Archive for the ‘Facebook Friday's’ Category

a Look at Facebook Statistics

Friday, April 17th, 2009

Via:

Taking a Look at Facebook Statistics from All Facebook | FlowingData

Of the platform wars

Friday, January 16th, 2009

Platform wars are interesting, mainly because the winner will potentially be in the hotseat for quite some time. Take a look at Microsoft winning the desktop platform war – they’ve had a very well entrenched position for a considerable amount of time.

We’re more or less at that point with the web. We were at the beginning of the wars about a year ago when Google launched OpenSocial and FriendConnect, and then Facebook with their platform and Facebook Connect. Having a well adopted framework is very important – developers typically want to develop apps for a widespread platform. This allows them to build once, and get multiple distribution on different sites.

From the outset, it looks like most of these services are very similar, but on closer inspection they do have some subtle and important differences, which I’m grappling with at the moment.

To sketch a background, I’m doing research on a pretty exciting portal project. At the risk of giving too much away – we need a portal that users can customize with widgets. It’s not too far off from something like Netvibes or Pageflakes. The scripts to run these sites are a dime a dozen and pretty easy to get hold of, plus it’s not so difficult to build them from scratch. They’ve almost become as ubiquitous as white label social networks, blog platforms etc. To use the lingo, they’ve become a commodity.

We initially did some research into white label networks to add a social element to the site. But this poses new problems though – will users need to sign-up to the site again, and find all their friends on the site? Wouldn’t it be cool if they could get a current list of friends already on the site, and potentially on the site right now? We honestly don’t want to build a new network from scratch. Cue FacebookConnect. We decided on Facebook Connect over Google Friend Connect for the predominant reason that we find the social profile of Facebook much more expansive than Google. Even though lots of people have a Google account, we feel the data in Facebook is much richer and also much more organized. There is the benefit of action injection into the news feed, as well friend linking and profile integration.

So we’re going to go the Facebook Connect route – we’re pretty excited about the one-click login for users as well. Now however, we’re posed with a different problem. We want to outsource the development of new widgets to the portal. It’s a similar problem that Facebook had a while ago, and the reason for the platform development (or definitely a large part of it). Facebook has effectively allowed for the outsourcing of it’s ecosystem – things which make the site useful. They first started with Events, Albums and Videos, eventually they expanded in the Marketplace. Soon enough it becomes apparent that they won’t be able keep up with new apps – what if they want to add a TV guide? And if they build a TV guide, how would they build a localized one – for us here in South Africa?

An easier route is to allow outside developers to build those apps – effectively outsource the development of them. Enter the Facebook Platform. This allows for hyper-localized applications (e.g. a TV guide for DSTV) without Facebook needing to build them, and also better applications. Facebook is going “license” the building of the marketplace to Oodle.

So what we’re going to need for our portal site is a similar platform framework. We could build our own platform, but that won’t make much sense. For one: we also want to outsource some of our development. Say someone builds a DSTV app for Facebook, we want that app to be available on our portal as well without the developer having to build the app again. Secondly, we also don’t want to go through the process of building an entire new platform – we simply don’t have the people to build a new platform, plus we want to play nicely with the other platforms out there (why build something that is already built?).

And we’re lucky here as well – we have actually have a choice! We can look at Google’s Open Social, or we can go the Facebook Open Platform route. But once again, we’re more partial to Facebook, also because we’re not to keen to go down a route where we need to figure out a way to integrate Open Social and FBConnect. Yikes. Plus the OpenSocial implementations that I’ve seen are pretty mediocre.

So now some problems start cropping up – I’ve never seen an implementation of Facebook Open Platform, plus I have no idea what we will be able to do with it once we have it setup correctly.

  • Will the Facebook Open Platform be compatible with our portal?
  • Will we be able to filter apps that will appear on our site?
  • Will we have access to the applications?
  • Will people be able to build an application once, and it be used on Facebook, and our site?
  • What happens to users who aren’t Facebook users?
  • Where are other examples of these same implementations?

These questions are really bugging me at the moment, and if anyone has any tips, we’d really appreciate some feedback!

What Facebook connect will mean for Identity 2.0

Friday, July 25th, 2008

Dick 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, 2008

If you take a look at the structure of Facebook you can see 2 main navigation sections (disregarding the rest of the site).

  1. Profile data at the top (Profile, Friends, Networks, Inbox)
  2. 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!

Facebook groups: A low engagement model

Tuesday, October 16th, 2007

I’ve opened up a Google Docs Spreadsheet that I’d love some collaboration on.
You can view the document here.

I’m trying to construct an argument about why Facebook groups are a useless organising tool for interest groups. I’ve added the 7 or 8 groups that Rohit Barghava has mentioned in his blog post. I disagree with him. I believe Facebook groups offer a bad way for brands and and other interest groups to engage with their users.

One of the core features of a CRM tool – contacting your users – is difficult, you can only mail a certain amount of your members before your connection, or the connection, plonks out. Also, viewing what info is new on a group is difficult. You have to trawl through discussions and threads to get to where you want to be. The end result is that people simply don’t comment. Or they do, but they leave it at that and don’t engage.

I’m still working on the piece, but I’d love some feedback from the community. Please help out by filling in or updating this spreadsheet. The idea is that we’d be able to get a snapshot of some of the more active communities/groups on Facebook.

Some links to take a look at:
Community Technology Foundation
Widgify
AllFacebook
Leease
Ning Blog

And some other great funny groups.
And what groups were popular in 1995? When Facebook just started out?

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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.

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Facebook has RSS

Friday, August 3rd, 2007

Finally we see some RSS in Facebook!

You can click through to the Facebook page here.

Orginal credit goes to Ben Martin.

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Facebook’s mail as a replacement for e-mail and a replacement for OpenID

Monday, July 30th, 2007

A 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
Dick HardtAnd 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.

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Will an Open Social Network work?

Thursday, July 12th, 2007

There 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.

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Who should you develop for?

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007

I’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

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