With the first month of 2010 in the books, Web statistics tracker Net Applications made headlines showing Google Chrome's browser market share exceeding five percent usage, taking tenths of a percentage point away from the top two most popular browsers on the Web, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox. But in our little niche, Internet Explorer has never had that huge a market share in terms of visitors to my site. Most of my peers utilize Firefox or Chrome, or if they are Macheads like myself, they trend toward Safari. After crunching the numbers, looking at my Google Analytics data from the last 13 months, to get solid year over year data for the month just completed, the trend is clear: cutting edge Web users are trading in their Firefox browsers and trying Google Chrome.

Over the last year-plus, the top four Web browsers to louisgray.com have been unchanged: Firefox, IE, Safari and Chrome. Yet in four of the last six months, Safari visitors have outpaced Explorer visits. Meanwhile, in October of 2009, Chrome visits passed up IE users, and by December, Chrome visitors had passed up Safari visitors, good enough for the second-highest browser share overall. This ranking repeated in January.


Just how rapidly has Chrome taken market share in terms of visits to the blog? In January of 2009, Chrome represented 6.53% of all visitors, a mark that held mostly steady through March of 2009. In the month just concluded, Chrome represented 17.46% of all visitors, an increase of 267%, nearly tripling.

At the same time, Firefox use dropped from nearly 51% of all visits to just over 41% of all visits, after peaking in March of last year with almost 55% of all visitors. The 10% of visitors who stopped using Firefox almost exclusively switched to Chrome, for IE visits declined only slightly from 20% to 16.5% of all visits, while Safari has held rather steady, at about 17% of all visits both in January 2009 and January 2010.

At the risk of making mountains out from small sample sizes, the trendlines cover almost a million pageviews over 13 months, and in each of the 3-month blocks following January of 2009, you could see a steady increase in Chrome visitors, from 6% in Spring of 2009, to 8% in the Summer, 10% by Fall and more than 14% by Winter. If the trend lines hold, I would not be surprised to see Chrome eclipse 20% of visits here by summer, and see Firefox fall to 35%, with continued declines in Internet Explorer visits that keep it below 15%. Pivot tables in Google Analytics also show that most of my Internet Explorer visits are from Google searches and other non-direct visits. Most referred visits from social networks, like FriendFeed, Twitter and Facebook, prefer Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

An ever-increasing percentage of the world's population is creating and consuming content from the Web and social networks. Surrounding much of the content on these networks is advertising, be it banner advertising, keyword advertising, behaviorally targeted ads, CPM ads, CPC ads, interstitials... they're out there, in an effort to bring the host site some revenue.

Despite the fact the Web offers an unprecedented amount of targeting to tailor the right message to the right people, I find we continue to be bombarded by off-topic, low quality garbage that certainly is degrading the reputation of the networks running the ads in the first place. Today's most recent jaw-dropper? An advertisement for car insurance on Facebook that featured the bearded visage of America's least favorite terrorist, Osama Bin Laden.

Now just whose bright idea was it that came up with the idea that Osama Bin Laden's stare was going to get me to change my insurance?

Never mind trying to find out if the advertiser tracked down Osama and found out where he lives in order to send him royalty checks for using his image... one simply needs common sense to know that this ad is offensive, and yet it's pretty much par for the course on the Web. Combined with rump-shaking mortgage advertisers, Obama grins in medical scrubs and the like, and it's hard to believe we've made much progress from the dancing bananas, or punching the monkey, as we did in Web 1.0.


Put bluntly, the low-quality advertising directly damages my perception of Facebook and other networks where I see these ads. While the outlets may claim they did not personally approve every ad's content, it is part of the user experience I see when viewing their pages, and they definitely impact my experience.

I have been asking companies like Facebook and others on the Web to leverage my social profile online and present me ads that are interesting. I once got so tired of Facebook's low-quality banners that I went on a rant and marked them all as offensive. But it seems like that hasn't had any effect, or the companies displaying the ads just don't care.

Amusingly, I did a search on Google for the word "Targeted", and the first response, based on my login credentials, was that of a page on Facebook advertising. So what was particularly targeted about the Bin Laden ad? The advertiser said that 32 year-old males can get a specific rate on car insurance. Well, congratulations on figuring out my age and gender. But did I also sign up to be a "Fan of Osama Bin Laden" on Facebook? No. Nor did I put myself as a candidate for male breast reduction surgery over the weekend, or tell Facebook that I wanted to hook up with any hot single ladies looking for an "overnight match".

In November, after hearing Twitter's promises that they would eventually debut an advertising system that we would love, I said I would embrace that approach. I am not anti-ads (despite my occasional complaints), but I am pro-relevancy.


Before anybody says that beer commercials on TV and in magazines are offensive, and this type of approach is just making its way to new media, consider the likelihood of Geico or other auto insurance promoters pushing a photo of Bin Laden in a 30-second spot during Jeopardy or the Today show. It wouldn't happen. Why? Because it's wrong, they are professionals, and they know better. So why, when we have more opportunity to better target our ads, and we have customers willing to buy things online, do we get surrounded with such complete dreck? This is not acceptable, and I challenge companies that are enabling this train wreck to shape up.

One of the classic books on many shelves in the Silicon Valley in the mid to late 1990s was Douglas Copeland's Microserfs, a story of former Microsoft programmers slaving away at their own startup, working ridiculous hours, and putting quality of code ahead of quality of hygiene. I often think about one of the main character's musings, saying that you could tell which companies were going to thrive by the hours the cars stayed in the parking lots, and if you could find a company whose lot was full on a Sunday, it could be an incredible investment opportunity.

My initial career experience in the late 1990s came at a time of Web 1.0, amidst the dot-com frenzy. It was a badge of honor to work late, and even after leaving the office, it was assumed you were on call to respond to product ideas, releases or customer issues. With the potential opportunity being so high, the challenge was to see if you could deliver the best possible products and experience, despite having a lean staff, and there was a constant question of whether you were doing all you could. This drive, whether shared by all colleagues, or whether exhibited by keeping near-nocturnal hours or simply outproducing everyone else, is one that I have had a hard time shaking, as I know at times, I can find myself being hyper-competitive. On the occasional times I've talked to jobhunters and recruiters in past years, I've easily handed that over as a weakness, that while I've been "always on", when others are not as committed, it bugs me, and I question their desire and drive to achieve.

I hate losing. I hate not seeing a result be as good as it possibly could be. I hate turning in a project or a product that is not to the best it could be. I believe in executing quickly, but not if it means sacrificing personal responsibility or standards. And I know I am just as competitive out of the office or off the Web, making sure I win at cards or board games, or beat my friends at bowling. If I don't, then I'll know where I screwed up, and remember it the next time I get a chance to redeem myself.

The best companies and people in business and technology refuse to compromise, even in the face of incredible challenges. The ones that are revered do not concede the battle for product quality, scale, reach or speed.

Take for example Don Dodge's solid and transparent description of how Google sets goals and measures success. A recent transfer from Microsoft, Dodge recounts how he submitted quarterly objectives, which he thought were "aggressive yet achievable", and they were rejected. Why? Because his manager said they "needed to set stretch goals that seemed impossible to fully achieve." He adds, "you can’t achieve amazing results by setting modest targets. We want amazing results. We want to tackle the impossible."

I got a picture of a similar discussion this week when I visited FamilyLink.com in Utah for a single-day visit. Without revealing the details of the conversation, one engineer was challenged to raise the target for a key feature's adoption curve beyond his initial estimate. As with Google, the push to meet this high goal would be set to find a way to achieve the impossible. It's no doubt part of why the company was ranked by comScore as the fastest-growing Web site for December of 2009. The high target was not set to guarantee failure, but instead, to enable success - and the culture was configured to help the team members achieve their full potential, not to reach a lower number, and accept mediocrity.

In a week dominated by iPad news out of Cupertino, we gained a window of insight into one of the most driven people on the planet, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who reportedly characterized software developer Adobe as "lazy", adding, "They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it." Steve Jobs, and his team are notorious for perfecting their products down to the pixel and down to the millimeter and doing things over and over again to get them "right", not just "acceptable". One can imagine the fun and excitement that would take place if he were to get the opportunity to run Adobe for 100 days, cutting the fat and finding people to focus in a way where they are not today.

Part of what keeps me excited about Silicon Valley, and what attracts me to finding out more about the entrepreneurs driving the next generation of startups, or exchanging ideas with fellow writers and curators on the Web, is seeing this drive for greatness and refusal to compromise. It can be pretty easy to tell when some people have the drive, and also easy to tell when others don't. Those that slip deadlines, or ship mediocre products, or don't respond to support issues, or leave the office at 5 o'clock to get home in time for primetime TV are easily exposed.

I'm not 22 years old any more, like I was in 1999, when there was little keeping me from being 100 percent dedicated to the job. Now, staying a few extra hours at the office, or embedded in my laptop at home, takes time away from my wife and the twins. While I wouldn't exchange them for anything, I do sometimes get jealous at the opportunity some Valley leaders have to feed the fire in their belly to achieve and achieve. I dream of finding a team that wants to put sleeping bags under the desks, like Jerry Yang of Yahoo! was always said to have done, and finding a team that is just as excited about talking shop on a Sunday as they are on a Tuesday. (If you've ever seen the reverse, it too can be draining)

It's part of why I often say, "Sleep is a waste of time. And unproductive."

Now that there are so many outlets on the social Web for us to see what people are doing, and sharing, and writing and thinking, we have more and more ways to find out how people are using their work time and their leisure time. There's a good reason that Steve Jobs and his direct reports aren't posting their every nuance to microblogging sites. There's a reason Sergey Brin and Larry Page only surface on rare occasions at corporate events. These guys, and many many others like them, have a drive to succeed and never accept second best or treat failure as an inevitability. It is a lifelong race that has no finish line, and they can never stop. I may not be scoring patents and writing the best code on the planet, but I do not want to be second-best. I want to win on virtue of being consistent, driving quality, thinking in a way that is differentiated, and being active in a beneficial way in as many places as I can to distribute value. If you can achieve, never accept the opportunity to not do your best, and expect the same from everyone.

Jason Goldberg's new startup, Fabulis, a new service targeting the lucrative, but potentially underserved, gay male market, announced the raise of $625,000 in seed funding today, the majority of which will be used to "build product". Fabulis' launch comes on the heels of Goldberg's success in building and selling Socialmedian to XING in 2008, which itself followed his work at Jobster, one of the more visible jobs and recruiting sites on the Web. The first round of funding came from the same supporters who invested in Socialmedian, clearly happy with their returns from the 2008 deal.

Following success with Socialmedian and Jobster, Goldberg sees Fabulis as a personal venture, about him and his friends. As he wrote me in an e-mail today, "If we can't get this right, we should just hang it up."

Fabulis' goal, in Goldberg's words, is to establish the site as the "definitive service that gay men around the world rely on to help them connect with amazing experiences." The company is planning to launch its Web site and mobile applications, for iPhone and other platforms, in the Spring, which will help site members to get tailored suggestions on "where to go, what to do and who to meet".

As has been well covered in demographic studies, gay men have a disproportionate amount of disposable income and discretionary time when contrasted to the general population. Goldberg and team look to tap into the $400 billion spent annually in the US alone by this group, and leverage the high amount of activity the demographic participates in for travel, online commerce, and early adoption. Goldberg's stats said that gay men are more than twice as likely to own an iPhone as their straight equivalents, and were also more likely to own laptops or digital video recorders.

Despite all this, Fabulis doesn't believe that there are adequate solutions online that help this market. Traditional travel sites do not target the gay male demographic, nor do restaurant listings, or other marketplaces, making the gay community rely more on word of mouth than any centralized directory.

Fabulis' focus may seem somewhat exclusionary to straight visitors or same sex female couples, but Goldberg thinks this focus will really give the site an advantage.

"Fabulis is intended for gay men and their friends. We are very focused on our target market," Goldberg said. That's not to be exclusionary, rather just to make sure that the site appeals well to our target user. This site is unapologetically for gay men," he added.

With such a massive growth in niche social networking sites focused on specific tasks, be that for credit card sharing, calendar broadcasting or location checkins, the opportunity to focus all the major social elements into a recommendation service for a lucrative demographic looks extremely promising, if it is done well. And unlike many Web services, Fabulis appears to already have a business model in mind that will make money - one that is "not just a straight ad model (pun intended)", Goldberg said.

After the successful launch to sale of Socialmedian, Goldberg is also doubling down on seeing how social relationships form and evolve in a community. He wrote me, explaining one aspect to the social graph that differs between gay men and the rest of the population:

"One really interesting aspect of gay male relationships that we're also spending a lot of time on is how the gay male social graph functions differently than that of the typical straight person," Goldberg said. "For instance, for most straight people, the social graph of who you know is enough. Facebook is really good at helping you share and discover things with your friends. But with gay men, it is often as useful to know what friends-of-friends are doing or recommending or where they are going. And, for gay men, even just knowing what everyone in your city is doing or gravitating towards is very interesting. So, that's an interesting problem to solve, how to make the big gay world seem a whole lot smaller."

And if you think the name is "Fabulis", you can tell the company is looking to have a good time building a "fabulis" product. You can get a "Fabulis shirt" just by explaining how you are Fabulis. The Fabulis blog explains.