Socially Wired

It’s unfortunate Adonomics (Facebook Analytics site) doesn’t have stats on user session times. I’m talking about Scrabulous (http://adonomics.com/about/3052170175).

I agree with Jeremy Liew from Lightspeed on the market opportunity for these type of games. The impressions served, coupled with user session times on these apps’ canvas pages, is some of the highest on Facebook.

If these apps are going to replace casual gaming sites like Yahoo Games and AddictingGames… then watch out.

I’m waiting for a company to own this space and to deploy their apps across OpenSocial sites as well.

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>10 million blogs launch every year; the vast majority of them barely update quickly disintegrating into the blogosphere.

In hopes of not becoming another lost blog, I post now.

Facebook’s “social graph” experiment is in month 2 of operation, this since opening up their API to third party developers.

I wasn’t moved at all actually when a friend recently forwarded news of early VC interest in this space. Bay Partners in Menlo Park announced the AppFactory (similar to CRV’s quick start-up fund) concentrating solely on Facebook applications being built on the Facebook “social operating system.”

I’m not sure exactly at what point in time it occurred: Facebook transitioned from a social networking site into a social operating system. As much as I applaud Facebook’s ambition I have to question– both rationally and cynically– some of the early funding in this area.

The simple analogy is that Facebook apps are like Myspace widgets. Well sure, yes. But whereas Myspace widgets served primarily to create traffic and even more importantly user registration for their mother sites, I currently see a solar system of stand-alone Facebook apps orbiting Facebook. Many, if not most, have no mother site. And the few that do, exceptions like HotorNot or iLike, are already mature and don’t require the funding of VCs like Bay Partners.

And due to Facebook’s tight hold on user privacy, for instance limiting the ability of apps to extract information from its network for external use, even launching mother sites after successful app launches is not immediately feasible.

Where as MySpace is an open meat market, Facebook is a fully enclosed shop. Luring customers away to other storefronts is much more difficult in the latter.

One of them helped fuel the growth of YouTube and Photobucket with its enabled widgets. It seems early VC interest may seem the market is betting on history repeating itself.

Of course if Facebook is truly interested in becoming the web’s next social operating system, is it in their own interest to spawn new behemoths and possible competitors (the likes of YouTube) from within their own ecosystem?

The answer of course is no. So whereas Facebook apps may serve very well in a complementary role to their sites, investing in stand-alone facebook apps is like setting a ship out to space with no means back.

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Joe Anthony, former owner of Barack Obama’s unofficial Myspace page, is a disgruntled online campaign volunteer. Get used to them. In our age of decentralized political campaigns (thanks to the web) controlling and satisfying every facet of a campaign from meetups to Myspaces is simply impossible.

In the now widely reported incident Obama’s campaign staff closed down Joe’s unofficial Obama Myspace page. It appears Obama’s friend count was exploding too quickly (over 160,000 friends). And the campaign worried that Joe (as an unpaid volunteer) would not be able to handle the demands of a Presidential Myspace page.

Of course this is something they should have calculated. Especially a campaign as web savvy as Obama’s. The coordinator of online organizing for the Obama campaign is 23 year old Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook.

It appears even social networking credentials like co-founding Facebook could not make up for his rather obvious inexperience.

Which helps explain why the Obama campaign could allow such a public gaffe to occur in the first place. If you’re a campaign coordinator, it’s unfortunate but true that all the press training in the world won’t help your legions of volunteers. There’s simply too many outlets and too much anonymity on the web to try old-fashioned control tactics.

And future campaign coordinators better take this as a cautionary tale. In a net-roots campaign effort, as any ground roots effort, you can not own every channel of communication. So don’t seek it. You’re much better off trying to shape a message that your volunteers actually understand. Crazy, I know. At least this way they can represent that message accurately themselves– through all the local TV interviews and Facebook groups they want. And you’ll never have to worry about censuring them.

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Casual online games are about as fickle and non-committal as you get. From the casual standard, solitaire, to the 1000’s of flash games featuring fuzzy little critters on sites like Neopets, what makes these type of games so alluring is their stupid simplicity and the advance assurance that there is no way you’lll ever fall hard for the game. Commitment-free.

Kind of like a casual mate.

So with all the recent talk of casual worlds like Gaia Online it shouldn’t be a surprise that these casual worlds are being placed on the polar end of “harder” more immersive worlds like Second Life and There.com.

The user interaction in the “casual” sphere is far simpler. No clients to download and install. That means an immediate play experience.

As of this post, Gaia Online owns no real trade marketplaces. Users aren’t able to trade in their virtual currency for real dollars. That may be a stupid business decision. But it definitely lessens the complication.

Entering Gaia’s site and designing my own avatar reminded me of my Happy Meal experiences when I was younger. Everything is so piecemeal on the site. There are hundreds of different “experience channels” to sift thru, marketplaces and forums. In fact according to Wagner James Au over at Gigaom only 10% of user activity takes place in world. Apparently, young users are too busy talking up their avatars on their forum boards to actually play with them.

I never kept my Happy Meal toys beyond the day I got them. Inside Gaia and other casual worlds the avatar customization is so seamless however, the moment you tire of one avatar look you can just change to another.

Worlds like Second Life just can’t package the Happy Meal experience like casual worlds can.

On the other hand, the danger with stupid simple, casual worlds is apparent.

Casual relationships usually lead to casual dumping.

Easy uptake also means easy churn and throw away. With little investment on behalf of the user into aspects like avatar customization, today’s most populous casual world can be tomorrow’s virtual ghost town.

Ask me to dump my generic template of a fuzzy little creature-something at Gaia, or my chubby penguin at Club Penguin I’ll offer little resistance.

Ask me to give away my self-modeled There.com avatar, or better yet my specially designed Jabba the Hut Second Life avatar and you’ll be reckoning with the force.

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Bloggers shoot high, and they either hit. Or miss… wildly.

For the last 3 hours I’ve been trolling the web trying to debunk or confirm whether this VA Tech alumni was indeed the now dead culprit of today’s VA Tech shooting spree.

Of course all those guns and the fact that his Facebook listed him as an alumni of VA Tech didn’t make a dismissal any easier.

Finally with the help of some co-workers, and utlizing Virginia Tech’s online directory, I placed phone calls to former classmates and friends of the student. All the friends’ names were listed in his Facebook profile.

His friends claimed he had made online posts earlier in the afternoon, well after the shooter had been declared dead. This of course would have confirmed he was not the killer.

Strange thing occurred. The posts were no longer there! Turns out the student deleted posts from his facebook and his own live journal which would have proved he was not the shooter! But why?

Well he lays out his reasons in his now open admission (just recently posted on Drudge as well).

The only response I have to his post is that it is one thing to try to make an example of how bad communication can lead to the wrong conclusion. It is another thing however to misdirect people by deleting posts which had been present earlier.

It’s a dangerous game he played. And considering the online site stats he has published, he seems to think it’s worth it.

Check out this story for the full write-up:

Online Mob Seeking VT Killer

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With VA Tech students huddled in their dorms as the shootings persisted, it appears some students took to forming groups in support of the early victims and their families. Fellow university students from across the nation have written in with wall posts.

It’s fascinating to watch this type of online activity happen almost instantaneously. The real promise however will be when social sites can serve to prevent these type of social disasters through the power of peer to peer social counseling and networking.

Facebook Support Group for VA Tech Students

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Readers are undoubtedly linking to CNN and Google News right now to find out more about the details.

A gunman opened fire in a dorm and classroom at Virginia Tech today, killing 21 people. Of course my condolences go out to all the family members of the student victims.

I’m watching CNN right now, and (without exaggeration) its entire coverage to this point has revolved around interviews with “I-Reporters”… essentially students at Virginia Tech who caught footage on video cameras (presumably cell phone ones).

The incorporation of user genered videos for News is not novel by any means. That is after all citizen journalism. But what astounds me is how quickly major news media like CNN have tapped into “CJ” this time around. Video footage provided by students from Virginia Tech appeared “on-air” within mere hours.

One student, named Jamal Al-Barghouti, shot some of the earliest video on scene. He’s being interviewed for the fourth time as I write.
Jamal Al-Barghouti’s cell phone cam filled in nicely for CNN’s betacam crew. Check out this webcast on how VA Tech students told their stories online even as the tragedy unfolded.VT Tragedy: The Online Rxn

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This goes beyond live streaming video. That’s why it’s called a lifecast. Or at least that’s the term dubbed by Justin Kan, a recent Yale Grad who despite the seemingly frat boy spring break nature of his idea (expose your life 24/7! Then get trashed!) has a pretty interesting project with Justin.tv.

Justin was actually behind the calendar startup, Kiko.com, one of the first ajax based calendar sites launched in the early web ?.0 days, and his transition into entertainment (and reality at that ) may seem rash if not for his background.

The idea of lifecasting has some merit… that’s if you cast a compelling character. It takes about 10 seconds to figure out Justin is simply not extroverted enough to make the phenomena of lifecasting work as pure entertainment. Find a struggling coke addict and partner him up with a pimp then you may have something. Or you can just lifecast Flavor Fav.

The idea may have some business potential if married to an independent HSN (Home Shopping Network) type of service. I’m imagining middle America mothers in Waterloo, Iowa pawning hideous sweaters for their son-in-laws to like-minded middle America mothers. A live, indie sort of HSN. Better yet marry this service to Ebay transactions then you’re onto something.

Regardless, I had the opportunity to visit this reality 2.0 phenom in San Francisco on assignment for MTV News.

MTV News Segment on the 24/7 World of Justin.TV

Funny, as I do more of these I’ve come to realize terms like “web culture” and “web news” are likely incongruous. After all the “infinite” web houses all subcultures and news topics theoretically. Designating a culture out of web phenomena is akin to creating a culture out of the UN. I think the segment should be called “hey look at the way these guys are using the conversational medium that is the web.”

Beats “web beat.”

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Fascinating that the NY Times of all publications would file a front page story in its Arts Section about the YouTube Awards. Yes, you know the same Arts spread dedicated to the off and occasionally off-off Broadway play, or that killer dance company full of “gaiety and disturbing mystery.”

Dance Company Covered by the NY Times:

This video didn’t make the cut. Almost 1,000,000 viewers have watched this gem. Art can’t begin to describe this user generated phenom.

Regardless, here’s the breakdown of all the YouTube award winners in each category to watch during those vegetative moments at work. (If you have to “veg out” to watch TV these days, I wonder what the “term” is to watch online video?)

But hey, good enough for the New York Times. Right?

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New media bloggers are out in full force today. The issue? NBC Universal and News Corps’ launch of an online video sharing service. In short, the networks’ competitive response to YouTube.

Sure the announcement is old news. What is new are the partnerships struck with portals like AOL, Yahoo, MSN and MySpace allowing you (theoretically) to access all your favorite FOX and NBC content (The Office anyone?) on all four of these major sites.

Now if you’re wondering where does that leave Google? Well, back with their user generated roots… thousands of faces pontificating to their webcams, hundreds of hillary mashups, and a crop of viral stars.

Mark Cuban, Don Dodge and Paul Kedrosky all share a seemingly sensible and logical viewpoint on where this is all heading.

Assumedly with Viacom’s lawsuit moving forward on Google, and increasingly more copyrighted videos being stripped off of YouTube, viewers will be only glad and perhaps thankful to watch their beloved network TV content, Heroes, on very familiar trafficked sites like MySpace.

To be fair, all three of them do say the success of NBCU and News Corps’ video sharing service will depend on its execution. But then what doesn’t depend on execution?

Some of those “keys” to success as listed by Don Dodge are “have it your way” and “allow user generated mashups.” Fair enough, basic tenets for online video sharing. Mark Cuban goes ever further stating “This new venture, if it can launch in the next few months, will hit the ground with more and better content, and more monetization options than Google.”

Mark of course has been calling out YouTube’s shortcomings from its very launch. Ultimately, the problem with putting faith in NBCU and News Corps’ video sharing service is… putting faith in NBCU and Newcorps.

I can’t tell you how many times I get called out, by technical colleagues working for “tech” companies, on why my own company (full disclosure: Viacom employee) doesn’t have so and so RSS subscription features, or roll out so and so widget application.

It’s the Engineering… dummy!

At Viacom, as at News Corp and NBC Universal, we are brilliant creatives… dare I say genius? But the point is when it comes to rolling out the latest app allowing viewers to cull our brilliant content and place it into a formidable and nifty ajax based widget…well, our collective response is whaha?

It seems we forget that Google is a “tech” company first, and content portal (YouTube) second. The success of NBCU and Newcorp’s service is a function of a many great things… most notably engineering know-how.

Sure, Microsoft in the form of “MS”NBC may lend a hand… but that only leaves us with a finicky Windows Media delivery platform. The DRM that will be demanded of this new service to safeguard network content from piracy will render the technology even more feckless. YouTube scaled and became the go-to-place that it is because of ease of use. My mother can work YouTube with the ease of operating her old VCR. But she still has trouble playing video on any media site (Name it, nbc.com, abc.com, foxnews.com).

Furthermore the deal has already announced that network content will be delivered via a proprietary platform, as if we don’t have enough of those rotting on the web.

Core competency is a catch-phrase business school students love spouting. In this case their favorite b-school term may be well invoked. We are in the age of new media, which by definition intersects with technology and which by definition gives tech companies like Google a competitive advantage when it comes to content distribution. And believe me folks… right now distribution is all that counts, if you have doubts just check out this latest vid of a man going by the name of MrPregnant with a pot over his head and achieving over 150,000 views.

And the biggest trump card that everyone forgets rests with Google. Network and cable copyrighted show content may be expunged from YouTube, but it will always exist and continue to be uploaded on any of the hundred YouTube clones out there. It only takes Google to open up their search range and incorporate videos from these sites to have the herd come back and view videos in a way they have become comfortably accustomed to: ad and DRM free online video.

This is not to say NBC and News Corp are headed towards disaster, but they are headed to a very humble place– where viewers come to watch their videos in spurts, before the delivery platform lags and an ad shows up whereupon the viewer is off to dailymotion.com to watch the same episode of The Office.

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