Two more thoughts on Facebook: On Accel, Amazon, and Microsoft
1) What Accel did by investing in Facebook was the equivalent of spending $100 on a old painting at a yardsale that later appraised on Antique Roadshow for $5000. That was BEFORE the creation of this developer network. The way they've built this thing is like coming home and discovering that, hidden in the frame of your old painting is one of ten known original copies of the Declaration of Independence.
What I'm saying is that, a few years ago, Accel invested a lot of money in a very hot social networking property. However, there's no way in hell, and no way that anyone could really convince me, that they foresaw Facebook's eventual prominence in the social application ecosphere as the OS. I'm sure they just saw pageviews and signups and all sorts of nice charts with hockey sticks on them and wanted to be a part of that. Now, maybe this is what Mark Zuckerberg had in his head... that's a possibility... I don't know the guy, but I seriously doubt he pitched the social OS concept to them before anyone really even gave any thought to what that meant.
2) If Microsoft wanted to spent that $6 billion of agency M&A money more wisely, they would have bought their way into the web OS by buying Facebook for half that. Google, Adobe... someone who wants to be in that layer should seriously consider throwing $3-5 billion their way.
Actually, to be honest, I think the acquirer that makes the most sense is Amazon. Amazon store+S3+Facebook would mean that you have a place to host your app, spread your app, ways to sell stuff in a whitelabeled way through your app, and a social network to integrate into a "Your friends bought this" concept. Imagine how powerful it would be if when I buy stuff, all my friends get notified.
Jeff Bezos... are you listening? Buy Facebook!
Facebook is Windows, MySpace is DOS
It would be hard for me to say anything that hasn't been said about Facebook's new developer platform.
So, just a few thoughts:
- If you are any kind of direct to consumer application developer, developing for Facebook needs to become a priority... RIGHT NOW.
- Facebook Widgets, or whatever you want to call them, work because they add in what most web widgets lack... broadcast. All that stuff sitting in my sidebar, it isn't any good to anyone if it doesn't get "in the feed"... Now, what feed, whose feed, where, how, etc... those are great questions, but the idea of getting in the flow of social data is incredibly important.
- I wonder if when Facebook came up with the NewsFeed, they realized how important it would be to their application platform. Just think about it... when I pick up my Twitter app for Facebook, now all my mainstream friends (all the ones who don't know how or where to subscribe to my RSS feed) can see it, grab it, and learn how it works. Facebook basically integrated RSS into their platform in a social way and now they're using it to fuel the spread and functionality of their apps. Incredible.
Let's think about a comparison between MySpace and Facebook and how they approached third party applications in their environment:
- MySpace allowed you to paste a piece of HTML code onto a page. That's it. No hooks into the service. No way to discover new widgets other than random browsing. Then, they tied one hand behind the back of their apps by disabling linking through Flash. On top of that, they made a big stink when others tried to monetize their creations, banned some folks, etc. There's no developer network. No notifications. No nothing.
- Facebook is encouraging development. It is giving apps hooks right into Facebook, enabling the pulling of various parts of my profile, and publishing right back into that profile and publishing notifications and various application output to friends. They even allow publishers of services competitive to Facebook features, like Twitter. There's a developer site, documentation, rules, etc.
Guess which one is the future of web based social application development and which one isn't.
I'll give you a hint, the future of app development rightly turned down a billion dollars for their company.
Brilliant. Anyone know who architected this? I'm so impressed. I want to pick that person's brain.
Sen. Schumer being treated for Lyme... softball in his future?
Noticed this story on how Sen. Chuck Schumer contracted Lyme upstate.... it was sent to me by one of my teammates on my softball team, which is aptly named: Four of Us Had Lyme Disease.
In fact our jersey has a tick in the O...
Just wanted to let Sen. Schumer know that he is absolutely welcome to throw out the first pitch at any of our upcoming games (or play a few innings, if he’d like). The great thing about the acronym is that it scales... allowing for “FIVE of us...”
Here's our schedule, Senator...
5/30 Wed 8:45pm Col. Charles Young #3
6/5 Tues 7:45pm Asphalt Green #2
6/17 Sun 6:30pm CP North Medow #2
6/20 Wed 7:15pm Riverside 107th #6
6/26 Tues 7:45pm Asphalt Green #1
7/11 Wed 6:15pm Col. Charles Young #3
7/18 Wed 6:45pm Riverside Park #8*
7/26 Thurs 5:45pm Roosevelt Island
And yes, I was one of the four.
We understand social marketing, we're special, you don't, nanny nanny poo poo: On the Public Flogging of Blog Pitches
I get pitched all the time. Please link to me. Please read my book. Please read my client's book. Please use my service.
And you know what, most of 'em are bad... like, really bad. Usually, I try to give them advice on how to pitch.
Once I got a pitch that started with:
"I've just begun to get acquainted with your terrific website, thisisgoingtobebig.com, and thoroughly enjoy reading it."
To be honest, I don't even think my site is terrific. I think I'm a terrific guy, but this site is kind of crap. I mean, look at all these silly widgets on the side... and theme? What's the theme? It's a snarky Web 2.0 and kayaking blog... which goes together like peanut butter and eggs. So, don't tell me it's a good site, b/c I know you've never read it.
BUT... that's totally ok. You're just doing your job. So I responded by e-mail with a story on a book that I bought b/c a blogger recommended it:
"... the web and the tech community is such a small world that isn't hard to break into at all... and so when something comes in from completely outside of my circle, it just goes in a big pile of unfiltered stuff that I'll look at later. So, this will probably come off as snarky, but I really don't mean it that way at all... Just trying to be honest and give you my honest reaction."
And then, I invited the pitcher in question to a nextNY event. In other words, I engaged her like an actual person... you know, the way that we bloggers say we want to be treated.
"Let's talk more about it more Wednesday. Again... just trying to be honest and helpful... not meaning to bite your head off at all."
I got another one the other day... one that I responded to in a similar manner:
"This whole blast e-mail in a can thing wasn't very "Next Big Thing". A tag for me in del.icio.us or a blog comment on my blog or a Twitter or a Facebook or MySpace add or just about anything else would have been a lot more appropriate. "
The person pitching responded in a very polite way:
"Thanks so much for checking out the site, even if my email rubbed you the wrong way... ...thanks for the suggestions, feedback is ALWAYS appreciated."
Not all the bloggers she wrote to where so friendly.
Some people took to their little soapboxes and called her out:
Blah blah blah blah silly little marketing person we know more than you blah blah.
The only person who seemed to recognize that Alison was just trying to do her job was this blogger, Ed Schipul:
""Ya, I took the email link bait. From a Fleishman-Hillard blogger outreach email from Allison Mooney...I still get my daily TrendCentral Intelligence Report, but I welcome new relevant content. Just please please please be sure it is relevant."
Pretty constructive, I'd say. He knew what he was getting.
Here's the thing that's easy to forget in the blog world... blogs, e-mails, tags, IM, are made out of PEOPLE. Real people who try to do a good job and have feelings and friends and all sorts of stuff. Do you know how I know that in this case?
Because, as it turns out, Allison is a real person. As it turns out, she was at nextMadisonAve, nextNY's discussion of the future of digital advertising and she just wrote about it in the blog she was pitching in her e-mail. So, she does participate in the community... and she wasn't doing someone else's PR dirtywork... she was actually pitching the blog that she writes for. Social media kudos for being a part of nextNY and pitching your own stuff. It also turns out we know more than a few local NYers in common and I found that out because I actually approached her like a real human.
Did her approach need a little work? Sure? Do most of our own approaches to social media need work? Absolutely. Does we need to tear someone a new one in public by name? I don't think so.
I mean, what if she got fired for her pitch gone awry? Is that what these bloggers wanted to see? Would they have felt bad if she did?
I can't say that I'm necessarily blameless in the snarky callouts department, but the next time you want to call someone out like this, you might consider the following:
- Respond directly to them by e-mail first, because that's the way they contacted you. No reason to elevate. When someone blogs something you don't like, it's more appropriate to blog about them, but keep the response to the medium it came in.
- What is the big picture of how I should judge this person? Do they participate in the community in other ways? In Allison's case, she does... she's a blogger, a nextNYer, Flickr user, etc, etc...not someone from the "outside" who needs to be taught a lesson.
- Is there added value to calling them out by name? Can you pull out useful pitch lessons from an e-mail without needing to embarrass someone?
- What position is this person in? Are they a VP of such and such... a prominent thought leader that makes their living by headlining conferences, etc. or just a worker bee trying to make their way up the chain who could do without you kicking them in the head because you happen to be three rungs higher up the ladder?
- Who the hell do I think I am? This is something I probably don't ask myself enough and frankly, few bloggers do. Saying stuff like, "I've been working in the social media space since 2004" is a good indicator of the need to ask this question more often. Wow, 2004, huh? That was like, even before YouTube existed. Jeez, what was it like back then? Did you have electricity?
links for 2007-05-24
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The earlier version of this is the one I dropped in the Hudson River!
Wait, I know her
Seeing Caroline on TV makes me feel like we're grownups.
People on the news are supposed to be adults... wait, damnit... we're adults! Fuck! When did that happen?
This is going to be HIRED and other widget updates
Man, does this pain me to do, but I just put up a Simply Hired powered "Job-a-matic" job board called "This is going to be HIRED." Obviously, having worked for Union Square Ventures during the time of the Indeed funding, I was pretty conflicted about this.
I've wanted useful job tools on this blog for a while, but something more substantial than a sidebar widget. With this Job-a-matic job board, I can have a whole board at my domain where I can even sell my own jobs automatically. That's right, for $5 a week, you can have a prominently placed job on my job board.
Is it a good value?
Nope.
In fact, I'd be surprised if this job board gets any traffic whatsoever. In fact, Oddcast's personal experience with blogger boards has been relatively poor. Very few hits when we post to major tech blogger boards.
It's interesting, because, in my opinion, Simply Hired has done a better job in knocking down big names for job distribution... MySpace, Typepad, Feedburner... but yet they lag behind in traffic to Indeed. Why?
I think it's because of the location and implementation. I just don't think your favorite tech blog or social network is necessarily where you go to look for jobs. You go to the best and most comprehensive job search sites, and that, to me, is what Indeed has become.
And, even if you did get jobs from these random places, it needs to be prominently placed. While its neat to have a job board on my site, and I'll likely leave it there, I just don't see most of my traffic, which is RSS based, ever thinking to visit it. What I need is a better way to put what I think are interesting opportunities for my audience right in my posts. That's something I would integrate immediately, no matter who the provider.
As for the Job-a-matic... it was great because it was so easy, but not so great because it doesn't quite work like a distributed version of Simply Hired. I couldn't autosave a job search, b/c it isn't really their job search tool. It's just a list. I'm not sure why they did this, but that really takes down the usefulness of the tool. Also, while NYC-only was available as a filter for users, it wasn't the default, which, for this blog, it should be.
Anyhoo, that's not the only widget update I made. Last.fm just came out with some cool new flash ones that allow you to play snippets of the songs I listen to, and my personal radio station. I also added a Meetup.com widget for the NY Tech Meetups.
Gone is the co.comment widget. Co.comment was a fantastic idea, tracking my comments across the web and helping me pull them back, but they never really figured out a great way to make this useful to me or my audience.
Any other suggestions on helping me satisfy my widget cravings?
Filling the Angel Gap in NYC (if there is one)
So here are some meandering thoughts about the current state of the NY Angel market that I don't have the time or the intellectual capacity to synthesize into a coherent thesis/essay:
- People, including myself, say that there is an angel funding gap in NYC. The reason why is that they cannot readily identify very many firms or individuals who are known to do angel investing.
- At the same time, I don't know of any really fantastic startup companies in NYC who are struggling to get angel money raised. In fact, quite the opposite. I know of several companies who are raising or have raised significant angel capital just through their own network or introductions. Many of the investors have been people who do not usually do angel investing or at least don't have a shingle out to do so. So, angel gap or no?
- If there was an angel gap, how best to fill it? Early stage firms could go earlier. A USV incubator perhaps, a la what Charles River is doing?
- How about banding groups of angels together in a fund or group?
- What about other types of incubators? Corporate? CBS Interactive incubator?
- Well, we know from the last go around that anyone who doesn't have a larger fund who isn't 100% in the main business of venture investing over the long term are the first ones to get wiped off the face of the earth in a bubble... does that make them inherently bad structures or just more risky?
- There's a lot of money in NYC that isn't connected to the entrepreneur community... hedge fund and banking money. Would it be wise for someone to package up $5-10 million of that to do seed stage financing at 50-250k a pop? Who should do such a thing? Isn't a small investor like this going to get crushed in latter rounds because they don't have the money to maintain ownership positions? That brings us back to the USV incubator idea... and also brings us back to the "Why would USV be interested in entrepreneurs who aren't savvy enough to raise 100k on their own?"
- Is "professional" angel investing, i.e. someone setting up a smaller fund to invest in people not necessarily known beforehand, adverse selection? If an entrepreneur has never been successful before and isn't connected to enough powerful industry people with a compelling enough product to get backing from community insiders, what are the chances they'll be able to build a successful company? Same thing with incubators. If you can't find a space to build your business, how are you ever going to actually build a business?
Are angel funds a bad idea?
So, here's a question...
NYC has a lot of money floating around... lots of hedge fund and banking bonuses... but little of that ever finds it's way into burgeoning startups.
The problem as I see it.. or at least as I think I'm seeing it, is a connection and to some extent a filtering problem. The money doesn't know how to find the right startups, nor are they immersed enough in the tech to really evaluate it in an intelligent manner.
So, I often wonder if it wouldn't be valuable for someone to come along with a $10 million fund in NYC to do 20-40 deals of 250-500k each
There's a fine line between brilliant and idiotic: I may have just crossed it with this contest
Did you know that today was Abstinence Day?
Yeah, no kidding.
Well, to celebrate, we came up with a contest for Voki.
Basically, you go to Voki, create an account, then send your sexiest avatar over to contests@accounts.voki.com.
Here are some ideas for the kind of thing we're looking for:
- Describe your steamiest encounter... (or imagined encounter, for those of you who are waiting for wedding bells)
- Long distance love? Send us a note for them that will help pass the time until your next encounter.
- Tell us your sexual fantasy.
- Fake an orgasm...or...don't fake it! (Does abstaining pertain to when you're on by yourself in front of a computer?)
- Tell us about your secret sex crush!
Yeah, this is the kind of thing where if it gets 20,000 new users, it's brilliant... or if you get fired, maybe it wasn't such a good idea.
Voki by the numbers (and a little good natured poke at the competition)
In a little over a week of our Alpha launch, Voki had 1665 non-Oddcast employed users this morning.
How's that for transparency?
Now Mayka, the intern from Meez, will know, and you'll see her little cartoon head appear in my MyBlogLog and she'll go take that stat back to the management of one of our competitors. Hey, at least they participate in the social web and use their own product.
Anyway, so what if they know? So what if you all know?
Registered users are an absolutely meaningless number and in the early going of a product, I think most companies play it way too close to the vest with this sort of stuff.
For example, our goal is 350,000 registered users by the end of the year. Is there anything different that we're doing to try to get to 350,000 that we wouldn't do if we were trying for a million? No, absolutely not. We'd love a million. We'd love ten million. In fact, we're actually shooting for 350 million, but the bottleneck there is the pain we would experience upon extracting these numbers from our own business ends.
The reality is, you don't really know how many users you're going to get, but you just want to pay very close attention to who is signing up, how they find out about it, and what they're doing with it, and adjusting your marketing strategy accordingly.
For example, I've noticed a lot of users posting Voki in their MySpace blogs as a way to speak to their users, rather than as one of 100 widgets on their profile page. (Makes sense... since your Voki can talk, as opposed to just thrash in silence, crowd surf in silence, or ride a bicycle in circles in silence.) Is this better or worse? Certainly the blogs get less traffic, but in terms of engagement and placement, very rarely do you see many widgets posted in blogs at all, and when your friends subscribe and see a new post, they get notified right away and will come visit. So, it's actually not such a bad place to be, but of course, we'd like to see Voki on the profile as well, too.
As for the number itself, one might think that's on the low side. We're used to seeing big launches that lots of people buzz about because of a TechCrunch feature... and since TechCrunch has 350k subscribers, having a little over 1500 after a week of alpha seems sort of low, no? Actually, no... because TechCrunch registrations are often a blip... noise generated by a highly engaged and curious audience that has 180 other widgets to play with. We're happy to never get mentioned on TechCrunch because those users aren't by any stretch of our imagination our target audience. I don't know any 15 year old girls with 600 friends in MySpace who develop in AJAX and read TechCrunch religiously. (Not to mention the fact that I already know they like Gizmoz better because of their technology. Me personally, I'd rather my avatar platform not have terrorist characters with guns and ski masks available for use. I don't exactly find that sort of thing amusing. Gagz!)
When I look at these e-mail addresses of users, I'm really happy with the 1500 we have, because we've got mostly "imaprettygurl85@domain.com" and "suchandsuch@college.edu"... On the surface, definitely the audience we want to hit.
Plus, it all depends on how you're marketing. We're working on little bugs and site improvements here and there... getting feedback from the early adopters, etc.
Growth is an interesting thing. So, we need about 24% weekly growth to hit our target... but obviously, its a lot harder to go from 100 to 124 than it is to go from 100,000 to 124,000, right?
Well, let's think about that actually. Sure, I could power my way to another 24 users with some e-mails to friends and of course that doesn't scale. However, that's not a I'm likely to get repeat, sticky usage. You might thing that it would be hard to add on another 24,000 users, but when you already have a base of 100,000, some good marketing to your users, some contests, viral feature improvements, etc, can be very powerful.... not to mention the fact that new people are that much more likely to have seen Voki elsewhere, maybe multiple times, and have a strong desire to get one because their friends are using it. There's a tipping point in there somewhere, buried among all the network effects.
Plus, we never really got into the idea of what being a user means. I mean, I've created a WeeMee and posted him to my blog, and that's all I've done. I don't think I've changed him since I first made him. Do I count? It's also getting lots of pageviews everyday, so its not like I have a totally stale account. It would be really interesting to see how I get counted in their user numbers.
So, we have a lot of work to do to identify key metrics. How to we compare a posted Voki out on the web to one send as a message via e-mail? What do we want people doing? Just recording new audios? Messing with characters? Is a Voki created with our Text to Speech engine inherently less valuable than a Voki with a real voice?
Lots of questions, lots of Voki out there, lots more still to go... but one thing's for sure... headline numbers don't mean a damn thing.
I mean, Zwinky has like 4 million plus registered users by now, I think... but how many of them still use it versus how many can't figure out how to uninstall the Ask.com toolbar that comes with it?
Seen those commercials yet? Get Zwinky! Get Zwinky! Get Zwinky! It's enough to make me want to throw the TV out the window.
Avatar Humor: The 5 Worst things you can hear from a Voki
You should definitely check this out... If nothing else, to hear the cameo by my grandmother, who recorded her scene totally ad libbed and on the fly.
Things that really suck: Getting your minivan crushed by a tree in Bay Ridge
I went to go move my car last night and I happened upon a really unfortunate sight:
Some poor shlub got his car buried by a bunch of fallen branches. At first, I pitied the owner of the little black car, until I went around for a closer inspection:
Turns out it wasn't the black car that got the brunt of the damage, and it was, in fact, the whole damn tree that game down. Actually, what I didn't show here is that the tree actually completely missed the little black car, other than a few light branches here and there... by inches!
The whole damn thing got yanked right out of the ground at the roots:
Man, if I would have come out to discover my car like this, I'm pretty sure I would have cried.