David Beach's Blog

Facebook Outcast

Last night I got kicked off of Facebook. Apparently I violated their terms of service. All I was doing was using a feature on their site. I wanted to change my personal feed from just this blog to my soup.io feed which contains an aggregation of a variety of my content. So I changed the feed url. Previewed it, then wanted to see if I could get the links to work from a couple of the sources, so I used a different soup.io feed. That didn't work, so I went back to the original. This must have triggered some "abuse" flag and I got dumped. I like to think I got Zuckerberged.

Now I can't log in and they are being pretty non-responsive. This is all the info they provide:

"Your account has been disabled by an administrator. If you have any questions or concerns, you can visit our FAQ page here. Facebook enforces limits on the site in order to prevent certain actions that can be considered abusive. Your account has been disabled for persistent and rapid use of a certain feature. Unfortunately, for security reasons, we will not be able to further explain these limits."

I can understand having these kinds of safety measures, but I've never encountered such a thing before. I was using their tools according to how they instructed. Enter a feed URL, then preview it. I expect if you don't like the way things look in the "preview" then it would be okay to change things. That's all that I did.

I hope that they reinstate me soon so I can get back to poking people.

Tumblr, Twitter, and TV

I'm seriously considering moving this blog to tumblr. The whole thing. I've thought about this before, but now I think it might be time. Reasons: 1. tumblr kicks ass 2. tumblr is free 3. tumblr is free. My only hesitation is that my archive will go away. Tumblr has no way of importing a blog archive. I'll likely lose quite a bit of traffic as much of my visits come from search. I'm trying to simplify things, I see this as a good step in that direction.

Has anyone thought about Twitter as a social search application? Today I tried it out. I wanted to know the best burrito place in SF and SC. I got great answers that I totally trust and I didn't have to search. Now the problem with this kind of search is that the "results" are only going to be as good as your network. But if you pool the content together, you could have a decent corpus. This is not Y! Answers, this is something else. Probably just a piece of a complete social search engine.

I'm addicted to Television. I'll admit it. I've had one around all my life. I watch baseball, news, and other shows nearly every night. Can I live without it? I don't know. i'd like to. I can save money and have more time for other stuff. But I love baseball and my family would probably not appreciate it. Maybe we'll try it for a week to see what it feels like.

Tom Hodgkinson on Facebook

Apologies to Marc and Rabble, but I think Tom Hodgkinson is my new favorite anarchist. He's written an excellent perspective on Facebook (or as my friend Clev unknowingly or ironically says "TheMySpaceBook"). He goes off on their basic concept, looney privacy practices, and the political views of their board. I enjoy this kind of commentary...

"I despise Facebook. This enormously successful American business describes itself as "a social utility that connects you with the people around you". But hang on. Why on God's earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me? Why should my relationships be mediated through the imagination of a bunch of supergeeks in California? What was wrong with the pub?

And does Facebook really connect people? Doesn't it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk? A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations.

Facebook appeals to a kind of vanity and self-importance in us, too. If I put up a flattering picture of myself with a list of my favourite things, I can construct an artificial representation of who I am in order to get sex or approval. ("I like Facebook," said another friend. "I got a shag out of it.") It also encourages a disturbing competitivness around friendship: it seems that with friends today, quality counts for nothing and quantity is king. The more friends you have, the better you are. You are "popular", in the sense much loved in American high schools. Witness the cover line on Dennis Publishing's new Facebook magazine: "How To Double Your Friends List."

It seems, though, that I am very much alone in my hostility. At the time of writing Facebook claims 59 million active users, including 7 million in the UK, Facebook's third-biggest customer after the US and Canada. That's 59 million suckers, all of whom have volunteered their ID card information and consumer preferences to an American business they know nothing about. Right now, 2 million new people join each week. At the present rate of growth, Facebook will have more than 200 million active users by this time next year. And I would predict that, if anything, its rate of growth will accelerate over the coming months. As its spokesman Chris Hughes says: "It's embedded itself to an extent where it's hard to get rid of."

All of the above would have been enough to make me reject Facebook for ever. But there are more reasons to hate it. Many more..."

Read on...

Social Bookmarking - What's The Deal?

I'm getting a little frustrated with the social bookmarking space. It is going nowhere. As near as I can figure, there has been no innovation in more than a year. I have a need to save and share links to a feed with images in a manner that's easy and accessible. I've tried Kaboodle, but I don't really care for their approach to everything linking to their own site. I want to use the original URL. Wists is lame and forces you to tag. Blue Dot, now Faves, embeds their own Amazon Associates ID as does Kaboodle. I want a service that serves my interests, not theirs. Magnolia is a fine service and I like the people involved, but it could be better and I want the option to include an image.

Update: Magnolia released their mobile version today... m.gnolia.com

Delicious has the potential be so much more than it is. This is the most frustrating of all since it's a Yahoo product. I don't understand why it has remained largely stagnant since the acquisition. I still support and use the service, but it's mostly out of loyalty. I cannot for the life of me understand why they have not built a search and discovery engine using delicious data. Social Search? A Google "killer"? Delicious could be it! WTF?! I see it clear as day, do my friends at the Santa Clara campus see it? Do certain people in Sunnyvale see it? Rarr!

What's Up With Plaxo?

My inbox has been plastered with Plaxo. All of a sudden, people I haven't thought about in a long time have been spamming me from a service I hadn't thought about in a long time. I know this has been going on for awhile and is related to their open social support, but for someone that doesn't care, it's baffling.

"Plaxo 3.0" says it all. This company has reinvented itself twice now. It always seemed like it was behind the curve, even though it was an early web 2.0 business. Perhaps that's the reason? My problem with them was that I never knew what their value proposition was. It was never clear. Contact management? Social Network? Business application? LinkedIn clone? Address book spammer? Facebook clone? Open Social Network? eCards with ferrets? ... Digital Life Manager? Maybe that's it. Maybe they are trying to become a DLM?  If that's the case, then they still lack focus. A DLM needs to build itself around a central and essential application.

Frankly I find it difficult to trust a minor company that spreads itself out like this.

Update: I just deleted my Plaxo account. Whew one less whatchamacallit to worry about.

Facebook Frown Town :(

Facebook is rapidly getting jacked up. It's not one thing, it's everything. A melange of distraction and aggravation (and privacy issues) that's making me lose faith in giant social network applications. Facebook was the clean, goodly cousin to the debauched circus freak that's MySpace... but now it's getting more difficult to tell them apart. I'm not talking about design or interface, I'm talking about overall noise and attention.

Without getting into the details, Facebook needs to be careful about the quality and variety of applications. There are nearly 30 Flickr applications for instance. All of them suck. People want the functionality that F8 provides, but there's only so much that one can absorb.

Noticing The Adds

I've been noticing my inbox lately. Thinking about it, I can't remember the last time that I've been added as a contact or friend to some sites that I use frequently... and I'm wondering why. I'm getting way fewer MySpace add requests. Where I used to get 2 or more a day, now I get 2 or more a month.

It's been months since I've had a Flickr contact request. Months. I used to get them all the time, from people I know or not. But for some reason it's been quiet.

I belong to dozens of social networks and am active in at least 10. But the slow down of the friending has me wondering if there's a behavior change going on. First, with Flickr, I concede that maybe everyone I know is using it and I'm already friends with them, except that's not true. I meet new people all the time. And Flickr is growing right?  This is the same with Upcoming and MyBlogLog.

I'm wondering if people are tired of friending. I know I am. I still get twitter followers and facebook friend requests, but these sites are newer to more people. I'm happy that my network has been moving to Facebook. it has everything I need for the most part. Though I'm not sure why people are adding me on Twitter. I'm fine with it, people can follow my twits. But I'm reluctant to return the favor, unless I know them. I just spent 10 minutes turning off notifications from several people. If I'm going to use the service, I want to see content from people that I really know.

LinkedIn has slowed down too. Is it the maturation of these sites, or is there a trend going on of people slowing down this behavior?

I think part of it has to do with the fact that I've been on many of these sites for some time and my network can only get so big. But I also feel that idea of friending is losing its luster as people get more familiar with the function. It's curious.

Yahoo! As Social Network

I've been mulling this over for a while now and thought I'd put pen to paper, as it were.

Yahoo! has an interesting opportunity to become a giant social network of micro networks. A meta social network of micro social networks? Lord, that's geeky. But I think there's something to this. Yahoo! has all the components, it just doesn't tie them together. Which is typical of Yahoo!.

The components are a huge user base, tons of vertical interest sites, great content, and a basic social network infrastructure. I hope I can explain this as well as I see the pictures in my head...

MyBlogLog is a very light weight version of this concept. It allows people to express affinity for content (blog, site, etc.) by "joining" a community for that site. The problem is that joining the community does absolutely nothing for you. I don't even know to which communities/sites I belong, nor does it matter because I don't get anything out of it. It would be better if MyBlogLog let you participate more inside the community and then pushed content to you from that community. I'm sure those geniuses are working on it.

But let's expand the idea out to Yahoo and beyond. Right now Yahoo! has a very real problem of getting people to sign in and stay signed in. There's not much reason to sign in except to get email and access My Yahoo!. I believe that 30% to 40% of Yahoo traffic is from logged in users. It may actually be less.

So what if we turned on a MyBlogLog/Yahoo! 360 hybrid system that allowed users to express affinity for content and vertical areas, find and collect friends, and share user generated content in any area of the network?

I thought of this because it's almost baseball season (thank God). I found that I wanted to "Add" myself to the Oakland A's page on Yahoo! Sports. By doing so, I would express my affinity to the Oakland A's (Go A's!) and become part of a community of users who also shared my passion for the team.  I would then be able to participate in a discussion in that community. I could also be fed updates from the content of the area and the community through a content stream that would appear in a variety of places including my Yahoo account/profile, phone, email, feed reader, etc.

With me so far? (maybe/maybe not but trust me, this is something)

I think that this could work for almost any area of the site (if not the web). I'd like to join the Yahoo! Nintendo Wii "community", the recipe community, the tech community, and certain categories of news, music, shopping, autos, health, etc. etc. I would even join a search community and a Yahoo! Developer Network community. This would allow me express myself and connect to content and people in an entirely new way.

I would then have a Yahoo! profile page that promoted my affinities, interests, friends, personal content, and reputation from across the network to anyone who visited it. It would let me collect and share my flickr photos, videos I made or enjoy, Yahoo! Answers Q&A, bookmarks or whatever I choose to be public. I would also be able to pull in feeds from other personal sources as well as have a blog. People could send me messages and comment on my profile, if I choose the option.

This profile should include my calendar, links to other profiles that I have across the web, and other information that is pertinent to my online identity. The Yahoo! Profile wouldn't be Y! 360 or embedded into any other vertical... it would just be Yahoo! -- a central hub to everything I do on the network and the web for me to share as I please.

Now MyBlogLog actually does some of this. It provides a way for people to connect themselves to a web site. It also provides a rudimentary commenting system. This is the bare skeleton of the concept.  But it's a long way off.

One of the troubles I've had with Yahoo! is that everything is so contained in each vertical or silo. Each product team reinvents the wheel over and over again when adding community or other social features. You see this over and over again. Answers launches social networking, Tech does blogs and lists, Autos does customization, Shopping does social lists, Local does social lists, travel does social lists, 360 is in its own corner, but very little is connected or even consistent... so on and so forth.

I don't think it would take much physical effort to plug in a social software layer across Yahoo! The pain would be to get everyone to agree and stop building their own apps. Consistency is key, then having a unifying profile page for people to bring together and share their content, activity, and affinity.

Now is the time for Yahoo! to do something this ambitious. Balls out. It would change the perception of the network and give it vitality for years to come. A half-assed attempt to make this work would be a disaster. It needs to be a central component of and a natural addition to the Yahoo! experience.

I hope I see the day this happens.