Tools

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about platforms and services as platforms. The recent strategy trend in start up companies seems to be: become a platform.

That’s what Twitter is doing, that’s what Facebook and every other social network is doing. You build an infrastructure and an API and you invite people to play on your system.

But the one thing to remember is that the web is the ultimate platform.

I keep seeing the exodus of Facebook features, one by one, to the native web. Twitter is enhanced, open, archive-able “status updates.” FriendFeed is trying to co-opt the News Feed (what I give credit for popularizing the idea of the lifestream) and bring it out onto the open web. In many ways it is succeeding.

I think it’s inevitable that online community is going to end up as a disparate set of open services that work together instead of a closed system (Facebook) that offers all services.

The future of social networking is that everyone has:

• a blog (profile + notes)
• FriendFeed (news feed)
• Twitter (status)
• flickR (photos)
• del.icio.us or Google (shared items)
• etc., etc.

The smart way to go about “building a platform” is not to build something on top the web that traps users and developers, but to build something within the web so that it connects with everything that’s already available.

What’s the difference?

Facebook sits on top of the web, and it relies on its users and its developers to be content with only a base level of interaction with the greater web. When you build a Facebook application, you’re building a Facebook application, not a web application.

It’s the difference between wearing a Starship Troopers exoskeleton and working out. The exoskeleton is really cool looking, polished, and lets you plug in all kinds of gears and gizmos. But you’re not actually any stronger than you were. And your muscles aren’t really connected to it, even though it’s responding to your push.

I love how people keep coming up with ways to use Twitter’s API to build really cool services based on the integration between the web and SMS.

Case in point: today I discovered that TrackThis lets people track their shipments via direct message on Twitter. The process is simple. You follow TrackThis (and they follow you back), then you send them a direct message with your tracking number and the name you want attached to it.

So it looks like this:

d trackthis 8269038620386 my sweet new computer

And then TrackThis sends you a direct message every time your package changes location. Sweet.

Of course, I am also fundamentally a lazy person, which is probably why this particular idea appeals to me. I found out about it here.

Facebook’s long-anticipated tabbed profile layout will contain room for individual application tabs, says Inside Facebook blogger Justin Smith. Under the new system, users will be able to create a special profile section for their favorite application. This will give application developers an unprecedented amount of real estate on the Facebook profile to display user data.

It’s become common wisdom at this point that display or “showoff” apps don’t do well on Facebook. Users aren’t there to stare at one another’s profiles. Not when there’s so much else going on. MySpace users are more apt to show off.

But with the increased customizability of the profile, this may change somewhat. Users will still be selective about what applications they choose to enable in this way, but I predict that applications that allow users to enhance their personal brand via the profile in dynamic, interesting and highly customizable ways will experience a bump in user engagement and adoption. After all, nothing could be a better endorsement of your application than a user creating a special tab for it on their profile.

Without any hard data about how this phenomenon will play out, the only thing to do is engage in wild speculation — my favorite pastime. Here goes: [click to continue...]

Longtime users of the Facebook platform have seen how applications from popular web services like Twitter can add tremendous value to the News Feed and Mini Feed features. In fact, one could argue that News Feed was the inspiration for lifestreaming tools like Tumblr and FriendFeed.

Now, it appears that the inspiration flows two ways. Facebook announced today that they would begin allowing users to import Mini Feed stories from Flickr, Picasa, Yelp and del.icio.us.

To use the new service, go to your profile and look at the Mini Feed section. Look for the new “import” link at the top, right corner of the Mini Feed profile box. Then, follow the instructions to import your activity into Facebook.  No word on how soon users will be able to import other activity, but other promised services include Digg.

I wonder how fast these updates will become a part of the site, and whether MySpace profile updates and other information will be included in the lifestream.

Also, why is Facebook announcing a feature associated with the Feed when the main feature is clearly broken at the moment? I wonder if this feature addition is the culprit for the massive News Feed slowdown.

About a month ago, I posted a strategy for conversation monitoring by following the attention streams of the influencers in your space. Facebook and Twitter are a couple of my favorite tools for doing this.

One of the downsides of Twitter is that its straightforwardness makes it difficult to see who your friends know and figure out who else you might want to be paying attention to. You have to actually stay on top of who people are having conversations with if you want to be a full participant in the community.

Enter Twubble, which interfaces with the Twitter API and tells you who your friends are following. If enough of your friends are following someone, chances are that you might want to follow them, as well.

[Via Rodney Rumford.]

Apparently the anti-spam account-disabling features at Facebook are just as inconsistent as their privacy features. This popped up on my screen while I was reading my FB messages this morning:

Anyone else being threatened for reading messages?

Google is scheduled to make a big announcement tonight and TechCrunch is speculating that it’s related to BigTable — which could be used to enable a scalability solution that competes significantly with Amazon. This comes on the heels of unscheduled downtime for both Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services.

I talked to Emmett Shear, CTO of popular lifecasting service Justin.tv. They use EC2 to handle overflow during peak demand times for their site. He told me that Google would have to significantly undercut Amazon to justify his relocation expense, even with the recent outages.

TechCrunch says that the main competitive factors will be downtime and price, but I’ll add ease of use to that. If Google builds in an application like Scalr that comes standard with its system — or modifies and bundles the open source Scalr with its product — that would be enough to make me take a serious look at Google’s services over Amazon’s.

Update: Here’s what Google announced. This is an Amazon competitor in some ways and not in others. As Mashable put it, the big winner in all of this is Google - and the Python community.

Rodney Rumford’s tweet this morning sent me over to an article at CIO magazine about the business value of Twitter.

I think the best takeaway is actually from a commenter:

The Business Value of Twitter said great things about Twitter but failed to point out that much functionality has been built around Twitter. My favorite example is the American Red Cross, known on Twitter as @RedCross. The Red Cross has created a way for friends and family to become reunited after disaster all by the cell phone and Twitter. Twitter goes beyond connections and really extends beyond the question “What are you doing?” Twitter is instant knowledge.

I think the business value of twitter is tied directly to the API. Like almost everything making waves in social media, Twitter is an infrastructure technology.

It’s like running power lines; now you can build there. That’s the business value.

Widget marketing is a relatively new strategy, one that many mainstream businesses are conservative about attempting for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is scalability.

Obviously, the biggest concern for anyone building a widget marketing campaign is to get the widget into circulation and widely used. But what if you do your job too well? What if your widget takes off too fast for your servers to keep up?

Scalability issues have stymied many a tech-heavy marketing initiative. One example is the Snakes on a Plane campaign that enabled users to send a custom phone call to friends using pre-recorded statements from Samuel L. Jackson. They underestimated demand, and the lousy execution became as much a part of the story as the messaging was.

This is of particular concern in organizations whose primary function is not building and scaling Web-deployed tools.

The recently open-sourced Scalr makes scaling innovative online marketing initiatives just a little bit easier. Scalr is a super-smart framework for managing the different resources provided by Amazon’s “Elastic Computing Cloud”  (a.k.a. EC2) service. In normal-speak, this means that Scalr can automatically determine what kind of resources are needed based on the demand for your widget and then get them from Amazon when you need them — and only when you need them — without human intervention.

If you’re looking into widget deployment as a marketing strategy, this might be a good tool to keep in mind as you move into the scalability and infrastructure phase of your planning.

It’s pretty hard to screw up in social media if you’re being honest. As long as you’re upfront about what you’re trying to accomplish, ask permission to engage with people, and generally act like you would act in person, you’re going to be OK.

Which is why I’m always surprised at the number of people who decide that bad ideas are good ideas.

All Facebook wrote about fake application reviews yesterday, and how they’re effectively screwing up the system:

Duncan Riley wrote a post earlier today about Slide posting fake positive reviews on their own application. This has become a standard practice nowadays by companies. This problem happens time and time again when you set up any sort of review system. Even on this blog, I have application reviews. It’s pretty obvious who’s voting when immediately after I post an application review and there are suddenly 5 perfect reviews within minutes.

Here’s the thing about fake reviews: they’re deceitful.

We (noisy, blogging) consumers don’t want to be deceived.* And it makes us angry when we see companies trying to pull a fast one on us.

Every time this happens, a little bit of trust in the medium goes away. Right now, social media has this great, wonderful, high level of trust and personal contact because as a whole people are being very genuine. Let’s not waste it.

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* Outside of, say, a magic show.

I see people becoming increasingly worried about monetizing social networks. Case in point: Nick O’Neill’s post on the Social Times this morning.

It reminded me of Battelle’s post from a few days ago that I started chewing on yesterday. I still think that the best way to look at social media monetization is to see it as a vehicle for promoting your business. Trying to build at profitable business based entirely in social media is, for now, an extremely difficult task.

But if you must try, I think that focusing on building your brand is the best way to do it. Engagement, as an undefined metric, is the most important thing you can generate.

For all you developers out there who’ve seen the insides and outsides of the Facebook developers site so many times that you might as well live there, you now have a chance to tell Facebook…everything about you as a developer.

Pete Bratach posted on the developers blog about a half an hour ago asking for feedback about their developers site through this survey. The survey asks such self-critical questions as:

• Are you profitable on the platform?, and
• If yes, how much revenue are you generating per month?

OK, OK, to be fair, they do spend about half the survey asking you to rate, on a scale of 1-3-5, different aspects of their platform. And there’s a field where you can offer yourself for an interview.

So if you’ve got feedback to give, hop on over to the google doc and fill ‘er out.

Thanks to Tim Reha, I had the good fortune last year to attend the excellent Future in Review conference in San Diego and have just now signed up for the 2008 event.

Mark Anderson is the impresario who hosts the conference and is the CEO of the Strategic News Service (SNS).

Unlike other “future” oriented events and newsletters, Mark focuses his attention on the view of the technology industry over the next 3-5 years. This emphasis on the near- and mid-term future applies IMHO better to those looking to make real-world investment decisions. This also may be why his prediction accuracy is considered to be unusually high.

Speaking of investments, Mark posted recently about Social networking sites and monetization at the Industry Standard site and his conclusion is that “…early projections by News Corp., Google, MySpace and Facebook are way too optimistic in online ad revenue estimations.”

While I think the current valuation of Facebook will prove to be on the high side, I don’t think that the advertising model is off the mark.

Anderson says that one lesson to be learned from the Facebook Beacon fiasco is that advertising on privacy-sensitive sites is “inappropriate” and that users will “revolt.”

I certainly agree that further invasive approaches like Beacon could lead to a revolt, but passive approaches have their place. Google users certainly don’t mind (and often value!) related ads appearing next to search results. Beacon was more akin to Google notifying friends about your recent searches.

I logged into Facebook this morning to the usual flurry of messages, notifications, pokes and friend requests. As I was responding to each point of contact, I noticed a couple of distinctly weird new behaviors.

First, in my notifications, I was told that someone by the name of Derek had joined Facebook and that I should friend him.

I have no idea who this Derek character is, so it came as a surprise to me that Facebook would want me to friend him. I assume this is part of Facebook’s new friend recommendation feature.

The feature is cool in theory, but it needs to be dialed down in its intrusiveness in practice. I really don’t want to get pinged with new potential friends. I want to go through the list of recommended friends at my leisure and decide who I might want to connect with the way Linkedin does it.

If this is indeed part of the new feature, then it’s really news to me. Facebook shouldn’t just unilaterally launch features that fundamentally change user interactions with the site, say by notifying them about something they’re not used to getting notified by, without discussing it with the user base first.

Obviously, this isn’t as big a deal as the News Feed or Beacon being unilaterally thrust upon users, but at this point — given all the information that comes flying at my head every time I log into FB — it’s just as annoying.

After screen-shotting the offending friend notification, I went about dealing with the rest of my inputs. When I got to the pokes, I noticed that a strange man — someone I do not know and am not friends with on the site — had poked me. This is odd because, as you can clearly see below, I have disabled the function that lets non-friends poke me.

I don’t know how this fool was able to poke me, but I don’t like it. It doesn’t matter how young and hip you are, a random uninvited poke from a guy you don’t know is just plain creepy.

Update: Apparently, despite having my privacy settings tuned to disallow poking in search results, the poke option is still showing up in my search listing. My friend and colleague Ellen Petry Leanse was kind enough to send me these screenshots of how my search listing looks:

and how it should look: