The Week in Geek™ – May 7th, 2010

Mark Zuckerberg: The Temptation of Facebook’s CEO
I was disappointed when Fortune’s David Kirkpatrick left his regular beat.  He’s one of the best journalists in tech. I’d regularly assigned his readings to my students, and his work helped inspire me to write a textbook.  But I was thrilled to learn that his leave from Fortune was to pen an opus on Facebook.  Kirkpatrick’s is one of the few books benefiting from insider access to Zuck (others being the excellent ‘Once your Lucky Twice Your Good’ by BC TechTrek friend Sarah Lacy, and ‘Facebook Fairytales’, which profiled my former student Eric Barker’s use of targeted Facebook ads to land a job).  Kirkpatrick’s book has been excerpted in Fortune and promised to be outstanding.  It’s already in my Amazon queue, waiting for the June 15^th publication date.

The expert (above link) includes a great ethics in business tale of how the young Zuckerberg was moved to tears, left weeping in a men’s room floor by the pressure to take massive coin in a way that would violate the trust of an early investor and mentor. Check it out!

Facebook Open Graph: The Definitive Guide For Publishers, Users and Competitors
ReadWriteWeb offers a nice overview of the sweeping new Facebook features announced during the Spring ’10 f8 conference.  Here’s a crib-sheet to some of the most important points:

• Login with Facebook: It’ll be easier for site developers to use your Facebook login credentials instead of requiring separate accounts for their sites. Third party sites that use this feature can allow you to see your Facebook buddies who are also members of their service. Login is HUGE – it’s a lubricant for web experimentation, and an adoption and innovation accelerant – think “I wasn’t gonna try this site, but I can use my Facebook ID? OK, I’ll give it a shot”.
• Recommendations: once you’re logged into that new site, you can see what your friends have done there. A visit to Facebook-linked Yelp allowed me to  see recommendations my friends had made, rather than just the musings of strangers.
• Like button: Click a “Like” button on a third-party site and your endorsement will squirt back to your news feed. Now any site can take advantage of Facebook’s viral sharing to spread the word (yeah, I know, I’ve got to find time to add “Like” throughout my site – coming soon). Facebook claimed it would serve over a billion Like buttons in the first 24 hrs. after the announcement. Of course, many news sites changed “Like” to “Recommend”.  After all, do you really want to “Like” a story about a tragic but noteworthy event?
• Feed & Stream Integration: Not only will your activities feed back into Facebook’s News Feed, but activities performed by your Facebook friends can show up on other services.  See what your friends are listening to on Pandora.  See comments they’ve posted on CNN. This is key – stuff in News Feed scrolls away and is forgotten.  Now shared data can be pulled up and shown on a site, offering value when and where it’s needed.

Also noteworthy is the announcement of Docs.com, a beta effort allowing Facebook users to share and collaboratively edit Microsoft Office documents online.  Cloud collaboration is supposed to be a Google space, but Facebook may very well be the greatest market envelopment machine the Net has ever seen.  Facebook swallowed photo sharing even after Google (Picasa), MySpace (Photobucket), and Yahoo! (Flickr) collectively spent well over $100 million in that market.  Facebook now owns chat, Facebook “Like” looks like it’s on Digg/Del.icio.us turf, and rumored efforts in payments, e-mail, and music show Facebook may have designs on businesses as diverse as PayPal, Hotmail, and iTunes. See the “Facebook Encroaches All” slide (#6) from this Spring’s Facebook lecture for a quick recap.

Implications: As Fred Wilson pointed out, past links can replace (or enhance) search. Now anyone in the pure search biz is at a potential strategic disadvantage. If Facebook partners with a firm, rivals should shudder. Facebook could also become a collaborative filtering engine.  And although no ad platform was announced, it’s gotta be in the works.  Most of these new Facebook API and platform initiatives are currently offered to firms for free.  That creates a a huge free-rider problem with Facebook fronting the cost of the back end services with no direct compensation from others. If Facebook can serve ads across the broader network of firms leveraging its service, and split the take, it could become a devastatingly effective ad platform.  Look at the model from Twitter’s new ‘sponsored tweets’ ad platform, which will eventually feed to other services via Twitter APIs, as a model.

Commentary: Zuckerberg’s brilliance includes the character strength to avoid selling out too early.  We’ve seen so many great, early social media efforts fizzle under the boot of acquisition.  But by sticking to his vision it looks like Facebook is ready to step forward and become the very center of social life on the web, extending its reach into other sites, feeding you personalization and allowing you to feed content back to the Facebook mother ship.  This’d never have happened had Zuck taken the $10 million offered after Facebook was up for just a semester, or the billion+ offered by Viacom, Yahoo, and others. That’s more than luck & conventional alpha-geek smarts – it’s the hallmark of a true visionary.

7 Tools, Apps, and Mashups that Use Facebook’s New Features
Want to see how some firms are tapping into the new “Open Graph” features of Facebook? Check out Mashable’s roundup of what developers launched in just the first two days.  You can see what’s trending, what your friends are sharing, and what folks can see about you.  Also here comes a new term ‘Like fraud’- being tricked into ‘liking’ something other than what was conveyed by the surrounding text.

Does Privacy on Facebook, Google, and Twitter Even Matter?
When Google launched it’s Buzz social network it really screwed up.  By scanning Gmail and automatically adding a user’s most frequently e-mailed contacts to Buzz, the service exposed their contact list to others, immediately surfacing conversations that many did not want to share.  Would-be whistle blowers had reporters in their public Buzz contact lists, so did job seekers who e-mailed the competition, and two-timing spouses were also outed.  That’s why we teach students to think beyond technology, and instead consider entire systems, including how each new rollout impacts people and procedures beyond the ‘cool’ (see Technology ≠ Systems half way down).  In contrast to the Buzz screwup, Google’s rollout of ‘interest-based ads’ last year was widely praised.  Google was late to the ad personalization party, but dove in when it acquired DoubleClick.  When Google announced it would track activity across web sites you visit in order to deliver more relevant ads, the firm also included with these ads a single link to an Ad Preferences settings center.  Only one in fifteen visitors ended up removing interest-based ads.  Four more changed the ads they’d be served, the other ten left things unchanged.  FastCompany calls this the paradox of privacy, saying “we want some semblance of control over our personal data, even if we likely can’t be bothered to manage it”.

Commentary: This may be important for Facebook.  The roll-out of services mentioned above was followed by inquiries from four U.S. senators, concerned that it was so difficult to opt out of the new initiatives.  Other problems exposed live chat sessions and pending friend requests to others – ouch! (video)  Facebook may well become the center of recommendation & personalization, but the service will also have to be very clear about respecting user privacy and empowering users to hit the kill switch if something freaks them out.  And a phased roll-out of new services may be better than allowing initial glitches to draw ire and fuel calls for regulation.

Whoops — Facebook Is Once Again Overhyped

Blodgett’s piece in Business Insider throws a bit of cold water on the current Facebook excitement.  I am now a firm believer that Facebook is the most important firm on the web, but the sobering chart above illustrates how much work lies ahead of Zuckerberg & Co.  One key insight worth repeating:  Monetizing people communicating is tough.  Monetizing people looking to buy things isn’t.  For more read “Attention Challenges: The Hunt vs. The Hike” in our Facebook Case (scroll about 1/8^th down).

Social Media Revolution 2
Eric Qualman has done an excellent series of videos for his widely acclaimed book Socialnomics.  Here’s a refresh from a version that made the rounds on the web last year.

Also, here’s the Social Media ROI video, which was posted online last Nov., but which I had missed http://socialnomics.net/2009/11/12/social-media-roi-examples-video/.

Netflix Earnings Rise as Subscribers Climb
Some up-to-date figures for our Netflix Case: Subscribers are up to 14 million, 55 percent of customers stream video, the firm’s share price broke $100 (priced to perfection, always a tough bar to meet), and churn is at a record low.  Roughly 1 million users streamed Netflix over their Wii consoles in just the first few weeks the Wii-link was offered (I’ve tried it, it works great).  Still, as we pointed out in the last WiG, studios are propping up Blockbuster, allowing them earlier access to videos than Netflix.  And WalMart’s VuDu effort got the right to stream Avatar well before Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes (for VuDu, it helps to have Walmart’s scale in selling physical DVDs).

Get S.M.A.R.T. – the Social Media Awareness and Response Team
When Jerry Kane, Rob Fichman, John Glaser, and I published our “Community Relations 2.0” paper in Harvard Business Review last Fall, we’d developed a broader framework for what we call SMART – the Social Media Awareness and Response Team.  I’ve written up a draft primer on the topic which I will include in the edited update to my textbook (new version out this summer).  I’ve also posted slides with what I hope were some really compelling examples.  Enjoy!

21 Twitter Tips from Socially Savvy Companies
Adapted from the book Engage by Brian Solis, this is a great roundup of real-world examples of how firms are using Twitter.  While many of the examples are familiar to my students there are some really great new ones, like the ‘secret word’ coupons tweeted by California Tortilla and Albion’s Oven (using BakersTweet), which tweets when goodies are piping hot.

Tweeting Cows
So we’ve seen the tweeting oven, Tweets during brain surgery, tweeting washing machines, tweeting plants, and KickBee – the device that allows babies to tweet from the womb.  Now we’ve got cow udders sending out milking updates.  Watch out, Kutcher.  There’s serious competition headed your way!

How LinkedIn Will Fire Up Your Career
Key advice for graduating students and internship seekers alike: As this Fortune cover story points out “If you don’t have a profile on LinkedIn, you’re nowhere”, and “if you’re serious about managing your career, the only site that maters is LinkedIn”.  LinkedIn has been profitable since 2007 (1/3 of the revenue comes from premium subscriptions, 1/3 from advertisers, and 1/3 from corporations using the site’s firm-focused features).  It has well over 60 million users, and it’s the first place many firms are going to hunt heads.  After all most LinkedIn members have jobs so they must be good! Public profiles also may lead to less resume fraud (everyone could see if you’re a fake). One LinkedIn believer is Accenture.  The firm will hire will hire 50,000 this year and almost all hiring will be done online. Accenture’s Head of Global Recruiting claims the firm spends upwards of $150,000 for each exec recruited through a headhunter.  LinkedIn’s a powerful challenge to that biz.

Student Run Search Engine Takes First Place

Big congrats to TechTrek alums David Toliopov (A&S ’10) and Shahbano Imran (A&S ’09), winners of this year’s Boston College Venture Competition.  Their PIQC.net (pronounced pixie) offered a drop-dead live demo of the promise of the semantic web – showing how the service can allow users to interrogate structured data through a luscious interface.  This is definitely one to watch!

Creator of PHP Joins WePay
More on BCVC – the event’s co-founder, TechTrek alum Bill Clerico, continues to roll on with WePay, the startup he’s launched with fellow BC Eagle Rich Aberman. WePay recently hired Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of the PHP language (a linchpin of the LAMP open-source stack).  As TechCrunch points out, this is huge news.  Along with the A-List seed funding the firm has received, this underscores the esteem some of the brightest in the Valley have for the firm. Look for an impressive API rollout later this year.  WePay everywhere!

Spring 2010 Podcasts
I”ve posted podcasts for my Spring 2010 Computers in Management class.  Slides & other teaching materials are online at https://gallaugher.com/chapters.  Enjoy!  If you like them, do write & share your thoughts.

Micro Donation – Mega Impact
Alums – The Heights just pointed out that both Notre Dame & Holy Cross have higher giving percentages than we do.  Those percentages influence many of the rankings calculations used by national publications.  BC is once again running an alumni challenge.  Eagles, please consider supporting your alma mater.  A support challenge is underway with a May 31st deadline. We’ll keep pushing to advance the value of your degree, and we’ll work to deliver post-graduation value, as well.

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WiG readers, thanks again for your patience!  This semester I’ve taught 6 sections (the normal is two), I’ve advised several campus groups, and pushed forward my own research work, all while rolling out an update to my online textbook (BTW: HUGE thanks to all the schools that have adopted the textbook! It’s been great hearing from students & faculty worldwide).  It’s been a challenging semester and I’m very much looking forward to my Fall 2010 sabbatical!