Goodbye [S][C][R][A][B][U][L][O][U][S]
Hasbro appears to have won a battle with Facebook application “Scrabulous” which has been wiped off of Facebook. One of the most popular applications on the massive Social Network, many thought Hasbro would buy Scrabulous from the two founders. That may still happen but Scrabulous’ negotiating position has been severely weakened over the past month as Hasbro first launched an “official” Scrabble on Facebook and now has won the copyright battle and had the competitor removed.
As I’ve noted many times before the prevailing notions of copyright among onliners differ quite a bit from those held by most judges and the legal world at large and this will continue for some time. Napster, YouTube, and Scrabulous may seem like reasonably clean applications for the online crowd, but in a legal sense they are on very shaky ground. Will these copyright issue clear up anytime soon? In one two letter word … [N][O]
Malik: Facebook Connect is better than Colin Farrell?
I can’t help but think Om Malik is under some kind of Facebook conference spell when he first criticizes their presentation as too stylish (comparing Mark Zuckerberg to that bastion of style and wit Colin Farrell = OUCH!) but then gushes that Facebook Connect is going to be the big winner in terms of bringing web-wide social functionality.
Malik notes:
In addition to offering a simple authentication method, FC allows granular social interactions to be embedded in non-Facebook services. If Facebook can work with its partners to build interesting use-case scenarios that go beyond simple sign-on, it is quite feasible that Facebook can out-execute Google, MySpace and everyone else with its ID ambitions.
I suppose it depends on what he means by “quite feasible”, but I’d still predict that Google Friend Connect (still in Beta) is the system to watch in this space for two very simple reasons:
1) It’s Simple
2) It’s Google
A great example of the first challenge is to read the Malik excerpt above. How many mom and pop websites will read that and say “wow, gotta have it!”. The answer is very few. Instead, I think in a few months they will be working their PPC account at Google and be prompted to “click here for the code to make your site a social masterpiece”.
Even assuming Facebook’s social application will allow very simply integration with any website, it’s going to be very hard to compete with the web’s top brand as web empires as well as mom and pop websites seek to integrate social functions into their sites.
I’m not suggesting Facebook will fail however. I just think that once the game begins in earnest both Myspace and Facebook will struggle to keep up with Google. I think we’ll see social functionality spread quickly across the web, probably starting from the three key places working this angle right now: Google, Facebook, and Myspace. A key question will be how these three will choose to allow their applications to interact, but luckily for users there is a lot of pressure for cross compatibility of social networking.
So, in the end everybody is going to win, and we should soon see a great new layer of social functionality spread across the entire web. And that….is a good thing.
Facebook tells me I’m overweight - this is *good* targeted advertising?
Logging into Facebook I was assaulted presented with an advertisement featuring a picture of an incredibly fit fellow’s chiseled abdomen with the caption “48 YR OLD Overweight?”….
I suppose I should be thankful this was not a picture of a shirtless Mark Zuckerberg, but ..
I’m 48 so I can’t believe this was a coincidence - obviously Facebook is using my personal information to target ads to me - using the information they said they’d keep confidential and I really don’t want shared with any old Tom, Dick, or Hairy bodybuilder advertisers.
As I’ve noted before online privacy is largely an oxymoron, and I’m really not very concerned about the privacy “violation” here. However something about this pisses me off - I think partly because after all the hype - including from people like me - I hate to think this is the best we can do with targeted advertising.
Sure, I’m a *little* overweight but I don’t need the bogus overpriced green diet junk advertised to me here by Mr. Muscleydude. This is the classic type of junk product “seen on TV” presented in an annoying way using information I don’t want given out to advertisers. In my book Facebook has already pushed past the limit of advertising more than is welcome by me, and I get the strong feeling that with revenues in question we’ll see a lot more of these marginally relevant ads in the future.
Facebook, Facebook Get Ya Facebook Shares at 80% off
TechCrunch is reporting that an insider at Facebook is shopping his shares at 80% off the normally quoted (and probably absurd) 15 billion dollar valuation. TechCrunch is also suggesting that even Mark Zuckerberg is willing to sell shares at a price consistent with a 6 billion valuation for the company.
Like Arrington, I’d also like to take one share of Facebook. For me please add a Coke and a Cheeseburger.
The 15 billion never made any sense, and as it becomes clearer that social networking won’t monetize well their perceived value may quickly drop below a billion, though that would still be one heck of a payday for Mark Z and the gang.
Twitter less?
Seems to me that Twitter is, in fact, a very important issue with far too much discussion about downtime and not enough about why Twitter appears to be replacing blogging, Facebook, and email as the communications paradigm of choice for the digital elites, which often means the rest of the online world will soon follow.
Twitter’s system failures have become so common that several of the silicon folks like Mike Arrington are suggesting that people should be moving to other services - most noted is FriendFeed which now allows “room” conversations as a way to sort noise from signal and talk with a group about specific topics. I think if they’d come along at same time FriendFeed would be winning the war for the hearts and minds of the legions of twitterers, but Twitter has such a foothold as the microblogging / communication tool of choice it’ll be hard to unseat Twitter unless their services fail to improve over the coming months. Improvement is likely given their recent Venture capital injection which effectively valued Twitter at about 100 million - enough that money will soon pour in as needed to beef up their shaky infrastructure.
Why is Twitter important? It’s really a form of A.D.D. blogging - fast and furious with links out to full treatments which can be read only if they really look interesting. Because Twitter caters to short attention spans and also throws everybody in regardless of laptop color or digital creed, it’s going to keep catching on fast with the business and tech crowd. I am NOT convinced it’ll be a big hit for grandma or even Nascar dads, who will see Twitter for the time waster it tends to be…
Yikes.. my Twitter Deficit Disorder makes me think a blog post of more than 143 letters won’t generally get read anyway, and makes it harder to write.
MicroHooBook rumors are very probably false. A test of the non-Emergency Blogcasting System?
I thought I’d coined “MicroHooBook” but Matt had done that a full hour before.
Just a moment, just a moment…. looks like The 463 had it before Matt. Originality sure isn’t what it used to be…
Microsoft is certainly working with Yahoo now to try to buy a piece of the company rather than the whole - Microsoft announced that over the weekend. Most think they want to buy the search component of Yahoo and that Yahoo may sell because if they don’t Carl Icahn will be forcing a proxy fight that he will probably win, having already bought or lined up about 30% of the votes/shares in his favor.
But John Furrier ”broke” the rumor that as soon as they had Yahoo search MS would snap up Facebook for 15-20 billion. I think this rumor is speculation and nothing more and I’m even thinking this was something of a test of the non-emergency blogcasting system, which generally delivers misleading information even faster than the truth.
John Furrier and Robert Scoble are both clever guys, which is why I’m a bit suspicious they have cooked up the MicroHooBook rumor to test TechMeme and how the blogosphere reacts to unfounded rumors.
As usual, the blogOsphere loves unfounded and unverified rumors and this is the key tech blog story for Monday May 19.
I think Sarah Lacy has this right, and she’s got more of an inside track to Facebook than most reporters.
Facebook owes me $1.50 per year!
Over at WebGuild I was doing some simple calculations about my value as an information slave to social networks like Facebook. Using their 150MM revenues last year and dividing by approximately 100 million current users, we get a value of only $1.50 per year per average user.
The value of an average user in terms of the capitalization of these companies is obviously much greater. Facebook is (over) valued by some measures at 15 billion based on Microsoft paying 240 million for a tiny share. By that metric I am worth $150 to the company. By traditional stock metrics this should jive in logical ways with the revenue and profit potentials, but the internet economy has shattered many of the old sensibilities about company values, which these days are largely a function of hype, competitive takeover strategies, and other unusual metrics.
Digg for sale! Again. This time it’s for real. Maybe.
TechCrunch is reporting that Digg is likely to get sold soon - probably to Google and probably for about $200,000,000. Good for Kevin Rose and the VC folks, but I’d like to know from the key Diggers if they’ll feel any loyalty to the new owners or to the project. Also, do they think they are owed more than … zero… on this deal?
Social sites do offer their participants something of value = participation and platform - but are there “losers” in these equations?
How do the high level participants who have put in thousands of hours and made the site what it is feel about these cash outs?
I’m wondering how often distribution of equity during the *liquidity* event properly reflects the building of equity. Entrepreneurial capitalism correctly asssumes you need to highly reward risk to get folks to take business risks and innovate. But as Mike Arrington has noted entrepreneurs have a value system that appears to actually assign a high value the thrills and chills of the experience. Thus to get optimal production and innovation it appears to me we need to pay “deeper” on these big internet deals. In the case of a YouTube, DIGG, or Facebook I’d find a way to reward those down the food chain in some proportion to their contribution to the enterprise. It’s possible that these rewards would be small enough that I’m wrong to think this matters much in the overall equation of optimizing the capitalist experience, but even a modest reward would brand the mega deals as “fairer” than simply a situation where fat cats effectively exploit self-motivated worker bees who have generated the user content and social networking that the market values so highly right now.
Social Networking = Facebook? Myspace is more likely to be an average person’s social space.
Marshall’s at Read Write Web is right to question some of the prevailing social networking wisdom.
He notes that the ongoing Facebook frenzy is driven in part by folks who are infatuated with Facebook while they keep foolishly thinking Myspace is of little long term significance. The numbers show how Myspace remains *the* key social media player, and trends suggest this will be the case for some time.
2008 will see a tidal wave of social online activity and applications
My prediction about the evolution of the internet in 2008 is that we will see a lot more excellent applications like Flickr and Picasa to store, organize and share stuff as well as a lot more Twitterfeeds and Tumblrs which allow you to more easily share and assemble content you have stored or created elsewhere.
I don’t think there will be more huge breakthroughs in search or social applications, rather we’ll see people increasing and refining their use of social applications (and to a lesser extent search aps) and we’ll seee a huge number of new programs arise to accommodate the tidal wave of online social activity.
We’ll see blogging go much more mainstream and probably show signs of levelling off in the affluent world as those of us who are compelled to write all get blogs. People in tech who like to write already have blogs, and people out of tech who like to write are mostly in the process of “getting blogs”, and I mean that in both senses of the word “get”. In the developing world, with the advent of One Laptop Per Child and other great technology enabling projects, blogging will begin to take off in extraordinary fashion as everybody with something to share will soon have the means to … share it with everybody.
These are exciting times for those of us fortunate to be on earth and online. Let’s not screw it up, OK?
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