Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Raj Lalwani, the co-founder and CEO of Hallmark Social Calendar (formerly Social Calendar), a birthday reminder app on Facebook.
In 2007, when Facebook opened its platform to developers, it seemed Facebook was using Microsoft’s playbook—let developers create apps using their platform and see what apps succeed (just like Microsoft did with Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, and Harvard Graphics). Then acquire or clone the successful ones (Microsoft Excel, Word, PowerPoint) as the cash cows and leave the crumbs (relatively speaking) for others. But something seems to have gone wrong—the third-party app ecosystem is not exactly thriving and Facebook still has no cash cows like Microsoft does (Office and Windows).
Instead, Facebook is increasingly looking like Yahoo!—it does everything from Photos and Chat to Email and Places. It provides just enough features to be functional but leaves much to be desired, and increasingly depends on advertising as the revenue model.
Until recently Microsoft had the largest market cap in technology (it’s Apple now). Here is what Facebook should steal from Microsoft’s playbook.
Facebook Must Make Sure The Third-Party App Ecosystem Is Thriving
This is important for two reasons. One, it keeps the platform alive and vibrant for users—Windows would not have been very interesting or successful if all apps came from Microsoft. Two, successful ideas will come from this ecosystem. If the Facebook platform is not viable for app developers, they will continue to look for alternatives and someone will crack the social graph code sooner or later elsewhere. For instance, Apple’s iPhone is becoming a meaningful platform for app developers.
It seems Facebook has thrown the baby out with the bath water when it comes to communication channels that were being abused by some app developers. I used to play Scrabulous on Facebook. I tried playing Scrabble recently but the other player wasn’t notified that it was her move! Since then I started playing Words with Friends on iPhone and it just works. As soon as my friend makes a move, I get a Push Notification. Facebook should handle notifications the same way as publishing on the Wall—ask users for explicit permission to send a notification to a friend.
News feed stories increase engagement and discovery for apps. But the volume of stories generated has forced Facebook to algorithmically decide what stories to show on the home page. Have you visited FarmVille or Causes lately? They both prominently display friend activity on their home page. Why? The same reason that made Facebook so successful—users can see what their friends are doing—an explosive mix of social discovery, social proof and voyeurism. This is where I see the solution for resolving the battle for news feed stories between Facebook and app developers. Instead of each app trying to implement its own friend activity, Facebook should provide an easy way to display the app-specific news feed inside the app. At the same time, Facebook should continue to bubble up interesting stories on its home page.
That leaves the problem of app discovery—reaching out to new users who are not yet app users. If social discovery is going to be the killer app for Facebook (I will come to that in a moment), app discovery is just a small part of that. Showing apps used by a user on their Profile, as Facebook used to do before, is a good start. But when it comes to discovery, Facebook can borrow from another playbook: Google’s. Some developers will be happy to pay for leads. How about sponsored links just above the organic list of apps used?
Facebook Must Find Its Cash Cow—Fast
To me social games like FarmVille seemed like a cash cow. Facebook should have acquired or cloned Zynga. It seems Facebook has chosen a platform angle instead, namely, advertising and Facebook Credits, which has the potential to be a cash cow for Facebook.
However, I believe, “social discovery” is potentially the killer app for Facebook. If you are like me, you discover new restaurants because a friend recommends or takes you there. I always ask my friends about new movies—I know which friends have similar taste as me,and which ones I can safely ignore. The list extends to TV shows, plumbers, books, music, kitchen appliances, and gadgets. (Facebook’s Photos app has become so popular mainly because of social discovery of new photos uploaded by friends. Tagging is just a mechanism to facilitate discovery.) When I buy a book on Amazon.com, I should be able to publish a story for my friends (but not an automatic story—remember Beacon?). When any of my friends clicks on the action link or completes the transaction, Amazon would pay Facebook. Such sponsored feed items should be clearly marked and shown prominently just like sponsored links on Google.
Facebook should look to Microsoft for its playbook to make its platform more developer-friendly, but also sprinkle in a bit from Google’s sponsored links and apply them to social discovery.
I love Twitter for Mac. Love it. It has completely altered my day-to-day workflow. And it has changed the way I use Twitter itself. And that was before I found out about this killer little hidden feature today: Tweet from anywhere.
I don’t know how I missed it before, but apparently installing Twitter for Mac adds a new “Tweet” command to basically a ton of apps running in OS X. MacStories first pointed this out earlier today, and now I can’t get enough.
For example, if you’re browsing the web in Safari or Chrome, highlight a word or passage and right-click. At the bottom of the drop-down, you’ll see the “Tweet” command. Hitting it will populate a tweet for you with the highlighted section. And it works in TextEdit, iChat, Calendar, Mail, etc. If you read it, you can tweet it.
One thing I wish it did in web browser was automatically add a link as well as the text you’re highlights, but baby-steps. I have a feeling that will come.
And yes, plenty of plug-ins have had this ability for a while, but now it’s system-wide. It’s as if Twitter is now baked into OS X.
The SecondMarket Facebook shares auctions are back on after a holiday break, and the valuation is up big time. The last auction prior to this one closed December 15 at $22.75/share. Today it hit $28.26 per share. With 2. 5 billion or so shares outstanding, that’s a $70.65 billionish valuation. A month and a half ago shares were trading on SecondMarket at a $50 billion valuation.
What’s changed? The Goldman Sachs investment announced earlier this month increased the hype even further. No wonder the SEC is starting to pay attention to these trades.
Sounds like Accel Partners may have sold a little before the peak.
The email from SecondMarket is below:
Subject: Privileged and Confidential – SecondMarket’s Facebook Auction Update
To Facebook market participants:
Thank you to those who participated in this week’s SecondMarket auction for Facebook shares. The auction was successful and fully cleared at a per share price of $28.26. Next week, the floor price will be $26.25 and we will require a minimum sale of 25,000 shares. In observance of the national MLK, Jr. holiday, please find the adjusted auction timeline for next week below.
If you own shares that you are eligible to sell and wish to participate as a seller, please complete the attached Seller Information Form and submit it to SecondMarket at [email protected] by Thursday, January 20 at 7:00 PM EST.
Please see below for detailed results on previous auctions and for next week’s adjusted auction calendar:
Previous Auction Results:
Total Shares Cleared to Date: 2,721,265 over five auctions
Clearing Price in Most Recent Auctions:
January 12, 2011: $28.26
December 15, 2010: $22.75
December 8, 2010: $21.90
December 1, 2010: $21.01
Next Week’s Adjusted Auction Timeline:
• Thursday, January 20 at 7:00 PM EST – Seller Information Forms due
• Thursday, January 20 at 8:00 PM EST – Buyers informed of share quantity available and minimum purchase amount
• Monday, January 24 at 12:00 PM EST – Buyer Information Forms due
• Monday, January 24 at 5:00 PM EST – Participants informed of auction results
• Monday, January 24 at 8:00 PM EST – Transaction documentation distributed to buyers and sellers
• Wednesday, January 26 at 4:00 PM EST – Completed transaction documentation due from buyers and sellers
• Wednesday, January 26 at 7:00 PM EST – Notice sent to Facebook, Inc.
By reading this email, the recipient acknowledges and agrees that all of the information contained herein is confidential and that the recipient will keep this information confidential. The recipient further agrees that it will not copy, reproduce, or distribute this email in whole or in part.
Please contact us at [email protected] or 212.668.3919 if you have any questions.
Please note that the information in this email does not constitute an offer to sell to, nor a solicitation of an offer to buy from, nor shall any securities be offered or sold to, any person in any jurisdiction in which such an offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful.
Regards,
Boyd
Garry Tan, one of the cofounders of easy-to-use blogging service Posterous, is moving on from the company. Tan will be leaving to take a position at Y Combinator, where he will serve as a designer in residence. Posterous doesn’t put much weight on titles, but Tan had a hand in the site’s engineering, design, and product development.
Posterous isn’t taking off as quickly as its competitor Tumblr, but it has a solid audience and has recently released a neat Groups feature. Tan didn’t elaborate much on his reasons for leaving, but says that it boils down to wanting to work with smaller teams, which he’ll be able to do at Y Combinator (Posterous is now at around 13 employees). He also added that Posterous is going “gangbusters” and that he expects 2011 to be “really phenomenal”.
Posterous has raised over $5 million, including Y Combinator funding and a Series A round in March 2010.
Here’s Tan’s post announcing the news on his Posterous blog:
Just as Posterous has prospered, grown and changed, so to is it time for me to evolve my role. Effective today, I’m ending my day-to-day development with Posterous and moving into an advisory role. Though my day-to-day may change, my faith in the team and the product is unchanged and unwavering. Posterous is in good hands and on the right track to fulfilling its potential. I am proud of what we’ve built together and look forward to the future with anticipation to see where the team and you, the users, take this very special community.
My greatest passions lie with the early stage of building world-changing consumer products. To that end, I’ve decided to join the team at Y Combinator as a designer-in-residence and help the dozens of top pre-seed startups in the newest Winter 2011 batch reach their potential through excellent user experience.
I am greatly thankful to our team, investors and most of all our users for all the amazing work and adventures. Thanks for all of your support.
Former TechCrunch developer Ben Schaechter left TC a couple months ago to launch his own startup and today we finally get to see the fruits of his labor. Sick of the poor analytics, lack of geographical information and little vote analysis on industry leaders like Poll Daddy, Schaechter built GoPollGo to maximize what he felt was the potential of polling services.
Says Schaechter, “The polling space is crying out for disruption and innovation. There is *so* much information that can be dervived from vistors. When mashed up with users’ opinions, the data gets thoroughly interesting.”
The beautifully designed site is based on a freemium model. It’s simple to make an embeddable poll like this one, this one or this one. Users can then share it with friends via Facebook and Twitter, get comments or discover new polls. Premium subscribers can also access analytics on their polls, segment voting data and as well get reports like the one below.
Schaechter has already had hundreds of users and hundreds of thousands of pageviews since he launched the site two days ago and plans on opening up the premium features to big brands soon, “Think of it as a really simple method of market research.”
Schaechter’s future plans include building out the feature base and community for the bootstrapped GoPollGo as well as raising funding to potentially hire more people. “[We’re] focusing on building the best social polling website on the Internet,” he says.
You can take the “Apple vs. Google” poll here, or just have it out in the comments.
Yesterday we ran a post about Cubeduel, a service that mixes the best (or worst) of Hot or Not with LinkedIn. Fire up the site and it will show you photos of two coworkers — pick the one you’d prefer to work with, and Cubeduel will present you with another pair of photos. It’s addictive, a bit evil, and has skyrocketed in usage over the last few days since it launched. Unfortunately, it took off a bit too quickly.
The service went down earlier today for reasons that were initially unclear — did LinkedIn block the site because it ranks coworkers in a way that isn’t exactly flattering to everyone, or did the site just get too popular, too fast? Turns out it’s the latter — Cubeduel has exceeded LinkedIn’s API limits (which is what one of the site’s creators, Tony Wright, initially guessed). Here’s an explanation from LinkedIn Director of Communications Hani Durzy:
We did not shut Cubeduel down. The application was using our open LinkedIn Developer Platform, which has a daily access limit that is publicly documented. Our developer platform limits are designed to protect our members, and have been in place since the platform program was introduced a year ago. We are in communication with the people behind Cubedeal to discuss how they can move forward. We are always interested in seeing our platform used in creative, innovative new ways by developers.
I followed up by asking if the site might be allowed to exceed the standard API limits, or if Cubeduel would have to find a way to restructure the site to fit within the normal constraints. The answer to that isn’t clear — Durzy says they’re still talking to each other.
Wright says that before the API limit was hit Cubeduel was far exceeding his expectations — he told me yesterday the site would get “hundreds of thousands” of ranked users by the end of the week. Now he says they were “well on our way to millions” before the API limit kicked in.
When Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz launched their venture firm, they talked a good game about things being different; about having a smorgasbord of partners skilled in different areas that could tag in-and-out of portfolio companies as appropriate. And a lot of that sounded like the usual “value-add” venture capital spiel.
But two funds into the firm’s life, that vision is starting to take shape. Witness today’s announcement that Mark Cranney will be joining the firm as a partner. Cranney isn’t some techy whiz-kid, visionary founder or even a financial wizard. He’s a sales and operations guy and his job will be to help teach Andreessen Horowitz’s predominately engineer-centric founders and CEOs to be a little bit more like those things many of them decry: a sales guy, an MBA, a grown-up manager. Look at him! He even looks like a sales guy!
In addition to coaching founders and helping them find the right management talent to hire, Cranney will be building essentially a pre-sales organization within the firm that will constantly scout purchase-level managers at Fortune 500 companies, to pave direct lines to them and know in advance what kinds of products they want to buy, leading to a shorter, almost pre-qualified sales cycle for Andreessen Horowitz’s companies. “The weakness at a lot of venture capital firms is that we know the CEOs or CIOs, but we don’t know the managers making the purchase decisions,” says Horowitz.
I asked how big this group would be and Cranney declined to answer saying that was “proprietary” (See! He talks like a grown up manager too!) but he scoffed when I called it a “gargantuan task,” pointing out he’d built huge sales teams from scratch several times in his career. “That’s the easy part,” he said. Not for the typical geeky founder, of course, and that’s the point.
Like a lot of the firm’s team, Cranney worked at Opsware with Horowitz and Andreessen, where he was the executive vice president of worldwide field operations. He grew the headcount from 10 people to 350, grew revenue from $18 million to $150 million, and had four years of 100%+ growth in new bookings. That’s just not a skill set you see at most VC firms.
If this team works as advertised, it’ll be a huge, huge advantage for the firm. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this become a trend among the well-heeled venture funds, especially if this renaissance in business software blooms. As Cranney says: “If you want to sell to companies you gotta put boots on the ground. That’s not changing.”
Hundreds of mourners are expected later in County Tyrone at the funeral of Michaela McAreavey, who was murdered on her honeymoon.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Mr Cameron will say he wants public service modernisation to be a “legacy” of his government
Prime Minister David Cameron will set out his determination to modernise Britain’s public services during 2011, in a key speech later.
Mr Cameron will say he wants reform to be a legacy of his government, despite planned spending cuts of £81bn.
He will tell an audience in London that it is a “personal and political” priority for him to improve services.
However, his speech comes as NHS reform plans for England face increasing criticism from medical groups.
Ministers will publish a health bill this week that will pave the way for GP consortiums to take over management of the NHS from primary care trusts.
But the Royal College of GPs and the British Medical Association say the upheaval is unnecessary as the same results could have been achieved by a small change in the current structure.
At the same time, the heads of six health unions, including the BMA, have warned in the Times of their “extreme concerns” about greater commercial competition between the NHS and private companies.
However, in his speech, Mr Cameron will praise news that 140 GP groups have come forward to take on the new commissioning powers ahead of their introduction across England in 2013.
The prime minister will dismiss suggestions that public spending cuts will mean a deterioration in services, but he will say that urgency is a must, arguing Britain can be one of the “great success stories of the new decade”.
“I’ve experienced first-hand how dedicated, how professional, how compassionate our best public servants are.”
David Cameron Prime Minister
Mr Cameron will say that even after the cuts are complete, public spending will still take up 41% of national income – the same level as in 2006.
And he will say that at £5,000 per pupil, spending on education will be the same as in Germany and more than in France; London will have as many police officers as New York; and health spending will match the European average.
“It’s just not true to say that the spending taps are being turned off,” Mr Cameron will argue.
He will also try to shake off claims by Labour that his reform agenda is driven by the wish to save money and an ideological desire to reduce the size of the state.
“My passion about this is both personal and political,” he will say.
“Personal because I’ve experienced first-hand how dedicated, how professional, how compassionate our best public servants are.
“The doctors who cared for my eldest son, the maternity nurses who welcomed my youngest daughter into the world, the teachers who are currently inspiring my children, all of them have touched my life, and the life of my family, in an extraordinary way and I want to do right by them.
“And this is a political passion – and priority – of mine too.”
He will say that the coalition government has a better chance of implementing successful reform because it has “tried really hard to learn the lessons of the past” and will avoid repeating the mistakes of previous administrations.
“These reforms aren’t about theory or ideology – they are about people’s lives. Your lives, the lives of the people you and I care most about – our children, our families and our friends. We should not put this off any longer.”
Meanwhile, changes to parental leave to give both mothers and fathers more flexibility are going to be considered, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg is to announce later in a separate speech.
Describing the current system as “Edwardian”, Mr Clegg will say the coalition will introduce in April measures drawn up by the Labour government to allow fathers to take up any remaining unpaid maternity leave if mothers go back to work early, up to a maximum of six months.
Additional reforms could be introduced in 2015, he will say.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
