Tag: facebook

LinkLog: The Story of a Product Creation

This is probably one of the best descriptions of a product creation, I have read in a while.  It is the story behind the story (I took the liberty of breaking the final  summary paragraph into three). You can read the full story here  – Facebook Engineers Reveal How New Messages Features Came to Be

“It starts with intuition,” Bosworth said. “It starts with a feeling that there’s an opportunity here. Something has to tell you to look at the data. …

So we have an intuition that’s well informed from just being people who use products, and people who communicate with their friends and think it should be easier.

Then you look at the data, and you see the trends, where they’re going, and that either confirms your suspicions or it doesn’t. And then you look at social design and you say, let’s rethink this. If we were starting from scratch, what would it look like?”

This is the story of the Facebook messaging product. I don’t know how it is going to be. It does not really matter. What appeals me about this story is the courage to think different and take a risk.

Social Shopping

This is a fragment from In defense of Facebook

That’s what Facebook’s ad strategy will work to deliver: social shopping. And I want that. Just as I’m interested in what apps friends install I’m interested in what products they buy, so long as they are willing to tell me, and also what they think of them.

I normally consult my friends when I buy something.  I also used to buy something because someone I know and trust bought something (like a digital camera) and raved about it. Social Networks like Facebook just make that kind of consultation and referral easier.

So there is some app idea lurking here. Combine the concept of a virtual circle (gadget freaks is a good example) with product recommendations. It may already be there. Difficult to tell when you have to scan through several thousands of applications.

The Best of 2007 and Predictions/Trends 2008

I think it is the time of the year when people come up with the Best of <Current Year-1> and the Trends/Predictions <Current Year>. I like reading those. I gather them for a few weeks (as they arrive in my email and blog readers) and keep updating this blog entry.

Seventy Best Lifehacks of 2007

(lifehacks is one my favorite blogs). This provide Happy reading into several days of the new year.

  • Networking and Communication,
  • Writing and Studying
  • Productivity, Creativity and Motivation
  • Leadership, Work and Money
  • Body and Mind
  • Software and Technology
  • Family, Home and Life
  • Success

PC World – The 25 most Innovative Products of 2007

Includes iPhone, Microsoft popfly and Facebook API.

Google Zeitgeist 2007

In compiling the 2007 Year-End Zeitgeist, we studied the aggregation of billions of search queries people conducted on Google. We should note that no individual searcher’s information was made available to us. Except where noted, all of these search terms are most popular for Google.com in the U.S.

Fastest raising – iphone, badoo, facebook, dailymotion, webkinz …

ExtremeTech’s 10 best technology trends of 2007

Gaming, storage, displays and more.

SD Times – Best Blogs of 2007

Businesses and individuals use blogs to disseminate information and share their perspectives. Whether it’s a conscious decision or not, people are frequently turning to blogs for information as part of their personal media mix.

US Tech Trends for 2008

Mobile video conferencing, virtual currencies, Semantic Web, location based mobile services and interactive TV.

Predictions for Google Next Year

Includes Knols, YouTube, Android.

12 Predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2008

Web Innovation 2007: Keynotes

Jaspreet Bindra, Country Manager India (Wow. I loved his talk.)

India story is going to continue.

Heavy growth in education, entertainment and communications (mobile)

India is not emerging. It has already emerged in mobile space. It is a different kind of story. It is not Korea, not Japan and definitely not China.

Global players will win in services, local players in content.

75 million English speaking people and growing.

For local services, we need to evolve a uniquely Indian model.

Don’t create a Facebook of India. It is already here. Leverage it to build your communities. (We don’t need yet another Social network, we need innovative uses of existing networks for the Indian context)

Bollywood and Cicket are Open Spaces (uniquely Indian). There is also education. These are the three largest content categories. Education is the biggest.

WWW is too big. It is all going to be MyWeb (my relevant subset of the WWW)

Problem of delivery and channel (narrow pipes)’

In India parent will starve to get children educated (so that they can have a better life).

Mohit Hira, Director – Times Internet :

It is not Web 2.0. It is web 2.i (i as in I?)

Can we do another glocalization like matrimony.com?

Think Stormhoek

Naresh Gupta, Managing Director – Adobe – Rich Internet Applications

Web 2.0 is about how to make ideas and information more engaging

Why Content needs to be engaging? ( I agree. See my A Picture is worth a thousand words and an animation is worth a thousand pictures)

  • Too much information
  • Too little time

Web 2.0 is engagement

(Comment: A bit of irony here. I think Naresh missed a great chance to make his presentation engaging. He was talking about Rich Internet Application using a Poor non-internet medium). But he made some good points. Something we don’t normally think about.

Open Social – The Next Big Leap Forward?

Marc Andreessen certainly thinks so. How can you fight a name like that? It is an API for building social networking containers and applications. From Marc’s Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web

In a nutshell, Open Social is an open web API that can be supported by two kinds of developers:

  • “Containers” — social networking systems like Ning, Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, and Friendster, and…
  • “Apps” — applications that want to be embedded within containers — for example, the kinds of applications built by iLike, Flixster, Rockyou, and Slide.

That is cool. It can expand the platform for social networking applications, sparked by Facebook’s API. While reading Marc’s blog, I also noticed that Ning has over 100,000 social networks (not applications, but actually networks). That is amazing.

The next few months will be very very interesting since the industry pundits all agree that it is a great idea.

Open Social Web

Google Open Social: The Third Place

Google to Out Open Facebook

Google Transforms into… from Dare

Corporate Social Networks

If you are a member of any type of social network, you probably understand the ease with which you can stay connected with friends and colleagues. In addition, you can discover new groups, communities and applications. This is exactly what is happening to me in Facebook. I see the applications they add, the communities they join and even people they connect to. Within less than 10 minutes a day, I can get a bird’s eye view of what is going on in my network of family, friends and colleagues.

How can we take this effect and translate it to our organization? How can we stay connected with our customers, employees (present and past) our advisors and partners. How about deploying a corporate social network?

In 5 Reasons to Deploy Corporate Social Network, CIO Insight highlights the opportunities and challenges of deploying corporate networks. From improving knowledge management, to increasing business opportunities, this presentation covers several benefits of corporate social networks.

I think there are a couple of other intangibles. First of all social networks are fun. Knowing a bit more about my colleagues is more likely to make my interactions with them better. Second, social networks may make hierarchical organization look flatter. Informal networks will blossom given the opportunity for interaction. Finally, I think social networks are great tools for harnessing collective intelligence.