DanLin.net

Digg.com has been using John Battelle’s Federated Media for their ad serving ever since the initial investment by Omidyar Network. Being funded by the same guy and all. But recently it looks like Digg has ditched FM in favor of their ex-ad server Google Adsense. Is it just me or has anyone else noticed this? Is there any story behind the switch? It seems that Federated Media would be able to fetch a higher CPM rate by selling ads using their sales people than the ‘we’ll make it up in volume’, notoriously under paid system Google offers. I suspect that Digg might be in talks with Google about an acquisition deal. That would explain why Digg is favoring adsense exclusively to show Google why they are worth the $150M price tag they are asking. It’s just my speculation and contribution to the Google rumor mill. Thank you very much.

Ning is a company that has been around for about 2 years now and this week they finally launched a product that is worth discussing. They are near the forefront of commoditizing social networks by allowing people to create vertical social networks based on their interests. Conceptually this is pretty cool and as it is free, it might have put fiveacross out of business had they not been acquired by Cisco earlier this month.

From a development and design perspective, the product is very beautifully made with gratuitous Web 2.0 UI features. Usability is very intuitive and setting up a social network is literally a few clicks away. I tested the service and created my own trendy Web 2.0 social network called ThunderAndLight.Ning.com.

Today’s social networks are like the message forums of the 90’s and the blogs of 2003. Ning to me is the PHPBB and Wordpress of social networks. The only difference is that it is free but not open source. I can see a lot of small organizations like schools and churches begin building social networks of their own using services like this. Ning’s business model currently looks like purely advertising driven and they are betting on the vertically integrated model to drive enough traffic to build revenue.

Founded by Mosaic co-creator Marc Andreessen and his protege and Stanford Business School grad Gina Bianchini (Link to Flickr profile), cash and industry connections are not likely gonna be problems. Let’s just hope this vertical market thing lives up to its hype.

You may have seen the video of Microsoft Photosynth app. Here is the Web app you can try for yourself. It is simply amazing. I never expected it to work so smoothly inside the browser (Even Firefox).

Photosynth Tech Preview

This game takes a second to figure out what you are suppose to do, but once you get going, you will not be able to stop. Just try it…

I upgraded the backend to the latest Wordpress 2.1.1 as well as switching over to a new theme called Garland (ported by the wordpress.com guys from Drupal). Looks like everything is working but let me know if you find any bugs.