Unlinking my Twitter Feed from Facebook
A number of months ago I linked the vast majority of my social media presence (Tumblr, Flickr, Twitter, FourSquare) to Facebook. I was a bit reluctant to do so at the time as I have over 1,200 Facebook ‘friends’ and was not sure how many of them would respond to the increased presence, especially those on the margin. But I decided to go ahead and give it a shot.
I quickly realized that my FourSquare check-ins were overwhelming my feed and I did not want or need every one of my Facebook friends to know where I was at every moment.
The Foursquare guys have done a great job however of adding very easy to use functionality in their iPhone app that allows me to selectively push check-ins to Twitter and/or Facebook. I use this religiously and it is the best implementation I’ve seen yet. I want it incorporated in all my web and mobile services.
In the absence of that functionality and after a few further months of experimentation, I’ve now heard enough rumblings about excessive posting from a number of my Facebook friends to call it quits.
I am officially de-linking my Twitter feed from my Facebook feed (at least for now).
Part of the problem here is that multiple of the same posts often go to Facebook. For example, Tumblr posts will feed directly to Facebook but will also come in through my pushing them to Twitter. Flickr photos often have a similar issue. A pervasive FourSquare-style selective push feature would help solve this problem as well.
As for Tumblr & Flickr, I’m going to keep them linked for now as I feel those services most closely reflect what I want to share with ‘friends’ and what Facebook is best for sharing (photos, content, etc.). But I guess we’ll see.
A number of my friends have taken the additional step of paring back their Facebook networks to only include true friends who would not feel spammed by the additional posting. I have done a little bit of paring and will continue to do so, but like having a somewhat wider network on Facebook as I find it very interesting to see what my outer circles are up to.
This has all left me with a profound sense of the difference between friend and follower relationships and the distinctions even in friend circles in terms of whom I want to share specific things with.
Along with the character restriction, the unidirectional follow relationship is the genius of Twitter. It’s ease of turning anyone on or off makes it unique and will continue to do so. Facebook is a broad-based social network geared towards selective sharing with friends and acquaintances. And Foursquare is for sharing location information with a different and smaller group.
These differences make each of these services unique and are why I believe they all have an important place in the ecosystem.
Community is Organic, not Manufactured
We’ve seen a lot of the web giants attempt recently to move into growing areas dominated early by young upstarts.
Google Buzz has of course been all the rage these past couple days, with it’s Twitter/Facebook-like feed integration into Gmail. Prior to that it was Yelp taking a swipe at FourSquare with their check-in addition. Even Yahoo launched Meme recently to compete with the likes of Tumblr.
All of these recent moves reflect a desire on the part of these larger companies to incorporate more of a sense of community into their already successful platforms. The inherent problem with this is that community (like entrepreneurship — more on that another time) can’t be manufactured. True community is organic, and it usually builds around a very simple, clean premise. And once it begins to tip, it has a life all its own usually very difficult to stop.
Bijan has a great post today on Google Buzz and trying to do too much. What’s so powerful about the simplicity he espouses is that it is precisely that initial use case simplicity that generates natural community.
For many years, when looking at acquisitions or building businesses, I worried about the likes of Google, or Yahoo before that, and their ability to move into the market we were going after and destroy us.
While this fear is grounded and often a very real threat, it is usually only so in the cases where the area you are playing in is fundamentally strategic to the respective 800 pound gorilla.
Community is something they all want, but not fundamentally strategic to what they currently have. Google is a search and advertising business. Yelp is a user-generated content and advertising business. Neither of them begin or end with community.
Communities are natural. They have a power all their own. Tumblr, FourSquare, Twitter, Facebook — they are who they are because of the power of their communities, not the other way around.
So while Yelp and Google may finally have some success with their attempts at community, to think that they can uproot or halt the growth of natural, social, viral communities is just not right.
Facebook’s Finances
Facebook’s capital situation is again the topic du jour. Techcrunch is reporting that the company received term sheets at a $2B valuation, SAI has it at $4B and the blogs are of course having a field day. My take:
Notwithstanding their race to cash flow positive, Facebook will need more capital to build it’s business. The key choice for them is whether they raise private capital now, figure out monetization and then go public or prepare earlier for a public offering.
Monetization is of course the fundamental issue, and I suspect Facebook is working on grand plans for a digital economy of sorts. Which makes complete sense to me…at least in theory. If you support a ‘people economy’ the size of Facebook (on and now offsite with Connect), payment infrastructure is a very natural evolution of the platform. More so than advertising given the utilitarian nature of the service.
As for the terms of the deal if FB does raise now, valuation will certainly be closer to $5B than $2B. And investors will swallow an expensive equity conversion in exchange for a piece of paper that sits at the top of the capital stack (first money out) and carries a preferred rate of return likely in the 14% - 16% range. This gives them little downside risk, a decent return in that instance and a chance for a big win should Facebook fulfill it’s promise. See the recent HomeAway financing as an example.
While I’m not sure that a deal gets done — FB may just swing for the IPO — I for one think it would be smart if they took the time to figure out the monetization path before exposing themselves to the brutal scrutiny of the quarter-to-quarter public markets.
