Think what you will of Jason Calacanis no one can dispute that he has been successful in the web space and I think what he did at Netscape has really moved social networking into the mainstream. So when he declares Facebook bankruptcy I think we should listen to what he has to say.

Basically his issue with Facebook is that, with applications, he is just being overwhelmed with information. And a lot of this information is not really all that useful to him.

This goes to point out the real flaw with social network thinking that is mainstream right now. Its connection centric. What does that mean? Good question. Basically all I am saying is that you want a way to stay connected with the people in your network but you don’t have a way to say who is in your network.

Yes, I know you can add friends. But every child on a playground knows that all friends were not created equal. I find some people more interesting than others. I want a level of interaction with some people more than other people. I have degrees of “friends.” But on all the social networks today all friends are created equal. Utopian perhaps, but not very useful.

Over at the Library Clips blog they have been having a lot of posts about lifestreams. This is what we want. An easy way to view or networks lifestreams from our vantage point looking out in the network. Apply the Apple principle to the design. Make is so simple it hurts. Add in a lot of the design patterns displayed by the socialstream demo and now you have the next generation social network. And this is one that will be sticky because it is all about your interests and not everyone in your networks interests.

Now as soon as someone hires me to build it we will all be successful together.

Tags: Lifestreams | Facebook | Jason Calacanis

I have had a busy week, hence the reason posting is down. In what little spare time I have had, I have begun playing with Zend Framework.

If you are familiar with Ruby-On-Rails, then Zend Framework will seem vaguely familiar. The release of a production version of Zend Framework on July 2, 2007 got me interested in taking it seriously. So I downloaded a copy, attended the introduction webinar and started coding.

If you are like me, reading endless hours of class documentation is only helpful once you understand the basics of the product so I started searching for some overview tutorials. This is where the infancy of the effort begins to hit you. Yes, there are a number of tutorials and overviews, but you will varying degrees of success with them because the released version and the documented versions may not coincide. Aside from the webinar, I found two tutorials the most helpful: Zend_Controller Quick Start and Getting Started with the Zend Framework. Neither of these tutorials worked for me as written. I am still playing with it to determine if it is my specific install or their version of Zend Framework and mine are slightly different. But with a little modification of the instructions you can be up and running quickly.

If you have had a taste of Ruby-On-Rails you will find that the Zend Framework is like an infant sibling. I see the potential from the Zend Framework when it grows up, but right now its like a child with no expectations of it. By that I mean, they suggest a directory structure, but don’t expect one. They expect an MVC paradigm, but it will function just as well without it.

Another thing you will find missing is tools to make routine tasks easier, like a generate script to generate and stub out your controllers or views. It’s this lack of polish that makes me wonder if it is ready of prime time. And don’t get me started on object oriented PHP which lacks the real elegance of Ruby.

All-in-all I am please with what they have done so far and eagerly await the polish that is sure to come. If you are like me and switching your entire company from PHP to Ruby-On_Rails is a task that seems virtually insurmountable the Zend Framework is a very good alternative.

Tags: Zend Framework | PHP | Ruby-On-Rails

I was wondering when someone was going to come out with this, and if other have before, sorry I missed it. Read/Write Web has just installed a comment reputation/rating system called SezWho.

What SezWho does is provides a means for each visitor to rate some ones comments. Over time this will build into a reputation that enables you to then filter out the comments others have not found useful when you come to a blog.

This is a real missed opportunity for E-Bay to break out of the auction mode. They are the masters of reputation, but have yet to release a way for people to use these reputations outside of E-Bay. If E-Bay wanted to they could easily become a powerhouse in this space.

The big question is do we really need it or does it just stifle the conversation?

I think that in today’s world you need all the ways to filter data you can get and no matter how much you want to believe it some peoples comments hold more weight in a conversation than others.

Tags: sezwho | Reputation | E-Bay

Bye, Bye RSS. A format controlled by no one. Now Google is going to force us to change to a more Google compatible format, which means Atom. At least Dave Winer thinks so.

Dave has gotten a bad reputation lately by the pundit, but he has a point this time. When Microsoft was able to control the file format everyone used, guess what, Wordperfect and Lotus Smart Suite are used only by the lonely few. Well it might happen that way again with RSS.

With the purchase of Feedburner by Google and Google Reader becoming the most prevalent feed reader, Google has become the largest feed consumer. With that much power it would be easy for them to make incompatible changes to the current feed formats to improve their products at the expense of everyone else’s. Despite how much all the other feed users complain, the fact is they will have to re-code their applications or risk losing access to a large market segment.

Gives us something to think about.

Tags: RSS | Atom | Feedburner | Google

How many social networks do you belong to? If I include only the ones I use day-to-day seven. I suspect some of you have even more. That is a lot of networks to hand out to each contact when you connect. Who wants to deal with that? Which of your contacts wants to catalog all your social connections just to link to you and know what your up to? The answer is simple, no one.

The second generation social networks will need to figure this out. I have seen a lot of bursts in this direction, but no one has put it all together yet.

The first thing a second generation social network will need to tackle is the move from object connections to people connections. Current generation social networks are focused on linking people to your objects. They do this by building management and storage software to handle your shared objects. Look at Facebook. Facebook created a photo gallery. It’s ok, but not as full featured as Flickr or photobucket. Instead of building an ok photo gallery, they would have better spent their time building hooks to the existing social photo sites that would let them keep your network up-to-date on the photo’s you have added or updated.

This points out the big problem that needs to be addressed. I don’t want a social network to reinvent the wheel for me. I want to say that “Joe Smith” is someone I want to connect to me network. Oh! He is doesn’t have an account with this social network. Thats ok, we will create a contact for him and you can populate it with all the public social accounts you know about and send him an invite to join.

If “Joe Smith” decides to join the social network and create an account, most of his information is already in his profile because you created it. Now “Joe Smith” wants to take over managing his contact information because he is now a member. No problem. The system sends you, the contact originator, and e-mail with his request. You determine, yep thats Joe, so you approve the contact transfer.

No provide the value added stuff. For a perfect example of this check out the Socialstream demo.

Two companies are dabbling in this space. I know there are more, but these two are the only ones that seem to be on to something and have direction. Spokeo, who allows you to create “friends” and their links to social objects. The other is MyBlogLog with the recent addition of the Service tab that generates a list of your social objects as part of your contact information.

Ok! Who is going to build it?

Tags: Social Networking | Second Generation Social Networks

Both Robert Scoble and Jeremiah Owyang are making this claim. I agree that Facebook doesn’t let data out, but is that a bad thing? Is having one place for all of your data a bad thing?

I like the fact that I can connect to my network, add my blog feed, and add other services if they have built a Facebook application. One central place for everything.

This isn’t the optimal solution. I would rather have a more open architecture where I can connect all my social data and connect to my network in a way that allows my network to not necessarily be part of Facebook. We all have different needs from our social network. It would be nice to be able to use the network of my choice but still connect to friends that are one another network.

Today Facebook is the best we have. It only takes one development effort that is well thought out to push the community into the next generation of social networking, possibly open social networks.

Social networking is a young industry. I think calling Facebook a data black hole is not very helpful. Let’s explore some constructive ideas form improvement along with pointing out the flaws.

Tags: Social Networking | Facebook

Stop the boat! What just happened here? Facebook, a company that I like, but hasn’t figured out how its going to make money when it grows up, just purchased Parakey, a company you likely haven’t ever heard of because, as far as anyone can tell, they haven’t ever built a product.

What is Parakey you ask? Well that is a good question. They got a lot of hype a few years ago. Then they did what most software companies that where hyped like the second coming do, nothing. Complete vaporware. The company’s web site has the same lame page it had roughly three years ago. Here is a link to the wikipedia entry which is vague and has no source of real information.

So let me summarize the events.

A company, in this case Facebook, which is really not making money, at least as far as the pundits can tell, purchased a, presumed, software company that, as far as anyone can tell, has no product after all these years.

This is a crazy industry in which we work.

Source: (Yahoo! News)

Tags: Social Networking | Facebook | Parakey

Updates:

As the news spreads the pundits are coming out.

Techcrunch: FaceBook’s First Acquisition: Parakey 

Read/WriteWeb: Facebook Acquires Web OS Company Parakey

Prodded to investigate social network aggregators by a Mashable post I began hitting the list and creating accounts. What I learned real quick is that this space is young, underfunded, and in need of a little creative thinking. If you want the list I looked at go to the Mashables post, I didn’t hit all of them. And most of the rest I found disappointing. What was offered was not well thought out or I got a frustrated feeling that it would be so easy to just go a little further.

Two of them stood out as having the most potential: Spokeo and SocialURL. Both approach the problem in similar ways of allowing you trying to tie you to your network and all the services that everyone uses. I think this basic approach is good, but there is so much more that could be done with it.

Why not build a social network around all of these connections. Let me add mine to my profile. I manage my own “card” of information, flickr for photos, RSS for my blog, del.icio.us for bookmarks, etc. When a friend wants to connect the get access to all these public connections just by adding me to their contacts list.

The social site should specialize in facilitating the contact and profile exchange. Let the bookmark sites specialize in bookmarking, photo sites deal with photo’s and the blog software makers with blogging. Between API’s and RSS/Atom feeds this information can be aggregated together and easily shared.

I don’t want just an RSS reader, and I don’t want to have to build connections to everything the people in my network are sharing by managing their profile as well as mine.

Why reinvent the wheel with every new social network application? Specialization will insure that each application performs the best in its niche without having to worry about how do I deal with connections or how do I host photos or videos.

The social network companies should give me a way to manage all the data, not create new ways to store the data.

Tags: Social Networking | Spokeo | SocialURL

I have been saying for sometime Goggle is not Yahoo!’s competition. Yahoo! just announced second quarter financials and the nay sayers have come out in droves. But I would like to point out that Yahoo! has been around longer than the nay sayers. They learned a valuable lesson from the last ad market bust and have diversified, something that is likely to bite Google in the end.

I found a post at Internet Outsider to be a breath of fresh air that really looks at what Yahoo! actually reported. They bulleted out some of the bright spots you may have missed from other reporting such as:

• Yahoo is outgrowing the market
• The company is still profitable
• Panama has increased revenue per search by 15% - 20% over last year
• Yahoo has 463 Million users, up 13% from last year, and is still growing
• Revenue is accelerating. The most profitable revenue stream, search and Yahoo! proprietary properties is growing faster than the rest of the business and is accelerating.

That last item is important. The key for Yahoo! isn’t search, its proprietary properties. Yahoo! has stickiness. People go to the Yahoo! properties and stay a long time. Goggle is an in and out business.

I hope that the leadership at Yahoo! doesn’t get caught in the game of comparing them to Google. If Yahoo! gets fixated on Google, that is when they will lose. Let the pundits make comparisons, but remember that they are comparing apples to oranges and saying they are the same because they are both fruit.

I am playing along with Read/Write Web and making this weeks posts about Facebook.

I just realized today that you can import your blog posts into your Facebook Notes. I am not sure why this fact has escaped me for so long. The more I scrape at the surface of Facebook the more I find I like. But wouldn’t it be better for Facebook if I just made Notes my preferred blogging tool?

Where are trackbacks? I find trackbacks an important feature for blogging conversations. The question is are they really necessary in Facebook? The answer is maybe, maybe not.

If everyone is on Facebook then they will automatically know when a new note is published. But this leaves anyone not on Facebook out of the conversation. Facebook plays down that Notes are blog posts, but I am not sure you can see them any other way. As I have mentioned before, this is one of the items that ruined a potentially wonderful social network, Yahoo! 360. Lets hope there will be some movement to further develop Notes into a full fledged blogging platform.