it is impressiv how fast they got from nummer 1000 to nearly 500 top sites of the world. (less than 3 weeks)

i expect them to get on the top 20 sites of the world within the next view months!

how much did you spent to get on the top 20 sites of the world?
i think the investment was much cheaper than your budget

take a look:

http://www.alexa.com/data/deta.....=slide.com

here as well:

http://hitwise.com/registratio.....report.php

cu

p.s.: why should myspace block embeded systems? they made myspace big in bringing more value into myspace. if they block slide, they kill some mil. slideshows within profiles. impossible! hope you all know the facebook story in the same time they kill all partner business cases they built up!
this is a feature of myspace not a bug :->

If you doubt this, take a random sampling of MySpace profiles. I’ve done over 3,000 at this point. Both RockYou and Slide each average over 10% of profiles with a slideshow or other widget on them. MySpace has 100MM users. Now take a look at Bebo which has integrated Slide and Rockyou. Do a random sampling of Bebo profiles and you’ll see very strong adoption. Bebo has north of 25MM users. Across every large (and open) social network, you can do the same analysis. These users make lots of changes to their slideshows and widgets regularly (i.e. they come back to RockYou and Slide a lot). Once you add up the numbers, the monthly user numbers start making sense.

The real question is what value massive consumer adoption is worth. Google didn’t generate ANY meaningful revenues and was described as a search ‘feature’ not a product for quite a while. But once they attained a massive user base, building Adsense to a revenue juggernaut was actually realizable.

The same could be said for Skype. A free VOIP product charging 2 cents a minute for landline calls? A lot of folks thought that had little value. Except that there’s now over 100MM registered users and nearly 10MM users live at any one time. This year revenues will cross $200MM (a basis for eBay’s multi-billion acquisition) based on MASSIVE user acquisition.

Ultimately if any ‘feature’ generates the interest of 10s of millions of users and becomes part of their daily, weekly or monthly interaction with the Internet, it’s valuable. Real revenue is very realizable by giving away free services and content to users — think Google, Yahoo and eBay. All three offer the bulk of their services (mail, search, news, finance, shopping, voip, payments) for absolutely free. All three charge for access to their users (through ads) and have premium paid for services.

Finally, the doubts related to technology are very logical. There are a lot of slideshow providers in the space. The only issue is that the top 3 providers (RockYou, MySpace and Slide) make up 80% of the market and new competitors with great technology (ala Filmloop or Slideroll) don’t get anywhere in the space. Why? It’s the viral effect. I have a post on my blog about that, so I won’t repeat it here.

Ro

On a side note, I am not privy to Slide’s business, nor to Filmloop’s, but I know that Rockyou has built its business on capital an order of magnitude lower than some of the numbers being bandied about here. This isn’t a reflection of the high quality Slide and Filmloop engineering teams. From the outside in, I would guess that this is a function of the much higher level of difficulty of building client software than building web apps.

On a sidenote. VC’s are very smart people. They see from the top floor of the highrise; yet tell the tale as visible from the first floor.

To me what would be interesting is if Slide has brand recognition or not. ie. are users adopting Slide because it has a good name, or are they taking up ‘that slideshow thingy’ they saw on a friends page. If Slide has recognition and respect amongst users, then they will be able to use this to branch out into other areas. If not, then users won’t be able to tell the difference between a Slide widget and a MySpace widget, and in that battle MySpace would have the upper-hand since they can better integrate their own offering within the network.

Those that mention that FIM can easily shut slide down, you might remember that they tried that with YouTube long ago, and there was such a backlash that the blocking only lasted a little over 24 hours - though the official story was that YouTube widgets didn’t work because of a bug in MySpace (which is possible).

The big difference between YouTube and Slide is that YouTube took advantage of their reach within the social networks to become a destination unto itself, I don’t think Slide has taken off as a destination.

Those that think that the value of Slide is simply the cost of replicating the technology are also wrong, it is a very flawed argument. Getting to the level that Slide is at takes a lot more than just technology, and it is often shown that successful companies are often not those with the better technology but are those with the best user experience, market strategy, etc. etc.

As for the funding, this is just a sign of a very healthy VC market. It is hard to judge this deal as an outsider since we don’t know the specifics nor do we know about their strategy. The reason for the $20M could be to branch out into other products and to hit other markets.

Having said that, I do agree that users won’t accept advertising in their widgets. Even with the most targeted advertising, the user will always have an option to switch to an ad-free alternative. Perhaps a rev share on the ads in a widget *might* be an incentive for users to accept advertising.

I would love to see the business plan.

But, what I have a hard time figuring out is

- what is slide going to do with $20M bucks ?
- for that matter, what is digg going to do with $14M bucks

Creating a product or company with no revenue and expecting to be acquired is a horrible idea. I think the VC’s are all drinking the same Kool-Aid.

Maybe it would be a good idea to venture outside of the valley for the next big thing…

Also, the enormous amounts of money being poured into the creation of these small web apps is pure comedy. The bubble is back and lots of people are going to get hurt.

Blocking would mean MySpace is preventing its users from importing new and innovative content, the very thing that blew them right past Friendster which tried too hard to be a walled garden.

MySpace has created their own but that is no guarantee of success. For example, their addition of video uploads hasn’t impacted YouTube in anyway.

The only question that nobody can answer (yet) is the monetization. I think the investment is speculative and the goal may well be an acquisition. Not that there is anything wrong with that :-).

Do they have some plan they’re not disclosing yet? Otherwise, it makes no sense. While I’ve been underwhelmed by some Mayfield investments, Khosla and FF are very smart folks.