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a Look at Facebook Statistics
Friday, April 17th, 2009What Facebook connect will mean for Identity 2.0
Friday, July 25th, 2008Dick Hardt, the guy who sort of helped kickstarted OpenID and had that awesome presentation, has blogged about an abbreviated history of identity systems. It’s a pretty good read if you want to understand since when the whole Identity 2.0 thing has been coming – and how Microsoft might actually have been on the forefront of the movement, but did it in a sucky way.
The part that struck me most, and what I believe is really important for the web, is that we are seeing the web mature more. I posted about signs of a maturing web earlier in reference to more complex advertising and how digital advertising is coming into its own.
What Facebook Connect will mean is that we’ll see your real identity commenting on this blog and moving with you on the web. Which says a lot. OpenID is a cool way to do that already, you can create a profile and sign-on easily, but how do I know that it’s really you? Current commenting systems suck even more at this.
For example, here we have Nelson Mandela commenting on the Facebook Connect post on Quirk’s blog:
Many services have been suffering from a similar problem – fake or multiple identities. 24.com regularly suffers from spammy comments and Muti has also gained flak for allowing people to register multiple profiles (and thereby game the system).
Magnolia has an interesting way of getting around some of these problems – you can’t register an account with an email address (as these are quite disposable), you can only register with a select group of services. While this doesn’t directly solve the issue of identity, it was one of the first services that I saw that used a type of Facebook Connect before there was a Facebook Connect.
Now. What we’ll see is more of this, better identity with Real People in commenting. Real Identity. And this is why the web is maturing even more. It’s moving away from the geeky world of AcidBurn76 commenting on everything, to a more mature web where you are responsible. I find this exciting because it also opens up the opportunity for web communities to flourish more.
(As a side note, Facebook is the first service that has managed to get probably everyone to use their real name to sign up. It’s quite incredible really.)
DiSo project: Taking a page from Facebook
Thursday, February 28th, 2008If you take a look at the structure of Facebook you can see 2 main navigation sections (disregarding the rest of the site).
- Profile data at the top (Profile, Friends, Networks, Inbox)
- You have apps and other things on the left.
The way we’ve been thinking about the way Facebook works in terms of architecture and find it incredibly interesting, from an innovation perspective and also because the products we’re building rely on similar kind of systems.
We follow the standards or thoughts in the DiSo project, as well as the concepts in the Social Network Portability (really the same thing), so we’re trying to look at how your profile can be more portable, and follow you around the web.
In Facebook, your top profile is the one that really counts, it’s the one that follows you through all the apps you’ve installed, and brings you back to your data, the one on the left is basically all the different “sites” you’re on. It’s like FriendFeed or Plaxo or whatever, but the relationship between data-owner and application is much more skewed.
This post is pretty half-arsed and pretty obvious, but sometimes you need to state the obvious!
Secrets behind MobiMii and NudgeMii Facebook apps
Friday, August 31st, 2007
Most of my friends have the NudgeMii Facebook application installed – it allows you to send a “Nudge” to a friend, which then sends an SMS to that friend.
NudgeMii is brought to you by Fontera, a company that specialises in mobile products.
Fontera develops and manages innovative mobile products and services for leading companies across the globe.
MobiMii is the new social network that they launched recently. It’s a mobile social network that you can use to connect to your friends.
Now, let’s take a ball park figure of 20 000 SMS’s sent per day. This is pure thumbsuck, but let’s say that it’s true. Now, at 30cper SMS that equates to about R6 000 per day expenditure. That’s a lot of money. Per month it would come to R180 000. That’s even more money.
Now how would you think the SMS service makes any money?
I went over to the MobiMii site and was amazed at how populated my profile is so far…
Not only do I already have a whole bunch of friends, but they also seem to have a whole bunch of friends.
I’m thinking that people who have added the NudgeMii application populate the MobiMii network. It’s scary. It’s also brilliant.
Facebook’s mail as a replacement for e-mail and a replacement for OpenID
Monday, July 30th, 2007A while back I wrote about how Facebook could become the defacto Identity 2.0 provider for a lot of people if OpenID doesn’t get their game up, the post has been getting some great hits and some interest from some great people as well. Gotta love them internets.
Facebook mails better than e-mail
Recently Dave Duarte mentioned how he sees Facebook killing e-mail. While I don’t agree with him on it (Facebook has a terrible mail interface), it did get me thinking about mail and identity differently than before. Facebook e-mail isn’t really e-mail. You aren’t sending a mail to a name@domain.com anymore, you are actually sending the mail to a person as opposed to an e-mail address, which is a total paradigm shift essentially when you think of anonymity on the net. I recently received a mail from someone after a presentation I did at a backpacking conference, almost 2 months ago. The guy must have looked me up on Facebook and sent me a message (note even the language is different).
Previously, I was a lost entity. There was no place that he could have looked up my contact details except through a tedious process of calling the organisers (ok, only tedious for me…) if it wasn’t in the conference pack. Lucky for us, in trots the hero of the day, Facebook. The attendee can now simply do a quick search for me, I can recognise him if I spoke to him and we can quickly strike up the conversation where we left off. The most important part here is that we never had to exchange e-mail addresses. He could contact me as if he was walking up to me – no need to need a secret pass-key (e-mail address), or keep that ever elusive business card.
E-mail as it should be
And this is the way that we should move towards communication. I want to see some sort of identity provider that someone can search for and find my details (currently Google does that for me…) But there should not be one ID provider, there should be many (echoing the ideas of Malcom Gladwell and his TED spaghetti sauces presentation) and it should be open. You’ll remember I mentioned the great talk by Dick Hardt (back in 2005 mind you) where he asks how do you replicate your ID document online, but not only yours, you need to replicate the ID of South Africa, Botswana, America, Thailand, Greece, Morocco, Denmark, etc etc. and they all need to talk to each other in an understandable way. When you walk up to the bottle store in America and you show them your SA ID document, how do they know you are over 21? They trust your ID document.
But I’m straying again – previously e-mail was a pretty good measure/keeper of your identity. Some registration processes used to (and many still do) require you to login with your e-mail address. What kind of a sure-fire identity system is that? I can go and create 50 different ones and then create 50 more using any of the free e-mail services, or I can send the confirmation mail to an anonymous mail client like Mailinator. The fact is that e-mail is and never was a good identity provider, so why are we sticking to it? Because it’s the only weak one we have.
But now Facebook has broken past both of these barriers (geekyness from OpenID, and easily forged for e-mail). I’ve said before that I believe Facebook to be very secure. I don’t believe that Facebook will see that many sex predators (if any) as Myspace because it is such a good identity provider (you can’t fake your friends).
I’d love to get to the day that people don’t ask me what my e-mail address is but simply send me a message (and not in the sense of “Ya cool, I’ll add you as a friend on Facebook”). I have no idea how this would work, but that is what all those smart people are out there for.
Technorati Tags: identity 2.0, openid, facebook, e-mail, message, identity
Will an Open Social Network work?
Thursday, July 12th, 2007There have been a lot of calls for an open Social Network lately.
One of the bigger players like Google has helped out the small capstone project called Socialstream that will aim to aggregate all the other networks, something like a Unified Social Network. And it seems like Yahoo is trying to get into the game as well.
Marc Canter also has a post over at ZDNet on how Ning can/should help out with this project.
I’m all for an Open Social Network, but man, if we can’t even get our IM platforms to talk to each other, how are we going to do this with Social Networks?
At any one stage I have Gtalk, Skype and MSN running. I’d love it to be in one interface (ala Trillian) but I find that UI uncomfortable.
Call me skeptical.
Technorati Tags: socialstream, ning, unified social network, facebook, myspace, social network, Marc Canter,
Who should you develop for?
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007I’ve mentioned before that I think you should rather build an app on top of Facebook than build your own social network (of course, this doesn’t apply for everyone).
Mashable covers the Facebook vs Myspace: Platform or what?
MySpace Concedes: Facebook Does it Better
You might think that this has no implications for your network, but in fact it is a very very important point. Just as app developers can pick between these two networks, they must pick your network as well, and you should make it as easy as possible.
Some South African SN’s that have been popping up haven’t opened up. They simply don’t have the scale for it to be viable. Instead they opt for developing the apps themselves and launch it as a feature. Why do this when you can crowdsource? It’s the web2.0 way to do it.
It’s been proven now that opening up your network to external developers is the way to go. You must somehow make your network open and available to build on top of.
That being said, Why don’t you rather clone the architecture behind Facebook, or atleast the query language, so that it would be easy to e.g. import the iLike app to your own network. So, when developers are faced with developing for your site, they can easily take their existing code that they built for Facebook (because they will first develop for that) and make it easy to port to e.g. 24.com or Mk89.com
Technorati Tags: social network, web 2.0, south africa, developer, facebook, integration, local