Tag Archive for 'Community'

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Chef Google

Chef GoogleIn the Google documentary on ARTE somebody told a story about how his grandmother discovered Google: she typed ingredients she would like to eat in the search bar and Google returned recipes for dishes with exactly those food combinations. Today, thinking about lunch, I tried the same and it worked very well.

Wouldn’t that be a nice fridge feature?

Based on the food what’s left, the fridge looks up and suggests recipes. Nowadays one could extend it even with some community features. Like last.fm tracks the music users play on iTunes, the fridge robot scans the food in the fridge and recommends recipes, based on profiles of other users with similar fridge content and taste.

User commerce

Read/WriteWeb offers an interesting review – as most of their articles – about Yahoo! Travel, referring to the Web 3.0 framework.

What I’m missing in that framework is the user’s share in the big C standing for the commerce.

Let’s take Yahoo! Travel and Flickr as example:

Most Flickr users pay Yahoo! for a Flickr pro account ($25/year), get a great platform in return and have fun participating and sharing photos. In the meantime, as result of millions excited users, Flickr has grown to one of the largest and best documented photo databases ever. Of course Yahoo! seeks for ways to leverage that database in other parts of its business. Like Yahoo! Travel for instance, where Flickr user photos can be viewed to illustrate travel destinations.

Now the problem I see is that especially pro users wont be happy about the fact that their pictures show up on Yahoo! Travel right next to tourism ads and the entire revenue goes exclusively to Yahoo!. Even if Yahoo! has, according to Flickr user agreements, the right to do so and doesn’t care if a “© All rights reserved” stands next to the user photo. It’s just bad karma.

I think in the long term a solution about that issue – commercializing user generated content – must be found. Otherwise why should a paying Flickr pro user provide Yahoo! with free photos for other Yahoo! divisions than Flickr?

Anyone remember the discussions about user content when YouTube was acquired by Google? Some users got slightly upset seeing Google paying billions of dollars for basically user content…