Don’t get us wrong, we love the Cloud-based operating system and there’s nothing quite like it out there right now (well, at least until Chrome OS arrives), but when you consider that most netbooks with Windows 7 Starter cost around £229 (or $299 in the US) and that you can download the Cloud OS for free the value proposition isn’t all that great

Tried Jolicloud a little while ago myself and ‘lo — here are Jolicloud netbooks.  Very stylish.  Very stylized.  I don’t think I’m the target audience … I still found it rather limiting even if the boot times were zippy.  To be honest, in retrospect it seemed to try and occupy the same space that tablets do — light, portable devices mostly for media consumption and a little light editing.  Trouble is that a netbook isn’t a tablet, and can’t be tablets at those features (and by tablet, I mean the iPad, really).

Anyway, I think Friendfeed would benefit tremendously by getting someone over there (and, really anywhere where people are pushing out their social media profiles to millions of laypeople all the time), to sell their idea of what Friendfeed is — and how it can help by inserting five words to the end of any social media pimping phrase.

Those words?

“… and follow it all on Friendfeed.”

While its not uncommon for Twitter celebrities to get subscribers in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions, I daresay that amongst the lay public (and even amongst the Twitterati), that while Twitter has its obvious benefits (its pretty much the only way to get up to date news from what’s going on in Iran at the moment, for example), it continues to suffer from a few significant drawbacks, not the least of which are unified areas to both have and witness conversations,  unify social media streams, and in a meaningful way, increase the signal-to-noise ratio.

There’s no question that Twitter is the media’s favourite darling at the moment, but I wonder if and when the shoe will ever really drop on Friendfeed as the real means of “joining the conversation” (another phrase I hear all the time on CNN) in a way that’s just not possible on Twitter.

Not knowing any other languages other than English does make it hard for me to find Web2.0 copy-cats, but my first experience with it was a Digg-clone, of which there are many, many, many of them  [Sorry, co-Rank -- "Digg" has become synonymous with social voting systems, almost, but not quite like Xerox with photocopying and Kleenex with paper tissue] with quite a few being Chinese versions.

Heck, I got dugg to the frontpage of a Chinese Digg about a year ago and wrote about it over here (abridged version: you don’t quite get the same Digg effect, to put it mildly).  At the end of the day, it does pose an interesting legal question for those companies State-side which make it big, as these smaller international versions are clearly unauthorized representations — or, the reverse: if any of these international sites *do* make it big, but the one in the States (the ‘original’) does *not*.  Does that make it ripe for copyright “trolling”?  And that’s besides the interesting look at why it did in one country and not another.

While the actual debate might be months (or years) away while the while web application milieu around the world matures, for the time being, I’ll keep my own faux outrage in check.  After all, that Chinese Digg that I hit the frontpage of?

It’s went into the international dead pool a long time ago. ;)

I think the answer is “… maybe!”

Well, this is an idea that Thomas Hawk goes into much greater depth with, but basically Flickr already has algorithms to determine popularity and relevance.  This is governed largely by the way that images are sorted and tagged and viewed by the community at large.  In fact, the community itself determines the relative importance of each photo, which in turn, has an important effect on how Flickr sorts through those photos and the order in which it serves them up if they are searched through.

Could Yahoo! learn a thing or three about this?  Sure.  And Thomas makes some great points about it, but suffice it to say, its a similar, but very different way of understanding importance.  The current model of determining relevance has to do with many different factors, but one of the principle ones involves the pattern of inbound links to a given page for given keywords.  Link structure and the evolution of that over time is what has driven how search engines do what they do.

But for results and data that are derived from social networks, like Flickr in Yahoo — its a bit different story because of the users tag, or even, internally rank (vote?) for specific photos for a given tag.

I think this introduces an entirely different dynamic, because acquiring inbound links in the World Wide Web at large seems like a very different kettle of fish than acquiring the same kind of positive ranking in the factors which matter in a social system. 

But is this an improvement over the way that Search Engines have done things?  I think the answer could be yes.  After all, Matt Cutts at Google has said that Google is trying to dabble with how humans can help the algorithm do what it needs to do.  And what are social networks if not human activity that involves adding, sorting and tagging information in ways that can be infinitely measured and quantified?

Which begs the question, of course:

If social networks can improve the search results of certain topics (and this is a huge presumption), does it make sense for search engines to start acquiring those social networks? 

Not for a content play — but so that it can examine how certain social networks *do* rank data, and so they can have access *to* that, but also, and literally, own the content of those search results?

I have no idea.  But if Google suddenly snaps up Facebook for people search, please reference me in any future posts you might do. ;)

I’m not going to debate the price paid out for Rivals.com — after all, unlike its other ‘new media’ properties and acquisitions, Rivals has already been profitable for the past year or so, generating (using my fancy back of the napkin math) about $18M in subscription revenue per year.

That’s pretty good.

But before I give Yahoo! a double-handed pat on the back (rarely done and hard to execute, I should add), one does wonder where this seemingly smart content acquisition will fit into the overall Yahoo plan.

You know — the Peanut Butter one.

As a bit of a refresher, in November of 2006, an internal memo was widely circulated throughout the technosphere about what Brad Garlinghouse, a Yahoo! Senior VP thought about the current state of affairs.  Some thought it was refreshingly candid (yours truly included), as he introduced an analogy that will probably stick with him for years — calling Yahoo!’s strategy something like peanut butter, because it was being stretched far too thin amongst a variety of disparate properties. 

Hence, the “Peanut Butter” Manifesto.

Well, amongst the widely publicized acquisitions in recent months, we have Flickr, Del.icio.us, and MyBloglogs … all social media / network plays to a greater or lesser degree.  All still floating, more or less, on their own, with a superficial integration within Yahoo! proper (although Flickr is making slow strides with a unified login system amongst other things).

Now we have Rivals.com, which isn’t a social network *per se* as its really a content platform for college sports.  Sure, its a smart move as it dove tails nicely within Yahoo!’s own sports network — but as I asked a few paragraphs ago:

Where’s the peanut butter?

How does it fit within Yahoo!’s grand strategy and vision for the future?  Or is it merely a revenue generating cog within the lumbering and discombobulated hulk that Yahoo! has become?  Or is it even a sign that Yahoo! is moving towards a more content focused, subscription oriented model?

And where do the rumours of the MySpace acquisition (for $12billion dollars), complete with a parternship with Rupert Murdoch, come into play? 

Well, lots of speculation, but I simply have no idea at this point.  But from the looks of it, one does wonder if Yahoo! has plans to morph into a social network content new media play with a freemium model thrown in for good measure.

Hell.  If Jerry Yang is in the house I’d love to know what he thinks about this.

Wait — I think he said something about striving for excellence or monetizing an audience or something … ? ;)

I mean, at its heart, its a silly debate … one that speaks more of the bloggers who are protesting a little too loudly, and a little too long, about how they feel about their own ages.

I would like to think that I’m not old. I don’t think 30 is old. But, I *do* understand what Fred Wilson is getting at. Every few years, there’s a change in how young folk “use” the Internet. I’m probably a few generations away from how teenagers are currently using it, and it will continue to change and evolve even beyond how teens are using it now. And I think *THAT* is what Fred Wilson is getting at.

Would you like two examples?

How many of you check your email?

Or, this one: How many of you wear a watch when you leave the house?

Teenagers today use email less than any demographic, for example. Use ‘less’ email? Why might that be? Perhaps because they’re sending messages via their own closed networks, such as MySpace or Facebook. Or, perhaps because they’re using their phones to send text messages. I’m not quite sure of the reasons (where’s Charlene Li when you need her?), but this kind of fact carries incredible implications

Consider the usage of watches. I don’t have a link here, but I did see a bit on a local news station the other day, and I was surprised to hear that something like less than a quarter of all teenagers carry watches. Why is that? Well, when asked about it, most said things like “I’m carrying a cell phone around with me *all* the time — that has the time.” Or, “Why would I need a watch? I just look at my iPod”.

Both of these kinds of patterns are unfathomable to *me*, but it is precisely these kinds of things which define how a generation interacts with different media, and in this case, the rise and (off-line) ubiquity of instant messaging. Sure, when they ‘grow up’ they’ll all start using email and begin wearing a watch because business standards will force them to adopt them.

But it says a lot about how they would *rather* spend their time. And these two small examples are clear examples of how digital generations are “different”, even to individuals who might not classically be defined as of a “generation” than them (as I clearly am).

Now, just because you’re older doesn’t disqualify you from being a net native. However, its clearly the rule, rather than the exception. The average 60 year old will understand email, but because none of his or her peers are using instant messaging and off-line texting to communicate, I’d wager there’s an aspect of this pattern of usage that they just won’t “get”.

If you’d like an analogy, when boomers were listening to Rock and Roll, I’m sure there were folks who were part of the Greatest Generation who “got” that as well, and were just as happy to turn up the volume on Mick Jagger, Barry Manilow, or Paul McCartney (for those boomers who were into those artists). But, I’ll wager that most didn’t.

Furthermore, if you were in the music business, of course there were professionals that were older and seasoned, but if you wanted to learn more about creating a new sound that was fresh and new, unless you’re always in places and with people who were making that new sound, you just wouldn’t be right for the job.

Bottom line? It doesn’t mean that you have to be young, but it helps.

Fred Wilson’s post wasn’t a shot at people who have paid their dues in the technology business. All it was was a recognition of a phenomenon that happens with every generation. And, more importantly, something that happens with the exploration and maturation of every new medium.

You don’t have to *be* young to recognize and take advantage of new patterns for the “web2.0″, but you do have to be in it, thinking about it, and using it often enough to be facile with the terminology and usage that you *could*do it. That Fred Wilson sees so many “company’s” these days with younger and younger pitchmen is a testament to the fact that many of them happen to be 20-somethings.