My Fantasy League Pick for Yahoo's Board: Steve Jobs

Over 11 years ago, after seeing one of the release candidates for Windows 98, I wrote “The browser wars are over, Microsoft won.” I took a lot of heat from the Netscape and Mac faithful, but at the time it was obvious that whatever the default was in the late 90s was going to win.

That was one prediction that I got right. But saying “the search wars are over, Google won” isn’t a prediction, but rather a statement of what already happened. Here’s a screen shot from a recent day’s worth of search traffic for TVbytheNumbers:

If search is the focus, combining Yahoo and Microsoft doesn’t really make up much ground. I’m mostly for Yahoo staying a separate entity because it has such massive scale overall. It’s lagging in search, but its other properties ranging from mail, to MyYahoo, to Yahoo sports perform very well. My theory, boneheaded as it may be, is with that much scale you ought to be able to figure out how to make more money. The one problem I have with the combination isn’t really Microsoft, it’s that combining the companies doesn’t seem like it will wind up increasing the scale that much.

Today Fred Wilson posted a list of board members he’d like to see in light of Carl Ichan’s recommendations. To be honest, I’d rather see Mark Cuban than a lot of Fred’s recommendations. Though I loved Fred’s pick of Bill Gross, overall there are too many deep-thinking smart people on his list. I’m not sure anything ever gets accomplished when you throw that many deep thinkers in a room. And with the mix of people Fred recommends I’d worry about the testosterone warrior mentality of making Google the target of all strategy. I think that would be a bad strategy. I’ve seen what happens when companies make their major competitor the sole focus, and it doesn’t usually work out well.

The one guy I’d really like to see on Yahoo’s board if we’re doing fantasy league is Apple’s Steve Jobs. Think about it. Apple stopped making Microsoft its direct focus, all doing so got it was the need to ask for Microsoft’s help to bail it out! Which Microsoft did.

It took a while, but then came the iPod and now Mac and its OS are very steadily gaining share too. The Apple Store? A retail hit! The Microsoft Store? Not so much. Jobs seemingly knows how to ride these things out better than anyone. Marc Andreesen may be a great product guy and Tim O’Reilly may be a genius at seeing the future. But Jobs has the practical experience of actually surviving something similar.

Disqus: Is Following Buzz More Important Than Building Good Product?

I was initially surprised to see Disqus put *any* focus on integrating Seesmic video comments *right now*. I have nothing against Seesmic (or Disqus). I just question this as a priority for Disqus. Though I installed Disqus on our blog, I’m currently considering removing it. One person reported an issue where they can’t see the Disqus comments for ll posts (still not sure why yet) and there are issues with the way we use Wordpress where sometimes comments for posts are lost completely (huge downside!). Then there is the issue of SEO, while not a huge issue for us is apparently a huge issue for many.

Is it better to follow hot buzz? The base of users who read and post comments is much higher than the base of people who view or post video comments. I do understand the need to glom onto “what’s hot” to some degree, but it seems like Disqus should have many priorities ahead of Seesmic. That said, Loic is a social media marketing guru and though perhaps video commenting is not yet any big deal, MANY of the right people are aware of Seesmic. So while I understand Disqus’ desire to give it some focus, I still very much questioned it as a priority given the other issues Disqus currently faces.

I’m sure that the Disqus crew believes building good product is very important and I doubt that incorporating Seesmic is any big deal for Disqus, but it’s still overhead that takes away from focusing on other things. It seems that in the priority queue, Disqus felt it was at least as important to glom onto “what’s hot” as it is to fix other stuff with its product.

The more I thought about it the more I thought it’s a good call on Disqus part. I don’t think Disqus is concerned with buzz because it’s looking for a quick exit. I think Disqus is looking for the most visibility it can possibly get without spending much (any?) money on marketing. From this perspective, I would do exactly what Disqus is doing simply because Loic is such a “free marketing” genius. It will garner Disqus more mindshare and without spending any money other than the man hours required for the integration and I doubt that was a huge number of hours.

In the world of small startup companies, it seems that sometimes there are good reasons for "riding the wave".

Debating Disqus Seems Stupid, But He Did it Anyway

David Risley, most likely in an attempt to glom on to a "meme" about Disqus on TechMeme (and it worked!), wrote a post called Debating Disqus Seems Stupid. After reading the post, I think what he really seemed to mean was USING Disqus seems stupid. I have no qualms at all with rabble rousers stirring the pot , especially if it generates some useful conversation. I’m not quite sure yet whether Risley is just a chucklehead, but I can weigh in on why we didn’t think using Disqus on TVbytheNumbers.com was a stupid decision.

Disclaimer: TVbytheNumbers while niche is more targeted to a mainstream audience rather than an early adopter/Internet or social media enthusiast crowd. As we push towards 100K monthly uniques (currently just over 80K), if 1000 of them have ever used Twitter or heard of FriendFeed, I’d be surprised.

Having said that, it’s not like we lack data. We can see what people do. While we have a fair amount of commenting on our blog, not only do our visitors overwhelmingly NOT post comments, they overwhelmingly don’t even read them. And at this point we have a lot of data to suggest that even people who comment often are not reading any of the comments. So from our perspective comments are just a way to give people who want to speak up a voice to do so, it also enables some two-way communication that is very useful for us. Over time, we garner a fair bit of knowledge about the stuff we write about as a result of comments people have made.

But for us, the debate over comments, while perhaps not stupid is mostly moot. For this reason, things like “Disqus doesn’t post trackbacks in the comments section” is completely irrelevant to us. Usually most of the trackbacks were from scrapers anyway and just got caught in our spam filter and were something to manage. It’s not like we had 50,000 people a month thinking, “Wow, nobody frakking links to these guys, I can’t ever read this blog again!” While I would like to be able to give blogs that link to us some visibility, I don’t see it as a huge downside for us or for them. Our experience is that links within posts can sometimes drive a fair bit of traffic to other sites, but links in the comments, trackbacks or otherwise get very few clicks at all. I don’t think though that our average reader is as “click-happy” as the average avid Twitter user.

While it’s nice that I can share comments on FriendFeed for like the 5 (ok, 30) people who are following me, it’s not a huge deal. I imagine most who follow me hid my Disqus comments because they’re mostly about TV and not relevant to the early adopter crowd. We have no issue at all that Disqus can centralize our comments. If 20,000 people a month are reading our blogs comments via Disqus, sure we’ll care. But it won’t even be 200. I’m not sure it will be 20!

So who cares? Our readers certainly don’t. After one week on Disqus, where Disqus was only on new posts, we flipped the switch so that it would be Disqus on ALL posts. This had the downside of nuking existing comments off our site, but since our readers aren’t all that obsessed with these conversations, why should we be? We’re not seeing any less commenting as a result not even on older posts.

Still, I think the biggest downside of Disqus for most is that there’s no easy way to integrate it with whatever comments you already have and still wind up only having one comments system to manage. But we switched primarily for two reasons:

- We wanted better looking comments but I didn’t want to screw around with restyling the CSS for the comments.php in our Wordpress theme
- We wanted to be able to reply to comments by e-mail. This is a really nice benefit

Disqus accomplished both things without alienating our existing readers. I haven’t seen one comment or e-mail complaining about the switch, though I did field a couple of e-mails about the Disqus registration being buggy and some pain in trying to upload a picture for use (Disqus is aware of this and working on it).

I’ve seen some talk about because of the way Disqus works comments can’t be indexed in search engines so there is no SEO value. For some blogs that may be an issue, but I doubt there are many blogs getting significant traffic based on comments coming up in organic search. I’m sure it’s not “nothing” for many blogs, just so close to nothing as to be irrelevant.

So if switching to Disqus:

- Didn’t piss our readers off
- Didn’t reduce overall commenting
- Made the comments easier to read/look nicer
- Didn’t put any extra burden on readers or commenters

- Made it easier for us to respond to comments
- Has no negative impact on our traffic

…how can it be stupid?

P.S. David, I linked to your blog post rather than your FriendFeed feed linking to it, but this blog gets no traffic. I'm not holding back the TVbytheNumbers.com "Google Juice" (not that there's much at a PR of 5!), it's just not appropriate subject matter for that blog. But at least you got the TechMeme link...