cruel to be kind

Scoble writes about map and APIs:

Why? Cause we don’t even realize that Google is playing in the Superbowl and left us playing for the high school championships. It’s nice to win the high school championships, but it isn’t close to the Superbowl.

The tag line is always: Make it easy for me to spend my money. Or in the case of a content owner: Make it easy for me to implement your service.

Google ads? Piece of cake. Little generator to do them, one applying, usable every where I like. But I tried to look into the affiliate business – forget it. You have to be masochistic to even look deeper into that. The advertiser wants me to submit a request for every site I have and basically ask for permission to display their ads. Yeah right.

It is not even about “give me control” but about “allow me to do what I want. Make it easy for me to use it. I will play with you, but you have to do your share too”. I tried to play with affiliate. They did not even let me into the door. So I stick happily with Adsense. (Until something better comes up. MSN beta perhaps? I am a good tester! ;))

Now, back to maps. I would love to integrate maps. I would love to do the ‘user generated content’ and do things with it. Well, once you get this little continent Europe going, but let’s assume I would use it with US data.

And do for my little town a website with every local address entered by me so I can offer a service to the community and earn money on the way Of course, I would use it ‘commercial’ because I would need to get paid, which makes it commercial. But it needs a map.

So I will go out looking for what map stuff is available. And I will take, what is available and play with me. And enter my data there. Now, Yahoo maps only allow non commercial and max 50 thousand views. This is a stopper before I even start to play with them.

Read that again: Before I even start to play with them. And when I don’t play with it, I don’t get excited. If I don’t get excited, I don’t spread the word of mouse.

Well, I assume I could try to pay for them. Which I will not do. It is their task to present a way that I will not have to pay money directly. I am paying by the fact that I will present your application on my site to my visitors. I will probably enter data into your database for free.

We can talk about how to link back to you etc, but in general, I am already paying. Let’s work on models where we both win, and I will play with you.

Additional note (it seems as if my trackbacks are not working *grr*):
Playing defined / Yahoo to change their Tos already?

Technorati Tags: Yahoo maps,, Adsense,, Google Maps,, Virtual Earth

Tags: cruel to be kind