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Why Google Copies
At Digital DD, we’ve long argued that Google uses a two-stage process to expand into new businesses: first, they scoop up and aggregate lots of data, while distributing lots of traffic to the people they aggregate. Then, they use their aggregated data to bootstrap their own content creation. Once their content is…
A Reductio Ad Absurdum of Facebook / Google+ Comparisons
Alan Wolk at The Toad Stool has an amazing post about a Chrome Extension called BetterFacebook, which “most notably add[s] the Circle functionality of GooglePlus to Facebook.” As regular Digital DD readers know, the “Circle” functionality on Facebook is called “Lists.” Not only does it predate Google+, but Facebook…
LinkedIn released their earnings on Thursday, beating estimates. They showed faster-than-expected growth in all segments, particularly premium subscriptions (60% growth, vs a 37% projection) and marketing (111% growth, versus 58% expected). As we have previously argued, LinkedIn is making a useful and aggressive push towards being the “Twitter of business.” Their Twitter partnership refers more traffic…
How Startups are Outsourcing Distributed Spam Attacks
There are two practical reasons not to spam:
If you’re using your own server, your ISP will quickly identify you as a pest and shut you down. If you’re paying to use a mailing service, they will identify you as a pest before your ISP gets around to it.
The…
Web.com has announced that they’re buying Network Solutions for $405mm in cash, and shares worth $155mm (or $207mm post-announcement—more on that later).
As ReadWriteWeb notes, this is less than the $800mm that General Atlantic paid for it in 2007. And much less than the $21bn that Verisign paid in 2000. There’s a decent chance that General Atlantic…
One of the surprising effects of blogging culture and social media is that articulate and/or popular people have a vastly different experience than the rest of us. Just look at the EJ / AirBNB saga. Here’s how EJ started her story:
I am crouched low on the carpeted steps of my apartment building’s old staircase,…
LivingSocial Updates
Even a few months ago, LivingSocial seemed like the definition of an also-ran: Groupon got PR, small group-buying competitors got PR, and when those small companies got written up, LivingSocial could hope that the phrase “Like Groupon and LivingSocial” would appear somewhere in the copy.
But they’ve recently been recognized as a player…
If there’s one way to sum up the resurgence of display advertising compared to search advertising in the last few years, it would be this: Display is finally a market. Like a financial security that can be split, swapped, sliced, diced, packaged, unpackaged, and hedged, ad space is being matched to the exact right bidder,…
AirBNB’s Drastic Crisis Response
Hot on the heels of VC Charlie O’Donnell’s rousing defense of AirBNB, the company announced a new, dramatic policy: $50,000 in de facto insurance for all hosts. This opens AirBNB up to significant fraud risk; they may impose some pretty strict hurdles, or end up paying the $50,000 mostly to people who…
Alipay Settlement Doesn’t Impress Yahoo Shareholders
Yahoo’s Alipay settlement, announced early Friday morning, initially pushed the stock up. By the end of the day, Yahoo was down slightly. This was due, in part, to negative comments from analysts, who are still concerned that Yahoo essentially gave away part of an extremely valuable business.
Epocrates:…
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