Pajama Entrepreneur

I live in Amsterdam, everyone should know that by looking at my Facebook profile. Yet, Facebook has inserted this ad for Blockbuster in my news feed. Totally irrelevant to me. This is nothing more than SPAM. In a few months, my news feed will be clogged with utterly useless ads. How do I opt out of Facebook spam?

Think all those Facebook widgets are so cool? Watch out for this one which installs the Zango adware / spyware, says Fortinet:

Fortinet Global Security Research Team discovered a malicious Facebook Widget (officially, a “Platform Application”) actively spreading on the social networking site which ultimately prompts users to install the infamous “Zango” adware/spyware.

Click here for more information.

[From Niall Kennedy]

UPDATE (10 Jan 2008): Facebook has deleted the widget from the site.

Cory Doctorow has written an excellent piece about how Facebook suffers from exactly the same dilemma suffered by earlier online social networks: when everyone’s on, it’s not cool anymore. And worse — you’ll need to “defriend” people. Oh how to do this without offending people? You can’t. Here’s an excerpt from Cory’s article:

You’d think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this. It’s not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there’s a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I’d cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, “Am I your friend?” yes or no, this instant, please. It’s not just Facebook and it’s not just me. Every “social networking service” has had this problem and every user I’ve spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that’s why these services are so volatile: why we’re so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace’s loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It’s socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list — but removing someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war.

I left LinkedIn, a popular business networking site precisely because lots of people wanted to be my contact and began pestering me for endorsements even though I hardly knew them. It was a complete waste of time. If I need to contact someone, I don’t need to go through LinkedIn. I have a very good network already and my friends are more than willing to make introductions to other people.

Here is a screenshot of my Facebook newsfeed dated 10 November 2007. Pay attention to the California Car Insurance sponsored ad in my feed. Is this all Facebook can do - insert stupid irrelevant sponsored ads about California car insurance to a person who lives in Amsterdam?

Facebook is purportedly worth $15 billion. If my company were worth even $1 billion, I would spend at least $100M working on a super-targeted advertising solution and with that kind of money, $100M, I could do it. First, I would definitely ask the person to whom I am showing the ads what he or she is interested in.

Clearly, I don’t live in California. Even without asking me, Facebook would have known NOT to show the ad. Who gets ripped off? The advertiser. Who gets annoyed? Me.

If this is all Facebook can muster, what can I expect next in my feed? Dog and cat food ads, even though I own no pets? Weight-loss diet ads even though I weigh 100 lbs (five feet four inches in height)?

Wouldn’t surprise me. Sloppy, unprofessional work from a company worth bucket loads of money. I am not impressed.

UPDATE: Several hours later, I see on the left hand side of my Facebook feeds, two ads delivered one after the other: (1) Botox and (2) Tired of Dating?

First, I do NOT need Botox. I may be 46 years old but I don’t have hideous wrinkles and the thought of getting large needle next to my head to inject poison sounds gruesome to me. Second, I don’t give a damn about dating or being tired of dating. Where the hell does Facebook get this idea that I need wrinkle-reducing treatments or help in my romantic life? Is my photo THAT bad?

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