Facebook and the Donner Party. Is Open Graph the new Hastings’ Cutoff?
The History Channel is running a series called America, The Story of Us and a couple of weeks ago they discussed Manifest Destiny and how the wealthiest people from the eastern states believed they had a right to the land in the west so they sold everything, packed everything and hit
the trails west to California. Along the way, a group of 81 reading an old map created by an early emigrant, Lansford W. Hastings that showed a short cut to prosperity. The map was outdated and not tracked and led the Donner Party on a treacherous trail through the Sierra Nevada. The group got to within 30 miles of California but was snowed in by 5 feet of snow and left them trapped and led to cannibalism and the majority of their party dying a very cruel death.
So, why the short history lesson.
The same week that show ran, Facebook announced their “Open Graph” plans which was pushed as a short cut to growing your social graph. All you need to do is add this one line of code and pop these like buttons in where they fit on your site and this will allow seamless socialization for your audience and their friends on all participating sites. They marched out several sites that were early adopters including Yelp, CNN, ESPN and others. Now if your users “like” something on your site, it will alert their friends on Facebook as well as any friends that may happen to your site. This short cut to audience growth is being bought because their is a promise of audience growth for the participating sites. While that audience slowly grows Facebook is using that one line of code to mine key information from your users and advertisers. They will know the habits and trends of your audience and use that as fuel to generate new advertising sales. Facebook will make billions while each of the participating sites try to figure out what they have gained from the partnership and then pray that their is even the slightest potential to monetize it.
So, now reality sets in and you remove the code from your site which in turn, makes your users believe that you have complicated their lives while Facebook makes things easy for them. It seems harder because you will need to rebuild the majority of your registration database which will make users register again.
So, now you have taken the short cut and are now snowed in and the only thing you can do is watch Facebook cannibalize your audience. Remember, they already know they have your friends and their friends playing Farmville, Mafia Wars, Poker and sharing funny anecdotes. Now through a simple line of code they are getting expense free R&D so they can build out what you have and keep your old audience happy.
My recommendations:
- Create a “like” button of your own and make it post to multiple places — Facebook, Twitter, Buzz and more without giving up your valuable data-points.
- Allow your audience to post the content they feel is valuable enough to the social nets of their choice. It’s not that complicated. Compelling content will make your audience act.
Facebook is a necessary part of the promotion engine. It may be the most important piece of the entire media mix today but just like with traditional media, Google and other forms of web advertising you want to maintain control of your message and audience. Focus more on mobilizing your passionate audience and let them push your message to the right place.
Open Graph is the new Hastings’ Route with one main difference, Lansford W. Hastings didn’t purposely create a map to put others in harms way.
Users have a lot of other concerns. Look at the list of posts just from last week…
A look at last week’s headlines shows the trend:
Facebook’s Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline
Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook
http://gizmodo.com/5530178/top-ten-reasons-you-should-quit-facebook
Yet another Facebook privacy risk: emails Facebook sends leak user IP address
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/05/07/yet-another-privacy.html
A Stunning Infographic on Facebook’s scary privacy evolution
http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/
Facebook’s “Posts By Everyone” Feature: Do People Realize They’re
Sharing To The World?
http://selnd.com/96avG4
Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative | Epicenter |
Wired.com
http://bit.ly/aoNxf0
Senators Call Out Facebook On ‘Instant Personalization’, Other Privacy Issues
http://tcrn.ch/907D27
Facebook’s email days: “I’m CEO bith@#$%!”
http://bit.ly/ba5wRY
Facebook’s new features secretly add apps to your profile
http://bit.ly/bHXpH5
The Day Facebook Stole My Page
http://bit.ly/ar4A4As
Facebook is Dying – Social is Not
http://bit.ly/atwbzX
Facebook’s “Evil Interfaces” | Electronic Frontier Foundation
http://bit.ly/9ww6g3
Today, I read Jason Calacanis’s post The Big Game, Zuckerberg and Overplaying Your Hand where he says –
Zuckerberg represents the best and worst aspects of entrepreneurship.
His drive, skill and fearlessness are only matched by his long
record–recorded in lawsuit after lawsuit–of backstabbing, stealing
and cheating.
As TechCrunch reports that more than 100,000 sites have integrated the Open Graph, it just makes me wonder, at what price?
I also feel very confident that by the end of the week, Foursquare and Facebook will announce some level of partnership. It could be Facebook using Foursquare like they use Oodle or potentially an acquisition. Some say this partnership could be the local endgame but I see it otherwise. Facebook has yet to prove they can get their audience to do much more than play games and share photos and Foursquare was just beginning to make a move. Combine the two along with an integration plan and it leaves a lot of opportunity for other players in the space.
We’ll see!
Untitled
Getting ready for the big launch this month @localhabit, here is some sample schwag http://www.createmytee.com/Proof/?ID=Local%20Habit%202:1089%20proof_8569.jpg
As per your voice-mail – Question for revenue share opportunity
Stan Gauss
Founder & CEO
Dream Local, Inc.
609-903-1752
stan.gauss@dreamlocal.com
www.dreamlocal.com Our business is Local. Our imagination is Global.
—— Forwarded Message
From: Mark Jones <markjones@promoterlocal.com>
Date: Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:40:41 -0700
To: Stanley Gauss <stan.gauss@gmail.com>
Subject: As per your voice-mail – Question for revenue share opportunity Stan, PromoterLocal resells Google local listing services to companies that have local products and services in many cities across the U.S.. I wanted to contact you to see if your company has an interest in a partnership to bundle our services or resell your services with our national sales team. I am not quite sure what the relationship would look like but we currently have thousands of customers using our a wide variety of our marketing services. We initially started in the real estate and mortgage business seven years ago competing with Lendingtree.com, HomeGains.com, and Housevalues.com type companies. As we are migrating our business model to focus more on the local marketing capabilities we are finding businesses like yours may find working together to be mutually beneficial. Thanks, and feel free to give me a call if you would like to discuss an opportunity in working together. Mark A. Jones
President
PromoterLocal.com
PromterOnline.com
888-710-8169 T
801-705-9288 O
801-705-5111 D —— End of Forwarded Message
It’s a People Driven Economy Stupid!
Stan Gauss
Founder & CEO
Dream Local, Inc.
609-903-1752
stan.gauss@dreamlocal.com
www.dreamlocal.com Our business is Local. Our imagination is Global.
LocalHabit: Making Things More Personal.
We are coming up on our private beta and getting prepared to roll out a very early version of our platform for review, so I thought this would be the perfect time to discuss our goals. Basically, we want to be transparent abo
ut what success looks like to us in 2010.
Our Business Model
LocalHabit is a site dedicated to the people in local communities around the world. Our goal is to create Behavioral Based Communities within Geographic Communities, thus increasing the amount of useful sharing amongst inhabitants. The consumer is responsible for representing their favorite local brands while the local brands need to relinquish some of their control allowing consumers to steer, promote and build their brand for them. In essence, our business model is to make things more personal by connecting like-minded people with the brands they love and love to hate.
To accomplish this, we are providing the community (consumers and businesses) free access to our content delivery system so that they can be the leaders in shaping the local communities of the future.
Here is just a sample of the types of content that can be shared for FREE.
- Free Classifieds for everyone. Yes, that means free jobs, cars, homes, coupons, legals, and yard sales. If it’s a classified ad, it’s free.
- Free distribution for everyone. Place your content on Localhabit and we will geocode it and push it to all relevant social nets to increase your reach.
- Free business pages for every business. That means every business basically gets a free, optimized profile page that includes a photo gallery, video, and all the content necessary to tell their story. Ooops.. It also includes unlimited coupon syndication.
- Free events for everyone. Whether you are a business having a gigantic sale or a parent having a birthday party, LocalHabit provides a free events calendar that can target the masses or your chosen few.
We also want to be good citizens so we are going to pay our users for content as well. Look for more details on this but we will ensure that we are the best and most comprehensive local information site by paying super users for the following:
- Business Reviews
- Product Updates
- MicroBlogs
- Category Updates
- Photos
- Video
- Breaking Local News
- and more
Because we know people are inherently good, we are also going to provide a mechanism for people to give thanks to others. More to come.
By providing the outlet and becoming the source for local we can establish a local habit within our users. A local habit is always thinking local first.
It is a big enough goal building out the local experiment we outline above but that isn’t good enough. We need to put some tangible goals in place. Our goals need to be both quantitative and measured using trusted 3rd parties like Quantcast but also qualitative through continuous communication with our users.
Here is a sample of our Year 1 goals:
- Be the largest hyper-local content site in our chosen markets. We will be national from the beginning but our roll out plan only has us focusing our content and marketing machine on key markets in 2010.
- Be the largest and most comprehensive local Question & Answer site in our chosen markets. Don’t get this confused by thinking we are trying to compete with Yahoo Answers, Mahalo and Aardvark. We truly mean LOCAL, things about your neighborhood.
- Represent the cleanest and most comprehensive set of local data in the industry. Clean data is useful data.
- Be the most comprehensive local search provider. This means we will combine multiple APIs and include photos, video, deals, tips, products, blogs, twitter, shopping trends, events, and more.
- By the close of 2010 be a top 500 site as measured by Quantcast.
Stan Gauss, Founder & CEO, Dream Local, Inc.
For press inquiries, contact:
Carl Schindler
carl.schindler@dreamlocal.com
716.812.5651
