Pajama Entrepreneur

Ninety-two percent of young people surveyed by Dutch research firm, Qruis, between the ages of 6 and 29 say they don’t want to see ads on their mobile phones. Only 11 and 13 percent of those surveyed gave a positive or neutral reaction to ads on chat and game sites. Ads on websites and in emails received a positive/neutral rating among 13 and 15 percent, respectively. Funny enough, 33 and 41 percent of young people consider ads in traditional media, TV and newspapers, not to be irritating.

Qrius believes that young people consider their mobile phones and chat programs to be private domains where advertisers are not welcome. I think there’s a simpler reason: they’re used to seeing ads in newspaper and on TV.Qrius will present the results of its annual survey next week.

I have not seen Qrius’s report and don’t know what kind of advertising young people find objectionable. Still, I wonder how Blyk, the first free, ad-supported mobile operator, will do when it launches in the UK in a few weeks. Those who plan to monetize their sites (gaming, video, chat, etc.) may be turning off their audience by inserting annoying ads.

Ofcom, the UK telecoms regulator, has just released a report (The Communications Market 2007) that is hundreds of pages long but very interesting. Among the little tidbits of information in this report which covers TV, radio, broadband, Internet use, fixed and mobile telephony are:

• women 25-34 spend more than 20% online than men;
• of the 70 million mobile phone subscriptions in the UK, 64 percent are prepaid, 36 percent on contract;
• broadband speed doubled between 2005 and 2006;
• online advertising is one quarter of total press advertising;
• 78 percent of people who own DVRs (digital video recorders) skip the ads;
• 60 percent of 10-year olds own a mobile phone.

Click here to read more little tidbits I have picked out from this report.

Om Malik wrote in this blog about a number of people are turning away from Facebook because it wastes a lot of time (and by implication, does not yield the appropriate return):

We are not using the privacy settings of Facebook, and are too polite to say no to invitations from people who want to friend us. No wonder, the social environment is starting to resemble a crowded nightclub. (You go to clubs to be seen, not talk.) … What we need is something more intimate, more private. It’s not about the number of friends, but it’s about connection.

I wrote a post a few weeks ago on why I’m not buying the Facebook hype. Sure it has an open API, very nice for developers, but now that thousands upon thousands of applications can launch on Facebook, it will, like all portals, suffer from having too much. You will have to wade through endless lists of apps. Another giant time suck.

I took several steps this week to weed out the useless activities that only clogged up my schedule and created stress:

(1) I unsubscribed from more than a dozen mailing lists.

(2) I stopped using Twitter and Jaiku. They were novel and fun in the first week, but extremely annoying in the end. I did not want to twit whenever I was going out running, doing grocery shopping, etc. The people who asked to be my Twitter “friends” would write updates almost every 5 minutes it seemed, so that my Twitter screen would be filled with their useless garbage. Anyone who twits that much is, in my opinion, a TWIT.

(3) I deleted 75% of the RSS feeds on my RSS news reader. 75% of people have nothing important to say to me.

(4) This week, I did not respond to time-wasting emails from people who wanted me to do their work for them. In a number of cases (lazy journalists), I did respond, but gave them a link to the appropriate online resource where they could find the answers themselves.

Deleted my account at Linked In

The boldest move of all was to leave Linked In. Read here about why I left the networking site. It was utterly useless and only a burden (all those people I couldn’t care less about wanting to connect, asking questions and worst of all, wanting me to endorse them).

False sense of guilt is the biggest offender

As Om Malik mentions in his Facebook fatigue post, the reason we accept invitations to be friends with someone on Facebook or other social networking sites, or in my case, to endorse someone on Linked In, is that we feel guilty about turning them down. We don’t want to hurt their feelings. So we do all the things we don’t want to do and waste time and energy. I decided that my time is very precious and that if someone I don’t know wants to waste it, I need not feel guilty about saying no.

A lot of social networking sites today, including Facebook, have privacy filters so we should use them more often. It’s time to put the guilt back where it belongs: on lazy people who want you to do their work for them, pathetic connection hounds who have no friends in real life, people who have no direction or purpose other than to waste their own time, and “noisy” people (those who run around doing ten things at the same time - multitasking - but accomplish absolutely nothing).

We need private networks that are like private clubs

I am sure these exist already, but the time is really ripe for these things to spring out of the ground. Ning, a social networking site, allows you to create a private social network. It’s time to bring out the virtual doorman.

Here I am again, this time on Facebook, typing in the same details I had typed in at Friendster, Orkut, Tribe and MySpace. I could have done it my sleep, answering the same inane questions about my favorite TV shows, movies, books, hobbies, and interests. So I have to tell yet another social network that I still hate TV, I love John Cheever’s books and Sofia Coppola’s movies, and I enjoy cooking and traveling.

I can think of better ways to spend a lovely summer afternoon in Amsterdam than typing in the same pieces of information for the fifth time in three years. But I have to try this “new” thing because my techie friends in San Francisco are telling me I should try it, and Marc Andreessen (founder of Netscape) says:

To start, my personal opinion is that the new Facebook Platform is a dramatic leap forward for the Internet industry.

I can’t argue with Marc, whose experience in these matters exceeds mine.

So, am I the only idiot who can’t figure out what’s so great about Facebook? It does nothing for me. It’s a total waste of time like Friendster, Orkut, Tribe and MySpace (where my languishing profile has not been updated in a year and Keane still plays “Bedshaped”). I added these applications to my Facebook page: Flickr, Twitter and Flixster (where I found that one of my favorite films, “Der Untergang” had an unpopularity rating of 64%). I also added an application called My Books, but could not face having to add one by one the 248 books that are already listed in LibraryThing.

So what’s there for me in Facebook? I guess I could look up former classmates from high school and university, but why? If I haven’t kept in touch with them in the prehistoric days before Facebook, why should I do it now? Was there anyone I really missed? My current friends already know where to find me. They know where my Flickr photos are posted and the bookworms among them already share their libraries with me on LibraryThing.

Must everything be turned into a portal?

Go back a few years, back in the days of the dot-com boom, before someone coined the term “social networking site”. We had these one-stop shop operations then. They were called portals and their valuations were in the billions of dollars. I’m thinking of Yahoo, MSN, and Lycos. And there was Spray Network, a pan-European portal I joined in early 2000, at the height of the craziness, as its first and last chief legal officer.

Each portal promised to be the ONE place where you would do everything: catch up on email, read news, shop, find movies, etc. By attracting all those eyeballs, enticing people to set up accounts and keeping them on it for hours a day (they hoped), the portals could sell massive amounts of advertising (they thought).

Indeed, there were and still are a lot of people who visit their Yahoo home page. Not me. That’s the glory of the Internet. I don’t have to rely on Yahoo to find the things I need to shop for or to gather up the news I want to read. All of that is a click away. On the Internet. I have old-fashioned tabs on my browser with my favorite sites. There’s even a search engine called Google.

Now, it appears that the idea of a portal never really died. The one-stop shop idea has carried over into the open-API social networking hype of the moment. Facebook’s investors use a more sophisticated argument that combines the latest buzz words and trends: open API meets social networking.

And why not? Those investors have to make Facebook seem like anything but a 1999 portal otherwise there’s no billion dollar exit via an IPO or a MySpace-like acquistion by a media conglomerate or even by (don’t-call-me-a-portal) Yahoo.

Here’s the argument: Facebook’s not a portal, it’s a one-stop place where you can access your photos that are posted on another site (Flickr), your books (My Books), your movie reviews (Flixster). And somehow all this is just more convenient that whatever you’ve been doing before plus to get to find your old long lost friends and make new pals.

By opening up their API, Facebook has indeed made it easier for online services like Twitter and Flickr to integrate their applications into the Facebook interface. So now, you can access Twitter right there on your Facebook profile page. Never mind that it takes only a few seconds to open up another browser window to type your Twitter news or access your Flickr photos.

Here’s the other argument people use in favor of using Facebook: your friends can see all of your books and movie reviews on one page, and best of all, other people who are connected to your friends, can also become your friends on Facebook. This sounds exactly like Friendster and it did not work for me. The only people who consistently pestered me were “connection hounds” — people who loved to brag that they had 1000+ friends. They were exactly the kind of “friends” I did not want to have.

I have two blogs and my friends read my postings there. They know where my Flickr photos are posted and where LibraryThing books are archived. If I reviewed a movie, restaurant, hotel, or beach chiringuito, it’s going to be on my personal blog, Rosecantine.

What’s behind Facebook?

Advertising. Can you think of another model? I can’t, so again maybe I am missing something.

What kinds of ads do you think I’ll get from them? Let me guess, the same sort of mass market ads I got from Yahoo, MSN, and Lycos back in the old portal days. Shopping will consist of chain store offerings from the GAP and Victoria’s Secret, film and music promotions will no doubt consist of mainstream acts and Hollywood’s latest garbage, and TV - more garbage, or what the Spanish call “telebasura”.

And unlike Flickr, where your photos are yours, everything you enter into Facebook belongs to them. How nice. I get pitched bucket loads of ads, don’t make any money for taking the trouble of helping them sell ads, and then they own my content. Along the way, I help the founders and investors get their $$$ exit.

Sounds like a portal.

[Note: I loved working at Spray Network. I had great colleagues and was really upset when we did not go forward with our IPO in 2000. We sold the company to Lycos Europe at the end of 2000 for $550 million. Lycos Europe wrote off $500 million in 2001.]

Update (10-10-2007): Check out this post by Jason Kottke who thinks Facebook is also overrated: http://www.kottke.org/07/06/facebook-is-the-new-aol