readers commit! “Success”
I will… “Make my niche social network a success no matter how long it takes.”
Look at the Book
Look at the Book
Look at the Book
F8 - it’s big
FB’s ambition has been to be the “social operating system” of the internet. Ebay was an original platform for business, and FB ads the social dimension, and has already passed ebay’s pageviews. A key link on FB’s marketplace shows the listings of your Friends. It’s clear we’d prefer to do commerce with people we know, and this is a natural evolution of the internet - in <10 years I predict most web activity will be social. It's just more natural. Ebay is market capitalized at $44B, half off of its 2005 high, so is this commercial foray works out, FB will be easily over $5B. As Peter Thiel noted in the New York Times yesterday, Facebook is not for sale. (anymore)
Formalizing the position of businesses using the Platform (previously call Facebook API) will encourage designers to invest the development time. For example, I'll implement it on PTrades.com my niche commodities trader social web application - so that for my on-Facebook members, their executed trades will appear in their mutual news feeds.
I also think F8 is a cool name, and it shouldn’t have been just for the big party. F8 is geeky, it looks like FB and it is a rather unique search keyword in the social webapp context. What’s I’M, Microsoft’s new IM initiative? Try to search google for that - only their sheer brilliance brings one right link into the top ten if you add “Microsoft” to the query. Now search for “f8 platform”, which shows clear results.
You should Poke her
What’s a facebook poke, and why is it important?
Initially FB was very successful at helping people hook up, or find sex friends, which apparently is a big deal at Harvard. As I write in the book, the first version of mobile had an easter egg all about sending your room number if you’re in that mood.
So Poke was a way of showing interest. Now it seems no one know what it means, which is why it is the awesome yet tremendously underused feature.
Poke is: a) a temporary friendship, b) a high visibility and low pressure way of getting attention. As such, it has no conceptual rival in the social networking space. Facebook should promote it, so I go out of my way to revive Pokey. If you create a group dedicated to him, I’ll join it and promote it.
Pokes appear prominently in the top right of the “Home” page view, and don’t go away until you act. Poke allows the other party to see your profile, to gauge interest by themselves in contacting you, so a mutual poke is a temporary friendship. Since friending is rarely undone, even when it should be to prevent friend dilution, it is nice that the poke expiry requires no action. I’d like to be able to archive friends, the same way I’d like to archive FB messages, when I’m not actively involved with them.
Poke just means “look at me”, whenever you like. It’s nice and polite. Go forth, and Poke.
