I owe you all a part 2 on this whole Open Social thing, and then a Part 3 that covers Facebook’s new advertising strategy, but I’m obsessing over a problem at work and haven’t spent much time thinking about anything else (I haven’t bathed in several days, but my co-workers haven’t seemed to notice). That said, I know you all are desperate for me to talk about social networking stuff, so imagine how happy I was when I came across a little post by Krish linking to Fred, talking about the weak link in ego-centric social networks like Facebook.
The idea is that the primary activity in ego-centric networks is connecting to other people, as opposed to object-centric networks like Flickr, where the photo storage/tagging is useful to you on a personal level as well as a social level. When you’ve run out of people to connect to, one of the major pleasures of the social networking experience is over.
So what do you do? You add Applications. And now, you add Products and Bands. It simulates the feeling of adding new friends, but you don’t really get the same payoff– it’s not like this stuff can compete with the feeling of reconnecting with an old friend. I wonder if Facebook (and all ego-centric social networks) aren’t in an endless chase to give their users more and more things (of lower and lower value) to connect with in an attempt to keep them engaged. Fred argues that all ego-centric networks have a fixed lifespan; it’ll be interesting to see what impact this has on Facebook’s.
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I’m going to be in San Francisco this weekend to visit some ex-Austinites and to check out the town that everyone seems to love so much. I’ve made not liking California into something of an art form over the past couple of years (e.g., I’ve trained the voice in my head to do an impression of Ahnold whenever I read ‘California’), but I’m making an effort to go into this trip with an open mind. Just for this weekend, I’m going to forget about the astronomical prices, the soul-crushing traffic, and my debilitating fear of earthquakes and just try to enjoy the city in and of itself.
In other news, Doug is moving to Austin this weekend, and I came across a post he did on MySpace as a gaming platform that I thought was spot on and worth a read.
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- Sean deployed OpenID for the comments on his blog. The best part about Sean working @Google is that we can now make ludicrous, unsupportable inferences about Google’s business strategy based on things he says and does, and all he can say is “I can’t talk about that.” It’s like he’s one of those dudes at Buckingham Palace with the silly hats.
- 30 Rock fucking rocks. That show cured my inoperable brain cancer before it was even diagnosed. Yeah. It’s that good. (Let’s hope it lasts longer than the 2004 Emmy Award Winner for Best Comedy Series and Pinnacle of Western Civilization.)
- Madonna says she is an ambassador for Judaism. Right, because the Jews don’t have enough problems.
- There are few real tests of friendship in life. Most of the time it’s cool to just chill, kick back a few beers, and watch the game or a movie with people whose company you enjoy. It’s not until we’re faced with a really rough patch that we know who our real friends are, and there’s nothing rougher than moving. The topic has been on my mind lately, so here’s a list of people who I would help move, no questions asked, as long as they provided beer. Of course, if they didn’t provide beer, they wouldn’t be the people I think they are.
- Jordan
- Jim
- Clay
- Jimmy Jo
- Tina Fey
- Kate
- Mike
- Other Mike
- Sean (at least until his first anniversary at the Goog, at which point he’ll be more machine than man and will have no need for beer.)
- KShep (at least until he gets married.)
For everyone else, your best strategy is to get as much dirt on me as these people have. Also, you should move away from Austin. No way I was going to put someone on this list who I might actually have to help move.
- Duke plays Notre Dame on November 17th. Right now, there is a decent possibility that Duke might have a better record than Notre Dame at that time, and might even be favored. That makes me laugh hysterically.
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I was somewhat irate (read: pretty fucking pissed) when Steve Jobs announced the $200 price cut on the iPhone. Steve’s decision to offer $100 store credit to we poor, stupid early adopters has been thoroughly covered by every single technology blogger on the planet, but it was only when I read Cringely’s piece this morning that it crystallized for me: I am in an abusive relationship.
I wish I was joking. But when you look at their recent behavior, it sure seems like Ike Turner is not only consulting on the Iraq War, he’s also doing marketing at Apple.
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I was just chatting with a friend of mine who is spending some time in Pine Apple, Alabama. I’ve never been to Pine Apple, but I learned alot about it on the Internet:
Me: So where the hell are you, anyway?
A: In a trailer next to the woods directly behind the clinic.
Me: In Pine Apple, AL.
A: Please don’t say anything scary. Seriously.
Me: I would never do that. I have my dog here, to keep me company. Whenever I get scared, I just put my hand under the bed and she licks it until I feel better.
A: Dammit Josh. You fucker.
Me: What? I’m trying to be comforting. It looks like Pine Apple is pretty far from the beach.
A: Yes, it is.
Me: Not really close to anything- Montgomery, maybe? I’ve never been there.
A: Closer to Montgomery.
Me: It’s so strange. Who would have thought that Pine Apple would be right down the road from the Alabama State Mental Hospital for the Criminally Insane? Google Maps has all sorts of useful information.
A: You are such an asshole.
Me: I think Mt. Morah Road cuts through an ancient Indian burial ground.
A: Jackass.
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For those of you who I don’t talk to regularly, I’ve spent the past few weeks figuring out how to get off script and start figuring out what might make me happy. To that end, I’m leaving my current gig to work at Indeed, the job search engine. They have some fantastic people over there and alot of great problems that I’m looking forward to wrapping my head around. During my discovery process, I had some conversations with folks over at Google and Facebook, but in the end, I found that it wasn’t time to leave Austin. There is more work I need to do towards figuring out (and in a way, remembering) what it is that makes me happy.
Passing on Facebook was tough. The people there were amazing, my friends would have been super-impressed that my obsession with math had earned me a job at the hottest company on the planet, and if the hype is to be believed, I would have almost certainly made many millions of dollars via stock options. I haven’t found many people who understand why I did it, even among close friends. Conversely, I have a hard time understanding how they could not understand why I did what I did. It’s all been very confusing, so I’m going to try to lay it out here.
Two things you need to understand about me: 1) I don’t worry about whether or not I’ll ever make millions of dollars, because I will. I worry about the way in which I’m going to make millions of dollars. 2) In the set of all problems to work on, there are two mutually exclusive subsets– My Problems, and not My Problems.
I understand that my first point might sound a little arrogant, so let me explain it a bit. In my life, I have passed on several opportunities to become a millionaire. In all likelihood, so have you. For example, I could have gone to law school after college and gone to work for a big firm. I could have gone to NYC or Chicago and become a derivatives trader or a quant. These are both clear paths to lots of money that I passed on, and I feel like it’s easy to understand why: those lifestyles kind of suck, and alot of the people who go down those paths don’t end up being very happy. I’m not saying Google and Facebook are crappy places to work, I’m just trying to establish that there is more to life than money, and using money as the primary driver of life decisions isn’t generally a good idea.
There are a lot of problems in the world that I find interesting– both in the math world and in the business world. Within the set of interesting problems, there are a few isolated islands that are My Problems– the problems that I feel a connection with, like my mind was designed to solve them, and working on them is akin to a religious experience. I don’t generally know where I’m going to come across one, but my experience over the last several years has given me some guideposts.
At the end of the day, that’s why Indeed won– I became bewitched by a particular problem that I felt I could solve there. Facebook and Google both give off the “Place with Interesting Problems” vibe, and I feel like I could have found something I would have enjoyed doing at either place. But that’s not ever going to be as compelling as having one of My Problems staring me in the face and getting the opportunity to earn my wealth by solving it, because that’s how I want to make my way in the world.
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Scoble did a post on why Microsoft doesn’t deserve Facebook, and the comment section got into a discussion about what Facebook should do– sell out, IPO, etc. Most of the comments were the usual thing– people talking down Facebook, saying they should sell the company while they can still get a good price, etc., etc.
This sort of thing has been happening alot lately, and it’s starting to get on my nerves that no one seems to get it, so I weighed in with my own comment on the real value of Facebook– as the source of our online identities. I was really happy when I checked in later and saw that I got some love from Mario Romero, who wrote my favorite Facebook app, Google Reader Shared Items.
Facebook’s valuation is so hard to pin down because they’re going after something that is absolutely huge– huge enough for Microsoft to make an enormous effort to go after it a few years back– but is incredibly challenging to pull off. The fact that Microsoft failed completely– no one talks about Passport or HailStorm anymore– might have made people think that it couldn’t be done. But Facebook has come up with a very clever strategy, and though they face several significant challenges, they are better positioned to make a go of this than anyone right now– better than any of the Big Five (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay.)
There’s something to all of this stuff that makes me feel like I’m living in some real-life version of The Usual Suspects– the greatest trick that Facebook ever pulled was convincing the world it didn’t want to manage our online identities. I feel like we’ll be talking about this alot more over the next several months, as more people start to get it.
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I added a link to my Google Reader link blog over on the sidebar, so that you may enjoy reading what I read. I checked my Reader stats today, and I’ve read 8,373 posts over the last 30 days and shared 41 of them on my link blog, for an approval rate of 0.48%. If you’re the kind of person who is fascinated with multilevel models, monetizing social networks, and/or whatever Fake Steve Jobs said today, check it out.
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- Reading The Trap.
- Listening to St. Vincent.
- Watching Dexter.
- Cleaning my house.
- Falling more and more in love with my iPhone with each passing day.
- Using Facebook (the webapp that answers the question, “Who is Scoble friends with today?”)
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