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Facebook’s grand plan for the future

ft.com

1–10 of 18 posts

Re: Facebook’s grand plan for the future

#2
From the article:

"As Zuckerberg was still on stage, an analyst leans over to me and says, 'They just changed local commerce forever.' It wasn’t even lunchtime yet."

I'll be a contrarian. They're keeping up with their neighbors. Groupon, Living Social, Yelp, Foursquare. It's all part of the race.

The interesting thing for me is that reading the article generated my idea on a way to do better: offer the "local discounts" without the privacy intrusions, overly intensive emailing, or any of the other trade-offs that current solutions have as a byproduct.

Re: Facebook’s grand plan for the future

#3

From the article: "As Zuckerberg was still on stage, an analyst leans over to me and says, 'They just changed local commerce forever.' It wasn’t even lunchtime yet." I'll be a contrarian. They're keeping up with their neighbors. Groupon, Living Social, Yelp, Foursquare. It's all part of the race. The interesting thing for me is that reading the article generated my idea on a way to do better: offer the "local discoun…

The only motivation for the advertisers to do the local discounts is so they can tap into your profile and market very targeted offers to you. Without the privacy intrusion and emailing, how would they do that?

Re: Facebook’s grand plan for the future

#4
'And while this may sound hubristic, it reflects Zuckerberg’s belief that Facebook’s map of human relationships is among the most important developments in business history. “That, I think, is the strongest product element we have,” he said. “And [most] likely one of the strongest product elements that ever has existed."'

I've been coming to grips with that statement being true.

Re: Facebook’s grand plan for the future

#5
post #3

From the article: "As Zuckerberg was still on stage, an analyst leans over to me and says, 'They just changed local commerce forever.' It wasn’t even lunchtime yet." I'll be a contrarian. They're keeping up with their neighbors. Groupon, Living Social, Yelp, Foursquare. It's all part of the race. The interesting thing for me is that reading the article generated my idea on a way to do better: offer the "local discoun…

The only motivation for the advertisers to do the local discounts is so they can tap into your profile and market very targeted offers to you. Without the privacy intrusion and emailing, how would they do that?

I suspect there are "more anonymous" possibilities than the current implementations of these ideas.

Re: Facebook’s grand plan for the future

#6
Maybe Robert Scoble was prescient [2009].

"Here’s the phases of Facebook:

Phase 1. Harvard only.

Phase 2. Harvard+Colleges only.

Phase 3. Harvard+Colleges+Geeks only.

Phase 4. All those above+All People (in the social graph).

Phase 5. All those above+People and businesses in the social graph.

Phase 6. All those above+People, businesses, and well-known objects in the social graph.

Phase 7. All people, businesses, objects in the social graph."

http://scobleizer.com/2009/03/21/why-facebook-has-never-list...

> The takeaway from that is that the social features are really the killer part of this,” Zuckerberg told me. “Having good social integration is more important than high-res photos.”

Look at the rapid rise of Instagram. If you make a product that makes you appear cooler to your friends and followers, you can attract a lot of users quickly.

[1] "Previously, Instagram reported 100,000 users in its first week post launch. The startup is now said to be close to the 1 million mark"

http://news.yahoo.com/s/mashable/20101203/tc_mashable/instag...

Re: Facebook’s grand plan for the future

#7
"According to comScore, about one in four online display adverts in the US now appears on Facebook."

Most of the Facebook ads are easily ignored, but some are quite well targeted to things I'm actually interested in.

There's far too many "get a college degree" ads that don't go away no matter how many times I give negative feedback on them. Note to facebook- if I explicitly reject an ad more than once, you're wasting opportunity by showing it to me again, no matter how high the ppc is for education-related ads.

But there's also a decent percentage of very, very niche items that are advertised that I am truly interested in. I click on FB way, way. WAY more than I do on any Google ads.

Re: Facebook’s grand plan for the future

#9
Working on something similar. The business plan is coming this February. In fact, I'm looking for financing to get it started.

http://miximum.ca/en_newProjectPage-kiosk.html

gallerytungsten, I agree with you that it's part of the race, but I believe Facebooks approach is fundamentally different.

What's important in this idea is that the content has to be geographically significant to the consumer. Some apps focus on other things, like game mechanics, search, etc. As mentioned in the FT.com article: "Facebook’s application can “check in” to a physical location, such as their local coffee shop,". Significant geolocalized information is key. For example, this concept clearly works a lot less well on a PC. Has to be on mobile or in my case a well localised kiosk.

The objective is to make it significant. Adding friend metadata to the info makes it more important to us.

Re: Facebook’s grand plan for the future

#10
"During his presentation, Zuckerberg uses words such as 'revolution' and 'disruption'."

Fun to contrast this with Jobs thoughts from the interview that was on HN recently: "What's the biggest surprise this technology will deliver?

The problem is I'm older now, I'm 40 years old, and this stuff doesn't change the world. It really doesn't. "

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