September 2007

Please do join in the (awesome) conversation taking place in our Facebook group!

A snippet of the conversation from brilliant comedian and thinker Baratunde Thurston:

Let’s do the math very simply. What does it mean to be “worth $10 billion?” In one case it means, people BELIEVE it is worth $10B and since “dollars” are a social and psychological construct, in theory, Facebook could be worth $10billion constructs.

Come and join our conversation, or just leave us a comment here if you *gasp* don’t have a Facebook profile.

Welcome to our community! If you like what you see, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed!

First of all I’d like to commend Robert Guth at the WSJ for managing to use the word “familiar” 11 times in a 749 word article. That word made up a full 1.4% of the piece. But I’m being glib.

What surprises me most about this news is not that Microsoft is trying to get their paws on a chunk of Facebook (that’s been more or less “common knowledge” for some time), but that Facebook, according to “those familiar with the matter” is entertaining the idea.

From what I can tell, it looks like Facebook is (doing an excellent job of) playing familiar rivals Google and Microsoft off of each other for a better investment. I’m somewhat surprised at the size of the numbers being thrown around though - $10bn dollar valuation now, Facebook rumored to be holding out for $15bn. I think it was about a year ago that the rumors of $2bn floated around.

To me that indicates some massive revenue growth somewhere. (What is the rule of thumb, 15x annual determines your value?)

[click to continue...]

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Microsoft Corp. is in talks with Facebook Inc. about making an investment in the social-networking startup that could value Facebook at $10 billion or more, according to people familiar with the matter.

The talks set up another likely face-off between tech titans: Google Inc. has also expressed strong interest in a possible Facebook investment, said people familiar with the matter.

I can’t say I’m surprised. Microsoft got the sweetheart advertising deal with Facebook and they’ve had MS executives speak at Facebook events in the past.

This is what happens when I go out for lunch and spend the afternoon blissfully designing Websites without going near my feedreader…

You might remember that we recently announced a session at the Web Community Forum 2007 called Group Management: Care and Feeding of Your Community.

When we thought up this particular session, we said to ourselves “wouldn’t it be great if we could get some kind of ‘community manager’ to sit on this panel?” Which was followed quickly by “hey, isn’t Connie Bensen a community manager?”

The answer is yes, she is. Update by Teresa: In fact, she’s the new community manager for ACDSee.

I’m happy to announce that Connie Bensen will be joining us as a speaker at the Web Community Forum 2007 in Seattle this December. You can see where her session fits in on this kick-@ss dynamically generated schedule that Teresa built for the event.

Don’t forget to register (sooner than later), $190 pricing only holds for four more people, and after that it jumps to $290.

I sent out a mass event invitation to members of the Web Community Forum Facebook group last week. After this, I noticed a huge spike in my friend requests. At first, I didn’t put two and two together. But I did notice that not a single one of the people who friended me — none of whom I had ever met in the real world — felt the need to provide me with any context for how they knew me.

I sent back messages to the first two people who requested my friendship, politely asking, “how do I know you?” In both cases, the reply was, “you just invited me to your event.” Feeling silly, I responded to subsequent requests by checking through the list of Web Community Forum group members to see if there was a match. If so, I went ahead and approved the request.

This raises a few points of Fetiquette (etiquette in Facebook):

1. Is it acceptable to send out a mass event invitation via the “host” function that allows you to pair a group with an event, or should you invite people more sparingly as you get to know them?
2. If you’re an admin, shouldn’t you be able to recognize every single one of your group members by name and photo without having to look through the list? (And does this make me a bad admin?)
3. Is it acceptable to friend someone who sent you an event invitation via a group without providing context?

What do you guys think?

Update: I can’t BELIEVE that I accidentally shared items intended for my personal blog here on Web Community Forum. I knew this would happen sooner or later with two del.icio.us accounts running in the background. Many apologies and *le sigh.* [click to continue...]

I realize that the trickiest part of Facebook’s new “flyers pro” advertising feature might simply be finding it, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the sweet baritone of my voice for a few minutes while I walk you through the process of buying one.

Actually my voice sounds a bit odd, but that’s because my mic gain was turned down pretty low and I had to talk extra loud to make it work right.

Any flyers you buy show up in the Facebook lefthand sidebar. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, log in and check the left under the navigation. That’s where they go.

I’ve also uploaded the video to our WCF group on Facebook (this is Revver, since I can’t embed FB video elsewhere).

Inside Facebook’s Justin Smith asks an important question about the success of Booze Mail, a Facebook application that allows users to send one another virtual drinks. What do you do when you experimental, brand extending Facebook application is a runaway hit?

Renkoo, the company behind Booze Mail is an online event management company. They never intended for Booze Mail to become a huge deal, but it now has over 3 million users.

Booze Mail has driven increased traffic to their original service. This in and of itself is good evidence that a brand extending application doesn’t need to hard connect with your core value proposition to be a solid marketing vehicle. But with 3 million users and counting, it’s hard not to think of Booze Mail as a revenue generator in and of itself.

My favorite idea was suggested by one of Smith’s commenters:

Talk to alcohol vendors about doing a specially branded drink for them for a fee. “The Absolut” martini, Captain Morgan, etc.

This is a great revenue generator that can also be tied back to the core service. If Absolut decided to sponsor a drink on Booze Mail, it would also make a great suggestion on Renkoo. Have a contest for the most creative photo taken of the custom drink in action at your Renkoo party and win a case of Absolut. The cross-promotional opportunities are endless.

Another good cross-promotion is to have a vendor sponsor a drink inventing contest via Booze Mail. The winning drink is a featured both on Booze Mail and at Renkoo and the winning mixologist gets some first rate tools for perfecting his or her craft.

All of this could simultaneously generate revenue, expand the Renkoo brand and keep Booze Mail interesting to Facebookers long past its predicted expiration.

Online event organizing companies like eVite and My Punchbowl face a major threat as Facebook gains more popularity. The Facebook events applicaton — which comes standard on all new Facebook accounts — allows users to organize events and invite people from inside Facebook. All of a sudden, other event planning sites seem extraneous.

Rather than attempting to compete with Facebook’s pre-installed app, My Punchbowl has come to the table with a fun application that lets friends interact with one another while reinforcing the central theme of their brand: parties.

This is a smart move. Facebook users aren’t really looking for another application to manage their events within Facebook. Creating an event management application would have been redundant and mostly a waste of time.

Instead, the folks at My Punchbowl used the application as a way to extend their brand inside Facebook and remind people that when it comes to planning parties, it’s good to go with a site that specializes.

These brand-extending widgets are really the future of marketing. Sure, pre-existing online services like Slide, iLike and Pandora stand to make tremendous gains in customer base from building Faceobok applications. But so do companies without a Web-based offering of their own. By creating an application that adds value to people’s lives and uses a soft-sell model to reinforce the brand, you’ll reach people more cheaply and deeply than you would by spending millions on banner ads.

If you’ve been paying attention to either Google or to Tinu’s Facebook feed, you’re no doubt aware that Google has set up a “Shared Stuff” page for each of its users, and released a bookmarklet to go with.

Out of curiosity I wandered over to the page to check it out. Since I had an empty shared stuff page I had to wander around and find some stuff to share.

It’s an interesting feature, but I’m not sure I’ll abandon it for sharing in Google Reader, because most of what I share is blog posts anyway, and google reader shares are easier to do (hit a key), and they automatically make their way into my facebook and my blog sidebar.

But just in case you’re curious like me, here’s my shared stuff page.

• Americans giving up friends, sex for Web life - Yahoo! News
  I honestly find this article a little overblown and would like to take a good look at their statistics. Most adults I know aren’t that addicted to the Web. My generation might be a little more like this, but certainly not enough so that we give up sex and
  (tags: internet psychology society social_media sex life)
• 2 Minute Video: Dave McClure on Facebook
  Jeremiah Owyang has a video of Dave McClure (of the upcoming Graphing Social conference) talking about Facebook.
  (tags: facebook Graphing_Social Dave_McClure)
• Build a Facebook Profile You Can Be Proud Of
  Some tips for branding yourself for success on Facebook.
  (tags: facebook branding)
• Google Goes Social with Shared Stuff
  The Shared Items feature in Google’s Reader application is already the premiere app for spitting content from yoru RSS feeds. Now they add a social application for spitting content to your friends from your browser a. la. del.icio.us. The problem: it does
  (tags: google feeds social Shared google_reader)

There’s been a lot of conversation about the idea that social networks should pay users some of the (m/b)illions that they’re making in ad revenue from the attention we give them. At first, my response was, “that’s utter horse pucky. Facebook created this great tool for social networking and we get to use it.”

But then I started thinking about how much I appreciate that video-sharing site Revver shares advertising revenue with its content creators. And that’s what we essentially are on Facebook: content creators.

Sure, it’s a different type of content. Revver videos can be spread all over the Web and draw tons of attention to their attached ads. Facebook content stays in Facebook and is usually relevant only to the person’s friends. But as Mark Zuckerberg explained in his keynote at f8 this year, Facebook users draw indirect benefit through the social graph from all the other Facebook users. For example, I’m friends with both Bette and Tina, but they don’t know one another. Because both Bette and Tina are on Facebook, I spend more time there putting up photos and information. Both Bette and Tina benefit from one another’s presence because I’m spending more time and energy on Facebook to stay in touch with both of them.

The power of the social graph says to me that Facebook should consider rewarding its most prolific users. If not with money, then certainly with special features a la Club Penguin.

What do you think, should Facebook pay users or compensate them in some other way?

A recently released ComScore report indicates that the most popular social networks in Europe are those that allow users to interact in their local languages. This may explain why Facebook is having such a hard time penetrating Germany. From the report:

Interestingly, Facebook, which has been growing rapidly across Europe, has not yet made a major introduction to the German market. The site experienced 422% growth in Europe and attracted 7.6 million U.K. visitors in July compared to 177,000 German visitors in the same period – a reach of 1.2 percent of the entire German social networking community.

Bob Ivins, EVP of International Markets at comScore, attributes the relative success of these sites to their ability to cater for local markets: “These sites are founded on their ability to allow Internet users to communicate quickly and effectively with one another. As MySpace.com’s European success shows, language is an important factor. Being able to develop local language pages has allowed them to attract traffic from a number of European countries.”

Our Speaker Nick O’Neill observes that the data about use of Facebook in Europe — which grew 422% in July — may be skewed by the overwhelming British use of Facebook. London is now the biggest network on Facebook and the UK is third overall in users behind Canada and the United States.

Given the importance of local language, this comes as no surprise. Facebook is a brilliant platform and the international audience is growing. But as long as the UI remains English-only, world domination is going to be impossible. [click to continue...]

Social networking ethnologist Danah Boyd made waves in the social media community a few months ago with her observation that the division between Facebook and Myspace is largely socioeconomic:

Hegemonic American teens (i.e. middle/upper class, college bound teens from upwards mobile or well off families) are all on or switching to Facebook. Marginalized teens, teens from poorer or less educated backgrounds, subculturally-identified teens, and other non-hegemonic teens continue to be drawn to MySpace.

A few days ago, Chuck Lam of Data Strategy looked at schools in the San Francisco Bay area to see if Facebook penetration correlated at all with the independent ratings of local high schools by GreatSchools.net. His data set after the jump: [click to continue...]

In the spirit of writing more inane polls that nobody will answer but that amuse me anyway, I want to know how often you change your profile picture.

I’m the guy with the camera whose never actually IN pictures, so the number of pictures I have to choose from is ridiculously small. I’ve been on Facebook for a while (I don’t actually remember when I signed up - can you find that out later?), and I’ve only ever had three profile pictures.

The first one was this artsy pic from Disneyland (California Adventure, technically) that I still like for no apparent reason (top of post).

The second picture was one in which I looked exactly like the Facebook guy (you know, shaggy hair, slightly angled…EXACTLY the same).

And then there’s the one I have now. So I’ll guestimate I’ve been on Facebook for 2 years, which means I change my profile once every 8 months. How often do you change yours?

 Loading …