Of course, folks will talk about the relationships and the real-time and the social graph. But that's all data. It's all data yet it's only data, and yet it's the most important part of the puzzle. Control the data, or the access to the data, and you have an advantage - if and only if the data is useful. If someone can create value with the data then you have isolated a new natural resource that you can monetize. It may take some time to figure out how to efficiently monetize it, but it will happen. It always happens - only often it's not the first mover that taps the money well.
Most of the work going on feverishly about Facebook application development is purely to get access to your data. Whoops, I meant [ul]Facebook's[/ul]data! For all the protections they provide for your data (and if you don't know them well I recommend you read this blog entry. ) That will at least protect your data from others, but Facebook can do whatever it wants with your data. It can, and is, cross-referencing it, sifting it, looking for connections and useful things. So far they don't seem to be finding ways to convert this natural resource into money (at least that we can see).
But given that they control the data, they could be poised to be a huge provider of '4th party' services.
What's a 4th party service?
A 4th party service is a means of connecting customers to suitable vendors who can meet their needs. This kind of connection is what was always existed in human commerce, but in the age of mass advertising modern culture lost much of it. We came to have conversations about 'brands' and such - like a brand really matters. Brands mean nothing more than 'reputation.' And reputations amongproducts are earned - you cannot really bamboozle your way into it and expect it to last. Funny, reputations among people work the same way. But back to the 4th party concept. I read a very good blog entry about it that defines it as:
" A fourth party logistics provider is primarily coordinator of
other supply chain partners through the ownership and maintenance
of information systems. This is differentiated from third party
logistics providers that provide physical handling and or
transportation of goods."
The definitive book about this revolution is now almost 10 years old. Here's a link:
If you have not read it, buy it now. Of course, I'd love it if you bought it through my link so it would help defray the costs of operating this blog.
So how does this matter with the data? The data holds the reputation. The APIs to access the data are about accessing the reputation. Who do you trust and what do they trust? You will trust that by association. Once you start down that path you won't care about 'branding' messaging any more - unless that brand is one that has built trust through your own trust network!
There are folks who envision a future where the data is not centralized in only a few companies. They say:
" Tomorrow, as everything becomes social, you will be able
to shop Amazon directly from within your iGoogle page without
ever having to visit the site. What's more, Amazon will
show you what your Gmail address book friends have publicly
said about a product and/or its category in any one of
thousands of online communities. Finally, to help you
further Amazon will offer an aggregated view of your
friends' friends opinions in a way that protects their
identity."
That's a great vision. But it will be awhile before we all can own and share our own data as we choose. Today there's data in Facebook that's as valuable as oil sitting under a Middle-East desert. Tapping that well is there for the taking. If they think in the old way and focus on traditional advertising they will miss the boat. That's the past, and I'm of the opinion that the age of advertising is seriously in decline (though most ad folks don't know it yet). However, if Facebook can grasp the revolution happening in the way customers seek data - and try to connect with reputation - then they will have that billion barrel well they can tap for near-endless money. But, and this is the important part: do they have the vision to grasp this? Or will they fall into the trap of the past and just sell demographic targeted advertising?
And perhaps the more important question: who's in a garage startup right now working on the technology for the customer driven real time web - and when do they launch? And who will recognize it?
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( 3 / 8 )This is most certainly not my usual technical or leadership kind of blog entry. I've been thinking about something all week and I finally have the time to write my thoughts.
Last Sunday I heard about a project that is well worth supporting. At Saint Boniface Catholic Church in the Tenderloin of San Francisco the homeless can come in during the day and sleep on the pews. There's a lot of reasons that they cannot sleep at night, but primarily it's fear. Fear that their few belongings will be stolen, or that they will be beaten, or perhaps fears that exist only in their own mental illness. This church, run by Franciscans, opens the doors, provides security, feeds them breakfast, and provides them a safe place to sleep.
A safe place to sleep. So many of us take that for granted every night.
Once upon a time, I didn't. It's only luck, or the Grace of God, or Divine Intervention - pick your term - that I didn't end up permanently on the street. Once upon a time - way back in the dark ages when I was a teenager - my family life was pretty rocky. My Mom had a dual addiction: alcohol and bad men. My little brother and two little sisters and I coped the best we could. Life took us to a small cottage behind my Mom's boyfriend at the time brothers house - two rooms and a tiny bathroom for six people. At least that was until Mom came home at 3am and made us all leave. It seemed that Mr. Boyfriend had gotten a bit abusive and she'd decided we had to leave - immediately. So a late thirties woman with four kids - aged from 17 (me) to 8 - ended up sitting in a donut shop until dawn. No money, no home, afraid to go to the only sliver of shelter that we could call 'home.'
We most definitely did not have a safe place to sleep.
Life twisted, and my brother and sisters went to live with my Dad in the midwest. I stayed - ironically - with the brother of my Mom's boyfriend, who owned the cottage and the house we'd stayed in. He gave me a safe place to sleep. I was 17 and trying to stay in high school. Mike, if you ever read this, please know that I am eternally grateful for letting me crash on your sofa for a few months. It may not have been a big deal to you, but it was to me. It was a safe place to sleep. I think about you often. After a while, my Mom got sober (but not necessarily sane) and within months I moved back in with her an my life moved into the next phase of growth.
But last week I sat and listened to a Jesuit Priest (who works with a group of Franciscan's at St. Boniface) speak passionately about the importance of providing a safe place to sleep for those who don't have it at all. I remembered my own past, my own brush with the chaos of the streets, and I deeply, passionately understood what he meant.
In a few minutes I will go crawl into bed next to my wife and sleep comfortably until morning. Just before that I will check on my kids and make sure they are covered up and that they didn't knock their pillow onto the floor. My family has a safe place to sleep. I am counting my blessings.
I hope and pray that you never experienced a lack of a safe place to sleep. I hope that none of us ever will experience that. But tonight, and every night, many people do. My heart reaches out to them, and I plan to do what I can to help. Please look into your own heart and find your own 'safe places to sleep' and do what you can for those less fortunate.
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( 2.9 / 18 )I spent to evening playing around with Facebook Application Development. I'll tell you about my grand application idea another time (but you can be sure it's an idea centered around the real-time web and Vendor Relationship Management (VRM)). I've built a ton of PHP code in recent years so the only learning curve is the Facebook API.
I have to say that I wanted to create a clean sand box to play in so I bought a SliceHost virtual host to use for development. Incredibly easy and a basic slice good for development is only $20 per month. They say the cost to start a web-based business is dropping by half every two years. With this kind of easy virtual hosting it's got to be dropping faster than that! Within 5 minutes I had an Ubuntu server live with a full LAMP stack installed. Amazing. Do you realize how many hours I've spent formating disks and installing linux over the last 15 years (yes, I started doing linux in 1994).
I bought two books to help climb the API learning curve. Both are helping a lot though are already slightly out of date. They are:
and the excellent reference:
I have two big initial observations:
1. There are very few useful Facebook Applications that I know of;
2. Setting up the Facebook Developer with a new Application is mind-numbingly detailed and complicated
Useful Facebook Applications
I don't know any useful Facebook apps. Do you? There's all sorts of play applications - where have you been, what City should you live in, etc. But what's really useful? By useful I mean one that really uses the social graph to increase the value for the user. I've not seen one yet, but I'm sure they are there. If you know of one I'd appreciate it if you dropped me a note or comment.
Mind Numbing Options
The Facebook New Application page has more configuration settings than you can shake a stick at (as my Grandmother would have said). It's insane! I realize that this is complicated business, but geesh. Anyway, I set up the name (had to do that to create it) and the most important configuration options were on the Canvas tab.
Te Canvas Page URL is the catch all place where the Facebook platform will go to get content to render within a users Facebook page when they are running your application. The Canvas Callback URL is where the majic happens though. That's the calculation engine.
Getting a List of Your Friends
So, the Canvas Callback URL I tossed together does not format or anything - it's just a small extension to the example code they provide.
<?php
require_once 'facebook.php';
$appapikey = 'yourkey';
$appsecret = 'yoursecretkey';
$facebook = new Facebook($appapikey, $appsecret);
echo "<p>Friends:<br>";
$friends = $facebook->api_client->friends_get();
$friends = array_slice($friends, 0, 500);
foreach ($friends as $friend)
{
$uids=array($friend);
$fields=array('first_name','last_name');
$users=$facebook->api_client->users_getInfo($uids,$fields);
foreach ($users as $u)
{
$f=$u['first_name'];
$l=$u['last_name'];
print "<br>$f $l ";
}
}
print "</p>";
?>
This little snip of code will go grab a list of up to 500 friends getting their Facebook UserID. Then it gets those users names and prints them.
Of course, this doesn't do anything useful either, but in about an hour total I was able to fiddle around and learn how to pull real data out of Facebook. Not bad for an evening's fiddling.
What have you done with Facebook apps? What would you like to see done?
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( 3.2 / 11 )RTP: Audio and Video for the Internet by Colin Perkins is a must have book if you are interested in modern streaming media. My recent post on RTP drew some interesting comments by Randell Jesup. I don't seriously disagree with Randell. But to discuss the subject you first have to understand it. Randell is clearly an expert. I think I am too. For those of you who are interested in streaming media and want to learn more about RTP I can recommend the following book on the subject:
Well worth the money in my opinion. The discussion of jitter and lip sync alone are worth more than the book costs. It's very far superior to trying to get an understanding purely from reading the RFCs (like I did intitially!)
But on to my topics. It's late tonight (again I worked late into the night) so I cannot really go into the detail that I want to. But here's a short jab at it.
There's some great work going on with scalable codecs - methods of encoding media where a client can decode only the part that they need. A lower resolution client can tap the stream, basically, and show a low resolution version. These are borderline magical, in my opinion. Great stuff. Only I don't see where they will be deployed in the real world yet except for on PC clients. Cell phones - where it would potentially be the best bet - operate on walled garden networks where the wireless provider is going to control it anyway, likely in a greedy attempt to monetize a controlled video source (yes, I'm being harsh - but cellular video is pretty rigidly controlled in my opinion - open solutions need not apply). Set Top Boxes are mass manufactured to get low cost through economy of scale. The chip sets in them have MPEG2 and H.264 decode and built in MPEG2 Transport Stream decoding. The scalable codec support is not in the chips (yet, at least, to my knowledge). That leaves PCs, mostly. Interesting, but I still think that video streams are for lean-back watching, and I lean forward on my PC. It's where I work, not watch video. I think most people think that way, though my really young friends are certainly busting that model so maybe I'm wrong.
I came to my MPEG-centric, broadcast-centric view of the RTP landscape through my work mostly. I've spent the last 5 years building and deploying a 'narrowcast' IPTV system. It's a hybrid store-and-forward system where the media is streamed onto a private network from a media server in the venue, but media is delivered to the server as files. I map the same solution pattern onto homes. I suspect that in the future media will be delivered to a streaming-capable device - which may or may not be a server - that will in turn stream to edge devices. The link local bandwidth from the media source to the media sink will be large compared to the number of streams and the value of a scalable codec will not be enough to justify the costs. In this scenario the same economics that drive the capability set of today's STB units will still prevail: MPEG transport streams will still carry the day, and the software complexity of RTCP (needed if you split the audio out from the video into separate streams) is exactly what I keep hearing folks say: too complex, too costly, serves no purpose for the given application.
So, Randell is right, for the world he works in. The world I work in seems to resist even using RTP. I argue with vendors who think that just tossing MPEG transport stream frames in UDP packets is enough. I have yet to convince any of them to do a real RTCP implementation. Even before the economy tanked, these vendors have to pay real cash to real programmers to implement real features. The market is asking for a pile of things that those programmers need to implement. RTP/RTCP is not on the list. So I'm right too. As I get older I've lost the passion for the most elegant Engineering solution and found an affinity for the solution that I can sell at a profit. I think the business-side folks never had that conflict to start with.
But I live and work in a microcosm. What do you think?
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( 2.9 / 20 )I've been telling friends about Twitter recently. Some of these friends are technical, some aren't, but all of them are Internet savvy. Some of these folks use social networks already, but some don't. All of my friends are heavy email users, and some even have blogs. A few jumped in with both feet right away and are in the twittersphere. The naysayers are skeptical. The number one question they ask about Twitter is "why should I care?" In general, they think of Twitter as another fad, or maybe another Facebook. One or two even see Twitter as a service that is primarily used by twenty-somethings that are so self-absorbed that they want a way to announce to the world every inane thing they are thinking and doing.
Of course, Twitter is all that.
And, it's so very, very much more.
I see Twitter as the leading edge of a whole new kind of Internet application. Email is great when you want to convey some information to a select group of folks and you don't care so much when they read it. Instant Messages (IM) are good if you care about 'presence' - that the person is online and can chat, usually to answer short questions. Text messages are the same but you cannot really put links to online resources in them (that are easily used) and are person to person only. Phone calls require the person to stop what they are doing and thinking to talk to you, and of course you cannot share a link to online data.
What if I want to share a small amount of information that is time sensitive (recency matters) and I want to shout it out to anyone in my circle that cares to listen. I could email, but it just drowns into the inbox and gets lost in the sea of much longer data in my inbox.
Twitter solves this need. Twitter lets you post short bits of information - including links - that are consumed by the folks 'following' you. Those folks might include your friends and family and if you so choose might include a pile of other folks too. I have my profile set to not protect my updates, so everything I post (that's not a direct message to someone) is on the public timeline of posts. It's out there, available to anyone following me, and to anyone following the grand flow of Twitter data on the public timeline.
The magic of Twitter - and of the family of new applications that will be like Twitter - is that software can 'follow' these 'tweets' (posts) and do keyword searches. I tweeted about a wine that we were going to share at dinner at a friend's house and several wine enthusiasts (and a few wine sellers) automatically started following me. A few replied with some information they thought I might find valuable. I had indicated one of my preferences, desires, and interests. And the twittersphere responded, automatically.
The future of Twitter-like applications is not about tweets like "I'm going to coffee now" but are rather going to be like "what's the best head phones for under $25?" - and data streams will reply to you. And systems will start to know you based on what you tweet about. And information that is relevant to you will become available to you without you having to go search it out. You will automatically become part of virtual communities that ebb and flow based on real-time *and* historical data flows.
Likewise, ideas like TwitterData are going to enable computer systems to more easily participate in this flow of data. I can foresee things like your car tweeting to you that it's getting low on fuel or that it's time for an oil change... or your house tweeting you that the temperature is getting really hot and it's near the time you usually leave for home and would you like to turn on the air conditioner? Twitter is an extremely low-bandwidth means for simple message communication across a common fabric - a fabric that can be used to provide an *ecosystem* to help pay for that fabric.
What do I mean? I mean that nothing is free. Someone has to pay for a service that connects all these parts, that enables all this kind of virtual community and communications and status updates. If we had to pay for it as a monthly service fee, we probably would not do so. But the ecosystem of Twitter can cover the costs because there is commerce available. I don't want to be bombarded with ads for things I don't care about (funny, since I'm in the advertising business). But I do want to hear about products and services that I do care about. If there's a great deal on a good bottle of Amarone, I would like to know about that. If my car needs an oil change I'd like to know if some local shops have a great deal on a change and some spiffy new synthetic oil. If my car tells me that it needs oil and three local shops tweet me that they want my business and offer me a deal, that's advertising I want.
These ideas are simplistic and are not indicative of the limit of what Twitter-like services can do. We've not imagined what we can do with this kind of data fabric yet. That's what makes it so exciting to me. I get the same tingle I got the first time I realized that the Internet was ideal for moving voice data to make phone calls, and the first time I realized that you really could do great video over an IP network. Only this tingle is bigger.
Twitter matters. In a year it may or may not be the dominant near-real-time internet messaging application. But it's set the stage for a whole new kind of collaboration and entire new sets of applications and services. And I'm excited to be in on the beginnings of it.
Oh, and if you want to follow me on Twitter I'm gherlein. See you in the Twittersphere!
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