THE DREAM IN ACTION

This weekend @Mollstar and I had a long (relative to the amount of time I can usually get her to talk about the web) conversation about how we don’t really understand who plays all these Facebook games. Other than Poker from Zynga, which I play a decent amount of, I don’t understand who grows virtual farms, zaps their friends with black magic, and others. Then, on Halloween, Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch posted a follow up post to his question to Anu Shirkla of OfferPal at the Virtual Good Summit about the ethics of many adverting trends within the virtual currency markets. His post covered examples of these ad schemes and a very entertaining video of classic Arrington antics at the event. You may like him or hate him but you can’t deny he’s kind of a bad ass.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-gaming-ecosystem-of-hell/

Then the next day on Nov 1, Tech Crunch followed up with quotes from two respected entrepreneurs who admittedly said they’d executed these types of ad strategies in the past and weren’t proud of it. One even said, “I’m surprised it took this many years to be reported by the “media”. These kind of scams have been going on for years…”

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/01/scamville-hotornot-plentyoffish-facebook-myspace/

Then Dennis Yu the CEO of BlitzLocal wrote a very honest post about scamming Facebook and the 3 most common ways to do it: 1) Downloading a spyware tool bar, 2) Tricking users to give up their email using ‘you’ve won a “free” camera, just tell us you email address’, or 3) Getting a users phone number by using ‘thanks for taking that IQ test, give us your phone number so we know where to send it’, which charges a user $20/month.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/01/how-to-spam-facebook-like-a-pro-an-insiders-confession/

The next follow up was from Zynga’s VP of Biz Dev Andrew Trader who stated that about 1/3 of Zynga’s revenue comes from advertising. This is the same advertising that Arrington calls ’scammy’.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/02/scamville-zynga-says-13-of-revenue-comes-from-lead-gen-and-other-offers/

Next Mark Pincus, who I wrote about last week, responded to Arrington’s claims with a very thoughtful post about the industry and openly admitting that yes, some players on these social media platforms are ‘scammy’ advertisers and they’re creating bad user experiences. He also raised a point I hadn’t thought of; there are many users who don’t have access to online payment methods (broke kids) who are still interested in making in game purchases. So they’re able to take survey’s and perform tasks to earn in-game-currency. Pincus says this about the worst offender:

In fact, the worst offender, tatto media, referenced in the techcrunch article, had already been taken down and permanently banned prior to the post.

There is no doubt that social gaming is entering the mainstream culture and there is a business to be created around fun….

As we evolve to a world where people connections are the basis for the largest consumer services, we will face more challenges. I’m confident that with so many smart people (and critics) we will overcome these.

http://markpincus.typepad.com/markpincus/2009/11/my-take-on-zynga-and-cpa-offers.html

Then yesterday Arrington respectfully responded to the Pincus post:

Hats off to Zynga. Flat out admitting that the problem exists and taking early steps to fix it is just something you don’t see from most companies.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/02/zynga-takes-steps-to-remove-scams-from-games/

I hope that I could catch you up to what’s going on here and make it easier for you to follow than reading every post (although you can of course). As I stated last week in my application economy post I really think that Pincus is a sharp entrepreneur. He understand that you can’t just F’ the user and still build a great business so I’m excited to see how he responds to this in the longer term. I wouldn’t doubt it at all if Pincus were to push Facebook to adopt the standards that Arrington et al. are calling for.

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image via aknacer

“We will be looking for someone with public company experience who can help take (Facebook) to the next stage in our growth.” – Mark Zuckerberg, an internal FB email

I just finished reading Kara Swishers post on AllThingsD (from 2 weeks ago) about Zuckerbergs announcement that Gideon Yu’s departure, their now ex-CFO. I don’t think it takes any stroke of genius to realize that FB is planning to go public. I’m not sure of the terms or the relationship between Yu and Zu(ckerberg) but as FB continues to turn down HUGE acquisition offers it’s obvious that Yu’s departure had to do with his experience, and going public is in FB’s near future.

lanjut →

via vadirajcs

I’m pumped that now my Tweets feed directly to Facebook. All the friends that made fun of me for using Twitter are now commenting and joining in conversations around my Tweets and my blog posts that I share on Facebook via Twitter. This is a huge “crossing of the chasm” for Twitter because the “normal people” are now joining in on web based conversations at a rapidly increasing rate.

Sorry this post is so late, I’ve been thinking/working on it for a while. First, I’ll share why you should use Twitter for status updates, then show you how.

9 Reasons Why You Should Use Twitter for Status Updates

I have found multiple reason for using Twitter. I’ve use the service for almost a year and have been able to meet a ton of cool people using the service. I’ve used Twitter for personal and business cases. It’s a phenomenal communication platform that allows for extreme flexibility in communication. Here are my top 9 reasons why you should use Twitter to update your Facebook status.

1. Twitter allows for mobile status updates – Go to the ‘Devices’ tab under your Twitter account settings and give Twitter your mobile phone number. Then SMS or txt message ‘40404′ your message. This will update Twitter and now also your Facebook status. Easy peasy!

lanjut →

You probably saw the Hubspot Twitter grader, most people who use Twitter regularly have. And if you have a business online you’ve probably used Hubspot’s website grader. They measure for SEO strengths, etc. Now Hubspot, just (last night), released the Facebook Grader. The measure your friends, strength of friends, and how active and updated your profile is.

I got a pretty solid grade here and I’m convinced it’s all because of how sweet my college and college friends are. I’m assuming other schools are the same way, but when Facebook hit Miami University it was a frenzy. There was mass creapin’ being done. It was college.

Loic had a great idea that they should include if you have a fan page. It would hurt me and help him, I guess rightfully so. Comment with your score!

I’m the 47th strongest facebooker…that won’t last long.

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*click on the pic to watch live

This afternoon I watch the BearHug Camp hosted by Steve Gillmor.  The event was focused on the progress of the micro-blogging space. One of the main topics of conversation was around live search of the Twitter data. Currently there is nothing that is “real time” and for political purposes among others this service is much desired.

Evan, Biz, and Alex from Twitter came just before lunch and they really took a lot of heat. Many of the comments online stated that it seemed that Steve set this group up to “gang” up on the Twitter crew. My perception is that this is probably true. The guys were put on the spot big time about how they will listen to the developer community going forward. Alex’s response was that his email is an open door for suggestions, comments, concerns (alex@twitter.com).

In attendance from my point of view (online) was Loic Lemeur (Seesmic), Leo Laporte (TwiT Army) who livestreamed the event, Dave Winer (Scripting.com), Ari Steinberg (Facebook), Kevin Marks (Google Open Social), Angus Logan (Microsoft), identi.ca guys, among a group of developers in their respective fields. There was a lot of talk around XMPP becoming just as common as HTTP so that the web can be much more LIVE!

My take-aways: This event was interesting but the stubbornness of Steve Gillmor and the politically motivated conversations took away from the event. The best part of the event that I enjoyed the most was the time that Evan, Biz, and Alex were there. The conversation although tough for them was the most focused that it had been all day. I see a huge push for the web to become more and more “live”. The web used to be static, now it’s updated, next it will be live!

As many know Facebook held their annual developers conference yesterday at the San Fransisco Design Center. The agenda (shared below) emphasized three main changes coming to FB: more sharing, simplification, and getting developers more involved. There were a few main sites that will now be much more integrated with Facebook such as Digg and Seesmic! The live blog of that event was covered extremely well over at TechCrunch.

The question that was never answered fully is one that Max Levchin founder of Slide asked, “is Facebook going to create more contracted agreements with app development houses?” I can see why Max would obviously love that as one of the premier app developers. However, I don’t see that as such a great thing for Facebook or the development community as a whole. If Facebook starts entering into contractual relationships with the “big swinging dicks” of app development (Slide, RockYou) then the “little guy” development houses will not be able to participate or continue to  feed the Facebook app community with innovative ideas. Keeping things open and available for anyone has been the strategy for Facebook to grow their development platform since the beginning and judging by the excitement and attendance of yesterdays event it looks likes it has been working quite well!

So Mark, listen, keep the platform open. Give the little guys a chance at “making it big”. There are a lot of great start-ups out there that would love to use the Facebook platform to change the way people use the web but if you cut “deals” with these big dogs of the FB app world the small man is out of the game. Give’m a chance.

*I just saw this morning that my Facebook profile has been updated and wanted to share a small portion of the new look.

Agenda:

12:00 – 1:30 pm: Doors Open

Registration & Exhibitor Area Open

1:30 – 3:00 pm: Keynote, Mark Zuckerberg

3:30 – 4:15 pm: Breakouts Round 1

User Experience: Introducing the New Facebook Profile & More

Technical: Building to Facebook Scale

Business: Building a Business on Facebook

4:30 – 5:15 pm: Breakouts Round 2

User Experience: Integrating Facebook Connect into your Website

Technical: Advanced App Building

Business: Marketing your App on Facebook

Workshop: App Building 101

5:15 – 6:00 pm: Break

6:00 – 6:45 pm: Breakouts Round 3

User Experience: Building Great Applications on Facebook

Technical: Feed & Social Distribution

Business: Entreprenuership on Facebook Platform

7:00 – 7:45 pm: Breakouts Round 4

User Experience: Design & User Experience at Facebook

Technical: Made for Mobile

Business: fbFund – A look inside – Seeding Opportunity on Facebook

Workshop: Taking your Platform Application Global

8:00 – 12:00 am: After 8 Celebration

*Photos courtesy of Brian Solis

  I love this image because for me it encompasses the way people <bias> should use the internet<bias/>. Personally, these are the three tiers of my web experience. The hardware, the interaction, the information.

Tier #1: Apple 
As you probably know if you read this blog regularly I recently purchased a Mac Book Pro and absolutely love it. It is so nice to finally have a machine that I don’t have to worry about it working properly.  The suite of applications is just as robust or better than a PC running Windows and is likely better designed. So, let me just dispel the rumor that you won’t be able to find applications for a Mac. I can guarantee if you enjoy being on a computer at all then getting a Mac will exponentially increase that enjoyment. I see Macs continually increasing their market share and thus being the premier computers (mainly laptops) of the future.

Tier #2: Facebook 
In my eyes Facebook sort of represents social networking on the web. I was a relatively late adopter to the social web and that was in 2004 when Facebook really started to grow to other universities outside of Harvard. I remember the day that my school, Miami (OH), got Facebook. I joined that day. We had heard about it prior to its arrival because of the stink that MySpace was making. How much better is Facebook?

Obviously there are other social tools out there, that’s not what I’m arguing. I’m merely using Facebook as the poster child for the social web. Social software has changed the general uses of the web. The days of one way information flows on the internet are archaic. The web will can only get more and more interactive.

Tier #3: Google 
The top layer of these building blocks is Google. Really it could be the first layer or the middle later but for the sake of this image, its the top. Google is the key to the door that keeps information from the consumer. Can you imaging an internet where you had to guess URLs in order to find good websites? Or a web where only the highest paying websites would come up? You wouldn’t be reading this, that’s for sure (hold comments about wishing you weren’t reading this!) The web is open, accessible, free, opportunistic, all thanks to the guys who wanted to download the internet, Google.