Jonothan Stribling

Some time ago I wrote that Facebook was doomed because the business model relied on erecting billboards in parks.

People were there to play, not be sold to.

Since then, Facebook  has become bigger than many medium-sized countries and has been valued at more than $50 billion by investment bankers.

Oh and my Dad who is 74, is now on Facebook.

So if Facebook is bigger than most countries and worth a lot of money, how can I be right? 

The answer is in comparing Facebook to Google.  Google has become uber-successful by opening advertising to the masses. Anyone with a credit card and a website can advertise to qualified buyers fast. Google make it really easy by giving away advertising vouchers so anyone can try before they buy. The results are instantaneous and infinitely measurable.

Facebook on the other hand provides a weak value proposition for advertisers. The Facebook audience is not shopping for a gift for Aunt Rhonda in Ohio, they are looking to see what their BFF is up to, or to LOL at a chimpanzee eating its own poo. Or perhaps they are planning a revolution as recent events in Egypt demonstrate.

Whereas Google is a community of buyers and shoppers, Facebook is a community of thrill-seekers, bored adolescents, peeping toms, and horny perverts. They are very disengaged consumers.

U.K. Facebook exec Stephen Gained sees a future where company websites are made obsolete by Facebook. His argument is that Facebook offers more ways for consumers to engage with brands through devices like the Like button, and that visit times to Facebook average 28 minutes – much longer than most company websites.

The metrics make for a compelling argument but Facebook is still a sad, closed, blue world offering low clicks and ROI.

Building a list of fans is a great way to promote your brand, model but it is a poor way to sell product. Most of the commerce success stories are just hyperbole, the social media community are so desperate to demonstrate value they promote small and meaningless examples of why Facebook will dominate the Internet.

So I agree that Facebook is a great place to recruit a graduate, promote a new shampoo, or run a competition to build brand awareness. But if it is engagement and revenue you’re after then search is the clear winner.

The focus on the short tail is not exactly what makes Facebook another MySpace and not another Google. My completely unprofessional advice to Facebook investors beguiled by the $60 Billion valuation is to get the out now.

Take a profit and wait for the bubble to pop.

I really want to delete my facebook account.

I was enthusiastic about the idea after all the changes the Zuck made to “privacy” this year and then I read this polemic by Jason Calacanis about how facebook is evil and the Zuck has Zucked his way to the top.

I was kinda gratified because it meant that my suspicion and anxiety about facebook was felt tenfold over by an industry observer.

It meant that my doubts about the business model were in part justified because eroding privacy for commercial gain is clearly unethical.

And not being transparent about it is very unethical.

Privacy should NOT be opt-in.

A year ago I said facebook was (almost) doomed because of the difference between the sacred and the profane.

After facebook became the most visited US website for a week in March I thought I was completely wrong.

I wasn’t.

Running a massive website is expensive and advertising won’t generate enough of a return for the Zuck so he is monetising his biggest asset – you and me.

I don’t want my private data to be monetised and Zucked up. If I share publicly I use twitter. If it’s a private conversation between friends I might send an email, pick up the phone, send a text or just maybe use facebook.

The problem is that I need facebook. I need to understand if advertising and targeting is more cost effective for certain campaigns than Google.

I need to understand it, to use it for traffic generation, to observe it with a critical gaze.

So I guess I’ve been Zucked after all.

We all have.

When you’re one of the cool kids, it is pretty easy to forget that not everyone is in the cool club.

In fact, some people are so far removed from the cool club that they haven’t heard of Twitter, social media, ecommerce, WordPress, Android, the Nexus 1, or the RunKeeper iPhone application.

But generally, every human living in an advanced economy who can read has heard of Google and Facebook.

We’re so connected these days that it is easy to forget that there are a bunch of people who are not connected; who are yet to realise the liberating potential of the Internet.

And they know it. They know that no one uses the big yellow book to find a glazier or carpet cleaner. They know that their kids are doing things online that they might enjoy, that might make simple stuff easier but they haven’t made their move yet.

They are scared, intimidated and worried about looking stupid.

And all the cool kids reckon they are “stupid”. That’s why they are cool and not stupid, they are good at trying new stuff, seeing trends, labelling stuff.

Nothing online scares them. Except comic sans, fuscia backgrounds and being marketed to.

To me users should never be thought of as stupid. Rather, it is the marketers, designers and developers who make them feel stupid who are, well, stupid.

So many conversations in the tech, social, online communities concern the known world of tech, social and online.

It strikes me that it is a bubble where the people listening are the same people talking who are the same people publishing aphoristic thought bombs who are the same people reading the aphoristic thought bombs who are the same people thinking of the next aphoristic thought bomb.

It is exhausting, and to a complete outsider completely meaningless and uninteresting.

And because the same people are building the tools and selling the tools and dreaming up the next tools, the kids not part of the cool club are forgotten.

They are left to find their own way with poorly written copy, small fonts, poor documentation, badly handled errors, and unclear instructions.

And for anyone running an ecommerce site, a blog dependent on advertising, a remarketing program, or an online community dependent on user engagement and re-engagement this is not good for business.

Whilst Australia has high number of Internet and mobile users, future growth will come from people changing their habits and behaviours. This means they will go online, start booking stuff and buying online, connecting with friends online.

It is up to the people working to build online experiences on Internet devices to make this journey as easy as possible and remind all users that it is never the user, it is always the tool.

This means talking to people who you might not talk to often to find out how they use the Internet and if not why not.

This means looking outside the closed network for cool kids and digital hipsters to identify wants, needs, desires, fears and anxieties.

It means making sure that your website works for them and meets their needs.

It means having a presence in Google and Facebook which are two of the most common first steps online for a new user.
It means giving a voice to some members of the community who need it most by showing them how to setup a blog and start publishing.

The promise of the Internet and web 2.0 is social transformation for the better and we need to strive to make sure this promise can be delivered.

Once upon a time there was a Hollywood star called Tom Cruise who had the world at his feet.

He was famous, rich and in love with a beautiful young woman called Katie. Being rich and successful, woman loved him and men envied him.

Then one day late in 2005 whilst talking with talk-show host Oprah, Tom celebrated his success and the joy of life by dancing a jig on her sofa; by jumping the sofa.

Tom’s fans were appalled and ashamed for him. This irrational exuberance was not the Tom they loved and respected, it was a freaky guy who seemed to be more than a little self-absorbed. Gradually Tom’s fans turned away from him and stopped seeing his movies.

Jumping the sofa, much like jumping the shark for TV shows, was the beginning of the end of Tom’s glittering career. It represents the moment when his star had reached its ascendant and began to fall.

Tom had misjudged his audience and sent out the wrong message. He had the wrong idea about what people expected of him.

Jumping the sofa is pretty easy to do online.

All you need to do is veer off course into the ridiculous – unintentionally.

Change your argument halfway through a blog post.

Go off on an tangent about how there was this guy I went to school with who is now working in Amsterdam and reckons it is one of the greatest cities in the world, not for the drugs but the people.

Oops.

Get your developers to build something without talking to your customers.

Send an email campaign to the wrong customer.

Display the digital camera landing page to someone who clicked on the Ipod advertisement.

Launch a new product without talking to your customers or your market.

In fact it is easier to jump the sofa online than it is in real life (metaphorically of course, you could be jumping on your sofa right now and no one would care).

The easier it is to publish, the easier it is to be ridiculous, comical and absurd – and to turn people off.

There are quite a few examples of jumping the sofa online. Here is a very short list.

Facebook privacy policy change

In January this year, Facebook modified their privacy policy and automatically opted people out of the extra privacy setting that removed a user’s content from being displayed in search engines.

This shocked and dismayed Facebook users as it was a significant breach of trust for fairly transparent commercial reasons.

People need to be able to trust that the online spaces they populate with personal information. Facebook jumped the sofa and betrayed this trust.

Microsoft Vista

Microsoft Windows Vista was launched with a bang in 2006 and very quickly fizzled as users complained about bloated and slow software, random crashes, and pointless steps that made it harder to do things.

Under pressure to release a new operating system after significant market share gains by Apple, Microsoft focused on the flashy unimportant stuff like phat icons and forgot about the things that make an operating system a pleasure to use.

Microsoft jumped the sofa by focusing on pretty graphics and slick marketing at the expense of features that enhanced how people experienced the product.

Aol. logo

The merger between AOL and Time Warner is a great read about hubris overcoming commercial reality. Ten or so years later AOL Time Warner has demerged and AOL has relaunched as Aol., a content and media network polluting the Internet one crappy article at a time.

The story of Aol. is one of jumping the couch so high that a business that had 30 million ISP customers in 2001 is now a media company. Aol. is a great lesson in evolving with the market and listening to customers even if there might be some short term costs.

Google Buzz/Google Wave

Everyone loves Google. Sing it with me. Everyone loves Google.

The Google brand is so strong that they threaten to launch a new product and the Internet goes into meltdown chasing “exclusive” invitations so they can be among the first to get tell their friends about how great Google is and how Google are the next Google.

Sadly, most of these releases are overblown hyperbole. Google Buzz was an exception. Linked to GMail, Buzz had real potential to allow multiple conversations all easily indexable, searchable and findable.

Unfortunately Google forgot to listen to user concerns about privacy and automatically added email and chat recipients as followers in Buzz. This was fine except the follower lists were public.

The fallout was massive, providing “evidence” to many people that Google didn’t care about privacy.

To their credit Google fixed the problem very quickly and proved why they are one of the strongest global brands – they listen to their customers and admit when they haven’t.

These are just a few examples of how some brands have jumped the sofa online by getting caught up in their own hubris and not listening to their customers.

The Internet makes it easy to listen and even converse with your customers. Get online and research your next decision before jumping the sofa. Talk to your customers. Take a moment to think about what you’re trying to achieve.

Have a really good think before you climb up on the sofa and make like Tom Cruise. And if you still want to, then go right ahead.

Google just released Google Buzz which has demands that we “go beyond status messages”.

To me this appears to echo the feeling many people had, including me, when confronted with micro-blogging sites like Twitter – so what.

It represents a profound misunderstanding of what a status message actually is. Status messages are really:

• part of a conversation
• the start of a conversation
• a cry for help
• a complaint
• a grandiose aphorism about what’s wrong with the world
• a proclamation of love
• and of course a comedy.

Whilst twitter and Facebook might appear to a Google engineer to be merely a system that accepts, validates and publishes status messages, these sites are much more than than that.

They are communications systems that helps people connect.

Much like email does.

I can see why the Google engineers and product marketing folks decided to use focus on doing more than updating and reading status messages. It is a good spin and a great reflection on Gmail’s strengths, which are that it’s very bloody easy to use and has a huge base of installed customers who are already having conversations.

What is missing from Gmail is a an ecosystem of third party applications which can help me share anywhere I like from practically any device I like.

Of course this wouldn’t sell any advertising.

And this is why I reckon Google wants to “go social”. The more people tweet or exchange Facebook messages the less they email and of course  Google has a reduced audience to display advertisements to.

After a long break from blogging which was sandwiched by two overhyped product releases, one from Google and one from Apple, I am feeling a little fatigued with product releases that are thinly masked market share grabs and do nothing to solve my problems.

And let’s not forget that Yahoo and Microsoft have had similar features for quite some time.

My first impressions from Buzz are that is pretty cool. The user interface is very slick and it is easy to do stuff like attach images, add people, comment, like, post links and browse posts.

My big complaint is that  I cannot update Twitter from Buzz although I can see my tweets in Buzz.

Sometimes something seems really really good but it’s actually really really bad; stupid in fact.

So stupid that when you realise that it is so, you feel like bashing your head against a wall and cursing the gods while shaking your fist at the sky.

Or something like that.

A “personalised internet address”. Wow. Are you excited. And guess what, you can get one from Facebook. Wow again.

So what does this “personalised internet address” look like? Well, it looks like a facebook URL as in facebook.com/yourusername. Mine looks like facebook.com/jonstribling and I am proud as punch.

Hang on I hear you say, isn’t that just a Facebook URL with a username appended?
And hasn’t Twitter had them for years?

And doesn’t MySpace have usernames and “personalised internet addresses” already?

And can’t I register my own “personalised internet address” as a domain name?

The answer is yes, yes, yes and yes.

That didn’t stop 500,000 people registering usernames in the first 15 minutes and 3 million registering in the first 24 hours.

That is impressive!

So why the excitement?

Perhaps it is simply the fear of missing out and the shameful memory of having to choose a hotmail address like garyrocks97@hotmail.com.

Perhaps it is the wisdom of the crowd (mob)?

Perhaps it is the next big thing in Internet marketing? Will this be the transformative event for Facebook pages?

Perhaps it is just hype and we all feel a little shamefaced, much like the feeling after a huge night out on the rails.

There is no doubt that for companies using Facebook to promote to consumers this may be a good thing. The pages may be more easily found using search engines and some might get lucky with direct type-in traffic.

But for most of the 67 million members all it may do is invite more SPAM and put their privacy at risk. Those folks who haven’t done so should get a their own domain name, get a blog through a good web host, add some Facebook widgets, add their CV and start publishing. Really start personalising the Internet.

The only “personalised internet address” is an address I own the license as in jonstribling.info or markzuckerberg.com. A URL provided by a company which then effectively ‘owns’ my content is not personalisation, it is bloody clever marketing.

Oh, get your real personalised internet address here at registerfree.com.