NEW YORK - Facebook has begun transforming itself from an online hangout into an online business district.
Companies can now create their own pages on Facebook for the first time and target ads on Facebook based on what users and their friends buy and do online, under a new program announced Tuesday. Advertisers also will be able to show users their pitches in the guise of a friend's endorsement.
For example, if the friend just booked a vacation on Travelocity, the online travel agency will be able to display the friend's photo to entice the user to buy flights and hotel stays.
The friend would have control over whether to share that information, but the user would have fewer choices over whether to receive it.
As Web companies look to boost advertising revenue by offering to target ads based on users' hobbies, interests and behavior, Facebook's move could change the tone of the site and revive privacy complaints it faced last year.
Key will be how Facebook tells users about the program, something it plans to do shortly.
"Some people may find it creepy," said Deborah Pierce, executive director of the San Francisco-based Privacy Activism. "They are trying to find some ways to monetize this and keep the lights on. If the disclosure is up front, yeah, I think this is a reasonable thing for them to do."
Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, who founded the company three years ago, said marketers must respond to the changing nature of communication, driven in part by social-networking sites like his.
"Pushing your message out to people is no longer good enough," Zuckerberg told about 200 advertising-industry executives. "You have to get your message out to the conversations."
Facebook will allow companies to build profile pages similar to the ones millions of users around the world now maintain. The key difference is that companies won't have access to user profile pages the same way users' friends do, even if the user has formally added himself to its "fans."
Companies also can now embed coding that Facebook calls Beacon on outside sites such as eBay Inc., enabling a Facebook user who lists an item for auction, for example, to generate alert messages for their Facebook friends, who may then check out the item next time they log on.
Users can now send alerts to friends about their reviews of restaurants, what band they enjoyed and what books or DVDs they bought online. And advertisers can have their pitches appear next to those alerts.
"People influence people," Zuckerberg said. "Nothing influences a person more than a recommendation from a trusted friend."
The new program also enables advertisers to fine-tune their audiences — having their pitches appear only to women under 30 who attended New York University and work at Goldman Sachs, for instance.
Self-service tools let advertisers immediately see how many users they will reach as they change their criteria.
Social-networking sites like Facebook and News Corp.'s MySpace have been trying to find the best way to profit from the trove of personal data their users put on profile pages. On Monday, MySpace announced an expansion of its targeting program to include more categories and more advertisers.
Privacy advocates say the key to user acceptance will be how Facebook notifies its users and what controls it offers them.
Zuckerberg offered few details in the speech, other than to say no personally identifiable information would be shared with advertisers.
Facebook has long prided itself on privacy, but the walls have gradually lowered as the site relaxed eligibility requirements and recently started letting nonusers search for members' personal profile pages at Facebook and through search engines like Google.
A feature allowing users to more easily track changes their friends make to profiles backfired when many users denounced it as stalking and threatened protests and boycotts. Facebook had to quickly apologize and agree to let users turn off the feature so that others can't easily see what they do.
Facebook's usage has grown rapidly since last year, when the site opened membership to all Internet users, rather than just members of selected communities such as college and high school campuses. According to comScore Media Metrix, it had 30.6 million U.S. users in September, more than double the 13.3 million a year earlier.
By contrast, social-networking leader MySpace grew only 23 percent, to 68.4 million.
Facebook's announcement follows by two weeks Facebook Inc.'s deal to sell a 1.6 percent stake to Microsoft Corp. for $240 million, spurning a competing offer from online search leader Google Inc. and valuing the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook at $15 billion.
At the time, Microsoft also broadened a marketing relationship that began last year, getting rights to sell Internet ads for Facebook as the site expands outside the United States.
Zuckerberg made no mention of either in his speech Tuesday.
Entrepreneurs are not by nature people who walk around with a Plan B in their pocket. Even though it goes against the grain. It goes against the unflagging optimism and sense of “I can do this” that keeps great entrepreneurs going long after others have given up. But successful entrepreneurs are also savvy, practical survivors.
Great entrepreneurs are also masters of timing. The master of timing in Web 1.0 was Steve Case, when he persuaded Time Warner that AOL was their equal in a merger. It was so outrageous that it was the signal that triggered the end of the Web 1.0 boom. Of course when history does repeat itself - as it usually does - it does so with a surprising twist that takes everybody by surprise. The obvious parallel today, Facebook and Microsoft, does not apply. Microsoft is only investing what is a rounding error for them; and they may well have a preferred rate, which means that in the worst case they get the same return as they get on their cash hoard in Bonds.
So, no, I am not calling a bubble or even forecasting the timing of a recession. But I would say that one of the following should be on the To Do List for entrepreneurs in the current climate (which one depends on the lifestage of your venture):
1. Raise more money (a lot more) than you think you need. VCs have plenty of money to put to work and you need enough to ride out a cycle and really build something to last. Jason Calacanis said he raised enough for 5 years with Mahalo and he has seen a cycle come and go.
2. Get to cash flow positive quicker than you had planned. (And if you are already there, don’t take this as the time to start a major expansion built on borrowed money).
3. Accept that offer. Not the first one of course. Not the second one if you have good poker nerves. But take the third one. Live to venture another day.
The aim of many entrepreneurs is to take a business idea and convert it into a professional and functioning business on a low budget. This is typically called “bootstrapping” and it is fraught with potential pitfalls and dangers. But when done well it can really help get a company going fast, professionally and without the founders having to give up much (if any) equity - or bankrupting themselves.
Wiki : Bootstrapping
Domains are hot again. After the bubble burst in the 90's, no one ever thought that anyone would pay a 5 years salary for a domain name again. Think again. iFly.com was recently sold for $65.000. Thats not a wild sum, but it's not a wild domain either. I did read somewhere that creditcards.com was sold for $2.750.000 last year. Someone did a pretty good investment there. I browsed ebay and found that ss.com was up for bidding, and the tag was around $55.000.
So why do people spend a redicoulus amount of paper on something as silly as the right to use a certain address on the internet? Think of it as real estate. Buy and sell later. Another reason is that the clever SEO crowd discovered that anchor text is one of the strongest SEO tool availible. That means if someone link to my site with the text "widgets" in the anchor tag, search engines will associate my site with "widgets" and give the site higher rankings on that particular search phrase. So this means that if I own "widgets.com", chances are that many people will link me up with the domain name, and since that contains my main keyword, half the SEO is already made.
Don't get stuck in keywords
So what should you look for when buying a domain name? Assuming you don't have the big bucks to spend, you try altering your searches and broaden your acceptance of domains for your web presence. This can be very frustrating. Let's say you are selling "widgets". So you want widgets.com - tough luck. That domain was registrered 3 years ago and some guy wants a whopping 50 grand for it. Ok, what about "widgets.net" or "widgets.org". Try again. All of them are most likely occupied. Given that all popular keywords are taken combined with the releases of some new country codes, people are coming up with some creative domain ideas. How about welcome.to/sweden? or the popular del.icio.us?
Let's rewind this for a moment. Is it really that important to have your main keyword in the domain name? Should you really be looking for "buy-widgets-at-my-site.info" in the end? Think of the big ones. Google. Amazon. Kelkoo. Apple. The key is not the keyword - it's the brand. Keyword domains are out. Branding names are in. Big time in.
So when choosing your domain name, don't get stuck in the keyword thinking. Take it back to the brand. If necessary, have a domain lookup tool at your disposal when choosing the brand in the first place.
I particularly like google (who doesn't). Its easy to remember, you can verbalize it (let's google that) and it has a deeper meaning (googolplex - the highest number there is). And today, the brand is stronger than ever.
Learn the lesson from google itself. Think beyond keywords.
This article was written by David Hellsing
David Hellsing is a designer and web developer living in Gothenburg, Sweden. He is the founder and gentle dictator of Stylegala and the swedish design firm monc.
I pass WEB 2.0 Design Quiz :) and now I am graduated ! Give yourself a try and figure out how smart you are on Web 2.0. Even so the results are believable. After you take this test you will receive a special code with the results on an icon that you can place on your website so that every visitor can see how aware of the Web 2.0 issues you are.
Omid Zaman - Web 2.0 Design Master's Degree
To start let's define two things that make a social network; the app and the underlying social graph. On a site like dogster, the application is "dogs" and the social graphs are the groups, the messages, the profiles, friends and comments. Features are added to the app by the company, and users add to the social graph. "Dog of the week", "dog blogs", "dog videos", "local dogs" are all features of the app, and how the users interact with each other what friends they make are the social graph. Sometimes the apps grow a lot bigger than the social graph, sometimes the social graph grows a lot bigger than the app. In the case of myspace the application started as voyeurism and music, but the social graph grew so big and spawned many other applications. In the case of youtube, the application of sharing videos got so big that the comments and profiles, the social graph got dwarfed even though those features were there.
What's important is that regardless of the outcome, a lot of companies got funded as "social networking for X" where X could be fantasy sports, trendspotting, dogs, cats, vampires etc. The formula that got VC funding was, "take an application that people know, and build a social graph around it." The hard part wasn't building the application but getting the users. It was all about getting users, building the social graph.
What facebook did was turn this upside down. They said, "we have a social graph, why don't you build an app on it". In their platform you start with the social graph and build the app on it. Since the hardest part of building a social network is getting the social graph, facebook effectively gives this to an application. This is what's so impactful about the platform.
It's because of this paradigm shift, there are apps with 9M users in under 2 months. Facebook gives the app maker a social graph to work on the app maker grows fast, adds back to the social graph, grows it a little bigger, benefiting the next app and most importantly facebook that owns the social network. They own the most important, hard to do, defensible, valuable piece of any social network, their users.
By owning the social graph they are controlling what makes the network work, they control the operating system. As networking guys will realize instantly, facebook becomes the "IOS of social networking". Hopefully, the application developer learns to monetize their apps (haven't seen a good example yet, doesn't mean I won't) and everybody wins.
Facebook took a good killer app, your desire to know what your friends are doing, aka, your social graph, and turned it into a platform. The killer apps of today are the platforms of tomorrow.
So what does this mean for a social networking site? The days of starting a site to build a user base on your own is over. You will have to do it on facebook, otherwise your competition will and they will grow faster. For those sites big enough to have a decent social graph, they still have to have a facebook presence, not to be left out, and will their current user base remain relevant if the facebook user base grows fast. It's the old Microsoft adage "no need to build this, the operating system gives it free". Over the years Microsoft took the top applications on windows and made it part of the OS. This is the same story happening here and there is no stopping it. Every independent social network has to keep a good eye for what's going on at facebook, and if I were them go straight there and stay there. Yes, Microsoft got the lion's share of the market, but app developers on windows did well if they wrote the right apps. But one thing is for sure, no app vendor made it big if they were not supporting windows.
Becoming the operating system of social networking is why the facebook platform is the most relevant thing that happened to the Internet this year. They are on their way to become a Microsoft of sorts.
So what are they worth? I don't think it's $1B, I don't think it's $2B, I don't think it's $3B. I think it is more. Who will buy them? My bet is that it won't be any of Yahoo, Google, Microsoft. They all have products that touch this, and they all have the capability to do this. I think the buyer will be one that who is much less obvious, one for whom this move is way more disruptive and game changing.
The next big question is, will they take a $10B offer? I am not sure that they will.
Microsoft in talks to buy 5% of Facebook for $500M; $10B valuation.
There are only a handful of companies in Venturesource to have ever recieved a private round valuing them at higher than $1B post.
Here they are:
1 Chorum Technologies Richardson, TX Communications & Networks: Fiberoptic Equipment & Photonics Out of Business
2 CoSine Communications Redwood City, CA Communications & Networks: Connectivity Products Publicly-held
3 Internet Brands El Segundo, CA Media/Content/Info.: Media, Content & Information In IPO Registration
4 Tellium Oceanport, NJ Communications & Networks: Fiberoptic Equipment & Photonics Publicly-held
5 TradeOut.com Valhalla, NY Cons/Bus Services: Business Services (Not Financial) Out of Business
6 Zhone Technologies Oakland, CA Communications & Networks: Connectivity Products Acquired/Merged
I know Venturesource has mistakes, they are missing Procket Networks for example. It's also funny to note, the two of these 6 companies are now out of business. They did their rounds in early 2000.
Nonetheless, $10B is higher than any of the valuations these guys had. This may mean that the facebook deal may be the highest valued venture deal of all time...
London is famous for many of its sights and historical buildings. Buckingham
Palace, Big Ben, the Tower of London, to name but a few. Last July, I was
visiting one, a monument, which perhaps you may not have heard of but is also
well worth a visit. A monument is a statue or building that is put up to
remember and honor a person or event and this one is rather tall.
In September 1666 the City of London was devastated by The Great Fire. To
commemorate the event and celebrate the rebuilding of the City The Monument was
built.
it's a tall stone column and there are stairs inside that you can climb and
view London from the top. Just above that viewing platform there is a golden
ball of fire that commemorates the Great Fire of London in 1666.
Monument built was started in 1671 and finished in 1677. It designed by
Christopher Wren, it's over 200 ft tall, that's about 61 meters and there are
311 steps to the viewing platform. finally after 311 step I made it up to the
top and what a spectacular view. Well I am out now on the viewing platform. I'm
looking towards one of London's more famous landmarks which is Tower Bridge.
Really is a fantastic view from up here.
Here I took a lot of nice shot at the top pf monument and you can find them
at my picasa web album.