BuzzMachine

I think I’ve been thinking about hyperlocal the wrong way. Like most everyone else chasing this golden fleece, I’ve defined it as content, news, a product, listings, data, software, sites, ads. It’s not. Local is people: who knows what, who knows whom, who’s doing what (and, yes, who’s doing whom). The question should be — in Mark Zuckerberg’s famous-if-I-have-anything-to-do-about-it phrase — how we bring them elegant organization. They already are a community, already doing what they want to do, already knowing stuff. How can we help them do that better?

Local is people. Our job is not to deliver content or a product. Our job is to help them make connections with information and each other.

In truth, that was, long ago, the job newspapers saw for themselves. That’s why they lived to get as many names in the paper as possible. They knew: Local is people. Newspapers gave us news that mattered to us and would be trivial to anyone else. Newspapers were small and local and served their communities — and their advertisers — better. This is very close to the real mission of a newspaper, a mission we have lost as they got bigger and more egotistical and more powerful, as they become one-size-fits-all monopolies. Except today we have new tools (and new competitors). No one can or should do it all anymore. We need to help people do it themselves. Yes, themselves.

I’m not suggesting that hyperlocal is just a social networking tool. Or just a forum. Or just a bunch of blogs. Or just a listings tool. Or just a search engine. Or just a news site. It needs to end up being all those things and more. And as I said the other day, this will not happen in one place, on one site, but will be distributed across wherever people are being people and communities communities, locally. The trick, once more, is to organize it all. Elegantly.

And this will not happen all on its own. It needs investment, motivation, leadership, shared and distributed ownership.

What exactly does this look like? I’m not sure yet. I’m working on that. But I’m getting a better idea, I think, by working from a new starting point: People, not content. People, not data. People, not software. Long ago, when I launched the GoSkokie project at Northwestern’s Medill, I told the students that towns know things I wanted them to figure out how to tap that keg of knowledge. They got partway there with (which was a model for Backfence, by the way), but that was only partway.

I now believe that he who figures out how to help people organize themselves — letting them connect with each other and with what they all know — will end up with news, listings, reviews, data, gossip, and more as byproducts.

Thoughts from the beach. Stay tuned.

Here’s my apperance on Howard Kurtz’s Reliable Sources yesterday with Ana Marie Cox. Subject: Facebook.

Click To Play

Nick Douglas complains at Valleywag:

Remember when all you had to worry about on Facebook was some awkward acquaintance adding you on Facebook too soon? (You know, like they talked to you at lunch once and instantly wanted to be your friend?) Maybe sometimes you got invited to the “Two and a Half Men is TV’s Greatest Show” group? But now I’m getting bombarded with crap like “Jim-bob wants to share movies with you” and “Janiqua wants to share secrets.” No, I don’t want “free gifts.” No, I don’t want to be a zombie. No, iDon’tLike. So stop spamming me every time you get an app. (Unless it’s that rocking graffiti wall.)

Right. Letting the world in won’t ruin Facebook (because we still see only a small part of that world). Opening up Facebook to apps will only help it. But apps that spam us? Stop! Please! If I told you once, I told you a hundred times, I don’t want to share bookshelves with you.

I tried to use Friendwheel to analyze my Facebook friends and their connections. I was told that I had too many. Heaven forbid.

I needed to come up with a list of people who could help me with something I’m doing at CUNY — a very neat project in entrepreneurial journalism I’ll blog about shortly — and so it was quite handy to just dig into my list of Facebook friends and find likely prospects. I also find that I’m making contacts with people in new ways. For me, it’s more effective than LinkedIn has ever been and I’m not sure why that is: maybe it’s more fun; maybe it’s because I have more friends; maybe it’s because it became hotter and so lots of my friends joined. By the way, I maintain my policy of friending only people I know. I wish there were a way for me to meet the other people I don’t yet know. I’m not sure what that is; to have tiers of friendship sounds awfully snobbish. But maybe there’s a need to have virtual mixers.

First Scott Heiferman and then Jason Kottke tried to tamp down the yeasty enthusiasm for Facebook’s platform by making comparisons with AOL, arguing that this was just another closed network. (Heiferman has since said that he has changed his thinking but he doesn’t have time to explain how. Damn. Kottke has amplified his thinking here. )

They hhavead a good and interesting argument, but after thinking about this a lot, I’ve come to disagree — because the two services are closed for different reasons: AOL was closed to give AOL control over us and our money. Facebook is closed to give us control over our identities and communities. AOL tried to “own” — their language back then — our relationship with them. Facebook enables us own our relationships with our friends. Kottke complains that my stuff on Facebook is not searchable on Google, but I think that’s the point; I should decide what I want to be searchable and findable to the world instead of just my friends. Yes, it’s closed, but I get to build the walls this time.

I’ve also argued, agreeing with these gentlemen, that Facebook needs to be more open if, indeed, it intends to become the Google of people. It needs to let me export and open to the world more of my faces. It needs to let me import more of my identity from elsewhere on the internet. It needs to help me organize and present that better. Will it do all that? I have no idea. The platform, I think, is a first step. It’s the next steps that matter.

When I was at Davos (OK, I’m place-dropping), I sat in on a brainstorming about how to keep the connections we make there alive the rest of the year. It’s hard. Davos is a safe world: Those who are invited there with you are there for a reason and so it’s much easier to strike up a conversation and exchange a business card than it is down off the mountain. It was hard to figure out how to extend that.

But lately it has occurred to me that Facebook gives us each our own Davos. We have control over or identities and communities. We befriend people we know. We use it to make new connections. It feels remarkably similar. Just without the snow. And Bono.

Facebook was down for a few hours this morning. I was getting the FB DTs.

On the wall at the Guardianista group on Facebook, of which I am a proud member, Stephen Brook reports this:

I quote from today’s Evening Standard media diary: “An explanation for the Guardian’s new obsession with Facebook: editor Alan Rusbridger has just joined the social networking site. Rusbridger has acquired 18 friends, most of whom are inevitably Guardianistas. Elsewhere on Facebook, Guardian hacks have formed their own online group, where they have been grumbling about the paepr’s redesigned website. Guardian online chief Emily Bell replied: ‘I would bet my boots the NYT won’t have a Facebook page with their own employees describing their output as shite.’ Indeed.”

To which the Guardian’s director of digital content, Emily Bell, adds:

Evening Standard Gets Media Diary Stories from Facebook Wall

says it all really

To feed my Facebook obsession: the unofficial Facebook blog. (via Martin Stabe)

Here’s son Jake’s latest Facebook app: Scratchpad.

The Guardian asks 10 media biggies why they joined Facebook and then writes an editorial about the importance of it all. Good, I’m not the only one going overboard.

Seth Goldstein writes an inspired post today about Facebook’s chances of becoming the platform for people. First, he sets the scene:

Meanwhile, the kids who treated their MySpace profile, and concomitant friend requests, with the same reckless abandon that we have done with our LinkedIn profiles, have now de-camped for Facebook. While I don’t have fresh data on hand to support this hunch, the well-sourced rumor I heard last week about MySpace scrambling feverishly to open their API’s reinforces what is becoming obvious: MySpace’s Kremlin-esque behavior towards 3rd party widget developers -”we buy them or we crush them!”- is on a crash course with the debauched dirty-dancing going on amidst the MySpace spring-breakers. As these kids move from junior high to high school, from high school to college, and from college to the work force, they are increasingly choosing the meritocratic social logic of Zuckerberg over MySpace’s “hot or not?” popularity contest

There can be little doubt now that Facebook is a platform for social media, as opposed to simply a web site community.

He then talksa bout what it takes to make a platform.

In 1999 I sat down with Brad Silverberg of Ignition VC who Microsoft recruited out of Borland in the early 90’s to become the lead developer and project manager of Windows 95. Never has there been a more valuable platform. He described 3 things that platforms needed to have:

* wide distribution
* application developers making money
* good tools

Let’s test those three axioms against the preeminent platform play of our time, Google:

* Wide distribution? YES
* Application developers making money? YES (if you count all the adsense publishers)
* Good tools? YES (all the adwords and adsense self-service goodness)

Now let’s test these axioms against Facebook:

* Wide distribution? YES
* Application developers making money? NO (at least not yet, I will comment on 3rd party Facebook developers such as Slide, Rockyou, and AttentionSoft)
* Good tools? YES

So, the question for establishing Facebook’s value as a platform is no longer whether Facebook itself can make money but whether its developers can do so. . . .

Nobody controls the web as a platform the way that Microsoft controlled the desktop. But certain parties do control enormous pools of user data and direct their behavior…API’s are fountains of data, mostly consumer meta data, that are the byproduct of some other functionality… The value of a web service API is tied to its ability to convert granular feeds of individual data into useful social media contexts. . . . Google does not offer this Social Media API. Facebook does.

That is the opportunity.

: A few more Facebook links:

* Mashable pits MySpace against Facebook, judging design, media, community, usefulness, and ease of use. Guess who wins.

* From a few days ago, Watchmojo tracks Facebook’s growth and says that 100 million users is not a question of whether but when.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg this week stated that the site was growing 3% per week, adding 150,000 users per day. Given the exponential nature of social networks, if the site is indeed growing 3% per week, and currently has 24M users, then by our calculation Facebook will have 100M users by February, 2008. Please note this is an exponential forecast: it calls for a 3% growth on the 3% growth… I also did less conservative forecasts etc., but for the sake of this post, this is for purposes of illustration and not an actual forecast that “Facebook WILL have 100M users, and it will by Feb 2008.”

They then go on to speculate on valuation. That’s anybody’s game.

* And I just started reading Inc. Magazine’s cover story on the Facebook that wasn’t, Friendster, and its founder, Jonathan Abrams.

It’s not easy being the brains behind one of the biggest disappointments in Internet history. Sure, there are those who describe you as a visionary, but in the same breath they’ll deride you as a lousy businessman. Bloggers attack you, call you “a real asshole” and “a very lucky idiot savant.” Former investors badmouth you. Other entrepreneurs copy your ideas without giving you credit. The New York Times makes reference to your “ballooning ego” and the local Fox affiliate can’t even get your name right.

Jonathan Abrams–founder of Friendster, the first online social network, and a pioneer of one of today’s hottest trends on the Web–tries his best not to think about these things.