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John Quelch, on of the experts profiled in Conversations with Marketing Masters, has an interesting post on How to Value the Advertising-Supported Internet on hbr.org. According to his post, the Internet employs 1.2 million people directly to conduct advertising and commerce, build and maintain the infrastructure, and facilitate its use. Each Internet job supports approximately 1.54 additional jobs elsewhere in the economy, for a total of 3.05 million, or roughly 2%, of employed Americans. The dollar value of their wages is about $300 billion or around 2% of U.S. GDP.

Read the full post here on hbr.org.

Online social media, meaning social networking and all 2.0 style platforms following the principles of the architecture of participation are growing rapidly and get a ton of interest across industries. The understanding is, that these compelling interaction communities are the new access to consumer behavior and thus need to be leveraged for marketing and sales to outperform the competition. Harris Interactive has done a poll earlier this month to address the question whether Online Social Media really leverage behavior or they just act as communication enablers:

When it comes to making purchase decisions, consumers obtain information using a mixture of old media and new media and those that would constitute “push” (advertising and websites) and “pull” (information from neutral, informal communication).

These are some of the results of The Harris Poll of 2,355 U.S. adults surveyed online between March 9 and 16, 2009 by Harris Interactive.

The most frequently identified methods of gathering information were:

• Using a company website (36%),
• Face-to-face with a salesperson or other company representative (22%), and
• Face-to-face with a person not associated with the company (21%).

Other frequently mentioned methods or sources were:

• Advertising in print media (19%),
• Independent websites that have reviews (19%),
• Phone call to the company (16%), and
• Public or private social networking sites (4%).

See the report here: http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/pubs/Harris_Poll_2009_06_15.pdf

The poll results are really quite interesting. But I am missing the demand and lead generation role of Online Social Media and their impact on the overall marketing and sales funnel. Obviously people do not go on Facebook to find the right brand to choose for their new car, but I’m quite sure that conversations on social media sites generate a lot of demand and leads that then later enter into the controlled and monitored sales process through one of the above mentioned channels.

Nice Sunday morning tour. Finally we got to do the Sattelegg. Weather was fabulous.

GPSies is the 17th most popular navigation application in the German app store. Thank you all for the great reviews and the lots of downloads.

Some of the reviews from Germany here:

“Super Apps - funktioniert und einfache Bedienung” - 5 Stars
Habe das Programm heute probiert, 50 km Radtour (Stadt und freies Feld) hatte mein iphone in der Brusttasche und ca 2 Stunden auf Empfang. Batterie war auf 45% und nach dem upload der Daten hatte ich eine Streckengenauigkeit von ca. 99% auf Google map. Einfache Bedienung und eine sehr gute homepage des Anbieters. Kann dieses Programm für alle die Wissen wollen welche Strecke sie gelaufen oder gefahren sind nur empfehlen und das ganze ist sogar kostenlos.

“Super und einfacher GPS Strecken-Recorder” - 5 Stars
Mein Garmin Edge hat gestern leider versagt (Radtour, Akku leer). Da habe ich mir bei einer kleinen Pause GPSies heruntergeladen und die Strecke aufgezeichnet. Absolut Top! Keine Aussetzer, Akku war nach den 3 Stunden zwar fast leer, aber das nimmt man gerne in Kauf. Tolle Darstellung der Strecke im Netz! Top!!!

We also getting good reviews from the US, but still could do better.

“Great app” - 5 Stars
Great gps track app. Let’s you upload track to website and share. Great for cycling trails.

See all reviews on Moopf AppStoreReviews.

This is the global distribution of the application:

Get the App here and write your own review here.

Techcrunch has published their True Value of Social Networks Report for 2009 and the information actually made it on the front page of today’s tagesanzeiger.

The number given for Switzerland is 1.859 million unique users per month, which means almost 25% of the Swiss population visit Facebook regulary.

Marcel Weiss has a good analysis explaining why Facbook overtook Myspace on netzwertig today (German) distinguishing between platforms for communication and such for publication and the ability to retain an anonymous (alias) user.

I remember writing email to only to three other students in the CS lab and to the one other admin that I worked with as a student. It was not really reliable, because you had no idea when and if at all the person would actually get the message (”Did you get my email about…”) and there were hardly any people that would have an email address (that they knew of or had proper access to). The other cool thing at the time where SMS text messages. My first mobile phone subscription in Germany came with unlimited free SMS - no one thought that the service would be relevant or actually be able to generate substantial revenues and it came at almost no additional cost for the operators.

In the mean time the almost 40 year old email and 25 year old SMS have become the most widely used data applications world wide (read a great article on SMS and its user base and reach here).

Only in recent years we see the continuously increasing messaging traffic growing in other channels like instant messaging and online chats, collaboration platforms including wikis and forums, blogging and micro blogging and the cross syndication of those - even in larger corporations and enterprises (tell companies how to use Twitter at http://256.dk and get access to the data here at http://aleqz.com).

But each channel has more or less their own primary purpose and the very synchronous (IM, chat, etc) and very asynchronous (email, forums, wikis etc) ways of exchanging messages do not mix very well with the standard messaging clients today. As much as I always believed, that it was important to determine the most effective delivery mode since it directly impacts the level of interaction, micro blogging services like Twitter seem to prove me wrong or at least render the question irrelevant, as they seem to be able to address both - depending on how you use the service (and set up your client).

And even more “both” is in Google Wave. Google Wave is a soon to be open sourced framework for distributed messaging and collaboration platforms. It perfectly combines asynchronous email type messaging with instant messaging capabilities (both look extremely usable) and adds collaboration as content is not categorized as message, stream or document before selecting the sharing and editing metaphor.
The user experience is equally compelling like with Google Maps - no surprise with the two Rasmussen brothers on board of the Australian team. Drag and drop from the desktop, context sensitive action menus inside the content and concurrent live editing by multiple users are just a few highlights of what was shown at Google I/O.
Other features include wave history and playback of changes, Android and iPhone mobile browser support, versioning and version control, extensible content model to support more than just rich text content, embed API (as in maps: APIs make it happen) and plugin architecture. The chess game plugin definitely benefits from the history/playback feature but the spell checker, the link checker and the real time translation are genius tools already by them selves. Doodle will not like the Yes/No/Maybe plugin too much I assume.

Google Wave has only be announced an a small group of users is currently testing an early version. But if Google gets is half as right as they did with Maps, Google Waves is going to become the platform for most of the communication that is today distributed over hundreds of networks, platforms and technologies. What Facebook provided as the combination of micro blogging, picture gallery and exchange and address book is going to be available from a Google supported open source community with additional features and integrations. And this combination and the fact that Google is opening it up AND giving it into the hands of the community might be the right foundation for a new standard way of communication.

Curious to see how the mobile and address book service for non internet devices is going to be addressed.

The product: wave.google.com
The platform: code.google.com/apis/wave
The protocol: www.waveprotocol.org

Ever since the times of Netscape and the early Internet Explorer versions we have been discussing useful cross browser testing setups. I’ve seen through my career as (web-)developer, tech lead, test lead, project manager and account manager very different setups of addressing the issue of different behaviors of webpages and applications in different browsers because of different maturity levels of the software and different sets of standards and their interpretation implemented. Those include multi screen setups, two or more computers next to each other and virtualization on local or remote machines. I think one of the most popular setups by the way is to ignore cross platform and browser compatibility and hope for all on the team to only use standards that are well supported. ;) Ever since the native support of Windows on the (Intel) Mac platform a lot of us have settled with a local virtualization engine on Mac OS that allows you to run most of the browsers and platforms out there today locally. But it still sometimes remains cumbersome to connect all those machines to the dev environment that you are working on and keeping those environments up to date with virus protection and software updates.

And today, after all those years Adobe is now finally coming up with something really useful: Adobe BrowserLab.

BrowserLab provides web designers exact renderings of their web pages in multiple browsers and operating systems, on demand. BrowserLab is a powerful solution for cross-browser compatibility testing, featuring multiple viewing and comparison tools, as well as customizable preferences. Since BrowserLab is an online service, it can be accessed from virtually any computer connected to the web. Also, Adobe Dreamweaver® CS4 software users have access to additional functionality such as testing local and active content.

It is currently free to use, but the offering is limited and I guess Adobe will ask some money for this over time, especially when adding additional platforms and browsers.

As of today the service supports

• Firefox 2.X and 3.X (Windows XP and Mac OS X)
• Internet Explorer 6.X and 7.X (Windows XP)
• Safari 3.X (Mac OS X)

With Dreamweaver CS4, BrowserLab adds the ability to test local content and different states of interactive pages.

See details on the labs page here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/browserlab/, the service is available here: https://browserlab.adobe.com/

On Thursday SourceForge announced the acquisition of Ohloh!, an open source code and community directory that I have been following myself while Optaros were establishing and growing the enterprise open source directory eosdirectory.com.

While the Eosdirectory is a collection of what Optaros believes to be enterprise ready solutions that then get rated by Optaros and also independently by the community, ohloh! has a more automated approach to rating, that uses a metric that is focused not on what visitors say about a project but what active contributors actually do to the code. Ohloh! analyses the programming languages involved, can indicate the size of a community, when it has been established, how active it is also over time (e.g. Firefox has a “Decreasing year-over-year development activity”), and this provides useful hard data in addition to the qualitative commentary and discussions. Through the community platform you can identify and get in touch with individuals behind the projects with a reference to their other activities and thus a broader context.

As such and with it consistent and wide reach over more then 3´500 open source projects it is a great addition to the SourceForge portfolio supporting a business model that is primarily based on advertising.

“We expect the acquisition of Ohloh and the integration of its technology to significantly improve our insights about the open source development community and our ability to target advertising,” said Jon Sobel, SourceForge’s group president of Media.

This is a great success story. I hope that the acquisition will help SourceForge and the existing ohloh! community, as currently the two platforms are mostly complimentary.
Congratulations to the ohloh! team for a great effort since 2004 and to SourceForge for what I consider a good but also bold move.

The Eosdirectory is also an important place to watch. Check out the recent request for improvement suggestions for a soon to come re-launch of the platform.

After opening the API for the news feed recently, Facebook announced end of April that they were working on OpenID support for signle-sign-on. Not even four weeks later you can select Google, MySpace, Yahoo, Vidoop, Myopenid and OpenID as linked account options.

You can also connect with these logins later. If you do that e.g. for Gmail, you will be able to access Facebook with out login when coming from your Gmail account.

This is truly what I call a bold step. Most other larger platforms will allow you to use their credentials in an openid way for other sites, but Facebook are the only ones to allow 3rd party credentials and thus spare you the local registration.

This is a big move towards openness but also a big step towards each other between Facebook and Google. Quite surprising to me, given that Google was supposed to work on their own social network and had recently announced friend connect. Maybe finally Google starts to realize that Facebook will be difficult to overrun - even for a Google.

Update:
I also noticed that the Gmail account linking will ask for permission to share the Gmail contacts. Not sure how this impacts friend finder features and to what extend they get automated, but it is truly the more interesting effect “Addressbook control” of the new feature for Facebook and Google compared to the convenience of a single-sign-on.

This is the plan for tomorrow’s route. Ping me by midnight if you want to join in.

No need to mention I guess, that I will use the GPSies iPhone GPS Logger Application to track the tour.