There is all this talk going on about Path uploading address books and privacy here privacy there. I understand the fact that Startups push too far from time to time and Silicon Valley believes to have the right to shoot first ask later. But to be honest… there might be something wrong in my head… But I am by far more xkcd-like enraged about a more fundamental thing. Telephone numbers and address books suck as a system.
Telephone numbers are a disgrace to our generation.
Addressbooks show what happens when technology providers start to make money too quickly and to easily. They get lazy and stop fixing underlying problems in their concepts.
If you think about it telephone numbers are IP addresses and Address books are your local /etc/hosts. You spend ages to type any potential IP address you might want to use into this textfile and whenever you get a new IP from your friends you go like “oh giggily i need to add this like right now”. It feels like the early days of dialup hackers all over again doesn’t it?
But you don’t stop there - you invent this whole infrastructure of software, cables and tools to synchronise this /etc/hosts file over all your devices. You have all this magic going on just to simplify this. Like seriously? What’s wrong with us that we even do that.
Telephone numbers are a disgrace. They are a system that never bothered to evolve.
Of course they tried to fix it. Damn they even killed trees for it.
Telephone numbers need a DNS system!
I have friends that have three numbers in their signature. US, UK, local-european-country-no-one-knows. This whole system assumes I want to call their cellphones. Which is not true - I want to call them. The people behind that numbers, simcards and devices…
The real traveling salesman problem is not to find the quickest route between points. Thank you cheapairlines for fixing that. The biggest problem is being contactable when you are reach these points. Or for the office to contact the traveling salesman.
The first thing when my plane lands ? SIM cards juggle.
You want to call me? It’s my UK number. No wait it’s my european numbers. A no wait you couldn’t know but I am in NY.
Who cares you can contact me via twitter at anytime.
It’s not that it is not possible to handle this useless system of having to store random numbers in abstract databases to connect to remote devices when i actually just want to speak to an human person. It’s possible to handle this. Millions of people do. Every goddamn second.
I am angry on a system view point of view. It pisses me off deeply when I look at it from an abstract view. I am a developer I want products give sense to things bigger than just the mere ok-its-working-use-case.
Addressbooks need a distributed system (like facebook has)
We need a change. We need a player to step in an introduce a new system. Telecom providers can be happy about it. They are infrastructure providers that confused themselves to be customer service providers. And they never really where that - yes i am looking at you British Telecom. They provide the cables and the technical infrastructure. You pay your internet cables, you pay to get IPs but pay different people to get your Domain name. Did you ever bother to update a DNS record of a site you wanted to visit to its new IP ? No? Why not? Because it would be brain dead wouldn’t it. Telecom providers get out of the way. Please.
Update/Edit: to clarify what i want:
Unique IDs that are callable no matter where the other person is… (like email addresses - happy to use e.g. http://facebook.com/andreasklinger for that or any other host + name system to avoid nickname clashes)
Dynamic updates to the address book. Similar to facebook (if not even done by facebook).
Who can save my sanity?
Your Social Address Book Startup ?
Bring it on. So far I only saw fixes to the faults no redesigns of a to-me broken system.
And I am serious. Send me the startups you know that fix my pain via twitter and I will add it to this blog article.
Skype?
Ok now seriously for 10 seconds. This might be even possible because of the windows phones. But let’s be realistic for another 5 seconds. A big clumsy company got acquired by a bigger clumsy company. Done.
Google introduced Google Voice. It’s simplifing the system Instead of 5 numbers per human entity I only need to store one. And jokes aside thats by far better. The problem? International people who want to call me will have to call a remote number and pay my overheads. But Google come on you can solve that.
Facebook?
Facebook can solve that problem. They got telecom providers to implement 0.facebook.com which is basically saying let’s screw your big data deals. They got facebook apps in every half smart phone. They can get the current number from the device and update the facebook phone number automatically for the user. People can already call their friends today by clicking on the phone icon in the friends list. Many hardware/software providers automatically sync the facebook friends phone numbers to the normal address book. What facebook needs to do (imho) is to split that telephone part of facebook like the messaging part and see if they can accelerate adoption by that. Get traction and take over the world.
Commerical Break: Vox.io?
There is a crazy silicon valley/silicon slovenia company that basically does Skype in a browser. They are a fellow seedcamp company. They are called vox.io.
When you start using it you realise how outdated Skype actually is. “You want me to… download a client?… and store my contacts… to call pinky2000?”
But their current strategy is not to kill Skype. It’s to replace phone numbers with URLs by putting real phones on the other end. Tomaz the founder of Vox.io said in his good-as-if-it-was-paid wired article “Before youtube we used to send each others videos via email and people opened it in real time player or quicktime and nobody questioned it. Then youtube came.” If you apply the same logic to phonenumbers it makes complete sense.
Similar to facebook where people still have to have me in friendslist to access my phone number hidden behind the URL www.facebook.com/andreasklinger they provide a simple url where you can call people with one click. The real fun with flags starts when you think about alternative use cases like “One-Click-link-to-join-phone-conference-emails” or “Ok-bro-pitch-me-but-only-once-i-am-dave-mcclure-throw-away” URLs.
Can they do it? Who the hell knows. It’s a global problem of decades of epicness. They might have the potential but not the power. I bet that Google or Facebook looks close to acquire them.
Btw:
Facebook you did a coop with skype? Seriously? I tried it.
I WAS DOWNLOADING A JARFILE, IN 2012, BECAUSE OF YOU. I HATE YOU FOR THAT. And even as I managed to get it working, my other end of the line didn’t.
Anyway
I get this really aggressive passion when I see stuff that makes no sense to me. I hope someone in the world understands me for going mental on this. If yes please let me know. I feel crazy.
Send me suggestions. This is fixable and I am pretty sure a lot of people already fixed it but I am too blind with rage to see. Please post your suggestions to the HackerNews comments or send them via twitter.
Every epoch in the history of humanity had a raw resource that became the key to commercial success that time. Similar to companies that once sourced and refined silk to textiles, energy to electricity, or ore to steel, we now have companies that sourced and refined data to something useful. In the information age, data is the new steel and to find new forms to refine or apply it generates new opportunities for the whole market.
It is common knowledge that the next big opportunity is not in refining information in general but the manipulation of it in real-time. I first misunderstood this shift as just the “faster” version of working with information. But it is – at least in my humble opinion – far more than that. It is something new - it is a new phase of the information age - The real time information age.
About twitter…
This week I spoke with the brilliant @isasun - Twitter’s Germany employee #1. During the discussion I realized that Twitter has fundamentally changed its base. She basically smiled and watched me while I stumbled from “how is it to be at… you know… twitter” to “OMG this is awesome”. Because something happened I didn’t expect to happen ever again: I am excited about twitter.
At this year’s DLD@Jack didn’t use the word social – he merely spoke about conversations. Twitter is about real time data and its distilling to real time editorial content.
This is the reason why they want to control the presentation to end consumers and this is the reason why they de-emphasise on the social aspect of it.
Robin Waters made a great interview with @Jack. But he missed what Jack tried to make him excited about. It’s not the “working business model” of ads, it’s not that he works double shift and Twitter and Square. Hell seriously nobody cares for ads and he wouldn’t go back if he wouldn’t see something big.
Our goal is delivering relevant content to people, instantly. This sounds simple but is in fact extremely complicated to pull off in real-time. We want to bring you closer to what’s happening in the world, and we have a lot of work to do…
From real-time delivery to real-time editorialization…
With the relaunch twitter moved from the focus on real time distribution and interaction to real time “content editorializing” the activity of processing data into understandable context. This purified real time data will be a highly valuable asset in the next 5 years. In this space twitter is in the best position to be.
In the real time information age twitter might be bigger than google!
Their content source – their ore/their tweets - is highly socially curated, highly contextualized, summarized and location-aware content – it’s perfectly prepared.
Their final product – the “Discover” area - is the perfect playground to find out how far you can automatically (via social curation) prepare content for editorial consume. Their communication tools are still the only transparent global channel in social media, connecting the people around a topic and therefore contextualising and verifying topics.
The new section “Discover” moves twitter from being the place where news are discussed and distributed to the place where news are consumed and it pushes twitter to be the first real time press agency worldwide. Within the next 5 years they will supply all media houses. In the real time information age twitter might have the purest steel, the finest silk cloth, they have the purest real time content.
Shit… Twitter is exciting… again.
Commercial Break - Teleportd.com
As a sidenote: Maybe i am so excited about real time news because i have seen first hand how interesting these can be. A fellow seedcamp company called teleportd works hard to become something like reuters for real time images. They categorizes photos based on social and location in realtime and watch for stuff happening outside of the signal to noise baseline. And trust me: If something is happening right now in front of your eyes and you only see the relevant signals not the blurry noise - it is interesting! - trust me.
The next (possible) steps:
Twitter already started to launch “hotspot“ pages for every current topic which summarizes the topic, includes all forms of media and provides an introduction into this news based on relevance.
Twitter will introduce twitter alerts that inform media houses automatically if events are happening right now. They will provide them with the information in a structured and qualified form. They will use social annotation and social proof to provide verifications of sources to the media houses.
Twitter will provide media houses with easy to use tools to moderate the realtime content. By that they minimize the time media houses need until they can monetize the news. Media houses will get tools that (By social and semantic context) will pre-moderate real time content to safe and verified information bytes they can show their users.
The Old Press Agencies and the Future Media Houses
Classical press agencies will focus on what they focused on anyway lately – being copywriters for publishers that can’t cover all topics with their own resources. Only the few press agencies that can better beat twitters speed with quality will survive in the sourcing game.
Media houses will do what they always focused on. Gather, qualify and contextualize sources of information and bring them into bigger pictures. But twitter will become their number one source for content.
It’s 2012 – We have moved from the information age into the real time information age. And in the real time information age Twitter might be bigger than Google. Twitter is no longer the forever-second in social media. The game is changing. Right now.
Thanks to @lifftl for reviewing this article and helping me to get my brain-dump-overload into order.
Please let me know know what you are thinking by contacting me via twitter or commenting in the hackernews discussions.
Until then go play. The Internet is awesome.
— Andreas
Ps: I bet a full case of beer that Twitter acquires Teleportd this year, unless google beats them to it. These guys fit perfectly in Twitter’s current strategy. I am pretty sure they will teleport into the blue bird’s nest quite soon.
Last week @robfitz asked me on short notice to join a panel at #foundersexchange about what first time founders shouldn’t do. I quickly took a moment to write down some suggestions into my moleskine to prepare myself. Things I witnessed in our company and things I noticed in other startups.
That “some suggestions” became a full page and that full page became a monster that had almost no free white space left. It was so full of stuff we did, it was ludicrous. It was dark like the night and microscribbled as if I hated that poor moleskine page.
My message at the panel was simple: “Don’t be a first time founder…” – or at least not the kind of first time founder I used to be ;)
After a gentle push by Rob and Sal I decided to share those first time founder mistakes we did publicly. I hope you can learn a thing or or two (to avoid) from this. If you have been through your first startup maybe you see yourself in some of them as well :)
I have to admit that some of the items are a little bit more specific to what I did wrong. So maybe you didn’t see yourself in all of them. Although several of those mistakes contradicted my instincts even back then - I still did them. And this simple fact shows me how much I fundamentally needed to learn.
We have been working on our Startup for 3 years now and there were more reasons that it should have collapsed than I can think of. But we have survived and have (hopefully) grown a lot since then. Maybe that is why it feels like I work already in my second company. But maybe I am just still very naive…
Commercial Break: A new event format for London
I strongly advocate speaking openly about things I did wrong - and I advise you to do the same. Maybe it’s because I am better in seeing my mistakes than the things I did right. And maybe it’s therefore easier for me to share at least the things you shouldn’t do instead of things you should do. But learning from failure is imho always worth sharing.
If you want to share you own failures or want to learn how to avoid those, join the upcoming meetup of London’s new event format Failboat. It’s no VC, no Press, no bullshit. Just founders talking straight honest.
You?
I am pretty sure you did some of the things I mentioned above. And I am quite certain you did some other ones as well…
I am happy to extend the list - What’s your list of “sh*t first time founders” do.
Let me know via twitter or in the Hackernews comments .
Until then. Go play. It’s only failure if you don’t stand up ;)
Edit2: Until now I had only two kinds of feedback: “I did a lot of these…” and “Those things are obvious aren’t they…” guess which feedback was by first-time founders ;)
Since the launch of platform, Facebook has the approach of shipping features early, very early. They ship first, ask later and document even further later. And I, personally, love them for that. Back in the days you used to find half or non documented features in their API or libraries on a daily basis. Every time you find one of those little gems your product owner brain goes all sparkly and happy, it jumps for joy and you see the future of the web unfolding in front of you. And done right - given facebook’s leverage in size and fast distribution - those little new possibilities usually open huge possibilities for your product. This is the fun part about being on the bloody edge of web innovation.
Move fast, break things and look stupid.
The Open Graph
Facebook is building the graph for the social web, the social layer that explains interactions beyond Network, Presentation or Application but People. All technology of the last year leads to new achievements in society – like being able to see who listens to Justin Bieber. This is beautiful.
Tamas insists that someone was using his laptop during that time.
Disclaimer: I tried the plugins, they were not yet fully working. So please take everything with a grain of salt. Keep in mind that the job of the product owner is to think forward and to have everything ready – so that your product will be one of the first to implement.
The new Activity Feed, Facepile and Recommendation Box.
Showing human faces show to a new visitor generic social proof and therefore increases the confidence in your service. If you can show friends you are adding trust and peer pressure into this mix.
Previously you were able to show to new visitors of your site which of your content objects have been liked by their friends. This is great. But to truly leverage this in your product you needed to have the like button as a central part of the product UX. Apart of media services, like newspapers and galleries, the like button never truly got part of a product’s core user flow. Therefore, in most cases, it was just reduced to a (very powerful) friction less version of the share button.
With the Version 2 of the activity feed, facepile and recommendation box you are now able to show the actions that happend within your app. It enables you to show which of the visitors friends actually USED your product or even better specific features of it. Without you actually needing to know anything (especially no register or login) of the visitor.
Facepile - How to use this in Lean Startups.
The old usecase: Call to action for register (or core action of your app).
Example
“Hey you, register on Examplify now! 50 of your friends are already using Examplify”
This is nothing new and is easy possible by using the APP ID as parameter for facepile:
With the new facepile you can provide the actual content element and the action the user did.
Examples
Soundcloud: This song has been listened 200 times and among others these friends listened to that song.
Kickstarter: 400 people pleged, among other these friends.
Why is this useful? If you app is done right, it is highly likely that more people actually use the core of your app than just like it. Eg. More people will listen to a song than “like” one specific song.
Make a marketing campaign where you have to XYZ (e.g. post something on facebook, or spend money for fresh water, play a game, join a activity group, etc).
Create a verb for that action.
Create your own landing page for that marketing campaign.
Show the friends who already did this specific action on that campaign page.
Bonus points: You can show the friends that started the campaign and the friends that completed the campaign! (Think:“Level 1: Anton Berta Carla, Level 2: Anton Berta, Level 3: Berta - Can you beat them?”)
I am pretty sure for many apps there is something big in here worthy to explore.
Bigger Better Alternate Usecase #2: Upgrades and Pricing for Saas
Your integration of FB connect is usually limited to fb:login and you want to keep it that way. You cannot be bothered with thumbnails or any other friendgraph information within you MVP - Your focus is not social, but social proof will always help conversions.
You have people using your test-mode, lowest or free plan.
You want them to upgrade.
You want to optimize your conversion on those upgrade pages.
Show the friends that upgraded to that price stage. If you really want to move the needle - why not just show them on your pricing page below the packages you offer?
Run it A/B. If it doesn’t increase your upgrade conversion I owe you a beer.
Bigger Better Alternate Usecase #3: Build your own like button - extend your widgets.
When you are done thinking about how awesome that would be think about how to extend your button-widget.
Not only show the “use-count” also show faces of the friends of the visitor using that app. Add that to your iframe widget and distribute that through the web.
Or:
Imagine you are Soundcloud (yes… that would be awesome i know…).
Now extend your player widget by showing who of the visitor’s friends actually played that song.
This is big. Actually bigger than the updates to facepile
Example Usecase: Music pages
Imagine you stumble upon an online radio because a friend shared a link– Eg. Mixcloud.com.
The player is very minimalistic.
You are here the first time.
You listen to this new song the first time.
The webproduct knows nothing about you (you are just a visitor).
But it is able to show you more music your friends have been listening to.
Music that you might care about. Even if not. It makes deep content accessible in a (basic but) qualitative way.
And remember: This is happening without you registering. You will continue to engage with that service. And the more you engage the more likely you are to stay sticky to the webservice.
And the big upside: If you do not have friends actually using that website. Recommendation and Activitiy feed have fallbacks and just show you which content elements of the website have been used the most.
‘Add this to timeline’ is (edit: should be) the new share button.
Since the roll-out of the like-button the sharebutton got less and less focus. Fun fact: Until now (in my experiments) sharebuttons drive more first-time traffic than any like button. Only the upside of the like button of less friction and an open backchannel keeps me using it.
Facebook introduced adding content to the timeline through their JS library at the last f8. If i understand it correctly: The Button is “just” a simple way for content publishers to integrate the same functionality without going mental in understanding what onclick means. And you do not have to authorise the app for that action upfront.
You will still have to add all values to your App settings, but i am pretty sure step-to-step guide will popup within the next 30 days.
But in general the effects as a sum are bigger. It means even small blogs will add customised content to your timeline. The can annotate edges and they can basically very cheaply enrich facebook timelines. Recipe websites can create little timeline gallery of dishes you cooked. From a product view this is beautiful.
Run an A/B – replace your share buttons with Add-to-timeline buttons. Test if people actually get it. If they do, they will create beautiful embeddings in their timeline without actually registering on your site. And more important: by that you can define those edges which you are afterwards are able to reuse with the plugins mentioned above.
We don’t see add-to-timeline as a replacement Share button - add to timeline is technically similar to the login button, in that it shows the auth dialog and lets a user auth the app.
But once a user has added your app to timeline (authd/logged in) then you can publish actions when a user clicks your own native buttons in your site - you can make your native actions social.
If I was designing, I’d put add-to-timeline in the right column and retain a share or like button next to my main content objects. Then I’d wire up Open Graph actions to my site’s native actions too.
I will leave this here for now. I personally disagree with this approach to think about it, but well i guess they know their stuff better ;)
Recommandation Bar
The Recommendations Bar is always docked to the lower right (or left) of the screen. When the page loads the Recommendations bar will be collapsed and the user will have the option to ‘like’ your page.As the user nears the end of your page, the plugin will expand. The expanded view will show the user a social recommendation of the next article to read on your site.
I wasn’t able to get the plugin running but to me it sounds like all those wordpress plugins about sharing. Might be nice but to be honest i am already sick about the dominance in design of the current social plugins. Facebook should rather work access to APIs for anonymous visitors instead of forcing their design patterns like with fb:comments or now with fb:recommendation-bar. But let’s see.
Why is this big for Lean Startups?
The new plugins help you focus on the core of your product. The core you actually want to iterate on.
But still - very cheaply - by using this plugins you are able to provide qualified deep content discovery and can easily offer social proof.
What is missing from facebook
Until now every creation within the Social Graph is meant to generate a visual content in facebook. Or simply put: You “post stuff on facebook” when you want to define edges within the open graph, between (people and) objects.
That’s good from a distribution point of view. That’s bad if your goal is to annotate your namespace of the Social Graph as good as possible. Example if you want to go into details.
I am pretty sure facebook will offer the possibility to create edges without actually posting something to facebook in 4-6 months. For now the usecase isn’t very obvious.
Summary
Facebook completes the circle with those social plugins and proves that they take their approach to the social web serious.
You as a product owner can optimize your product. You can define niches/features. You can personalize your website a step further very cheaply for non-registered visitors while actually focusing on the core of your lean startup.
You can keep users engaged and (hopefully) ultimately convert them.
How would you use those plugins? What obvious usecase am I missing? Let me know! Eager to learn. Please send me your thoughts on twitter or in the comments of HackerNews.
Facebook is building the graph for the social web, the social layer that explains interactions beyond 
