Archives: October 2007

A funny thing happened this morning when I was walking to pick up a coffee. A man jumped out from behind a lamppost and shouted “Oi! Look here you single 28-year old white male who sits around all day watching Star Wars”. It is quite common for strangers to call out abuse based on my somewhat geeky appearance, but on this occasion the manager of my local Blockbuster hadn’t even noticed my sandals and out-of-fashion t-shirt. As he demonstrated the latest Luke Skywalker Anniversary Box Set, he explained that he was trying out a new Facebook product that reveals to advertisers anywhere on the planet my likes and dislikes according to my Facebook profile.

The idea that Facebook could follow us around the entire web, flogging our intimate details to advertisers as we go, is likely to cause uproar on a scale unseen since the early days of News Feed. And then we’ll all settle back down and go on with life as usual. After all, relevant ads are good for us. Untargeted banner ads give you headaches.

They say you can call something revolutionary if it changes your behaviour. When I first received a friend request from a family member I logged straight out of Facebook, cleared my cookies, and even considered taking refuge in a fake Orkut account. Since then, I’ve calmed down, done the decent – but difficult – thing and allowed brothers, sisters, and cousins to peek at the intimate secrets of my life that I trust only Facebook itself to understand completely.

I long-ago gave up scanning my wall posts for indiscrete comments from friends that I wouldn’t want Dad to hear about. And do you know what? Just maybe my relationship with my family is stronger because Facebook has shared aspects of my personality that I find difficult to explain face-to-face. My brother says not to worry about the pictures of me drunk and wearing a skirt – apparently he too had a great time at college. And my sister reassures me that it’s OK these days for people to have alternative sexual preferences (actually, I must have ticked that box by accident, but it’s interesting to note she wasn’t surprised).

The truth is that sharing my vital stats with advertisers is nothing compared to sharing my profile with those closest to me.

Now I just need to fill out a few more movies, interests, and activities in my profile. I’ve already bought enough Star Wars clutter to last me a lifetime.

Earlier today Lee Lorenzen of Altura Ventures sent me a message referencing a note where he postulates about Facebook’s upcoming ad network. He brought up something that I previously hadn’t thought of: the opening of Facebook’s ad network. Imagine if Facebook, who now has access to over 50 million users’ personal information could target ads based on those profiles anywhere on the web. It’s not far fetched and it is exactly what Facebook will be announcing on November 6th when they announce the SocialAds network.

After speaking with an individual with specific knowledge of how the network is being structured, I was informed that Facebook will be leveraging the cookies installed in users’ browsers after logging into Facebook in order to target them across the web. In the instance that the user doesn’t have one of the Facebook cookies installed, ads similar to those of what Google currently provides will be displayed. Now for those wondering why on earth Microsoft would invest $240 million in Facebook (while Steve Ballmer strategically played down the value of Facebook), this is it.

Thanks to their advertising partnership, Microsoft will now be able to provide targeted ads not only based on demographic data (location, age, gender, etc), but they will also know that the person visiting your site is interested in skiing and guitar. So how much money will Facebook make from this? A ton. Higher CPMs and CPCs will create a new competitive landscape between Google and Facebook. Facebook to Google: we are gunning for you.

Apparently Google’s new social platform is codenamed Maka-Maka. While it may sound ridiculous, according to one of the Techcrunch comments, “‘Maka’ in Hebrew means ‘a hit’ or ‘a punch.’ When you say a guy made a ‘maka’ in Israel, it means that he made a great deal and earned a lot of money, really fast.” Looks like Google is trying to prepare the Facebook knock out. It doesn’t look like Google is going to be ready by the rumored November 5th launch date though.

According to people that I’ve spoken with, the announcement will be made on November 1st and the actual launch of the platform will be on December 1st. For those that don’t realize the amount of technical innovation that had to take place in order to develop the Facebook platform, over 5 months later there is still no competitor and not even Google will have something for over a month.

After speaking with a number of developers from the Facebook platform, it sounds like many of the most popular applications on Facebook are now being approached to be launch partners with all the other social networks that are preparing competing platforms. Not a bad situation for those that are at the top of Facebook. These companies that currently have hundreds of thousands or millions of users are about to gain even greater exposure through competing platforms. Imagine finding out that your company which just doubled in the past 5 months is about to quadruple in the next 6 to 12 months. Not bad!

From the sound of things, Maka-Maka has a pretty good chance of taking on Facebook given that they are about to open up a lot of their services to the entire web rather than using Facebook’s walled garden approach. While nobody knows how the platform wars are about to pan out, one thing is for sure: the next 12 months are going to be exciting times!

This morning I discussed the rare instance of Facebook banning user accounts. I thought it was a relatively infrequent occurrence but according to Glenda Kwek this is a much more common occurrence. For those that suffer the wrath of Facebook, it can be devastating. Having your Facebook account shut down is a similar experience to losing a cell phone. Suddenly all of your accounts are sent to oblivion and aside from your close contacts, chances are you won’t remember everyone you had contacted.

Personally, my reliance on Facebook has grown exponentially. I now add business contacts and friends and frequently rely on Facebook for their contact information. Thanks to Facebook’s restrictions within the platform API, there is no way to access a user’s phone number or email address and hence no way to export their contact information to outlook or any other contact management software. While the best model is to avoid violating Facebook’s terms of service, if by some fluke your account is canceled, you will be screwed.

For the time being, all you can do is manually backup the contact information of your Facebook friends. This is going to have to change as Facebook’s user base grows and more complaints begin to surface of randomly disabled accounts. I can name at least one person who has had their account disabled; have you or any of your friends had their accounts disabled?

This morning, the Wall Street Journal points out a new issue facing Facebook thanks to their new investment by Microsoft: hiring. Any rise in Facebook’s valuation will create a subsequent rise in employee stock options. While that wasn’t a significant problem for Google or Microsoft who’s employees became overnight millionaires after their respective IPOs, Facebook has a huge valuation considering their estimated $150 million yearly revenue.

Any new employees that join Facebook are going to have to truly believe in a future valuation that is comparable with Microsoft and Google. If Facebook plays their cards right that may not be out of the question but given their current size and revenue base, they have a long way to go. For all those early Facebook employees that had the privilege of a small share price, they may not be as happy as you would imagine even with Facebook’s new valuation.

While Facebook is now worth billions of dollars, rumor has it that many employees wanted Mark Zuckerberg to accept an acquisition offer from Yahoo or Microsoft. At this point though, Facebook’s only exit strategy is IPO and that could easily be years away. While some employees may not be happy, Facebook still provides new employees with perhaps the greatest opportunity for becoming overnight millionaires like their Microsoft and Google predecessors (some of whom now work for Facebook). Even though some may have wanted Zuckerberg to exit, times aren’t too tough over at Facebook currently.

Are you an avid user of Joost, the new web based t.v. on demand service? If so, there is a great new plugin for Joost that enables you to view all of your recently played shows. The application also displays your entire show history. While this application provides little to no interactivity within the application aside from displaying what applications you have seen. While this application has launched it appears that it still has some bugs as I was receiving time out errors while testing out the application.

Aside from that, the application is a great idea. What would be even better is the ability to view Joost directly in Facebook. While I’m not quite sure what added benefit this would provide, it would definitely be slick. If you haven’t downloaded Joost yet I highly recommend that you go try it out. Joost has created partnerships with MTV, Comedy Central, CNN, CBS, Paramount Pictures and a number of other large media companies.

As Erick Schonfeld highlighted a few weeks ago, Joost will have some heavy competition in the near future. In the meantime, you might as well enjoy the free on-demand television and let all your Facebook friends know what you are watching. If you want to share your viewed shows with your friends go download the Joost plugin and install the JoostBook application.

As I covered last week, Facebook is going to soon remove their limit on Facebook groups. Whether this will be all groups or only specific groups, I am not quite sure. One thing is for sure though, if groups start gaining significant traction both politicians and commercial organizations could benefit from lobbying group admins. Stephen Colbert was able to recruit 1,000,000 users in 9 days. Imagine if he was able to email those million people. That would create a significant opportunity for any politician.

Facebook is going to do whatever they can to prevent spam from proliferating across their site. As such, I have a feeling that Facebook will limit groups that can mass message people. Alternatively, there will be a some sort of mass message approval queue so that Facebook can moderate all large outgoing messages. Spammers are not always a burden to Facebook. Just like hackers, they can help find exploits and in turn help Facebook to prevent future spamming. Facebook still has a way to go until they have successfully prevented spammers from the site.

Currently, there is no real way to validate that any given account has a valid user behind it or if it is a duplicate account. While this is an unsolvable issue for the time being, Facebook has been the most effective at disabling fake accounts. On occasion, their stringent policy has resulted in the disabling of legitimate accounts but 9 times out of 10, the account is re-enabled and the issue resolved. Back to the issue: lobbying Facebook group admins. I think it may start happening if Facebook completely opens up group messaging, do you?

Given that I spend countless hours on Facebook, I’d imagine that calling me a “Facebook Addict” wouldn’t be too far off. I mean it is pretty much my job at this point. According to the FB Addict application though, I am not hooked on Facebook. My qualification for a Facebook addict? If you add this application to check, you probably are a Facebook addict. The factors used by this application to determine whether or not you are an addict are: entering your gender, being part of a network, recency of profile editing, filling all of your profile, having a popular wall and posting lots of notes.

Entering your gender accounts for one sixth of your Facebook addiction? I have to disagree with their model. I would base your addiction on time spent on Facebook, number of status updates, number of messages sent and number of applications installed. All of these things can’t be tracked by applications though so they had to use another model. While this may not be the most accurate model for measuring your addiction, close to 15,000 people used this application yesterday and over 150,000 users have add the application in total.

If you want to check if you are an Facebook addict based on the FB Addict model, go install the FB Addict application. If you disagree with their model, what do you think are the tell tale signs of Facebook addiction?

While speaking on a panel at Snap Summit yesterday, one of the audience members posed a question to the panel: how do you gain exposure outside of the U.S. on Facebook? My response was to simply translate your application. While browsing through the application directory yestreday, I saw a number of Spanish and Turkish applications that were quite successful. One individual approached me after the summit yesterday and said that he is Turkish. He brought up one application in particular: Raki Sofrasi.

This application now has over 80,000 active daily users. That’s pretty impressive considering that there are currently just under 600,000 Facebook users in Turkey. Why was it so successful? Cultural affiliation. Prior to the Jewish high holidays this year there was a Rosh Hashanah application that acquired close to 100,000 users in a matter of days. If you want to succeed on Facebook, simply target a cultural, demographic or religious group that is currently being underserved.

Lee Lorenzen of Altura Ventures made a great suggestion at yesterday’s summit: go through a bookstore and look at the covers of every magazine. If any of the demographics being targeted by the magazines aren’t currently served (or are underserved) on Facebook, go build an application that targets them. It’s as simple as that. Have you seen any other applications that leverage this strategy?

Just when you thought you had seen all the friend visualizations that there are to see, another comes along and puts just a slight twist on things. King’s Collage provides you with five different collage variations: the traditional friend collage (similar to the friends grid and my entourage applications), a sun, a start, a heart and an arrow. Not very creative shapes but definitely different. Since the application launched just a couple of days ago, it has added almost 10,000 users. Not bad for an application that doesn’t provide an extremely unique offering.

Honestly, Facebook needs to come up with a way for grouping similar applications together. Rather than having users browse through countless duplicate applications, it would be much more useful to view a list of completely unique applications. There are now over 6,600 applications on Facebook and there is no way that most people are going to browse through all of them. Enough of my bickering!

The King’s Collage application provides a slight twist to an already successful Facebook application model. It has gone viral by forcing users to invite their friends if they wish to use other visualizations aside from the classic one. While I refrained from spamming my friends in order to unlock other visualizations, hundreds of other people have chosen to participate in the fun. If you want to spam your friends in order to get semi-unique looking visualizations, go grab the King’s Collage application.