I am in San Diego for demofall08 and plan to blog live as best as I can.
Today the conference opened with a reception at 6pm. All through the day entrepreneurs were seen huddling in small groups charging the air with their upcoming launch excitements.
I had first come to Demofall2000 to launch my first startup Coola and it set the bar high for me about a product launch and induced in me the excitement for startup energy and for tracking new trends in technology.
I am up at this hour as I am too charged with my conversation with Walt Mossberg today. I had an amazing conversation about my past dreams for mobile space from my Coola experience, and his views about mobile devices today - iphone, android, windows mobile and Palm and my favorite topics - Dash, facebook and social media!
I am always a fan of Walt, but his clarity of thinking and ability to capture the history of tech industry and articulate where it can go is very refreshing.
What a difference I feel as an attendee instead of an excited, naive entrepreneur! I am curious about the attendees and will try to capture the real mood here and my learnings for the next two days!
Monday, September 08, 2008
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Facebook Garage Palo Alto Live Blog of Fb Connect Edition
I am listening to Dave Morin present Facebook Connect from Blue Chalk Cafe in Palo Alto.
Julia Lam has done an awesome job with the logistics and facebook developers have loaded this place with amazing energy and support for facebook platform.
7pm: I. Dave Morin presents Facebook Connect
It can be summarized in 3 key points: Feed, Friends, Identity
a) Friends - Facebook has your real friends.
b) Social Context acts as a filter
You can learn more about your friend if you knew the same friend was on digg and had a certain preference.
c) Identity/Dynamic Privacy
People share on facebook because of the privacy setting. Dynamic privacy is all about user control. With dynamic privacy with fb connect users can take this comfort level to the web. When you change privacy setting on facebook, it will reflect on a fb connected web site.
Mike Vernal fb connect engineer presents an App "The Run Around"
Features to show in detail:
Facebook tracks three scenarios
2. Identifty - Profiles and Logged-In State
Fb connect give three choice to developers to select the most natural experience to connect user to their site.
a) Embed user info in site using fbml call eg Welcome b) Client library c) Server library
3. Feed - Sharing Content
Register set of template that corresponds to type of story to publish to profile.
Call Fb.Connect.ShowFeed Dialog.
4. Communication - Server FBML & Requests
Client and Server side is relevant
fb:serverfbml
5. Communication - Connect Request - connect friends already using that site to connect up their account. Again in three steps to respect user intent and user privacy.
Step 1: App developer can suggest connections
Step 2: Allow user to send invites
Step 3: Register post authorize URL and rotate it.
6. Dynamic Privacy - Putting user in control
ON facebook - give user control their privacy and relation with applications
On fb connect - user is in control on what info is shared or to opt-out
On your site/app - Give tool to developers. Today users can use friend list on facebook to manage different category of users. You can do the same with fb connect to allow different friendlist of users certain access.
7:58pm : Presentations starting now! signing off to take some videos now.
Julia Lam has done an awesome job with the logistics and facebook developers have loaded this place with amazing energy and support for facebook platform.
7pm: I. Dave Morin presents Facebook Connect
It can be summarized in 3 key points: Feed, Friends, Identity
a) Friends - Facebook has your real friends.
b) Social Context acts as a filter
You can learn more about your friend if you knew the same friend was on digg and had a certain preference.
c) Identity/Dynamic Privacy
People share on facebook because of the privacy setting. Dynamic privacy is all about user control. With dynamic privacy with fb connect users can take this comfort level to the web. When you change privacy setting on facebook, it will reflect on a fb connected web site.
Mike Vernal fb connect engineer presents an App "The Run Around"
Features to show in detail:
- Connect users to your site
- Option for user to publish an action to facebook.
- Friend linking - finding friends on a site who are also my facebook friends.
Facebook tracks three scenarios
2. Identifty - Profiles and Logged-In State
Fb connect give three choice to developers to select the most natural experience to connect user to their site.
a) Embed user info in site using fbml call eg Welcome
3. Feed - Sharing Content
Register set of template that corresponds to type of story to publish to profile.
Call Fb.Connect.ShowFeed Dialog.
4. Communication - Server FBML & Requests
Client and Server side is relevant
fb:serverfbml
5. Communication - Connect Request - connect friends already using that site to connect up their account. Again in three steps to respect user intent and user privacy.
Step 1: App developer can suggest connections
Step 2: Allow user to send invites
Step 3: Register post authorize URL and rotate it.
6. Dynamic Privacy - Putting user in control
ON facebook - give user control their privacy and relation with applications
On fb connect - user is in control on what info is shared or to opt-out
On your site/app - Give tool to developers. Today users can use friend list on facebook to manage different category of users. You can do the same with fb connect to allow different friendlist of users certain access.
7:58pm : Presentations starting now! signing off to take some videos now.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Facebook Change-thon Developer Event live now
I am at the fb change-athon event which I (from Bay area fb meetup) helped organize it with Waleed of Weekend appds.
Its a developer nirvana! Breakfast, lunch and dinner served with a room full of fb developers sharing their questions, experience and tips to make the most of migrating to the new profile.
Waleed gave a cool presentation about his experience migrating his App to Facebook
He has posted his entire presentation on his blog selfdebugging.com
Waleed did an awesome job and it was a very interactive with lot of Q&A.
Here is part1 which is the basic outline of all the changes to focus on to migrate to the new profile. (I had done a post from fb Garage 08 with user's Q&A summarizing Facebook's presentation of the new profile launch here). This one is real developers with their real experience migrating to the new profile.
He did a part2 which walked through with real code on step by step guidance on migrating to new profile. The Q&A brought up new tips and techniques and some frustration of what didn't work for some developers. I'll update here after I get these two videos up.
Its a developer nirvana! Breakfast, lunch and dinner served with a room full of fb developers sharing their questions, experience and tips to make the most of migrating to the new profile.
Waleed gave a cool presentation about his experience migrating his App to Facebook
He has posted his entire presentation on his blog selfdebugging.com
Waleed did an awesome job and it was a very interactive with lot of Q&A.
Here is part1 which is the basic outline of all the changes to focus on to migrate to the new profile. (I had done a post from fb Garage 08 with user's Q&A summarizing Facebook's presentation of the new profile launch here). This one is real developers with their real experience migrating to the new profile.
He did a part2 which walked through with real code on step by step guidance on migrating to new profile. The Q&A brought up new tips and techniques and some frustration of what didn't work for some developers. I'll update here after I get these two videos up.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Social Conversations takes grassroots shape at SocialMediaCamp SF today
I am a believer of grassroots events which propel brands and cut through crap to help us learn what is really happening in any realm of tech space. This is an evolving movement affecting marketing and user generation for brands, similar to how open source impacted software industry.
I am old enough to have started in online marketing with the linkexchange in 95 to portal co-branded deals as traffic drivers to SEO and SEM thru the 2000s and now onto Social Conversations.
So I am here, blogging live from SocialMediaCampSF, I just was lucky to be able to join this amazing energy of grassroots entrepreneurial social media architects.
This is a BarCamp style event where the topic was created on the fly this morning by all attendees.
Chris Heur who founded Social Media Club has spearheaded it and am pleased to report its very well organized, theres lot of good presentations and wonderful hallway conversations.
What I mean by Social Conversation
Microblogs like twitter, friendfeed which makes social browsing bringing all our online activities together for a community of people to follow others and engage in a conversation by comments and a simple google style UI to add a "like" to link an item to our feed.
Ok, I am a huge friendfeed fan, but what I love is they have so many widgets and APIs to seamlessly adapt friendfeed into your online life, its such a natural way to have a social conversation, without stopping to think about it.
Summize was just bought by twitter.
Disqus allows integrating of your comments across the web, similar to mybloglog but for dicsussions.
Some presentations I am seeing and liking here today below includes another social conversation or social browsing tool.
1pm: I saw a demo of Yoona by their evangelist Kevin.
Yoona is a sponsor of this socialmediacamp and they showed a demo. Compared to friendfeed to show socialbrowsing with a Firefox plugin. I'll try it out and update my comments here. Its a young, promising looking startup.
1.30: David Cohn is presenting spot.us crowd funding for journalism.
It is kiva style community funded citizen journalism. This looks very very promising. Dave is so sincere in his presentation.
Summary - users fund $10 or so to consolidate funds to pay a journalist to get a story, all driven by local community. He has started with a grant from Knight Foundation and he is testing it in Bay Area first. He has checks and balance in place to provide validated real content and took good Q&A.
update: 3pm: Qik Live streaming by Qik's Rishi and Daniel
http://qik.com/video/130494
This is a product demo of QIk live video , nice. Daniel did a live Qik of the room and it was funny we could see our audience live as he moved his hands to talk at http://qik.com/appleuniverse. Good quality video.
I am old enough to have started in online marketing with the linkexchange in 95 to portal co-branded deals as traffic drivers to SEO and SEM thru the 2000s and now onto Social Conversations.
So I am here, blogging live from SocialMediaCampSF, I just was lucky to be able to join this amazing energy of grassroots entrepreneurial social media architects.
This is a BarCamp style event where the topic was created on the fly this morning by all attendees.
Chris Heur who founded Social Media Club has spearheaded it and am pleased to report its very well organized, theres lot of good presentations and wonderful hallway conversations.
What I mean by Social Conversation
Microblogs like twitter, friendfeed which makes social browsing bringing all our online activities together for a community of people to follow others and engage in a conversation by comments and a simple google style UI to add a "like" to link an item to our feed.
Ok, I am a huge friendfeed fan, but what I love is they have so many widgets and APIs to seamlessly adapt friendfeed into your online life, its such a natural way to have a social conversation, without stopping to think about it.
Summize was just bought by twitter.
Disqus allows integrating of your comments across the web, similar to mybloglog but for dicsussions.
Some presentations I am seeing and liking here today below includes another social conversation or social browsing tool.
1pm: I saw a demo of Yoona by their evangelist Kevin.
Yoona is a sponsor of this socialmediacamp and they showed a demo. Compared to friendfeed to show socialbrowsing with a Firefox plugin. I'll try it out and update my comments here. Its a young, promising looking startup.
1.30: David Cohn is presenting spot.us crowd funding for journalism.
It is kiva style community funded citizen journalism. This looks very very promising. Dave is so sincere in his presentation.
Summary - users fund $10 or so to consolidate funds to pay a journalist to get a story, all driven by local community. He has started with a grant from Knight Foundation and he is testing it in Bay Area first. He has checks and balance in place to provide validated real content and took good Q&A.
update: 3pm: Qik Live streaming by Qik's Rishi and Daniel
http://qik.com/video/130494
This is a product demo of QIk live video , nice. Daniel did a live Qik of the room and it was funny we could see our audience live as he moved his hands to talk at http://qik.com/appleuniverse. Good quality video.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Dash's GPS Industry's First Over-the-air Software Update
Its an exciting day today at work at Dash Navigation and my customer's world of Dash Drivers as Dash kept its promise to improve software and add features with an over the air software update to its first Internet Connected GPS "Dash Express".
I am not kidding when I say, I know of customers taking day off to experience the GPS industry's first ever over-the-air wireless software update and try the new features of MyRoute, Search Along Route and improvements of FasterFind and improved performance and new UI.
EVERYONE is talking about it - Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Engadget, CrunchGear,VentureBeat, Crave, JK on the Run, NaviGadget, GPS Review and GPS Tracklog ...
As someone immersed in customer conversations at the grass roots level daily, I want to thank our customers who spoke to us and led us to prioritize and bring them just what they wanted next.
Thank You! You Rock!
I am not kidding when I say, I know of customers taking day off to experience the GPS industry's first ever over-the-air wireless software update and try the new features of MyRoute, Search Along Route and improvements of FasterFind and improved performance and new UI.
EVERYONE is talking about it - Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Engadget, CrunchGear,VentureBeat, Crave, JK on the Run, NaviGadget, GPS Review and GPS Tracklog ...
As someone immersed in customer conversations at the grass roots level daily, I want to thank our customers who spoke to us and led us to prioritize and bring them just what they wanted next.
Thank You! You Rock!
Monday, June 23, 2008
The Feed Wars - Friendfeed vs Facebook
I am someone who has consolidated all my net activity on facebook. Every worthwhile site has a facebook app - twitter, wordpress blog etc.
Then came friendfeed. I was introduced to it as a simple facebook app and I could integrate everything worthwhile outside of facebook world to follow friends and find feeds of their activities, interests.
Private vs Public Social Graph: The main difference is that friendfeed is a public world of everything thats open for all to see from the people I follow or the friends who follow me. Facebook is my private world of pictures and comments shared by my circle of friends thats not archived for the world to randomly read.
Seinfeld of the Internet: Friendfeed has become the first site to pull me out of facebook to read random twitter feeds and multimedia digged or bookmarked or commented or shared on flickr or youtube - like a reality tv show in short bursts . Someone called Friendfeed the Seinfeld of the Internet (ping me if you know who said that). But its more than TV, you have control on when you flip channels and read feeds of friends or surf through the tinyurls of links your friends want you to read or get engrossed in a discussion of comments (a lot by Robert Scoble) as if you crashed into a cocktail party discussion about a random topic.
The problem is many of my friends on facebook are on friendfeed. They use twitter to say where they are, facebook status doesn't do it for many. My real dilemma came when I had to decide on where I should post an album of pictures after my facebook meetup. Flickr makes it public for the world. Facebook pictures add a personal angle as my friends acknowledge they saw it by tagging it. Same for videos, youtube is my favorite and I have a channel and followers., but facebook video manages support for all size and formats of videos and friends can tag. I chose to defer the problem and continue to use both with sometimes redundant efforts and friendfeed app feed showing redundant feeds of pictures on flickr while my friends on facebook have already seen the pictures on my minfeed.
Enter Facebook's minifeed imports:
Today I noticed Facebook has a simple "import" option in mini-feeds on a profile. And guess what? We have the choice of importing actions from our public sites onto our minifeed.
One first look this could bring the friendfeed functionality inside facebook feeds, but since we all see what our social graphs show, I think friendfeed is entrenched and its hard to expect my friends to adopt the minifeed as their discussion community with comments. Facebook will have to do more to make this import of minifeed (wish it had a better name than that) to be visible to the world and not lost in my minifeed.
On a different note, this import of minifeed could be facebook's attempt to make the profile page an engaging piece of facebook and allow "profile surfing" as is available on bebo.
Choice is good, but this is not enough to take me away from facebook or friendfeed. This could be fun for us as users if friendfeed survives as a standalone company, else this becomes a smart move by facebook to build friendfeed functionality before Google or MS buys friendfeed.
What do you think?
Then came friendfeed. I was introduced to it as a simple facebook app and I could integrate everything worthwhile outside of facebook world to follow friends and find feeds of their activities, interests.
Private vs Public Social Graph: The main difference is that friendfeed is a public world of everything thats open for all to see from the people I follow or the friends who follow me. Facebook is my private world of pictures and comments shared by my circle of friends thats not archived for the world to randomly read.
Seinfeld of the Internet: Friendfeed has become the first site to pull me out of facebook to read random twitter feeds and multimedia digged or bookmarked or commented or shared on flickr or youtube - like a reality tv show in short bursts . Someone called Friendfeed the Seinfeld of the Internet (ping me if you know who said that). But its more than TV, you have control on when you flip channels and read feeds of friends or surf through the tinyurls of links your friends want you to read or get engrossed in a discussion of comments (a lot by Robert Scoble) as if you crashed into a cocktail party discussion about a random topic.
The problem is many of my friends on facebook are on friendfeed. They use twitter to say where they are, facebook status doesn't do it for many. My real dilemma came when I had to decide on where I should post an album of pictures after my facebook meetup. Flickr makes it public for the world. Facebook pictures add a personal angle as my friends acknowledge they saw it by tagging it. Same for videos, youtube is my favorite and I have a channel and followers., but facebook video manages support for all size and formats of videos and friends can tag. I chose to defer the problem and continue to use both with sometimes redundant efforts and friendfeed app feed showing redundant feeds of pictures on flickr while my friends on facebook have already seen the pictures on my minfeed.
Enter Facebook's minifeed imports:
Today I noticed Facebook has a simple "import" option in mini-feeds on a profile. And guess what? We have the choice of importing actions from our public sites onto our minifeed.
One first look this could bring the friendfeed functionality inside facebook feeds, but since we all see what our social graphs show, I think friendfeed is entrenched and its hard to expect my friends to adopt the minifeed as their discussion community with comments. Facebook will have to do more to make this import of minifeed (wish it had a better name than that) to be visible to the world and not lost in my minifeed.On a different note, this import of minifeed could be facebook's attempt to make the profile page an engaging piece of facebook and allow "profile surfing" as is available on bebo.
Choice is good, but this is not enough to take me away from facebook or friendfeed. This could be fun for us as users if friendfeed survives as a standalone company, else this becomes a smart move by facebook to build friendfeed functionality before Google or MS buys friendfeed.
What do you think?
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
DEMO Party SF Rocked
DEMO Party in SF rocked! ok, it was crowded, very crowded with 600 people! Thanks to Ramu of Qik, I managed to capture live videostream of parts of the event in a single click from a N95.
Rafe Needleman shared his nostalgia of how he was involved in the early days in 89 with Steward Alsop and had a demo story about being a repeat demo alum.
Brian Solis you rock! No one can capture more meaningful pictures and get them up faster on flickr on time Brian lets his pictures narrate who was there. I took some pictures, but mostly it was a blur of lot of people excited about DEMO.
Many had been there many times, some PR folks had taken companies to DEMO, some newcomers wanted to go there soon! Its phenomenal on how Chris Shipley goes around the globe and spots the winner companies and provides the fertile launch pad to succeed.
The beauty of the party was many many interesting conversations. I caught some on video as DEMO Stories that I am collecting for DEMO's facebook fan page. Ping me if we you have a demo story, the goal is to share our Demo experience on facebook and start some interesting conversations, you never know, something good will come out of it!
Rafe Needleman shared his nostalgia of how he was involved in the early days in 89 with Steward Alsop and had a demo story about being a repeat demo alum.
Brian Solis you rock! No one can capture more meaningful pictures and get them up faster on flickr on time Brian lets his pictures narrate who was there. I took some pictures, but mostly it was a blur of lot of people excited about DEMO.
Many had been there many times, some PR folks had taken companies to DEMO, some newcomers wanted to go there soon! Its phenomenal on how Chris Shipley goes around the globe and spots the winner companies and provides the fertile launch pad to succeed.
The beauty of the party was many many interesting conversations. I caught some on video as DEMO Stories that I am collecting for DEMO's facebook fan page. Ping me if we you have a demo story, the goal is to share our Demo experience on facebook and start some interesting conversations, you never know, something good will come out of it!
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
DEMO Party tonite! Yay!
I am working on a project called "DEMO Stories" collecting real DEMO conference experience of alums to help new entrepreneurs. This goes on the DEMO Facebook Fan page. We have video interviews of Woody Benson and Julie O'Grady and podcasts in a yodio file there.
I am a DEMO alum from 2000 and have since taken two companies to DEMO, one as VP Marketing in Fall07, and another as startup advisor in DEMO08 . I blogged about last year's DEMO party.
Tonite is the 2008 DEMO Alum party in San Francisco! 600 people have signed up. You can follow DEMOtweets or watchout for the Qik live video streaming I plan to do for you!
If you are at the party and have a DEMO story as an entrepreneur, VC or Corporate Development person, I'd love to chat with you.
We have couple interns in Boston and Bay Area and can always add more if you want to do some DEMO story interviews anywhere in the world.
See you tonite.
I am a DEMO alum from 2000 and have since taken two companies to DEMO, one as VP Marketing in Fall07, and another as startup advisor in DEMO08 . I blogged about last year's DEMO party.
Tonite is the 2008 DEMO Alum party in San Francisco! 600 people have signed up. You can follow DEMOtweets or watchout for the Qik live video streaming I plan to do for you!
If you are at the party and have a DEMO story as an entrepreneur, VC or Corporate Development person, I'd love to chat with you.
We have couple interns in Boston and Bay Area and can always add more if you want to do some DEMO story interviews anywhere in the world.
See you tonite.
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Facebook Platform is OpenSourced
We all heard Dave Morin at the fb garage last week. Facebook has opened its platform as open source quietly in its own way here.
It is a lisenced under Common Public Attribution License (CPAL), which follows the Mozilla Public License (MPL) with the addition of allowing web services.
What does this mean for the developers?
Over the weekend I played with Bebo and wanted to understand the comparison with Facebook platform to see if Bay Area Facebook Meetup would like to see a bebo demo about Facebook migration. Interesting enough I connected with my facebook friends on bebo and haven't heard back from anyone who logged back into bebo. Ok Dave McClure is busy with GSP East, what is everyone's excuse?
I wonder what is the impact for Bebo which has the same Facebook platform lisenced which is not opensourced, right after Bebo's aquisition by AOL. Is this another influence on Facebook's decision to opensource the platform?
What do you think as a developer? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
It is a lisenced under Common Public Attribution License (CPAL), which follows the Mozilla Public License (MPL) with the addition of allowing web services.
What does this mean for the developers?
- This is facebook's response to Google's opensocial?
- Facebook has 400K developers while Opensocial has been expanding with an industry wide support with developers trying it but waiting for better than beta quality from Opensocial platform. This move by Facebook deters developers from moving to Opensocial because they can now contribute to the platform and improve it to their own choice.
- Choice is good and this makes life interesting for developers. myspace is likely to adapt its platform to Facebook style to get fb developers faster.
- One subtle point that goes un-noticed in any analysis I've seen so far is that the lisense has been expanded to include Web services. This is the most interesting piece. This is in line with Facebook's promise of Facebook Connect whereby they plan to open up the social graph to allow access from any web service. This is the bigger step in the Social Media war with Facebook Connect being Facebook's response to Google's FriendConnect and everyone comparing Facebook Connect to FriendFeed etc.
Over the weekend I played with Bebo and wanted to understand the comparison with Facebook platform to see if Bay Area Facebook Meetup would like to see a bebo demo about Facebook migration. Interesting enough I connected with my facebook friends on bebo and haven't heard back from anyone who logged back into bebo. Ok Dave McClure is busy with GSP East, what is everyone's excuse?
I wonder what is the impact for Bebo which has the same Facebook platform lisenced which is not opensourced, right after Bebo's aquisition by AOL. Is this another influence on Facebook's decision to opensource the platform?
What do you think as a developer? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Facebook Garage08 Platformaversary - complete Q&A as I heard it
Yday evening, May 29th, 600 of us lined up in Palo Alto outside Aquaris Theater for the 1 year anniversary of facebook platform. Caitline O'Farrell pulled off an awesome garage seamlessly again this year!
Ben Ling of Facebook presented a review of the first year of the platform 400K developers from 160 countries in 1 year! And from the audience, its going on strong!
This was followed by a video of the 1 yr anniversary by facebook team here
New Facebook Profile Page
The bulk of the evening was spent, facebook style on really sharing their excitement for the new profile page changes planned and getting feedback from users and listening to them.
Dave Morin gave a presentation about the new profile page. Youtube will not allow large videos and restricts formats, here is the video on facebook!
My Summary:
The entire platform team was there and listened and answered questions. I thought I got it when I saw the presentation and demo, but the audience had real good questions. I've tried to capture all Q&A, pl ping me if something is amiss!
Q. Waleed started the first question about box profile. Is the box like the canvas page?
Yes but no flash auto play allowed in the box (waleed help fix this, there was more to your q&a)
Q. Jesse Stay asked: Can we comment on the feeds we see in a friends' profile.
No.
My comments: I've refrained from an analysis and to present the Q&A as I saw it for the benefit of fb fans everywhere who couldn't join us. However, this question brings about the general sentiment that users are looking at this new feed as similar to friendfeed. I think commenting on a friend's profile would be cool. We could always do so with a wall post, so why not allow it in context of each feed item? - imho.
Q. Any limits to number of tabs?
6 tabs UI wise is the limit. Additional apps will be added to a drop down menu. User will have the option to re-order the tabs to their choice.
Q.Any change to App directory?
None.
Q. What explicit integration points does app developer has without asking user for explicit permission?
Apps can publish stories. User needs to give permission to add app to profile box and Tabs.
Q. Support for apps developed with Flash in feed dialog?
Adding flash info to short stories is coming.
Feed form - is in the works, not yet ready. A flash developer can use FBJX bridge and do feed forms for now.
Q.Any plans to redesign profile on iphone?
Not at this time
Q. Today wall attachments allow us to give free gifts (or other app interaction) to a user who has not added an apps from a user who has added the app. Will this change?
Yes, it will work only for combination of users who both have the app.
Q.Where will facebook ads be in the new profile?
TBD
Q. Aggregate of feeds?
Ari Steinberg came up specially to explain the profile and news feeds. (I am missing something here, my don't have much, pl help if you heard this question)
Q. Tabs limited to Canvas URL, can there be different URL from server for rest of the App action? (Missed this one too)
Q.How will pages, groups be displayed in the new profile page?
They will fit in the info tab. Groups and Page layout will be made to match the new profile layout later. Way to add apps to pages remains the same.
Q. (my Question) How much work is it for a developer an average app to migrate to the new profile page? What happens if they did no change to an App?
The new profile offers lot of opportunities for the developer to create content thats part of the new profile for engaging apps. If you do nothing canvas page will remain the same, you app will be bucketed into the tab for user to decide if they want to keep it, and you'll lose all other benefits of user decision points to create visibility in their profile page.
(I want to hear from real developers who have let behind first few apps and moved on to newer fb apps on their actual experience on this one)
Q. Can one app add to a user's profile box, boxes, info section, tab etc.?
Profile box and boxes are multually exclusive, rest all can be added with user's permission.
Q. Whats new with feeds, we have mini feeds and news feed now, is it totally different, is mini feed gone in the new profile?
yes
Q. What is the roll-out schedule?
Developers should start getting their apps ready for the new profile page. Users will have a beta opt-in period to try the new profile and give feedback. Then old profile will be eventually discontinued and everyone will be rolled into new profile
Q. Because of App add removal, does this mean an app developer can email users?
Yes, only with user's permission. It will be another option to ask for user permission by app.
Q. Last Question by Dave McClure - When can 3rd party Apps message into the news feed of a user who has not installed the app?
It is already happening now.
After the Q&A we went to the happy hour at Blue Chalk cafe!
Bay Area facebook Meetup folks: Is there any interest in covering this topic in our upcoming meetup? Just post on our fan page wall here
Also, help me clean any omissions or inaccuracies in the Q&A. And do try the sandbox of the new profile here http://www.new.facebook.com/
Ben Ling of Facebook presented a review of the first year of the platform 400K developers from 160 countries in 1 year! And from the audience, its going on strong!
This was followed by a video of the 1 yr anniversary by facebook team here
New Facebook Profile Page
The bulk of the evening was spent, facebook style on really sharing their excitement for the new profile page changes planned and getting feedback from users and listening to them.
Dave Morin gave a presentation about the new profile page. Youtube will not allow large videos and restricts formats, here is the video on facebook!
My Summary:
- The new profile page is going to be a totally different look and feel with tabs for everything.
- It takes the base philosoply of facebook treating apps as keeping the platform fresh and allows users engagement with apps to produce new content on their profile.
- A new feeds item is going to allow feed notification of profile items to show what a user's friends are upto beyond the current news feed. Feels like a comparison to friendfeed, but for everything facebook only, including apps on facebook. This is the coolest feature!
- Apps don't have to be installed and this means work for the developer with opportunity to win with engaging apps as each engagement can showcase content on the profile
The entire platform team was there and listened and answered questions. I thought I got it when I saw the presentation and demo, but the audience had real good questions. I've tried to capture all Q&A, pl ping me if something is amiss!
Q. Waleed started the first question about box profile. Is the box like the canvas page?
Yes but no flash auto play allowed in the box (waleed help fix this, there was more to your q&a)
Q. Jesse Stay asked: Can we comment on the feeds we see in a friends' profile.
No.
My comments: I've refrained from an analysis and to present the Q&A as I saw it for the benefit of fb fans everywhere who couldn't join us. However, this question brings about the general sentiment that users are looking at this new feed as similar to friendfeed. I think commenting on a friend's profile would be cool. We could always do so with a wall post, so why not allow it in context of each feed item? - imho.
Q. Any limits to number of tabs?
6 tabs UI wise is the limit. Additional apps will be added to a drop down menu. User will have the option to re-order the tabs to their choice.
Q.Any change to App directory?
None.
Q. What explicit integration points does app developer has without asking user for explicit permission?
Apps can publish stories. User needs to give permission to add app to profile box and Tabs.
Q. Support for apps developed with Flash in feed dialog?
Adding flash info to short stories is coming.
Feed form - is in the works, not yet ready. A flash developer can use FBJX bridge and do feed forms for now.
Q.Any plans to redesign profile on iphone?
Not at this time
Q. Today wall attachments allow us to give free gifts (or other app interaction) to a user who has not added an apps from a user who has added the app. Will this change?
Yes, it will work only for combination of users who both have the app.
Q.Where will facebook ads be in the new profile?
TBD
Q. Aggregate of feeds?
Ari Steinberg came up specially to explain the profile and news feeds. (I am missing something here, my don't have much, pl help if you heard this question)
Q. Tabs limited to Canvas URL, can there be different URL from server for rest of the App action? (Missed this one too)
Q.How will pages, groups be displayed in the new profile page?
They will fit in the info tab. Groups and Page layout will be made to match the new profile layout later. Way to add apps to pages remains the same.
Q. (my Question) How much work is it for a developer an average app to migrate to the new profile page? What happens if they did no change to an App?
The new profile offers lot of opportunities for the developer to create content thats part of the new profile for engaging apps. If you do nothing canvas page will remain the same, you app will be bucketed into the tab for user to decide if they want to keep it, and you'll lose all other benefits of user decision points to create visibility in their profile page.
(I want to hear from real developers who have let behind first few apps and moved on to newer fb apps on their actual experience on this one)
Q. Can one app add to a user's profile box, boxes, info section, tab etc.?
Profile box and boxes are multually exclusive, rest all can be added with user's permission.
Q. Whats new with feeds, we have mini feeds and news feed now, is it totally different, is mini feed gone in the new profile?
- mini feed is old and won't exist in new profile.
- Profile feed is the narrative of the owner of the profile. It includes wall and apps inside it.
- News feed will show show a user's friends are doing.
- Publisher is an upgraded wall attachment and goes to profile feed by user.
yes
Q. What is the roll-out schedule?
Developers should start getting their apps ready for the new profile page. Users will have a beta opt-in period to try the new profile and give feedback. Then old profile will be eventually discontinued and everyone will be rolled into new profile
Q. Because of App add removal, does this mean an app developer can email users?
Yes, only with user's permission. It will be another option to ask for user permission by app.
Q. Last Question by Dave McClure - When can 3rd party Apps message into the news feed of a user who has not installed the app?
It is already happening now.
After the Q&A we went to the happy hour at Blue Chalk cafe!
Bay Area facebook Meetup folks: Is there any interest in covering this topic in our upcoming meetup? Just post on our fan page wall here
Also, help me clean any omissions or inaccuracies in the Q&A. And do try the sandbox of the new profile here http://www.new.facebook.com/
Friday, May 16, 2008
TIECON08 - Mike Speiser's keynote on startup execution
I am blogging live from TIECON08 in Santa Clara listening to Mike Speiser
I admire Mike Speiser because I relate to his approach of defining the startup process with an Engg approach. I heard him from a TIECON07 panel last year as an entrepreneur and am amazed that now as a a VC, he has the same advice, with the same passion and clarity.
He founded Bix, raised $7M, spent $700 when he sold to Yahoo, now he is joining Sutter Hill Ventures.
I am going to upload a video of part of his presentation, will do better justice to his passionate advice for entrepreneurs! (will update here once it is ready)
Update: Mike's presentation(pdf) with his notes are at his blog here.
My summary: I've taken 3 key points and as I sit listening to Mike, I remember many entrepreneurs I know who are in early stages building out their startup either from my blog readers or my mentorees from MIT VMS program and everyone of his advice is so true and profound.
1. Iterate, Iterate and find your real product
This is not about speed but about finding the real product-market match that creates revenues. He was making a subtle reference to this other point. The key is not about building technology for the sake of technology or a product thats productizing of your technology by a product manager, but finding a product that generates real revenues with market validation for it.
2. Do not do marketing before your product is ready
As a marketing person and entrepreneur, I find the need to add a clarification here.
Marketing for new entrepreneurs, especially engineers includes everything other than engineering design and development.
I think Mike refers to spending time/focus/money to reach users/customers with outbound marketing efforts like a launch event, PR, speaking engagements, conference exhibits etc.
This does not mean you build a product in vacuum, but you as the entrepreneur need to spend time understanding your customer, reaching them and listening to their feedback to adapt your product to iterate to what really generates money directly or scaling excitement of consumers that can be monetized.
This implies for Web businesses (or facebook app based businesses) that you need to build metrics by which you understand your real user behavior and you have to be super aggressive in reaching variety of customers who would pay.
You iterate here as much as the product and be ready for the chaos of change and hire the early team that can survive, appreciate your approach and help you succeed in adapting to customers.
3. Recruit the best VC
This is another gem of wisdom here. Focus on building product, finding market validation that scales, then go find the best VC.
Do not select a VC only based on giving out less equity but find the best VC who can help you scale your business, aligned with your long-term vision.
I admire Mike Speiser because I relate to his approach of defining the startup process with an Engg approach. I heard him from a TIECON07 panel last year as an entrepreneur and am amazed that now as a a VC, he has the same advice, with the same passion and clarity.
He founded Bix, raised $7M, spent $700 when he sold to Yahoo, now he is joining Sutter Hill Ventures.
I am going to upload a video of part of his presentation, will do better justice to his passionate advice for entrepreneurs! (will update here once it is ready)
Update: Mike's presentation(pdf) with his notes are at his blog here.
My summary: I've taken 3 key points and as I sit listening to Mike, I remember many entrepreneurs I know who are in early stages building out their startup either from my blog readers or my mentorees from MIT VMS program and everyone of his advice is so true and profound.
1. Iterate, Iterate and find your real product
This is not about speed but about finding the real product-market match that creates revenues. He was making a subtle reference to this other point. The key is not about building technology for the sake of technology or a product thats productizing of your technology by a product manager, but finding a product that generates real revenues with market validation for it.
2. Do not do marketing before your product is ready
As a marketing person and entrepreneur, I find the need to add a clarification here.
Marketing for new entrepreneurs, especially engineers includes everything other than engineering design and development.
I think Mike refers to spending time/focus/money to reach users/customers with outbound marketing efforts like a launch event, PR, speaking engagements, conference exhibits etc.
This does not mean you build a product in vacuum, but you as the entrepreneur need to spend time understanding your customer, reaching them and listening to their feedback to adapt your product to iterate to what really generates money directly or scaling excitement of consumers that can be monetized.
This implies for Web businesses (or facebook app based businesses) that you need to build metrics by which you understand your real user behavior and you have to be super aggressive in reaching variety of customers who would pay.
You iterate here as much as the product and be ready for the chaos of change and hire the early team that can survive, appreciate your approach and help you succeed in adapting to customers.
3. Recruit the best VC
This is another gem of wisdom here. Focus on building product, finding market validation that scales, then go find the best VC.
Do not select a VC only based on giving out less equity but find the best VC who can help you scale your business, aligned with your long-term vision.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Startup energy and entrepreneurship in local geek events - check techcocktail and startupriot
Its been my dream see all local entrepreneurs, angels and startup geeks all over the country connected without losing their local flavors to demystify the startup process for new entrepreneurs!
I came across the Atlanta yenta when I connected with Sanjay Parekh who started Startup Drinks as a world-wide phenomenon from Atlanta, an energetic entrepreneur and fellow angel investor. Sanjay is head down focused on organizing StartupRiot, a cool one day event with 70 entrepreneurs presenting in Altanta on May 19th 2008.
Today I located the Chicago Yenta, and the search process made my day!
During the search I learned that we in the valley tend to rely on upcoming.org for our events, events seem to find me on Facebook, and from my east coast past and as an organizer of the Bay Area Facebook Meetup, I tend to lookup meetup.com for every special interest group.
Chicago is ahead of everyone in sharing events. Techcocktail is on twitter. Techcocktail is the first to bring total transparency and sharing the excitement of the conference planning live on twitter, not just during the event for live micro-blogging.
I found Jason Rexilius from an old ChicagoBarcamp wiki and he led me to find out about Techcocktail conference and follow up mixer event. There is a huge Techcocktail conference coming up on May 29th in Chicago, I am sure its worth the drive or flying to get to it if you can make it.
Techcocktail is a mixer event started by Chicago locals Frank Gruber of SOMEWHAT FRANK blog and SOMEWHAT FRANK TV and Eric Olson, founder of Feedburner and blogger at Olson’s Observations.
All of you in Boston, DC, Chicago and Denver, look for Techcocktail in your local area Its amazing startup energy! Tom Sherman maintains a calendar of events in Chicago at Windy Bits ha, local thinking in the name of the windy city!
Footnote: I cannot shake this thought out of my head after Web2.0 Expo, after hearing AOL, Y! and everyone announce open APIs.
Are we getting ready for the next phase of the Web and like Open source movement changed the face of software development, the barcamps, and techcocktails and startup dinners are scaling up the existing SuperHappyDevhouses, developer garages and Code-a-thons to build a huge wave of localized developer and geek networks to create an interwoven web with a new layer of product and services not even imaginable today!
Anyone there who shares the same vision, I'd love to hear from you!
I came across the Atlanta yenta when I connected with Sanjay Parekh who started Startup Drinks as a world-wide phenomenon from Atlanta, an energetic entrepreneur and fellow angel investor. Sanjay is head down focused on organizing StartupRiot, a cool one day event with 70 entrepreneurs presenting in Altanta on May 19th 2008.
Today I located the Chicago Yenta, and the search process made my day!
During the search I learned that we in the valley tend to rely on upcoming.org for our events, events seem to find me on Facebook, and from my east coast past and as an organizer of the Bay Area Facebook Meetup, I tend to lookup meetup.com for every special interest group.
Chicago is ahead of everyone in sharing events. Techcocktail is on twitter. Techcocktail is the first to bring total transparency and sharing the excitement of the conference planning live on twitter, not just during the event for live micro-blogging.
I found Jason Rexilius from an old ChicagoBarcamp wiki and he led me to find out about Techcocktail conference and follow up mixer event. There is a huge Techcocktail conference coming up on May 29th in Chicago, I am sure its worth the drive or flying to get to it if you can make it.
Techcocktail is a mixer event started by Chicago locals Frank Gruber of SOMEWHAT FRANK blog and SOMEWHAT FRANK TV and Eric Olson, founder of Feedburner and blogger at Olson’s Observations.
All of you in Boston, DC, Chicago and Denver, look for Techcocktail in your local area Its amazing startup energy! Tom Sherman maintains a calendar of events in Chicago at Windy Bits ha, local thinking in the name of the windy city!
Footnote: I cannot shake this thought out of my head after Web2.0 Expo, after hearing AOL, Y! and everyone announce open APIs.
Are we getting ready for the next phase of the Web and like Open source movement changed the face of software development, the barcamps, and techcocktails and startup dinners are scaling up the existing SuperHappyDevhouses, developer garages and Code-a-thons to build a huge wave of localized developer and geek networks to create an interwoven web with a new layer of product and services not even imaginable today!
Anyone there who shares the same vision, I'd love to hear from you!
Monday, April 28, 2008
Web2.0 Expo Roundup -my own video interview collection
I have covered the keynotes with blogging here ! The main theme was opening of their platforms from Y! Mozilla Firefox for mobile and AOL opening up AIM. AOL is no the most open platform on the web and if you are a developer or entrepreneur you cannot miss it.
Sun's Jonathan shared his vision for Sun and Marc Andresson for Ning. Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs was the most entertaining funny session buried with smart insights in his keynote.
Here is a roundup I did talking to people as I walked the Expo hall. Of course, I carried my Dash Express GPS and people shared their excitement for it!
Watch this to hear web2.0 feedback from Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve jobs, Naveed Anwar, Director AOL Developers Platform and many more users.
Sun's Jonathan shared his vision for Sun and Marc Andresson for Ning. Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs was the most entertaining funny session buried with smart insights in his keynote.
Here is a roundup I did talking to people as I walked the Expo hall. Of course, I carried my Dash Express GPS and people shared their excitement for it!
Watch this to hear web2.0 feedback from Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve jobs, Naveed Anwar, Director AOL Developers Platform and many more users.
Friday, April 25, 2008
At web2.0 Expo SF Keynote Jonathan Schwartz of Sun in conversation with Tim O'Reilly
I am blogging live from Web2.0 Expo SF today!
Its interesting how we can see how many people are registered for each event on crowdwine, ahead of the actual event. Think of connecting with like-minded people at a conference!
Jennifer Pahlka (CMP) and Brady Forrest (O'Reilly Media, Inc.) are setting the stage with details on where we can provide feedback libe on twitter etc.
A Conversation with Jonathan Schwartz (Sun Microsystems), Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media, Inc.) is happening now!
294 attendees signed up ahead of time, 1000+ are in the room.
I am taking video of part of the presentation, will upload and youtube and link here, I can do better justice to this conversation.
They are talking about Sun using blogs, MySQL purchase, Greening of Data infrastructure (eg Niagara platform which went to $1B run rate in 18mo) .... Jonathan is smart and knows where is taking Sun and has a clear pulse of where the market is going and is confident to influence it by blogging and creating a context where other people can think the way he wants the world to be.
Tim wants us to twitter @timoreilly your questions right now!
Its interesting how we can see how many people are registered for each event on crowdwine, ahead of the actual event. Think of connecting with like-minded people at a conference!
Jennifer Pahlka (CMP) and Brady Forrest (O'Reilly Media, Inc.) are setting the stage with details on where we can provide feedback libe on twitter etc.
A Conversation with Jonathan Schwartz (Sun Microsystems), Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media, Inc.) is happening now!
294 attendees signed up ahead of time, 1000+ are in the room.
I am taking video of part of the presentation, will upload and youtube and link here, I can do better justice to this conversation.
They are talking about Sun using blogs, MySQL purchase, Greening of Data infrastructure (eg Niagara platform which went to $1B run rate in 18mo) .... Jonathan is smart and knows where is taking Sun and has a clear pulse of where the market is going and is confident to influence it by blogging and creating a context where other people can think the way he wants the world to be.
Tim wants us to twitter @timoreilly your questions right now!
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh talks about opening Yahoo at Web2.0 Expo SF
It was a good vision and a good presentation. Yahoo announced opening up Search Monkey for Developers as the first step.
I had blogged last Oct about my dream for the Social Email Graph (SEG) and particularly how its a low hanging fruit for Yahoo!
Wow! Yahoo can lead the market to open up search and email, won't that be cool!
I had blogged last Oct about my dream for the Social Email Graph (SEG) and particularly how its a low hanging fruit for Yahoo!
Wow! Yahoo can lead the market to open up search and email, won't that be cool!
What MySpace Knows by Steve Pearman (MySpace)
Web 2.0 Expo has these 5 minute segments on "What a company knows". I am live blogging the Myspace 5 min segment.
Steve Pearman started as a Product Manager then head of Products and now SVP of Product Strategy at Myspace. He shared stats on scale of Myspace.
Steve was personable and very sincere and did justice to his 5 minutes. Looks like Myspace is serious about listening to users and managing spam, we need to watch out!
Summary:
Privacy, Spam controlled from developers and users are the major user concerns.
On what lessons learned from community building on myspace:
Steve Pearman started as a Product Manager then head of Products and now SVP of Product Strategy at Myspace. He shared stats on scale of Myspace.
Steve was personable and very sincere and did justice to his 5 minutes. Looks like Myspace is serious about listening to users and managing spam, we need to watch out!
Summary:
Privacy, Spam controlled from developers and users are the major user concerns.
On what lessons learned from community building on myspace:
- Vibrant communities allow for self expression
- Operating community is difficult and more difficult by scale
- Live and die by goodwill and participation of community, never as good as them.
- Listen to community. How?
- Community tells you indirectly - 10Bil structured public data, millions of comments, directly users tell Tom.
- Major changes, Tom posts blog and gets user feedback.
- Check your ego at the door.
Web2.0 Keynote A Conversation with Marc Andreessen
I am blogging live from Web2.0 Expo SF.
I caught some of Marc Andreessen's keynote structured as a conversation with John Battelle .
Marc was pitching for Ning here are some highlights of his conversation:
Questions: Audience had questions about Bill Gates, Browsers today , role of academian in innovation and transitioning to industry etc all bringing back nostalgia of Marc and how he was responsible for Netscape and creating the Web evolution.
This is the first time I got to see Marc live and he was smart and articulate but was clearly media trained and focused on promoting Ning.
I caught some of Marc Andreessen's keynote structured as a conversation with John Battelle .
Marc was pitching for Ning here are some highlights of his conversation:
- He summarized it as a platform, open with interoperable data, part of Opensocial
- Growth of 1 Million users/day and 1000s of networks added/day.
- He compared with Facebook and made it sound like a past on how they built social networks and Ning was the future. It sure helps justify Ning's valuation to be built upon Facebook model
- Ning has been validated Valley style by their recent round of funding.
- Marc seems to have made a comment that Ning's funding was for an upcoming economic downtime. He explained this very articulately.
Questions: Audience had questions about Bill Gates, Browsers today , role of academian in innovation and transitioning to industry etc all bringing back nostalgia of Marc and how he was responsible for Netscape and creating the Web evolution.
This is the first time I got to see Marc live and he was smart and articulate but was clearly media trained and focused on promoting Ning.
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Are you in SF city for Web 2.0 Expo, here is the party list
I cannot believe its Web.20 time of the year! It is Web2.0 Expo in San Francisco 22-25, 2008.
Last year I was relatively new in the valley and went to Web2.0 and spent bulk of my time at Web2Open, the barcamp event inside Web2.0 (see business week's mention of my talk here). I honestly believe Tara Hunt who organized this barcamp segment deserves more credit but missed the business week reporter!
Robert Scoble at Web2.0 Expo SFO from sujam on Vimeo.
I was in the valley and was excited to meet Arrington, Scoble and Om Malik and blogged their panels live and did mini live videocasts.
We've seen a whole bunch of web2.0 companies last year. Next week, we will be hearing from a lot more new ones we cannot live without!
Dash, the first Internet connected GPS is going to be there this year, at a keynote to tell you "What Dash Knows". It will be a great place to come see a real Dash Express if you are thinking about getting one or compare notes with other Dash drivers if you used your Dash to beat the traffic to the city and to get to the various parties on time.
The real fun is the endless list of parties which Juhani has graciously compiled for us to choose from!
Another fun site to check is this one where you can schedule to connect with others at Web2.0
See you there!
Last year I was relatively new in the valley and went to Web2.0 and spent bulk of my time at Web2Open, the barcamp event inside Web2.0 (see business week's mention of my talk here). I honestly believe Tara Hunt who organized this barcamp segment deserves more credit but missed the business week reporter!
Robert Scoble at Web2.0 Expo SFO from sujam on Vimeo.
I was in the valley and was excited to meet Arrington, Scoble and Om Malik and blogged their panels live and did mini live videocasts.
We've seen a whole bunch of web2.0 companies last year. Next week, we will be hearing from a lot more new ones we cannot live without!
Dash, the first Internet connected GPS is going to be there this year, at a keynote to tell you "What Dash Knows". It will be a great place to come see a real Dash Express if you are thinking about getting one or compare notes with other Dash drivers if you used your Dash to beat the traffic to the city and to get to the various parties on time.
The real fun is the endless list of parties which Juhani has graciously compiled for us to choose from!
Another fun site to check is this one where you can schedule to connect with others at Web2.0
See you there!
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Jason Calacanis Promotes a Dash Contest on twitter and Ustream.tv
I am so thrilled to be part of the Dash team and everyone knows I am Social media fan.
Its exciting when a friend called now to say buzz has broken out online on Digg, twitter and ustream and as I write this Jason is asking for youtube video and ratings there too - all about an awesome product I help market - The Dash Express the new internet connected GPS
Its awesome when someone who is a fan of the product becomes an evangelist and starts marketing for you! Here is a real customer video of Dash I found on youtube!
Classic social media, now you know why I am so crazy about it.
read more | digg story
Its exciting when a friend called now to say buzz has broken out online on Digg, twitter and ustream and as I write this Jason is asking for youtube video and ratings there too - all about an awesome product I help market - The Dash Express the new internet connected GPS
Its awesome when someone who is a fan of the product becomes an evangelist and starts marketing for you! Here is a real customer video of Dash I found on youtube!
Classic social media, now you know why I am so crazy about it.
read more | digg story
Monday, April 14, 2008
Bay Area Facebook Meetup Mar 2008 Event Blog
It's long due! Here is a summary of the Mar Meetup. See you at our next meetup @ AOL on Wed 4/16.
It was crazy fun with 200 people in a 150 people space, very interactive, lot of learning, good networking ...
Thanks to Nick for the pictures from the event!
I moderated a panel of experts about the 3 S' of success.
What is involved in Scaling, Social Graphing for Viral Play and Spreading to other platforms with similar success.
* Jia Shen, Rock You, the largest App network inside Facebook with 1/2 of Fb users served by Rock You.
* Siqi Chen, of Friends for Sale App which is the hottest viral play on facebook
* Nick Gerekines, of Y! Delicious and Author of "Building Facebook Applications" by O'Reilly Publications
* Kevin Chou, CEO of Water Cooler, the largest sports and entertainment community inside Facebook, Myspace
* Markus Weichselbaum was our surprise addition, of TheBroth, a top 10 App network with 26 Apps, visiting us from Australia.
Thanks to Vishy for the videos, he has more on qik.
(Does anyone have a good sound recording of the event, especially the part where Jia Shen discussed viral plays and A/B testing, please let me know.)
Thanks to Abbas Zaidi for excellent time management to MCed the Lightning Demos of Facebook entrepreneurs. Demoes included: (pl feel free to post your App URL in the comment and I'll update it here when I get a chance)
1. Jing Chen, Richard and Charles - Developer Analytics (http://www.developeranalytics.com), a cool developer community and analytics site helping fb developers with virality and app engagement.
2. Waleed Abdulla of Weekend Apps showed his new "Blogs I Read" app.
3. Dan Carroll and Sara Buckwitz presented social recommendation API -- SoMR. http://www.somr.org/
4. George Deglin "courses" app has been working with Fb since F8 launch. He shared his insights about his other education related Apps.
5. Yong Su Kim - Askpedia, an ebay like knowledge marketplace where users can pay for the best answer from the community. This is an example of an existing business launching a fb app, good example to see if fb is an additional outreach or user acquisition channel.
6. Pikipages by Tony Zuccarino (I love this one, its an amazing example of cool web technology + facebook
7. Patrick Boyle - My Home Thingi, has a nice easter hunt builtin :)
8. Holly Liu Watercooler (http://www.watercooler-inc.com) an online entertainment and sports communities inside your favorite social networks: Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and Friendster.
9. Derek Dukes demoed Dipity App which allows you to create a social timeline, wow, what imagination to create new apps fitting in the social graph.
10. Dave Nielsen demoed Bracketmadness, an online supplement game to NCAA mens basketball tournament.
12. Ryan Merket will showcase an SpinVox (www.spinvox.com), an example of integration of fb with other web2.0 sites using cell network.
13. Ann Shin will demo Mashed Life App.
14. Mark Slater will show Listage and his demo is focused on "friends list"
Live Event Streaming: Wadiwallah.com, a a platform for the community side of the Silicon Valley and The Siliconstani sponsored live video streaming of the event.
It was crazy fun with 200 people in a 150 people space, very interactive, lot of learning, good networking ...
Thanks to Nick for the pictures from the event!
I moderated a panel of experts about the 3 S' of success.
What is involved in Scaling, Social Graphing for Viral Play and Spreading to other platforms with similar success.
* Jia Shen, Rock You, the largest App network inside Facebook with 1/2 of Fb users served by Rock You.
* Siqi Chen, of Friends for Sale App which is the hottest viral play on facebook
* Nick Gerekines, of Y! Delicious and Author of "Building Facebook Applications" by O'Reilly Publications
* Kevin Chou, CEO of Water Cooler, the largest sports and entertainment community inside Facebook, Myspace
* Markus Weichselbaum was our surprise addition, of TheBroth, a top 10 App network with 26 Apps, visiting us from Australia.
Thanks to Vishy for the videos, he has more on qik.
(Does anyone have a good sound recording of the event, especially the part where Jia Shen discussed viral plays and A/B testing, please let me know.)
Thanks to Abbas Zaidi for excellent time management to MCed the Lightning Demos of Facebook entrepreneurs. Demoes included: (pl feel free to post your App URL in the comment and I'll update it here when I get a chance)
1. Jing Chen, Richard and Charles - Developer Analytics (http://www.developeranalytics.com), a cool developer community and analytics site helping fb developers with virality and app engagement.
2. Waleed Abdulla of Weekend Apps showed his new "Blogs I Read" app.
3. Dan Carroll and Sara Buckwitz presented social recommendation API -- SoMR. http://www.somr.org/
4. George Deglin "courses" app has been working with Fb since F8 launch. He shared his insights about his other education related Apps.
5. Yong Su Kim - Askpedia, an ebay like knowledge marketplace where users can pay for the best answer from the community. This is an example of an existing business launching a fb app, good example to see if fb is an additional outreach or user acquisition channel.
6. Pikipages by Tony Zuccarino (I love this one, its an amazing example of cool web technology + facebook
7. Patrick Boyle - My Home Thingi, has a nice easter hunt builtin :)
8. Holly Liu Watercooler (http://www.watercooler-inc.com) an online entertainment and sports communities inside your favorite social networks: Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and Friendster.
9. Derek Dukes demoed Dipity App which allows you to create a social timeline, wow, what imagination to create new apps fitting in the social graph.
10. Dave Nielsen demoed Bracketmadness, an online supplement game to NCAA mens basketball tournament.
12. Ryan Merket will showcase an SpinVox (www.spinvox.com), an example of integration of fb with other web2.0 sites using cell network.
13. Ann Shin will demo Mashed Life App.
14. Mark Slater will show Listage and his demo is focused on "friends list"
Live Event Streaming: Wadiwallah.com, a a platform for the community side of the Silicon Valley and The Siliconstani sponsored live video streaming of the event.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Product Management for Facebook Economy for P-Camp
I am planning to present this topic at p-camp, the barcamp for product managers at Yahoo Sunnyvale tomorrow (Sat Mar 15th).
My definition of Facebook Economy: I see it as the social networking world and the open platform play that Facebook initiated that has created a thriving economy of new facebook apps, businesses trying to reach users by extending their web product with a facebook app and the ecosystem of other platforms like Opensocial and APIs everywhere which was created because of the success of Facebook Platform.
I am finding that its an exhaustive topic so I am going to limit it to Facebook primarily at tomorrow's session.
Whats common in Product Management in all Facebook Economy is the mindset. Some would call it Web2.0, but show me an example that exemplifies all the points below except facebook.
The Facebook Economy Mindset:
I plan to cover the 101 of Product Management as it applies to facebook apps.
My definition of Facebook Economy: I see it as the social networking world and the open platform play that Facebook initiated that has created a thriving economy of new facebook apps, businesses trying to reach users by extending their web product with a facebook app and the ecosystem of other platforms like Opensocial and APIs everywhere which was created because of the success of Facebook Platform.
I am finding that its an exhaustive topic so I am going to limit it to Facebook primarily at tomorrow's session.
Whats common in Product Management in all Facebook Economy is the mindset. Some would call it Web2.0, but show me an example that exemplifies all the points below except facebook.
The Facebook Economy Mindset:
- Customer believes to be in charge
- Customer communicates with other customers independent of company, this becomes part of product in the case of user generated content and user's social experience
- Total Transparency
- Shorter product life cycles leading to Agile development
- APIs and platforms from everyone - Y!, AOL, Google, Dash as a new way of extending your product roadmap and doing market assessment at the same time
I plan to cover the 101 of Product Management as it applies to facebook apps.
- Define the Product - Customer Definition, Roles and Responsibilites - use cases
- Develop Product Requirements - PRD and MRD
- Market Assessment, A/B Testing vs Multi-Variant Analysis
- Product Phases and Decisions- A phase gate development strategy
- Managing the Product Roadmap
- Launch Plans
Thursday, March 13, 2008
The Lesson from Sarah Lacy-Mark.Z SWSX interview twitter uproar
Sarah lacy and her interview of Mark.Z is all over the blogosphere. I don't believe in linking to prominent posts and write unless I have a sincere passion or point of view worth of you readers time.
I wasn't there at SWSX. I trust Dave McClure's honest and quick summaries and he represents the audience geek's view well. Arrington seems to want to bring some balance and decency to the topic with his post. Brian Solis does the best job of providing a neutral decent post.
I am a little biased here as I am a Sarah Lacy fan and everyone knows I am crazy about Facebook not just as an active user but for Mark.Z's vision and execution to bring our real world social networks to flow through facebook creating a new paradim shift in marketing, advertising, online content, community play and how we evolve as a species with the next generation of the Internet.
I see this event as a strategic inflection point in the maturing of the live web, though everyone may not agree its for the better.
What is ironic is that SWSX grew twitter to a phenomenon and SWSX was for college students for not just geeks, but young geeks who went to party with each other. This year Twitter has reciprocated the favor and elevated SWSX to a notable conference with enough pageviews and web referrals!
Lets get out of taking sides and acknowledge that this mobbing on twitter and blogs is a testimonial to the power of social media to let people speak their minds and gang up in numbers virtually, however we maybe divided on whether it was right or not!
Companies started taking bloggers seriously after Apple lost 40% in 3 hours. Sarah herself referred to the audience ganging up against her as "mob like Digg" which is a episode where users ganged up to speak their mind to control Digg content.
Sarah in all fairness seems to have done her homework well in preparation for the interview. She is not any old media business writer, she is someone who has lived the transition to social media with transparency in her response to her fans. She was transparent in her approach to reply at her own fan's page on facebook last night.
I see this event taking regular conferences to unconference BarCamp mode where audience want to run the show! This is the beginning of users on twitter or blogosphere ganging up any product or service one way or the other to truly let companies focus on the consumers.
I wasn't there at SWSX. I trust Dave McClure's honest and quick summaries and he represents the audience geek's view well. Arrington seems to want to bring some balance and decency to the topic with his post. Brian Solis does the best job of providing a neutral decent post.
I am a little biased here as I am a Sarah Lacy fan and everyone knows I am crazy about Facebook not just as an active user but for Mark.Z's vision and execution to bring our real world social networks to flow through facebook creating a new paradim shift in marketing, advertising, online content, community play and how we evolve as a species with the next generation of the Internet.
I see this event as a strategic inflection point in the maturing of the live web, though everyone may not agree its for the better.
What is ironic is that SWSX grew twitter to a phenomenon and SWSX was for college students for not just geeks, but young geeks who went to party with each other. This year Twitter has reciprocated the favor and elevated SWSX to a notable conference with enough pageviews and web referrals!
Lets get out of taking sides and acknowledge that this mobbing on twitter and blogs is a testimonial to the power of social media to let people speak their minds and gang up in numbers virtually, however we maybe divided on whether it was right or not!
Companies started taking bloggers seriously after Apple lost 40% in 3 hours. Sarah herself referred to the audience ganging up against her as "mob like Digg" which is a episode where users ganged up to speak their mind to control Digg content.
Sarah in all fairness seems to have done her homework well in preparation for the interview. She is not any old media business writer, she is someone who has lived the transition to social media with transparency in her response to her fans. She was transparent in her approach to reply at her own fan's page on facebook last night.
I see this event taking regular conferences to unconference BarCamp mode where audience want to run the show! This is the beginning of users on twitter or blogosphere ganging up any product or service one way or the other to truly let companies focus on the consumers.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
WeekendApps Sunday Nite Cool Demos
Waleed and Tyler were impressed by "Stanford Apps Launch Nite" and got inspired to start Weekend Apps and have done an amazing job.
Bunch of people got together and built many Facebook Apps from friday nite to launch now on Sunday @ 8pm. You can goto @ http://discuss.weekendapps.com to vote for the winner tonite., another winner is the App that gets max number of users in 1 week.
Today I gave a brief presentation about Facebook App Monetization followed by a panel discussion on micropayments. (my talk is below, I'll try and get the panel video online soon). There was also a cool presentation by Lee Lorenson who was a sponsor of this event. (I hope someone captured that talk, I was busy listening).
I am blogging live demo of Apps built this weekend now!
1. Deface a Baby - Tyler and Shawn, the name says it.
Cool tech piece is they added a "Share on facebook" which adds a bookmarket.
2. Tyler launched "Lessig for Congress" on friday.
3. Pikipages by Tony Zuccarino, Juan Pinzon, Paul Acevedo, Murray Low - A Drag and Drop Wall for Facebook, can drag and drop from web (say Flickr) or from anywhere on Facebook, resize, arrange creatively, add background, embed any media, allow friends to edit this and it shows on your profile.
Its super cool, but what I like best is that its open and can be viewed by friends who are not on facebook, or who have added this app., thats truly letting the users decide how cool it is without forcing a viral play on them.
4. Matchastic - Jeff Roberts , started on friday and coded all weekend in ASP.net. Cool matchmaking app, flirt in realtime, with stalkers, cool feature loaded.
5. OH SNAP! - Team of 10 guys, all met at weekend Apps. Real success story of this weekend App concept! Its about managing your facebook photo albums, keeping it fresh in photo page, with built in viral tagging and newsfeeds.
6. Peace Quiz by Standford Persuasive Technology Lab led by B.J Fogg learnt to use platform and use this as a template for future.
7. Hitchhiker Hookup - Bill, Jake, Tony, Ellie and Andy. Came together on friday, way to meet new people from social graph. Go from point A to B and meet people, cash in points for real vacation. I voted for this one, very promising.
8. ASPECTS by the cool team of Suling Yee, Aihui Ong, Nick Urban, James Ream. This app shows the world the different aspects of your life, your skills and your interests. This app allows people to add icons to their profile to show their hobbies, skills and interests. (updated feb 29 thanks Aihui Ong :))
9. Spring Break - Andy and friend John (from San Diego), App lets you meet new friends and gives you a relaxation for the week with a virtual spring week. I like this App.
10. Send Artist - Paint me a Picture request to friends by David Amusin. Can buy a poster of the combined work on an affiliate's web site allposters.com
11. Blogs I Read - by Waleed Abdulla's App, cool to show what blogs we ready, sorted by blogs so you can discover new blogs that your friends read or common blog interests you share with friends. I am going to add this blog, so if you are on facebook and a regular to this blog, do add it and rate it, ok? I love mybloglog on the web, I can see myself using this one.
Bunch of people got together and built many Facebook Apps from friday nite to launch now on Sunday @ 8pm. You can goto @ http://discuss.weekendapps.com to vote for the winner tonite., another winner is the App that gets max number of users in 1 week.
Today I gave a brief presentation about Facebook App Monetization followed by a panel discussion on micropayments. (my talk is below, I'll try and get the panel video online soon). There was also a cool presentation by Lee Lorenson who was a sponsor of this event. (I hope someone captured that talk, I was busy listening).
I am blogging live demo of Apps built this weekend now!
1. Deface a Baby - Tyler and Shawn, the name says it.
Cool tech piece is they added a "Share on facebook" which adds a bookmarket.
2. Tyler launched "Lessig for Congress" on friday.
3. Pikipages by Tony Zuccarino, Juan Pinzon, Paul Acevedo, Murray Low - A Drag and Drop Wall for Facebook, can drag and drop from web (say Flickr) or from anywhere on Facebook, resize, arrange creatively, add background, embed any media, allow friends to edit this and it shows on your profile.
Its super cool, but what I like best is that its open and can be viewed by friends who are not on facebook, or who have added this app., thats truly letting the users decide how cool it is without forcing a viral play on them.
4. Matchastic - Jeff Roberts , started on friday and coded all weekend in ASP.net. Cool matchmaking app, flirt in realtime, with stalkers, cool feature loaded.
5. OH SNAP! - Team of 10 guys, all met at weekend Apps. Real success story of this weekend App concept! Its about managing your facebook photo albums, keeping it fresh in photo page, with built in viral tagging and newsfeeds.
6. Peace Quiz by Standford Persuasive Technology Lab led by B.J Fogg learnt to use platform and use this as a template for future.
7. Hitchhiker Hookup - Bill, Jake, Tony, Ellie and Andy. Came together on friday, way to meet new people from social graph. Go from point A to B and meet people, cash in points for real vacation. I voted for this one, very promising.
8. ASPECTS by the cool team of Suling Yee, Aihui Ong, Nick Urban, James Ream. This app shows the world the different aspects of your life, your skills and your interests. This app allows people to add icons to their profile to show their hobbies, skills and interests. (updated feb 29 thanks Aihui Ong :))
9. Spring Break - Andy and friend John (from San Diego), App lets you meet new friends and gives you a relaxation for the week with a virtual spring week. I like this App.
10. Send Artist - Paint me a Picture request to friends by David Amusin. Can buy a poster of the combined work on an affiliate's web site allposters.com
11. Blogs I Read - by Waleed Abdulla's App, cool to show what blogs we ready, sorted by blogs so you can discover new blogs that your friends read or common blog interests you share with friends. I am going to add this blog, so if you are on facebook and a regular to this blog, do add it and rate it, ok? I love mybloglog on the web, I can see myself using this one.
Bay Area Facebook Meetup Feb08 @ Google Summary
Wow Folks, Thank You for taking the time to make our Feb Meetup @ Google such a huge success.
Its high time I summarize the meeting as I promised with all the videos for those who could not make it within the 170 people limit. Next time I need some volunteers to help with the videos, please let me know if you can help.
Date: Feb 13, 6.30 to 9.30pm Location: Google (Thank You Elizabeth for the food, and all the professional logistics) Logistics: John Lin and Hiren Patel, the event ran smoothly only because of your help, thanks Guys!
Pictures from the event are on facebook here, please tag yourself and your friends.
OpenSocial
We started with OpenSocial Update from Patrick Chanezon, his slides are here.
Google would love to get your feedback about this event so take a survey here.
Announcements
Its high time I summarize the meeting as I promised with all the videos for those who could not make it within the 170 people limit. Next time I need some volunteers to help with the videos, please let me know if you can help.
Date: Feb 13, 6.30 to 9.30pm Location: Google (Thank You Elizabeth for the food, and all the professional logistics) Logistics: John Lin and Hiren Patel, the event ran smoothly only because of your help, thanks Guys!
Pictures from the event are on facebook here, please tag yourself and your friends.
OpenSocial
We started with OpenSocial Update from Patrick Chanezon, his slides are here.
Google would love to get your feedback about this event so take a survey here.
Announcements
- Dave McClure announced App Nite @ Graphing Social Pattern, you get 50% off if you signup for these awards as a developer. Check it out!
- Mitch Levy shared marketing meetup info where Jason Alba, author of "I am on Facebook, What Next" was presenting. Cool Book, worth your time.
- Waleed and Alexander announced Weekend Apps, its not too late, come tonite to see the launch of new apps that were created this weekend.
Facebook Entrepreneurs, cool Demos and Experiences (video pending for first 3 demos, will update, I have a huge video of all 3 demos which Google video is unable to upload)
1. Frengo - Mobile API for Facebook:
Mahi De Silva showed Flirtable App and presented "Frengo", a new Mobile API for Facebook Apps which is in use at RockYou and Slide (will get video soon as soon I can upload or break it into smaller ones)
2. Social Mints - a new micro payment system for facebook Apps.
I launched my new Facebook App Social Mints and demoed it with my partner Sumit Gupta. We showed Puzzle Bee, which is one of 26 apps of Thebroth network of Apps and King of Vegas, from SocialGears. Both Apps use Social Mints to allow 1 click purchase of points @ $1 or 100 mints.
3. Listmania - Subbu Subramanim did an engaging presentation sharing his experience of building and launching a Facebook App. Is it a myth that you can scale users easily using Facebook Apps, what are the lessons for new developers.
4. Intelligentsia - Raymond Rouf (video) presented a new IQ App for Facebook. Very cool! See how smart you are compared to your friends with enjoyable puzzle questions. He uses SocialMints to allow users to use mints to get the correct answer.
5. IMO.IM - video pending, a cool Social IM App demo. This was an impromptu demo by Ralph Harik and Praveen Krishnamurthy.
6. Social.IM - Building an App outside of Facebook
Yanda Erlich presented Social.im (video) a cool software to chat with your facebook friends and manage all your facebook alerts like wall posts, messages etc. What was cool about this presentation was that Yanda shared his experience in calling Facebook from outside of Facebook and how he tackled those problems creatively.
7. Skiwithme - Vikas Gupa of Jambool (video) amazed us with his demo and sharing his experience of building user generated content using facebook Apps. He has an authentic list of ski resorts better than any place on the web, created by his users.
His slides are here.
Networking
Wow Folks, this is hard to capture, but we finished all presentations by 8.40pm and hung in there till 10pm when Google security had to herd us out. This part was fun to meet 170 people, learn about stealth mode projects, brainstorm with Dave about the future Social Media on the web ....
Next Meeting: Its mid Mar, 19th Mar (tentative date to be confirmed shortly) @ AOL, Mountainview. Please join our Facebook Group and Meetup site to stay in touch.
If you would like to demo your app, please ping me on facebook. See you all!
Please use Flickr tag: bayareafbmeetup for your pictures or just share on facebook and tag everyone.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Facebook Hype or Optimism? Just look in the right place
Robert Scoble wrote today "Is facebook doomed? following a blog post from Rory Cellan-JonesRobert has two complaints, one that he cannot add new friends because he has reached the max of 4999 users. We all saw it happen so quickly and Robert had a ball with his notifications and blog posts and Posted Items Shared.
You have an easy solution, Robert, unfriend some friends who you just don't remember who they are and those you will not remember if you see them in person, that should free up more friending option! You can always add them later if you meet them again and realize you care to keep them as friends.
As for Facebook stopping too much messaging, let the complaining user's friend create a group and share his actual grievance and see if his friends on facebook support him. Facebook is a democratic place and they have checks and balance to respect our privacy and stopping spam.
Now to the Nay sayers!!!
1. Facebook is still fun and growing, for students and for older crowd who is joining daily.
2. Its common to see new people who hear about the facebook hype signup and fumble around with poke, wall, tons of App request and look for something tangible and useful to do. These people take a while to figure out how to change their preference to the privacy setting they want, turn off emails from facebook Apps and groups and try to spam notifications on all their friends by trying out everything all too quickly.
But most of them settle down and appreciate the beauty of "just being you online", connecting with old friends, finding simple ways to nudge an old connection or even learn more about friends they already have. They figure out the right way to enjoy facebook by making it a part of their online access points to their real world without spending all day on facebook.
If the hype is dying from Media, maybe it will help all newcomers to come and enjoy this settling process more elegantly.
3. Facebook is not going to become dull as long hundreds of thousands of developers love it and believe in it and are busy chugging along expensing their creativity to learn what works and make new Apps with lots of hopes an dreams. Its like Google Ads where a whole SEO industry was created and everyone who did not get results went wondering how to get smarter than the other guy who seems to get the users.
If you really want to understand if Facebook users continue to love it, you need to be at Weekend apps this weekend at Santa Clara. There are a whole bunch of new developers trying to come up with new facebook apps, old timers sharing their experience of what works and what doesn't, instant reviews of viral plays for new apps that are going to go live today!
Its startup energy, theres optimism, and it is going to create fresh content for facebook and lets sit back, relax and enjoy the new apps notifications, viral invites and more spam (if you wan to call it that by not setting your preference right) to shower upon us in the next week or so.
You never know, the killer App for facebook is still waiting to happen!
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Silicon Valley Events coming up rest of Feb 2008
I've been meaning to blog about various events in the valley from my experience in the past year in the web2.0/Social spaces. Thats gotto wait, as its too big a project!
Let me share my excitement about upcoming events in the next week which will be worth your time.
Jason Alba, co-author of "I am on Facebook, What's Next" is visiting the valley this week. He speaks about Facebook in some events and also about linkedin based on his prior book on that topic in some event.
Here is his speaking calendar for the week.
I love the SNAP Summit and SNAP Chats, image having Jason Alba in a SNAP Chat. Thats what is waiting for you on Monday 18th in SFO . Details here!
On Feb 22nd, theres a cool event called "WeekendApps", where you meetup on friday nite and come back Sat and Sunday and are guided to build a facebook App within the week, pretty Cool, eh? Its a free event. Details are at http://www.weekendapps.com
Eweek at Stanford starts on Feb 22nd and you can find interesting speakers and really learn if you are into entrepreneurship (not just facebook topics). Details here!
Have a great week!
Let me share my excitement about upcoming events in the next week which will be worth your time.
Jason Alba, co-author of "I am on Facebook, What's Next" is visiting the valley this week. He speaks about Facebook in some events and also about linkedin based on his prior book on that topic in some event.
Here is his speaking calendar for the week.
I love the SNAP Summit and SNAP Chats, image having Jason Alba in a SNAP Chat. Thats what is waiting for you on Monday 18th in SFO . Details here!
On Feb 22nd, theres a cool event called "WeekendApps", where you meetup on friday nite and come back Sat and Sunday and are guided to build a facebook App within the week, pretty Cool, eh? Its a free event. Details are at http://www.weekendapps.com
Eweek at Stanford starts on Feb 22nd and you can find interesting speakers and really learn if you are into entrepreneurship (not just facebook topics). Details here!
Have a great week!
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Search SIG: Using the Social Graph / Social Platform
I am blogging live from the Search SIG at Yahoo! Sunnyvale. I expect an interesting evening, my high expectation are set because its moderated by Dave McClure
Food and Networking: Thanks to Y! for Lasanga. Huge audience including Jeff Clavier.
(I haven't see him for a while since I blogged his event last yr, guess I am more into Facebook events these days than general web.20 events.
Intros:
Panelists are:
Kevin Marks, Google
- Orkut, Opensocial, Social Graph API are 3 products from Google in social space.
Aditya Agarwal, Dir of Engg, Facebook
- works closely with Facebook search team, cool thing in social space are Friendfi and facebook.
Kent Brewster, Yahoo
- works on the developer network, and social updates using mybloglog.
Eve Phillips, Chirp
- Chirp pulls content discover what your friends are doing.
Dave McClure
- Welcomed everyone to Social Graphing Pattern conference and what he thinks cool are - slideshare.net photoplow - virtual chat w flickr
Dave: Whats special about Social Search or Discovery, is it evolutionary or Revolutionary
Google personalized search from Google, not hugely sucessful - DM
Adithya - Surprised everyone saying its evolutionary.
There was huge data on internet google came w ways to find relevance. Facebook data is around a particular use to apply as next step.
Chirp - Social content, using friend graph to filer thru all that as two parts.
First part is a search problem. Answer comes from second part. Eve is smart, her perpectives have been deep and very articulate.
Dave: Seredipitious discovery like stumbleupon, other I know what I am looking for
How does social data play into it, how does it monetize it, which is easier.
Kevin says search with intent is direct and easier to monetize.
Adithya - both are similar data, news feed has lot of data. In future, huge amount of data around social graph coming up. Yes, its clear monetization strategy when theres intent.
But brand ad is larger thats where the facebook potential lies.
Eve - Difference is similar to the difference in experience between sitting in front of TV/Radio and Computer.
Social context - you don't just get a coupon for P&G product, but you get familiar with the brand.
Dave: Whats assets does Y! have to bring to discovery?
Mybloglog - integrates users diff profile on diff New in API, you can sya who user is at this point of time (Check developer.yahoo.com)
Dave: what parts of search engine and social graph are important?
Dave listed feeds, developer API to build upon the social graph, and brought my favorite - email and IM data.
Kevin - Says privacy issues of friends hidden in email as compared to open friends declared publicaly by the user.
Adithya - All facebook measures to encourage people to show their accurate social graph.
Adding tags as family member was not highly motivational so it was not hugely successful. We want user to express the entire content.
Needs feeds content is built on friends list and also knowing about a person whether they like video stories more etc. Dave said Facebook should be infering a person's real social graph by the frequency of communication etc and Adithya didn't accept or refute it. This is fascinating, guess thats how they prioritize what they show in feeds.
Dave: Yahoo, do they have everything needed to tap into a user's social graph, what about email.
Kent says who is being followed on twitter vs who is following on twitter is different. He says email list is not good to follow, can't spam people based on their email interactions. He says why social networks don't use email.
Well, I disagree here. Email data is different, I agree people will not appreciate the spam message but there maybe a different way to overlay services on top of email based on the knowledge of the email social graph.
Dave: Upcoming became more interesting after Dave added his friends. So what do you see as assets you would like to share to make it better by being open (this is my understanding of the question):
Kevin - Opensocial allows the App developer to take the social graph in their network and do interesting things. We all see the world from our view, Kevin learnt a lot of interesting thing about social graphs of different social networks involved in Opensocial.
Dave follows us asking explicitly what assets of Google will they be bringing out as open.
Adithya - About platform and interacting with other networks
Opensocial allows App within separate small networks. Facebook opened API to allow more cool Apps, because we need active users first.
About Javascript API of Facebook API - Adithya says its the first iteration of Facebook platform, allowing user to take their graph to their web site. Its an interesting new beginningm I wish I could learn more on the impact of this one. Guess, this is Search SIG, this is not the place for it.
Lets focus back on social search.
Dave: Dave Acordian in is audience who is a huge proponent of - Privacy and Portability - how important are these?
Kevin - email is private but doesn't give any info about user, social site shows who is the person but doesn't allow communication.
Adithya - Privacy is at the core of everything we do.
Kent - There can never be a privacy surprise. Also runs a Bulletin Board for writers for 10yrs. Its not portable if you cannot remove it.
Dave: Question to audience - Privacy, portability or password more important.
Demos now:
1. Blogjuice by Kent: I am a huge mybloglog fan from start. They have something called blogjuice allowing mybloglog user to share their social profiles that can be discovered live for any sites's reader. Cool.
2. Chirp by Eve: Integrates content (in this demo) photos from facebook, flickr etc shows as screen saver, whats interesting is you can comment on a picture from chirp and it will show up on facebook.
Interesting, I didn't realize any external program could input data into facebook.
Anyone know of more examples of being able to write into facebook from the web, thats a step towards making an open web?
3. Social Graph API from Google by Kevin.
Audience question: Demos from Y! and Google and Chirp are about discovering what user is doing, maybe embarassing serendipitous search. Concerned about leaving consumer out without engaging them.
Adithya raises a set of questions of what all user concerns maybe and Facebook's thinking on where to ask user to show user' data to friends. Bottomline These are difficult questions so Facebook is committed to portability but slow because they are comitted to privacy and want to do it right.
Nice finish for this talk.
Food and Networking: Thanks to Y! for Lasanga. Huge audience including Jeff Clavier.
(I haven't see him for a while since I blogged his event last yr, guess I am more into Facebook events these days than general web.20 events.
Intros:
Panelists are:
Kevin Marks, Google
- Orkut, Opensocial, Social Graph API are 3 products from Google in social space.
Aditya Agarwal, Dir of Engg, Facebook
- works closely with Facebook search team, cool thing in social space are Friendfi and facebook.
Kent Brewster, Yahoo
- works on the developer network, and social updates using mybloglog.
Eve Phillips, Chirp
- Chirp pulls content discover what your friends are doing.
Dave McClure
- Welcomed everyone to Social Graphing Pattern conference and what he thinks cool are - slideshare.net photoplow - virtual chat w flickr
Dave: Whats special about Social Search or Discovery, is it evolutionary or Revolutionary
Google personalized search from Google, not hugely sucessful - DM
Adithya - Surprised everyone saying its evolutionary.
There was huge data on internet google came w ways to find relevance. Facebook data is around a particular use to apply as next step.
Chirp - Social content, using friend graph to filer thru all that as two parts.
First part is a search problem. Answer comes from second part. Eve is smart, her perpectives have been deep and very articulate.
Dave: Seredipitious discovery like stumbleupon, other I know what I am looking for
How does social data play into it, how does it monetize it, which is easier.
Kevin says search with intent is direct and easier to monetize.
Adithya - both are similar data, news feed has lot of data. In future, huge amount of data around social graph coming up. Yes, its clear monetization strategy when theres intent.
But brand ad is larger thats where the facebook potential lies.
Eve - Difference is similar to the difference in experience between sitting in front of TV/Radio and Computer.
Social context - you don't just get a coupon for P&G product, but you get familiar with the brand.
Dave: Whats assets does Y! have to bring to discovery?
Mybloglog - integrates users diff profile on diff New in API, you can sya who user is at this point of time (Check developer.yahoo.com)
Dave: what parts of search engine and social graph are important?
Dave listed feeds, developer API to build upon the social graph, and brought my favorite - email and IM data.
Kevin - Says privacy issues of friends hidden in email as compared to open friends declared publicaly by the user.
Adithya - All facebook measures to encourage people to show their accurate social graph.
Adding tags as family member was not highly motivational so it was not hugely successful. We want user to express the entire content.
Needs feeds content is built on friends list and also knowing about a person whether they like video stories more etc. Dave said Facebook should be infering a person's real social graph by the frequency of communication etc and Adithya didn't accept or refute it. This is fascinating, guess thats how they prioritize what they show in feeds.
Dave: Yahoo, do they have everything needed to tap into a user's social graph, what about email.
Kent says who is being followed on twitter vs who is following on twitter is different. He says email list is not good to follow, can't spam people based on their email interactions. He says why social networks don't use email.
Well, I disagree here. Email data is different, I agree people will not appreciate the spam message but there maybe a different way to overlay services on top of email based on the knowledge of the email social graph.
Dave: Upcoming became more interesting after Dave added his friends. So what do you see as assets you would like to share to make it better by being open (this is my understanding of the question):
Kevin - Opensocial allows the App developer to take the social graph in their network and do interesting things. We all see the world from our view, Kevin learnt a lot of interesting thing about social graphs of different social networks involved in Opensocial.
Dave follows us asking explicitly what assets of Google will they be bringing out as open.
Adithya - About platform and interacting with other networks
Opensocial allows App within separate small networks. Facebook opened API to allow more cool Apps, because we need active users first.
About Javascript API of Facebook API - Adithya says its the first iteration of Facebook platform, allowing user to take their graph to their web site. Its an interesting new beginningm I wish I could learn more on the impact of this one. Guess, this is Search SIG, this is not the place for it.
Lets focus back on social search.
Dave: Dave Acordian in is audience who is a huge proponent of - Privacy and Portability - how important are these?
Kevin - email is private but doesn't give any info about user, social site shows who is the person but doesn't allow communication.
Adithya - Privacy is at the core of everything we do.
Kent - There can never be a privacy surprise. Also runs a Bulletin Board for writers for 10yrs. Its not portable if you cannot remove it.
Dave: Question to audience - Privacy, portability or password more important.
Demos now:
1. Blogjuice by Kent: I am a huge mybloglog fan from start. They have something called blogjuice allowing mybloglog user to share their social profiles that can be discovered live for any sites's reader. Cool.
2. Chirp by Eve: Integrates content (in this demo) photos from facebook, flickr etc shows as screen saver, whats interesting is you can comment on a picture from chirp and it will show up on facebook.
Interesting, I didn't realize any external program could input data into facebook.
Anyone know of more examples of being able to write into facebook from the web, thats a step towards making an open web?
3. Social Graph API from Google by Kevin.
Audience question: Demos from Y! and Google and Chirp are about discovering what user is doing, maybe embarassing serendipitous search. Concerned about leaving consumer out without engaging them.
Adithya raises a set of questions of what all user concerns maybe and Facebook's thinking on where to ask user to show user' data to friends. Bottomline These are difficult questions so Facebook is committed to portability but slow because they are comitted to privacy and want to do it right.
Nice finish for this talk.
Monday, February 11, 2008
Open Social Graph
Cross posted from my digitalmusings blog which I've tried to fold into this blog recently where I blogged this live!
My biggest motivation of Graphing Social Pattern07 conference was this topic of OpenFaced, takes me back to the dreams of web1.0 with XML and microformats and creating an interconnected web built on open standards of different sites.
Dave McClure set the stage and said if Yahoo and Google were serious about the Open Social Graph, they need to participate in such panels. Brad Fitzpatrick co-author of the "Thoughts on Social Graph" has joined Google, setting expectation of Google opening into the Open Social Graph
Live Blogging from the Panel here:
OpenFaced panel: Opening Up the Social Graph - Tantek Celik (moderator), David Recordon SixApart, Chamath Palihapitiya Facebook, Joseph Smarr Plaxo, Ted Grubb Satisfaction Unlimited
Joseph Smarr Plaxo:
Online Identity Consolidator find the same person's account across twitter, flickr,ma.gnolia.com, pownce and everywhere else on the web , all without compromising the privacy if the user.
opensocialweb.com - lists a bill of rights to build out an openweb.
David Recordon SixApart
Ted Grubb Satisfaction Unlimited allows import profiles from other services which support microformats.
Love the ability to create an address book, where is a friend should get a friends phone if I have his email.
Facebook does not allow data taken out of facebook using Facebook API to be stored for more than 24 hrs.
Chamath Palihapitiya Facebook:
Questions:
How about integrating Openid and symantic web?
How long will it take for developers to build to an open web across platforms instead of one facebook platform?
What is each panelist doing to share open social graph:
David: Implement Openid
Facebook : want as much information to flow across the graph and touch everyone in the world.( This is an ambitious and audacious goal, but does not seem to signal real open graph outside of facebook, or unless I missing the point here)
update- my followup thoughts: Facebook has done well in initiating an ecosystem of developers and VCs with the F8 platform.
Facebook is building a competitive advantage with this ecosystem and unless the ecosystem demands with clear competitive returns, it does not make business sense for them to open up.
From my own personal experience hanging around facebook developers and SF Bayarea facebook meetup I find facebook clearly aligned with developers and opening up slowly where it makes sense for the developers and facebook.
Chamath has articulated this eloquently and I believe facebook is here to stay and buildout its competitive lockin.
My biggest motivation of Graphing Social Pattern07 conference was this topic of OpenFaced, takes me back to the dreams of web1.0 with XML and microformats and creating an interconnected web built on open standards of different sites.
Dave McClure set the stage and said if Yahoo and Google were serious about the Open Social Graph, they need to participate in such panels. Brad Fitzpatrick co-author of the "Thoughts on Social Graph" has joined Google, setting expectation of Google opening into the Open Social Graph
Live Blogging from the Panel here:
OpenFaced panel: Opening Up the Social Graph - Tantek Celik (moderator), David Recordon SixApart, Chamath Palihapitiya Facebook, Joseph Smarr Plaxo, Ted Grubb Satisfaction Unlimited
Joseph Smarr Plaxo:
Online Identity Consolidator find the same person's account across twitter, flickr,ma.gnolia.com, pownce and everywhere else on the web , all without compromising the privacy if the user.
opensocialweb.com - lists a bill of rights to build out an openweb.
David Recordon SixApart
Ted Grubb Satisfaction Unlimited allows import profiles from other services which support microformats.
Love the ability to create an address book, where is a friend should get a friends phone if I have his email.
Facebook does not allow data taken out of facebook using Facebook API to be stored for more than 24 hrs.
Chamath Palihapitiya Facebook:
- Facebook pioneered open technologies like Memcache.
- The service itself itself is conducive to people trusting facebook.
- There is one social graph of 6Bil users in the world, we have captured 45Mil of it.
- Here is one model of it, we acknowlege we need people to help us.
- Everyone including facebook is at the starting point, we need to measure progress over coming years.
- Its a delicate balance between being open on the web on one hand and trusted and private on the other side.
- Should be done methodically and systematically not reactively.
- Consumer choice leads in the end.
- We need to provide more and more control to App developers and will open slowly and cautiously.
Questions:
How about integrating Openid and symantic web?
How long will it take for developers to build to an open web across platforms instead of one facebook platform?
What is each panelist doing to share open social graph:
David: Implement Openid
Facebook : want as much information to flow across the graph and touch everyone in the world.( This is an ambitious and audacious goal, but does not seem to signal real open graph outside of facebook, or unless I missing the point here)
update- my followup thoughts: Facebook has done well in initiating an ecosystem of developers and VCs with the F8 platform.
Facebook is building a competitive advantage with this ecosystem and unless the ecosystem demands with clear competitive returns, it does not make business sense for them to open up.
From my own personal experience hanging around facebook developers and SF Bayarea facebook meetup I find facebook clearly aligned with developers and opening up slowly where it makes sense for the developers and facebook.
Chamath has articulated this eloquently and I believe facebook is here to stay and buildout its competitive lockin.
Sunday, February 03, 2008
When did I Endorse a Business on Facebook in their Ad?
I came across two Ads with friend's pictures on Facebook Sponsored Ads in the past 2 days.
Hmm, Sumit seems to have added Blackjack App, which appears like a notification, but actually its an ad for Scramble Facebook App.
Still its all in the realm of Facebook App world right?
Look, what I saw just now? Brett's picture for a Blockbuster signup as a notification of their Movie Clique App. Brett may approve of a notification of his app usage, does it mean he endorses Blockbuster as a brand and signing up for a paid membership, I am not sure?
Now this is getting interesting!!!
In the normal web world, no company would create an ad with your picture without your explicit permission for an ad of their product just because they found you using one of their products!
I am curious to learn more on the user's involvement in these cases, but want to learn of similar such campaigns by other businesses and user views.
The promise of social media marketing, particularly facebook is to allow user's adoption of a product as endorsement of the brand to their social graph. But there were people who objected to Facebook Beacon. Wonder who else is using the power of such user's implicit endorsements?
Friday, February 01, 2008
Facebook as Marketing Medium for Authors
I have always compared Facebook to the web and F8 to Netscape launch! No, I am not there where I would replace "Facebook" with "all Social Media Sites", Facebook is unique from the perspective of a business or anyone interesting in marketing anything!
I see businesses who were focused on SEO and SEM now expanding in Social Media Optimization with Facebook Apps and Facebook Ads.
Here is the first (my observation, I haven't seen other authors on Facebook) book author who is promoting his book release on Facebook with a Facebook Fan page.
I am on Facebook, now what? is the new book from Jason Alba and Jesse Stay with their own Facebook Fan Page.
It has just started and has 138 fans a I write this. They have smartly added their own blog as Notes to this Fan page. I am going to watch this as its a beautiful example of using the essence of Facebook to allow initial fans to tap into their social graph to invite more friends or friends hear about it from their friend's notifications.
I heard about this Fan Page from a notification from Dave McClure's feed notification. This is the start of the viral play, each of us sharing our supporting of this book brand!
I see businesses who were focused on SEO and SEM now expanding in Social Media Optimization with Facebook Apps and Facebook Ads.
Here is the first (my observation, I haven't seen other authors on Facebook) book author who is promoting his book release on Facebook with a Facebook Fan page.
I am on Facebook, now what? is the new book from Jason Alba and Jesse Stay with their own Facebook Fan Page.
It has just started and has 138 fans a I write this. They have smartly added their own blog as Notes to this Fan page. I am going to watch this as its a beautiful example of using the essence of Facebook to allow initial fans to tap into their social graph to invite more friends or friends hear about it from their friend's notifications.
I heard about this Fan Page from a notification from Dave McClure's feed notification. This is the start of the viral play, each of us sharing our supporting of this book brand!
Monday, January 28, 2008
A Competitive Research of Photo Apps on Facebook Apps
I've been slicing and dicing Facebook Apps to look at whats out there and find new opportunities in various different segments.
Its such a fun exercise as new Apps crop up within the time I sleep, and I waking dreaming some new possibility only to find its been tried out in a different way.
Online Photos is a space thats still in infancy in spite of many acquisitions and IPOs. I've blogged about it since 95 here. Facebook seems a natural platform for new entrepreneurs and this in my summary analysis of Facebook Photo Apps.
Its such a fun exercise as new Apps crop up within the time I sleep, and I waking dreaming some new possibility only to find its been tried out in a different way.
Online Photos is a space thats still in infancy in spite of many acquisitions and IPOs. I've blogged about it since 95 here. Facebook seems a natural platform for new entrepreneurs and this in my summary analysis of Facebook Photo Apps.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Scrabulous leads the way to Business Transformation in the Facebook Economy
Hasbro has sued two Facebook developers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla from India, claiming that the developer's App Scrabulous which gets 600,000 daily active users infringes on their US and Canada distribution rights for the board came Scrabble.
I've joined the 17,000 members of the Save Scrabulous group on Facebook.
Living and breathing facebook Apps and hanging around with the growing Facebook economy, I am amused at Hasbro and Mattel's move. I've spent a lot of time with large companies as they adapted (some are adapting still) the web.
It reminds me of when Barnes and Noble woke up to Amazon's success and sued them for claiming to be the world's largest book store before waking up and building their online site. An interesting lesson there was that the web strategy for Barnes and Noble was not a pure online business like Amazon, but a transformation of their brick and mortar business to use the internet to extend their business, leaving us consumers with more choice.
I was lucky to be part of the team who build Harcourt.com for $2B education publisher Harcourt Brace & Company (now part of Reed Elsevier) where we integrated 27 brands into an online site. I led strategic planning working with 27 business unit presidents to understand their business and how to transform it using the Internet and executed on it working with many disparate groups with entrenched business knowledge and vested interests.
The Scrabulous-Harbro story today seems a simple case of business negotiation where Hasbro is trying to leverage it's size to threaten two Facebook developers to bring their market valuation down which should be minimum at $6Mil at $10/user acquisition cost. Any business executive in Mattel or Hashbro can see the cost of building Scrabble in the Facebook world and the customer acquisition cost to even match with Scrabulous as it is today would be costing upwards of $20Mil and a time to market of 1 year+. Also inside a corporate setting, any executive has to justify this cost by coming up with a plan on how they would monetize this acquisition by translating it to new business for existing Hashbro or Mattel businesses bearing the real risks behind this plan on his or her career.
Lets look at it from a Facebook Developer point of view! Building and launching a facebook App as done by most developers I know is counted as a single person's time of few months. The smart ones adapt to the social graph and viral reactions of early users to build user base. Many facebook developers from Facebook Meetups that I meet daily dream about a similar scenario where they would like to sell their Apps in millions to some large company.
If Hashbro or Mattel sees the business potential of Facebook, they can easily tap into 600,000 active Scrabulous users upselling the board game and other related products. So the Scrabulous developers should try to negotiate a partnership with Hashbro to upsell their products and generate revenues out of Scrabulous App. I am sure some smart executive in Hashbro or Mattel is likely to see how they can scale this partnership and will likely buy Scrabulous for its right valuation.
In the meantime Hashbro and Mattel have created a PR fiasco against themselves. History has shown repeatedly that the large company who sues a startup with real user following fails. My favorite example of this is Ben and Jerrys ice cream which was sued by Hagen Dazs to stop their distribution which prompted Ben and Jerrys to sue the parent company Pillsbury with the campaign "What the Doughboy afraid of?" in Boston.
Michael Staton of Courses App has shared with us about how he hears from companies wanting to do bizdev deals with him from the education industry every day. It takes time and experience to see which of these are viable deals worth pursuing.
Its fun growing up as an entrepreneur when your small App gains attention and you can work a real business deal to generate revenue, thats when we are truly tapping into the Facebook Economy for all its promise and potential.
I've joined the 17,000 members of the Save Scrabulous group on Facebook.
Living and breathing facebook Apps and hanging around with the growing Facebook economy, I am amused at Hasbro and Mattel's move. I've spent a lot of time with large companies as they adapted (some are adapting still) the web.
It reminds me of when Barnes and Noble woke up to Amazon's success and sued them for claiming to be the world's largest book store before waking up and building their online site. An interesting lesson there was that the web strategy for Barnes and Noble was not a pure online business like Amazon, but a transformation of their brick and mortar business to use the internet to extend their business, leaving us consumers with more choice.
I was lucky to be part of the team who build Harcourt.com for $2B education publisher Harcourt Brace & Company (now part of Reed Elsevier) where we integrated 27 brands into an online site. I led strategic planning working with 27 business unit presidents to understand their business and how to transform it using the Internet and executed on it working with many disparate groups with entrenched business knowledge and vested interests.
The Scrabulous-Harbro story today seems a simple case of business negotiation where Hasbro is trying to leverage it's size to threaten two Facebook developers to bring their market valuation down which should be minimum at $6Mil at $10/user acquisition cost. Any business executive in Mattel or Hashbro can see the cost of building Scrabble in the Facebook world and the customer acquisition cost to even match with Scrabulous as it is today would be costing upwards of $20Mil and a time to market of 1 year+. Also inside a corporate setting, any executive has to justify this cost by coming up with a plan on how they would monetize this acquisition by translating it to new business for existing Hashbro or Mattel businesses bearing the real risks behind this plan on his or her career.
Lets look at it from a Facebook Developer point of view! Building and launching a facebook App as done by most developers I know is counted as a single person's time of few months. The smart ones adapt to the social graph and viral reactions of early users to build user base. Many facebook developers from Facebook Meetups that I meet daily dream about a similar scenario where they would like to sell their Apps in millions to some large company.
If Hashbro or Mattel sees the business potential of Facebook, they can easily tap into 600,000 active Scrabulous users upselling the board game and other related products. So the Scrabulous developers should try to negotiate a partnership with Hashbro to upsell their products and generate revenues out of Scrabulous App. I am sure some smart executive in Hashbro or Mattel is likely to see how they can scale this partnership and will likely buy Scrabulous for its right valuation.
In the meantime Hashbro and Mattel have created a PR fiasco against themselves. History has shown repeatedly that the large company who sues a startup with real user following fails. My favorite example of this is Ben and Jerrys ice cream which was sued by Hagen Dazs to stop their distribution which prompted Ben and Jerrys to sue the parent company Pillsbury with the campaign "What the Doughboy afraid of?" in Boston.
Michael Staton of Courses App has shared with us about how he hears from companies wanting to do bizdev deals with him from the education industry every day. It takes time and experience to see which of these are viable deals worth pursuing.
Its fun growing up as an entrepreneur when your small App gains attention and you can work a real business deal to generate revenue, thats when we are truly tapping into the Facebook Economy for all its promise and potential.
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