Hiatus

Sorry for the time gap… I’ve been out of the country for a couple of weeks. But I’m back now, and developing news only rendered one of my unfinished posts obsolete, so all is well.

That reminds me… MySpace = Not Evil.

I got off in my previous post about how much the app-maker leeches upset me at this conference, and so I feel like I should mention who I was most impressed with there. It was totally the guy from MySpace.

I don’t remember the guy’s name or even his title, but he was good. I even shook his hand afterward and specifically thanked him for not being evil. And I’m not a MySpace guy. I have an account, but it gets used about as much as my Twitter account – that is to say, not at all. I’m sure I’ll touch on my feelings about Twitter soon.

As much as I’ve always not cared for MySpace, and made fun of the kind of people who do, here’s a company that has had its head on straight. While Facebook has been running around, trying to reinvent themselves for every new highest bidder, MySpace has been straight as an arrow. Their profiles are still the same customizable mess that artistic young folks get into. They still focus on music. And they’re still reaching their same core market in a big way, still kicking Facebook’s butt in the numbers.

The fella that presented at the conference was a good representative of that, too. In a room full of bloodthirsty app developers, he told them that apps were going to have to be approved by MySpace first. He told them that MySpace wasn’t going to give them the spam tools that Facebook did. He told them that they were launching without any messaging API at all, and even as they tore his still-beating heart from his now-limp, lifeless body, he stood his ground and told them that MySpace had learned from the mistakes of others

It was cool. They got shown.

Funny how Facebook, who used to be the clean, sophisticated, unspammy one, has jumped the shark and now I’m writing positive stuff about MySpace.

The other problem is the apps themselves.

Hope everybody had a good Memorial Day. If you live in the United States, that is. By some scheduling accident I spent part of it in a meeting with our Canadian marketing consultant, who doesn’t have any specific attachment to American holidays.

The weekend’s news brings that RockYou, maker of many an asinine Facebook app, has raised $1 million – when they were hoping to raise $70m at a $400m valuation. Matt Marshall at VentureBeat pins blame on “stormy changes in the market.” Sean P. Aune at Mashable just calls it “issues” and perhaps a “return to a more logical sensibility.” I call it fully expected.

I went to a conference a couple months ago, where two of the presentations were made by people from such a major Facebook-app-maker (I’ll spare the names to protect the egregiously guilty). And I’ll tell you what, it made me feel dirty.

The presentations didn’t include a discussion of the value of a social platform to build on, or the addition of utility to a purely social site. Or a single mention of the user experience, from any angle. It was all about the numbers. Cold, hard numbers.

I’ve always wanted to believe that business owners always mean well, that they always care about their users – these people did not. Their main concern was getting enough users installing the app to outpace the number of users uninstalling it each day. As long as they could trick enough people into signing up, and then spamming their friends, they were in good shape.

I can not overemphasize how literal I am being – these are the people that had a fit when Facebook stopped letting them require people to invite friends before they could add an application.

Let’s be clear: The Facebook Platform has problems, as I discussed in my previous post, but they’re not the only ones to blame. The other side of the coin is that the very few good apps are getting lost in the haystack of terrible ones, and it’s hurting everybody. Functionality is being scaled way back (functionality that could be useful), because the lame applications are spoiling it for everyone.

3 likeness quiz requests, 2 pirate invitations, and a partridge in a pear tree.

A couple of teenagers from church just added me as Facebook friends, which means I’m getting another onslaught of application invitations. They’re sending me Pokémon things, Are You Interested invitations, Flirtable Pet Trees, and whatever else they’ve come up with these days.

Getting the invitations is annoying, for sure, but I think it’s also a reflection of the flawed social model that Facebook has started – and that everyone else seems to be following.

The reason why it’s a good idea to build social applications into an existing social network is because of the user base, obviously. Everyone is already a member, and connected socially. You can use that existing structure to create some great functionality – see what movies your friends are watching, get music recommendations, etc. etc.

But how in the world can you benefit if each member has to add the application individually? Music recommendations are useful if they come from all your friends – but not if it’s just one or two. If each person has to add the application, then the existing social structure means absolutely nothing. There is little to no benefit to having the functionality built into an existing social network, because you don’t actually have 70 million people linked together! You only have the few that have added your app, and then you’ve made it really easy for them to uninstall.

Wouldn’t it be better, for both the user experience and the third party developer, to instead have a few really good pieces of functionality that get built right into the site?

And I guess a few people have at similar conclusions, seeing as how Facebook developer activity is down. Caroline McCarthy at c|net goes so far as to suggest that the platform has an expiration date, despite only being a year old.

Maybe if it does, then I won’t have to get these invitations anymore. That would be fine with me.

Breaking: Facebook to open up to lemurs, monkeys

Adam Ostrow’s post on Mashable from Tuesday gives a nice rundown of the latest Facebook news – site traffic is down in the U.S.

Combine that with David Kaplan’s post on paidContent last week, about how Facebook is focusing on language translation and international growth, and we have a story.

The point? Facebook is trying to find a new group of users, because nobody in the U.S. likes it anymore.

And I generalize, of course. But with all their recent growth, and with 90% of the media still brown-nosing like crazy, shouldn’t the traffic still be healthy? And how about Fortune suggesting that American adults – who gave Facebook all this growth – are getting tired of it now, too?

Let’s back up. Having a college-only social network is a really, really good idea. And Facebook did it well, back when they did that. The 18-24 demographic is golden for advertisers, Facebook had relevant social networking content for students (being able to find other people in your classes? Good idea), and students actually liked it. But enough has never been enough for Zuckerberg and Facebook, and Z’s recent refusal to have a good product is leaving all but their newest users feeling betrayed.

First, some history, in convenient timeline form:
February 2004 – Facebook starts
September 2005 – They let in high school students, which I think was the beginning of the end. Their strongest selling point before then was being the anti-MySpace. Then they started becoming MySpace.
September 2006 – Open to everybody. Did they ever intend to keep it college-only? Yeah, I don’t think so.

So, every time Facebook starts to see a slowdown in growth, they find new people to push it to. They don’t try to strengthen their product, increase engagement, or improve the user experience – they look for a new group that can jump on Facebook as a fad to keep their growth numbers up.

No wonder nobody believes the valuation.

This is a new blog.

There aren’t any old posts to go back and read. There isn’t any validity to go on, so far, so you’re faced with two options. You can take off now, on the chance that you might stumble back here later, or you can trust me and add it to your Google Reader. Your call.

I have some bones to pick with Facebook, MySpace, social networking, online local advertising, college networking, social relevancy, etc. etc. etc., and I’m going to write about them here. I have a lot of gripes, but I like to think I’m part of the solution – my name is Roger Pimentel, and I’m one of the creators of Lymabean.

Thanks for dropping in.