YCRFS 7: Applications of Facebook Instant Personalization

My current company (thehotlist.com) has been working on what you asked in these two paragraphs for two years.

"Facebook began by testing Instant Personalization with a handful of popular existing sites. But the interesting question for us is: what new things could be built using it that couldn't even have existed before? What new things could you do if you already knew users and their friends the moment they arrived?

One obvious advantage is that it will decrease the friction of trying something new. That will make it easier to launch dramatically novel things. The problem with dramatic innovations is that users often don't understand what you've made till they try it. Now you'll just be able to show them."

Would you like to give me some feedback if you visited thehotlist.com?

And if anyone visits thehotlist.com and has questions to ask me about the experience in using Facebook as main data source, feel free to ask me.

Eugene Jen

But say I'm reading an article and it says "your mother likes this too," well to me it doesn't add much to the site. So what's left is the creepy factor naked and exposed. I guess that's why there's the RFS: so we can find more useful integration of facebook. But as soon as it's useful no one will think creepy. Creepy is the ugly girl who stares at you, but the pretty one who does it isn't.

I'm not sure it's just that. A big factor in the creepy feeling is the unexpectedness. You don't, generally, expect most websites to know who you are and what your social circle is. And if they are, unexpectedly, it feels creepy. I understand that Facebook's idea is 'one day, it will be so common, it won't be creepy'. They may well be right but it seems like a tremendously high hurdle to overcome, to me.

First - our system lets businesses to invite their customers and prospects to the joint workspace (target customers are B2B companies. Facebook-like system - see screenshots here: http://blog.smartupz.com/2010/08/summary-of-key-elements-of-... ).

If the sales cycle is longer you have a lot of email chaos (both on sales team end and customer team end) and we help those teams to avoid that, build stronger relationship and maintain their own business social network. We also automatically track sales cycle progress based on the communication that is going on in the system.

And yes - we are using this right now and people prefer this to an email. It really works (because every action you make in the system sends an email notification it's not really such a huge workflow change).

Anyway - we see that Instant Personalization could improve shared customer workspace a lot: - customer could see "social proof" - who else in his social network did business with that company? And instantly ask for the reference. - auto avatar and contact info - Sales team could have instant info on what current customer likes (i.e. food, hobby etc.). This is a bit creepy but could speed up the sales cycle.

What do you think?