Scoble, Google, Yahoo, Zvents
Check back after 11am Pacific time… the wheels are turning behind the scenes.
Update: I originally put this post up at about 2am, and Robert saw it early this morning. Yahoo asked me (nicely) to hold the post while they had some internal discussions. I’ve now heard from Vince Maniago, Product Manager, Yahoo! Local, that they’ve clarified their TOS. Vince has a blog post at YDN that you should go read. Here’s my original post:
Scoble, Google, Yahoo, Zvents Which of these is not like the other?
It’s great to be at the center of the tech blogosphere’s version of a media firestorm, kicked off by Robert Scoble’s post yesterday entitled “Yahoo’s new pretty maps are doomed (and so are Microsoft’s)” It’s also pretty cool to be Scoble’s proximate example of what’s cool and what’s next in Silicon Valley. Thanks, Robert!!
The trouble is, I think that Robert is wrong in his latest post.
At the same time Robert was writing his post, Zvents was in the process of integrating one of the new Yahoo Maps web services into our site.
“Now, convince Zvents to take that Google Map off of their page and put a Yahoo one (or a Virtual Earth one). Hint: they won’t do it.”
For now, we’re sticking with Google Maps (which we love). But…
By the time you read this, Yahoo’s “powered by” web services logo will be on our home page, and their geocoding API calls will be driving the percentage of “where” searches and user venue creates that the Tiger/line database can’t handle.That’s a VERY useful API call that Google doesn’t allow in their maps TOS, and I’m delighted that Yahoo has decided to make it available.
Robert was right about one thing – that the restrictions in Yahoo’s TOS, as written, would have prevented us from using that service. But a call to Yahoo determined that they are in the process of changing the TOS, and we’ve pushed our new code live.
Will we ever use Yahoo’s maps on our site? Their new maps product is way cool. Yahoo’s a business. We’re a business. Google is a business. We can talk.
This is an incredibly exciting time to be building the Web. A generation of people and products that fully get the non-linearity of the net are all coming to maturity at the same time. Not only are we all aggregating each other’s RSS and making calls to each other’s APIs, we’re embedding each other’s widgets and mashing each other up. Is there a crying need for a revenue model around all of this? Sure. Will it all get sorted out? Sure.
Do all the big guys (and there are at least three, Robert!!) want us small guys as signed on and as cross-sold on their products and platforms as possible? Of course they do. Do all us small guys want to avoid commitment to one behemoth as we surf ahead of the wave, building the next generation of aggregate-able, API-able, embeddable services? Of course we do. Welcome to the new Great Game.
What’s at stake here? Let’s be clear: The target market for Zvents is much larger than Google and Yahoo’s current revenues put together. And we’re just small fry. Google and Yahoo’s potential revenue is easily in the hundreds of billions of dollars – annually. Over the next 20 years, we’re going to see the utter reinvention of communication and media, and it’s all going to be done in non-linear, programmatic, bowl-of-spaghetti fashion.
Who will be the Spaghetti Monster?
A little Shakespeare: I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot!
-Shane
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