The Public Facebook
Public Facebook: 845M MAUs, 483M DAUs in December – $3,7B revenue and $1B net income in 2011; http://eicker.at/PublicFacebook
Tagged: Platform Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
Gerrit Eicker
Mobile and Cloud Platform Wars
IDC: 2012 will be the year of mobile and cloud platform wars as IT vendors vie for leadership; http://eicker.at/MobileCloudWars
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Gerrit Eicker
IDC: “One year ago, International Data Corporation (IDC) predicted that the IT industry’s next dominant platform, built on mobile computing, cloud services, social networking, and big data analytics technologies, would begin its transition into the mainstream. Today, spending on these technologies is growing at about 18% per year and is expected to account for at least 80% of IT spending growth between now and 2020. With future market revenues at stake, IDC predicts that 2012 will be marked by some of the first high-stakes battles as companies seek to position themselves for leadership in these critical and fast-growing technology areas. … Overall, IDC predicts that worldwide IT spending will grow 6.9% year over year to $1.8 trillion in 2012. As much as 20% of this total spending will be driven by the technologies that are reshaping the IT industry – smartphones, media tablets, mobile networks, social networking, and big data analytics. … 2012 will also be the Year of Mobile Ascendency as mobile devices (smartphones and media tablets) surpass PCs in both shipments and spending and mobile apps, with 85 billion downloads, generate more revenue than the mainframe market. The mobility market will see heated competition in 2012 as Microsoft joins the crucial battle for dominance in the mobile operating system (OS) market and the Kindle Fire challenges the iPad in the media tablet market. … Competition will also characterize the world of cloud services in 2012 as the strategic focus shifts from building infrastructure to the creation of application platforms and ecosystems. Here the battle for enterprise platform dominance is just getting underway with established players like IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle facing serious challenges from Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com, and VMware. … Social networking technologies – especially where they are being accelerated by mobile technologies – will be recognized as a mandatory component in every major enterprise IT vendors’ strategy. As a result, IDC expects a number of major IT vendors to make ‘statement’ acquisitions in social business while others continue to expand their community platforms. … Finally, Big Data will earn its place as the next ‘must have’ competency in 2012 as the volume of digital content grows to 2.7 zettabytes (ZB), up 48% from 2011. Over 90% of this information will be unstructured (e.g., images, videos, MP3 files, and files based on social media and Web-enabled workloads) – full of rich information, but challenging to understand and analyze. … The number of intelligent, communicating devices on the network will outnumber ‘traditional computing’ devices by almost 2 to 1 within next 24 months, changing the way we think – and interact – with each other and devices on the network.“
Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus Platform
Google opens Google Plus for 3rd party tools, adds photo/video API, becomes a platform; http://eicker.at/GooglePlusPlatform
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Businesses can create and manage their pages directly through Google+. We are committed to working on enhancements and innovative features to offer businesses more flexibility and power to run their pages. We also recognize that some businesses use social media management companies to manage their presence across multiple social networks. So today we’re announcing that Google+ is enabling six companies to test Google+ functionality in their management tools – Buddy Media, Context Optional, Hearsay Social, HootSuite, Involver, and Vitrue. … These companies will offer a subset of their clients the ability to manage circles, publish to Google+, and monitor usage. To learn more about their services and pricing, check out this page. – We are currently working with these companies so that we can experiment and get feedback. They were selected based on their extensive experience helping brands and businesses manage and analyze their presence on social networks. If you’re a social media management company interested in working with Google+, get in touch with us.”
Google: “Google+ is working with six social media management companies to test Google+ functionality in their management tools. These companies will offer a subset of their clients tools to manage circles, publish to Google+, and access insights. These companies were selected based on their extensive experience helping brands and businesses manage and assess their presence on social networks. If you’re a social media management company interested in working with Google+, get in touch with us.”
Mashable: “Google has launched a pilot program that will let owners of Google+ Pages manage their accounts via third-party apps such as HootSuite, Involver and Buddy Media. … While the integrations with Google+ vary, the functionality seems extensive at first glance. Hootsuite, which also announced it was a launch partner, specifically mentions that it supports sharing to different Circles, searching public Google+ posts, viewing recent user activity and managing Circle membership. The launch partners are also offering analytics for tracking the performance of an individual Google+ Page.”
RWW: “Today Hootsuite announced its new social partnership with Google+ Pages. HootSuite users can manage their Google+ circles, post public updates to select circles, search public posts and push out messaging to select circles. … Google+ Pages for brands launched on November 7. Since then, there’s been speculation over whether Google+ Pages is a true competitor to Facebook Pages. For now, Google+ has only 40 million users, which hardly compares to Facebook’s 800 million.”
HootSuite: “New Google+ Pages functionality is now in the dashboard and available for HootSuite Enterprise clients. HootSuite is excited to be selected as an official launch partner for the Google+ Pages trial and to add this functionality to the advanced social media management tool-set. … HootSuite continues to exapnd the dashboard’s functionality as a robust and comprehensive tool for social savvy businesses. The dash now includes key social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn as well as new Google+ Pages.”
Google: “Today, we’re making it easier to leverage the power of personal and professional images by releasing our first Google+ API for photos and videos. – Google+ gives users full control of their information, and we’re starting with read-only access to public albums, photos, and videos. Google also supports Creative Commons licensing, which we expose so developers can easily respect copyrights. – Using the new API, developers can get a list of public albums from a Google+ user, and list the photos and videos within each album. … Prefer videos? A quick hop over to the API reference manual explains how to use the similar methods videos.listByAlbum and videos.get. We’re looking forward to hearing your feedback during our next Google+ platform office hours, helping you build your first photo-powered Google+ app on our Discussion Board, and continuing the conversation on Google+.”
TC: “Based on official blog posts that were apparently posted early (and then pulled), developers will soon be able to access some key features of Google+ via the service’s API: photos and videos. … According to the pulled blog post, this initial API will only give developers read-access to users’ content – third-party apps will not be able to upload new photos and videos yet. But it’s still an important step – photos and video are crucial to any social network (Facebook is the world’s largest photo site by a huge margin, for example).”
TNW: “We don’t know exactly when the APIs are to be released and officially announced, but we assume that it’s going to be soon, since someone had their hands on the finished blog post already. … How long can the service turn down growth opportunities with having a read and writable API? Twitter saw incredible growth when third parties started building apps on top of its service.”
Gerrit Eicker
Brands are Publishers
Battelle: All brands are publishers, learn how to be a good one; http://eicker.at/BrandsArePublishers
Gerrit Eicker
Diaspora #NewHere
Joined Diaspora 3 months ago (#62659). Now there are more than 150,000 saying: #NewHere Join! http://eicker.at/DiasporaNewHere
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Gerrit Eicker
Some ‘historical’ Diaspora posts here on Wir sprechen Online:
- Diaspora rockets on Kickstarter, 15.05.2010
- Diaspora gets funded with $200K, 03.06.2010
- Diaspora’s first month and first progress, 04.07.2010
- Diaspora works! 27.08.2010
- Diaspora Alpha, the developer release, 16.09.2010
- Joindiaspora.com opens its doors in private alpha, 24.11.2010
- Diaspora summary, 20.07.2011
- Diaspora’s First Year, 18.09.2011
- Social Freedom, 29.09.2011
- Diaspora Communications, 02.10.2011
Gerrit Eicker
Tablet News Reader
Tablets and news are a perfect match: Google and Yahoo are going to add more reader apps; http://eicker.at/TabletNewsReader
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Gerrit Eicker
ATD: “Memo to Flipboard, as well as Pulse, CNN’s Zite and AOL’s Editions: You might want to make some room in the already-crowded news and social reader space, because you’re about to get some bigfoot company. – Next Wednesday, according to sources close to the situation, Yahoo will finally officially unveil its offering, called Livestand. – And perhaps as early as next week or soon after, Google will also weigh in with its version of the genre – code-named Propeller – which also might be the product’s name. Another moniker under strong consideration: Currents. As I have previously reported, Google Propeller is an HTML5 reader for the Apple iPad and Android – essentially a souped-up version of similar apps such as Flipboard, AOL’s Editions, Zite (which was just bought by Time Warner’s CNN) and Pulse. … Yahoo and Google PR declined comment.”
RWW: “Livestand is Yahoo’s take on the personalized reading app for tablets, which ousted CEO Carol Bartz announced earlier this year. Sources tell AllThingsD that the app is expected to be released next week. It was originally slated to be launched on iOS and Android during the first half of 2011. … More than Flipboard and Zite, Livestand looks and feels like AOL’s Editions app for iPad. … It’s a natural extension of Yahoo’s efforts to become a company that specializes, among many other things, in digital content. … Also in the pipeline is a project from Google, code-named Propeller. Less is known about how that app will look and function, but it’s generally understood to be the search giant’s answer to Flipboard, which Google unsuccessfully tried to acquire. … Even with the cross-platform advantage and enormous development resources behind it, products of this nature from Google and Yahoo could simply fail to catch on. The iPad has been in existence for nearly two years and applications like Flipboard, Zite and Pulse have proven very popular among consumers. To compete, the big players will need to offer something truly unique to readers, publishers and advertisers alike.”
VB: “The tablet readers from two of the Internet’s largest technology companies has the potential to disrupt a landscape that has previously been dominated by small, nimble companies such as Flipboard and Pulse. Google previously tried to buy Flipboard, which was valued at more than $200 million in April, which is still chump change for the search giant.”
pC: “Companies like Flipboard, AOL, Zite, and Pulse have found a lot of interest in their apps, which organize Web content through custom filters or by hooking one’s social-media feeds into the app. But given how new tablets still are to the vast majority of the population, and how as a result usage habits have yet to really settle into any established pattern, there’s still a lot of opportunity for both big companies and small startups to attract users.”
Gerrit Eicker
Google Transparency Report
How do governments affect access to information? Google’s Transparency Report 2011; http://eicker.at/GoogleTransparencyReport
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “How do governments affect access to information on the Internet? To help shed some light on that very question, last year we launched an online, interactive Transparency Report. All too often, policy that affects how information flows on the Internet is created in the absence of empirical data. But by showing traffic patterns and disruptions to our services, and by sharing how many government requests for content removal and user data we receive from around the world, we hope to offer up some metrics to contribute to a public conversation about the laws that influence how people communicate online. – Today we’re updating the Government Requests tool with numbers for requests that we received from January to June 2011. For the first time, we’re not only disclosing the number of requests for user data, but we’re showing the number of users or accounts that are specified in those requests too. … We believe that providing this level of detail highlights the need to modernize laws like the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which regulates government access to user information and was written 25 years ago – long before the average person had ever heard of email.”
Google: “Transparency is a core value at Google. As a company we feel it is our responsibility to ensure that we maximize transparency around the flow of information related to our tools and services. We believe that more information means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual. – We’ve created Government Requests to show the number of government inquiries for information about users and requests to remove content from our services. We hope this step toward greater transparency will help in ongoing discussions about the appropriate scope and authority of government requests. – Our interactive Traffic graphs provide information about traffic to Google services around the world. Each graph shows historic traffic patterns for a geographic region and service. By illustrating outages, this tool visualizes disruptions in the free flow of information, whether it’s a government blocking information or a cable being cut. We hope this raw data will help facilitate studies about service outages and disruptions.”
GigaOM: “Any lingering fantasies of the web as a no-man’s land where content is free from the restraints of geographical boundaries probably should be put to rest. Google Tuesday morning released a treasure trove of data relating to content-takedown requests, and the numbers speak for themselves: requests are up worldwide and Google complies with the majority of them. … When it comes to requests for user data, all that Google and companies of its ilk really can do is ensure that requests are within the bounds of the law and notify users of requests for their data. But in the United States, at least, the laws regarding web-user data are still fairly lax and don’t require a search warrant in many instances. It’s yet another example of the web and the law not being anywhere near on the same page. – It’s easy to poke them for being too willing to bend to the wills of government officials and authorities, but web companies can’t flaunt the laws of the countries in which they want to operate, either. Otherwise, as separate Google data illustrates, the lights might go out on their services in those countries.”
RWW: “Google has updated its Government Requests tool with data from the first half of this year. For the first time, the report discloses the number of users or accounts specified, not just the number of requests. Google also made the raw data behind government requests available to the public. … Electronic communications have changed a bit since 1986. They form a ubiquitous, always-on fabric of our lives now. Fortunately, Google isn’t any happier with the status quo than privacy-aware users are. It’s among a number of major Web companies pushing for better laws. And Google and other data-mining companies take their roles in public policy seriously. Both Google and Facebook’s lobbying efforts broke records this year.”
TC: “Google Declines To Remove Police Brutality Videos, Still Complies With 63% Of Gov’t Takedown Requests – US Government requests for user data jumped, however: 5950 versus 4287 during the same period in 2010, asking for information on 11,057 users. 93% of these were complied with, ‘fully or partially.’ So while they’re making something of a stand on removing data, they don’t seem to have any trouble giving it out.”
Guardian: “Figures revealed for the first time show that the US demanded private information about more than 11,000 Google users between January and June this year, almost equal to the number of requests made by 25 other developed countries, including the UK and Russia. – Governments around the world requested private data about 25,440 people in the first half of this year, with 11,057 of those people in the US. – It is the first time Google has released details about how many of its users are targeted by authorities, as opposed to the number of requests made by countries.”
VB: “Notably, in the United States, Google refused to remove YouTube clips showing police brutality. In these cases in particular, we are seeing how relatively neutral platforms such as YouTube can have great social impact depending on the intentions of the person posting the content and the integrity of the content host in keeping that content online.”
Gerrit Eicker
Chime.in
UberMedia starts its own social network: Chime.in, a Twitter, Digg, Reddit, Facebook clone; http://eicker.at/Chimein
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Gerrit Eicker
VB: UberMedia CEO Bill Gross isn’t dodging the fact that his latest app, Chime.in, is a patchwork of other successful apps. – ‘It’s an amalgam of blogging and Reddit and Facebook – there’s aspects of each in there,‘ he told VentureBeat in a phone interview last week. – ‘We’re definitely borrowing those good ideas. But this is a deeper dive into their interests and intelligent conversations around [users’] passions.‘ – The Chime.in site will launch tomorrow, but the app is available now in the iTunes App Store. – As Gross mentioned, it has a lot in common with other social media tools. It gives users and brand-oriented publishers a public, online forum for sharing text and picture updates, just like Twitter. You can also share videos and polls, just like on Facebook.”
TC: “A tipster informs us that UberMedia, the company behind social networking apps like Echofon and UberSocial / Twidroyd, has unintentionally pushed its new iPhone application onto the App Store… This is plausible, because the Chime.in website isn’t accessible yet at the time of writing, although the support pages appear to be live already. – So is Chime.in the oft-rumored challenger to Twitter, which UberMedia has had run-ins with in the past? UberMedia has always denied that it had plans to launch a competing social network, so it’s a question worth asking. And the answer is no, not really. – Chime.in is described on the support pages as an online and mobile network organized around interests, or an ‘interest network’ to keep it brief. Still according to the support pages, Chime.in was ‘was created for people who are active in social media and looking for a way to engage in conversations and more deeply interact with content related to their interests’. … ‘All other social networks are all about connecting with people. Chime.in is about connecting with interests and people – it’s an interest network. It lets you tailor the content you see and search for to the topics you care about, so you aren’t bogged down sorting through posts you aren’t interested in.'”
GigaOM: “Bill Gross wants to take on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ – [H]e is launching a content-focused social network called Chime.in that will compete not just with Google’s new social platform Google+ but with Twitter and Facebook too, and link-sharing sites like Reddit and Digg as well. Does the world need another social platform for sharing content? Gross says that it does, and that his connections with content companies will help Chime.in succeed – but the odds are stacked against him. … Chime.in may not be a direct competitor to Twitter, but it is clearly a shot across the bow. According to the support pages for the service [which have since been taken offline], it will allow users to post to Twitter or Facebook or Google+ as well as to the Chime.in network, and is therefore not competitive but ‘additive to the ecosystem.’ … [T]he biggest hurdle for Chime.in is the simple fact that Facebook now has 800 million users and Twitter has 200 million or so, with Google+ in the 50 million range. Useful features aren’t always enough for a social network to flourish, especially when there is so much competition. In the end, even if you build it they might not come.”
ATD: “Serial entrepreneur Bill Gross’s latest effort is called Chime.in, a social platform for writing about and discussing common interests. What makes it different from other social network and social news sites is that Chime.in wants to pay people for their contributions. … Gross argued that the Chime.in community will police itself against gamers and crappy content – the kind of stuff that’s plagued sites like Digg and content farms like Demand Media – because users won’t recommend Chimes they don’t like. – ‘The breakthrough that’s happened is if you let people have the flexibility to share, they’ll get the message to the right people and do the dirty work for you,’ Gross said.
Gerrit Eicker
X.commerce
eBay’s X.commerce wants to be the future platform of technology-powered buying and selling; http://eicker.at/Xcommerce
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Gerrit Eicker
X.commerce: “See it first at the Innovate Developer Conference. A seamless commerce experience – any time, anywhere, any way. That’s what consumers want, and that’s what technology is making possible. Now the capabilities developers and merchants need to compete and win in an increasingly complex, fast-changing environment are available in one place.”
X.commerce: “Technology is completely transforming the relationship between consumers and merchants. – Consumers today want and expect more choices in how and where they shop. And multi-channel innovations – online, offline, mobile, and the fast-blurring spaces in between – are delivering. Consumers are also armed with more knowledge before they buy. Reviews and recommendations. Daily deals. Barcode scanning and instant price comparison. So as today’s consumers use technology innovations to seize control, the question is how can merchants of all sizes keep up? … X.commerce is the future of technology-powered buying and selling. – It’s more than e-commerce. More than marketing automation. More than mobile transactions. It’s the first end-to-end, multi-channel commerce technology platform designed for all the ways consumers choose to shop today. And it’s the only platform that combines the power of eBay, PayPal, Magento, and all the ground-breaking commerce capabilities within the eBay Inc. family.”
X.commerce: “For starters, X.commerce is available today, free to registered users with premium services to be added over time. We’ve also added a wide range of technology assets in the eBay portfolio to the X.commerce ecosystem, including Magento, RedLaser, Milo, and Zong. These new technologies combined with existing assets from eBay and PayPal allow us to offer a complete collection of commerce capabilities to merchants and developers. – We were also joined by Facebook’s Katie Mitic for a discussion on how shopping has become increasingly social and people-centric. Katie also showed off the fact that Facebook’s new Open Graph functionality will be integrated into eBay Inc.’s X.commerce open commerce ecosystem. … We also joined PayPal in announcing a new trusted commerce identity system, PayPal Access, which lets consumers shop safely and easily across web with just their PayPal usernames and passwords. This is a big move with major implications for merchants and consumers alike.”
X.commerce: “The technology assets in the eBay Inc. portfolio collectively represent the most robust, scalable, commerce platforms currently available in the retail industry. They offer developers the opportunity to create new applications and capabilities that play perfectly into evolving consumer shopping practices. These assets, which will be available on X.commerce, include: Magento, the feature-rich, open-source e-commerce solution, launched a new version of Magento Connect: The Magento Extension Marketplace. – The newly opened API from Milo allows developers to create apps that localize the benefits of online shopping by searching the inventory of local stores in real-time. With Milo, developers everywhere can harness the power of local commerce for their app or website. – RedLaser, the free barcode scanning application for mobile comparison shopping, is previewing a new iOS application offering a refreshed look and new features. – With thousands of apps already available on the Android Market, Zong’s SDK makes it easier for developers to get paid on the Android platform. – The eBay Mobile iOS SDK will be available soon to developers in the X.commerce ecosystem who have an eBay Developer Program account. The iOS SDK will contain APIs to help developers build mobile apps specifically designed to enhance the eBay selling and buying experiences.”
TC: “‘We’re at an inflection point’, eBay CEO John Donahoe said from the stage at Innovate, eBay’s brand new developer conference that launched today in San Francisco. ‘We’ll see more change in how consumers shop and pay in the next three years than we’ve seen in the last 15 years’. – Donahoe’s prediction for the future came as context for giving a more complete introduction today to X.commerce, the platform formed by eBay and its nest eggs PayPal, Magento and GSI – designed to create a robust, full-service and ‘open’ eCommerce solution. The eCommerce solution ‘to rule them all’, one might say. … One of the more anticipated announcements to come out of Innovate was a partnership between the world’s largest social network and eBay, which will see the latter integrating Facebook’s Open Graph… The virtual shopping experience is a long ways off from one that mimics its offline counterpart, and I’ve yet to be convinced that just because one of my grade school friends interacted with a product on Facebook, which then popped up in my news stream, that I’m more likely to interact with that product and buy it just because of some loose social connection manifesting while I’m in the process of turning off more Facebook sharing features. Yes, it adds to a brand’s network, and if I’m browsing friends’ profiles and see a product I want to learn about before buying, this is a great conversation starter.”
WSJ: “EBay officially unveiled Wednesday its X.commerce online shopping platform as a way to encourage developers to build new online shopping tools, a move that comes as the company is pressing ahead with a transformation from online marketplace to comprehensive Internet retailer. – EBay said X.commerce will draw developers to an open platform, and enable them to build new shopping and payment tools for merchants that will be used by eBay’s marketplaces and PayPal units. The move is reminiscent of efforts by Apple Inc. to entice developers into building apps for its iOS platform, and by Facebook Inc. to encourage the creation of tools for its social network.”
Forbes: “EBay launched its new X.Commerce platform today at its conference in San Francisco, opening up technology for developers to build new commerce tools and services for merchants–as well as a marketplace for merchants and developers to buy and sell them. – The open platform is designed to enable developers to quickly build applications that connect to a variety of online and offline commerce services, including eBay properties such as PayPal, Magento, GSI Commerce and Milo. … On the social front, eBay announced a partnership with Facebook to integrate Facebook’s new Open Graph technology into eBay’s Magento and X.Commerce developers. This will enable developers to post a variety of actions that consumers take back to Facebook–such as ‘Jack bought Adidas shoes,’ and the like. … It will be interesting to see if eBay announces further integration with Facebook to, for example, bring Facebook social information to eBay about buyers and sellers.”
ZDnet: “PayPal Access becomes the Facebook Connect for online payments – Essentially, PayPal Access is a login, identity system that simplifies shopping for customers by keeping track of multiple passwords and accounts. Even more simply, think of it as Facebook Connect for PayPal. – In theory, and likely in practice in time, this will make online shopping more seamless than anything we’ve even seen before. To get started, all users need to do is login to participating websites with their existing PayPal accounts. That should automatically bring up preferred shipping and billing addresses and more.”
Gerrit Eicker
Social Freedom
The Diaspora Project, a fun and creative community for social freedom; http://eicker.at/SocialFreedom
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Gerrit Eicker
Diaspora: “We are happy to announce that DiasporaFoundation.org is now live. DiasporaFoundation.org will be the home of the Diaspora* project, a place where our community can share information, learn about cool new features, and information about where they can get an account. – This new blog replaces blog.joindiaspora.com (WordPress FTW), and will be updated with news from the community and announcements from the core team.”
Diaspora: “Social freedom. – Ever wanted to to share something with just a certain group of people? Diaspora* pioneered Aspects, the original system for sharing things with just the people you want. Of course, you can still tell the whole world too, if you want to. – Diaspora* lets you stay connected with your friends, even if they’re not on Diaspora* yet. Simply connect your account to other major services, then use Diaspora* as your home base to post to your profiles on these other services too. Diaspora* currently supports cross-posting to your Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr accounts, with more to come soon. … Own your data – Now you don’t have to settle for having your data on someone else’s server. Since Diaspora is completely free software, you can grab the code and host it wherever you want. We’re constantly making it easier for individuals to host their own pods on Diaspora*. – Coming soon: Download all of your data in standard formats that can be used in other places. – Get started on a community pod and then move all of your social data to a pod you control. Diaspora*’s distributed design means that you will never have to sacrifice control of your data to stay connected.”
Diaspora: “Join the movement. – The future of the social web starts with you. – Diaspora* is already in the top 2% of all open source projects ever. The codebase has received over 800 forks, over 5000 followers on GitHub, and over 300 Grassroots Volunteers… Open source is about individuality, transparency, creativity, and destiny. It is about having an idea, and making it reality. Diaspora* was founded to fulfill a passion for fun, and for making the Internet a better place. Open source is what enables us to change the world, for ourselves, and let our friends across the web benefit from our exploration. … We all make Diaspora*. We might not know you just yet, but we think you’d be a great fit for building the future of the web. You’re fantastic, and you’re ready to change the world. Contributing to Diaspora* comes in all different shapes and sizes. Whether you’re a user helping us find bugs, providing feedback on our mailing lists, or contributing code or design, we need you.”
Diaspora: “Roadmap – These are things that are in our plan, but haven’t yet come to the front of the priority queue. If you’re looking for a feature to implement, and any of these strike your fancy, come talk to us in IRC first. We may have thoughts about how we want these implemented, and we can help you get started…
- Data portability: allow people to Oauth to a new seed and move their entire account to the new seed, and then notify all of their contacts of the change, so people can move around seamlessly.
- Twitter-style API for posting and searching public posts.
- Services integration: attach services to particular aspects.
- Server to server authentication: Right now Diaspora is push-only. We need servers to authenticate with each other to pull data in.
- Refining aspects – having people only in the public group, a Twitter-style follow model, etc.
- More standards compliance: for instance, we have a salmon implementation, but it’s not tested against the spec yet. It should be made compliant with the salmon spec.
- Events
- Photo tagging
- Mentions and tags should work in comments and captions.
- Software Update Framework for folks running their own pod.
- An administrator interface that would do the entire update automatically, like the way WordPress can be updated through its admin interface.”
Diaspora: “We’re building the future we want to see – a new social web that keeps you in control of your data, giving you the freedom to do what you want and have fun. We’re a tiny core team of developers working our tails off, and we’re also a huge community effort, with more than 150 people having contributed code to our open-source software, hundreds of others engaged in community organizing and spreading the word, and thousands of people providing feedback and financial support. We can’t do this without you. Please give what you can. Thank you.“
Gerrit Eicker 16:30 on 2. February 2012 Permalink |
Facebook, Prospectus Summary: “Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. – People use Facebook to stay connected with their friends and family, to discover what is going on in the world around them, and to share and express what matters to them to the people they care about. – Developers can use the Facebook Platform to build applications (apps) and websites that integrate with Facebook to reach our global network of users and to build products that are more personalized, social, and engaging. – Advertisers can engage with more than 800 million monthly active users (MAUs) on Facebook or subsets of our users based on information they have chosen to share with us such as their age, location, gender, or interests. We offer advertisers a unique combination of reach, relevance, social context, and engagement to enhance the value of their ads. – We believe that we are at the forefront of enabling faster, easier, and richer communication between people and that Facebook has become an integral part of many of our users’ daily lives. We have experienced rapid growth in the number of users and their engagement. … We had 845 million MAUs as of December 31, 2011, an increase of 39% as compared to 608 million MAUs as of December 31, 2010. – We had 483 million daily active users (DAUs) on average in December 2011, an increase of 48% as compared to 327 million DAUs in December 2010. – We had more than 425 million MAUs who used Facebook mobile products in December 2011. – There were more than 100 billion friend connections on Facebook as of December 31, 2011. – Our users generated an average of 2.7 billion Likes and Comments per day during the three months ended December 31, 2011. … Revenue 2011: $3,711B, Net income 2011: $1B”
Facebook, Letter from Mark Zuckerberg: “Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected. – We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter. – At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television – by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together. – Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones – the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries. – There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on. – We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other. … We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy. – We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services. – As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.”
Jarvis: “Zuckerberg has his own, social version of Moore’s law – I call it Zuck’s law, though he doesn’t. It decrees: This year, people will share twice as much information as they did last year, and next year, they will share twice as much again. Facebook will expand to more users – from 750 million today to a billion soon? – and users will expand their sharing. Meanwhile, one Facebook investor, Yuri Milner, tells me that advances in artificial intelligence will get better and better at understanding and making use of all the service’s data. It has only just begun. ‘The default in society today still is, OK, I should not share it. The by far default today is that everything’s anonymous,’ Zuckerberg laments. ‘In the future, things should be tied to your identity, and they’ll be more valuable that way.’ There is the master plan.”
RWW: “Facebook shocked no one by filing an initial public offering of its shares today. – The filing was the first glimpse into the company’s inner financial workings and, as expected, Facebook said it would try to raise $5 billion when the company’s shares begins trading – a number that could eventually be raised to $10 billion and would ultimately value the company between $75 billion and $100 billion. – Today marks the day that Mark Zuckerberg goes from being the guy who makes world-changing technology to the guy who makes money. (He could be worth $20 billion when all is said and done). And it also means today is the day you stop being a Facebook user and become a Facebook customer. – That can mean good and bad things for you, the end user. But one thing is certain: Facebook will never be the same again. … A successful Facebook IPO means some restored faith in the social media space. That means more capital and more incentive for the next Zuckerberg to come along and create something earthshaking instead of finishing a degree at Harvard.”
Guardian: “The seismic nature of the Facebook IPO can hardly be oversold. The IPO creates a currency that will allow the company to buy whatever it needs to vertically integrate all the elements of its massive appetites – to be your wallet, your phone, your search engine, your company’s cash register, your entertainment portal, and your publishing platform, as well as your social life. And to do this all in a closed world of protocol enforcement, behavior monitoring and data gathering. – The technology business is an ever-expanding effort at monopoly and control: Microsoft sped past Apple to grab the desktop; Google sped past Microsoft to control the internet itself; Apple reappeared to control mobile devices. Now Facebook seeks to control pretty much … well, you. … That’s, of course, the ultimate Facebook sell: Mark Zuckerberg, a true American savant – Steve Jobs, but better even (and not so nasty) – has created a wholly-owned internet, which can not only monitor behavior but can encourage it, and regulate it, and dominate so much of it that Facebook inevitably becomes the platform for modern life.”
NYT: “With sharing at the center of Facebook, and the new new Web, analysts also wonder if the constant chatter will create too much white noise. As psychological barriers to sharing fall and companies become more deft at leveraging social media, there’s a legitimate concern that platforms, like Facebook, will be less valuable without the proper filters. User growth has slowed in some mature markets. – ‘What are the limits of sharing?’ said Ms. Yi, of the Altimeter Group. ‘At what point does the presence of all these partners on Facebook, all this sharing, begin to degrade the quality of the site overall?‘”
GigaOM: “Brad Silverberg, a veteran of Microsoft and other tech companies and general partner at Ignition Partners, a Seattle-based venture fund, thinks that the IPO could have a corroding influence on the company culture. … Facebook – Mark Zuckerberg’s Hacker Way missive not withstanding – is a lot more mercenary and materialistic. And part of that means employees are likely to cash their chips and run, only to place them on some new startups. And whichever way you look at it, I am pretty sure 2012 is going to be one heck of a ride. Buckle up!”
FC: “Zuckerberg first love has always been the Facebook product itself. There’s nothing he loves more than rolling up his sleeves and getting down and dirty with a set of mockups and a prototype or two. So while the Zuck will toss on the old jacket-and-tie and tap dance through the IPO dog-and-pony, as soon as it’s all over, it’ll be back to Menlo Park and the product, while COO Sheryl Sandberg (and CFO David Ebersman) continue to sweet talk advertisers and analysts alike.”
Gerrit Eicker 08:28 on 3. February 2012 Permalink |
Guardian: “So is Facebook worth it? After a fevered day and evening reading the S-1 document filed with the US securities and exchange commission (SEC) – an event that proved so popular online that the SEC had to devote an extra server to handling demand – the answer seems to be that it’s not worth $100bn (£63bn), but it might be worth $75bn. … Analysts say it can’t continue: ‘The hypergrowth is probably over,’ said Michael Pachter, head of research in the private shares group at Wedbush Securities. ‘The low-hanging fruit of the western developed world’ has already been grabbed, he said. ‘It’s just kind of obvious that they’re not going to ever get every single person that lives on the planet.’ … Some analysts believe that Facebook’s reliance on advertising is a weakness. … And Facebook is now wandering among giants – with one in particular eager to crush it. Google’s annual revenues in 2010 were $38bn, ten times larger than Facebook’s, and almost all of that comes from advertising. Google is setting up its own social network, Google+, and trying to tempt people away from Facebook through come-ons in its search results in the US which have pushed Facebook results down.”
VB: “‘The issue of click-through rate was not mentioned as a risk in the S-1,’ said Peter Adriaens, a professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Michigan’s Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies. That omission stood out for the Internet IPO expert because research suggests that the percentage of Facebook users who actually click on ads is quite low, and that means advertising dollars could eventually drop. – Facebook does not publish its average click-through rate (CTR), but independent analysis from Webtrends on more than 11,000 Facebook campaigns showed that the average CTR for Facebook ads in 2010 was 0.051 percent, which is about half the industry standard CTR of 0.1 percent. The rate, according to the Webtrends report, dropped from 0.063 percent in 2009, which points to a downward trend. … ‘(Facebook) talked about the risk of privacy laws … but what was not mentioned is that the European Union issued a list of 35 requirements related to privacy that Facebook is going to have to adhere to,’ Adriaens pointed out. ‘(Facebook) can’t automatically collect the data that it might be collecting in North America … so what I see going forward is this challenge … of having to deal with very fragmented privacy laws. Those privacy laws are directly going to affect the value of Facebook’s data to its advertisers.’”
GigaOM: “Of Facebook’s 845 million monthly active users (MAUs), 425 million accessed Facebook in December alone through a smartphone or feature phone app or through its mobile-optimized website. In 2011, 85 percent of Facebook’s $3.7 billion in revenues came from advertising, but none of it came from its mobile platforms, over which it doesn’t serve up display ads. Despite that huge gap, Facebook is doing nothing to discourage the shift in use to handsets and tablets… As the S-1 points out, most Facebook members use mobile to supplement their PC activity, not replace it, so the company does ultimately put its ads in front of their eyes. But that won’t always be the case. … Facebook’s problem has an easy fix: It can simply start putting ads in its mobile apps and website. … My guess is that Facebook just doesn’t want to put apps into its mobile products – at least not yet. There is limited real estate on a handset screen, and Facebook probably doesn’t want to clutter up its slick interfaces with display ads, especially while it is still formulating its mobile strategy. … Either way, Facebook’s filing makes it clear that it has to do something to monetize its mobile traffic soon. The company will soon be public, and while it will likely be controlled by Zuckerberg and those loyal to him, investors will question why Facebook is devoting so much effort and so many resources to building a mobile business it makes absolutely no money from.”
Gerrit Eicker 07:48 on 6. February 2012 Permalink |
Winer: “To me Facebook already feels over. I really don’t feel like I’m missing anything. Look at it this way. There’s lots of stuff going on right now that I’m not part of. That’s the way it goes. Me and Facebook are over. It’s going to stay that way. And if I’m on a ship that’s sinking, well I’ve had a good run, and I can afford to go down with the ship, along with people who share my values. It’s a cause, I’ve discovered, that’s worth giving something up for.”
Boyd: “Facebook is the new AOL, despite the market cap. But it’s headed for a hard landing for other reasons than Winer is pushing. Facebook will fail because of the imminent rise of social operating systems – future versions of iOS, Mac OS X, and Android – which will break the Facebook monolith to bits.”