Posts from Facebook

Last month, I participated in a PII event and sat on a panel (a format I dislike and try to avoid) moderated by Kara Swisher. Kara posted a video of the panel on ATD a few days later.

Sometimes when you are in a public setting you say things that have been coming together in your mind but you have never articulated before. That happened that day. I said the following about 40 minutes into the panel:

Twitter is default public and everyone knows that's what it is. Your Twitter identity is the lightest weight, most public, and therefore the best identity on the web.

Many other online identites we are all developing are heavier weight. They have more private information about us in them. When the companies that operate those identity services share our information with others we get nervous, upset, and anxious.

Twitter and other default public identities (like my daughter Emily's "Things I Like" tumblog) contain only the information we are willing to have the whole world know about us. And therefore they are better identities. They can be portable without our permission. They are crafted by us with the full knowledge that they will be seen by others, potentially many others.

We just completed a long and taxing hiring process. We had over 250 applicants to our analyst position. We asked each and every applicant to share their online profiles with us. Most shared default public profiles like blogs, twitters, tumblrs, etc. We learned so much about each of the applicants through reviewing those public identities. Default public online identities are very powerful and very revealing about people, maybe more so than default private identities. They can be used for almost anything that default private identities can be used for. But they can be used without asking for permission from the owner of the profile because the information is public already.

This is counter intuitive for many. But I'm pretty sure that default public identities are the future for most things (maybe not healthcare and personal finance and the like) and that they are the best form of online identity.

About a month ago, William Mougayar, an AVC regular if there was ever one, emailed me about an idea he had to create a web service to make social conversations easier. We went back and forth on the idea. I pushed him to come up with a simple name and a simple UI. I told him "make it like gmail for social conversations."

Over the past month, he and his crack team of something like two or three developers did just that. And today, I'm pleased to tell all of you that William and his team have built something pretty special.

He calls it engag.io. It's a good name. An io channel for social engagement. Here's what my engagio inbox looks like this morning:

My inbox is dominated by AVC discussions. For most people, their inbox will have a multitude of conversations from many services; Twitter, Foursquare,  Hacker News, Facebook, and hopefully AVC too.

There are a few other nifty features shown on the left sidebar. Engagement shows who you are engaging with. Shared links stores all the links being passed back and forth in your conversations. And Sites shows what sites your friends are having discussions on. So engagio is not just your inbox for social conversations. It is your dashboard for social conversations.

William's got a blog post up on the engagio blog explaining his vision for the product. It's a good read.

Engagio is offering 100 invites this morning to AVC readers. The first 100 users will get in. The invite code is avcengage (lower caps). Give it a try and let us know what you think.

Just In Case You Were Wondering: Neither me nor USV has any financial interest in engag.io or eqentia, it's sister service.

I've been doing that route for 25 years. And never have I felt that these two cites/regions have been more connected at the hip than I do right now.

This past week brought the news that Facebook plans to open an engineering office in NYC. Serkan Piantino, the Facebook engineer who will lead the NYC team said:

This isn’t a satellite office. This is going to be a core part of our engineering stack.

This follows on the heels of eBay's Hunch acquisition and the news that eBay will build a team of 200 engineers in NYC. Twitter has a team of engineers in NYC now after the acquisition of Julpan this summer and Zynga has a game development team in NYC as a result of its acquisition of Area/Code almost a year ago.

For many years, Google was the sole big bay area company with a strong engineering presence in NYC. That's changing and changing quickly.

Sales offices are one thing. Tech companies have had strong sales offices in NYC forever. But adding product and engineering to the mix changes things in important ways. Most importantly for NYC, it brings talent flowing here that would not have otherwise come here. And it makes it easier for the talent to stay here through multiple job changes.

Kudos to our mayor and his team for recognizing that NYC has an important new industry developing and pouring fuel on the fire to get things going even stronger. The city's leadership is on its game right now and showing how to lead. It's great to see.

At some point yesterday, I was in the chrome browser (which is basically my OS these days) and I hit Edit, Copy URL, and I realized that I must do that dozens of times a day. Grabbing links and sharing links is possibly the most common thing I do from day to day.

And now with the latest build of Android, when you hold your finger over the address bar in the android browser, you are given the option to Copy URL. Since discovering this feature recently, I do it on my phone dozens of times a day as well.

Android also has the "share page" feature which will let you send the URL of the page you are on into any app on your phone that can take a URL (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Kik, gmail, text, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc).

This isn't an advertisement for Chrome and Android. I'm sure most modern browsers offer this feature. And I suspect that iOS supports this feature too (although I don't believe it offers the "share page" feature that android has).

This is just a recognition that URLs/links are the lingua franca of the web and every app, web or mobile, should make capturing them and working with them as drop dead simple as possible. I certainly appreciate this feature and I suspect all of you do as well.

Cory Doctorow has written a fantastic post on the subject of online identities and the forced use of real names in Google+.  I've been blogging a fair bit on this topic lately. I'm annoyed that Google has adopted such a wrongheaded approach to identity in Google+ and I've been having a hard time articulating why. Fortunely there are others who are saying what I am feeling. Cory nails it with these closing paragraphs:

The first duty of social software is to improve its users' social experience. Facebook's longstanding demand that its users should only have one identity is either a toweringly arrogant willingness to harm people's social experience in service to doctrine; or it is a miniature figleaf covering a huge, throbbing passion for making it easier to sell our identities to advertisers.

Google has adopted the Facebook doctrine at the very moment in which the figleaf slipped, when people all over the world are noticing that remaking ancient patterns of social interaction to conform to advertising-driven dogma exposes you to everything from humiliation at school to torture in the cells of a Middle Eastern despot. There could be no stupider moment for Google to subscribe to the gospel of Zuckerberg, and there is no better time for Google to show us an alternative.

Our community here at AVC welcomes real names, pseudonyms, and anonyms. And we have one of the most civil and intelligent communities on the world wide web. If anyone wants to understand identity and social software, I suggest they spend some time hanging out with the AVC community. They could learn a lot.

I like simple ways to think about things. Like mobile first, web second. These kinds of constructs work for me. One that I've been using a lot lately to describe what we like and don't like as much is User First, Brands Second.

When you are building your product and thinking about your go to market strategy, you need to decide who your first users will be and how they will take your product into the market. You can focus on getting everyday internet users first. Or you can focus on getting brands first and working with them to get users. This decision is critical and will impact almost everything about your business going forward. So don't make this decision lightly.

There are some great businesses that have gone with the Brands First, Users Second approach. Two that come to mind are Groupon and Buddy Media. They are very different businesses but both go first to brands, work with them to craft offerings for users, and then work to get those offerings in the hands of users.

Contrast that with Foursquare. The Foursquare app launched without any brands on it and went after user adoption directly. Today they have over 10mm registered users. Millions of users engaged on the Foursquare service attracts brands. And the brands come to Foursquare without much effort on Foursquare's part. This is the User First, Brand Second approach.

Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr are all User First, Brands Second services. The brands are all over these services now. But for the most part, these services didn't do much to bring them. The engaged users did.

Our firm vastly prefers the Users First, Brands Second approach. I don't want to say definitively that we would not invest in a Brands First, Users Second business, but it would have to be something very interesting to get us to do it.

We do have several portfolio companies that took some version of a Brands First, Users Second approach to market. WorkMarket brings large employers and staffing firms onto their platform who put work orders into their system. That brings workers who pick up the work and get paid via the Workmarket platform. SoundCloud initially targeted audio content creators who put their work on the SoundCloud platform and according to Quantcast, that audio content brings over 14mm people a month to the service. But in both cases, these services launched day one with a valuable offering to both brands and users and they were not crafted specifically for the brand's benefit. That is a key point to be focused on.

The biggest problem with a Brands First, Users Second approach is you can get caught up in product development efforts to satisfy the brands and as a result you can't put enough energy into satisfying the users. And if that happens too much, you end up servicing the needs of the brands over the needs of the users and then you are a service business not a platform.

So when thinking about whether or not your company is a good fit for investment by our firm, think about whether your business is User First, Brand Second, or the other way around. That will be one of the first things we focus on when we evaluate it.

Christina jotted down some thoughts on indentity on a flight to SF and I read them this morning. In her post, she references Ev's excellent post on the same topic from a while back. So I went on a bike ride as the sun rose over the east end of long island and thought a bit about all of this.

Before going on, I'd like to emphasize that these thoughts are mine and mine only. Nobody has seen this post before publishing other than me, including my partners and our portfolio companies. It does not represent the opinions of any company I and/or our firm are involved in.

I don't have a single online identity. I have many. They are rich, representative, and different from each other.

@fredwilson

facebook.com/fredwilson

fredwilson.vc (tumblr)

avc.com

foursquare.com/fredwilson

soundcloud.com/fredwilson

fredwilson.fm

etsy.com/people/fredwilson

disqus.com/fredwilson

And many many more.

I apologize to all the services out there (in and out of our portfolio) that I left off this list.

I believe that OpenID is on the right track. In the OpenID scheme:

The term OpenID may also refer to an ID as specified in the OpenID standard; these IDs take the form of a unique URL, and are managed by some 'OpenID provider' that handles authentication.

OpenID has two important concepts in it. The first is identity. The second is authentication. The two are totally different but they have become comingled on the web because the leading third party authentication services, Facebook, Twitter, and Google, are combining the two in interesting ways.

When you build a web and/or mobile app and you want to make it easy for the user to share data between your app and one of these big three web services, you provide for one button authentication to them. Everyone who uses the web and mobile apps is now familiar with "login with Facebook", "login with Twitter" or "login with Google". We use them all the time. They make things easier on us.

These authentication services provide some notion of identity as well. But only your identity in their service. Not your entire identity.

So back to OpenID for a minute. I really like the idea that a URL can be an ID. But I don't like the idea that one URL is your ID. I like the idea that a list of URLs makes up your ID. I started my list at the beginning of this post. It is not complete by any means, but it is a good start.

So what I want is a layer that sits on top of all these services, aggregates up all of my URLs (identities), and then provides authentication in the same way that Facebook, Twitter, and Google do today.

And I'd like this layer to be able to provision to web services exactly the same data that you can get (and give) by authenticating directly with the social platforms. And, of course, I'd like to control what data gets provisioned to what apps.

Many have taken a stab at this over the past few years. It is a big opportunity and a big problem. But none (including OpenID) have gotten the kind of traction that Facebook, Twitter, and Google have. I believe there are several reasons for that. First, you need a brand that users recognize (and trust??) to be able to do this. Second, the authentication experience needs to be simple, easy, and not geeky in the least. And third, you need the cooperation of Facebook, Twitter, and Google to do this well and it is in their interests to be the providers of authentication and identity on the Internet so getting that cooperation has been tough.

The good news is it is becoming increasingly clear that no one web service will control our identity online. The success of Google+, Tumblr, Foursquare, Instagram, etc, etc in the past year has shown that users want more social platforms in their lives, not less. Or at least that some users want different social platforms than the ones that have been leading the way for the past decade.

So maybe the big three can get together and cooperate on building this authentication layer on top of their services and promoting is as an indepedent way to authenticate and provision identity and related data to web and mobile services. I'd love to see that happen and I suspect the Internet would be a better place because of it.

When I read a book, I tend to do a lot of highlighting. I like to share many of them publicly on the web. I'm currently reading Keith Richard's biography Life and you can see the public sharing in action right now on my tumblog.

For years, when I came across a highlight I want to share, I pulled out my laptop and manually typed the quote into Tumblr. I do that with hardbacks, paperbacks, and the Kindle app on my iPad. It's a pain in the butt, but the desire to share the quote is such that I've been doing it.

I was with my friend Steven Johnson yesterday and he told me about a trick that is a game changer for me and maybe you too. When you are reading on a Kindle (or a Kindle app), your highlights are sent to a private page at amazon.com. The address of my page (and yours too I imagine) is https://kindle.amazon.com/your_highlights. If you have a kindle and do a lot of highlighting, go visit that page and you'll see all of your highlights.

From there, via the tumblr bookmarklet, it's trivial to share the quote on Tumblr. And so I suspect I'll be doing quite a bit more sharing as a result of this discovery.

Amazon has a gold mine on its hands but they aren't doing much with it right now. First off, they should let me make that page public or at least let me make some of the highlights public and showcase them on a public page. They should let me domain map that page so it becomes part of my social media presence. And they should let me connect that page with Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who does a lot of highlighting and would like to share many of the highlights with the world at large. Curation is a huge part of social media and discovery and pulling quotes from books and sharing them is a big opportunity and one that Amazon should work to unlock for us.

Over the weeekend my friend Jeff Jarvis and I had a twebate about this topic. You can see it in action on storify thanks to David Connell.

I'm all for real names if people want to use them. I use "fredwilson" on every web service I can and that is almost all of them. It's a vanity thing for me more than anything else. I want to get to the service early enough that I can grab that handle.

But not everyone wants to use a real name. There are all sorts of reasons for that. This post on the EFF blog, which kicked off the twebate between me and Jeff, lists a bunch of them.

This community is a perfect example of the value of anonymity. Kid Mercury, FAKE GRIMLOCK, Prokofy, JLM, etc, etc. They are some of the most engaged community members. We love them (at least I do), and I could care less who they are in real life. What I care about are their ideas, their voice, their participation, and their energy. If anonymity brings that out in some, then bring it on.

David Weinberger left a comment on Caterina Fake's blog that I love and reblogged on Tumblr last week:

In our culture, we’re suspicious of strangers. They’re a threat. They lurk in shadows. On the Web, however, strangers are the source of everything worthwhile. Strangers and their utterances are the stuff of the Web. They are what give the Web its matter, its shape, its value. Rather than hiding in our tents and declaring our world to exist of the other tents near us — preferably with a nice tall wall around us — the Web explicitly is a world only because of the presence of so many strangers.

The desire to clean up the web, civilize it, and sterlize it pisses me off. I hate it. The Zuckerbergs can run a sterile community on the web if they want. That's just fine. But to suggest that real names is the source of their success it to learn the wrong lessons from Facebook.

Facebook is successful because they bring structure (phototags are the best example) and order (the newsfeed) to the social web. The requirement to use real names is a weakness not a strength of the service.

But of course not everyone will agree with me on this. Jeff doesn't. We ended our twebate with an agreement to take this debate to the stage. I hope we can do that this fall somewhere in NYC. I'm hoping for some sketchy dicey neighborhood to be honest. This is an important debate as it impacts the way social services are designed and executed. So let's have it.