Apple: iTuning it to the Bank

The following Yahoo stock graph speaks for itself. Over the last two years Apple’s stock has soared, increasing by nearly 400%. Microsoft’s has barely budged. One’s a growth stock, the other a value stock — like a utility, I’m told. With Microsoft’s market capitilization ($286 billion) being about five times that of Apple’s, and its revenue last year ($40 billion) nearly three times the iTune maker’s, I had a strange thought. Why doesn’t Microsoft buy Apple? Certainly has the money to do it. Seems I’m not the only one with this ‘strange’ idea. See this article at TechNewsWorld.

Newspapers: Future Exchanges? Not.

This morning on public radio WAMU’s (88.5 FM) Marketplace Morning Report, Andreas Kluth, a commentator from The Economist, argued that ‘old media’ needs to become more like an exchange — much like Yahoo and Google, where content, in whatever form, is bought, sold, and bartered. Gave the impression that ‘old media,’ I’m guessing he meant newspapers, TV and radio, should even get out of the content-creating business. What he wants is for such companies to emulate Google, and become the infrastructure for finding and trading content, in this case news.

I don’t see this working anytime soon. So The Washington Post is going to become a site where I can find wire stories, blogs, video and the like of news about D.C., the federal government, the world at large, local sports scores, etc.? And where I can buy and sell such news content? Great. Can’t wait to buy content from the Department of Such-and-Such, and to have a directory of blogs, individuals doing the work of the newspaper. Already have that, via Memeorandum. But the vast majority of the news there is from the ‘old media.’ That’s because blogs don’t create news (except for a handful); they comment on it.

Don’t hold your breathe. Blogs won’t be doing in-depth stories and investigative pieces anytime soon, like those we find in today’s major newspapers. Because it’s not free — content costs real money and takes real resources and talent.

There’s a much better piece about the future of newpapers over at The New Yorker by James Surowiecki.

User Interfaces: East Coast vs. West Coast

I recently had an insight about the interfaces of two extremely popular social networking websites: MySpace and Facebook. These sites allow you to create a page on their network where you can post a photo and profile of yourself, allowing your friends to contact you online. However, these two specific sites take very different approaches.

MySpace is centered around independent bands and grew out of a desire to promote the LA club scene. Personal profiles almost always feature music and often have several music videos playing. You can customize the layout, background, color scheme, and just about anything else on the page (there are actually external websites offering free MySpace layouts). Everyone can be a groupie. The site can be slow at times, but that doesn’t seem to stop millions of users from spending hours there.

College campuses are the unifying factor of Facebook. Your invitation is sent to your school e-mail account. The pages are relatively uniform with very little customization, but they always load quickly. Facebook allows you further define the details of your “friendship” (common clubs, you both lived in the same dorm, you’re brothers, etc…). Mark Zuckerberg created the site as a way of putting faces on the flat listings of the Harvard directory.

Both sites accomplish roughly the same thing and are highly successful, yet take almost opposite approaches. What does this tell us about software development? Know your audience. Grassroot campaigns should give users the ability to personalize the way they’re spreading a message. Corporate consortiums should make it easy for members to quickly find and contribute accurate information. Both are important and need very different user interfaces.

Meme Tracking Hits the Sports Market

A few weeks ago Sports Illustrated published an expansive feature article (subscription required) about how citizen sportswriters are changing sports journalistm. Obsessive and often posting about events in real time, these sports bloggers are spreading rumors, arguing and just generally feeding their sports addictions 365/24/7. Sometimes they even break stories. By the time a traditional sports columnist publishes their take on a game/issue in the local paper, these guys have changed topics three or four times. The real time nature of sports blogs make traditional sports pages obsolete to truly obsessed sports fans.

So it should come as no surprise that Memeorandum has launched a baseball meme tracker called Ballbug just in time for baseball’s opening day. Ballbug hopes to be the real time newspaper for the most passionate (and computer literate) baseball fans – tracking which stories and blog posts are being talked about the most in the baseball blogosphere.

It should also not come as a surprise that a competing baseball site called striketwo.net beat Memeorandum to market a few weeks ago or that there is a basketball meme tracker called lowpost.net.
There is little doubt in my mind that by the end of the year we will see meme tracking sites devoted to just about every vertical you can imagine – football, finance, health care. It’s just a matter of who enters which vertical first at this point.

I first read about Ballbug on Techcrunch.

Update: I took a closer look at Ballbug and Striketwo.net and Striketwo.net has a big advantage in that it allows you to track entries specifically on the team and players you follow.  Politics and sports are always local.  Here’s a screen capture of the Striketwo.net team tag cloud.