It's Rishi

Lookery, an ad network for Facebook and other social networks with developer platforms, announced that, as part of their effort to rapidly grow their inventory, they are offering guaranteed minimum of 12.5 cents CPM for the next three months for an exclusive on the application’s traffic. 12.5 cents CPM at first glance seems awfully low but one must consider the alternatives.

Ad rates, in this case we’re talking in terms of CPM, generally correlate directly with context. Stronger context means a more focused audience. Targeted ads for this audience brings in high rates. For Facebook apps that have pages with real context, it’s likely that they can and should do much better than 12.5 cents. Depending on the content genre, it may take a bit more legwork on the part of the developers to find the right advertisers who will pay, but if the volume is there, it shouldn’t be too hard. However, for apps that have no real context (the majority of apps), 12.5 cents CPM may be about as good as they can get. Facebook itself sells its “flyer” ad space (the left column under the nav links) for not much more than this. In fact, I recently paid about 20-25 cents CPM for an ad and that was when I instructed Facebook to serve my ad only to a very precise demographic (matching only ~40k users out of the 50M+ Facebook userbase). Without such targeting, I would have gotten away with paying much less.

From my own experiences, I’ve found SocialMedia to be quite lucrative. SocialMedia advertisers, primarily developers who are buying installs for their own applications, pay 15 cents and upwards for a click. When SocialMedia first launched, when we published their ads prominently at the top of our canvas pages, we saw eCPM as high as $2 or so. Now it’s less, but still is above 50 cents eCPM. My hunch though is that applications which serve massive page views, particularly a large number of page views per user session, will see decreasing eCPM from SocialMedia. There’s only so many ads that each user is going to click in a session, no matter how many page views in length. Again, this is just a hunch though.

So, if you are one of the application developers that has a massively popular application which offers no meaningful context, then Lookery’s offer is probably pretty attractive. And this type of developer is exactly who Lookery wants in order to achieve their goal of adding a billion page views of inventory a month for the next few months.

PRN (Paul, Rishi, Nick) just launched a new Facebook app called My Apple Life. It allows users to share the Apple products that they have and want on their Facebook profile. Also, users can find others that have the same products that they do and engage in discussions like “What’s the best waterproof case for my iPod Nano?” Check it out…

It was rumored back in August that Facebook would be adding friend lists to the site. Many speculated about how exactly friend lists would work and how exactly it might spell the death of the Top Friends app by Slide. Today, four months later, the feature has launched. Were the predictions true? Here are some thoughts:

1) For now, friend lists are private and cannot be made public. Moreover, lists cannot be accessed by the API. Thus no RIP for Top Friends just yet. It’s possible users may be given the option to make lists public and API’s may be able to access lists in the future. For now, though, it would seem that Levchin and Co are okay – heck it wouldn’t surprise me if Slide and RockYou used their leverage to influence Facebook’s decision on this issue.

2) Some other posts have implied that Facebook provides a news feed specifically for each list. That’s false. You cannot currently see a news feed for a specific friend list. You are able to see a list of most updated profiles and status updates for friends of each list though.

3) Anyone suggesting that this feature is a LinkedIn killer needs to do some deeper thinking. I’m not saying that Facebook doesn’t already provide much of the value (keeping track of contacts, people browsing/hunting, etc.) that LinkedIn does, but these private friend lists don’t add much incremental value in making Facebook a professional tool. Facebook already provides enough tools to search through your friends if you need to pinpoint a certain friend or a friend matching a certain (network, interest, etc.)

4) So what does this do? Adds more, finer edges to the social graph. My best bet is that these lists will be exposed via the API such that both Facebook and third-party app developers as well as advertisers (again more edges on the social graphs means more ways to discover behavioral and interest patterns between persons in the social graph) wil be able to take advantage.

5) Why did friend lists take so long to launch? It was four months ago that the API tool dropped a hint as to this functionality. Four months is an eternity in Facebook time. Unless I’m missing something, this feature – in it’s current state – would not have taken that long to develop. Hence, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s more than meets the eye here. We’ll find out soon enough…

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.

Whether you realize it or not, the interactions you have with other people and businesses are a big part of your identity. Every interaction you have says something about who you are. If you kept a journal that summarized every interaction you’ve ever had, that journal would paint an accurate picture of yourself.

Of course, no one actually writes down summaries of interactions they have. However, while you may not actually write anything down, you are likely to record in your head a little memory of the experience i.e. “My barber John kicks ass. Another bitchin’ haircut!” or “WTF, the drive-thru guy seriously doesn’t understand a word of English. I’m never going back! “. Those memories of your experiences usually just remain in your own head. You might share your experiences with friends and family, but that’s about it. As a result, you, and maybe your friends, know that your barber John rocks, but at the same time there’s many more people in your community that are either in search of a good barber or are walking into John’s barber shop with no clue of what to expect.

So what’s a solution? The (now) obvious answer is to rely on members of the community to publicly share their experiences with one another. I can read about the experiences of others who have interacted with this person/business. Generally speaking, this additional information will help me determine whether I want to interact with this person/business.

Okay, so blah blah, what I just described is simply the concept of what we now know to be a community feedback system. Far and away the largest, most mainstream feedback system belongs to eBay. eBay’s feedback system works well because it is a very tight system. Each user on the system is required to validate their identity and each feedback entry is linked to an eBay transaction. Because of these two requirements, it’s relatively difficult to game their system.

People networking sites from social networking sites like Friendster and MySpace to career networking sites like LinkedIn are founded on this principle of exposing one’s identity and reputation for a possible gain. Users of LinkedIn are encouraged to thoroughly describe their backgrounds and solicit endorsements from past colleagues to bolster their professional reputations. The same thing happens on social networking sites. In both cases, your profile page is your reputation so users naturally want to pad it as much as they can. The problem with these sites is that they are much easier to game. There is no concept of identity verification and one can easily fabricate a profile. Nevertheless, networking sites continue to grow rapidly in popularity and will likely be a force to be reckoned with in the identity/reputation space.

For quite some time I’ve been thinking about the implications of reputation on both personal and business interactions in the Internet of the future. One of the most intriguing topics around reputation is privacy. Of course, I want to use my reputation when it can help me get what I want. For example, I’m generally protective of my credit history, but when applying for a loan, I’m more than happy to divulge this information to help me obtain better loan terms. Similarly, even as recently as a decade ago, one’s resume was considered to be a fairly private document. Nowdays, many people make their resumes publicly accessible on the Web in hopes of landing an even better career opportunity.

Right now, fragments of your reputation are spread all across the Internet on different sites. It’s all but impossible for anyone to assemble those fragments to get a complete view. Let’s say you have a a couple eBay transactions gone bad. What if a bank saw that and rejected your loan application because of it? Sounds kinda farfetched but is it really that crazy? After all, your eBay feedback represents real transactions that you were involved in. So, really, we want to utilize our good reputation when it will help us but mask any negative reputation when it might hurt us.

And that is precisely where things get complicated. First of all, how should reputation be applied? What are its boundaries? How can your reputation in one space be applied to another space? Does it make sense? Who gets to decide? As it is now, most reputation systems are closed systems so for now there is no cross referencing. I can have a horrible reputation on a dating site and no one outside of that dating site will ever know.

One site that’s trying to knock down those boundaries is RapLeaf. They’ve built an open community system. Any site in which the users exchange feedback can integrate with RapLeaf. Initially, they’re focusing their attention on the classifieds and bartering space. Basically every site but eBay. There certainly is value in bringing together reputations from many different communities into a single place. If your reputation is stellar across all the communities, then this is a big win for you. However, if you have some holes in your reputation, now they will be visible across many communities. RapLeaf’s mantra is “it’s more profitable to be ethical”. While this mantra makes sense in the context of transactions, the idea of being “ethical” does not always make sense in other contexts.

The bottom line is that within every community, no matter how small or large, that we belong to, we have a reputation. The Internet is slowly revolutionizing how that reputation can be used for and against us.

Hmm.. this post didn’t really come together as much as I wanted too. There’s still some more points that I wanted to cover like universal/portable identities but this post is already too long and disjointed so I’ll stop now…

I was browsing LinkedIn today and noticed something: the advertisements on their site seem to be horribly targeted. For the AdSense ads, I repeatedly got ads for self-storage companies and real-estate search services. I’m not sure what content on my profile and other pages indicate that I might be interested in either of those two categories, but the ads that Google served to me were exclusively those. In LinkedIn’s own “Sponsored links” there’s more crappy ads like for mortgage rates and corporate surveys. It also appears as if LinkedIn has having trouble selling their (non-AdSense) ad space since many pages seem to have less than the max number of ads and the same couple of ads just keep repeating.

In this day and age of Internet advertising, such untargeted ads are pretty appalling. Hey, LinkedIn, do you guys wanna make money? In a recent article, MySpace said that they will be using user profile and behavioral data to better target ads. LinkedIn can and should already be doing the same thing. An easy first step would be to use AdSense’s own section targeting support to focus advertising based on people’s profile summaries. From my profile you can immediatley see key words indicating that I’m a software engineer, founder of a tech startup, a blogger, where I went to school, etc. That’s a lot of valuable data to help improve ad relevancy presented to me. Moreover, if I’m searching for someone in my network with J2ME programming experience, why not serve up ads relevant to Java/wireless development. In this latter example of a search, I have a clear intent for being on the site as opposed to just casual browsing. LinkedIn must make sure to monetize this type of activity.
There may even be some more interesting profiling that can be done by not only looking at people’s own profiles but also looking at the profiles of 1st or even 2nd degree connections.

Anyways, I just found the whole thing pretty shocking. Sites such as LinkedIn generate huge numbers of pageviews yet they generate such small revenue. You’d think that LinkedIn would have done everything possible to maximize the value of their ad space. It seems instead that they’ve already accepted that it sucks and are focusing on premium services. Oh well…

I stumbled upon a very nice essay by Danah Boyd which compares and contrasts MySpace and Friendster and in the process describes the DNA of a social networking site and its users. I have read just about every commentary on social networking, Friendster, Facebook, Tribe, MySpace,… over the past couple of weeks for some research that Andrew and I have been doing. I will go out on a limb and say that if you read one commentary/analysis, read this one. Kudos Danah!

Some quotes:

People were hanging out on Friendster before they hung out on MySpace. But hanging out on Friendster is like hanging out in a super clean police state where you can’t chew gum let alone goof around and you’re told exactly how to speak to others. Hanging out on MySpace is more like hanging out in a graffiti park with fellow goofballs while your favorite band is playing. That said, there are plenty of folks who don’t want to be hanging out in a graffiti park and they are not sticking around on MySpace as a result.

This is the difference between tasks that people are required to do and social life. Social life isn’t about the easy way to do something – it’s about making meaning out of practice, about finding your own way.

the vast majority of Friendster users simply went back to email and IM, web surfing and the occasional blogging. Friendster didn’t meet their needs and the core practices of identity production and social sharing that MySpace offered were not significant enough for this group.

Oh and btw, if you think that you don’t need to care about MySpace, think again. A statistic from a few months back showed that MySpace had over 27 billion pageviews per month. All of Yahoo!’s properties combined is 32 billion. Google is around 10 billion. MySpace also has over 10% of the ad inventory on the Web. Un-freakin-believable.