Yahoo! Widgets – Get Weather, Photos, Calendar, and More on Your Mac or Windows Desktop. Just had a great dinner with “Brad”:http://feld.com. What a smart guy. Had three suggestions for folks who invest in or build companies on the Internet:
# Read a set of blogs everyday. Spend an hour taking in the gesalt of the Internet. Where do you get a list, well, his site and what he reads is not a bad place to start. There are some awesome tools to do this. This gives you an early warning sign about what the trends are. *I’m going to start doing this.*
# Get to know the competitors stuff really well. Actually, “John”:http://www.marketingplaybook.com covered this really well in his book and blog, but its a good point. With the web so open, you should use everyone elses products all the time.
# Get to know the big platforms. He’s going to switch entirely to using Microsoft, Yahoo and Google stuff for a month at a time. This has already been a real learning experience for me as I just love the Google Desktop and in particular their side panel. I think that MSN Space is particularly good but haven’t really gotten deep. These new Yahoo Widgets look very nice too (see the link above). That would include their ad side stuff too to experiment with Adsense, Overture and Adspace respectively.
To this I would add my own fourth point which is to use the up and comers outside of your sector alot to see what other folks (e.g., the non-bloggers are doing). That for right now would be the top “movers and shakers” on Alexa which are “myspace”:http://myspace.com and “facebook”:http://facebook.com
