Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavs and sometimes polemic blogger, gives some great advice for entrepreneurs in this “bubble 2.0″ kinda world. Most of this probably applies in the downtimes as well. In summary:
I can definitely relate to number 1 and number 3. Number 2. seems like its part of number 3.
Esther Dyson, in her post here, talks about a company called Seriousity. Its been a while since I saw something this creative and seemingly applicable.
Giving “small company” like accessibility to larger organizations. This could even lead to some sort of digital reputation building within organizations.
The true future of the internet is not content devliery…. its pizza delivery!
Folllow up on my post Why Facebook is better than Myspace
Facebook has the opportunity to do something that very few other companies have the opportunity to do: Literally grow and mature with their users.
Many kids, high school and younger, start off with social networking sites like Myspace and Piczo. As high school kids get to college, a great social pressure pushes them to move on to Facebook. “Like, totally, Myspace and Piczo were so senior year of high school. We’re all on Facebook now!” These users may keep their old accounts to keep track of their old friends, but chances are that most of these high school friends will move on to Facebook as well. It is a right of passage, and it would be uncool not to follow the rest of the crowd.
These users then spend four years of college interacting with all their new college friends (on campus) as well as their high school friends that are now at other colleges (off campus). The Facebook addiction is reinforced by the collegiate atmosphere. “Facebooking” someone has become a standard part of the college experience and it has 4 years to sink in.
Now, as users graduate college and begin to outgrow their college needs (i.e. Where’s the party? What was that cute girl’s name? What are people doing this summer?), they will continue to use Facebook to interact with the people they met in college, but now they’re going to need a whole new set of tools as they face the real world. They are young professionals now, and the priorities will change.
One problem was, “Wow! I have a lot less time now, I can’t spend hours keeping up with people on Facebook.” Problem solved. Facebook news feeds, though polemic, take care of that in one fell swoop. I can log in, and directly on my front “home” page I can see the last days worth of activity from my friends. Sneak a peak at work, or scan it for a few minutes every night when you get home, and you can catch snippets of all your friends’ lives.
Next, I need to get my non-Facebook friends on Facebook. I am right in the gap where people any older than me did not catch the Facebook wave, so in order to not be stuck communicating with just the younger crowd, I’ve got to get everyone into Facebook. Well, Facebook is one step ahead and already took care of that by opening their network, and extending it to the workplace. They’ve even gone a step further by enhancing their picture posting functionality and offering a notes/blog feature for you to publish things to your friends.
These features are definitely a sign of Facebook growing with their audience. At the same time I’ve even noticed the generation gap being closed. People that were older than me in college and missed the Facebook trend are signing up for accounts as they realize they can reconnect with everyone. Reaching out beyond the “college only” crowd could greatly expand Facebook’s user base, and hopefully they’ll do this in such a way that it doesn’t alienate the college crowd, which is their core base.
From what I can tell so far, they are not relaxing any of the visibility privileges, and Facebook for colleges is still retaining its exclusivity. They need to do what MySpace can’t seem to avoid, and that’s keep out the creepy people.
Now that they still have the users attention in their new professional lifestyle, they need to take the next step and move into the enterprise/job space. Time to compete with the Craigslists, indeed.com, Monsters, Jobsters, and Linkedins. Not only can they compete with them, but also they have the opportunity to do it right. None of these sites have a strong and as demographically focused social network around it as Facebook, even if Facebook can touch the same number of people as Craigslist. In a recent post Steve Poland, a blogger at TechCrunch, writes about how bad current job websites are. He says,
In all honesty, finding a job online sucks. Indeed and SimplyHired have taken it to the next level by aggregating all jobs into one search, but I want to see a company come out and eHarmony-ize the job market. Make it so candidates go through a 15- to 30-minute application process that might include various tests related to their claimed skillsets. Allow recruiters to specify what skillsets are required and make them somehow rank the importance of the required skillsets.
I’d also like to see some social networking aspects along the lines of LinkedIn — allow people to refer their friends to jobs. Yahoo! could integrate HotJobs with their 360 service. Monster.com could integrate with the Facebook API to add some social networking. IAC has put a hault on acquisitions, but a jobs website seems like a good addition to their extensive consumer portfolio — their own Ask.com search engine doesn’t offer a vertical job search. Possibly an Indeed or SimplyHired acquisition?
LinkedIn never worked for me because there was no focus in my social network. On LinkedIn I have a few random people from a variety random encounters I’ve made in a variety of separate social networks. I don’t share a strong connection with these people and I don’t use Linkedin on a regular basis. Every once and a while I check the site when I realize that someone new I know is on LinkedIn, or that I need to update my profile/resume (which I haven’t done in months). But it doesn’t nearly have that stickiness Facebook does, which it could easily apply to provide the critical mass needed for a liquid professional job search/job referral site.
Whats the next question? Are these companies worth all this money?
Here are a few resources I’ve found on the topic so far, and I’ll do a full post on this sometime soon.
I have been having trouble with Del.icio.us lately.
All of the bookmarklets where too slow to tag on the fly, so i moved to using Pukka. This took care of the speed issues, and I was able to tag more material faster, and to multiple different accounts.
The big problems began when it came time for retrieving information from my database. When I’m looking for “that article that one guy wrote about that one thing that one time?” Then I can barely remember a tag or two, so what I really need is a fast way to scan through all of the bookmarks containing certain tags. I tried cocoalicious and delicious director, which where closer to what I wanted, but still not quite fast or flexible enough.
Then after another one of my rant’s about how delicious addressed the user’s selfish needs for better bookmarking first, before trying to sell the user’s on the social aspects, I decided I wanted to track down the blog post where I had originally read the idea. After a couple minutes of frustrating search through my delicious account, I decided to call for help. I went to the research machine. The guru of efficiently consuming and archiving data across the web. Rob Finn, of Ventureblogalist.
So, using gmail, I sent him an e-mail that went a little something like this:
Me:
Rob,
Quick question about an article we talked about during tech crunch. I was talking about delicious, and how you needed to have a service that speaks to a users selfish needs first before you sell them on the social aspects. AKA, the hook, the service needs to be useful on its own because people don’t go to delicious to share, they go to have a better way to manage their bookmarks, the social benefits were just an side effect.
Anyway, I’m trying to track downt he article that first said all of that. Any idea where it was?
Then His reply a few seconds later:
http://bokardo.com/archives/learning-more-about-structured-blogging/
How did he find it so fast!! He certainly didn’t use delicious. Well, I’ll attempt to get to the point. It turns out he had set up Google Co-op’s Custom Search Engine to search through all of the blogs he reads. As with me, most of the articles/links that get tagged into delicious probably came from these feeds, so its a safe bet that the Google Co-op search will turn up what you were looking for.
Sure enough. Search for two words “delicious” and “selfish”, and you get the Bokardo article as the first result! Hmmm, maybe that’s why Google is a verb. I love finding what I need with a few keystrokes.
Thanks for the great tip Rob. Google Co-op based on my feeds can be found below. I’m sure none of this is totally new or original, but I just didn’t have the time, energy, or brains to put this together sooner.
My name is Evan Bartlett, and I'm all about connecting people and finding better ways to do things. Every day life should be approached with the eye of an entreprenuer, so here's where I'll hash out my ideas on the intersection of sales, community, and product!
By day I'm working on a betaworks project called Allify, making tools for mobile app developers.
On the side I've just launched an iphone app called Matchbook with my buddy Jason. Its a new easy way to remember the restaurants, bars, and shops people recommend to you.
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