The Fallout Continues?

We have covered Facebook in several posts here on the IngBoo blog specifically, the Facebook Open Graph initiative and its implications for the Internet industry. The first article discussed how Facebook is becoming the de-facto social platform for the web. The second article discussed recent developments with regards to Digg and Yahoo! Buzz.

Today, AOL announced that it is selling off Bebo, their social network service. AOL acquired Bebo for $850M 2 years ago. According to an article in Business Week, they now sold it for $10M. Ouch!

Does this surprise anyone? The current situation is unsustainable anyway. Consolidation simply must happen in the market. Social syndication is great but no one benefits from this:

The image above is from AddThis, a popular plug-in to allow readers to share content.

What may be the next move from Facebook? Maybe they will get into the content business (as in a publisher)?

The Fallout from Facebook Open Graph

We recently wrote about Facebook's new publisher tools and how this will change the Internet forever (again). In the article, we specifically mentioned that some companies, like Yahoo! (specifically Yahoo! Buzz) and Digg need to watch out. We didn't know how fast this would happen. Digg dropped like a rock in April. This coincides with Facebook's roll out of their new social plug-ins. Look at this graph from Compete.com:

Digg dropped from 38.6M unique visitors in March, to 24.7M by end of April. While 24.7M is an impressive visitor number, it is also a 36% drop in traffic... in just one month!

How do we know that this is Facebook's "fault"? We don't. We just applied some logical analysis in April, named a couple of companies that should be concerned and then looked at those companies again now. Maybe this is just a coincidence, we don't know.

Yahoo! Buzz on the other hand, made some strides in April, according to Compete.com. This speaks against our hypothesis.

Buzz climbed from 4M unique visitors, to 6M, which is a 20% increase in traffic. Maybe Buzz just has more overall momentum thanks to integration with Yahoo! sister properties? Thanks to that momentum, Buzz will either take longer to show a drop or, will just stagnate at its current level. Do note that Digg still has over 4x the traffic over Buzz. Maybe Yahoo! should pick them up?

WebGuild has some additional perspective on Digg, which you can read here.

Video Interview with IngBoo Co-Founder and CEO

A couple of days ago, IngBoo co-founder and CEO, Rikard Kjellberg, was interviewed by Andrew Warner of Mixergy. Andrew has a great Internet site, focused on interviews with entrepreneurs. Andrew is a successful entrepreneur himself. You can read his story here.

If you have 40 minutes to spare, the interview is here:

SebCAM TV - One Man on a Mission

We recently partnered with SebCamTV.com (Beware - ADULT content) for content syndication. Sebastian, who owns the site, has a great concept. He shares his life (work and otherwise) in an Internet video show as well as blog. We felt that his site had really good quality content (yes... adult too).




Given his profession, the site provides a unique and fun insight into an industry that most of us know little or nothing about.