大家好吗？经过了忙碌的一个星期，今天想上来跟大家聊一聊最近发生的一些大事以及我的看法。

谷歌推出了所谓Facebook和Twitter终结者：Buzz。凭借全球1.87亿Gmail用户这一优势，Buzz刚推出就拥有了一个庞大的社交网络。

我从1994年进入互联网产业以来，目睹了许多试图复制其他公司成功的案例。在我看来，谷歌推出Buzz的行为非常好。原因有两个：1）限制Twitter，不再让其随心所欲发展；2）不再让Facebook成为惟一一个“沟通和交友的集聚地”，要知道Facebook现在已经有超过3亿的用户了。
 

另外，我的好朋友马克·平克斯(Mark Pincus，社交游戏开发商Zynga的创始人)将收购一个小型的社交游戏开发公司Serious Business（呵呵，这个名字不错）。Zynga现在已有几百万的游戏用户，其中比较出名的游戏包括黑帮战争（Mafia Wars）和虚拟农场游戏Farmville。Zynga到现在已经募集了超过2亿美元的风险投资。不说你不知道，马克还创办了网站Tribe.net，这是当年首批的社交网站之一，不过这个网站没怎么搞起来。现在Zynga已经借Facebook飞速增长的东风，成为社交游戏的领导者。

谷歌以5000万美元收购了社交信息搜索公司Aardvark（vark.com）。Aardvark是一个由前谷歌员工建立的新兴搜索引擎，用户可以通过这个网站向自己的朋友询问问题，然后找出最合适的人来回答。这听起来让我觉得有点恼火。试想老是被朋友询问各种各样的问题，谁都烦。我宁愿向朋友发发邮件也不需要让这种服务来代劳。我认为这更像是谷歌的一种“防守”行为。

MySpace两年前还是社交网站的王者，现在已经是迷失太空了（Lost In Space），它的CEO上周也被解雇了。出现什么问题了？连续9个月没有增长了。由于Facebook吸引了所有的注意力，MySpace似乎已经失去了它的灵魂，没有了方向和目的。在美国，上至老太太下至小学生都在用Facebook，MySpace有这么受欢迎吗？我想它最大的问题在于外观太难看了，它的设计和排版简直一团糟。在07、08年的时候，MySpace本来有机会将自己的网站整理变得更加有用的，但是它却错过了。现在我想MySpace最好的机会是尝试吸引那些12到18岁的小孩子，因为没有小孩子会想和自己的爷爷那奶一起出现在Facebook吧？

最后，各位，我现在正尝试看在中国有多少人会加我为好友。各位请加我为好友吧，幸运儿将获得一本我亲自签名的关于互联网企业的畅销书。

以下为英文原文：
 
Google Gets A Buzz, Facebook Freaks, MySpace Gets Lost In Space

Been a busy week in Silicon Valley and I wanted to catch you up on what’s going on and provide my spin on it—

Google launched its wannabe Facebook and Twitter killer: Buzz. It takes advantage of the 187 million Gmail users worldwide to jumpstart itself into a “social network”.

Having been in the Web industry since 1994 I’ve seen a lot of attempts by companies to copy others. Bottom line here: Google Buzz is actually pretty good. It will do two things:

1)   Stop Twitter from growing as fast at it wanted to

2)   Stop Facebook from being the only “conversation/friend hub” for over 300 million people online using Facebook

Meanwhile, my friend Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga, the leading social gaming company on Facebook and other sites) agreed to acquire a smaller social gaming company called ‘Serious Business’. Good name for a gaming company. Zynga now counts several hundred million users playing a raft of its games. Some of the more popular are Mafia Wars, Farmville, etc. Zynga has raised more than $200 million in venture capital so far. The irony is Mark founded one of the first social networks, Tribe.net, which never really took off… now Zynga has ridden Facebook’s phenomenal growth to become the leader in social gaming.

Google acquired social search startup Aardvark (vark.com) for $50 million. These are the guys who published a research paper about social search last week. They used to work at Google and now get to return albeit $50 million richer. How’s that for incentive bonus to leave Google, start your own thing, and then sell it to Google? Aardvark lets you ask your friends questions and tries to find the best person to answer it. Sounds kind of annoying to me. Imagine getting asked all these questions by friends? This looks more like a defensive move by Google rather than a killer application they needed. I tend to email friends a question direct rather than try and let a service do that for me without any context.

It was the king of social just 2 years ago but now MySpace is Lost In Space as its CEO was fired. Problem? No growth in past 9 months. MySpace seems to have lost its soul, its mission, to me as Facebook stole its thunder and passed it by. In the US grandmas and grandkids use Facebook. MySpace is not that widespread, probably because it looks like a disaster, the design and layouts are a mess. Not sure fired CEO Owen Van Netta is 100% to blame here. MySpace blew its chance in 2007/8 to really clean up the site and make it more useful. Best shot it has now is to try and appeal to kids 12-18 since how many kids want to be on Facebook with their grandmas?

By the way, I'm trying to add as many friends in China as possible to see how many I can add. I'm giving away a signed copy of my bestselling book on Internet start ups (features Jerry Yang of Yahoo and others).  Add me as a friend.