Web 2.0

What the Heck is This Twitter Business About, Anyway?

That’s the question that WebProNews posed to its readers. The catch was that responses were limited to one word. As you can imagine, the answers were varied. Some people said “aggrandizement,” “egos,” or “useless,” while others offered up “communication,” “relationships,” and even “possibilities.”

If pressed for an answer, I’d have to say “experimentation.” I know that in the virtual world, one month is the equivalent of about five years, but I still think it’s too soon to concretely and objectively evaluate Twitter’s utility–for communication, for search engine optimization, for anything.

Besides, Nielsen Online recently did a study showing that Twitter’s retention rate sits around 40%. When MySpace and Facebook were in their emergent states, as Twitter is now, their retention rates were nearly double that.

What do you think Twitter is all about?

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YouTube and Universal Music Group Partner to Form Music Video Site

After announcing partnerships with ESPN and Disney-ABC Television Group and expanding its Click-to-Buy program last week, YouTube has taken another step towards better monetizing its services by partnering with Universal Music Group (UMG) to create VEVO, a new music video site. VEVO will feature premium video content from UMG—and potentially other major labels in the future—and will be owned by both YouTube’s parent company Google and UMG. The companies will share ad revenue from the site.

On the YouTube blog, Partnerships Director Chris Maxcy explains, “This service will blend UMG’s broad catalog of artists and content production capabilities [UMG is the world’s largest recording company] with our video technology and user community—in other words, we’ll provide the technology infrastructure that will power VEVO and host UMG’s extensive library of professionally-created music videos on the new site. This content will be exclusively available through VEVO.com and a new VEVO channel on YouTube through a special VEVO branded embedded player. It launches later this year.” Per the agreement, users will also be able to create and watch videos containing UMG sound recordings.

According to The New York Times, YouTube is hoping VEVO will reproduce the kind of success that Hulu, an online video site from NBC and Fox, has had in the past few months. Although Hulu is less than a year-and-a-half old and attracts a smaller audience, it has been able to pull in strong advertisers. Moreover, Hulu viewership is growing steadily, increasing 55% between January 2009 and February 2009 to reach 7.8 million visitors.

The UMG partnership should also help YouTube circumvent some of the legal troubles that it has faced in the past over the use of copyrighted music. Google is currently embroiled in an ongoing $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Viacom. Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the Times that the agreement with UMG could become the model for resolving future conflicts between media companies.

Is Web 2.0 the New Industrial Revolution?

Consider this excerpt from Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 classic Winesburg, Ohio:

In the last fifty years a vast change has taken place in the lives of our people. A revolution has in fact taken place. The coming of industrialism, attended by all the roar and rattle of affairs, the shrill cries of millions of new voices that have come among us from overseas, the going and coming of trains, the growth of cities, the building of the interurban car lines that weave in and out of towns and past farmhouses, and now in these later days the coming of the automobiles has worked a tremendous change in the lives and in the habits of thought of our people of Mid-America. Books, badly imagined and written though they may be in the hurry of our times, are in every household, magazines circulate by the millions of copies, newspapers are everywhere. In our day a farmer standing by the stove in the store in his village has his mind filled to overflowing with the words of other men. The newspapers and the magazines have pumped him full. Much of the old brutal ignorance that had in it also a kind of beautiful childlike innocence is gone forever. The farmer by the stove is brother to the men of the cities, and if you listen you will find him talking as glibly and as senselessly as the best city man of us all.

Reading those lines, it’s hard not to think about Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, news aggregators, blogs, and the like. In this age of info-dumping, have we traded our “beautiful childlike innocence” for immediacy? And, more importantly, in this new Age of Reason, what becomes of individual minds “filled to overflowing with the words of other men”?

YouTube, Sony Pictures Discuss Partnership

Tired of pirating movies from the rough seas of the Internet? If a rumored deal between YouTube and Sony Pictures comes to fruition, you may be able to snag some movies for free on the online video site, though perhaps not enough to hang up your tri-cornered hat just yet. CNET reports that the two companies are in talks to offer full-length movies on YouTube via Sony’s video property Crackle; however, CNET speculates that the number probably won’t exceed 15 and no word on possible titles yet. At present, there are about 60 Sony films available on Crackle, including such titles as “Groundhog Day,” “Wild Things,” “El Mariachi,” “Ghostbusters,” “Idle Hands,” “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” “Rudy,” “The Karate Kid” (all three installments), and more. Sony could choose to make a portion of these public on YouTube, provided that YouTube uses the Crackle video player, which would allow Sony to retain control of the advertising. But the videos would have limited usage, as the studio does not allow its partners to syndicate its content. That means YouTube users wouldn’t be allowed to post their favorite videos into their blogs, Facebook pages, etc.

Still, YouTube needs to develop ways to monetize its services further to avoid losing money, even though online video sites are growing faster than ever. According to global financial services firm Credit Suisse, the company could lose as much as $470 million in 2009 due to inflated bandwidth and content licensing expenses. Recently, YouTube has struck deals with ESPN and Disney-ABC Television Group to try to drive advertiser demand. We’ll see if a Sony Pictures partnership could also help YouTube avoid landing in the red this year.