Cool Numbers: Tech

"Worldwide, people sent 1.9 trillion text messages last year" <- That's a lot of money spent. That stat comes from this article, written in last month's Technology Review, a fantastic magazine put out by MIT (I guess it's like their Harvard Business Review, my all-time favorite publication).

Another cool article in the same magazine talks about the founder of modern venture capital, a Frenchman by the name of Georges Doriot. He earned his stripes in the US in the 20s-40s. They mention a biography in the article that I might pick up. I recently read Faust In Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics, that discusses the lives and discoveries made in the community of theoretical physicists at the beginning of the 1920 and 30s, when quantum mechanics were pioneering a new understanding of our universe. The first half of the century must have been incredibly exciting for developments in science and business, but it is nothing like we're seeing now... especially in areas where they merge so closely, like the web. Here's one last fantastic (huge) article about concerns over monetizing Web 2.0.

The biggest issue? Advertising, which these types of websites are depending on for income, is being ignored by users. Basically, the best model is Google's Adwords Auction.

"Advertising on Google works because visitors come to Google looking for specific information. If a user who types "scooter" in the site's search field is hoping to buy a scooter, the keyword ads that appear at the right of the search results can be more useful than the results themselves. In social networks, on the other hand, users show up to find friends; ads are, at best, irrele­vant to that goal. The click-through rates on social-­networking sites bear this out. While around 2 percent of Google users actually click on a given ad (and the number is much higher when users are conducting searches for purchasing reasons), fewer than .04 percent of Facebook users do, according to a media buyer's report obtained last year by the Silicon Valley blog Valleywag."

THIS is intelligent advertising, because Google is taking advantage of people who are actively looking for something, while the Web 2.0 companies have to depend simply on a large user base. The only difference between advertising on Facebook and advertising on CNN is Facebook can better target people with specific ads - but the nature of the advertising remains the same.

The article is long, and talks about some of the interesting failures to address this issue, like Facebook's ill-fated Beacon program, and MySpace's HyperTargeting system. I'll leave it to you to read it.