social networks

Web 2.0 is over… in case you weren’t aware… and I think Facebook killed it. Facebook has been the talk of the web since it launched the developer platform, and continues to steal headlines with its ridiculous valuations and ad network that is a little too perfect. These things have changed / are changing ways in which we use the web, and I’m pretty sure it is for the worse.

I was getting ready to write a post on Hulu and Facebook and how the tide has turned into a state in which we are seeing the potential of the web being realized… then I realized how far off I was. Facebook hasn’t revolutionized the web, it has stifled it. I remember not long ago always reading about new independent startups coming from all over the globe… now I hear about Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and efforts like Hulu that are born out of corporations not individuals. The swing hasn’t taken full effect yet, but while the world is applauding the brilliance of Facebook developer platform and Google’s “Open”Social, I’m a little scared. This is a serious detraction from innovation. Instead of trying to build the next great website the developer community seems to be focused on building the next great Facebook app. That’s a big problem. As a result of Facebook platform and the notion that, “you don’t have to build a network, you can just use Facebook’s,” I think we at the beginning of a downward spiral in terms of independent innovation.

And now Google has entered the game with its “Open”Social. A platform that masks itself as open when all it really does is steer developers away from developing for the web and into developing for large corporate sites. Developing for social networks rather than for the web does little to drive real innovation. What it really does is perpetuate the success of sites like Facebook and gives the developers of the insignificant parts of the whole a false sense of accomplishment.

When I think of what Web2.0 was, I think of big-eyed independent entrepreneurs out to change the way the web worked… not followers out to build a little piece of a big site. I think back to the early days of del.icio.us (before it was purchased and entered into the unfortunate life cycle of a corporate product) and the first time I used Digg (a product I openly hate, but did respect), and I wonder when we will see innovation like that again. I don’t know when it will be, but I do know that it won’t come from a Facebook app.

Facebook is not the internet, it’s a part of the internet. Your Facebook app is a part of a part, that seems pretty insignificant to me. The web needs innovation, challenge, and a ton of voices… if we just develop for a handful of large companies (and only use the services of those companies) the power of the internet is lessened. We need more independent developers and leaders, and less followers. Platform is not a buzz word it’s a death knell. Of course, I’ve been saying that web 2.0 was ending since January 06… so maybe I’m wrong.

I may be giving up Lopico. I’m not 100% sure, but I think it’s time for another project (or two). I’ve had a lot of fun with Lopico and learned a lot - it has been an incredibly valuable experience - I just don’t know that my heart is still in it. This current month has been the worst since Lopico relaunched, and I’m apathetic. Things were going well for a while - for a long time - but I don’t know, I think it’s nearing the end. The local niche / vertical just doesn’t do it for me anymore. There are so many other ideas I’d like to try out and other things I’d like to do… I think some time away from Lopico will do me good. I’m not going to close the site, I don’t even know that I won’t finish the redesign - I’m just saying I need to try some other projects.

NEO2.0 is my newest project - I think it has potential, but needs a LOT of work. For NEO2.0 to really work I need to have more time for it, and I only have so much time to work on my own projects. Cutting back time from Lopico will help. I also registered a new domain for another new site today that I think has a lot of potential. It’s focused on something that interests me more right now than the local vertical.

So… what do you think?

I had an informal meeting last week with my good friend Jeff, who has an e-commerce website. He reads this blog and during the meeting we talked about one of the posts - this one in which I ramble on about my possible future. Anyway, while we were talking about it I mentioned Brewed Fresh Daily, Knotice, Sage Rock, and probably some other bloggers / people / companies that he hadn’t heard of that are based in Northeast Ohio. I thought about doing a post about these bloggers / people / companies, but then I thought it’s probably better as a stand alone, not a post that will disappear from the homepage in a week or so. So… I’d like to introduce NEO2.0.

NEO2.0 is a wiki to help promote all of the great things happening in Northeast Ohio. I feel that the people that are working hard to push our community forward don’t get enough recognition - especially in the early stages of their projects - I’m hoping this wiki can help a little in that regard. (The password is ohio.)

For now I’m just using a free hosted wiki (from pbwiki which I highly recommend) - but if it gains a little traction I’ll consider hosting it or doing something other than a wiki. Ideally, I’d create a social network for the type of people interested in this site that allows the people that I’m trying to promote to connect, exchange ideas, and maybe plan some interesting events. We’ll see - that’s a long way from where this is right now.

Try it out and please add as much stuff as you’d like. Remember the password is ohio.

Last week Om Malik mentioned that Facebook and Jobster appear to be hooking up to provide job search on Facebook. My initial reaction was, that makes sense, but now I’m not so sure. Yes, in terms of being a utility it makes sense, but in terms of being a social network it does not.

I think a lot of the success of Facebook comes from its closed door / walled garden status. If Facebook was more open, I’d probably be reading about how it, rather than MySpace, is destroying the morals of America’s youth. It’s too closed off for most journalists to realize the things on FB are just as bad as those on MySpace… or any other Social Network. So, many use it because they feel it is a little more private and they don’t have to be as conservative or restrained as they are on other sites.

But jobs seems to take some of that away. If you know an employer is watching you’re going to censor yourself in some way. The more conservative and restrained the users feel they must be, the less interesting the site becomes.

This leads me to believe that the best social network will be one where no one can see anything about you unless they are your friend. However, most SNs have a constant desire to add more features and make more money. Those desires will ultimately lead to some sacrifices of privacy. So, I have two questions:

1. Will we ever see the craigslist of social networks? Sacrificing profit to give people what they want.
2. Is job search on FaceBook a good idea?

I was asked by Josh Amer to do a guest post. I run, amongst other businesses, iBegin, a local search engine. Right now only in Canada, it will soon be expanding into the US.

There is a lovely little buzz going on about user-generated content. Tired webmasters no longer need to work and write quality content - nay, let the users carry that burden. After all, they get something out of it… don’t they?

Many of them are beholden to the idea that (in general), users are good. If there is one bad user, there are ten others to stop the vagabond. Pretty grand isn’t it?

Alas, two major holes crop up:

1. Often times, the reporting user is taken at face value. The algorithm seems to be rather simple. Every time a user-generated entry is reported as spam, internally the system does this: +1 spam_report. If spam_report > 5 (5 people have reported this as spam), hold or delete. It seems while provisions were made for malignant contributors, there were no provisions made for malignant ‘helpers’. To be honest, I have not seen a single website where this simplistic approach is not taken. This even works on Digg: observe the cloud view of upcoming stories. In my own random testing, it took roughly 5 ‘this is lame’ for the bottom stories, 7 ‘this is lame’ for the middling stories, and 9 ‘this is lame’ for top stories. Frontpage stories took roughly 11-13 ‘this is lame’. I have enough employees to neuter almost any story. The former #1 user P9 had this done to him - every single story he submitted was immediately buried. Eventually he ‘quit’ - in really he had been neutered and could make no impact on the site. With the stakes higher as Digg becomes more popular, suppressing a competitor’s story becomes rather useful. (NOTE: I only buried spam/duplicate stories.)

A few sites are starting to create UserRank values, akin to Google’s PageRank. The thinking is reasonable - if we know the ‘quality’ of a user, we can know if his/her contributions (be it new submissions, reports, etc) are valuable or not. Noble, but this leads into point #2 …

2. How do you know a user really is a user? In order to understand the challenges faced by user-driven websites, I have started delving into some blackhat SEO (purely research). Suffice to say, sites like Digg and Reddit are already being heavily abused. Image captchas and so forth? All you need is a list of open proxies, a pinch of cURL, a dash of OCR software, mix well, and you have an automated system to run roughshod over any of the existing ’social’ systems. Just generate some rules and the system can be digging or redditting or bookmarking within an hour. And email validation? All you need to do is pipe all the email addresses to a single script and simply fetch the URL contained within. Easy as pie.

The processing power required to really weed out ‘networks’ of users is immense. Digg has tried to do this for submissions (but not for reports) - if you often digg the same user’s stories, eventually your digg counts less. Of course, in reality this only works for real users. An automated system will have a unique IP (courtesy of proxies), a unique signup name (just take a list of first+last names, and concatenate them together with two random numbers at the end), and a unique ‘voting’ history (all votes are randomized). There is simply no way to know that all these (fake) users are interlinked.

The above two points are very important as about a month ago I set out to make user-driven politics website (coming soon at Wing Politics. Having already
seen how ugly Digg’s political section got, it was obvious to battle #1 I needed a UserRank system. Yet I also had #2 to contend with.

The answer was actually quite simple. A major site was already doing it, the cost was low, and its only downside was it did require some trust.

With that in mind, I make a bold prediction:

As user-driven websites become increasingly manipulated (in more and more sophisticated manners), they will have to start ‘validating’ that a user exists. The preferred choice of validation will be by sending a validation code an SMS to a user’s cellphone

Google’s GMail is already doing this - the amount of spam coming from an @gmail.com address is almost nil. People who contribute to such sites heavily skew towards technophile/younger demographic - highly likely to have a cellphone. The cost, both time and monetary, would be rather significant for an abuser to gain enough trusted user accounts. The cost of sending an SMS is not very high, and as long as the user can be convinced that their cellphone # will not be used for any spam/marketing purposes, you have a solid way of ensuring the uniqueness of a user.

This post turned out to be rather lengthy, but I wanted to elucidate on the over reliance (and implicit trust) users have in most web 2.0 sites. I am also sure as exploits become more commonplace the solution I have proposed will become much more common.

I can’t believe it either, but the Washington Post suggests that maybe teenagers aren’t a real stable audience. Wow!

Supposedly teenagers are moving to Facebook because they’re sick of MySpace stalkers. The article is based on the opinions of one high school English class, which tells us that teens travel in packs (more shock). I have a few problems with the article:

1. Article relies on too small of a sample.
2. Creeps don’t ruin MySpace, spam ruins MySpace.
3. Things won’t be much better at Facebook.
3a. I still don’t think the two work very well in direct comparison, and I have a whole new round of issues with FB that I’ll discuss later.
4. Article mentions YouTube but not the MySapce downturn effect on YouTube.
5. Failure to cite Josh Amer for all of his insight into this coming problem.
6. 320,000 new profiles a day is still pretty damn good growth.
6a. The real problem is that of those 320,000 many are either one time users or businesses (that use spam and call it viral marketing) not real people.

Best line of the article: She routinely heard from people who complained they weren’t designated as one of her top eight friends. “People would be like, ‘why am I not in your top eight?’ ” – that’s the type of insightful journalism that separates blogs from print.

Sorry this isn’t on schedule - we’ll call it the Sunday Special.

Yes it’s interesting that so many new sites have come from former PayPal employees, but would it hurt to do an article like this about non-sillicon valley companies? It could be summed up as follows:

1. You need a strong network to succeed.
2. People that used to work at PayPal have a strong network.
3. People that used to work at PayPal are succeeding.

Shocking I know. Haven’t we heard enough about these overly hyped ex-PayPalers. With the exception of YouTube, none of them have really rocked the world in any noteworthy ways. The others have built great networks not great technologies. I’ve heard enough of this, I’m ready to hear what’s coming from places not called silicon valley.

The lesson this piece seems to send is that it matters less what the product is and more who’s behind it. A sad state, but that’s reality. And that lesson is part of the reason I’m trying to help get the Ohio tech community to come together. I may not like the lesson, but it’s one that people outside the valley need to learn.

—————————————
NYT - It pays to have firends in the valley
GigaOm - The PayPal Mafia
Valleywag - By our powers combined, we are Captain PayPal!

I wouldn’t have called it that but, check out this article from Wharton if you’re interested in the business of social networks. I agree with most of this article, and would add that it makes for a more difficult media buy the more you change your audience.

DOPA, is yet another example of foolish law making restricting freedom in what is supposed to be the land of the free. First the gov’t seeks to ban online poker, now social networking sites in schools and libraries. Poker seemed to be driven by lack of tax revenue from offshore poker sites, but most popular SNs in the US are US based. So this seems to be based more on the governments desire to have Americans believe that we need the government to protect us. Banning the entire scope of SN sites is foolish. This would have been like banning all P-to-P technologies when Napster was the hot issue. The problem is that the Government cannot discriminate on an individual basis, so they either have to make the law fully applicable or the law cannot pass. This is a seriously overbroad law, it will impact all social networking sites that do not have sexual predators as well those that do. This means that a site like FaceBook (I’m assuming) would be banned from high schools, that’s pretty terrible. My Gf’s younger brother will be attending Duke this fall and thanks to FB he already has 50 or so friends at Duke. That’s pretty helpful (of course, he went to a private High School, and he probably never used FB at school, so this isn’t the best example). The gov’t however, only manages to see potential problems, and for some reason thinks that it is their responsibility to protect people from these problems even when people can do a perfectly fine job of protecting themselves. If individual schools want to restrict access to sites I don’t have a problem with that. If schools want to block things that will hinder their ability to push their academic agenda, that’s fine, but a wide-sweeping ban is irrational. The more the government restricts our ability to access the internet, the more we will fall behind in out technological advancement. I’m not sure why the government thinks restricting the internet is a good idea, when allowing full access will enable us to fully optimize the economics of the web, which will make our country richer, increase employment, and help strengthen our place in the global economy.

I really am not a big fan of talking politics (or law), but such extreme ignorance brings it out.

I write a lot about social networks for someone that is more in the local vertical, but I’ll have plenty of time to talk about local search. Who knows how long the new SNs will be around.

There’s a pretty good write up on publishing 2.0 about the fall of MySpace. I don’t agree with the rejection of seasonality as a factor, but I do think that certain signs point to a downturn. Seasonality is a factor, it’s spring people at college are onine less, that’s just a fact. The argument that it wasn’t a factor last year is misguided. MySpace’s penetration in the college market is much higher than it was at this time last year (okay it’s just bigger in general), isn’t it possible that the new users that were added are more of the trend-following-less-loyal type of user, not the always-on-no-matter-what-time-or-day it is early-adopter? The same thing happened with facebook’s herd of college students last year. Facebook’s data from when it was thefacebook is no longer available through alexa, but it went through a huge downturn when schools let out - the same trend seems to be starting up again (weekly traffic rank 66, 3 month avg. 55).

More important however, is Guy Kawaski’s (gasp) Focus Group. Seasonality is something that will always happen, but Guy’s focus group seems to indicate that permanent changes are coming. Sure the sample was way too small to mean anything, but the implications from the study are pretty much in line with what I would expect from a “trendy” company. The problem is a company will never survive by being cool. Being cool means sooner or later everyone is going to want what you have, when the mass-audience arives early adopters will leave and eventually the rest will once again follow, leaving your “cool” brand behind. In 5 years no one will talk about MySpace or Facebook unless they drastically change their focus. To survive, both companies need to find target audiences with higher loyalty and greater attention span. Hello Boomers.

Related: The Wrinkled-Facebook

I seem to be writing about FB more and more, a habit I would like to stop. However, I have not seen this talked about anywhere else.  Facebook will be sponsoring the Silicon Valley Boomer Ventures Summit, an event that gathers persons that invest in or serve the 40+ boomer consumer. A seemingly stange move for a college focused software company, but less strange for a company that is looking to enhance its professional image and move beyond the college market.  I guess I just didn’t realize how quickly Facebook wanted to turn off its core consumers.

Related: The Space v. The Face: it doesn’t make sense; Facebook for $2 Billion?

I’ve changed my habits lately.  I’ve finally started using MySpace and I’m rarely on Facebook anymore.  This is mainly because I just wanted to try out MySpace… prove that pages don’t have to be ugly, also wanted to download some free songs.  What I’ve found is that I really don’t think any MySpace-Facebook comparrisons make any sense.

Facebook seems to be supporting my general thought about the distinction - that it is more of a LinkedIn than a myspace - through it’s recent moves to add limited networks at large employers.  FaceBook seems to be going more for a “this is what I’ve done” and “this is where I am” focus rather than the MySpace focus of “this is who I am.”  The problem is that FaceBook’s users haven’t really figured this out.  I believe that most of them view this as a social tool to post pictures, leave messages for friends, and put jokes in their profiles.  Truly it is little more than a glorified aim profile.  There’s nothing wrong with that but that’s probably not the direction FB would like to steer its users. I believe FaceBook is trying to move away from “the place to keep in contact with the girl you hooked up with” and move towards “the place you keep your professional and actual educational contacts.” Personally I think this is the right move, I don’t think FB can last forever just on being a cool website that a lot of people are using.  It needs to morph into a tool that people can actually use for some life purpose.  Otherwise it’s the next abercrombie - everyone on campus is doing it for a while and then it just gets a little old.

MySpace on the other hand is strictly personal which I think makes it likely to suffer a Friendster type fate.  The main advantadge is the Music that will help keep it around as long as MySpace can keep the musicians happy. Personally I like it because I like hacking up CSS, others just stick templates in, and that’s fine, but there’s some scary stuff on MySpace. Flexibility is nice, but also seems to make it hard for the site to do upgrades.  If MySpace changes its core code most templates would not work anymore.  That fact seems to make it something that people are likely to get bored with. I don’t know I’ve been using it and have to think that it’s not as bad as everyone claims. I even reccomend that someone that I know in the entertainment industry set up a page - it does have its role.

What both are lacking is real interaction - and this palopia promises.  We’ll have to wait and see, but I’m pretty skeptical.  Even after the valleywag interview.

Lastly, Sphere (blog search) launched today - it’s pretty good. I like how the profiles of the blog work, but then again I always like useless statistics. I first heard about this a long time ago, and it was worth the wait - hopefully this will crank up the innovation in the blog search industry.

I just read that Facebook is on the block for $2 Billion, and as much as I like the Book’s potential, that number is way too high.

Facebook has some big challenges. Right now it’s cool, but it’s targeted at college students, where things tend to be cool for 3 years max. What happens when a generation that has had other means to stay connected (ie MySpace) and hasn’t had Facebook gets to school? How do you keep advertisers happy in the summer when no one is using Facebook? What about the number of features? It’s definitely behind MySpace and other competitors in the number of features. Facebook hasn’t really even figured out how to leverage all the data that it has yet.
It’s a great product and the market it reaches is viewed as a goldmine, but come on, 2 BILLION!?

Jason Calacanis, who is one of my favorite bloggers, had a good post the other day on the struggle of Social Networks to effectively advertise.  The gist of his post is that the entertainment provided by the social networks makes the user unlikely to leave the site.  So, if they don’t suck why do social networks fail?

As I see it, the problem is not with the sites / concepts, the problem is the user.  MySpace started out by targeting bands and actors, almost guaranteeing that it would just be a fad. Is there any group more prone follow to fads than entertainment industry? Maybe high school and college students, which happen to be a primary target for SNs.  The problem is the users.  They don’t care about the future of a social networking site, all they care about is the network, its residence is immaterial.

For example, a lot of MySpace’s success is based on Bands.  If a few influential bands had incentive to leave MySpace their followers would soon leave, and eventually the wannabe bands would leave as well.  No one cares that they are on MySpace, they care about who else is on MySpace.

So, who can win in this space? The answer is, a social network that can survive without the network. If you can survive without the network, that is to say you offer something other than a residence, you may be able to survive.  If you can’t do this, you will fail.  The sites best suited to offer social networks are probably sites not initially set up as Social networks. A company like Apple could probably create a lasting social network, because they have other things to offer. If you built a social network around iTunes you could offer all of the features of MySpace, but also offer the uniqueness of the iTunes store.  Therefore, even if some of the network residents leave, the unique thing that they all want, the thing that initially brought them to the network, remains and will keep them coming back at least for that aspect.

Apple may not be the best example, but it’s one possibility. The point is, if a SN is created on 1) a fad-prone network of users and 2) a business model based solely on advertising, it will always fail.