The proprietary chat gig is up-- finally!

With Facebook's announcement that they are moving forward to enable cross-platform chat using XMPP/Jabber the chat wars are effectively over. With Facebook and Google on the XMPP. bandwagon it's just a matter of time until the proprietary services either switch or become totally irrelevant. It's about time this happened. This was the world's biggest no-brainer: Using Facebook Chat via Jabber.

Since the launch of Facebook Chat, we've received a lot of positive feedback from users about being able to connect instantly with their friends on Facebook. With Chat fully launched and growing steadily, we've started working on more new features to enhance the Chat experience.

Right now we're building a Jabber/XMPP interface for Facebook Chat. In the near future, users will be able to use Jabber/XMPP-based chat applications to connect to Facebook.

Internet business models: Scrabulous

I was reading this article in Fortune: Will someone please start a Facebook group to save Scrabulous?, about Hasbro trying to shutdown Scrabulous for copyright violations. I didn't find the intellectual property parts of the article that interesting, but this did catch my eye:

Their site launched in 2006 and quickly signed up 600,000 registered users. Not too shabby for a year’s worth of work. So the brothers launched a Facebook application in June, 2007 and the results were stunning: 2.3 million active users as of today. For those of you keeping score, the application generated 70 million pageviews in the past month. Not a bad deal for a two-man operation.

I don't know about you, but 2.3 million users and 70 million page views seems pretty impressive. With numbers like that you'd expect them to be making some serious cash. But no...

Jayant said that he didn’t exactly understand what all the fuss was about. Its ability to generate insane numbers of pageviews notwithstanding—he said some players play as many as 170 games at a time on Facebook—the application isn’t throwing off that much money. He declined to say exactly how much, pegging revenues at “over $25,000 a month.” Hmmmmm.

That's only $300k a year for 2.3 million users and 840,000,000 pageviews?

If you're thinking that you might strike it rich on the Internet you might want to think twice before you give up your day job.

Trying to stop the bots is stupid

Jim Russell, in commenting on my last post on Screen scraping and DRM pointed me to his Russell's Law:

Russell's Law (which I made up, but has been holding up very well so far) states: You cannot encrypt past the intended recipient. It was originally coined to convey the impossibility of enforcing "for-your-eyes-only" emails via cryptography, but it applies to many situations. Like the impossibility of foolproof DRM-protected music. Now, here's another situation where it applies perfectly. You can't stop your Facebook friends from giving your email address to whomever they choose. You can make it temporarily tedious, but that's it.

Back in the old days when talking about email privacy the standard answer was, "Just assume that everything will be forwarded." The same rules apply today. If you put something in Facebook (or anywhere else for that matter) you should assume that it won't stay there. It doesn't matter if Facebook is a walled-garden or not.

Identity, privacy and Facebook Beacon

There's a good interview on Forum One Communication with Bob Blakley on: User-centric identity. I recommend you read it. He concludes with a comment, which to me cuts to the chase with why people are having such a problem with the new Facebook Beacon advertising system.

Privacy is not about keeping personal information secret. It's about ensuring that people who handle personal information respect the dignity of the individuals to whom that information refers.

That seems to me to be the core of the issue. The way that Facebook has chosen to implement Beacon shows a tremendous disrespect to the dignity of its users.

Social networking - build your own community or join an existing?

Elizabeth Dunn at Small Dots, and Beth Kanter have been discussing social networking strategies for non-profits. They are discussing whether organizations should install their own white label social networking solutions, or use existing big box solutions such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc. They are discussing this relative to the non-profit sector, but their discussion is relevant for any organization considering using a social network solutions to connect with their community, be it a community of donors, supporters, learners, voters, etc.

This is something I've given a lot of thought, and there aren't easy options. Beth's start at a decision tree is quite interesting: Social Networks Decision Trees. I don't have much to add to the discussion other than our personal experience. Mind you, ours was a limited test but it was our reality none-the-less.

We'd just begun to create some beta communities in Facebook when we discovered the white label social networking solution Elgg. We saw how Elgg was being used in a couple of communities similar to ours, and it was obvious that it was flat working. From the perspective of an organization it offered all of the functionality of Facebook and more. Plus it was open-source: no lock-in, no advertising, it scaled to very large numbers, it had open profile data, and most importantly it could be mined for use in our other applications. I fell in love with Elgg. Sure it had some rough edges, but what software doesn't? (Don't even get me started on Facebook's rough edges). Elgg had everything we needed, and it offered solutions that we were desperately needing. Sounds wonderful, hey?

So we embarked on getting some people to help us kick-the-tires on Elgg. We "invited" our advisory committees. People we knew well and that we had easy access. And we invited, and we invited, and we invited. We couldn't get even 50% of our advisory committee members to even try it. They never once logged-in. Mind you, they didn't even have to create an account. All they had to do was login using their existing identities. We also tried to work with some of our select, and mostly progressive communities to give it a try with zero uptake.

In the mean time, we'd already started our beta groups in Facebook. With almost no effort at all our groups exploded. We saw growth that we never could have imagined. I can't begin to tell you have easy it was to create functioning and engaged communities. It was so successful that I have considered closing down some of our old ways of reaching these people. I don't think we need them anymore.

If I was adding something to Beth's decision tree it would be something about ease of creation? Building your own communities is hard work. It might be next to impossible. White label or big box? Our experience has been that you'll have far more success going to where the people are already assembled.

The impending death of email

It's true you know, email is broken beyond repair. I toasted 8200 emails in my campus inbox today without even looking at them. Tell me what choice I had? I searched the pile for certain topics and individuals, I tried my best to find things that might be important, but let's get serious... There were not enough hours in the day (the year?) for me to even begin to process this sort of load. It's also important to note that almost all of these messages were of the broadcast form. They were not personal. The messages from real people don't stand a chance of being seen in that mess. It's broken, and quite honestly it doesn't bother me. I've moved on to more effective means of communication: IM, Twitter, syndication feeds, Facebook messaging, SMS...

Thomas Hawk has a great read on this topic in reaction to the Slate Magazine article on the death of email:

Sometimes people will give me crap about not returning their emails when I see them in real life. "Dude, I sent you three emails and you never responded."

But that's where the beauty of spam comes in. "You did? Crap! That spam filter never lets anything through. Sorry dude. What's up?"

So I'm curious, how many of you read mailing lists anymore? I'm talking about the old "conversational" variety not the small and discreet workgroup lists? How many of those old lists are coming to you through syndication feeds now? How many of you are finding that a good number of messages that would have previously been in email are now coming through Facebook? How many of you are getting a non-trivial number of work messages through Twitter? How many of your colleagues know that the sure fire way to get to you is through SMS? Have you started to make the move to post-email communication?

QOTD: Umair Haque on organizational DNA

Umair Haque from Evil is in the DNA, Special Facebook Edition

One of the traits that turns nobodies into radical innovators is a deeply felt desire to change the world for the better. A startling number of today's most successful businesses (not just 2.0) share this trait.

Several new interesting Facebook things

Facebook has several new things you might find of interest. First is this beta Grazr Twitter widget that gives you an incredibly nice interface. It's way better than the standard Facebook Twitter application, and it can also be installed on your Netvibes, Pageflakes, and iGoogle pages:

The second item is also a new Twitter capability. You can now update your Facebook status directly from the Twitter client of your choice. application within Facebook. Wouldn't it be nice if Facebook allowed you to update your status from outside of Facebook from the client of your choice: e.g. Twitterific or even MoodBlast? Regardless, only having to update your status in one place is a positive. This is a huge deal as it is the first time that Facebook has allowed you to do something inside Facebook without having to be in Facebook. Progress!!! Before this will work you need to make some changes to enable this through the Twitter application in Facebook.

UPDATE: This has gone through several edits. Originally I had it written the way it reads now. I couldn't get it to work from outside, but it worked just fine from the Twitter application within Facebook. I tried several times. Well, it does indeed actually work. Perhaps there was some lag from so many people trying it out shortly after it was announced? Regardless, this is wonderful. Is this an early sign that Facebook might be willing to open-up?

The next item relates to rumors that there is a Facebook instant messaging application coming late this week. The biggest, and still unconfirmed part of this rumor is that the Facebook client is supposed to talk XMPP. This could be just what we need to bury forever the proprietary chat formats of AOL, MSM, and Yahoo. We desperately need a unified chat protocol, and if Facebook can help make this happen it's a positive. The new client is supposed to work completely in a browser, no client download, and even work outside of Facebook. Besides messaging, it is will have several features to allow you to manage other Facebook communications -- like updating your status. Finally, the application's release was delayed a week for no apparent reason? Could they be rushing to add the rumored Facebook groups before release? Makes total sense to me.

Finally, and this is not new, but I just wondered how many people were aware that there is a very capable XMPP chat application already in Facebook? Yep, there's a sweet GTalk implementation that you could be using right now. Here's a capture of me chatting with myself. Sweet!

Facebook: All your geeky friends...

Kara Swisher at Boomtown: 15 Billion More Reasons to Worry About Facebook talks about why Facebook's future may not be as great as some are assuming.

3. Most techies were not popular in high school: No, it is not fair, but this is true. But in a friending and poking frenzy, Silicon Valley’s denizens have embraced Facebook as only those who were picked last at dodgeball could.

I kid about the dodgeball part, but what is more serious is the warped view those in the tech sector have for Facebook, because it is the latest and shiniest thing and because their geek friends are all using it.

She's dissing Facebook as being just another geek playground. This is where she's got it totally wrong. First off, the world's geek population is much less than 30 million. Nope, all those people in Facebook aren't geeks.

From my own analysis the uber-geeks I know are all pretty much anti-facebook. They see it as a walled garden, they're getting all the functionality offered by Facebook from other places, but mostly they just don't find it that interesting. Nope Facebook is not being driven by geeks - it's decidedly anti-geek in its value system.

The question is how do you counter balance the network effect? I don't think you can. The geeks not liking Facebook is not enough to slow it down.

QOTD: Dan Farber on Facebook growth

Dan Farber from ZDNet

At the current growth rate Facebook would have 220 million members in a year.

So how do you ignore that?

Facebook costing businesses millions?

The BBC has this story on how employees using social networking sites like Facebook are wasting all sorts of time and costing their employers millions a day: Facebook 'costs businesses dear'

Workers who spend time on sites such as Facebook could be costing firms over £130m a day, a study has calculated.

Of course, this only works if you are an old-world type organization where you have office hours and something called a work day.

If you are a "burst" organization then employees using these tools costs you nothing. Actually, you could get creative with metrics and demonstrate just as easily that these tools are making organizations millions a day. Where do breakthroughs come from? How do you spawn innovation, creativity, and ideation? What is the next "big idea" worth?

It's all what you decide to measure. Counting seat time is so last century it's laughable.

Privacy - yearning for yesteryear

I've been reading with interest the Facebook privacy conversation between Doc Searls, Danah Boyd, Robert Scoble, David Weinberger, et al. It revolves around Facebook's decision to open user profiles to Google search. The arguments are mostly around opt-in vs the Facebook default settings that assume people want their information to be made public. From Danah Boyd:

It makes sense to attract those who want to be public, but how public can they go without affecting those who relish the closed-ness? For the most part, Facebook has been immune from privacy-related attacks from the Attorneys General and press. They've been toted as the "right" solution. Can people who want to be private live alongside those who want to be PUBLIC? How are boundaries going to be negotiated? It seems to me that this all comes back to context and context is really getting cloudy here. It seems to me that there might be two totally different sets of expectations emerging without an in-between solution. And I have a sneaking suspicion that the "solution" is to push people into accepting being public.

My heart is totally with Danah. She's right. The problem is -- it's not going to happen. The day where we could expect privacy has gone the way of the newspaper, the recording industry, and the mom-and-pop grocery store. We're not going to turn back the clocks. Remember DRM? Where there is a will there is a way...

All of the "partial" privacy settings that people are asking for are positive, and yes setting them to public should be on an opt-in basis. That'll work to a certain extent against nuisance sorts of invasions of privacy. In reality, however, they're not enough, and they're nothing more than bandaids. If someone wants to get your private information they will. Even if someone isn't trying to get your information, some entity will do something stupid and expose it anyway; e.g. an employee taking your credit card and social security information home on their laptop.

I'm going to argue the best privacy solution is a total lack of privacy. That the solution to our concerns should come from seeking total transparency. If you don't want people to see something then don't put it on the World Wide Web and expect it to be private. You have complete control over this. Some stuff simply does not belong on the Internet. If you put it there you should assume that the whole world can see it.

On the other hand, you also shouldn't expect to consume people's private information anonymously either. This I believe is the solution to most of our privacy concerns. In a transparent world I should have the ability to see who is looking at my information. That should be true everywhere on the Internet. I would like my Google Analytics capabilities to be extended to every location where I post content. If you're looking at photos of my children on Flickr I should be able to see that. If you're hanging on my every Twitter post -- I should know that too. Transparency needs to be a two-way street. We need our social networking sites to open-up and allow us to embed tracking scripts on our personal pages.

What's good for the goose... If people know we can watch them watching us they will be far less likely to wander in with spurious intent. It's just like Neighborhood Watch for the Internet.

Why organizations can't ignore Facebook

Facebook announced this week that they are going to expose user profiles to Google search. I saw this in Blogstorm: Is Facebook the new Wikipedia:

Facebook has 18.5 million incoming links. Wikipedia has 47 million so it is fair to assume it won't struggle with rankings. Wikipedia features at the top of almost every search term you can think of at present.

Expect Facebook to feature in the top 3 results for 90% of people you search for within 3 months.

When this happens the game is over. Actually, the game is already over. One of the rules of the burst economy is that there is no such thing as a work life and a personal life. There's just life. Attempts to containerize one or the other will fail. If your profile isn't on Facebook you won't exist as people won't look deeper than the first page of a Google search to find you.

Judging a company by their support: Facebook

I've been party to two instances of requesting support from Facebook over the last week. I have to tell you that they rock. In both instances we have received speedy and personal messages, and rapid follow through. This is a breath of fresh-air.

I can't tell you the number of responses I've gotten over the last year from support services that say something like, "Yep, we've got a problem" and little else. And those are the good ones. Most inquiries go unanswered.

I'm a paying customer on Second Life, have privileged access to their support services, and have yet to get a satisfactory answer from either a live chat, submitting a support ticket, or phoning. I am inevitably told that 1) the person I'm talking with doesn't have access to that information, or 2) a specific person will need to fix my problem. I have yet to get an answer from Linden of any sort. Right now I have an open support ticket that has been sitting for over a week. It hasn't been touched.

If support is any measure as to a companies future success, I am bearish on Linden Labs and bullish on Facebook.

Explode comes to Facebook

Dave Tosh of Elgg fame points to their integrating ex.plode.us (love that URL) into Facebook: Social search comes to Facebook via Explode. This is so very cool. Explode is new, but has so much potential. I've been following it for a while, and find developments like this quite exciting.

This Facebook app brings all the power of Explode's social search - as well as nudges, external friendships and more - to Facebook users. If you're a Facebook user, you can click here to install it for yourself.

Opening up Facebook

One of the reason I am quite excited by this development is because it is the first app on Facebook that lets Facebook users properly connect to and interact with people who are not Facebook users from their Facebook space, and yes there are people out there who don't use Facebook :)

One of the things I do love about Explode is that it is a consumer of OpenID. We're seeing more and more sites accepting OpenID logins. Yay! The OpenID authentication from the Explode Facebook widget is not yet working, however.

When they get this working from within Facebook it will be most cool!

Facebook Free Week: Crap I missed the memo

Oops, too late now.... Sorry! From CenterNetworks: CenterNetworks Declares "Facebook Free Week"

No matter what blog I have read in the past month discussing some aspect of Facebook, inevitably someone posts a comment that they are exhausted with all of the Facebook discussions. I agree and have decided to declare that this week (August 12-18) "Facebook Free Week".

I'll start my own week-long moratorium beginning tomorrow.

Facebook (et al), OpenID and network effects

Dare Obasanjo at Carnage4Life has got it exactly right about Facebook (and others) as it relates to the network effect. This is the first time I've seen the network effect mentioned in regard to Facebook, but this is exactly what is happening. It's scary as crap, and unfortunately they will not be stopped.

I don't like it one bit, but we can complain all we want -- this is our new reality. We either figure out how to play or our internet presence will become totally irrelevant:

Openness isn’t why Facebook is currently being valued at $6 billion nor is it why MySpace is currently expected to pull in about half a billion in revenue this year. These companies are doing just great being walled gardens and thanks to network effects, they will probably continue to do so unless something really disruptive happens.

So what might that "really disruptive" thing be? Someone at Facebook gets an ounce of conscious and does the right thing? They decide to become responsible netizens? They surprise us all and become the first major player to openly embrace OpenID?

I won't hold my breath-- just my nose. I'm voting on the side of greed and control carrying the day. After all, we've seen this play out before. I can't begin to tell you how happy I will be if the day comes when I have to eat these words.

Twitter vs Facebook at Publishing 2.0

Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 has been living a Twitter/Facebook experiment, Web Communication Experiment: First Round Goes To Twitter, and he has declared an early winner:

Twitter is in many ways like Google — just type into a box, hit enter, and get results. Simple, elegant, highly usable. It’s self-evident how to use Twitter, also just like Google.

And yes, I am giving this post a shoutout because he points to a tweet of mine. :)

openID - who is going to make it happen?

I found this Dave Winer gem buried in the most unlikely of articles: What Twitter is

A relatively open identity system. I've said it before, Twitter or something like it, could be the holy grail of open identity. While the engineers of the tech industry have been, imho, looking at the problem the wrong way by trying to glue together the huge namespaces controlled by powerful companies who don't want to give up control. Twitter, with it's ultra-thin user interface, and light feature set, and simple API (more on that in a bit) and the nothing-to-lose attitude of its management, may be the breakthrough. Or it could be Facebook, with it's much larger user base and a management that also likes to roll the dice. The key is lots of users, a growing user base, and an API with no dead-ends.

We so need a major player, a site where everyone goes to play, to be an openID consumer. I'll put my money on Twitter being first, but think that Facebook's adoption would make a bigger impact.

Whopper(s) of the Week: Chris Kelly of Facebook

I saw this article featuring Chris Kelly, Facebook's chief privacy officer on CNET: It's no secret: Facebook's allure is its privacy and thought, "What a crock of spin and outright lies." Which led me to add a new feature, The Whopper of the Week, aka WotW. There were so many good whoppers in this article that I couldn't stick to just one:

Privacy is beginning to transform from the classic 'right to be left alone' to this notion that 'I want control over my information.'

Who better to do that for you than Facebook? If the users were in control they would let you take your information out of Facebook, which of course they do not. Privacy in this context means that you have to totally trust Facebook to protect your private information.

We have tried to take a very control-based approach for our users, so Facebook information doesn't leak out on the Web in general.

They are the walled-garden of walled-gardens. I had this to say about Facebook's architecture of control before, "The plan is to build in-world services so that the inhabitants never have to leave. It sure looks to me like the Web equivalent of the PUD."

In a trusted environment you share more.

Especially if they force you to share: Facebook's new Friendster moment.

There is an opportunity to target advertising, as long as you keep that trusted environment.

Translation: we can mine your personal information and sell it to people who want to sell to you. This is completely about making money, monitizing your personal information, and not about privacy.

Stay tuned: We are all about user control.

Right!