Just wanted to do a quick post encouraging those of you who are interested in smartphone games to attend this year’s Smartphone Games Summit on September 24th in San Francisco. We’ve put together an all-star lineup of excellent speakers and panelists who will share their thoughts on what’s happening in the market today.

This year’s event will address a lot of the most interesting questions in the market today, including the rise of Android and what it means for games developers, the future of mobile social networks with the launch of Apple’s GameCenter, and interesting developments in the global market for smartphone games. We have a great list of confirmed speakers, which you can see below.

You can also save 15% by using the code CHUDSON when you register.

* Jason Oberfest, ngmoco
* Chris Williams, Playfirst
* Brian Morrisroe, Booyah
* Andrew Stein, PopCap
* Marc Gumpinger, Scoreloop
* Tracy Chan, ngmoco
* Jason Citron, Aurora Feint
* Si Shen, Papaya Mobile
* Stewart Putney, Moblyng
* Jim Greer, Kongregate
* David Helgason, Unity 3D
* Charles Ju, Playmesh
* Michael Chow, Newtoy
* Tomoko Namba, DeNa
* Akira Abe, Mixi
* David DC Collier, Pikkle
* Andrew Lacy, Tapulous
* Lee Linden, Tapjoy
* Hill Ferguson, Zong
* Ron Hirson, BOKU
* Michael Chang, Greystripe
* Aunkur Arya, Google

Related Posts

• No Related Post

Related posts:

1. Great Companies Speaking at the Freemium Summit – Yammer, Zoosk, Pandora, Xobni, Dropbox, Box.net, Recurly, Chargify, and Many More I’ve been hard at work on the Freemium Summit and...
2. 3 Things You Can Do to Make the Freemium Summit Even Better Thanks to all of you who have recommended speakers and...
3. Social Gaming Summit – May 6th and 7th (Earlybird Ends on 4/14) I just wanted to do a quick blog post and...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I’ve been playing with Facebook Places for a few days. It’s a really simple to use application. I am not sure if it’s going to “kill” Foursquare, but I am pretty confident that it will succeed. Facebook was supposed to “kill” Twitter by focusing more attention on status updates and the like. It didn’t happen. I’d suggest that’s because the use case and usage model for Twitter status updates is and was different than how people were updating status on Facebook. If people are using Foursquare in such a way that having their location info shared among their social network on Foursquare is different and unique than how it plays out on Facebook Places, then there’s a good chance that they won’t get killed either. I don’t yet have a strong enough viewpoint on how Places usage will evolve and potentially diverge from the way in which people use Foursquare today – that to me seems to be the key in figuring out how the market eventually settles.

I have an old blog post about FB as a commoditizer that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. In a nutshell, the advantage FB has is the ability to subsume popular stand-alone social services and roll them out to the FB community. They have the scale and reach that they can take niche products that are not yet at scale and put them in front of their major scale. They’re already a major force in online photos, video, news distribution and information sharing, and events. I suspect that they’ll also end up being a major player in the check-in space. I think there’s a good chance that Facebook could end up commoditizing the check-in, making it much harder for other players in the space to build really interesting businesses and communities in the future. There are a few things working in Facebook’s favor:

None of the existing players have an insurmountable lead in terms of absolute audience. While a number of the location / check-in services have audiences in the millions, that is a fairly modest portion of the total addressable mobile audience on smartphones.
FB Places does not require another application – if you have the iPhone app (and eventually the Android app), you will be able to use Places. That’s one less hurdle to overcome for user adoption and mobile continues to be a major growth drive for Facebook.
Facebook has identified and built the basic primitives for what I believe you need to build a successful check-in app.
*Social – It should integrate with your existing social network or allow you to bootstrap a new one
*Simple – Checking in needs to be a fairly simple process. Foursquare has nailed this and Places also does a good job.
*Useful or Fun – There needs to be a “reason” to check in. I am not saying that the reason needs to be some serious utility-maximizing event. Two reasons to check in are that it’s easy to do so and relevant to your friends or that it’s just fun and gamelike.

As much as people seem to want to paint this as Foursquare vs Facebook, I really think that allowing Facebook to commoditize and own the check-in has much larger implications for Google and Yelp than it does for Facebook. Why do I say that? Well, I think that whoever controls / owns the check-in experience for the masses is going to have the opportunity to have a really interesting set of conversations with local businesses.

Imagine a world in which Facebook, which already (probably) has lots of demographic information on 500 million or so people using their service can combine that information with knowledge of where you are and where you go. Aside from creepy stalker use cases, there are some really interesting

Option 1: Give “Places” owners more demo info on people who come to their places of business and allow them to message / contact them. Facebook could become a way for local businesses to get a better sense of who (in terms of demographic info) is coming into / checking into their businesses. This would be interesting and valuable information, especially if it could be paired with something like Facebook Pages to allow users to grow their fan bases / email lists for future communications.

Option 2: Online to Offline “check-in” as a conversion. One other really interesting business model would be to allow advertisers to offer online deals, discounts, and promotions that can only be redeemed in person, using the “check-in” as a way to redeem the offer. This is not necessarily different from some of the things that Foursquare is doing, but it could be another way to engage advertisers and get them to better understand the relationship between online spend and offline store traffic.

Option 3: Reviews product. Facebook has a huge opportunity to build a great Yelp competitor. With check-ins, Facebook will now have a reasonably good piece of proof that you’ve actually been to a place. It would only be natural to start asking people who go to places to provide feedback, ratings, or other information about their experiences at that place. Given that Facebook is largely about real identity, they could build a really interesting social reviews and recommendation service on top of Facebook that I bet could grow fairly quickly and would have the benefit of knowing that the reviews come from Facebook-verified people.

Google and Yelp have both spent a ton of time, money, and energy building relationships with local businesses, albeit using different approaches. Yelp has been focused on using reviews and ratings as a way to engage local businesses around opportunities for advertising. Google has been really focused on using a combination of Google Maps and Places pages as a way to engage local businesses. These two companies have been really focused on figuring out how to give local businesses a reason to invest in and engage with their online presences. If Facebook can succeed with a combination of check-ins and Places, they could in one big swoop, take a lot of wind out of the sails of Google and Yelp. Sure, Google Maps will still be useful and important as a navigation tool. And Yelp reviews will still have merit. But Facebook will have a pretty formidable and sticky product offering for small and local businesses.

As always, comments are welcome.

Related Posts

• No Related Post

Related posts:

1. Two Services I’d Like to See Integrated More Deeply with Facebook (Yelp, Eventbrite) and Thoughts on a Few Others (Yelp, Posterous, Tumblr, WordPress, Meebo, and Music) I spend a lot of time on Facebook, for work...
2. Is Zynga Running Out of People to Acquire on the Facebook Platform? I’m knee-deep in last minute preparation for this week’s Social...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Back in March we had the first Freemium Summit in San Francisco, CA. I was really inspired by a lot of the information that I learned from the presenters and I’m now actively working on the sequel to that first event. We had a ton of great speakers, including Pandora, Automattic, Sixteen Ventures, Dropbox, Box.net, YouSendIt, ngmoco, Smule, Tapulous (now part of Disney), the great Dave McClure, Chargify, Evernote, and many more. For more about the last event, see this great write-up that Liz Gannes from GigaOm wrote following the event. We’ll be switching coasts for this one and holding the event in New York City.

If you know of companies doing interesting work in the freemium space or interesting topics to cover, feel free to leave a message in the comments, message me at Twitter (@chudson), or give me a ring. We have a few confirmed already but I want to make sure I cast a wide net.

Related Posts

• No Related Post

Related posts:

1. 3 Things You Can Do to Make the Freemium Summit Even Better Thanks to all of you who have recommended speakers and...
2. Great Companies Speaking at the Freemium Summit – Yammer, Zoosk, Pandora, Xobni, Dropbox, Box.net, Recurly, Chargify, and Many More I’ve been hard at work on the Freemium Summit and...
3. Freemium Summit 2010 – An Event Focused on the Freemium Business Model So, I’ve been really excited about the freemium business model...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Every day I seem to love my iPad more and more. I read a few reviews of people declaring that they could easily go iPad-only during their workday and not a miss a beat. I was a bit skeptical of that claim, so I decided that I would try to go iPad-only during my workday and allow myself to use the Macbook while at home.

If you’re short on time, the summary answer is that I the iPad cannot be a 100% laptop replacement for me during the workday. That being said, I did identify quite a few use cases or types of days where it was perfectly fine to go iPad only and leave the Macbook at home.

To give the iPad vs laptop comparison a fair shake, I thought it was only fair to compare an iPad without an extended / additional keyboard to a laptop. While having an external keyboard would have closed the gap between using an iPad and a laptop, the real goal was to see if I could get by with the iPad as is – if I’m going to carry the iPad plus a dock or keyboard, I might as well just carry a laptop. I should also say that I have been using an iPhone for about two years and am very comfortable with the iPhone operating system and user experience.

Broadly speaking, most of the workdays I have fall into one of three main buckets (or a combination of them):

* Heavy Meeting Days – These are days where I have 6-8 meetings during the day, with maybe 30-60 minutes in between each meeting.

* Heavy Transit Days – These are days where I might not have a lot of meetings, but I do have to make a major transit move or two, going from Mountain View to San Francisco, Berkeley, or somewhere else more than 30 minutes from home. The time spent commuting is a pretty meaty chunk of the day, at least 2 hours or more.

* Desk Days – These are days where I’m mostly sitting at a desk of some sort. It can be a coffee shop, hotel lobby, or some other reasonably comfortable place where I can work for blocks of 1-2 hours at least once per day.

The biggest thing I realized from going iPad only is that it’s a total waste of time to lug around the Macbook on days where I am doing a ton of commuting or have a lot of meetings. By and large, I was able to keep up with email, Facebook, the news, and deal with Google Docs and light spreadsheets / presentations on the iPad alone. When I was going iPad only, I basically just deferred any long emails until I got home (which was generally okay) and deferred playing Flash-based Facebook games until I had a Flash-capable device. Overall, I found that I was happy to use the iPad for about an hour straight to do work before I started wanting to have a full keyboard and larger form factor.

Oddly enough, I did not miss having a full keyboard. Unlike the iPhone or my Droid, where I am pretty fast holding the device with one hand and typing with both hands, the iPad does not allow for easy one-hand typing – it’s too heavy and too awkward. The simple workaround for me was to simply defer typing intensive tasks until I had a full keyboard.

There was one very unexpected surprise. The iPad is a much more capable all-day computer than my Macbook. I generally can’t get more than 2-3 hours of useful stuff done on my Macbook on a single charge. On the flipside, my iPad is able to last an entire day on a single charge with nearly constant use.

So, overall, I was pleasantly surprised with using the iPad as a laptop replacement. At least 2-3 days per week I have a combination of commute and meetings that basically make the laptop useless. When I’m on the go, I rarely get the opportunity to sit down, plug in, and get enough work done to justify lugging around the laptop. I’m happy to have found a new device to lighten the bag for days where I’m on the go.

As always, leave a comment if you like.

Related Posts

• May 25, 2010 -- The HTC Incredible Has Shown Me that Android is Now “Good Enough” to Compete (3)
• December 14, 2009 -- Google Nexus One Phone and Creating an Android Exemplar (2)
• February 8, 2008 -- The iPod Touch as Training Wheels for the iPhone (9)
• September 7, 2007 -- The iPod, the RAZR, and the Treo – One Icon and Two Also-Rans (1)
• April 9, 2010 -- Three Reminders about Platform Businesses (Apple, Twitter, and Facebook) (3)

Related posts:

1. The HTC Incredible Has Shown Me that Android is Now “Good Enough” to Compete I’m now on my second Android phone and I have...
2. Google Nexus One Phone and Creating an Android Exemplar I saw so many posts about the new Google Nexus...
3. Three Reminders about Platform Businesses (Apple, Twitter, and Facebook) This has been a really interesting week in the world...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I’m now on my second Android phone and I have to say that Android has come a long way. When I first got my Nexus One, it wasn’t an iPhone killer by any means (some of my early thoughts on the Nexus One can be found here). In reading a few posts, this one by Robert Scoble, this one by MG Siegler, and this one by Joe Wilcox, I’m reminded of a key thing about competition. Sometimes you don’t have to be better to compete effectively – you just have to be good enough. That’s how I would describe where Android has gotten. The iPhone is still the best overall device experience. The one major advantage it still has over other smartphones is that it’s got tight integration with the iTunes ecosystem, and that’s where all of my media lives.

You know what strikes me as funny? I would never have felt the need or desire to even try an Android device at all if not for the spotty phone performance of my iPhone. It’s not a lack of compelling features that made me want to try Android – it was the inability to simply complete and maintain a phone call. With something approaching suitable phone performance, I would have remained a happy sole iPhone owner. Below are a few observations from my time using the Android platform:

Google Voice has allowed me to use the HTC Android device without having to go through the trouble of switching my number or blasting all of my contacts with my new number. That makes it a lot easier to test out the phone without the personal switching cost of getting the word out to my contacts.

About 60-70% of the applications I have become accustomed to using on my iPhone are now available on my HTC Incredible. There are usable versions of Foursquare, TripIt, Twitter, Pandora, Mint, Facebook (not quite as good as the FB version, but usable), and the New York Times. Gmail works great, as does the calendar. I’m missing ESPN Radio, XM Radio, and all of my favorite games. I suspect that will be remedied as Android grows.

Developers go where there is usage and volume – developers are unlikely abandon Apple regardless of what it does in terms of platform policies. However, as Android grows, developers will follow.

Getting media on my Android devices still feels broken, especially compared to the iTunes sync experience. But I’ve found that DoubleTwist is serviceable and up to the task. That makes my Android device more fun – I can actually take some of my music with me on the go.

Overall, I think Android has a pretty bright future. Despite all of the free vs closed debate, I think Android stands to be a strong competitor not because it’s open (whatever that means) but because it’s free. Having a very good, competitive free operating system that isn’t bound to one carrier or device should allow the platform to really reach scale. I wouldn’t have believed how much the gap had closed had I not played with devices myself.

Feel free to leave me thoughts or comments below.

Related Posts

• December 14, 2009 -- Google Nexus One Phone and Creating an Android Exemplar (2)
• June 8, 2010 -- The iPad as a Laptop Replacement – My 1 Week Experiment (13)
• December 22, 2009 -- The Five Ecosystems I’m Watching in 2010 (iPhone, Facebook, Twitter, AppleTV, and Google) (0)
• April 22, 2009 -- I’m Finally Giving Up on MobileMe (10)
• September 7, 2007 -- The iPod, the RAZR, and the Treo – One Icon and Two Also-Rans (1)

Related posts:

1. Google Nexus One Phone and Creating an Android Exemplar I saw so many posts about the new Google Nexus...
2. The Five Ecosystems I’m Watching in 2010 (iPhone, Facebook, Twitter, AppleTV, and Google) I’ve been thinking about doing a 2010 predictions post for...
3. Buying a Google Nexus One Unlocked is a Terrible Experience – Fixing It is Easy I have had my Google Nexus One for about a...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I’m knee-deep in last minute preparation for this week’s Social Gaming Summit. It should be great and I hope you’ll be there to join us. I was spending some time on AppData and was struck by something – I thought it warranted a quick blog post of my own. I was also inspired by something I saw over at Gamezebo (hat tip to Joel):

No matter how you slice it, Zynga has to find a major growth channel off the Facebook platform if they are to continue their meteoric rise. It has nothing to do with Facebook Credits – you can fix economic problems. The real problem is growth. I did some quick and dirty nu

*Estimated Global Facebook Audience = 400 million people per month via Facebook’s press page

*Zynga Audience (non de-duplicated) according to AppData = 247 million people per month

Those are high level numbers. We need to make a few assumptions. In November 2009, Zynga had a blog post that said they had 200 million non de-duplicated people across the network 100 million on a de-duplicated basis. In other words, it’s a 2:1 ratio. Let’s assume that ratio still holds today in rough terms.

We also need to make another assumption. Not every one of those 400 million people on Facebook are truly active or actually interact with applications at all. The truly casual user and the user who does not interact with applications don’t really count. Facebook’s own statistics suggest that 50% of people are active on a daily basis. I’m going to make a simplifying assumption that 70% of the Facebook audience is the addressable audience for Zynga – the 50% daily users clearly engage with Facebook enough to be acquired and there must be another chunk (I’ll put that chunk at 20%) who log in regularly but not daily.

So what does the new math suggest?

*Addressable audience on Facebook = 400 million * 70% = 280 million people
*Zynga audience = 247 million people * 50% = 124 million people

The good news is that Zynga has not yet reached 50% penetration. The bad news is that this simple model suggests that they’re at least getting close. If they want to grow, I think they’re wisely looking to things beyond the Facebook platform to spur that growth.

Feel free to leave thoughts in the comments below. And challenge the math if you see fit to do so. And if you like this stuff, follow me on Twitter (@chudson).

Related Posts

• November 18, 2009 -- Is Zynga’s Farmville.com A Sign of Things to Come or a Clever Hedge? (9)
• April 10, 2010 -- Does “Sign In with Twitter” Make Sense Without an Web Ad Play? (0)
• April 6, 2009 -- The New FriendFeed UI – More About Content, Less About Sources (1)
• January 2, 2009 -- Why Social Nets are Shying Away from Payments (9)
• November 24, 2008 -- Twitter and Facebook? (0)

Related posts:

1. Three Reminders about Platform Businesses (Apple, Twitter, and Facebook) This has been a really interesting week in the world...
2. Is Zynga’s Farmville.com A Sign of Things to Come or a Clever Hedge? I was reading TechCrunch’s article on Zynga’s launch of Farmville.com...
3. Does LinkedIn Want to Be a Part of My Daily Life? Facebook Sure Does I use Facebook a lot (I do work at a...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Earlier this week I got my bit.ly pro account activated – I’m now sharing links at chudson.me. The nice thing about bit.ly pro is that it really reveals a lot about how powerful bit.ly really is as a service. After playing with the pro version of bit.ly, I’m really convinced that they’re on the verge of something big and anyone who wants to own and understand the “global like” (an Internet-wide understanding of what content is being shared most often and by whom) needs to ultimately own this company or whichever company becomes the de facto URL shortening service.

Let’s be clear – URL shortening is a commodity service. But so is free email. Once upon a time, search was a commodity service as well. I continue to believe that you can build a big business in a commodity service if you are the winner and there are network effects to your business. I do believe that bit.ly has network effects – being the de facto URL shortening service of choice for more people means a) you’re seeing more shared content and should be able to get a better sense of sharing patterns among a larger audience of people and b) if enough people see a given URL shortening service being used by their friends, they’re likely to adopt that service. The other way to engineer around the need for network effects is to just get baked into other products via distribution deals (which they have already done).

I’ll go one step further – if bit.ly ultimately becomes the de facto URL shortening service for the Internet, that’s far more valuable to Facebook than it is to Twitter. I’ll explain why below. First, let me assert the difference between the trajectories for Twitter and Facebook:

Twitter is heading toward becoming a broadcast medium where people go to distribute and discover content. Sharing and commenting are important signals to what’s interesting, but that’s secondary to the primary function of content distribution.

Facebook is becoming more than a social network – it’s trying to own your implicit and explicit interests and preferences and presumably reuse those to deliver more targeted advertising both on Facebook and across the wider Internet. Understanding what you like, share, and consume is critical to understanding who you are and what type of advertising you should be shown.

After playing with bit.ly pro, I’m really impressed by what bit.ly could ultimately become. Being the top URL shortening service on the Internet gives you a window into three really important (and hard to ascertain) things on the Internet:

*Top Creators – Who is producing or discovering content that is being shared widely?
*Top Distributors – Who is responsible for distributing content? Who are the nodes who have large audiences? Who are the top curators?
*Relevance – What content do I, as a user, want to consume? What resonates with me?

You know what that sounds like? It sounds to me a lot like the core search problem that Google solved. I’m surprised when I look at what it could mean if bit.ly solves this problem as the de facto link shortening service for the web. They will have a ton of data about the production, distribution, and consumption of information across the web. They’ll have it both in real-time and on a historical basis. That’s a big deal. And it’s a private corpus that they alone own. Do you think it’s interesting to own what content is shared, by whom, how often, and to whom it’s interesting? I sure think so.

Bit.ly pro is super important to the company’s strategy as it gives them relationships with some of the top content creators – the vanity URLs they give and the associated metrics allow top content creators to understand how their content is being distributed. While that data is interesting to the publishers, it’s extremely valuable to bit.ly as well.

Having a distribution deal with Twitter also gives them a lot of information about how information is shared on Twitter as well. So what would happen if Twitter swapped them out for another URL shortener? Well, unless Twitter banned bit.ly from 3rd party clients, all bit.ly would lose is all of the automated shortening that comes from Twitter. They wouldn’t lose “power users” who use bit.ly and want the analytics and data on what’s shared.

Thoughts? Leave me a comment!

Related Posts

• April 10, 2010 -- Does “Sign In with Twitter” Make Sense Without an Web Ad Play? (0)
• April 9, 2010 -- Three Reminders about Platform Businesses (Apple, Twitter, and Facebook) (3)
• December 22, 2009 -- The Five Ecosystems I’m Watching in 2010 (iPhone, Facebook, Twitter, AppleTV, and Google) (0)
• September 9, 2009 -- Why Twitter Is (Probably) Not the Right Place for Games Today (1)
• April 21, 2009 -- Google Profiles – Not For Early Adopters, but Potentially Useful for Everyone Else (3)

Related posts:

1. Does “Sign In with Twitter” Make Sense Without an Web Ad Play? I’m starting to see the “Sign in with Twitter” button...
2. The Five Ecosystems I’m Watching in 2010 (iPhone, Facebook, Twitter, AppleTV, and Google) I’ve been thinking about doing a 2010 predictions post for...
3. Two Services I’d Like to See Integrated More Deeply with Facebook (Yelp, Eventbrite) and Thoughts on a Few Others (Yelp, Posterous, Tumblr, WordPress, Meebo, and Music) I spend a lot of time on Facebook, for work...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Just wanted to do one more quick blog post about the inaugural Startup Lessons Learned Conference this Friday, April 23rd here in San Francisco. It’s going to be a really awesome day and I hope you can make it out to the Westin to join us in person. In the event you can’t make it, we have over 50 groups around the country and around the world who will be hosting simulcast get-togethers – you can see the full list at http://www.sllconf.com/streaming.

Curious about what we’ll be covering at the event? Check out some videos at http://www.sllconf.com/preview to get a flavor for our speakers, topics, and what we plan to cover at the event itself.

Related Posts

• No Related Post

Related posts:

1. 3 Things You Can Do to Make the Freemium Summit Even Better Thanks to all of you who have recommended speakers and...
2. Two Great Events – FailChat and Flash Gaming Summit One more quick events post. Two of my friends are...
3. Great Companies Speaking at the Freemium Summit – Yammer, Zoosk, Pandora, Xobni, Dropbox, Box.net, Recurly, Chargify, and Many More I’ve been hard at work on the Freemium Summit and...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I just wanted to do a quick blog post and remind everyone that Earlybird Pricing for the Social Gaming Summit 2010 ends tomorrow, Wednesday, April 14th. We’ve got a great lineup of speakers and topics and you can save 15% if you register using the code SGSCH. We are in the middle of very exciting times for the social gaming space and this year’s Social Gaming Summit will highlight some of the key issues on the minds of top developers in the space. We’ll cover everything from monetization to engagement to what the future holds for the largest and smallest developers working on social games. Below is a list of the great folks who will be speaking at the event (not all of them are up on the website yet but will be shortly):

Mark Skaggs, Zynga
Christa Quarles, Playdom
Sebastien de Halleux, Playfish / EA
Peter Relan, Crowdstar
Keith Rabois, Slide
Jia Shen, RockYou
Kavin Stewart, LOLapps
Robert Goldberg, Zynga
Donna Powell, Meteor Games
Greg Thomson, Tall Tree Games
Joel Auge, Hitgrab
James Currier, Wonderhill
Patrick Liu, Rekoo
Luke Chen, Five Minutes
Kai Bolik, GameDuell
Arthur Chow, 6waves
Richard Fields, Mindjolt Games
Garrett Link, Real Networks
Mitali Pattnaik, Playfirst
Dennis Ryan, PopCap Games
Renata Dionello, eBay
Terry Angelos, TrialPay
Karl Mehta, Playspan
Mihir Shah, Offerpal Media
David Marcus, Zong

I hope you’re able to join us at this year’s event!

Related Posts

• No Related Post

Related posts:

1. Two Great Events – FailChat and Flash Gaming Summit One more quick events post. Two of my friends are...
2. 3 Things You Can Do to Make the Freemium Summit Even Better Thanks to all of you who have recommended speakers and...
3. Do Social Games Need More Social Chaos? Something has been bugging me about social games of late....

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I’m starting to see the “Sign in with Twitter” button in more places on the web. I’m still trying to figure out what the bigger picture plan is for this service. To me, it looks very similar to Facebook Connect – it’s a simplified way to log into 3rd party sites without having to create a brand new account. In both cases, a user gets the benefit of a more seamless registration process and the site gets the benefit of having access to a user’s social graph, whether it’s used to bootstrap a social network or to publish to a newsfeed.

I continue to be a strong believer that the ultimate path for Facebook Connect is to have that service paired with an ad network that works off Facebook – users who sign in with FB connect on 3rd party websites will see ads that are not only based on the context of the page but on their behavior and preferences from activities on Facebook. Facebook already has a lucrative display ad business on its own site and it seems pretty clear to me that advertising is going to be a core, if not the primary, revenue stream for the company. Provided that is the case, I understand the benefits of Facebook pushing Facebook Connect broadly as a precursor to an off-Facebook ad product.

So what’s the development path for “Sign in with Twitter” at the end of the day? Twitter still hasn’t unveiled a business model, so it’s hard to figure out how it fits into the big picture. Maybe it isn’t part of a grand plan. But the more I use Twitter, the more I see it as a great distribution / publishing platform. If Twitter continues to go down the road of focusing on their platform as a way to distribute and broadcast short-form content, I can see their 3rd party sign-in service as a way to turbocharge the distribution of content on news, blogs, and e-commerce sites. But I’m not sure what that ultimately does for Twitter.

The one thing that does make sense to me, though, is that Twitter is working as a distribution source for blogs and news sites and I suspect they would embrace and welcome a lightweight service that helps them a) know more about who some of the people are who enjoy consuming and distributing their content and b) makes it much easier for them to get more reach for the things they produce.

What do you think? Any thoughts on how “Sign in with Twitter” fits into the big picture for Twitter?

Related Posts

• April 6, 2009 -- The New FriendFeed UI – More About Content, Less About Sources (1)
• November 24, 2008 -- Twitter and Facebook? (0)
• February 23, 2008 -- FriendFeed and the Facebook News Feed – FriendFeed is For Sharing and Facebook Used to be About my Friends (4)
• January 28, 2008 -- Mining Facebook Status Updates – Search and Trends (6)
• May 4, 2010 -- Is Zynga Running Out of People to Acquire on the Facebook Platform? (6)

Related posts:

1. The Five Ecosystems I’m Watching in 2010 (iPhone, Facebook, Twitter, AppleTV, and Google) I’ve been thinking about doing a 2010 predictions post for...
2. Why Twitter Is (Probably) Not the Right Place for Games Today I have been thinking a lot about whether Twitter will...
3. Some Early Thoughts on the Differences between Tumblr and Twitter I recently started using Tumblr about a week and a...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.