The social media buzz around the Kony 2012 campaign has subsided over the past week. For about a week or so, though it was inescapable.
So just how big was it?
For some perspective, I recently talked with Scot Chisolm, CEO of StayClassy, the online fundraising platform that works with Invisible Children on its campaigns. The platform launched in 2010 and Invisible Children, the organization that produced the Kony 2012 video, was among its first clients.
I asked Chisolm what his key lesson was from the Kony 2012 sensation. He said that while it appeared to many people that the video exploded out of nowhere, the viral success was really the result of years of work, building up a base of supporters. When the right message hit, they catapulted it into the stratosphere.
“It appears like it happened overnight,” Chisolm said. “But in reality, it was the culmination of years of work. That supporter base, which was in the millions, acted as a catalyst when this first hit. And they’ve become evangelists for the whole organization.”
And Chisolm emphasized that past campaigns as well as this one, have offline components as well as online. They go into schools. They have buses traveling various regions. They have other events to connect supporters. In other words, there’s a heavy does of good old fashioned community organizing that complements the virtual networking.
“Embrace failure” is the first thing anyone will tell you is the secret to Silicon Valley’s success. There are other things of course, but that’s likely the first thing that will pop out of people’s mouths.
But as important that philosophy is, the news today that Google had “hired” or “acqui-hired” or “whatever-hired” Kevin Rose seems strange and depressing. AllThingsD broke the story that Rose is joining Google. And then TechCrunch followed with the additional news that Google had hired Rose as well as his entire team from his latest venture, Milk.
There’s been no official statement from Google or Rose as far as I can see.
Milk is best known for, well, nothing. It released a mobile app called Oink which it recently announced it was killing after three months. Rose is best known for starting Digg which was going gangbusters until it wasn’t, and Rose left.
“The Internet, with companies sniping at one another and blithely ignoring major privacy violations, is on the verge of the same fate as the true-blue American industries before it: losing its sense of fun.”
Bilton is on to something interesting, but thinking about the issue in terms of “fun” is the wrong way to frame it.
I’m not sure the industries he mentioned, such as airlines or cars, were ever really known for being fun in their early days. I mean, Henry Ford wasn’t known for his ability to generate yuks and smiles. If anything, the notion of the assembly process he championed was uber dull, breaking each task down into its simplest stage and stamping out lots of cars all the same color. Pretty drab.
Okay, that’s not really the main issue. Bilton frets over this sense that companies like Google and Apple have lost their sense of joy because they’re doing all sorts of un-fun things like pilfering users’ data behind their back. While he doesn’t mention the, I would throw Facebook into this pile as well.
He cites plenty of anecdotes that are all valid. But they point me toward another thought.
Rather than “fun,” the issue seems to be that these actions are evidence that these companies have shifted away from being focused on the user first, the bottom line second.
Now, I’m not naive. We all know these companies are for-profit and are in the game, ultimately, to make money.
Yet the way they went about that originally, seemed to be built around being obsessively focused on the users’ experience. Apple, famously, has its human-centered approach to design that spurned things like focus groups and market research. Google was so worried about the purity of its search experience, it vowed to always be neutral in search results and left its homepage ad-free, a move that probably has left billions of dollars on the table.
And even Facebook, especially in its early years, reportedly turned down big ad deals because founder Mark Zuckerberg worried that they would undermine the user experience. Now there is a creeping feeling that, with the IPO looming, the company is launching all sorts of changes like “branded pages” and “social ads” that threaten to gum up out newsfeeds with pitches for soap.
The problem, then, given the examples Bilton cites, is that there is growing evidence that these companies are making decisions aimed their bottom line first. Again, no one’s kidding themselves that these companies were charities.
But in making this philosophical and strategic shift, if that is indeed what is happening, the companies are possibly abandoning the basic formula that has made the successful. At its heart, that formula held that by focusing first on the user, the business would take care of itself because users would be passionate adopters of the products or services. And that passion, would in term, make those customers the best possible ambassadors of the service.
By doing things that appear to be aimed at increasing profits first, the companies risk breaking that virtuous cycle. If customers start to feel like, well, just customers, then their loyalty will slowly fade. They become a little bit more leery of the company’s intentions when it comes to new products or features are rolled out.
It’s not something that happens all at once. Now, obviously, from a financial standpoint, all three companies are still going gangbusters. If there is an impact, it will be more like a slow, almost imperceptible decline.
I think all these companies genuinely wrestle this this tension, and it’s not too late for any of them to make a course correction. Because here’s the thing about Silicon Valley. We want love our gadgets and services. That love often goes to those companies that make us feel like they’re putting our needs above the desire to make a quick buck.
The danger for Facebook, Google, and Apple is that by appearing to chose the buck first over love, they risk losing both over the long term.
Facebook has topped Google’s Orkut to become the top social network in Brazil, the world’s fifth largest country and Internet market, comScore will announce later today. That’s a huge win for Facebook, because Brazil for years has been a stronghold of Google’s Orkut social network.
The switch reflects Facebook’s rapid growth in much of the developing world, particularly in South America and Asia, countries that are now providing the lion’s share of Facebook’s growth, with membership approaching the saturation point in countries like the U.S. and Britain.
comScores said that in December 2011, Facebook.com attracted 36.1 million visitors, a 192 percent jump in traffic over the previous twelve months, meaning it passed Orkut, even though – to surpass Orkut as the leading social networking destination in the market.
In an early view of the release later today, comScore said:
“Facebook’s rapid ascent in the Brazilian market has certainly been one of the most interesting stories to develop during the course of 2011,” said Alex Banks, comScore managing director for Brazil. “Brazil has always been a particularly social market and currently owns the fifth largest social networking population in the world. But despite the cultural affinity for social media, Facebook adoption had traditionally lagged in the market. That has all changed in the past year, during which the site has tripled in audience size as engagement has grown sevenfold to assume the leadership position in the market.”
Here’s an odd thing. Today, a former colleague sent me an email saying they had just called the Facebook switchboard. When the automated attendant came on, the second option was for “law enforcement.”
I agreed that seemed unusual, so I called myself (650-543-4800). Sure enough, “law enforcement” is the second option. But the full message was also amusing.
The message starts with the expected, “Thank you for calling Facebook…For customer support, press 1. For law enforcement, press 2.”
Law enforcement comes ahead of business development, marketing, press, and employment verification in the list of options.
Is Facebook really getting that many calls from law enforcment? Apparently so. When I pressed 2, the next message says: “This message is only for members of law enforcment. Please note that due to a very large volume of incoming calls, the current call back time is two to four business days. For faster response time, please leave your work email. A member of Facebook’s security team will email you in a timely manner.”
So, what do you suppose all those cops are calling about?
In the past year or so, I’ve grown increasingly impressed with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Though he’s still young for a guy running the most important company on the Web, I felt he was growing into the CEO role. This was a reflection of his strategic insights, the way he’s expanded Facebook’s user base past 500 million, and his improved presentation skills. That last bit may sound shallow, but the ability to stand up in front of the world and convery your ideas and persuade people to believe in them and follow you is a critical skill for any tech CEO these days.
Given all this progress, I was left doing double-take after double-take as I watched the livestream of the Facebook Places announcement Wednesday afternoon. I lost count of how many times I found myself thinking, “Did he really just say that?” or “Did they really just do that?” It bordered on the surreal at times, and easily ranks as one of the most bizarre corporate announcements I’ve witnessed while covering Silicon Valley for more than a decade. To be clear, it wasn’t just Zuckerberg, but the whole crew of Facebook execs who toddled across the stage.
But let’s start with Zuckerberg, since he was up first.
When he first hopped onto the makeshift stage set up at Facebook, Zuckerberg seemed a bit lost. Holding up the microphone to his mouth, he said so the whole room (and the Web audience) could hear: “Hey, do I have to stand on this thing? Okay….It’s a driftwood stage we constructed. Awesome.”
Awkward pause.
Then, Zuckerberg explained the Facebook tradition of holding a launch party when they have new products. “These are a lot of fun to do, so thanks.” Another awkward pause.
Then: “This is going to be a long interesting summer. We’ve got a lot of interesting products we’re working on.” Pause. (Would I be nitpicking to point out that summer is two-thirds over?)
Then: “The thing we’re going to talk about tonight is a new Places product that we’ve been working on for a few months. Uh, awhile”
Okay.
Then, Zuckerberg told a story about how he knew the product was ready to go when he was showing it to his girlfriend and they discovered that Facebook VP Chris Cox and his girlfriend were at a restaurant next door.
“I was in Menlo Park, and I never go to Menlo Park. I’m always at home or in the office.”
“When that serendipitous moment happened, I knew that the product was ready to go. And we were ready to start sharing it with the world and help people stay connected wherever they go.”
What struck me as odd, as I listened to Zuckerberg and some of the Facebook execs that followed, was that they sounded like they had just discovered the wonder of location-sharing and check-ins. Zuckerberg explained that Facebook Places was intended to do three things: Help people share where they are in a “nice and social way,” help you see who is around you, and help you see what else is going on. Fine. But that’s pretty much what Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, Where, and many others, have allowed you do for a couple of years now. Facebook is a relative late comer, though potentially a game changer given its 500 million users.
Then Zuckerberg was followed by a gauzy, Hallmark-card-y video that tugged at your heartstrings with some warbly music and shots of people interacting in the real world, all thanks to the magical thing that Facebook had just discovered:
Up next was Michael Sharon, product manager for Facebook Places. “Places is not about broadcasting your location to the world,” he said. “It’s about sharing your location with your friends.”
And again, he went through the list of wonders that pretty much every other check-in service has allowed you to do. Check-in! See who else has checked in!
What should they have done? While many of other early leaders in the space appeared on stage after Sharon (Gowalla and Foursquare), I think Facebook should have acknowledged their pioneering work. And then pivot and say: Hey, these are great, but it still leaves this gap. Define what that gap is: These are early adopter services. Facebook represents a way to bring location sharing to the masses. The more people you know who use this type of thing, the more useful it becomes. Facebook’s opportunity is to bake this into its platform, make in a mainstream activity, and let other people build applications on top of it, just as they have on Facebook’s main platform.
After the competitors left the stage, Cox appeared on stage to kick the weirdness quotient up another notch. He started out with an attempt at a joke that sucked the air out of the room: “The thing about Facebook employees is that we’re all closet sociologists.” Um, huh? “We all get on a bus and go to the Stanford library and check out books on the history of designing public spaces.” Hello, is this thing on? “That was a joke.” Ah, thanks for clearing that up. Cue nervous laughter.
This was all leading up to Cox’s sociology lecture. He gave a nod to noted sociologist Ray Oldenburg, who was apparently sitting in the audience. Cox then elaborated on Oldenburg’s theory about “third places.” He started by filling us in on particularly obscure sociological term that describes the first place: “home.”
“Home is where you wake up, it’s where you go to sleep, it’s where your family is, it’s where you eat and it’s where you go to digest and reflect upon the experiences you had during the day.” Got that? To recap, home is where you eat, sleep, live. There will be a test on this later.
Second place: work. (Do I need to explain that?) The third place is called….”the third place.” These are bars, restaurants, anywhere people go to share their lives with other people.
“Oldenberg made a pretty crazy hypothesis that the technology we were creating in the 20th century was in danger of destroying the third place. There was a fear that now we have television and phones and radios, we would just sit at home on our couches rather than going to the amphitheater to watch the play, rather than going out to have coffee, we’d just call our friends on the phone. Rather than experiencing the world outside, we’d cloister ourselves indoor…Over time, these third places would be destroyed and we’d be sitting in these pods. It’s like Wall-E, with these fat people rolling around in their bubbles.”
But!
Cox: “Technology can be the thing that pulls us out. Technology does not need to estrange us from each other.”
“Maybe one time you walk into a bar, you sit down at the bar, and you put your magical 10-years-into-the-future phone down. And suddenly it starts to glow. ‘This is what your friend ordered here’. And it pops up these memories…’Go check out this thing about the urinal that your friend wrote about when they were here about eight months ago.’ ”
Cox explained that all these check-ins, photos, and videos could be gathered on pages about a place to create “collective memories.”
“That’s dope.”
Yeah, he said that.
“Too many of our memories are still stuck at home, gathering dust on a shelf.” Now those stories are going to be on Facebook! “So that maybe one day in 20 years, our children will go to Ocean Beach, and their little magical thing will start to vibrate, and it will say, this is where your parents had their first kiss.”
As one journalist remarked to Cox later: He practically had tears in his eyes at this point.
Cue Zuckerberg back to the stage to introduce the product team. This included attempting to pronounce the name of one Indian engineer on team. ”Did I get that right?” Zuckerberg asked. “Awesome.”
For the finale, Zuckerberg recounted the tales of Facebook’s legendary hack-a-thons, in which people stay up all night working on a project not related to what they work on during their day job. Apparently, someone at one such event decided it would be cool to build a “launch switch.” Which would be: a wooden plank on the side of the room. That gets pulled whenever the launch a new product. But first, a gong must be banged:
Phew. That’s a wrap.
Now, I know I’m older (41) than probably just about every single person who works at Facebook. But the event felt like I was watching some guys in their dorm commons room knock back a few beers and practice their first presentation. Maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise given Facebook’s famous roots in a college dorm room. But it was hard for me to imagine the group I saw overseeing the massive company Facebook would become if it ever does an IPO.
“The affair started late and Zuckerberg had some awkward pauses while on stage. But the 26-year-old handled himself well enough as he introduced a new feature that will likely make rivals in the location-based services business tremble with fear. We’ve uploaded scenes from the press conference in several videos for your enjoyment. You’ll also see the company’s video describing Facebook Places, which lets you share your location with friends, find out where your friends are, and discover new places.
I always find it fascinating to see how one of the world’s youngest billionaires at one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley handles himself on stage. He seems like a pretty ordinary guy, just one more coder among many.”
“One final observation: We thought Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg were at the top of their games tonight. Mark was relaxed and in his element, and after a couple of challenging and awkward public appearances recently, seeing him in his element was refreshing. Facebook, meanwhile, is positively bursting with excitement and energy, as might be expected of a company that has wrested the center-of-innovation mantle from Google and is really, truly changing the world.”
I agree with the bit about Facebook taking the mantle from Google. But if this was Zuckerberg was “at the top” of his game, then I’m terrified to think what those other appearances were like.
Since the announcement that it was killing Google Wave, Google has turned on the spin by proclaiming how they “celebrate our failures.” There is a lot to admire about Google, and one of those things is its ability to experiment and, as CEO Eric Schmidt said, “try things.” It’s not just hard for many organizations to find the culture and capacity to do that, it’s hard for them to acknowledge when those things don’t work.
“But in its statements to the world, Google rarely sounds like it’s celebrating these missteps. It doesn’t really document anything that was learned. It just seems to say as little as possible to move on.”
But the bigger problem I see at Google is its approach to developing those new things. Just because you enable it, or allow it, doesn’t mean your approach to you develop new products and services. And what strikes me about Google is that so many of these products seemed dead on arrival.
I spent Tuesday at the Internet Identity Workshop at the invitation of Kaliya Hamlin. I met Hamlin a couple of years ago while working on another conference, and had some fascinating discussions at the time about the Semantic Web and the future of news.
Hamlin was named by Fast Company last year as one of the most influential women in technology. She’s the organizer of numerous un-conferences around the valley. But in this case, she was being recognized for her co-founding and ongoing role in the Internet Identity Workshop. Started five years ago, the group gathers twice each year and was holding its 10th conference this week at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
The subject of identity on the Web is especially timely right now with the controversy swirling around Facebook. The social media giant wants to essentially be the main repository of your online identity, and allow you to carry that around the Web with you. There are a lot of benefits to that, but there are also reasons to be wary. The folks at the workshop are developing more open alternatives.
“The issue at hand is fundamentally about FREEDOM: the freedom to choose who hosts your identity online (with the freedom to set up and host your own), the freedom to choose your persona – how you present yourself, what your gender is, your age, your race, your sex, where you are in the world.”
So I stopped by the workshop for a few hours to sit in on some sessions and talk to Hamlin about the subject of identity on the Web. It was a great conversation, so let me summarize some of her thoughts. And at the end, I added a copy of her presentation that kicked off the three-day gathering.
After spending the morning at f8, the Facebook developers conference, I’m convinced more than ever that Facebook is about to take over the whole Web. And by the whole Web, I mean, well, all of it.
And if Google isn’t trembling over this, they ought to be. We might look back at this day as the moment when Facebook set itself on a path to eventually dwarf Google in size, power, and eventually, revenues.
Simply put, Facebook is positioning itself to become deeply embedded in almost every single website. And the way it’s structuring this platform, it places Facebook itself at the center of Web more than ever.
Here’s why I think Facebook is about to become a monster.
Google Buzz is here. And the big question is this: Can Google finally get in the social game? After playing around with Google Buzz for a bit today, I’ll say the jury is out for me. But I have a few thoughts, and will have more after I’ve played with it for a few weeks.
The first impulse I have is to fight is the despair over creating and learning a new social networking tool. Facebook and Twitter work well for me, despite some imperfections. I won’t say there isn’t room for improvement. But any new service has to clear a pretty high barrier to become part of my daily routine.
After digging in and following a few friends on Google Buzz, the next thing that strikes me as interesting about Google Buzz is how much it mirrors the approach to social that Yahoo is taking. And there’s something I wouldn’t expect to be writing: How Google is following Yahoo. Read the rest of this entry »
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