Profiting from Social Networks and Idle Browsers

Came across an interesting article in BusinessWeek:
"
Here are two potentially billion-dollar questions: How can you turn the Web's social-network users into consumers? And how can you turn idle browsing into a flourishing bottom line? Back in May, marketers hoped they might have the answer when social-networking giant Facebook opened its network to external developers. This instantly allowed them potential direct access to a user group of millions who are notoriously unimpressed by traditional advertising methods. The only challenge: developing real-world applications that users might want to embed in their profiles, which would have a real-world effect beyond mere entertainment."

The article goes on to say that doing this (developing an application that will catch fire on social networks) is not easy as it sounds. Interesting read, full article here

The two questions raised deserve some scrutiny:

1. How can you turn the Web's social-network users into consumers?
2. And how can you turn idle browsing into a flourishing bottom line?

In a small way, folks like me benefit from social network consumers...mainly by getting good web traffic to flow to our sites...but wowing such a massive networking with killer apps and making those fickle-minded folks to take your application (ever for free) is a completely different story. How does one do that? And how can one indeed profit from the millions of eyeballs and fingertips spent on idle browsing?

Interesting, significant questions

Treasure Ship's Half-billion-dollar Question: Who Owns the Treasure?

Treasure ship's half-billion-dollar question: Who owns it?

The Merchant Royal limped through the sea on Sept. 23, 1641, weighed down by tons of gold, silver and jewels, and sank. The ship, though privately owned by Britons, carried a load of treasure fresh from Spain's American mines.

In May 2007, Tampa-based Odyssey Marine Exploration released footage of gold and silver coins it says came from a shipwreck. The company has been tight-lipped about the ship's identity...but British shipwreck historian Richard Larn, who maintains the seven-volume, nearly 50, 000-entry Lloyd's Shipwreck Index of the British Isles, said he's almost certain Odyssey has found the Royal.

With this recovery will come important questions. Who owns treasure? Spain, the country that mined the gold and silver? England, the country whose ship transported it? The descendants of the slaves who dug it out of mines? The captain of the ship? Or is it the company that found it - Odyssey?

These questions might be considered academic, until one realises that the value of the treasure could be over half a billion, and who knows, perhaps even much more than than given the uncertain values that people place on antique and vintage treasures.

That's a billion dollar question for you today!

Read the full report from the St Petersburg Times

Taking Care of Web Site Performance Critical to E-business

Taking Care of Web Site Performance Critical to E-business

While enormous amounts of money are spent on making a site look good and one more tranche of enormous sum of money on tech gizmos on the site, how much money is spent on monitoring and ensuring that your web site performs well at a basic level?

That is, how much money do we spend on:

1. Monitoring what % of time the web site is up & running
2. How fast is the pipe leading to your web site / server and hence the download time for a user?
3. Do you lose traffic at times because bandwidth allocated to you by your service has been exceeded?

Put another way, how much money and efforts are we spending to ensure that the site we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on, is up & running?

A simple, but very important, question indeed!