I just realized I haven’t talked much about what I’m up to lately. When we moved back to Montreal, I had what I thought was going to be a great job developing a new, should-have-been revolutionary web product… but that didn’t really work out very well (they didn’t share my vision of what the site could have and should have been and I didn’t think it was worth the investment to think small). Since then, I’ve been working really hard to get a new company off the ground. My great friend Claude moved back from Paris a few months before I came back to Montreal and he has been working like a maniac to establish Exvisu in Montreal. Almost immediately we talked about merging our forces, and after one aborted attempt last spring, in the fall I started devoting some time to it and based on my good experiences in the early going, this past winter I dove in head first.
At the moment, Exvisu is all about doing a very unique and advanced kind of research to help leaders with marketing, communications, and political opportunities (or problems). We have the ability to go out into existing but unstructured data sets and learn a great deal more about an issue than traditional approaches can provide. From there, we work very closely with our clients to develop appropriate web-based strategies to address the opportunity or problem. And, to round out the offering, if our clients lack the capacity to execute on the strategy themselves, we’ll work with them to do the job.
It’s a pretty broad offering, but we’re exceeding the goals we set for ourselves in January. We have several clients and partners we’re working with such as AGY Consulting, K3 Media, Gartner Lee Limited and several others I can’t really mention. As well, we’re working hard on a couple of different technology projects that will be the key to moving from a pure consultancy to a much more ambitious play down the road.
Thomas Purves has written a great post suggesting - correctly, in my view - that It’s time to take “social” for granted.
Here’s the news. [Social media] is no longer interesting. It’s time is done. Now don’t get me wrong, there’s still vast areas of everyday business, enterprise and government that still need to be beaten severely with the Web2.0 stick (even the Web1.0 stick would still help in some places). Rather, it’s now time to think of socialness and 2.0ness as “business as usual” in the IT industry. The substantive battle is over, this is a mopping up operation. And there’s a ton of rolling up the sleeves and value to unlock left to do in almost any vertical industry.
I’ve been working on crossovers between social media and mobile for over a year now (from time to time - consulting gigs) and from my perspective mobile has already arrived. I think it’s almost irresponsible to consider a “new media” strategy without considering the social and mobile options that can be baked in, and not as some kind of cute bolt-on strategy but integrally to the whole thing.
Avenue A | Razorfish’s Garrick Schmitt has written a great post in the Digital Design Blog that riffs on information from their Digital Outlook report: Does the Home Page Still Matter?: Why Distribution Trumps Destination Online. Most of the web folks that I know have been working on this basis for some time now, but it remains important to underline that the old “get people in through the homepage” model is broken (and likely always was, it was just harder to figure out before).
Trying to force people into a specific usage pattern is a recipe for failure - trumped only by the mistake of trying to predict where users will come from in the first place. What does this mean in practice? Many things (and the conclusions in the post are right on), but two immediate things spring to mind:
- Deep links have to provide context within the URL itself (i.e., be readable)
- Don’t hide content in non-machine-readable formats that people can’t link to directly (and that Google can’t grok)
In two recent posts (Facebook sucks, The you-don’t-need-more-friends lobby, Robert Scoble has complained about the 5000-friend limit in Facebook. He said,
[…] it isn’t scalable and falls apart at 5,000 contacts. It pisses me off more and more every day because of that scaling wall.
and
Someone asked why I keep pointing out the 5,000 friends limit. Why? Because I still haven’t gotten through and I’m still getting pushback from the lobby. So, let’s try one more time.
I agree with Scoble to some extent. The issue is important: scalability, both in terms of network size and application quality across different functions is where sites like Facebook will live or die. Plus, Scoble is an edge case, clearly, and I always think edge cases are important for webapps to take into consideration as they grow and develop.
There is a problem, however, and it is quite simple. The problem is this: Facebook seems to have been explicitly designed to NOT be a rolodex, to NOT scale to thousands of friends per user, and to NOT be an application that scales to the needs of highly-networked businesspeople as a function of their job. I don’t think it’s just a difficult engineering problem that will be overcome with time - it’s intentional. And, more than that, I think that accounts for the success of Facebook.
Facebook’s success isn’t just dumb luck (though there was almost certainly some luck involved). There are lots of other social network sites out there - including MySpace, which is still (arguably) bigger than Facebook. Of course there’s also Friendster, Orkut, Tribe.net, and many more. I’ve been on all of these, and a whole bunch more to boot (more task-oriented sites like Flickr and Shelfari). Facebook, however, is much bigger (for me) that all of these. Why?
- Facebook has always been popular outside the tech/internet/weblogging crowd. On Orkut and the rest of them I always had the same kinds of contacts/friends. Some YULBloggers, friends who I’ve been in online communities with since the mid-90s, tech/business folks involved in other social networking or web properties, etc. My college roommate? Never. The girl I dated for a few months in twelfth grade? Never.
- In Facebook, you can’t “collect” friends very easily. This is a huge difference from almost all of the other social networking sites, which explicitly privilege friend collection.
- It’s easy to say “no” in Facebook. There isn’t even a message to the requester when someone declines a friend request. In some of the older systems, it was a big deal to not accept someone’s request - I suppose they thought that the social pressure to accept requests would grow the network faster. Without that social pressure, though, a paradoxical thing happened: even though it might have slowed the growth of the network, the whole system was non-threatening to non-professional users, who stuck around (in droves).
- In Facebook, your friends list isn’t the most prominent part of the interface as it was for almost every similar system in the past. Rather, it’s what your friends are doing that’s front-and-center. Having more or fewer friends is simply a way to have more or less “stuff” parading up the screen from hour to hour, day to day. The “social graph” isn’t fundamentally about the list of friends - the social graph is just the conduit to the real content: interaction opportunities with other people.
- There’s a cost to the user for each friend that they add. Each friend makes it that much more difficult to follow what any one friend is doing. This social cost is important, because although it puts negative pressure on the number of friends a user has in his or her list, it also helps most users to keep their friends list uncorrupted by non-friends who are simply collecting names (like they do in MySpace).
In all of these, there is a common thread: Facebook is expressly NOT there for collectors, it tries to privilege real life relationships as opposed to fleeting acquaintance. Scoble says,
[…]a “friend” in Facebook is NOT a “real friend.” (Let’s define “real friend” for now as someone who you’d invite over to your house for dinner). In social networking software a “friend” is someone you want in your social network. Period. Nothing more. The fact that people assume that you should only have “real friends” in your social network is just plain wrong.
In fact, I think that the distinction between Facebook and the other social networks - and the primary reason for the success of Facebook - is that is about “real friends” or at least is trying to be. MySpace and the rest were about collecting as many “friends” as you could. They were about the scope of the network above all things. Facebook isn’t about the network, but what the individuals in your network are doing: events they are going to, photos they are posting, games they are playing, chumps they’re biting, and all the rest.
Maybe the Facebook engineers were being honest with Scoble and it is just an engineering issue. If so, then they’d better watch it - because anything they do to remove the negative pressure against “collecting” instead of privileging the content over the network for its own sake could be Facebook’s downfall.
