YASENR

Time for yet another Sunday evening news roundup (or in short YASENR).

Inside Facebook on Facebook standardizing application invites. Comments from Andrew Chen.

Chris "Long Tail" Anderson: Everything in the music industry is up! (except those plastic discs) And he doesn't take into account the money going to artists because they are brands (endorsements etc).

History might not repeat itself, but it definitely rhymes. The old privacy discussions surrounding online-offline advertising targeting integration (DoubleClick + Abacus back in the dot.com days) will likely resurface as Acxiom is doing the same thing today.

Martin Jönsson comments on the interesting acquisition made by the cash rich and highly profitable Herenco in the Swedish local newspaper market. Previously Herenco-owned Jönköpings-Posten was the only local newspaper without a news web site. Instead of launching one, they acquired the startup competitor Jnytt

Don't play games you cannot win

Ian Rogers, VP of Product Development Yahoo! Music: Convenience Wins, Hubris Loses and Content vs. Context, a Presentation for Some Music Industry Friends. [via: TechCrunch]

"Inconvenient experiences don't have Web-scale potential, and platforms which monetize the gigantic scale of the Web is the only way to compete with the control you've lost, the only way to reclaim value in the music industry. If your consultants are telling you anything else, they are wrong."

...

"I'm here to tell you today that I for one am no longer going to fall into this trap. If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I'm not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I'll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won't let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don't have any more time to give and can't bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life's too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out."

Good example of thinking about alternative cost a.k.a. the best way to spend resources and having a strategy that includes avoiding playing games that cannot be won.