Tag: facebook

How many friends do you get to keep?

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

The Sunlight Foundation went into the weekend with a hit piece on the much-maligned re-designed GOP.com.  Over at TechRepublican, James Richardson started the week with a well-researched rebuttal, noting that Sunlight missed a couple of items in the shadows in decrying the projects price tag.

But for the site’s well-documented technical faults, on the internet content is king, so there’s at least reason to laud the Republican new media operation:  The Facebook Friendship Fairness Czar application.  The application tallies the number of your friends and assesses a “tax” reflecting how many you have over the average Facebook user’s 120-friend total.  It’s a pretty neat way to needle the Obama Administration’s tendency to entrust policy decisions to executives with no Congressional oversight.  The postcard alerting you of your tax is actually kind of funny, too:

friendship fairness

Facebook is a necessity for any new media operation – even MySpace knows that now.  That means finding creative ways to connect and keep people coming back.  Even if GOP.com has its problems, at least the Republican party is thinking strategically.

Facebook and FriendFeed: Boardwalk and Park Place

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

The news which broke yesterday about Facebook acquiring FriendFeed makes good business sense, but it won’t be the last big deal of its kind where two online properties merge.  And once those deals and mergers become more common, you can be sure that Washington, DC will start looking at social networks in a whole new way.

With rumblings already beginning that Google’s near-ubiquitous nature may create trust concerns among federal regulators,  Facebook is moving toward it’s own kind of ubiquity.  For example, FriendFeed used to be a central place to aggregate your social network activity; once the details of the merger are worked out, you’ll be doing that on Facebook.  Facebook won’t just be one place where you share your life online, it will have the ability to be the central hub.

And that seems to be the ultimate goal for Facebook – to be the internet extension of your life.  Just as you might walk out the front door to enter the real world (assuming you live outside of Washington, DC) Facebook would be the place where you start your activity on the web – whether connecting with friends, shopping, or catching up on the news.

If it sounds ambitious, think about Google’s current online dominance.  How many people do you know who have a Gmail account?  How many have Google as their home page, or check current events through Google News?  When you want to find out about someone’s background, how do you start?  By Googling them, of course.  Considering that, 10 years ago, no one knew anything about Google other than it was a 1 with 100 zeroes after it, that makes Facebook’s apparent ambitions pretty reasonable.

That is, until someone at the Securities and Exchange Commission who understands technology starts asking whether losing niche social networks/social media services (like FriendFeed) hurts consumers through a shrinking marketplace where the currency is personal data.  If the current administration isn’t thinking about this yet, it will almost definitely be on the radar screen of the next.  And then the online mergers and acquisitions may be come very big deals.

No Twitter? OMG!

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Everything is ok now, but the digital apocalypse was almost upon us yesterday, as both Twitter and Facebook went down (apparently due to an attack aimed at a Georgian political blogger by Russian hackers).  Somehow, humanity survived.

This was apparently big news, despite the fact that Twitter, GMail, and other groups have occasional service hiccups.  But some additional factors may have given this story more legs than usual.  First, with unemployment staying high, there were more people without day jobs affected deeply by a lack of an online life.  Second – and much more importantly – is that more and more journalists are using Twitter to follow politicians.  If something happens to a journalist, it’s much more likely to hit the news.

The guys having the beer already agree

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

One week ago today, the Cambridge Police Department and Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates released a joint statement, with both sides admitting the professor’s arrest was a “regrettable” escalation, and that dropping the charges of disorderly conduct was a “just resolution” to all sides.  Both sides had kissed and made up when, hours later, the President accused one side of “acting stupidly” – a statement which, while apparently true, was just as apparently incomplete.

Now, someone has lost their job over it. Lee Landor, an aide to Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, criticized Obama’s criticism on Facebook, stating that arresting officer James Crowley was doing his job.  In another post, she called Sharptonian racial arsonists to task be questioning the idea that all white people in positions of power are evil racists.  According to Stringer’s flack, Landor’s comments “were totally inappropriate and in direct contradiction to the views of the borough president and his office.”  I’m not sure what parts of Cambridge, Mass. fall under the jurisdiction of the Manhattan Borough President, but apparently disagreement on this local issue and the national politics surrounding it constituted an irreconcilable difference.  Landor was forced to resign today (adding one more to the unemployment rolls).

The President will invite Gates and Crowley to the White House so they can make up “officially” and look like a peacemaker.  Crowley will, if he wants it, gain a degree of notoriety as the victim of a witch hunt at the hands of Sharpton and his ilk.  And for a professor who heads a department named after a Marxist who renounced his American citizenship, a racially-tinged flap with the police is a guaranteed moneymaker – Gates could make six figures talking at campuses in the next month and never leave Massachusetts.  Hopefully, Landor can find a way cash in on her involvement in this controversy as well.

Dot-com 2.0?

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

I talking about social networks and online environments with a colleague this week, the 400-pound gorilla of the web 2.0 world came up: nobody is making any real money yet.  “What people don’t realize,” he said, “is that YouTube has a lot of views, but has been losing its shirt.  Facebook doesn’t make money.  Twitter doesn’t make money.”

It’s a good point.  Just as the “dot-com” craze launched a bubble and an eventual bust in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Web 2.0 industry has a bubble of its own.  Outside of Google – who has made tons of money, but is seeing their business model coming under attack from privacy groups – most companies have been supported by venture capital.

For all their popularity, Facebook and Twitter will have to figure out some way to make money off the masses who use them or they could find themselves endangered. And while some recent innovations (like Facebook opening up it’s back-end programming) make these sites more useful to more people paradoxically make it harder to make money.

For the past year and a half especially, people have tracked and managed Twitter accounts via third-party programs either on their laptop or mobile phone – people rarely go to Twitter.com.   With Facebook opening up their programming, it invites the same pattern of usage.  In other words, both these sites promise to offer infrastructure for people to use for sharing content – but without having eyeballs on their actual sites, they can’t rely on the advertising revenue stream that so many other online companies have used as their bread and butter.  That’s why there’s some speculation that browser companies might take over social networking as an attractive add-on to Firefox, Chrome, or Internet Explorer.

At the same time, outside groups have an interest in keeping these services afloat.  Politicians and advocacy campaigns come to mind immediately as entities who have benefited from online networks.  But wherever monetization ultimately comes from, at some point the monied interests who have supported the web 2.0 bubble will look for a return on their investment.  If that return isn’t there, this bubble may burst, too.