“Facebook won the MySpace battle because of better and more immediate interaction with people,” Eric Covino says. “The more they get away from that, the bigger the concern.”

Covino is the founder and CEO of CreativeSignals, an online marketing firm that buys Facebook ads, among other things. And he’s not impressed with the new of the impending autoplaying video ads that Facebook is rumored to be adding in the next few months.

Source: John Koetsier

Facebook’s clean, uncluttered new News Feed.

As soon as July, according to some reports, Facebook will be rolling out 15-second video ads right in your news feed. You’ll only see one video ad from one company a day, but the positioning right in your news feed — and the fact that they may be autoplay ads– makes it a risky move. That’s very different than Facebook’s existing video ad proposition, as Wired notes, which is on brands’ own product pages.

The rationale, however, is the pot of goal at the end of the digital rainbow.

“They’re looking to push out millions of dollars of ads,” Covino sayw. “The price per spot is definitely north of a million.”

The challenge, for Covino, boils down to user experience. MySpace bit the dust because of a horrible user experience cluttered with ads. Facebook, which just added retargeted ads in the middle of your news feed, initially had just one ad per page. The social network moved to four in 2011, then to six, and has tested up to 10.

The pressure, especially now that Facebook is a publicly-traded company, is to increase revenue. And there’s also pressure from advertisers, who want new and better ways of splashing their messages in front of social media users.

“With both Facebook and Twitter, you have these tremendously large user groups with advertisers salivating over them,” Covino told me. “I’m worried about the user experience … they keep interrupting people.”

Facebook, of course, is not unaware of these problems, and they test almost everything they do with small groups of Facebook users before migrating the changes slowly to others. So if there is a significant user backlash, Facebook will know, and it will be able to course-correct.

Source: Jolie O'Dell/VentureBeat

Mark Zuckerberg announcing the updated News Feed

The question, however, is whether the tension between cash and user experience will be resolved in a way that solves both problems.

Covino’s not so sure.

“The core problem of all this is that you have to overcome the psychology of what your users think your service is,” he says.

In other words, people come to Facebook to connect with friends, not necessarily with brands. That is probably largely true, but people are also connecting strongly with companies on Facebook — especially local community businesses. In fact, Facebook trumpeted just a month ago that its users have made more than two billion connections to local businesses, view their Facebook pages 645 million times a week, and comment on them 13 million times a week.

And Facebook fans have never been more valuable to brands — BMW fans are worth $1,613, Starbucks fans $177, and Coke fans are worth $70 to their respective brands.

The core question, to Covino, is how long they’ll stay that way.

“All these things are great, and they sound great, but can that money overcome psychology?” he wonders. “I’m extremely skeptical.”

Ted Ullyot, general counsel at Facebook, is leaving the social network to take time off, according to AllThingsD.

Facebook confirmed the departure yesterday. Ullyot, 45, will depart in July. The search for his replacement is going to include outside and inside candidates.

Ullyot had a tough job, overseeing controversial legal issues ranging from Facebook’s ownership battle with the Winklevoss twins to investor lawsuits over the company’s initial public offering. He also had to stand guard on privacy issues related to the company’s giant social network.

Ullyot joined Facebook in the fall of 2008. At that time, he had been a high-powered Washington, D.C. lawyer who previously held senior legal positions at AOL, the law firm Kirkland & Ellis, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Jim Breyer, the Accel Partners venture capitalist who played a big role in Facebook’s launch, has decided to step down from the social network’s board of directors. In a filing with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission, Breyer notified the company that he will not stand for reelection to the board at the shareholder meeting on June 11.

Breyer told AllThingsD in a statement that “it has been a genuine honor to serve as an investor and board member since April 2005 as Facebook has grown from an emerging social network for U.S. college students to a global service that connects over a billion people. After over eight years of board service, it’s time to step aside in light of my other responsibilities, including my recent election to the Harvard University Corporation Board. I will leave the board knowing that Facebook is a global Internet leader with exceptional leadership within the company and on the board.”

Breyer has been on the board since 2005 and was instrumental in getting the company enough capital to accelerate the growth of its social network at a critical time in the company’s history. Breyer was at the right place at the right time, and he netted more than $100 million personally from the investment in Facebook. Accel itself got a 337 timesreturnonitsoriginal investment– one of its best of all time.

At the time that Accel invested, Facebook had 20 employees and less than $1 million in revenue per quarter. Today, it has more than 4,500 employees and $1.5 billion-plus in revenue per quarter. Besides joining the Harvard board, Breyer also leads the IDG-Accel China relationship, and new investments such as Prismatic. Breyer also decided to to stand for re-election at Walmart.

“Jim made many, many important contributions during his long tenure on the board and we were well-served by his presence,” Facebook said in a statement. “We will continue to have a strong relationship with Jim and going forward, we’re thankful we can continue to rely upon the tremendous depth and expertise of our recently expanded board.”

Top image courtesy of Kinetic Imagery, Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The stock market is like a deep forest, filled with cleared pathways, hidden snares, and an ever-present sense of the unexpected.

Robinhood launched an iOS app today to guide you through the dangerous woods of stock market investing. The startup wants to be “your stock market companion.” Robinhood’s app is a social network for stock market investing, creating a place where people can exchange information and ideas, and make predictions.

“Robinhood is a modern interpretation of the investment advisor,” founder Vlad Tenev said in Q&A. “Financial advisors, brokers, and investment research firms derive much of their edge from being gatekeepers of this information. With Robinhood, we aim to make a transparent and free social platform for investing ideas by harnessing the wisdom of the crowd to provide simple, informative, and trustworthy insights into the stock market.”

The community on Robinhood is supposed to act like the band of “Merry Men” from the story. Users share their predictions for the future, past experiences, or insights that could lead to successful bets. The individuals who perform best rise to the top, gaining more exposure and recognition, while those who are less knowledgeable still benefit from the diversity of opinion and success of others.

Founders Tenev and Baiju Bhatt met as undergrads at Stanford while studying math and physics. This is their third company together in the financial space, although it’s their first time building a consumer-facing product.

“We identified several inefficiencies in the investment advisory and brokerage spaces that we felt could be addressed through technology and great design,” Tenev said. “We believe the dominant financial services companies of the future will be social and will follow a Spotify-like business model, where high quality core services are free and people pay for premium features on top.”

Of course, this is not a risk-free approach and bad advice inevitably gets mixed in with the good. But then again, the stock market itself is a risky place, and the founders have built in social controls that hopefully limit the amount of fraud or deceit. Each user has a profile that contains their percentile ranking within the community, rating accuracy, overall points, and average points per stock. If you make terrible suggestions, Robinhood will show it.

Robinhood will also suggest relevant stocks based on your location and community activity and will create a watchlist of your investments. The platform personalizes a news feed based on your portfolio, and you can check how the stock market is doing from within the app. Tenev said that Robinhood is distinguishable from competitors by being mobile-first, expressly designed for users on-the-go. Furthermore, he said, Yahoo Finance and Google Finance lack a social layer, and Stocktwits suffers from a lack of structure that “invariably leads to a low signal/noise ration.”

“Robinhood data is much more structured,” he said. “Every message contains a prediction about the future performance of a stock; this makes it much more accessible to newcomers and results in a data stream that is 100% signal. It also allows us to assign a track record and performance metrics to users.”

Whether this model will lead users to fame and fortune is still unknown. Tenev acknowledged that with social networks, as with the stock market, the future is uncertain.

Robinhood is based in Palo Alto and backed by Google Ventures.

That’s right. It has nothing to do with games. Vue is a free mobile app that EA has released on the iPhone and iPad in Canada and Australia. You can “share your life to music in an instant” with friends or relatives on the app’s own social network, where “life meets music.”

You can find songs for your photos on music services such as Rdio and Spotify. You can create “living shows” and share them with friends, add text, pin Google maps to them, and throw in special effects. If you make changes to your photos stored on Facebook, those changes can instantly show up in your “vues.”

This is certainly an odd diversification effort and the strangest part of the legacy of John Riccitiello, the chief executive who recently abruptly resigned from EA. A spokesman for EA declined comment. We hear this is a low-budget exploratory project that started with the EA Partners group.

Regardless of who built it and whether it is a good fit for EA, it certainly looks like an interesting app. I’d guess that 90 percent of my pictures are sitting idle on my computer, with no fancy slide show, captions or soundtracks to go with them.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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MENLO PARK, Calif. — Facebook’s News Feed has finally gotten a long-awaited, well-deserved facelift. It’s a design overhaul that fits right in with the company’s shift to a highly visual aesthetic over the past two years.

You will start seeing the new News Feed on the web today; phone and tablet updates should happen over the next couple weeks.

Source: Official Facebook photo

This screenshot from Facebook shows off the old news feed style (left) and the new (right).

As founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg just announced at his company’s headquarters this morning, he wants Facebook’s News Feed to be each user’s “best personalized newspaper you can have” with social and local updates on a variety of topics.

“We also believe [it] should be visual, rich, and engaging,” he continued.

“Because News Feed supports such a broad range of content types, the format has to change as well. … News Feed has become primarily about visual content,” the CEO said, noting that currently, photos make up around 30 percent of all News Feed content.

Not surprisingly, photos are larger and more in-your-face in the new design.

Design is king in News Feed update

The update is not unlike the upgrade to Timelines that launched back in 2011. At that time, the engineering-centric company put a fresh focus on photos, videos, and engaging, interactive content as opposed to text updates.

Zuckerberg continued to say that today’s updates bring to News Feed a triple focus: rich, visual stories; your choice of feeds; and a mobile-inspired U.I.

Facebook design director Julie Zhuo showed off some features of the new design, especially as it pertains to brands. Logos and thumbnails are larger, and pictures and videos take up more of the page. Overall, the interface feels much more like a glossy web magazine than the old, text-heavy Facebook you’ve been used to.

Here’s an image gallery of the new News Feed.

New options for different slices of the News Feed

Chris Struhar, the technical lead for the new News Feed, also gave some updates on new options for it. Facebook is listening to user feedback about its algorithms and the stories those algorithms deliver, he said. People complain that they see too few relevant stories from close friends, so now, they can jump between various types of feeds to focus on different kinds of content.

Source: Jolie O'Dell/VentureBeat

Facebook employees, including founder Mark Zuckerberg, discuss getting rid of the News Feed clutter.

An “all friends” feed to give you a full firehose of updates. It also has a “following” feed to show only branded content from news organizations and companies you’re following — a much-requested feature from people. The “music” feed shows music-related sharing and activity, plus photos or updates from musicians’ Pages. And the “photos” feed shows off the visual side of your network.

“We’ve tried photo feeds in the past, but never anything as vibrant as what you see today,” said Struhar.

Mobile continues to play a big role in Facebook’s updates

Also, as Facebook exec Chris Cox pointed out, the design is mobile-inspired. While Facebook got its start a bit too soon to be mobile-first, it’s quickly playing catch up on mobile competencies and mobile interfaces.

Cox said today’s updates will bring more consistency between Facebook on the web and Facebook on mobile, fulfilling the network’s previously expressed goals about delivering Facebook everywhere without regard to platform.

“It’s amazing how much more modern and clean this feels just because we’ve adapted some of the things we’ve done for the tablet and for mobile and brought them to the web,” Cox said.

Hope for revenue fits into Facebook’s ‘three pillar’ model

When Facebook’s Graph Search launched just two months ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said these three products — Timeline, News Feed, and Graph Search — constitute Facebook’s “three pillars” as a company and a web service. And in each of the three, he said the company is striving to focus on its roots, which lie in personal connections and information’s relevance to those connections.

And we Facebook users can’t forget that all this revenue hangs not on Timelines or Graph Search but on News Feed, which remains for now the sole money-maker among those three pillars.

For advertisers, Facebook reps said that ads will, like your updates, be “richer and more immersive.”

Source: Jolie O'Dell/VentureBeat

Mobile is always top of mind for Facebook.

Zuckerberg also said, about creating more ad inventory across the different feeds, “There’s more [user] demand for more content, and we don’t necessarily want to push more stuff to the front page.”

In the company’s most recent earnings call, we learned that advertising made up 84 percent of Facebook’s total revenue: $1.33 billion in the last quarter alone, which makes up 13.3 percent of the total online ad market.

Also, mobile revenue made up nearly one quarter of all ad revenue in Q4, for a (relatively) huge $306 million.

In fact, Facebook’s mobile ads — which didn’t even exist mere months ago — have led to a huge boom in the U.S. mobile advertising market.

“With 25 percent of revenue going to mobile in the fourth quarter, Facebook has cemented its position as the leader in mobile display advertising in the U.S. by a wide margin,” an eMarketer analyst told VentureBeat recently via email.

Additional reporting by Meghan Kelly. Zuckerberg image via Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat

Path announced this morning that Path 3 is now available, and the focus is the the type of intimate, free-form communication that happens in person. As the private social network says, “There is so much more than words that pass between us. A smile or nod or encouraging gesture – these allow for true connection and understanding.”

To enable that in a more organic — and non-Facebook way — Path has introduced private messaging. Despite the name, it can be used for both one-on-one and one-to-many communication, but the defining characteristic is that it is very free-form. Ye good olde fashioned text or photo-based status update looks almost a little limited in comparison.

A brand new language?

In the new Path, messages can be text or photos (of course) but also voice, location, a cartoon-style sticker or badge that communications your emotions of the moment, a song, a book, a video, your location, or even a movie clip you’ve found online.

In other words, just about anything but the pat on the back.

And a brand-new monetization

One of the new communication channels Path is adding is stickers, kind of a next-gen emoticon.

“These are pieces of art to be used in messaging. They are expressive and fun, and they communicate what words can’t,” Path says.

You get two free “packs” just for being a Path member, but other packs are available as well, at extra cost. Some of my favorites are designed by Hugh McLeod of GapingVoid fame, but stickers from other artists such as David Lanham and Richard Perez are also available. Path didn’t release any pricing information yet.

The new version of Path is available immediately for iPhone, and “coming soon” for Android.

MENLO PARK, Calif. — Today, throngs of reporters have gathered at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters to hear about the social network’s latest updates to News Feed.

News Feed is the single most public-facing Facebook feature. As such, it’s also the most-often complained-about feature.

Leading up to today’s big launch, consumers and news outlets alike have been buzzing about what the changes might bring and what normal Facebook users are hoping to get out of the day’s announcements.

But what most are hoping for is a massive change that would toy with Facebook’s long-cultivated revenue streams and tinker with one of its most precious pieces of IP: The News Feed algorithm.

How News Feed works now

Currently, News Feed is the service’s default landing page for logged-in users, displaying updates, images, and events from all your Facebook-connected friends as well as any brands, companies, or organizations whose Pages you “like” on the site.

From its inception, the Facebook social graph has faced a problem of information overload. Imagine you have just 100 friends on Facebook, and each one updates their profile just twice a day. That’s 200 updates of varying lengths, each with a unique claim on your time and ability to respond, and each with a different degree of relevance to your actual interests and daily life.

The solution is almost entirely programmatic. News Feed’s carefully crafted and constantly updated algorithms (bits of logic like if/then statements that attempt to intelligently sort information and arrive at optimal outcomes) attempt to sort every update in your network not just by its overall relevance or importance but also by its direct relevance to you.

Imagine, for example, that you like Kim Kardashian’s Facebook Page. On Tuesday, she posts a selfie with Kanye West that gets thousands of likes in the first five minutes it’s online. Meanwhile, your mom also posts an update that she got a new dog following the passing of the much-loved family retriever; it’s a Yorkie, and your Dad is not happy, and all your siblings and even your cousins are weighing in.

Facebook would know that your dear, sweet Ma’s update is actually more important and relevant to you than Ms. Kardashian’s, and it would put that update at the top of your News Feed.

The problem with News Feed

What most users we polled are hoping for today is a total revamp of how that algorithm works, or at least how well it works.

“Not seeing the posts of the people and pages I’m following,” said VentureBeat reader Dona Collins, is her biggest problem with News Feed. “The algorithm still seems a bit too random.”

That statement was highly “liked” on the VentureBeat’s own Facebook page and was echoed by many others who said they didn’t see enough posts from their actual friends, that they didn’t see the kinds of posts they wanted to see.

Others complained about the prevalence and placement of advertising in News Feed, especially when it comes to Sponsored Stories. These updates initially appear to be similar to other kinds of content from friends in your News Feed; however, they’re actually paid for by companies and promoted to a huge audience regardless of their relevance to individuals. It’s basically commercial algorithmic override.

Sponsored Stories started popping up in their latest, most subtle form in June last year. And interestingly, they’re also a huge part of Facebook’s plan to monetize its mobile products.

“As companies are promoting services more frequently on mobile, this option gives them the opportunity to focus on specific placements that will impact them most directly,” a Facebook rep told VentureBeat in a recent email exchange.

Most users we talked to said they’d simply like to see more relevance in advertising and more separation between the information they see from people and brands.

A three-headed beast

News Feed, along with Graph Search and Timeline, is one of three main products Facebook is focusing on as core to its site and service.

In fact, when Graph Search launched just two months ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said these three products constitute Facebook’s pillars as a company and a web service. And in each of the three, he said the company is striving to focus on its roots, which lie in personal connections and information’s relevance to those connections.

Timeline, the oldest of the three products, came out late in 2011. It represented a complete overhaul in how Facebook designed and displayed personal profiles and information. It was more visually appealing, more personally expressive, and more modern than any product the engineering-centric company had rolled out in the past.

“We looked at a lot of print, and we did entire studies on scrapbooks,” Facebook product chief Sam Lessin told VentureBeat in an interview in San Francisco during Timeline’s initial roll-out period.

“We’d get out a big box of old pictures, flip through the photos and talk about them. We were watching test users reminisce over these things, and we tried to design with that in mind and create that experience.”

Graph Search, on the other hand, is a much more recent launch, and its design is more closely linked to ‘big data’ and infrastructure than pixels and pictures.

At a meeting last month, Facebookers explained in great detail what’s coming next in Graph Search — how the whole product is built on a computer-science understanding of people, places, and things as objects with multiple attributes, nodes in three-dimensional space with edges connecting them to one another. And Graph Search is a powerful new paradigm for finding those nodes based on those connections.

“The biggest problem is the result set sizes tend to increase exponentially,” Facebook engineer Mike Curtiss told us in a recent interview.

“If a node is connected to 100 other nodes … you can get 10,000 output nodes. In another round of execution, you get one million output nodes. This is literally an exponential problem, a difficult problem to scale. … You can’t just solve it by throwing more machines at it.”

These dual challenges — Timeline and Graph Search — and their related disciplines of design and engineering, come together with News Feed to represent everything that Facebook is today and will be for the foreseeable future.

Facebook’s financials

We first got wind of the News Feed changes just a few days ago.

Since then, the company’s stock price has seen a measurable uptick:

In the company’s most recent earnings call, we learned that advertising made up 84 percent of the company’s total revenue — $1.33 billion in the last quarter alone, which makes up 13.3 percent of the total online ad market.

Also, mobile revenue made up nearly one quarter of all ad revenue in Q4 — a (relatively) huge $306 million.

In fact, Facebook’s mobile ads — which didn’t even exist mere months ago — have led to a huge boom in the U.S. mobile advertising market.

“With 25 percent of revenue going to mobile in the fourth quarter, Facebook has cemented its position as the leader in mobile display advertising in the U.S. by a wide margin,” an eMarketer analyst told VentureBeat recently via email.

And we Facebook users can’t forget that all this revenue hangs not on Timelines or Graph Search but on News Feed, which remains for now the sole money-maker among Facebook’s all-important three pillars.

Image credit: Jolie O’Dell

My question: Won’t Facebook Graph support this kind of thing natively?

The app is basic and beautiful, providing a gorgeous full-screen window into the restaurants you and your friends visit, with large images, a map view, and simple ratings capability. You can share recommendations, discover new spots, and yes, memorialize your inner gourmet.

Source: OpenTable

Places I’ve Eaten

What it makes me think, however, is: Why now?

Why is OpenTable, probably the largest restaurant reservation service available, with its 27,000 restaurants and 400 million users, releasing a Facebook app? Sure, Facebook is the place where well over a billion people get together and talk about their day, including where they ate, but that’s been the case for some time now.

My guess — and it’s just a guess — is that Facebook Graph has a lot to do with the genesis of this app.

Facebook Graph has the potential to replace a huge swath of the local-search, local-events landscape that OpenTable, Yelp, various Yellow Pages incarnations, and other companies service. Places I ate at would be a simple search in Graph, as would places my friends ate at. Implementing this potential, of course, is a whole other thing. And exploiting the financial opportunity is yet another.

So Facebook has a long way to go, and partners will continue to be important for the social network for a long time.

But make no mistake: Facebook is the big kahuna in social, and Graph is the path that will help it monetize that status. As such, services like OpenTable and Yelp and at risk.

Which I’m pretty sure is not lost on them.

photo credit: » Zitona « via photopin cc

Earlier this month, founder Dalton Caldwell told me that people won’t adopt a new social network just because it’s good for them — it needed to be “truly better.” That’s probably true.

But free is also good.

Caldwell started App.net as a counterpoint to free social networks like Facebook and Twitter. His goal was to create a social space online that isn’t beholden to advertisers. Now, after six months as a paid site, gaining more than 30,000 members who pay $36 a year each, and building a thriving community on a web client App.net never expected to build, the service is poised to vastly expand its reach by adding a free tier. There is a catch, however.

To preserve the close-knit App.net sense of community, you need to be invited by an existing member. And there are a few limits on free accounts, App.net’s marketing manager Ben Friedland told me.

People with a free account will only be able to follow 40 people, will only have 500 megabytes of free file storage, and can only upload files with a maximum size of 10 megabytes. (Paid accounts can follow an unlimited number of users, get 10GB of included storage, and can upload 100 MB files.)

“As a bonus, members can earn even more file storage by inviting friends,” Friedland added.

Both the invited and inviting member will get 100 MB of extra storage if the invited member follows five people and authorizes at least one third-party app. Members can earn up to 2GB of extra storage this way.

This is big news for the social network, and it has the real potential to make it take off and grow quickly. Not to Facebook or Twitter size, but certainly 10 or even 100 times larger than it currently is.

“App.net has never been about the numbers,” Brian Solis, Principal Analyst at Altimeter Group, told me this morning. “I think this is an experiment in curated growth, much like Quora did.”

A quick poll of my Twitter followers found that some who haven’t yet taken the plunge now would, if it was free. When asked if he would join App.net if it was free, photographer @AlanBailward said “Yes, probably.” And software developer @CurtisMcHale said the fact that App.net isn’t just purely free is a plus for him:

“I think the appeal is that it’s got a business model.”

Three weeks ago when I chatted with App.net’s Caldwell, he said he felt that due to recent API spats between Twitter and Instagram, people were started to “get it.” In other words, people are starting to understand why a social network that is beholden to its users, not its advertisers, is a good thing.

Now we’ll see, won’t we?

photo credit: Yodel Anecdotal via photopin cc

In other words, the rumors appear to be true.

The visual social network’s last round was in May of 2012, when the company raised $100 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. The current round, if true, comes close to doubling Pinterest’s valuation … and gives it much more time to figure out revenue.

Valiant Capital Partners apparently led the round, but existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners and FirstMark Capital also reportedly took part. Japanese web retailer Rakuten led the previous round.

Pinterest still only has about 100 employees, and while the network’s growth may have slowed, it has solidified a place alongside Facebook and Twitter as one of the top three social networks in North America. It currently has about 31 million unique monthly visitors, according to Compete.com:

Source: Compete.com

Pinterest traffic

I’ve contacted Pinterest PR for comment and will update as we learn more.

“The decisions are more than amazing,” said Thilo Weichert, a German privacy commissioner, in a statement.

Instead, the court ruled that German law does not apply since Facebook’s European office is in Ireland and its German subsidiary is only a sales and marketing office.

But the government data protection agency, which plans to appeal, said that the real name policy is “undoubtedly contrary to … the German Teleservices Act,” and that it was bizarre to say that Irish law should apply, because the Irish office does not actually manage the storage and processing of real names either. Never mind, of course, that the accounts are actually created in Germany, so the data originates on German soil.

This is a tough issue for governments and privacy organizations.

Social networks — and the Internet itself — do not lend themselves easily to regulation that differs based on colors on a map. And the data that they collect in one country might be analyzed and processed in another, stored in multiple other nations, and transferred through any number of other nations when being requested from locations all over the world.

In fact, with cloud services and content delivery networks, it’s likely that in most cases networks, users, and governmental organizations really don’t know where all of their data is at any given time.

All of which begs the question: Who has jurisdiction?

Apparently, according to a German court, Irish law has jurisdiction over German citizens’ data privacy. Which really means that U.S. law and a U.S. corporation has precedence over what German citizens can and cannot do. And which, as Weichert said, means that for a company to circumvent local regulation, it need only set up a subsidiary in a relatively regulation-free data-privacy zone — such as Ireland — to do business in Europe however it wishes.

Putting aside what role you think governments should play in regulating the Internet and social media companies, that’s interesting, to say the least.

photo credit: caribb via photopin cc

As crazy as a pay-for-access social network might sound in the age of Facebook and Twitter, it’s not without precedent. The Well was essentially the first social network, and it was expensive for people to access.

But the key, for Caldwell, is quality.

“I don’t believe that massive numbers of people will adopt something just because it’s good for them,” Caldwell told me yesterday. “To become mainstream, it must become truly better — MySpace was better than Friendster, and Facebook was better than MySpace.”

Not that huge numbers are the goal for App.net. Caldwell’s initial goal for the beholden-to-users-not-advertisers social glue that became App.net was a mere 10,000 users. App.net has already tripled that, and it recently reduced prices from $50 to $36 a year due to economies of scale.

Rather, the goal was freedom.

Freedom for subscribers, who would be the customers and not the product of a social network for perhaps the first time since The Well. And freedom for developers, who would not be at the mercy of a service that owed its capability to meet payroll to advertisers’ capability to make a buck, and therefore to their ability to package and sell users’ attention.

“In my first blog post [about app.net] I said I believed that the social API backends of Twitter and Facebook were really useful to developers, but unfortunately, they’re getting locked down,” Dalton says. “It’s not like the people running the companies are dumb or bad, but they have a business model that forces them to control the stream.”

Which means that that Facebook and Twitter — and any other social network that depends on ad revenue — have a financial incentive to “hose their developers” over and over again. The recent API dustup between Instagram and Twitter that resulted in Instagram photos being banned from the Twitter stream is just one example.

“All the things I’ve been writing about have been coming true,” Caldwell says.

Which is one reason why App.net recently introduced its new file API, which is essentially the building blocks for having your own private cloud without having to own any hardware. With the new API, if a Flickr user wanted to join 500px instead, she could simply import her photos from Flickr and pick up right where she left off at 500px. If — and here’s the massive caveat — both services supported the new API.

That caveat is one reason it makes perfect sense that in conversation, Caldwell still refers to his 6-month-old baby as “an experiment.” It’s a social experiment as much as it is a technological experiment, if not more so. The original idea was to only create a social API backend — a backend for literally almost everything that could be social online — and let developers play with it, build on it, all in a spirit of freedom and openness. User-centricity plus developer-friendly.

“Originally we weren’t even going to have a client ourselves … we didn’t want to build a client for it,” Caldwell said.

Eventually App.net did build a web client, more as a proof of concept than anything else, but Caldwell is more interested in what other developers are doing.

Source: App.net

Patter on App.net

Such as a new client for App.net called Patter which, Caldwell says, looks nothing like microblogging or even Facebook. In fact, it looks like AOL chat rooms, with different topics and rooms you can go into. In other words, nothing like anyone from App.net would have built.

“That’s exactly the point,” Caldwell says. “Stuff that we would never have expected ourselves.”

Whether App.net is a successful experiment or not is still an open question. Early returns are positive, but 30,000 users in a world with billion-user social networks is clearly a blip on the radar. It’ll be interesting to whether that blip is the tip of an iceberg, or just a rowboat tossed in the waves.

App.net, however, has two things going for it.

One is its developing community, who care enough about the service — and what it stands for — to pony up cash for something others think they’re getting for free elsewhere. These are the power users that are spending time on App.net’s fledgling front-end, building relationships and engaging in richer, deeper conversations than they’re finding elsewhere.

The other is that, as sociologist Margaret Mead said, “a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

And Caldwell has a plan for that small, committed group to grow at a much faster rate. But that’s a story for another day.

photo credit: Dunechaser via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Three billion check-ins and tens of millions of tips ought to add up to something. In Foursquare’s case, that means the “Best of” series, which highlights “the most awesome places in cities across the U.S.”

The location-based social network, which has downplayed the competitive aspect of its service in which users get “points” for checking into various locations, has been focusing on local exploration and discovery. This new part of its website, launched today, helps people explore other places as well.

That means, apparently, that Mi Cocina is the best Mexican restaurant in Dallas. And that the 3 Crow Bar is the best nightspot in Nashville, Tenn.

“We use signals like tips, likes, dislikes, popularity, local expertise, and nearly three billion check-ins from over 30 million people worldwide to determine how much people love a place,” Foursquare said in a blog post. “The Best of Foursquare pulls together lists of the places people love most in cities across the U.S., from cafés and pizzerias to museums and bookstores.”

The new service is great for checking out what might be a good place to visit when you travel. But it’s also yet another nail in the traditional Yellow Pages-style directory — and a direct shot across the bow of a Yelp, which has owned local business recommendations, especially in the entertainment space.

Frankly, it also makes even clearer the competition between Foursquare and the more hotels-and-flights focused TripAdvisor as well as even the new graph-search-enabled Facebook.

Now, if only Foursquare could figure out a truly viable business model to go with all its wonderful data.

The new app for business owners, which allows them to monitor Foursquare check-in activity, check out top customers, and monitor analytics data, and the recently added feature enabling businesses to promote events might help with this.

That’s one of the reasons Facebook is reportedly working on a new app that will let users send photos — and maybe videos — to friends that will self-destruct. According to AllThingsD, Facebook is testing an app to compete with SnapChat, the social network that deletes photos and videos seconds after they’ve been viewed.

SnapChat’s app, which has been accused of being a sexting tool, allows users to take pictures or short videos, add short, superimposed text messages, and send them privately to a friend. The sender can also chose how long the message should be viewable. As soon as the receiver gets and views the message, the timer starts. Once the message is deleted, it disappears from the receiver’s phone, the sender’s phone, and Snapchat’s servers.

Too bad there’s such a thing as screen captures.

After perhaps a slow start in mobile that Mark Zuckerberg blames on an over-reliance on an HTML5-based strategy to build cross-platform apps, Facebook has moving into the app space aggressively with standalone apps. Of course, it bought photo-sharing service Instagram for $750 million. It also has Facebook Messenger, a sort of SMS-replacement app on which messages do not disappear, and the apparently Instagram-competing Camera.

In addition, as part of a strategy to improve quality and get better faster, Facebook is now pushing out refreshes to its core mobile Facebook mobile apps every one or two months. Just in the past week, Facebook updated its Android and iOS apps, which are both now native apps, with better performance than ever.

The new SnapChat competitor is rumored to be going live sometime in the next few weeks. Little hint to Facebook: before Christmas would be a nice gift to your users.

photo credit: Shandi-lee via photopin cc

And Facebook is growing rapidly in that part of the world with a population of about 400-500 million people: 29 percent growth in 2012, according to a new infographic from Socialbakers.

The “Arab Spring” popular uprisings in 2011 and 2012 contributed to that growth, according to Socialbakers — particularly in the most politically active countries, Qatar, Libya, and Iraq. Those three countries’s Facebook user numbers have soared in 2012, 115 percent, 86 percent, and 81 percent respectively. Facebook, along with YouTube and Twitter, helped protesters organize and collaborate during the popular uprisings in those countries.

Egypt, the most populous country in the region, grew the most by absolute measures, adding 2.5 million Facebook users.

It’s not profitable growth, at least not comparatively, and not yet: Facebook users in MENA countries are some of the least valuable users as far as advertisers are concerned. But that will likely change over time.

One oddity that I noticed in the infographic: Israel is missing from the map. In a variety of sources that I checked, Israel is included in the MENA countries in some cases but not all. It does seem strange, however, that Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon are shown on the map, but Israel is not.

Here’s all the data, in visual form.

photo credit: jonrawlinson via photopin cc

Microsoft’s fledgling social network is a bit of a puzzler. Pronounced “social,” Socl debuted to the public Tuesday with a fresh coat of paint, new features, and no clear purpose.

The product of Microsoft’s Fuse Labs research team, Socl was originally intended to appeal to educational communities — design students, for instance — and folks who are want to collaborate online in unconventional ways. A year into testing, Microsoft has invited newcomers to try out Socl and redesigned it to be more adept at helping people connect around shared interests.

My post on Boo, created with images from Bing search results.

At its core, Socl is all about search, but search dressed up in pretty, image-rich collections. Posts take the shape of photo collages that members put together from Bing search results around terms or topics. Each image, video, or search listing in a collage links to the original web source. Members can comment, tag, like (technically “:)” at), and share posts to other social networks. People can also “riff” on posts, which is a feature that looks to be like a more open-ended version of Twitter’s retweet. You can be inspired by a cat collage and then go on to make your own, for instance.

“Socl helps people find and share interesting web pages by extending the search metaphor, create rich posts by assembling montages of visual web content and provides rich media sharing and real time sharing of videos,” a spokesperson said. “We encourage users to reimagine how everyday communication and learning tools can be improved by researching, learning, and sharing in their everyday lives.”

As far as I can tell, Socl users enjoy making posts that contain collections of their favorite things, be they puppies, animated .gifs from “Gangnam Sytle,” or random maps of Switzerland. Learning, not so much. Some also seem to want to use Socl as a more traditional social network, which means they’re posting individual photos and text updates to opine on the world at the large.

Spend a few minutes in the free-for-all “posts” stream and you’ll come across many a collage that seems to exist without rhyme or reason, likely because it’s a little confusing as to what you’re supposed to do here. The idea of collecting items around topics and interests is one that Pinterest has already made popular. The search results-only element both simplifies and complicates Socl’s collection-inspired collages. Finding exactly what you want to add is a bit of a pain because you’re forced to work with just what Bing serves up. The easiest option, then, is the most boring: adding the first several images or articles that Bing returns. The end result are collages that look a lot like search results pages.

Socl also comes with a feature called “parties” that lets people participate in online video viewing parties. Parties seem tacked on, and are a very loose stretch on the whole interest-based search experience. It’s as if Microsoft needed to create a semi unique foil for Google+ Hangouts and this is what they came up with.

The overall aesthetic is quite appealing, but Socl strikes me as more novel than useful. People do, as history instructs us, seem to get a kick out of novelty on the web. Plus, my post of Boo photos and links racked up a few instant reactions, so there seems to be a small but engaged audience ready and willing to help Microsoft sort out of the point of Socl.

Facebook shared a few of those details today.

Mozilla’s goal was to build a Social API that would integrate content from any social network directly to your browser, even when you’re not on the actual social network’s website, Facebook engineer Pamel Vagata said in a post.

Facebook’s implementation keep you connected with your Facebook friends while you surf the wider web.

Facebook Messenger for Firefox is the first Facebook product to use a key new feature of HMTL, WebSockets, at scale. WebSockets enable persistent connections between your web browser and a webserver in a manner that scales well and also uses few resources. Facebook rolled out WebSockets on its existing chat servers but also had to reengineer its front-end Messenger code to eliminate dependencies on code fragments that simple are not available in the browser implementation.

Facebook credits its organizational structure — small groups, independent engineers — with the capability to make the changes quickly.

“Our ability to work with a small team and push code on a daily basis meant we could rapidly iterate on the API design and feature work to get this integration into the wild,” Vagata said.

Facebook is the first major social network to make use of this API, but theoretically, any such site could make use of it. Just a few days ago, Mozilla released a demo of Social API with WebRTC that shows off even more advanced functionality, such as chatting, video chatting and file sharing.

Here’s Mozilla’s overview of its Social API with WebRTC:

photo credit: Βethan via photopin cc

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This startup provides an online gathering place where users meet new people based around shared interests. Every day, it connects users to someone they haven’t met before based on location, history, interests, and intent — what the service calls “pools.”

Upon signing up, you join pools based around your background, passions, and the type of people you would like to meet. The technology then makes relevant matches and the rest is up to you.

“There are numerous reports showing how social networks are making the world less social,” said founder and CEO Alex Capecelatro in a statement. “As the Internet has evolved, we’ve seen more access to data, more access to curated content, and more access to the people we know, but very little in regard to connecting new social spheres. Frustrated with how difficult it is to meet new people, and how the Internet has been a barrier instead of a gateway, we set out to create a platform that gets us offline.”

The goal is to help people interact in the physical world. At The Pool makes introductions that can go beyond the first stage. The web is replete with dating sites that provide a similar service, but those are mostly patronized by people looking for a romantic connection. At The Pool is more focused on friendship and peers, so you no longer have to go alone to those obscure indie film screenings or have someone to play badminton with.

This invite-only “exclusive community of extraordinary people” launched in July and has expanded its presence into more than 50 countries. Today, At The Pool is announcing product updates and a $1 million round of funding from Clearstone Venture Partners and a syndicate of L.A. angel invetors. The homepage was redesigned to switch from a focus on daily matches to a news feed format where relevant content and updates are posted.

The team also enhanced the “activities” feature so users can post things they want to do nearby and notify people who may be interested. This was in response to a large number of requests from members that wanted to organize events on the fly.

Since launching, the levels of user engagement have been high. The company claims that members send an average of 15 messages in their first 60 days and 20 to 30 percent of members return almost daily. The gender division is split fairly evenly. As for age, it’s a young crowd with 85 percent of members are under the age of 35 and 55 percent are under the age of 25.

At The Pool is based in Los Angeles. It is the silver to Facebook’s gold.

But Vancouver-based Perch has a different idea … one in which video communication is a normal, background constant. No starting and stopping an app, no “phoning” and connecting to another person or group of people, no required synchronicity. Instead, just simple video communication, always available.

It’s kind of like a tiny video-oriented social network, with Facebook’s 2011 “frictionless sharing” concept brought to life. Except only with people you really, really care about.

“I’m a dad, and I work a lot since I’m in a startup,” Perch CEO Danny Robinson told me last week. “My kids are 11 and 8 … the oldest has a phone and can text, email, or IM me, but when she really wants to talk to me, her first choice is to use Perch. It’s completely frictionless, there’s no barrier — you walk up to it, you say what you want to say.”

Perch is an iPhone app — soon to be Android too — that connects any number of people in a family or a company. The app is designed to be left running, full-time, on an older device positioned (dare I say perched) anywhere you want to enable communication. Someone who wants to communicate simply steps up to the device and waves, speaks, or otherwise communicates, and a message is sent to everyone who is connected in the same Perch group.

When they get the message, they simply view the video, and, if they choose, send one back.

In Moments mode, Perch simply records and shares video whenever it senses motion, adding sound whenever its facial recognition sensors detect a face.

This works for families, and it also works for companies, Robinson says, adding that Perch uses its own service almost exclusively for internal communications. For example, here’s Emma, Robinson’s daughter, showing him a report card via a Perch-equipped phone just inside the family’s front door:

“We leave it running all the time in the kitchen or at the front door,” Robinson said. “It’s perfect to see the little moments — I know they’re at home and feel a sense of security … everything’s OK.”

This is not Robinson’s first time around the block. He started Spinway, raising $100 million in 1999 and growing it to the second-largest ISP in the U.S. after AOL before selling it to United Online. Perch is his latest startup, and he’s just raised a $1 million seed round from Zack Lebow and Michael Peroni, two of the founder of Barracuda Networks, as well as geeks-on-a-plane and lean startup guru Dan Martell, with Mike Edwards, one of Vancouver’s super-angels.

One thing is clear: Perch is an idea and a vision, not just an app.

Robinson’s very aware of the fact that communications is a trillion-dollar industry, and seems to have several related products and services up his sleeve, though he’s currently coy about the details. Certain Android is in the very near future (the company has a job opening for an Android developer) and Amazon’s Kindle is a very tempting platform.

“We have a very well-thought out business model,” he told me. “We’re not an Instagram trying to figure it out after the fact, but we are just trying to keep a lid on that right now.”

Coming features include private messages to specific people — currently all group communications are available in a family or company conversation view, and options about how long Perch archives your video messages.

For now, the service is completely free.

Perch works on iPhone 4 and up and the iPod Touch 4 as well as more recent versions. Older iPhones and iPod Touches lack the horsepower for onboard face recognition and some of the other more challenging things that Perch does.

One thing that should reduce the creepy factor for anyone who’s worried: Perch automatically disables the back camera. This is not a tool for spying, Robinson is at pains to highlight.

“We don’t want you to hide this behind a teddy bear. This is designed to be open … everyone knows it’s there.”

Image credits: Perch

Pinterest blocked traffic from Amazon and other websites on Black Friday last week, according to Pinfluencer, a Pinterest analytics service. Socialtimes reported today that extra holiday traffic — and suspected malicious activity — prompted Pinterest to refuse queries from the sites.

Update 9:38PM — Pinterest PR gave me the following statement:

During the holidays, we believe a third party was using Amazon Web Services to scrape our site so we temporarily blocked a specific traffic source, which is a common measure taken by web services. Some legitimate services may have been affected momentarily, but we do not believe that traffic to or from Amazon.com or other Amazon properties was impacted. 

Pinterest drives massive referral traffic that can drive impressive sales for online retailers. And though its growth has slowed in 2012, and the site is virtually ignored by small and medium-sized businesses, it is still on track to be the fourth-largest source of referral traffic on the web.

Amazon added Pinterest buttons to its website earlier this year (although it can be a massive where’s-Waldo exercise to find the social sharing buttons on Amazon’s busy pages). Presumably so many product pages were being viewed and shared by shoppers, Pinterest’s automated danger signals were activated.

The blockage lasted for 15.5 hours, from 11:30 PM on November 23th to 3PM on November 24th. Since Pinfluencer tracks pins, repins, likes, and comments, its services were affected as well.

I’ve contacted both Pinfluencer and Pinterest for more details, and will update this post as those companies respond.

photo credit: Thomas Hawk via photopin cc

We’ve heard the Twitter creation myth before, but this time two-time Sundance-winning director Ondi Timoner has produced a short insider video on exactly how Twitter pivoted so successfully.

The star witness is Dom Sagolla — @dom on Twitter — whose first tweet was the 38th use of the platform that now has well over half a billion registered users.

Here’s the video:

Sagolla, who was the ninth employee at Odeo, was not a core Twitter founder for long. In fact, he spent only eight months at Odeo before moving on to Adobe and then several startups, including his latest, Chaotic Moon Studios.

But he was there right at the beginning, in charge of quality.

And he was there for perhaps the most important single moment in Twitter’s history: the hackathon at which Jack Dorsey announced a new idea for an incredibly simple product.

Image credit: The Pivot

But it’s not the written rules that are the problem. It’s the unwritten ones.

At least, according to Marco Arment, developer, blogger, general gadfly, and — of course —  creator of Instapaper. Arment is calling out Twitter for, as he puts it, “being a dick again” (yeah, check the URL, not the title).

The problem is that Atta Elayyan, who built Tweetro, a sweet-looking Twitter app for Windows 8, asked for permission to go over Twitter’s API connection limitations. Tweetro got popular, quickly, averaging 3,000 to 4,000 downloads a day from the Windows Store and bursting well past the maximum of 100,000 users that Twitter allows for free.

So he asked for an exemption, because Twitter doesn’t have an official Windows 8 client, making Windows 8 theoretically an underserved market which could potentially qualify for an ask-us-for-permission exemption. But Twitter has already announced that it is building one. So Twitter denied the exemption, saying:

We know that there are developers that want to take their passion for Twitter and its ecosystem to unique underserved situations. As such, we have built some flexibility into our policy with regard to user tokens – which went into effect September 5th, 2012.

Unfortunately, it does not appear that your service addresses an area that our current or future products do not already serve. As such, it does not qualify for an exemption.

Arment takes issue with that — as he has before – saying that the wording of the rule is vague and essentially meaningless. The real rule, he says, “if Twitter was honest and direct, is simple: ‘We don’t permit anyone to exceed the limit unless we feel like it.’”

That’s perhaps a little harsh, since the company has said don’t build Twitter clients, we’re doing that, and has announced plans for a Windows 8 native Twitter client. But it is shutting the door on developers who are promoting the service.

Which effectively means, according to Arment: Don’t develop for Twitter. And he’s taking that message to Twitter:

Honesty would be communicating unambiguously to current and future developers that their API access is tenuous, fragile, and time-limited.

—
Marco Arment (@marcoarment) November 16, 2012

and

Proposed honesty: “API features or access may be revoked for any client, at any time, for any reason, even if published rules are followed.”

—
Marco Arment (@marcoarment) November 16, 2012

Image credit: John Koetsier

According to Twitter’s blog, the social network is now rolling out a share-this-tweet-via-email feature. Or, as I like to call it, “tweemail.”

If that sounds a little odd from a communications utility that already enables massive amounts of sharing via its own tools on its own service, that’s because it is. But Twitter has a method to its madness, and it’s all about reaching new users:

Of course, you can retweet any of these to your Twitter followers, but sometimes you want to share with another group, like your college roommates or your parents or a friend who isn’t yet on Twitter.

The feature will be rolling out over the next few weeks, Twitter says. A “More” icon will be show up next to the reply, retweet, and favorite buttons. Click it, select email, and Twitter email the tweet, with a comment or introduction, to whoever you wish.

(That does bring up the question: What else will be added with email under the rather nebulous heading of “more.”)

No doubt Twitter will use the email address you send — and the tweemail itself — to market its services to those who are not yet tweeting.

photo credit: factoryjoe via photopin cc

The startup mines social data from Facebook and leverages it into fundraising and outreach. In a nutshell, this platform modernizes traditional mobilization campaigns by providing an online replacement for phone calls, emails, and snail mail.

Amicus gamifies social fundraising by letting users earn points and move up a leader board as a result of how many friends they talk to. There is also the opportunity for people to win real world prizes. On the organizational side, Amicus helps them conserve time and money by creating a more effective outreach channel. Administrators can use the management platform to stay on top of the campaigns.

Customers include juggernauts like the Human Rights Campaign, National Education Association, and the AFL-CIO. During the lead up to the recent election, Amicus powered outreach efforts in the four states that had marriage equality on the ballot.

The company participated in Y Combinator’s 2012 summer class and investors include YC partners Alexis Ohanian, Garry Tan, and Harj Taggar. Other investors include Omidyar, Y Combinator, Peter Thiel’s FF Angel, Andreessen Horowitz, Start Fund, SV Angel, and General Catalyst, IA Ventures, High Peaks Venture Partners, and 500 Startups, as well as existing investors RRE, Quotidian Ventures, Esther Dyson, and other angels. The team is based in New York.

It may be shocking to some men — or at least advertising art directors — but not all women have the stereotypical Barbie dimensions. Or the Twiggy lack thereof.

That’s what BeauCoo, a play on the French word beaucoup, meaning lots — was created to solve. Co-founder Victoria MacLean puts it this way: ”Why should a woman take style advice from someone who looks nothing like her?”

A quick google for images that match “fashion stylist” suffices to make her point:

Source: Google

Fashion stylists, according to Google image search, are not average women

So Beaucoo aims to connect women who look alike, allow them to share fashion tips, ideas, and finds with each other, and discover cool new looks. Along the way, they can earn rewards from fashion retailers: targeted promos and discounts based on what they’re sharing and viewing.

The social network lives mainly in Beaucoo’s mobile apps. iOS is available at launch, Android and web apps are coming in November.

The Beaucoo team of four founders are all successful entrepreneurs, having sold their previous company Decoder. They’ve raised $1.1 million in funding from Zinc Ventures.

[Update: We fixed some quotes; we regret the errors]. Gina Bianchini, the founder of startups Mighty Bell and Ning, went off script today to talk about failure. At the Failcon conference in San Francisco, she talked about how to learn from your bad breaks.

She has come face to face with failure. Bianchini’s last big startup, Ning, sold for $150 million in 2011 and had more than 100 million registered users. But it was considered a failure because it had once had a $750 million valuation and had raised more than $100 million. And it lost out to Facebook, which became worth billions of dollars.

One lesson is to roll with failure and not become a victim. She learned this in the third grade, when her mother took her to a tournament race (she was a competitive walker) and they arrived too late for her to compete.

“It was totally crushing,” Bianchini said. “I could have been a victim at that moment, feeling sorry for myself. That was not my M.O. My dad was killed when I was 11. Not winning the vice president race in my high school. It’s not about what happens to you. It’s what do you do next. How do you bounce back from failure? Try to stay focused on the things I can control and look at life as a series of small moments that I have some control over.”

You can trace failures back to small moments, she said.

She added later, “What did I learn this week? Did I do everything within my control to drive this? It’s so much more relaxing and so much more fun. It’s not like a big scary world crashing down on me. I feel I am in control of my own destiny, and failure and mistakes and fucking up is part of that process. It is a process. It’s so much more fun to succeed. The joy is in learning every single week.”

Bianchini said she writes down lessons that she learned in a week every Sunday and her goals for the coming week.

“[Carrying] failures on our back as we go into the new week is like climbing Mount Everest not with just your supplies but with 50 pounds of rocks on your back,” she said. “It’s exhausting.”

Asked what she learned at Ning, she said she learned a “ton of lessons.” But it was hard to pinpoint any one singular lesson of “five or six years of my life.”

Another speaker at Failcon, author Scott Berkun, said that one of the fallacies about failing is that there is a single point of failure.

“We believe simple lies over complex truths,” he said.

She did not say that Ning itself raised too much money. But she did say that people consider the ability to raise a lot of money to be like a status symbol in Silicon Valley.

“That was fucked up,” she said.

Raising a lot of money when you have growth is good. But having revenue to go with that growth is important, even though venture capitalists tend to value growth above all else, she said.

She also said she was humbled that many of her own “genius ideas” didn’t work. Sometimes the ideas that worked came accidentally or from someone else. She said it’s hard but you have to embrace those ideas, no matter where they come from.

Bianchini said that working in small groups and having lots of one-on-one conversations is the way she likes to work. In that environment, it’s a lot easier to make products and “be real” with people on your team. That is something within your control.

Bianchini said, “The power of intimate communities to change people’s lives is the most important lesson I’ve learned in the past decade.”

Teams have to be willing to iterate back and forth based on constructive feedback. They don’t do as well if, after they launch a beta version of software or a web site, if they get nothing but congratulatory feedback.

“We live in such an interconnected world, nobody wants to come out and say, ‘I don’t get what you are doing,’” she said. “….You see congratulations threads. Once you get through that cycle, you can understand what was real about what you built and what was not about what you built…. People love what you are doing….It’s crickets when the actual numbers come in.”

If you spend a lot of money on a big bang launch and it fails, then “you look like an asshole,” Bianchini said.

“I look myself in the mirror and ask, ‘Am I prepared to publicly fail? The answer is yes….I don’t believe you can build anything new if you are not willing to look in the mirror and put yourself out there.”

And the haters will come out. Bianchini was a big target in part because she got a cover story in Fast Company magazine — and she was a high-profile, attractive woman.

“I’ve seen people get a lot more shit than I got for that,” she said. “There were like two haters…. Don’t listen to them. The message in Silicon Valley was to keep your head down and keep delivering.”

A recent Piper Jaffray survey of 7000 U.S. teens ranked Facebook first in importance to teens. Twitter came in second, and Instagram — owned, of course, by Facebook — came in third. Detailed results, including how big the differences are, were not released, but Gene Munster, a Piper Jaffray analyst, said that Facebook is well positioned to stay top dog in social networks for teens.

That, however, contrasts with a mammoth social media demographics study completed by Pingdom just two months ago.

In that survey, which analyzed social media use at 24 different social networks, the average age of Facebook users is 40.5 years, while the average age of Twitter users is slightly younger, at 37.2. And when Pingdom compared the results to a previous study, the website performance monitoring company found that while the average age of Facebookers has increased by two years since 2010, the average of Twitter users has decreased by the same amount.

All of which correlates well with statistics way back from 2009 which showed Facebook users aging and Twitter users growing younger.

Source: Beevolve

Self-disclosed ages on Twitter

And it matches up with Beevolve’s recent survey of a whopping 36 million Twitter users. In Beevolve’s study, almost three quarters of users who disclose their age on Twitter are aged 15 to 25. That needs to be taken with a big fat grain of salt, as most of Twitter’s 500+ million users don’t disclose their age on the site, but is still an interesting indicator of a sizable youth contingent on Twitter.

A possible explanation?

Facebook has more than double Twitter’s users. At over a billion daily active users to Twitter’s perhaps 550 to 600 million total users, there’s a massive size advantage. Take into account the percentage of monthly active users out of Twitter’s total userbase — about a third — and the difference becomes even more apparent.

Daily active Facebook to Twitter users is probably about a five to one ratio … a billion to maybe 200 million. And that’s even before you take Instagram into account.

Which means that even if the average age of Twitter users is young, and perhaps on a percentage basis Twitter has more teens than Facebook, Facebook still easily has Twitter beat.

But that may yet change in the future, if the current demographic trends on social network continue.

photo credit: ruurmo via photopin cc

Google product manager Anish Acharya  announced the update on — where else — Google+, but the laborious method of actually managing pages is not going over well with at least some of the commenters:

This is likely going to cause some support issues for Google: I updated Google+ on my iPhone, and wasted a few minutes searching for the page management functionality that Google promised in the release notes before checking online if others were having similar issues.

One app store review of the new app says that:

“This new version prompted me to choose a page I manage when I launched it, and now I cannot find ANY way to switch back to my regular profile … do I need to uninstall/reinstall? There are no settings under the settings section.”

But the bigger problem for Google might be the comparison to Facebook’s very slick iOS and Android apps, which show Facebook pages in-line with your Favorites, Apps, Groups, and Friends … meaning that you can update any of your pages right from the same Facebook app that you use to update your personal status, with no annoyance like signing out and signing back in.

Source: John Koetsier

Google+ forces you to sign in as you, or a page. Facebook allows you to manage your pages with a single login.

This probably reveals something about the architecture of the Google+ network, that the users, pages, and permissions models are not fully integrated. That would explain this laborious process, and possibly also explain why social media management tools such as HootSuite and SproutSocial still do not offer the ability to update the Google+ stream, even though HootSuite can manage Google+ pages.

On the good side, the Google+ app is stunningly gorgeous, as is the recently-released Google+ iPad app. It’s visual and rich. In addition, Google has added iPhone5 and iOS6 support on iPhone, as well as the ability to edit posts, and a new ‘Find People’ experience on Android.

Source: John Koetsier

The new Google+ app

Many of us hate email. Articles abound on the “disease” of email. Entire technologies, such as Google Wave, were invented to try to kill email. And all, to date, have utterly and impressively failed.

Nowogrodski (try saying that three times quickly) is the chief executive of Clarizen, the cloud-based project management software provider, and he sees email a little differently. In fact, he’s downright passionate about it. He loves email.

While he recognizes the challenges inherent in email — mentioning that his spouse is unhappy whenever he spends an evening at the computer replying to business associates — he offers three reasons why companies should avoid the mistake of trying to kill email.

“Email is the biggest social network on earth, everyone has an email (which is not true for any other network), and email is accountable.”

Instead of trying to kill email, Clarizen is now integrating email into the essential processes and projects of a company. And while many lightweight project management tools, such as Wrike and Asana, allow you to create tasks by email, or even live in your outbox, Clarizen’s goal is to connect all the unstructured information in the correct context of the right processes.

“There is the analogy of a funnel,” he says. “The social graph is creating conversations, and some of those conversations become activities. From them you can create a shared todo list, but some of those activities become company deliverables … such as budgets, ROI calculations, and business intelligence data.”

So Nowogrodski and his team are reinventing how companies like FritoLay, Marketo, NBC — and even NASA — are using email.

Most project management or internal social network solutions deal with either social and unstructured data (think Yammer) or projects and structured data (think any project management system you’ve ever used).

Clarizen’s goal is to connect the two.

The team started with email and projects, and is rolling up social via APIs and an app store-like marketplace: find what you want, such as a SalesForce.com bridge, and plug it in.

It’s a big vision, which is part of the reason Clarizen has created a plugin architecture with plug-and-play apps. Already, users can create projects automatically in SalesForce via email, with target companies and automated management reports to various parts of the company including sales, production, and more.

But there’s much more to come. When a company’s project/knowledge management system automatically see emails flowing and assigns them to projects as appropriate, checking off tasks and moving projects forward with a high degree of reliability, he’s know he’s won.

Email, after all, in spite of all its flaws, is a massively scalable messaging system: componentized, reliable, ubiquitous. Nowogrodski’s goal is to harness it to company goals, not to change it.

If he succeeds, he’ll be one of the first.

photo credits: caribb via photopin cc, Stéfan via photopin cc