Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp’s Web 2.0 blog

It seems like Facebook is all that marketers talk about these days. Ever since Facebook launched their platform, people have been trying to figure out what the secret equation is to make an application that will extend their brand. I don’t know about you but I can’t take any more poking, slapping, shooting, beer passing, zombie biting applications.

The Facebook apps have that been my favorites are the ones that allow me to share my activity from other Web apps into Facebook and over the social graph. For example, I love the Pandora Facebook App. It allows my friends to see what Pandora radio stations I have created and I can see theirs.

Other apps that do this within Facebook are Upcoming for events, WordPress with blog posts, Twitter with status updates, del.icio.us with bookmarks, Digg with dugg news stories, and many more.

A users activity inside of your applications is very silo’d. No one else gets to see it. But you really do want a users to be able to show their friends what they’re doing with you’re applications. That way things can be more viral.

You want the first user to go about his/her business with your Web app. Within Facebook, people will see what they’re doing with your app. Hopefully your user’s friends will start using it and their friends will start using it.  You’ll be sharing your content without having to actually share it explicitly.
The Web is so big. People want to be able to use their friends as a filter for what they should and shouldn’t check out in life in and out of the Web. Why not provide them with the most information possible?

I have to say that the DC Tech Community is alive and active.  I have been meeting so many great people who share similar interest to me.  It’s a fun time to live in the Washington DC area.

Here’s a recap of the last week and a half….

Will Meyer talks Widgets at Refresh DC

Last Week, Clearpsring’s Will Meyer talked to a packed house of 100+ people at RefreshDC.   Widgets are something that a lot of folks had heard about but i’m not sure how much they’d actually worked with.  This high level overview and discussion was great.

This  Refresh DC was also one of the first major events since BarCamp DC, so there was a lot of the same excitement.

CopyNight DC bring good beer and great discussion about the state of online music

This was my first time attending CopyNight DC,  which is hosted by Joseph Price.  They met at Regional Food & Drink in Chinatown, which has a GREAT beer selection.   What was even better was the discussion.  We got into an impromptu discussion about the state of the online music industry.    With the Amazon MP3 music store just recently coming out, this was one all of our minds.  I really enjoyed it, met some great people, and will be coming back next time.

NextDC Happy Hour Tonight (I’m Bummed I Missed It)

Moses McCall’s group NextDC hosted their very first happy hour tonight.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make it.  I’m sure it was a great time and I’ll see photos of it on Flickr tomorrow.

DC Tech Network is almost at 100 members

A few weeks a go I had the bright idea of using a Ning social network as a way for the DC Tech community to stay better in touch with one another… so I created the DC Technology Network.  I’m pleased to say that we’ve just signed up our 90th member.  The network is getting more and more active everyday.  We’re even working our own book group from the network.

Oh… and there’s more.

There is so much that’s happening in the DC tech community.  It’s exciting.  I hope to share more soon.

There is an interesting thread in the blogosphere about how Facebook might just be a gigantic way to be unproductive.  Web standards luminary  Jeffrey Zeldman and even Facebook app consultant/self-proclaimed Facebook addict Nick O’Neill have  admitted to its unproductive qualities.

The question I ask is… if the best thing Facebook has going for it is its ability to help you waste time really well, can’t it be easily replaced or won’t it slowly die out?  How can this be a long term viable platform?

Some other Web application or social network is going to help you waste time in an even more fun way and people will flood to that, in the same way that people are moving away from MySpace to Facebook.

At TechCrunch40, everyone got super excited when Mark Zuckerberg announced the new venture fund they’d be starting to spur on the growth of Facebook applications.   They have apparently set away $10 million for this.  I guess this means I can apply to get $25k to build the next generation in Zombie biting Facebook applications.

Please, someone build me a Facebook applications that blows my mind.  Build me an application that really takes advantage of the social graph in an meaningful way.   Show me how you use it in a way that is beneficial to your day to day.

I like Facebook Events but I’d rather use Upcoming or Evite because its not as restrictive.   I like Facebook Photos but I like Flickr better because everyone can see it.  Facebook Video is great but I don’t use it that much.

I need more.

I have been really busy lately. Work has had my que loaded pretty non-stop. When I’m not working, I’m getting ready to move into the city, organizing conferences, and hanging out with friends. It’d be incredibly easy for me to go a week without using Facebook.

I’ve been thinking about, talking about, and writing about Facebook and I’m still not really sure what extraordinary thing it does.

Facebook is the place where I find out whats up with my friend from third grade who I haven’t talked with in 10 years. Facebook is where I get bitten by the Zombie application from the person who I met at a conference but haven’t talked to since. Facebook is where my friends join groups which do absolutely nothing.

I challenge all of you who read this to not use Facebook for a week. See if you can live without it. I bet you can.

If you can’t live with out it, tell me why. Like Robert Scoble, has it become your address book? Do you have 5000 friends you have to keep track of?

Also… I challenge my friend Nick O’Neill to live without Facebook for a week or to write me a post convincing me why he can’t live without it (and the reason can’t be that its the center of his business.)

So to continue the conversation on Facebook, I thought I’d write about one of my favorite applications, Facebook Video. (I don’t want people to think that I’m completely negative on Facebook.)

Facebook Video is very simple, which I think is part of its charm. You can upload videos that you have on your computer or you can capture video right from your Web camera and send that to all of your friends or to certain specific friends as a video message.

Uploading videos that you have on your computer isn’t that exciting. That’s what we have YouTube for.

Being able to send video messages is what excites me. I have an Apple MacBook, which means I have a Web camera built into the lid of my laptop. (This is so genius of Apple.) So… all I have to do is literally open the “Create a new message window,” hit record, and start talking into the camera. It’s that easy.

There are times which I’m tired and don’t feel like penning War & Peace in the form of an e-mail. It’s so much easier to just to open up Facebook Video, type in the person’s name, hit the record, and start talking. I’ve been doing this with one of my best friends from college. It’s so much fun.

With video, so much more comes across. You get the emotion and personality so much clearer from the person that you’re talking to. It’s quite cool.

So you’re assignment for today, if you have a Web camera, go on Facebook Video and send me a video message and I’ll send you one back. As I said before, this should be incredibly easy for those of you that have Apple MacBooks.

You’ll see how much more fun it is then sending e-mail.

It happens way to easily. You get crazy busy at work. You get home and you’re exhausted. The last thing on your mind is blogging. All you want to do is to relax and kill some brain cells by watching reality TV.

Well a huge part of blogging is writing consistently. The key is to get back on the horse again and just go at it. Don’t give up just because you haven’t posted in a few days.

So… Yeah this week was nuts for me. All I had on my mind after word was this really cool bottle of California Cabernet and watching season 3 of Hell’s Kitchen. Well now, it’s time to get back on the blogging train. The week got away from me but the weekend won’t.

One thing that I took away from BarCamp DC was that there is a really awesome tech community in the Washington DC area. It may be spread across a number of groups. It may be in multiple states. Regardless, there is an awesome technology community that exists.

The question I and a number of others had was how can we bring this community together. We need one place online where the community can go to chat with one another and keep up with what’s going on. It’d aggregate a lot of information from other sites. My esteemed DC colleagues agreed.

I’m very happy to announce the launch of the DC Technology Network. It is a social networking site powered by Ning. While the site is very primitive (or beta) and still evolving, I think it’s a fun and interesting way for us to all stay in touch and maintain that awesome feeling that existed at BarCamp DC.

So… if you live in the Washington DC metro area (or formerly lived in the area) and want to stay in touch with your fellow local geeks, PLEASE SIGN UP for the DC Technology Network.

Have you signed up? What do you think? How can we make this more useful?

There is this really cool conversation going in the blogosphere right now about real friends vs. online friends and how they’re played out in social networking applications.

Facebook has allowed you to stay in touch with more than just your close day to day friends. It has given you the power to track and keep in touch with your whole friendship ecosystem.  It allows you to keep in touch with everyone from your best friends to the person you met a conference once to your long lost friend from third grade.

The thing is for the most part all of the relationships are seen as the same in Facebook.  This makes it incredibly hard to filter out the noise and just hear the signal because you have this constant stream of everyone’s activity.

Robert Scoble has very elequently stated in some recent videos how Facebook knows who you’re close to.  They can tell you interact with, message, poke, attend events, went to school with and so on.  You think they could put in some type of automatic filter that allowed me to see my close friends more prominently then the person from the the conference who I don’t really talk to or know that well.  The thing is… they don’t have this feature.

Facebook should be using all of this activity and attention data to shape how we see the dat that is being presented to us.

Right now there is a Facebook Application where you can choose who your “Top Friends” are (which I still think is a dumb idea). I’d love to see an application which would show you who your top friends are purely based on the history of all your interactions on Facebook.

Tonight, we continue our walk through Facebook, looking at what it has to offer.

In today’s active global society, it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on with all of your friends. Facebook is ingenious because its convinced users to record their social history in one central location. That social history can then be easily exposed to those that are within your social network.

Within Facebook, this was first done with by getting a very high level view of what friends had changed their profile. Later, Facebook added the ever infamous News Feed, which makes every change within a users social history available for public view. As we all knew this caused a outcry.

During the outcry, users finally started to realize the level of detail that they were exposing to their friends. Now instead of just exposing less of their social history through Facebook, users decided to just hide themselves from the News Feed. It’s entirely possible that there could be things happening with your friends that you don’t know about because all you’re doing is paying attention to the news feed.

What if I wanna expose my social activity history to some people and not to others? One of the biggest added values of Facebook is being able to see that aggregated view of your entire network’s activity. If key people are being hid, it makes it less useful. The thing is I’m forced to treat my long lost friend from 5th grade the same way I treat my best friends. There is no way you can choose who you expose information to.

I think so much could be done with the News Feed. I’d love to see it be rethought or redone.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about Facebook.   Jeremiah, Scoble, and Nick can’t stop talking about it.  Scoble recently called Facebook “the new business card.” For me, my excitement goes in waves.  I get excited about it and then I two or three weeks without using it.

I just wonder… is Facebook helping us to stay in touch with our community or is it making our relationships more shallow and voyeuristic?

A few weeks ago, I was saying good bye to one of my friends who was moving out of town.   I said something like, “We should make sure that we’re Facebook friends.  It’ll help us all stay in touch.”   So a good face-to-face relationship has turned into the Facebook Newsfeed and Wall posts?  Whats up with that?

There is the Facebook Platform which people are so excited about.  Just take a look at the top applications… Top Friends, Super Poke, Graffiti, Free Gifts, Fortune Cookie, and Horoscope.    While poking people can be fun for a little while, which of these Facebook apps really benefit my life in any way?  They don’t send me running to my computer when I get home from work.

I think Facebook Groups is probably one of the most underdeveloped features in the whole product.  For the most part, people don’t take advantage of the actual group aspects of the application.  Facebook Groups have become profile labels.  You can  be in the “I like naps” group.  This group doesn’t talk about naps or plan get togethers to nap.  It’s just a label.

The Facebook Newsfeed is cool but some people use it and some people don’t.  A lot of times the people that I want to hear from or about keep their updates private and so I’ll never see them.   I dunno.

Just so I’m not all negative… Facebook Events are great.  If I’m marketing a get together, it’s one medium for getting the word out.  For some reason, I still prefer Upcoming as a main marketing tool.   I like Facebook Photos but I feel pretty emotionally invested in Flickr.  I like Facebook Video, especially being able to send my long distance friend video messages.

I dunno….

Over the next week I wanna write a series of posts about Facebook.  I’m going to dive into more of the features.  I want to dive into the philosophy of Facebook and see if I can identify what about it is missing and were it could be improved.  I’ll also see if I can identify what type of social need its filling which is causing it to be so successful.