Google Lat Long Blog: Better access to your content is, well, better

(Cross-posted from the Google Places Blog.)



Google Places makes it quick and easy for you to tell your friends, and the world, what you think about the places you visit.

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Google Lat Long Blog: Better access to your content is, well, better

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Facebook ‘Send’ Button Aims for More Private Content Sharing

Facebook on Monday introduced the 'Send' button. Simply put, it's like the 'Like' button but giving the capability to privately share content to an individual friend or a Facebook group.

Facebook ‘Send’ Button Aims for More Private Content Sharing

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Online Content Empire Sugar Inc Raises $15 Million More

Sugar Inc, a network of content and commerce sites aimed at women, has raised another $15 million in funding from Sequoia Capital and Institutional Venture Partners, AllThingsD's Kara Swisher writes. This brings its total funding to $46 million.

Sugar is a content powerhouse aimed at women with a network of blogs and a social shopping operation. The company will use the money for international expansion and acquisitions.

It's one of the biggest success stories of online content creation. There had been rumors that Yahoo or AOL would want to acquire them now that their strategy includes a stronger media focus, but AOL bought the Huffington Post instead and Sugar says it wants to remain independent anyway.

For more on Sugar Inc, don't miss our Q&A with Sugar Inc founder Brian Sugar →

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See Also:

• Hyperactive SuperAngel Dave McClure Starts Fund By And For Designers
• Tiny Startup Solves HUGE Media Problem
• EXPLAINER: What Is The Freemium Business Model?

Online Content Empire Sugar Inc Raises $15 Million More

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Netflix Gets Into The Original Content Game, Buys Upcoming Show For A Rumored $100m

Netflix got its start as the red-envelope movie rental service, later turning into the video streaming authority (bankrupting Blockbuster in the process), and now may be making yet another major move: bankrolling original content. Deadline Hollywood reports that Netflix successfully outbid HBO and AMC for the rights to House Of Cards, an adaptation of the successful 1990 British miniseries. The show reportedly stars Academy Award winning actor Kevin Spacey, who we know isn’t cheap, and David Fincher, who is hotter than ever following the success of The Social Network.

Netflix Gets Into The Original Content Game, Buys Upcoming Show For A Rumored $100m

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Actually, Google Is NOT Getting Into The Content Business (GOOG)

Just in case there's any confusion: Google's acquisition of Next New Networks, a company that has played a role in creating some very popular online video content, does not mean that the search giant is about to jump into content creation.

Instead, we are told, the whole point is for Next New Networks' experienced team to help existing YouTube partners make more and better content.

Google thinks of the NNN team as a group of management consultants, not as a new, internal content creation business. Its ultimate goal will be to help partners (and Google) make more money from top-notch YouTube content, not to create the content itself.

Google may continue to make some one-off original videos, like this cool promo for its Chrome browser from last year, but it's not about to start competing with big content companies.

And anyway, if Google did want to get into the content business, there are many bigger, more established companies it could have purchased besides Next New Networks, which it spent less than $50 million to acquire.

Click here to flip through Next New Networks' most popular videos >

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Actually, Google Is NOT Getting Into The Content Business (GOOG)

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Comment on Demand Media: Search Spam or the Future of Content? by Matt

It seems that as people depend on search for finding quality results, if those results are producing worse quality, the search engine is also flawed. However, in near monopoly environments where everyone just makes a choice without thinking, maybe the results over time just get worse and worse without anything noticeable for most users. Makes you wonder how bad it's already gotten, how much farther to go before eventually getting better. Maybe the IPO will be a good thing to shed some real light on the activities, we'll see.

Comment on Demand Media: Search Spam or the Future of Content? by Matt

Backlink: http://gigaom.com/2011/01/31/demand-media-search-spam-or-the-future-of-content/#comment-584255

Comment on Netflix’s Next Big Problem: Keeping Quality Content by Josh

Ryan, if you are an avid user of Netflix, you would know that content ebbs and flows in the instant queue. It always has. You can even see when they will expire online. Do you honestly think that Netflix doesn't know it needs to improve on it's quality of content? Yeah, they're probably a bunch of schmucks who got lucky.

Comment on Netflix’s Next Big Problem: Keeping Quality Content by Josh

Backlink: http://gigaom.com/video/netflix-streaming-gettting-worse/#comment-578366

Comment on If an App Is Your Content Strategy, You Are Doomed by Dan

Zineo interested me for a long time but didn't make sense until my iPad. Smithsonian and Car And Driver subs at half or less. See everything in mag with text option for easy reading plus clips or extra pics. Reading at night without turning on lights to bother wife. Very pleased! Also happy with Economist that works about the same. Probably will go without the print version when sub up. From iPad.

Comment on If an App Is Your Content Strategy, You Are Doomed by Dan

Backlink: http://gigaom.com/2010/12/30/if-an-app-is-your-content-strategy-you-are-doomed/#comment-565306

Pew: 65% Internet Users Paid for Digital Content ‘Music, Software, and Mobile Apps’

Pew's latest data about how many people pay for digital content online, revealed that 65% of people online have paid to download some form of digital content or for a subscription to a digital media service. The survey excluded physical goods bought online and was focussed only on digital content such as music, software, news, and other online or electronic publications.

Pew: 65% Internet Users Paid for Digital Content ‘Music, Software, and Mobile Apps’

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65% of Internet users have paid for online content, says Pew.

65% of Internet users have paid for online content, says Pew.

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65% of Internet users have paid for online content, says Pew.

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Comment on When All Content Is Personalized, Who Needs TV Networks? by cheese

Let me play devil's advocate. The remote control P+/P- is still the easiest (and brain-dead) way to consume TV. Why would a majority of people choose a more cumbersome approach? Agreed, FB integrates Netflix integrates Xbox integrates youtube integrates twitter integrates watchamcallit - but this still does not beat the simplicity of a P+/P-. For all talk of content customization, my two questions: 1. How will this change consumption behavior? 2. Live TV stays relevant for news, sports - unless the content creators in this space move out of TV distribution, consumption behavior is not gonna change. We might hate it, but live TV rules in the real world.

Comment on When All Content Is Personalized, Who Needs TV Networks? by cheese

Backlink: http://gigaom.com/video/personalization-vs-tv-networks/#comment-554980

Yahoo IS Focused: "We're A Content Company" (YHOO)

News Corp.'s Jon Miller took a potshot at Yahoo this morning at IGNITION, saying that the company is caught between being a media company and a technology company, and that it has to "get religion" about something.

But recently, Yahoo's been fairly clear about what it is: a content company.

On stage at Web 2.0 last month, CEO Carol Bartz said Yahoo is focused on content. Technology is important to personalize that content to users, but editors are important as well--for instance, no algorithm could have predicted that users would be interested in the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico earlier this year, since a similar event hadn't happened in a long time.

Bijan Marashi, who sold his company Xoopit to Yahoo in 2009 and worked closely with Bartz and other executives like Chief Product Officer Blake Irving, put it even more plainly in an interview: "Yahoo isn't trying to be Google. Yahoo's a content company, and great at it."

Marashi, who is now working on a new startup, pointed to sites like omg!, Shine, and Citizen Sports as examples of the kind of specialized niche content that Yahoo is good at creating (or acquiring). He also said that the Yahoo's home page products--like My Yahoo--are the best and most widely used in the industry, with hundreds of millions of visitors per month.

So what about communications, like Yahoo Mail, which got a major revamp in October. Marashi acknowledged that Mail is still a big area of focus, and will be getting updated more frequently moving forward. And why not? Yahoo Mail has had the largest userbase of any email service for 14 years running. It would be crazy for the company to give it up.

So what's Yahoo NOT doing? Marashi pointed out two things:

• Search technology. The deal with Microsoft allowed Yahoo to offload the very expensive work of indexing the Web and maintaining search algorithms while still giving Yahoo most of the financial benefits--at least 88% of search revenues on all searches conducted through Yahoo's sites. He hinted that most people were coming to Yahoo Search through its content sites, not the other way around--it's not like people were using Yahoo as their one-stop search page like they do with Google.

• Social networking. Yahoo's main focus is helping people improve their personal, private bonds--the kinds of individual interactions that happen in email, SMS, and instant messaging.

Yahoo isn't ignoring social entirely--the company did acquire Indonesian location-based social network Koprol in May, but that was more to expand its footprint into a relatively new market. But Yahoo isn't about to layer social features onto a product that people expect to be more about private one-to-one interactions. 

Marashi agreed that Yahoo has a perception problem in the media, and that's making recruiting harder than it should be given all the interesting stuff going on behind the scenes. But that's because Yahoo is being compared against companies like Facebook and Google. Sure, they're But they aren't in the content business.

Of course, Yahoo still competes with Google and Facebook for advertising dollars and talent, and those companies are growing faster. But at least Yahoo now knows how it's trying to compete: by delivering great, relevant content to a huge audience. You can argue that it's the wrong strategy, but don't argue that they're unfocused.

Marashi also expressed a personal opinion that taking the company private (as has been suggested) might be helpful, as it would let Yahoo plan more for the long-term instead of having to show immediate quarterly growth for every new product and acquisition. He has no idea if Bartz and the board are actually considering it, though.

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See Also:

• Yahoo's Content People Better Get Ready For Big Changes Under Ross Levinsohn
• Jon Miller: Yahoo Needs To Get Religion About SOMETHING
• Yahoo M&A Chief Out

Yahoo IS Focused: "We're A Content Company" (YHOO)

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