The news that Verizon is moving to a tiered data plan data plans that better suites individuals data needs is quiet unfortunate. I am thinking VERY hard about staying with Verizon (or keeping a smartphone) if the reported $20/2GB or $50/5GB is actually correct. It is yet to be seen how this will effect family share plans, but this is a big issue going forward with mobile data.
If these rumors are true, I have the next big Android/iOS app (that might actually pay for my data plan)! Here it is:
An app that runs in the background and monitors when data is sent and received. Only check email every 20 minutes, only upload photos on wifi, only stream music if you have > 2GB left on your monthly plan. Think of it as Locale or Tasker (Android apps that manage various phone states) but just for data management.
Boom!
Thoughts?
Little children all over the world are asking one question today: “Where do web videos come from?”
My daughter asked me just that question this morning. So I looked into it and found some interesting things to tell her. But first, the setup…
At Shelby.TV our users sign in with Twitter and/or Facebook and we pull in, in almost real time (seriously, almost instantly), their feeds from each service, looking for links that point to video. We keep track of all the links that pass through what we affectionately call Arnold, our Link Processor. We also keep track of how many times we see each link. We see some links already >20k times each (in the 2-ish months Shelby’s been around in alpha while we are building her out). Overall so far we have seen ~1.63 Millllliiiiooooon links.
So back to the question: Where do web videos come from?
Looking at all those links there is no surprise as to which we have seen the most of. We’ve seen ~1.4M YouTube videos and that comes as no surprise seeing that they recently announced they have ~48 min. of video uploaded per minute and 3 Billion views per day.
Rounding out the top five are:
{Vimeo : ~53k, UStream.tv: ~47k, Livestream: ~20k, TED: ~18k}
The full data set is shown in the chart below. The number of “hits” is the # of times that domain passes through Arnold (remember he is our Link Processor).
Have you read The Long Tail by Chris Anderson? If you have, then this chart will look somewhat familiar especially when I tell you that the “OTHER” category is made up of 36 domains having between 1 and 36 videos. Thats a tail if I ever saw one! More to come on this in a future post…
[For some scale we recognized videos from the facebook.com domain name ~40 times and is the reason that bar is not visible on this graph. And for some more perspective we have seen video from Qik ~1,100 times.]
So the answer to The Question: YouTube, mostly.
I am excited to start learning more about how videos spread around the web as Shelby.TV matures and grows out of the private alpha we are currently in. Interested in learning more about what we are doing @ Shelby? Leave a comment below or tweet my way @henrysztul.
[P.S. If you are interested in reading about how the Long Tail relates to Quantum Mechanics read more here!]
This is some interesting insight from Albert. At first I thought the Google +1 was an interesting idea, a little but of a little brother, tag-a-long move, but an interesting idea, at least as an experiment.
BUT, what Albert points out is VERY interesting. Google is admitting that implicit data signals are seemingly not enough anymore. Could the underlying signal of this move be that something might be rotten in the state of denmark? Probably not, but something is up, and it’s more than just a new product called +1.
continuations:
Adding an explicit signal button with +1 is an admission that the implicit data sources are not enough. Clicking on +1 is saying to Google explicitly: I think this is interesting. Now the real challenge for Google will be making this an actually useful signal.
This is a MIND BLOWING statistic. Scary! I am actually a little excited to see what Bit.ly will do with all of this valuable information!
hiten:
Bit.ly Links Get Clicked 3.4 Billion Times A Month, New Features Coming
I pulled a day of bit.ly data — all the bit.ly links that were clicked on May 6th. The 50 most popular links generated only 4.4% (647,538) of the total number of clicks. The top 10 URL’s were responsible for half (2%) of those 647,538 clicks. 50% of the total clicks (14m) went to links that received 48 clicks or less. A full 37% of the links that day received only 1 click. This is a very very long and flat tail — its more like a pancake. I see this as a very healthy data set that is emerging..
THINK / Musings» Blog Archive » Distribution … now (via fred-wilson)
Very intersting! Good find Fred!
