This Week: Ancestry IPO, FamilyLink goes viral, Navigating Facebook Platform changes
Filed under: Facebook, Facebook Applications, FamilyLink.com, Genealogy, IPO Watch, Social Networking Watch
This week is going to be amazing. Possibly, the most interesting week of my career. I’ll explain.
Ancestry.com is slated to go public on Wednesday. I always dreamed of being part of that IPO, but I’ve been out of the company (7 years) longer than I was in the company (6 years). But my excitement about watching a company I helped create trade on a public exchange is mounting. I cannot wait to see what happens when ACOM debuts on the NASDAQ this week.
I’m thinking about holding an IPO party at my house on Wednesday for the early Ancestry.com employees who are no longer with the company. It would be fun to reminisce a bit and see where everyone is now. If “public demand” for a party is high, I’m sure we’ll be able to pull it off on short notice. Between LinkedIn and Facebook, my blog and twitter, we should be able to get at least a dozen or two people to show up. If you’re interested already (and qualify as a “former Ancestry employee”), shoot me an email. (paul AT familylink.com) We’ll watch a couple of old company videos and hopefully some Tivo’d coverage of some of the business news about Ancestry from Wednesday.
This week is also exciting because FamilyLink.com is going viral. Our FamilyLink.com Quantcast chart shows that we’ve had more than 6 million unique visitors since we debuted last month and we are just getting started. We think our Flash-based family tree tool is the funnest online tree ever created, and it is getting tons of usage. We hope to be a top Facebook Connect site soon. In fact, Facebook’s Wiki shows FamilyLink as an example of how to create invites and requests using Facebook Connect. Facebook has been an incredible platform for our company to build on.
Even though Compete.com shows us as having more unique visitors than Ancestry.com, and even though we are classified by them as a genealogy site, we are actually a totally different creature. We are a family social site. Users of our Facebook applications (we have about 60MM users) can easily navigate to FamilyLink.com and enjoy an enhanced family experience there. We connect you to your living relatives. We help you share content and life experiences and memories with your immediate and extended family. Family trees are a fun part of our overall experience (because everyone loves to see how they fit into their family) but we are not currently a deep research site for ancestral records.
About 15% of our users consider themselves genealogists (which means 85% do not). Many of them already subscribe to paid services like Ancestry.com or use free genealogy web sites for research. We believe that genealogy will likely be an important advertising category for us in the future, since we are attracting millions of families to our service and as the saying goes, “there’s a genealogist in every family.” But you can also say there is a photographer, event planner, scrapbooker, top chef, health nut, sports fanatic, vacationer and couponeer in every family. When we ask customers what additional features they want us to build into FamilyLink, we get everything from photo albums to recipe sharing to online chats and event planning tools. We will generate ad or product revenue from a lot of categories as we try to meet the needs of millions of families worldwide.
This week is also intense and interesting because of all the upcoming changes Facebook announced for their Platform last week. Here are some links:
- Video of Facebook’s platform changes. Ethan Beard, who heads up the Facebook Developers Network, describes the product roadmap in this nearly one hour video. Mark Zuckerberg introduced him.
- Facebook’s developer policies have been condensed from 17 pages to 3 pages — all policies are now in one place
- Nick O’Neill’s This Week in Facebook post shows how much is going on at Facebook right now. The pace of change is incredible, and it is hard to keep up with everything, but the pay off for being in the Facebook ecosystem can still be amazing.
More information has been coming out in the last few months about the best ways to monetize social web sites than I have ever seen before. The Social Ad Summit in NYC provided a lot of good information, especially about virtual currencies and virtual goods; PeanutLabs followed the Mike Arrington “Spam Facebook Like a Pro” blog post with some great survey data about how users prefer to pay for in-game virtual currency; and this article from VentureDig covers monetizing social networks with recommendations for 2010.
It’s a great time to be in social networking. Investor interest in social networking related companies seems really strong. For years the conventional wisdom was that social networks could not be monetized, but it turns out that for most of that time the fastest growing social networks (like Twitter today) weren’t even focused on monetization. They were sacrificing revenue or deferring even thinking about revenue to capitalize on the fact that millions of people would be joining social networks and that the network effect would lead to a few winners, with a winner-take-most outcome. That was a very good bet.
It is well known that Facebook has turned cash flow positive, Twitter raised money at a $1 billion valuation, and Zynga is generating a ton of revenue, some say about $250 million this year. But it is not so well known that teen social network myYearbook turned profitable this year (in Q1 according to CEO Geoff Cook) because of “Lunch Money” and virtual goods. There are other under-the-radar social networking companies and app/game developers that aren’t well known at the moment that will breakout in 2010 and become widely known.
Here’s to hoping that FamilyLink.com will be one of them.
FamilyLink Climbs Facebook Developer Leaderboard
Filed under: Facebook, Facebook Applications, Social Networking Watch
Sorted by Monthly Active Users
Name DAU MAU Daily Growth 1. Zynga 47,142,368 161,442,415 1.11 2. Playfish 12,136,211 57,661,305 -0.04 3. RockYou! 2,493,761 41,616,918 -1.41 4. 11,868,141 32,375,076 -0.26 5. Causes 2,135,480 31,881,017 0.72 6. Slide, Inc. 1,234,691 24,757,153 -0.05 7. Familylink.com 1,266,743 22,096,540 0.72 8. SlashKey 5,830,463 18,709,422 -0.08 9. 3happybytes 549,065 18,643,657 -4.07 10. LivingSocial 708,836 17,740,792 -1.30
If you don’t count Facebook’s own applications, FamilyLink.com is now the #6 developer in the Facebook ecosystem, based on Monthly Active Users. It won’t be easy to climb this chart, but with some of the new features we are launching soon, there is a chance that we will.
Posted via web from Paul’s posterous
oh my gosh, facebook is for families
Filed under: Facebook, Facebook Applications, Families, Social Networking Watch, Uncategorized
On Feb. 2nd, InsideFacebook reported that the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is women over 55.
In just the past 120 days, usage of Facebook by women over 55 has grown by an astonishing 175.3%.
Our team at FamilyLink.com is particularly excited as social networks attract older users because our mission is to connect families to each other using technology, and the glue that keeps most families (and extended families) together often happens to be the older female family members–moms and grandmas.
As they come into social networks in droves, a very large percentage of them do so with the primary purpose of communicating with their children and grandchildren–and not necessary just with their friends.
My mom started using Facebook actively just a few days after Christmas. During the holidays we had a big family discussion about how we could all keep in touch better. Everyone talked about their Blackberries, iPhones, Facebook and even Twitter.
I am now friends on Facebook with my mom, my siblings, my 82-year old aunt, and dozens of cousins, children of cousins, nieces, nephews, and other extended family. And we all use We’re Related. In fact, the primary way we found each other was through this application.
Time Magazine published a “Nerd World” column this week titled “Facebook is for Old People” in which author Lev Grossman listed 10 reasons (all in jest) why older people love Facebook. Reason #7 was:
We have children. There is very little that old people enjoy more than forcing others to pay attention to pictures of their children. Facebook is the most efficient engine ever devised for this.
That’s pretty funny. But more based in reality than Grossman’s claim that old people want to force others to see pictures of their children is the fact that most older people care more about their family members than younger people do and they themselves want to continually see new family photos.
Young people are busy with school, friends, and work. All of life is ahead of them, and they are optimistic about the future. It’s well known that college students phone home mainly when they are out of money. 
On the other hand, as we grow older, everything changes. What once was important in high school, college, and in our work years, no longer seems to matter so much. We have so many more memories to think about and we become more thoughtful about the past. As we age, watching children (and from what I hear, grandchildren) grow, and learn, and experience life, and staying in touch with our own remaining family members, becomes the most interesting and meaningful part of our own lives.
I think there is quantifiable evidence for this. While working at a previous company (from 1998-2002) my team discovered that the older people were the more times per month they logged into their private family web sites. It was pretty astonishing to see this hold true even for people up into their 80s.
Because older people are flocking to Facebook, the We’re Related application (by FamilyLink.com) has jumped in the last few months to become the #2 most popular application on Facebook as measured by Weekly Active Users. For a few days, it was #1 in daily active users, but that number fluctates often as various apps experience occasional surges in traffic.
When we launched We’re Related in October 2007, we reached our first million users in 29 days, and our second million a few weeks later. We were surprised that our application spread so quickly, especially because Facebook had already clamped down on the “unlimited invites” that had helped the first successful apps reach millions of users in just weeks or months. Our cap was 20 invites per user per day, so Facebook users with a thousand friends couldn’t tell all of them about our app at once. And yet we still grew like crazy.
But what surprised us even more was our discovery that half of our first two million users were from Canada, and that 17 of our top 20 cities were in Canada. We teased our product manager (who is from Canada) about making this happen on purpose.
We discovered, through further investigation, that even though the US population is about 9.1 times greater than the population of Canada, at that time there were actually more women over age 55 in Canada using Facebook than here in the US.
Then it made sense. Older people, especially women, love the We’re Related application. In fact, it might be the primary reason they use Facebook — like it was for my mom.
We weren’t 100% sure why Facebook had more members 55+ in Canada than in the U.S. But this is our theory: since Facebook was originally for college students (first at Harvard, then at 60 Ivy League schools, then for all US colleges and universities) and then for US high school students, and only in September 2006 was opened to the general public, the perception was widespread in the U.S. was that Facebook was for young people only.
In fact, the famous NY Times article from June 7, 2007 titled “omg, my mom joined facebook” reflected a reality at the time in the U.S. that young people didn’t want older people (especially their moms) to see what they were doing online.
For some reason in Canada Facebook spread quickly to all ages. Maybe it hadn’t really taken off in Canadian universities. Maybe Facebook had launched in U.S. high schools but not in Canadian high schools. Or maybe Canadian youth don’t have as many things to hide from their parents.
Who knows? But whatever the reason, there were literally more men and women over 55 in Canada than in the US on Facebook.
When We’re Related launched, it became especially popular in Canada, probably because the large population of moms and grandmas embraced it and shared it.
We don’t know if our growth will continue at the current rate, but if it does we will have more than 50 million users by the end of this year. Not bad for an app that will turn 2 years old in October.
The challenge for us now, is to design a user experience that meets the widely varying needs of millions of families. Families come in all different shapes and sizes.
We are anxious to create an experience that works for your family, that helps you stay in touch regularly with your siblings, parents, children, and extended family, in meaningful ways.
We would like to know what you want We’re Related to do for you and your family. How can we make it better?
Please comment on this blog about what features or design changes would lead you to use We’re Related regularly to keep in touch with your relatives.
We would really appreciate your suggestions.
Or, if you want to vote on each other’s ideas, please visit our customer feedback forum on Uservoice, where thousands of our active users are suggesting ideas and voting on them.
Please let us know what we can do for your family.
Top 25 Facebook App and hybrid business models
Filed under: Facebook, Family Tree Projects, FamilyLink.com, Genealogy
I remember when I first learned about LinkedIn.com, and was the 4th person to sign up for it in Utah County. Soon I got into a competition with two friends to see who could end up with the most (real) connections. I finally won that competition, but we all ended up with hundreds of connections. But I remember when one of my friends knew they were losing on the connections number that they claimed to be winning on "endorsements." They changed their key metric, so that they could claim that they had actually won.
The key metric on Facebook apps used to be total installs. Some apps were incredibly viral, especially early on, and got millions of installs. But some of these apps were also fluff and lost their appeal very quickly, so they actually didn’t get used much. Later, Facebook reporting started focusing more on Daily Active Users (DAU), and apps were being valued by third party reporting systems based on how many people were using them each day. Last night, our social team told me that Facebook just replaced Daily Active Users with Monthly Active Users (MAU), and that we are one of the winners in this changing in reporting. With this metric, our We’re Related application jumps up to rank #23 overall for all Facebook apps, with more than 2.1 million Monthly Active Users. It’s gratifying to see our application being used by so many Facebook users world wide to connect with relatives.
Quantcast is now reporting that our FamilyLink Network of sites and apps for families now has 2.77 million uniques globally and 1.15 million from the U.S. The chart looks great, with real steady growth over the last few months. If this trend continues, we’ll soon become a top 1,000 internet property globally which could lead to more revenue opportunities for the company. Our advertising revenue continues to grow as a percentage of total revenue, and we’d like to see that trend continue, even though we absolutely love the subscription business model that WorldVitalRecords.com uses to generate the majority of our revenue.
We’ll also be launching a storefront later this month for the first time with thousands of products available for purchase, so for the first time we’ll be able to advertise these products to our millions of users.
Our investors support our hybrid business model (subscription, advertising, e-commerce) but it is hard to forecast each one of these with such a short track record. We started seling advertising in January. And now e-commerce is just about to launch. I’m sure all of these revenue streams will grow, but at what rate?
Can anyone who has worked in a company with a hybrid business model privately email me, or comment publicly about what they think is typical for the revenue-mix going forward?
I need to carve out a few hours to read some SEC filings from some internet companies so I can find some of this info out myself. A friend of mine said he’ll try to make SEC filings available on the Amazon Kindle, and I told him I’ll be subscribing to a bunch of them, so that every quarter I’ll get them pushed to my device
That reminds me of a great domain name that Provo Labs once
purchased for a potential service to make SEC filings more accessible
and searchable. The domain was suggested by social media creative
genius and podcaster Judd Bagley. It was 10qverymuch.com. We might even
still own it, if someone would like to make an offer for it.
I find myself reading TechCrunch and Mashable every morning on my back porch from my Kindle. I was amazed when I found myself paying for a subscription to these blogs, when they are actually free online, but they are really cheap and the Kindle reading experience is much more enjoyable and relaxing than sitting in front of a computer, or even using my blackberry or iphone. Yesterday I wanted to subscribe to the Economist on my Kindle, but it doesn’t seem to be available yet.
Becoming a Top 1,000 Web Property
Filed under: Audience Measurement, Facebook, FamilyLink.com, Genealogy, Internet Marketing Tactics, World Vital Records
Yesterday we set two traffic records. WorldVitalRecords.com had more than 36,000 unique visitors–6,000 higher than our two previous best days, earlier in April. And We’re Related on Facebook had more than 105,000 daily active users.
One of the best parts about being an internet entrepreneur is how immediately your actions translate into measureable results. Our team members are working hard on search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, email marketing campaigns, and improving our affiliate marketing program. As each channel improves, the overall cumulative results are exciting.
When you have team members that have experienced the thrill of extreme growth in the past from how a web site was built or marketed and when they are hungry to experience it again, and know how to do it, then you have a great success formula. When you don’t have a team that has done it before, you have to inspire them by getting them to listen to or read about people who have done it before.
My personal observation is that the vast majority of people that work in most companies have never experienced anything like the rapid real-time success of a massive internet marketing campaign that they personally helped launch, or a melt-down of servers caused by publicity or viral marketing from something they personally helped build. I remember watching a few product and marketing managers in the early days of MyFamily.com go through a personal transformation when they personally designed or launched a feature, or a marketing campaign, that brought in huge numbers. They were never the same again. From that point on, they wanted to do it again and again, and avoid as many meetings and as much bureaucracy and red tape as possible. They wanted to be on a small dedicate team focused on rapid development. They wanted to experience that thrill again.
Most people I have worked with over the years are willing to spend a lot of time in meetings, or in planning, or in writing 20-page MRDs (marketing requirements documents), rather than spending most of their time building a site or actually launching a marketing program. We have a high concentration of experienced and hungry team members at FamilyLink.com, so we are optimistic about the future.
A good description about the difference between a traditional business with its long-term planning cycles and a fast-paced internet company comes from Meg Whitman, who joined eBay after a successful career with Hasbro, Disney and Proctor & Gamble. In the book Net Entrepreneurs Only, on page 179, she describes the radical difference. I blogged about this in 2004.
Everyday we use Omniture Site Catalyst to run our online marketing programs. But we are also looking at our public Quantcast numbers every day. Recently we were able to figure out how to place a Quantcast pixel on our Facebook application so that we can get credit publicly for the Facebook users that are using our We’re Related application every day.
Our Quantcast chart for the FamilyLink.com network of sites now looks like we must be on the verge of a server "melt-down" — and we’ve had people ask us about this. But in fact, we’ve had a ton of Facebook traffic for months now, and it is only just now showing up on our public chart. And the good news is that thanks to Amazon EC2, we are scalable as far as the eye can see.
After another two weeks of Quantcast tracking our actual usage across all of our properties, it appears that our network will break into the ranks of the top 1,000 web properties in the U.S.
It takes about 2.1 million unique visitors per month to be a top 1,000 web site or property. We’ll soon be in the company of prweb.com, looksmart.com, and stanford.edu in terms of unique monthly visitors. To break into the top 500 web properties, we’ll have to reach 3.3 million monthly uniques.
I remember going to Fall Internet World in New York City back in 1998 and first running into Media Metrix. At their booth they had a list of the top 500 web sites at that time, and I was thrilled to see Ancestry.com on that list. I remember later, after the successful launch of MyFamily.com with its meteoric viral growth, and after our acquisition of Rootsweb.com, that our network of properties broke into the top 50 in reach, and our reported monthly page views put as at #19 for all US internet properties. Imagine that–a top 20 internet company based on page views!
It is clear from those early days that genealogy sites and tools for connecting families have huge potential. With the right business model, partners, and the right team, a company in this space has tremendous potential. It’s no wonder, to me, that Geni.com reportedly got a $100 million valuation on their Series A round last year. They are still, of course, trying to grow into that valuation, but they are showing steady growth. The family tree and family social networking space is hot. It has huge potential. The big question now is which of the many various companies in this space will execute well enough to survive and to attract enough customers to become viable. Our team is quite confident that we can make it. We have a number of team members who have experienced the thrill of victory before and are hungry to experience it again.
As I said in my previous post, We’re Hiring. If you have been a part of a fast-growing internet company in the past and are interested in joining with us, please contact me and send me your resume. It’s going to be a really fun ride.
Does brand loyalty come from family word of mouth?
Filed under: Advertising, Consumer Products, Customer Surveys, Facebook, Viral Marketing
During nearly 20 years of marriage I think on two or three occasions my wife and I have discussed the laundry detergent that she uses. As a pragmatist, I have often come across less expensive generic detergents, which she refuses to use. I can’t even get her to try anything else, even once! She is a die-hard Tide detergent user and she would never ever consider changing brands. Upon closer investigation I discovered that she inherited that brand loyalty from her mother. I don’t exactly know how, but there is no denying that her mother’s recommendation is stronger than any suggestion that I can ever make. I need to find out if my wife’s 7 sisters also have the same brand loyalties. That would be an interesting question.
My company, FamilyLink.com hopes to become the leading developer of social networking applications for families and for genealogists. My background is in subscription marketing. I co-founded Ancestry.com in 1996 and it approached 1 million subscribers in the next 10 years to its massive genealogy database library. And now WorldVitalRecords.com has passed 25,000 subscribers and our rate of growth is increasing.
But as everyone knows, most social networking sites are free (Ryze.com was an exception, and it claimed to be the first profitable social network, back in like 2003) and rely on advertising revenue to grow. In order to generate advertising revenue from our family apps and widgets, and from our own social network (which have attracted more than 2.3 million users in the past 4 months), it will be useful to understand what brands and products are used based on family recommendations.
So yesterday, we asked some of our customers what brands they are loyal to because of their mother. Here are the top 28 responses:
1. Tide
2. Ivory
3. Clorox
4. Campbell’s
5. Crisco
6. Dove
7. Crest
8. Kraft
9. Comet
10. Quaker
11. Hellman’s
12. Dial
13. Palmolive
14. Colgate
15. Arm and Hammer
16. Heinz
17. Gold Medal (flour)
18. Dawn (dish soap)
19. Oil of Olay
20. Folgers
21. All (laundry detergent)
22. Wisk
23. Kleenex
24. Windex
25. Jello
26. Clabber Girl
27. Cascade
28. Ajax
Tide actually had more than twice as many responses as the next highest, Ivory. So the brand marketers there must have been doing something terribly right all these years.
I heard a projection at CES that 1.2 billion people will be using social networks by 2012. And since so many people try or buy products and services based on word of mouth recommendations, and since we hope to have tens of millions of families using our applications, we will invest a lot of time and energy into understanding how viral marketing (or what we called “genetic marketing” back at MyFamily.com) works within families–both within nuclear families as well as extended families.
I need to make it clear that our survey was not scientific. We got about 1,000 responses in a day. But with our reach growing larger every month, we will use surveys and quizzes to become experts on family word of mouth.
If any of the brand managers of the brands listed above (or any other major brands) want us to do some research for them and discover the genetic marketing quotient for their product, we’d be happy to work something out. We have a Facebook audience of ~2.3 million users and a genealogy audience of more than 500,000 monthly visitors.
Social Networking Strategy for Utah Companies
Filed under: Facebook, Social Networking Watch, Viral Marketing
I recently organized a Facebook group called Utah CEOs with a Facebook Strategy. Now I wish I had named it better. It should be something like Utah Executives who Have or Want to Have a Social Networking Strategy. The first event had more than 30 attendees. One of them blogged a summary of the Facebook Strategy lunch that we held this week, and said it was very worthwhile.
If you want to join this group which already has 125 members so you can be notified when we schedule our next event, click here.
As we (at FamilyLink.com) increase our expertise in building applications and making them both viral and scalable (which has taken us months of effort and investment) we are planning to select some key strategic partners–companies who have content or services in the family space–and develop some co-branded applications with them. These applications can generate revenue and click-throughs for both our partners and our own web sites.
We will sign our first co-development deal next week and announce the application shortly thereafter. We believe this new application is unique and will spread to millions of Facebook users, and that is related to our business of connecting families. Our We’re Related application has had more than 2 million installs, and our next two applications are growing very, very quickly. Both should reach into the hundreds of thousands of installs within a month.
If you are interested in talking about partnering with us, please use the Contact Me form on my blog, and I’ll get back with you shortly.
Facebook Strategy Lunch for Utah Executives
Filed under: Facebook, Social Networking Watch, Viral Marketing, Widgets
I organized a Facebook Group for Utah CEOs who have a Facebook strategy or want to develop one. I wish I could change the name of the Facebook Group, but Facebook doesn’t allow that. I can see why. What if someone set up a group called “Mothers Against Drunk Driving” and got a million members, and then arbitrarily decided to change the name of the group to “We Love Beer.” The creator of a group can control a lot of things, but can’t change the name after people have joined it.
If I could change the group name I would broaden it to include any Utah Executive (not just CEOs) and also to broaden it to include Facebook, OpenSocial, and other major web sites such as Yahoo that are opening up their platforms to third-party developers.
At CES I heard a forecast that 1.2 billion people will be using social networks by 2012. On Wikipedia’s excellent list of social networks I count 26 that have nearly 10 million users already.
There are opportunities everywhere you look to build social networking applications or widgets that can spread throughout the web. And there are companies that can help you get started:
- Widgetbox, a VC-funded company (Hummer Winblad), helps companies build and distribute widgets. They claim that 10% of the Facebook applications started as widgets that have migrated to Facebook. They announced last week a Bebo accelerator that can help a widget turn into a Bebo application. (Bebo is a massive social network that opened up last week to third party applications, just like Facebook.)
- KickApps has raised $18 million to date. It provides widgets and social networking components for a fee. I spoke with a KickApps executive at CES. He said they charge for their applications and widgets based on page views/usage. So if you need a video player with social networking functionality built it for your web site, you don’t have to build it from scratch. It also appears that they can provide you with your own white label social network like Ning.
- Ning allows anyone to quickly build their own social network on its platform. Founded by Marc Andreesen, Ning reached 100,000 social networks hosted back in September.
- FBFactory.com claims to be the first company that exclusively builds Facebook apps for customers. They have a growing list of applications they have built.
So, if you are a Utah Executive and you would like to learn more about how to develop a strategy that can help you reach the 1.2 billion people who are going to be using social networks in the next 4 years, and how to do it inexpensively and virally, sign up for this Facebook group, and plan on attending our lunch meeting next week in Provo.
My New Personal Facebook Strategy
Filed under: Facebook, MyFamily.com, Social Networking Watch
I have been a serious user of social networks since joining LinkedIn several years ago–the fourth person in Utah to join, as I recall. My friend Michael Tanne, now CEO of Wink.com, turned me onto it. Of my 858 connections, I think I personally know about 98% of them. I have turned down a ton of connection requests because I really did want to be part of a trusted network. But I read that you should connect to a couple recruiters and a couple of the most networked people in the world, and I did, and it has dramatically expanded the reach of my own network. I am three degrees away from 3.74 million people. I use LinkedIn all the time to make contact with people from other companies.
I tried many other business social networks early on, including Ryze, Spoke, Xing, ZeroDegrees (first caught on with entertainment execs in So Calif) and Tribe.net but nothing had the ease of use of LinkedIn, so I’ve dropped them all except Xing, which is strong in Europe. Someday I’ll beef up my usage of that site.
I’m not a fan of MySpace, but have been active in Facebook for quite some time. I have about 300 Facebook friends, but probably 90% of them are just casual acquaintances, and the reality is that less than 10% of my actual close friends use Facebook. So how useful is it to me really? I’m married and have kids, so much social life is pretty much limited to work, family, church, and my kids’ school activities. The vast majority of Facebook apps are useless to someone like me. For business I rely on LinkedIn, and for family stuff, my own family and my wife’s family still use MyFamily.com, the social network for families which I helped build in 1998.
With all of that in mind, I’ve decided to dramatically change my usage strategy of Facebook. I’ve got 130 friend requests that are pending–almost all of them from people that I’ve never met. Many of those requests are from people in different countries. I am certain that many of them think I’m the Microsoft Paul Allen so they friend me. Or maybe they are entrepreneurs or members of the same Facebook groups that I belong to, and they just want to beef up their friend network.
During last week’s Robert Scoble controversy, where he was using the new Plaxo tool (in Alpha) to mine email addresses from his Facebook friends, I learned that he has about 5,000 Facebook friends, apparently the upper limit of what Facebook allows. I read recently that one person with more than 1,000 Facebook friends uses it to get a first hand glimpse of how Facebook apps spread, and who is using what apps. I got to thinking…maybe my Facebook connections can become as valuable to me for market research as I watch what they are doing and ask them questions using My Questions or other surveying/polling tools, and I’ll get a much better sense of what my own company can do in Facebook.
I see some serious downsides.
- My newsfeed will become interesting mainly as market research, kind of my own mini zeitgeist, and not very satisfying in terms of keeping up with people that I really care about.
- Reputation comes in large part by association–you are judged by the company you keep. So anyone who knows me and then clicks on any of my “friends” may assume certain things about them, based on what they know about me, and now, that trust by association will be almost completely lost. In fact, my own reputation, may be damaged.
I am quire worried about the reputation thing. Just last week a friend of mine told me should couldn’t believe I ever worked with so-and-so, who had tried to defraud her and take credit for her idea, and there was clear guilt by association. Thankfully I told her that I had met with him a couple of times and talked about doing something together but had such serious disgreements with him that we never actually worked together.
But the upsides are interesting also. I envision getting 5,000 friends like Scoble, with most of them being international entrepreneurs and older consumers. FamilyLink.com’s products and services are primarily of interest to family historians, who tend to be older, often over 50. Canada has more Facebook users over 50 than the U.S. does, with only about 1/9th of the population.
I’ll publish my blog into Facebook and attract more comments since I’ll have more readers. I highly value reader comments, and love to get 10-20 comments per post.
When I travel internationally, I often have very few good contacts in a given country, and it is hard to have a successful first trip when you don’t already have some kind of network there. I usually use LinkedIn to make some initial contacts and to set up some meetings, but now I may have some Facebook “friends” who may be willing to give me advice about where to stay, how to get around, and who to meet with.
For the last few days I’ve gone back and forth about the value of meeting new people through Facebook vs. the risk of a damaged reputation and the possibility of friends trusting people that aren’t trustworthy.
I’ve decided to go ahead and try an experiment. I’ll accept the 130 other friend requests that I have, and actively start seeking friends in countries that I’m planning to travel to this year. I’ll try to find a way to “warn” my own friends and acquaintances that I’m using Facebook in this way, and that they can’t instantly trust people in my friends list. I’ll also start using the new Friends List feature of Facebook, so I’ll have my own way of communicating instantly with all my real friends.
I was on the fence for several days. But I finally decided to go ahead and get a zillion Facebook friends when I realized that if this experience turns out badly, I can just reboot. I can delete my Facebook account and start over from scratch.
So, tell me what you think about my decision. I’m starting right now, and if you really think this is a bad idea, post a comment and tell me so, and maybe you’ll save me from a disaster. Or if you have any advice for me, please share it.
CES 2008–for me, it’s about Facebook
I’m in Las Vegas for CES 2008. Last night on my drive from Provo I listened to some podcasts in the Stanford Entrepreneur Lecture Series. (You can download them for free from iTunes or from Stanford’s web site.) The most interesting was Mark Zuckerberg’s talk 2 years ago when Facebook had 5 million users and was still limited to authenticated college students and invited high school students. It was growing by 20,000 member per day, was generating $1 million per month in revenue, was cash flow positive, had taken money from Accel by then, and had more page views already than Google. Mark said the key metric he looked at most was the percentage of his users who used the service every day.
The most interesting moment was during the Q&A where a Stanford student asked if Mark (and Jim Breyer, a board member and VC who was also there) had thought about opening up Facebook (which Mark had been arguing was an online directory utility, not a social network) to other developers and turning it into a platform. Mark’s answer was immediately: yes, and if you have experience coding operating systems, etc, then come and help me do it.
So that was a long time ago, in internet years. Mark had just turned 21. This was 2 years before the May 2007 official launch of Facebook Platform, that Mark indicated that Facebook wanted to be open to third party development.
I also listened (for the second time) to Marissa Mayer’s lecture on nine ways that Google fosters innovation and creativity. She joined Google in 1998 and has managed its consumer search business for years. This is a fantastic lecture. She describes the 20% time at Google and how it works in practice. She indicated that in one recent six month period, 50% of the new products launched at Google resulted from employee 20% time. The most interesting moment for me was her description of a 3 am brainstorm session back in about 1999 when a bunch of developers were staying late to lend support to Harry, the sole guy in charge of running the 3-4 day web crawl updates using 500+ command line commands, and during a brainstorm at that time they came up with what is now Google Book Search–the idea of scanning all the books in the world. She describes the magical moment that it was for all of these early employees at Google, but then she indicated that Google continues to recruit people who want to change the world and that creative moments like this continue to happen every day or night at Google around the pool table as incredibly bright people try to imagine what Google could possibly do next.
So now I’m finalizing my plans for today using the excellent My CES online planning tool. It’s definitely the best online experience I’ve ever had looking for speakers, companies, exhibitors, and products that I want to learn about.
Facebook, it appears, has a booth at the Sands/Venetian, and they have about 20 employees registered to be here this week. This is a bit surprising since the major search engines and web sites don’t usually exhibit at CES, although they participate in keynotes and on panels. I’m very curious to see if this is really a booth or just a meeting room.
I’m hoping to meet up with some other Facebook developers and thought leaders today or tomorrow. Our first Facebook app We’re Related now has 2 million users (our press release announcing this should hit today.) Since our company’s mission is to creative innovative tools for connecting families, we intend to develop apps for other social networks and to create widgets that operate on major web sites (like Google and Yahoo) and on mobile devices, that will help family members communicate and share information with each other. Yahoo made a big annoucement yesterday at CES about Yahoo Life! which apparently will allow third-party developers to create widgets that can be utilized in the new combined search portal/social network platform that Yahoo is building by combining its key tools into one user experience. I don’t quite understand it all yet (I wish I had seen it in person), but my main interest is in figuring out how we can deliver utility to families who are using any major web site. The more open large companies are to third party development, the more likely we are to focus on creating value for their users rather than trying to build destination web sites ourselves.
Before I head over to the first keynote, I’m going to use LinkedIn to attempt contact with 6-8 people in the social networking industry that I hope to meet tonight or tomorrow at the show, and see how it goes. When I travel I can’t believe how useful LinkedIn is in getting last minute meetings set up.
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