Running With Foxes

I just tried to message a friend and even look at his profile when I was greeted with two errors: an inability to message, and a complete meltdown of CSS on their page.

Facebook previewed their new design recently, featuring a new feed interface and tabbed pages. It’s all looking strikingly more like a portal start page I imagined before.

The app page has essentially become a version of Netvibes within Facebook. Users can add/remove applications to a separate page in the same way Netvibes adds widgets (in fact you could add Facebook to Netvibes). There are minor details, such as the web page needs to expand to fill a users larger browser window.

It all strikes me as Facebook becoming a lot more like My Yahoo than Google. The big difference is that Facebook has a social context. One of the hardest problems with start pages can be getting new users to invest in building their own page. Facebook’s viral loops make it a collaborative effort (friends suggest apps).

Facebook also doesn’t incorporate web search, but that’s because they don’t want you to leave.

The other shoe that I’m waiting to see drop will be the “Google - like” strategy out of Facebook when they start finally leveraging data outside of the network.

Co-Founder of Reddit, Alexis Ohanion is not only hilarious, he’s charitable. For the second time, he’s auctioning off a laptop for charity (link). This time it’s an OLPC XO laptop (last time it was their Reddit laptops for curing cancer).

The XO laptop (pictured) is up for auction on eBay and is signed by notable attendees of ROFLcon (Tron guy, Xkcd, etc., list here). It expires on May 23rd and 100% of the auction goes to the OLPC.

I think Facebook has finally hit the nail on the head with their new form of integration through Facebook Connect. On the SocialMedia blog I called it a “Really Big Deal” because it seems to be the Goldie Locks of their platforms. It’s early, but it looks like the platform will enable the deep integration and portability offered by the two previous platforms.

This is a great development for a couple of key reasons:

Websites are more sophisticated - Facebook applications can only stuff so much into that little profile
Portability - I can now import my friend list into another website - big win for FB and users, not so good for third party services trying to bridge this gap. Not threatening OpenID yet.
Ubiquitous Social Computing - the future of the web will be closely tied to applications with a social relevance. Akin to how the internet multiplied the utility of desktop computers, social computing and platforms will do the same, but also include the mobile web.

Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester has some interesting career tips. The basics are (with my thoughts inline):

Learn something new every day - read interesting blogs
Often, the fastest way Up is Out - if you don’t have a large stake in a company, remember that you’re the chicken in the breakfast, not the pork (committed vs. affiliated)
Reverse engineer the job you want - get a mentor
Education matters, but not as much as you thought - you don’t have to go to business school to make a lot of money
You are a company of one - enumerate your personal accomplishments and be able to articulate them
Develop your plan, and put it in writing - don’t be lazy

A couple weeks ago I posted about how LinkedIn can help you build your career as well.

More of Facebook Platform in headlines yesterday, this time talking about a drop in developer interest. Basically the argument is that less participation in the developer communication’s tools means less interest in the platform.

From my vantage point on the ground, I agree that there is less interest in the platform. However, it’s less interest from the amateur crowd; the kinds of guys that throw up a poke application in weekend just to see how it does (a plethora of quiz apps have also diluted the application count). There is a “professionalization” of the Facebook platform afoot, where small groups of developers or companies are gaining a better grasp of how the platform works and starting out with more sophisticated strategies (launching portfolios of applications, or developing many more small applications). We’re passing through the hype curve and have finally found that the Facebook platform can’t make everyone instant millionaires (although for some it comes pretty damn close).

Sanity is coming to the application space and the persistence of the platform is starting to make larger companies and brands comfortable with developing on the platform. In the next coming months, we’ll be seeing many more large organizations logging on with increasingly more sophisticated application and advertising strategies, some of which I can’t talk about right now.

Update: Jesse addresses a lot of this in an update.

I’m surprised at the interest this little chart caused:

The analysis of the post was spot on, but a lot of the reactions were far off (techmeme). Now the meme is back (albeit on track this time).

I think the platform’s unfairly getting a bad rap with many writers overly criticizing the platform. Boomtown and AlleyInsider criticized the platform as trivial, essentially saying apps were trivial and that they earn no money. While many apps are trivial, what did they expect? A mammography app that would detect cancer? People log on to social networks in their free time, not as part of work. Users, in aggregate, will cringe at the idea of real work. That’s why Google’s image labeler doesn’t work as well as Flickr’s image tagging.

Arguing that the entire platform is trivial because a subset or even majority of apps are useless, broken, or boring is tantamount to saying there’s nothing interesting in the blogosphere because there are 120,000 new weblogs being created worldwide each day (source). That’s about 1.4 blogs created every second of every day. And some of them are even inane spammy blogs like this.

I’m on a personal trip to Montana this weekend and packed light. Boy Scouts need 10 essentials to camp; I need about 5 (change of clothes, computer, phone, ID, credit card). But one of the things I’ve packed with me, once again, is a book for the times I can’t read off a computer screen.

The book? “Founders at Work“, by Jessica Livingston. If you haven’t heard of it already, you should have. It’s a series of no B.S. interviews with founders of some of the largest tech companies in the valley (PayPal, Google, Apple, etc.). I prefer books like this because the narrative doesn’t gloss over the tough or unsightly bits of running a company like so many business books do in order to support their larger thesis.

I’d particularly recommend the Evan Williams interview, considering the open monetization questions about Twitter.

MySpace recently announced that developers can pay for promotion of their applications on MySpace’s platform (Rumored cost of $100,000 a week). I can’t say I’m surprised. MySpace has always been savvy as a media property. There are ads everywhere. Every one of those ads places a visual tax on their users. My question is it getting to be too much?

With a finger to the sky, I’m getting the feeling that users are getting restless and looking elsewhere. I recently looked at the Alexa stats for Facebook and MySpace and noticed an interesting cross over. At the beginning of April, Facebook surpassed MySpace in the rankings. Anecdotally, one of my best friends, who clearly fell in the MySpace camp (cool musician), joined Facebook and apparently abandoned his MySpace profile.

These services exist in a marketplace, and with the rise of Facebook and advent of OpenSocial / DataPortability, switching behavior will become easier. Social technology will also permeate a whole new set of properties (friendfeed, socialthing) that give users what they want, the chance to connect with old and new friends.

Users will vote with their clicks and take their business somewhere less cluttered. Users want to connect with old friends. Seeing the latest trailer or band is only incidental. Developers will also trickle away from the site if they’re not given a fair shake to make a profit, as Facebook is doing. MySpace may be making a dollar today, only to lose two in a year.

A little stale news this time in the day, but it’s great to see Mike in the Time’s 100. He’s fittingly in the “Builders & Titans” category. I remember Mike’s original promise that by joining TechCrunch with it’s (now meager) 20,000 subscribers I’d have the opportunity to be at the center of everything happening in the valley. Over the next year and a half, it was definitely the case as new web startups were born in Mike’s backyard (featured in the photo along with his shoddy lawn furniture).

TechCrunch was really at the center of two turning points, the growth of blogging as a business and the next growth spurt of the web. TechCrunch fostered the growth and attention on startups unlike any other site on the web. It also gave rise to the idea that readers could get more value from reading a blog by an entrenched industry expert(s) instead of the business section of their paper. I look at the attention Mike’s getting as not only his personal validation, but also validation of the community the site’s fostered over the years.

Congrats.