I've Heard Good Things

The Dalai Lama, a designer and a Facebooker walk into a bar…

So, this designer at a dive bar tells me a story:

The Dalai Lama is waiting for a much anticipated letter from a head of state. Day after day, week after week, he asks his assistant if the letter has arrived. Finally, it arrives and the assistant rushes it in. The Dalai Lama tells him to set it on the corner table. Three days later, the assistant is in the office and notices the letter remains unopened on the table. He inquires, “Why haven’t you opened this letter that you waited so anxiously for?” The Dalai Lama replies, “I will open it when I no longer have the desire to open it.”

The story came up because a coworker was talking about how he wanted to buy an expensive bike. He biked a lot in high school and then after three years of not having a bike in college he wanted to jump on a new one. Right before making the purchase he decided against the top-of-the-line choice in favor of a beat-to-shit used bike. If he found himself riding that enough, he’d upgrade.

Through all this chat about resisting temptation and desire I started to think about the opposite - acting on impulse, and how much that’s been a force in my life. I crave and lust all the time. And I move on impulses pretty regularly. There was a list of design principals that the Facebook team came up with earlier this year and the one I loved the most was “when you have a great idea, act on it immediately.” There’s this crazy fuel that comes in the brief hours immediately after you have a good idea. It’s not only an advantage for you, but that enthusiasm spreads to those you’re working with. There’s another mantra at Facebook: Move Fast and Break Things. It’s basically a theory of iteration. Build awesome stuff and get it out there. Constantly fix and improve it based on feedback. Don’t wait. Don’t ask for permission. And if you have good intentions from the start, and you fail, it’s not a big deal.

In trying to reconcile these two beliefs - structured restraint vs impulse - I thought about where Facebook is as a company. In the past month I’ve seen several discussions crop up where two coworkers have fundamentally different strategies on how to approach the same project - one distinctly ‘old school Facebook’ and one ‘new school Facebook’. Old school Facebook hacks. They do things cheap, fast and as good as they can be under those two restraints. They tinker continually once it’s out there. New school Facebook wants to take a step back. How can we do this really well from the start. What are the resources we have, and what can we do to make this incredible at launch?

It’s not as cut and dry as a risky versus conservative approach. It’s not as easy as saying, “well Facebook got to where it is because of its hacker culture, that’s obviously the best strategy.” There are more resources for larger projects now, and the allocation of those resources takes a longer time to navigate correctly. It takes a period of reflection before execution to make sure all the parts are in place. Taking one’s time pre-launch is not simply a risk adverse strategy - the projects may be as bold as they were before, if not bolder.

On a similar token, it’s even harder to dismiss the merits of moving fast and breaking things. It’s unique and exciting and it keeps an organization flat. Anyone from any department can work on a project that might ship to millions of people with relatively little oversight, so long as the intentions are good. Lose that core structure and who knows what else we lose with it.

These battles between restraint and impulse, plan and hack, are going to crop up more and more. It’s part of the transition of turning into a large company. In general, I think success is going to mean maintaing our ability to accept failure and rebuild. If we can keep a culture where it’s okay to make mistakes on a massive scale, employees will feel empowered to ship as fast as they can. It’s fear that slows down the biggest companies. Fear of shareholders, fear of wasted resources, fear of public perception, fear of internal brain drain. There are endless things to be afraid of. Perhaps, more than anything, it’s the fear of being wrong and having to admit it, that ruins the best companies. If we can simply not fear being wrong every now and then, and equally have the humility to admit it when we are, we’ll win.

Cold Snap

Tonight I recorded an interview between ABC News Reporter Christiane Amanpour, ABC News Producer Andrew Morse and our team here at Facebook (Randi). It was supposed to be a Live interview, but we ran into a ton of difficulties Skyping from Egypt that will hopefully be worked out for tomorrow. 

Christiane spoke about how her interview with President Mubarak wasn’t an interview at all, it was a conversation. She spoke of his expressiveness. His extreme emotional state. He was fed up with public life. He was frustrated. In President Mubarak’s eyes he has put everything he could into his country. He’s convinced that if he were to step down before the upcoming election the nation would plunge into chaos. 

There have been quite a few articles written about how the lack of leadership in this movement will ultimately be its fatal flaw. In our nation, we have a presidential election every four years and we work hard to pick the better of  two options. For over 200 years we’ve developed a set of values that we expect our government to uphold. With each new election we evaluate between relatively subtle differences in opinion, but we rarely touch upon fundamental ideology: freedom of speech, press, assembly, trail by jury, no national religion, etc. We know these by heart because they’re what our nation is built upon. 

I don’t think I have a good grasp on what the Egyptian people want. I listened to Christiane. I hear ‘anti Mubarak’ and ‘pro Mubarak’. The only clear truth I see is that a large and dedicated portion of the nation want Mubarak gone. He has been in power for 30 years. The people seem to quite simply want a new ruler. Christiane said that a not-so-insignificant amount of the population was satisfied that he would step down in September. Clearly many more were not okay with that. 

I get this sense that here in America we expect this revolution to lead to a crazy upheaving of ideology. We assume that when the people of Egypt uprise looking for a new leader, that means they want a democracy. And a democracy must mean all these other things. There will be relative peace and free press and speech and thoughtful judges and separation of powers and no more religious head butting and all of these amazing things. 

I can’t help but think we might be wrong. Maybe the people of Egypt just wanted a new leader. Maybe 30 years was all they could take of one man. I like to think that all these other great things that come with electing a leader with a finite term will come to Egypt in time. Yet for some reason I don’t see that happening now. This week. This month. This year. I could be wrong, I hope I’m wrong. But hoping I’m wrong is about all I can do as these increasingly tense and violent events unfold. 

Party like it’s 1999…

A coworker posted this fantastic essay published in The Sunday Times back in 1999 about this new thing called ‘The Internet’. It’s pretty indicative of all the challenges Facebook (and any new social technology) faces today. My favorite part:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

OH @ Facebook

“Do you know how to do this in Photoshop” (points to screen)

“I don’t, but ask him” (points to guy one pod over) “He designed Photoshop” 

Always nice to have guys like that on hand. 

Facebook’s Beginning

There has been a profusion of discussion about what Facebook launched yesterday at f8. I’m still wrapping my head around it, and the best way for me to do that is to write, and flesh out what these launches really mean for the web.

There are two camps forming. One side believes that what Facebook launched is one of the most ambitious, thrilling, visionary and scary steps forward in recent web history. Simply not enough hyperbole would do justice to what Facebook has set out to do. The other side believes that what Facebook launched is one of the most ambitious, thrilling, visionary and scary steps forward in recent web history - except they are vehemently against it.

The point I’d like to start out with is that there is no question that the moves Facebook made yesterday are a game changer for the web, and our lives. It radically impacts every single industry that uses the Internet to connect with consumers in any capacity.

It has been likened to the cross-contiental railroad, or even more grandiose, the Sun, with the rest of the web being planets and stars.

So what is it? What exactly did they do?

There are thousands of sites across the web outlining the launch, but here is my take:

So on Facebook right now there exists billions of objects. An object is a User (like me!) or a Page (like Coca-Cola) or Events, Groups, Applications, Status Messages, Photos, Photo Albums, Videos and Notes…

We connect to these objects right now on Facebook. I become friends with another user, I like a Page, or a photo, I attend an event, I comment on an article. I’m basically making connections with objects. In the case of Pages, if I ‘like’ (formerly ‘become a fan’) a Page, say Coca-Cola, they then have the ability to update that Page and that update will be sent to my News Feed. They’re keeping in contact with me. It also creates a ‘story’ that I liked this Page, and that goes on my profile, and also to my News Feed.

So all of that was the status quo until yesterday.

All over the internet, on millions of different sites, there are objects. Just think about it for a second. The New York Times, NFL.com, Hulu, Amazon, Gap, The White House, Yelp, Menu Pages, NYU, Oprah’s Official Site, Miley Cyrus’s site, NYC.gov. All of those sites have content, or objects. They have restaurants, or articles or photos, or movies or represent specific people, teams, athletes and events. And I interact with those objects every single day, but nothing connects my interactions to each other. If the site went through a long winded Facebook Connect integration, then I could interact with the site and they may prompt me to publish a feed story here and there - but it required a login and was extremely complex to integrate. Additionally, all the data from the user could only be stored on that site for 24 hours, and that data and interaction was confined between the site and Facebook itself.

Today, every single site in the world can implement a like button with literally one line of code. That like button can be attached to the objects on the site. When a visitor to a site clicks the like button, they’ve established a connection with that object. That object can then independently publish updates to the user’s News Feed, and it also exists within the user’s profile. Additionally, it gets added to the user’s Open Graph, which is the most powerful component, and I’ll have more on that in a second.

To see what I’m talking about, check out a few fun examples:

Levi’s: http://store.levi.com/#store
They have the like button on every single product.

IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1250777/
They have it on every single movie page.

Just click the like button on one of these sites. See how easy it is.

Yesterday, nearly 75 major sites launched with new integration and Facebook predicted over 1 billion likes would be made in 24 hours. Think about that. 1 billion likes. All streaming stories back to Facebook. All bringing additional Facebook users back to these sites. 1 billion points of information stored in Facebook’s Open Graph. In 24 hours, from 75 opening sites.

What’s so great is that I haven’t even gotten started…

Each Like Button, connected to an object, carries with it meta data. So Facebook gives the example of the movie The Rock, on IMDB. If you like that movie, with one click of the button, you’ve sent a link back to your Facebook, and you’ve added the fact you like The Rock to your Social Graph. Facebook posted a stream story on your profile, and possibly on the News Feed of some of your friends that you liked the Rock, and if you added a comment, it has a nice photo, and some information about the movie, just as if you had formerly ‘shared it’. But that little link to ‘The Rock’ on your Facebook has meta data attached to it.

A title: The Rock
A type: Movie
A URL: imdb.com/etc…
An Image
Description: A group of US Marines…

and the publisher can keep adding meta data:

Genre: Action/Adventure
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Sean Connery

and so on. The meta data doesn’t have to be visible. It lives in the code. So as a publisher you can add as much as you want. Be as specific as you want to be.

This meta data applies to all objects. Imagine what meta data you’d add to a restaurant or an athlete or politician or musician.

You can add location to the meta data if it’s a real life business:
latitude, longitude, street address, etc.

You can even add contact information to the meta data: email, phone, fax.

All of that meta data exists within that little link that came from ‘Liking’ something.

So when a user likes an object, which the publisher of the object has given meta data, all of that meta data associated with that object is now associated with that user. And it’s transportable.

So if you like a ton of different restaurants on Yelp, when you show up to MenuPages, they can quickly access everything you’ve ever liked, review the meta data associated with those likes, and make recommendations to you instantly. All instantly when you arrive at the site with no work on your behalf. You just happen to have liked a ton of stuff throughout the web.

BBC can make news recommendations to you based on what you liked on CNN, Netflix can make film recommendations based on what you liked on IMDB. If you purchased a new shirt from JCrew online and liked it during check out, Gap can make suggestions to you based on that data. The possibilities are completely endless. And all of this data is driven through Facebook. And all of it is searchable.

What do I mean searchable?

Google uses HTML from websites to scrape and cache the web, and we go to Google to search for things, and it delivers great results.

The Meta Data Facebook is collecting in the Open Graph is really a set of universal definitions being applied to billions of pieces of content (objects) that were formerly never universally defined. This meta data is searchable on a level significantly more intimate than HTML. 

This is the beginning of the semantic web.

An incredibly simplified definition of the semantic web is a universal system, or integrator, that lives across the web on different pieces of content, applications and systems and allows those pieces to recognize and interact with each other, without human aid.

From Wikipedia:

Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks such as finding the Irish word for “directory”, reserving a library book, and searching for a low price for a DVD. However, one computer cannot accomplish all of these tasks without human direction, because web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so computers can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, combining, and acting upon information on the web.

While it has been around for some time, meta data has never really been applied at scale, so it hasn’t really shifted us closer to the semantic web. With Facebook having over 400 million users, growing faster than ever before, and predicting 1,000,000,000 likes in 24 hours, you can better believe meta data is going to be applied at scale. Facebook will dictate the meta data that will literally connect the web. And what’s so incredible is that sites around the web will willing do this for Facebook. The traffic increase and user engagement they’d miss out on if they didn’t is absurd.

There are dozens of other aspects from yesterday’s launches that I could get into, but that’s the big idea, so enough back story.

This is a major step forward for the web.

I want to wait a bit to see what sort of privacy reactions come about before getting into that topic. I’m noticing a lot of people educating others on how to do a ‘Facebook privacy cleanse’. This mostly involves removing personalization options and blocking reputable applications. The fact is that most of these actions are misguided. Not to the fault of the user, but simply that privacy itself, specifically online privacy, is a murky area. It’s also an area I’m particularly sensitive to, and will definitely devote a later post to where exactly privacy fits into this new Facebook web.

For now, I can’t help but be excited. I’m excited because I believe this is going to be good for the web and technology as a whole. I’m excited because the ambitions of a few engineers with great ideas to change the world are actually coming to fruition.

They truly are going to radically transform how individuals carry an identity throughout the web.

Good luck Facebook. I’m rooting for you.

Transactive Memory and the Difference Between Facebook and Twitter

Last summer I received a forwarded email from a friend of mine. This email contained a passionate note, or plea rather, from a young woman, let’s call her Liz, begging for her Facebook account to be reinstated.  The night prior, as a desperate last minute attempt to complete a class assignment, Liz had sent hundreds of her Facebook friends messages containing a psychology survey. She had sent one too many messages, and due to automated Facebook restrictions protecting against spam, her account had been suspended. Just like that, it was over for her.

To most of us, this is yet another story of yet another deleted Facebook account. It doesn’t phase us; it hardly even registers anymore. But Liz’s story doesn’t end here.

Her email was incredibly detailed. She cited the loss of all of her photo albums, all of her videos, all of the friends she had and their contact information - the usual suspects. But she continued: she lost her ‘wall to walls’, she lost her message histories, she lost photos tagged of her, and all the tags she had ever created of her friends. Notes she had written to her friends and gifts she had given, scrabble games currently in progress - this email was downright painful. She was in mourning. She simply didn’t lose access to an online account - she lost a significant catalog of her past.

In 1985 Daniel Wegner introduced the concept of transactive memory. In short, transactive memory, often referred to as ‘groupthink’, is the idea that we can store and retrieve knowledge from those closest to us. Fellow employees we work with on a daily basis, classmates, family members, wives, husbands, and anyone we might consider a teammate in some capacity. Malcolm Gladwell makes significant reference to it in The Tipping Point, if you’re familiar. We simply don’t store all of the information we need to function and thrive in our own brains, we assign and shelve it in those around us. Transactive memory is one of the reasons that we find breakups or divorces so emotionally devastating. We’re losing a part of our memory, we’re losing major portions of our past. From what I’ve researched, transactive memory is predominantly only applied to other people. Living beings that we can utilize to quickly retrieve information from our past, and vice versa. However, upon reexamination of Liz’s note, she’s not reeling over losing data - it wasn’t just contact information - she lost memories, and more importantly her relationships to those memories. The tags on the photos, not the photos themselves. The wall to wall signings, message histories, these are memories that you haven’t backed up and stored on a hard drive, or a journal, or a flickr account. They were stored in a living breathing piece of software, compiled of hundreds of her closest relationships. She drew on these relationships to extract information from her past. She tagged photos to create relevant timelines, to remember names, faces, experiences. Facebook, and the relationships she had harbored there, built a context around an enormous amount of otherwise stagnant text and data.

When I examine my current experience with the dominant social utilities, Facebook and Twitter, a startling realization is made: I don’t store any transactive memory on Twitter, or anywhere else for that matter online: except Facebook. 

We all have become aware over the past 12 months of the incredible power of ‘the stream’. It’s a waterfall, it’s endless, it’s real-time, and you can drink from it as little or as much as you please. But when I contribute to it, it’s gone as quickly as it was created. The real-time web is a powerful force for staying informed, but it could not be weaker when it comes to groupthink.

This is the great divide I see between software like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Tumblr, even Google, and Facebook. If absolutely nothing else, Facebook has created a system for us to associate past and current relationships with data and create context. My friends mention to me how little they use Facebook anymore, and how much they use Twitter - I can attest this is true. But when pictures from Halloween were to be uploaded, they all went on Facebook and were promptly auto tagged, commented on, categorized and filed away neatly and efficiently. Sure one or two photos or videos go up here and there on Twitter - but they’re gone as soon as they’re posted. There’s no dam, there’s no reservoir. The same holds true for Tumblr, while more filtered and permanent, posts lack context, organization and relationships. Tags on Tumblr are weak relationships to irrelevant posts of irrelevant people at irrelevant times.

Liz’s Facebook was reinstated and all was right with the world. Her survey probably ended disastrously, but hey, that’s Karma. As for me, my money is on Facebook for the long haul. Facebook Connect will expand, and my dream is that someday we’ll be able to tag any element on the web with our friends: from photos on Gawker to videos on YouTube, to articles on The New Yorker. These tagged elements will be archived and efficiently filed in our Facebook albums, just like posted items. Twitter may be the instant ‘what’, but Facebook is the who, what, when, where, why and how. Google’s goal may be to organize the world’s information, and Facebook’s  stated mission may be to make the world more connected - but combine the two and you’ve got yourself timeless context - now that’s a worthy mission.

- Skip

The Thin Blue Line… of Facebook Privacy

Before I write something like this I’m always impelled to give a little disclaimer. I would be hard pressed to find a single person who respects what Facebook is, has done, and will continue to do more than myself. I admire the people running the company and I look to them as some of the most intelligent, driven, logical and innovative people I know. I have adored Facebook on a level that is probably considered unhealthy on most scales. End disclaimer.

Barry Schnitt, Facebook Director of Corporate Communications and Public Policy:

“I think WSJ is paraphrasing. What I said is profile picture and current city are optional. You don’t have to include a profile picture or you can include a picture of your dog or anything you like. Similarly, you don’t have to indicate your current city or you can indicate that your current city is “Atlantis”, “Valhalla” or, again, anything you like. We hope people will use accurate information if they are comfortable doing so because that information helps them to be found by their friends, which is part of the point of joining the site.”

As seen in TechCrunch here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/15/facebook-lie-terms-of-service/
and the WSJ here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126084637203791583.html

So, I’m inclined to always take tech gossip with more than a grain of salt. Doesn’t matter if it’s on Valleywag, WSJ or the New York Times, chances are they don’t know the intimate details which actually make a profound impact on the story, or they’re misreporting the facts. But when I see a direct quote from Barry Schnitt that essentially says the only way to preserve privacy over my profile picture or current city is to put up a picture that isn’t me, or a city I’m not in, to me it’s more than a sign of changing times - it’s the sign that Facebook has fundamentally changed their core values.

Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.

What Schnitt’s quote says is that they’ve placed making the world more open above giving people the power to share. What exactly are we sharing? A false picture? An incorrect current city? Those are the suggested privacy settings?

I’m an advocate of being open. I blog, I use Twitter, Gowalla, and over all am just a person who believes we shouldn’t have to hide who we are. As we’ve seen over the past four years, online tools are simply more powerful when they’re used by real world identities. That being said, I still like to control who exactly gets to know who I am. Since I joined Facebook I have always made my profile viewable to Friends Only. I’m aware that my profile picture and network have always been ‘public’ within Facebook, and I’m okay with that. But from my understanding there was always a setting that allowed users to be invisible from search results, or there was always control over if you wanted your profile picture and network to even come up in a Facebook search.

What makes this situation so upsetting to me is the fact that someone in Schnitt’s role at the company would suggest you change your picture or town to reflect false information as a means of privacy. It goes against everything I remember Facebook valuing while I was there - granted that was quite some time ago.

Facebook is in a tricky spot. There is a certain amount of information that I share with everyone I am friends with and for the most part, I am most open online with my Facebook friend list. From the photos and videos I share, to the notes I write, I am most open because I know that only friends that I have actively confirmed can see that information - and, even more private, specific friend lists within that.

If I want something to be completely public, I go elsewhere. I have a tumblr, and I have a twitter. That’s the problem Facebook faces, clearly. People go elsewhere for public communication. From what I’m seeing from an external perspective only, the general push at Facebook is to encourage users to make more and more of their information public. In many cases, users have been reckless with friending, or already were open to a certain network (like New York, NY) which was so large they might as well be blasting to the public - privacy essentially an illusion to begin with. However, that’s simply not true for all users. My privacy wasn’t an illusion and it still isn’t. My photos and videos are protected to very specific levels. When I want something to be completely public, I’ll put it on my tumblr and it syndicates to my Facebook. And therein lies the solution…

To me, Facebook Connect was the answer to Facebook’s problem. Rather than “encourage” users to open up all their content on Facebook to everyone, they made Facebook a mechanism for login (and much more) around the web, and they are doing it incredibly well. In this scenario, when I take actions on Twitter, Tumblr, Huffington Post, Discovery Channel, TechCrunch, almost anywhere - I do it through my Facebook account, and it’s shared, via feed story, with my trusted network of Facebook friends.

Rather than try and make everything on Facebook public, I loved the idea that select public actions I take around the web are broadcast to my trusted network of friends within Facebook. I simply don’t want to be ‘friends’ for all intents and purposes with ‘Everyone’ on Facebook. Sure, the information is out there if someone wanted to find it. I’m sure I have let friends slip in through the confirmation cracks, but it means something profound that I have this trusted cluster of friends that can be notified and see what I am up to, and I can do the same for them, and we have personally confirmed each other. These are the kind of people I’m sharing intimate details of my life with. Facebook to me is, and always will be, my home base. I love the fact that I can bring everything I do in the online world back to my home base - that is powerful, that is in my control, that is Facebook Connect. But I simply don’t want to share my home base with anyone outside that trusted network. It will lose it’s intimacy - it will lose it’s long term potential.

The last point I’ll make is a growing sense I have that we’re all going to hit a wall of immunity sooner or later. It’s why we migrate. Fax Ads, Telemarketers, Email Spam, the precedent is all there. Our phones ring off the hook so we de-list ourselves from the phone book. My email overflows so my communication with everyone via email drastically deteriorates. Even text messages are a dime a dozen and very rarely get a prompt reply anymore. Immunity is the natural course of events. Facebook has done a phenomenal job of fending it off thus far and I have no doubts they’ll continue to do so, but that has to be taken into consideration when privacy moves such as these are made, and statements about being okay with falsifying information are cast into the news. Immunity isn’t something tangible you can plan on tackling down the line in the company timeline - it needs to be considered in every decision that is made.

Facebook needs to push the boundaries of human comfort to stay on the incredible course it has cast for itself. They need to take risks. They need to make mistakes. They need to be thinking about what we’re going to be comfortable with 6 months, 18 months from now in order to stay not only successful, but even relevant.  To me, Connect is a huge part of that and they’ve executed near flawlessly. However, dynamically changing core values of privacy that many of us still cling to, that’s a much more complex task. I have no doubt they’ll be able to handle it, but I truly hope they consider what privacy means outside of just the antithesis of openness. Privacy means built in curation. Privacy is a weapon in the battle against immunity. And privacy among real world identities can be a valuable asset in a world that has quickly forgotten the meaning of the word.