Peter Yared's Musings

This post was also published in VentureBeat. The social era of computing has produced three multi-billion dollar companies: Facebook, Twitter and Zynga. As light is increasingly shed on the formation myths of Facebook and Twitter, a lot of new information casts doubt on the ethics and motivations of their respective founders. It is ironic that Zynga has had no such drama, since the company’s founder Mark Pincus has been lambasted for being unethical due to what TechCrunch dubbed “ScamVille” . Was ScamVille really a scam? There is no question that the offer ad networks like OfferPal that Zynga was using were shlocking uninstallable toolbars and illicitly signing people up for mobile subscriptions. However, numerous major Fortune 500 companies were also using scammy offers at the time, which TechCrunch itself later noted . As I have written before, TechCrunch has a repeated inclination to quash people’s reputations with tabloid-style posts . For the technology audience, “Marc Pincus...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. There’s a reason Lady Gaga recently visited Google and snubbed Facebook . The music industry is on the precipice of another huge transition from downloads to streaming, and Google has the opportunity to own this transition. It can circumvent both Facebook’s growth as a media channel and Apple’s forthcoming streaming service . There was a time when Myspace was people’s first stop after hearing about a new band. They would immediately go to the band’s Myspace page, where they could listen to tracks, see what people were commenting, and read what the artists were posting themselves. Now people are going to YouTube first. As the Rebecca Black “Friday” video showed , YouTube is the hands down best platform for media to go viral. YouTube is definitely right up the artists’ alley; artists can add a fun background image on the channel, see how many video views they have, post a message to their fans, and also check out what all the comment t...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. Google has finally unveiled its +1 social initiative , largely aimed at stemming Facebook’s ability to learn what links are relevant to others in a social graph. The Google +1 implementation, where people can recommend individual items within search results, is definitely a step in the right direction. However, it could also hurt Google’s revenue stream — I predict that adding a +1 option to keyword ads will have a negative effect on clickthrough rates. Google has been gradually embedding interactivity in search results, lately even asking directly in search results if a particular Twitter handle is yours. The new +1 feature harkens back to a 2008 Google experiment that mimicked Digg’s interface and let users move search results up and down, and even comment on them . This new feature where users can directly like particular search result links definitely will help Google better rank search results by involving crowdsourced humans i...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. For a so-called social utility, Facebook has been getting more and more useless. At first, Facebook friend overload was an early-adopter problem for overnetworked Silicon Valley insiders. But now, friend overload is hitting the mainstream consciousness . Many people who have been using Facebook for a few years find themselves inundated with friend requests by everyone from elementary school classmates to work colleagues. The resulting mess of casual acquaintances on Facebook has quickly overwhelmed newsfeeds with uninteresting minutiae and people you really don’t care to see. In response, there has been a lot of recent activity by startups exploring concepts related to small groups of friends. Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley has long talked about how his location-based service has a more “real” social graph — people with whom you’re willing to share your location. Path is run by Dave Morin, a well-known ex-Facebook employee, and is deli...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. Sentiment analysis is a hot new trend in social media, with the promise of helping brands understand what consumers are thinking and saying about their products. Products including early contender Radian 6 , newcomers such as BuzzLogic, and my own company’s Webtrends Social Measurement product are becoming pervasive in marketing organizations. But while consumer sentiment is important, what’s much more important is revenue. When revenue is down 10%, “but people like us!” is not an acceptable response from the head of marketing. Sentiment analysis isn’t a solution unto itself, but it can be highly useful as a realtime feedback loop for advertising effectiveness and may soon be able to predict advertising results. In the Mad Men-era heyday of mass marketing, marketing spend was impossible to quantify. TV, magazine, radio and billboard ads were purchased, and it was very difficult if not impossible to track exactly the return on investme...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. Do your best impersonation of a movie-trailer voice-over artist and say it: “FarmVille 2. This time, it’s agricultural.” That’s right: Like the Hollywood studios of old, like the stodgy makers of console games before it, Zynga, the San Francisco-based publisher of social games like CityVille, Mafia Wars, FrontierVille, and FarmVille, is inevitably going to get into the sequel business. Zynga has been a phenomenal success story with continuing growth, incredible profits, and big investments from major players. If things continue, it will soon be the most valuable gaming company — even though it’s still privately held and rivals like Electronic Arts and Activision Blizzard are publicly traded. Despite the carping from some corners, Zynga’s success is well deserved, as it figured out the twin precepts of the new era of casual gaming: incremental gameplay through virtual-good acquisitions and asynchronous cooperative gameplay with friends. Zyn...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. One of the charms of Google’s once and future CEO, cofounder Larry Page, is that he’s never seemed particularly worried about being liked. But Google is very worried about knowing what you and your friends like — a domain of data that Facebook has so far dominated. And under its brash new leader, it could be gearing up for a real fight with Facebook over this priceless information about consumers’ preferences. And Google has a secret weapon in the like battle that no one seems to be talking about. It has been almost a year since Facebook introduced its Open Graph API in April 2010 , offering websites social plugins to enable logins, let people easily “like” content on the Web, show which of your friends were on the site, what your friends recommend, and even what activities your friends have performed on the site. The login and like plugins have been enormously successful for large, popular sites like The Huffington Post, CNN and CitySearch....

This post was also published in VentureBeat. Ever since Yahoo Connected TV launched at CES in 2009, there has been a steady stream of TV app platform launches, including Google TV, Samsung, Broadcom/Adobe, Boxee, Blu-ray players, MythTV, and even Microsoft Xbox. However, there haven’t been any breakout apps for Internet-connected TVs — so-called “smart TVs.” And the dirty secret? The TV apps out there are rarely used. I know this first-hand: At Transpond, the social apps-developer I founded and sold to Webtrends last summer, we made a couple of connected-television apps for one of the major broadcast networks, and the apps had almost no traction. So what happened? It’s pretty simple. TV apps are cumbersome and awkward to use. Using a remote control to navigate across a bunch of app features is slow and confusing. In the process, you annoy everyone else watching the TV. This is the reason that Apple is not supporting apps on the Apple TV, even though it is essentially an iPod Touch wit...

This post was also published in ReadWriteWeb. For almost four years, since the Facebook Platform was launched, I have been involved in delivering Facebook apps for top brands such as CBS, NBC, Lifetime, Universal Music, Visa and more. Here's what we have learned doesn't work, and more importantly, what does work. Deep Campaigns Don't Work First, deep campaigns don't work. Digital agencies love deep, expensive campaigns on Facebook, with tons of pages, interaction, and art. It fits in with how agencies build microsites and websites, and justifies the $100,000-plus price tag that they like to charge. Examples include lightweight games, prediction contests, treasure hunts where you include friends, and such. Unfortunately for agencies and the brands that drop a lot of cash, Facebook users decidedly don't like deep campaigns. They do not like to spend 20 or 30 minutes on a single brand's page, unless they are consuming innovative, funny, or exclusive content. So a t...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. The mobile operating system wars are a battle for the future of computing, not a battle for the future of phones. Former Morgan Stanley analyst and newly minted venture capitalist Mary Meeker highlighted this fact in her latest Mobile Internet Trends presentation . The key trend: Smartphones and tablets together outshipped PCs for the first time last quarter. The good news for developers: The tumult in the mobile market may mean that they have more leverage with the creators of new platforms than they ever had with Microsoft during the era of Windows on the PC. What escaped the legacy mobile industry is that phones are no longer phones but are in fact full-fledged computers that required full-fledged operating systems. Computer hardware and software? That happens to be Silicon Valley’s specialty. No wonder that existing players were not able to compete with the likes of Apple and Google, the duo now dominating the smartphone category ...