Bebo + AOL +Time Warner + AIM = Watch films with your friends online

I was reading through the interview of Ron Grant, AOL's COO, on Giga Om, where he mentioned potential synergies with Time Warner and Bebo with regards to media and entertainment, and have been thinking about what this could mean in the future. With the addition of the AIM and ICQ instant messaging (IM) systems to the equation (they are owned by AOL), they could be the first company to actually get going with interactive online film viewing with your friends. 

People have been speculating for a long time about the possibilities for combining IM with online media viewing to allow people to watch films or shows 'with' their friends, by being able to chat with integrated IM as they watch. Bebo has been one of the most forward thinking of the social networks when it comes to media, producing shows like KateModern which have interactive elements, and could well be about to take another leap forward. With all the elements above they are in a unique position which should allow them to take the lead in this area - stay tuned. 

I've heard of a couple of tools and platforms which at least have this possibility, for example Apple TV, but none which also link in to the social graph (either with social networks or instant messaging), and none which are currently available - do you know of any?

IM and Facebook - a prediction I made in January (kind of)

Was reading back on the article I posted in January, Some Thoughts on the Pew Internet Report, and realised I'd said this at the time:

"A big drop in chat room popularity

The study found a drop of chatroom use to just 18%, from 55% in 2000. As social networks are allowing people to reach others, including interest groups, and form weak ties with them by becoming friends or joining similar groups, with instant messaging allowing these users to have direct chat, and even to form their own private chat groups via the IM clients, I expect that these conversations are still going on, just in a different format. Watch this area - instant chat in Facebook groups, possibly?"

Okay, so not exactly the same - but my recent research on Fubar and their use of exactly this leads me to predict again that this isn't far off. 

Facebook: Friend List Privacy Controls

In an update this evening, Facebook has added completely granular privacy controls using friendlists, and also added the option to show more information to 'friends of friends'. It is now possible to control what elements of your profile can be seen by different friend lists, and the lists themselves have been updated so that it's very easy to move users to new lists or between lists.

As part of this change, the 'limited profile' has now got its own friend list. In addition, the Facebook blog reports that when uploading new photos or albums, they can be specified for a particular friend list - so you could share an album just with your family, for example, or just with your girlfriend. 

It isn't clear what the priority of the lists are - i.e. if someone is in two lists, one of which has access to photos and one of which doesn't, which one trumps? I'm assuming that being in more friend lists always give more access, apart from the limited profile list which has special status and restricts access regardless of other lists. This seems to be the case although I cannot find it stated anywhere.

This is a great move for Facebook and will be really useful for users expanding their social graph to a wider range of people. For example, I may wish to share my photos with my family, but not my wall, which is more likely to contain offensive banter from friends, or visa versa. 

Clay Shirkey at the RSA

I went to listen to Clay Shirkey speak on his new book, Here Comes Everybody, at the RSA this afternoon. It was very interesting, opened my eyes to some different uses and potential for social media tools, and great to see an organisation like the RSA pro-actively embracing social media (they're working on turning their fellows into an online network). 

I won't write a full run-down of the talk (just buy the book - which, by the way, I have but haven't read yet. It's in the big pile by my bed, so I'll reach it sometime soon, hopefully), but I'll just mention a few key points:

Twitter made it more fun

I tweeted about the event this morning, and because of that quite a few people who follow me decided to come along, spurred by other people in the network saying how good he is as a speaker. We were all live-tweeting comments and picks from the talk, discussing style (e.g. the choice to group questions was very annoying. It just increased the time spent answering, as Clay had to think back to all three questions he'd just heard, sometimes getting clarification again - this wasn't his fault, some of the questions were long and complicated), and getting feedback from each other and others in our network who weren't at the event. 

Social Media gives individuals the tools to co-ordinate action

Clay talked a lot about the imbalance of power that formerly existed between co-ordinated organisations and un-co-ordinated individuals. He used the Facebook/HSBC example as a prime example - a couple of years ago, HSBC could easily of cancelled the interested free overdrafts of graduates, as the graduates had left their close university networks, and would just be angry individuals. However, because of Facebook these individual angry graduates could group together and co-ordinate their anger - regardless of geographic distance. This forced HSBC to reconsider. 

Techniques like Flash Mobbing are also being used to great effect for political action, with people being able to make stands against dictatorships (he used Belarus as an example) by creating real-time protest events which are impossible for the state to prevent happening.

This re-balance of power to individuals essentially takes away the monopoly that organisations have had on many parts of life, and could have big implications for the future - at the moment, the state organises many parts of life that are very difficult for separate individuals to handle, but which could be handled potentially far more efficiently by co-ordinated individuals.

Before we start dreaming of a libertarian utopia, he did emphasise that in all of these things, the governance question does always spring up eventually, usually when a tool becomes successful - the more success, the more spam and crap, and someone's got to decide where to draw the line to ensure the tool remains useful. And someone's got to decide who gets to decide where the line is, and what their constraints are, etc. 

The next big thing............... Email!

I stepped up to ask what tool he thought could create the next step change in social behaviour, pointing out my use of Twitter throughout the event. He started by saying it's the use of a tool, not the tool itself, which can create revolutionary change - wikis being a perfect example. They were created in '95, but it wasn't until 2003 and Wikipedia that they suddenly started making a big difference. 

Clay thinks that the big thing for the next year is email - because it's completely ubiquitous, and could be used to organise a much greater range of activity and communications. He thinks that Twitter is great but a few years off making a difference to mainstream behaviour. 

What do you think?

IM, Social Networks, and the Death of the SMS

This week has seen some big news for Instant Messaging (IM): first, the huge Bebo acquisition by AOL, and their subsequent announcement of integration with their AIM and ICQ IM clients (the NYT called it "Bebo: Randy Falco’s $850 Million Rescue Plan for AIM"); and second the announcement that Facebook is planning to launch its own IM service. 

This could mark quite a step change in the IM and social net spheres. IM is a great tool for having multiple one-on-one in-depth conversations. For myself, I used it a lot as a teenager, as did all my friends, spending hours chatting away to friends at home as well as friends all over the world. However, as I grew up, went to university, left home, I made new friends, and gradually my 'friend' list on MSN became more and more outdated. Now, it has almost no relation to my social graph, other than the few old friends I've stayed in touch with. I do use it still - but apart from those few friends it's now mainly for work purposes. 

For myself, my social graph on Facebook is pretty accurate and up to date. If I was going to chat to anyone on IM, it would be the people I'm friends with on Facebook.

I'm betting that this move could create a boost for IM among adult users of social networks out of the work sphere as it becomes an easy means of communicating with friends, without the need to keep your IM contact list up to date with your social graph. 

Fubar, and Live Chat Groups

I was involved recently in research on the social network Fubar, which gained some coverage when Compete reported that it had grown 3,272,217% in the last year. One of the most stand-out features of this site is its heavy use of IM and live chat between users. All users have a 'shoutbox', which allows any other user on the site to start up a private IM chat with them when they're both online, and their groups (or 'lounges') use live chat, rather than the discussion forum / bulletin board system of most other social networks. 

This is interesting, as normal 'chat rooms' have declined in popularity considerably since the rise of social networks has allowed users to interact more readily with their friends online, and with 'real people', which the anonymity of the original chat rooms made difficult. By combining social networks with live chat and IM, however, users know who they're talking to, and the chat will often be more constructive and less brazen or offensive - if users have spent a long time building up a social network profile and friend list, they don't want to have their account removed for acting like idiots in a chat room. What's most interesting about this is that the lounges in Fubar are far more lively, interactive and engaging than the groups on Facebook, which most of the time can seem pretty dead. 

With the speed that Fubar has grown in the last year, it would be silly of the big social networks not to be looking at what they're offering, and it will be interesting to see if they start offering live chat in groups as well. 

Mobile Integration and the Death of the SMS

With more and more social networks integrating in the mobile sphere, and services like Yahoo's OneConnect looking to integrate these further, this could be a great opportunity to have easy phone based IM with all of your contacts. A similar service is already available with the Blackberry Messenger, but this is only for BB users, and requires knowing an additional 'pin', so has quite high barriers to entry. However, it is great to use - and between friends who are BB users, it makes it really easy to chat and stay constantly in touch, without having to worry about the limitations (or cost) of SMS. If I had my whole social graph on Blackberry messenger, and they were all connected regardless of their phone, I would use it as my primary communication tool. 

The Monetisation Issue

This is the one problem with all the above - how is anyone going to make any money (apart from the mobile service providers who can charge a data tariff)? IM has traditionally been very hard to monetise - ads, like on social networks, are pretty ineffective, and for the same reasons - users are looking to engage with each other, not to click away somewhere else. 

It looks as though Facebook will be keeping the IM on site for the time being - which they're betting will increase time spent on the site, and hopefully ad clicks. However, this isn't how users like to use IM, and I expect clients will become available, either from FB itself or through an API. 

There are lots of possibilities - e.g. integrating IM with applications (as MSN has done with some games), paid virtual gifts with the emoticons (or branded emoticons), direct branding or sponsorship opportunities (e.g. the Chat Box at DontStayIn is sponsored by O2). 

It will be interesting to look at the different strategies used by Facebook and Bebo, and of course to keep an eye on the activities of the other social networks in this area.

Facebook Developer Garage - slides now up

For those of you interested in my write up of the Facebook Developer Garage, I've now got links to the top apps/cavemen emotions slides, the copyright talk slides, and also the Facebook poll results. Enjoy!

Facebook Developer Garage, 5th March - "Growing Up"

Last night I went along to the London Facebook Developer Garage, hosted by Sun Microsystems. I help to organise these through the garage committee. Last night was about "apps Growing Up, how we use them in business, how applications compete against each other and how they're coping with the real world of copyright".

The event was pretty packed, as normal, and amazing almost everyone managed to turn up at exactly the same time, so there was a huge queue to register. After everyone had arrived we cracked open the beers, and the pizzas (loads and loads of them) were delivered from Dominos).

Once we'd all had our fill we settled down. Had a quick introduction from Toby Beresford, who is the primary organiser of the garages here. He played us the "Facebook Anthem", a UK made song about being bored of Facebook and annoyed especially with applications. We then had to turn to the person next to us to ask what they thought about the future of applications (this discussion was continued into the pub after). 

Alexey Gabsatarov took a look at some of the top applications, stating that 90% of the top 200 apps have no utility or rational appeal, and appeal to our emotional make up, or as he described it: "apps a caveman would like". He suggested that our basic emotions are hardwired and have remained the same since caveman times, and so groups applications in this fashion:

The Self (personality tests etc)

The Family (kissing/hugging/personal relationships)

The Tribe (Friend lists, top friends etc)

The Chief (Compare/Compete with friends)

It was an interesting talk, although it does mainly apply to the 'emotional' applications with little rational utility, which I believe will decrease in predominance as more engaging and useful applications grow, boosted by the crack down on spammy applications which have fueled the growth of many of these simple apps. 

Next up, Andy McLoughlin from Huddle.net and Tom Woolway from Techlightenment took the stage to discuss the Huddle Workspaces application, which allows you to have secure spaces to store files and work notes, whether for personal or work. Huddle have a 'freemium' business model, allowing full functionality to free users, with additional storage for payment, and large scale serviced enterprise clients. They admitted that they designed the application mainly as a marketing tool to get users to sign up to the main service, and so didn't include complete functionality, although stressed that users within Facebook still had more than enough functionality to make use of the application without ever leaving, and the PHP facebook application works off the primary (ASP.NET) application using a mixture of APIs with SOAP, so that Facebook users could work alongside users from the main website, and could interchange between using Facebook and the main site with the same account (although to use the main site with the extra features you have to register, with your email address). 

I asked why they couldn't of given full functionality within the application, and why they thought that users were more valuable on their main site. They responded honestly that they wanted users email addresses to be able to try and upsell, rather than doing that through the application itself which may put off users. This is valid, although it is possible to send emails directly to users of apps through Facebook. It would also of been possible to ask users to register with their email inside the app to get access to more functions. What do you think?

David Parfect, from the new Facebook London office, came up to show us the polling system on Facebook. Relevant to our initial discussion, he asked "Apps on Facebook are useful for...", and bought 500 responses at $1 each, which is the fastest way (the votes started coming in real time). I jotted down the responses, but don't have the screen shots, so the wording of the answers may be slightly inaccurate:

1. Interacting with friends: 9%

2. Showing your emotions: 2%

3. Making your day go quicker: 15%

4. Irritating friends: 20%

5. Nothing: 54%

The responders were roughly split between male/female, with most from the 18-24 age range. Hmm... not a great response for application developers! Nevertheless, I believe this reflects the general fatigue of all the crappy, spammy apps that have pervaded Facebook for too long, and which I believe will die out over the course of the next six months, to be replaced by engaging, relevant applications. 

We had a great talk on copyright issues, with a particular look at Scrabulous, from Vanessa Barnett, BLP Law. This was really fun, and had a long digression into the legality of showing photos of Banksy work (it's still artwork, and thus copyright, even though many of it is also illegal graffiti). 

Matt Clayton, from Wakari, gave another excellent talk. He was hired by Sony to build an application to promote the new Rambo movie here in the UK, however at the same time another company was briefed to do almost exactly the same application to promote it in the US (duh). The US version was called Get Rambo, the UK one Become Rambo. In summary, Get Rambo tanked, whilst Become Rambo did amazingly well. Why? Well, that made up most of the talk!

There were a couple of key reasons. First, here in the UK they'd been promoting a Rambo facebook page, and by the time the app launched they had a few thousand fans who all installed the app and provided the first boost. This meant that when they started advertising the app (ad spend unknown) people saw activity and usage, a big difference. Also, instead of a simple attacking option which Get Rambo used, Become Rambo included a 'gameplay' element, with points and rankings, and different weapons which unlocked as you got more ranking points, as well as options to defend or retaliate. When you got to 100 points you 'became Rambo', and they had a secret status at 300 points. Matt said that there were users with over 2000 points still battling it out. Over 5 weeks, the length of the campaign, they got over 50,000 users with 6-7k daily active users.

They worked really hard on the page flow to keep users coming back, and added loads of viral functionality, with a really high conversion rate. The application itself is beatifully designed, combining the Rambo style with Facebook design features. Matt also talked about the huge importance of constant testing, saying that tiny tweaks made huge differences to invites and conversion levels. 

After the event, I went to the pub round the corner with Toby, Matt and Mike Butcher from TechcrunchUK. Around a few drinks we had some great discussions on the future of applications. Anyone following my tweets through the event would of heard that during his talk, Matt said that being reported in Techcrunch had no effect on user levels and was a waste of time for application developers trying to get users - not realising Mike was standing in the door. Of course, Techcrunch is primarily a business publication, so it was unlikely to make a difference - and Mike and Matt were getting on just fine in the pub after, so no hard feelings!

Facebook, the Friendfeed Killer.

Last month, Friendfeed launched publicly with the announcement that they had $5m of funding. They're a social aggregator, feeding in stories from your different social tools, e.g. Twitter, Flickr, Delicious etc. However, they have the added ability for comments and discussions to be started about any of the individual posts. 

It had a lot of fanfare and created dedicated fans among the blogosphere because of the value of some of the conversations taking place. 

However, as Techrunch reported a couple of weeks ago, Facebook are opening up their newsfeed to allow external sites (such as Twitter, Flickr and Delicious) access, essentially making it the same service as Friendfeed, with the added value that not only are all your friends already on Facebook, but also that Facebook have developed an advanced algorithm for picking and choosing stories to ensure they're relevant to you, rather than delivering everything in the newsfeed - and you can still get everything from a person in their mini-feed if you want.

Of course, Facebook hasn't announced that they're adding comments into this... but, wait a minute - they have announced a new profile layout, with a single big page which combines the wall and the mini-feed into one, big feed: put them together and you're going to be able to comment directly after stories coming in on your friends mini-feed. Of course, this isn't quite as advanced as Friendfeed, but then the new profile page isn't fully confirmed yet, and they could well go the whole hog.

If they do, this would certainly make the existence of friend feed almost entirely pointless for most Facebook users. What do you think?

8 Random Things About Me

I've just been tagged by Thayer Driver to share 8 random things about myself. Hmmm, I better choose wisely...

1. I've played guitar since I was 12, initially electric lead guitar, then acoustic for the last 7 years or so. I sing, and write my own songs, and have performed in bands and solo, but I do it for myself more than anything else.

2. I've been training in Baguazhang, a Chinese internal martial art, for almost 9 years. I get up early to train, usually for about an hour a day.

3. I was a PC user for years, but switched to Mac a year and a half ago and haven't looked back.

4. I'm half Spanish, but although I've stayed in Spain with family many times my grasp of the language is very basic.

5. I had originally planned to be a barrister, and have a law degree from Durham University, before I realised I was far more interested in business, running my own companies, and generally doing my own thing.

6. I'm one of those people who are interested in everything, and have to work really hard to limit what I do. Things I've been interested in (some pretty seriously) include card magic, kayaking, surfing, break dancing and hiking, to name just a few, and I'm a prolific reader.

7. I was in Scouts when I was a teenager, got all the way to the Queen Scout Award, which is a step up from Gold Duke of Edinburgh.

8. I have family who live in Kenya, I've been out there many times. Luckily they were out of the country when the troubles hit. The election problems were really saddening, Kenya had so much promise - I just hope it manages to fix itself and get back on track.

Well, that's my eight - what are yours?

I tag Kelly Rusk, Scott Gavin, Dan Light, and Jeremy Gould.

Added tags: Laura Whitehead

Fat Face Facebook Application - Wasted Opportunity

I came across the Fat Face Facebook Application, "Big Fat Resolutions from Fat Face". The basic idea is that you send a resolution to a friend (e.g. learn to ski, go sailing etc), and if you're lucky you (or them, it's not clear) could win a holiday with the activity.

It's a quite good idea, but the application has some serious flaws:

1. No Facebook theme - if you look at any successful application it will use Facebook designs for the Facebook features, e.g friend invites, tabbed browsing. These make people feel comfortable and means they can easily get around the app without having to learn the design again.

2. Invite process - I almost stopped using the app at this point. After choosing a resolution to send, instead of being able to write in a box who I want to invite, the application pre-chooses a load of irrelevent people who I obviously don't want to send the resolution to, and then makes it really difficult to choose the person I do - the 'clear all' button didn't work, so I had to manually tick off each person, then when I went to choose a new person instead of the normal Facebook invite with a name box as well as photos, they'd created their own with no name box, so I had to manually trawl through my 300+ friends to get to the one person I wanted to send the resolution to. Very annoying, and likely to destroy their invite limits under the new rules.

3. No navigation. This is of such primary importance. After I'd sent one resolution, I wanted to go back and look at others, but I couldn't - There was no browsing, just links to a guide they were selling, and the Fat Face site - lovely, but when I want to send more resolutions this just annoyed me, so of course I'm not going to click on the links.

I hate to see good brands wasting their Facebook real estate, so I decided to send my thoughts above to the developer, Ok-Cool. They seem to be a web application company, not sure how much Facebook experience they have.

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UPDATE:

Mark and Tom from Ok-Cool have both responded to my post. It's really great to see them being so open and objective, I look forward to seeing other applications they produce in the future.

Enterprise Twitter: Multiple Accounts with Twhirl

I've been looking into the use of Twitter as an enterprise tool for a while now, and will be speaking on the subject at the Global Mobility Network, a round table of senior execs in London. I recently discovered the Twitter client Twhirl, which allows multiple account handling - essential if you want to set up secure Twitter accounts for business use.

It's a great client, and definitely the best I've used so far. It could be used to set up a number of secure accounts for different company channels and projects, without having to individually sign in and out of each one.

Of course, this still isn't perfect - it's outside the firewall, and you can't set up easy to administer channels, so everyone involved still has to individually follow each other - but it is a step forward.

MySpace: Engaging Apps 1 Spammy Apps 0

I've just read this morning on the story of RockYou's 'Likeness' application on the new MySpace platform. Adam Ostrow wrote over at Mashable how, after installing the application, it wrote comments on all of his friends walls advertising the application, without his explicit consent.

He was quite annoyed, as it was spammy behaviour, and it was detrimental to his online image.

Subsequently, RockYou CEO Lance Tokuda announced that the application is being shut down, and MySpace informed Mashable that they wouldn't be tolerating such behaviour by applications, and are deleting all of the wall comments.

If you've read many of my previous posts you'll know that I'm a strong supporter of anti-spam measures by application platforms, as it's the only way that applications will continue to have real value into the future. Facebook made the mistake of letting applications do what they want, and this has lead to huge spam levels and application fatigue, as well as making it much more difficult for engaging applications which have real value to spread among relevant friends. They're now correcting this with hard anti-spam measures, and I'm very happy to see MySpace being firm on this from day 1. It will be very interesting to see what kind of applications become popular on MySpace, with all the users starting from 0.