Ian On The Red Dot

Top story on Techmeme now is about how the interviewer Sarah Lacy did such a terrible job with Mark Zuckerberg founder of Facebook. The most important thing about this breaking story - Who is Sarah Lacy? Actually, the most important thing is - Is She Hot?

Yes, she is.

Anyway, following the common trajectory of most online, and to a certain degree all Silicon Valley related stories, let the backlash against Sarah Lacy backlash begin.

Michael Arrington defends Sarah on Twitter here and here.

What Really Went Wrong with the Zuckerberg Keynote at SXSW — Hint: Sarah Lacy isn’t the Problem

And showing that she isn’t just hot but sassy - her twitter response.

For the past two weeks, I was in camp having my reservist training. Managed to follow some of the tech news via Techmeme. Learned that Bebo established their own platform that was similar to Facebook’s to embrace Facebook application. Today, I managed to log into Facebook and I saw this post. Whoa! Ever since Google launched OpenSocial, there has been speculation if Facebook would open up and join Google’s initiative or even be allowed to join. Well, I guess Facebook just decided to start their own club. OpenSocial is a work in progress and Facebook already has all those developers and applications, so would it be Facebook that makes Social Open? Well, Facebook might be in a better position to ensure that applications for social networks can be written once to run anywhere (i.e. standardization) but would the resulting social network landscape really be open especially since it seems social networks would have to license the Facebook Platform methods and tags.

It would seem that Facebook’s strategy is to control the other social networks’ platform efforts to ensure their Platform’s relevance while Google is trying to create the environment for collaboration between social networks to establish a standard for applications on social networks.

Same Difference?

Facebook as a piece of technology is amazing. As a site that purports to be a social utility that connects you with the people around you, it does just that. It is the ability to fulfill this purpose well that, to me, makes Facebook bad for friendships.

Firstly, weak ties have a place in society. Mark Granovetter in his book “The Strength of Weak Ties” explains how weak ties help spread information to individuals that are not accessible via strong ties.

The problem to me is that while Facebook becomes an effective tool to manage those connections with people that are weak ties, it also creates the danger of making more ties weak.

Take for example birthday wishes. It used to be that the only way to wish a person ‘Happy Birthday’ was to be physically with a person. Then there was mail, so now cards could be sent. Then there was the telephone, so a call just needed to be made. Then there was email. Then there was sms. It became progressively easier to show ‘we care’ as long as we made the effort to remember. Now, even the effort to remember is not needed as Facebook does it for you. Someone left a comment on an earlier post that seemed to indicate that the lessening of effort needed somehow results in the decrease in sincerity. I’m not sure if this is always the case. The message may be of a medium that is easier to use but that does not always make the message less sincere although it can be argued that the medium used is the message.

Granted then that using a medium that takes little effort on your part to communicate with your friends may not always be indicative of a lack of sincerity, how would Facebook be bad for friendships?

Before I go further, I would like to assert that the use of the word ‘friend’ to describe everyone on your social network by sites like Facebook increasingly blurs the distinction between what is an acquaintance and friend to generations that grew up with the Internet. I would like then to make another assertion - that such a distinction is actually important for the proper functioning of society and we are all worse off with the lost of that distinction.

The reason why Facebook is bad for friendships is the use of apps like ‘SuperPoke!’ and ‘Gifts’. ‘SuperPoke!’ is an application that allows you to specify ‘actions to be taken against a friend’. ‘Gifts’ allows you to give a virtual present to a friend which will result in an image representing the gift appearing on the friend’s profile. These applications allow you to do something to show the friend that you are aware of that individual in your online social network if not your life as well as a reminder to that friend that you are still around (i.e. keeping yourself in view). It is as much about the giver as it is about the given.

The problem of the use of such applications is that friendship becomes mediated by a form of media. When I was in Primary School, my friends were classmates and people that I played with after school. We were friends because we were being friends. We did stuff that friends did together. We stood by each other. We encouraged each other when exams came up…

When Friendster popularized online social networks, friends became a collector’s item. Granted that there were always those sort of people who just had to or seemed to know everyone and kept count in that ‘blackbook’, collecting friends became something everyone engaged in naturally by the use of online social networks. While not everyone took it to the extreme like those who seem to max out the number of friends they can have on an account, online social networks brought the concept of ‘having friends’ to the foreground of our consciousness.

Now, with Facebook and similar applications, we have reached a stage where it isn’t just about ‘having friends’ but ‘appearing to be friends’ not just to ourselves but to others in the network. Such applications then work against us. They reduce what could have possibly grown to strong ties to weak ties because little effort is made beyond connecting over applications like Facebook - it is just that easy. The sadder thing would be if existing friendships become reduced because instead of making the effort to meet up and really talk and spend time together, we put that off because being able to connect over Facebook deceives us by making us feel that the existing state of the friendship is healthy and that amount of interaction is sufficient.

Of course, it would probably not be superfluous to point out that I’m using a Timex definition of friendship in a digital age.

Friendship is being redefined by how we use technology. The question then is this - is that a good thing?

You can read about what happened during the event at E27 and Sg Entrepreneurs.  I just have one thing to comment about the night and that is what I learned about Trey who is the programmer of the F8-winning application.  He isn’t a computer science student nor a computer engineering student.  He is majoring in philosophy.

When he shared this about himself, I started wondering about the oft mentioned lack of innovation in Singapore.  And I wondered if it is because students in Singapore are not interested in knowledge across domains.  In other words, are we too specialized?

In NUS, we are made to take modules outside our faculty as part of the university requirements.  Most of the people I knew in Engineering would try to bid for the easier modules - the non-Arts faculty modules.  There was the general consensus that Science modules would be easier for an Engineering student, followed by Business, then Arts.

The friends I had in Arts would try their best to stay away from Engineering modules and go for the Science or Business ones.

There is a tendency to choose the easiest possible module from another faculty with interest in a module sacrificed as a result.

Of course, not all NUS students are like that.  There are those who do choose a module out of interest and worry about grades later although I cannot help but feel they are the minority.

What are the backgrounds of the people interested in being entrepreneurs in this Web 2.0 phase?  More importantly, do we have cross-domain knowledge?  Do we pursue interests outside the domain we are supposed to specialize in?

Why would that be important?  There are many reasons, but one of them is that a problem in one domain can be abstracted such that solutions to that problem which have been solved in other domains could be applied to it.  Increasing our knowledge in other domains adds to our arsenal of problem solving tools, tunes our pattern recognition and trains the abstraction of problems.  These can help us in being more innovative.

I wouldn’t presume that it was Trey’s philosophy background that helped him in being the winner with his application.  But maybe, just maybe, it was because he wasn’t in a computer science course that he didn’t have the ‘we must add more features’ hang-up that programmers arguably seem to have.  Maybe, just maybe that helped him spot that application which was simple in concept and technicalities but was what people wanted and needed.
It is time for us to step out of our little circles.

allfacebook shares Facebook will be launching their new ad system.  This will be the next step after the improvement made with Facebook Flyers which has been argued by ReadWriteWeb that it might not be something Google should be too worried about.  Valleywag talks about Google’s ad system being about servicing expressed intent, while Facebook’s is to service latent intent if not create intent.

What would Facebook’s new ad system look like?  These are my thoughts.

1.  They target you based on your preferences.

With the information entered onto your profile page, they already know a fair bit
about you.  Advertisers can already use Facebook Flyers for what looks like highly
targeted advertising based on preferences which could be revealing latent intent..

2.  They know your relationships.

How does the social graph help in advertising?  It can be used to infer behavior,
intentions and preferences.  How?

Say I have a friend who puts that his interest is rock climbing.  He is connected to
a lot of people whose interests are also rock climbing.  One of his friends has not
put rock climbing as an interest.  Basically, this friend has not bothered with
putting much information on the profile page.  Now, this friend and the one who
likes rock climbing have common friends where a significant percentage of them are a
subset of those who do like rock climbing.  Facebook could infer that this friend
also is into rock climbing.

How about behavior?  This can be inferred by the events you get invited to.  Say
friend A gets invited for lots of events.  They fall into two categories - tech
conferences and clubbing.  But my friend only invites me for clubbing events.  My
friend probably would do so because he as a friend knows I find tech conferences
boring with the lack of hot babes (although I am going to try to score brownie
points by saying Singapore females geeks are HOT ).  So this relationship and how
my friend and I interact using Facebook has revealed important information that can
be used for targeting.

So maybe on a Wednesday morning I might not have any plans yet.  But Facebook knows from the invites that I have been accepting from my friends that I tend to go for clubbing on Fridays but not on a Wednesday.  But what if there is a really good deal for a Wednesday clubbing event?  Or say that it is a Friday morning.  The intent to go clubbing that night is already there.  Why not target it?  Facebook would have the information to allow advertisers to do so.

3.  They already know who the influencers are.

Who are the ones who pass on messages?  Who are the ones who consistently invite
people?  Who are the ones who share stuff?  Facebook already knows that.  More
critically, who are the ones who get their invites accepted?  Who are the ones who
get clickthrus on what they share?  Also, who are the ones who share new stuff as opposed to who are the ones that just pass on stuff.  Now based on relationships and interaction between people, Facebook might be able to deduce who are the innovators or early adopters.
It won’t be too hard to imagine that targeting the influencers and innovators/early adopters with a well constructed message will probably help advertisers achieve better results.

Well, Facebook’s social graph can help provide that information for that extra edge in targeting.

4.  They already know the statistics about the different demographics.

Granted not the whole world is on Facebook, but the number on it is pretty big.  I don’t think it would be too presumptuous to say that major political decisions have probably been made polling less people.  So Facebook is able to establish profiles of different demographics.  What could they possible do with that information?

a.

Sell the aggregated information without revealing individual details to marketing people.

b.

Use that information to target ads off Facebook.  Put a code on your website and tell Facebook what your website is about.  Facebook could use information on your website to deduce the possible profiles of your visitors.  Based on the demographic of the visitors to your site, Facebook could use the aggregated information about the different demographics to know what sort of ads your visitors might most likely be interested in.  They serve relevant ads based on that information.

5.  They know what people are currently interested in.

Related to what people currently put on their profiles, the events they go to, the groups they join and what people share, Facebook will also be able to understand what is the currently hot trend or topic.

Possibly more interesting is when individuals change their profiles.  What is removed?  What is added?  Does this change happen just at the individual level or is it happening across groups of friends?  Across networks?  Across demographics?

Facebook is a data miner’s dream.