SocialStartups.com

Thanks to a Facebook Application called Friend Wheel, I can generate the visualization pictured above of my 549 Facebook friends (and still growing). It’s kinda fun to look at; my friends are listing around the edges of the circle, and a line connects to people who are also friends of each other on facebook.  The reds, oranges, and yellows are high school friends. The deep blues are Amazon.com friends. The greens and aquas and most of the rest are college friends.

I had dinner with my friend Steve McNally last night, who is roommates with my other friend Jake Tuck. Lisa asked me which one was I closer to. My response was that I had more history with Jake (we were housemates all through college, whereas Steve only lived in my house for half of college) but was probably closer to Steve since we shared a passion for baseball. Tough call, since Jake is a musician (as I am). Then Lisa asked me if they were friends with Will Paul. I said no, because Will is a hometown friend while Jake and Steve were college friends. So that got me into thinking about how to visual social networks and how inadequate two dimensions is.

Let’s try three dimensions. For the x- and y-axis, imagine an ideaspace - this is a plane that maps out the various interests people have, the hobbies they participate in, the fields they work in. So you have one circle for the friends you go to jazz concerts with, one circle for your photowalking friends, one for your baseball friends. The size of the circle is the number of mutual friends you have who share that interest. At the center, (0,0), is you. The circles in the plane are arranged such that the interests that are most passionate to you are closest to the center. Does this make sense? Two dimensional graph containing overlapping circles of various sizes, with the ones closest to center being of the most interest to you. Got it? Good.

Now for the third dimension, which is time. Over time, you will naturally transition environments. High school, college, work, living abroad, joining the local book club, marrying your spouse and meeting her friends and family, moving to the suburbs to raise a family, etc. Each of these events expands your social network and can form dense clumps. The third dimension in our visualization allows for the stacking of these clumps. It is more uncommon for connections to span the clumps, but it can happen and can be enlightening. I think seeing such a visualization would tell a lot about a person - what their interests are, who their friends are, and how have they changed over time. What’s your social network look like in three dimensions?

Web Warrior - Forbes.com

This article reminded me that the Facebook vs. MySpace vs. Google platform wars may be a little premature. The biggest platform, outside the OS, is the browser. Everyone uses it, and through the browser, everyone accesses all other sites. Your browser stores your account information, commonly submitted form fields like email address, street address, credit card numbers. There are already a multitude of extensions.

This article reminds me that Google is working on a Google-branded Firefox browser. My guess is that this ties right in with Google’s claim to release a platform that is more open than Facebook’s. What if they centered it around the browser?

Here’s how this would work. Google knows my social network from Gmail, GTalk, and Orkut (if I use Orkut). Google knows all of my login credentials for all sites on the internet because every time I log into a new site, Google asks me if I’d like to save that information with them so that I don’t have to be bothered with logging in to Amazon, Netflix, eBay, etc. Google has access to my areas of expertise by applying semantic analysis (like what Twine does) to my emails (Gmail), documents/spreadsheets/presentations (Google office suite), and local files (Google Desktop). Google knows my financial portfolio (Google Finance). Google knows what areas I’m interested in (Google Reader, iGoogle, and my browsing history).

Mozilla could do this too - Combining Thunderbird (email) and Sunbird (Calendar) with Firefox  would get you a social network, areas of interest, and login credentials. Various extensions have been created for RSS aggregation, messaging, bookmarking, etc. I think it would be a hell of a bold bet, but an interesting one.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: facebook, google, firefox, platform

Facebook Wish List: Five Apps I’d Actually Like to See

Sorry, but I think there is a serious disconnect between what Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins wants and what most Facebook users would want.

A podcast client? How many people know what a podcast is?

A Top 40 list? We know now that most adds are from the Profile box. So again, most users won’t care what’s in the app directory.

A PR Connection Tool? Right, because everyone needs to initiate a little PR.

IRC and FTP clients? How many people still use those? Way back when, Facebook launched a P2P media sharing client named Wirehog, which was a total disaster. I’m not convinced an FTP client would do better.

I admit I actually have no understand of his 5th wish list idea, so I won’t comment. I think he’s trying to describe Ning.

My top 5 wish list

1. A personalized version of Google News, taken from the shared items posted from your Friends.

2. Tagging of friends. This is something suspected is in the works. I want to be able to send messages or invites only to certain friends.

3. OpenID for all facebook users. Every facebook user should be able to easily link their Facebook account with their Amazon or eBay or Paypal or Skype accounts. E-Commerce has a large role to play in Facebook, and lining up who you are in facebook to who are you in Skype is crucial.

4. Stronger integration with local Neighborhoods. So yes, there are a few Neighborhood apps, but Facebook would be well served by growing the connectedness of a geographic community. Want to throw a party for the neighborhood? Find playmates for your kids? Tell your neighbors to look for your lost cat? The internet can help counteract what Robert Putnam describes in Bowling Alone.

5. A real email client. Sure, there is Facebook messaging, but what Facebook really should do is build Gmail right into Facebook. They could easily tack on features found in Xobni and Twine, and you’d get a heck of an email application.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: facebook

I’ve been thinking about writing this post for a few weeks now, and have finally decided to do so now that a number of posts are coming out about Facebook replacing email.

Facebook has the potential to replace a lot more than just email.

Facebook could be the next Internet platform. One built upon interconnected social networks.

How about:

• classifieds (Craigslist)
• used and new products (Ebay)
• personalized start pages (Netvibes)
• social bookmarking (del.icio.us)
• video (YouTube)
• news aggregators (Digg)
• search engines, except the one inside Facebook

That scares me. Why? Because it’s a black hole - what goes in doesn’t come out.

Data is everything. If you own it (and have a LOT of it), you have a HUGE advantage. Just look at what Amazon can do with it’s recommendations.

Social networks, because of the network effect, are winner take all markets. Move everyone to the platform, build all of the apps on top, add trust, filter out all of the crap/spam, and you’re left with an Internet sized bundle of content with nothing but good stuff.

Which is wonderful, except the lock-in part. Facebook shouldn’t own all of the data built on top of it.

Do you trust Facebook?

First, read this.

The Opaque Value Problem (or, Why do people use Twitter?)

Thanks. This is important, and most people over the age of 25 don’t understand this. (Uh oh, I’m not bringing up the age question again, am I?)

Let’s start from a simple statement.

How compelling you find content is directly proportional to how relevant it is to you. The more relevant to you, the more you care.

OK, how about one more simple statment.

The people in your social network are relevant to you compared to those who are outside your social network. For more on that, read this.

Let’s mash the last two statements together.

Given that your social network is relevant to you, content generated from your social network is going to be compelling to you. The more content generated from your social network you get, the better.

It’s going to be boring nonsense to everyone else. So what.

Sites need to realize that if they want customers to visit at least once a day, there needs to be a lot of content available for consumption generated from their social network. This is what Facebook does. This is what Twitter does.

How well does your site integrate with my life?

Wow, that was easy! Thank you Magpie RSS (formerly on Sourceforge) for such a great and easy to use php rss parser. It worked on the first try, as promised.

So now I’ve got an application that will publish to my profile the contents of the recent purchases rss feed. Next step: Automate the feed retrieval.

I had made a typo. Rookie mistake.

Continuing on in the tutorial…

Bummer, ran into my first problem.

Fatal error: Uncaught exception ‘FacebookRestClientException’ with message ‘Incorrect signature’ in /home/.pax/dlifson/socialstartups.com/f8/recentpurchases/facebookapi_php5_restlib.php:378 Stack trace: #0 /home/.pax/dlifson/socialstartups.com/f8/recentpurchases/facebookapi_php5_restlib.php(79): FacebookRestClient->call_method(’facebook.auth.g…’, Array) #1 /home/.pax/dlifson/socialstartups.com/f8/recentpurchases/facebook.php(84): FacebookRestClient->auth_getSession(’4aed0976c07b034…’) #2 /home/.pax/dlifson/socialstartups.com/f8/recentpurchases/facebook.php(75): Facebook->do_get_session(’4aed0976c07b034…’) #3 /home/.pax/dlifson/socialstartups.com/f8/recentpurchases/facebook.php(51): Facebook->validate_fb_params() #4 /home/.pax/dlifson/socialstartups.com/f8/recentpurchases/appinclude.php(6): Facebook->__construct(’200172bb47a151b…’, NULL) #5 /home/.pax/dlifson/socialstartups.com/f8/recentpurchases/index.php(2): require_once(’/home/.pax/dlif…’) #6 {main} thrown in /home/.pax/dlifson/socialstartups.com/f8/recentpurchases/facebookapi_php5_restlib.php on line 378

Got as far as step 15 on http://tperry256.dreamhost.com/f8/tutorial/, lost it at step 16.

Phew. So I’m back. My laptop hard drive died and I lost the password to this admin account, so I’ve been unable to post. But never fear, I finally discovered the “Lost your password?” link and guessed the right username/email combination.

Since it’s memorial day weekend, I’ll be playing around with the coolest thing to hit Tech since… jeez, I dunno, maybe AJAX - Facebook Platform! I’ll be twittering and blogging about my experiences as I figure out what I’m doing. First tip: This looks to be a great tutorial, running through it now. God bless wikis (found via F8 documentation wiki).