Showing posts sorted by relevance for query facebook. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query facebook. Sort by date Show all posts

Monday, March 07, 2011

Facebook Comments: First Impressions

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...Image via CrunchBaseI got excited about Facebook Comments right away, long before it got rolled out. I am very much for using real names with comments. When you leave a comment at my blog, I want the option to be able to click over to your Facebook profile if I want to. I want you to stand by what you have to say. I want to meet real people. To me that's the whole point behind the internet, that geography is irrelevant. The blogosphere's appeal is that it allows for a meeting of minds. Facebook Comments takes that to a whole new level. It is more than meeting of minds, it is also meeting real people.

Thursday, February 02, 2012

So Facebook Went IPO

Big deal. And I don't mean that in a sarcastic way. It really is a big deal.


GigaOm: Facebook just revealed its Kryptonite: mobile
GigaOm: Zynga & its Facebook Problem
New York Times: From Founders to Decorators, Facebook Riches
Jim Romensko: The Graphic Artist Who Is About To Become A Facebook Millionaire
Wired: Facebook’s ‘Letter from Zuckerberg’: The Annotated Version
Above The Crowd: Why Facebook Clearly Belongs In The 10X Revenue Club
AllThingsD: Zuckerberg Is the Billion-Share Man: Who Owns What, Who Makes What in the Facebook IPO
BusinessWeek: Zuckerberg Controlling 57% of Facebook Seen as Risk to Investors
Mark Zuckerberg: My Desk
Pando Daily: Mark Zuckerberg Loves It When A Plan Comes Together
Inside Facebook: The details: Facebook spent $68 million on acquisitions last year
ReadWriteWeb: Biggest Winners In Facebook's IPO
Mashable: Facebook IPO Reveals How It Made $3.71 Billion in 2011
Guardian: Facebook IPO sees Winklevoss twins heading for $300m fortune
Guardian: Facebook's letter from Mark Zuckerberg - full text

Facebook And Big Data
Finally Facebook Lets Me Reach Out To Non Friends
Facebook's Next Major Breakthrough
The Google/Facebook Of Microfinance
Facebook Will End Up The Social Graph Operating System
Should FourSquare Be Scared Of Facebook?
Facebook Alternative? Dave McClure Is Full Of It

Randi, The Flamboyant Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg In 2005
Jessica Mah, Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg Loves Union Square Ventures
Zuckerberg Has Stature
The Twins Were Rowing Boats

Thursday, April 07, 2011

Facebook Location

Aerial view of San Quentin State Prison, in Sa...Image via Wikipedia
New York Times: A Corporate Campus Made to Mirror Facebook: Facebook, which started out in a dormitory at Harvard, transferred to a rented house in Silicon Valley and now occupies a cluster of office buildings in Palo Alto, Calif., is about to make its biggest move yet: to a 57-acre campus in this small city about 30 miles south of San Francisco. ...... a series of stucco-covered low-rise buildings occupied by Sun Microsystems until Sun was bought ...... s. The campus will resemble an urban streetscape, with cafeterias .... if the campus will be a microcosm of a city, it’s not clear that the real city around the campus — including the largely Mexican-American neighborhood of Belle Haven ....... the Facebook site is surrounded on three sides by water, and separated from the rest of Menlo Park by railroad tracks and a divided highway. ..... The site is so insular that in the two decades it was occupied by Sun Microsystems it was nicknamed Sun Quentin (a reference to San Quentin prison, about 40 miles north). And because Facebook provides its employees with three meals a day in its own cafeterias, there may be little reason for them to venture off the property. ..... the city, which has a population of about 30,000 ..... Sun had 3,600 employees on site; Facebook, with a work force that is growing by 50 percent a year, could exceed that number ...... because Sun’s engineers had private offices, while most Facebook employees work in unpartitioned spaces ...... they can’t have more than 3,600 employees until they get City Council approval. ..... leasing with an option to buy .... walking and biking paths and greater access to public transportation and the wetlands alongside the Facebook site. ..... One team, charged with connecting the Facebook site to the rest of Menlo Park, devised an elevated ringlike walkway that links the campus to the Belle Haven neighborhood, a proposed transit station and the San Francisco Bay waterfront. The architects named it Friends Circle. (Though Belle Haven is a tidy neighborhood, many of the homes are small and flimsy-looking.) ...... Contractors have already replaced rows of small offices in one of the Sun buildings with a loftlike space where desks will be pushed together in groups of four. “We like that you can sit at one end and see all the way to the other,” said Mr. Tenanes, showing off a section of building that had been stripped to concrete and ductwork .... “protecting Facebook’s extraordinary company culture.” ...... he liked the “casual eclectic” look of the firm’s Ace Hotel ..... (The Ace crowd, which tends toward 20somethings with laptops, mirrors the Facebook employees’ demographic.) Unlike the Sun campus, with color-coordinated buildings reminiscent of an upscale resort, Facebook is looking for “an urban streetscape where no one architect or designer” dominates, Mr. Tenanes said. “Random is good” ....... Facebook wanted there to be "life and soul and some idiosyncrasy to the campus.” ...... “They don’t want to buy into that corporate structure,” she said. “They want to continue to feel hungry." ..... Currently, about 40 percent of Facebook employees commute to work on foot or bicycle or by bus (including some provided by the company), Mr. Tenanes said. For those employees, the remote location of the new site will pose a challenge. But he is already planning bus routes and considering opening a pedestrian tunnel that was dug but never used under the Bayfront Expressway, the highway that separates the campus from the rest of Menlo Park. (In case it outgrows the Sun property, Facebook bought a 22-acre site across the road.)
The key phrase here is urban streetscape. Facebook wants its campus to look and feel like New York City. My bias for the city just got stronger. New York City is the place to be.

The other key phrase is unpartitioned spaces.

Tuesday, January 01, 2013

Snapchat, Poke And Facebook

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase
You end up feeling like you have seen this movie before. Facebook tried to do in FourSquare. FourSquare's popularity skyrocketed after Facebook's try.

Pokey
Snapchat, the trendy smartphone app that lets you send photos and videos that self-destruct after a few seconds ....... Facebook constantly “roams the tech universe in search of interesting technology, then mercilessly assimilates all the best stuff into its ever-larger catalog of features.” Over the last couple years it has copied the defining ideas behind Foursquare, Twitter, Google+, Groupon, GroupMe, Instagram, Quora — and now Snapchat. .... The only reason that the app could acquire millions of users in a few months’ time is because Snapchat spread through each of its users’ Facebook friends. Instagram and Pinterest, the two other recent social-networking successes, also benefited tremendously from their users’ Facebook’s connections. .... Every photo that people were sharing through Instagram was a dagger at the heart of Facebook, the world’s largest photo site. That’s why Facebook attempted to copy Instagram—see its Camera app—and then had to buy it. Similarly, every message that you send to your Facebook friends through Snapchat is a lost opportunity for Facebook. That’s why Facebook had to squash it. ... But Poke is already losing to Snapchat in the app standings. Like Facebook’s failed imitations of Instagram and Quora, Poke’s quick decline shows that if Facebook wants to stay on the vanguard of online communication, it needs to act even before it sees an opportunity—by the time somebody else has had success with something, Facebook’s version isn’t going to catch on.
Enhanced by Zemanta

Wednesday, November 03, 2010

Monday, September 06, 2010

The Facebook Search Engine

Facebook founder Mark ZuckerbergImage via WikipediaNo surprise there. The whole idea behind the like button has been to take over the web. Mark Zuckerberg made it very clear in his speech at the F8 conference that that is what the like button was for. Just like Facebook should be your primary place online, the like button should tell you where to go instead of the links that the Google engine depends on. That was the hint.
GigaOm: Facebook Ramping Up The Social In Its Search Engine: The new feature is the latest step in rolling out the network’s social-search engine — which could become a competitive threat for Google and other traditional search companies, as more users turn to recommendations from their networks instead of those determined by algorithms.
What has been giving me headaches for months and months now is as to why Facebook will not make it possible for me to search my own wall, and that of my friends. If I could I might be able to use my Facebook wall as the repository of links I might want to visit later on. That would be a huge incentive for me to share more links on Facebook. That in turn would make Facebook searches even better.
GigaOm: Is Facebook's Social Search Engine A Google Killer?: one of the company’s goals was to use the resulting behavioral data to power a social search engine — one based on likes instead of links .... more than a million websites — including some highly trafficked sites such as The Huffington Post — have integrated its features, and 150 million of the network’s more than 400 million users “engage with Facebook” in some way through external sites every month. ...... Being able to search for recommendations from close to half a billion users could be very powerful..... since Facebook’s Open Graph protocol is theoretically an open standard, there is the potential for Google to use that to pull in the network’s results in the same way it uses Twitter’s API ...... gave the network a relatively puny 2.7 percent share of the U.S. search business, but still put it ahead of AOL.
The human part is when I press that like button, which I do all the time. (Hello Mark!) The machine part is what Facebook does after I have already pressed that like button. The human part was when someone placed that link. The machine part was Google making sense of the link. There are clear parallels.
All Facebook: BREAKING: Facebook Now Displaying All Liked News Articles In Search Results: based on two things: the number of likes and the number of friends who liked that object ..... shows how important Facebook’s Open Graph is to the future of the company. ..... the content displayed “is only available for articles shared by your direct friends (not globally to all users on Facebook).” Additionally, “This is not surfaced to you based solely on number of ‘Likes’ for the article.”

Enhanced by Zemanta

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

The FriendFeed, Facebook Merger



The Would-Be FFugees Shouldn’t Pack Up And Find A New Home Just Yet TechCrunch

Facebook buying FriendFeed has been one of the more exciting developments in tech as of recent. There has been much speculation as to if Facebook did it for the talent or the product. It has to be both. Facebook had been copying little features here and there from FriendFeed. So why not go all the way and acquire?

Image representing FriendFeed as depicted in C...Image via CrunchBase



If you think social media is a sideshow, possibly even a distraction, then this is hum-ho news. But if you think social media is no hype, that it is a big deal, like I do, this is a huge deal. This merger is a big deal.

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...Image via CrunchBase


But this is not a Twitter killer merger like some have been suggesting. Twitter is in a slightly different space. FriendFeed was half way between FriendFeed and Facebook in terms of functionalities. It was a choice between imitating Twitter and acquiring FriendFeed. Facebook made the right choice.

Facebook Landgrab: A Friday Midnight Call
Facebook And Mashable: Social Media And Social Media Blog
Is Google Wave Social Enough To Challenge Facebook, Twitter?
Facebook's Ad Space Is Different
Facebook Faceoff Firefox
Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter
What Should Facebook Do

Facebook buys FriendFeed: Is this a big deal? CNet
Facebook Acquires FriendFeed (Updated) TechCrunch

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Thursday, October 21, 2010

A Facebook Browser? A Facebook Operating System?

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...Image via CrunchBase
TechCrunch: Another Chrome OS Engineer Defects To Facebook In The Build-Up To Launch: 99.99 percent of my working day is currently spent in Chrome ...... a mildly worrisome trend occurring leading up to the launch of Google’s first desktop operating system: defections. Also interesting: what does Facebook want with these guys? ..... the talent continues to pour into Facebook — and much of it from Google

Friday, October 15, 2010

Eduardo Saverin: Roommate Does Not Mean Best Friend

Image representing Mark Zuckerberg as depicted...Image via CrunchBase
Mashable: The Other Facebook Co-founder Speaks Out: Instead of moving out with Zuckerberg to Palo Alto to grow the company though, he decided to work as a finance intern and the two began to have major conflicts over the direction of Facebook. Eventually the company was restructured, leaving Saverin out in the cold. His co-founder title was stripped and his share of Facebook reportedly dropped from 30% to less than 5%, for which he sued Facebook in 2009..... making his net worth somewhere in the range of $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion.... Even his Facebook page is bare; it only has two posts. All it says is that he’s a “technology entrepreneur and investor.”
I don't believe companies have co-founders. It is rare for a company to have a co-founder. The title co-founder denotes equal status, and that almost never happens. Paul Allen was not a Microsoft co-founder. Bill Gates was the founder, the indispensable person, the person who saw where the company might be in 20 years. Bob Miner was not an Oracle co-founder. Larry Ellison was the founder. Bob Miner never was able to make peace with the fact that at some point his net worth surpassed a million dollars. That was not a co-founder.

The big bang of Oracle happened with Larry Ellison and Bob Miner happened to be nearby. Paul Allen happened to be nearby. The big bang of Facebook happened with Mark Zuckerberg. Saverin was not a best friend, not even a friend. Saverin was roommate. He happened to be in geographical proximity. He is the accidental billionaire. The guy did not get the idea. And by that I don't mean to suggest the idea of Facebook did not originate with him. What I mean to suggest is the guy did not "get" it. He never got it, until he realized Facebook was getting really big, and so he sued. His billion should go straight to charity.

The two idiot twins should not have received any money. The justice system is flawed that they ended up with any money.

To some extent Paul Allen was there, he was number two. Bob Miner was with Oracle for years. He did work. These Facebook drama clowns did nothing. The twins were rowing the boat. Saverin had all the wrong ideas about where Facebook needed to go. The guy, if anything, was not even a non founder, he was an anti-founder. If o-n-e of his ideas had been incorporated, Facebook was gone down the tube.

I want the money back.

David Kirkpatrick: "Zuck Is Not An Asshole"
To Make Sense Of The Facebook Movie
I Gave In: Facebook: The Movie
The Social Network: Before Seeing The Movie



CNBC: Facebook Co-Founder Speaks Publicly: What I Learned From Watching “The Social Network”

Enhanced by Zemanta

Wednesday, September 08, 2010

StartUp Anxiety For FourSquare?

Image representing Foursquare as depicted in C...Image via CrunchBase
I touched upon this topic in a blog post weeks back when Facebook Places just went live.

Facebook Doing Location Is Like Google Doing Social, Almost

In light of this New York Observer article (In Facebook's Crosshairs), I feel the need to elaborate a little.
New York Observer: In Facebook's Crosshairs: He didn't make the trip himself, sending in his stead Foursquare's new VP for mobile and partnerships, a fellow named Holger Luedorf, who spoke at the event for only a few minutes and made clear that Foursquare was not yet sure about the nature of its "partnership" with Facebook. ...... The next day, Mr. Crowley wrote on Twitter that his 86-year-old grandma had called him and remarked that this Facebook thing "sounds like Four-Squared, but without the fun." .... the New York City tech scene, which badly needs a major local success story ..... turning their fledgling service—currently at some three million registered users and growing by about 18,000 new users per day—into the city's first true social media juggernaut. ...... Crowley wants Foursquare to transcend its status as a niche mobile check-in tool, and to become the platform upon which all other check-in tools, whatever they turn out to be, are built. ...... —if you control the infrastructure, you control the market. We see the same thing with Twitter and with Apple." ...... "My personal view is, it's going to be huge—Facebook huge," said Hunch founder Chris Dixon, an investor in Foursquare who is not known for polite optimism. "They'll have a huge brand and a direct relationship with users. ... They absolutely could become the dominant platform upon which all check-in services are built." ........ "your favorite, er, mobile + social + friend finder + social city guide + nightlife game thing" ...... Facebook's apparent desire to become the dominant platform for check-ins did not worry him ...... We're developing this really deep and rich road map for what we're going to do ..... the implementation of Places would be good for Foursquare in the long run because it meant Facebook would be doing the hard work of popularizing the hard-to-grasp concept of check-ins—location-based and otherwise—while the Foursquare crew was left to innovate and figure out new ways to make them useful to people and the businesses that want to sell them things. ........ Where Foursquare has an admired—some might say tricked out —API, Facebook has so far released only a read-only version of theirs, which severely limits what developers can build on top of it.
It is perhaps relevant to mention another company that I blogged about recently: FoodSpotting. That is a bi-coastal startup. But it does have a major New York City presence. So I guess hometown pride is warranted. But perhaps bi-coastal is the future. You get the best of both worlds. And you prove geography is not that relevant.

FoodSpotting does not do bland check ins, it does a very specific type of check ins. Does that mean FourSquare will some day wake up and eat up FoodSpotting for lunch? I don't see that as a possibility. FourSquare just can not do what FoodSpotting does. That same logic for Facebook, FourSquare is even more true. Facebook does not have the option to become an experience for which checking in is your starting point. On the other hand FourSquare could make claim that the FourSquare social graph is much more real than the Facebook social graph. The truth is they are just different.

FoodSpotting Is The Next FourSquare

Even if Facebook had not done Places, there were no guarantees FourSquare would survive and do well and see an IPO exit - my personal recommendation to the company - but the real news from the Facebook Places launch was it gave FourSquare a visibility that it never had before. How is that depressing? There were more check ins on FourSquare that day than any other day in recorded history.

If I were FourSquare, I'd still be more worried about Gowalla than Facebook, although I'd work extra hard to work out just the right partnership with Facebook.

The FourSquare founders are brimming with ideas they want to execute, features they want to add. The real action for FourSquare is in the front, it is not in the rear view mirror.

I look forward to FourSquare burning up all its 20 million and getting ready to raise its next round. Sooner is better.

It is unrealistic to think Facebook could have stayed away from the location space. It is also unrealistic to think Facebook can become the leader in the location space if checking in is not the starting point of the Facebook experience, which it isn't. Facebook Mobile is mini me. Facebook is a big screen web experience, primarily.
New York Observer: Foursquare’s Happy Growing Pains: Crowley said the space shortage has been not just inconvenient but detrimental to Foursquare's evolution ..... "There are three or four big-ticket items we've been talking about all summer," Mr. Crowley said. "All the specs are written—they're waiting there, like half of the designs are done—but they just haven't been implemented because we don't have an engineer that could work on it full time." ...."Or when the lounge furniture started coming together, it was like, 'Whoa, real conference rooms, with chairs!'"
In The News

VentureBeat: Blog Platform Tumblr’s Soaring Traffic Brings Growing Pains: seeing massive traffic growth ..... skyrocketed over the first half of the year and reached about 1.7 billion page views in the month of August. .... WordPress.com, an older, more established blog platform, recently reported 2.1 billion monthly pageviews ..... Tumblr, which employs about 10 people ..... Six Apart, a blogging pioneer whose TypePad service competes most directly with Automattic’s WordPress.com, recently announced it is folding the simplified blogging service Vox, which never gained firm traction after four years of existence. ..... You can give this to somebody who can barely program a VCR and they can do a blog post in a minute.” .... you can find a whole lot more of value on a Tumblr page potentially than on a Twitter page.

GigaOm: Chris Dixon To VCs: Act More Like Startups: “have fewer meetings” and “have everyone at the firm blog/tweet.” ..... venture firms should act more like the startups they invest in, right down to his suggestion that they “have offices that look and cost like startup offices — or better yet, don’t have offices at all [and] spend your time visiting companies.” ..... VCs should not “talk/tweet/blog about your vineyard, yachting, golfing etc. while you tell your CEOs to work non-stop and be frugal.” ..... “Stop kidding yourself that you add a lot of value beyond recruiting/intros/governance/financing/selling companies.” ..... “Say no to companies. Saying “come back later” feels like a free option to you but actually hurts you and the startup in the long run.”

Enhanced by Zemanta

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Dennis Crowley, Facebook, And The Location Ecosystem

Image representing Dennis Crowley as depicted ...Image via CrunchBase
TechCrunch: Foursquare’s Crowley: The Giants Are “Generic,” We Are Fun. I Wonder Who He’s Referring To…: Crowley discussed the opportunity for places, outlined his plan for the next iteration of Foursquare and knocked Google for its social awkwardness. .... Crowley’s painting the picture of Facebook as a generic-borderline-boring service, versus Foursquare, the hip, edgy, playful alternative .... Facebook is so huge (500 million large versus Foursquare’s 2.8 million) that its check-in service has to be simple and minimal to accommodate such a huge and diverse group— anything too quirky or outlandish runs the risk of alienating factions. While Foursquare cannot dream to compete with Facebook’s installed base, the startup can certainly differentiate itself by offering a creative, more dynamic product that is less utilitarian and more personality-driven ...... he does believe that Facebook has a major role to play in the location ecosystem. Facebook can aggregate check-ins from different services and introduce new users (millions upon millions of them) to the world of check-ins. Thus, if Facebook stays in its corner, the relationship could be a very symbiotic one for Foursquare, which saw a record number of sign-ups on Thursday. ...... when it comes to creating the most engaging, valuable location experience, Crowley is ready for a fight. ..... We’ve been thinking for awhile, what’s act two for us? And act two is OK let’s take all this information about what people are doing, what people want to do, and let’s build this back into the app in a way that’s manageable for people and easy to share.” ..... Our social graph is more representative of the people that you meet in the real world ..... Facebook is literally everyone I’ve ever shaken hands with at a conference or kissed on the cheek at Easter. Twitter seems to be everyone I am entertained by or I wish to meet some day. Foursquare seems to be everyone I run into on a regular basis.



Not surprisingly, Dennis Crowley is on the spot on Facebook's entry into his space. He is not threatened. He should not be. Instead he seems all set to ride the Facebook wave.

Facebook Doing Location Is Like Google Doing Social, Almost
This Is Not Happening: King Dennis

I might be one of the first to talk publicly in terms of a FourSquare IPO. I am a fan of the company. When FourSquare goes IPO in a few years, New York City will have finally arrived on the tech scene. You don't get credit for other forms of exits, not in my book, not for a city this big and glamorous.

If search is the starting point of your big screen web experience, and I love Google like some people love Apple, then Google is your company. For many people social is that experience.

The thing is FourSquare is not a big screen web company. Location is such an obvious starting point when you are out and about that the simple nugget is a genius idea. I almost feel stupid saying that. Because, I mean, what is so revolutionary about location? There have been places since times immemorial. There are so many places mentioned in the Bible, for example. Jesus was checking in.

You could argue there is only re-invention, there is no invention. Einstein was not the first to ponder about time, but it is like he added a whole new dimension to the world of physics. Suddenly we started thinking about time just like we had been thinking about space.

(Sweet disclaimer: I have never thought of Dennis (@dens) and Naveen (@naveen) as Einsteins. They are both smart guys, but genius is a whole different ballgame.)

Dennis is a born entrepreneur. How do you know that? You just have to look at his hair. The same applies to his Michael Jackson co-founder.

How My Grandfather Became Mayor The First Time


In The News

New York Times: Roommates Who Click:theirs was a match made on URoomSurf.com, a Web site that does for dormitory life what eHarmony and Match.com have long done for romance .... “My sister woke up her first night of college and drunk people were poking her, asking where her roommate was.... “The ones who choose their own roommate tend to stay together

BBC: Swedish Rape Warrant For Wikileaks' Assange Cancelled: Mr Assange, said the appearance of the allegations "at this moment is deeply disturbing"..... The current whereabouts of Mr Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, are unclear.... there were two separate allegations against Mr Assange, one of rape and the other of molestation

New York Times: Facebook Feels Unfriendly Toward Film It Inspired: the filmmakers, who portray Facebook as founded on a series of betrayals, then fueled by the unappeasable craving of almost everyone for “friends” — the Facebook term for those who connect on its online pages — that they will never really have..... “It’s crazy because all of a sudden Mark becomes this person who created Facebook to get girls or to gain power,” said Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder who left in 2007 to join the Obama presidential campaign. “That’s not what was going on. It was a little more boring and quotidian than that.” .... “it’s a sign of Facebook’s impact that we’re the subject of a movie — even one that’s fiction.” .... Ben Mezrich’s book, “The Accidental Billionaires,” and on the legal protection provided to free speech .... “The Social Network” appears to be mostly about emptiness.... much of the film, including many of the details of Mr. Zuckerberg’s personal life, are made up and “horrifically unfair.”

TechCrunch: Facebook Kept Thousands Of Check-Ins On Lockdown For Months. Impressive
Enhanced by Zemanta

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Facebook Doing Location Is Like Google Doing Social, Almost

Facebook logoImage via WikipediaChecking in is not the starting point of your Facebook experience, and that is why Facebook is not a threat to FourSquare in the location space. If Facebook is smart, it will just help its users more closely integrate FourSquare into their Facebook experience. One thing I would like is to have the option to have a much greater control over who I share my check-ins with.

But chances are Facebook will try and offer a FourSquare substitute. I am looking at Twitter here. Facebook "learned" features from Twitter and FriendFeed. It outright bought FriendFeed. Buying FourSquare is not an option. Copying FourSquare is harder than copying Twitter.

This Is Not Happening: King Dennis

FourSquare is inherently a mobile web thing. You could add blogging features to my Gmail account, but Gmail is a different experience. You could argue Facebook has also thrived in the mobile web environment. But it started as a big screen web native. The mobile version is Facebook Lite. There is no FourSquare Lite. I have felt stupid every time I have visited the FourSquare homepage on the big screen web. It feels like sitting in a bus that is not moving.

I have no idea how Facebook will roll out location. It was inevitable that it was going to, but the details have not been obvious to me personally. It is because there is an inherent conflict in what I think Facebook should be doing in the location space, and what I suspect it might end up doing instead in that space. And so I have decided to just wait and watch.

Facebook could not have stayed away from the location space, but it has the option to do it right.

TechCrunch: As Facebook Location Looms, Has Foursquare Entered The Pantheon Of Services?: it seems highly likely the Facebook is going to take a platform approach to location. That is, they’re more likely to federate other location streams (such as Foursquare’s) while they themselves remain fairly cautious with their own location services..... Facebook likely has a deal in place with Localeze to build out a massive place database that they’ll then populate with all this data they’re federating and creating on their own.....I remember very well when it seemed like just about everything I read on the Internet said that Twitter was the dumbest service ever imagined and it would never go anywhere .....they run the risk of becoming the Friendster of location
AllThingsD: What Will Facebook Be Announcing Wednesday? Location, Location, Location!: Facebook will finally be rolling out its own geo-location offering .... a long time coming, as Facebook has noodled on how to incorporate the hot trend
Enhanced by Zemanta

Saturday, October 30, 2010

Unique URL For Facebook Updates

Image representing Lars Rasmussen as depicted ...Image by Google via CrunchBaseWhile I was reading this TechCrunch post about the father of Google Wave jumping ship to go join Facebook, I came across something I have wanted a long time. For a long time I have wanted every Facebook update of mine to have a unique URL that gets automatically fed to the search engines. My privacy settings on Facebook have been to Everyone from the outset.

Thursday, July 07, 2011

Facebook Beats Google Plus On Design

Ashton Kutcher at Time 100 GalaImage via WikipediaI Am On Google Plus Now
Facebook Videocalling: I Am On Now

Google Plus is not a threat to Facebook just like Facebook Messages, touted by the media as the Gmail killer, has been no threat to Gmail.

Facebook has its advantages. It has mapped the social graph. Google Plus is not even trying to. Plus has a Google Buzz like awkwardness to it in terms of who all end up in your circles. Apparently you don't need people's permission before you add them to some circle. So it is a little diffuse.

Facebook has a sleek design. One of my very favorite parts of Facebook for years has been that font. How did they do that!

The starting point for Google is search, not social. The starting point with the Facebook experience is social. Just like FourSquare will beat Facebook in the check in space, Facebook will keep the lead in the social space.

But I see me using both services. There is a place for Google Plus.

My Google Plus stream seems to be dominated by the two social media stars Robert Scoble and Anthony De Rosa, the Ashton Kutcher of Tumblr. I like both fine, and I personally know Anthony. But my Facebook stream is different, although there too another social media star - Baratunde Thurston, another person I happen to know - shows up quite often. But Facebook is much more likely to throw up people I know.

Saturday, December 29, 2012

Facebook Search Can't Be Bing

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase
That is the obvious point. Facebook search necessarily has to be social, relying on data Facebook already has. Of course.

Why Facebook's Search Engine Won't Be Anything Like Google's
By mining users’ updates about vacations, music listening interests, online habits, and more, Facebook Search could be better at answering subjective questions, about what products, experiences, and businesses you might be interested in, than a traditional search engine. ..... “Because Google is so big,” says Gerasoulis, “they have data for the long tail”—the uncommon queries for which relatively few pages are a match. .... Since 2009, the Redmond company has spent more than $5 billion on Bing ..... serves only 15 percent of U.S. searches, compared with Google’s 65 percent. .... answering queries about the things that people share and discuss on Facebook, such as vacations, movies, recipes, and more. “When you go to specific subjects, the signals Facebook and other social networks have are amazing,” says Gerasoulis. ...... Mining users’ comments could help Facebook unlock even more useful data ..... “Facebook and Twitter both have teams working on search” ..... Digging deep into social data can uncover a wealth of information and forgotten content related to things people care about ... most of it not accessible by conventional search engines. ...... “Search is about what you want right now,” says Gerasoulis. “You go to Facebook and hang out; it doesn’t currently have the same directness.”
Enhanced by Zemanta