Randy Weber

Collaboradate.com posted about businesses building themselves up using MySpace. He suggests that “they should continue to phase out competing widgets, or charge companies to have their widgets be compatible with the site.” I’d do this if I were MySpace. So I’ll say it again - be careful when attaching your fortunes to other businesses without some kind of contractual relationship.

MarketingVOX points us to a ComScore study that claims most traffic to US sites comes from outside of the US. This certainly came as a surprise to me. The lessen to be learned here is that US marketshare numbers are not always as they appear. I hope that the major ad networks are crediting the accounts of advertisers that are purchasing geo-targeted ads.

Startup Review wrote a great case study on Facebook. The main takeaway for me is that offline behavior drives online usage. Other examples of community sites that fit this bill are Gay.com, BlackPlanet.com, and iVillage, all of which are successful sites that were created to serve an existing community. They were not communities created online from within another site. Looking at sites like Linkedin, which is on it’s own a very successful site and one that I like very much, has tried to create communities from within its site as exempliefied by university and professional affiliations. This has not worked nearly as well external sites serving these same groups. If you’re a mainstream service trying to create niche communities, you would be better served trying to partner with existing sites that serve these niche groups than to try building the community yourself.

From shmula » Google’s Acquisitions: A Timeline : Business, Technology, and Stuff in Between comes a review of Google’s acquisitions. It’s interesting to see how many aquisitions have accounted for new products at Google. I had forgotten most of these.