By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Twitter/FriendFeed)

As a Salt Lake City, Utah resident, one of the most prevalent events of the year happens around the Sundance film festival. While not quite an event for Tech Geeks, the festival has become more and more techie as film geeks have begun to converge with computer geeks and find new ways to present the media they are creating. I visited Sundance last night and was amazed at the number of former film geeks trying to create their own web ventures as the economy slims for the film industry.



Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

Guest Post By Adam Singer of The Future Buzz (FriendFeed/Twitter)


image credit: pshab
I've written previously that Facebook and MySpace are the modern AOL and Prodigy. I stick by that. The great walled gardens of the web live on more than a decade later, resurrected by Web 2.0, but just as closed off, spammy and unexciting as before.

I have been thinking about how little time I spend on Facebook and why the open Web and other social sites are far more interesting. Here are some observations:

There is no interesting content in Facebook itself

People who create great content don't do so within Facebook - they know better than to contribute their hard work to an area they don't control. The best content creators do so on the open web because they want to retain the value of their efforts. If you are a content creator (or a marketer) be careful with the amount of time you spend contributing content to a closed network.

I get it, you need to fish where the fish are - but use Facebook to draw people to a place you control, not one where you have to play by the rules of another network - that is dangerous. They could change the rules at any time, or there could be a mass exodus of users from the network as we have seen time and time again in the social areas of the Web, rendering all your hard work worthless. Use Facebook as a part of your outpost strategy, but draw visitors back to a unique spot that is yours.

Content sharing on Facebook is far behind the curve

I will see something compelling on Reddit/Digg, message boards/forums, blogs, StumbleUpon and other areas of the open web, and then days or even weeks later it ends up on Facebook. Facebook is fine at sharing friend-centric content like pictures of your last social gathering with a group, but it's simply not a place for discovering news, interesting blogs, or other valuable content. The content eventually gets into Facebook via links but by the time this happens, it is old news. In fact, just use FriendFeed and easily get everything in one place, customized exactly how you want it.

Facebook wants to keep you on Facebook

Their network is built to keep you on their site, which is something that never sat right with me about walled gardens. Google's OpenSocial platform and now Friend Connect are much nicer and I personally like their strategy more - integrating social elements with web properties that already exist and with tools that have real value. They seem more willing to let go and allow users to drive the network, not vice versa, a strategy I agree with.

No option to opt out of third party application invites

It is either all or nothing. You can use apps, but you don't get a choice to opt out of requests from others to add applications. Of course not, because Facebook wants to inspire developers to spend time developing apps purely for their system. It leads to me having to click "ignore all" when the end of every week looks like this:

Why would I want to add any of these apps? I have used Facebook since I was in college and it was a student-only network, and have watched it slowly degrade into a place equally as spam-filled as MySpace. Just because the layout is cleaner doesn't mean it isn't spam.

Facebook advertising is broken - both for advertisers and users

Many have reported that Facebook advertising results have been lukewarm at best. The ads they serve me are pretty terrible as well. I'll give you a quick example: I am single, so Facebook tries to serve me ads for dating sites. I have no interest in using online dating services, thus the ads are irrelevant to me. Facebook has the option of giving feedback on ads, so each time a dating ad is served, I actually take the time to give them feedback that the ad is irrelevant to me and vote it as such.

Concurrently, they serve me ads about marketing and music, things that are of interest to me and actually a good fit. So not only do I click the relevant ads, I go a step further and give them feedback that these are good ads, please serve me more of them. Yet I am continually served dating ads. I have a hard time taking them seriously as a marketer when they clearly have a system in place to improve the user experience but don't bother to use it.

Here are the ads Facebook is serving me (I took a quick screengrab):

Facebook gives you the option to click the "thumbs down" where you can let them know feedback:


I have been letting them know these ads aren't relevant to me for several months and they are still serving them. But why even bother giving feedback if no one is listening? Their system just doesn't learn.

You don't hear career success stories from time spent on Facebook...

Yet we hear great stories about people building their reputations or scoring jobs through LinkedIn or a blog all the time. All we hear about Facebook (and MySpace) is people losing their jobs or not receiving jobs due to inappropriate photos/content on the profiles.

For well-connected individuals, the "people you may know" function is useless

I can't remember the last time I actually knew someone in the "people you may know" section of Facebook. Yet they show these right on the homepage daily to all their users. As an example, I was served this today:

Facebook is offering these people as connections to me merely because we both went to UF (University of Florida)? That is hardly what I would call a connection, the number of people who went to UF is staggering, and just because we both went to UF doesn't make someone relevant to me. If that is the best they can do, they shouldn't even offer this feature at all. How about instead of people I may know, what about people with similar interests? That would actually be useful.

For example, I list some relatively obscure electronic music artists in my profile under musical preferences. If they connected me with others that have similar taste in music, that would actually be interesting. Also connecting me with other public relations or marketing professionals would be interesting too.

The way they are currently trying to guide my hand in building a network isn't very useful. It just seems like they have so much meta data on all of us but aren't using it in ways that actually would build value and draw us deeper into the network.

Difficult, perhaps impossible to gain critical mass with anything directed outside the Facebook platform

Again, this is by design - Facebook seeks to keep its users on their network as long as possible so they may gain more ad impressions. Applications, pages and groups within Facebook can easily spread within the network, but I haven't seen many ways to easily direct Facebook traffic outside of Facebook. MySpace too. This is all by design of course and why I mentally file Facebook in the "closed off" section of the web. I know Facebook just launched their connect tool, but I'd be interested in seeing what the actual results of that are for site owners. I'm not talking about sites like TechCrunch that already have critical mass, I'd be interested to hear the results from sites in the long tail.

The conversations on FriendFeed, on blogs, on Reddit, Digg, Twitter, etc. are far more interesting

The conversations on Facebook are not even close to the level of the open web, or even other social sites. Do you notice the same thing? Perhaps it is the poking, the cheesy applications, or the general nature that people carry on within the network, but I see far more compelling conversations outside the walled gardens. Perhaps it is because people with deep interests seek out specific networks or build their own, and view the general networks as less specific and relevant to them.

Wrapping up...

Facebook is actually useful for things like staying updated on what you're friends from years past are doing, but this doesn't provide any real value other than fleeting entertainment. The people I am interested in staying connected with I am already connected to in more useful ways.

My use of the internet is not to develop fleeting social relationships for entertainment, but to develop more valuable relationships with people to work and collaborate with on projects and ideas we're passionate about.

As it stands right now, Facebook just isn't all that interesting a place to spend time if you are seeking compelling content or looking to build a subscriber base, it is merely an outpost. Your largest opportunity is to build an audience for your brand or yourself in a place that you control. Remember, these monolithic social networks can fall out of favor quite quickly and hemorrhage audiences.

Devoting too much effort to any one platform, especially a social network like Facebook, is far riskier than working on a place you control where you can build multiple traffic streams to. This way if one stops producing you'll still have other options.

It's not that I dislike Facebook, it is just I have found the site to offer a better user experience in years past - and that is the opposite of what I would expect for one of the leaders in social networking. The experience on Facebook should be getting better, not worse. I know from conversations with colleagues I am not the only one who feels this way - hopefully they are listening and will work to improve things in the future.

Read more by Adam Singer at The Future Buzz

Google's impact on a Web site owner is tremendous. The ubiquitous search engine can deliver anywhere from 30 to 70 percent of a Web site or blog's traffic, and in some cases, has been shown to provide upwards of 90% of all traffic from search engines. Given this, it's no wonder the industry of trying to be at the top of Google's results through search engine optimization is big business - and even though Google's efforts are fairly transparent, they have to be mysterious enough so they can't be directly gamed, and consequences are direct and dramatic. But sometimes, the decisions seem odd enough that it can't be anything but a mistake.


Google Drives Significant Traffic to Most Sites
You have no doubt seen the posts, the articles, the tweets, the e-mails, and all matter of comment spam around increasing your rank on search engines, and "getting to the top". You might also see people eagerly await tweaks to Google's PageRank, an algorithm that gives weight to a site based on its relationship on the Web to other linked sites, and their own perceived rank. Theoretically, it is assumed that the higher your PageRank is, the more likely you are to be higher in search results (based on a 0 to 10 scale). As one's rank is pushed upwards, you can expect to see more traffic on Google, and if you're demoted, you can expect it to similarly drop.

But what if you find your site dropped down to zero?

No doubt the feeling can be one of disbelief and powerlessness. I was surprised this morning to learn that the excellent blog "The Future Buzz" had seen its PageRank knocked down to zero, and while I can't say I watch PageRank that closely, or knew what it was before, I don't think that' move makes any sense. Adam Singer, the author of the blog, and a great electronic musician, by the way, has been running the site since November of 2007, and has grown his RSS subscriber base beyond 500, myself included.


The Future Buzz's Page Rank Evaporated...
So what can he do? I think our typical response is to cry out to Matt Cutts and hope that he can swoop in like the white knight to save the day. But as you can guess, Google is very big, Matt is very busy, and that sort of thing won't scale.

I find the situation similar to the issue we discussed last year, when Dan Morrill of TechWag found his site blacklisted by Google, thanks to what was believed to be a rogue script. One person's power in the face of the Google monolith can seem futile. No doubt Adam is going through the proper channels to learn what he did wrong, or why the site's PageRank changed, but for now it's a mystery. I've been lucky so far that Google and I get along okay. I'll just try not to tick off the pigeons who run the whole thing.

Internet Explorer doesn't have a monopoly on the browser market like it did nearly a decade ago, as Microsoft systematically suffocated Netscape - speeded by the company's own failings. Today, IE reportedly has just under 70 percent market share, with Firefox owning just over 20 percent and others, including Safari, Google Chrome and Opera, making up the remaining 10 percent. (See: Wikipedia for a stat table)

At Internet Explorer's peak, it claimed more than 90 percent share, as recently as 2004. As it became the de facto standard, it was common for Web designers to optimize their pages for IE, or even require users to run IE to access the site. While the practice is less common these days, there are still a select number of Web applications that push users toward IE, or as many Mac and Linux users find themselves told, to use Windows.

As the Internet mob has repeatedly spoken, designing for IE is wrong. The browser has never quite nailed Web standards the way other browsers do, and to force users to have a certain configuration to get to something that should have universal access flies in the face of one of the major tenets of the Web - that data will be presented in the same way to all current browsers on any platform. But even as this has been agreed to, some cutting-edge applications are pushing Firefox extensions or Greasemonkey scripts to simply work. And unfortunately, even if doing so means the development team can leverage the browser in new, innovative, ways, it dramatically limits their market share, and keeps people who might like the applications, but prefer another browser, out.

As an Apple Safari user, I know there are some places where the browser falls short. For whatever reason, it isn't supported by toolbars, including StumbleUpon or the Google Toolbar. I can begrudgingly accept that developers aren't going to make work-arounds for such small market share, but the practice of purposefully designing solely for Firefox and requiring people to download an extension seems counter-intuitive, if the goal is to have wide adoption. So while I understand that Firefox users are vocal and love their browser's extensibility, the entire practice has me shying away from new services like Clikball, and rarely using Feedly, even if I think they're cool.

But there's no outrage and frustration when developers demand Firefox extensions the way you see the same tumult when a site demands you use IE. It could be because the practice is more rare, or because the Firefox community likes being catered to. But I believe it's time to move away from demanding plugins and extensions to our browsers. There are enough tools out there, and enough tricks you can do with code to make the Web do some great things. If you can build it without making me download yet another program, or switch browsers, it'd be much appreciated.