My good friend Mario talks about a NYTimes article on Fakebook generation.

First relevant quotes: from NYTimes:

Facebook did not become popular because it was a functional tool —
after all, most college students live in close quarters with the
majority of their Facebook friends and have no need for social
networking. Instead, we log into the Web site because it’s entertaining
to watch a constantly evolving narrative starring the other people in
the library.

Facebook purports to be a place for human connectivity, but it’s made us more wary of real human confrontation.

To me Facebook or any other social network is about expressing your
personal side, your social side and your fun side, but it’s never going
to be cool to share my party pics with my team at work (for obvious
reasons). I enjoy the social narrative and on a separate level love to
see my professional network updates on LinkedIn, which in my opinion
heralded the coming of the mini-feed, which many faithful & typical
Facebook users hated at the time of its launch (Just ask Danah Boyd about the “Privacy trainwreck”).

I have an account at both Facebook and LinkedIn. I add friends very slowly and only those I know at facebook. Whereas use linkedin for anyone who sends me a request – why? I use linkedin ONLY as an online contact manager.

I know they have a lot more capabilities and features, but none of those matter to me. I spend about 15 min either helping people connect with potential hires or adding new friends on linked in a month.

Facebook though is the best way to keep up with all my business contacts. What events and shows they are attending, what books they are reading and what they recommend.

In some senses, I dont use facebook as a social tool as much a business “communication and ongoing keep in touch” tool.

Navel gazing on Facebook never caught my attention. I dont turn people into Zombies or return beers because my other friends dont send those to me. That’s probably what Gen Y does. Which is why as a business tool Facebook is far move valuable than Linkedin will ever be to me.

Not a big fan of those $10.95 / month “identity theft protection” services, I view reputation management with that same skeptic’s view. I do realize that large companies are extremely paranoid of their “brand image” and so they do invest in these solutions / processes for their online presence. I would agree with #1, #4 but the rest are really waste of time.

This comes
from Jody Nimitz via seo-space.
It’s part of a series to develop an online reputation management strategy
within the SERPs
(Search Engine Results Pages) and improve online reputation with actionable
business tools.

He reports
keeping an eye on your online reputation is especially critical because
increased competition creates reactive instead of proactive situations for PR
firms dealing with their client’s reputation.  

Jody provides
five critical steps to provide proactive actionable intelligence to manage an
online reputation. They’re summarized here.

1. Monitor Your Existing Online
   Presence – In
   order to manage your online reputation, you need to know what is being
   said about your brand online. An easy way to do this is through tools such
   as Google Alerts and Yahoo! Alerts (which
   you can feed into your reader). 

2. Analyze Your Online Presence
   within the SERPs –
   Consumer generated content is increasing and a blogpost or negative
   article can surface in the first page of organic search results, so a keen
   understanding of your search engine environment is necessary.

3. Control Your Online Destiny with
   Optimization –
   Optimize your site and online properties to dominate the search results.  

4. Control Your Online Destiny with
   Participation –
   Be active in industry forums, social networks, and review & opinion
   sites. Participation within these areas can help change negative
   perceptions. Blogs are extremely popular for consumers and are often the
   first place they go to find information.

5. Repeat Steps One Through Four – Being proactive and
   understanding the customer’s perception of your brand and your
   organization is one of the best ways to begin with your online reputation
   management strategy.  

Whether it’s
B2C, or B2B, it’s important to participate in online forums and social networks
to gather actionable intelligence about what is being said, both positive and
negative, about your enterprise and brand.

Jody provides a link to his
downloadable PDF report: Online
Reputation Management

Matt Dickman
at Techno//Marketer
is helping deal with the overuse
of techno jargon. His ongoing series of instructional whiteboard sessions
offer techno marketing tutorials on software
industry acronyms and Web 2.0 buzzwords.

His
key takeaways from this session are:

• AJAX allows technology to get out of the way of the
  end user
• User experience is improved with dynamic,
  application-like interfaces
• AJAX is driving Web2.0
• Microsoft has their own version of AJAX called Atlas
  
• AJAX bridges the design/user interface field and the
  technical/integration field (ie: it makes users happier)
• Less pages to load means less impressions hence the
  death of the pageview
• Major companies are using AJAX to design more
  responsive interfaces

Here’s the video
link. 

As a side
note, there’s a very interesting article about the company’s CEO, Jonathan Swartz posted on BusinessWeek.

Social Media Group Maggie Fox:
“I’m going to cut straight to the chase on this one. There are, of
course, thousands of different shapes and forms that communities can
take, so making blanket statements is (as with most things) not
advisable. However there is one primary ROI that all firms who do this
well experience, regardless of whether they are leveraging the
collective knowledge of their loyalists, users, vendors or employees: competitive advantage through accelerated innovation.”

Hat Tip: Paul Dunay

Here are 3 artifacts:
1. Joel on Hello from Seattle (Microsoft Zune)
2. Apple Ipod in flames
3. Video ad bashing Microsoft

Use any search engine
with the exact phrase: Why I hate ___________ (fill in the blank with a least
or most favorite software
development company) and you find hundreds, even thousands of passionate
detractors in the results. 

Do it again substituting
love for hate in the search phrase. Guess what? You get hundreds, even
thousands of SERPs of passionate evangelists for the same product.

It’s like hating the Yankees
because they’re good. Or loving them because they’re good. Either way, people
will generally identify with a brand positively or negatively. It’s a way of
bolstering personal identity. How can something be good if there isn’t
something bad to compare with it? 

The Big Dogs seem to be
easy targets, and there’s natural tendency to root for the Underdog. But these
are purely emotional responses. Often the reality is the reverse of popular
perception. Here’s an enlightening example in a Wired
commentary about Gates vs. Jobs. Things may have changed since this post,
but you get the point.

Compare products too.
Both companies have created market winners and losers. Apple has the iPhone,
which is an exceptional hand-held device. They also created  Apple TV. There’s Windows Vista, and there’s Halo3.

Ultimately, the consumer
will determine the success of the product regardless of hype, or attempts to
predict future behavior. It’s like baseball players batting averages. Success
can be measured against perfection as a concept, even though it’s unattainable. 

What’s really
interesting is that the crossover between competing industry giants is blurring
the lines between their differences. For example:

·        
Do you charge
your iPod with a Windows-based machine?

·        
Do you use Word
on your MacBook Pro to create documents?

      .    Are you running
dual operating systems with a Parallels desktop on a Mac Pro with Intel Xeon
processors? 

Many do. It just makes
good business sense to use what is available with proven tools that work best,
and most everyone uses a Microsoft product daily, whether they love it or hate
it.

I have friends and
acquaintances at most of the major software development companies. They are
smart, well
intentioned and focused on doing the best for their product. And that’s the
bottom line.

I love Paul Graham’sessays. Although longer than my usual reading allows the best way to read them is to star them on my google reader and read them later on the plane when I have downtime. He’s got a latest piece on the future of web startups. Dave’s got a summary but I think the main point is the “barrier to entry” is so much lower (costs, risk, etc.) that there will be a lot more startups than before. I have 3 important but different points than the ones either Dave or HipMojomake.

1. When I was at Cisco (1995+) we used to joke that Cisco purchased companies more often than we went grocery shopping. The times were good. You could buy companies with stock (Cisco’s stock was a huge premium then) and not have to worry about it. Not so any more. More companies are acquiring in mostly cash and some stock. Why? Accounting rules. Its just not possible for a lot of companies (save Google and a few others) to acquire companies for cash consistently. FAS 128 makes it difficult.

Previously, companies were required to amortize
goodwill over a long time (40 years), and this non-cash expense reduced
reported (GAAP) EPS. FAS 142 eliminates amortization and institutes an
annual impairment test. This article will briefly review the potential
impact of these changes on reported earnings. We expect the changes to
start impacting earnings by the end of 2001. 

2. The BIGGEST hurdle in doing acquisitions is the “integration” the day after. If as Paul suggests lot more companies get acquired, this creates a HUGE strain on the acquiring company. Regardless of whether you are acquiring 2 person startup or a 2000 person organization, the integration is tedious, complex and often time consuming.

3. Sourcing and having a acquisition “champion and owner“. The real power of the acquisition is after the combined entity has something valuable together (as in 1+1=10). Even at Mercury we did about 7+ (2 were extremely successful) acquisitions in 3 years and getting an executive to “own and champion” the acquisition is difficult. Not because they don’t want to do it, but more because they have a day job. Keeping the role of champion outside of the organization that wants this acquisition done is also a problem.

So, I agree the costs of starting a company are lower now, but also think if you do get a downturn the “opportunity costs” for any individual working for a $200K job at Google versus $60K + bread + water is too high. People will go back to the “safe bet” when the market does (and it will) turn for the worse.

I agree though that these are best times for entrepreneurs.

Happened to catch the front end of this program on way to lunch. Andy Carvin, NPR’s senior strategist for online communities, describes
how online social networking sites are taking off among adults.

He talks about Twitter, MySpace and Facebook.

Smaller niche networks are also discussed.

Worth a listen. (36:55 minutes).

If you ask most vendors of white label social networking products, about why they are getting so much interest from Fortune 1000 and several companies wanting to “build their own customer community” here’s the top 3 reasons I get:

1. There are board level discussions about how to tap into the “mojo” of Facebook and other networks. I know there are others that sayits because companies really want to have conversations with customers, but there are very few enlightened executives who really want to do that. Most of them really heard it from their kids and want to figure out how to leverage it.

2. There is fear of “being left out by the competition”. If our biggest competition is there, we should also be there.

3. Its become very EASY. Which is the biggest point I have to be very underwhelmed by Marc’s post on why Social Networking is not the Geocities of yesterday.

Please tell me that someone who is as visionary as Marc is NOT telling executives at large companies that a set of features separates the new thing from the old thing. That’s like saying cars are like horse carriages but with windshield, a steering wheel, etc.

a) It was extremely painful, cumbersome and boring to be “blogging” or updating your pages on Geocities. Not so with facebook.

b) My Geocities “page” was 90% text and 10% stolen (with attribution) images from the web. Facebook – photos, videos etc. – More entertaining and engaging with rich media and content.

c) Much as many people bemoan the state of broadband in US, you cannot argue that its been the main reason for the adoption of YouTube, Flickr, etc.

These are the reasons people like the new “social networks” to the old “communities”. Not a list of features that read like a speeds and feeds guide on the back of a router manual.

Techmeme posted a leaderboard of blogs that showup most frequently on it. Dave says that’s caused people to try and game it. Many people apparently agree with that point of view. Some disagree.

Most business communities that are good have a rewards system. There are very few “doing it for the good of the word” business communities. Regardless of what people say.

Rewards systems exist for a reason – to drive and incent behavior that the community owner perceives to be in their best interest. Not sure I can say the same of Gabe who did owns Techmeme. His reasons are explained here.

When you have a rewards systems you will find a few people try to game it. But the community (if its strong enough) realizes this and has enough checks and balances to neutralize those.

Sometimes the intention is not to game, but to introduce conversation that is controversial. That’s what Jason I think did. That’s a tactic  that generates interest and traffic. But does not mean you have to censor it. If you dont want to read it go elsewhere. Or start your own conversation.