Google and Facebook Grow Comfortable and Complacent - Nick Bilton via NYTimes.com

Nick Bilton thinks Facebook and Google are slow to get mobile — several meanings of ‘get’ intended — because the engineers and managers there are relatively sessile (go look it up):

Nick Bilton via NYTimes.com

I have a theory on why they both have been slow to capitalize on the shift to mobile.

It’s that working at these companies is like going to work on an all-inclusive cruise ship. The analogy is apt in terms of the luxury — and the isolation.

An employee’s day often begins with a comfy shuttle bus whisking him or her to work in Silicon Valley. The buses have Wi-Fi, so laptops are put to work before anyone arrives on the sprawling campuses.

Once there, dozens of free breakfast options await. Free buffet lunches break the monotony of the day. There is free dinner, too. There are free snacks for those peckish between meals. (The stuff that’s bad for you is on the hard-to-reach lower shelves.)

All of this is wonderful for the employees — and of course well deserved — but these perks could be stultifying. At some of these Silicon Valley businesses, there is no reason to leave the office.

There are on-campus gyms. Day care. Massages. Dry cleaning. Car rentals. (At the Google offices, some of the toilets even have heated seats.)

Sadly, this isn’t how the rest of the world works.

Most people actually have to leave their offices to get coffee. While wandering out into the real world, we unfortunates tend to do a lot with our mobile phones.

We look for new restaurants, check in with location-based apps, share short pithy updates about things we’ve seen in this outside world, and take pictures of food and sunsets.

I’m betting that the Googlers and Facebookers don’t see as much outside, since all these perks are meant to keep people working as long as possible.

Perhaps there is something even more powerful at work, here: the self-centered, self-important mindset that is engendered in these world-beater companies tends to encourage a strong tie to the period of time when the companies became successful, which is three to five years ago. These companies — like Microsoft and Yahoo before them — became mired in the past, like mammoths and saber-tooth tigers sinking in the La Brea tar pits.

Is Thompson Moving The Deck Chairs Around, Or Pointing Yahoo In A New Direction?

Scott Thompson has reorganized the company around three ‘groups’: consumer, regions, and technology. But his long term plan is totally unclear, despite having taken three months to get set. My sense is that he’s moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic, rather than addressing the gaping hole in the side of the boat.

However, trying to centralize the business on capturing user information exhaust does at least line up with what others — Facebook and Google, for example — are planning, so at least he’s looking in the right direction.

Yahoo C.E.O. Hints at a Strategy - Nicole Perlroth via NYTimes.com

With 700 million visitors, Yahoo still maintains one of the largest audiences on the Web, but has been unable to increase revenue. The company continues to cede advertising market share to competitors, notably Facebook and Google, and has frustrated shareholders with its reliance on cost-cutting rather than new areas for innovation and growth.

Based on the restructuring, it appears Mr. Thompson plans to hedge much of Yahoo’s future on the media and content properties it hopes will tether visitors to its site and lure back advertisers, as well as on the data it has on its users.

Mr. Thompson has yet to elaborate on how Yahoo plans to use that data. Sources inside the company, who declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak, said that it was still unclear how, or even whether, the company could leverage the information to its advantage.

There is certainly room in the marketplace for a large media player to innovate in media based on mining big data from social exhaust. We’ll have to see if Thompson is trying for that, since he’s been fairly silent on strategy, but it looks like a viable option for Yahoo, at least.

Jerry Yang (Finally) Leaves Yahoo

Jerry Yang has left Yahoo, a few weeks after Scott Thompson took the reins as CEO. I looked back and found this from 2008, a rumor that Yang would be leaving the company as part of an acquisition by Microsoft. That deal — for $47B— fell through, and the company is now worth less than half that. As I said then, Yang fumbled the future at Yahoo, and should be shown the door. Now, he finally is out.

The Yahoo comparison makes sense the way Elgan constructs it, but I think it’s more apt to say that Facebook’s goal has been to be the new AOL. “Walled garden” is a phrase that gets batted about a lot with regard to the Big Fruit, but Apple rarely builds services that you’re forced to use in lieu of interoperable standards. Facebook has little interest in building anything but.

Coyote Tracks: Why Facebook is the New Yahoo  

I don’t agree with Elgan, it seems like a very stretched and somewhat fallacious comparison right now but I love this gem from Watts Martin. It feels like Facebook is trying so hard to look ‘open’ with all their apps, API’s and login systems but I almost always end up at Facebook rather than departing it.

(via christopherdwhite)

(Source: chipotle)

fred-wilson: Facebook’s Growing Web of Frenemies - WSJ.com Starting to remind me of Microsoft a decade ago, when they were trying to win on seven or eight fronts — PC O/S, IM, email, mobile phones, game systems, corporate IT, office apps, etc. — and meanwhile the web came along and screwed everything up, and gave serious advantages to others. Now Facebook is fighting on seven fronts on so, and something is coming to upend their position at the center of today’s web: social O/S. Watch out, Zuck.
Zoom

fred-wilson:

Facebook’s Growing Web of Frenemies - WSJ.com

Starting to remind me of Microsoft a decade ago, when they were trying to win on seven or eight fronts — PC O/S, IM, email, mobile phones, game systems, corporate IT, office apps, etc. — and meanwhile the web came along and screwed everything up, and gave serious advantages to others.

Now Facebook is fighting on seven fronts on so, and something is coming to upend their position at the center of today’s web: social O/S. Watch out, Zuck.

Starbucks Digital Network

It appears that Starbucks is launching its own Starbucks Digital Network, so that when you next connect through the coffeeshop chain’s wifi, you’ll be seeing this:

 

And it appears that Starbucks is basically just trying to brand itself as the sort of company that provides high quality and localized digital experience to its customers. It is not, apparently, trying to make direct revenue from brands like The New York Times, or Zagat’s, according to Jennifer Van Grove:

Starbucks’s Vice President of Digital Ventures Adam Brotman sat down with Mashable (Mashable) in advance of the October 20 launch day for a complete tour.

“The vision,” he says, “is for Starbucks Digital Network to be a digital version of the community cork board that’s in all of our stores.”

[…]

One would assume, correctly so, that Starbucks has not gone to trouble of providing free Wi-Fi and a premium digital network without thinking about how it could profit by these pricey additions. If we didn’t know better, we’d presume that Starbucks was charging its partners for placement. Instead, as we’ve disclosed before, there’s no money changing hands — unless SDN users make purchases from partners, in which case there is a revenue share.

What it comes down is a matter of choice. Coffee and tea drinkers have a myriad of options, so for Starbucks it’s about motivating the customer to choose its stores, and its digital network content partners by association.

SDN is designed with two key objectives in mind, says Brotman: enhancing the customer’s experience and better engaging customers while they’re in the store.

“Tens of millions of customers are coming in to our stores and logging in to our WiFI on a monthly basis anyways. They’re coming in because we provide this great experience — good music overhead, quality food and coffee and the opportunity to connect with your friends or the baristas … What we hope is that this is a nice complement to that experience.”

Starbucks has to push the brand button in our heads, hard, to justify the premium it is charging for hot brown liquid, and a premier online experience could help a bit, no doubt. We’ll have to see if the experience is actually better than just browsing the open web, though. I am not sure that Starbucks teaming up with Yahoo (their behind the scenes partner) to create a private AOL is the answer however.

I am more intrigued with Starbuck’s foray into wine and beer, which seems obvious but broadens the brand picture in people’s heads.

The mumbo-jumbo about Starbucks supporting the local neighborhoods, by the way, is counterfactual on an economic basis. If they want to support the local economy they should be purchasing goods and services locally, to recycle the money back into the area’s businesses. Instead, Starbucks and other chains centralize a great deal of their buying power, and don’t contribute much locally, compared to local stores:

Loconomics: Support The Local Networks

[…] recent research from the US indicates that between 54 and 58 cents of every dollar spent at a locally-owned retailer stays in that local environment, as they tend to employ a local accountant, a local delivery service, local web designer, local graphic designer and signwriter, local architect, advertise in the local paper, and so on. A national store contributes only 15 cents to the local environment, for every dollar spent, as they tend to centralise those same functions in order to induce greater efficiency.

related articles

Facebook Groups versus Groupings

Facebook has announced a new implementation of Groups:

Mark Zuckerberg, Giving You More Control

We’ve long heard that people would find Facebook more useful if it were easier to connect with smaller groups of their friends instead of always sharing with everyone they know. For some it’s their immediate family and for others it’s their fantasy football league, but the common concern is always some variant of, “I’d share this thing, but I don’t want to bother 250 people. Or my grandmother. Or my boss.”

Until now, Facebook has made it easy to share with all of your friends or with everyone, but there hasn’t been a simple way to create and maintain a space for sharing with the small communities of people in your life, like your roommates, classmates, co-workers and family.

We set out to build a solution that could help you map out all of your communities, that would be simple enough that everyone would use it and that would be deeply integrated across Facebook and applications so you can communicate with your different groups in lots of different ways.

We approached this problem as primarily a social one. Rather than asking all of you to classify how you know all of your friends, or programming machines to guess which sets of people are likely cohorts, we’re offering something that’s as simple as inviting your best friends over for dinner. And we think it will change the way you use Facebook and the web.

Today we’re announcing a completely overhauled, brand new version of Groups. It’s a simple way to stay up to date with small groups of your friends and to share things with only them in a private space. The default setting is Closed, which means only members see what’s going on in a group.

Groups will make Facebook more corporate, and less like the open web.

The tech world is falling over themselves about this great advance.

But this isn’t a great step forward. Groups — addressable collections of people who become associated by invitation from the group’s owner, and who have symmetric relationships with each other — are as old as the web. You have them in Yahoo Groups, Flickr, and all over the place.

One of the most interesting and exciting advances on the social web have been ‘groupings’,  where people are spontaneously members of free-form and ad hoc associations without invitation.

For example, all those people that follow me on Twitter are in effect members of a Stowe Boyd grouping. Or all of those people that use a given tag, or follow it (I wish Twitter would implement that, by the way). Or all the people that have liked the same artist in Ping.

Consider Last.fm’s ‘virtual neighborhoods’, based on people’s music play. Wandering around in my Last.fm neighborhood introduced me to more great music in a few hours than all the people I know had played for me in years.

If I were only connected to people on Twitter that I already knew — that I invited to be friends with me — my world would be much much smaller.

Don’t get me wrong: groups have their place, especially when privacy or secrecy is needed, as in many business situations, or when planning a surprise party. But openness, transparency, and serendipity are more interesting as general principles than closedness, opaqueness, and knownness.

Groups will make Facebook more corporate, and less like the open web.

With services like group chat Facebook is taking a run at Google, preemptively, since Google is known to be building a ‘Facebook killer’ that will leverage Google advantages, like Google Talk.

This really feels like the instant messaging wars between AOL, MSN, and Yahoo, all over again.

I find it astonishing that so few people seem to think this ‘advance’ isn’t. Oliver Chiang is one:

Facebook’s Fundamental Flaw, And Why Its New Groups Misses The Mark

The new Groups interface will also have three components: shared space, group chat and email lists. The latter two are exactly what they sound like. Shared Space is a section within Facebook where groups can share communications, photos and other content.

Taking aim at competitors Google Groups and Yahoo Groups, Zuckerberg says “Most people use them as email lists, but we think that what we’ve built here in version 1 blows everything else away.”

Zuckerberg compares to the way groups will spread to how photos spread. Though a small percentage of people upload photos, 95% of users are tagged in photos. Likewise, though a small percentage of users may form groups, Facebook is betting that this “social solution” will get most of its user base to be tagged in groups. In addition, Facebook will rely on users and their social norms to form accurate groups. For instance, if someone adds a non-family member to a family group, the group members will be able to see who made the addition and contest the addition with that user.

But the problem with the new Groups is lack of incentives. Tagging people in photos is one thing. Tagging people in groups and then expecting accurate and agreed-upon groupings to arise naturally is an infinitely more tricky thing. Groups in real life aren’t easily defined, and are dynamic, slippery things. Even something seemingly as simple as a family group raises many issues. Who is considered family? The nuclear family? Extended family? God-parents and second cousins? Who gets to make these final decisions within a group? Asking group users to explicitly name these groupings on an online social network in black and white could easily lead to conflict and disagreements.

[emphasis mine.]

related articles

updated articles 10/7/2010

updated articles 10/8/2010

  • Facebook Groups demonstrate the downside of “social design” (venturebeat.com)

    • The key to social design, Cox said, is that “the interactions of one person … affect and organize the interactions of the people around them.” Cox repeated the phrase during his speech and called it “profound”, prompting me to snicker along with some of the other journalists around me.

    Maybe we should have been paying closer attention. There was a dark side to Cox’s statement that I didn’t really catch until today’s complaints. When someone’s actions “affect and organize” your life, that can be useful, but it can also be a huge pain.