What are big trends?

Last week I had a chance to have a long talk with my earlier startup colleague.  We both love high-tech startups and share interest in following latest venture trends.  While we were talking, I realized how much things have changed last time we worked together to launch our startup back in early 2000.

"Frictionless sharing" - Isn't that oxymoron?

Last month I wrote about Facebook Social Reader.  It's also known to implement "frictionless sharing".

I talked about what it means for publishers and marketers.  It is a great tool to keep track of who's reading what, and how contents spread through open social graph.

But this has profound implication to readers (that's you!).  Let's stop and think about what it means to readers.

Blogs and social network

As a blogger, I have been writing on and off for little over a year.  When starting, I had committed myself to write once a day, but with my workload it proved to be a difficult commitment to keep.  These days perhaps I've slacked off too much, not even posting a blog per week.

When I first started writing, the most difficult thing was finding readers.  How do you know whether anyone is reading your blog?  If you wrote something that no one cared to read, is it not a complete waste of time?  Well, I believe it is not a waste of time.  It's because when you write something it helps you think logically and organize your thoughts into black and white.  It's amazing how often I found myself changing my opinion once I started writing a blog entry.  When you are thinking about things in your head without sequencing them as one logical argument, it is hard to make your argument clear even for yourself.

Facebook Social Reader

Facebook F8 launched a bunch of things.  One of the most interesting thing is social reading.

Basic idea is to share what you are reading automatically with your friends.  One way to think of it is to look over your friend's shoulder to see what they have been reading.  Except that it's better because you can go back and see what they have been reading even if it was months ago.

This creates interesting use cases.  It means that everyone who's reading articles using Social Reader is publishing their own reading list to all your connections.  No more need to publish your curated list.  What you read is what you are interested, and you are likely to curate out of what you read (one would hope).  This has potential to become the killer app for sharing articles.

Now for those Facebook old-timers this might remind them of Facebook's earlier attempt at auto-sharing user's activity.  Anyone remember Beacon?  Beacon, which tracked what people bought on websites like Amazon and automatically shared it with friends, had to be pulled due to privacy backlash.  So how is Facebook getting around that privacy concern?

Well, Facebook has added privacy control to let users control whether they want to share their activity.  But as you might expect this is opt-out option is buried deep inside the application setting control.  What Facebook is relying on is that users will realize that this sharing happens inside the application, Trove.  By installing the app, you as Facebook user is expected to acknowledge that what you read will be shared and tracked.

Yes, tracked.  That will be a gold mine for marketing folks who wanted to track not only what articles are popular, but also who read and how it passed along from one reader to another.  That's a powerful tool that would interest any publisher and marketing team.

What will be interesting is how people will react to sharing their reading habit.  No more anonymity.  Every article that you read on Social Reader will be available for all your friends to see.  It's like reading a magazine in your corner street cafe.  Except that it's a cafe where 800 million customers hang out, including colleagues, family members and, of course, your government.

Email vs Social Network: Differences

The other day I blogged about similarities between email and Social Network. I talked about how Social Network might evolve in future looking at how email has evolved. In today's blog, I want to talk about the differences between them, and where the future may look like for these two different communication mediums.

There are several differences between email and Social Network (again, I'm using capitalized Social Network to mean social Web 2.0 sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Jive, Connections, Sharepoint, etc.).

Email vs Social Network: Similarities

Today I had a lively discussion about the evolution of social network and where it's all heading with our executive team. During the discussion, one question that kept coming up on my mind was the similarities and dissimilarities between how email and Social Network have been evolved and their future (I use capitalized Social Network because I'm talking about Web 2.0 sites that are categorized as social media or social collaboration sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Jive, Connections, Sharepoints, etc.).

Twitter Malware: It's Coming After You

Most of readers of this blog are sophisticated social media users. I would include myself in that category. Well, I would have until last Sunday.

I may need to wear a shirt like this in the office.

Yes, I will come out and admit it for once. I got suckered into clicking on Twitter malware link that was forwarded to me by one of my trusted venture friends. Now that I got that off my chest, and demonstrated that I could be just as naive as thousands of users out in the internet, I think I can talk about this incident somewhat objectively.

It turns out that this particular malware spreads by getting Twitter user to click on the shorten t.co URL that was sent via private message. When unsuspecting recipient clicks on the link, it automatically sends the same tweet to all of the recipient's followers as private message. Very sneaky.

It was quite an embarrassing moment when I realized what just happened (I even had to update the new Twitter app to follow the link on my iPhone). Thanks to a couple of my co-workers and good Twitter citizen @DevonAlderton, I came to my senses only after a few hours later. Once a few seconds of disillusionment of my malware detect-o-meter had passed, I regained enough composure to delete all my private tweets to all my followers (thank goodness I don't have Kim Kardashian's follower base), and took remedial actions to shore up my defense.