This is a bit off-topic, but what struck me in this article was the fact that AOL overpaid for Bebo by $550 million. Why isn't there an eBay for companies?
The bidding for Bebo was mediated by Allen & Co. “They just ran circles around us. It was media guys trying to grab an internet company and they didn’t know better.” The final purchase price was $850 million dollars. “I later learned that the only other serious bidder, Sony, stopped at $300 million. They basically had us bidding against ourselves.”
http://www.flippa.com is sort of like an ebay for websites. And, just like ebay, it's mostly full of (literally) derivative products sold via a combination of SEO and regurgitated ideas.
It's interested to check out if you haven't seen it before, though.
These types of sites can be very profitable if you operate a fleet of thousands of them and have automated tools to manage updates etc. to all of them.
For years the major weakness of gmail was the really poor contacts management. Now that they have Plus users actively curating their social network into Circles, I am going to cry if that doesn't tie back to Gmail. I want to be able to email a circle.
The other missing link is Google Calendar - if I have an appointment with somebody, I want to tie that it to my other info I have for that person, such as their phone number or their Plus profile.
There is a ton that one could do with contacts management in Googleworld if one wanted, but I am not hopeful that Google is interested in pursuing them.
Email is underrated, probably because it's underused by the younger demographic. Only once you get an office job is someone guaranteed to finally be forced to get really familiar and comfortable with email, regardless of where their interests lie. Adoption in university depends on ease of use and reliance on email for course work, but texting is more convenient because you're not in front of the same computer all day.
I wonder what the teenager adoption rate is for Google+? I'm guessing lower than the office crowd? What about among university students?
When I was a teenager I wasn't using email, not because it was hard to use.
I wasn't using it because the available clients / providers sucked. I ended up with an email account on @yahoo.com -- but the interface was clumsy and slow, spam was running rampant (still is), storage space was awfully limited and POP3 access was only for paying members.
But here comes GMail, with a kick-ass web interface, with more storage than you'll ever need, with free POP3 access and I've been emailing like mad ever since.
Email for me is the best form of communication -- mostly because it is asynchronous (I don't have to answer right now); but also because I can choose whatever email provider I want while keeping my address (I own my own domain).
Email is so good that every other form of communication directly competes with it (poorly).
Fwiw, you can't signup for Google+ giving a birthdate that says you're under 18.
It might not prevent young teenagers from coming, but it says something of the expected audience, from Google's point of view.
I'm pretty sure email competency is required at almost every college these days. Certainly at my college, and at those of almost everyone I know, and I am not in a technology related field.
I think it's that when chasing the next big thing (social networking) you shouldn't ignore the assets at hand and assume M&A is the best route.
Google+ will be much better for Google than buying Twitter or Facebook ever would have been. It integrates with their existing stack and represents their culture.
There's also the perception that social networking is the game to be in, and it's been the carrot everyone's been chasing for quite a while, and that AOL saw success with Bebo as absolutely vital to its corporate survival, worth the risks. Subsequent developments bear this out somewhat as Bebo's failed and been spun off, and AOL continues its decline.
There's also the truth that social is a network-effects game. The bigger your network, the greater the value. Up to a point. From a user perspective, the Odlyzko/Tilly refinement of Metcalfe's Law is a better estimator: http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf
Essentially: for any member, there are a small number of high-value members of any network. Additional members have a decreasing marginal value, and eventually (particularly with heavy marketing adoption of a network, but also with trolls and other malevolents) many members have a negative participation value. The death of many prior "social networks" (Usenet, email, Myspace, early AOL) derives in part from this negative aspect of growth, as well as the flight of high-value participants to nascent (and high S/N) networks. Such as, say, HN.
The social value of networks is hugely volatile and tippy. Networks can go from titan to has-been in a matter of a few years, though some survive longer: AOL, Geocities, Yahoo, MySpace, Facebook, Google+, ....
The network effects also come into play on the business side, and the business side of social networking is advertising and marketing. Here Google already have a huge advantage (and are already the subject of some anti-trust investigations). This both increases the likelihood of success for Google and raises the bar for new entrants.
The other interesting story from history is that while early-stage technology is often marked by the emergence of walled gardens (think of the time when MCImail, Prodigy, and AOL mail systems couldn't communicate with one another), eventually such networks tend to merge. At the same time, commodity backbone providers (telcos, generally) tend strongly to consolidate. The two opposing factors are commoditization and opening of protocols (e.g.: SMTP) and the monopolization of common carrier infrastructures (rail, telegraph, telephone, radio/TV, mobile, Internet).
If history is any guide, we'll eventually see some set of social networking protocols emerge (messaging, identity, authentication, directory services, data interchange), while there's a consolidation of certain back-end services (comms, advertising networks, possibly compute resources and storage). Initiatives such as Diaspora may play a role, or not. Give that another 4-5 years to play out.
On the other hand, Yahoo Messenger is huge, and Yahoo mail is even bigger (bigger than GMail). And Yahoo has built, for all intents and purposes, an entire clone of Facebook into them. And do you know who cares?
Nobody, that's who.
So while email integration is important, it's clearly not sufficient in itself. I don't think AOL really missed an opportunity here - they were doomed either way.
The bidding for Bebo was mediated by Allen & Co. “They just ran circles around us. It was media guys trying to grab an internet company and they didn’t know better.” The final purchase price was $850 million dollars. “I later learned that the only other serious bidder, Sony, stopped at $300 million. They basically had us bidding against ourselves.”