So, happy new year! (Sorry for such sparse posting here on weiksner.com.) Good news: we’ve made enough progress with customers, product and fundraising that social feet is hiring! It’s a cool position if you are a ninja with the browser and are interested in emerging social tech like OAuth, Facebook Connect, Open Social, etc.
I am excited to announce that we are hiring a Lead Developer at SocialFeet.com. I think the tech challenges are interesting, and that the financial upside is large. Here is a brief quote of the tech challenge:
From a database perspective, you have transient streams (not just persistent relationships), continuous (not one-time) queries, sequential (not random) access and unpredictable data arrival patterns. From a UI perspective, you have ajax-y goodness a la Google Wave to manage synchronous and asynchronous messages in a small, yet highly contextualized, footprint. We have to define new standards and APIs for activity stream capturing and publishing. And our service has to scale not just to the total number of page views on our network of sites but to the number of interactions on each of these sites.
To promote this, we’ve posted our job description at Craigslist, Techcrunch, LinkedIn and other places. I’m now blogging about it, and we’ve tweeted it and posted it to Facebook. But the definitive place to check it out and send people who might be interested is:
Key people from Youtube (Steve Grove), Facebook (Randi Zuckerberg) and Twitter (Chris Sacca) talk about “Government 2.0“. Very interesting commentary about who is driving the show: it’s Obama and then a bunch of small protestors, etc., from around the world. An interesting 50 minutes.
A good question at the end about what is the new role of the fourth estate. But no good answers to the problem of outreach vs. accountability.
I was just invited to use aardvark, a match making service for questions and answers using instant messenger. It lets you tap into the expertise of the friends of your friends. I think the results speak for themselves. Here’s the transcript to my first question:
My Question: “Do you know of any applications of facebook connect that have ‘gone viral’?”
Kelly: here’s a list of all of the implementations: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Facebook_Connect_Live_Sites
the geni.com implementation is really cool
Citysearch has shared that users voluntarily publish 94% of their reviews back to Facebook
and most Connect implementations have a publish-to-click ratio of 0.8 to 2.0 (meaning, for every story a user sends to FB, approximately 0.8 to 2 people go back to the original site)
Kelly is a manager who works at Facebook, and I got these statistics from inside the Facebook connect team–within 3-4 minutes of asking. Sweet!
And so today, I returned the favor. I was asked to answer a question about “education”. I was skeptical at first, but I firgured, hey let’s give it a whirl. Here’s the transcript of that conversation:
Niko: Who is passionate in New York about educational technology? or online tutoring? Me: One company I know about is called imentor
I learned about imentor through a board member, Matt Klein, who is also the ED of Blue Ridge Foundation. Niko: Blue Ridge Foundation is just what I was looking for. Their portfolio companies are a godsend to the community. I’m a student at Columbia/Harvard. Would Matt Klein be the best person to talk to regarding the vision of the firm? Me:I met Matt Klein very briefly in a large conference. He seemed very knowledgable and nice - I would think you could approach him directly. Niko: Thanks a million. This aardvark thing may just be a huge hit.
I agree - aardvark is amazing. I have 9 more invitations - post a comment with your email and include three topics that you are knowledgeable about and I’ll send you an invitation. Cheers!
Facebook has relaunched it’s homepage, and I think that it is a step backwards. Admirably, they’ve opened up their newsfeed and now it acts like a waterfall, displaying the most recent updates from your friends. But this design decision fails in a few critical ways.
1) twitter folks now DOMINATE the feed, since they are hyperactively engaged! I can only imagine how unfriendly the new streams and streams of #’s and @’s are to tens of millions of regular FB users.
2) It diminishes rather than highlights the great content like photos and videos that people post directly to Facebook
3) The featured column is really broken. It is highly promotional, and there is no way to get stuff to disappear on it.
There are a few good parts to the new format, including interesting ways to interact with the content in the featured column. But I hope that Facebook is listening to its users, because I have to think that this launch is largely a step backwards for them. (Someone on twitter responded that this mistake marks the beginning of the end for Facebook. I think it is merely a step backwards and not a complete failure. We’ll see.)
One twitter is enough! (And for many people, even one twitter is too much.)
I had a meeting this morning with Ed Baker, CEO of Demigo, and viral expert par excellence. He made an important observation: your viral factor is a sum over all your distribution channels. Why is this observation so important?
First, adding channels is basically a linear cost. There is a certain overhead to learning how to use Facebook Connect. Within Facebook, there are certain costs for figuring out how to integrate with each of the internal channels they provide (e.g., newsfeed, profile, notification, invites, etc.). Individually, these channels boost your marketing potential but perhaps not enough individually to achieve viral lift off. And after facebook, you can also add channels by distributing on other networks like open social, twitter, AIM, etc.
Second, when the sum of these channels creates a viral factor greater than 1.0, you will grow *exponentially*. When you have this happy occurrence, you will reach millions of people in a matter of weeks or less. So, his recommendation for SocialFeet.com is to keep at it. Don’t be discouraged if you aren’t viral on the first go around. Prioritize and optimize viral channels. Keep working on it, because those linear costs may in the end create an engine for repeatable viral growth.
Linear costs, exponential revenues. That sounds like the kinda business I want a piece of! :)
Nathaniel and I just had breakfast with John McCrea of Plaxo. His thesis: Facebook is the AOL of the social internet. The key similarities: both Facebook and AOL were walled gardens in their early days. Since the open Internet eventually beat the walled garden Internet, he concludes that Facebook must continue to open up, radically, or face a similar fate as AOL.
I think that the analogy has some validity. Yet, there are important differences. As I pointed out in our conversation, social relationships can generate interactions and collaborative artifacts among people. Who controls those things? There is no analogy for these social interactions and artifacts on the traditional client/server Internet.
So, cruise on over to his blog to follow an advocate of the open social Internet. And time will tell if his bold prediction comes to pass!
My mom forwarded me this column by Dave Carr about Twitter. It captures the essence of twitter: a confusing, time sink that can occasionally be invaluable. I created an account on twitter, savedemocracy, but don’t expect much activity from me right now.
I do, however, regularly update my status on Facebook and so far, I’ve gotten much of the value that twitter might offer from that.
InsideFacebook has written this nice piece about our new service, SocialFeet. They have had an interest in our kind of service–one that spans multiple sites–and it is nice to be acknowledged as a leader in this nascent space. And as they note, there is some controversy but I am hopeful, as we say in the article, that “we can and will remain in the good graces” of Facebook.
Here is my thought about sharing, privacy and trust. People succumb to the psychological force of ‘cognitive dissonance.’ Cognitive dissonance says that you have to reconcile contradiction between behaviors and attitudes to reduce the uncomfortable feeling of dissonance. In the case of facebook, people know that they care about privacy yet they find themselves in a place where they’ve shared their inner most secrets with a web site. To resolve that tension between attitudes and behaviors, they choose to believe that they trust facebook.
It’s a powerful virtuous cycle: the more you share, the more you trust and conversely, the more you trust, the more you share.
I am *extremely* bullish about the social internet in general, and in facebook connect in particular. Here is a nice slide deck that helps frame the opportunity by imagining what Amazon and iTunes might look like with real facebook connect functionality.
I just watched Mark Zuckerberg’s speech announcing Facebook Connect. The Internet is going social. (By the way, CNET has some really video coverage of technology. I watched two “daily briefs” that automatically started after this video ended about Facebook Connect and iPhone apps that were both really good.) In any event, enjoy!
This presentation by the founder of RockYou has (almost) everything you need to know about viral marketing. A tour de force if you want to understand this kind of stuff.
I recently posted about annoying Robocalls that I’ve received. In response to them, I’ve changed my phone setting so that no one who hides their phone number can call me. But that hasn’t stopped the robocallers. I just received my 40th or so “second notice” about my auto-warranty. This time, I got some information. The caller is “NIC Reinecker” at 620-585-0104.
Unfortunately, I could not reach anyone at that number. However, I did google the number and this interesting site popped up. This a spy vs spy site that lets people like you and me coordinate our efforts to fight these evil telemarketers. You can type in the number or name from your caller ID, and find out what others have experienced and tried to do to respond.
In this case, however, the only gratification I got is knowing that I am not alone in this fight. As I posted earlier, we just don’t have the tools to fight back on this scourge yet.
