Furrier.org - Business & Technology Blog

Facebook just pulled a Netscape. What the hell are they thinking? They just flipped off Google and others in this openness war - how? by being closed.

Most of the Facebook kids were not around when Netscape blew it to Microsoft. Now Facebook is making a blunder to fight Google on a frontal basis.

Here they write via their developer blog ….hold on let me get the violin out..”Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we’ve had a chance to evaluate the technology. We’ve found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service. Just as we’ve been forced to do for other applications that redistribute data in a way users might not expect or understand, we’ve had to suspend Friend Connect’s access to Facebook user information until it comes into compliance. We’ve reached out to Google several times about this issue, and hope to work with them to enable users to share their data exactly when and where they choose.”

Kara Swisher please decode this for us? I think that this is garbage for Facebook to do this - Hello Beacon…

I have been following Facebook for some time and never got one response from their PR people. I’m tired of waiting. My opinion is that this move is bad. What a PR blunder.

Update: Mike Arrington has a detailed post from both companies. Nice post Mike!.

Facebook: Privacy my ass - This is a Facebook PR stunt backfired…this imho only hurts Facebooks platform development efforts because FB need to develop the platform and this petty shit has to stop.. ..Elliott’s 2nd day on the job. Nice job pal - NOT.

Social Gaming Network lands a round of $15 million in venture funding.  Eric Eldon at Venturebeat has the best  writeup on the company and the news.

I think that Social Gaming Network is on to something really big.  The social graph is working and these guys have proven how fast applications can grow.  The big news here is the scale of their reach and the platform that they are building for Social Graphs and Social Networks.

This is a very important trend to watch.

In January I blogged that Jerry Yang will have to join opensocial.

Now it’s time for Yahoo to step up. I find the non-profit angle very interesting. It reminds me of the old IETF days… nothing really gets done but it certainly looks good on paper.

Facebook will be under a ton of pressure especially on the innovation side. I’d like to see what their R&D plan is like?

Yahoo joining OpenSocial is a major win for Google and a blow to Facebook.

8 months ago I set up a group on Facebook called Entrepreneurs Only- it has 264 members of only entrepreneurs as of today.   What is very interesting is that it isn’t the number of people signed up but the quality.

The group isn’t active but people seem to be signing up.  Groups on facebook have become spam lately - I get emails from groups to promote this or go to that event.  No real work gets done classic signal vs noice problem.  To much noice coming from these social media tools.

I wonder what the engagement level or engagement level could be in these targeted affinity groups - if they are indeed targeted.

I saw this coming a mile away in January but the Microsoft bid must have slowed it down.  After my initial blog posts I got a tip from a source close to Yahoo confirming my earlier posts that Yahoo will be joining Opensocial.  NY Times is breaking this story - finally.

Word on the street is that the Microsoft hostile takeover has put the Opensocial deal on ice until now.   The timing of Yahoo joining Opensocial puts the pressure on Microsoft and might give Yahoo a fighting chance to go alone.  If the Opensocial deal was in the works prior to Microsoft then that is a great sign for Yahoo - it shows that they are going open.

I’m sure this will be hot on techmeme tomorrow.

For the past three years I’ve been working with over 40 corporate advertisers in developing, testing, deploying, and measuring social media. I’ve discovered many things and learning more everyday.  As I am documenting my findings I have to highlight Charline Li’s post from yesterday.

Charlene Li has a great post on her views of Social Graphs and business models. It’s about “Social Everything”.

The big trend in Charlene’s post is that social individuals, groups, networks, graphs are great, but they still don’t connect to real world value. This linchpin to real world benefits is where I have the vision for social everything - it’s about collaboration. Virtual activity is highly productive, but seems to dead end when translating and scaling to real world offline benefits.

If you have been one of the 10k people following my blog you know where I stand and have a sense of what I’m working on for my next venture- Social Advertising, Social Media, Social Graph, Social Everything.   Charlene’s post reasonated with alot of my findings and the direction that I’m heading.  Here are some nice gems in Charlene’s post:

“.. the idea of social graphs being “owned” by different social networks makes no sense. Yet, all of today’s social networks build their business model and competitive advantage on having the largest, most complete social graph. The result: I have a close colleague who enjoys exploring all of the new social networks and “friends” me on all of them, figuring I’m a pretty good person to have in his new network. In a world with a single social graph, he would be able to import his existing personal, social graph into any new service, and immediately begin enjoying the new service without having to wait for his friends to catch up. And I would be spared the insanity of having to accept his umpteenth “friend” invitation!….In a world of a single social graph, social networks will have to compete on the basis of creating the best experience for its members – not because it controls a unique social graph.”….

…”The brilliance of Facebook Platform is that it greatly expanded what people could do on social networks. The problem is that what people do is still pretty limited. Take a look at the top applications on Facebook – they can be roughly grouped into 1) managing/comparing/interacting with friends in a general context; 2) self-expression (FunWall, Bumper Sticker); 3) games; and 4) media preferences (iLike, Flikster). These are all fun and interesting, but they only begin to scratch the surface of what I do every day.”….

…”A business model where social influence defines marketing value. Today’s advertising models don’t work on social networking sites – that’s because simply targeting better on profile or social graph details is still the same old media model of CPM and CPC pricing. What’s missing is marketing value based on how valuable I am in the context of my influence. For example, Steve Rubel is a highly influential person because he is an authority on social media, the people in his social graph tend to interested in his views, and they in turn have a great deal of authority as well. (Several people came up to me after the speech and said that this is similar to a “PageRank of people”, a very easy way to crystallize the idea.)

This means that each person will have their own “personal CPM”, an idea I heard JWT’s Marian Salzman discuss at a private event in February (here are more details on the JWT’s Top Trends for 2008). The idea is that marketers want to reach highly influential people, and hopefully curry their endorsements. This has traditionally been the province of public relations, where they reach out to key influencers. But in the world of social networks, this is influence writ large and wide – every person has their own network of influence, and hence, their own personal CPM or value that they contribute to a social network.

..”There are several start-ups as well as established agencies that are already looking at marketing, brokering, measuring, etc. social influence, so you can expect to hear more about this topic soon. But don’t expect advertising spending to quickly embrace social influence – after all, the vast majority of ad budgets are spent by media buyers who still cleave to the tried and true reach and frequency, CPM models.”

Why is this relevant? Because as pointed out yesterday by industry visionaries, the iPhone SDK announcement represents the biggest trend since the PC revolution - socially connected individuals, groups, and media are at the heart of this new revolution.

Social Everything includes devices (iphone) to connect to networks (open social + social graphs) to consume media and information (social media). Users love it and so advertisers will soon have solutions - hopefully provided by us entrepreneurs.

I wrote a post over the weekend about how Facebook is becoming cluttered while the new LinkedIn is clean.  Today WebWorkerDaily has a post on the new LinkedIn.  Love the last line in the post “As long as LinkedIn never offers anything with the word “poke” or “wall,” maybe they’re on to something after all.”

I have been doing a lot of research on social networks and will be posting results soon.  One thing that I noticed in social networks, media, and groups is that that the most successful social media advertising or information connects virtual activities to the real world.  Recently my LinkedIn experience has been blowing away the utility value of Facebook.  It feels like a chore for me to work Facebook in order to connect to my real world relationships and activities.  At first Facebook worked great then it became littered with notice - very dirty communications.  Bottom line: it effected my productivity both on a personal and business level.

I have neighbors who work for Facebook and know a bunch of people over there so I hope this post can be taken as being constructive.  If Facebook founders want to be the best social utility on the planet then it has to be 1) simple, 2) elegant, and 3) easy to use.

For professionals I have to say ‘Advantage LinkedIn”

Disclosure: I’m a fan of Facebook.

Facebook is getting dirty. I’m pounding out more rejections for unwanted stuff and unwanted clutter - Facebook is dirty. Others are feeling tired of Facebook.

Facebook is so cluttered that it feels dirty. Meanwhile the new LinkedIn is clean. It reminded me of how Google had the clean design in 1998 and all the other search engines went down the cluttered portal route.

Facebook clean your act up and be a utility not a pain in the butt.

In the 60 minutes interveiw of Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg (which I thought was a puff piece) Kara Swisher is highlighted as the expert in Facebook.  Kara deserves to be on there because she has been following Facebook hard for a while.  I like Kara and read her blog.  Kara is a pro journalist, but I fell off my chair at the end of the interview on her comment on Facebook’s beacon product.  I have to call foul on this one Kara. 

Kara: I respectfully disagree with you.  First, I think that you’re wrong on your take on beacon.  You said Facebook was wrong for doing it and not explaining it.  Then you go on to basically question their judgement.  I disagree with you.  Beacon is a good thing for Facebook and for users.  I think that Facebook rolled it out the wrong way, but it was a good move for Facebook.  It’s a competitive advantage weapon for Facebook and a possible innovation lever for their user experience (and for future monetization).   Secondly, you have a relationship Google and know that Google practices the same techniques as Beacon (can we talk about gmail, data centers and toolbar among other similar data driven innovations).  By your logic Google is wrong and has bad judgement.   Competing on the value of data extraction is precisely what Google built their brand on and it is what drives their ad monetization business. 

Both Google and Facebook derive their products core value propositions from the aggregation and knowledge about data and data relationships. 

Here is the 60 minutes interview. Note: Bill Gates was 17 when he started Microsoft.

Two Parts: 

Part I

Part II

One theme coming out of the conference here is the value in the platform - the data and the ‘data effects’.  More importantly the Internet Operating System (IOS).  Tim O’Reilly pointed this out today at the Social Graph Conference.  Here is a great post from Stu Phillips about Data as a service - eg facebook and other social networks.  Stu ironically was the key player behind Cisco’s IOS.  As we all know Cisco had one of the most sustainable and nested advantages in their routers.  I think Stu has a great perspective in looking at the role of the Internet as an operating system.  Add higher level stack abstractions and you have Cisco’s IOS + Web 1.0 + Web 2.0 = Modern Web. 

If you’re an entrepreneur who is interested in building a business as part of the Internet Operating System you need to meet with Stu who is helping fund and advise startups.

Stu points out the following:  “Facebook could find some interesting ways of monetizing that database – not only does it have a detailed set of relationship data, it also has a rich transaction stream – every time you add a friend, change your profile, interact with an application… Facebook generates a transaction. Mining both the database and the log of transactions could provide very valuable data. “

Stu is highlighting an article from Fred VogelStein at Wired.  Fred penned an article about Facebook for the La Times.

Here is a link to my data on Facebook. 

Dave Morin works on the Facebook platform team to bring out the platform - developers.facebook.com.  He is talking about Facebook, the Social Graph, and the Facebook Platform. 

Facebook is a technology company and a social utility.   Facebook is growing at 225k users per day and doubling every six months.  The new users are coming from people over the age of 25.  Mostly users outside the US (uk and canada dominate the international distribution).  Over 50% of users return each day.   60 billion pages every day.

The official definition:  Social Graph is the network of connections that exist through which people communicate and share information.  Applications like photos and events are examples that leverage the social graph.  Dave highlights that the Events App (written by Mark Zuckerberg in 8 hours one night) on Facebook is dwarfing evite because of the social graph and the network effects. 

Facebook will be open for developers and users.  I wonder what this means.???  Facebook is a young company and I think that they will do the right thing in making it ‘really open’.  As Tim O’Reilly says whoever makes the developer money will win the platform war.  Right now Tim says that Facebook is a subsystem of the Internet platform.  If they make the right moves on the developer front they can win the platform war.

New features will harness the fact that Facebook is moving toward a metric of engagement.   New opportunities?  Three things important to Facebook:  managing the growth, get to engagement apps and metrics, and monetization on these new social patterns.

Dave says that Facebook has 90,000 developers and growing.  Facebook is excited and humbled by the outpouring of support from developers.  Another interesting stat - 80% of users have adopted at least one application. 

Sitting in the row of press next to Nick (allfacebook.com) and Brian Solis.  Dave McClure is putting on a great event with top silicon valley press and developers.  The “Don” of blogging - Dan Farber is blogging and leading the charge on techmeme.  Tom Foremski has some earlier posts. 

What is the social graph?  Everyone wants to know.  It’s really not fully defined but in general I think that it’s a movement that will have legs.  Why?  Because we are all connected and fully networked.  I expect to see some interesting new approaches to content, collaboration, and advertising - maybe we should call it the social semantic web.   Some think that Social Graph is based in hype.

Right now Danny Sullivan, the authority on search,  is taking about search engines and how it relates to the social revolution that we know of as social networks and media.  

web 1.0  search success:  “off the page” metrics - clickthrus, anchor text, actual text, and link relationships.   Problem: spamming and manipulation of text and links.

Evolution:  vertial search and personalized and social search.   Changes will be gradual and won’t be noticed by most users.  How does this happen?  Data used by Google.  Yes Google is monitoring your web history.  Tagging.  Will this be enough?  Search will be going through major transformation in the next few years. 

What about Facebook?  Social graph and social network data…watching what others are doing… reshape results and actions based upon what friends are doing.   To me is facebook about watching what people are doing rather than something of value?  Is there a collaboration app waiting to be born … uhmm..

Is facebook for real Danny asks..he points the crowd to this picture…

New trend in facebook ..Friend pollution - “true friends”?  are your friends effecting the search engines?  He says that facebook doesn’t have a facebook friendly search technology.  I agree with Danny.  I think that Facebook search is terrible. 

Question from crowd:  what does he think of Mahalo?  Danny doesn’t see Mahalo as social search because it is done by editors not a community.  Hmm I think that Jason is doing both not just editors.  Jason Calacannis is this true? 

Search is an on demand activity based upon what a user knows what they want.  Different from discovery..getting something that you would like that you don’t know you want… Digg, aggregated news, content that is aggregated knowledge of what your friends watch.

I tried to ask a question but they ran out of time.  So I’ll ask it here…

Danny:  web 1.0 search was based upon open data (crawling pages) and multiple companies were created to address search (altavista, excite, yahoo, etc).. Will Facebook be monolithic search or will it open up its data?  If so what is the best way for facebook to enable entrepreneurs to create new search applications?

Update: Danny answered via the comments..Thanks Danny

Danny Sullivan’s response:  “I suspect Facebook will not open up its social data, so the best way to enable entrepreneurs will probably remain though application development — that you could develop an app to call on Google, Yahoo, Microsoft or Ask search results and somehow store activity on them by those sharing through some type of search app.”