Posts tagged Letter
Zuckerberg’s Letter to Shareholders: “Personal Relationships Are the Fundamental Unit of Our Society”
Feb 1st
Editor’s note: As part of Facebook’s initial public offering announcement today, founder Mark Zuckerberg included this letter to potential shareholders.
“Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected.
We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter.
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At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.
There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.
Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones – the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.
There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.
We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.
Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small – with the relationship between two people.
Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.
At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.
People sharing more – even if just with their close friends or families – creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.
By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph – a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.
We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.
We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy.
We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.
As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.”
Photo by Silverisdead
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On Magic & SEO: Open Letter to Forbes, Bill Barol
Jan 25th
SEW’s reply to a blog post on Forbes.com entitled, “Sex, Free iPad, Naked Pictures of Cat Deeley, 8 Ways to Get Rich Right This Second and Lose Weight While You Sleep” which urged demystification in SEO but instead reproduced endemic superstitions.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
A Letter From Santa To The Search Community
Dec 14th
December, 2011 The North Pole Dear Search Community: Thanks so much for your many letters to the north pole. Your nicely written texts and emails included some familiar requests from last year and some entirely new ones. Lisa and Ian, I’m very sorry, I can’t drop that referring keyword data from…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
A Letter to All SEO Clients – Promotion World (press release)
Nov 21st
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A Letter to All SEO Clients
Promotion World (press release) There are a lot of blog posts out there detailing how a site or business owner should go about interviewing and hiring the right SEO firm for their business. I'm sure I've written a few of my own “how to” posts on the subject over the … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
SEO: An Open Letter to CEOs and Boards of Directors – Huffington Post (blog)
Jul 26th
 Search Engine Watch |
SEO: An Open Letter to CEOs and Boards of Directors
Huffington Post (blog) CEOs and board members, as well as managers of international companies wrote me asking why they should be concerned about SEO (search engine optimization) when they already have an attractive website. Foreign companies wanting to get traction in the US … Local SEO: 10 Tips for Ranking in Your Area Turn Your Site Into Profit Generating Tool With Website MOT Service Down On the Farm: Demand Media and Google's Attempts to Make Search More Valuable |
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Netflix Letter to Shareholders Shows It Couldn’t Care Less About DVDs
Apr 26th
Streaming video and DVD subscription service Netflix announced its first quarter earnings for 2011 today. In its letter to shareholders (.pdf), the company showed off its continued growth, with 3.6 million new subscribers worldwide and $719 million in revenue, but the real story might be the company’s continued march away from its once-bread-and-butter offering – the humble DVD.
The company barely pays lip service to DVD subscriptions, and spends the majority of the letter discussing plans for first-run TV series and movies, expanded network offerings and competition within the streaming video space.
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In 16 pages, the word "DVD" is mentioned only a dozen times, with just over 100 words devoted to the topic in a section titled "DVD was a Booster Rocket, but is not a Differentiator":
We believe that DVD will be a fading differentiator given the explosive growth of streaming, and that in order to prosper in streaming we must concentrate on having the best possible streaming service. As a result, we are beginning to treat them separately in many ways. Already, if you look at our signup page for non-members, it is all about streaming. Having said this, DVD rental is still a great business for us, and we are working on solutions to make sure DVD continues to be a profitable business for us in the years ahead, but it is not core to winning in streaming at this point.
In the handful of other mentions, we find the word "DVD" next to words like "flattening" and "decline". The writing has been on the wall for months now and here it is again. So what does Netflix have in store, then, for its multiplying streaming customers?
- A "wider and better selection of TV shows and movies then ever before. Netflix points to a partnership with CBS, which it says makes it the "only online premium subscription service that offers shows from all four broadcast networks, as well as many of the largest cable TV networks."
- Increased content with: Sons of Anarchy, Glee, Mad Men, Weeds, Blue Mountain State.
- Look out for more first-run, serialized content like "House of Cards". The company says "Serialized dramas, like the original BBC series on which “House of Cards” is based, have been big favorites on Netflix and we want to confirm our theory that because we are click-and-watch rather than appointment viewing, we can efficiently build a big audience for a well-produced serialized show." If this one is a success, the company says it is like to "license two or three similar, but smaller, deals."
- The biggest competition is coming from Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime, with Dish Networks "likely to launch a substantial subscription streaming effort under the Blockbuster brand," in case you’re looking for an alternative.
- The word “stream” shows up 26 times in the letter, while “DVD” shows up only 12 times. Just saying.
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Grooveshark Pens an Angry Open Letter to the Music Industry (cc’s Google, Apple)
Apr 20th
The peer-to-peer music streaming service Grooveshark has had a series of run-ins with mobile providers. Its iOS app was pulled from the App Store in August of last year, and its Android app was booted from the Android Marketplace earlier this month.
The company has now fired back at the music industry and at Apple and Google, contending there’s nothing illegal about its app.
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Grooveshark works differently than many other streaming music services. Rather than solely relying on licensing deals with the record industry in order to offer music content (streaming or downloads), Grooveshark users upload their songs to the catalog, which can in turn be streamed by anyone with the app. That peer-to-peer element clearly runs afoul of the record industry’s longstanding argument that this sort of sharing is stealing.
Grooveshark insists that it complies with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and that it processes takedowns as they’re filed. Indeed, the company says it’s taken down over 1.76 million files and suspended the upload privileges of over 22,000 users.
Grooveshark says it focuses on licensing with these individual users, but it is also working to secure rights with record labels. It touts licensing deals with over a thousand labels, as well as payment agreements to performing rights organizations. “These are not the characteristics of a company ‘dedicated to copyright infringement,” something that the RIAA and labels have accused.
Grooveshark makes it clear in its open letter that it wants to defend its name:
“In light of the recent misleading press concerning Grooveshark’s application, it is important to make clear that we will defend our service, and the letter and the spirit of the law, in court and in Congress. We will defend our name and our ideals for the sake of our users who expect modern delivery systems and comprehensive access across devices, for the sake of artists and content owners who fear another decade of decline, and for other innovators who continue to bring new ideas to market through the expression of creativity in the form of technology.”
For Android users who want to skirt the ban from the Android Marketplace, you can download the Grooveshark app directly from the company homepage. For iPhone users, well, you’re out of luck.
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Grooveshark Pulled From Android Market Over RIAA Letter
Apr 6th
Peer-to-peer music streaming app Grooveshark has had an-again off-again relationship with mobile providers. Last summer, the service hit iOS only to be pulled from the app store just days later.
Today, Google booted the app from the Android Market in “a move that comes after some of the top music labels have accused the service of violating copyright law,” according to CNET’s Greg Sandoval.
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Grooveshark differs fundamentally from other popular streaming music apps, like MOG or Rdio, in that it relies on users to upload music to its catalog, which can be streamed and downloaded from the app via either Amazon MP3 or the iTunes Store.
When Apple pulled the app from the App Store last August, we predicted that “the move is likely related to the lawsuit in which Universal Music [...] is suing Grooveshark for copyright infringement,” which turned out to be the case. Today’s removal from the Android Market seems to stem from a similar situation, in which a letter from the Recording Industry Association of America caused it to be pulled.
A Google spokesperson told CNET that “we remove apps from Android Market that violate our policies.”
The company provided a statement regarding its removal:
“It is our full intent to get Grooveshark for Android back into the Android Marketplace, and we haven’t received any specific information from Google about what in the developers’ terms of service, exactly, we need to address to be re-admitted to the marketplace-only that Google received a letter of complaint from the RIAA.
As a user-sourced service, like YouTube, Grooveshark complies speedily with all DMCA requests to make sure that we operate within the law and respect the wishes of content owners. Unlike Apple’s iPhone ecosystem, Android is an open platform, and Google is traditionally a supporter of DMCA-compliant services-indeed, Google itself relies on the DMCA for the very same protection that Grooveshark does.
Grooveshark works night and day to develop new successes in the music industry, as well as pay the many content partners with whom we work. The current unavailability of our app is taking money from the thousands of hard-working labels, artists, and content partners who benefit from a share of Grooveshark’s mobile subscription revenue. We look forward to working with Google to get our app reinstated.”
Last year’s issue with Universal wasn’t the first time it ran into problems either. In 2009, the company settled a lawsuit with music label EMI.
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A Letter to Google’s David Girouard: 100% Web is Not Such a Great Idea
Dec 16th
Dear Mr. David Girouard,
I decided to write you a quick note after reading your post about 2011 as the year there will be nothing but the Web. I am not so sure that is a great idea.
I’ll give you a few reasons: WikiLeaks, Delicious and YouTube.
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WikiLeaks
Well, we know the sad history and precedent caused by Amazon Web Services dropping Wikileaks. Amazon did not show much thought for due process. Instead, AWS shut down WikiLeaks citing its terms of service. That should be a concern to any business when considering using a cloud service. We can’t trust the Web 100% if there is that threat of closure without any way to appeal.
Delicious
How many people do you know who lament today’s announcement by Yahoo! that it is closing Delicious? The service it provided had many a bit confused when it launched. Technologists scratched their heads. Tags? What do they do?
People still adopted the service and became passionate about its applications. Millions of people provided a wealth of links that companies used to create tools and processes. Now Delicious is going away. That’s the nature of Web services. But if you use the Web as a place to store information then it kind of hurts when a service closes. The outcome can be disastrous. Big Web companies like Google do not do a good job of providing ways to export data. Sometimes it makes sense to avoid services that don’t export well. Google’s own Vint Cerf touched on the issue when he spoke last winter about the lack of standards in the cloud. It needs to get better.
YouTube
This is a tough one. The YouTube service rocks. Yet you have a community guidelines policy that is causing serious disruptions to companies that rely on YouTube for income. We talked to Christian Cantrella a few weeks ago who said that YouTube shut his company’s account for weeks. The company does reviews about watches. What could be so objectionable? He had to blog about it to get some attention to the matter. Ironically, I was on the phone with Chris when YouTube restored the company’s account. That does not reflect well on Google, YouTube or other services that people and small businesses rely upon.
Looking to 2011
I hope you know that I love Google’s services. I used your service while writing this letter. Your team at Google Apps has done incredible work. The people at your company are a fantastic community. They are recognized all over the world for their brilliance. Like other large Web companies business issues seem to be clouding judgement. That can cause issues with communities.
I agree that 2010 is the year of the cloud. I am not so sure 2011 should be the year we see nothing but the Web. I think of that especially after reading an interview with someone like Chris Anderson. I’m thinking it should be the year about everything and the Web.
Let me know what you think.
Feel free to ping me anytime.
Thanks. Alex.
Alex Williams
@alexwilliams
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