I happened to visit Facebook’s Business Solutions page, and was struck by how, at least on the surface, these advertising formats seem like exactly the kind of innovation that should be helping Facebook achieve Goolge-style revenue — which is of course what Facebook’s $15 billion valuation assumes will happen.

And yet with 100 MILLION users, Facebook’s [...]

Google is taking a big shot at Facebook in the PR war over data portability and social network interoperability. I signed in to Google Friend Connect, implemented on the Go2Web2.0 blog, and saw this:

Normally, you wouldn’t list a service that isn’t a partner, but in this case Google chose to list Facebook and let users [...]

What’s wrong with the “friends connection” programs announced by Facebook, MySpace, and Google? Many people have been trying to explain the principle of data portability as if it were a new concept, but it’s actually not. It’s been on our PCs for years.

Why isn’t Facebook a founding member of the OpenSocial Foundation, along with Google, Yahoo, and MySpace? Because Facebook is threatened by OpenSocial’s ultimate aim of connecting user profiles and enabling users to easily manage and port their data across any social network.
Facebook is worried that this will enable groups of friends to easily pick up [...]

I wrote a while back that Facebook is not for business, i.e it’s not clear how an application designed for socializing among students could be used — without any customization — by professionals. There a bit of data and more buzz coming out that offers support for that thesis.

If you dig beneath the surface of the brouhaha over Robert Scoble getting his Facebook account suspended for testing a new Plaxo Facebook app that mines user email addresses in violation of Facebook’s terms of service, you’ll find evidence of two increasingly apparent realities about the future of the web:

Data is POWER
A war will be [...]

Google has been quietly rolling out social features across all of its services based on Gmail contacts. While Google still has to overcome some of its social tone-deafness (e.g. automatically adding contacts without asking), this move makes perfect sense. For people over 30 (and probably even over 25) email IS the social graph.

I somehow got logged out of my NYTimes.com registration and just hit the registration wall when I tried to read an article — I almost forgot it was there. Which made me wonder, now that the TimesSelect pay wall is gone, what the real ROI of this registration wall is for the New York Times [...]

I came across a post I wrote last summer about Facebook monetization and was horrified to read the following:
What if there were a way for companies to identify which Facebook users were actually using their products, and then create a mechanism for the users to highlight their use of the product to their friends — [...]

So email is, you know, dead because everybody communicates through Facebook and other social networks. Rights. That must be why Facebook finally caved in to user pressure to stop the madness of sending Facebook site mail notification to users’ email — without actually sending the text of the site mail message!
In what seems typical of [...]

As with Facebook Beacon’s implosion, the PR tailspin of Facebook itself is more interesting for what we can learn from it than why it is happening. What’s most interesting about Facebook’s downturn, as Josh Quittner observes, is that there’s nothing wrong with the technology:
The really weird part of this story is that there’s absolutely nothing [...]

Facebook Beacon, currently in the process of going down in flames, is a classic case of overreaching. So much has been written about what’s wrong with Beacon — blatant privacy violation, lack of blanket opt-out, failure to make it opt-in, gathering data from non-Facebook users — but I haven’t seen much about WHY they got [...]

Facebook has a shot at being the first web company since Google to build a really big BUSINESS, not just a big user base. But Facebook has a number of vulnerabilities, which are worth pondering as we also ponder its huge potential. I’ve written before about some of these vulnerabilities, such as the risk that [...]

“The value of a social network is defined not only by who’s on it, but by who’s excluded.”
This quote is from futurist Paul Saffo in an Economist article that makes a contrarian case for Facebook, in part by arguing that as social networks grow, they will eventually encounter the inverse of Metcalfe’s law, becoming LESS [...]

When I argued that Facebook is NOT for business, that assertion was roundly dismissed by Facebook’s tech fan club, determined to prove (with Mark Zuckerberg gleefully rooting them on) that Facebook is a serious business tool. In today’s NYT, a more authoritative voice weighs in — one of Facebook’s original college student users, who speaks [...]

Facebook has rolled out public stripped down versions of user profiles that are crawlable by search engines, which has lots of upside for Facebook, but raises privacy issues for personal users and has questionable utility for business users. Here’s what I found when I logged into Facebook:

Here’s what you see when you click through to [...]

Facebook’s closed platform and data lock-in are coming under siege from Dave Winer and others. It’s time to call another Facebook foul — the notion that Facebook is suddenly a killer app for business that will unseat LinkedIn, simply because Facebook opened its doors to everyone.
Yes, Facebook Platform makes Facebook infinitely extensible, but the core, [...]

Here are some questions about Facebook and Twitter arising from my ongoing web communication experiment.
Feel free to answer any or all — although most of you reading this likely won’t answer any, because you’re in passive media consumption mode, as are most people. (Nothing wrong with that — being active sure takes up a [...]

So I got my Publishing 2.0 feed set up to crosspost to Facebook and Twitter, but I’m wondering about the utility of doing so, given that most of the people I’m connected to on Facebook and Twitter also subscribe to my regular blog RSS feed.
I’m starting to think that this has the potential to [...]

After one day of experimenting, I’m already addicted to Twitter. I get it now. It’s really an elegantly designed application:

See everyone who is following you

Follow them with one click

Address message to specific people with @

I also get the 140 character limit now — it keeps you in the right mode of communication, so that you [...]

With some wickedly smart and prescient people having invested in Twitter and with Jason Calacanis having quit Facebook (high profile anti-hype is always an interesting sign), I’m going to invest some time in trying to figure out how to maximize the utility of these two applications, particularly for communicating on the web — Fred Wilson’s [...]

Each killer communications app has a unique core value proposition that nothing else can beat:

Telephone — synchronous one-to-one voice

Email — asynchronous one-to-one text

Instant messagingg — synchronous one-to-one text

Blogging — asynchronous one-to-many text

Banner ads on Facebook is a dumb way to monetize. Same on MySpace. People don’t pay attention to banner ads on social networks because they are too busy paying attention to EACH OTHER. It’s no surprise that people are complaining about low click through rates on Facebook display ads.
But that doesn’t mean that Facebook won’t [...]

As speculation and chatter increases, the question of whether Google ends up buying Facebook is turning out to be one of the big questions of 2007. My bet is that there is already an offer on the table, and that Facebook is seriously considering it. I’m also willing to bet that Facebook will [...]

The discussion about Facebook Platform being the new AOL, i.e. redundant to the platform we already have called the Internet, has rung true for me, despite my initial enthusiasm. I finally figured out exactly why — Facebook Platform applications are appended, not integrated.
For example — why can’t I use Twitter IN PLACE OF the [...]

By Robert Young
Late last week, the Financial Times reported that MySpace was likely to respond to Facebook’s much-hyped F8 Platform initiative with its own third-party application/widget development program. Last week also brought forth an interesting debate, initiated by Jason Kottke via his aptly titled post “Facebook is the new AOL”, questioning whether the [...]

Fred Wilson has been bravely attempting to discuss whether age is a determining factor for successful entrepreneurship — and has been taking it on the chin as a result. As I told Fred in an email, I don’t think he’s come across as being argumentative or dogmatic on the issue at all, it’s just that’s [...]

After writing a long Talmudic discussion (as Jeff Jarvis called it) on whether sponsor posts are a legitimate ad unit, I was surprised to see Facebook, the Internet darling of the moment, had adopted the format:

Never underestimate Steve Jobs. After all of the hand-wringing over Apple’s iPhone being a closed platform, today Apple announced that the iPhone will indeed be open to third-party applications — ingeniously, through integration with Apple’s Safari web browser, which has just been released for Windows (which itself is a huge smack against Microsoft, which has [...]

Facebook Platform is already having a huge impact on the crowded and competitive Web 2.0 start-uplandscape, most notably in the social music category, i.e. applications that allow users to share with others what songs they listen to and to discover new music by seeing what their friends and others in their network are listening to. [...]

Facebook Platform, which allows companies to build applications — and entire ad or fee-driven businesses — inside Facebook is a brilliant move, which could given Facebook the opportunity to become the next Google. The secret to Google’s success with AdSense was sharing revenue with publishers and letting them figure out how to optimize the revenue. [...]

Has Facebook missed the boat by not being acquired by Yahoo, or is it just getting warmed up? A MediaPost piece by Gavin O’Malley showcases some opinions supporting the former:

It’s sure rough trying to charge for a service that other businesses are offering for free. Just ask any newspaper exec. With 20/20 hindsight, it seems inevitable that the web would be the perfect platform for free classified ads, but no newspaper exec in their worst nightmare could have imagined Craiglist, which has done huge [...]

The once monolithic media industry is undergoing a radical schism, dividing itself into content creation, on the one hand, and content aggregation and distribution on the other.
The nature of this transformation suddenly crystallized for me when I read Tom Foremski’s piece on the new West Coast/East Coast media industry divide. Tom seems to be focused [...]

It’s deeply ironic that the day after Fred Wilson posted a thoughtful list of everything he has learned from Flickr, which he calls the “Seminal Web 2.0 Service,” there’s a user revolt at Flickr over some changes to the system: limits to contacts and tags, and requiring users to adopt the Yahoo ID login. Thomas [...]

I wondered about a MySpace downturn back in May — I may well have been just flat wrong — or maybe I was just premature. An article in the WSJ looks at the problem of MySpace and Facebook becoming overcrowded and too full of commercial messages:
“good bye myspace.
I’ve always hated you.
I just never had what [...]

According to Web 2.0 ideology, all sharing is good, by definition. Users will run to embrace any feature that increases their ability to share information with their community. Sharing. Community. It’s all so warm and fuzzy — what could be wrong? But Facebook discovered the hard way that there are limits to Web 2.0 sharing [...]

When I predicted a social networking privacy backlash a few months ago, most everyone scoffed. Young people have grown up online. They are used to exposing their lives. They are willingly give up their privacy. They aren’t concerned about the risks.
Well, it turns out that the digital generation does care about their privacy (and they [...]

It’s happening again — the numbers just don’t make any sense. Facebook turns down $750 million, hoping to hype themselves up to $2 billion. And why? Well, just look at that CASH COW MySpace — it’s making…how much money? I’m on the edge of my seat for News Corp’s first 2006 earnings release, but “in [...]