Don't worry about Time Spent on Facebook

Is this BI/comScore chart bad for Facebook, or is this what we would expect? BusinessInsider says the time spent is shiftting to other social networks. I am not convinced.

Look at the Facebook developer site: Build Facebook for Websites. Build For Mobile. Build Apps on Facebook. These are strategically important initiatives, all taking the Facebook platform and making the digital world more social, but also taking time and attention off of “Facebook”.

From Facebook's Developer Homepage: this is what Facebook is betting on, and consumers are flocking to it. I can't prove it with the data above, but if you're only looking at minutes on the site, that's what you'd see.

Behavior Networks like Pinterest are easy to start because the Facebook Identity layer is there for support - if Facebook were Microsoft it would probably have shut off Pinterest's access to the open graph; Facebook is a very different kind of company.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-facebooks-engagement-has-peaked-and-now-its-falling-2012-5#ixzz1vjRLWPry

Could your ISP track your Roaming via CableWiFi?

The downside of the CableWifi roaming partneship is clearly about privacy.  TheNextWeb reports that five major ISPs team up for massive Wi-Fi sharing effort across the US.

Imagine the ad targeting possibilities – with a single sign on as you roam the country, your ISP/MSO record is now going to follow you around he country.   Now with a slick landing page over wifi, or a flag on your addressable cable box, your surfing and travcel habits are now even more interesting fodder for multi-screen ad targeting.  It would be fascinating to know whether the CableWifi folks will be partnering with an offline/online cookie solution.  

According to the article:

In what will be a massive win for US cable company subscribers, five of the country’s largest cable providers have announced that they will combine to offer each other’s customers access to their own metropolitan Wi-Fi networks — the largest such project in the US to date.

The partnership will include Bright House Networks, Cablevision, Comcast, Cox and Time Warner Cable and will include access to over 50,000 Wi-Fi hotspots across the US under the CableWiFi brand.

...

In order to connect to the hotspots, subscribers simply have to look for a CableWiFi network and then connect using the same details that they use when connecting to their existing provider’s networks. Over the next couple of months, those networks will automatically connect to these networks when they are near a CableWiFi hotspot.  

Reminder: free wifi is hardly EVER free.

My Googa Mooga Experience: Yum, Poor Lexus

For an event with its own - slickly designed location-aware iPhone app - the expectations were prety high. All week i was thinikng, "This is what the events experiences of the future will be like." If so, lord help us...

Spent 5 hours at the free event today; I didn't feel ripped off in the way that Gotham Gal and many of her commenters (where some of this rant also appears) did, but definitely felt the food-serving capacity was completely off for the number of people there. I felt pretty happy about getting a Spotted Pig burger instead of waiting 4 hours for a table, but the 200 people-long line for Luke's Lobster was incomprehensible.

What really bothered me, though, was the atrocious AT&T and Verizon service. The only thing the festival drained faster than my wallet (though I wasn't totally unhappy about the beer tent) was the battery on my iPhone. I would have tried to tweet, check in, or text, from the time we got to Prospect Park onward, even as we left the festival area late afternoon, no email, Text, calls, or Foursquare.

I feel the worst for Lexus.

They had this really cool Instaprint booth in the "Third Rail Coffee" tent, printing photos tagged with their hashtag. ZOMG - where have you been all my life. Maybe if I had been able to use Twitter at all, I would have seen some tweets about it!!!

After a day of trying in vain to text my friends about the Luke's Lobster line, tweeting a branded hashtag seemed like a pipe dream at best and salt in the wound, at worst.

There was no way to know about the hashtag outside the booth, and I must say that knowing how much the Lexus sponsorship (combined with the Extra Mooga integration) likely cost (including branded VIP shuttle to and from the Extra Mooga area), I'm hoping the whole Instagram ecosystem doesn't get blamed for the poor ROI of this one installation.

Like the rest of the festival's data services, the one social-media friendly element was a total dud.

Enjoyed the Crawfish Monica, Jean Georges Chicken Sandwich, Craft's Duck Dog, and some excellent beer. I had the Southampton Abott 12, and the Harviestoun Old Engine Oil. It was pretty amazing how much local/ specialty beer was displayed by Brooklyn Brewery and Saranac, but it seemed like by 2pm they were all empty kegs.

But you'd never know I was there if you're my Foursquare friend...but I suppose I covered that already.

Facebook will know the future before you can Tweet it

What were you doing last night?  Mark Zuckerberg had a hackathon.  Oh yeah, and today his company went public.

I have been thinking about valuation of Facebook all week, and i think whatever the offering price is, it's wrong, and the GM announcement just made things worse by focusing on revenue in the Millions.  The valuation should not be  based on revenue.

Instead we are looking at the premiere testing ground for defining social expereiences and ad products across multiple channels based on the behavior and reactions of real users.  The future is clearly coming, where recommendations and votes of confidence from friends will be louder than advertising.  With the end of broadcast, and even the end of web portals,  attention is a strategic asset.  And Facebook has a boatload of attention, because we are addicted to news about other people.  

This need to gossip, and the need to share, is a basic human need- It's Brain Candy, according to Harvard researchers.

To be cute about my hypothesis:  Facebook will know the future, ship an awesome product and move on,  before you can Tweet it. 

Facebook is in a dominant market position to be able to take the attention people spend on the platform, across devices and all over the social web, to find out what works before any of their competitors, and with enough scale to stay ahead.  As long as they do not piss off users (the product being sold to advertisers) then the business is incredibly valuable.  I don't really know how to value it, but you must imagine some of these platforms competing with each other, and almost no one can compete with Facebook in this regard. 

It comparatively easy to build a behavior network to scale, but people are growing tired of joining new identity networks - they already have Facebook, or Linkedin, or Google,  and it is so easy to get traction by just riding over the top of that; consumers will begin to expect it.  Such a strategic advantage is incredibly valuable, and suggests that Facebook might even have a business when many of these other platforms just get boring.  Facebook will be the social layer people use - and that could echo for a decade or more.

Facebook keeps saying they are not trying to be a great company, they are trying to make a great product, and while the effects are similar the emphasis contained therein produces really remarkable results.  So don't worry about getting the valuation right, because they are going to ship a lot of code before anyone figures out the generational shift in behavior and advertising we're in, but I think Facebook might be the company that gets there first.

Facebook stock closed barely above the offer price - find me someone at Facebook who really cares about that, instead of shipping  a great product.  Their strategy? Culture as strategy.  Facebook tries to get people to enjoy but not flaunt their wealth and these norms suggest that inside Facebook is brewing...the next Facebook.

Path, Twitter, LinkedIn and Foursquare: Can there be more than one identity network

iden·ti·ty. noun \ī-ˈden-tə-tē, ə-, -ˈde-nə-\:  the distinguishing character or personality of an individual -Merriam-webster.com

I suggested in my previous post about identity networks that Behavior Networks have certain properties.

But what about Identity networks?

Identity networks are primarily networks of connections, not content.  Even though content rides on top, identity (friends, co-workers, classmates, teammates etc) is defined by connections between users are the primary organizing principle.

Behavior networks don't need to or even really care to store your data of this variety.  To some degree, this is about the maturity of the network itself.  Path is well-funded, and doesn't necessarily need to generate revenue - it is focusing on creating a product people love.  It is also riding the tide of people who think identity networks are too powerful.

This property of identity networks is quite interesting.  Who is the customer, from Facebook's perspective? Depending on your point of view, the customer is the one who pays (the advertiser) or the user (the person who registers an account for their identity).  What if those two groups do not want the same thing?  So identity networks are constantly seeking to grow revenue without alienating users, who produce the inventory for sale to advertisers.

The inventory is connections, and content, and the trackable data within the network, and we are now at the point where users have more control, but also less power in this equation.  They have more discrete levels of control over their information, but less aggregate power: their information remains on the site.  The business of Facebook marketing seeks endlessly to grab data from users, turn it into inventory and find willing bidders for that inventory.

LinkedIn is Facebook's strongest rival identity network.  LinkedIn has added many more content behaviors than I really thought possible, but it has proven its staying power and has  a commanding advantage in terns of data that is increasingly an opportunity for display advertising and the emerging corporate pages that employees are now connecting to. What remains under-leveraged is the extension of LinkedIn's identity network into the physical and corporate IT environments. I'll do a separate post about some strategic opportunities along those lines for LinkedIn.

The value of a network increases exponentially with the number of people (nodes) and the number of connections between them, but as users become aware of the power dynamic in which they stand, value is being drained out of the network.  This is first reputational damage done by privacy scandals and the like, and subsequently by users who defect to behavior networks or leave the social world altogether.  this is why Facebook runs aggressive re-engagement campaigns for users who have not logged in regularly.  

Path is somewhere between a behavior and identity network, and seems chastened by the address book privacy scandal from just a few months ago.  In fact, if you go back to the launch of Path's app "With" which had a very simple photo sharing mechanic for sharing who you are With, Path lets us know they are in the business of building networks:

as we continue our quest to build new types of networks which maintain their quality over time, we have been fascinated by the idea of an interaction network. Or, as we enjoy calling it, the With Graph.

Interaction networks, or behavior networks, can be discrete products, to test features and bring a feature set clearly into focus before adding it into a product.  It's clear that this ethos is infused within Path, as many have discovered.  Check out Path's About web page - which I have labeled below; the lesson: don't build when you can get all of the functionality without woorying about the infrastructure?

 

These are just some of the issues that companies struggle with.  Do we build our own networks, or extend others?  Do we have the ability to trust business partners to host our content, and critical utilities, when they are focused, precise, but not under our control?  One of the side effects of a services-oriented world, in which marketing services are delivered by a multitude of vendors and in-house solutions, is that identity and  behavior networks can be easily adopted into the marketing ecosystem - will it be you, or your competitor who gets there first?

Foursquare has a better shot at being a location-enabling platform, and it is doing a great job of expanding the behaviors - from check-in to discovery - that can be built with the network.  It could become a centralized clearinghouse of your place in physical space, enabled with your permissions and enriching digital interactions.  Foursquare's connections are transmit location information, which has different sensitivities, and it's been harder for other social networks to effectively create location-sensitive content filters.  The rich opportunity for serving deals and enriching merchant relationships arising from actual, physical visits and commerce.   Perhaps Foursquare could a platform for retail commerce, featuring payments and offering retailer CRM opportunities..but it will have to become a stronger Identity network in order to do so.

I will address ways to profit from this tension between behavior networks and identity networks, and how to effectively leverage behavior networks, in my next post.