There's a lot of talk out there about freemium, premium, etc...   but what about products where you have one market that gains real economic value from usage, and another market segment that you really want using it that gains none?   Can you offer the same exact product to two different classes of users and simply say that one group has to pay and the other gets it free, and expect no cheating?

That's what "Non commercial use only" implies.   There are many examples of software out there that you're supposed to pay for if you're a business, but if you're a person, you can get it for free.

The question is how to enforce that and how many users slip one past the goalie and get away with it?  Are most people honest?  How do you enforce that? 

There's a lot of open source stuff out there that works in this manner, and I'd be curious to see research or first hand accounts of management of this... and potential for "cheating".  I mean, are developers and users of open source code just a more respectful and sophisticated class of users? 

Could this work if MySpace adopted this model?  I think MySpace's issue is that the little guys, like my local pool hall, would be hardpressed to pay thousands of dollars for their page... but what if there was a way to set appropriate pricing... that they had to pay 5 bucks a month for their page.  Could you enforce that?

I've been remiss in writing my follow up post to CommunityNext.  First off, Noah Kagan did a fantastic job organizing this.  He had great speakers and the whole thing went off like clockwork, especially considering the ambitious schedule. 

The tough thing for me, though, was that I didn't quite get who the audience was.  I hung out with Fred and Brian (who treated us to bar substinance, btw...  very sneakily, too...  never got a chance to thank him), saw Stephanie... Tara spoke, and got to meet Anastasia and Frank...   and then I thought to myself...   Why are we all here?   I mean, are we all preaching to the choir?

Tara wrote in her post conference notes, "The audience, I guestimated, was more than half filled with people who were asking the question, “How can I use community to make money?” 

I have to admit, I didn't run into many, or any of these people for that matter.  Unlucky Tara.

Or maybe I'm just looking at these people differently.  Hell, maybe I'm one of them.  There are a lot of people out there who work for businesses that maintain communities....  so I guess they are "using communities to make money" or put another way, "are in the business of providing services that include communities".  Sounds a little bit different depending on the word choice and order, doesn't it?

To use another example, would you rather monetize a community or create a sustainable community...  because last I checked, its hard to sustain a community, grow and innovate without some dough.  Even Wikipedia is asking for money.  No one calls it monetizing, but that's essentially what they're doing...getting money from users.

And, that's just fine.   In fact, its more than fine.  Its fantastic that people are asking "How do I make money?"   Because, what is implied is that they're really asking, "How do I make money without totally pissing off all my users and having them disappear in a year?"

The way I see it, with no real barriers to entry and hardly any switching costs, in a wide open web, the big bad corporations and money makers should actually be aligned with users, no?  No users, no money.  More users, more money.  Get users by making something people want to use.  People are not idiots, they will only use useful stuff.

For all the MySpace bashing that went on at the conference and that I even do here, if MySpace didn't really provide any value to its users, it would cease to exist.  They'd all move over to Hi5 or back to Friendster.  A lot of the evangelists at CommunityNext cringe at the thought, but the reality is that it doesn't take passion to create community and it doesn't take care, concern, etc.  I think the people at MySpace care about community to the extent that it is a monetary decision and that seems to be working for them.

Why?  Because, you're not really creating community online.  Community was there.  People talked before blogs.  They found music before last.fm.  They had anonymous sex before Craigslist...um...  I mean... bought each others couches, or whatever.  There were garage sales before eBay.   Granted, online tools allow better expression of community and more explosive growth... more robust information exchange, and more efficient communication... People are social animals...   they started making the web social long before  the term social software came out.      In the end, all you really need is to put the tools of expression and connection in the hands of the people.

That's what MySpace did.  They gave people big dumb empty boxes and allowed us to throw whatever crap we wanted in there.  That's community.  We threw our thongs, our middle fingers and our bling in there...   and MySpace threw ads all over it.  Do people care?  They don't seem to.

Community?  MySpace is the Mott Haven to the Soho of our rich Flickr Web 2.0 life, but, gasp all you want, they're both thriving web communities. 

I think people are confusing passion for community with good product design.  Do the people at last.fm have passion for community?  I dunno... I don't know who they are or what they stand for, but the product rocks.  AIM, Skype...   Good products.  Passionate communities?  umm...  On the other side, a lot of people fail at community because their product just sort of sucks... its not because they lack passion.

Or look at what I'm up against in my area.  IAC has used paid advertising to get over 4 million people to register for the Zwinky avatars, which come with a lovely Ask.com search toolbar that installs itself all over your system.  Long after you abandon your Zwinky, the toolbar remains, generating search revenue for the company.  That kind of behavior should lead to a massive revolt by their community, no?  No... people continue to click and register everyday.

Show me a fantastic social product that went nowhere because the founders lacked passion for community.   

I guess what I'm saying is, while passionate founders and community caretakers definitely instill an authenticity and quality to their community...think Craigslist, Vimeo, etc...that hasn't shown itself to be a requirement, nor, unfortunately, an advantage.  Hopefully, though, when Voki arrives in March, we will use our passion to our advantage and you will see it in our usage, our content and in our marketing...and in the product itself.

If anyone wants to learn a little something about online viral apps, walk through Flixter.

First, I got a message from someone who accidently uploaded their whole address book and sent invites to take a movie quiz.   Loving movies, I signed up and took the quiz, but the whole while, it made a big point of getting me to invite my friends, and then it had me paste a MySpace bulletin as well as a widget in my MySpace movies section... automatically.

Plus, smartly, it tells me when friends of mine have answered my quiz and coaxes me to go online and see how we match up.

Admittedly, I haven't gotten into much of the depth of the product....  I'm not sure they've developed enough hooks yet to pull users deeper into the system to encourage more movie ratings, but that will come in time as they grow their community.   For now, I can see how this is going to grow like a weed.

Of course, I'm ceonyc on there, too... 

But I signed up for it anyway.

If you're connected to me on Facebook (which I've been keeping pretty much friends-only, btw... in case I turned you down), then you've noticed that I've been obsessing over the whole "I'm in ur (noun), (verbing) ur (noun)z" cat thingy.     In fact, I'm so obsessed with it, that I just secured iminur.net.  I don't even know what I want to do with it yet. 

In any case, the idea of away messages that are freed from the IM client and universal is interesting, and so I thought I'd give Twitter a try.  I think they have a long way to back into a whole social network or business, but it's an interesting concept.

Actually, though, if I were AIM, I'd just break the status messages out of AIM and allow people to place them as a blog widget and change them from my phone...   they're well positioned to do this.

I love Clay Shiry's quote here:

"Shirky describes this generational shift in terms of pidgin versus Creole. “Do you know that distinction? Pidgin is what gets spoken when people patch things together from different languages, so it serves well enough to communicate. But Creole is what the children speak, the children of pidgin speakers. They impose rules and structure, which makes the Creole language completely coherent and expressive, on par with any language. What we are witnessing is the Creolization of media.”"

This is what a lot of people who aren't "of this world" don't get...  the advertisers, the brands, the agencies, and even some of the social networks themselves...   you can't just throw any crap up and say, "Come and create" or "tag this" or "be my friend" and expect the dollars to start flowing. 

Few people really want to learn the culture, which every international businessperson will tell you is probably more important than just learning the language.

I was working on a blog for a kayaking program on the other side of the Hudson, and trying to add neat little "add to Outlook" buttons.   They don't seem to work as well online as they do off, however.  I uploaded .vcs files to typepad, but when I try to open them in Firefox, they just open in the browser as text.  When I try in IE, the download window pops up just fine, but when I actually click "open" I get an Outlook message saying "The operation failed.  An object could not be found."  Do you have the same issues or any suggestions as to what I'm doing wrong.  These files open up just fine when they're on my desktop.

Download kayaking08282005.vcs

Link: Nick Bradbury: NewsGator Acquires FeedDemon, TopStyle...and Me!.

First off, let me say that I'm an avid FeedDemon user and I like the software a lot.  It was well worth the $30 I spend on it.  Nick Bradbury built a great tool and I'm happy to see him doing well for himself.

That being said, I'm not really happy about this merger...  mostly because I don't believe in a subscription model for a piece of software that sits on my machine that I don't get any support for.  Newsgator is a subscription based tool and they've offered me a free two year subscription, but then I'll have to start paying for FeedDemon annually.  I'm sure the support forums and other efforts are great... but I don't use any of them.  If given the choice, I wouldn't sign up for support either.  FeedDemon shouldn't break.  Period.  Its a piece of software that does a relatively simple thing...  reads RSS feeds.  I don't pay for my browser on a subscription model...  how is this different?  Its a really nice piece of software that I really like, but, not enough to pay an annual fee for it when I already paid for it once.  I feel like I bought it, and basically now I have to pay again for it, just because the company merged.  This isn't what I thought I signed up for. 

A long time ago, I switched my Flickr account name to my Yahoo! screename.  Why?  Because they asked me to and because I basically use the same signin for everything anyway, so it really wasn't such a big deal.

And eventually, it will probably happen with MyBlogLog and del.icio.us, too.  Seriously... who cares?  It won't make me use any more Yahoo services.

And why don't I care?  I don't care, because, at the end of the day, I'm glad the little startup where I store all my precious photos got bought be a big profitable company.

Yahoo! has lots and lots of servers and they're unlikely to ever completely go out of business.   So, if I had a choice between signing in to Flickr with my Flickr vs. signing into Yahoo! and giving me a better shot I won't have to move any of those photos in the remaining 58+ years of my life, I'll take the Yahoo! ID and signin.

It's the same as when your bank gets bought by a bigger bank and they give you a new card with new numbers.  It's a little bit of a hassle, but your money is probably safer at Citibank than it is at  First Fifth Third Bank of Saskachawan.

I'm not pissed off.  I'm thankful that such a great service exists, no matter what I need to enter in the box to login.

There's a Matrix-like movie called Equillibruim that stars Christian Bale where an omnipresent Big Brother character called "Father" appears on TV screens across the land.  We find out later that the real Father died years ago and the powers that be voted to continue to use his digital likeness to rule the masses. 

Lately, that's sort of how I feel about MySpace.

Of course, I know that MySpace founder Tom Anderson isn't really dead, but when his own profile got hacked and he never addressed the community about it, you couldn't help but wonder if he and his millions are largely checked out.

I mean, he doesn't even seem to really use the service, other than to be everyone's default friend and to accept comment worship.  No cool layout.  Same pic all the time.  No widgets.  Jeez, adopt a BunnyHero pet or something.  In fact, despite the fact that he gets 100's of comments a day, Tom has only addressed the community seven times in the last year through bulletins...oh..check that..six.  One of them was a spam bulletin sent when his profile got hacked.

Whenever my profile gets hacked or my widgets suddenly don't work, I look to hear from the voice of MySpace... and I get...silence.  As spammers and hackers run amuck on this site, the community is made to feel like they are fending for themselves. 

Contrast that with Facebook.

The other day, I was recruiting for a position through Facebook by targeting young marketing people.  I didn't get 30 emails out to people with public profiles about a real job from a real company before I tripped the spam alarm and was warned against it.  When I contacted the support email address they gave me about it, an actual human with a name answered my questions and politely asked me not to use Facebook for recruiting.  And when users were up in arms over the newsfeed, you couldn't login to the site without hearing directly from Mark Zuckerberg who, like seemingly all the other people who work at Facebook, actually use the site.  They even worked hard to get new privacy settings into the system. 

The same holds true for Craigslist, where Craig Newmark cares about the community so much that he has handed the day to day running of the business to someone else while he spends all of his time on customer service issues.  He trolls forums and chases down New York City real estate scams.  Talk about rolling up your sleeves!

Spam, scams, and other bad stuff are products of MySpace's relatively open architecture, which is part of what makes it great in the first place.  I understand that.  What I want is a voice, Tom's or anyone else from behind the curtain, to talk me through it all...an actual human who tries to explain what's going on and makes me feel like we're all in the same boat.  If Tom's kickin' it in Aruba with his millions, good for him, but then there should be another voice to anchor the site.  Wendy from Customer Service... we could all be her friend.   Or, maybe he's working hard fighting pedophiles or setting age policies or whatever...the point is, the average user's experience is that MySpace is a ship cast adrift.  Everyday, another one of my friends gets their profile hacked or sends a spam bulletin they didn't intend to.  Fake people try to add me left and right.  (Sidenote: There's going to be big market for average looking models in the spam profile world, because right now, the girls that try to add me are too hot to be believeable as actual humans using the service.  Get some average looking people to add me and maybe I'll fall for it.) 

Equally ignored is the development community that has both benefitted and benefitted from the site's open architecture.  The other day, aspects of the Flash embed code were changed completely without warning, wreeking a good deal of havoc, albeit temporarily, with the widgetosphere.  Would a public developer notice ahead of time been that much trouble?  I know we would have liked to be able to tell our customers that their avatars might experience some odd behavior and what to do about it.

The site is still growing.  Its only going to get more and more commercial.  It needs someone telling the users where that line is going to be... that there's someone out there who cares about the quality of their experience.

Tommy, can you hear me?

  Joshua and Peter 
  Originally uploaded by ceonyc.

For the sake of posterity, I thought it would be neat to keep track of the progress of del.icio.us as a growing company.  Brad, Fred, and I, and everyone else associated with this deal are all very excited about it.  Its great to be around such a fast growing phenomenon at this early stage.  Joshua and Peter have been unpacking a lot of boxes in the last week or so and they now have their DSL up and running in the office.  You might not recognize Peter their in the background.  He used to look more Rasputin-like, but now he's a walking Gillete commercial.

There's been a minimeme going around about Facebook vs LinkedIn as the future of professional social networking.

Its obvious that Facebook clearly has a lock on college social networking and LinkedIn is quickly wrapping up the 28+ professional market but it's not entirely clear that its a generational gap.  I'm inclined to think that, at some point, people just start getting more proactive and systematic about their career management and that's why they join LinkedIn. 

Plus, Facebook hasn't quite mastered or had an interest in the idea of the professional profile.  There's a section to fill out work information, but it's not exactly intuitive how you would show your drunken college pics to your friends, other people at your college, but not recruiters who may have went to your college.  I think maybe they need a "Don't show to alumni" privacy feature, because many alumni recruit at their own schools.  This is why, like danah, I don't believe in one network to rule them all.  People are multifacted and they want to show different sides of themselves in different places.  Facebook, as a community, may be best served just sticking to being a social service, even though I think that they could do a lot of good in helping young people reach out and help each other professionally.

Speaking of alumni, Facebook also hasn't been particularly aggressive in keeping alumni interested in the site.  I've heard a lot of people say that they just don't use Facebook much after school, and maybe that's just natural.  Plus, I'm not quite sure what alumni features would be.  Perhaps they could enable people to publish alumni events and notices to everyone in the network via the newsfeed?  Just an idea. 

Keeping people interested in the site after graduation would be key to winning in the professional networking market, but I don't think that's where they want to go.  They have setup work networks, but it seems like that's more about your friends from work than anything else.  I fact, the other day, in trying to recruit for an entry level marking position, I tripped the spam alarm because I was sending a job post to a lot of young marketing majors.  I was warned on the site, and when I contacted FB to tell them that I was a real person with a real job opening at a real company, and asked if that was spam, they very politely said it was and asked me not to use Facebook for recruiting.  Recruiting and jobs seems to be a big business they're leaving on the table, and I'd be really surprised if they didn't make a move there.  Prolific commenter Jeremy said that they should at least corner the internship market and I agree.  They might just allow free internship postings and live off the ads around those pages.  If they did that, I think they'd be well served to use Indeed to give themselves a huge head start in backfilling the database day one.

But, again, moving up the ladder to these types of professional tools doesn't seem to be on their roadmap.

On the other hand, LinkedIn trends older and hasn't made any headway at all into the college market.  Career offices don't push its usage, and when you're just starting out and don't have much of network, the value of LinkedIn isn't immediately obvious.  If I was LinkedIn, I would use the Facebook API to pull in your major, your school, your friends' names...not only to give younger members more value, but if nothing else than to signal the market that you never can start too early.  I wonder if perhaps they really don't want the college crowd on LinkedIn, because their networks wouldn't add much and they'd likely take more than they would give.

So if I'm in college or just out, LinkedIn doesn't want me, because I'd be a mooch, and Facebook doesn't want to help get me a job, because that's not fun and social enough, so where does that leave me?  Pretty underserved, I'd say.  It's really amazing to me that one of the largest and most desperate group of job searchers, and the youngest and most technically savvy doesn't really have a place to go to start building professional networks. 

I think there are two causes for this.  First, there's a lot of self-fulfilling proficy going on with this age group.  It is assumed, often in liberal arts schools, that career management is too early because they don't know what they want yet or they're still focusing on their education.  So, what happens is that college seniors often find themselves illprepared to enter the workforce and they take the first decent job that comes their way.

Second, I wonder if today's MySpace Generation who grow up with recreational social networking has been trained to think of the internet as a place for friends and not really for careers.

Either way, I really think there's an opportunity for someone here.

So our little talking people didn't work for new embeds starting last night.  Before we sold our firstborn to Fox Interactive Media, we did a little work and blog reading and found this helpful user comment:

"MySpace began rolling out a change that would block embed tags, but allow object tags for embedded content. This caused some users to report stickers as “not working.”

...This is probably part of a larger, more-intelligent Flash filtering solution that would lend itself to a situation where MySpace acts as a gatekeeper to Flash stickers (as discussed)."

Well, we're all about more intelligent filtering solutions in MySpace, its just that a little notice would be nice.  I still think MySpace should launch a developer or whitelist program.  We're a legit company... whatever we need to do to our code to play nice in their, we're all about it for the sake of the users.  In the meantime, we'll just keep playing cat and mouse.

So, for now, the code that works is as follows:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="400" height="300"> <param name="movie" value="movie.swf" /> </object>

After which, MySpace will forceably add a bunch of PARAMs into the code.

So, I'm happy to report, my little MySpace guy is still quoting Spaceballs.

Thanks Chris Bennett for the fix.

I graduated high school in '97, so the original version of this song means a lot to me.   Here's my take on it for today's tech world:

Entrepreneurs of the class of '07... launch a startup.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, startups would be IT.

The long term impact of startups has been proven by analysts, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering and thus far shortlived experience.

I will dispense this advice now.

Enjoy the power and beauty of simple HTML. Never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of simple HTML until the web has been completely eaten by Flash and AJAX. But trust me, in 20 years you'll look back at your site in the Internet Archive and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay in simplicity and how fabulous your site really looked.

Your app is not as lightweight as you imagine.

Don't worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to code PHP by chewing bubblegum. The real troubles with your servers are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4am on some idle Tuesday.

Add one feature every day that scares you.

Sing....on YouTube.

Don't be reckless with other people's data, don't put up with people who are reckless with yours.

Sleep.

Don't waste your time jealous of other people's traffic spikes; sometimes you're TechCrunched, sometimes you're not. The race is long, and in the end, it's only with yourself.

Remember compliments you receive on your company blog, forget the insults; if you succeed in doing this, tell me how.

Keep your old wireframes, throw away your old Paypal confirmations.

Sleep.

Don't feel guilty if you don't know how you'll monetize. The most interesting startups I know didn't know at 22 million dollars of funding how they wanted to make money, some of the most interesting 40 million dollar startups still don't.

Get plenty of link love.

Be kind to your beta users, you'll miss them when they're gone.

Maybe you'll get bought by Yahoo!, maybe you won't, maybe Google, maybe not, maybe you'll implode in a bubble, maybe you'll dance the funky chicken at your initial public offering.

Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself, either.

Your clickthroughs are half fraud, so are everybody else's.

Enjoy tagging, use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it, or what other people think of it, it's the greatest categorization you'll ever use.

Dance... on YouTube. Even if you have nowhere to do it but in your own living room.

Create an FAQ, even if no one reads it.

Do NOT read Dvorak, he will only make you feel angry.

Get to know your users, you never know when they'll be gone for good.

Be nice to your angel investors; they are your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.

Understand that developers come and go, but for the precious few you should hold on to them. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle of your userbase, because the older you get, the more you need the young people who will paste your widget in MySpace.

Build a company in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard; Build in Silicon Valley once, but leave before it makes you soft.

Travel...after you get bought or blow up.

Accept certain inalienable truths, prices of AdWords will rise,
politicians will drop the ball on net neutrality, you too will get old, and when you do you'll fantasize that when you were young AdWord prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children entered their correct age during registration.

Respect your Privacy Policy.

Don't expect VCs to support you. Maybe you'll get funded, maybe you have a wealthy hedgefund partner; but you never know when the dry powder might run out.

Don't mess too much with your hair.  In fact, just shave it, because bald is cool when you work at a startup.

Be careful whose blogs you read, and comment when someone blogs about you. Blogs are a form of feedback, and subscribing to the right ones is a way of cutting through the noise.  Just gloss over and paint over the ugly parts, recycling reviews on your front page for more than they're worth.

But trust me on the startup.

Its 2:24PM and I am freaking out...   The PBWiki that I created for my class tonight COMPLETELY DISAPPEARED.   I spent hours this weekend on it.

Support has been contacted, but I'm going to go LinkedIn my way to someone higher up.

2:50PM Update...   David Weekly, the founder, who has all his contact info online, including his cellphone, just IMed me back and said there was no data lost and they're fixing it.

Can you imagine IMing Bill Gates when Windows crashes?  I love startups.  :)

So the other night, my parents asked me what an iPhone was at Gino's...

...Clearly, that's some fantastic PR when new technology trickles its way into my parents' conversations just days after launch.   I mean, my dad just got broadband last week.  (Wooo!)

"It's a phone and an iPod in one, so you don't have to carry both things around."

"Wow, that's great."

They didn't care about iHandcuffs, third party apps or whether or not they are locking themselves into Apple. 

The fact is...   Apple's products are such a vast improvement in overall consumer experience that most users will be more than satisfied.   All the technobloggers are bitching about the lack of openness.   

I ask you: Open to what??

I have a $600 PocketPC Phone and you know what third party apps I have on it?  Newsgator Mobile and Typepad, and Typepad I could just blog through an e-mail address anyway.   A lot of good my open Windows Mobile platform is doing me.  Two apps.  Two goddamn apps.  Plus, the stupid thing can't switch out of apps fast enough to answer the phone a lot of times anyway.  Without apps that people really care about, no one gives a rat's ass about open.

I wouldn't switch, because I'm a business user that needs more robust e-mail and contact management, but I recognize that this product isn't for me.

Closed?  Bleh.  DRM?  Boo.   But, give Apple credit for singlehandedly carrying the whole digital download market on its back and putting music in our ears in the first place.  Do I think it's stupid that I basically walk around with a small computer in my iPod that can run no apps at all?   Yes.   Do I hate their DRM?  Yes.   Is it a ridiculously better product than anything than came before it?  Yes, absolutely. 

Open is great when you have something to be open to...and, geekery aside, if I had to choose between open for open's sake and a great consumer experience, put me in handcuffs, baby. 

Let Microsoft come out with a better product that has a development platform for it.  Zune was a punchline...  and until someone starts understanding what consumers want as job one, no amount of handwringing is going to bring about "open".   

Its funny, because we bloggers say the same thing about carriers.   My non-techie non-blogger friends bitch about carriers, too, but not because they can't get off-deck apps or don't have an open OS...   because they pay too much per month and that's what my parents thought of the iPhone.. it costs too much.

People want value.  Value means more or less money in their pocket.  They can touch and feel money.

They also want real improvement in function.  iPod+Phone... that's a real improvement.  That's one less device that we need.   Third party apps?  Which apps?  What do they look like?  Who wants them? 

There's a reason why people buy Apple's stuff and if there's no useable alternative that is open, can you blame them?

Because, in the end, it actually doesn't. The put in the privacy features that allow people to decide for themselves what gets broadcast, but a lot of people never even bothered changing them. I have to say that I find it to be one of the most engaging features on any social site.

In fact, yesterday, I was at a Fordham Young Alumni Committee meeting, and someone mentioned this girl that two of us knew. I couldn't help but add, "And it was her 25th birthday" and someone else said, "Yeah, I'm sorry I missed that...it looked like fun." Everyone else was a little confused, but what the two of us realized was that both of us had seen separate friends of ours tagged in photos from the part in our Facebook Newsfeeds that day.

What the Newsfeed does is to keep oiling the social gears in the machine. I have no doubt that it causes more comments, more messages, and more importantly, more offline interaction. That's something a lot of other networks are missing. I'm signed up to about a dozen other networks at least. Friendster I hear from once a week with similar updates on friends, but my friends just aren't that active anymore there. Once in a blue moon I get a Tagworld invite. And the flurry of Kaneva friend requests? They've dropped off the table...not sure why.

Keeping people engaged is so critical to a social network, and what Facebook does best is to put keepping people engaged with each other over keeping people engaged with the site. For example, they just sliced an extra (advertising supported) pageview off the poke. When you poke, you get a quick java popup, not a full page refresh or new page to confirm. Slick, easy, faster. Another good example is how they show me my friend data. They actually tell me who my friends just became friends with. Friendster, on the other hand, makes me click through to my friend's friends to discover that on my own, and see another ad.

The Newsfeed has also started to feature sponsored items and I really don't find them intrusive at all. If I'm not interested in them, unlike email, they disappear down the page.

So, despite the weeping of tears and beating of the breast, I think the Newsfeed turned out pretty well, actually. It's definatlely keeping me more engaged with my friends and the site, too.

A few years ago, we saw a big push for software as a service (SaaS).  Why built big clunky pieces of software that required installs and updates when you could sign folks up with just a browser and a registration, and push updates on the fly... makes a lot of sense, right?

Well, now I'm thinking that the browser isn't really the right place for a lot of these apps.  I think the tipping point for me was yesterday when I tried to run Zimbra, Gmail, Facebook, MySpace, Google Docs, Typepad, and Newsgator all out of the same browser window in tabs.  Firefox and it's lovely memory leak ballooned to 800MB of memory usage and my computer started spitting up Mentos and Coke.  Ok, so not really, but it definitely slowed to a crawl.

Today, I'm back in Outlook, patched into our Zimbra server in a desktop e-mail client. 

Browsers were historically meant to show text and graphics in a one way broadcast, and now we're asking them to run some pretty resource intensive apps.   I don't know if Apollo is the answer, but it seems pretty clear to me that we're going to see some apps bust back out of the browser and onto the desktop while retaining some connection to the web. 

Desktop apps are better for uploading, which is key in a two-way, interactive web and notifications as well.  (That's why I was never a fan of MeeboMe....   didn't want to have to sit in the browser window the whole day to see IMs.)

So are desktop widgets the answer or does someone need to build a better browser for running apps?  And when does this start to happen?

Social applications have added a wide array of nomenclature and associated protocol to our digital lives.   There are lots of ways of indicating social association, but what about various levels of stalk...er...  um.... interest in association?

Take the Facebook "poke".  It's sort of unique.  It's not public.  You don't gain anything from getting poked in the community, nor does the poker really lose much in terms of effort or social capital if the poke is not returned.  It's sort of brilliant actually.  Poking is like the grease in the Facebook machine.  I wonder how many pokes a day there are and how often men poke versus women, and what the average pokes per person are.

The other thing I like about it is that there really can't be any alterior motives with a poke, unlike a MySpace "add".  Some people are just maximizing friends and don't care about actually connecting with you other than as a statistic.  Sometimes, you'll get asked to be someone's friend as a first step on MySpace, before they write to you or expect to be written back, whereas in Facebook, well, that would be sort of sketchy. 

They work very similarly to the "winks" in Match.com.  Winks, pokes... what else could people do.  Cough?  Sigh longingly?

In Flickr, it's a different story.  Most of the people who have added me on Flickr either know me and look at it like a newsfeed of either my life or NYC or just like my photos.  I don't think I've ever gotten an "add" that was more meant to be a "poke" in Flickr.  Yet, I've talked to people who want to reach out to people they see in Flickr and can't figure out what the right protocol is.  Do you just start leaving comments?  Do you add someone?  Both?   What about one way adds?  Is it rude not to add people as contacts who have added you?  Mary Hodder is subscribed to my photos, but I'm not subbed to hers...   I didn't want to make it obvious by doing it now, because I feel like I passed my window of opportunity.  I'm hoping she doesn't notice.  :)

One thing I can't really figure out at all is the del.icio.us network.  One time, I had someone recommend a lamp store to me on the web because they noticed that I was tagging furniture for my apartment... and it was the first time I realized that anyone was actively reading my tags (before they were posted daily to my blog).  Why would someone want to read my tags?  Thought it was sort of weird at first, but now we have expressed networks.  As I look at my network...  I have 80 "fans"....people who read my tags...  Over half of them have never attempted to contact me in any way and I have no idea who they are, but they're not pure lurkers, b/c they know I can see them.  (Hi, you guys... hope my links are satisfying and entertaining).   Is this a form of del.icio.us poke?  Am I supposed to join their network in return?  Is it also rude if I don't?

I think the worst network you could ignore or turn someone down on is LinkedIn.  Unless I'm spamming my contacts, if I met you in person, and then asked to be connected to you, it's really quite a smack in the face to turn me down.  I had one guy do that to me and it was someone I had met at two angel investing meetings and a NY Tech Meetup, and his response was that he didn't know me well enough.  I'll always think he's kind of a prick for that.  Fine... I don't want your stupid network connecting to mine.

I don't know where I'm going with this post... I've been writing it intermittantly all day and I forgot whether or not it ever had a point.

A really fantastic young woman named Jarah Euston just had her site, Fresno Famous, get acquired by the Fresno Bee, a McClatchy publication.  I met Jarah back in 2000 when she was interning for a bank when we were both in college here in New York City and ran into Fresno Famous randomly sometime last year.  It's a very cool site and I hope it can manage to continue being a community resource now that it's found a home.

Here at Union Square, all of our deal meetings are pretty conversational.  I don't think we've ever fully gotten through a Powerpoint, and if we did its because we skipped past a lot.

But one thing I told a team today was that, if we say a lot, but its not what you wanted to hear, that's actually a good thing.

In other words, if we have a slew of stuff to day about your deal, but we don't sign any checks, if nothing else it means you're playing in the right space--a space that we've talked about a lot and debated internally previously.

I love those meetings because that also means that we'll bring the teams we meet into the debate and often times generate new ideas.  The other day we talked about future web endeavors for our firm and whether or not it makes sense for us to throw ideas into the void that we like and see if anyone wants to run with them. 

So one came up this morning.  Feedback or testing is always appreciated:

Lots of the daily interactions that we have with people involve trust... some more than others, especially on the web.  How do you ensure that resumes are legitimate?  How can you trust the people you see on Craigslist?  Ebay probably wouldn't exist without trust measurement, because you're buying from people all over the world.  Another company, Daylo, for example, is aiming to become a marketplace for services, like photography, and services especially depend on trust.  Even on LinkedIn, you can give someone a little thumbs up and say that someone is good.

Interestingly enough, the vertical that probably depends the MOST on trust, dating, is the one that addresses it the least.  None of the dating sites I've seen have a trust rating for people that may have gone on a date with members.  How would you like that?  A little thumbs up/thumbs down or comment section. 

"Charlie was  a nice guy on our date.  He's a little bit too goodlooking for me, but he's certainly trustworthy enough to show you a nice time.  Thumbs up!"

This list could go on and on and its symptimatic of my earlier Y.A.F.P. posts.  We have too many places to live on the net and nothing to tie them together.  So, I could be a crook on eBay but have lots of thumbs up thingys on LinkedIn.  Well, that doesn't make any sense.  Even with blogging, people have asked me how you know a blog is legitimate.  People could rate my posts, but where does anyone rate me as a person as a trustworthy person on the web, across all of my disparate profiles?

So, how about a little PeopleTrust badge? 

PeopleTrust would be a neat little box I could post on any profile... on craigslist, eBay, Match, etc. and it would show my trustworthiness in a rating.  It would be kind of like that trust-E symbol, but instead of for websites, for people.   Here are the rules around how it would work:

1. It would be a little piece of Javascript or something that only I could generate and no one could steal and pretend to be me with.  I'd have to go to the PeopleTrust site to generate the code and tell it where I'm putting it.
2. It would be based on algorhythms and it would not only state my rating, but also state the strength of that rating (so if you don't have many ratings, it would show that not a lot of people have rated you yet.)  The algorhythym would weigh people's ratings based on their participation in the system and their own hit rate.  So, if I spam lots of people with bad ratings, and I'm the only one who seems to hate these people, I don't get weighted highly.  Plus, if all I do is knock people, that doesn't count as much either.
3. You could tie it into other types of interactions, like AIM warnings and such as well.  Would you tie your credit rating into it, too?  I mean... do you want to know if you're dating a Match.com deadbeat?  You would, right? 
4. You could look up people's interactions and see why they got one rating vs. another, too.  Kind of like a credit report.

What's the business?  Not sure, but, if you can figure out a way to get enough people to join, there's value in being the way to trust people on the web no matter where they are.  Perhaps businesses like Wackenhut would pay for a PeopleTrust indepth profile.  Does it replace other systems like eBay's.... no, I don't think so, because there are different types of trust.  So, maybe someone ships their packages on eBay really late, but I might still want to date them and if they're eventually coming through, they're probably not such a bad person.  But, certainly eBay could be a dataprovider to a universal system. 

A lot of people might feel this is too open and too personal, but I think, at some point, the days where you can do sketchy things on the web and not be liable for it in other parts of your life are over.  So, if I stalk several Match dates or screw a dozen eBay buyers, perhaps that should effect my background check for new employment or ability to get an apartment.

I imagine that the only people who would actually use this would be the good guys, but that's enough.  In a world of lots of bad guys, if we just had ways to mark the good guys and exclude the bad guys from participating, that might be enough.