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.

My Thoughts on Google+ (Part 2): Challenges

This is part 2 of my thoughts on Google+. In the last post, I discussed the innovative features in Google+ project that will likely spur other social networking sites to adapt and change. In this post, I want to touch on some challenges that Google+ has to deal with to become a viable Facebook and Twitter alternative.

There is a reason why group is missing from above;
because Google+ has no group

Absence of Group

There is no group in Google+. At least the group in the sense that we all understand from Facebook and LinkedIn.

Let me explain. When we think of a group, we think of them as clique where we share information with everyone in the group and members in the group to be able to respond to other members post. In other words, group exists as an entity. Group mailing alias, Facebook group and LinkedIn interest groups are good examples. A group gets created by members, and everyone either joins or leaves the group, shares or does not share updates in the group. Whatever update gets posted on group page is expected to be shared with everyone else in the group because group members can access the group page.

It almost sounds redundant to explain group in this way. It is because we grew so accustomed to group membership and group sharing to happen in a symmetric way. What I share in a group is visible to all other members in the group, and what everyone else shares in the group is visible to me. Group is a separate entity that people can join or leave.

My Thoughts on Google+

It has already been close to a month since the launch of Google+, and I feel obliged to express my thoughts around Google+ on this blog. After all it's only fair that I give a due time and attention to what Google created, the company that changed the way I use the web. Especially how Google fumbled earlier social attempts with Google Buzz, Wave and Orkut, they must have learned from those lessons.

I'm happy to report that they have. Let me talk about those few points that I think make Google+ shine on this blog post. In following blog post I will talk about some challenges that might slow down Google+ adoption.

Why I Believe Social Network Is Future Of Communication Platform

I was having lunch with my coworkers yesterday and talking about some websites that were still using static HTML to render their content. While describing them, I said they looked like they were from 1990's. Then I quickly realized that it was only 1995 when Netscape popularized websites, and most websites were developed after 1996. That was just 16 years ago.

Since the birth of graphical world wide web technology to allow people to communicate each other and share information have been evolving in dizzying pace. Pagers have been replaced by mobile phones, mobile phones by Blackberries and Blackberries by touch-screen iPhones. Email which quickly became de-facto electronic communication standard evolved to become webmail, then mobile messaging, and recently to microblog messages called tweets.

Abusing the power of email to the max;
how many of these group emails do you get a day?
(Don't worry, I know better not to send this particular one,
but I've done my own share of group replies)

But businesses still rely on face-to-face meetings, phone calls, conference calls, and emails to get our work done. As most of US economy has shifted to service industry, most of us derive our value from communicating or collaborating with other workers. Although some rock star programmers might be reluctant to admit, we spend our better part of day communicating and collaborating, not coding.

It's safe to say that most businesses would come to its knees if mail server is down and emails do not get delivered. We've become so dependent on email for almost all communication activity that we do, it's fair to say that our day revolves around email.

The problem of email is that it's meant to be private exchange of information between two parties. It's built using postal service analogy. There is a sender and there is a recipient. Message travels from one person to another. The message is not public, and is not meant for sharing with other people. In fact sending too many mails and asking them to reshare is prohibited by law (chain letter anyone?). Well, same applies to email.