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Written on May 13, 2008 – 11:44 am
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
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One week ago Nine Inch Nails surprised their fans with a special treat giving away their new album Slip absolutely free on their website. The album is available for download in a variety of formats: MP3, lossless at CD quality and 24/96 WAVE format, which means even higher-than-CD quality. Downloaders also receive a PDF with artwork and credits. This is not the first time that Trent Reznor is sharing his music for free. Here’s a little history for you.
In 2007 NIN produced an album called The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust and made it available to fans as a free download. Many thought that Trent was only mimicking Radiohead who asked fans to put their own price on the group’s release in the same year. Though I believe that by the time you’re finished reading this post, you will see that NIN are true innovators that have achieved quite a lot since being released from their major-label recording contract last year. The fact that NIN has given away music various times in extremely high quality formats and released it online using a variety of tools shows that it is serious about this model. This is not just an “experiment” for them like it was for Radiohead who have since said that they will not be releasing online again.
According to Mashable:
Reznor called Radiohead’s effort a “marketing gimmick,” and Yorke’s latest statement does nothing to disprove it. Reznor did it right. He set out his plan very clearly, and he’s doing well, earning 1.6 million dollars from album sales in the first couple of weeks, according to him.
In March 2008 NIN released a portion of their album Ghosts for free via BitTorrent. According to TorrentFreak, the band confirmed that they had uploaded the album themselves to sites like The Pirate Bay, Waffles.fm and What.cd. The NY Times quotes Trent describing file sharing as “a revolutionary digital distribution method, and we believe in finding ways to utilize new technologies instead of fighting them.” Trent Reznor himself admitted to downloading music using BitTorrent and being a former user of OiNK. The band also offered a digital download of the entire 36-track collection for a flat $5 from its site and Amazon.
On May 4th of this year, NIN released their single ‘Echoplex’ for free via their iLike page and told fans to check the NIN website the next day for a surprise. The surprise came the next day when fans found out they were receiving a full-length NIN album as a gift from Trent for their continued love and support. What an amazing way to cause a buzz and increase the love of fans! Everybody was twitting and digging about the free album.
NIN is truly paving the way for future artists to find new means of distributing (and profiting from) their music.
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Written on April 6, 2008 – 4:29 pm
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
Since MySpace recently launched its MySpace Developer Platform (MDP), I was looking for some statistics on the virality of MySpace apps.
According to Fred Wilson, Zynga, which has launched a couple of Apps on MDP, has done some interesting research and found the following:
1) Myspace apps are not taking off in the same speed that Facebook apps did (see below). This is probably because MySpace is currently not promoting these apps nor linking to them in any way. There is no newsfeed to promote the apps and apps are only visible on profiles. You cannot invite friends to an app and apps cannot message users in any way. For now, apps are being installed only by those users who are aware that there is such a thing as apps.myspace.com. As Wilson writes, this may be a deliberate move on MySpace’s behalf: “This may well be an attempt by MySpace to avoid the “app spam” that became a problem with the Facebook platform and has been largely eliminated with the new rules that Facebook has implemented.”
2) There are major differences between the top twenty apps on MySpace as opposed to the top twenty on Facebook (see below). It is not yet clear why these differences exist, however, I believe that it’s just too early to tell which apps will be most popular on Facebook as all this is still in development plus many of the apps on Facebook are not yet available on MySpace.
I also understand from a friend who’s working on a MySpace app that even though apps created for MySpace should supposedly work on all other OpenSocial networks, several changes are still required in order to upload the app on each of the platforms.
In spite of all this, I still believe that developing a MySpace app now has enormous potential and at some point soon, the virality of these apps will take off in full speed. I do think that players who get in on the action early will enjoy dominant positions later on. In addition, in order to stay competitive, MySpace has allowed platform developers to run ads and keep 100% of the revenue.
Written on March 27, 2008 – 11:00 am
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
Asi Sharabi has written his second report on Facebook Applications Trends. You can see my post regarding his first report here. I find Asi’s reports to be extremely interesting and useful. 
Any person/company that’s currently offering or plans to offer an application on Facebook, should definitely read both reports to get an idea on “what’s hot and what’s not” as far as apps go. In the first report Asi focused on the 100 most popular apps according to number of installs. This report focuses on the apps that have the highest number of active users. Looking at these apps allows us to truly understand what makes a sustainable Facebook app. All data in the post is taken from adonomics , an amazing site which provides all sorts of great statistics regarding Facebook applications.
Asi writes:
As some people have already noted there is a sense of ‘apps fatigue’ and this indeed reflected in the data. Still, according to recent report while there is for the first time a slow decrease in the apps fair, on average 51% Facebook users interacted with FB apps pages in January.”
Most of the prevalent, multi-million installs apps have fairly low percentage of active users. Evidently, it is one thing to create a ‘viral’ application and get loads of users to install it (which occasionally been achieved with some dirty tricks and is getting increasingly difficult), but it is a different thing altogether to create a sustainable application, i.e. application that’s not just a passing gimmick but one that offer lasting value that people keep using over time.
I think that part of the reason why users are fatigued by Facebook apps is because there are very few apps that offer users real added value. Succeeding in getting people to install your app is great. But that’s only the first step. The real challenge lies in creating a sustainable application which people will actively use.
There are currently 20,861 applications on Facebook (140 apps are uploaded daily). Only about 170 apps have over 1 million users. About 800 have 100K to 1 million users, around 2200 have 10K – 100K users, around 4300 have 1K – 10k users, which leaves us with about 13,000+ apps with less than 1K users. (more…)
Written on March 18, 2008 – 10:43 am
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
Nick O’Neill from The Unofficial Facebook Blog has recently interviewed Mark Zuckerberg (in a slightly different manner than Sarah Lacy). Here’s what Mark had to say:
1) He believes the reaction to his interview with Sarah Lacy was overblown.
2) Mark claims that the 5,000 friend limit on Facebook is more of a technical limitation than anything else and even though users have been complaining about this, it is not something they plan on changing any time soon. However Nick adds:
“I received a different response from one Facebook employee later that night who claimed that it would only be a few lines of code to change. I’m sure there is more to it than that but it definitely is not a high priority at Facebook currently.”
3) Mark claims that Facebook does not want to compete with other application developers. However, this still didn’t stop them from sending out a message to thousands (if not millions) of college students recently telling them to install the March Madness application. Over the last few years, CBS and Facebook had worked together in creating and promoting this application. The fact that Facebook is not allowing other developers the same promotional capability for their applications is angering many developers and justly so. When asked about this controversial issue, Mark mentioned that this year they had actually messaged less users than in previous years.
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Written on February 17, 2008 – 12:04 am
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
The Pew Research Center has recently come out with its “Internet’s Broader Role in Campaign 2008” report. This report’s findings are based on the results of a survey the Center conducted in December 2007 amongst 1430 American adults. The data is fascinating and I wanted to share of its most intriguing findings with you.
Summary of Findings:
1) The internet is becoming one of the leading sources for news about the presidential campaign for all Americans. 24% of Americans say they regularly learn something about the campaign from the internet, almost double the percentage from respondents in the 2004 campaign (13%) and almost triple the percentage found in the 2000 campaign (9%).
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Written on January 29, 2008 – 1:04 am
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
SeeToo which was founded in 2007, has just recently moved to public beta. SeeToo is a web-based application that allows people to invite others to watch home videos with them in real time. You can also chat while watching. In this manner, SeeToo allows you to share videos with people you want to share them with and not with the whole world. The video isn’t saved to any server and won’t be available on the Internet afterwards. Users can share video files of any size and don’t need to upload files anywhere.
Basically the process works like this: You download the SeeToo application to your PC. This application takes any video on your desktop, compresses it, and streams it right from your computer to the SeeToo Web page that is hosting the chat. You select a video file from your computer. You invite a friend by sending an automatically generated invitation over your preferred IM service or by sending the link in an email. When the invitee clicks on the link, the viewing experience begins. The great part is that the invitee does not need to install anything in order to start watching the video. The downside is that unlike in Meebo Rooms, where you can watch embeddable videos with a bunch of people, SeeToo only allows you to watch a video with one person at a time.
Though SeeToo provides a useful service, it faces fierce competition from Meebo as mentioned earlier and PalTalk which enables real time shared video viewing with a lot more people as well. I’d advise SeeToo to enable shared viewing with a a group of people as soon as possible if they want to offer a real challenge to their competitors and gain a larger share of the market.
The application is currently only available for Windows. A Mac version is scheduled for release next year.
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