Category: Facebook

Facebook Will Take Over The Web

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I’ve been a long-time facebook user. Dartmouth was one of the first 10 schools on the service in 2000-2001 and you could tell even back then that it was a special service. I’ve always thought it was the best social network – even as MySpace and others came around.

Facebook is a better services than other social networks simply because it has better features. Sure they have the same as a lot of sites, but they’re engineered better and they resonate with users MUCH more. Facebook features provide feedback, they portray status and most importantly, they’re social. Two of my favorite features on the facebook service are:

  • picture-4.pngPhotos. Supposedly this was the feature that spurned The Platform (see below). This feature is very similar to other services like Yahoo Photos, Photobucket, etc. except with one exception – it’s social. You can tag people in your photos and when you do it – that photo shows up in that user’s profile. In the past, if a friend of yours had a photo of you, this was never identified and you would never know.  Or if you see a person in a picture with your friend, you can see who that person is and click through to their profile. Facebook made photo viewing easy and made it social feature instead of just a way to enhance your profile. This caused the facebook photo sharing to be the most popular photo network on the web (or at least a close #2). Check out this article for details
  • News Feed. RSS is a simple concept. It is publish/subscribe. You subscribe to get information from certain sources and updates to those sources are published to you. RSS readers are doing this for the web such as Netvibes, iGoogle, MyYahoo, and the Google Reader (which is what i use). Just as your email inbox is a place for receiving mail messages, RSS readers are a place to receive messages from the web that you’ve signed up for whether it is a blog or a website. Facebook has an activity RSS reader called “News Feed” which displays any activity of a friend of yours on your home page. Most people don’t realize it’s RSS, but that’s essentially what it is and instead of delivering web messages, it delivers your friends’ activity. That is social and this feature alone is what makes facebook better than any other social network. It is great at telling you what your friends and network is doing and that is always relevant.  I also wrote about this a few weeks ago here.

Last week facebook came out with a new feature called F8 and also known as The Platform. This is a huge deal and it will change the web for millions of users. This feature allows any company to develop an application to live inside Facebook and makes it easy for any facebook user to install, share and use. With this feature, facebook is now a platform of users and friends available for any application or company to access. I repeat, this is huge. It has always been my thought that going forward social networking is a foundational attribute of the web. Any activity you do online – shopping, reading, watching videos – is enhanced if you can see what your friends are doing (or have done) and can easily share it with them. For any traditional site (BestBuy.com, Google Maps, Fandango, etc.), it could be much better if it was built into facebook and showed you what your friends had purchased, or had done, or what their opinion is. I already love using the flickr, netflix, delicious, and other facebook applications that have been created in the first week and i’m positive the quality will only get better.

To summarize – Facebook is a great site and similar to how Google went from building a great search product to building just great products (gmail, docs, calendar, maps, etc.), facebook is now on the path to go from a great social network to being an integral aspect of the internet. Also similar to Google, they are winning not just because of their vision but also because they are better at the subtle differences in their features and the overall simplicity of their site which makes the experience usable and enjoyable. Little things like auto-complete textboxes, slick javascript, and empty whitespace is why the site is so usable. Facebook is primetime now and it’s only the beginning.

Twitter: Facebook's News Feed for People over 25

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picture-6.pngThe technorati are going insane about the website Twitter these days. It’s all people can talk about. It’s driving me nuts! One thing that i keep asking myself is, isn’t Twitter is just the same as Facebook’s status indicator and news feed? If you don’t know about this feature in Facebook, here’s what it is…

When you log on to Facebook, there’s a little window where you can write what you’re doing. The home page for each user is something called a “news feed” which displays what all your friends are doing. This could be their status that they’ve typed in, a change in their profile, a new message, etc.

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Kids on facebook have been using this feature A TON, everyday, all the time. Twitter does the exact same thing – except that it is ONLY the status description as you can’t do anything else on the site. Facebook is mostly used by people under 25 and it is used frequently. So basically Twitter took one (of the hundreds) of features of facebook and made a site around it for people over the age of 25. Not a bad idea, but doesn’t seem worthy of all the hubbub.

What do you think?

What I Would do to Fix AOL

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I saw the annoucement last week (and news stories) of the new AOL CEO, Randy Falco, and got to wondering, if I’m in charge of running AOL which is now in the business of monetizing traffic to AOL.com and other pages, how would i do it? A few thoughts came to mind….

First, i would buy the best, more user-friendly and one of hte most popular social networks around – Facebook. With facebook, you not only get a great social network, but you also get one of the best photo-sharing applications on the internet. Then i would merge it with AIM, change all AIM-pages to be facebook pages, and place the mini-feed on every users home AOL.com page. That would drive traffic. Granted, it would take a long time to get everything on the same platform (calendar, aim, mail, etc.) but facebook’s interface and features are much, much better than AOL’s. Everyone’s speculating about Yahoo buying facebook, why not AOL? AOL has just as much cash and just enough desire to monetize their traffic. It’s almost as if everyone assumes AOL is dying and isn’t going to invest in their future.

Buy Meebo
AIM is one of the most precious assets AOL has and it is being threatened by Meebo. I would buy it immediately and make all meebo-me widgets become AIM widgets and place them all over the web and inside the recently purchased AOL-facebook pages.

Streaming Music Locker
Subscription streaming. AOL should abandon the WMA format and go for only streaming. In an iPod world, the only way to play is to make your server compatible with iTunes and that means abandoning DRM and/or simply abandoning any local download. A service like last.fm + mp3tunes would go a long way.

Video
Go all-flash as DRM instead of Windows Media so mac users can play. Have it all hosted so you can access anywhere and watch anywhere.

Mail
Build, Buy or do whatever it takes to do a SERIOUS upgrade to your mail application. Mail is the largest driver of ad inventory and if you’re service is completely ad-based, this should be your #1 priority. It’s been over 2 years since Gmail launched, you would think someone at AOL would have noticed how to please mail users. Where is unlimited storage, where are ajax-features to reduce latency, where? AOL mail is by far the worst webmail application on the internet. It needs to be fixed.

Voice
AOL bought 3 voice companies between 2000 and 2003: eVoice, Quack, and another one from Canada (i’m forgetting the name). AOL made serious investment in voicemail, voice recognition and other voice services. From what i can tell, all that has been completely abandoned. I would restart this effort and do more click-to-talk services, similar to Google’s. However, all of AOL’s services are tied into mail and AIM making them more attractive. For instance, it would be easy to do click-to-talk and then save to mp3 which would be put into your music streaming locker.

These are just a few of the things i’d do. What do you all think? I think Randy’s in for a tough job and i’m not bullish on AOL’s chances. I think the most successful internet companies are run by those who understand the technology and can see the trends coming. Google embraces technology and let’s it unlock new opportunities and i don’t see somewhat who’s entire background is in TV and TV ad-sales pushing AOL into new models and opportunities. That’s just my initial reaction. Then again, Terry Semel’s done a good job at Yahoo, so who knows.

If I Was Apple, What I Would Do To Protect iTunes

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Apple has a great monopoly on both the fulfillment and playback of digital music. ITunes is a great player, the iTunes Music Store is the most comprehensive music store available online, and the iPod is the best, most badass player on the market. However, competitors are coming on strong. Microsoft announced the Zune project, Sony is releasing new players (article), and smaller players like the Music Gremlin are doing some cool and innovative stuff.

So, what should apple do to protect this mighty lead? They should give aways as many iTunes tracks as possible! Seriously, like it is halloween or a homecoming parade they should throw tracks away like candy. And, like the clever company they afacebook.jpgre, that’s exactly what they are doing. Last week they announced that they are giving away tracks to college kids with a deal with thefacebook to give away 10 million tracks (btw: facebook is the 7th most trafficed site in the US). And yesterday Apple annouced a deal with Coke which said in the press release, “Coke will link its website to the iTunes site and give away millions of free music downloads and hundreds of iPod digital music players”

cokeapple.jpgWhy is this a good idea? Because every track that a user gets from iTunes keeps them attached to the Apple world. If you have hundreds of tracks that only work in iTunes and iPods, you’re not very likely to buy or use anything else but if you have only mp3’s from CD’s, eMusic, or “found” online it’s pretty easy to go somewhere else. So, to ensure that nobody switches in the future, Apple should lock everyone in with iTunes tracks. Personally, i’m keeping

AOL's State of the Union

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Time Warner just announced their quarterly numbers. Although TW profits went up, AOL subscribers continue to drop down to 19 million. Just a few years ago they were over 35 million and now they’ve shed around 16 MILLION members. Why is this? Could it be that all the areas they were once dominant in they are now not even second tier? In this new world of social media and collective intelligence AOL is nowhere to be found. As a former employee (2000-2004) at both AOLTW Corporate and AOL Broadband i’ve seen some things. Here’s my take:

  • Social Networking & Blogging. Currently being dominated by MySpace, thefacebook, and others such as Friendster, yahoo 360, etc.. AOL plans to launch something with AIM soon (AIMspace), but i’d say they are about 3 years too late. Why would anyone switch from MySpace to AIM? Tied in closely with this is blogging. So many people, novices and professionals are looking for a place to put their thoughts, rants, and memories. So, while Google is buying Blogger and Yahoo is partnering with Moveable Type, AOL is sticking with their AOL Journals which is very limited in custimization, doesn’t have RSS, and can’t be hosted. I think they either need to get serious or get kill it.
  • Music Services. There are several viable music services out there. For the moment, let’s ignore the fact that everyone and their mother is using iTunes. What else is there? There are music subscription services such as Rhapsody, Yahoo Music, Napster, MusicNet, and eMusic (description of each below). AOL has rested on MusicNet for the past 4 years and last year bought up MusicNow for around $10 million. They had roughly 250k-300k MusicNet subs and i doubt they have anything close to that with MusicNow. At least with MusicNow they are building in community features (i think with MusicStrands), but does it tie into the AIM social network – doubtful. Does it tie in to AIM? Probably not. Is it featured on AOL anywhere? No, not really. When you’re this far behind, the best thing you can do is call in the community. This is what Yahoo’s done with the YME. They know they’re behind in terms of features and functionality, so they made a robust plug-in architecture so the rest of the world can help them catch up. This is why i think Yahoo will be the biggest player after Apple.
    • Rhapsody has been around the longest, is the most web-based and gotten in bed with MS. They have some interesting radio features but for the most part is somewhat klunky. It will be interesting to see what happens with this once MS gets their paws all over it. Supposedly, all MSN music will be powered by Rhapsody.
    • Yahoo Music (with Yahoo Music Unlimited) is slick. As i mentioned above, iIt has some great API’s and ties in well with Y! Messenger. The subscription service is cheap ($60 a year). Unfortunately it has very little subs, but that could change if the WMA issue gets better.
    • Napster is getting better and better, but still has relatively few social aspects. It has a good library and great branding but not much else.
    • eMusic is differentiated with an mp3 library. It’s not all-you-can-eat but it is ipod-compatible which makes a HUGE difference in this world 45 million iPods. They don’t have any mainstream artists but have almost all the indie artists.
    • MusicNet has the largest subscription library but it is simply a fulfillment engine. It powers services such as Virgin, Cdigix, and even Yahoo!. But there is no community here.
  • Advertising. This is when i realized that AOL will always be the JV squad in the internet game. Yahoo was serious about music and went out and bought MusicMatch for $500 million in 2003 and Launch Music (good article) for $12 million in 2001. AOL waited 4 more years then invested $10 million for a MusicNow library. Then advertising emerged as a viable and powerful revenue stream, Yahoo! spent 1.6 billion on Overture and AOL spent a few hundred million on Advertising.com – forever relegating them to minor league ball. Not that they’re doing incredibly poorly, but will they approach anything like Google’s Adsense? The old AOL would have bought whoever it needed to stay on top.
  • Mail. AOL’s golden nugget is the screenname. Users won’t switch because they don’t want to lose their email address and they pay $24 bucks a month for it. Meanwhile Gmail comes out with (basically) unlimited storage – for FREE. Then Yahoo and Hotmail counter with equal storage. Gmail and Yahoo continue to make their services better and better with slick javascript (gmail is the AJAX gold standard) and the new Yahoo Mail Beta is supposedly amazing. What is AOL doing? They make mail the most click-intensive application ever. You need 3 seperate windows to just send a message. And to make it even worse, your mail still expires after 28 days. Wtf? When will they wake up and realize that on a scale of 1-10, AOL is batting about a 3. Let’s break mail down even more:
    • Authentication. AOL requires you to sign on each time you come to it’s site. Sounds reasonable. However if you go to check your mail multiple times a day, it gets annoying. Neither Yahoo nor Gmail makes you do that. Even if you check “remember me” – it doesn’t.
    • Session Time. Gmail lets you stay signed in all day (and actually b/c of this launched a slick app – check out my future post). AOL signs you out after 15-20 minutes. Why are they making it such a pain to read your mail? Should services try to delight the customer?
    • Inbox. Time to bring in some AJAX. The interface is slow and ugly.
    • Integration with other services. No AIM, no real precense, no easy to access address, nothing.
  • Video. This is one space where AOL is doing ok. If you look at the types of video becoming available on the web from amateur (caught-on-tape) on one end to amateur narrative films (iFilm) in the middle to professional content on the other end. AOL is focussing directly on the far end of professional content only. They have deals with many major players to stream the video (NFL, CNN, E!, NBA, WB, etc.) however they make it hard to find the video or to use it anywhere outside of AOL. Their new hi-Q initiative using Kontiki is very interesting because it downloads and dramatically improves up the quality of the video, but the there isn’t much content available in Hi-Q yet – it’s currently only trailers and music videos. My question is where’s the focus on short video clips? There’s an explosion of content coming from short clips such as SNL’s Lazy Sunday that is being distributed through YouTube, Veoh, and now MySpace. This is where the eyeballs are. This is what users are passing around and looking for on the internet. However, AOL is focused on bring TV to the small internet screen. IP might be a delivery mechanism for that someday, but eventually it’ll be viewed on a big screen. I’m much more optimistic about Tivo/Netflix or MS Media Center applications. They have made some big investments in video search. But i don’t know any users to use video search. Basically there are only a few players that host a lot of video (YouTube, Google, and iTunes) and users go to them and search. If something isn’t there, they’ll check one of the others.
  • Instant Messaging. AOL just released Triton, a much needed upgrade over the AIM application that hadn’t been changed for over 4 years. It is still cluttered with Ads, doesn’t integrate blogs or music. Also, check this out: there’s an AOL address book, but now there’s also an AIM address book (powered by Plaxo). And, to make their AOL Mail even more insignificant, there’s now AIM mail which is the exact same thing, but for free. How could you not expect users to be confused when you can’t even integrate AIM with AOL? I’ve started using Yahoo Messenger lately and found it to be just as full featured but with less bugs and easier to use. Google Talk is simplier and easier to use too. Obviously all the users are on AIM so that’s going to be the dominant player for years to come, but it’s horrible how they’ve failed to extend the AIM platform – no API’s, no major improvements, and increasing more cluttered with shameful attempts to suck cash out of it (games, voice, ads, etc.)

This is a long synopsis of a large multi-faceted company but it pains me to see how each step of the way they continue to build creative and useful applications to benefit their members.

Thoughts?