Posts from Facebook

I just read that a lot of the social news reader traffic publishers like Washington Post and The Guardian were getting from Facebook has dropped off dramatically.

Next we will read that the traffic social video apps get from Facebook has dropped dramatically.

All of this reminds me of the big drop in traffic SEO driven sites deal with every time Google does an algorithm change.

SEO and Facebook timeline integration is "best practice" on the Internet. You should do both. They can be great free acquisition channels. But they are not great retention channels. Because easy come easy go.

Be your own bitch.

One of my favorite features in a web application is Demand It! from Eventful. The concept is simple but powerful (the best kind). Users demand events, movies, concerts, etc and if they can rally enough demands, they get the events to come to their location. This puts the decision about where a touring event goes into the hands of the fans and reduces the power of the concert organizers.

Eventful founder Brian Dear told me:

I remember US bands shocked to discover they had throngs of fans in distant places like Finland and Uruguay and Japan, and so they'd go tour there because it turned out their Demand it! numbers in those places were big enough to get gigs that would be profitable.  

There are signs that this type of fan behavior is spreading to the large scale social networks and I think that's a good thing. AVC community member Tyrone Rubin recently told me about a Facebook effort to get Radiohead to play a concert in South Africa, a country they have never performed in. To date they have almost 6,000 south african fans requesting a Radiohead concert. Their goal is to get 40,000 fans to make that request.

I asked Tyrone about the broader significance of this effort. He said:

For me its the objective of success. And if we successfully do this,
by bypassing the top 3 concert organizers, hopefully South Africa and
Africa can start coming together like this for other things too.

Unifying people together for one strong centralized voice is not new,
but definitely new in Africa and South Africa.

With the Facebook IPO on everyone's mind, the topic du jour seems to be valuations, revenues, and profits. But the most impactful thing about social media is not the dollar value of these platforms, it is the people power of them. 

The startup world is about insurgents. A person or a few people with an idea. And they drop everything and go for it. They are going up against the incumbents and that doesn't just mean the big companies that occupy the market position they want. That means all the people, institutions, and organizations that are in cahoots with the big companies.

This is the framework through which we see the world. And this is the framework through which we would like others to see the world.

It is not the least bit surprising to me that Facebook supports CISPA. Facebook was once an insurgent. But now they are an incumbent. And we can expect them to be supportive of the ultimate incumbent, our government, particularly when it comes to sharing data on all of us with them.

I saw this this on HYV's Tumblr this morning:

Waiting to see if all the VC’s will call for a boycott of Facebook over CISPA like they did content creators on SOPA/PIPA. Or just act like it’s different suddenly.

If there were a boycott of Facebook over this CISPA thing, I'd gladly participate in it. I just don't know if people care enough about this issue to get appropriately annoyed about it. The impact of PIPA/SOPA on the Internet user was easier to understand. Cybersecurity and privacy and data ownership and sharing is much more complicated to understand.

Make no mistake, the incumbents have each others' back. But the Internet users have the insurgents' back. So when the Internet users care enough, the insurgents will win. That's what happened with PIPA/SOPA. It will be interesting to see if it will happen again with CISPA.

By now, regular readers of this blog should be pretty familiar with USV’s investment thesis centered around investing in large networks of engaged users that have the potential to disrupt large markets. I’ve mentioned it frequently here and my colleagues have also blogged regularly about it.

Today I got a tweet from Jon de la Mothe about the growth of professional networks on Facebook:

Professional Networks Built On Facebook Are Growing Like Crazy zite.to/H9KjuP via @fredwilson

— Jon de la Mothe (@delamothe) March 27, 2012

And I replied with this tweet:

@delamothe are they networks if they are built on top of another network?

— Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) March 27, 2012

I think it is possible to bootstrap a network on top of another network. Stocktwits did this on Twitter and Zynga did this on Facebook. But both of them eventually built their own networks directly on the web and mobile. Zynga still gets a ton of game play on Facebook and Stocktwits continues to benefit from tweet distribution on Twitter, but they have made the necessary investments to operate their businesses in such a way that they are not entirely dependent on other networks. In the case of Stocktwits, they did this early on. In the case of Zynga, they waited for a while to do this.

But my question to Jon is a bit different. I didn’t ask if you can build a network on top of another network. I asked if it is a network if it is built on top of another network. I think in that case, the answer is no. 

There is a third way, which are networks of networks. My partner Albert has blogged about this and I am 100% in agreement with him that this is the way the market should evolve. I believe that the Internet is an operating system and the networks that operate on the web and mobile via the Internet should interoperate with each other, share traffic and distribution with each other, and act as peers with each other. This is in keeping with the architecture of the Internet and is the most sustainable model and the one I am betting on in the long run.

Our portfolio company Kickstarter soft launched a feature this week that I've been begging for since the early days of the service. It is called Follow Friends and it looks like this:

As you can see, I am following a total of 123 friends and they have backed a total of 2,220 projects. However, it's not the projects they have backed in the past that is the big deal. It is the projects they are backing in real time. When they do that, I get an email letting me know they backed a project, with a link so I can go join them. That's the feature I've wanted since the early days of the service.

My friend Whitney built a hack that did this a while back. He called it Kisttr and I used it along with a bunch of friends. It worked well but Follow Friends is the fully implemented and integrated version of this simple idea.

Of course, this is nothing new for web services. This is state of the art actually. It's amazing that Kickstarter has gotten so huge without a social fabric.

I'm excited to see how Kickstarter evolves this social fabric now that they have it. I think this simple feature just made Kickstarter so much more awesome. Thanks Kickstarter team for finally giving me my #1 feature request.

The patents that Yahoo! is suing Facebook over are a crock of shit. None of them represent unique and new ideas at the time of the filing. I supect they all can be thrown out over prior art if Facebook takes the time and effort to do that.

But worse, Yahoo! has broken ranks and crossed the unspoken line which is that web companies don't sue each other over their bogus patent portfolios. I don't think there's a unique idea out there in the web space and hasn't been for well over a decade. Pretty much everything useful is based on prior art going back before the commercial web existed.

Yahoo! thinks they can bully Internet newcomers with their bogus patents. And that's a line they should not have crossed. Because other companies have bogus patents too. And they've opened themselves up to be sued back. Frankly I'd like to see it happen just to show them how stupid they are.

I am not writing this in defense of Facebook. They can and will defend themselves. I am wrting this in outrage at Yahoo! I used to care about that company for some reason. No more. They are dead to me. Dead and gone. I hate them now.

On Monday, I trained it up to New Haven to meet a Yale professor named Dina Mayzlin and talk to her class. I thoroughly enjoyed talking to Dina's class as it allowed me to work on some new material in a comfortable setting. But the talk Dina and I had over breakfast before class was even more thought provoking.

Dina got her PhD at MIT's Sloan School a decade ago, before she started teach at Yale. Her thesis looked at TV shows being talked about in the social media of that time, newsgroups, IRC, Usenet, etc, etc.

What she and her colleagues found out was that volume (number of mentions) was not a good predictor of popularity. Volume was more of a trailing indicator than a leading indicator.

But Disperson, or what Dina calls Entropy, turned out to be a very reliable leading indicator of popularlity of a TV show. The wider and broader the discussion of the TV show went within online social media, the more likely the show was to become popular.

By coincidence, the material I am working on in my public talks right now is about the fragmentation of social media. And so as I talked about fragmentation with Dina's Yale class, I started to weave her work, which was still rattling around in my brain, into my fragmentation thesis.

I am totally convinced that the world of social media is not consolidating around one "winner takes all" social platform. Instead, the world of social media is fragmenting into dozens of social platforms that are best of breed for a certain kind of social engagement. If you are building a social media strategy today, you absolutely need to address Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Tumblr. And you should also consider Foursquare, Instagram, Pinterest and Path. If you are in the music business, you need to consider SoundCloud. If you are in the book business, you need to consider Wattpad. If you are in the TV business, you need to conside GetGlue. And so on and so forth. Many of the companies I just mentioned, but not all of them sadly, are USV portfolio companies.

That's the thesis I spent thirty minutes on in front of the Yale class. But near the end of the talk to Dina's class, it occured to me that disperson/entropy can be gained by engaging on multiple social platforms. The number of likes on Facebook or tweets on Twitter is volume and is likely to be a trailing indicator of popularity. But if you track the essential social gestures across the fragmenting landscape of social platforms, likes, tweets, tumbls, checkins, pins, etc, then you get a measure of dispersion that may well be a leading indicator of popularity or the slope of the popularity curve.

That's the theory anyway. I'll leave the research to Dina and others. I hope someone will run the numbers to see if it works.

I was at a meeting yesterday regarding the ongoing online piracy discussion and the conversation turned to search as a source of traffic to sites with pirated content. I stopped the conversation and noted that search isn't what it used to be and pointed out that many websites get more traffic from social than search.

Here at AVC, it is no contest. Here's the top ten traffic sources to AVC in the past thirty days:

Google/organic is search. Direct and feedburner are regular visitors. Everything else (Stumbleupon, Twitter (t.co), Hacker News (news.ycombinator), Techmeme, google/referral, Facebook, and Linkedin are social. So if we break the top ten into three categories, direct is about half of the top ten's traffic, social is 40%, and search is 10%.

This blog isn't normal in a few ways. The fact that Twitter generates 13x Facebook in traffic is one example of that. And the very high level of direct/regular readers is probably a bit unusual too.

I'm curious if anyone is aware of a broader study of traffic sources on the Internet and how search and social compare these days. I suspect that they are neck and neck across the entire Internet or possibly that social has surpassed search. But I have not seen that data and I'd love to.

This will not be surprising to the AVC community but will certainly be a shock to the "real names" crowd. Disqus has shared some research they have done on three kinds of commenters; real names, pseudonyms, and anonymous commenters. Click on this link and check it out.

But if you are not going to do that, I will summarize the data:

– Pseudonyms lead to higher quality comments

– Pseudonyms are more engaged and active

Of course, nobody in the AVC community will be surprised. Kid Mercury, Fake Grimlock, JLM, LE, Panterosa, Prokofy, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc. We have tons of pseudonyms in action here and they enrich and enliven the community.

Props to Disqus for putting out this data. There are so many misinformed and uninformed people working in social media, even at some of the top platform companies. Hopefully this will cause everyone to think a bit more before forcing the real names paradigm down our throats.