It’s February 16. Do You Know Where Your Facebook Photos are?

February 16, 2009

On February 4th, the largest social network by all accounts, Facebook, quietly updated it’s terms of service to grant itself an unending and irrevocable license to use all content ever uploaded to its service.

This is fundamentally not all that out of sorts from what most services do when licensing user content, but their lawyers are clearly a a few cards short of a full deck of 52. Consumerist says it best:

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Are we being herded towards data silos?

January 28, 2009

The war over who is going to be our main data silo has been brewing for a while and I think we are going to see it come closer to an end game in 2009. MySpace, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo have been jockeying for position to some extent over the last few years to become your home base for all things on the web. (Well minus breastfeeding pictures of course.) The two places that you can really see this battle play out is within the two major social networking sites.

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Tech Predictions for 2009

December 30, 2008

As we gear up for 2009, there remains many questions about the economy and the growth curve of the technology industry. As a team, we have come up with predictions for 2009. Ray Capece, Venture Files editor for Technosailor.com and I make our predictions.

As always, these are predictions. Last year, we were dangerously accurate with our predictions and would like to think that we have a good understanding of the business and technology marketplace in 2009.

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The Dickensian 2008: A Look Back

December 22, 2008

This year might be the strangest year ever. It roared in with news of Robert Scoble having his Facebook account suspended for utilizing scripts to sync data between Plaxo and Facebook in violation of Facebook’s Terms of Service. Of course, the year ends with Facebook opening up fbConnect in a way to share that same data with anyone who so chose.

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Creative Ideas for Capital

November 3, 2008

A great side-effect of entrepreneurs’ optimism in tough times is creativity. At our OpenCoffee last week, discussions got lively when talk turned to bootstrapping — not just self-funding, but all sorts of alternatives for producing live-giving capital and conserving what you do have. Time to put on your thinking caps.

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Facebook Spam Pitches

October 21, 2008

There’s a new form of social media spamming happening in the name of PR social media relevance. It is the art of the Facebook “tag”.

If you’re fortunate enough, you’ve been hit with this spam a dozen times in the last week. It is shadiness at it’s best and I will not hesitate to out PR individuals or firms, regardless of how much “clout” they have in the social space, if they do this to me again. It will not be automatic, although it might be. You’ve been warned.

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Facebook Shows New Life and Value

October 3, 2008

A few months ago, we started to see a shift in how Facebook could potentially be used in a different way. Newsfeed commenting was heralded as a Friendfeed style approach. Initially buried in the original Facebook design, I sort of shrugged it off as just another me too approach that wouldn’t take.

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What’s a Social App Developer to do?

September 19, 2008

To Mike Lazerow, CEO of new-age ad agency BuddyMedia, Facebook is the future. Big brands trying to reach the world’s 500,000,000 social network members are ringing his phone off the hook, because his firm has the skills to create branded apps — what he calls ‘the new ad unit.’ But what might that bode for us ‘pureplay’ app developers?

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Do we really have to go through this again?

August 1, 2008

I was born in 1982. I remember my parents buying a VCR. That one broke, and we got another one.

It was a Betamax. Anyone remember those? Sony had this great format for Video Cassettes, but they only manufactured it themselves. Someone else had a larger, lower quality format, but they licensed it to anyone who wanted to build them.

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Walled Gardens and Business Models in the 21st Century

July 29, 2008

Walled Gardens. Defined as media properties utilizing privileged access to provide information services or content to a user. The classic example of a walled garden was AOL, before they opened up most of their services. Users paid $23.95 or whatever the access rate was and got access to the “AOL Network.”

Then there was Facebook, the walled garden social network that restricted access to college and high school students, and businesses who had a Facebook presence. In all these cases, the confirming matter was a legitimate email address issued by the legitimate university, high school or business.

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Comments About Sarah Lacy, SXSW and the “Apology of the Century”

July 18, 2008

Last night at the Twin Tech Party in DC, Sarah Lacy of Business Week and I had a chance to meet for the first time. What transpired has been spun unbelievably out of control by attendees of the party. Phrases like “Battle of the Titans”, the “Apology of the Century” and labels of me being her “archnemesis” have been bandied around.

I personally think it’s all a bit much and want to explain what happened last night with a brief history on what happened involving Sarah and I at SXSW.

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