September 2007

I like being right, which is convenient because I’m almost always right.

Remember when I said that the Facebook team gets it because they’re letting other people add value to their network?

Well they proved me right by putting some money behind it. According to several sites, Mark Zuckerberg announced at TechCrunch40 that the Facebook Founders and Accel Partners have come together with a $10 million FBFund for application developers.

Now, technically, Facebook isn’t throwing any money at it, but they are endorsing the fund. According to GigaOM, here are some of the deets:

The funding will be given out in grants of $25,000 to $250,000.

Rather than equity, the two firms will have a right of first refusal if the companies end up surviving long enough to raise a venture round. Facebook is not putting up any of the cash, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Vice President of Product Marketing and Operations Chamath Palihapitiya will be evaluating applicants, along with Peter Thiel of the Founders Fund and Jim Breyer of Accel, and investors Rajeev Motwani, Josh Kopelman, and Reid Hoffman.

Anyone can apply for funding with an idea or a full plan or, as I understand it, pretty much whatever. All you have to do to get into the review process is send your idea in an e-mail to platform@facebook.com.

Ready? Set. Go nuts.

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

Online community management can take a lot of different forms. Maybe it’s moderating and responding to your blog comments, as Liz Strauss does so expertly. Maybe it’s engaging with your Facebook group, as Jeremiah Owyang does with his Web Strategy group.

The best practices around community management in Facebook groups are still being discussed. How often is it appropriate to message your group and about what topics? If you accidentally send the same message twice, should you follow up with a third message to apologize, or just let it go? How do you resurrect a group that has gone stagnant?

Dealing with Facebook’s limitations is another area for debate. How do you deal with not being able to message a group of more than 500 members? How do you best share content with your group members? What features should Facebook add to the groups to make them more friendly for community managers?

We’ll be tackling all this and more in a session at the Web Community Forum. See here for schedule details.

Yesterday Fred Wilson asked about spouses and significant others in social networks:

If social nets are going to map our social relationships correctly, they’ll have to include our closest relationships. I am sure that for many who are ten or twenty years younger than me, they do. But as my generation goes social networking, do we take our closest relationships with us? Of that, I am not sure.

I consider myself in the younger group of Facebook adopters, which, according to popular wisdom, somehow grants me secret insight into the ways of the internet and social networking. But I’m still not convinced that even us younger people have an accurate online representation of our offline friendships.

Contrary to popular belief, we do still meet people and interact outside of the internet.

Zuckerberg talks about his Social Graph a lot. I talk a lot about adding different levels of “friendship” on facebook (you’re a contact, you’re a friend, you’re a colleague - all with different permissions).

I don’t think that our “social graph” will be accurate until you can reflect the strength of your relationship as well as whether or not you have one. (I could draw a bunch of parallels here between binary computing and quantum computing, but mostly that’s way over my head so I won’t).

• The first sister of Facebook
  Robert Scoble interviews Randi Zuckerberg, Facebook’s Director of Market Development and the sister of Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg. Major drop in productivity at Facebook since the platform launched.
  (tags: facebook Randi_Zuckerberg ScobleShow)
• Stanford University Offers Facebook Platform Course
  Oh goodness would I love to be in on this class. Wishing I were still in college.
  (tags: facebook Dave_McClure BJ_Fogg Stanford_University)
• MySpace Founder Proposes New Default Layout; Public Emits Audible Sigh Of Relief
  There’s a distinct possibility that MySpace will, in the near future, not be hideous. The new MySpace looks kind of like…Facebook.
  (tags: myspace facebook layout web_design)
• Facebook Business Conversations with Rodney Rumford
  Our speaker Rodney Rumford talks about the business applications of Facebook platform.
  (tags: rodney_rumford facebook facereviews)
• Momentum Growth Conference: Help Me Pick The Next Facebook.
  Who is the new Facebook? Ellen McGirt wants to know.
  (tags: facebook momentum crowdsourcing fast_company)

Is Facebook a Google killer? Probably not. At least not yet. But the question no longer seems quite as outlandish to ask given the recent launch of targeted, cost-per-click, pay with a credit card advertising.

You can target ads by political spectrum, sex, age, profile keywords, relationship status, education level and even workplace. Whether that’s a more effective way to target advertising than what John Battelle has called the database of intentions remains to be seen. But it certainly has a great deal of potential.

I have no doubt that we’ll be launching some of these context-based ads for the conference and reporting back on our ROI.

Do you have any plans to use these ads? What is your strategy?

Stephen Wellman thinks that Facebook could to kill Twitter.

If Facebook could talk, I’m pretty sure it’d be quoting Michael Jackson (”I think I told you, I’m a lover not a fighter“). One of the reasons Facebook is enjoying so much success is that it enables other services more than it squashes them.

I keep saying that Facebook is a platform. If you route your tweets through Facebook, your twitter audience grows dramatically.

If you try to use Facebook status updates to replace twitter, you lose some key functionality (past tweets for example - there’s no such thing as a permalink to an old facebook status).

More and more I find that I use Facebook as a conduit to other things - the value I gain from checking their site five times per day is in its ability to point me to new and interesting things. People have usually posted new links, left new comments, new tweets, iLiked new stuff, and the list goes on…

For a closed system, Facebook sure points outward a lot. It’s an enabler, not a killer.

Thanks Tinu for posting the link.

When we’re designing a blog for a corporate client, we often see concerns about using open source software. Many corporations are wary of investing a bunch of time and money in working with software that has not been designed by a commercial company with a formal tech support infrastructure.

The same issue may rear its head for Facebook. Our speaker Nick O’Neill has been posting a great deal about how his clients need some reassurance that Facebook will work with them if there are problems with their applications. Of course, hiring a good Facebook consultant will preclude you from concerns about having your application removed due to Terms of Service violations. But there is still the issue of unpredictable future changes to the platform’s capabilities undermining key functionality of your application.

[click to continue...]

Eric Weaver posted this in his Facebook shared items this morning. I’ve been using this tool almost since it became available and have become a very big fan. It keeps me up to date on new messages, friend requests, and my friends status updates. When I’m browsing in Firefox, I’m always connected to Facebook even when I’m working on eight other things. [click to continue...]

It used to be that when you found something cool on the internet and you wanted your friends or family to see it, you’d e-mail it to them.

My grandmother still does that, but I give her props for using e-mail in the first place. She’s pretty much a technology wizard.

Now there are at least thirteen million different ways to go about sharing the cool things you find, many of them on facebook, some of them not. I’m sure I’ve left out some big ones. But, simply because I’m curious, what do you use?

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I was reading Connie’s post about connecting with people via Facebook this morning, and I clicked out to Thomas’s post, which is really a more rounded expansion on the thoughts I dropped in Connie’s comments section: that the beauty of internet-based interactions is that it’s incredibly easy to get in touch with all kinds of people, all the way up to GMs at Microsoft.

Amid all the business and political possibilities we all see in Social Networks like Facebook, it’s sometimes easy to forget that at the basis of all of what we’re doing (OK, with Zuckerberg yelling “SOCIAL GRAPH! SOCIAL GRAPH!” in everyone’s ear, it’s not THAT hard to forget) are these connections we’re drawing between ourselves and other people.

Since we launched this blog, I think the list of friends I have on Facebook has grown by forty or fifty, which for me is a reasonably big leap, since I don’t actively seek to expand my friend’s list (I know I explained this before I can’t for the life of me find the link).

It’s amazingly cool because though Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, Blog posts, comments, and even email, I can talk to people that, in a pre-internet world, would have been essentially impossible for me to reach. I think that’s probably the coolest part to me.

I think people are finding out that there’s a fine line between what’s pushy, dumb advertising and what’s smart, fun advertising. More and more often, I’m finding that people resent ads that are deceitful, and ads that are too overt.

What does that leave? Not much. But I think a sponsored gift of Facebook is a pretty good sweet spot.

Having a sponsored gift is a definite plus for Skittles from a branding perspective, and it’s plain as day that they’re promoting a new product. But I think the hook is that they’re letting people choose to promote it.

Sometimes having a choice is more important than what the choice is. In this case the choice is whether or not to give or accept a skittles icon in your Facebook profile.

According to Robert Scoble, Facebook launches new features every Tuesday. This morning, they launched a new feature that shows how many mutual friends we have when you request my friendship. As our speaker Rodney Rumford writes:

This might seem like a very small change, but it makes a huge difference to me & millions of other facebook users. Now when you see a friend request, you can instantly see how many common friends you have. With 1 click you can see which mutual friends you have. This small change greatly enhances usability. This makes it very efficient for determining if you run in the same circles. It is also a way to separate out people that run in a circle where you care not to associate yourself.

In the past, when I received a friend request, I usually wanted to see a message from the person showing how we knew one another. Requests that came in without messages were usually seen as more suspicious. I investigated the requesters — and our mutual friends — before accepting the request.

Now, Facebook provides me with that information right within the friend request notification. I still like context, to be sure. Notes are just polite, especially if you’ve never met in real life. But if I have 40 friends in common with someone, it now seems less necessary to do a whole lot of poking around before accepting a friend request.

In the wee small hours of this morning, I got a friend request from someone on Facebook who had found me because a fellow Facebooker used the Expander application to recommend that we connect. Intrigued, I added the application and started playing with it.

After about 15 minutes, I concluded that while this app has the potential for abuse, it can be an incredibly powerful tool if used correctly. Imagine the goodwill you can create among the members of your community by sending them people you think they would enjoy connecting with.

Just make sure that you have a really good reason — and that you articulate that reason clearly when you message your contacts — for connecting the two people.

• Marketer rushes to judgment, claims you’re an asinine lunatic
  Some marketers don’t understand marketing
  (tags: social_media marketing second_life)

One of our commenters — Derek Scruggs from Enthusiast Group — sent me a preview version of his company’s white paper yesterday. It’s a pretty neat piece of work with a lot of interesting case studies and some excellent tips. Here are some points of interest that stood out to me as I read through: [click to continue...]