facebook » Dave Jenkins

Facebook Places: the play for multichannel relevance

Network, Social Media, United States, ecommerce 1 Response »

Aug 202010

Just remember, No matter where you go, there you are.

Multichannel, multichannel, multichannel. For online businesses, it is simultaneously the New Promised Land as well as The Impending Doom. I’ve discussed before how I think Amazon will ultimately see its greatest threat come from Walmart, and may actually acquire Target or Sears in order to pre-empt the risk of a competitor that can offer online deals as well as physical storefronts. The same could be said for Best Buy over NewEgg.com, REI over backcountry.com, or even Dave & Busters over Gamestop.com.

Along the same lines, I think Facebook’s recent addition of ‘facebook places‘ isn’t merely trying to push out fourquare or gowalla for eyeball share– quite the opposite– they seem to be warmly welcoming those partners into the fold. All Facebook wants is everyone’s current GPS coordinates, regardless of who tricks the user into surrendering them. Why? Because once Facebook has your 10-20, it can turn around and drop a dime on you to all those potential location-sensitive advertisers. Facebook has the opportunity to beat Google at it’s own game. Think Multichannel. Think Mobile. Think Minority Report, much sooner and much worse than anticipated.

Google must realize this also, hence its mad rush to buy up some social network providers along with location-triggered services. I fear it may be too late for Mountain View, however– everyone has their personal troupe/network built out on Facebook, and they’ll be loathe to do it again somewhere else.

The other risk here is that the proletariat may rise up in rebellion against constantly announcing their whereabouts, but if there are free lattes involved, I wouldn’t be surprised to see people surrender their bank card PINs.

Online Community: Individual-centric vs Catalog-centric

Network, Social Media, ecommerce No Responses »

Aug 022010

from the rightcliq website. What's up with the toolbelts?

Ever since Steve Jobs and Woz unveiled their little pet project to bring computing to the masses, we’ve had a debate about where the application should live: server-side or client-side. IBM always argued that server-side is faster, cleaner, and generally more profitable for them. Bill Gates made his billions bringing apps to the client-side. Cloud Computing is really this argument wrapped in shiny new clothing– and has been blargged about ad nauseum everywhere else, so I won’t bother with that.

I mention that debate simply to bring up what might be a parallel argument that is forming now that many sites are becomming socially-aware. Here’s the topic: is a social network invidivual-centric (client-side) or catalog-centric (server-side)? This isn’t a debate about where the actual software app resides, that’s pretty much invisible now. For a social network, the core function is the graph– but where is that centered? Is it centered around the individual (like facebook), or around the catalog (like amazon.com)?

An individual-centric graph has the person at the center, and she is free to add her friends, likes, dislikes, and catalog choices to her graph. In this model, she will always want to log in with her personal network ID, and then interact or share with a given website. Facebook is this way. Pluck offers this kind of model.

A Catalog-centric graph has the products or new topics acting as the currency of the graph, and individuals may come and interact with them as they please. The individuals may even use their Facebook ID for logging in, but the graph stays with the catalog and is structured in a way to build out the graph between those products, regardless of who or which individuals contributed any given part. Bazaarvoice is a catalog-centric model

At first blush, it would seem that the individual-centric graph has run the table, but this may change. Faceboook offers a ‘like’ button just about anywhere (any major website) now, and people are certainly participating. But those same individuals are starting to push back on the flood of information coming into their facebook feed. Everyone is hungry for peer-driven invormation about products, but very few are willing to contribute content if it pollutes their friend feed.

Can a catalog-centric graph solve this concern for users? Would you be willing to review more products or “like” more things if it could be somewhat anonymous? What would you need in return? Will you want to segment off your personal contacts (all your high-school drinking buddies) away from your shopping guru mentors? Visa has announced Right Cliq, an individual addon that serves as the bridge between the individual graph and catalog graph. Sure, we need another social network like another holein the head, but this may actually have some legs: consolidate your shopping peer-driven information with your purchase history, while segmenting it away from your personal contacts.

It becomes a catalog-centric social graph, but it belongs to Visa, not to the vendor.

p.s. if you like this article, please click the ‘like’ button in the upper right. :-P

Selling out the guest list

ecommerce No Responses »

Jul 252010

I’ve often described social media as a cocktail party– there are various types and levels of interaction, and there are some basic rules of etiquette. As host of the party, facebook has a tough balancing act: give out all that functionality for free while keeping the lights on. Well, it looks like they just sold the guest list.

We’ll see what effect this has, but I think it will be marked as an error after a while. I’ll have to think on this one some more: it’s a step toward a more connected intarwebs, but it also exposes the relationship between company and person. It all comes down to your personal delusion of privacy.

Thanks Harry for the link.

Everyone’s an expert (part 1)

Network, United States, ecommerce, wiki 2 Responses »

Jun 172010

Times was, I used to be able to spout off any random factiod I thought I knew, and the Internet took it as read truth. The Wikipedia used to be great for this. Now, my rants are pretty much limited to the blarg you’re reading right now– we’re probably all better off for it. Most university professors scowl very deeply if a student references the Wikipedia in a footnote, which is fair, but not for the reasons most people think: Wikipedia is a bad reference source because it’s a derivative work, not because it may be inaccurate: The student should be citing the original work, not someone’s summarized boilerplate. Wikipedia has largely squashed the ‘inaccurate’ label through a zealous use and requirement of all statements must have footnotes.

But that raises a conundrum for many of us: where is truth? Where is the expert? Is the expert the one with the most experience? Is the expert the one with the most money? The most devotees? Is truth simply the mob’s consensus? Graduate school told me that truth is the logical sum of a tested thesis. I spent 15 years being smug that I knew what that meant, only now to really see that when the Internet gave everyone a soapbox from which to preach, now social networks are giving everyone a Hyde’s Park corner complete with audiences. Companies like bazaarvoice and pluck are setting up these cacophonies wherever possible (good for them). These systems invariably include meta-rating systems to rate the reviews and the reviewers, in the hopes of crowdsourcing the good information from the bad. In general, it usually works. It is still, however, all based on a Kuhn-model of mob truth.

The NYT recently published an article on a new computer named “Watson” designed by IBM to play Jeopardy. Another possible use they summized might be to find counter-factual statements to anyone’s gtiven declaration on the Internet. In short: a bullshit detector. I can imagine they will be able to monetize this thing into millions of dollars: every social network and review thread can now come with a robot that can read plain speech, offer immediate counter-responses to erroneous information, and perhaps even show us a numerical score for ‘trustability’ or ‘truthiness‘ (all the footnotes in that link– irony!). The downside here, of course, is that most reviews for most products will be reduced to little more than the barren subjectivism of American Bandstand: “It’s got a good beat, I can dance to it.”

There is still salvation for quality content in quality reviews: hard numerical data, solid logic, and qualitative feature polarization. I’ll explain myself on those in some upcoming posts.

The Rise of the Network Biologist

Network, ecommerce, wiki No Responses »

Mar 212009

So, the Internet is everywhere. Times was (back in the day), that we used to surf around to websites just to see the design or some cool functionality, but we are no longer enamored with the technology (well, almost). Futurists no longer spend their time pontificating about capacity, bandwidth, or the extent of data that could be recorded in their great computers– all of that is assumed to be in place. Rather, these seers spend their time in two activities:

a) Blowing their own horn on twitter — not worth watching

b) Showing insights on the social interaction of the great online hive that has now come into being — these are what I’ll call “Network Biologists”, and are worth your time.

The network biologist will spend his/her time researching the strange interactions between people, and the even stranger medium that is created as a result. They are not sociologists, because it is more than the interactions of the humans; there are robots, scripts, and crude AI influencing the mix. The environment itself is ever changing– and the actors change as a result– but the center of focus has shifted to the behaviour of the fish, not the mechanical workings of the reef: hence the term ‘biologist’.

The usability managers in ecommerce companies were an early manifestation. Now, everyone in the online marketing department, merchandising, and even finance is trying to ascertain how the huge mass of people will react to the online environment. This is different from standard “retail science” or “catalog management” because of the constant arms race in online functionality as well as the multiple-variable equation where customers will influence each other in real time, as well as try to get in on the deal with some sort of affiliate, coupon, or recommendation in exchange for a slice of the profits.

The best results so far have been to segment and clasify online users into their various behavioural patterns. Oddly enough, people don’t mind surrendering them willingly. The current spate of “what [blank] are you?” viruses circulating on facebook are a segmentation maker’s dream: people are happy to tell us exactly what drives their brightest fears and darkest hopes. The most successful websites out there have tapped into the hive behaviour that humans portray when given just the right mix of anonymity and self-aggrandizement: Google’s page rankings are a canopy of dominant players and ground-dwellers in their shadow; Amazon’s entire merchandising catalog for millions of products is an expansion of fecundity like salmon spawning; Facebook is basic tribalism that proves Dunbar’s number, De.licio.us is our own pollen-finding wiggle dance; twitter is a sea of iridescent jellyfish desperate for attention; there is a flavour of pr0n out there for every strange perversion you could imagine (and a few you don’t want to).

I would imagine that colleges will soon have some sort of degree in Network Biology: it will be a combination of sociology, crowd biology, and basic network mechanics, to show how it is all wired together.

Crowdsourcing your next job

Network, St Louis, ecommerce 4 Responses »

Feb 232009

My good friend has decided to look for a new job. Today, she brought in some good Mexican food for the crew as a thank you. It was, however, not a free lunch. In return for the tacos, we were supposed to go to the white board in the conference room and suggest where she might work next. For the price of 2 dozen lunches, my friend tried to crowdsource her next job.

Soon enough (if not already), everyone will be connected to everyone else in their immediate market segment. We’ll all have a Kevin Bacon number of 3 or lower. Linkedin, which originally provided value as the “inside connection” to a given company or executive, now has become the ubiquitous contact folder for everyone. Where recruiters used to thrive on Linkedin because it complimented and extended their most valuable asset: their rolodex of contacts, it now threatens to replace that rolodex completely. The Recruiter still has value, as someone who knows how to interview a candidate and get at the soft chewy center of a person to see if they are a good match for the company with an open position, but not as a simple nexus of resumes in one hand and job openings in another.

Given that Linkedin has given us all that magic rolodex, why not try to crowdsource positions? How could one simultaneously incent the armchair recruiter in all of us, yet invoke enough friction to keep out the spammers and robots?

Here is my idea:

Vigorously pursue companies to list their open positions on the network
Invite people to recommend people in their network for the open positions, with a standing bounty of 10% of first-year salary (still leaving room for the recruiter doing the actual interviews to make 10-15%)
If Andy is going to recommend Betty to C Corporation, then Andy needs to pay $5 to Betty (she’s the one looking for a job, and probably needs the $5 anyway)
C Company would see that Betty is recommended by 7 of her friends (all willing to stake $5 on it), and therefore she is probably worth a look. If Betty is hired, the 10% is split amongst the 7 people who recommended her.
Andy just profited $1423 for his work (assuming 10% of $100,000 job, spilt 7 ways, minus the $5)

Hmmm. This might work. I should ping Harry or Alex or my old friends at Daijob.

UPDATE: 27 May 2010: Looks like I called it. http://www.notchup.com/ is almost a perfect match for this business model.

Facebook should be nationalized

Network, United States 2 Responses »

Feb 202009

The haters are out, there is no profitability on the horizon. Facebook is definitely well on it’s way to Stage 5 of the cocktail party: the cool kids are leaving, only the hucksters and sham artist are left. This party is no longer cool.

At the same time, we have a new administration that owes its existence and success to a mass movement of online communities binding together around key issues. That same administration is now trying to rally an even larger group– all 310 million of us– around key points of its agenda. Back in the 50s, the Feds would have duped Jimmy Stewart into making a propaganda film. That won’t work anymore. Thanks to those hippies over at the ACLU, the government cannot invade our privacy.

If only there were some way to get down to a majority of the citizenry, and find out their known associates, their political and sexual preferences, and their GPS coordinates. If only there were some network out there where people were ready to hand over all this information in exchange for some cheap games and zombie bites.

The federal government should nationalize Facebook. It’s not seeing any profit, yet it is sitting on top of an incredible amount of personal information, all surrendered willingly. The Obama administration could forward its plans at the grass roots level. Anyone who doesn’t play ball could be outted to their friend list. Together with Twitter for up-to-the-minute updates on terrorist threat levels and natural disasters, the Federal Government could finally achieve the true Jeffersonian democracy mass movement that has stood as an idealistic utopia since– well– Plato’s Republic.

Nationalize Facebook Now!

So, you’re on facebook– So what?

Network, United States 10 Responses »

Jan 122008

Someone I know is writing a book titled So You’re on Facebook, Now What? From what I can tell, it centers on how to build a commercial profile on facebook, and how to increase your visibility. Hmmm… I admit to having some doubts about this. We all make money on the stupid Intarweb in some way or another, but it seems to me that the social networks are like parties that progress through stages:

stage 1: not many people – this might be lame
stage 2: okay, some people are showing up – let’s stick around and see what happens
stage 3: wow– there’s some cool people here, and i’m a little drunk. Fun!
stage 4: rager! holy shit! look how many people are here! We can do anything! (let’s steal ketchup from the fridge and throw it into the street!!!)
stage 5: waaay too many people. The cops are gonna show up, and people are pushing and shoving, and i can’t hear anything you’re saying right now. This is lame.

MySpace progressed through to stage 5 rather quickly. Facebook is somewhere in stage 4. The problem I have with this book is the purposeful, driven, crass commercial intention of it. Just like that party, imagine the college friend of yours who comes through the crowds and pushes the Red Bull stickers and is trying to get you to buy pre-paid long distance cards. Meh– dork alert. Once the businesses are actively pushing their agendas on the crowd, the sponteneity, the fun interaction, the conversation, the party, begins it’s messy end. The cool kids head for a different darker smokey club, and the only ones left are the hucksters all trying to sell each other something.

I’ve already started to kill all the goofy apps from my facebook. I only check the thing once every 4 days or so now (down from my temp addiction of 2x/day last month). It’s nice to keep a line out to my old friends, and the moment I let it get past that, it’s no better than reality TV or mindless webtrash.

My advice? Be very very careful how you sell your shit on facebook– you may do more damage to your brand than you think. If the social network angle makes sense (some sort of friend interaction like wish lists or music tastes), maybe. If you’re just blabbing to the masses, get out.

Selling out the guest list

Everyone’s an expert (part 1)

The Rise of the Network Biologist

Crowdsourcing your next job

Facebook should be nationalized

So, you’re on facebook– So what?

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