Top Startup » Facebook

Special Event: The secrets of Social Network Platform Apps

Colin — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 23:14:26 +0000

WebInno is hosting a super secret special event on January 8th at 6:30pm about developing for Facebook, Bebo, Opensocial. Local companies are going to share their experience with those platforms. It should be a great networking opportunity to meet people in the space. Registration is free (password protected) and space is limited.

Here’s the link to register, drop me a comment with your email for the password.

Facebook cuts off apps emailing non-users… today!

Colin — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 13:00:27 +0000

Do you hear that?
It’s the sound of silence. It’s the sound of my inbox no longer receiving email from applications my “friends” use. Ninjas vs. Pirates, do I really care. Here’s one I received recently:

Troy Goatley has taken the Visual Peresonality test! Click here to take your own test!

(click here to change your email preferences)

—
This email was sent on behalf of Troy Goatley while using Top Friends.
To learn more or to stop receiving these emails, click here.

This is great news for users. I don’t want to receive emails like this. I am however interested in receiving a notification if a friend on facebook takes a specific action relating to me… such as sending me a gift on everygift. This move will severely cripple apps abilities to spread virally. If apps cant propogate, it makes the platform much less appealing.

At what point do people make the decision to not develop facebook apps?

It’s the freakin beacon speakin

Colin — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 22:40:38 +0000

I added a new review to Yelp! and understood Facebook’s Beacon all at the same time. It’s powerful, and a very good idea. Im slightly impressed

So here’s how it works:

Im signed in to facebook.
I then go on to yelp and add a review
Yelp infers who I am on facebook and sends a message to facebook that I have posted a new review
Next time I log in to facebook, I have the option to add that to my mini-feed.

Personally I am not crazy about adding MORE lifestream data into facebook’s clutches, but it’s a slick implementation and a solid idea.

Enjoy the beacon!

What’s really going on with facebook apps?

Colin — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 23:53:28 +0000

When we built Gossipr, the focus was pretty simple – make something that people will be compelled to use. Unfortunately, the motivation we’re using is largely a negative one: “I hope that it’s not about me”. It took an email from my friend Kristian to realize the full magnitude of how evil (and not in a good way) the app is.

Stop and think for a moment: If you’re spending your time developing a tool that channels negativity then of what are you a conduit?

When conceptualizing and developing applications, it’s easy to get caught up in how to make things viral and sticky. A lot of facebook apps are stupid games. Beyond those, many successful facebook applications feed and grow little narcissus within us. Compare People, Top Friends etc. The incentive for “comparing” or adding someone to “top friends” is the desire for them to reciprocate. That is what makes these viral.

So, with that said, I pose the following questions to anyone brave enough to answer:

Can an application be viral without being innately selfish?
What applications of a social network like Facebook can provide a net gain to society?

For more analysis on facebook apps, check out this analysis on the three types of facebook app.

Gossipr now live on facebook

Colin — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 05:01:12 +0000

Gossipr, the application I have been working on for a couple of weeks is now live. It is essentially a Web 2.0 way to spread gossip and rumors about your friends. People usually spread rumors and gossip on the phone or even in email. Now, there’s a better way

Gossipr beats email

Anonymity – email can always get back to you! Gossipr lets you hide your identity
Reach – a great piece of gossip can be seen by hundreds of thousands of facebook users
Privacy – choose only those people whom you know and trust with your secrets – there’s no forward button that leaves your email address attached

I hope you enjoy using Gossipr as much as we’ve enjoyed making it! Let us know how we can make it a better place to spread your gossip and rumors.

As addictive as crack, as evil as satan?

Colin — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 05:55:09 +0000

That’s the hope… here’s the first glimpse of Gossipr, the first ultra-viral facebook application by me and my buddy Dan Choi.

We’re expecting to do a quiet release in the next few days… working hard at night to make it happen. As a bonus for adding the app, you get access to an embarrassing story about me – you have to be my friend first though. Talk about eating my own dogfood!

Google pulls down their pants and exposes a huge PR Department

Colin — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 12:00:28 +0000

Google announced today their OpenSocial APIs reportedly located at this address http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial. As of this writing, there isn’t anything there yet. But when there is it will be huge?

All joking aside, Google does a lot of great work for open source and does give back to the community. For that, I definitely respect them.

Let’s dig in to the business motivation for your startup using these APIs:
You can write an application once and use it with many social networks – like LinkedIn, hi5, Ning, Friendster and Plaxo.

But the big question is… who cares? I haven’t used Friendster since 2004. Plaxo is great for backing up my contacts, but I dont trust them. Ning is pointless, and LinkedIn always wants you to pay to get any value. The other social networks I couldn’t care about. The only two relevant social networks for my market (the American market) are Facebook and Myspace.

So, google… either you’ve got a trick up your sleeve – like enabling me to host my profile on Topstartup and use your API to feed into to all of these social networks, or you wont make a big impact.

If anyone can do it, google, you can. Why not release something real before setting the PR drones in motion?

Click here to read more nonsense on Google’s OpenSocial

Tearing open facebook

Colin — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 12:00:12 +0000

That isn’t Zuckerberg in the picture… yet. Facebook continues to establish itself and gain a foothold in the online identity aggregation market. By that, I mean facebook is the most comprehensive place I can learn about my friends. As facebookers get superpoked, nerds with lofty ideals are trying to unseat Zuckerberg and Facebook.

I wrote a month ago about why facebook is doomed to fail. Ironically, in that past month I’ve been building facebook applications! Part of my time has been spent figuring out how to get you and your data out of the chains that bind you on facebook and onto the broader internet. We’re using the codename “Alien”. Like in the image above, we want to burst out of Facebook’s chest, rendering it dead.

There is some interesting discussion on the topic of getting out of Facebook on Slashdot.

In the meantime…
My personal favorite for getting info out of facebook is FSB Software’s Facebook Sync (Mac only). This actually makes you updating your phone number useful to me. It will automatically sync with my address book. If you’re on Windows or Linux, you can use FriendCSV to get your data outside of Facebook. I tried it and wasn’t too impressed.

Colin is no longer on Facebook
What I’d really to develop is a permanent alternative where I can install the “Im No longer here” application and tell all my friends that my data is free, and I no longer use facebook.

It will be a long time coming – expect 2 years from now or so, but it will happen.

Going’s Naughty Party

Colin — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 15:00:37 +0000

Going has a facebook application called Naughty Gifts. At first they were unsure if they wanted to associate their brand with the application. Now they’ve gone full out! It’s naughty gifts in real life. They’re hosting the naughty party in Boston on the day before halloween – the 30th October at 10pm. If you’ve got a flithy mind and like to party, this will be a killer event. Make sure to RSVP! Im going to be there. My interest is purely in how virtual communities can translate in to real communities and events

One in five facebook users set to receive stupid unicorn

Colin — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 12:00:38 +0000

For those of you living under a rock, facebook has virtual gifts that they sell. The gift for October 25th, a unicorn is set to a limit of 10,000,000 before it sells out. So, based on facebook’s october user numbers of 47,000,000 users, you have about a one in five chance of getting this stupid unicorn sent to you before stock runs out.

Assuming Facebook sells out of these gifts, and all purchasers buy them using the bulk discount ($5 for 10 gifts), facebook will take in a cool $5,000,000 (that’s $5 million for those bad with zeroes).

Does this kind of thing justify the rumored 500 million in investment that facebook just got on top of Microsoft’s $240 million facebook investment?