A LOT of fuss has been made over the transition to the facebook design in the last 60 days, and understandably it is a big change to make to over 100 million people. However, most of those complaining really don’t understand why they are complaining, they just want an excuse to create a group and get a million people on it (so they can possibly spam you or use it to promote other things).

So let me break it down for you in simple terms.

As a facebook user:
The new design means your apps will be able to have better experiences (more screen space for them to fill for you) on the canvas area (the space inside http://apps.facebook.com/whatever ).  The redesign also means your profile will be faster (not a billion boxes loading at once), which will make checking out your friends profiles less time consuming (less time = more profiles you can check out while at work).  It also means applications will be forced to engage with you, not just reward your friends for spamming you (sorry if that was your favorite aspect of apps).  So you should eventually get a richer experience out of the apps (the good ones at least).

As a marketer:
You now get more options on types of ads you can display to facebook users, you also get more engagement metrics to boot. But really the goldmine is in creating branding opportunities with the smart applications and application developers. Gone are the soft-touch applications that had a touch once and ignore forever relationship with their audience, you have to build truly engaging experiences to leverage the brand potential available to you.  The tabs on the user profiles are a perfect place for self-expression and brand affinity, you just have to grab it.

As a developer:
You unfortunately have the most work cut out for you, but who knows, maybe you can get renewed business out of reworking the apps you built before.  To a developer though, the changes are the most dramatic shift in the platform we’ve seen so far. You have to re-work the interactions and demands you are making of your users to build up something that has a more valid value proposition.  What incentive does your app have to bring its users back? What activities or enhancements are you offering them? Realistically good application design hasn’t changed much from the previous platform iteration to now, you just have less incentive to use BAD app design to promote yourself.  It also means this isn’t a real-estate grab as it once was, its an attention land rush. Attention we are going to learn is an incredibly valuable asset to possess in this new economy.

So what next? Where is this all heading? Well I think this all plays into my original theory of a multi-pronged approach, which I discussed a year ago. You need to use facebook as a net you are casting to engage users and drive their activities from wherever they are (in facebook our out) and figure out how to benefit from that traffic regardless of where it comes from.

I sit here late at night, on my 26th birthday no less, and reflect on where we are today.  I like to think that I am a fairly sharp individual, with a solid education and all that, but I came to realize something recently: what good is it to be capable of doing if you aren’t actively doing?  So in the spirit of change and progress I’ve decided that I am going to be more vocal, more active, and make an effort to effect change whenever possible.  This post is inspired by a recent post by Jeremy Schoemaker entitled “What is sticking your pecker out?“

The last 18 months have re-awoken the spirit of a rebel in me that I grew up believing I was.  I have always fancied myself a revolutionary at heart, though I probably wouldn’t fit the definition in the traditional sense.  In the last 18 months we’ve seen what can happen to our society when we allow people to let greed consume us, fear paralyze us, ignorance guide us, and leadership fail us.  We’ve seen the dollar fall, the housing market pop (you HAD to see that coming), the stock markets lose trillions in value, an unpopular war march on, and a ridiculous presidential race emerge. Now it hasn’t been all bad, we as a people have come together to help our fellow man in times of need, and many have been inspired by the symbol of change.

It is that change, the mere symbol of change, that has sparked this renewed spirit of enlightenment in me, and hopefully many others. When in the past many might have refrained from speaking their voices (a very troubling fact in my opinion) for fear of upsetting or offending people, now many share their views openly, and hopefully many more will follow their lead.  I for one was very tight lipped in the past about my support of liberal candidates and liberal policies for fear of upsetting people and having it negatively affect my business and personal lives.  Now though I know that by being tight lipped about my desire for change, or my disgust in the current political leadership (not limited to solely the executive branch), I was really giving in to the oppressive nature of the culture of fear we are allowing ourselves to submit to.  So with that in mind, I think that we cannot expect to grow as a culture and a society if we remain afraid to voice our opinions.  The old adage of “opinions are like assholes, everyone has one” might hold true, but if you keep your opinions to yourself aren’t you really just constipating yourself?

I’ve had a long fascination with observing trends people follow. Fads and trends intrigue me. Not sure why, probably has some sociological reasoning behind it. However there is something inherently valuable about being able to spot a trend before it becomes a fad. This insight is something not too many people understand.

One of my favorite professors at “The University” was an economics professor by the name of Kenneth Elzinga. He once said “anything you read in print has already had its influence on the stock markets.”  The same can be said of trends. Anything you see written about a trend usually means its already too late.  So what does this have to do with anything?  Well the point I am trying to make is that it pays to follow changes and observe them early on. Those who see the changes early enough can react to them and extract the most amount of revenue from them before the competition gets there.

Look at any early stage web business, if you see the risk takers who gambled on changes early on, when they were smart about it, they tend to have capitalized big time off these bets.  A venture capitalist is effectively betting on these changes hoping to bet on the right team that will sow the seeds of change in their respective industries.

So how do you keep a finger on the pulse of change? Sign up for trendwatching services (though if you believe the first argument, you are already too late, but you would be ahead of the mainstream press) such as trendwatching.com, trendhunter, springwise, and i’m sure there are tons of smaller ones throughout the web.  You can also monitor the media to see when something you thought was hot, was already on the cooling cycle (when you hear a 75 year old say he plurked you, then plurk has effectively jumped the shark ).

I like to keep my eye on lots of different sites as I see crossovers in trends that lots may be missing. Jason Fried of 37signals once told me years ago that he looked at architectural trends for inspiration in web design. So if you are looking for what the next big thing is, you better start scouring everywhere, even unlikely places, because I’m sure your competitor or future competitor is doing the same thing.

or why I haven’t continued building on the twitter platform

As many of you may know, my team at Infinimedia built one of the most popular twitter clients out there, Twitbin, which has over 35,000 users now. We were one of the first to build something along these lines (definitely not the first by any stretch), but we were clearly not the last or most popular.  Something interesting occured shortly after we built it: we stopped building.

You might be thinking, why is this even remotely interesting Brian? Well typically when we build something, we keep adding to it and improving it. With Twitbin, we have added a few things here and there, updated it to the latest versions of Firefox, etc., but we haven’t overhauled it or added anything major in a year. So we’ve been sitting on plans for a major overhaul + expanded offerings for something like 9 months, but we haven’t moved on it. Why? Well we couldn’t afford the time to something suffering from such instability. No matter how kickass we could make Twitbin 2.0, we would still be inundated with emails every time twitter goes down. If you’re building on someone else’s platform, whenever they are down, you are down. There is no way around that.

So will we ever start working on Twitbin2.0? Well thats a good question. We have a few options, but building something that makes money off of a service that doesn’t is inherently tough. We experimented with ads in our client, I think we made so little it wasn’t worth the annoyance it caused our users. But the underlying issue is reliability. We would love to invest the time and money in building out more creative and useful twitter tools, but at the moment there are other platforms which are more reliable and more money behind making them good long term bets.

I am not proclaiming twitter as a platform dead by any means. It will take ages for a plurk or a pownce to overtake twitter as far as utility (utility to me is the # of users on it x attention spent there). I am just thinking that its time to look back at the platform and all the platforms out there and measure their worth.  So I want to know what you think about twitter’s platform or any of the other micro-messaging platforms?

A year or so ago, Facebook unveiled something that has radically changed the landscape of the web and social networking sites in particular. As the first major and tightly integrated social network application platform (SNAP) to hit the market, Facebook was able to shift our expectations from what we had previously expected to get from a social site to something with theoretically endless possibilities. What emerged next, I don’t think even facebook had the foresight to predict.

I have a theory, and its that facebook didn’t want or expect the platform to become what it has. They had something else entirely in mind when they built it, and the upcoming changes to the metrics/engagement rules are proof of their original mindset. Facebook didn’t want disposable apps, they wanted people to add value, real value to the platform. Facebook was looking for people to find new ways to tie in the social graph data they were offering into new and useful tools. Facebook refers to itself as a social utility, not a network, and what does a utility do? It powers things. So what does facebook want to do? Power the web through social connections and relationships.

So what does the next generation of the platform have in store for us? Well to me it seems like they have taken a long hard look at the existing app usage, proliferation, and made a decision; one that many will find unpleasant. Facebook wants us to build things that improve upon their users lives: social shopping, social search, social recommendations, and maybe social gaming. Any activity that is improved by having your friends around is one that facebook wants to be a part of. So we’ll probably see this stuff percolating into existing sites as they adapt, but more than likely people will heed this advice and start building new sites that capitalize on it. And the apps in facebook doing this will ultimately be rewarded by Facebook through promotion and more functionality.

Now bear in mind that this is all my own personal opinion, I haven’t asked any of my friends at facebook about it. It is all based on my observations, and what I would want if I was in facebook’s position. So what are you waiting for? The social revolution awaits!

My completely speculative theory on the social operating system.

There is a battle for control of the next generation of the internet, and this revolves around my thesis that the current phase in the evolution of the web involves the connecting of people.  The battle is being waged by google, facebook, myspace, and a littany of others all vying for this control.

How we got to this point.
The first phase of this battle was about amassing as many users as possible as fast as possible. These users are your asset, they make your network exponentially more valuable. Facebook’s 70 million users are creating billions of unique connections, these connections each hold an intrinsic value in the grand scheme.   So they gave us developers a platform, a platform which is mutually beneficial.  This platform enabled them to double their user base, and at the same time offered the developers a simple way to tap that large and growing user base. 

So while facebook was giving us apps on their own, google was getting all the networks together to build their graph for them.  Google has seen this change coming for years. YEARS. They saw the evolution in social behaviors affecting the internet long before us common folk saw it. They just didn’t have the accounts to leverage it all (orkut has yet to take off here, and gmail isn’t massive enough in reach yet either), so they went to the 3-10th place networks and proposed a deal, that deal was OpenSocial.

There is an important thing to remember when it comes to these companies, they may give you something for free, but they are really making something from your data, so don’t feel bad for them.

What the next phase is:
Controlling the relationships and blowing them out to the entire web. Thats the central thesis behind the google friend connect, and the enabling of ajax api functionalities on facebook (that and the facebook friend connect thing too).  Once you amass enough users, and then tell the thousands of individual sites out there they can plugin your tool and become part of your network, you will have a massive amount of control over managing that network.

For those of you that have been following the teasers of Facebook’s redesign, the one coming july 15th, you might have noticed the shift to make it more like a desktop operating system interface (menu bar, footer/dock).  This is analagous to the concept they are working on to spread throughout the web. Why wouldn’t you install the facebook toolbar on your website if you could quickly and easily enable social relationships on a massive scale?  The quality of these relationships is important too, and that is where facebook has been trying to leverage its position as the social operating system. The Windows or OS X of your relationships.

So what can we expect?
Smart sites will foster this and try and grow with the two platforms, it won’t be easy, but they will be spectacularly worthwhile. Sites that don’t embrace it out of either fear or lack of technical knowledge will miss out while the smaller sites quickly grow past them. The sites that embrace these social levers will see the types of growth we saw on the initial facebook platform applications, but with the flexibility to grow their own loyal bases.

We will also start to see more emergence of open social graph standards spreading around like DiSO and others. Assuming developers can make these things idiot-proof, you’ll be able to move to any site and tap into your relationships wherever possible. The key there will be making them seamless to the user.

Ultimately this represents a major shift in how we design sites and develop their underlying concepts. The social “network” has become a feature or a commodity.

I had the pleasure of meeting German Martinez and Juan Pablo Scaletti on my recent trip to Lima at the local BeerTwit twitter and blogger meetup. These two guys are the brains behind Prezentit, a very cool new service that lets you build robust slideshows/presentations directly in your browser (without Flash!).

German was gracious enough to answer a few of my questions. (A spanish version is available here)
How did you start to work with web related business?
It all started with PreZentit, the idea of creating a web company from scratch seemed a fantastic idea, it was a big challenge and we learnt a lot in the process.

What do you think about the Peruvian web community ?
In Peru there is a large community of web users, but they use the web at a very basic level. They use the web more for fun than for work, the use of web applications has not yet become as widespread as in other parts of the world.

The number of web developers is growing little by little. Even though it is small there are people in Peru who are very well trained

What are the advantages/disadvantages of being a programmer/web developer in Peru?
The main advantage of being a web developer in Peru is that the cost of living and the price of web services like Internet are relatively cheap compared to the USA or Europe. This allows us to offer slightly lower prices than what is charged in those countries.

The great disadvantage is the lack of visibility. It is very hard to have your work become known in other countries. This is especially true about web applications such as Pre-Zentit.

Another disadvantage is the fact that most of the available information about web matters is in English. So it becomes essential for anyone who wants to grow as a web professional to have a good command of English.

How would you describe your Project, Prezentit , in l0 words or less?
The most user friendly online presentations editor.

Why did you create Prezentit
We realized that Power Point had many shortcoming when we wanted to create group presentations, so we decided to create an on line application that would solve these problems but keeping in mind our own needs.

What were your most important resources that you used to create Prezentit? What programming languages and libraries did you use to develop it?
We are big fans of Ubuntu and we created PreZentit using all kinds of free software. My partner, Juan Pablo Scaletti, was the main programmer. I think he is one of the best Python and JavaScript programmers in Peru. We used the framework TurboGears for Python and the library Mootools for JS.

In what direction do you think the Peruvian programming community is going to develop as regards the Internet?
I think web users are going to stop using desk applications and begin using more web applications.

The Internet will also become an essential work tool here.

What problems have you faced in working with foreign companies from Peru and in working with local Peruvian companies in Peru?
The greatest roadblock in working with foreign companies is the tools for payment. A large problem is not being able to link Pay Pal with a Peruvian bank account in order to receive payments easily. As regards local companies, they still do not realize the advantages that having a presence on the web gives them and most of them are not willing to invest in this presence.

Which are your favorite web 2.0 sites? Which ones do you see growing more in Peru than others?
Right now I am a big fan of Twitter. It seems like a fantastic idea to me. I also admire You Tube and Flickr.

Recien tuve la oportunidad de visitar a Lima, Peru y tuve la fortunidad de poder encontrarme con el grupo de twitters y bloggers aya. Durante esta reunion conoci por primera vez a German y Juan Pablo de Prezentit, un nuevo sitio para armar presentaciones sin tener que instalar cualquier software en tu systema.

German me hizo el favor de responder a unas preguntas que tuve, y aca las tienes. (la version en ingles se puede encontrar aqui)

¿Cómo llegaste a trabajar en la web?
Todo comenzó con PreZentit, la idea de crear una aplicación web desde cero me pareció genial, fue un gran reto y aprendimos muchísimo en el camino.

¿Cómo ves la comunidad en Perú con respecto a la web?
En Perú hay una gran comunidad de usuarios de internet pero a un nivel básico, se usa mucho más para ocio que para trabajo, además aún no ha entrado con fuerza el uso de aplicaciones web.

La comunidad de desarrolladores está creciendo poco a poco. Aunque aún es pequeña hay gente muy capaz.

¿Cuales son las ventajas/desventajas de ser programador/desarrollador en Perú?
La principal ventaja de ser un desarrollador en Perú es que aquí el costo de vida y el acceso a servicios como internet es relativamente barato en comparación con USA o Europa. Esto nos permite tener una tarifa un poco más baja que la que usualmente se cobra en esos países.

La gran desventaja es la falta de exposición, es muy difícil hacer notar tu trabajo en el extranjero. Sobre todo cuando hablamos de aplicaciones web como PreZentit.

Otra desventaja es el hecho de que la mayoría de información disponible al respecto se encuentre en inglés, así que es un idioma obligatorio para cualquiera que esté interesado en desenvolverse como desarrollador web.

¿Tu proyecto Prezentit, como lo describirías en menos de 10 palabras?
El editor de presentaciones online más fácil de usar.

¿Como vinieron a armar Prezentit?
Nos dimos cuenta de que PowerPoint tenía muchas limitaciones y desventajas a la hora de hacer presentaciones en grupo, así que decidimos crear una aplicación online que los resolviera teniendo en cuenta nuestras propias necesidades.

¿Cuales fueron los recursos más importantes en armar Prezentit? ¿Que lenguajes de programación y librerías usaste para desarrollarlo?
Mi socio, Juan Pablo Scaletti fue el que se desenvolvió principalmente como programador, yo lo considero como uno de los mejores programadores de Python y JavaScript en Perú.Usamos el framework TurboGears para Python y la librería Mootools para JS.

¿En que dirección crees que la comunidad peruana va avanzar con respeto al internet?
Creo que los usuarios van a dejar de depender tanto en aplicaciones de escritorio y empezar a usar aplicaciones web.

El Internet se convertirá en una herramienta de trabajo indispensable.

¿Que obstáculos has visto trabajando con empresas extranjeras desde Perú? ¿Y con empresas locales?
El mayor obstáculo al trabajar con empresas extranjeras es el medio de pago, un gran problema es no poder usar PayPal con una cuenta bancaria de Perú para recibir dinero.

Lo que pasa con las empresas locales es que aún no entienden las ventajas que les da la presencia en Internet, además en su mayoría no están dispuestas a invertir en ello.

¿Cuales son los sitios web2.0 que te gustan más? ¿Cuales ves creciendo más que otros en Perú?
Ahora mismo soy un gran fan de Twitter, me parece una idea genial, tampoco puedo dejar de mencionar a YouTube y a Flickr.

I get this feeling that there are a lot of industries that don’t truly understand the sheer magnitude of social media. There are tons of industries where we rely on social connections in real life to either facilitate or enhance the business transactions, it seems only logical to extend this to the web. Granted this is a purely superficial look at these industries, and a much deeper technographic and demographic study could help build a more refined social strategy for each one.

Travel
Aside from business travel, this is usually an activity done in groups. So leveraging the power of your existing connections and social graph to find more information on potential destinations or deals would be an ideal solution. Whose opinion would you trust more, your cousin Bob, or some anonymous web troll when you’re planning that trip to cancun?

Trip planning. Nothing is as much of a pain as trying to plan a trip with a group of people. So why not figure out a way to simplify things. Look at how dopplr and tripit are starting, and take it from there.  These are areas where the airlines and travel sites should be dominating.

Another key area where travel is failing on social media is in the post-trip/re-engagement phase. Why aren’t travel companies leveraging all the content these travelers just created (EVERYONE has a digital camera of some sort)?

Real Estate
Part of what you buy when you buy a home or condo is the community, a large part of it to be exact. So developers, realtors, and real estate information sites need to build the tools for connecting the property owners/renters to the community/web.  The stronger bonds that can be built through these networks, the stronger the physical community becomes.  This also plays well into the buying/selling of a home through the web, as it gives potential buyers access to the value-add that is the future neighbors and their wealth of knowledge.  Also correlate the value of where my friends might be living now, as that would definitely play a role in my house hunting.

There is a wealth of information out there today that is just waiting to be mashed up: photos (geocoded to boot), maps, zoning info, crime info, transportation, shopping, etc. This is definitely an example where the sum is more valuable than all the parts individually.

Apparel Shopping
Women’s fashion is built on one thing: what other women will think about each others outfits. Women don’t buy clothes to impress men, its to impress other women.  Women also tend to shop as a social activity, so why isn’t anyone translating this to the web?  Where are the sites that let people share fashion ideas, fashion tips, or deals? There are tons of visual tools out there that are just waiting to be pieced together.  I think a key component to this is for the fashion industry to understand what is driving web use, then see how these things can be leveraged by social utilities.

The branding potential in social networks for these brands to leverage is amazing. Its the ultimate use for social ads and leveraging personal recommendations. (Think, what do my friends think about this shirt, etc.) Imagine seeing on a shopping site “Your friend Jane bought this in red, you might also like the black.”

Entertainment
Last but certainly not least is the entertainment industry (movies, music, tv, games, etc.). The entertainment industry could stand to gain the most of all from leveraging social graphs and social media in a way that benefits both them and the consumers. Instead of running away scared of the beast that is the consumer and user generated content, they should take a page from Chamillionaire’s book and go to where the fans are.  Help them find/discover (like ilike or last.fm), help them create (video, audio, whatever), and help them make it dead simple to evangelize your product.

Realistically entertainment is one of the most powerful industries for leveraging social. Most of the activities we do in relation to this industry is social in nature (going to the movies, playing games, watching tv, and listening to music. They are all things we can do as individuals, but for the most part are improved when we add friends. They all also tend to be things that people use to identify themselves with (rocker, hip hop fan, jazz fan, anime fan, etc.).

Now this all may seem very superficial, and it is, but this post was really intended to spark the discussion within your organizations, not give you all a clear cut roadmap (that would make it too easy).

After my blitz trip through lima this past weekend it came to my attention that there is huge amount of underlying potential for the web in this part of the world, but its missing key components needed to grow. I spoke with a number of very intelligent and very in touch people who understand many of the changes going on in the social media and web2.0 sphere, and frankly came away with mixed emotions.

At my first South American Twitter meetup ever, over 40 people were there! Lots of people in this crowd were what we would call the early adopters here. Whereas in the US an early adopter of something like twitter is typically 6 months to a year ahead, there they are 2-3 years ahead of mainstream adoption. The main reason being that the infrastructure (SMS, Telecom, Internet) isn’t there for the majority of the population, and is still prohibitively expensive for many.

But here is what I see that made me really glad to have gone down to peru (from a developer/strategist perspective). There is a large group of people who are genuinely interested in these new emerging technologies, who have great skills in programming and development, and are really just waiting for a great project to come along. There isn’t the same entrepreneurial mindset there is here in the US, but there is a spirit of creativity. I spent hours talking to the talented team behind Prezentit about how to make the greatest twitter experience possible. How we could extend something as simple as the 140 characters of twitter and build a robust community around that social object.

Some of the things that Peru lacks from a web perspective: capital (not that much is needed, things are relatively cheap), someone with the balls to experiment on a number of things and put their $ where their mouth is, and people talking about the community as much as possible. The local paper El Comercio is doing a great job on this last part already (my visit is even mentioned here ) There are also a number of cultural issues that can be corrected, especially at the youth level (the same point where much of this development can occur).

I’ll write more in the future about south america and its role in this emerging global network of web development, software, and online culture. But for now I’d like to thank all my new twitter + facebook friends down there. Saludos a todos.