Not a Bubble?

Rumors of Facebook's Death are Highly Premature. Really?

Don Dodge opines 50M Facebook users don't care about OpenSocial APIs and tries to convince us that Facebook is not dead. Granted that Microsoft just spent $250M on Facebook so it must hurt to see all the coverage going to Google rather than letting Microsoft bask in the afterglow of its miniscule stake in Facebook. But, it looks like he is slaying an imagined Dragon.

Here is the opening salvo:

There are 50 Million Facebook users who don't know what OpenSocial APIs are...and don't care. There are about 5,000 tech bloggers and developers who think it is a revolution that will "Checkmate" Facebook and leave them with no moves. TechMeme has over 100 stories saying that OpenSocial is awesome and Facebook is dead. MySpace joins Google on OpenSocial initiative. OK, surely that settles it, Facebook is dead. Nope, not in my opinion.

I am with him so far, the battle is far from over - its not even fully begun. But then Don articulates his rationale for why OpenSocial is irrelevant and why Facebook is not dead.

Facebook is about the user community. Facebook has always been focused on the user community and providing a great user experience. Does this user community know or care that the apps are built using FBML vs. XML? Nope. There are already at least 20 other social networks out there to choose from. Are they fleeing Facebook for these alternatives? Nope. It is all about the community, and where your friends are. Are there some users who would like to transfer their Facebook friends list to another social network? Probably some. Maybe even 5,000.

Well, its been less than a week so its premature to count the numbers. And the whole point of having a well-defined standard API is that users don't have to care - the social networks can interoperate without having to understand APIs, import/export rules, etc. The sites can work with each other's APIs to make the user experience more seamless as she switches between sites. I repeat - integration is at its best when its invisible to the end users. I thought we-need-to-integrate-everything-under-the-sun-into-Windows Microsoft would have grokked this.

Are Facebook users going to cancel their account? Nope, I doubt it. OK, so every tech blogger and social network developer is going to cancel their Facebook account and go to what? Orkut? Even if they did that would amount to about 5,000 users which is less than one/one hundredth of one percent of Facebook users. Or put another way 99.9999% of Facebook users will be happy to stay right where they are. And, Facebook probably adds 5,000 new users a day anyway. So the impact (revolution) will be over in one day. By next week this is old news.

I have yet to see anyone suggest that users will be en-masse canceling their Google accounts. Nobody is burning their Windows machines just because they bought an iPod or a Mac. The question is: Will OpenSocial make it more likely for a user to expend the effort in maintaining a non-Facebook account knowing that the information she enters can now (or will in future) be leveraged across a broad spectrum of sites.

Did Facebook users approve this? When I agreed to be a friend of Robert Scoble, Mike Arrington, Marc Andresseen, and others on Facebook, that was just Facebook. Did I agree to have my "friend relationship" exposed on Orkut or 20 other social networks? No. Don't get me wrong, I am proud to be friends with Robert, Mike, and Marc. But, I think most users would agree that they didn't expect that their "relationship" would be exposed on other social networks. Or, that their name, picture, or any part of their personal profile would be exported to another social network. There may be a significant privacy issue here, or some questions about the use of PII (Personally Identifiable Information).

First off, this question is irrelevant Facebook is not part of OpenSocial. But let's apply this question to non-FB sites like Orkut. The OpenSocial API does not force any site or user to share her information - it creates a standard if they choose to do so. Significant Privacy issues is what Telco's bring up when they don't want to allow third-party apps on their networks. FUD at its very best. And to top it all off, Don conveniently forgets that Facebook itself has "Import" addressbook functionality for sucking up my Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail addresses. What do they say about good for the Goose?

Who approved?

Will developers stop building Facebook apps? No, of course not. Facebook provides a pretty good API set and a pretty simple way to develop applications for Facebook. Does anyone really think that developers will abandon Facebook and instead only write to the OpenSocial API set? Seriously, what are these tech bloggers thinking? Developers are very skilled at building web apps that work on both Internet Explorer and FireFox, or Windows and Linux. It really isn't a big deal to use Facebook's FBML which is just XML with extensions.

"Does anyone really think that developers will abandon Facebook and instead only write to the OpenSocial API set? Seriously, what are these tech bloggers thinking?" I am not sure who suggested this. Seriously Don, what are you thinking? Did you just read the paranoia book by Andy Grove? Breathe, its going to be okay. No one is leaving anyone or killing any one. We are just letting sites exchange information using a standard API. May be, Mister Softee can learn. Could save you billions.

In fact, the very posts Don links to including this New York Times article say things like:
"The alliance is not likely to erode the popularity of Facebook or immediately alter the dynamics of the social networking market. But it could help revitalize the sites of some of its members, which have seen their social networks eclipsed by the popularity of MySpace and Facebook. Orkut, Google’s social network, for instance, is popular in Brazil and a few other countries, but not in the United States."

But Don continues-

Not one single app has been written and not one single user has left Facebook, and already the tech cognoscenti is saying Facebook is dead. Get a grip guys.

Who? Where? Get a grip. Seriously.


P.S. Note to the humor challenged- Read this post with your sense of humor flag set to true. And Don - I am sending you a Facebook invite! Remember - this is about social networking. ;)

(Disclaimer: Please read disclaimer at the bottom of the page. Personal opinion etc.)

Looking for an Illiterate Maid in India on Facebook Lite

The New York Times today has a very interesting article on how technology innovation is being used to help the poor. This time, its social networking. Here is an excerpt:

Mr. Krishna found that many poor Indians in dead-end jobs remain in poverty not because there are no better jobs, but because they lack the connections to find them. Any Bangalorean could confirm the observation: the city teems with laborers desperate for work, and yet wealthy software tycoons complain endlessly about a shortage of maids and cooks.

Mr. Blagsvedt’s epiphany? “We need village LinkedIn!” he recalled saying, alluding to the professional networking site.

Full Story

The last big innovation (or technology) that helped the poor in India is cellular phones. My parents (who live in New Delhi, India) could now call up an electrician or plumber directly on his cell without going through middlemen shop owners who earlier took most of the money simply for connecting us to the nomadic, ill connected electricians and plumbers. Not only did they get to keep all the income but the incomes went up as they could now be fully utilized as opposed to waiting for someone to call them in the shop where they sat idle earlier.

Babajob.com (with Google Maps)

The last paragraph in the New York Times article is perhaps the most telling about why India (and many emerging countries) have a very bright future indeed:

Mr. Manhohar earns $100 a month. Jobs come irregularly, so he often spends up to three months of the year idle. Between jobs, he borrows from loan sharks to feed his wife and children. The usurers levy 10 percent monthly interest, enough to make a $100 loan a $314 debt in one year.

Mr. Manohar does not want his children to know his worries, or his life. He wants them to work in a nice office, so he spends nearly half his income on private schools for them. That is why he was at Babajob in a swiveling chair, staring at a computer and dreaming of more work.

Beginner's 5 Step Guide to Using LinkedIn and Facebook

The topic of Facebook vs. LinkedIn is like humidity in Miami - always present. And perhaps as hot too. Zoli brings up the topic again with his post titled Facebook Just Ain’t For Business, Get Over It (Business Needs Social Networking in Context) and points to this article in New York Times. Scoble has a nice piece on The you-don’t-need-more-friends lobby.

These are interesting discussions but if you are a beginner looking to understand how to deal manage your accounts on LinkedIn and/or Facebook, here are some questions to ask that can help you:

• Would you take a phone call from this person? If you receive an invite on LinkedIn or Facebook, ask yourself if you would take a call from this person on a busy Monday morning. If not, you may want to not have him be part of LinkedIn. Now, would you take a call on Friday evening from this person? If not, you should reject them on Facebook.
• Would you invite this business contact to a BBQ at your home? Ask this question when you get a Facebook from one of your Linkedn contacts (or any business contacts). If the answer is no, don't add them to your Facebook account - its way too personal. Even if you don't say or do much on Facebook, this person can now see who you affiliate with - it can be embarrassing if your cousin from Vietnam posts his massage pictures, or worse - the ending - happy or otherwise.
  
• Do you really need to know her direct? A lot of contacts are made by people through one level of indirection. A friend of my friend finds my profile and sends me a request to connect. Unless I really want to get to know this person first hand, I gain little by accepting her request except to not look rude. In fact, when I add her to my contact list, I loose valuable information about how I know her - through my friend. The social graph captures useful information on who knows who through whom - let's not loose that. Its like going to a party and being asked about the host "How do you know Larry?" - through Charles, of course.
  
• How do you balance the Links Budget? After a certain number of links, you may need to balance your "Links Budget". This means you must try to delete a contact for every new contact you add. And remember, LinkedIn does not notify the deleted contact so its unlikely they will notice. Before you delete, you may want to download the contact information to your address book. (There is a download vCard button on each LinkedIn profile that you are connected to .)
• Can you really be friends with 437 people? For most of us, its hard to maintain 3-5 close friendships and 20-40 business contacts on a regular basis. Technology can bump that number up 5 to 10x but the law of diminishing returns kicks in. Also, when you have 437 contacts, none of your contacts feel special. The great Groucho Marx once quipped, "I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member."
  

I will leave you with some quotes to ponder on when making these decisions.

"Those truly linked don't need correspondence. When they meet again after many years apart, Their friendship is as true as ever." - Deng Ming-Dao

"Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life." - Mark Twain

"Good friends, good blogs and millions in first round funding: this is the ideal life. " - I would have said.

"The bird a nest
the spider a web
the man friendship." - William Blake

Now, don't be a stranger. Good friends leave comments!

AnshuBlog.com valuation hits $5 Trillion after private placement round

My blog is now worth $5 trillion dollars. My best friend (now, BFF) agreed to buy a 0.0000000010% stake in anshublog.com for $50.

I will hold an IPO in December and the shares will be priced at $85 (of course, there will 58,823,529,411 shares outstanding).

You can obtain a prospectus by sending me $25 by PayPal. ;)

Learning from Facebook

Om Malik and Kara write about the rumors that Microsoft is about to acquire a 5% stake in Facebook at a valuation of $10 billion.

Here are some practical ways of applying this method (there is a method to this madness) to great advantage in other spheres of life:

• Propose with a 1% 10-Caret Diamond Ring: This would be 0.1 Caret ring but would make your fiance feel like a (1o-Caret) Princess (cut).
  
• Tell your boss you have been offered a $300K job: You can ensure that you are not lying by asking your friend (who will then be your BFF) to pay you $10 for a 3-minute chore such as washing a dish. The trick is to annualize your salary.
• Tell friends your blog gets 7.27 million-views-per-year: Note that you must not state that you get 7.27 million views in one year. In stead, state that you got hit at this rate - the trick is to measure over a 10 second period where you get 2 or more hits.
  

Send me your ideas. I am sure there are millions of good ideas I can come up with (since I came up with 3 in last 13 minutes - I just need to extrapolate.)

What do you think?

Identity Crisis in the Land of Social Networks and Platforms

The Facebook platform debate continues to evolve with Dan Farber's recent piece on Facebook, social capitalists and open networks and Wired's very well thought out article Slap in the Facebook. The key question from my perspective is whether we consider the Internet as the platform or does Facebook or some other single entity come to dominate and become a platform. The history, and even the brief history of the internet, has examples of both - a platform owned by a single entity, and the internet itself as the platform with various platform players as parts of the whole:

• EBay: Ebay is a platform and is a pretty closed one. They recently had the chutzpah to even take on Google by banning Google Checkout. The APIs and other interfaces to Ebay allow you to enhance the functionality but does not offer any interoperability - you cannot cross list items on Ebay and some other auction site, etc.
  
• B2B: B2B Exchanges were an attempt to create a platform (remember Covisint) but eventually lost out to the Internet as the platform. Companies transact billions of dollars of business today on the B2B platform but they rely on protocols like RosettaNet and there is no single hub or platform that dominates.
• Instant Messaging: IM is an interesting case study as it started out as platform islands (Yahoo!, MSN, AOL) but over time and sometimes grudgingly they have learned to play well with each other. IM is still not an open network in the sense that I cannot create a new IM service and seamlessly connect to these proprietary IM networks.
• Email: Email is the ultimate open network. It has mostly worked great except the openness allows for spam and viruses to be spread using this platform. This security issue is a (valid?) excuse many platform players are using to keep their platforms closed.
  

What model is Facebook following?

So is Social Networking going the way of the EBay model, IM model or the Email model? Facebook today sits somewhere between the Ebaymodel and IM model. Under the Ebay model, Facebook does not enable to send messages back and forth to say MySpace - in fact, the messaging system could have been associated with an email address (@facebook.com) but is not. At the same time, unlike Ebay which blocked out Google Checkout, Facebook is allowing third-party applications to be shared and used in conjunction with its service - somewhat akin to the IM model. You still can't use your Facebook id to interact with someone that does not have a Facebook account.

The Identity Problem

Its been suggested several times that the lock in and lack of interoperability comes from the fact that the identity systems of Facebook and other services are not open and standards-based. If Facebook and others like Myspace all adopted the OpenID or equivalent identity system, it would be so much easier for users to leverage multiple services without worrying about whether they are built by Facebook, LinkedIn or MySpace. Irregular friend Dennis Howlett describes the conversation on Facebook use within the enterprise on his ZDNet blog post.

Dan Farber comments on this lack of interoperability:

Today, people are mostly content, experimenting with the more civilized walled gardens that aggregate information and friends and bank all the personal data and social capital. The revolution won’t happen until social capitalists realize that the capitalists–Facebook, Google, MySpace (News Corp.), etc.– shouldn’t have too much control over their digital lives.

Who will bell the cat?

I feel that the masses will not be the one's that change the status quo. It will be a game changer - a new Facebook or Google that will challenge the closed networks by offering a good enough service that is as good as MySpace or Facebook but is entirely open. In fact, Google could do this, and it would be much easier than you think. Here is what I would do if I were running Google social networks group (no, they haven't asked me):

• Google has the email accounts of several million users.
• Google could analyze my email messages to all users - this is where having stored all my emails helps - to determine my top 100 contacts. Repeat this for every user and you have created a social networking graph for all Google users and many non-Google users too.
• Google could then instantiate GoogleBook (I own the copyright!) accounts for every Google user ready to be activated. All a user would have to do is select and unselect the suggested links and the account would be all ready to go. For non-Google users, a 'claim this' GoogleBook account would be created which they can claim by requesting an email be sent to their email address.
• Google Groups - like functionality would be available for each user i.e., I can send messages to all my contacts, share calendar, files etc.
• And since you are NOT required to ever create a gmail (Google) account with a new id, the users wouldn't be forced to create yet another dan.farber@gmail/cnet/yahoo/etc.

Whether Google or some other new player does this anytime soon is anybody's guess but many of us are getting sick and tired of creating multiple user id's, checking messages on multiple inboxes and accepting the same 75 friends on 10 different social networks. For now here is my personal solution to the social networking problem - if you have my gmail address and my blog address, that is all that you need to reach me, read about me, see my pictures, date me, send me fan letters and/or harass me.

Update: Dan Farber has posted a response to this post on ZDNet and the conversation continues.

Update: Dan Farber reports that Google is planning a foray into social networking. I expect them to mine my email etc. for helping create my network - as I mention above - let's see what comes out.

Facebook or Internet - What is the real social networking platform?

It is my perhaps not so humble opinion that the internet will continue to evolve as the platform for social networking. The early successes and leading sites like Facebook that have gained traction have an opportunity to be part of the broader ecosystem but I disagree with the opinion of some of my peers that one particular company will dominate social networking. The desire to be the platform and the glory that comes with it seems to encourage every successful entrepreneur to declare his technology, website or tool to be the platform.

Lately, there is been a lot of discussion about Facebook and its platform ambitions in particular. Fellow Irregular, Dennis Howlett has a post on ZDNet today nicely summarizing some of the discussion.

What is a platform and how do I build one quickly?

I define a platform as a set of tools, technology or more broadly any layer that allows new products or services to be built with an order of magnitude less resources than was possible before the platform.

Excellent examples of platforms include railway network, power grid, internet, telephony network, etc. In the technology realm, platforms that have made an impact include mainframes, databases, operating systems, email, etc. For example - before the railway network, if you wanted to build a power plant or a factory, you had to lay down the tracks, buy rail engines and bogies, etc. and all the costs had to be borne by one single entity.

It takes a lot of time and effort to build a platform. Most importantly, all platforms start out as applications solving a particular business or technical problem - in other words, platforms evolve from applications. Computers started out as specialized calculators to perform census or scientific calculations and over several decades generalized to what we call computers. Similarly, road networks evolved over 100+ years as people built roads from point A to point B - till the 'network effects' kicked in and Eisenhower launched the famous Interstate project.

Do you remember the previous platforms? AOL??

Many online businesses have thought they can short circuit this process and become the platform. Remember, when AOL was the dominant internet (with its own domain name system or AOL Keywords) or Amazon was the platform for online shopping. A single business entity has advantages of speed and single minded-ness that it can leverage to provide a compelling solution rather than wait for the ecosystem to evolve but eventually the broader system catches up and overtakes the giants.

So what are the underlying issues Facebook is addressing. As quoted on the ZDNet blog, I think the following are the principles underlying a next generation social platform :

• People want online identities to establish trust-based professional and personal relationships. FaceBook provides this but I believe in the long run a third party validation system could provide you with a ‘universal’ identity (with multiple faces/avatars/usernames) to conduct business over the wider internet.
• People want control over who connects to them and when. FaceBook, email and GoogleGroups provide this in different ways.
• People want a publishing platform. Unlike email, this is information or opinion you want to share but don’t want to push in an email. Blogs, MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, etc all do this. Email and IM are not good at this.
• Plus all the basic goodies like document sharing, managing relationships (invites, forwarding), messaging, etc.

These are just some of the issues and there are several groups and companies dedicated to solving some of these challenges like Identity & Trust, Content Management & User Control, Publishing, Messaging, etc.

I believe Facebook shows us in a small way what would be possible if we solved some of these challenges. But if you think Facebook is the final answer, then you may end up feeling like people that bet on MySpace as the social networking platform or AOL as the internet. Not very smart.

What do you think about Facebook? Is Google the real platform? What about Cisco & WebEx? Or Microsoft?