Tim O’Reilly on the Facebook Application
This is a good video presentation on where Facebook is headed. Here are my notes on it:
Facebook doesn’t have access to our real social network. Our phone has this information. But we have to hack around in the social networking services.
Facebook growing 1 percent per day
Applications growing 2 percent per day
87 percent of the usage goes to 2 percent of the apps
Top 50 apps looks like the long tail
Graph with 5000 is almost flat
O’Reilly print book market has the long tail characteristics on facebook.
On facebook are the top apps are taking off like wildfire and the rest are languishing.
Apps at the top are peaking out. The longer the apps are out, the growth is slowing.
Tim defines web 2.0: Systems that harness networks effects that get better the more people use it.
Dan Bricklin: Cornucopia of the commons.
Three ways to build a collective database: 1) you pay people (Yahoo). 2) Volunteers do this (Wikipedia) 3) Peer to Peer file sharing (it happens naturally).
Architecting systems so that they get smarter automatically is a key breakthrough in web 2.0.
Harnessing Collective Intelligence: every true web 2.0 company is building a database whose value grows in proportion to the number of participants. Accelerating returns to the winners.
Right now Facebook has that characteristic. But it could be better.
Google automatically extracts meaning from linking activity - use that to deliver user facing services - google automates
finding out how to make participation authonomic. It just happens.
Facebook has some automation there. One of the problems is that I don’t have much control over it. Facebook now requires too much manual work. Like authenticating friend requests.
Social networking has a long way to go until it becomes the web 2.0 address book.
Facebook is working from the outside in because the phone company which has all the data should be doing it.
Mining email and showing the top contacts and automatically extracting address book data from it. Click to call, email statistics.
Web 2.0 is about the future of the internet operating system. Subsystem is not about devices; higher level data subsystems.
Even though facebook is describing itself as a platform it is a subsystem platform. Not the whole thing.
Who is going to own these subsystems into the larger Internet operating system.
Two types of platforms: one ring to rule them all (Microsoft). small pieces loosely joined. (the web). The future social of networking is going to include small pieces loosely joined.
Facebook and others will work together to build together to build a small pieces loosely joined of the social graph.
Questions you need to ask yourselves: are you doing everything you can to build applications that learn from your users?
Facebook applications take this approach: learn from your users and take that and turn it into an application that serves the users.
Does my application get better with more users? Turn more into less. Once I have a certain number of friends, how do I do more smart filtering on that? What data do you own?
Data is the intel inside - source of competitive advantage - unique data resources that are growing through user activity.
Is the platform you are using? Does it give you and users control or take it away?
One of the challenges for facebook is you have to create more value than you capture.
What I want from the social graph?
I want social networking to reflect my real social network.
I want my social network to help me manage my connections.
Two classes of people: people we already know; friends of the company; then there are cool people who are doing interesting things. Who are the emerging superstars in fields I don’t know? I want to be able to manage this information. It is all on the premise that these people are your friends.
I want to be able to put people into groups: here is a field I am following and I want to manage that independent of whether I know them or not.
I want fined grained control over what I see and what I ignore. Take data in the minifeed and have control over it. I don’t want to see the tweets but I do want to see their blog posts. Because I want to discover interesting people.
Purpose built social networks: geni.com. Genealogy sites.
How do we build special purpose social network? Now we have that data. When somebody shows up in facebook, we can check Swift for what conferences we are going to? And who is speaking?
Facebook doesn’t give me any choice between friends and other.
Interesting ideas at 3base for any kind of data. Data graph of relationships.
Crowdvine. Social network for people to at one of our events. Tagging. People tag their company.
Jaiku.
Think ahead of the curve. All of the social networks work together to share data and get increasingly intelligent.
Spend as much time as you can thinking far out along that curve. Thinking about smart presence on the phone.
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