TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

LinkedIn to announce Knee-Jerk reaction to Facebook

LinkedIn has announced that over the next 9 months they’re going to be releasing API’s for developers to build off of. The timing of the announcement and execution scream “knee jerk” to me.

Despite historical and continuing growth, LinkedIn is under direct threat from Facebook in the professional-networking market. Facebook gets more users and more functionality, its network effects are going to push hard at other social networks. And Facebook’s demographic is going to steal more and more from LinkedIn as their core college market matures and graduates into the workforce - taking Facebook with them.

Mathew Ingram describes the situation even more aggresively, asking “Is it too late for LinkedIn to catch Facebook?” TechCrunch thinks LinkedIn may have life in it yet, but points out that Facebook’s openness makes it a compelling one-stop shop. ParisLemon thinks there’s an opportunity for Facebook and LinkedIn to combine forces. IdentityWoman points out that LinkedIn is passive whereas Facebook’s focus on daily interaction promotes daily use.

api, facebook, linkedin platform

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Bricks and Mortar 2.0: Amazon Fulfillment is a RW Platform and API

Amazon, reports the NYT, is blurring a lot of boundaries. With the “Fulfillment By Amazon” Business Solution, Amazon is creating a real-world platform with a physical set of API’s - taking the strategy of developing, surfacing, sharing, and selling back-end services that has worked so well online, and porting into the physical world. Fulfillment lets any merchant selling anything online anywhere tap Amazon’s warehouse infrastructure for storage, packing, and shipping.

Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is a new program that makes delivering your Pro Merchant Program and WebStore orders a snap. You send your new and used products to us, and we’ll store them. As orders are placed, we’ll pick, pack and ship them to your customers from our network of fulfillment centers. [from FBA]

And why not? Amazon recognized long ago that the systems and processes they use to make their online store work could be extended beyond the store via API users to drive business back to Amazon, create brand equity, create a revenue stream, reduce per transaction costs, and make everyone’s lives easier. The offline world is no different - except that the packets are in brown cardboard boxes instead of TCP/IP, and flow through warehouses and post-offices, not routers and gateways.

“We have this beautiful, elegant, high-I.Q. part of our business that we have been working hard on for many years,” he said. “We’ve gotten good at it. Why not make money off it another way?” [from NYT]

Amazon Fulfillment works in four steps:

1. Send your inventory to Amazon
2. Amazon warehouses it
3. Amazon fulfills it - finding it, packing it, combining it with other items, and shipping it
4. Amazon manages customer service (returns)

…and that is just spectacular. Its like the equivalent of Ning for bricks and mortar commerce. It makes it easy for merchants, creates a new monetization stream for Amazon, keeps Amazon’s resource utilization and per transaction costs down, and largely is built on sunk investment. Of course, fulfillment is not new to Amazon, as they’ve done it for Target, Borders, Toys R Us, and others. But extending it out to anyone in Web 2.0 style is.

At the end of the day, Amazon is leading the way in what I consider to be “3.0″ processes and technologies - things that consolidate the physical and online worlds and make moving between the two seamless. There will no doubt be bumps along the road (as the NYT article notes), but ultimately Amazon has seen the future and positioned itself to be the platform on which its built.

amazon, api, ebay fulfillment

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Digg API - Great One Way Access

Digg released a proper REST API today; read their documentation here, via Mashable.

Functionality includes:

1. Listing Stories (by any number of date, categorization, and popularity criteria)
2. Listing Events (the “diggs” that have hit a story)
3. Listing Users (by any number of criteria)
4. Listing Digg Categories

Of note: The API is one-way - is lets you get info out, but not in. There’s no way to programatically Digg or submit stories, comment, add remove friends, etc. That’s definitely a good thing - two-way access would have been a spammer’s/gamer’s dream.

EDIT: here’s the link to the original digg post, btw.

api digg

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The Google Roundup - big week

Many of these announcements have been sort of under the radar, but overall, Google has had quite the week:

1. GooglePoint: Google pulled the powerpoint trigger, completing the bulk of their anti-microsoft suite with the purchase of java-tool-maker Tonic.
2. Google Vs. StumbleUpon: After eBay’s questionable purchase of StumbleUpon, a pouty sounding Google fired back by adding dice to the Google toolbar - a button that apparently taps similar functionality as StumbleUpon’s.
3. Froogle is Getting Some Attention: Google Product Search. About time. Froogle was one of Google’s earliest branches out from core search, and has languished more or less since launch, getting demoted of the front page, and generally wasting away.
4. Charts: Google fleshed out the Sheets document type with charting - finally. EDIT: Zoli does charts.
5. RSS API: Google’s added an RSS/Atom handler to their search API. I haven’t really had a chance to dig into this, but its sounds a lot like the server-side functionality provided by MagpieRSS will now be available in JS.

api, atom, excel, google, magpie, microsoft, rss, stumbleupon tonic

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5 Suggestions to make Teqlo a Survivor

Teqlo is a company that needs to find a strategy and a community - or it will at best languish in obscurity. Like Ning in its prior incarnation or Yahoo! Pipes, Teqlo aims to turn the average Jane or Joe into a developer - “A Mashup Platform for Everyone Else!” Teqlo’s everyone-friendly platform consists of an often confusing UI that allows you to link a limited selection of widgets together via a limited set of interactions to create an application which you can then run in your Teqlo account.

What Teqlo has missed are the same two points that drove Ning’s recent self-reinvention as a canned social network host, and what will keep Yahoo! Pipes a curiosity:

Conjecture #1: There’s a big difference between those who would create something new, and those who wish someone else would create it.

Conjecture #2: Those motivated enough to create something don’t need an “everyman” platform in which to do it.

Human nature is a pain in the ass when it contradicts an idea that sounds golden on paper. Teqlo’s stated target market is the very small slice that includes those with motivation but without a traditional web skill set - an awkward, small middle ground between the masses and the technically competent.

If you recall, Ning had a gruesome, flat-growth year trying to grab this market before they switched value propositions and streamlined their business model. Teqlo is heading for the same place.

Teqlo need not end up as an eBay firesale, however. IMHO, their challenge is the same as Ning’s: market segment identification. Teqlo has a unique and valuable infrastructure that should be tailored to increase acceptance in a few key, revenue driving segments.

To get there, Teqlo needs to open up their platform, and segment their marketing:

1. Make the “everyman” platform part of a larger segmentation strategy, and focus on the “motivated people” and find ways to make their work easier. Ning has targeted a single segment in their relaunch - social networkers; in doing so they’ve gotten out of the tiny slice left by conjectures one and two above.
2. Publish a widget spec so that the Teqlo community isn’t dependent on Teqlo for functionality. If WordPress can do it, you can too. Keep all of the widgets GPL’d too to spur community development. See what widgets are developed and let this inform your strategy. Support the widget community like Ballmer supports developers.
3. Enable external publishing of applications. If the functionality is there, enable it already, see how its used, and let that usage inform your strategy.
4. Clean up the vocabulary. Are they “Teqlets” or “Widgets?” What’s a “teqlet” anyway? Is a “PowerPack” like a template, or something else entirely? The mishmash of un-words makes the creation process difficult to parse out conceptually.
5. Aesthetics of the process: Implement a cleaner UI on the application builder. Again, IMHO WordPress sets the benchmark with their easy handling of plugins, themes, and widgets.

That’s it in a nutshell. Teqlo no-doubt has great value tied up in their plumbing, but without a strategy (other than “build it and hope they come”) informing its deployment and a community contributing to the project (as opposed to just using it), its going to fizzle away.

api, ning, pipes, techfold, teqlo widgets

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