Incremental Blogger

Looks like the Facebook vs email suite (such as GMail or Outlook) discussion is finally making the rounds.

Yep. There are a lot of similarities. This has created a rush of new thinking about what’s really important for connecting with friends, family, and co-workers.

It’s not just the social networking sites that are eating into email use though, I think IM apps (like GTalk and Messenger as well as Twitter) have been doing this by providing platforms for saying the little things or for broadcasting announcements.

No matter the platform, it’s all about communicating.

As I’ve mentioned before I’m not into the idea of an all in one platform. I’m not too keen on Facebook. I’m not too keen on Outlook. I use them as needed to connect with the other people I know that use them. Because I do so many different things with so many different people on so many different computers, I have to jump around and segment my networks and how I connect to them. I could put everything into one Outlook pile and then spend much of my time trying to organize it, instead I skip around.

I think most people have multiple email addresses and use multiple email platforms for similar reasons. My nieces and nephews skip around from social networking service to social networking service the same way.

When you look at Facebook this way, doesn’t it’s value seem more temporal? It does to me. You bet advertisers would like to reach the college age demographic–it’s a good one. However, over time the network will move, just like people switch their favorite restaurant, or change houses, cars, or hobbies. Most people don’t sit in one spot forever.

This has big implications for what it means to share or move around your social network data too. Do you really want to move around everything and keep looking at it as an additive process? I don’t think so. The long term value will be in editorializing the network for you–I mean in organizing, clustering, filtering, merging, splitting, presenting your network. Maybe for awhile people will get along with the big pile style of managing their networks, but I don’t think it scales over time.

I think split networks have greater value for advertisers as well as the users. Services can try to infer who’s participating in this part or that part of the network, as it does with targetting one type of ad during Saturday morning cartoons and another during Sunday morning talk shows. However, it’s also much easier and probably just as well to place ads based on the network itself–such as the Food network versus the Cartoon network. Similarly, a teen site like MySpace might draw one group of ads, a college network like Facebook might draw another, and an R/C flyers social network (a.k.a. old style community forum with heavy YouTube-like video sharing) might draw another. (Some networks you really, really don’t want merged together, possibly like one geared around your healthcare.) Each advertiser can decide which network has the greatest value for them. And each person can decide which network has the greatest value for them at the time. One size is not going to fit all. And one size is not going to keep fitting for any given person as they grow throughout their lifetime.

Every now and then I take inventory about which products and services I really use and rely upon.

In terms of the latest trending products, my list is pretty thin.

At the top is my blog, which you’re reading here. It’s still my number one way of archiving my thoughts and experiences that other can read. It’s meant to be public and shareable.

Next up is Twitter. Some call it a micro-blogging service, some liken it to IM. Both are right. It’s a must have for pushing out small posts as well as keeping track of what’s going on.

In third place are social news sites, such as TechMeme and Thredr. TechMeme I think most people know about. It clusters conversations taking place in the blogosphere and various media sources. Thredr is something I started, which is like TechMeme, but tracks topics that TechMeme doesn’t cover, such as news around R/C vehicles, Apple, Tablet PCs, Microsoft developers, digital photography, and soon Robotics. I check each of these three of four times a day to see what’s going on.

I’m also a fan of video. So I often check what’s going on with Qik as well as a couple other sites, though I’ve noticed that I’m doing this less and less. I’m getting too busy I think.

What’s most notable at least to me, is that Facebook doesn’t make my list. It’s too much of a walled garden to be interesting and there’s tons of junk applets that make it too MySpace-ish for me. I wouldn’t notice if Facebook fell off the edge of the earth. I’m not alone in this. Many of my friends that were giving Facebook a try have pretty much stopped using it too. No doubt students will still use it because of its strong social networking value, but for the rest of us, it’s not all that.

Likewise, I gave FriendFeed a short spin. Outside of the fact that I could see it becoming the epicenter for many online conversations, I don’t have that much desire to sit and chat and page through lists of….stuff.

Lastly, I might throw in an honorable mention to Linked In. Whereas Facebook reminds me of a highly organized high school event (that would place MySpace in the middle school social rung I guess), Linked In has maintained a fairly professional feel about it. I don’t use it all that much, but every now and then I get a link request and visit the site. It does maintain a network for me that’s a step above my email contact list in terms of who I might know. My email list is still more valuable overall, but still, I see how Linked In fits in.

What’s all this mean? Who knows. Since I often guess wrong on trends like this, I’ll use reverse psychology and predict that Facebook is going to be acquired for more money than any other startup and that Twitter and TechMeme–both services which I think have the greater value–will continue on their independent paths.

Update: Robert Scoble argues the locked-in feeling I get with Facebook has great value to Microsoft.

This whole Sarah Lacy/Mark Zuckerberg interview broohaha is silly. This is the one story that overshadows all else at SXSW? Really?

I watched the interview online and I can’t help but wonder why all the hostility. Actually, I can guess why; I just can’t “appreciate it.” That’s also probably why I’ve never attended SXSW. Too much swearing. Too much drinking. Too much partying. Too much over the top behavior. The Zuckerberg interview was just one piece of it. I watched several other Qik feeds/twitter posts and a pattern was easy to spot. Several had the “I’m brash. I’m cool” feel about them–in and out of presentations. If that’s the way people want to be, fine with me. Obviously I don’t fit in the crowd. In fact, one presenter (can’t recall her name), showed a slide of a business-casual-dressed guy holding a Tablet PC and said, “This is what the industry thinks of us users, but we’re really like this.” And then she showed a slide of another guy that looks like he just spent the evening at an LA club, making an angered gesture at the computer/camera. The room cheered. Yep–I’m the “other” group.

Robert Scoble goes into a detailed analysis of what he thinks went “wrong” with the interview. Most of the points I agree with. The one thing I think he’s wrong on: The money. Scoble argues Lacy was asking too many business-minded questions, such as whether he thinks Facebook is worth $15 billion. Robert didn’t think people cared about that kind of stuff. Come on. That’s why they’re there. Take the money away and the room would have thinned out. A lot. To make my point: Imagine if she’d phrased the question this way, “What about this $15B? Look at all the people that use Facebook. Look at the worldwide attention. Look at this crowd. $15B can’t be all it’s worth, right?” The crowd would have roared in appreciation. Sorry. People are getting drunk over the money or at least the possibility of it.

That’s the way I see it.

Facebook has disabled Robert Scoble’s account for violating the terms of service. Supposedly he was running a script that Facebook didn’t like. So he’s been removed from Facebook altogether. He’s appealing, but this has got me thinking. Is Facebook the walled garden where I want all my social graph data? Fortunately my graph is nothing like the size of Scoble’s so it would be much easier to move to another service, however, if Scoble’s account is re-enabled, it’s one more reason to find a friendlier service.

The blogosphere is all excited about Microsoft supposedly considering an investment in faccebook at a $10b rate. I still don’t get it. Since the YouTube acquisition the numbers are flying sky high. I think calmer heads should prevail. But oh, well.

Let’s see, there was Prodigy, then AOL, then MySpace, and now Facebook. All of them make sense particularly when the break from the pack, however, long term I think you still need to watch for the pack is doing. My nieces are all on facebook, but then again they jump from network to network.

In my mind, Microsoft–especially as a platform company–should have been working all along to devalue networks like these. How? By providing tools to build them. Instead this was left to PostNuke or PHP or Ruby developers or whomever. Of course, this isn’t where the immediate dollars would have been, but it would have changed the game significantly and I bet we would have been evaluating the social networks more like print media than tech media–because the tech part would have been mitigated.

I don’t think it’s a bad thing if Microsoft wants to invest in facebook in exchange for premium ad placement. It’s not a bad idea as long as they don’t go overboard and pay $6b for something.
Oh, the times are ripe for those that can tell a good story.

Update: Now here is a good deal to me: EchoStar to buy Sling Media. Just at the right time for Sling Media as their technology sees encroaching competitors.

facebook, Accel and Founders Fund are joining forces to proide funding for facebook app startups.

According to TechCrunch: “The size of the fund will be $10 million (coming from Accel and Founders Fund) with anywhere between $25 to $250 thousand in grants available for each selected startup dedicated to developing Facebook applications. Founders Fund and Accel will get the right of first refusal for the first round of financing of any company in the fund.”

This would have been great in the early days of the Tablet PC market.