Tony Hue

The site was the first of its kind: a virtual meeting place that allowed Harvard students to upload and share photos, web links, and personal messages, creating a vast social network unlike anything seen before. In its nascency, the siblings say HarvardConnection—known in its early days as The HarvardConnection—already showed great promise, even before it emerged as the definitive cultural phenomenon of the 21st century, and well before “Winklevoss” became the household name it is today.

Hilarious piece by The Onion.

“Home transforms Facebook from just a social network into something akin to a neurological disorder.”

Facebook itself is a triumph of mediocrity. It’s not the best communications platform; that’s Twitter or WordPress. It’s not the best photo sharing app; that’s Instagram or Flickr or maybe even Snapchat. It’s certainly not the best app platform, the best address book or the best messaging service. Likewise, it’s so easy to hate on Facebook for privacy policies, or the annoying ads, or for constantly rearranging things, or the things your crazy uncle posts there or, well, hell — take your pick. But Facebook is really, really good at connecting people. And that means it can be just OK at everything else.

Wrote this guest post for my friend’s blog a couple months back. Forgot to post it here.

Enjoy! 

Of the three options, search is clearly the most interesting. An external ad network is inevitable. Google proved this model with Adsense. With an already huge base of advertisers bidding on CPCs, it is impossible for most other ad networks to compete on publisher payouts. But Facebook’s traffic is so great now that an external ad network might increase their revenues by 2x or so. The same goes for entering China. They might get another half a billion users who monetize at lower ad rates than US users. Neither move would put them in Google’s revenue range. They need a better business model for that. The only (known) models that deliver RPMs high enough to compete with Google are search, payments, and e-commerce.

Chris Dixon citing a report on Facebook’s possible options for growing the company.

With search, the main challenge is training users to think of Facebook as a place to search for answers, besides the default Google. An ad network seems promising, but I don’t know enough about it to really have an opinion. China is always a lucrative market given that it has the world’s largest internet population. But it’s more of a political challenge than anything else. Local social networking clones might also capture a huge market share before Facebook even has a fighting chance; eg, Baidu with search.

dustyprogrammer:

YA DIGG?

If you want to get your own follow these instructions!

1. Log into Facebook

2. Enable developer mode, if you haven’t already. To do this, type “developer” into the Facebook search box, click the first result (it should be an app made by Facebook with a few hundred thousand…

After the excitement and eventual decline in user engagement with the much-hyped startup, Color, the company has returned with a new version, aka it’s “pivot”, refreshing itself as a Facebook photo and video app. Why did the first version fall flat on its face? 

The primary reason Color fell flat on its face after it was released, its creators say, was because there weren’t enough people using it to make it interesting enough to revisit on a regular basis.

Ahhh…a chicken and an egg problem as mentioned on The Brooks Review. So of course! Use Facebook and its 750+ million users and you wont have any problem! Right? 

But the killer feature of the new Color, Mr. Nguyen says, is the ability to let friends “visit” one another through the application, or tune in live and see what their friends are doing at that exact moment. Say, for example, that a friend posts a picture from a Justin Bieber concert. Other friends using the application, or who see the picture on Facebook, can request a “visit” through the application — or permission to begin live-streaming with that friend and see what they’re seeing at that moment.

Sounds sort of like Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning’s new startup, Airtime, which is reportedly a live video site that lets users post and react to videos in real-time. 

Let’s see how long this lasts. 

These projects put him constantly on the road. He flies in a monthly loop from New York (base) to Los Angeles (music executives) to San Francisco (Founders Fund), then Stockholm and London (Spotify). In my last meeting with him I asked where he files his taxes. “That’s a damn good question. I don’t even know.”