January 2008

For those of you who don’t watch 60 minutes (probably most of you) and who haven’t spotted it already on Kara’s blog or Rodney’s blog (not very many of you), I’ve re-embedded the 12 minutes of 60 minutes that talks about the rise of Zuckerberg and Facebook.

I think the part of this that annoyed me the most was how she kept calling Facebook profiles “pages.”

I also disagree with Kara.

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Today’s Wall Street Journal article about using online social networks as market research tools glossed over an important feature of these tools: community. The only mention of community:

Many of their efforts have fallen flat, because people typically join a social-networking venue not to talk about brands but to socialize with friends…The companies that set them up have to constantly add games and other features — as well as provide incentives such as coupons, giveaways and sneak peeks at new products — to keep members around.

Whatever happened to just creating a community? Yes, giveaways and incentives are all well and good. But the most authentic way to get your audience to stick around is by offering them real connections with one another.

The article cites Del Monte Foods, the makers of Snausages. They used their closed “I Love My Dog” network to figure out what the new flavor for their breakfast bites should be.

If you want to build a network of dog owners to bounce your product ideas off of, focus on connecting them with one another. How about mashing up Google’s Maps API with the locations of all the public off-leash areas nationwide? Let dog lovers connect with others who use their dog parks and arrange playdates for their pooches. You won’t have to work so hard with the giveaways if the users create their own connections and reasons for returning.

The cardinal rule: be useful.

One of our favorite online communities is the group of gadget heads that gather at CES every year to blog and geek out. We love them so much that we throw them a party every year. Here’s some video footage of this year’s event:

Full coverage of the event can be found here. Special thanks to our sponsors:

We’re very excited to announce that our friends at Virgin America airlines will be handing out 80 free round trip tickets anywhere they fly. For you online community geeks, this might be interesting because of Virgin America’s nifty seat-to-seat communications tool.

So if you’re at CES and you’ll be around tomorrow night, drop my colleague Jason a line at jason [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com, include the URL of your blog and let him know that you’d like to join us.

Last night Facebook disabled Robert Scoble’s account for violating the terms of service. Specifically, they disabled it because they detected page view activity that was consistent with an automated script.

Scoble posted the actual e-mail that he got from Facebook, so you can read it if you’re curious.

For a lot of people, getting sandboxed by Facebook is really bad news for them. It might hurt their business. It might kill a lot of their social interaction. For Robert, getting sandboxed by Facebook is bad news for Facebook, because that big fat elephant that was lurking in the back of their office—you know, the one about who owns your contacts?—has now been dramatically pushed to the forefront of the discussion.

Guess what: you don’t own the contacts you have in Facebook. You can’t take them with you.

Robert was disabled for using a beta Plaxo Pulse feature that pulls your contact data from Facebook and links it up with your Outlook. Which is, stupidly, against the Facebook Terms of Service.

Robert’s planning to do a live broadcast today at 2pm (pacific) to answer all sorts of questions about Facebook and Plaxo. I’m also looking forward to picking his brain at our CES party next week

The bottom line is, everything goes in to Facebook, and nothing comes out. It is a black hole. Which is dumb, because Facebook is based on your input. There are only a few things where, if I put stuff in, I never expect to get them back out. The stock market, for example. (Oh, Zing!)

On Twitter, Andru Edwards, Teresa, myself, and others are having a cool discussion about the validity of Facebook’s ToS. Worth following (start from the bottom):

dbrowell @TeteSagehen , IMHO, I feel that I should b in control of my privacy, not Scobel; not FB either, which is why Beacon made people mad, right? 7 minutes ago from web in reply to TeteSagehen

AndruEdwards Facebook has a TOS. If you agree to it, use it. If you don’t agree, then don’t use it. It’s that simple! Don’t agree and then break it. 10 minutes ago from twitterrific

AndruEdwards @jasonp107 - so that you can contact me off of facebook, not so you can scrape all my facebook data out of it. 11 minutes ago from twitterrific in reply to jasonp107

jasonp107 @AndruEdwards then why do you list your e-mail address in FB? That’s a totally external piece of information… less than 10 seconds ago from web in reply to AndruEdwards

AndruEdwards @jasonp107 - yes, you get what info i provide ON and WITHIN Facebook. That is what i agreed to. 5 minutes ago from twitterrific in reply to jasonp107

jasonp107 @AndruEdwards I get your point on privacy, but I feel like friending on FB = you get whatever contact info I provide 7 minutes ago from Snitter in reply to AndruEdwards

AndruEdwards @TeteSagehen - it was his data he wanted. it was his friends data. I didnt agree to that when i joined facebook. 17 minutes ago from twitterrific in reply to TeteSagehen

AndruEdwards @TeteSagehen - it’s not lame to block someone who violates TOS! 20 minutes ago from twitterrific in reply to TeteSagehen

trishussey @TeteSagehen but there are ways to do it w/o breaking the TOS http://urltea.com/2gpp -would you want FB to allow screenscraping for info? 22 minutes ago from twhirl in reply to TeteSagehen

TeteSagehen But really, it’s just that their TOS is shortsighted. If they claim a monopoly on my relationships, it makes me less likely to use the site. 25 minutes ago from twitterrific

TeteSagehen @trishussey and @jspepper it’s DUMB that they won’t let you suck things out of Facebook. Other sites do. Also, he’s Robert *effing* Scoble. 26 minutes ago from twitterrific in reply to trishussey

trishussey @TeteSagehen is it though? He did break the TOS. Plaxo is complicit, IMHO. Maybe it should be lesson for all of us. We can’t break the rules 30 minutes ago from twhirl in reply to TeteSagehen

TeteSagehen Facebook is going to be royally fucked if they don’t let @scobleizer back on the site. INCREDIBLY lame that they blocked him. 44 minutes ago from twitterrific

[ Update: Scoble's FB profile just came back online ]