Freeconomics

Is the saying "there's no such thing as a free lunch" becomming obsolete?

There is a clear trend, especially on the Internet, that more and more services are free of charge. This has become possible mainly because the marginal cost of adding yet another user to the service is essentially zero.

Take some time and watch this video with Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail. (Sorry, no embedded version available.)
Update May 22nd, 2009 - sorry, the video I linked to above is not available any longer, try this link instead!
He discusses the drivers behind the "free" business model, and especially how the decreasing marginal cost of processing power, storage and bandwidth has transformed the Internet.

This is great for the majority of users. As we say in Sweden - gratis är gott.

I almost wrote "many people will never sign up for a service that would cost them, regardless how small the fee might be". This is not entirely true. There is plenty of examples where people pays for services, and are happy with that.

And in many cases people will continue to pay for high quality content and services. The "free" business model will not take it all.

But I still believe that the trend of free services are here to stay. And many free services are good. Really good. You probably uses a number of free services yourself.

Of course any (or at least most) services or products that are offered for free, without any other revenue stream, are doomed in the long run. If the business is not run by a true philanthropic there is probably a business model that will monetize the business one way or another in the background.

There is a number of business models that might apply. On Chris Anderson's blog you can read this post for some ideas and discussions.

Some of the models that can be identified includes:

• Ad revenues
  Very common of course. With several sub-types that can be outlined.
  
• Get bought
  The dream of many start-ups. Provide a service, get popular and get bought (for big money) by someone. Yes, we have seen this several times. But a truly gamble.
  
• Freemium
  This is my personal favourite in terms of attitude change. As opposed to (earlier) models where you could get a demo version or a version with very limited functionality for free, the Freemium model provides a free, fully functional, version for the majority of users. But for a small group of power users some extra features are unlocked for a fee.

Now, what about this blog? Oh yes, I do have ads on it. And for this post I created an Amazon Associates account. So please click on the ads and buy the book from the link above...

I truly doubt that I will make any revenue though. With a bit of luck I might cover the fees for the domain name and web hosting. Maybe.

What do you say? Would you pay to read it? Or pay to get the posts 24 hours before non-paying readers? Probably not (or? - let me know otherwise...).

The value for me to blog here is something else. And as you have read to the end of this (free) post, you hopefully found some value in it.

Now off to a not-that-free lunch.

Google is now an OpenID provider

With the current trend to open up it seems like everyone is competing to provide bits and pieces to the overall equation. Now Google has become an OpenID provider.

This happened shortly after Yahoo announced their upcomming OpenID support. Yahoo will go public beta end of January though. Google's OpenID works today.

The Google support is through Blogger.com. Meaning that the OpenID URL you submit to login is a URL to one of your blogs. At the moment you need to login to Blogger at http://draft.blogger.com/ - then update your Blogger profile. Currently it only works for blogs with a blogspot.com URL.

This is not a big surprise, especially since Blogger earlier enabled OpenID for comments.

And I just tried it. Did the trick for Dopplr login.

One question - what about blogs that are maintained by multiple persons? Will the blog URL be possible to use by all users who are registered to the blog?

The answer seems to be yes - if the other individual is admin of the blog. This means that such blog URLs will be possible to use by multiple persons, using each persons individual blogger login credentials.

By design or a "feature"? Guess it comes with the architecure. Might be a handy feature in some scenarios, but be aware that granting other people admin access to a blog might open up some OpenID sites for them.

Update 080129: Just noticed from a post at BloggerInDraft that the Blogger OpenID service can be used by any domain you own. This by using a delegate feature. Nice.

Facebook profile - time to tidy up

Today Facebook enabled the profile clean up tool that was announced a few days ago.

When I visited my profile page a few minutes ago I was presented with this box:


So, let's start the year with a fresh Facebook profile page. I selected some applications I do not use frequently and went ahead.












Sure enough - now at the bottom of my profile I see this:


And when I expand it I see the applications (they are not expanded since I manually minimized them).

So - a way for people to keep the applications on their profiles, but ensure that the main profile page does not appear that cluttered. Definately needed with the abundance of Facebook apps that gets installed.


Now - it would be nice if the tool procatively proposed when and what to move to this extended profile. And no, I do not have a proposal for a guiding rule for when to propose what.

Twitter goes to Japan

Twitter is about to launch in Japan later this year according to this source. Also mentioned here.

This seems to be a localized version. The first non-english one.

Twitter.jp is already registered, but it doesn't look like it belongs to Twitter? Or does it? Do you know japanese? As the text on Twitter.jp is enclosed as images I can not run it through a translator.

Here is a japanese news story. And here is the translated version.

Update 080117: ..and here is the Twitter blog post covering this...

"Nyskap", creativity and more...

It's Friday. Looking for something to watch during the weekend? Then watch this! (The videos are in Swedish though...)

I just found this lecture on YouTube. Fredik Härén from interesting.org speaks about the changing world.

All in all there's five videos. Shall be watched in sequence. It is actually two separate talks at the same event. The first talk is in video #1 and 1 min 50 secs into the second. From that on the second, longer, talk starts. But if you start watching the first I am sure you will continue through them all. A good speaker!

Some related notes before we jump into the show:

• Fredik uses a newlish Swedish word; "nyskap". It's a word game based on the Swedish words kunskap [knowledge] and ny [new]. So far it might be translated into "newledge". However in Swedish we also have the word nyskapande [to create something new]. Anyone have a good suggestion for a new English word along these lines? (Also note that there is a web site called nyskap.se - as of today just one screen as it seems.)
  
  
• While browsing YouTube to find all parts of the lecture I noticed that SvT (the Swedish television) has a YouTube channel. I must admit I had missed that. I knew about the SvT Play initiative, where a large selection of the archive is made available over the Internet. I didn't know that SvT uses YouTube as a channel.

Now, here's the videos. Enjoy!

Part 1:


Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

Ovi from Nokia

Here is a video from LeWeb3 where Ari Virtanen from Nokia presents the Ovi concept. Have a look!

Interesting indeed. Let's see when it goes live fully.

This is the first time I have seen any details around Ovi.

According to a press release "Ovi, meaning 'door' in Finnish, enables consumers to easily access their existing social network, communities and content, as well as acting as a gateway to Nokia services".

According to the video Ovi will both have an Internet site and a desktop application.
It will tie together both the phone management services (settings, phone book management, backup etc), the current Nokia Internet services and also interact with other sites and services.

In terms of Social Networking services Nokia Mosh is in beta currently. Of course you can find me there, I'm user johan. If you are on Mosh please connect to me so we can explore together.

Summing up 2007 and moving ahead into 2008

A new year. New blog posts to come.

As I didn't end last year with a summary of impressions from the year I thought I'd start with such a post.

The reason

This blog has existed for about half a year now. Why?

To publish things and expose yourself on the internet might be scary to some. I believe it is not that scary. And so does Annika Lidne in this post.

I have found that keeping a blog of this nature is good for several reasons:

• It is a proactive way of interacting and participating in the discussion.
• It is an alternative to write an email and send around to make your point. Of course given that the content is of an open and generic nature.
• It is a way for me to structure and document my thoughts around specific topics. Great to look back to if needed.
• It is a good exercise in writing.
• It is fun.
• And finally - it is rewarding to notice that people actually read it. Like you do!

I covered some other aspects here.

The content

TheKillerAttitude.com is intended as my "personal blog about not-that-personal stuff". I do have a number of other blogs (some visible here) which are more personal in their nature.

During the year I wrote about several topics that caught my interest. Quite a few hoovers around Social Media and related areas. Also other areas have been, and will be brought up. Have look in the archive to see what I covered so far.

The metrics

Since the start of this blog I have published 47 posts.

So, is this blog successful? Depends on how you define successful I guess.

As expected I don't make any money on blogging. Or actually I make some - so far my AdSense ads have generated $9.40. But I can't cash out until I reach $100 - I'll let you know when (and if) that happens...

What is more rewarding is to find that you and others visits this blog. Although I use several tools to measure the traffic it is hard to get a single digit that measures the traffic. A few things can be said though:

The trend is positive. There is an increase every month so far, except for the number of sites (~unique visitors?) in December.

In December this blog had over 5000 visits, and over 1000 visitors (unique hosts):

All in all, this is more traffic than I thought I'd get when I started.

Now, the number of visitors is not that important in itself. It is the reactions I get from you that is the real reward. So please drop me a note, add a comment or just drop by.

Finally, this blog was quoted in a Swedish newpaper last year. Fun!

The platform

I am using Blogger.com for this and other blogs. I know that there is other platforms available that might be seen as more capable. But so far Blogger.com has proved good enough for my needs, and more important, simple to manage.

The blog is published on my own domain name (rather than on blogspot.com). For a while I considered to use my family name domain, but went for the current one instead.

This post is however the first one I write using Google Documents rather than the built in editor of Blogger.com. Google Documents offers a better editor, and seems to integrate nicely when publishing with Blogger.com - let's see how it works out. (Update after post attempt - didn't manage to publish this post directly from Google Docs. Worked for blogspot.com-hosted blogs, but not for this one. Why? Any ideas?)

The RSS feed is delivered via Feedburner.com - you can subscribe here. Currently I have noticed an issue with the feed - embedded items (like graphs and videos) sometimes does not show up in the feed. Do you have any idea on why? Please give me a hand!

The future

What's next? Follow this blog to find out. At least what the next post will cover.

I will continue to post about things that I believe is fun and interesting. And especially things that is related to "There's no killer app - only a killer attitude ".

Have a great 2008!