bloat!

 We told you from the start that Joose was DOA. Why? It’s not browser-based. If you’re creating anything mass-market right now, it had better be work in a web browser. This isn’t 1999 or even 2003, when apps like Skype or Napster were downloaded in the tens of millions, making people rich and introducing new ideas and new ways to use the emerging network. Ever since the rise of embedded apps, such as YouTube, Google Apps, Webmail, Flash-based games, Scribd, etc., non-browser stuff has been even more useless then it was before.The web is so much more powerful then anything else out there, you’d have to be an idiot not to center your applications in the universal web-access device– the browser.  Joost’s website has been down recently, but as Mashable notes, did anyone even notice? Mashable’s audience is the target audience for Joost, early-adopters who will try any web app once and stick with it if it delivers value. 90% of them say they use Joost rarely if ever. 

Several of you wrote to ask what a “social media boulevardier” is. Let’s not get hysterical, I’m not trying to go all Umair Haque on you and invent my own jargon to make you feel stupid. A boulevardier was a fashionable Parisian man of old, who dressed well and lived well, flitting from place to place to see and be seen. More often then not, however, the boulevardier spent little money and was an observer rather then a true participant. A Parisian cafe-owner, for example, would love to have a few of well-dressed boulevardiers sipping absinthe at the bar– it made the place look fashionable and provided a nice backdrop. The last thing he’d want, however, would be an entire restaurant full of skinflint nobodies taking up all the tables. Likewise, lots of community-based sites struggle with users who flood the site with pageviews, but do little to increase actual value. Keeping the boulevardiers happy while still bringing in the regular customers is a tough balancing act, and one that every site needs to juggle.

Digg wannabe Mixx has been at it long enough now to give them a hard look.

Unfortunately for them, it appears all their clean code, slick design, integration with large sites like LATimes.com, and good intentions hasn’t been enough. The main thing about a site like this always will be strength and content of the community. A passionate, dedicated community with shared wisdom and a point of view? That describes Digg, Fark, Metafilter. So far the main community that seems to have embraced Mixx is people who want to “succeed” in social media. In other words, people who want to use social sites like Mixx to help their own failure-worthy businesses. These are “users” in the worst possible sense, people who want to “use” Mixx, rather then the core community on Digg, which wants to improve the site. The most visible evidence of this is that most of the most popular stories on Mixx are current events, breakthroughs in technology, etc. but rather crappy how-tos on how to run your “startup”, how to spam social media, and what a great site Mixx is.

Further adding to the misery, the “groups” area, which is the very first thing in the top navigation bar, is not useful, and the groups themselves are faceless link aggregators rather then anything unique, vibrant, or useful.

Mixx is proof, thus far, that even with the best tools, building a valuable online community is very, very tough. Even more difficult is changing the site’s community profile once its hit a certain point. Normal people like me who just want to find interesting news will be increasingly turned off by the site, and social media boulevardiers will continue to rush in, creating a useless echo chamber.

I’ve said it before, but must say it again– Alexa, Compete and Quantcast are not serious tools for analyzing web traffic. However, they are useful for comparing sites in the same basic genre, and for looking at the growth of various sites over time.  According to Alexa, Digg peaked sometime in late 2007, and has been slipping ever since. Compete and Quantcast show modest gains since late 2007. Which is right? Probably both– Digg’s core audience is over-represented in Alexa’s numbers, and some of them have moved on to other sites, others have gotten older and have less time to spend on the site, and for some the novelty has probably worn off. The slight gains that can be seen on Compete and Quantcast mean that Digg is reaching more mainstream users, which is a plus. However they must be somewhat worried that A. they’re not growing that fast and B. the core demographic appears to be slightly less crazy about the site then they were last year.

As we told you the day it launched, Edgio never had a chance. In any case, the best product was and always will be TechCrunch itself. RIP Edgio, we hardly knew ye (thank god).

Having failed to make out like a bandit ($10m before taxes is more then you or I will see in one shot, but it’s not exactly FU money) during Web 2.0, Jason Calacanis is determined that the same thing won’t happen on the next wave.

That’s why he’s decided that Web 3.0 = Mahalo, his ’search service’ which pays people above minimum wage to write how to’s and group search results a la About.com in 1999. About.com, of course, sold in the $400m range so you can see what Calacanis is gunning for. And Mahalo’s not a bad site, just nothing special or revolutionary.

Which brings us to web 3.0, which Calacanis says is “the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform.” 

If that doesn’t make you laugh just by reading it, then you’re reading the wrong site, but for the rest of you– what he’s really trying to say is that if you add editors to the wisdom of the crowds, you’ll get web 3.0. Just like Netscape, er Propeller, right?! In all reality this definition could have applied to any of Jason’s projects, past present or future. He’s an old school media guy, not there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s the cloaking of basic media tenets in garbled nonsense that’s annoying as hell. Instead of leading the way and actually explaining a thing or two to web 2.0 whippersnappers, Calacanis has a way of leading by following which is clever but ultimately meaningless.

One thing I found interesting in Robert Scoble’s recent “takedown” of Steve Ballmer’s comments of Facebook is that Robert Scoble is 42.

So, what’s the difference between Scoble and Ballmer? 9 years and about $15,000,000,000.

Hey, Scoble: Ballmer isn’t talking about Facebook’s coolness, usefulness, or anything else. He’s talking about its business future. Business, you know, making money– something you’ve not managed to do in 42 years on this earth and something Ballmer has done in spades because that’s what he knows how to do.

I’m not down on Yahoo! like a lot of other people because I use their services all the time. Mostly: Fantasy Sports (14/16 in my NFL pick ‘em league last week), Flickr, Upcoming, Yahoo News!, Delicious, Yahoo email (yes, just for signing up for other sites, but still that has some value to me) and Yahoo Sports. All of these sites are pretty well coded, have great content, and are important to me. I spend a lot of time in the Yahoo Network. Yet there seems to be no real way to link the whole shebang together in any useful way. I spent 20 minutes trying to upload the same user icon to the various services and could only get it to work half the time, and even then it seemed pointless because I can’t compare stuff. Their avatars are beyond lame and image uploading craps out 2 out of every 3 times. Yahoo! has great properties, why can’t they make them easier to use as a whole? Why can’t they leverage their huge geek/art base in Flickr, their massive sports base in Sports, their enormous News base in news, etc. into something greater then the sum of those parts?

Meanwhile, all sorts of supposedly smart people work there and they go and create useless garbage like Yahoo Pipes. Why don’t they get their top nerds together and make a Yahoo! profile that actually links together all their best and coolest properties? Probably because the place really is in disarray.

For all his puffery, jargon, impossible-to-disprove ‘theories’, etc., The BubbleGeneration guy is still the only deep thinker of “web 2.0″ and he has it exactly right about Facebook. Hey geeks, wake the fuck up– Facebook is trying to lock you in to their system by pretending to open it up. They’re whoring out the word ‘platform’ to mean ‘a way for us to steal ideas and own you all’. They’re playing you. Will someone else besides BubbleDude start pointing this out?

Sometimes even smart people like the Freak-o-nomics dude can badly misread what ‘media’ is. Google owns Blogger and YouTube, which makes it one of the biggest media companies in the world.