We’ve seen customers that engaged established software houses into the creation of a media streaming web sites ending in a failure to deliver the project after half a year!!! of work. The vendor experienced in this type of projects can roll out the similar solution developed from scratch during 2 months (assuming that the customer doesn’t want another clone of YouTube but has a more-or-less unique concept).

Now not only starts ups but big media companies need to innovate. Consider this example: an average American citizen spends 28 hours a week watching TV (sounds unbelievable, right) however for the young people that’s much less because they take this time and move it to their computer. So media companies, like MTW, suddenly say: Ooops, how do I get into computer? How do I reach this audience? What technologies do I use to engage the audience? In the majority of cases the answer can not be found internally. In the old days such companies were innovating internally but now when the web is evolving so fast the internal senior executives might not even how to use an RSS reader. Same issue with the internal IT folks – it’s most likely that they do their job instead of doing the research on new technologies and happenings on the web. So where is this innovation going to come from?

We see that more and more companies are relying on the outsourcing providers to come up with this innovation or support it. It’s important to understand for the customer and the vendor that to success in outsourcing innovating not only the technology aspects should be in place but the provider should understand the business of the customer and take themselves more of a consultant just as a provider of development services. This is the aim of the MoveYourWeb development departments and that’s where we are at partly and where we are going to. Not only we are proud to develop innovative web properties for our customers but support big names dealing with innovation, such as MixerCast – one of the best widget distribution companies out there.

Here at MoveYourWeb we understand this principle and develop a lot of innovating web projects and try to share the critical knowledge as much as possible among the employees engaged into production. Innovative web technologies and latest happenings on the web are under our radar and we are really pacionate about it because clearly this is the model that will be very popular in the future.

If your activity is not very much dependant on time and location and you are not the sole service provider in the area, you certainly need advertising. If not advertising in its pure sense, then at least some efforts to make your business known beyond the circle of your actual clients, their friends and relatives.

There was a time when ads in the local newspaper would spread the word about you to everyone. Then came a time when you needed to bother about radio-coverage, publish a couple of leaflets, and, who knows, may be your city was big enough to have a TV channel.

Today, however, the issue of spreading information is not that simple. The thing is that the pool of information is bottomless. If you want to get your message through to me, for instance, it’s no use trying to do it with conventional advertising techniques. It was 1.5 years ago that I last saw a newspaper; I only occasionally come across a radio broadcast once in a couple of weeks; as for the television, I don’t watch it at all. And it’s not that I’m a snob who doesn’t care about the world around. The thing is that I don’t have time to follow all the information sources. And even if I did watch TV, how could one guess which of the dozens of channels I would pick that day. When there used to be only 3 TV channels, the term “information space” made some sense. But since their number saw an incredible increase, there have appeared numerous, practically isolated information spaces.

It’s true that some people can afford advertising through television, and radio, and newspapers and the Internet, but I’m going to focus on the latter. Just a year ago all you had to do is launch a site describing your services, spend a couple of dollars on Search Engine Optimization and contextual advertising (AdWords and such), and there would be no way for me to go past your message. But if you consider the amount of information digested by today’s users, it becomes quite clear that it is not enough anymore. Seriously, I use search engines by far less than I used to. And I haven’t been to the news sites for quite a time. The reason behind this is that I long ago realized what kind of information I need. So I get my daily portion of information from thoroughly selected RSS channels and social networks like Facebook and sometimes even MySpace. If I ran a business or targeted customers in another country I would have to master quite a different approach to social media, and have a presence in, say, Orkut for Brazil and India, LiveJournal for Russia, Hi5 for Columbia and Ecuador and so on.

What I’m driving at is that simply being on the web is not enough anymore; you’ve got to show up on the pages of MySpace and Facebook. For many these words have become synonyms to the Internet. A MySpace user may not be aware of what’s going on beyond it, to say nothing of the things that are not in the cyberspace.

Can you be everywhere? I’m not sure, just because I understand that MySpace and Facebook were designed for completely different types of people. The techniques you use to bring your message to people in one system won’t work for the other. Even if you spend a lot of time to get the essence of it. And there’s never enough time for everything, even if spreading information is all you do.

So you either have to put up with the fact that your ads only manage to get the message to the ever shrinking audience of conventional mass media, or you’ve got to hire specialists in the new types of media. Not just the media that have already won their million audiences, but also the emerging ones. The thing is that the interests and preferences of those important for you decision makers can unpredictably and radically change in just months. They can turn to those new types of media that only a handful of specialists and enthusiasts are aware of today.

Just mentioning among other things that you have been at MySpace since 2003 can be very rewarding. Or how about getting to know in 2011 that quite a half of your clients learned about you from a site that will only launch its public beta testing tomorrow?

As for us, we already have our private beta invitation to the Next Big Thing of the internet, no matter which site happens to be the one.

1. Official news on Google Blog;

2. Home page where you can sign up for Google App Engine Account and download SDK plus other misc small things;

3. Getting started guide;

4. Gallery of applications which are already created (wow – more then 20 apps during the first day)

Now – it’s only a beta and registration is closed for the first 10.000 developers that were lucky to join the program. Our CTO is the happy person. There are many limitations which are currently in place but much of those should be lifted after the official release. The only supported language now is Pyhton. Luckily (or should I say proudly) here at MoveYourWeb we have such people and working on the first applications already.

There is HUGE buzz in the developers community already with the rumors that it’s competing with Amazon Web Services such as S3. The benefits are obvious – you concentrate on developing while not worrying about the system administration and servers. It would probably can compete with Facebook Applications platform also. During the last year the developers around the world were engaged in developing applications for Facebook trying to leverage it’s user base (and for good). Say every 1/10 customer of ours showed an interest in developing applications for Facebook. What might happen now is that everyone will want to leverage the user-base that Google has and build the application for on their engine also. You have gmail account already, right? With this say – it’s all the guessing game in the day one after the release and we will see how it will evaluates. For now we can just state: we are in this game already and working on our test applications plus we will be happy to help the existing and potential customers with the development of applications using Google App Engine.

For those of you who are still not familiar with Facebook the following facts are listed:

• The total count of active Facebook users is 55M+;
• 250.000 users join the network daily;
• 35% (and growing) users of Facebook are professionals, in 2006 Facebook shifted the focus away from being a students social network;
• Because of the focus shift the fastest growing age category is 25+ years.
• 1000+ developers start using Facebook API daily to develop applications covering every aspect of life.

The above mentioned means that Facebook is the perfect marketing opportunity for B2C businesses and the first steps toward marketing of Facebook will be creation of a corporate page there.

The following guide explains the corp page setup process step by step:

1. On the profile setup page select the industry relevant to your business;

2. Enter all the necessary descriptions about your business (overview, mission, product – the more the better) and upload corporate logo so the visitors can recognize the business.

3. Click on your business name hyper link and then click ‘Publish this page’

4. Become ‘fan’ of your business. And here is where the magic begins. As soon as you became ‘fan’ of your business your Facebook ‘friends’ will get the notification similar to the following one: Peter Melnikov became fan of MoveYourWeb. Assuming that the big part of your ‘friends’ would be your customers part of them most likely become ‘fan’ of your business to and ‘friends’ of ‘friends’ will see it too…

5. Optional. Might be number 1 if you played with Facebook arleady – before creating a corporate page add a lot of new ‘friends’ to your account by converting the database of your customers to facebook friends (many are likely have a Facebook account already). That will increase the results of this small marketing campaign proportionally.

Want to see a sample corporate page? Check out MoveYourWeb on Facebook and feel free to try becoming ‘fan’ of our business. Questions? leave those in comments and our Facebook developers or marketers will reply asap!