zyngagames.com has Chess with friends… you don’t need to be on facebook to play this and you can add “friends” w/o them knowing who you really are.
http://zone.msn.com/en/hearts/default.htm?intgid=hp_card_6 multiplayer hearts
I was meaning in terms of ideas. They always seemed to be one step behind, and instead of innovating they were imitating, poorly. Whenever Google took someone else’s idea, they’d twist it into something new, but whenever Yahoo took another company’s idea, they just copied it.
(I agree that Google+ isn’t going very well, but it has been a decent haven for amateur creatives, so if they harness that as a niche strength they could stick around for a while.)
I think the whole OP can be boiled down to business models.
In the 90’s, it was an acceptable business model to say “We’re going attract a billion eyeballs! And then… sell them something, I guess. We’ll figure out stage two, but we know the third step is profit.”
That was always Yahoo’s business model. It’s the Twitter and the YouTube model (both for the companies and the content providers).
The spirit of the 90’s that you miss was the assumption that everything could be offered for free. Sometimes that was on the assumption it would be advertising or premium driven later, sometimes it was based on communities providing things for free just because. (Wikipedia is still doing the latter.)
When the tech bubble broke last decade, people started getting the message, but it’s like Cecil fighting ignorance - it takes a lot longer to saturate the population than you might think. That’s why everyone is always talking monetization now. You spent a trillion dollars on eyeballs, now how do you reverse the cash flow?
Companies like Yahoo never had a viable answer to that, or at least not an answer that let them compete with their peers.
Agreed. Yahoo was never a huge font of ideas, at least not beyond its first few years, during which they grabbed a bunch of low-hanging fruit.
It would also be embarrassing to nix right now, so they are not going to do that. I bet it will be around 10 years from now.
I think so, yes.
Right. This blogger had a good take on the problem of online advertising in 2014: 20 years is plenty: let’s stop waiting for online ads to mature. He quotes from this great piece as well: The Internet’s Original Sin (which is the advertising-based model).
In the 90s and still today, we are dragging the radio and TV advertising model, which was never very good and is on the verge of collapse today anyway.
Sort of. I was in biz school, and my friends asked for my take on their project (or they didn’t ask, but I gave it anyway). They proposed to create a website with some sort of engineering calculator. Free! And they would sell advertising! I said, guys, I think that’s retarded. I’m not saying I was a prescient genius or anything, but even then there was some pushback on “build it for free, and they will come.” Not that anyone had any better idea of how to do things, nor does anyone today. Try to sell ads or put up a paywall–nothing really seems to work.
So “sort of” because I certainly enjoyed the freebies in the 90s (and today), but everyone was naive and hopeful and there was so much energy in the air.
By the way, speaking of business models, perhaps you can help me out. I get why Google makes money. Dominance in search, they only need to take a tiny “house cut” in the form of pay-per-click. I can also understand why pay-per-click can work for certain products and services. What’s nice is that you can stick your big toe in the water and, if it works, you can expand, and if it doesn’t, you can quit. Pretty low-risk. It’s also immune to ad-blocking. (Does anyone still do Adwords? I suppose, right. That doesn’t seem like a very good way to advertise.)
What I don’t get is how Facebook makes money. I never see ads on FB because I block ads. I don’t even see them on mobile, where I do not block ads: they just aren’t very prominent. OK, a lot of people don’t block ads, but then there is the matter of the value proposition to the advertiser. I just don’t see the visual ad cruft on FB as having to the potential to do anything. I can’t imagine a campaign actually working. And paying to have your posts more prominent and shit? Nah. I don’t believe it. So are a lot of big companies just throwing money at it in a what-the-hell type thing? Or am I wrong and FB advertising is amazingly effective? Any edification on this would be appreciated.
Indeed. I think the most sensible thing is simply to charge for a service that people find valuable. But apparently that is quite difficult as well, and getting critical mass on a site like Instagram or whatever seems to require giving it away for free to build up the user base.
Nope. Virtually a proof of concept that online advertising doesn’t work.
I never played at Yahoo Games, but am a frequent visitor to another site where various games are played, and which posted, upon the death of Yahoo Games, something sad implying Yahoo was its model. It probably has far fewer users than Yahoo Games had — if I’m reading it right there are only 702 chess players online at this moment.
That site offers Hearts and Chess but I’ve not tried them. I have played Go, Backgammon and Bridge there. The site is mostly non-American, but which nationality predominates varies by game. (Most of the Bridge players are Eastern European.) I like its Javascript-based interface. Is it similar to Yahoo Games?
(The only other on-line Bridge site I’ve heard of is bridgebase.com. Are there others?)