So what exactly are micropayments then?  As ever Wikipedia is bang on the money.  “Micropayments are means for transferring very small amounts of money i.e. 1/1000th of a dollar.  They are typically payments that are too small to be affordably processed by credit card or other electronic transaction processing mechanisms”.

So why am I writing about micropayments then?  Well would you be reading this article if it cost you £0.10 for the privilege.  Probably not, but I won’t hold that against you.  Micropayments are getting a fair bit of coverage at the moment for a number of reasons.  The main one is that we are in a global recession, marketing budgets are in free-fall and as such quality content providers (especially journalism – great article by Freakonomics, and news) are seeing their ad revenues drying up.  This brings us back to the debate over the free vs subscription model for online news providers which was reignited by Rupert Murdoch and the WSJ recently.

In a nutshell the WSJ is one of the only online news provider out there that has successfully maintained a subscription model ($100 p/year) and Murdoch wants a piece of this.  In an article with the Guardian last week Rupert Murdoch stated that he expects to start charging for access to News Corporation’s newspaper websites within a year as he strives to fix a “malfunctioning” business model. He also added “The current days of the internet will soon be over.”  Now Rupert Murdoch is a guy you have to respect, but ultimately he knows that if he starts charging £10 per month to get our daily dose of The Sun and The Times then we will migrate to alternatives in our droves.  This is where the idea of micropayments comes in.  By charging miniscule amounts per article News Corp’s scale would mean all those fractions of a dollar would eventually start adding up.  The WSJ also announced last week that they will be bringing in micropayments for users that don’t want to pay the $100 upfront for the year, so this is a very real prospect.

It seems that Murdoch clearly has a vested interest in micropayments but who else does.  Well predictably it’s Facebook.  Facebook have been working on a payment platform since late 2007 which is rumoured to be close to launching.  The possibilities for Micropayments on Facebook are huge.  Obviously they have at a basic level gifting, ranging through to their app platform.  The crucial thing about Facebook is that micropayments obviously work best on a large scale, so when you add in Facebook’s 200m+ audience you have a very interesting revenue model.

As we read down the list of who else could have a vested interest in micropayments it reads like a who’s who in silicon alley, Google with Google Checkout, Ebay with Paypal, Apple with iTunes / iPhone, but it could actually be none of these guys that come out on top.  Perhaps one of the biggest opportunities lies with mobile network operators.  As the mobile internet starts to gain critical mass through smartphones we could see mobile networks acting as a single billing point for online micropayments.  Techcrunch wrote a pretty cutting article on micropayments a few days ago, their idea was that you would deposit money into a Google account and it slowly depletes as you go around the web consuming content.

Thus far everyone seems to be pointing towards the future, but there are a couple of success stories for micropayments floating around already.  The first is a company called Zynga who are making a good living according to Techcrunch out of micrpayments around their gaming apps on Facebook, charging for time spent on the game or for chips in their poker game.  Gaming lends itself to being one of the biggest possibilities for micropayments.  Computer games are a premium product that people are happy to pay for.  World of Warcraft is a great example of people changing up real money for the game based currency which is sort of like a micropayment.  Habbo Hotel also have been utilizing micropayments of a kind for quite a while now to great effect.

So what are the barriers, well the main one is probably going to getting people to pay for something that they used to get for free.  The web has completely changed consumer expectations of content delivery especially with regards to how much they are willing to pay for content or rather how much they aren’t willing to pay for it.  People expect news and social networking for free now and that isn’t going to change anytime soon.  In terms of a world where we pay for news on a per article basis, micropayments might gain some traction in certain niche’s like the WSJ but I don’t think they have a future in the mainstream as people will always migrate to free alternatives.  However, micropayments may well have a bright future in gaming and mobile where additional services can be provided for a nominal fee.

I’ll leave you with something I read last week.  Apparently Twitter co-founder and current Chairman Jack Dorsey seems interested in a payment platform also so expect to hear a lot more about micropayments in the near future.

I don’t know about you but my web experience is becoming a myriad of logins, usernames and passwords.  Some tools like iGoogle, and Netvibes bring everything into one place but ultimately that’s not solving the problem.  Microsoft identified this problem years ago and went about creating a service called “Passport”.  Although 90% of us have one of these Passport accounts (via Hotmail) it hasn’t been adopted by any other publishers.  Next up was Open ID.  To quote Wikipedia “OpenID is an open, decentralized standard for user authentication and access control, allowing users to log onto many services with the same digital identity”. What Open ID is not is a single password / username.  It’s much more technical than that and it scares a lot of people off.  Don’t by mean means write this one off though.  So who else is throwing their hat into the ring?  Well suprise suprise there’s Google and Facebook.  Where have we heard that one before!

So short of having a single username and password why else do we need a single web identity?  Read Write Web eloquantly put it, “this battle isn’t about ’single sign-on’ – it’s about the payload that comes with it (friend networks, personal data, maybe more)”.  As we know the web has become an incredibly social experience and we don’t necessarily want to create a whole new group of friends everytime we sign-up to a new site.  We want one group of friends who we can share experiences and interact with across any site / widget / application etc.  To quote Kevin Marks, Developer Advocate for OpenSocial at Google ”Everything on the web is more interesting when it takes place with friends”.  Kevin Marks recently did an interview with Techcrunch on the social web.  It’s definitely worth a read.

So what’s in it for Facebook and Google?  For Facebook this is the second iteration of their Beacon system as Gig Om quite rightly points out.  The first iteration was one of Mark Zuckerberg’s biggest faux pas in what is becoming quite a large catalogue (see the lastest homepage redesign!).  Facebook are calling the second iteration Facebook Connect and in a nutshell it allows websites owners to allow people to log into their website using Facebook login credentials. The genius of this is that it instantly opens up a world of social options.  For example you can see which of your friends are already using the site, you can leave comments and interact with the community and crucially, this will all appear in your Facebook news feed.  This is good for the user at it enriches their Facebook experience and good for the website owner as it publisices their website in users news feeds.  Of course it’s great for Facebook  as they extend their reach across the web and increase their users interdependence on them  In addition from a commercial point of view they get a load more rich user data to mine and use to target people on behalf of advertisers.  Some of the sites already using Facebook Connect are Techcrunch, Digg.com, Mashable and Vimeo.  These aren’t just small sites, they have tens of millions of users.

Facebook Connect clearly makes a lot of sense for all parties involved as users have an established network of friends.  Google, on the other hand aren’t a social network and although most of us have a Google account for Gmail, iGoogle, Google docs etc, we don’t necessarily have a community that goes with it.  So what chance is there for Google Friend Connect? As we know you right Google off at your peril.  However, in saying that I’m going to do just that.  Although Google have integrated Open ID into their system, they simply don’t have the social back-end that say a Facebook have.  They have tried with Google Talk, Blogger etc. but it just doesn’t have the richness of data and friend connections that Facebook do. Sorry Google.

In an ideal world there would be one open source standard, that is what Open ID are campaigning for and they might one day get there.  At the moment though they are getting bogged down in politics (good article by Wired on this) and are already losing ground on Facebook.  For now, it’s a two way battle (Facebook Connect and Open ID are sadly not interoperable) and my money is on Facebook.  At the end of the day you have to look at the user need. Users want a single sign-on and the same friends across the web.  Facebook control that pot of data and that’s why they will win.

Lastly, why am I not using Facebook Connect on my blog? Well my PHP skills are somewhat lacking and although I tried and got it working momentarily it ended up crashing my site.  Any volunteers that fancy helping me, drop me a tweet.

The best analogy I have heard for social media, from the guys at Ryan MacMillan, is to imagine you are at a dinner party and you don’t know anyone.  You look across the crowd and there are several, possibly hundreds of people out there and many different conversations going on. Some may even be about you.  What right do you have to go up and join in any given conversation?  The answer is, you don’t have any right at all.  What say this time you bring something of value like a couple of glasses of champagne and introduce yourself.  Well, the glasses will most probably be gratefully received and you may exchange a few words and then leave.  Alternatively you may strike up a conversation and stay. Either way, you have brought value to the conversation and you have not outstayed your welcome.  Too often I hear people tell us if a conversation is going on online about our brand we need to take part.  I disagree, I think we should know about that conversation but only choose to enter if we have a role to play or we can add value.

With this in mind I have been trialling a social media monitoring tool called Radian 6 courtesy of the guys at 6 Consulting. Radian 6’s software monitors news, video, image, blog, micro-blog and forum activity on a real-time basis and spits all this information out into a dashboard.  From this dashboard you can see exactly what conversations are going on about your brand, sentiment attached to the conversations, how influential they are, etc etc.  It really is a very powerful tool.

The first thing you have to do is calibrate your settings, so as an example I set out to see if I could see what kind of buzz was generated when Facebook changed their terms and conditions recently.  So I setup all the corresponding options around geo locations / languages / types of media to include, then I built a keyword query.  The query meant that each article had to contain “Facebook” and “change” and “privacy” and terms and conditions”.  It has to be this detailed to make sure it doesn’t bring up every article ever written about Facebook.  Then I set it to look back at the last 3 days (bear in mind it is as good as real time, circa a 15min lag).  Once I’ve entered this I can choose how influential to make certain elements such as time spent looking at the article vs how many comments it has had etc.

With all this setup it took me through to the dashboard.  At this point I have to say this application is extremely fast and well built.  The dashboard is essentially a drag-and-drop iGoogle style page where I can take all of the key things I want to monitor and dump them onto a page. This is what I pulled together in literally 5 minutes.

Important to note as well that every single element can be drilled down further to see the next level of data. Working clockwise from the top left I have..

1) Trending Keywords

2) Articles and level of engagement

3) Posts by hour / day / week / month

4) Top 10 most active posts by comments

5) Most Influential Posters

With the right calibration this is an incredibly powerful tool which can allow media agencies / brands to monitor everything that is being said about them online in real-time.  I’m no social media “guru” but one of the first pillars of social media is to listen. Then the decision whether to get involved is all yours!

6 Consulting are an Authorised Solution Provider for Radian 6 in the UK.  If required they can consult on and provided managed services around Radian 6.

Twitter is the now quite rightfully the new kid on the block and why not?  It’s about time we had a new poster child for the so-called social web.  Like many startups it has a lot of users, is growing rapidly, and has a lot of VC funding.  What’s more it’s also has a distinct lack of a business model.  So that’s all the boxes checked then!

It was big news in the online world last week when a comment by one of the founders Biz Stone, to Marketing Magazine, in the UK, caused a lot of people to start speculating that Twitter would be charging users to have commercial account.  To be fair Biz moved quickly to confirm that Twitter will never charge users or companies for an account.  So just how are they planning to monetise all that traffic then?

Well, it’s probably worthwhile look ing at Google.  Back in 2001 they had a great search engine but no business model and look at them now.  Now I don’t for one minute think that Twitter is going to find a business model like Adwords or Adsense.  In fact they will probably be looking more to the Facebook model.  To some extend I think Facebook would have been the ideal partner for Twitter, and so did Facebook.  Mark Zuckerburg himself called Twitter “an elegant model”.  So why did talks break down between Twitter and Facebook. Well Facebook were offering $500m in Facebook stock, which is essentially paper money at the moment, and also over-values Facebook.  In addition the Twitter founders feel they have unfinished business with Twitter.

Below I’ve jotted down a few ideas for how Twitter could monetise the traffic and service they provide without charging users a subscription fee.

1) Sponsored Tweets in your feed – Similar to Facebook sponsored feed ads.  This would be relatively easy to do but without the level of demographic data FB have Twitter would need to target it based upon what users are Tweeting / Favouriting.  Would advertisers like this, time will tell. Likelihood = 8 (out of 10)

2) Google Adsense / Banners – Easy win, convert all that traffic into revenue.  Only problem is it will be low yield and also many people use an App to bypass Twitter.com.  Might make an appreance but would be worrying if this was their best attempt at a business model. Likelihood = 8 (out of 10)

3) Self service contextual ad system.  Google Adwords is the best, Facebook ads it getting some traction.  This might require a redesign of the layout but there could be room for some kind of engagement ad as Facebook like to call it whereby people can engage with the content and retweet the advertiser message to their friends. Likelihood = 6 (out of 10)

4) Research tool – There’s a whole load of information floating about on Twitter as to people’s thoughts, experiences and perceptions of a companies products and services.  What if Twitter could charge companies for advanced statistics and analytics on what people are saying about them, on Twitter, in realtime. Check out my post on the real time web.  This is along the lines of the TechCrunch article, mining the thought stream. Likelihood = 2 (out of 10)

5) Facebook Connect / Google Friend Connect - Linking either of these systems into Google Friend Connect or Facebook Connect ID system’s will give both parties another level or targeting to tap into.  i.e. they would know what you are twittering and what you are searching for / what your demographics and interests are.  Advertisers would then pay a premium for this targeting.  Ultimately this relies on Google / Facebook selling the inventory. Likelihood = 2 (out of 10)

6) Classifieds – We all know what hashtags are right? Well we could have a slightly more user friendly system where people tweet their classified ads (would work great with geo-location), i.e. “looking for a housemate in Clapham, London, £600pcm, non-smoker”. You then pay a small fee for a listing in certain categories, or Twitter gets a small % share of the sale item if you were selling something ebay style. Likelihood = 4 (out of 10)

7) Get bought - Last option, is to sell up, take the money and run. Leave it to Facebook, Google or Microsoft. Likelihood = 6 (out of 10).

So there are some examples, but I guess we are all going to have to wait and see what Twitter come up with.  If you want some further reading Business Insider have run a competition with their users to create the best 11 commercial business model for Twitter.

If a huge news story breaks, where are you going to go first? Switch on the TV, try BBC News, CNN, maybe. But what if you are at work…….? Ok, let’s say a plane crashes into New York’s Hudson River? Like many the first port of call for such an event is the web. Now we all know that 90% of people are probably going to start at Google. The problem is Google has on average a 1-72hr spidering lag depending on the site in question and it’s links / authority. So, if Google hasn’t got anything, what next, Google News, BBC, CNN online versions. Fair enough, there might be a holding page with minimal details. Now consider this, if you had navigated to search.twitter.com on 15th January 2009, you would have seen this picture come up.

Hudson River Crash Photo From Twitter

Ladies and gentlemen welcome to the real-time web.  Not only this, there were actual tweets from passengers on board the plane. A first hand account of what happened. Twitter is one of those things that polarizes opinion but it’s undoubtedly hit the news big time thanks in part to its popularity amongst celebrities. However some of the more clever applications have also demonstrated the real time web in action. In London last month we had about a foot of snow, which brought the country to a standstill, including the National Rail website. Fear not though, the Twitter account @uksnow was on hand to send through real time updates depending on your region and train service. Not just that but some clever folks used Twitters famously open API to build a snow map based upon people geo tagging snow reports. Now I’m not going to argue that Twitter is very much the premise of the early adopter / tech geek but it’s certainly ruffled a few feathers, enough to make Facebook try and buy them and to even open up their own Status Update API.

It’s not just Twitter taking advantage of the real time web though. Look at the Facebook / CNN tie up for Barack Obama’s inauguration. This was a great example of empowering me the user and my friends to watch a historic event and have a shared experience in an online environment. Now consider the iPhone, Flickr, Friendfeed, Google Latitude, Loopt. All great examples of the real time web.

So what next, is Google doomed, well clearly not. A good article by Read Write Web surmised it “Google cannot be real-time. It indexes the historical web, and it does it better and faster than anyone else. It finds me after-the-fact reporting on major stories from major media companies. But it misses the real-time story. And that matters today”. I’m not sure about the last quote, “Google cannot, be real time”. Google’s mission is to index the world’s content no matter what that may be. However, they do at last seem to have a challenger on their hands.

What is clear is that Google is missing a trick at the moment, and Twitter is going to go from strength to strength for the time being. Simon Waldman wrote a good article in NMA magazine saying why should we all bash Twitter anyway, isn’t it a good thing that there’s a new kid on the block, something new to get excited about?

I’ll leave you with a quote from Robert Scoble, a long-time advocate of the real-time web, “there’s a new expectation that we’re having thanks to Twitter. We want everything now in real time. I want to see everything that was published now and respond to it now and I want to have conversations about all that in real time”. Take a look at Scoble’s live Friendfeed to see what he means.

Location based services are for me going to be one of the next big things in the digital space. The only thing is I’m not sure when! I’ve been following the area closely since I heard about Loopt 9 months ago. In the online advertising business we always say in January “this is going to be the year for Mobile”, and it never is. These two fields are inextricably linked and as soon as the latter gets critical mass then so will the former.

So what is a location based service. It is a service (i.e. social networking) accessible through mobile devices that utilises the ability to geographically triangulate the device location anywhere in the globe, i.e. on your Facebook news feed, imagine seeing, “Joe Bloggs is in Leicester Square, London”. Social Networking is going to be the thing that drives this. Kids at school, people lost at festivals, mates in the vicinity, the possibilities are endless. But the possibilities also extend in so many commercial ways that brands with retail presences must be liking their lips at the very thought. Then there’s this idea of social graffiti, i.e. leaving geo-tags on restaurants, shops, etc, that your friends can see, share and comment on. Imagine I want to go to a local restaurant, call it up on Google Maps, and I see a menu from the restaurant, and comments left from 3 of my friends who have been there. We all know that recommendations are that much more influential if they are from your friends. Applications like Brightkite are already doing this in a simplistic way, check out the video below.

The barriers to this service are wide ranging and entwined with all sorts of legal / privacy concerns. We saw the backlash start with the launch of Google Latitude and then continued with the Facebook privacy row. Google Latitude is a location based service that can be installed on most new smartphones, although notably not the iPhone at present. Google obviously have a vested interest in this sort of technology with their complementary product portfolio of namely Maps, Android and Gmail. However for once it’s not going to be Google that drives this. Whilst there are a multitude of services out there like Loopt, Brightkite, etc, the growth is going to come from the established social networks. You can bet that Facebook and MySpace have Silicon Valley’s finest working on this functionality in readiness. To bring this to the mainstream you have to have an established network of friends in place already.

So until Facebook pull their fingers out and get on with it, we can dream. The Tonchidot, Sekai Camera is one such example. Premiered at TechCrunch50 this App stole the show and although the designers seem a little thin on how they are going to populate this augmented reality experience it is clearly a vision of the future.  Enjoy…!