I have to say that I have seen A LOT of hype about facebook recently. I haven’t seen this much hype about any change in a long time, with people relating it to a “tectonic shift” in the internet. They are saying this is actually changing the entire face of the internet.
Hard to believe, but that is what they are saying. Please read the following article about a company iLike who built out one of the first applications on facebook. They are attaining new users at a rate of something like 200,000 users per day!
The article makes a very strong argument for why companies should be building facebook apps instead of regular websites. Maybe this is our step 2, since it automatically integrates all social networking aspects into the site. Of course it targets a younger market, but this could really help us seal the deal with person to person lending.
A few days after social network site Facebook opened its platform to third-party sites, iLike, a popular music sharing site has scored 723,936 users on Facebook. It is by far the most popular application. We interviewed iLike chief executive, Ali Partovi. He compares Facebook’s platform to the web itself. VB: Tell me about your experiences with Platform so far. You’ve been working on putting iLike on Facebook for several months now. Yet on the integration since Friday morning, there have been bugs and other issues on iLike’s end. What’s the status? Do you have enough servers now?
AP: So, first to give you the back-story on how we got involved: Over the past several months, we’ve pushed and pushed with Facebook asking for some sort of exclusive relationship.
They repeatedly said they won’t do an exclusive relationship, but would rather create a level playing field where we could compete with other third parties. We then gave up a bit, and we were actually a bit late to the game learning about the platform in detail. But when we finally did get access, our President, Hadi Partovi (my twin brother) took very little time to decide this was a huge strategic priority. That was a month ago.
We re-prioritized everything else, and started moving our people off other projects onto this. First two or three people, then a few more, and by the end it was a huge group of engineers pulling back-to-back all-nighters for a week-long sprint to the launch. VB: What made iLike think that Facebook Platform would be a big deal? What stood out about it?
AP: Hadi has a strong background in the concept of platforms… at 24 he became the head of product management in the IE group at Microsoft, and was a key player in the browser wars. A month ago, even though the Facebook Platform wasn’t fully fleshed out, he saw just from the early beginnings of it that this could redefine web development.
What he said was, “in the history of computing, there was the personal computer, there was Windows, there was the web, and now the Facebook platform.” You can imagine that I and most our company was pretty skeptical. But he makes these calls so we followed him.
As to what stood out: it’s a combination of 3 things:
1) The technology itself — Facebook’s platform, like any platform, offers the developer building blocks to build apps faster than they could if they were starting from scratch, and to tap into a rich source of data & capabilities that would never otherwise be available.
2) The potential for viral spread — due to the way the Facebook news feed works, an app can spread across the community entirely by viral spread, as friends get notified when one person adopts it… this essentially bypasses the idea of trying to make your app “viral” as a standalone, because the Facebook is itself naturally viral.
3) The rhetoric from the Facebook management team, starting from the CEO himself, made it clear that they have a long-term commitment to a level playing field. For example, they absolutely refused to give us any special advantage, insisting that the market needs to see a level playing field… we offered them ownership in our company, money, etc — but they had no interest. Furthermore, they built and launched their own “video” app, but left it to “compete” on its own merits alongside other third-party apps rather than making it “pre-installed” for all Facebook users.
So, #1 and #2 made this something we had to jump on, and #3 made us comfortable with the long-term strategic implications.
VB: Some Facebook applications are still more viral than others… tell me why iLike is so popular?
AP: To be honest, we’re not completely sure! There is certainly some art and science to making an app viral, but also a healthy dose of black magic
But for one thing, iLike is quite different from almost all the other apps, in that it’s not simply a “widget” to add to your page, but an entire expansion of the Facebook feature set to add a rich music experience. For example, artist profiles — our app contains 500,000 and growing profiles for artists from major label acts to unsigned artists. It does include the ability to add songs to your pages, but also much more that you get on the app pages themselves — e.g. see upcoming concerts, who else in the community is going, etc. VB: You’re able to incorporate information from Garageband, right? [Garageband.com is a companion site to iLike that features profiles of independent musicians.] From that, what sort of traffic are you seeing back to iLike.com and Garageband from the FB platform?
Thanks to Facebook, the moment a new user visits iLike [directly], the very first page they see is automatically personalized to them already. Thanks to [the information on your iLife application at] Facebook, on your very first page view, we know your music tastes, your location, your list of friends, and their music tastes. So we can immediately tell you, “here’s one of your favorite artists with a concert near you, and these are your friends who might wanna go.”
We’re accomplishing the same thing on our own website (www.iLike.com), but you can imagine it’s much harder: first you have to tell us your music tastes, then invite all your friends, then they have to tell us their music tastes… Facebook solves the classic chicken-and-egg problem for a wide range of social applications like this because they already have all the chickens and eggs ready for you to use.
VB: How do you plan to monetize your Facebook user base, now that you have one?
AP: Rather than viewing our Facebook app as a way to get people to click through to our site, we view it as a self-contained site in itself, where we might even be able to build a bigger business than our own site. So, regarding monetization: We already make money from the links to buy music on iTunes or buy tickets on Ticketmaster. We also plan to place banner ads throughout the iLike app on Facebook.
The traffic on iLike.com was already quite substantial (well over a million registered users — I’m not going to disclose yet quite how many, but we’ll be making an announcement soon)… and to our astonishment the traffic on our 4-day-old Facebook app is already larger!
In terms of daily signups, iLike on Facebook trounces anything else we do… iLike on Facebook has been signing up roughly 200,000 new members a day — the only thing I can think of on the internet that’s growing faster than that is MySpace and maybe some of the free email/instant messaging services. And we haven’t even brought out the big guns to drive our growth (marketing to the existing iLike base, or paying for marketing on Facebook)
As for GarageBand, the number of MP3 streams and downloads has tripled almost overnight. It’s a very good time to be a GarageBand.com musician. VB: As to the other question, about the Platform terms of service — based on what you’ve said already, you don’t see a risk of FB trying to develop its own music app that it favors, or charging iLike for its use of platform?
AP: It’s a mutually symbiotic relationship. This is just the very beginning of the race, and our only concern right now is to put distance between us and whoever #2 might be. But the longer term question is, what if Facebook themselves wanted to build their own? The answer is that we’ll be adding value in ways that will be hard for them to duplicate. Or rather, hard for them to duplicate simply by building some code.
There are two other hypothetical long-term worries:
1) Facebook starts taxing us. I think the way they are already taxing us is by keeping the prime ad real estate (top and left side), which they sell; maybe they’d consider increasing their pixels of ad space. but I highly doubt they’d actually demand revenue: they’re smart enough to know that the way to make money is to keep your slice of the pie small, and make the pie grow huge… rather than try to increase your slice of the pie and risk shrinking the pie.
2) Facebook technically can’t keep up with the demands of web app development… what if the FB Platform somehow breaks under its own weight, i.e. they can’t actually technically support all the apps? That is what has been happening a lot the last few days… that one is the only legit risk, but I think it’s a good horse to bet on! VB: What do you plan to add that will let you keep that lead? Do you think that iLike/Garageband is already unique — hard for anyone to duplicate?
AP: For example, we’ll be collecting a lot more about people’s music tastes (right now we merely scan what they’ve typed into their profiles; soon we’ll hook up our iTunes applet that scans your entire music library to learn your tastes). We’re also letting people click, “I’m going,” or “I wanna go,” for any concert — this is building a giant database that makes our app more valuable, and anybody wanting to duplicate that would be starting from zero.
Imagine hypothetically, you’re wondering who to invite to the Arcade Fire concert. You can go to iLike, where millions of people are actively declaring which concerts they are going to, etc. Or you can go to the newly launched “official Facebook music” app that has just started and doesn’t have many users. Our service will actually be better than any challenger, because of the strength in numbers, because of the rich data we’re collecting. VB: Have you had any communication with Facebook, especially their legal department, about iLike’s relationship with record labels? Or other licensing-type issues?
AP: iLike has never had a single copyright-related issue, we secure all the necessary permissions from the copyright holders in advance, whether that’s the labels or the teenage bands. What’s great is that Facebook has created a platform where you can be the winner without breaking the rules. VB: So, if this is to be a long-term problem, it would assume near-infinite growth in the number of apps and in the number of people who use them?
AP: Well, we’ve already had some outages, mostly because we weren’t equipped to handle such instantaneous popularity, but in some cases due to issues on Facebook’s side. On day one, we added 10,000 users in the first ten hours. Then, mysteriously, we were shut down… we called Facebook and discovered that we had tripped an internal limit they had set for an app that receives 100,000 page views in a day. So they increased the limit to 1 million. We were shut down again 3 hours later because we had already tripped the 1 million limit.
Or, more seriously, today we experienced multiple very frustrating outages, which significantly curtailed our growth, and they were due to Facebook’s Platform having some issues… what’s worse is that the error page linked to our support email, which resulted in a ton of complaints to us.
I have sincere faith that if there’s anybody who can pull this off, it’s the Facebook guys — they are absolute professionals and unbelievably gifted engineers. Nobody had any idea how fast this would grow.
VB: What percentage of the problems you’ve experienced has been because of FB platform scaling issues as opposed to iLike scaling issues?
So far, 20% of iLike’s problems have been Facebook’s fault, and 80% our own fault (or that of third-parties on whom we rely for components of our service). We had dozens of servers ready to deploy, but we had no idea that this thing would eclipse everything else we’re doing quite so rapidly.
After a “deer-in-the-headlights” period, we decided to disable some of the features to reduce our load.
We also went on an emergency run to add servers… itself quite a story, because it’s not very easy to find 100+ industrial-strength servers in the middle of Memorial Day weekend! We spent Saturday loading a 24-ft truck from floor to ceiling with servers, and we spent Sunday “shucking” the servers (i.e. removing them from the boxes and styrofoam packaging), which itself takes many, many hours to unpack 100+ servers… all in preparation for the coming week. Facebook had told us that Memorial Day weekend is one of the slowest periods of the whole year for them. This is why we freaked out on Fri night when we saw that rather than slowing down towards the night as you’d expect, our traffic was still growing exponentially.
VB: What if, as some say, Facebook is the next Google. Google was search but now it’s building all sorts of apps (70+ at my last count). You’re saying FB won’t move in this direction? Tell me more.
AP: I think the more appropriate comparison is Microsoft. As we see it, Platform is to ordinary HTML what Windows was to DOS.
VB: What do you expect to be issues this week?
AP: Scaling to meet the demand. The best analogy I can make is that the spread of an app on Facebook is akin to the chain reaction that occurs in the core of a nuclear bomb… one atom splits, and sends particles in all directions, which cause neighboring atoms to split, and so on… In like manner, one person uses iLike, which notifies all their friends… In theory, there’s no reason why the growth would taper off at all — unless we run out of server capacity to handle it, or unless we begin reaching saturation of the entire Facebook community.
It feels a bit like Little Shop of Horrors… we keep adding servers to feed the beast and it keeps getting bigger and hungrier. Fortunately there are only a finite number of people in the Facebook community! Although I suspect Facebook’s own growth will accelerate dramatically, because people like us will contact their entire mailing list telling them to sign up for Facebook. The whole thing may seem insane, but remember, what’s at stake for us is the opportunity to become the music app for Facebook, which in turn could actually give us a shot at becoming the #1 music service in the world. Note that Facebook is the #1 photo service in the world, the #1 invite/event service in the world, etc.
A month ago, if I told anybody we could unseat MySpace in music, they’d say I was crazy. Today, it seems not only possible, but actually like it’s on track to happen unless we screw it up.
And that is an unbelievable turn of events, extremely eye-opening for me as much as anybody. VB: Based on what you’ve experienced with platform so far, what are the main concepts that hackers/entrepreneurs and investors should understand.
As to wisdom with respect to Facebook, what I’d say is that anybody who is currently involved in building a consumer-facing website should be thinking about whether they should be building a Facebook app instead.
To me, the developers who don’t ask themselves that question are like the people building multimedia CD ROM software in 1996 who didn’t ask themselves if they should be building websites instead… i.e. companies that distributed maps of the country on CD Rom, or encyclopedias on CDROM, etc.
I think the Facebook platform is an epic, tectonic shift, a paradigm shift akin to Windows replacing DOS or the emergence of the Web itself.
Yesterday I read an interesting post on the Pepperdine Marketing Blog about Heinz and all the problems they had with their recent contest to create the perfect user generated commercial.
This post is my response to the article, which I highly recommend that you read.
In my opinion, it is fairly obvious why this has been such a failure for Heinz. User generated media/content is not for creating high quality fantasy commercials like Heinz wants. Heinz wants to bribe people into lying to each other, but YouTube is about people expressing how they really feel, not about selling out for money.
Why is this a failure for Heinz? Because the advertisements they want are fake. YouTube and UGC (User Generated Content) are for releasing the true nature of the populace - and that nature is not BS videos of people enjoying how great ketchup is. In the real world people don’t really care that much about ketchup. Heinz tries to make them care with their $57,000 prize, but it can’t overcome the fact that people use YouTube as a sort of counter-culture mode for expression against these large established companies that have been feeding us their lame commercials for years.
When we launch our new website this September, we are planning on doing a similar contest. But our purpose isn’t to get people to create fake fantasy commercials about our new website (www.iRent2u.com), it is about spreading awareness. I don’t care how people express their views on our site, because just about any publicity will be good publicity. If I wanted to convey some controlled message then I would hire an expensive marketing team and be done with it.
UGC is about people having a voice - not people repeating what you want them to hear. That is why it is so popular, because it is real. I for one am starved for truth after an entire lifetime of being “sold to” by big companies. That is why, in my opinion, blogging, podcasts, social networking, and news ranking sites such as digg are becoming so popular so quickly. People want to hear from people they trust, about things they are interested it. Shoving a message down the publics throat is quickly becoming a dinosaur tactic - thank God.
I read the article mentioned above very closely, because like I said we are planning on doing something very similar. The difference is, we don’t care what the message is, people can say whatever they want. And if people tell us negative things about our product then great! At least we have people telling us what we need to work on. If I get people making a video of a dog farting in a puddle in front of an iRent2u.com sign, and hundreds of thousands of people download and view it, then great. I couldn’t be happier, people have now heard of our company. Later, in the future, after we have had time to grow, develop a user base, make money, perhaps then we can try to broadcast some sort of controlled message, but even then I am not sure we should. I want people to talk to each other, create stories, and then we can help share those. I want this because its real, and thats what people want.
Besides, it is so easy to make a video pointing out why the whole Heinz contest is stupid - and it is probably more entertaining to watch. If Heinz wants this to work they need to care less about controlling the message and more about encouraging participation.
If you are not already listening to podcasts you should be. You will find excellent information on topics that are not normally covered in the regular news. Below I have a listing of some of my favorite podcasts, ones that I listen to every time they come out.
1. The Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar Series published by the Stanford Business School
Out of all these, the one that I would recommend most highly is Marketing Voices. Every one of her interviews has been with top notch people talking about the future or marketing and the internet. And if you can predict the future, you are way ahead of the game.
By the way, you do not need an iPod to listen to a podcast. It is just an MP3 file. You can listen to it any way you like. Listen to it on your computer. Burn it to a CD… ok, well those are pretty much your options, but they are enough.
Todays post is about widgets. Widgets are little extensions of your sites functionality onto other peoples sites - think YouTube videos that you can insert into your own site.
Using widgets takes the power of one site, and multiplies it by the number of people who like the service. This is a very powerful multiplier. Imagine iRent2u.com widgets on millions of blogs across the US, helping people to advertise the items they own that they have for rent.
I know you may be tired of me telling you what is the future of the internet, so I wont. Widgets are not the future, widgets are now. YouTube uses them, eBay just started using them, Google is the king of widgets. Widgets are already everywhere, and the future is really going beyond simple widgets to creating robust application interfaces. Soon you will have websites that are just a compilation of other people widgets, all created automatically to try solve temporary and fleeting problems no one even knew existed before. This is the future.
But since we live now, lets take a look at what widget solutions, and widget providers, are available today.
The web has seen an explosion in the use of widgets over the past year or so. So let’s explore what a widget is and its uses. Note that in this post, we’re discussing Web-based widgets only, rather than desktop widgets such as those provided by Yahoo Widgets or Microsoft’s Vista widgets.
A Web widget can be best described as a mini application that can add functionality to your web page, blog, social profile etc. If you find a widget that you like, you simply copy and paste some code and add it to the HTML of your web page. Photo galleries, news, videos, advertising, mp3 players and pregnancy countdown tickers! You name it, there is probably a widget that does it.
Give me an example!
There have been a lot of very successful widgets to date. Here is a sample:
MyBlogLog is a widget that allows you to see other bloggers on the MyBlogLog network, as they visit your site. You can see it in action on the right hand side of this post. It has been a huge success for its creators and was acquired by Yahoo for a rumored $12 million in January.
YouTube’s widget allows users to place videos on their social networking profiles and blogs. It was a major factor in their rise to fame and eventual sale to Google for $1.65 billion.
Google Adsense has made a lot of money for website owners since its inception. It is probably the most widely distributed widget around. You can sign up for an Adsense account and relevant adverts are shown where you place the widget on your site. You then get a share of the revenue generated with Google. Whole sites and services exist today on the web that are solely funded by their share of revenue from displaying the Adsense widget. Estimated value? Billions!
The FeedBurner widget shows you how many people are subscribed to your RSS feed. It doesn’t have much use and is not very accurate in a lot of cases. But that little number it displays is still one of the biggest bragging rights available to a successful blogger, in spite of those bloggers who game the system.
If you are planning on building a widget or getting one for your site, there are a number of great websites to get you started. All of the following have vast directories of widgets to choose from and will help you distribute, track and monitor your widget should you choose to build one.
Snipperoo is just getting going at the moment, but already they have a directory of over 3,000 widgets to choose from and a very flexible method of delivering your widget. Ivan Pope (Snipperoo founder) also runs an excellent blog which discusses all things widgets.
Spring Widgets is a platform put together by Fox interactive. They don’t have a big selection of widgets at the moment, but their list is growing day by day. They only support flash widgets, but they have a cool desktop runtime that you can download. It allows you to grab any Spring Widget from the web and use it on your desktop. What’s really interesting about Spring Widgets is that they are owned by Fox, which also owns MySpace. With MySpace kicking off so much third party content from their site lately, I foresee them making Spring Widgets the only way to put a widget onto MySpace - which will help them control the flow of content through the site.
ClearSpring has just served their 3 billionth widget as of this month. Impressive stuff. They have a nice clean interface for deploying your widget and offer some really cool tracking metrics.
WidgetBox also has a big collection of widgets to choose from for your site. They also provide some nice reports on your widget usage. Users can grab widgets they like from any site that has a widgetbox widget and pop it into their own sidebar or Netvibes/Pageflakes page, for example.
Mobile Widgets
Nokia’s new platform Widsets is a great example of what can be done with mobile widgets. You simply download their free software to your mobile and choose from a host of widgets. Once you hook your phone up with them, you can log into their site at any time and choose which widgets you want - and it pushes them out to your phone. This is a really great service. I was easily able to create a custom Read/WriteWeb widget for my phone in minutes, using their studio.
Heres a YouTube video Widget of Kaj from Widsets explaining how it all works
Widget Commerce
Of course widgets have been in use in the world of advertising for a long time. Companies like DoubleClick have used javascript widgets to deliver their adverts to sites for years. The modern day king of the commerce widget is of course the Google Adsense widget. Here are a few other players in the market:
Auction Ads allows you to display live eBay auctions on your site, with a share of eBay affiliate fees coming your way.
Tumri lets their users create customized widgets to promote products on their site from a range of partners; such as Overstock, Shop.com, and Walmart. Revenue is then shared out between the website owner and Tumri.
Nooked is a newcomer to the market. They are just beginning to roll out their feed commerce widgets across a network of partner blogs. They are one to watch for the future. [disclosure: Read/WriteWeb’s editor Richard MacManus is an advisor to Nooked]
HomePage Sites
Sites like Pageflakes, Netvibes, Your Minis, iGoogle and My Yahoo allow you to choose from many different widgets (including email, news, weather) and build your own homepage for your browser.
Conclusion
I have only touched on what’s happening in the world of widgets in this post. Widgets are literally everywhere these days, in all shapes and sizes. For the moment widgets are the new black, but they also come with their own inherent problems - such as scale. For example if someone with 100,000 visitors a day places your widget on their site, essentially you as the widget maker inherit that traffic. That’s a good thing, but you need to be prepared to take the load. Slow loading widgets often cause problems on their host websites.
Another issue is one of style; some sites are becoming increasingly clogged with widgets that have no relation to each other - in terms of form or design. So the page as a whole can end up looking like a car crash.
But to finish on a positive note, widgets add a lot of functionality to your site. Functionality that you can pick and choose as you wish. They also add potential revenue streams for you, which is always a good thing.
Well, this is my second post of the day, but that is because I just read something that I found interesting. Please take a moment to view the most current post from Chris Anderson in his The Long Tail Blog.
Post Starts Here…
May 04, 2007
The Awesome Power of Spare Cycles
In physics, the greatest (theoretical) latent power in the universe is dark energy, waiting only for us to find a way to tap it (and to prove it actually exists; in the meantime it powers fictional superheroes). In people, the equivalent is “spare cycles”–the human potential that isn’t tapped by our jobs, which for most of us is a lot of it. People wonder how Wikipedia magically arose from nothing, and how 50 million bloggers suddenly appeared, almost all of them writing for free. Who knew there was so much untapped energy all around us, just waiting for a catalyst to become productive? But of course there was. People are bored, and they’d rather not be. The guy playing Solitaire on his laptop at the airport? Spare cycles. Multiply it times a million.
I am at this moment, somewhat randomly, in the Salisbury (MD) regional airport. It is tiny airport like thousands of others across the country. But, like all the others, it has to meet standard TSA security standards. There is a flight (which I am on) at 2:30 pm. It is the only flight out of this airport for the past hour. There will not be another flight out of this airport for another hour. Yet we need our full TSA apparatus. That includes the local police, who are represented by a sheriff.
I’m watching him right now. He’s in his room, labeled “Sheriff”. Young guy. He’s watching a movie on a portable DVD player. That’s fine–he won’t be needed for another half hour. But of course “needed” isn’t quite the right word. “Required” is closer to it. He will be required by policy to stand by, gun in holster, while I take my laptop out of my nerd backpack. He may, fingers crossed, go his entire career without a terrorist going through that security checkpoint. He may indeed never unholster that gun in the line of duty.
That sheriff is watching a movie because he has spare cycles. Spare cycles are the most powerful fuel on the planet. It’s what Web 2.0 is made up of. User generated content? Spare cycles. Open source? Spare cycles. MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Second Life? Spare cycles. They’re the Soylent Green of the web.
In the next issue of Wired we’ve got a great story about a woman who cyberstalked the lead singer of Linkin Park. She correctly guessed the password to his cellphone account. The rest was easy. She was a technician at a secure military facility. the Sandia National Labs. When eventually confronted, she explained that her job only took her half an hour a day. The rest was spare cycles. She used them to stalk the lead singer of Linkin Park.
Web 2.0 is such a phenomena because we’re underused elsewhere. Bored at work, bored at home. We’ve got spare cycles and they’re finally finding an outlet. Tap that and you’ve tapped an energy source that rivals anything in human history. Solitaire Players of the World Unite!
So I will be reposting the articles that I think are relevant and informative everyday, but I thought it might be good to let you know where I am getting all of this information from. That way in case you wanted to learn more you could subscribe to the blogs directly and read all of the information, instead of just what I repost here.
To facilitate this I have decided to post a list of all the blogs which I am subscribed to. Additionally I have included one newsletter that I actually read. It is by far the best newsletter I have come across, and the only one that I have stayed subscribed to for over 4 years.
Please Check out these different resources and let me know which ones you like. Don’t be afraid to subscribe to one of the blogs by clicking on the RSS feed (the little orange button).
Nokia’s new platform 