Will OnLive be a successful venture? tell us

The OnLive service was announced at the Game Developers Conference last year, and since there has been wide speculation as to how successful they’ll be with their plans. This week, we go from speculation to finally seeing the service in action. Before getting into the details, you might be curious as to how the service works.

OnLive works the same way as cloud storage does for accessing files. Games are hosted on a server and players access content through these servers. Let’s say you wanted to play the game: Batman Arkham Asylum. Instead of going to a store to buy the disc, or download it, OnLive will allow you to simply click on a link and have the game loaded instantly. Batman: Arkham Asylum will then pop up on your screen and you’re on your way.

Game saves will be hosted through these servers as well, so when you’re done playing a game you can pick up right where you left off. All with a simple click.

With the synopsis I provided above, you’d think OnLive would be a successful venture. The problem is everything I’ve explained has been simple theory. The question now remains; how will it work in practice?

Luckily, this week we get to find out as the service has officially launched. You can signup for the ‘Founding Members Program‘ which provides your 1st year free, with a $4.95/month charge for the second year. When they say "free", it means you have access to demos, community features, ‘friending’, chat, and spectating. Actual gameplay will require a separate purchase.

This separate purchase is called a ‘PlayPass’. Each game will have its own PlayPass, so to play Batman Arkham Asylum you’ll need to purchase its PlayPass. You can purchase a Full Playpass, which provides unlimited access throughout the game’s lifetime on the OnLive service. You can also choose to ‘rent’ the game for three or five days. OnLive has guaranteed games on the service will be supported for at least three years.

As of now you can connect to OnLive using a PC or Mac. They’re developing a MicroConsole TV Adapter to bring their service to the living room. No release date has been announced as of yet.

Obviously, OnLive is pushing the boundaries of gaming to places never attempted. The problem being, it might be ahead of its time. Streaming a game through a server to players’ broadband connection is a strain which could cause all sorts of lag. Potentially causing a game to be unplayable.

Stever Perlman, OnLive Founder & CEO, has voiced the potential of the service, along with the potential problems,

"Despite the enormous potential of OnLive technology, it is important to emphasize that the OnLive Game Service is a very different way to experience videogames. We are using the Internet and computers in ways that have never been tried before and, like any brand new technology, you can expect a few bumps on take off until we reach cruising altitude and achieve a smooth flight. OnLive has been tested in an enormous variety of locations using a vast number of combinations of computers, ISPs, displays and input devices. Even so, there are endless possible combinations. So while most OnLive testers report good results with their gameplay experience, we still run into situations where the user may have to take some action (e.g. reset a cable modem or use a different mouse), or unique situations that we have not yet accounted for and require further changes to OnLive technology. "

The success of the service will really boil down to two things; the frequency of lag or other technical problems, and price. They’ve announced the monthly free will be $4.95 a month to simply access OnLive (with the Founding Member Discount, anyway). What they haven’t provided is how much the PlayPasses for the various games will cost. If they set the price points too high, then you’re charging people a monthly fee along with another charge which might be too great for players to handle.

The evolution of gaming has been started by lofty ideas, and goals much like OnLive is presenting. The potential of the service is too great to ignore, but so are the foreseeable problems along with it. Whatever happens, cloud gaming is certainly something to keep an eye on.

Will you sign up for OnLive? tell us

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It’s not a news story–doesn’t really rise to the level of newsworthiness–but people do seem to be talking more lately about the death of newspapers. Recently even Eric Schmidt of Google discussed how newspapers must find a mixture of advertising, micropayments, and regular subscriptions to fund their futures. To me, all this talk about how newspapers collect money is misplaced. Instead, I think newspapers must think about how to flourish by remaining relevant in the new digital world.

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The question for the social media world that comes to mind is:

Hello, Classmates.com??? Are you listening??

Remember when Classmates.com was relevant? They could’ve/should’ve been the social networking site of the free world. And they still have a chance. They had 40 million members by the end of 2006. (My high school graduating class has 224 people listed on Classmates.com, but only 8 are on Facebook.) But every time you turn around on Classmates.com (or heaven forbid try to learn something about someone, their hand goes out asking for $15 for “Gold” membership).

I remember that business model for the web. Seemed like a good idea at the time, but that was a long time ago. Classmates.com needs to take the small dollar needle out of their vein (and I’m sure it’s not easy) and find a way to leverage their huge base of information in a new way. I believe they’re trying, but little incremental changes are unlikely to get them there.

There’s at least anecdotal evidence that Classmates.com’s window of opportunity is closing.

In June 2006, comscore reported that Classmates.com had slighter HIGHER numbers of unique visitors than Facebook. Classmates.com was #2 to MySpace.

By February 2007, Hitwise was reporting that had fallen to 8th, behind Yahoo360. Ouch.

Classmates.com, if you’re listening… It’s time for the big change. Find the VC, build the sales force and make the change. It might be a “risk the company” type move, but doing nothing is far riskier.

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First up, for those counting stats such as Darren Rowse, Robert Scoble and Techcrunch here are my numbers.

Google Reader is currently showing 3 different feeds that are all providing the same content, which you might think would be better served as a single number as appears in Feedburner.
Hopefully that will never, ever happen, as those split numbers are incredibly useful.

Why Are There Split Numbers?

It is vital to understand why split numbers occur to fully appreciate how useful this is.

There are 3 main ways people subscribe to your RSS feeds using Google Reader.

1. Using A Subscription Button

   My subscription buttons point to andybeard.eu/feed/ and this is the URL used by feed readers to collect my feed, even though that redirects to Feedburner using the Feedsmith plugin.

2. Autodiscovery

   This is that little orange icon that appears in your browser alongside the URL for RSS subscription. It is handled in different ways by various feed readers. Google Reader evaluates any redirect before you actually subscribe, thus you end up at feeds.feedburner.com/Exploring-Niche-Websites before making a decision. Historically speaking this isn’t a very good thing to happen, because as a feed publisher you "lose ownership" in some ways of those subscribers, as they are not subscribing to a page on your site that can be moved to somewhere else.

3. Javascript Bookmark

   This again uses the autodiscovery URL in the header of your blog, but for some reason, maybe my own oversight or mistake my autodiscovery URL is andybeard.eu/feed – notice this URL doesn’t have a trailing slash.

RSS Feed Subscription – Evaluation

This is where we gain a unique perspective on Feed Subscription

1. 580 people are subscribed to http://andybeard.eu/feed/ – those people used a subscription button to subscribe to my feed.
2. 196 people are subscribed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/Exploring-Niche-Websites – those are either very long-time subscribers from my time on blogspot, or they used RSS Autodiscovery to subscribe using Google Reader
3. 146 people are subscribed to http://andybeard.eu/feed – those people most likely used a javascript based subscription button in Firefox to subscribe to my feed.

Now if you are very smart, you could use this method to split test subscription methods, and rely on Feedburner for your aggregate data.

This isn’t an attempt to get on a list of SEO blogs or back-slapping.

In this post I am trying to highlight some unique information that no one has ever revealed before, and could be extremely useful.

This isn’t the same as tracking RSS subscriptions, in many ways it is better because the tracking only gives you a click on a button, and doesn’t give you anything from autodiscovery, losing half of the data.

I for one hope Google doesn’t "fix" this "problem" with aggregated feeds, because it could prove to be very useful.

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Originally published at AndyBeard.EU

TimesSelect debuted in May 2005, with an annual price of $49.95. The Times also added a monthly payment option priced at $7.95.

Subscription numbers have been declining. The Post claimed TimesSelect had 224,000 subscribers in April, but only 221,000 in June.

The official word on the demise of TimesSelect hasn’t come from the Times yet. A statement by a Times spokesperson in response to questions about the service only told the Post they were continuing to evaluate approaches for the paper’s online efforts.

Lets look at a few examples of authoritative leverage in action:

• Topix is aiming to be citizen driven, but opens up new markets using an automated blogging technology called RoboBlogger.
• The Wall Street Journal, which called blogging overhyped rubbish, recently started producing advertorials. Their CollegeJournal site links to Scholarships.com sitewide, and provides a co-branded scholarship search on CollegeJournal.com.

How will Google minimize the media’s ability to sell advertisements that rank in Google as though they had editorial value? They are going to have to start breaking sites and search results into pieces. If they do, it will not only minimize the downside potential of advertisements on popular sites, but that would also kill the .edu spam.

Personalization will lower the profitability of leveraging off topic broad nationwide ads by lowering their exposure by biasing search results to locally trusted sources. Matt Cutts has talked about personalization recently, not once but twice.

Given that some domainers control millions of daily page views, and there are plenty of cheap traffic sources I don’t think raw usage data will be that strong of a signal of quality. Like links, usage data is easy to manipulate.

As the web gets polluted with low cost links, other low cost marketing opportunities, and recycled junk the key to Google’s success is tracking attention data. They have the most popular feed reader, and their new homepage allows you to create topical tabs that show related feeds.

In tracking how people consume and share information they can understand local topical networks, while reinforcing the views of the local topical editors. It sorta creates a bunch of micro-Digglike communities, but more free-flowing, with less focus on free votes. Time is the one thing we are all limited on, and if you are paying attention to something then there is a lot of value in trusting that attention.

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Since that post, I’ve been reading quite a bit of commentary on the overall impact Google Reader is having on RSS subscriptions generally where it’s now possible to know how many people subscribe to your feed via Google Reader or their Google personalized homepage (it wasn’t possible to know this before).

Most people commenting about the Reader have largely talked about a sudden jump in their subscriber numbers which coincides with the Reader now including RSS subscription data.

While this feature of Google Reader may have been a contributor to the increase in subscribers to my feed, a sudden jump wasn’t my experience – my subscriber increase showed a gentle but consistent rise over time.

Nevertheless, Google Reader clearly is making its mark as an RSS aggregator. One small example of its emerging appeal is to look at the RSS tools subscribers to my feed use.

Here’s the FeedBurner stats picture over the last seven days.

While is shows that the single most popular tool used by subscribers to this blog’s RSS feed continues to be Bloglines, you can see that Google Feedfetcher (the means by which Google’s tools get subscription data) is the second most popular method through which people get my content via RSS.

What I find interesting is how Google has literally come out of nowhere in the past six months or so to become a favoured RSS tool.

What’s not surprising is that a combination of the latest browsers that offer one-click subscription options (and where the acronym ‘RSS’ isn’t prominent), Google Reader and the Google personalized home page just make it dead easy for anyone to pick up an RSS feed.

That wasn’t the case six months ago.

Compare this picture to the stats I reported in July 2006 which you can see in the second image here.

Bloglines was the favourite tool, which continues today as I mentioned although it’s share of the pie is significantly reduced, down from 47% last July to 30% today.

In this stat from last July, Google doesn’t get mentioned at all. Today, it accounts for 22% of subscriptions.

Yesterday, FeedBurner’s Rick Klau wrote about the overall RSS subscription picture noting that subscription numbers in a vacuum only tell part of the story. Equally important, he says, is the extent to which people are reading feeds and interacting with them.

Rick’s concluding comment:

[…] Today’s key takeaway is that feeds represent only one aspect of a publisher’s overall content consumption. We’re living in a world of distributed media after all: people might be reading your content directly on your site, within a widget, via resyndicated headlines on another site, or on a social networking site.

I agree. Knowing how many people get your content via RSS and from where is great, but knowing what they do with that content – how they interact with it – is becoming equally if not more important.

What do they click on in your feed? Where do they go? FeedBurner already offers useful stats on such aspects, where you can see in one place what your subscribers do when accessing your content via RSS.

We need more, though. More useful data to better understand how people interact with your content in a very crowded world of competing information.

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I’ve stated previously that indemnification is not as valuable as the work that your OSS vendor does to ensure that you’ll never need indemnification.

I still believe that 100%.

It looks like Red Hat questions the real value of indemnification also:

“Our management and board looked at it and said, Look, this isn’t worth a hill of beans, but if saying it will make people feel better, we’ll say it.’ We’ve added it to the program”

To judge the real value of OSS indemnification, we need to consider what the person/vendor that is claiming that their patent is being infringed really wants.

Is it a big payout from the end customer?

Maybe, but how reasonably can they expect that to be the outcome?

Much more likely, the patent-claiming individual/vendor could use the lawsuit to force the hand of the OSS vendor in question to license the patented code and make a payment to cover all the copies of the software distributed to date.

This is clearly one of Microsoft’s strategies around Linux & their deal with Novell.

Since a IP-related lawsuit against an end customer is really about going after the OSS vendor that provided the possibly patent infringing software, what’s the real value of indemnification to the end customer

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I am taking a semi-break from IBM life as I return to finish a PhD in Industrial Engineering. I’ve held roles in market intelligence, strategy and product management. I’m ex-product manager of IBM WAS Community Edition, and blog about enterprise open source topics.

No manually going to a site to check if there is new stuff.

Instead, it comes to you automatically in your RSS aggregator, either directly in your computer or to your preferred online service (or both if you use the latest version of FeedDemon).

Recently I added some additional RSS subscription options to this blog, something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. What that means is that if you use services like Bloglines, NewsGator, My Yahoo, My AOL, etc, you can now subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed through your preferred service.

But some people like to receive blog updates via email. A long-established service for that is FeedBlitz. I’ve never offered that option (can’t think why not, actually) even though two readers recently told me they would prefer to get my posts in their inboxes.

Well, now you can subscribe by email.

RSS feed management company FeedBurner has just introduced a useful new service where you can subscribe to blog posts by email. I’ve enabled that service on this blog.

One of the great things about using FeedBurner to manage your subscriptions is that every different way you offer people to get your content – whether it’s via RSS or via email – that content comes from the same source: the core RSS feed that FeedBurner manages. So no juggling multiple RSS feeds which makes it very difficult indeed to see how many subscribers you actually have, an issue I had with my old blog.

And one thing about the new FeedBurner service – if you already have FeedBlitz or Squeet enabled via FeedBurner, you’ll need to de-activate it in order to even see the FeedBurner email option in the Publicize’ tab in your feed account settings.

Whichever subscription option you choose, thanks for subscribing.

[Edit] Naturally, I tried out the FB email service for myself and signed up to get my own posts by email. Mostly to see that it works ok.

It does, very nicely. HTML or plain-text options. I have HTML so see nice formatting plus images. I do like the email address it comes from: emailenfuego.net.’ Heh! Spanish for email on fire’

Another good touch – in the footer of the email, you see this:

Nice encouragement to sign up for the RSS subscription!

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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.