Oliver Thylmann

There is a lot of rage about the new TOS from Facebook. In short, it gives all the rights (and I mean all of them) of what you share in Facebook (and what is connected to it it seems) to Facebook. With the new terms, this is even true if you delete things or your account. Mark now posted on the Facebook blog with a few words about the TOS but I am not really happy. He says that “In reality, we wouldn’t share your information in a way you wouldn’t want.” and that is just plain wonderful. But please, reflect that in the TOS and get your lawyers in line.

I can see how the TOS came about. The lawyers asked several people what they want to do with the content and started writing. Then they asked whether they might ever use it for advertising, and people said that sure, there might be something they could do there. Would they use it after the account was deleted, sure, for mining the data would be nice and my friends still have my mails via Facebook. And in all those things go.

Duncan from The Inquisitor actually has a great post about all of this. The good thing is that he copied over the TOS from Google’s Picasa and who would have thought, the Google Lawyers managed to write something up that makes sure I remain holder of the copyright and I remain in control. And I am pretty sure that Google would be able to do anything with my content if they really wanted to, unless I delete it.

Come on Mark, you can do better than Google. Sure it makes the TOS more complicated and sure, you need to add some limits to your system, but this is what the users want.

The bloggerati are slowly becoming the twitterati and if you ask the right people love for Twitter is all around you. For those of us who use Twitter daily, or like me have secured themselves a one letter Twitter nick (o), we are seeing that it becomes a lot more of our social network than a emm… social network.

I actually still believe things like Xing or LinkedIn should focus on syncing my addressbook, instead of life streams and all else. And the power of Twitter is that there are no conversations of a meaningful extent. And now the blogosphere is alight with recent news.

First of all Facebook joined the OpenID Foundation, allowing your Facebook Login to be used on other sites, which RWW thinks is wonderful news. I tend to agree and think it is a good first step in the right direction. It is still problematic that my content is locked in in Facebook. I use my mails on my own personal domain for the same reason. Still, Facebook is good and good is getting better.

The Facebook posted news of a new API to allow access to among others status items … the twitter like stuff within Facebook. So Loic thinks they now compete directly with Twitter and AllFacebook already says goodbye to Twitter. TheNextWeb thinks it is huge, and RWW has a nice little summary and more numbers and has one very good point.

Facebook is tearing down the wall. It is not trying to become the next Twitter, but it is just giving people what they feel their need to more intimately connect and are now slowly opening up the right APIs. This API is by now very rich, allowing applications to be written the upload status messages, videos, fotos, access status messages of friends, and so on. Slowly but surely Facebook is really moving where you can build a website with Facebook as a platform. If I would now want to do a focused little community I could move my video and photo storage to Facebook, do the messaging and all else.

A few good points on why this will not kill twitter can be found here on Techcrunch. In all simpleness, Twitter has a different focus. It’s really a system to send short messages and not a social network. Facebook is the other way around. Above that, Twitter is messages only and Facebook will tell me everything about my friends.

As sad as this makes me, it might be that this move allows Facebook to take the Twitter idea mainstream a lot faster than Twitter can. Twitter now has lots of apps around it and Facebook has those apps within Facebook. The problem is who wins and this is where I hope that things will slowly start to change.

There shouldn’t be the need for anyone to win damn it! I want to send all kinds of messages to all my friends. No matter where they are registered. We are still a bit of time away from this but Facebook opening up more and more and Twitter being fully stable and growing fast, the idea of openness is slowly gaining traction.

Next up I will touch on my personal social store thingie again, in which I am now using Noserub to store and index all my social life at thylmann.net.

I recently read a (german) post on potential revenue streams for social networks and I thought I’d add a few points. Of course there are lots of different ways to make money in social networks, like eCommerce, Premium-Accounts, WOM-Campaigns and more. The big question is really how much money that will be and how will it be managed. Remember, real people don’t scale, and if you need real people to handle the setup of special marketing projects or account within a social network, then that just doesn’t scale. That is where the value will really shrink in terms of what people are willing to pay for a social network from the investment side. Facebook is surely not worth billions because they can hire 20.000 people to talk to all the companies out there to set up special accounts on the network and optimize their interaction with their existing and potential customers.

The big point the post makes is that word of mouth marketing will be big in social networks and for those looking a bit behind the scenes of Ormigo, which is still very much in the beginning, we truly believe that this is something very important going forward. The problem is how to monetize it without endangering the relationship you have with your users. You don’t want a suggestion if you feel the suggesting party is making money by doing so. So saying “tell your friends about your digital TV and I will pay you” will not work. And I really doubt that Facebook will say “if you don’t pay us the message about buying a digital TV will not appear in the friends stream”… .

The valid point is that there is potentially a lot of value to be created by being able to tab into the social network of your users to find out more about them, but we have data oozing out of our ears and we are already not able to fully exploit it because it is so complex to think about or difficult to filter out the meaningful data based on standard models. A lot of times it is just having the right offer that is the hardest. Sure it is nice to know that you had your eyes fixed in a lasik surgery but without an advertiser in the space I cannot really do anything with that information. So I need all advertisers first or a lot of money to get over the dry stretch of not having them.

I have no doubt that social networks will make money, but based on the conversion rates we are seeing on social networks and on standard content portals, it is just worth A LOT less to advertise there and the content portals are already having problems working profitably. Just being the knot that ties your life together will only lead to immense server costs and not to profits. It will be highly challenging to increase your revenue ten fold through WOM or eCommerce. There is money to be made, sure, but it’s simply not enough.

As always I believe in performance advertising and this includes WOM or other forms of advertising with the only real challenge being now to be able to measure it. What gets measured gets done, or so they say. If we find a way to measure these kind of effects that Social Networks will be good at, we can integrate them into our performance advertising measurements and true money will flow in the direction of social networks.

Lots of thinking going down that road I think, so I am looking forward to seeing measurements appear that people really understand and that are valid. An example would be that if I can run an add on Twitter, and it gets Re-Tweeted 100 times, I might pay $100 CPM for displaying that ad the first time, because I have an effective $1 CPM which might be worth-while.