It's Rishi

I’m a day late in posting this but congrats to the team and I’m confident we’re finally going to get past the ALDS this year. And once we grind it out with the Yankess in the ALCS, we’re in the World Series baby. =)

If you want to catch the final out and a little bit of the post-game celebration both on the field and in the clubhouse, watch it on YouTube.

I’m not a big fantasy sports enthusiast but I usually participate in fantasy baseball and football every season. Anyone that plays, or has played, fantasy sports is that one thing you crave is real-time player news and stats. If your players are currently involved in a game you want to know exactly how they’re performing in that game, and if they’re not in a game, you want to know if there’s any injury updates or other news that might affect their future performance.

Most people use the Web to satisfy this hunger for player information. That often means watching the game on TV with a laptop in your hands or if your out at the mall shopping, it means running into the Apple store and checking the latest fantasy stats. Well, the good news is that technology is soon going to be making the life of a fantasy player easier.

Sprint NFL Mobile

A few weeks ago, Sprint launched a free application for their Vision and Power Vision (that’s what they call their data plan add-on for phones and it costs $15/mo for unlimited data) called NFL Mobile. Here are some screenshots of NFL Mobile running on a Samsung A900:

I tried it out yesterday and I can happily say it rocks. You fire up the application and you instantly get the latest NFL scores and news. The coolest feature is that you can personalize the application by adding any number of players to a “My Players” list. Whenever you view “My Players”, it shows you the latest fantasy stats for those players. Now, whenever I’m on the go, in just a few seconds, I can fire up NFL Mobile on my phone and see how my players are doing. This is an application that I honestly would have expected a mobile carrier to charge a couple dollars a month for. For Sprint to offer it free is very cool.

Yahoo! Sports for TV

Now for a real glimpse into the future. As I said earlier, a common sight for the typical fantasy player is to be on the sofa, laptop in hand, watching the game. What’s the natural evolution of this? Fantasy stats on your TV screen while you’re watching the game. How badass is that?! Well check out this screenshot of Yahoo! Sports for TV that Yahoo’s Digital Home team is launching this morning:

The features of this are the ones you would expect and is very similar to the Sprint app: league scores, fantasy stats of your own personalized list of players, and a live gametracker. Now that I have you all excited, here’s the cooler: you need a new “entertainment PC” that is Intel Viiv enabled. From this Wikipedia article

Viiv is a particular combination of CPU, mainboard chipset, software, Digital Rights Management and network card. It is intended for primary use as an in-home media and desktop platform with the ability to operate as a normal PC or as a hardware media player/centre – running applications, playing DVDs, CDs, MP3, photographs and games as well as subscription based (partially DRM protected) content such as ILoveFilm, Napster and SKY

. I didn’t spend a lot of time figuring out exactly what’s up with Viiv, but because of some DRM issues, it seems like you probably won’t be able to take any Windows MCE system and make it work. An example of a Viiv-based PC is the new Dell XPS 410.

Since the marriage of TV and Web content is inevitable, I’m going to bet that many more solutions like the new Yahoo! Sports for TV are on their way. Kudos to Yahoo! for making the first leap even if most people, including me, won’t be able to enjoy it just yet.

Forums are a big part of my online life. I spend at least 5-10 hours per week reading and posting on forum message boards. I’m far from alone. The largest forums on the web have well over a million members and have tens of thousands of posts every single day. Each forum, whether five hundred members or five million members, represents a community of people who enjoy sharing their thoughts, knowledge and experiences with one another. Some genre-specific communities, like Bimmerforums are focused on BMW discussions while many others are general interest and host discussions on a variety of topics.

For the most part, the only activity on these forums is the message board. There’s none of the other forms of interaction like blogging, photo sharing, friend networks, etc. that you’ll find on a typical social networking site. Where forums traditionally focus on topic-based discussion, social networking sites are all about connecting people in many different ways in order to foster interaction.

There’s thousands of forums on the Web which means there are thousands of these tight user communities. Each one of these forums represents sort of a cluster of interaction in the vast space that is the Web. So you have thousands of these clusters just floating in Internet space. Why not enable these forum communities to interact in the many different ways that you can on social networking sites? Furthermore, why not turn these forum communities into formalized social networks and then, for the first time, connect all these thousands of forum communities together?

Well, that’s what a new company called Zoints is trying to do. Zoints is very similar to your typical social networking site such as MySpace but it has a couple very important distinctions. The main distinction being that Zoints enables users to associate themselves with communities within the site. Each community represent an existing forum on the Web. Zoints has developed custom integration with many of the popular forum software packages. Forum owners who want to integrate Zoints into their forum can apparently do so quite easily. Once a forum has integrated Zoints, a forum user can browse the profiles of other forum members, add them as friends, and all of that other usual social networking stuff.

Zoints has already signed up over 200 forums, however only a few of those are large. Still, though, it looks like Zoints is doing a pretty good job hooking forums to sign on. From what I can tell, David Champan, the founder of Zoints, seems fairly well-connected in the world of forums so that’s going to help Zoints sign up communities. (Click here for an interview of David Champan on TheAdminZone forum.) The main selling points of Zoints to forum owners are that Zoints will help bring new members to the forum (Zoints claims that 50% of new Zoints users do not belong to any forums), increase ad revenue for the forum owner since the forum owner will get AdSense impressions on it’s own user’s pages, and helps to build the forum’s own brand and build a tighter community.

This all very much makes sense to me and I’m a big proponent of the power of forum communities. In my last company, Revunity, we built a product exclusively for forums, called Turf. Turf failed for a couple reasons: failed to effectively market it to forum owners and didn’t have forum software integration. It seems like Zoints is effectively tackling both of those issues.

I signed up on Zoints and, while not the prettiest site design, it seems pretty fast and has all the typical social networking features that you’d expect. Here are the issues I think Zoints will face:

• One basic question is do forum users want to expose their profiles to other members of the forum? Part of the reason forums are so popular is the sense of anonymity that users enjoy. You can be and act any way you want because people don’t know who you really are. All of the popular forum software packages already allow users to describe themselves in reasonable detail via user profiles. Yet few people do. Moreover you never see anybody using their real picture as their avatar. So will users want to publish their real-life photo albums for the rest of the forum to see?
• Will Zoints dilute the sense of community of each forum? For the most part, users on the larger forums that I’m on are very wary of new members (aka newbies or “noobs”) and generally fear mass influx of new members to their community. Each new member is seen as a small step towards the dilution of the existing community. Of course, some users turn out to be great additions to the community while others are detrimental. Right now, most new users to Bimmerforums likely come either from friends of current members or people who found the forum through a search engine while searching for BMW topics. In either of these situations, there’s a much better chance that the user will be a valuable forum member versus a user who stumbles upon Bimmerforums on Zoints. Ultimately, if the culture of a community gets diluted, this hurts the uniqueness of the forum and that is not in the interest of the forum members or forum owner.



• Right now Zoints is rapidly building its userbase by signing up forums and automatically getting access to all the members of each of these forums. The marketing pitch that Zoints makes to communities promises new members and ad revenue. While I do think that Zoints will help bring exposure to forums (this is especially important for small forums), I really doubt this is going to bring much in the way of ad revenue. As has been mentioned over and over, CPM rates on social networking sites is horribly low. Even at $1 CPM (which is very, very optimistic), a hundred thousand profile page views is only $100 in ad revenue. And since the forum owner only gets a portion of the total impressions, this is more like $50 (and again this is based on a very, very optimistic CPM). The fact is, Zoints is getting way the better deal out of its partnerships with forums. Zoints is getting the forum’s userbase for dirt cheap (the only cost is the ad-sharing). It’s a smart strategy but if forum members become dissatisfied, the forum relationships could quickly turn sour. Of course, once Zoints has sucked up the forum’s userbase, if the forum wants to walk away at that point, I don’t think Zoints will be too teary eyed. They’ll have gotten what they wanted: the forum’s users to become Zoint members.
• While forums are a big part of my online life, that is not true for the majority of Internet users. In fact, I recall a statistic that something like only 15% of Internet users visit atleast one forum on a regular basis. If even 50% of these users are on Zoints, that’s only 7.5% of the Internet population. For the rest of the 92.5% of people, I just don’t see any reason for them to migrate to Zoints from MySpace, Facebook, and other established social networks. Furthermore, if I’m going to invest time into building a profile, I’m going to do it on the social network that has the largest reach.
• This leads me to the biggest issue that I see for Zoints. MySpace (and other social networks) can easily add a “Forum/Other Communities” affiliation type to user profiles like they currently do with fraternities, clubs, companies, etc. Users could then add which forums they’re a member of and users could then search profiles by forum membership. Voila! You’ve pretty much got Zoints.

It came to my attention here and on TechCrunch a couple of hours ago that there has been a few changes on Facebook tonight. In addition to a minor makeover to the look of certain pages on the site, the two changes with the biggest potential impact are the News Feed and the Mini-Feed.

News Feed highlights what’s happening in your social circles on Facebook. It updates a personalized list of news stories throughout the day, so you’ll know when Mark adds Britney Spears to his Favorites or when your crush is single again. Now, whenever you log in, you’ll get the latest headlines generated by the activity of your friends and social groups.

Mini-Feed is a new part of the profile that shows all the latest stuff someone has added on Facebook. Mini-Feed is similar, except that it centers around one person. Each person’s Mini-Feed shows what has changed recently in their profile and what content (notes, photos, etc.) they’ve added.

So basically a record of each action you perform on Facebook and each profile update you make is logged and listed both on your profile and is streamed to all the people in your network. Of course, the intent of this feature is to help keep your friends updated with happenings in your life. So this is a great feature right? Here are some reactions from Facebook users on a big message board called OT that I’m on:

“this is horrible. i might just kill my account now”
“this is complete bullshit.”
“god damn these are stalker tools at its finest”
“good thing i graduated so i don’t use this anymore.”
“the Newsfeed business is the worst thing they could’ve possibly done to the site”

and my favorite comment which humorously points out how the feed system can be manipulated…

“I just got into a relationship, got engaged, got complicated, got married and now I’m single”

The facelifted UI also got negative reactions mainly because people think it’s too cluttered. One guy likened the messy design to MySpace, another wishes for a return to the simple purity of Facebook of 3 years ago, and another was worried about getting epileptic seizures from the new layout. =)

One aspect I think people overlooked is that you can delete any item from your Mini Feed that you don’t want people who view your profile to be alerted about. Facebook needs to emphasize this point. Currently there’s a tiny blue ‘x’ to the right of each item in your Mini Feed and I think people are not noticing it. However it’s not clear if deleting an item from your Mini Feed also deletes it from being published to News Feeds of people in your network.

We all know that a big reason why social networks are big is because people enjoy seeing what’s going on in other people’s lives. But there’s a big difference between looking and stalking. The News Feed feature turns social networking into social stalking and that’s just creepy. I think Facebook really needs to re-evaluate how the system works. Facebook has recently caught criticism from users who feel like the company just keeps stuffing the site with unnecessary additions (i.e. workplace communities) that spoil what once was an authentic experience. One of the best comments in the discussion was one user’s crude, yet truthful, opinion of what Facebook once was and what it’s now becoming.

The beauty of Facebook is to find people in your classes to borrow a book or locate a local college slut for a hookup. It’s now marketed to those who play wall tag with each other and try to make it a more sophisticated MySpace.

If you have a Facebook account, check out the changes for yourself.

UPDATE: Fred Stutzman had some great comments on this topic. Click here.

UPDATE 2: Just saying thanks to Margaret Kane at CNET News, Jack Schofield at the Guardian in the UK and Oliver Ryan at CNNMoney.com for quoting this post of mine in their news coverage of this story.

UPDATE 3: A reader asked me to comment on what I thought Facebook could have done differently. Here is an excerpt from a comment that I made on Fred Stutzman’s blog:

I feel like the biggest mistake Facebook made was in the rollout of the feed system. They should have given users a heads-up about the feature in advance of the launch and explained to users the benefit of the feed system and the related privacy issues (and include steps on how to control privacy). From all the comments I’ve read, I think people are negative because they logged into Facebook this morning and saw that a detailed log of their actions on the site is now in the public domain.

If I put my cell phone # on my profile, that is my choice and I do so knowing that it will be publicly available. Facebook did not give users the choice to publish their action history via the News Feed. They just went ahead and did it. Sure, the user can go back and delete individual items from their feed but it’s not hard to see why tons of Facebook users are having knee-jerk reactions of anger due to privacy invasion feelings. Users felt like they’ve lost full control of their Facebook identity.