big blog

This is a great article on Facebook’s strategy:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140529-c,sites/article.html 

Not sure what will happen with these guys in the coming months, but so far, so good. I’ve been a big fan of Facebook for about a year, and this move just makes me like them even more.

They have been in cahoots with Microsoft from a development perspective for a while. I think it was fairly organic how the relationship started, at least that’s what I heard. Turns out that for a while before the investment, thousands of Microsoft employees where using Facebook. Which makes sense because all of a sudden you can download Visual Studio Express (for free) and the Facebook Developer Toolkit and build a simple Facebook application pretty quickly. And by the way, the toolkit is hosted at Codeplex.com - Microsoft open source code/project website.

Google also has an equivalent, theirs is called OpenSocial. Bebo (UK’s largest social network, and the US’s third largest) says it will back OpenSocial and even launch its own Developer Platform.

So what does this mean? Well, it’s one of the reasons I left my last company, Omnifuse. They used to develop custom social networks. I’m not sure anymore that having your own social network requires that you have your very own custom-from-the-ground-up website. For lack of a better word, you need a “sandbox” where you can just drop in needed features and applications. Of course, it will be important for companies to own some of the intellectual property, but for the most part, a lot of the things we need and use in social network are already developed and available.

Another important consideration is the the fact that if you take advantage of things like Facebook’s application development tools, you’ll be able to tap into the network. This is 90% of the challenge. I’ve been involved in social network development of over 4 years, and it’s never the development of the social network that is difficult, it’s getting membership to grow.

So, good job Facebook and good luck Google. And for all you folks out there getting ready to build your own social network, make sure your strategy includes applications or widgets that will infiltrate and tickle the fancy of your member type who live in other social networks.

KWIRY (http://www.kwiry.com) is an SMS reminder service that just launched yesteday. basically, you text something that you don’t want to forget to: 59479 (k-w-i-r-y). so, say you’re driving and some amazing song comes on your fave 80s hair metal XM station, you can now take out your phone and text “warrant cherry pie” to 59479. then, when you get in front of a computer, you can log on to KWIRY and it will be saved there.

this is dumb. why?

• I have an iPhone, so I would look it up on Youtube and then bookmark.
• I could have just texted it to myself.
• I could have opened up a notes application on my phone and jotted it down.
• I could have emailed myself.

even though this is dumb, they still got $1M from Hummer Winblad. which makes Hummer Winblad, umm, well, you decide.

how can this be not dumb?

• give me an 800 number and put a speech recognition/speech-to-text app in front of it.
• dump the word/phrase into my fave search engine so I can look at it later.
• save what I said in a .wav file so if the speech software fails to recognize what I said, I can try to remember what I slurred (assumming I wasn’t driving while I was slurring).

Mr. Hummer or Mr. Winblad, call me please.

My two new favorite things are: Twitter and Tumblr.

I’m sure you’ve heard of twitter by now. It’s nano- or microblogging, and personally, I’m addicted. It’s the child of the dude who co-founded Blogger. I didn’t get it at first, but being narcissistic and always wanting to tell people about my adventures, I got it really quickly, and so did they people who follow me on it. Imagine that, I am now able to tell my friends and colleagues about my escapades as they happen. The only problem is that my tweets (that’s what your posts are called), start to trail off around midnight or at the point where I’m on my second bottle of champagne, which ever comes first…

Tumblr is rad. To put it succinctly, it’s a tumbler where you put all your stuff in. And stuff, in Tumblr’s case, are all your social media: photos, videos, blog posts, and tweets! All your stuff is aggregated into one site. Again, since I am an exhibitionist, I love the fact that I can share with my fans all my adventures using words (twitter), photos (Flickr), and videos (Youtube).