Facebook | Signal to Noise

Don’t confuse hyper-private with offline.

The assertion that Facebook can protect its market leading position by entering into the smaller-is-bigger philosophy or going async (a la Twitter) is nifty, but not the answer to “what’s wrong on the Internet”.

After reading Dave McClure’s post, subtitled “How to Take Down Facebook”, I think that, between all the f-bombs and Generation Z three-letter acronyms, Dave makes a few good points. For example, Twitter is better for following famous people (to which I would counter, Facebook is better for enabling fame).

Dave wants to see Facebook become an enabler of more private communities. To his burrito point, we could say that Facebook alerady does this through threaded, instant mail messaging. We could also respond to his friend overload point that perhaps Dave doesn’t know how to manage his profile privacy settings, or that perhaps Dave should start a Fan Page and whittle down his friend relationships to the bare essentials.

Bottom line is, true intimacy in relationships cannot be fostered by an inorganic structure like Facebook, in my opinion. Intimacy is about mutual experiences, not a mutual sounding board. We all have telephones–does this make us more intimate in our relationships than when we’re together, shoulder-to-shoulder, or working on the same outcome as a team? Hardly. Facebook is merely a platform for communication, and while it plays a role in enabling quality relationships, it is certainly a subserviant role.

My advice to Dave McClure is, you probably don’t have 2000 actual friends, so fix it. Delete. Delete. Delete.

But to give up those synchronous connections on Facebook is to give up the influence that comes with having a large audience. And herein lies the real challenge, if I can rephrase what Dave is saying here into something a little more succinct: Facebook is mediocre at protecting the privacy of celebrities, while Twitter is very good.

The effect of this can be seen in Facebook’s inability to provide more intimate connections, and in Twitter’s ability to prevent celebrities from having to spill anything more than they’d like to on their profile.

EventBox totally rocks

I saw Luca’s tweet about EventBox, and he’s absolutely right. This program is super cool. It’s for managing tweets, rss updates, facebook updates, etc etc all in one place. So far I’m loving it. Growl notifications for updates, heads-up display. Really cool. Grab a copy yourself if you’re running OS X 10.5 and let me know how you like it.

Skype as Facebook, and a quick counterpoint

Luca posted a great blog today, about how Skype has a way to become a social networking powerhouse, a la Facebook. Interestingly, it was on Facebook that I saw Luca’s tweet about the new post:

All that above together with the new features introduced with Skype 2.8 for Mac made me wonder: can Skype ever become the next big thing in the field of “social networking” rather than “only” the most popular VoIP service ever? Let’s try to analyze how far Skype is from this “big picture”.

Users are not certainly a problem for Skype. With over 200M users (not active, but downloads), it’s not far from the huge 150M active users of Facebook. What Facebook is missing at this time is a powerful desktop client. Despite the world of consumer services is moving to the “cloud”, having an always on client on your PC has many benefits, such as being always available and experiencing a realtime interaction with your friends.

I don’t know if a desktop client is the best place to do social activity management. The browser is good for what’s it’s good for: rich browsing experiences. But I don’t want to change the form factor of the IM client just to accomodate a feed list or yet another messaging utility. Skype needs to stay in the same size and shape it has now: on the right side of my screen, occupying maybe 10% of my real estate.

Plus, the other thing that’s cool about Facebook is that nothing has to be immediate. The realtime nature of Skype conversations is precisely why I’d sometimes rather communicate on Facebook, or e-mail, etc. But please read Luca’s post, as it is a really cool idea that warrants deeper inspection.

2008 in Review: Twitter, PS Home, VoIP, and more

Well, it’s the time of year again. Time to look back, and forward.

2008: the harbinger year for a revolution in the telecom industry? No, not exactly. Nor was 2008 the year of action of for end-to-end VoIP. But 2008 was a good year for me. I more or less quit consulting on VoIP, as the majority of clients who need help with VoIP are too small for my firm, and the top 5% of clients available in the field are too big for it. The in-betweeners are dominated by a group of recruiters who beat each other up and submit VoIP candidates to internal employment positions I can’t be interested in.

Twitter was an interesting subject, retrospectively, in 2008. On one hand it’s dying at the hands of Facebook. On the other hand, it’s got so much vigor and a following, too. Twitter is one of those things that, even as an objectively expert witness on the subject of social media, I still struggle to grasp. I wonder what the sex appeal is, minus all the fluff of a LinkedIn or a Facebook, of Twitter.

Sony launched a social network for the PS3. The world essentially yawned, already beaten to death with the concept as previously implemented by things like Second Life, Sims Online, and World of Warcraft. Now, if Nintendo had launched a social network along the lines of Animal Crossing–now that might be cool.

I received a pool table and air hockey table for Christmas and have nowhere to put either of them. At the moment my basement is full. My son wants me to move the foozball table to the living room. A-hem. Kids take a while to develop decorating taste, I guess. Maybe in 2009.

Achieving Ubiquity with Social Networks

If Facebook wants to be the king of hill, they’re going about it the wrong way. The number of useless apps that cram my Facebook feeds with useless “top friend invites” and “super hugs” is just too much. Those of us who would prefer a more serious social network tool would prefer the closed, no-frills approach of something like a LinkedIn, which doesn’t allow “apps” to be added, and tries valiantly to keep nuisances to a minimum.

Still, LinkedIn is for business-oriented users, and will never have the flexibility or wide-audience draw required to make a ubiquitous, dominant social network. People go to LinkedIn because because of its tight focus, and, in many cases, that’s why people avoid LinkedIn as well. And in the end, tools like LinkedIn won’t suffice to help salespeople, because it’s mostly sales people than inhabit its garden (let’s face it).

Buying and selling aside, I’ve been doing a ton of thinking about social networking lately, because I was charged with creating a social network for a company in the media business. This social network is geared around a specific pastime of American culture–a vertical subject area too narrow for a Facebook to be excellent at. What’s more, this social network wouldn’t be a good extension of a large publisher or broadcaster already involved in this pastime, because traditional media is bent on subcription fees and a lack of openness that discourages adoption.

So there’s a specific role for culture-driven social networks, things geared around video (like YouTube), sports, and music, though none of these verticals has been dominated by a single player, except for video probably. What’s needed is a social network infrastructure that allows many enrollment-based sites to be used with a common access credential–that’s right, a single sign-on for many social networks.

Google’ OpenSocial offers some of this thinking, but adoption has been laggard. Another example is Gravitars, which allow a common avatar picture across many blogs. Gravatars is supported by WordPress and Typepad, among others.

The challenge to seeing a single sign-on implemented across the medium is that the players who are big enough to make it happen (Facebook and MySpace, make no mistake) won’t do it, because they’ve gone into revenue-sucking mode. So time will tell.

Signal to Noise

Teddy Wallingford, Rock and Roll CEO

EventBox totally rocks

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