The latest from TechCrunch
- Zuckerberg: "Guess What? Nobody Wants To Make Lists."
- Cee-Lo's "F*ck You" Ain't Got Nothing On Gaga's "Telephone"
- Index Ventures Buys Into Etsy, Triples Valuation To Nearly $300 Million
- Facebook's "Platmobile" Team Working On Eliminating Mobile Password Entry
- Formspring Ramps Up Social Features As It Passes 16 Million Members
| Zuckerberg: "Guess What? Nobody Wants To Make Lists." | Top |
| A couple days ago, I wrote a post wondering if it wasn’t time to change Facebook’s social graph dynamic ? Specifically, I called for a simplified system that had two layers: your friends and your followers. I think that their current social management system which relies heavily on friend lists is highly flawed. And guess what? Mark Zuckerberg agrees. Tonight at a Facebook Developer’s Garage meeting at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Zuckerberg fielded a question about the service’s privacy controls. He said that the ideal solution for sharing different things with different people is to make a friend list. “ But guess what? Nobody wants to make lists ,” Zuckerberg admitted. Exactly. While the idea behind friend lists is great, for the average user (in other words, 99 percent of Facebook’s 500 million users) it’s simply not something they’re going to do. Or even if they make them at first, it’s not likely something they’re going to keep up with. Facebook has tried to lower the barrier to entry a few times ( most recently a couple days ago ) but they are still simply too time-consuming to set up and maintain. My solution is the two tier system: either someone is a friend and you have to accept them as such. Or they’re a follower — meaning they can opt-in to following your public updates without you having to okay them. When you update on Facebook, there would then be a big switch to decide if you want something to go to just your friends or to your followers (which would include your friends). I see no reason why there couldn’t be an option to use lists that further filter things beyond that. But friend/follower would be the main list/function that everyone used. Zuckberg is clearly thinking a different way to solve the lists issue. He thinks it still has to be something like friend lists, but done a different way. He noted that they have to come up with a way for people to control each thing they want to share, but do it in a way so that the tools are really easy to use. Again, even with such a vague statement, I’m worried that this is going to be too complicated. To be fair, it’s an insanely difficult problem Facebook is facing — and Zuckerberg knows it. He notes that after over six years of adding various privacy controls over features, things became “really hard to use.” But he still believes in the idea of sub-groups of friends because the average user has something like 50 friends now — and people who use Facebook more often, have a lot more. Those users might not want to share all their information with even just those people. Or worse, he noted that ” the people who you are most afarid of seeing [some item] are on your friends’ list .” He also spoke to the fundamental idea of friending someone and them accepting it as what they need to look toward going forward. He also believes the problem may simply come down to design. Again, the idea behind friend lists is correct in his mind — it’s just the implementation that isn’t. I still like my idea. CrunchBase Information Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Cee-Lo's "F*ck You" Ain't Got Nothing On Gaga's "Telephone" | Top |
| As seen by the entire Internet, the August 19th premiere of Cee-Lo Green’s “Fuck You” will go down in history as the day the phrase “fuck you” became totally benign and commonplace. But, in another case of loud web hipster chatter not resulting in a proportionate amount of viewers, “Fuck You” did not get to the 1/2 million or 1 million mark faster than glossy stuff like Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone,” which had surpassed the Cee-Lo video’s current 2,822,225 million views IN A DAY. While YouTube would not comment on the stats of any individual video, YouTube Product Manager Hunter Walker did answer our inquiry on Quora. “Love the Cee-lo video but it’s nowhere close to the fastest growing music video of 2010, or even this month. Check out Eminem’s “i love the way you lie” — 63 millions views in three weeks.” In testament to the overwhelming appeal of this video among a certain tastemaking segment of the online population, Quora Co-Founder Charlie Cheever even got in on the armchair viral video quarterbacking . And in case you are a nerd and were wondering what the Cee-Lo font is, it’s Champion Gothic. CrunchBase Information YouTube Quora Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Index Ventures Buys Into Etsy, Triples Valuation To Nearly $300 Million | Top |
| Crafty commerce site Etsy just raised another $20 million in its fifth venture round (that would be the Series E). Index Ventures is the new investor leading the round, with partner Danny Rimer getting an observer’s seat on the board. (The board is made up of founder Rob Kalin , Caterina Fake , Accel partner Jim Breyer and Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson ). Previous investors Accel and Hubert Burda Media put in some money as well in this round. The round gives Etsy a pre-money valuation of just under $300 million, about triple the valuation it got during its last, $27 million round in January, 2008. Most of the shares sold—nearly $14 million of the $20 million—were secondary shares held by some of the early investors. But unlike other rounds we’ve seen lately, this wasn’t a liquidity event for founders. Kalin says he did not sell any shares, nor did any employees. Etsy started turning a profit at the end of last year, just when Kalin took over as CEO again . Kalin projects revenues this year to be between $30 million and $50 million and expects the company to continue to be profitable. The company has 125 employees. He expects the total gross value of goods traded on the site to double this year to $400 million , and hopes to hit $1 billion next year. CrunchBase Information Etsy Index Ventures Robert Kalin Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Facebook's "Platmobile" Team Working On Eliminating Mobile Password Entry | Top |
| Earlier this evening, Facebook held a developer’s garage event at their headquarters — sort of like a State of the Union for third-party developers. Notably, they announced a new partnership with Y Combinator that has the goal of creating new startups with deep integrations with Facebook’s newest tools. But there was also a Q&A session with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg , CTO Bret Taylor , and Y Combinator’s Paul Graham that was pretty interesting. One question asked if Facebook was working on their instant personalization technology for mobile devices. Taylor fielded the question noting that mobile brought about some interesting technology problems in this regard. Most notably, he said the issue is with password entry on mobile devices. According to Taylor, that’s something they have an entire team focused on right now. Taylor noted that this team is called the “Platmobile” team (as in: platform + mobile, and said like ‘Batmobile’). This brought some laughs from the audience, but while the name may be somewhat of a joke, their goal is very serious. Taylor noted that many people have three-letter passwords that they use for mobile services to keep things fast and simple. But obviously that’s not ideal from a security perspective. He noted that many of the developers in the room likely had long passwords that included weird characters for this very reason. But Taylor said that this “ 10 minute process ” was a “ really negative part of the user experience. “ “ The Platmobile team is focused on improving that experience. I don’t know the exact timeline on that, but it’s something we’re really focused on because the user experience on the phone right now is sub-par, ” Taylor said. Zuckerberg chimed in to say that the mobile experience is obviously different, so instant personalization would be different too. Perhaps you’d have a group of apps that you set different privileges for (such as password memorization) with such a feature, he noted. “ The general trend though is that all of this stuff is going towards less friction to get to social interaction ,” Zuckerberg concluded. CrunchBase Information Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Formspring Ramps Up Social Features As It Passes 16 Million Members | Top |
| Formspring , the Q&A service that lets users invite their friends to “ask them anything”, has had a wild year: since officially launching last November, the service has skyrocketed to over 16 million registered members, 40 million monthly uniques, and it’s now closing in on one billion questions answered. Because the company is still quite small and has had to deal with actually scaling the site, Formspring’s feature set has been pretty spare until recently. Now the company has a few key new features in the pipeline. The biggest upcoming feature, which will be launching in the next few weeks, is called ‘Connections’. Before now Formspring has had a very limited social graph — you could ‘follow’ other users, but you couldn’t see who was following you (nor could you see who was following anyone else for that matter). Visiting someone’s formspring profile has been largely a dead end, and there hasn’t been a convenient way to find interesting new people to start following. Connections should help change that. The system won’t use the traditional ‘follow’ model seen on services like Twitter. Instead, you’ll automatically establish a connection with a user whenever you answer one of their questions or they answer one of yours (there’s more to it then this, as the system will also use weighting to show your strongest connections). Of course, many of the site’s questions are asked anonymously, and no connection will be created if you ask or answer an anonymous question. Another highly-requested featured has been an iPhone application. Formspring still doesn’t have its own official application, but third party developer Taptivate has used Formspring’s still-private API to build one themselves. It’s called Spring , and it’s slated to land early next week — expect it to be quite popular. Formspring says that this isn’t the official app, and that it will consider building or buying one itself down the line. The site has also just rolled out Facebook’s Like button, which should help drive as more questions get shared to users’ Facebook News Feeds. One other thing to note: Formspring’s traffic has actually dipped in the least couple months, but the company says that this is seasonal. CrunchBase Information Formspring Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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