The Praized Blog

During the Holidays, I met with my friends and family multiple times and one topic of conversation that came up very often was Facebook. “What’s Facebook?” my mom would ask. “Why are people so fascinated with it” my brother-in-law would add. “It’s useless” or “it’s a waste of time” would also come up very often. The proof of the whole uselessness was the “poking” and the “sending my friends a virtual beer” examples. I tried explaining Facebook the way I’ve explained it many times in this blog but I quickly realized I was getting nowhere. My friends and family members that thought Facebook was useless wouldn’t change opinion even after I explained my big social media theories. “I am Media” did not fly as well in the offline world as in the blogosphere.

What was I doing wrong??? And then it hit me…

Facebook is just a game. That’s it, that’s all.

Yes, it’s a game. Out of the 60M+ monthly active users, most of them are there to have fun, hang out with their friends and reconnect with old ones. Only a few thousands (like Scoble and me) are using it as a broadcasting platform, sharing interesting links, discovering new ways to market products, services and ideas.

So if it’s a game, it must be a complete waste of time, no? No.

Why? People are learning while they’re playing. Remember my blog post showing the speeding up between the introduction of new communication tools? This generation will have to learn two, possibly three new communication tools in their lifetime. E-mail was definitely one of them in the ’90s. And now the next phase of learning is happening right before our eyes and we don’t realize it. Facebook users are discovering social media’s opportunities and pitfalls. They’re learning to blog and micro-blog, post pictures and videos online, They’re learning the proper etiquette in a social media environment. And it’s beautiful to watch.

So, is Facebook relevant today? Yes, like training wheels when you start riding your bike. Will it be relevant in the future? Maybe, maybe not, but that’s not important. The key is that a whole cohort of web users will be ready for the next evolution, the social web.

Big storm this week in the blogosphere as Robert Scoble’s Facebook account was temporarily suspended for breaking the site’s terms of service. He was using a new tool from Plaxo Pulse that was extracting and matching Plaxo and Facebook users. As Robert said: “I wanted to get all my contacts into my Microsoft Outlook address book and hook them up with the Plaxo system, which 1,800 of my friends are already on.” Scoble was eventually reinstated but the debate about data portability now rages on (see also DataPortability.org).

A few minutes ago, I discovered that LinkedIn now allows you to export your data in various formats (.CSV and .VCF). I don’t know how long they’ve been offering this feature (not long I suspect) but it’s an extremely smart move to position themselves as the definite business-oriented social network. Bravo!

Following the furor over the new Facebook Beacon product, the company has decided to back-off and offer a complete opt-out to the product. Mark Zuckerberg explains on the Facebook blog:

Facebook has succeeded so far in part because it gives people control over what and how they share information. This is what makes Facebook a good utility, and in order to be a good feature, Beacon also needs to do the same. People need to be able to explicitly choose what they share, and they need to be able to turn Beacon off completely if they don’t want to use it.

This has been the philosophy behind our recent changes. Last week we changed Beacon to be an opt-in system, and today we’re releasing a privacy control to turn off Beacon completely. You can find it here. If you select that you don’t want to share some Beacon actions or if you turn off Beacon, then Facebook won’t store those actions even when partners send them to Facebook.

What it means: as Scoble said yesterday, this is a perfect example of a badly handled PR situation.  Facebook should have come out sooner to solve this obvious privacy issue. “Do the press conference. Admit you screwed up. Take your shots. Look into the camera and say you’re sorry.” said Scoble.  I think the last straw was the fact that, even though you declined to share your information on Facebook, the info was still sent to Facebook from third-party web sites.  This move should reassure most people but make sure you opt-out if you’re still worried.

On Monday, Yahoo Search launched improvements to their search engine including something they call the “search assist“. Like some other bloggers, I wasn’t too impressed until one of my friends showed me how you could use it in the context of people search.

If you do a search for my name on Yahoo and trigger the search assist, you can now see concepts associated with my name. The keywords Linkedin, Facebook, Robert Scoble, local search, social networks, blog archive, online media and product management appear in the search assist screen. As my public face on the web is mostly professional, all these keywords are bang on and offer a good representation of who I am on the web:

Linkedin: I’m a heavy Linkedin user and the site has a great SEO strategy.

Facebook: I’ve blogged about Facebook a lot during the summer and some of my ideas had big impacts in the blogosphere.

Local search and social networks: my job and what I blog about.

Online media and product management: my job.

Robert Scoble: I discovered what Robert was doing with Facebook and blogged about it, creating an important Web meme.

The people-search site Spock uses tags to convey the same kind of related information. Unfortunately, on a search for my name, the info is much more limited as it comes only from my Linkedin profile. It misses a large portion of my other online activities, most notably the blogging.

What it means: structured business data has always been the bread and butter of the directory industry but most publishers have put their residential search function on the side, not really caring about it. Be careful! Residential or people search is a great traffic driver into your ecosystem of web sites and many people are after that traffic. By introducing structured people search, Yahoo, Spock and others are making it much more relevant. Residential search is about to be disrupted.

Today, I celebrate my first year of blogging. When I started, I had an objective of writing at least one blog post per business day. Mission accomplished! I now have written close to 300 blog posts on a variety of local search and/or social media topics. I’ve met many new friends and blogging has become a very important part of my professional life. I currently have 416 RSS subscribers and I think I’ve found my blogging “voice”.

To celebrate, I take a look back at my top 5 blog posts that generated the most comments and trackbacks in the last year:

1) “Robert Scoble is Media“, July 14, 2007. By far my most popular blog post. I stumbled upon a major meme with “I am Media”. Lots of people have talked to me about that one and have told me they now understand Facebook because of it. If any book editors are reading, I think this could be a great business book…

2) “What Micro-Blogging is All About?“, September 13, 2007. Re-reading one of my favorite Douglas Coupland book, I found this excerpt which poetically describes what micro-blogging is potentially all about. Mashing-up Douglas Coupland with Web 2.0 earned me some great reactions.

3) “Google Opens an Office in Montreal“, January 25th, 2007. Major buzz in the Montreal blogosphere as I was the first blogger to discover that announcement in Montreal’s La Presse.

4) “Chronology of a Successful Facebook Group: The “Save Business 2.0″ Example“, July 19, 2007. Chronicling my efforts (with Colin Carmichael) to save Business 2.0 magazine using Facebook. That one was a lot of fun and offered some great learnings. We unfortunately did not save the magazine (I got my last issue today…)

5) “Web 2.0 Startup Praized Media Inc. Secures $1,000,000 in Seed Funding“, September 18, 2007. The announcement of our seed round of financing was welcomed by the local search blogosphere.

I’d like to start my second year of blogging by thanking all my Year 1 readers! Thanks and here’s to another 300 blog posts!

If you’re not a RSS subscriber, click here to add my feed to your favorite reader.

The day started with Robert Scoble discussing how “social graph-based search” (Mahalo, Techmeme, Facebook, etc.) is going to beat Google and other search engines.

Scott Karp summarizes Robert’s points:

• Humans can judge what’s missing from an aggregation of information on a topic
• The key to effective human filtering is leveraging a “fabric of trusted individuals”/”people who are trusted and credible”
• By connecting these trusted people through a social network, you can leverage that resulting social graph to validate trust and create network effects

Then, Karl Martino added:

(…) there is a growing role for “Trusted Human Editors In Filtering The Web”. Our friends, our families, our communities. Not just machines and algorithms. My favorite and fellow bloggers, Slashdot, Salon, the home page of the NYTimes, Philly Future, Shelley Powers, Scott himself, my news reader subscriptions, are all trusted humans, or representations of trusted humans, filtering the Web for me. So it
still comes down to trust - What organizations do we trust? What systems do we trust? What communities do we trust? What people do we trust?

What it means: I believe the web is slowly transforming itself into a big word of mouth machine. Social will eventually be embedded directly in the fabric of the world wide web. Media companies have an advantage today as they are a trusted source but those that resist the “socialization” of the web will be left behind. In the directory business, there is a saying that word of mouth is the biggest competitor out there. I think it can become the biggest opportunity in local search.

I’ve been using Facebook intensively for about 4-5 weeks now and it has become an important staple in my blogging/media strategy. Here’s how it complements what I’m currently doing in the Praized blog:

1) Facebook Status Updates: I use the “status update” function as a micro-blogging tool (a bit like Twitter). It helps me put in words what’s on my mind in that specific moment and it captures my personal zeitgeist. It only takes a few seconds to write but people react to it. I usually receive one message a day from friends/readers reacting to my status update line. Don’t forget it’s a status update that triggered the Save Business 2.0 efforts.

2) The “Post a Link” function in the Posted Items page: I use that function when I want to share with my friends/readers an interesting article I just discovered that might not be completely within my pre-defined blogging topics in the Praized blog (i.e. social and local). Examples in the last week include the Skype outage and the Google browser rumors. I always comment on the article to add value and I often end up my comment with a question to trigger additional reader comments.

3) I import my blog posts within Facebook Notes using the Import a blog function. You just need to plug-in your RSS feed URL. I’ve tried using the MyBlog app but it does not work well (I have to manually update the RSS feed to get my blog posts within Facebook). My readers get warned I’ve imported a note (in their newsfeed) and they see an excerpt from the post. They can also comment within Facebook or go to the original post.

One caveat: don’t abuse your friends’ trust by posting too many links or importing too many notes every day. Unless you’re always interesting, they’ll shut you down and change the channel. That’s what happened to Robert Scoble last week with some of his Facebook friends. Tomorrow, I’ll offer five suggestions to improve Facebook. BTW, don’t hesitate to add me as a friend on Facebook if you’re interested in reading/discussing social media.

Some people have been complaining this week that Robert Scoble is taking over their Facebook newsfeed after having added him as Facebook friend. They’re calling it “friend spam” and saying he hijacked their news feed. The blog comments seem to go in the same direction. They’ve even created a Facebook group called “Scoble’s Feed Victims” (which Robert joined as soon as it was created). Most people are not directly blaming Robert but more the way the Facebook newsfeed algorithm works.

But, in any case, remember my “Robert Scoble is Media” post from a few weeks back? Can I say I told you so? By inviting Robert Scoble to become your friend, he doesn’t become your “real friend”. You become a subscriber to ScobleMedia, a feed of stuff he finds interesting (the same thing happens when you add me as a friend). He’s the editor and he broadcasts stuff. He’s obviously using trial and error, learning just like us about the way the Facebook newsfeed works. And this is also about conversation. If there’s stuff you find non-relevant in his feed, but you still find Scoble relevant, tell him! But if you don’t like what’s on Scoble TV, change the channel!

Remember last Saturday morning when I shouted “I am media”? Want to know what happened since then? I accidentally went from theory to practice…

Robert Scoble picked up my post and confirmed my theory. My blog received 10 times more traffic than usual for two days and I’ve had many interesting conversations during the weekend. I also added many friends to Facebook, Pownce and Linkedin.

And just when I thought that wave had subsided, the magic of Facebook connected Colin Carmichael and I on Tuesday morning and put us on a mission to save Business 2.0 magazine. Alerted by my status update feed, Colin created a Facebook group dedicated to this cause and we started leveraging social media to create some buzz around the group. You can read the chronology of these events here.

The group now has about 1075 members. We’ve been adding 1 member every five minutes since the launch and all of the major industry influencers have joined the group. Since the launch, we’ve received coverage from the following major media/blogs:

Valleywag, “Facebook to the rescue!”

Advertising Age, “Can Fans Save Business 2.0?”

San Francisco Chronicle, “Save Business 2.0”

GigaOm, “Saving Business 2.0, Facebook Style”

Fast Company, “Can A Social Network Save Business 2.0?”

Washington Post, “Trying to Save A Magazine Through Facebook”

San Jose Mercury News, “Facebook group hopes to save Business 2.0”

Business 2.0, “Can Facebook Save Business 2.0?”

I even got mentioned by name in the San Jose Mercury News article! Many Business 2.0 readers have had the chance to express their love for the magazine, many subscriptions have been sold and some people even registered on Facebook just to be part of the group! I think we’ve already made a difference in the lives of the Business 2.0 team. I think there’s a lot of things we can learn from this experience especially about the various social media vehicles working together but I’m still digesting as this is an ongoing process. It’s been a good ride so far. What a week.

One thing’s for sure: I am media!

Great reaction yesterday and today from the blogosphere on my “Robert Scoble is Media” post, starting with Robert himself:

Sebastien Provencher, senior manager strategy and business development at Yellow Pages Group, Canada’s leading directory publisher, figured out what I was doing on Facebook in a post that says “Robert Scoble is Media.” If he had stopped there he would have only figured out half of the story. But he ends up writing “I am media as well.” Bing! Bing! Bing! See, what’s cool about Facebook is that for the first time I can see all of you and anything you publish on your Facebook profile also comes to ME. In five words he nailed Facebook and why this thing has such huge value.

Thanks for the acknowledgment and sorry for “outing” your Facebook secret…

The Praized blog got 10 times its usual Saturday traffic (on track to get 8x my regular Sunday traffic) and I seem to have hit a nerve with a lot of people interested in social media. The positive reaction I got tells me I’m definitely unto something but it also left me with many more questions. I hope to reflect on them in the next few weeks.

Amongst them:

1) how do we define “friends” now? And should Facebook create closed networks (within your larger network) for traditional friends & family? As a local search guy, I’ve always been interested in “trusted sources” (i.e. word of mouth) and I think that might be the beginning of a definition. I’ve already exchanged a couple of e-mails with Robert on this one and I’ll ask him for permission to share his thoughts on the “friends” definition.

2) Given the high-level of fragmentation, how do we manage all these new communication channels from an outbound messaging perspective?

3) And how do we filter the incoming messages i.e. what’s zeitgeist, what’s fringe and what’s noise?

4) and last (and not the least as it is my specialty), how does this impact traditional media?

Feel free to let me know how you feel about those questions.