favorite new site and service is Wakoopa, which lets you share what software you are using with your friends and vice versa. Basically, it is social networking for hard core programmers.
Bret Taylor, Co-founder, FriendFeed and formerly of Google, says that the key to the social networking site that he has founded is that you are using your friends and their trusted opinions to filter the fire hose of data that we have to deal with each day on the Internet. In the case of his site, they are not trying to monetize it yet. It is more important to build the community at this stage. He and his company is focused mainly on filtering, but we wants to put more focus on relevance of what is presented to the user going forward.
Loic Le Meur sees Seesmic as a video talk show open to everyone in the world. The idea is that you post a video talking about anything and somebody replies back with their own video. He is not monetizing the site yet and has no immediate plans to. He is serious about building this business (like the 4 other businesses that he built and sold in Europe). He had 3 offers to buy the company at Europe’s conference Web 2.0. Seesmic is creating branding channels for advertisers like their recent launch of the X-Files movie on their site. In the “good news for video sites”, bandwidth costs are decreasing. His company is paying on the order of $10k for their bandwidth. But he is not concern. His company has raised $12 million to ride out any market downturns. One of his investors is Jeff Clavier, Founder, SoftTech VC and on the same panel.
Tags: social networks, Stanford, VLab