Facebook Will Lose Location: The Location-Flawed Social Graph

Facebook Places is finally here. Within hours of the announcement, many of the usual suspects have already relegated companies like Foursquare and Gowalla to the ‘niche’ pool.

I think (and yes, hope) that Facebook fails in this latest endeavor. Ok, with an ‘installed base’ of 500MM users they certainly won’t fail fail, but I would argue wholeheartedly against the following statement from Silicon Alley:

Facebook will now become the platform on which other check-in applications like Foursquare will be built. 

What is the first number that comes to your mind when I ask how many people you are interested in sharing your location with? On average? I bet it’s not 120.

120 is the average number of people the average Facebook user is friends with on Facebook.

As in the offline world, for each social group (family, friends, work friends, colleagues, gym friends, classmates, etc.) and for each social object (photos, videos, locations, news, tweets, status), users will rightfully demand unique privacy profiles to limit access to only those most relevant and appropriate connections. For example, I may want to share videos with classmates but not family; I may want to share location with gym friends but not colleagues.

Foursquare has in part been successful because, along with the emergence of a new social object (location), it has given users the opportunity to build (from scratch) a set of connections particularly relevant to that associated privacy profile.

My friends on Foursquare are only those people with whom I am willing to share my location. They tend to be in New York and they tend to be close friends (especially when compared to the 474 people I am “friends” with on Facebook).

So fear not ye social web start ups! The location-specific social graph is not easily replicable and the social graph subsystem of the Internet OS is only just beginning to mature. Purpose-built social applications that are subject to privacy policies outside of Facebook’s core competency will remain safe from the grasp of Goliath (for now)!

For more crusading against Facebook, see some of my prior posts here and here.

For more on social segmentation, see here, here and here.

If Facebook is an Open Platform, Then the Web is a Walled Garden

Facebook’s announcements at f8 today represent a vision of the social web that I strongly believe in: one where our experiences online, as offline, are intrinsically and persistently social; one where communication is embedded in the fabric of the web; one where ‘social’, broadly defined, is a primary layer instead of a surface application.

TechCrunch explains just how powerful this vision can be:

Add some “like” buttons and anytime someone likes a restaurant, song, or movie anywhere on the Web with a Facebook like button, that information will flow back into the Open Graph. So that Yelp will know what restaurants you and your friends have liked elsewhere and take that into consideration when giving you recommendations, or Pandora with music, and so on. 

Unfortunately, Facebook’s announcements at f8 also represent the single greatest threat to the achievement of that vision. 

I’ve written in the past about the challenges Facebook poses to innovation on the social web. The launch of Open Graph takes us from orange to red. Here’s why:

At first glance, the scenario described above appears to be a win for all parties. Yelp and Pandora get to make more relevant recommendations and add more value to their users’ experiences. Providing more value to your users means you can extract more value in exchange. Users receive more value from these external sites because their friends are better at making recommendations than some algorithm developed in some engineer’s garage. And Facebook, sitting at the nexus of this information exchange, begins to learn more about internet users than anyone else. Knowing more about users than anyone else means you can charge a premium for access to that knowledge.

So where’s the rub?  

With a user base of 400 million, the promise of dead-simple integration, and an experience that can offer so much immediate value to current and prospective users, Facebook’s Open Graph will be the single social solution of choice for most publishers. 

But what if I want to share my activity with co-workers on LinkedIn? What if I want to share my activity with followers on Twitter? What if I want to share my activity with a product that has yet to be built, whose founders are yet to be born?

Beyond sharing, what if the face I want to present to Yelp is different than the face I want to present to Pandora? What if I have music friends and restaurant friends and they have a totally different set of likes and dislikes? 

The 500 people I am connected to on facebook are comprised of co-workers, family, friends, best friends, camp friends, and friends from my semester abroad in Scotland. My profile data on Facebook is different from my profile data on Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Tumblr. Each profile has a relevant context.

I fundamentally believe that no single social web service can accurately represent the identity of a human being. In the offline world we present different personalities in different social contexts. There is a nuance to identity in the offline world that is not easily replicable in a single, catch-all, generic, online social experience. I can’t quite crystallize why this is important, but my hunch is that this human nuance is critical to meaningful social interaction.

The future we should fight for is one where users decide which profile to present when, and to which sub-group of ‘friends’. If Facebook were serious about building the social web together they would recognize that they cannot do it alone. 

Metaphysics aside, in the long run competition benefits the user more than seamless vertical integration. Of course, in mature industries there are always barriers to entry - I doubt that any new search startup will have an easy time eroding Google’s 60% market share - but what is at stake here is more important than search intention and advertising dollars.

What is at stake is the promise of the social web - the potential for relevant, dynamic, and nuanced social interaction through a medium we are just beginning to understand.

Let’s raise hell when proprietary solutions threaten the future we know we want. Let’s build towards this vision with tools that foster innovation and promote the true dynamism of human identity.

Being Wrong in Public

What does it take for a brand to successfully ‘socialize’? Anyone who has ventured into this line of inquiry knows that there is a lot of noise out there, and very little signal. I spent the better part of the last two weeks reading, talking, and thinking about brands and the social web, and I thought it would be helpful (definitely for the writer, and hopefully for the reader) to distill my learnings into a few choice nuggets.

1. Listen more than speak

Use brand monitoring tools like Radian6 to listen to what customers and prospects are saying. Engage with a human voice that is more interested in conversation and support than sales.

2. Provide a platform that enables your customers to be your advocates

Brand and promote those customers who use social media most effectively to engage with your company. Rewarding these leaders will signal to others that there is a very public benefit associated with engagement.

3. Leverage social-savvy employees

Make your employees famous. Chances are, they are already engaging successfully in this space. Create a human face for your brand by including them in the conversation and encouraging them to build thought leadership. It’s much harder for a critic to attack real people than a faceless corporation.

4. Consumers of content visit your site with expectations for basic social features

Sharing, liking, commenting, RSS, retweeting. A content site without this functionality looks ancient in the eyes of a social web user (i.e. 400 million people). Any YouTube regular will fear comments, and rightfully so. Reward good behavior and ignore bad behavior. Reward thoughtful comments with a response, or a link, or points, or moderator privileges. Ignore the flamers and allow your thoughtful commenters to manage them on your behalf. See Fred Wilson’s blog for a great example.

Overall:

Any company that is serious about leveraging the social web to further its corporate objectives must come to terms with the crucial reality that authenticity is a requirement. And yes, being authentic means being wrong in public. Being authentic means giving your employees a megaphone and allowing them to speak on your behalf. Being authentic means hosting a comment on your site that may better belong below a YouTube video.

There is certain risk in authenticity, but the failure of a social media strategy that does not engage with an authentic voice is just as certain.

—

I highly recommend the following blogs:

• Web Strategy - @jowyang
• Being Peter Kim - @peterkim

These companies are doing a great job:

• Zappos: twitter.zappos.com & blogs.zappos.com
• Microsoft MVPs
• Walmart ElevenMoms
• BestBuy’s Twelpforce

Boycott the Button (Why I Refuse to Click on Facebook Connect)

It’s getting a little scary. I’m at the point where I would rather spend 5 minutes filling out a new profile than log into a third party site using Facebook Connect. Don’t get me wrong, Facebook Connect is a great tool (for Facebook) and I appreciate the gesture of interoperability, but I can’t help but see it as the single greatest threat to the future of the social web.

First, here’s what Facebook connect does well: If I were to click on the button, I would find it incredibly easy to share profile data with any site on the web; I would find it incredibly easy to send my activities back to Facebook where all my friends could take a look; and when I return to that site, I would be so happy to learn that I don’t have to remember yet another user name and password. And therein lies the problem…

Facebook does these things so well that publishers might not feel the need to integrate their sites with other social networks. They will be tempted to conclude that they’ve found the one-size-fits-all easy mac solution to that whole “social media” thing.

For many publishers this reasoning makes sense. With Facebook nearing 400 million members, it’s likely that any existing users of the site already have Facebook accounts. Why force them to create a new profile for the site? Users win because they don’t have to spend time creating an entirely new profile and re-connecting with all of their friends. Publishers win because any friction in the sign-up process is reduced to a mere click.

I believe that in the long run, everyone loses.

When a user logs into a site with Facebook Connect, that user’s activity is shared with Facebook and Facebook alone. This will be enough for some people. But what if I want to share my activity with LinkedIn? What if I want to share my activity with Ning? What if I want to share my activity with an innovative startup that is just beginning to build it’s user base? What if I want to represent a different side of my online personality to the site I’m visiting? Two possible answers: 1) The publisher takes the time and resources to develop an additional ‘Connection’ for each and every additional social service, or 2) I can’t.

#1 is inefficient, #2 is anticompetitive. Both alternatives are bad for users, bad for business, and bad for future of the social web.

The barriers to entry for the small innovative startup will be nearly insurmountable in a world where every site is content with Facebook’s ease of use. Joe the job seeker who wants to engage with other readers of a career advice blog will be forced to represent himself as Joe of Facebook instead of Joe of LinkedIn (when we’re at work, do we act as we do among friends and family? See this post for more). Simply put, Facebook Connect is a lock-in play.

My guess is that the right product will match Facebook’s ease of use but provide ‘plug and play’ functionality so that sites can easily integrate multiple social web services (yes, like OpenID).

Let’s not pretend that all the innovation in the social space has happened. Instead, let’s make room for the next generation of Zuckerbergs.

Boycott the Button.