TickerHound is now on Facebook!
You can become a fan of TickerHound on our Facebook company page. Simply click here and then click the Become a Fan link on the right side of the page.
We put up some pictures of TickerHound Head Quarters too - so check it out to see where we work and what we do all day to make TickerHound a great place for you.
Enjoy!
Thursday, January 24, 2008
TickerHound is on Facebook!
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Mixed Feelings on Facebook's new Ad platform
So yesterday at ad:tech Facebook announced its long awaited ad platform. Here's a quick recap:
New services:
- Beacon - Beacon gives site owners the ability to integrate a user's actions on their own site into Facebook's newsfeeds. So if you have a customer who is also a Facebook user and they buy something on your site, it'll get displayed in their news feed.
- Social Ads - The social ads tool allows you to take Beacon a step further by having these "social actions" broad casted to people outside of your customer's network on Facebook. It's also highly targeted - you can target by gender, age, location and even political affiliations.
- Facebook pages - Now businesses can set up a page on Facebook where they can recruit fans/customers (new phrase: fansumer), and use FB as a new point of contact. The pages allow you to set up photo areas, discussion boards, a wall and even a messaging center so it's easy to keep in touch with your following. It's basically a souped up version of Facebook Groups.
- Insight - Facebook Insight is an analytical tool that helps you measure your reach and penetration into your target market on Facebook.
But in light of Google's OpenSocial announcement last week, I don't see this as being a killer app.
If you look at the argument I laid out in my last post, you'll quickly see how Google has the potential to cripple Facebook's ad platform. I mean, all Google has to do is get the rest of the social networks (and it's network of existing publishers and advertisers) to line up behind a new social ad platform, and then POOF, Facebook's value is greatly diminished. It becomes just another site to advertise on as opposed to a category killer like Google's AdWords.
Just as a side note, Google's AdWords is a category killer for a number of reasons. It's ease of use is just one reason, but the real value is in Google's reach (the network effect). The more publishers that serve Google's ads the more valuable the service becomes to an advertiser because they no longer have to reach out to all those publishers individually. The same will apply to any social ad platform that Google creates.
So all in all, Facebook showed some real vision due to the fact that this was a platform that had probably been in development for quite some time (definitely prior to the Google announcement). But they'll have to do a lot more if they want to protect their castle.
Posted by
Wayne Mulligan
at
10:23 AM
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Labels: advertising, Beacon, Facebook, Google, OpenSocial, Social Ads, social networks, strategy, web
Saturday, November 3, 2007
Snackbyte: Google's Best Move Yet - OpenSocial
Google's latest move in its fight to dominate all things web is one of its savviest moves yet.
With the launch of the OpenSocial platform Google basically commoditized the online application platform space.
Everyone expected Google to roll out a social network of its own, or make a bigger push for Orkut in the States. But instead Google decided to redefine the value proposition, side stepped the all out battle with entrenched competitors (i.e. Facebook, MySpace, etc.) and instead created a universal platform for all social networks.
Google has effectively become the fabric that will weave all of these networks together. Social networks have effectively become "portable."
Here's how:
If an application can function and reside on all platforms (thus, pulling data from each) then this application can effectively unify a user's social networking experiences. So my data on Facebook will now be accessible on MySpace or LinkedIn. This adds a tremendous amount of value to my web experience without requiring me to become loyal to a new brand - in this case, Google.
Here's where the money comes in:
Let's say Google decides it's going to leverage its reach in the advertising and publishing markets in order to start a type of "product news feed" - similar to Facebook's Porject Beacon, but on a global scale. So if I buy something on Amazon, then all of my friends on Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn will know.
If I'm an influential member of these networks then it might cause other people to buy this book as well. Google can then take a cut of the revenue generated through the sale or on a CPC basis and even decide to cut me in (the same way it does its network of publishers). This would be phenomenal and truly be the first global application to monetize social networking.
I can't wait to see what Facebook's next move is!
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Portable Social Networks
Been thinking about this topic a lot lately...
In the wake of the tremendous success Facebook's application platform has had, many people have been wondering what the next "big" application platform will be. It seems like Facebook is doing for the web what Microsoft did for the desktop -- so in order to understand what might come next, we need to recognize why these companies were successful to begin with.
Facebook and Microsoft were successful because their platforms had 3 key characteristics:
1. Created an easy to use API (Application Programming Interface).
2. Opened up their system to anyone who wanted to build on it - no partnering necessary.
3. Created an effective distribution mechanism (Facebook really nailed this more than Microsoft ever did).
So what's next?
Many argue that the web itself is the next great application platform. However, I think it's clear that in order for this to happen there needs to be some type of social network weaved into the fabric of the web. That's the only way the crucial distribution component will work -- developers are going to need a frictionless mechanism for promoting and distributing their software.
Rockefeller had it right -- it didn't matter if you hit oil, if you couldn't distribute it then you couldn't make money. So he focused on distribution...and the rest is history.
So what could be done to make this vision of frictionless distribution occur on the web?
Well, the first thing we'd need is a portable social network - or a network that wasn't bound to a particular web site. It would require a standard to be developed for social networks, much like the standards that were developed around SMTP (e-mail), HTTP (web sites), FTP (files), etc.
Brian Oberkirch recently wrote one of the most compelling outlines I've seen for the necessary "ingredients" in a portable social network. Really amazing stuff there.
But I don't know how much of a reality this vision will become. OpenID has been around for a while now and even though more and more sites are becoming OpenID compatible, we're still not seeing a lot of traction.
I think we'll see the same when it comes to creating open social networks.
Maybe it would take the backing of a major internet company to get this off the ground, but then again Microsoft had tried pushing the Passport system for quite some time before raising the white flag last year.
We'll just have to wait and see, but if a distributed social networking platform were created and reached some level of considerable scale then I think we'd be seeing the advent of "Web 3.0" (I know, I hate using the version numbers for the web too).
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Facebook App Idea - Study Aid
Although I've always wanted to add something to the Facebook Application community, I don't feel that my target audience will be found in abundance on Facebook. So I've always put most of my ideas in a notebook and tucked it back into my desk drawer.
But after reading about all the amazing stuff that went on at Startup Weekend, I thought I'd dust off my notebook and share an idea with the people out there who have the desire, time and resources to build an app. This isn't some blockbuster idea that's going to change the world, but I think it solves a problem for students and could be something fun to work on for those who are interested.
The only thing that I ask is that if you find this idea compelling and want to take it to the next level, that you share your development experiences/process with me so I can write about it here (obviously write about it on your own blog as well) :)
So here goes...
The Problem
There are a ton of applications on Facebook that allow members to track the classes they're currently taking and find out who else is taking them. Then you can connect with other students, possibly friend them and message them through Facebook's existing infrastructure.
This obviously adds some value, but it definitely misses the mark on what we could be doing with an application like this. The social graph exposes a lot more than just simply connections between people, it also allows for communication and collaboration between community members as well - so we should be leveraging that within the applications themselves and not relying on Facebook's communication tools.
For instance, what happens when 2 or more students taking the same class are all having a problem with that week's homework assignment? Or what if they're in a study group but one student gets sick and can't make it? Or while they're in the study group they want to share a single source of study notes after the meeting?
What if we could build a "Courses" application that really took advantage of the communication and collaboration features found in many other applications on the web, but brought them into Facebook?
The Solution
Create an application where students taking a course can join an associated group on Facebook for that course. Then within that "Course Group" they can utilize a number of collaboration utilities:
1. General White Board - I'd keep this fairly basic: no advanced formatting, basic text stylization (underlines, bolds, and italics) and allow for HTML links. No advanced permissions: basically anyone in the group can edit the write board. This will be good for keeping ongoing notes, ideas, and general assignments posted.
2. Files - This is where I'd allow students to upload any and all files related to the course they're in. This would also be a perfect place to charge for premium services (e.g. anything over 50 MB and if they want a direct URL so they can access them outside of the system and it'll cost $X per year/month).
3. Advanced White Board - This is the place where users can create multiple collaboration spaces based on the assignment they're working on. For example, if you're in the same study group for a particular class all semester, then you'll obviously be working on different projects. Here you'll be able to create a white board for each project and it'll have some advanced features.
Instead of just basic text editing you'll be allowed to import files - from the files section or linked to from 3rd party sites - add descriptions, easy PDF creation and printing, etc. A 3rd party HTML editing tool will be necessary but those are a dime a dozen now.
4. Deadlines - Simple calendar module with built in reminders and notifications (e-mail, Facebook message, Facebook notification, etc.).
5. Privacy and Preferences - The name of the game these days is privacy and control when it comes to social media applications (Case in point: See TechCrunch's piece of Facebook's new "friend grouping"). So the same must hold true for this application as well. I don't think ALL of these privacy controls need to be incorporated on the first build, but they should be included at some point in future iterations.
- Group Creator Preferences - Allow/disallow members (ie. only members can see content in this group). Group expiration - meaning, will the group die out after this class is over or should it be kept up for future collaboration and/or use by future students in this class.
- Member access - All members can/can't edit specific pieces of content, upload files, etc.
- E-mail notification - let members know about updates, new files, etc. via e-mail.
I'd host this thing on EC2 and Amazon S3 hybrid solution - all of the files could be pulled from multiple S3 instances and perform weekly/monthly backups to a physical server to ensure data is never lost. Use multiple EC2 instances to serve up the application and keep 1 physical web server to act as a load balancer and admin for the instances.
Obviously folks out there with more infrastructure experience than me will likely poke holes in this setup but I think it's a good, low-cost starting point -- especially if you slap a flash front-end on this, then an Amazon AWS solution would definitely be the way to go.
Summary
As you can see this is a mix of Facebook groups and Basecamp - in fact, it's more like Facebook groups on steroids! This is something that students will definitely find useful if it eliminates the friction found in Facebook's infrastructure and has an intuitive interface. I mean, Zuckerberg himself talks about building an app like this while he was still in school. And even if that's just PR fluff, it still illustrates the value something like this would bring to the community.
Making it go viral wouldn't be difficult at all because the application relies on invites and group collaboration for its most basic uses. That takes a lot of pressure off of thinking about marketing and will allow the developer to focus on the user and on the product.
And picture this application in the next year, 2 years or even 3 years. The data assets that will have been built from the millions of students putting up course material, study notes, papers, pictures, etc. will be a study tool in and of itself outside of Facebook.
I'd like to hear any thoughts and feedback you may have. And like I said, if you decide to go ahead with this please share your experience with developing it.
Good luck!
Posted by
Wayne Mulligan
at
1:40 PM
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Labels: applications, collaboration, Facebook, idea, nextNY, startup, technology
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
fbFund - What does it really mean for Facebook?
So about a week ago Mark Hendrickson at Tech Crunch reported that Facebook (along with a number of high profile VCs) will be launching a $10 million fund for Facebook application developers. However, instead of investing in these applications and taking an equity stake, the fbFund will simply be giving cash "grants" to these budding entrepreneurs -- very similar to the cash grants many students receive while attending college.
So what is the fbFund?
Is this is an education fund for would be entrepreneurs -- the principle being to teach them to develop on the Facebook platform before deeming them worthy to conquer the rest of the web? Or is Zuckerbeg such a "good guy" that he just wants to throw money at ideas and see what sticks? I mean, it's a win-win for Facebook anyway - a tremendous amount of value gets added to their system each and every time an application gets developed. So they're just adding fuel to the fire that's burning within this hot mini-market of companies.
This must've thrown a bucket of cold water (no pun intended) on Bay Partner's idea to start a fund to do the exact same thing -- however, Bay Partners would be looking for equity right away while fbFund simply gets right of first refusal on any follow-on financing that takes place.
But is that the only benefit for Facebook?
Could these guys simply be looking to add incremental value to their product and possibly invest in some of these start-ups before anyone else can get their hands on them? That sounds possible - it seems like a sound business strategy...
But yours truly has a conspiracy theory hatching in his sick, twisted brain.
As some of you may or may not know, Facebook recently acquired web-OS company, Parakey. Parakey was founded by the same dynamic programming duo that built the oh-so-popular Firefox web browser.
And while most folks thought that the investors who put $2 million into Parakey walked away with a handsome reward of Facebook stock, that just wasn't the case. According to Arrington, it turns out Facebook paid only $4 million for the company - considering the previous round was done for just under $2 million, which probably had a much higher post-money valuation. In fact, I'd be surprised if investors made anything at all on this deal (read Mike's post to see his ideas on why investors even let the deal happen).
The founders of Parakey, however, walked away with a Facebook employment contract that included Facebook stock and options compensation agreements!
So it looks like these guys sold themselves AND their company...so even though Facebook came out of pocket for $4 million (not a large sum of money for this company), they in turn got two rock star developers.
Conspiracy Theory
Facebook isn't only looking to add value to their platform by encouraging people to develop great applications. Nor are they simply looking to invest in those companies down the road.
Facebook is looking for developers that know how to create very popular consumer software applications.
It's like a publisher being able to find an author like J.K. Rowling -- someone who already has a following and can consistently write list-topping best sellers over and over again.
Think about it: the relative cost for acquiring top talent is huge. By funding some of these companies for a comparatively small amount of money, Facebook sees some tremendous upside:
1. They add value to the Facebook community by making it easier for new applications to get launched.
2. They have the ability to invest directly in these applications as they become more successful and potentially move away from the FB platform.
3. They have the ability to acquire top talent after already seeing them in action (a HUGE cost savings along with a tremendous benefit).
So while I called this a "conspiracy", it's more of a very savvy business move on their part.
Go Facebook!
Posted by
Wayne Mulligan
at
8:04 AM
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Labels: Arrington, Facebook, strategy, TechCrunch, Zuckerberg
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Your Face(book) on Google!
After reading Michael Arrington's post about Facebook allowing non-Facebook members to use its People Search feature, I decided to sign into my account and see what's what.
I wouldn't have been concerned at all until I read the announcement a bit more carefully:
People might be able to search for me, see my photo and personal information directly on Google? That's a little weird for me and I really think it goes against some of the early values of Facebook - privacy and control!
I understand what they're doing from a business perspective, but I just don't agree with it.
I'm sure they'll give us the option of changing our privacy preferences - which I'll be sure to do - but for people who don't check their accounts very often, or who simply don't pay attention to these sorts of developments, this could come as a HUGE shock to them to see their face plastered across Google.
Maybe I'm blowing this out of proportion but it just doesn't sit well with me.
Posted by
Wayne Mulligan
at
10:37 AM
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Labels: business, Facebook, Privacy, TechCrunch, Values
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Where did Friendster go wrong?
In my personal opinion - which, in the grand scheme of things, doesn't amount to much - one of the most important things one can do as an entrepreneur is to learn from past mistakes. Not mistakes of one's own doing, but rather from the mistakes of the countless entrepreneurs that came before us.
"Standing on the shoulders of giants" is a phrase that comes to mind.
Now we all know of the well documented technology problems over at Friendster, along with the internal VC and management conflicts - lessons to be learned from those two issues alone but we need to dig deeper here.
Here was one of the very first large scale social networks - this company had the world in the palm of its hands but somehow watched it all slip away (like my shot at becoming a professional basketball player when I never grew taller than 5'11'').
And while this company is starting to pick itself up by its boot straps it still has never manged to "get it right" -- what are they doing wrong?
Here are some of my thoughts:
1. Poor Information Architecture and Usability
I've brought this up to a number of people and while some agreed, there were many who didn't. But I really stand behind this one and I'll talk about why.
First off, why do ads take up almost a third of the profile screen? They have a massive leader board at the very top and then two big boxes on the right. I can see how that may benefit the bottom line but how does it add value to a user's social networking experience?
And have you ever tried using Friendster's photo feature? Forget the fact that you still can't tag other people in photos, click on a photo to go to the next one, etc... those things are annoying enough, but have you ever noticed this:
If you hit the back button in your browser while looking at an individual photo it'll take you right back to the gallery view of all of the photos (usually causing me to lose my place, say "Oh fuck it" and go elsewhere). The site is essentially forcing us to go against conventional wisdom in favor of Friendster's desire to use AJAX in their code - sorry guys, big "no no".
The list goes on but I'll stop here.
2. Day Late and a Dollar Short
Contrary to popular belief, Facebook didn't originate the idea of a news feed in a social network. The originator of social networks did - that's right, in case you forgot, Friendster was the first to offer users a peek at what their contacts had been up to on the site.
However, until recently the social news feed wasn't very "social". Let me explain...
When Friendster first released this feature it would simply tell me that one of my friends added a new friend, but it wouldn't say who. It would tell me my friend added a new photo, but it wouldn't show it to me. It would tell me they got a new comment but not tell who wrote it and what it said.
Essentially, the system was designed to promote click-throughs, page views and revenue. It wasn't designed to increase the utility of the site - again, another big "no no".
They did finally started to head in the right direction recently - now I can at least see who my friends are becoming friends with - the comments and photos are still off the mark though.
By releasing a half-assed feature that was meant to increase revenue and not utility, Friendster was once again passed over and Facebook reaped all the glory and benefits of the social news feed.
3. No Platform, No Traction
My friends are probably sick of hearing this one but history has proven that the companies who help other companies make money are dramatically more likely to succeed than those who don't.
Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Google, MySpace, Facebook - what do they have in common?
They all created a platform that allowed other individuals and companies to make money.
Microsoft allowed software vendors to create software that could be marketed and sold to millions of users on a standard operating system.
Wal-Mart made it so people from all walks of life could afford to buy DVD players and TV sets.
Google helped start-ups monetize their traffic and gave marketers the ability to advertise in every corner of the web.
MySpace and Facebook both allowed application developers to piggy-back their networks and market their wares in a viral manner - Facebook is unarguably doing a better job at this than MySpace which is why I think they'll eventually "win" but I'll save this argument for another time.
Friendster just hasn't caught onto this concept - they're operating a closed social network (which is mediocre at best) and not allowing for the third "C" in Hagel's "3 C's" of the web. They have the Content, they have the Community but they just don't have the Commerce!
Lessons
And the moral of the story kids: Don't be a "Friendster"... j/k ;)
But in all seriousness, these are the things that go through my head as I toil away in my crappy office space building my latest company.
How can I make my web application as easy to use as possible? How can I reduce friction, clutter, excess, etc.? How can I make this site as elegant as the iPod?
How can I use the technology I'm building to solve a real problem for people - how can it become a utility for my target audience?
How can I give other people the opportunity to benefit from this service monetarily?
Tough questions - but I think if we keep them in mind we'll at least avoid many of the mistakes made by those that came before us.
And those are my two pennies for the day!
Posted by
Wayne Mulligan
at
8:50 AM
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Labels: business, Facebook, Friendster, MySpace, social networks