finally a web platform that doesn't claim to be "beta!" This is nothing short of
a revolution!
Context
a key point is
integration - there is no place on earth physical or online that has the people in my community of all walks of life show up in one place - this alone is reason enough for me to drop email as my primary communication tool!
Slide presentations
- Facebook Study - a study from France that hits the nail on the head with the ability to have "multi-dimensional conversations" - the fact that straight ASCII just doesn't do it for a lot of folks in this day of flashy graphics!
- Your Facebook Strategy - skim this presentation - it does a good job at covering the basics without being too wordy and is great if you are in the midst of just wanting to get an overview to make a decision as to how you want to incorporate facebook into your product strategy. see the french study if you are looking for more academic thoughts.
What's Possible
- Launch of F8 - nice summary of keynote
- "50% of registered users come back to the site every day."
- Could Facebook become the next Microsoft? - get the importance of "platform-orientation" (fair warning a massive debate follows putting down the idea)
- Facebook = social network 2.0 - get a nice frank honest opinion as to why Facebook is more "user-friendly" to your networks...
- iPhone Facebook Application WOWS Users - very positive review of one of the first apps to fulfill on Steve Jobs' vision - to put the development of the "perfect" phone interface into software designers hands!
- Facebook surfers cost their bosses billions - raging debate re: facebook in the workplace - let em play i say! ;)
- Top 10 Facebook Business Uses - I'm a big fan of Facebook in this regard and as a loooong time social user of email - as well as a big fan that online communication be an effective way to get to know people when you are not meeting them face-to-face or on the phone with them.
- Stanford Facebook Class - news article about the trend in persuasive technology!
- (shameless plug: anyone interested in starting such a course in Thailand, please contact me ASAP!)
- Why Facebook is the Future - a down to earth article my dad could easy read...
- "Facebook constitutes a critical rebalancing of the Internet's founding vision of unfettered electronic liberty"
- "If you're annoying folks, you'll essentially cease to exist, as those you annoy drop you off the grid."
- Is Email Facebook's Competitor? - the short answer is clearly YES - I believe the key is to remove your dependency on email and it starts by removing all facebook email notifications and developing the habit of checking facebook regularly. Such behavior is reinforced by our natural inclination to explore, discover, be related, and connect with one another.
- Facebook for thirtysomethings
- "According to Business Week magazine, more than 41 percent of Facebook visitors are 35 and older."
- "Don't think social networking is just for younger people."
- "Use different sites in different ways. Haynes, for example, will more readily add someone on MySpace than on LinkedIn. Because LinkedIn is professionally oriented, she wants to be able to vouch for anyone in her network and thus wants a stronger connection to those contacts."
- 'Facebook Fridays' Enrich Enterprise Software Firm
- `Facebook fills the missing link between e-mail and talking to someone directly.`
- "We're geographically dispersed, so being able to share a common interest with someone or simply find out more about people you work with is big."
- Avoid Information Overload: Your Online Professional Networking Strategy - very nice overview of the spaces one may lead connections made on the internet through!
- Email and Cellphone Contacts are the Real Social Graph - right on - see my comment re: discovery of SMS app on my iPhone! this said, we will continue to see a trend towards more analysis of communication patterns in social networking spaces.
- "Sending someone an email, in contrast, actually requires having something to say. It requires introducing yourself. It requires actually COMMUNICATING substantively, rather than just empty gestures like adding, poking or sending virtual beer."
- The New Portals: It’s the Bread, Not the Peanut Butter - nice evolution of portals diagram
- "Facebook promises a kind of Socratic knowledge: it tells users things they didn’t even think to ask."
Platform
http://www.facebook.com
Intention
NOTE: section quickly getting dated as what is happening is facebook is causing us to jointly
discover new uses for the platform without having thought of it first!!!! (see news articles above)
- keep requests nice, clean, and to the point
- keep chatter out of email which in my opinion, is best for requests inside the context of enrollment and being related
- keep pen pal type letters here and not feel so "pressured" to reply right away
- have fun with being a global team. what's so is I can't just ask you to go grab a bite to eat after our call. I'm a stand we have a sense of our personal lives and be focused and intentional.
- stand for technology - embrace paradigms for possibility. facebook is on the bleeding edge without going into the realm of 3D virtual worlds. it is accessible to the masses and stands to transform the way we communicate.
- blur the distinction between work and socializing (what biz people get from facebook to date)
history
I scribbled this down to myself one day...I don't schedule time for it anymore as I relate to it like how I used to check email!
Many of you ask "why facebook?" (ref hypernetworked generation) communicate I will only communicate by facebook and wiki. I will only reply to requests by email, no longer participating in the Omidyar Network, online boards. do not keep up with RSS feeds at this time. share what's happening, what doesn't work, (addiction to checking email) and now scheduling time to be in facebook - a rich space for online interaction. my intention is to cause what makes facebook fun occur in Second Life and have no commitment to be in Second Life at the moment.
Vision
this used to be a feature-oriented vision - figure simple, readable prose belongs here.
the basic vision is a system that achieves balance. what happens today is most communication system don't bring any context to the picture - anyone can email you, you see your entire skype list - this is not a scalable solution as we all realize our ability to be global players in this world.
some systems like Groove Desktop did a great job at contextualizing workspaces and we're trying to bring some simplicity to a web interface - one that is accessable anytime, anywhere and does just the basics of human-interaction when you're not in front of people.
speculation
given facebook has the highest percentage of real names and photos (faces) - the opportunity for community maintained address books (a la plaxo) becomes a reality. what happens today is I often manually attach pictures to my contacts and would love it if people maintained their own pictures that would show up automatically when my phone rings. You see some semblance of this with gtalk.
Integration
now
future
- wiki (not now but i imagine soon!)
- project manager - calling all PMPs!
- CRM (salesforce.com)
facebook will inherently become "3D" over time as more & more people adopt advanced collaboration paradigms
Executive Team
Surprisingly, any information on the executive team behind Facebook is difficult to find in
their about page!
perhaps they want us to discover them through the platform itself.
UPDATE: the company clearly has matured and transformed:
http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?execbios
did manage to rake up how this started as a project at Harvard
on Hoovers
see
Controversy section below to see what surfaced on my search to learn more about Mark Zuckerberg!
Feature Requests
this is a list of key enhancements (partial, some reported directly to facebook engineering)
this is another way to get a sense of where I feel facebook is going...
- group applications - just as you are able to add applications to profiles, group admins can add additional functionality to enhance their "group experience" - in particular: wikis, project managers - in the spirit of having fun - applications designed to let the team get to know each other! :)
- network filter be able to filter communication (inbox, wall, application activity) by network. in this manner, when you are at "work" - you are only receiving input from your colleagues and at the same time, your communication can be fun & playful. this is the end of "groups" as we know it - your profile page is contextualized - it becomes your home, your view of life.
- msgs from "local" peeps (ie. your region) bubble up top first.
- GPS-driven devices automatically contextualize to your network based on where you are standing (ie. at home or at your office and with permission, a dynamic view of the network within 10 meters around you is available on your device!
- advanced collaboration support - to have a facility to talk and transform discussions into outcomes, projects and tasks. an application is able to assist project managers in tracking tasks and communicating with their team. (related: Groove Desktop component)
- this could be implemented as a "group application" (ie. project manager) and a first cut at self-organization is the development of a wiki group application (all hail Omidyar Network! :)
- virtual business card - it is quite common when networking or out at events, I run out of business cards. Plaxo has for a long time filled in a need to be able to present yourself professionally online after a function. Plaxo has since lost what I believe is a key feature to business networking followup in such a scenario. You can knock Plaxo dead guys!
- invitation templates - invitations right now have a set "invite to be my friend" template that is rather generic and does not have people immediately get the value of facebook upon receiving this email. users shall be given a choice in regards to how "formal" the invite looks ranging from:
- business invitations sharing what's possible with facebook
- app developer
- biz networker
- recruiter
- standard business networking invite
- custom plain text
- community-centric (ie. how facebook expand our Dance Labs community in a fun, social way - just like dancing!)
- invitation management - right now it is not possible to see who you've invited and who you haven't invited. it would be good to interface your current address book (ie. gmail) and get the status of each invite (not invited, invited on DATE, invite expired) (see LinkedIn for a good example) [requested]
- relationship "weights" - as much as there is the idealism of "all relationships be equal" this is not the case in reality - some friends are closer than others and it can be due to a variety of factors - not just location. this weight calculation can feed into reputation or drive certain applications that wish to use this data to sort lists, preferences, whatever.
- contact taxonomy - networks are great but not 100% flexible. as the number of people in your facebook network grows, you'd like to take a look at other ways of categorizing your contacts (ie. other views) that are not based on region, work, school, facebook group, etc. they should be non-trivial to others but meaningful to you. be a plus if inheritance be taken into account (ie. you can put your mom & dad into a class called "parents" and this is automatically classified as "family" which also includes your little brother ;-)
- profile text search - you can now search all applications in your profile for text. wall posts, private messages, and any other objects will show up that match your criteria. you can restrict your search by application and/or date and time for your convenience (could be extended to networks, groups, think: hierarchy)
- group sense - the mini-feed on your home page is great for discovering groups and seeing where your network is having conversations. what s missing is a facility to discover conversations outside your network (esp groups your network dont join). it also doesnt work well for groups that have been neglected for awhile that need catching up and require attention (esp those you moderate) this new feature allows you to stay current with your current communities/groups and avoid the endless cycle of joining groups! (which is not bad in any way in itself for the record!)
- advanced messaging support - being a long time Google Mail user, lots of things are missing. If the two companies would just partner - I would be happier about my ads too ;-) (admittedly, the messaging paradigm is not meant to be a replacement to email - something to think about...) (i personally would like to see some kind of hybrid - see all my communications (wall, private, group) in a linear time-ordered fashion)
- print thread
- archive email (all you have is delete)
- text search (or at the very least, see all communications related to this profile (abstractly person, group, or network))
- integrated instant messaging (continuity of conversations even offline)
- blind-carbon copying
- auto-saving
- bulleting and numbering
- formatting
- collapse threads
Controversy
(debatable whether i should maintain my own blog just on facebook!)
mini-feed
wow - 9 months ago (Sept 2006) the mini-feed was protested against by facebook community users - the story made it to
Time magazine
it's good to get the history behind the mini-feed and as a user who became active daily starting in July 2007 - I think the mini-feed feature is the best thing since sliced bread at the creator of the feature is a genius - it does what a blog tries to do at a finer level of detail and allows you to keep in touch with your network in a way that is unintrusive (i have 5000+ unread RSS entries and detest keeping up with email & mailing lists) yet inviting. that's my 2 cents on the matter!
automation
see
Facebook Opening Up but on its own terms - I'm an automation evangelist so this one bothers me a bit but at the same time I can see they are looking to prevent abuse!
corporate use
Alternatives
- great list on Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites
- couchsurfing.com - just as facebook stands to "open up" the workplace. couchsurfing.com literally gives you a facility to open up your home! the platform is not intended to be as advanced as facebook and worth noting esp given its official non-profit status. I suspect this community will be "more open" to implementing changes designed to fit local community building needs (such as a printed community events calendar for our Bangkok Ecovillage - our inspiration!)
- Open Social API
Market
- United Online Cans Classmates.com IPO - i personally dont think there is a market for paid services unless u include productivity applications (ie. integration with email systems, project management tools, CRM, etc) - my personal experience with classmates is not stellar (if not annoying) - I have no confidence they will embrace an application model to empower their "classmates" and this is based on limited experience at the risk of being judgmental of the organization
- "If you think the subscription-based model will grow in perpetuity -- even though sites like Facebook and MySpace are free and ad-based -- then the valuation was reasonable. But if you think the subscription business could run into trouble, the deal wasn't attractively priced."