So Dopplr got funded and so I feel inclined to spend a little more time thinking about what I'd really like it to do, because it's a great concept.

1. Events: Show me, in a structured way, why people are going where they're going.  If everyone I know is planning on going to SXSW, tell me, and tell me where everyone who plans to attend SXSW is coming from.  People have been trying to nail the relevant events thing for a while and if Dopplr could tell me what out of town conferences people were planning on attending, that would be a great dataset to show everyone--particularly the conference providers themselves.  Who's coming for Day One, Day Two, or who's just in the area for other stuff
2. Let the people drive the dates.  I'm thinking about trips to Boston, Providence, and Toronto in the next month or so, but I'm kind of up in the air about it.  Dopplr forces a date on me.  Why can't I just say, "Sometime in the next month" and see if other people are planning on going at any time within that.  Seeing that kind of data might help me narrow down my trip.
3. Show me strangers...  like, on every page.  When you first join Dopplr, the user interface just doesn't show a heck of a lot of people.  It feels like an empty place.  I should be able to see who is coming to NYC in the next week, even if I don't know them.
4. Combine with other profiles.  I'm glad to see Reid Hoffman investing in this, and hopefully, when the LinkedIn API comes out, Dopplr will be one of its first developers.  I'd like to see the LinkedIn profiles of people who are coming to NY and at the same time, the Dopplr intentions of everyone in my LinkedIn network.
5. Dopplr Autopost:  Before you build a widget that most of my RSS hungry audience is never going to see or use, allow autoposting of Dopplr updates to my blog (and yes, my Facebook).  When I add a possible trip to Boston,  even if I know the dates, I want a post on my blog to automatically appear that says, "I'm thinking about going to Boston soon... find out what dates and subscribe to my updates via my Dopplr feed."

I'll prob be doing a fair bit of traveling for the rest of the year.  Toby suggested I join Dopplr, which I did.

And then I sat there and stared at it.

Here's an app desperately in need of a "Find your Gmail friends on Dopplr" tool.  It wanted me to add trips, so I added one.  Nothing happened.  I thought I might find some people going up to Boston on weekend of the 15th.  Nope... nothing.

So, um... what's the point?

Don't apps need, um...  like, magic or sex or something?   Shouldn't you show something to the user to hook them?  Keep them engaged? 

Perhaps I don't know enough Web2Heads that go to all the same confereces as everyone else.

I was excited to see that Yahoo! thinks there's an opportunity in the college career space.  They're supposedly creating a new social network called Kickstart.  From the Path 101 perspective, I say, "Bring it."

Man, I can't wait to see this. 

So, when's the last time a big media giant created a really successful social platform from scratch?

[crickets]

It seems like we're not even sure if this is just vaporware, but even if it isn't, I'd say there are at least five things that Yahoo! is inevitably going to trip up on.

1. Hell hath no fury like a media company scorned by a social network.   They couldn't buy Facebook, so they decided to make their own.  But, they needed an angle.  What do college students what?  A social network about beer?  Nope... they're underage.  Sex?  No, can't do that, not that it wouldn't be successful.  Ah!  Jobs!  Yes, jobs!  It seems like Yahoo! is starting out with the idea that what they're building must be a social network, without really considering whether or not the social network approach makes the most sense.  This is just bad product development.  You don't walk into a problem and say, "Whatever the opportunity is in this space, we're going to solve it with a social network... and a hammer."  I actually tend to think that social connecting/friending isn't what students really need... it's content, direction, guidance, tools...  Just connecting is like handing students a business card.  They don't have any clue what to do with that connection and how to get the most of it, let alone even know who to connect with in the first place.
2. Play well with others?  Ha!  Let's see...  34 million Facebook users.  14 million LinkedIn users.  Let's build our own thing and not plug in to the vast networks of existing students and professionals already out there and start completely from scratch because we want to own this category.  If you can't bridge the gap to your customers by meeting them in the places they already are, then don't expect them to come to you.
3. It's going to be all about jobs and companies.  Yahoo! knows how to sell stuff, like jobs and ads.  So, they're going to build something that is going to be immediately monetizable, meaning its going to be all about companies, jobs, etc.  There are two problems with that.  What about companies that aren't on there?  What if I don't want to work for some big corporation that can afford to pay Yahoo! to have a presence on Kickstart?  Is this going to be a place where art students are going to find jobs?  What about drama majors and people looking to work in the non-profit fields?  Doctors?  What about grad school?  Or, most importantly, what if I don't have a clue what I want to be?  What then?  Am I likely to join a social network based around job recruiting if I'm "undecided"?  I highly doubt you'll see any freshmen or sophomores on this site because they haven't chosen a field of interest yet and probably aren't sure where to go.  That's the real problem that needs solving... helping them figure out where they want to direct themselves, not connecting kids who already know what company they want to work for (which is how many of them anyway?)  Here's the other thing.  Because of their HotJobs affiliation, is Yahoo! ever going to tell a student that the best way to get a job is through networking?  What they're doing isn't real networking.  It's putting a social network around a job posting.  There's no way Yahoo! will eat its own lunch and totally disrupt the jobs space.  They'll find a way to perpetuate the old business model of charging for posted jobs at a few hundred bucks a pop.  In a pure socially networked world, there wouldn't be that kind of opportunity to extract so much value, because the right opportunities would fall into the right laps all the time in a seemless, barrierless way.
4. Professionals: Sign up and get spammed by students desperate for jobs. If I'm a professional working at a company, exactly what is my motivation to sign up for a social network based around getting college kids jobs?  If I put a profile up and people can contact me, aren't I opening myself up to just getting spammed with resumes?  The service has to work for everyone involved and if all these college kids can only find their way to a company by connecting to someone who works there, the last thing I'd want to be is the first Google employee who puts a profile up--especially since the atmosphere here is all about jobs.  Professionals love giving advice and helping students away from the recruiting process and such relationships are best built over time.  If the whole thing is just focused on jobs, its going to have the feel of one of those really bad "networking mixers".
5. Their customer is the company.  One of the advantage that startups have over bigger companies is that they can spend a little time purely focused on value to the end user first before figuring out who their customers are.  Take Indeed.  Indeed could never have gone to job boards day one and said, "We'll crawl all of you, and then you pay us to sponsor your listings and get them to appear in the sidebar results."  However, after they proved to be a very compelling consumer service with growing traction, job boards realized the value, especially the smaller ones, and got on board with what they were doing.  When you are a big media company, you don't exactly take risks with your clients, but where that leaves you is lacking in the end user value.  I mean, would YouTube have become so big if they didn't start out with all sorts of illegal clips?  Students want real insider content...  and real discussion.  Do you think any of these students are going to get into a discussion on the Nike page of whether or not they'd actually like to work for Nike given their history of human rights violations?  Have they cleaned up their act?  Is this a place I want to work?  I wouldn't ask with the recruiter sitting right there in my network, that's for sure.

Look, Alex and I haven't built anything yet and the proof is in the pudding, but seeing these kinds of attempts just gives me that much more confidence that we have the right approach with Path 101 and will succeed.  I've been in the classroom with students talking with them not as a corporate focus group, but as a teacher, mentor, recruiter, etc...   not asking them, "Hey, if we built this, would you sign up for it" but discussing their real struggles.  They don't know where to start and this isn't it.  Not only do they not have a network, but they don't know what to do with a network once they have it.  They don't know how to e-mail a professional.  The services that are out there don't attempt to tackle the hardest but most compelling problem in the career development space...  how to get students figuring out for themselves where they belong and pursuing those paths.  Just throwing a bunch of jobs and companies at them is window dressing and not going to really help them figure much out.  If anything, it just perpetuates the problem that most students think their only options are to become bankers and lawyers or work for big companies, because that's who they see recruiting.  Path 101 will get them talking, exploring, using tools, very much the same way TheKnot.com not only helps you find flowers for your wedding, but helps you actually think about what kind of a wedding it is you want to have in the first place.  After that, flowers are the easy part.

Most actual Facebook users knew the deal, but today, Facebook released "activity" numbers for its apps and the results aren't pretty.

Instead of lots of applications showing millions of "users", only one single application has over a million daily users, and that's Top Friends.   Most of the applications had around 10% of their userbase that actually interacts with the application in any given day.  Knowing that most Facebook users average logging into their Facebook accounts everyday, this isn't really that much usage.

For example, the ultraviral "Zombies" app only has about 3% of its installed base using it on any given day, making its actual usage numbers around 90,000 people, not 3 million. 

On the other hand, the "Are you interested?" application has about the same number of active users, but this represents a full third of their userbase! 

This is a great way to show statistics on usage and also puts this Facebook phenomenon in a little bit of perspective.  Nice move!

Now, all these developers can get to work creating apps that more than 10% of the people that have them want to use in any given day.

From Hulu.com...

"The first bit of news we'd like to share is that we have a name: Hulu.

Why Hulu? Objectively, Hulu is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and rhymes with itself. Subjectively, Hulu strikes us as an inherently fun name, one that captures the spirit of the service we're building. Our hope is that Hulu will embody our (admittedly ambitious) never-ending mission, which is to help you find and enjoy the world's premier content when, where and how you want it."

The name is inherently fun--and fun is the spirit of the service we're trying to build...  good old clean corporate-pay-a-naming-consult-$100k-to-come-up-with-a-name-the-MySpace-kids-with-their-Chemical-Romance-and-their -bling-will-like kinda fun.

Personally, I liked ClownCo.

Looking for a partner is different than looking for just a developer, and it's a difference that was particularly important to me.  To build Path 101, I could have just scraped some angel money together, done some consulting, and pulled a spec out of my own personal echo chamber and put something out there.  But, that wouldn't have been as good as something that was vetted by someone who had a stake in the outcome--whose interest and ownership in the project inspired a true sounding board, real feedback, and new ideas.

But where to find someone in this market?  On one hand, it felt like everyone who had the technical capability to be out there building something was doing just that--and working on really interesting things.  On the other hand, this new wave of innovation had been going on long enough that there were probably a few early projects that were impressive but just didn't seem to make it to the next level.  I figured there had to be a few talented folks who may be ready for their second Web 2.0 tour of duty.

When I was at Union Square Ventures, we looked at ATTAP, the builders of Riffs, PersonalDNA and Life I/O.  I used to joke and call it the "techie commune".  It was a bunch of really impressive, cutting edge tech folks working on some very ambitious personal information management and recommendation products--all located in half of WebCal founder Bruce Spector's apartment.  The first time I met Alex Lines, he was a lead developer there and he showed us how he had hacked together a mobile geolocation system based on cellphone tower data.  It enabled a cellphone to know where it was in the city long before phones had GPS built into them.  He had hacked an exposed mobile API and did some tower wardriving throughout the city. 

ATTAP alumni was one of the first groups I went looking for to find potential partners.  Even though the company might not have reached the success they were looking for, I was always impressed by the people they had and their ability to flat out build really elegant stuff.   

I met him again earlier this summer at a nextNY event--after he had left ATTAP and I was anticipating leaving Oddcast.   I didn't know I would be working on Path 101, so our ships passed a second time in the night.  But, after scoping out some team pages, asking around, and cross referencing a nextNY softball RSVP by "a. lines", I zeroed on on Alex, who, as it turned out, had already read the original Path 101 post on my blog with some interest.

So we met up and realized that we saw eye to eye on the project from the start.  What was important to me was that we had the same approach to partnership--mutual respect for experience and each other's opinions, open communication, and a goal-oriented approach.  This was not a guy I was going to get bogged down in personal issues with, nor someone who thought he knew everything or thought I did either.  I also liked his approach to technology--focusing on  functionality and relevance to the user--above loyalty to "web 2.0 trends".  Alex met with a former colleague of mine and the feedback really summed it up nicely:

"...he is a technologist, and not predisposed to any programming language or framework. Find the best technology to solve the problem. Big plus. "

His technical capabilities extend to perl, ruby, php, c, c++, sql, korn, bourne, javascript, html, Oracle, Sybase, MySQL, FreeBSD, Solaris, Linux, OpenBSD, Mac OS X, and, as we learned last Friday, softball bats.

He's also a bit of a Renaissance Man.  At Vanderbilt, he was a Physics and English double major. 

Plus, he's also a Brooklynite (Park Slope), so how could I go wrong? 

I'm excited to be working with Alex and we're currently busy laying out our vision of Path 101, meeting with potential angels, and other stakeholders like career offices and professional societies.

We're also looking for a great front-end designer/developer to join our team, so if you know anyone, please do send them our way.  This train is leaving the station!

I'm pretty sure I'm not allowed to fundraise according to the SEC, so let's just play hypotheticals for the moment... wink wink, nudge nudge.

IF I was a startup looking to raise seed money for development of a project, ooh.... something similar to Path 101 (I think I've settled on having a space there), and raising somewhere between 250-450k, what should the makeup of that round look like?

On one side, not many VCs would even do such a round pre-product, but a few of the would.  There are
some smaller, perhaps more specialized funds that do this sort of thing.  Either way, these are people that are primarily in the business of investing in startups.  To me, the benefit is that they have experience, connections, and they (ideally) have a sense of professionalism around the way they conduct their business.  (i.e. They're not going to show up at your door one night demanding their money back.)

The one thing I don't necessarily believe is that it makes them any more likely to invest in an A round.  Sure, they've gotten a chance to get to know you, but if a VC is interested, they don't need to put in 200K to do that.  They can take you out to a few lunches and hang around the rim enough to see what you're up to.  Plus, if you don't wind up coming out with a compelling product, they're free to just walk away from the deal anyway.  At least with angels, there isn't an expectation that they're going to participate significantly in an A round, so you won't have egg on your face if it doesn't happen.

As for angels, you're likely to need them at this point, so I think the question becomes more of a question of composition.  Friends?  Family? Big names?  Angel groups?  A mix?  How many?

If you can, I think its advisable to avoid friends and family, unless you have friends and family in the business that you're going into, whether its tech or something else.  You'll need their moral and emotional support and you should let them know that's what's important.  You don't want money, or lack of it when the company blows up, getting in the way there.  Plus, unsophisticated investors, even if it's your mom, are probably going to be a little bit of a pain in the butt.  (Although, Jeff Bezos' parents turned out to be good angels...)

I think a mix should probably be in order.... the professional investors that you know best, and also a few "reach" candidates.  If you could get anyone on board--captains of industry, celebrities, etc--who would it be?  For me, I think anyone on the founding teams of Monster, Careerbuilder, or Hotjobs would be perfect.  Published authors of books like "What Color is Your Parachute?" would be ideal, too. 

But I'd like to hear from entrepreneurs.  What's been your angel experience?  Surprises?  Who's been a much better addition than you expected?  Who's been a disappointment?  VCs in angel/seed rounds?

We might not score 30 runs, but at least we'll get in a few pitching position players. 

Come on up to Central Park's Hecksher Field #2, right by Columbus Circle at 6:15 today (Friday, August 24th).  We'll try and get the first pitch off at 6:30, but if we have some 1.0 guys, they might need a little more time to stretch.  :)

Feel free to pull friends and folks from your companies...   we have extra spots.

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No more captchas...  wooo.   

Disqus is a perfect example of an opportunity to do exploit something small to a bigger player, like commenting, do it cross-platform, and create a lot more value to users than any one platform could do on their own. 

Now if there was some way to combine it with MyBlogLog, that would be something...   a suite of social tools around surfing and commenting with a single identify and tracking of participation.  A geek can dream...

Thanks Daniel and Jason!

Yesterday, my brain ceased to function for about 3 minutes.  It was scary stuff.

I was supposed to meet with a VC about Path101 (or is it Path 101?  Space or no space?) and they e-mailed me saying their flight was two hours late.  So, I figured that was the end of the meeting and replied that we could talk on the phone in the next few days.  I was at the Web 2.0 Meetup at Slate and I was starving.  So, I ordered myself a chicken panini with gouda. 

Fifteen minutes later, the VC calls while in a cab coming over from a meeting in Jersey City and asks if I'm available to meet for dinner.  He had dinner scheduled originally with someone else, but he was going to bail on it to meet with me.

Here's where the 3 minutes begins.

I told him that I had ordered a little while ago and suggested maybe we could meet up after our respective dinners.

When I got back to my conversion with Kristian, he said to me, "So a VC that you really want to work with offers to cancel his dinner to meet with you, and you pass because of a nine dollar panini?"

"Oh...  wait... . jeez...  That was really stupid wasn't it?"

"Yeah."

"Dammit... I gotta go call him back... what was I thinking?"

I'll tell you what I was thinking...  I didn't want to waste food.  Years of my mom scooping extra servings on my plate so that she didn't have to throw anything out just hardwired themselves into my brain, cementing a pattern that would be highly sub-optimal in this situation.

So I paid and bailed on the panini...  told the waitress to enjoy it... and left for dinner after calling him back to let him know I was totally free to meet up if it was still on the table.  Thank God it was.

"Yeah... I could have had a $500 million exit...   if it wasn't for that $9 ($12 with tax and tip) panini."

When I was eight, we got a computer.  An IBM PS/2 with an 8086 processor and a 20MB hard drive.  That was 1987—twenty years ago.  My only experience with coding, however, was the C-logo class I took in school that year.  Man, could I make that turtle rock and roll…  I was the C-logo master.  But, I never followed up on it at home, because our home computer wasn’t for hacking.  It was for my dad’s business.  Quite a few times, I got lectured for not reading the MS-DOS manual first before just playing around on it.  That was pretty much the end of my coding career, which means that, today, now that I want to build Path101, I need someone’s help. 

I can always go outsourced--to some team of Uzbekistanians (Uzbeks?), but I want to do more than just get something up.  I want to be able to break out of the echo chamber and work with a true partner—not someone who may be gone from this project in three months.  There’s no substitute for a real live human in the same room as you who has his or her own dry erase marker at the whiteboard.  Even virtual teams will tell you that the most productive sessions are the ones they have in person. 

So, in the spirit of uber anti-stealth, I’ll put my conceptual thinking for the build and the structure, as well as what I’m looking for in a partner relationship, in the hopes that there’s someone out there who not only sees the value, but has the same philsophy on how to create this. 

First of all, whoever takes this project on has to be a data jockey.  The real value of a Web 2.0 app is the leverage it can get out of its data—the data it pulls in, the data it pushes out and the mashup of data in the middle.  Every piece of data that comes in or out of this thing needs to get used 8 different ways if we’re really going to knock socks off.

Example:  Imagine a student is using a resume building tool.  You shouldn’t have to create a resume for paper and a resume for LinkedIn and a resume for Facebook.  Using standards like hResume, they should be able to use the resume wizard once, then populate a LinkedIn profile with the same structured information that we popped out a fancy PDF version to send out by e-mail.  But let’s go a step further...  Let’s say that a student participated in a special summer program related to their major at a local college—a two week immersion course on financial modeling, for example.  The enter it in the resume wizard.  However, our structure means that we know the dates, we know the location, and we can ask what this thing was—a course?  A scholarship program?  An internship?   We should allow the student to be able to publish that information to other students with similar interests.  That’s how I found out about the mentoring program at my local financial professional society.  Someone a year ahead of me went through it the previous summer and suggested I participate.  The information about that course was on her resume, but for it to get into my head, she had to bump into me randomly in the cafeteria—a lucky break for me.  Efficient use of data structures and matching would have put that program and the 8 other summer programs just like it in front of me when I was thinking about my summer. 

You might ask why would students allow that to happen?  Aren’t they competing with me for the same jobs?  Not if they’re a year ahead of me in a different recruiting class.  Plus, perhaps they understand (or we can teach them) the value that sharing a summer program with me this year means that I might send a job opportunity their way at my company next year. 
     Just as an aside, one thing that also seperates Path101 as a business from what’s out there is our philosophy of giving as much value back to the students as possible.   Think about that aggregated dataset—all those college resumes with all those positions.  Monster has them.  They know where almost every college student interned last summer.  That’s about as close to the total universe of available opportunities as you can get, but do they expose it to students?  No.  They show those resumes to recruiters who pay for the access to the students and they show you the jobs that people pay to list, leaving the larger universe of opportunities to rot.  That’s their business.  All those random little companies that you’ve never heard of that provided some really interesting internship opportunities—ones that never get posted at $250 a pop because the company can’t afford it—are being wasted by Monster and not shown to students in order to protect their own bottom line.  Millions of students worked their butt off to research and network their way to internships they couldn’t find on Monster, especially in the non-business areas.  Monster sits on that useful data, leaving next year’s students on their own to recreate that whole research process all over again.  No wonder it’s so hard to find a great internship.  That’s not the way Path101 is going to create value for students.
     In addition to trying to get the maximum value creating leverage for every piece of data, whoever works on this build needs to believe in portabilty of the application.  Its not just about Facebook either, which obviously a student needs to be able to access all of our services on.  One day, before they buy us, Monster may want our whole application to appear on the Monster site, or the NYTimes, or the PR Society of America.  Schools may want this to appear on their sites and we can’t afford extensive enterprise integrations with every school.  Integration needs to be a matter of skinning, cutting and pasting iFrames and code, and incredibly robust APIs—caveman style easy…but I’ve been beating that horse to a pulp lately.   
     Also of major importance to me, and maybe this is most important, is the platform this is being build on.  No, its not Java or LAMP or Ruby on Rails—it’s TRUST and RESPECT.  I need to be able to trust and respect the insights of someone who has built a scalable application before and that person needs to trust me that I’ve actually been in the classroom with college students, mentored them,  and talked to them about their career aspirations.  But it goes deeper than that, right?  It goes far beyond the 1’s and the 0’s.  I had a VC ask me what I would do if Facebook offered me $10 million for this site in a year once its up in 25 schools and growing.  As a co-founder, perhaps that nets me $2-3 million after tax—not too shabby for a year’s work.  You know what, though?  That doesn’t really change my life much.  Plus, I honestly don’t consider myself a serial entrepreneur.  This is my idea.  Will I have another one?  Maybe.  Maybe not, and if I don’t, $2 million basically gets me a nice apartment in the city.  I’m not really about to trade in my big idea for a nicer apartment—that’s not enough for me.  What I really want to do is to be able to tour the country talking to college students because I’m the guy who started the service they use day in and day out to pursue their passions.  I want to hear about the paths they uncovered and the people they met.  I want to get a letter from some successful entrepreneur ten years from now who tells me that they didn’t even know what entrepreneurship was until they logged on to Path101 and started exploring.  That’s what value is to me.  If I was just in this for as quick money, I would have spent the first two years of my career burning myself out as an investment banker. 
So, in a since, what I’m building… well…  This is going to be BIG.  At least I want it to be anyway…and perhaps one day we’ll capture the even larger opportunity of career changers, moms returning to work, people laid off at 50…  even goals that aren’t necessarily about career stuff. 
Whoever joins will be a signficant equity partner, be able to get his hands dirty in the build and also manage a tech team.  I’ll be honest—there’s been some strong angel/VC interest in this (over and above folks you might guess on your own) and so it seems likely the team will be able to be focused and fulltime for six to nine months. 
So that’s me and that’s a little bit about what Path101 is looking for.  Maybe you’re sitting in a big media company twiddling your thumbs itching to get back in the startup game.  Maybe you just had a successful exit or a big blowup and you’re looking for the next thing.  Maybe you’re at an early Web 2.0 startup and the writing’s on the wall that it isn’t going to wind up inside Google anytime soon.  Let’s talk.   

Are you serious?

Yes, I'm beating this point to death, I know.

THE WHOLE POINT OF GETTING THE APP ON FACEBOOK IS SO I DON'T NEED OR WANT TO HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH GOING.COM!!!

If you can't figure out how to get me to use your service without having my e-mail address... or at least convincing me that giving you my data is useful by providing value first, don't expect to see me using your Facebook service anytime soon.  Uninstalled.  (Do not want!!)

What's the bigger problem?

Not all having all the professional contacts you know on LinkedIn or LinkedIn not providing enough utility?

Not having all you friends on Facebook or Facebook apps in general being pretty lame?

Do you wish all 150 of your Facebook friends or 800 of your MySpace friends used Twitter?  I don't.

How much time in a day to you spend actively managing, syncing, adding to your online friend networks?  Not much?  Yeah, me either.  I spent more time trying to get two calendars to sync to my phone... porting the contacts themselves around has been pretty painless.

What I'm getting at is that Brad Fitzpatrick's call for innovation around the social graph is a solution for something that isn't really a problem. 

I have disconnected, partially overlapping social networks both online and off.  Some of my friends use Twitter, some don't.  Most of them are on Facebook, but some aren't... and a lot of people I connect with professionally are at least on LinkedIn, regardless of whether or not they actually use it.

Here's the thing... I can't really think of any application whose main barrier to being incredibly useful is the lack of connectedness of my social networks or people on the web.  Typical barriers include people's issues with privacy, or the ease of use of the app, etc.  Would I like to be able to see where my friends are actually eating via their credit card data?  Sure... but that's not a social connectivity issue... its a business issue/risk for the credit card issuer and a privacy issue for my friends.  Solve both of those problems in a really compelling way and that problem will definitely go away.

And frankly, the gaps in connection serve purposes.  I like the fact that there's some barrier to discovery and usage for services like Twitter.  It allows communities to develop norms of behavior--atmospheres.  Frankly, it bothers me that all of these people are just barging right into Facebook--my Facebook world--and expecting me to connect with them. 

100% seemless connection to everyone...  and the ability to see how everyone is connected to everyone else...  that's a wall I'm not sure should come down.  I like the fact that the barrier to finding me means that you have to be aware of the blog world or nextNY or be on LinkedIn or whatever... its a nice filter.  On top of that, its the gaps and hurdles that allow me to be successful--it gives my network an advantage because not everyone is tapped into the same people that I am.

And, no, I don't particularly care that Facebook is a walled garden... because it's open enough.  They built enough of the right hooks in such a way that was far beyond what anyone else had put out there.  Would a completely "open" world be better?  I dunno... what would it give me that Facebook isn't giving me now?  Am I worried that they'll steal all my data?  What data?  I'm not banking through it, or paying my taxes.  And frankly, my friends are my friends regardless if Facebook knows about them or maintains that data or not.  I'm not worried about losing them.

I guess I just don't see what the big glitch is.  Social is not the bottleneck.  It's utility.  Build something easy and useful that plugs into what's out there and people will use it... and if the masses demand that it work with some other app, it will happen.   The world is too competitive for it not to.

Sorry for the foul language, but I don't think the message I tried to convey in my other post about building Facebook apps really came through strong enough.

I just heard an entrepreneur tell me that his problem with Facebook is that it would give him zero conversion to his main site.

So what?

The whole idea that you have a "main site" is dead.  Stick a fork in it.

And while you're at it, stick a fork in the widgets, too--at least the way we're been creating them.  Right now, most of the widgets that are out there are an attempt to squeeze the elements of a service into a neat little sidebar rectangle--a bottleneck created by one-way APIs, limited space, and underwhelming goals.

What you need is a site that is completely agnostic as to where it lives--at your branded dot com address, in Facebook, on the iPhone, or as a "powered by" section of the biggest media site you could possibly ever think of partnering with.

And you shouldn't have to spend 50 man-months customizing your site to fit in all these random places, reworking the architecture to get your square pegs in your business partner's round holes.  (That sounded dirty, didn't it?  So this is a PG-13 post.  So what?)

True "BizDev 2.0" only comes when you start eating your own dog food--when you develop your site's infrastructure so that you actually use all of your own APIs and portable modules to construct your site.  So, if you're a video sharing site, you have the upload widget that could be embedded anywhere and the API calls to display videos, links, ratings, plays, etc. in as many sort orders as you can imagine.  It should be a matter of cutting and pasting, with perhaps an additional PHP page generation scripts as the glue, to completely recreate your service in another place on another platform.  The iphone.yourstartup.com should do all of the same things as yourstartup.com and the Yourstartup Facebook app, not to mention the version of yourstartup that is going to appear as a channel in AOL's site.  And they should all have self-contained revenue models... Facebook ad networks in Facebook, appropriate banners for the iPhone, and whatever networks net you the most cash on the dot com. 

And you shouldn't need to "convert" any user of one place to a user of another place.  Sure there are issues of universal sign-ins, unique identifiers, etc...  but your account management system should be smart enough to handle registered users, partially registered users, unique Facebook IDs, phone numbers off the WAP site and allow you to tie as much or as little of them together and expose that user's history and unique data to them across all the instances of their site.

So, at the end of the day, you shouldn't care where the user winds up... everyone can access your content or your service in a form native to the platform that its on, but will the full functionality of whatever you're up to. 

Until that happens, we're going to have dinky widgets and namby pamby Facebook apps.

I've recently been asked to seek out two people for two really interesting jobs.

One is a very interesting position with a company developing mobile apps that already has a solid base of users... they're looking for someone to be a thought leader for developing and detailing new ideas for what kind of applications they should be developing.  I call it a Mashup Manager, because you'll need to be able to read a lot of APIs and figure out what interesting data sources you can tie into, how to work with what the carriers give you, etc.   A couple of years experience in a product related position (not necessarily mobile) and a good perspective on the youth market would be helpful.

The other job is an interactive strategy position for a company in the cable space...  helping dumb pipes get smart, create value for customers using new technology.  The great thing about this position is what whatever you implement/recommend could find its way into millions of homes!  Let's call this position Cable 2.0.

If you want to send over a resume and various links to your digital spaces, send them to my gmail account.  charlie (dot) odonnell (at) gmail (dot) com

Last night I twittered that I'd sent out my startup overview presentation (saved it on Jing, which is awesome, btw... posting soon) to anyone who was interested.

It got picked up by Henry Blodget's Silicon Alley Insider.  It was the second time this week I got mentioned... Tuesday night he wrote about how I was noticeably absent from Tuesday's Tech Meetup, because I went to the Mets-Braves game with Fred.

The last two and a half years have been an amazing ride for me...  bursting out of obscurity to local digital "celeb" status--all while having accomplished relatively little compared to some of the other folks in this space, in my opinion.   

Frankly, I shy away from it.  I don't ever want to be known as a self-promoter or someone whose reputation and prominence in the spotlight is ill-deserved.   I'm not the guru of anything.  I'm just "an ordinary guy with nothing to lose."

I wrote this note to Henry just now and thought I'd share it.  The bottom line is that it is great that we've finally got a post-Calcanis voice covering NYC and we need more...   but that voice needs to talk about people we don't know about.  I'm the last guy anyone needs to hear about twice in a week on SAI... and so is Fred...

Henry,

I appreciate the links and all, but with all due respect, I really shy away from "celeb" status.

I don't run nextNY and compared to lots of other great area entrepreneurs, I really haven't accomplished anything yet.

I have no partner, no code, no nothing but a presentation at this point...   

There are so many people don't really interesting and great things around here that are so much more worthy of coverage.  I don't want to become known as the Guy Kawasaki of the East Coast...  a great self-promoter who people know, even though he really hasn't actually accomplished anything of substance.

The NYC tech scene is so much more than "USV and friends" and I'd encourage anyone covering the scene to do their best to reflect that.

And no, I have not approached anyone for funding.  The folks at USV are great friends because I worked with them.  If anything, I'm less likely to approach them because I'd never want this to appear like any kind of an "insider" deal.  I need to make my own way on this.  I'm proud of the fact that, for example, my subscribers have grown much more after I left USV than when I joined and during the time I was there...  so that I know I don't have a Fred-fed blog...      

I'm glad you're covering the space, because more people need to, but if you could point the camera at all of the other really great things going on here and maybe wait until I actually accomplish something useful, I think that's the right away to go.

I'm being anti-stealth on this not to start up the hype machine, but because its really how I want to build this business... to get as much feedback from everyone who cares about the space... to be a lightning rod for anyone thinking about this... to get the word out to colleges and a potential partner.   

I hope this makes sense and I def don't want to come across as snarky and unappreciative because I appreciate every link and every mention...  I just want it to be deserved.

I don't celebrate birthdays for the same reason...   not dying is not a thing to celebrate... until you're like 85... then its an accomplishment.  :)

Charlie

Facebook analysis:

I grouped the Top 50 apps into various categories, and recorded the total combined users of those applications, as well as how many of those types of apps showed up in the top 50.

Friend display apps allow you to categorize friends in various ways.  Thinks I like allow you to maintain lists, like music you like or places you've visted, and compare with others.  Wall apps improve functionality of the Facebook wall.  Quizzes... self explanatory.  Poking improves upon the poking functionality on Facebook, allowing you to throw sheep or do other short form actions.  "Of the day" is basically a piece of media bling that shows others quotes, scenes, etc. from your favorite shows, books, authors, etc.  Gifting is all about giving virtual items to others.  Videos is the Facebook Video app.  Viral stupidity is where I put Zombies and such.  I really hate those apps.   Status is a display of your current emotion or some other element of the moment.  Pets can be anything from actual pets to gardens to virtual things you keep.  And so on and so forth.

What can be learned from this?

Well, for one, much of the reach in the top 50 is related to what I call, "Facebook Infrastructure" ... walls, pokes, friends.  How many more apps like this are there going to be.  How many ways can you ______ your friends or leave them a bulletin board post?  Or rather, how many various bulletin boards are people going to want?   

I think you'll start to see a shift...  now that we've advanced the poke and the wall to the umpteenth iteration, we should start seeing apps further up the stack.  Communication tools, like Marc Pincus' SocialChat, are sure to move up in popularity.  I think the key is building on top of some of what's already there, which is what players like SocialMedia and RockYou are hoping for.  They're trying to create networks or platforms out of their apps.

Another interesting phenomenon is that hardly any of the top apps come from pre-existing web applications.  Possible reasons?

1. Popular off-Facebook apps have yet to make a big push into Facebook.  (see eBay, AIM, Skype)
2. Popular off-Facebook apps have no clue how to make a big push into Facebook.   
3. Popular off-Facebook apps have such crappy APIs that you're better off using them outside of Facebook.
4. There are no popular off-Facebook apps...  because you're nobody until you're a Facebook app.

Remember back when we used to talk about MySpace?  Oh, those were the days...

Jason gives it to the man in DC...   worth a watch if you're into the mobile space or if you have a cellphone.

John C. Dvorak.

"Today everything from YouTube to the local church has a social-networking angle. And this doesn't even consider the actual social-networking sites, from MySpace to LinkedIn to Facebook to even Second Life. This scene is totally out of control and will contribute to the collapse for sure."

Yeah, that's some iron clad logic there, Johnny. 

Alright...  most of 'em just downright suck.  But why?  Is the Facebook platform not all it is cracked up to be?

Many people are giving the excuse that the really robust versions of our favorite web apps just haven't had time to get built, but doesn't that violate everything we learned in BizDev 2.0?  If every time you need to syndicate your service to another place, you need to rebuild, your infrastructure is not optimized for a world of small pieces loosely joined, aggregated, remixed, mashed up, etc.  Aren't all these applications supposed to be able to live and function anywhere?

There are two main reasons why the current group of Facebook apps have been generally unappealing:

1) Like many websites, many of them were not meant to be any more than amusing wastes of time.  We went from catblogging to sheep tossing, which is fine. 
2) Many web services develop their own APIs as an afterthought--a narrow bottleneck through which Facebook users are struggling to squeeze utility, since most of the FB apps use the original app's API.

For applications that are essentially powered by data (i.e. Most of Web 2.0), you essentially have a database, input mechanisms and output - a way to call, manipulate and present the data.  Ideally, they're built in such a way that they're largely agnostic as to where the input and the output occurs.  Even the business models should be such so that any user, any piece of data, anything can be monetized or contribute to monetization even if it occurs off of your main site.

In fact, the very idea of "conversions" should have no meaning here.  You shouldn't be trying to pull users off Facebook... you should be shoving the full functionality and business model of your app IN Facebook.   If your Facebook app has no business model, then your service has no business model.  If you're building a service and designing it in such a way that the ultimate goal is land at your destination, that kind of territoriality is going to be a major stumbling block with partners.

Take Voki, for example.  The Voki avatars are powered by the Oddcast avatar engine and audio database--neither of which actually live at Voki.com.  They live on some wacky internal Oddcast domain and unless we wanted to clone that engine and database, which we didn't, Voki.com had to be built in such a way that it actually used our own APIs.  So, the site is essentially the first partner implementation of itself.  The core features of Voki.com--launching an editor, saving an avatar creation to a database, publishing it to a page, calling previously made scenes--are all fully functional within our API.  Therefore, you could recreate an implementation of Voki just about anywhere you wanted--which is essentially what we did on Facebook.   There's a link to create your avatar, a button thta publishes it back to our system, and ways to call previous scenes.  We rely on the Facebook side of the API to distribute those scenes to the Newsfeed, specific friends or your profile. 

Actually, one could argue that the Voki app that is on Facebook is better and more useful than the one on Voki.com.  That was our idea for the partner program--that partners bring with them a context and a purpose unique to that environment.  Voki in an instant messenger chat box would be more compelling than the Voki on Voki.com and so would Voki on event invitations, fantasy sports bulletin boards, etc. 

Your destination site should actually be the least compelling implementation of your product, because it has to serve mass appeal and has no context for participation and use. 

Developers and entrepreneurs need to stop thinking about Facebook as s different way to build or even a different place to build.. its a partnership deal plain and simple... and your app needs to be easily "partnerable" without a ton of custom work.  Databases need to flow across your platform and users should be able to encounter it at multiple touch points, but it shouldn't require a major rebuild.