Many of the today’s most successful informational sites such as Yelp, Wikipedia and TripAdvisor relied heavily on SEO for their initial growth. Their marketing strategy (whether deliberate or not) was roughly: 1) build a community of contributors that created high-quality content, 2) become the definitive place to link to for the topics they covered, 3) rank highly in organic search results. This led to a virtuous cycle where SEO drew more users, leading to more contributors and more inbound links, leading to more SEO, and so on. From roughly 2001-2008, SEO was the most effective marketing channel for high-quality informational sites.

The modern economy runs primarily on information, and the Internet is by orders of magnitude the greatest information mechanism ever invented.  In a few years, we’ll look back in amazement that in 2011 we still used brokers to help us find houses, that doctors kept records scribbled on notepads, that government information was carefully spoon-fed to a compliant press corps, and that scarcity of information and tools was a primary inhibitor to education. Predicting the future of the Internet is easy: anything it hasn’t yet dramatically transformed, it will.

Google recently added a caustic warning message when users attempt to export their Google Contacts to Facebook: Hold on a second. Are you super sure you want to import your contact information for your friends into a service that won’t let you get it out? Facebook allows users to download their personal information (photos, profile info, [...]

Google is fighting battles on almost every front: social networking, mobile operating systems, web browsers, office apps, and so on. Much of this makes sense, inasmuch as it is strategic for them to dominate or commoditize each layer that stands between human beings and online ads. But while they are doing this, they are leaving their core business vulnerable, particularly to Amazon.

I never had the opportunity to invest in YouTube but I have to admit that if I did I probably would have passed (which of course would have been a huge mistake). I’d been around the web long enough to remember the dozens of companies before YouTube that tried to create crowdsourced video sites and failed. Based on “pattern recognition” (a dangerous thing to rely on), I was deeply skeptical of the space. What I failed to appreciate was that the prior crowdsourced video sites were ahead of their time.

In the last decade there have been major advances in storing, analyzing, and acting upon extremely large data sets. Data sets that were previously left dormant are now being put to (mostly) constructive use. But the vast majority of information in the world isn’t available for analysis because it isn’t being electronically collected.

This is changing rapidly as new data collection mechanisms are implemented – what engineers refer to as instrumentation. Smart phones are one obvious new source of potential instrumentation. A person’s location, activities, audio and visual environment – and probably many more things that haven’t been thought of yet – can now be monitored.

I don’t know if Malcolm Gladwell is right when he claims “the revolution will not be tweeted,” but I can say with certainty that the Twitter he describes is not the Twitter I know. Gladwell’s central argument is that Twitter creates weak ties but social movements require strong ties. I’ve made more strong ties through [...]

Before the rise of social networks, online ad targeting services (mostly) tracked people anonymously, through cookies that weren’t linked to personally identifiable information. Social networks have provided the means to de-anonymize information that was previously anonymous. The good news is that the things users want to keep secret are almost always the least important things to online advertisers.

Many singles bars have “ladies’ night” where women are offered price discounts. Singles bars do this for women but not for men because (heterosexually-focused) bars are what economists call two-sided markets – platforms that have two distinct user groups and that get more valuable to each group the more the other group joins the platform. This applies to singles’ bars – and startups.

Disruptive technologies are dismissed as toys because when they are first launched they “undershoot” user needs. This does not mean every product that looks like a toy will turn out to be the next big thing. To distinguish toys that are disruptive from toys that will remain just toys, you need to look at products as processes.

It has become customary to use “graph” to refer to the underlying data structures at social networks like Facebook. Facebook’s social graph is symmetric (if I am friends with you then you are friends with me) but not transitive (I can be friends with you without being friends with your friend). Twitter’s graph is probably best thought of as an interest graph. One of Twitter’s central innovations was to discard symmetry: you can follow someone without them following you. The Twitter graph isn’t transitive but one of its most powerful uses is retweeting, which gives the Twitter graph what might be called curated transitivity. Over the next few years we’ll see the rising importance of other types of graphs.

A huge challenge for user-generated websites is overcoming the chicken-and-egg problem: attracting users and contributors when you are starting with zero content. One way to approach this challenge is to use what’s called the ‘bowling pin’ strategy: find a niche where the chicken-and-egg problem is more easily overcome and then find ways to hop from that niche to other niches and eventually to the broader market. Facebook executed the bowling pin strategy brilliantly by starting at Harvard.