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web 3.0 = facebook 2.0?

17 Jul

Google died on May 24, 2007.

Not Google the company, nor the stock, but the idea of Google as this unstoppable juggernaut of world internet domination.

Facebook opened up its platform to 3rd party developers- it moved from Facebook 1.0 to Facebook 2.0- and nothing has been quite the same since.
I am not sure if it’s the applications themselves, or just the fact that we have something new to share with eachother, but without a doubt we (the blogosphere?) have all adopted a new interface which is capturing more and more of our attention.

I like the way Pulver put it when he said that:

In LinkedIn, everything centers around establishing a connection. In Facebook, connecting is just the beginning. Facebook is all about community. And this can been seen by doing things like leaving messages on users’ walls, joining groups and having discussions, as well as some of the more social applications built for Facebook.

I tend to agree with this. While page views persist, and connections are being made in MySpace and LinkedIn and other networks, the only place where people are actually engaging socially in virtual real-time is within their Facebook feeds and profiles.

My friend Ted here in Mill Valley confided in me that “yeah, well I think I am now spending two hours a day on Facebook after having never used before a couple of months ago.”

I no longer Twitter.

Or Flickr so much.

Or del.icio.us anymore.

It gets harder and harder to maintain the heavy responsibility of a WordPress blog when I can communicate so quickly to specific social groups within Facebook.

My friend Pierre told he how much he enjoyed tracking my progress across the East Coast the past few weeks on Facebook, with status updates and pictures and video, even while I was feeling guilty about not properly blogging.

I still search with Google, and use it for email and docs and calendaring.

I wish that my Facebook inbox would talk with my buddy list and keep a record in my Gmail search, but I am willing to suffer through this lack of interoperability because the Facebook communication kit has become so vital to me (and so quickly for that matter).

A number of people have commented about how Facebook has enabled them to connect with long lost friends, who they are suddenly back in touch with in strangely, suddenly intimate ways.
It’s like StumbleUpon for people.

What if Web 3.0 is not about the “semantic web” or about any major revolution in natural language search?

What if, instead, Web 3.0 is really about moving from pagerank to peoplerank?

And what if the Facebook Newsfeed, opened up as it was in May to third party applications, marked the dawn of this next phase?

Netscape browsed the Web. Yahoo! organized it. Google searched it. And now Facebook has made it social.

What we actually want to do within this social platform is the big new question in Silicon Valley, where everybody is scurrying to figure out what are the Social OS equivalents of Word Processing and Spreadsheets.

Walls and pokes?

You can look at the fact that millions of people are turning their friends into zombies, spraying grafiti on others’ walls, getting super-poked, and sending “poop” at eachother as simply so much chatter.
Food Throws

Or you can look at these gestures as new forms of language, crude in their pronunciation but rich in meaning and intentionality.

I turned the page on Attention and the back of it reads: “Engagement.”

Focusing on banner CPMs and click-thru rates in this new medium is like focusing on the Television set as opposed to the shows.

Facebook users are more engaged with their media, in a truly social way, than anybody else. This is why my friend Rich Greenfield of Pali Research who is a *media* analyst on Wall Street is so f-ing excited about what is going on.

This is different than Google which is an accidental media company. Nancy Peretsman of Allen & Company told me how Google kept thinking they were a technology company until she (and no doubt others) revealed to them that they were in fact a media company.

I doubt Facebook needs this clarification.

The bear case on Facebook has become somewhat clear in recent weeks:

  • Advertising does not work
  • Few of the Applications that people are installing and spamming their friends with have any staying power
  • Facebook is throttling back the viral coefficiency of applications and offers no clear path to monetization
  • There are no barriers to exit for Facebook users, who will inevitably move to the next “cool” social network

Against this critique, the only legitimate responses are usage, engagement and responsiveness.

  • How many people are using Facebook applications?
  • How engaged are they in these activities?
  • How responsive are they to interact with 3rd parties (friends, friends of friends, marketers, etc)

Some of these metrics are available (for example usage of apps via our Appsaholic service) but the critical metrics on engagement and responsiveness are still to be determined. The early indications across a few million users in our Social Media network, however, suggest that users are interacting far more often with applications and are more than willing to interact with marketers, than the Facebook bears would lead you to believe.

More on this in the days to come.

Facebook Sugar: How to Build Successful Facebook Applications

20 Jun

Facebook Apps

I am still not sure exactly how Facebook relates to the Attention Economy. But that has not stopped us from embracing the challenge to develop innovative social applications on top of this new platform. As you can see from the graphic above, we have created enough Facebook applications in the past few weeks to fill the profile above the fold. Our first application for Facebook was Trakzor, which we ported from MySpace, where it has millions of users who use the service to see who is checking them out. Within days, Trakzor for Facebook went from nothing, to thousands, to hundreds of thousands of users. It was such an adrenaline rush to see social media growing at scale; at its peak growth spurt two weeks ago, more than 7,000 people were adding the application per hour.

On the heels of this growth, we decided relax the focus on Attention with a capital A and start developing fun, interactive software that leveraged the implicit social graph of Facebook. And so FoodFight was born.

Food for Fighting

As “cooked up” by one of my co-founders Dave Gentzel, FoodFight reimagines the archetypal mess hall brawl as a distributed social media game: every day you get $5 for lunch money and can choose from a list of foods to throw at your friends. In perfect social media fashion, users have been (1) asking how to increase their lunch money (read: microtransactions) and (2) coming up with new food ideas to throw at their friends. By the time you read this there will be more than 1,000,000 FoodFight users (in less than two weeks).

Food Fight Users

Earlier today we launched Tag, which brings Web 2.0 tagging to tag the game we used to play as 2nd graders. In order to find out what you have been tagged as, you need to tag a few of your friends. We are learning to embed the viral coefficient directly into the user experience. It’s not longer just software as a service, it’s now software as a sequence. I bet you will see more and more Facebook applications that do not deliver their money shots until you first agree to share them with your friends. This is the socialization of the Free ipod concept which proved so successful as a cash cow in the online lead gen world.
Whether you think that the Facebook platform represents the reincarnation of Netscape in terms of its impact on the Web, or whether you think that this is just so much twiddling, the fact is that nobody really knows how this will play out. Which is all the more reason to get out there early, learn the language, and start having conversations while other people are still wondering whether they should or shouldn’t jump in. All of us would likely agree that if we had it to do all over again, we would have bought up short vanity domain names before they became trophies, or loaded up on Adwords and SEO early to maximize our Pagerank on Google. I believe that many of us will look back in a few years with similar regrets wrt Facebook if we do not start taking risks now.

As a treat, I wanted to share some tips from Dave Gentzel, founder of Trakzor and part of our AttentionSoft posse that includes Sourabh, Roj, David, Jonas and Ted. He is 24 years old and is quickly becoming the “Tom” of Facebook, friending everbody who downloads one of our apps.

David Gentzel's Facebook profile

<!–

SG: What is the secret to developing a killer Facebook application?

DG: There isn’t a formula at this point. It seems that the most popular applications are the ones that are simplest, already exist in the real world, and live almost exclusively in one’s profile. It goes to show that a good idea, a two minute brainstorming session, and a quick development turnaround is all it takes. Oh, and “integrated social distribution mechanisms.” Lots, and lots of those.

What do kids really want versus what grown-ups think kids want?

DG: Kids want simple applications that their friends will find cool. Profile bling is only worth something if other people see it. There’s always something to be said for being an early adopter and influencing friends, even if it’s with a pet rock application.

What was your key to getting Trakzor to scale on Facebook?

DG: Trakzor is a product that works well if no one else has it, and really well if tons of people have it. This gives people a real incentive to invite their friends and encourage them to get Trakzor, and even if they don’t, their experience is still solid. Lots of consumer demand didn’t hurt either.

What was your key for succeeding with Trakzor on Facebook?

DG: Tens of millions of people know Trakzor from MySpace. Even though the migration to Facebook required that the Trakzor service operate somewhat differently, people were enticed by the prospect of knowing who was paying attention to them and knew Trakzor could assist in that social discovery process.

How did you come up with foodfight?

\u003cbr\>I'm a day dreamer. There's really little else I'd rather be doing than thinking about new product ideas. Food Fight and most everything else I've ever done was something that just popped into my head at one point or another. The trick with Food Fight was to turn the "throw food" brainstorm lightbulb into a deeper and nostalgic experience. Thus, cafeteria menus were born, lunch money was given, and now even 40 year olds are dying to throw that "mystery meat" they never were able to forget.\n\u003cbr\>\u003c/div\>”,1] ); D(["mb","\u003cspan class\u003dq\>\u003cbr\>\u003cblockquote class\u003d\"gmail_quote\" style\u003d\"border-left:1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex;padding-left:1ex\"\>- what fbook app are you most impressed by (other than ours) ?\u003c/blockquote\>\u003c/span\>",1] ); D(["mb","\u003cdiv\>\n\u003cbr\>Graffiti is a winner. Simple, social, self expression.\u003cbr\> \u003c/div\>\u003cbr\>\u003cblockquote class\u003d\"gmail_quote\" style\u003d\"border-left:1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex;padding-left:1ex\"\>-----------------------------\n",1] ); //–DG: I’m a day dreamer. There’s really little else I’d rather be doing than thinking about new product ideas. Food Fight and most everything else I’ve ever done was something that just popped into my head at one point or another. The trick with Food Fight was to turn the “throw food” brainstorm lightbulb into a deeper, nostalgic experience. Thus, cafeteria menus were born, lunch money was given, and now even 40 year olds are dying to throw “mystery meat” at their friends.

What Facebook application are you most impressed by?

Graffiti is a winner. Simple, social, self expression.

What is your ultimate goal?

Having somebody recognize me at the mall.

Facebook Foam

11 Jun

CappuccinoThere is usually so many things I want to write about that I end up overdigesting my ideas and write very little… and when I do write it tends to be long and expansive and hard to process in one gulp.

I had drinks last week with Josh Kopelman and Rob Hayes of First Round Capital. I have the unique distinction of having Josh as an investor in companies I founded (Majestic Research, Root Markets), of being an investor in Josh’s fund as an LP, and of investing directly alongside of Josh (del.icio.us and Aggregate Knowledge). Suffice it to say that Josh knows my many sides and so I appreciated his perspective on my blogging: “Seth, all you ever seem to write are long, esoteric posts about… Attention. You have such great, funny perspective to share.” He wanted to know not what I thought of metadata ownership, but rather my off-the-cuff reflections as a recent New York transplant in Silicon Valley.

I told Josh and Rob how enthusiastic I was about the Facebook ecosystem that seemed to be bubbling up like thick layer of foam over a double shot of Google. It is as if in a matter of months, both the high end of LinkedIn and the high-end of MySpace had been absorbed into the Facebook social graph. LinkedIn is suddenly no longer the social network of choice for us chic geeks. Yes, we learned how to tell our professional stories these past few years in the LinkedIn profile fields, but- as in summer of our 8th grade- we are now ready to lose the awkward friends we had accumulated , and start from scratch in a new environment.

Meanwhile, the kids who treated their MySpace profile, and concomitant friend requests, with the same reckless abandon that we have done with our LinkedIn profiles, have now de-camped for Facebook. While I don’t have fresh data on hand to support this hunch, the well-sourced rumor I heard last week ab out MySpace scrambling feverishly to open their API’s reinforces what is becoming obvious: MySpace’s Kremlin-esque behavior towards 3rd party widget developers -”we buy them or we crush them!”- is on a crash course with the debauched dirty-dancing going on amidst the MySpace spring-breakers. As these kids move from junior high to high school, from high school to college, and from college to the work force, they are increasingly choosing the meritocratic social logic of Zuckerberg over MySpace’s “hot or not?” popularity contest

There can be little doubt now that Facebook is a platform for social media, as opposed to simply a web site community. Time will tell whether it can continue to scale through opening up its audience to 3rd party developers like Microsoft did in the 80′s. This weekend I watched the Gates/Jobs conversation from D on my iPod. The elephant in the room that nobody really discussed was the fact that competition stopped at a certain part in their relationship, Microsoft became a monopoly, and Gates became the richest person in the world.

This was not an accident, but was in fact a direct result of the platform strategy that Microsoft so successfully pursued. Back in March, 2005 in a blog post, I recounted a meeting that taught me more about platforms than anything since:

In 1999 I sat down with Brad Silverberg of Ignition VC who Microsoft recruited out of Borland in the early 90′s to become the lead developer and project manager of Windows 95. Never has there been a more valuable platform. He described 3 things that platforms needed to have:

  • wide distribution
  • application developers making money
  • good tools

Let’s test those three axioms against the preeminent platform play of our time, Google:

  • Wide distribution? YES
  • Application developers making money? YES (if you count all the adsense publishers)
  • Good tools? YES (all the adwords and adsense self-service goodness)

Now let’s test these axioms against Facebook:

  • Wide distribution? YES
  • Application developers making money? NO (at least not yet, I will comment on 3rd party Facebook developers such as Slide, Rockyou, and AttentionSoft)
  • Good tools? YES

So, the question for establishing Facebook’s value as a platform is no longer whether Facebook itself can make money but whether its developers can do so. And in a world where retail software sales are no longer a legitimate business model for developers, the default assumption is that these developers will make money through advertising. Which begs the question as to whether there is a pragmatic alternative to Google adsense (no) and therefore suggests that Facebook will need to create this for its developers.

Later in that post from March 2005 I related platform strategy to API structure:

Nobody controls the web as a platform the way that Microsoft controlled the desktop. But certain parties do control enormous pools of user data and direct their behavior…API’s are fountains of data, mostly consumer meta data, that are the byproduct of some other functionality… The value of a web service API is tied to its ability to convert granular feeds of individual data into useful social media contexts.

I wrote this before I had ever used Facebook but the implication is clear now. Google does not offer this Social Media API. Facebook does. Here is an example of its API syntax:

facebook.friends.areFriends

Returns whether or not each pair of specified users is friends with each other. The first array specifies one half of each pair, the second array the other half; therefore, they must be of equal size.

What could be more useful as a social media context for a software application than being able to ask whether two users are friends with eachother?

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