THINK / Musings

Interesting article by the founder of Meetro about what he learned from his startup experience.   Intrigued by the discussion about launch and member growth — he talks about how it first took off in Chicago and then it started spreading into small communities around Chicago.   A lesson I leant at Fotolog was the value of compacting social networks — its counter intuitive but it makes sense when you think about it.     Communities need to be compact or tightly connected at the outset in order to reach critical mass.    Duncan Watts has done a lot of great research on this — Adam Seifer taught me about it in practice.    Raw growth is not the right metric to focus on when you start a social network — you need to measure and track the density of those connections – tight, compacted social networks grow faster than thin broadly distributed one's.

Betaworks is starting to roll out SwitchAbit, our first homegrown product. SwitchAbit is a content router. A switchboard to connect one service to another. It will let people shuttle a flickr to twitter, or to tumblr, facebook or pownce or pretty much wherever people want. SwitchAbit doesn’t aspire to be another UI to aggregate data — in fact its the reverse — it assumes that people want to contextualize information streams within existing services and existing communities. I’m tired of companies seeking to jam users into a new user experience that is mostly designed to drive a business model rather than drive new, relevant or meaningful interactions. As a consequence SwitchAbit is designed to be a platform — Twittergram will be the first service that will be powered by the platform.

When we started working on SwitchAbit one of the foundational services that inspired us was Twittergram, a service that Dave Winer created almost a year ago. Few individuals have been more innovative in finding ways to move data — live & static data — laterally across the web. This lateral movement of data is exactly what SwitchAbit is about. Once we had an alpha version of SwitchAbit working I sent it to a handful of people, one was Dave. After a rapid set of email exchanges — we came to an agreement and Dave is joining SwitchAbit as an advisor. The last deal we worked on was back in Userland days, between AOL and Userland — after months we never managed to finalize a relationship — this time around we managed to get this done end to end in about an hour. Good stuff.

It’s less than six months since we setup the development team at betaworks and this is the first of three products that will roll out in the coming months. As I started to outline last week betaworks is a company that through focus and structure is designed to drive linkages and accelerate innovation across what we call our network. The intent is to create a set of loosely coupled components — some wholly owned, some partially owned — and drive innovation, context and value across the network — thru the exchange of data. What people today call monetization, but monetization as it applies to a network, not two isolated nodes. Over time this network will look like a company — I guess a media company is the best analog we have today — but a little different in focus, structure and purpose. And we aren’t going to start talking about new media, again. For now we are very excited about getting SwitchAbit rolling.

Discussion of the life of Herman Buhl. An inspired life — talks about his dash up Nanga Parbat where he basically dumped the team and team leader and bolted to the peak. Took a while to find the image of where Buhl disappeeared off the edge Chogolisa’s broad (bride) peak. Amazed that no one has put this on to wikipedia yet.

My old friend Don Burton has started blogging. His focus is early stage child development — specifically as it relates to his third child, Whitney. Week by week Raising Whit is becoming a wonderful resource for parents who think about applying some of the more advanced areas of developmental psychology to raising their child — he catalogues development stages and types of play with video’s. Don has spent 20 years thinking and working in this area — he is smart as can be and very passionate about his work/play. Great to see theory in application — up close, very real and personal.

The week before last I packed up my office and formally ended my tenure as CEO of Fotolog. I will miss Fotolog and the team, we had an amazing and exhilarating year, what follows is a handful of thoughts on what mattered, what didn't and what I learnt running Fotolog.

#What we accomplished In the space of 12 months we took Fotolog's membership from 5.8 Million members to 14 Million, we grew engagement in terms of time on the site and features, we moved up into the top tier of Alexa's and Comscore's rankings (Alexa ranked us as #13 worldwide last week ), we turned the site into a business and we completed a sale to one Europe's largest advertising and micropayment networks. It was a busy year. When I think about how we accomplished this — the first and last thought I have on the subject are the people.

AdamS AdamL AndrewC AndrewL Andrey Angelo Anna Brian Cynthia Dan Danielle Elke Frank Jason Joseph Linh Luis Mathias Meghan Melissa Michael Olu Rachel Rodrigo Scott Thomas Tom Toshimitsu Warren 'n' Yossi made it happen, it was a privilege to work with you all. The team grew through the year — we lost some and we added a handful — and we figured out how to work as a team, how to set and deliver priorities. When I came on board the company was in a position that was on one hand typical of a start up and on the other unusual. The typical included a somewhat overwhelming list of things to get done with few agreed upon ways to prioritize or assess what should get done when and why. The unusual included the fact that Fotolog was a small team running a hugely popular web site with an audience that was predominantly international. The first job was about prioritization and focussing on scaling the site and reducing latency. We worked to establish a common set of priorities and then establish a process to execute against those priorities. We then shifted attention to monetization, cleaned up some odd contracts, tested partnering with some exotic non US companies and then drove monetization with the ad networks, and the partnership we struck with Google. We worked through up's and downs: outages, breaking 10M member threshold, a membership strike, massive growth in Europe, drowned servers, visits from the FBI, and a good deal of member love. Throughout getting the team to work together as a team was I think our biggest accomplishment — our successes flowed from that. My thanks.

#Active angel, advisor, board member, get a job… My relationship with Fotolog started as an angel investor in 2003. Then in late 2006 Scott Heiferman, Fotolog co-founder and board member, raised the possibility of my coming on board as CEO. I had known Fotolog as an investor for years — but coming in as CEO offered a wholly different perspective of the operational challenges. Thorough the experience, I learnt that you can be as active as you want as an investor, be an advisor, sit on the board, help with product or business development but you wont really have a clear idea about what's going on within a company unless you actually work at the company. You need to be in the flow of everyday decisions, you need to understand workflow, process and — most evidently what are the real challenges a company faces — not the one's they think or you think they face. The lesson here as an early stage investor is to balance the time you spend with companies — it's tempting to think you can help solve operating issues from the outside — but unless you are willing to jump in and take a job much of your backseat driving is as useful as backseat driving.

#Balancing capital raises with audience growth and monetization One of the things the Fotolog team did right since the first day the site was launched was managing the cost base of the company in a way that was appropriate to the audience, monetization and funding. At no point did the Adam, Fotolog's co-founder, misjudge the balance between these drivers. This is hard to do particularly if VC's are offering funding based primarily on audience metrics. There are sites who have audiences growth comparable to Fotolog with 4x or more the headcount. In 2008, I think, striking this balance will be as important as ever — in particular re: businesses who are building audience on the back of platforms like Facebook or Twitter — eg: indirect vs. a direct (non mediated) form end user interaction.

#Fresh matters There is a tremendous amount of value that accrues to coming into a situation fresh and seeing things without the encumbrances or assumptions you inevitably make after been in a role for a while. The Fotolog team had all the answers to the paths we ended up taking there right in front of them, it is just hard to see those paths after you have been in a role for a while. Keeping perspective is always hard to do in life, and the formation pain of becoming an entrepreneur makes it especially hard. Back at AOL, a long time back, Steve Case and Ted Leonsis used to talk about periodically firing one another — in order to keep perspective. The lesson here is that as an entrepreneur you need to flip between fervent passionate belief in your ideas and objective reassessment of your position — those perspectives usually sit at either end of a spectrum — making that flip is hard to do, very hard. Sometimes an outsider can help, sometimes getting away helps. In Fotolog's case, Adam Seifer, gets credit for making those flips. Adam and I had known each other for a long time — going back to the mid/late 90's and six degrees / Total New York — as a co-founder of Fotolog he was open to re-invention and an objective assessment of what we were doing right and what we weren't. Hard to do, not always easy, but necessary.

#Positioning matters When I started at Fotolog one of the early set of discussions we had was about positioning — what is Fotolog? what does the brand represent to our members and what is the relationship our members have to the experience? Fotolog had for a long time been considered as an international version of Flickr. Yet when we looked at the usage data it was radically different to Flickr. Yesterday, to take a random data point — 6% of all the people who ever signed up to Fotolog uploaded a photo to the site, thats a degree of engagement beyond Flickr and many other photo sites (870k pictures, one picture per member, 13.9M members — translates into 6.3% of the total membership). Last month comscore tracked Fotolog users as spending 26 min on the site, per day, Flickr's numbers are less than a quarter of that number. By digging into usage data we concluded that the Fotolog experience was social, social media. Understanding this helped us orientate our positioning for our members, our advertisers and ourselves. The rituals associated with digital images are slowly taking form — and operating from within the perspective of a mature analog market (aka the US) tends to disort one's view of what how digital imagery is going to be used online. The web as a distinct medium is developing indigenous means of interactions. We figured out the positioning, summarized it in a short phrase (share you world with the world), put together a banner with 1.. 3 steps to get going on Fotolog and got to work. Clear positioning helped us, and helped our partners figure out what we were and what we weren't.

#Scalling, speed matters Fotolog is a huge bazaar of user generated content, displayed on a small number of page layouts. The importance of rendering those pages as fast as possible cant be understated. It's always easy to put more things on a page but rendering a page quickly and giving the user what they came for has to remain the top priority. As we go into 2008 Fotolog has steamed passed the 150M daily pageview threshold, we are heading towards 5BN monthly pageviews, we now have more than 350M photos that we host, guest book messages per photo now average almost 12, an increase of more than 30% over the past year, and Alexa ranked us at #10 in the world last wednesday, #10?!@ (the average for last week was 13). This past Christmas period saw records of uploads, pageviews, November to December saw month over month growth of over 10% — a big shift since in past years the holidays have been downtimes for our membership. Its hard to determine what has changed, I think its a combination of the relative growth in Europe (where uploads and activity has continued to grow through the holidays) and the fact that the internet and Fotolog are becoming more and more threaded into people's personal lives, and media experiences. Maybe its also a little bit about Florkey — Fotolog continues to make people feel special — its microfame of a form that Warhol could never have anticipated.

#Saying no is hard It is hard for young organizations to say no. No to possible partnerships, no to business development inquires, no to investors who think they understand your business. Yet saying no is what many small companies need to learn how to do. When you are still figuring out what you do and how you make money opening those questions to third parties can either grind you to a halt (partnerships are complicated), distract you into retrofitting a model that your partner understands but may not be right for you or just confuse you. Bob Pittman taught me how easily a mass of small projects that you leave unfinished or undecided can drown out the one's that matter. When I arrived at Fotolog one of the first thing we did was shut down many of the business development conversations the previous CEO had opened up. We might have missed a gem but shutting them down gave us the space to figure out what we needed to do. What we didn't have a chance to do at Fotolog was the automate the business development process. Once you get to a scale and can standardize your contracts along with your API's you can scale partnerships in a manner that doesn't require saying no to partnerships — everything becomes a test and trial.

#Integrating publishing and distribution into a seamless experience Fotolog taught me the power of melding a publishing capability with distribution. This is what Facebook did when they added the news/mini feed — all of a sudden your updates, activity on site was pushed to your friends — its an important lesson that many other user generated content sites could learn from. Media companies often separate these functions — which in turn skews value towards distribution. Social media networks are using a distributed audience to categorize and rank what is valuable and most interesting. Fotolog started doing this over five years ago — the form that Fotolog uses is simple but effective. When you publish a photo it appears on your page and in thumbnail form on all the pages of your friends. Since the average Fotolog user has 51 friends — each photo you publish is distributed through to 51 people, they in turn re-distribute it. Facebook introduced the news and minifeed structure a year and a half ago as a means to drive and distribute information accross the socialmap they were building. In 2007 the newsfeed became such an important part of the service that people are exploring Newsfeed optimization since only an estimated 0.2% of all submitted items get published into the newsfeed. Fotolog's approach was simple but it was and continues to be groundbreaking and in my opinion a core piece of innovation that is now spreading to the web as a whole.

#Working with an investment bank Several people asked me whether it made sense for Fotolog to engage and work with an investment bank. At Fotolog working with a bank, in our case UBS, was necessary. Interest in Fotolog spanned four industry categories (media, internet, cell phone and traditional photo companies) and three geographies (US, Europe and South America) — organizing inquiries from the matrix of companies that fit into these boxes was complicated to say the least. The UBS team did a fantastic job of putting out a broad net and pulling it in quickly to find out where the legitimate inquires were coming from — they worked tirelessly on our behalf. The transaction we ended up doing was technically a sale but it was also part merger, part recap. Fotolog had been through three meaningful rounds of funding and the cap table was more mature than the business was. The business needed both a direct ad sales capability and a micropayment partner in Europe — Hi Media gave us both. UBS worked with us to navigate our options, mindful of the stage of growth the business was in. Key investors — including myself — continue to hold stock in the acquiring company, not because of a lock up (there was none) but because we believe in the combined value.

# Working with an international audience is challenging This shouldn't be the case, for years the leading web companies in the US have talked about international growth, international commitments but in pretty much all cases international audiences are an afterthought for US companies. I think this is a mistake. The web offers means to reach and monetize audience outside of the US in ways that couldn't have been imagined ten years ago. Think about building a US based company that garners one of the larger audiences online that is pretty much all outside of the US and marketing and monetization are all executed within the platform, nothing needs to be local. Its pretty astounding. Looking forward as global GDP growth outpaces US GDP growth (3.9 percent versus 2.2 percent in 2007), as broadband continues to be available faster and cheaper outside of the US as innovation starts to happen outside of the US (vs. replication which is much of what has happened to date) — as all these things begin to come together international growth has to become a meaningful part of US companies growth.

#Google's scale and reach is astounding … Mid summer '07 we signed a deal for Fotolog with Google to add search to the Fotolog's member pages. The deal had many benefits — among them access to search services and greater transparency into Ad Sense — offering greater control over our our inventory. We learnt a lot doing the deal with Google and we learnt a lot executing on the deal. In doing the deal we learnt how far ahead Google is vis its rivals — I cant offer much more detail but when you dig into it their scale and footprint is astounding. In executing the deal we learnt that despite the improvements in transparency that we gained by entering into a direct relationship the Google platform is still hard to manage as a publisher, it's closed or maybe translucent is a better word — you get the impression that you know what is going on and why, but often its an illusion. This is a problem — as CEO I bet our strategy on Google's platform, applying it to our international audience to get us to break-even and beyond without having to scale up and ad sales team. In hindsight Fotolog needs to have a direct ad-sales capability to complement the networks — the Hi-Media deal gives us that capability in one fell swoop. The deal we did compliments our network capability in a way that we would have had to build if we hadn't decided to work with Hi-Media.

#The future of advertising & social media networks … Is still very much in its infancy. Yet there are indications that display advertising matched with technology that offers adequate cross network targeting could un-tap the value of user generated content sites. Targeting and conversion are real challenges for advertising on social media networks — the more engaged the audience, the more fluid the conversations, the less likely that on page targeting is going to work effectively. Yet companies like Lotame and Lookery are starting to use the data inherent in the structure of the social network to improve targeting and relevancy and hopefully conversion. It is early days but I believe there is promise here — so much so that betaworks has invested in both these companies). Let me offer a detailed example. If you look at Fotolog's PC gaming group over one month in 2007 the group received 500k pageviews. Yet it you look at the "virtual group or channel" — if you target gaming ad's to all the people who visited the gaming group in that past month — even when they are on other areas of the site the reach is extended to 100M pageviews. As Andrew Cohen likes to say "pictures of Aunt Edna might not be so easy to monetize but if you know all the places that people have been who are looking at Aunt Edna you might be able to influence and target where they might want to go next". I believe this holds promise.

Looking to 2008 there is much to do at Fotolog. Integration with Hi-Media is done — we started that back in August and completed much of it before we closed — and the fruits of integration are now coming forth. The team at Fotolog is pretty much as it was — Erik-Marie Bion and Andrew Cohen have taken over leadership (Erik Marie in Paris as CEO and Andrew in NY as the GM). Cyril, Emirik, David and the Hi Media team have been a pleasure to work with, truly. And now they have another great asset on their hands, I am excited to see what they and the team here in NY do. Thank you once again — I learnt a lot from you all.

V. Nice, from Adam

Quick post: someone asked me yesterday how Fotolog is doing growth wise in Europe  and then Scott sent me this chart.    Google trend analysis for search terms Jesus, Real Madrid and Fotolog — as you can see Flog is on somewhat of a tear in Spain.  Note flagged news items — F was clearly a driver of traffic, but E? ?

Early in the week Fotolog's Alexa rating nose dived:

And then 2 days later, we were up at #11 worldwide:

Alexa needs to start to operate more like a business.   They have a huge lead in terms of toolbar based traffic analysis — they might be a standard but the product hasnt evolved much, the toolbar is considered by many to be sypware and there is little to no customer service for publishers.   Quantcast and others are building businesses and Alexa is standing still.    There are quirks in there system that just need to be sorted out, like doubleclick is #200 or so — they have to be reading iframes and banners wrong to track that ranking.   As for our numbers, I know our geo mix is wrong — there should be a way for publishers and users to interface with Alexa.   We have settled back down to #16, a three month average of 21 — #11 was fun for a day.    

Just passed 10M member accounts on Fotolog.  What a year it has been, some community metrics / data points.   

• We have almost doubled our membership so far this year
• We hit Alexa #17 in the world yesterday (ahead of ebay!), average over the past week is #18, yesterday we were tracking reach of over 2%.
• Comscore recently logged us as having 4.5M daily unique visitors on a base of 10M member, and 15M monthly uniques
• Over 20% of our pageviews last month were from Europe.

And the adoption of new products has been very strong.   When we launched Fotolog Messenger three weeks ago we had 1.5M people try it out in the first 15 hrs.  As of Friday we had 3,193,618 members who had enabled the messenger feature, almost a third of everyone, who ever, over the past 5 years opened and used an account with us? ! That's, one engaged membership.  

Thank you to our members, thank you to our team in NY and thank you to everyone who helped make this happen — its a privilege to be part of this great social media network.   We are figuring out who is member #10M is and do something special.  We will also be launching more new features on Fotolog this week than ever before in our history — 10M or not, this was always going to be a big week!

Billy, creator of Downfly created something pretty interesting called Fichey.  He designed it as a navigational tool to browse links people had sent to you via Downfly, but this week Billy, Seth and I decided to launch it as an independent application .    A Microfiche inspired browse tool, that lets you browse popular sites.  Billy pushed it out last night and TechCrunch picked it up today.    A fun week in the press.

The launch last week of Facebook's platform initiative, F8, has generated a lot of talk, much of it in the mainstream press.  Its a compelling story, Facebook is becoming a platform, out maneuvering Myspace, doing to the web what Microsoft did to the PC.   Its a story we have heard before, it seems to recur periodically.  However, the announcement last week was mostly about distribution -  it didn't involve either deep or open access to Facebook data nor open access to its infrastructure.   F8 as it stands today is a partnering platform.  This one more small step in a long negotiation that is taking place between web sites on how data is owned, on how its shared between sites and how people navigate through services on one site to another.   This conversation is still in its infancy.  

XML really began the process of lateral data flows between sites and the vision of the semantic web offers a rich set possibilities — yet it's early days — most sites still operate in vaccum's and most user data is still stuck in proprietary silos.   And while the technology certainly needs to evolve so do the scope and kind of business arrangements.   The web of contracts, contracts between vertical sites, contacts between sites and users - needs to evolve in order for the vision of the semantic web to reach some of its compelling end points.   Weaving, back to the Facebook announcement.  What happens next is more interesting than what happened last week.    Facebook has taken a different approach to Myspace - who has opt'd to control much of its third party innovation through fairly simplistic interfaces and binary business driven rules, more like a traditional media company, vs. letting the community really build on top of the service in a meaningful manner.     As the Facebook platform evolves there are a handful of things I will be watching:

1. How deep are are the API's that Facebook is going to present to the community.    Facebook markup language is a proprietary API, the "platform" maybe wide in terms of distribution but its not deep, there is little to no access for third parties to the social data or infrastructure that makes Facebook such an interesting service, and its not open for developers to just build on, everyone accepted into the platform has to be sanctioned by Facebook, the degree of openness, real openness (vs. marketing gibberish) will dictate the depth and the value of the platform.   Amazon has done a great job at developing a set of platform services — starting with the affiliate model, extending it into community and then the Mechanical Turk and the elastic computing cloud services.  These web services were built step by step along with trust and a degree of openness that surprised many.    Pretty much every startup I work with today is using EC2/S3 — if Facebook going to have the same influence over the web application space, if so they need to open up more than a distribution funnel. iLike's weekend server hunt demonstrates a need on the infrastructure side, but the is also a real need re: social data.    Offering Facebook users the ability to port social data, their social network across applications and letting applications developers innovate on top of that data set would be really interesting.

2. How will the application metaphor evolve?   I see the metaphor Facebook has applied as the most interesting thing in the announcement last week.  The web has spawned many interesting platforms for micro application development.    Applets, plugin's -  from Wordpress to Firefox to Myspace there is a an active ecosystem of development around many web sites.    But the term application suggests user control beyond a widget or plug-in, applications are often monolithic, the management of applications by the underlying OS is usually benign and in service to the application (get me that device driver)  — the term application presents a high bar for Facebook to jump over.    To me the use of the term suggests a rich set of API's and a clearly defined layer - a layering of both technical and business terms.   Its an exciting challenge to see if they can make this truly an application environments.   And if they do, what is Facebook's relationship to these applications?   The identity issue below is only scratching the surface of this question.   It was fascinating to me that in the announcement last week most of the mainstream press look in the rear view mirror for metaphors — this was going to be like windows was to the PC.   I hope not — we don't need another OS, what we need are open development platforms — and open access to data.    I did a lot of work on platforms a long time back — back in 1998, I invested in a company called WebOS that tried to go down the path of applying the desktop metaphor to the web, of duplicating the inadequacies of the desktop on the web.    There were few people comparing last week's announcement to Adobe's Apollo — Apollo is setup to be a more traditional, extensible platform.  One of the companies I am working with — im in like with you — is developing much of its service in Apollo.   Apollo is truly a web application environment — offering state management outside of the browser, for example Apollo will let me do my web mail while I am unconnected.  But Adobe is building this as a platform service, like Flash the intent is to proliferate the tool set across the web, developers will adopt it as will end users and like Flash it will provide revenue from scaled developers paying Adobe a license fee.   This is a platform business model that the market understands.   A cross platform run time isnt as sexy sounding at F8, but it might be more meaningful.  And then there is Firefox 3 — another valid comparison that didnt seem to come up in many discussions.   

3. How will application providers be promoted in Facebook?   This is critical to understanding the underlying business terms between the distributor and the application creator.   Last weeks announcement was about distribution, and it formalized an approach for Facebook partners, business development in a box, a highly scalable approach to partnering.     But what are the underlying economic drivers?     At AOL promotion and positioning was usually governed by dollars spent.    At Google it now seems to be about long term strategic value: years ago the Google services that were tiled above search results - were best in class - for finance related searches (search for a stock ticker), Yahoo finance was promoted, Mapquest was the default when you searched for a location.   Then slowly over time Google services received prominence equal or better to others.   Today its pretty much all Google services upfront, in default positions — nice to leave some pointers for competitors but as Google knows well defaults drive traffic and traffic drives revenue.  

Last week the COO at Facebook, Owen Van Natta, said:  "How are we promising not to trump your application? We're going to level the playing field, developers won't be second-class citizens–we're going to compete directly with them."   Accordingly, the Facebook application directory is organized today mostly by popularity — but mostly is different to always. 

See the ringed sections of the screenshot — unlike third parties Facebook applications don't list the number of users of its applications (Marketplace is a Facebook application).    And note the that Application directory (boxed) starts with Facebook's top Applications.    Finally, as the users expands and contracts the application list (the more carat, where the arrow is pointing) Facebook's one advertisement on the page moves down, partially below the fold.  Tell me this execution isn't setup to collide with business priorities.

In Japan, on the cell phone, Do Co Mo understood that with a limited UI placement of third party services needed to be ranked by usage.   Is Facebook headed down the same path — and what does the COO really mean?? — Facebook owns this garden, competing directly with application providers is going to be, interesting.

4. How will Facebook manage identity and data across third party applications?   Some sites promoted in F8 seem to be managing identity independent from Facebook, others are doing a one click install and sign in (but even in the case of Mosoto, you are signed in for chat but to file share you need to sign in again?).    Does Facebook become a alternative identity broker on the web and if so they are going to have to a lot more open in their approach to data — open ID is a pretty high standard.      Facebook has traditionally had a fairly rough privacy policy — they gather a lot of data about their users and there has been a fair amount of controversy about it.    As they manage data across applications this is only going to get more challenging. 

5. Lastly, how does Zuckerberg social graph extend beyond the core college audience / behavior?   The feed feature added a whole new dimension to Facebook and extended the time people were spending on the site significantly, Comscore data suggests it went up by over 5 mins per day.   Fotolog has a similar, feature that alerts users to new uploads by friends — its a significant driver of our navigational based traffic.   But how does the audience and the use cases evolve beyond the core?   Will people outside of college enter in real names into profiles and will the social dynamics of the broader audience fit with the services that were built for the student based audience?   Over the past year I have started to use LinkedIn more — its starting to become useful, the network is large enough, the alerts I get from LinkedIn are useful — not spam.  I signed up for Facebook shortly after they opened up — but I didn't go back, till friends started inviting me.   Over the past 6 months I have visited the sites to confirm friends but there is nothing useful about Facebook as yet, and useful aside it better be either personal or entertaining — but like so many other social networks its about collecting connections, but whats are the services that are going to drive usage for me — I don't see it yet.   

This is a quote from Giga Om's review post the launch event, its worth a slow read.   "Zuckerberg says you can serve ads on your app pages and keep all the revenue, sell them yourselves or use a network, and process transactions within the site, keeping all the revenue without diverting users off Facebook. This was the opposite to what was stated in the WSJ article earlier this week, and gets by far the biggest reaction from the crowd."  

This got the biggest reaction from the crowd??  Maybe a crowd packed with Web 2.0 service and feature developers who are in need of an audience found it it interesting.    If a user today opt's in to use your site on Firefox — or your application on windows — or even within the grandfather of walled garden's AOL — you still get to keep the ad-revenue.  So why is this a big surprise?  Maybe the attention the announcement garnered is also about the proliferation of web based features searching for a destination to marry themselves to.

Intent and that Telegraph Road

I do think its worth do ask whats the intent behind the Facebook announcement, who is meant to serve and whats the need behind the F8 initiative?    The Facebook was launched as a service for US college students.   It was full of social tools, it let you build out your own network, post events, notes, photos and most importantly its all private, so that students can develop a profile that is real vs. many of the fantasy based profiling you see on Myspace and other sites.   Facebook achieved a lot of its early traction for the same reason as Cyworld did– you could enter your College, your year and actually find friends, colleagues, friends to be, cruches etc.  Because people used real names on the service — emails were verified by domain and you could find anyone in your university.   This was and is a big idea — few sites have a relationship based with their users that maps to real identities.     Anyone who has attended a US university or college knows exactly what this is about. Then came the monetization.  

Facebook started with advertising, they achieved some remarkable successes by mid 2005 they became profitable, they had 2,000+ colleges and 20,000+ high schools on the service.   And the audience was rabidly engaged — 2/3rd's of the active membership came to the site everyday.     But look at Facebook's reach through 2006 — it is flat, because by 2006 they had tapped into an audience and grown the business about as far as it could go given its natural limitations: students.    They were now faced with the question of how to scale your business beyond its base.   They could go global — there are services like FriendsReunited in the UK and Australia who are demonstrating, albeit with differences , that the market exists outside of the US for a Facebook like service.    And /or they could opt to extend the scope of the Facebook offering and try to reach a broader audience in the US beyond students.   They decided to push on both fronts but most significantly in September last year Facebook opened up to users irrespective of whether they were in school or not.   In 2007 Facebook's reach more than tripled.  Before they opened up the doors to the broader audience they were adding 15,000 members a day, today they are adding 100,000 a day (NYT stat, note Fortune says 150,000 a day).  They now have 24M active users, posting mostly Photos, notes and events.

But now reach has extended they need to find ways to get people to spend more time on the site.  Here comes the platform initiative.  The platform that was released last week is about extending Facebook in a different manner to the other social networking sites.  Its about continuing to extend Facebook features by offering distribution of third party applications on Facebook.  Yet the features been added are contained within the Facebook experience.   Out the gate its a great opportunity for fledgling sites, particularly sites that are more of a feature than a destination — Facebook is offering one click installs for applications within Facebook. Its about distribution and its about continuing to drive the amount of time people are spending on the site, which in turns drives advertising.  Facebook is playing the same game as media aggregators have played since the dawn of time.    Whether its Disney, Yahoo or AOL — its all about getting in front of the distribution firehose — they are selling their audience.   Day 1 its not setup as a sale.   Remember that AOL used to pay service providers to offer content and services within the walled garden — then in 1996 when AOL hit a scale it stopped paying providers and started charging — bit by bit AOL flipped the model.  This all seems far less interesting and ambitious than the headlines suggest.   Zuckerberg told Kirkpatrick that what Facebook is unveiling would be "the most powerful distribution mechanism that's been created in a generation."  I hope its is more than that.     If Facebook's F8 is about trying to extend the size and scale of innovation and services in what amounts to another a walled garden experience it will another building block in the long history of web hype.  The Facebook has a great social platform to build off, I hope they are brave enough to let their users take their data and extend services beyond their control, beyond the walled garden.  

A last point worth making is the absence of Microsoft, Yahoo, Ebay and AOL in the platform / social networking space.     Live.com was meant to be a web development platform — but things hewed back to Windows with the launch of Vista.  Microsoft developed much of the thinking behind the web as a platform — with hailstorm and then live.com — but IE7 and Live haven't taken the lead.   Yahoo made all these great acquisitions, many of which they they have left in silos and failed to build upon.    Ebay has this amazing social / trust network that links merchants and end users.    We think of profiles as been specific to social net, but Ebays profiles as they relate to trust and commerce and communications (skype) are a trove of data that could be opened up to users, applications and the web as a whole.  And the merchant relationships, what about extending them into advertising.     Like wise with AOL — there was a recent comment about the importance of opening up AIM, again…     Its amazing to see the leaders of earlier generations of the web MIA — gone from this social networking race.

The semantic web needs to be distributed at its core, another walled garden is too low a bar for a really powerful and interesting social network to aim for.  I hope Facebook actually step beyond the marketing hype and deliver a social platform for the web.

Today is Fotolog's 5th birthday — a few words, and some images to mark the day.   It has been an amazing five years for Fotolog.  The history of the site is fairly straightforward.    Fotolog was started in mid '02 by Scott Heiferman.   Adam Seifer came on board soon after and took over the project and Scott focussed on building Meetup.   

The vision of the service was to cater to new picture taking behavior — as people were starting to adopt digital cameras the use cases around the capture and processing of images was also evolving.  Pictures have always been social - but the digital world was giving images a whole new social dimension.  Fotolog was created as a social media network — the genesis was Photo Blogging, the result was a mixture of social networking and user created media sharing.   This is what Scott's original Flog looked like:     

The layout of Fotolog, was and is intentionally simple.     Fotolog has resisted the temptation to add feature after feature — rather it has stuck to offering a handful of features, similar to Craig's list the focus has been on the content and the conversations.    From the early days Scott and Adam had the vision that the pages on Fotolog needed to be social.    They needed to include not only your images, but also images from across the network, providing a visual navigation that today drives much of the time our members spend on the site, a self formed, organic distribution system, letting members see and be seen.    Complementing this social network of images they added comments and guest book entries — making the experience one where media intersects with communications, day in day out, millions of images collide with billions of conversations.     The growth of Fotolog has been steady and consistent — but it took 2 years to gather real steam — as the chart below illustrates.   In early 2005 we hit a million members — amazing to consider, since we are now adding close to a million a month.  

The phenomena started in Brazil.   Adam will tell you that in those early days he was concerned that Fotolog might get stuck in Brazil, Portuguese isn't a global language.   But Brazilian's have turned out to be a strong early indicator of global internet phenomenas — from ICQ to Hotmail to Okrut to Fotolog, Brazilians seem to have a knack for early adoption of global social platforms.  The Fotolog audience started skipping geographies and borders and today we sign up members from approximately 70 different countries everyday.    Our audience is still very large in South and Central America and we have complemented that base with strong European growth.   The primary language of Fotolog is images, beyond that the chatter around the site includes and mixes many different languages.  

This is what the home page looked like when we hit a million members.   Its not that different to what the home page looks like today — again, simplicity and consistency has mattered to the history of Fotolog.  

Out of interest I checked how many of the 15 members with images above were still active on Fotolog.    A quick check of member names and recent posts indicated that nine of them have updated Flogs in the past six months.    Four of them have updated their Flog in the past 3 weeks — juju15 , lepadilha, tabata, mash — its amazing that after years members are still coming back and using Fotolog to share their world 

Yesterday we had 673,150 uploads to the site — with our regime of one photo a day and 8.3M member accounts that means that yesterday a little over 8% of the people who have ever signed up to the site, uploaded a photo to Fotolog.    That doesnt included all the members who just visited friends Flogs — but to have 8 percent of your membership coming back everyday is pretty engaging and pretty amazing.   Fotolog also hit #18 on Alexa earlier this week — our highest ranking ever.   The traffic on the site continues to surge — our reach continues to grow (see a ranking vs. facebook), and for people who want to relate us to other US photo sites (which I always say is a poor comparison, given that Fotolog is about self publishing and socializing and photo's just happen to be the medium, they aren't the end), see the relative traffic rankings over the past three years, vs. other photo sites, Photobucket is picking up share, Flickr seems to be flatlining, and Shutterfly is still a seasonal processing site.     Fotolog is a testament to the creativity the internet has unleashed — millions of people sharing moments of their lives through images and conversations.  

A thank you from the team in NY to all of the people and all of our members who have made this global collage of conversations possible.  

And read Adam's Birthday post here .    

I went to see Ted Leonsis’s film Nanking this week. It is a hard movie to write about, let alone see. The film documents the rape of Nanking, an event that I thought was named as a metaphor for a city that was pillaged. Pillaged it was but the people were also indiscriminately raped. It’s an awful, gut wrenching documentary of human nature and war. It is also a story of eight or so people who managed to save hundreds of thousands of lives — but there is little to no glorification of their roles, its told upfront, in your face, the words are taken directly from the diaries of survivors. Disasters of this kind are usually told from a distant, sanitized, and historical perspective. This movie does none of the above — similar to Spielberg’s Shoah documentary. Amazingly one of the people who saved so many was the head of Siemens — a Nazi. I also didn’t realize the dates of the massacre — this was 1937/38 — a full year before the start of WW2. Seemingly we leant nothing, would things have turned out differently if this history had been documented and telegraphed around the world?

A few people asked me — should I see it? I think its a personal decision that warrants a few minutes of thought. We are at war today and almost everything we see if filtered through the sanitized lens of our media — this film is about war and the depths of human depravity, its not nice and the loose ends aren’t tied up in a way that gives you any closure. The bravery of a few people is a small measure compared to the depth of evil that is documented. I never understood the degree of attention that rested on Koizumi’s decision to visit the Tokyo War Shrine. I now understand what an historical affront that was.

Finally, documenting the tools of war propaganda — so literally — was something I had never seen before. It’s clear why this history was never clearly documented or told in Japanese history books. Why the soldiers wanted the westerners out of the city before the military arrived. Seeing clips of Japanese journalist filming children getting candy from soldiers as the people of Nanking were been “liberated” — while nothing could have been closer to the truth. Even if you insist on discussing the many subjective truths that make up history — there needs to be some averaging, and history here has been seemingly devoid of any perspective. Nanking is a reminder to chew carefully before consuming any news media today. For that reason alone I think its worth seeing the film.

I am trying out the Canon TX1 hybrid cam. I am a big fan of hybrids — for the past couple of years I have used the Sony DSC M1 hybrid. This Canon promises a lot and thus far seems to deliver fairly well. The Camera is very stripped down and easy to use — but the ergonomics aren’t as good as the Sony, harder to hold and shoot with one hand. Stills are 7.1 pixels and other than the flash (which is weak) the stills are good. The face identification software does a really good job of finding faces — less clear whether the adjustments it does once it has found faces is worth much, but that strange allure of technology recognizing a human feature is enough to make one think it must be have some value.

Video is just weird. Canon promote this as an HD hybrid and sure enough the video is 720p, 16:9, 30fps. But it records in M-JPEG (Motion JPEG - basically a string of jpeg images?!). Hugely inefficient at encoding, gives you approx. 13mins of video on a 4 gig card? There is the advantage that you can pull a still from the video stream, which is kinda interesting if you want to wade through a gazzillon frames for the 1/30th of a precious second. But why M-JPEG, Divx or MPEG4? I suspect they wanted to (a) save on licensing fee’s — and (b) make sure the camera wasnt too good at doing video. The tension that hybrids have for Camera manufactures persist — if its too good then people wont need to buy two devices. But the choice is an interesting testament to how the plunging cost of storage continues to radically effect technology standards.

I wrote the following as a response to “Web 2.0 firms face unusual problem: too many customers a confusing article in the Mercury News (amusingly, since publication, the title changed to “Web 2.0’s global traffic dilemma”)

To the editor:

Try this for a headline: “San Jose Mercury-News faces unusual problem: too many readers.” You’re not likely to see it. The notion in your March 8 article, “Web 2.0 firms face unusual problem: too many customers,” is equally preposterous to anyone who understands the dynamics of media let alone social networks, where the addition of an member is even more valuable to the network. Not to mention the growing value of international audiences. The web, is becoming an increasingly international phenemena, as the US market matures and companies seek new audiences — that pesky other W is coming into focus.

My company, Fotolog is a very international web site — with 90% of our traffic outside of the US, we are the 29th largest site online. We are the third largest social network in the world, ahead of Facebook, behind Orkut and Myspace. Like Orkut our extraordinary growth started in Brazil but it then grew through all the other major South American countries to Europe. People in the US sometimes ask me whether Flog is really a social network. The experience on Fotolog is social, the media people discuss are photos — but if you consider that against each of the 200 million photos on the site there is on average 10 posts, you can see how social the site is. If you want to measure us as a photo site, today we’re larger than photo sites like Shutterfly and Ofoto with almost 10 times the page views of Flickr. But more important to me is our extraordinary level of engagement – nearly 20 percent of our members visit the site every day, spending approx 24 minutes a day with us — thats the social bit again. How did this happen? Is it the viral nature of the site, its stripped down wikipedia like simplicity of the site, or the fact that images, the media type that drive the conversations on Fotolog are undestandable to a global audience. The answer is not clear, but the service has become a global phenomena and the exchange of social capital across the network is clearly a key driver of our viral growth. Each active member brings non-linear value to the network, from wherever they come.

Beyond its misconception of individual member value, the article was also off in dismissing the international audience. A glance at the headlines – MySpace’s international expansion, Google’s deal this past week with Friendster, the number of European cross-border acquisitions – all underscore how web companies are looking beyond our borders to find new audiences — as U.S. Internet user growth matures and foreign advertising markets develop rapidly. 2% yoy growth is what comscore recently tracked US growth to be. Okrut may be big in Brazil, but even in young geographies like Brazil, market data again contradict the articles assertion that “there are still no mechanisms for making money (online) in Brazil.” According to Zenith/Optimedia, Brazil’s Internet advertising spend will exceed $124 million this year this represents a growing share of a total (local) advertising market of over $7 billion. No mechanisms?, a little bit of data usually helps ground broad brush statements.

Fotolog’s place as one of a small number of social networks able to continually build audience across multiple geographies gives us a head start in the race for these rising global advertising revenues. Our international reach has boosted us into the top 30 in Alexa’s global rankings and top 20 in many countries as our audience has spread from the U.S. to Latin America to Europe. As the web becomes an increasingly global phenema its important for the US to continue to look outward and lead in that development. Google clearly views Orkut, as it views many of its business lines, through a long term lens. But even if they didnt, the assertion in the article that Google wouldnt keep Okrut betrays a lack of understanding of the economics behind these businesses. The operating leverage that I see in my business — one where a small amount of capital and less than 25 people have built a top 30 web site is extraordinary. Orkut is likely made up of Orkut and a few other people. Newspapers for one — would die for that kind of operating leverage.

Lastly, the article manages to blur a critical area of national competitiveness — as the web becomes increasingly international its important for us to look beyond our borders for innovation as well as audience growth. Our friends in “old europe” are buying for less than $30, 20 mpbs broadband connections with telephony and video thrown in for free. The proliferation of thick broadband pipes is driving innovation in places the US would typically lead. In the past quarter two of the video offerings to gain the most attention — Joost and Babbelgum are both coming out of “old europe”. The rest of the world is becoming more than just another audience, its also another platform for innovation.

It’s a big world out there and Silicon Valley is at its best when its looking outward for opportunity and change, not inward.

Sincerely,

John Borthwick

CEO

Fotolog

(turns out they only accept letters of 150 words or so, so the press team cut this down to size)