Faster and Faster
I was talking with one of the Yahoo! PR/corp comm people at AD:TECH about how everything seems to be accelerating. And recently another person from Yahoo! said he hoped things would slow down a bit so he could relax a little and take some time off. To paraphrase the first President Bush, "Not gonna happen." I tell people the competition and frenzy are now permanent, and it's never going to slow down. There is no hump to get over. This is the way life is — six announcements every day!
The journalist/author James Gleick wrote a book several years ago titled "Faster," which describes how our world is becoming, well, faster, and our relationship with time is changing as everything around us speeds up. Technology is one of the chief culprits here.
The pace of things is getting really absurd as is the notion of "grokking" (as people now say) or having coherent opinions and views about all these developments. Especially with blogs, we now live in a world of "instant analysis." I don't know how others feel, but I can no longer physically keep up with all that's happening. OK, end of therapy session.
On to more developments:
Free classifieds site/platform provider LiveDeal announced the launch of its AdShare private label program for newspapers and other local media sites that want to offer classifieds to their users. LiveDeal is moving aggressively to be a big player in the online classifieds space and, with programs such as AdShare, aligning itself with newspapers (especially community and independent local newspapers) in the increasingly competitive online classifieds marketplace.
Google seeks to expand its free Wi-Fi offering beyond its SF bid to its hometown of Mountain View, CA. According to a company statement Google denied that it has plans to offer free Wi-Fi beyond the Bay Area. More here.
ShopLocal relaunched its site with more e-commerce. The site is seeking to be a comprehensive local shopping resource, with local offers (FSIs/circulars) from major retailers, local retailer information as well as e-commerce. The site looks more like a shopping search engine than it did before.
Google pushes personalized search out of Google Labs.
InsiderPages' Andrew Shotland indicated that InsiderPages hit a 400K review milestone across its network.
The N.Y. Times indicates it has 270,000 subscribers for TimesSelect (135K online only, which is the more meaningful number). At $49.95 (the full annual price), that represents about $6.7 million (PaidContent breaks down the numbers and finds much less actual revenue). We'll wait and see if those are die-hard fans or whether the Times can keep those numbers growing. I'm skeptical. But I hope for the paper's sake that it can.
It's only 8:30 in the Pacific time zone. There's still time for 10 or 20 more things to happen before the end of the day.