Archive for the 'Facebook' Tag

All of the opinions below are mine and only mine.

On top of everything else happening in the social space (Google Buzz, everyone leaving MySpace, Facebook changes), this happens: Facebook Patents The Newsfeed. You can read the full copy of the patent here.

Now before we all have a “What the hell moment,” here are a few things to remember:

Some patents are virtually unenforceable.

Various companies have patented the shopping cart, the GIF image, the one-click purchase and the affiliate program. The one-click purchase made Jeff Bezos look like a fool for a while, especially after they went after Barnes and Noble.

If you haven’t noticed, none of the above are really enforced except for the GIF image patent, which there’s “sometimes” a $5,000 licensing fee. Unisys at one point threatened to go after every website that had a GIF image somewhere on the site.

That was popular.

A few patents, like the one-click purchase and the affiliate program, have given rise to protests and eventual defeat of a lot of the claims Amazon had over the business process. Most of those patents are violated every second of the day because they are ubiquitous and so mainstream there’s no way to enforce them.

Some patents are more for defense against large competitors.

While it doesn’t make sense for Facebook to sue everyone, I’m sure they’re thinking about what they can bring up against Google, MySpace and a few other large properties with a newsfeed.

Other places are probably thinking about how to re-architect their solutions now to avoid any patent infringement. That said, if you’re running a site that isn’t one of the top 1,000, I don’t think Facebook is going to be sending a lawyer your way anytime soon.

Some patents are for getting money out of people and for increasing market value.

One of the few points people forget about Google is that the concept of AdWords wasn’t invented by them. It was patented by GoTo.com. I’ll admit that Google does it much better than GoTo/Overture ever did, but it was enough of a threat that Google eventually settled with Yahoo!, who had purchased Overture.

The lawsuit against Google related to its AdWords service. In February 2002, Google introduced a service called AdWords Select that allowed marketers to bid for higher placement in marked sections – a tactic that had some similarities to Overture’s search-listing auctions.

Following Yahoo!’s acquisition of Overture, the lawsuit was settled with Google agreeing to issue 2.7 million shares of common stock to Yahoo! in exchange for a perpetual license.

That patent was probably one of the reasons why Yahoo purchased Overture. There are holding companies whose purpose is to hold patents. However, they are selective about who they sue because lawyers are expensive. It’s an ROI equation, and there’s no point going after someone without money, right?

GigaOM says:

Friendster, which was recently bought by a Malaysian company, made much of the fact that had obtained five U.S. social networking patents, at times using the patents to scare off the competition, at least in the press.

Scary.

Some patents are declared invalid.

The U.S. Patent Office grants a lot of patents. It doesn’t necessarily mean they will stand up in court. Gibson Guitars has been on a rampage, suing anyone that produces music simulation software like Guitar Hero. Read more here.

They have yet to win.

What would happen if Facebook went after MySpace in court, and the patent was declared invalid?

What if a single social network invented before Facebook had the same implementation, and Facebook was in violation of the intellectual property of that website? Would that company win $500 million like when Microsoft was sued over the browser plug-in?

GigaOM points out:

The patent is particularly valuable because news-feed style communication has become pervasive since it was launched on Facebook. However, it’s not clear that there aren’t precedents for the technology; for instance, the social network Multiply.com had a similar interface for keeping track of friends’ actions before Facebook launched its own.

Mutliply.com suing Facebook? That would be fun.

What next?

As big as a deal as this may seem, it isn’t until they do something with it. For now, it’s just another asset they have in the universe of Social Media.

Google guesses who your friends are, including your mistress that your wife doesn’t know about – and then shows everyone.

This is such an inexact science, because anyone can figure out your email address. We receive so much spam and other garbage through email accounts (is a shopping site really my friend?) and there are conversations you want private. Those connections are now public by default, as Gizmodo points out:

• A girl you slept with in college sends you a message on Gchat, to tell you she has five beautiful children now, and she doesn’t ever think about you, ever. Ok!
• You exchange some messages and a couple of emails to be polite. You defuse the situation. You don’t mention it to your current girlfriend, because that would be weird.
• Coincidentally, you enable Google Buzz, which adds both your current girlfriend and this lady who you politely deflected.
• Your girlfriend checks out your Google profile, sees your friends list and asks you who that lady is.
• You clumsily try to explain, “Oh, it just adds people you talk to automatically,” which only makes things worse.
• Fight!
• You break up, which was probably a good thing anyway, because your relationship sounded really unhealthy. But you get the point, right?

The situation is so bad, some sites, like Lifehacker, are showing ways to turn off the contact list. Think about it, do you want every telemarketer to be your friend? Facebook has one important filter: you can deny friend requests.

It’s never, ever a good idea to create a social graph the way Google did. That’s why most of the IM clients do the double opt-in approach. The follower model is killing Twitter.

Google Buzz reinforces the power law online, which means you’ll get to see 100 photos of Jason Calacanis’s dog or promoting how he pays more than some services, but less than About.com for content

The people you want to talk to automatically become long-tail, yet the people who are endlessly self promoting always bubble to the top because they have 11,000 followers. Someone’s always going to make a comment.

Social Customer points out Buzz does two things that will simply make it unusable.

1. It shows threaded conversations and strongly highlights the initiator of those conversations and makes the comments subservient to the initial post.
2. It takes posts that have “new” comments and immediately bumps those posts to the topmost position of the viewing window.

This interface will greatly reinforce the existing power law relationships online and have the effect of greatly reducing the serendipity and interest in things like the current Twitter and Facebook interfaces.

Not that many people use Gmail and most who do are the digerati.

From twittercism:

This is also the first time I’ve noticed how few of my friends actually use Gmail. I love Gmail and recommend it to everybody, but people are often quite set in their ways and prefer to stay with Hotmail or Yahoo, irrespective of the lack of features. Looking at my address book, I’m guessing probably less than 20% of my friends have a Gmail address or even a Google account, for that matter.

Yeah, it’s mad, but it also means Buzz is already limiting my network.

Social networking is an all or nothing game; and if you only have 20 percent of your friends, do you really think the other 50 percent or so are going to create a Gmail account to see Google Buzz?

I think not.

What’s the take away? Not ready for primetime.

I agree with twittercism:

My gut feeling? Unless they make some major changes and improvements to Buzz soon, and that includes addressing those privacy issues, it’s never going to be a threat to Twitter or Facebook. It’s just another aggregator, and a bad one at that.

Everyone sees Facebook as the center of their social graph. They also see Google as the place that wants your information, which is why people won’t trust them with their social graph.

What do you think?

From the Washington Post:

Tomek Kott is so stubborn about not joining his friends — in truth, nearly his entire generation — on any social networking site that his wife launched a mini-crusade against him. Exploiting a tactic surely befitting our times, she whipped up a Facebook group last year called “Tomek Kott Must Join Facebook.”

…

“I am old-school in the personal touch way,” said Tomek Kott, who lives in Silver Spring and has outsourced many of his digital communication duties to his wife, Anne. “All my friends from high school have also met my wife, and they’re friends with her; my wife ‘friended’ them or whatever it’s called.”

Kott and others like him are social networking refuseniks: people in their 20s or early 30s who have gone off the grid, eschewing the ecology of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and the like. In Washington, refuseniks are not exactly operating in isolated, Luddite worlds: One is in a dance company, another is a rapper/hip-hop singer, another is a Georgetown undergraduate. Kott grew up in Redmond, Wash., where his father is a software engineer for Microsoft.

…

The vast majority of their peers in the millennial generation are social networking pros: About 85 percent of all Internet users 18 to 34 visited Facebook, MySpace or Twitter in August, according to ComScore, a Reston-based Internet data research company. And about 84 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds check social networking sites at least once a week, according to a May study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

I find that 85 percent number to be extremely high. Whatever it is, I would think that there’s a few people out there that say they check the sites, but don’t really do because they want to be in the “in crowd.”

I’ve been playing a bit with a BuddyPress installation, the new social networking application for WordPress. It requires WordPress MU as the platform. I really like it — it’s like they say, the basic features of Facebook in a box, plus you get to add blogs and other functionality that some sites don’t have.

BuddyPress is an uber-set of WordPress Plugins that add a lot of structure and functionality to WordPress, but even with that, the installation isn’t as tough as you would think.

The pluses

• Social networking: You can add friends, create groups, create blogs — all the actions you would expect in any social network, including emails that will be sent out during particular actions. It’s all open source too, so you have complete access to the code base to customize it, and believe me, you can customize WordPress a lot.
  
• Customizable profiles: While there’s some wonkyness to adding fields to profiles (you can’t order them), adding them is a snap. I have no idea how you would actually search the fields in an advanced search sort of way — looking at the database, it didn’t appear to be very easy — but the amount of customization you can do and the easy of use to do it is ridculous.
• WordPress Plug Ins: You get full access to the thousands of plug ins that have been developed for WordPress, including the BBPress discussion forum, which plugs right in the to the groups.
• Your server, you own it: While Ning is a great solution (I’ve seen some awesome implementations) at the end of the day if you’re a business, it’s best to have it on your box so you are less suspectible to the platform. BuddyPress is that.

The minuses

• Installation: It’s on WordPress MU, so moving it over from your standard WordPress installation isn’t as easy as you would hope (well, it’s not for the normal WordPress user). There was some database installation funkiness that a few extra minutes in PHP would have solved in handling errors better. Outside of having to delete the WordPress configuation file a few times, the installation was fairly run of the mill.
• Designing The UI: With the extra funcitonality comes the extra overhead of designing a look and feel for the application. While the first theme is great — I used some of the examples to solve design issues with a marketing directory I’m working on — there is a significant amount of work that has to be done that’s well outside of the “well, it’s WordPress, I can pay only $500 to design in” comments by clients. It is Facebook in a box, and should be treated as such for complexity, and I can imagine spending a month at least designing a decent social netowkr.
• WordPress Plug Ins: Not all of them will work well with WordPress MU, so the predictability of what works and what doesn’t is trial and error. You’re going to have to live with the caution of “well, this may work, but it will be an adventure” on some of the plug ins.
• Performance: It seemed a bit sluggish, and if you are running a social network of any size, I recommend having it on a dedicated server. Some of the plug ins haven’t been tuned yet, so there is a lag. Remember, it’s version 1.0.

From Inside Facebook as summarized from The Economist:

The average male Facebook user with 120 friends:

• Leaves comments on 7 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
• Messages or chats with 4 friends

The average female Facebook user with 120 friends:

• Leaves comments on 10 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
• Messages or chats with 6 friends

The average male Facebook user with 500 friends:

• Leaves comments on 17 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
• Messages or chats with 10 friends

The average female Facebook user with 500 friends:

• Leaves comments on 26 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
• Messages or chats with 16 friends

In other words, Facebook users comment on stuff from only about 5-10% of their Facebook friends. And as has been shown by many other studies, women communicate with more people in all cases than men.

This is the takeaway, and it’s very true:

His findings: while many people have hundreds friends on Facebook, they still only communicate with a small few. Or to quote the author of the article, “Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever.”

I’m going to pick a fight.

Consumerist’s user agreement:

Except as otherwise set forth in this User Agreement, by transmitting any public Communication to the Site, you grant Consumer Media an irrevocable, non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, unrestricted, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, reproduce, distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, modify, edit, create derivative works from, incorporate into one or more compilations and reproduce and distribute such compilations, and otherwise exploit such Communications, in all media now known or later developed. You warrant that you have the right to grant these rights to Consumer Media and that you will not post any content that infringes or violates any proprietary, privacy or publicity, or other rights of any party or that violates any law. You hereby waive all rights generally known as “moral rights” in your Communications to the extent they can be waived, under any existing or future law of any jurisdiction.

Facebook’s user agreement:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

They look awfully similar. Or, famous white trash proverb:

If you live in a glass house, don’t throw stones.

One of the reasons I love the web is because it repeats the same story lines, over and over again. For example, here’s a story that came out, and I’m removing references to the social network in question for your own humor:

Today, [insert your favorite social media network here] changed the terms of service, much to the protests of the users who use the service for free. The revision grants [insert your favorite social media network here] complete, perpetual ownership of content uploaded or added to [insert your favorite social media network here] — including the rights to sublicense said content.

[insert your favorite social media network here] Terms of Use previously stated that material uploaded onto the site falls under the license of the company. Prior to the update, however, users that removed their content from [insert your favorite social media network here] legally forfeited its license to their material, though the socnet reserved the right to maintain archives.

The users invaded the blogosphere, stating their disagreement to the new policy.

[insert mad blogger here who uses said social network] said, “Yo, this sucks. I’m not paying for the service, but they shouldn’t be able to do that with my content stored on their servers. I’m going to cancel my account and blog about it. They suck.”

Blah blah blah, blah blah, blah.

Back to the real world, folks.

A lot of this terms of service is realistically about as enforceable as a non-compete agreement in California (and for those of you that don’t know, non-competes in California are so limited, you’re better off setting it on fire than trying to enforce it). Lawyers are supposed to overreach, it’s in their blood. That’s how they compromise. Until this document is challenged, it doesn’t mean much, anyways.

I would have loved to be in the office of those lawyers:

“Hey, I think we missed a few things in that terms of service,” said Facebook lawyer one. “Should we add a couple of lines?”

“How about we own them forever? What do you think? How much will page views go up?” Said Facebook lawyer two.

It’s kind of like driving down the highway: there are tons of laws that could be invoked if you are even doing the speed limit, but common sense says the cops can’t pull over everyone, and even if they do pull you over, there’s a good chance the case will get thrown out of court because most courts operate on some level of common sense.

Lawyers do all kinds of things that bend the law as far as it will before it breaks, from working at a company to constructing terms of service. Their job is to always protect their client. Facebook’s lawyers are protecting theirs.

I’ve been doing this for too long to realize what they are doing, and I’m like a lot of other bloggers (Greg Bussmann, Wet Asphalt, Art Fag City, TechCrunch): not really that worried. This seems more to be a few blogs looking to get some traffic (and I’ll take all the traffic I can get).

In fact, I see this as more of an attempt for Consumerist to justify it’s Alexa Ranking than real news. How about looking into the data collection issues of retailers in the United States, yo.

Here’s a few truths about social networks and their terms of service:

Facebook would be crazy to license the materials

Hypothetical: let’s say Andy Warhol rises from the dead and posts one of his famous Campbell Soup prints to Facebook. Do you really think they would sell the print on eBay? Hell, no. That part is virtually unenforceable from both a legal and a realistic standpoint. There’s a story over at the New York Times where the artist that designed the Obama artwork is getting sued by Associated Press. No matter what companies think, there are laws protecting people’s copyrights.

Companies put all kinds of crazy statements in the terms of service — stuff up unto giving up rights to your first born — but it doesn’t mean it’s some kind of legal document that’s going to stand up in court. If there’s a lawsuit, judges and juries tend to side with the law or common sense, which ever comes first. What it really means is that all aggregate data Facebook puts together they can sell as market research, but they aren’t going to sell your photos.

Your supermarket and credit card companies probably collect more information on you when you use your card than Facebook can. And the reality is that Facebook and MySpace collect so much information, there’s physically no way to digest it all at the level that it would endanger your privacy (I’ve even been told as much by some of the network engineers that work at the companies).

And for public relations purposes, Facebook would go out of it’s way to contact and/or compensate you, to avoid backlash. Even if they did use your likeness in an advertisements, they would probably contact you first. There’s case law around this. Please, be informed.

Removing content damages the landscape of any social network

I used to run a message board ages ago (ages being early 2000, but consider internet dog years and the grey hair in my goatee), and the most difficult issue was dealing with users we had to ban (and we had to ban a few of them). They would stand upon their soapbox and say nasty stuff, and then I would get a phone call at 3 a.m. along the lines of, “This person said this, you have to take it off the board. Waaa!!!!”

No matter where you are at, stuff you put on the web is up there forever, as Chris Brogan points out.

Social networks are a functioning ecosystem akin to weather’s butterfly effect: what happens in one place on the system and it’s resulting effects tends to magnify across the entire network. There were particular people that, looking back, I wish we hadn’t banned. even if they were horrible people and killed cats, because the outrage wasn’t worth the trouble. The reality is that sometimes responding to the issue is worse than the issue itself. Seriously, in a message board, how do you delete replies to a nasty post? Some of those threads went on for over 100 replies.

What Facebook is really trying to do is this: let’s say they put part of the service behind a subscription wall. With this new agreement, they can charge subscriptions and not have to worry about paying customers for their content. Imagine if customers decided, “Yo, I don’t want my content anymore?” What an awful mess that would be, programatically. And again, one of the undecided issues of the digital era is, who does own that content?

You aren’t paying for the service, Facebook, or better yet, their advertisers are

Rule number one about online services: they aren’t charities. They’re there to make money, and if you forget that nothing is really for free, it’s all about the library, the candlestick, and the butler. Get a clue.

On a few of the social networks I’m on, when something happens that the users don’t like, the users stand upon the mountains with their ten commandments, shouting at how awful the service is, even though they aren’t footing the bill. “The moderators are Hilteresque,” they rant. “Something should be done,” they howl.

I’ve footed the bill for some awful users that bordered on needing psychiatric treatment. I’m going to challenge every single blogger to do this: if you don’t like it, start your own damn service.

Whomever the founders are, whether it be the MySpace gang or Mark Zuckerberg, or your mom, they’re the one’s that put in their own sweat to start something that has millions of users. Sometimes, they have to make unpopular decisions, knowing some blogger somewhere (like me, for example) is going to say something about it. If they make too many unpopular decisions, they lose customers (read, Friendster). But they are running a business, and sometimes forcing a new set of requirements, whether it be new user experience or a reworded terms of service.

Millions of people might gripe a bit, but move on with their lives.

Some people start groups. Others blog about it. Very few actually do anything about it of any note.

It’s good business to lose a particular set of customers

The realities of business is that some policies (like bandwidth throttling by Comcast, for example) may not be popular with a particular set of users, but a) those users are not only a pain in the ass but are also unprofitable, and b) those users compromise less than one percent of the user base, yet probably eat up about 10 to 20 percent of the resources.

The same is true of marketers that use MySpace and Facebook, considering that most of the people that make money off the services aren’t employed by the services: they eat a considerable amount of resources, and of course Facebook would want to limit them.

Businesses do this all the time: they make changes to their business model or the groups they employ so they feel they can be more profitable. This includes from changing of policies to laying off workers. It doesn’t mean it’s right, but it’s just part of business.

This is a rant, pretty much, but will be a continuing discussion about how the social media platforms are evolving, and the key differences.

This is a pretty new blog, so I don’t get a lot of comments, other than, “hey, I agree with you!” My writing style doesn’t lend itself well to controversy — I usually come off as very matter of fact — so I get readers, but not discussion.

That’s really true for the vast majority of websites.

A very small minority of people control the content on sites like Digg (Social Blade tracks it), and Coding Horror has an article about how less than 1000 people contribute the content on Wikipedia. I ran a message board back in the day, and less than 100 people contributed to a message area that was getting close to two million page views a month. Just under .2 percent of You Tube visitors actually put up videos, and the trend goes on and on.

It’s really about being an active contributors: very few of us are in the world are truly active, and the majority of traffic on MySpace isn’t people posting to their profiles, but users who have joined to have a really basic account there browsing through photo after photo. The user may comment occasionally, but for the most part, it’s really just about seeing what other people have done.

The perception of passive versus active is very important in User Generated Content: for sites like Yelp.com and MySpace, they don’t exist if there isn’t an active community, but the distribution of contribution for all these sites has a definate long tail result in graphs (a few people generate most of the content).

Some of the sites, like Yelp, have turned a lot of views into contributors in a way that other sites haven’t by essentially creating hundreds of Yelps, all locally based. Yelp events happen all over the country, and they have generated a sense of community among it’s users that Facebook has to a certain extent, but MySpace hasn’t except for music and entertainment event.You can go to Yelp events, and meet the people behind the reviews. Locally, there is a certain set of people that contributes much more than the rest of the audience, so they are essentially the super connectors, the people for whom if they didn’t contribute, the community didn’t exist.

With Facebook, you tend to stay within your own social circle, so the same effect happens, even if you don’t meet the other people on a regular basis. There are events, but more often than not, there’s a disconnect between the virtual and the physical world because the status messages are from people in other parts in the country versus someone reviewing the dry cleaner down the street.

There will be more thoughts on this. Please stay tuned.

Now, I’m not under 30, thank god, but this article came across the RSS wire. The original review was written by Richard Bernstein, a New York Times book critic and columnist at the International Herald Tribune. The article in question was about Mark Bauerlein’s new book, “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30).”

I’m going to add my opinion under each snippet.

“The great thing about the Internet is that it gives everybody an opinion and a venue to express it,” Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, said in a recent phone conversation. “The bad thing about it is that it gives a venue to everybody with an opinion.

“But one of the signs of maturity is to realize that 99 percent of the stuff that happens to you every day has absolutely no significance to anybody else.”

Sure. But these are conversations I have every day with my friends, my parents. At least they are polite enough to just nod their heads and agree.

There are statistics to point to in this regard. A survey by the National School Boards Association indicates a very large number of students spending around nine hours a week doing computerized social networking and another 10 hours watching television. Other surveys show a majority of high school students doing an hour or less of written homework a day.

There are lies, more lies, and damn statistics. I watch much less television than my parents. How come no one reports on that?

That’s a school problem. If the teachers aren’t giving out enough homework, then something’s wrong with the system. For that matter, there’s always been uneducated masses, and somehow there’s this assumption that everyone should be able to write like Nathaniel Hawthorne. That’s entirely not something I’m not interested in on any medium.

And then there’s Facebook and the other social networking devices that were created for young people – specifically at college campuses as a way for new students to be introduced to their communities – and have been adopted by older ones to do exactly what their children spend too much time doing.

Language changes. People’s habits change. Networking changes.

Just because older people adopt it doesn’t make it bad: it just means the product management group of that site understands target audiences.

Some of us use the Facebooks, LinkedIns and MySpaces of the world for more than just reporting, “I think I’m going to eat corn flakes this morning” (which is close to the message I had for my activities for the day). It’s a way of connecting in the crazy world with some of our friends that is both professional and personal.

Social Networking has been around for as long as there were two people on this Earth, and just because the form is different doesn’t make it any less important.

It’s really up to us to take the tools of the day and teach our children how to use them more effectively. Right?

What would you do for a whopper? This is a great application for Facebook and website that creates some fun in exchange for free food. I don’t know if it will result in extra sales, but this is exactly a fun way to attach a reward component to social networking.

And, it’s been very successful from an awareness standpoint (Other posts at The Future of Ads, Inside Facebook). What do you think?