SocialStartups.com

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.