November 2007

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been spending a lot of time in the attendees-only Facebook group discussing possible topics for the unconference. The conversation has been incredibly helpful and informative.

Here is a table of the topics that I see emerging from this conversation and where I see them potentially being covered.

So what do you guys think? Did I capture everything major here? Does anyone want to get the ball rolling on proposing an unconference session?

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Have you guys seen Myspace News?

http://news.myspace.com/

I’ve started to see these news pages show up in Google searches alongside Digg and Netscape pages. You can browse through the “hot” news articles in whichever category you pick and then vote on how cool it really is (there are gradients here beyond just “like it” or “not”).

It’s too bad that you can’t submit stories, though. Or at least I can’t figure out how, which amounts to more or less the same thing.

On the other hand, though, do we need another social news aggregator? Netscape works because there’s a meta-level that really sets it apart from Digg (and they have a slightly different audience). But what extra value do you really get from tying it in to a social network? Would it matter if a Facebook app provided this functionality? Would you switch from Digg?

Metrics of influence are always a tricky thing. Steve and I have always described Alexa as a thumbnail sketch of a site’s overall influence and traffic, since the Alexa toolbar is a truly self-selective tool.

Still, the news that Facebook beat MySpace in the Alexa rankings is very interesting indeed.

Leo Blanco writes, “It only proves that even the king of social networking can bleed.”I think we already knew that.

[Thanks to Nathan Ketsdever for the heads up.]

MoveOn.org definitely thinks so:

Online activist group MoveOn.org is poised to announce a campaign targeting Facebook’s “Beacon” advertisements, which post information about users’ activity on partner sites (movie rentals, purchases from online retailers) onto their friends’ News Feeds. According to MoveOn representatives, the organization considers this to be a “glaring violation of (Facebook’s) users’ privacy,” and has launched a paid ad campaign on Facebook, a “protest group” on the social-networking site, and an online petition to encourage the company to allow users to opt into the program at their own volition.

And there’s more interesting coverage at Silicon Alley Insider:

Although we can’t imagine why MoveOn can’t find something better to do than complain about Facebook, we do note the speed with which 1) Facebook responded to MoveOn’s complaint, and 2) 2,000 Facebook users signed up to support MoveOn. And we don’t blame them. We already hate the idea of bombarding friends with lists of the crap we buy. The fact that Facebook will only let us opt-out of that bombardment on a case-by-case basis (at the virtual cash register at third-party sites) is infuriating.

I’m not sure if I think that MoveOn is right; I have no illusions that what I buy or rent online is anywhere near private information. If Facebook wants to reproduce that in my newsfeed - fine. Maybe someone will get some value out of that.

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Is is still here. Is isn’t going anywhere, is it? I’m sure it is. Eventually.

After the big mess of blog posts yesterday announcing the departure of the “is” part of Facebook status messages (which I gleefully took part in), they are still here.

Hey Facebook, what gives?

Like most people, I was deeply disturbed and saddened by the story of Megan Meier, a Missouri teen who killed herself after the mother of a former friend used MySpace to perpetrate a cruel hoax.

The woman — 48 year-old Lori Drew — posed as a fictitious 16 year-old boy named Josh Evans on MySpace to gain Megan’s confidence. After six weeks of being the perfect e-boyfriend, “Josh” turned cruel. “His” last message to Megan:

Everybody in O’Fallon knows how you are. You are a bad person and everybody hates you. Have a shitty rest of your life. The world would be a better place without you.

Megan promptly ran upstairs to her room and hung herself with a belt. She died the next day.

As with other forms of adolescent cruelty, most people get over the effects of cyberbullying as they grow up. When I was in 7th grade, some girls in my class made a website all about how ugly I was. The worst part was that the parents of the girls in question did nothing to punish their daughters when my mother brought the website to their attention.

I was utterly humiliated, but I somehow managed to survive the experience, just as I survived the cruel notes in my yearbook and the attempts to flush my belongings down the toilet. I grew up and (mostly) moved on.

But this was before online social networks were a glimmer in anyone’s eye. I can only imagine how horrible it would have been if those same cruel girls and their idiot parents had been able to use MySpace for their ends. Social context accelerates everything: application and group adoption, the spread of news, and cyberbullies’ cruelty. It’s like pouring gasoline on a fire.

That said, I hope that people won’t rush to condemn MySpace for Megan’s tragic death.

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I had the pleasure to speak with Mari Smith, one of our Web Community Forum attendees, earlier today about some of the fun stuff she’s been doing in and out of Facebook for the past few months. Mari is a bright woman with a good grasp of how Facebook can really help your business, so it was interesting to hear what she had to say.

She’s been using a service called Podclass, which exists both on its own in the internet and as an app within Facebook, to help introduce people to Facebook by running a class called Facebook Fortunes. I was going to try and summarize the conversation for you, but I think it’s better if I let her explain what she’s doing herself.

Mari graciously offered me a copy of the conversation (did you know you can get a Skype number for people to call in to? I didn’t), which I’ve edited slightly so that you don’t have to hear me go “uhhhh” for fifteen minutes at a time.

In any case, enjoy.

 

 Conversation with Mari Smith [15:29m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In case you didn’t spot the news here, here, here, or here, I’ll repeat: Facebook is updating their status feature so that you can backspace through the “is” that’s always been inserted into the status, meaning that you can start adding other little joiner words after your name.

This is one of those little things that will make a bunch of people happy. Me? Well I’m keeping the is. Every single status update I’ve ever made has been “Jason is [insert random adjective].” Currently I think I am bendable.

It’s official from the LA Times: Zuckerberg has a “trademark” outfit:

On a recent afternoon, the Harvard dropout sat in a Facebook conference room, wearing his trademark uniform of hooded sweat shirt, jeans and Adidas flip-flops. His boyish face, framed by curly brown hair, lit up when he talked about Facebook’s potential to transform how people connect.

Hmmm, only Steve Jobs gets a trademark outfit! And yes, Jason, they are apparently drunk:

The deal may have positioned Facebook’s 23-year-old co-founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, to one day supplant Google co-founder Sergey Brin as the technology industry’s youngest self-made billionaire.

The article on the whole reads as a bit of a puff-piece, but for those people who aren’t familiar with Facebook as a business, how it got started, its size, and what the company culture may be like, there’s a lot of information in the article.

One of our speakers, Connie Bensen, wrote a post yesterday about some of the creative uses of social media that are popping up in various places.

There are restaurants now, like Papa Johns, that allow customers to text in an order. Not too shabby. And now there’s apparently a service called gomobo.com that facilitates this kind of text-message ordering for restaurants that choose to sign up for the service.

The ad campaign that Connie points to (”ask restaurants in your area to join gomobo”) reminds me a lot of the way that Facebook initially spread to other universities (”ask your administration to add support for thefacebook.com”). It seems to work well, at least for Facebook.

At the moment, it often feels like social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook are fairly disconnected from the “real world.” Why can’t we use Twitter to check the hours on a local store? Why can’t we use Facebook to check the price differences between the local Target and the local Best Buy?

These types of apps are already beginning to surface on Facebook, and it’s only a matter of time before these two worlds become more interconnected. I’m curious to see how that happens.

Demand for the Seattle forum has been so strong that our main conference space is now full. The good news is that we have reserved an adjacent second room where the audio and video streams from the main room will be piped in. All new conference registrations received will be badged for this second room.

I’m starting a new rule: if I get more than two bulk messages from a group in the space of a week, I’m leaving the group.

It seems like people are responding to e-mail less and less frequently these days, and it can become very tempting to start using that “message all members” feature in a Facebook group to ping a couple hundred people every time you have a new post or a new quiz or a new thread somewhere you want people to follow.

That’s a great trick for making sure the big stuff gets noticed, but it works because it is not yet over-used. Save it for the stuff that’s really interesting, or when you really need the input (like our topic tables poll).

Now that a business can create pages on Facebook, I think we should create a distinction between how pages and groups are used and approached. It’s not a functionality thing; it’s a hands-on-the-table sort of thing.

When I become a fan of a page in Facebook, I understand that one of the primary reasons the page exists is to promote someone’s brand, or idea, or product, or web page. I’m following them because I’m either interested in or willing to support whatever it is they’re promoting. I’m also giving them permission to put their brand in my newsfeed and to message me with relatively commercial “updates.”

No, that doesn’t mean they can or should spam me, but these messages go into a separate tab in my inbox (Updates), where I can keep them separate from my regular “messages.” I like this system. I want to encourage people to send their promotional updates to my updates tab and personal messages to my messages tab. I think that distinction is good to have.

I’ve been brainstorming some topic table ideas for lunch for Web Community Forum 2007. The results of my storming appear below.

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The top six topic tables — three each day — will happen at the conference. You can vote for up to six tables.

Or if there’s something awesome I’ve neglected to include, feel free to tear me a new one in the comments.

This time, the stats are form Nielsen Online. According to iMedia Connection and Fortune’s Bit Tech blog, Neilsen reports that LinkedIn is the fastest growing of the three social networks, although MySpace is still by far the biggest (and Facebook is the most swanky).

I ganked some of the data from Fortune, although there’s more data on their site about blog services:

Although, like a lot of other people, I’m starting to notice “social graphs” in all sorts of other places online, like AIM and E-mail. Of course those are networks - I’m connected to hundreds and hundreds of people through e-mail threads and Skype conversations. Why don’t we map those out?

Fred Wilson did some extremely rough guessing and came up with statistics for “networks” like Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail, which incidentally cream anything you see above:

Our buddy (and keynote speaker) Jeremiah Owyang is in Barcelona at the Forrester Consumer Forum, where he got to chat with Jay Stevens, VP of Operations for Myspace, and then shared “a few nuggets” from his presentation, most notably:

[Jay Stevens: “User told us that ‘I don’t want brands to advertise to me, I want them to be my friend”]

This is also the core concept behind Facebook’s new “advertising” efforts. Companies have pages that a user can befriend. It seems like MySpace is now (and maybe has been already, I don’t know), advocating for businesses to create profiles in MySpace and just become friends with users. Jay offers an example:

So how do you take advantage of these social networks? Build a network within a network. Create icons (content, images, logos) that will be dressing up users profiles. A few don’t matter as much, until thousands and then millions do this. An English tea brand called has 9500 friends in MySpace, they encouraged users to change their profile pictures to become a cute monkey icon.

Sounds like good advice that applies to all social networks.