PALO ALTO, Calif.--Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, says the company's still not sure why the recent redesign process irked so many of the Web site's users.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg
(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET)"In terms of what went wrong with the redesign, we don't know yet," Sandberg said during a Q&A session at the Global Technology Symposium held Thursday at Stanford. But she added that the percentage of users giving the redesign a thumbs down was smaller than previous changes to the site.
"As a percentage of our users, this one is much less than before," she said.
She also offered a backhanded compliment to Twitter, the microblogging site that Facebook considered buying last year.
"What's interesting about Twitter is that they are a very good company doing one thing very well, which is real-time update," she said. "We are, by far, the largest photo-sharing site on the Web...Similarly, we are larger at doing what Twitter does. We think what they're doing is good. Our redesign is not in reference to them--nor was our redesign in reference to Flickr."
Separately, Sandberg said that the economy has not reduced advertising revenue. "We are growing our revenue. We are growing our advertising," she said, without getting into the specifics.
Update: Following the publication of this post Thursday afternoon, Sandberg subsequently sent me the following note, which I am including with her permission:
I appreciate your story and want to clarify what I said at the Stanford conference. Our recollection is that an audience member suggested in a question that Facebook had a flawed redesign process, and I responded that it was too early to tell if it [the new home page] was flawed at all. Consistent with how we have been speaking about the new home page, I absolutely did acknowledge that some of our users are upset and we are listening to them. And as announced on Wednesday, we've made changes in response. Facebook is always iterating on the site and we regularly launch new features and make changes along the way, often incorporating suggestions from users. In fact, we don't regard the process as a flaw at all. We believe the level of engagement of our users and the feedback loop we've created gives Facebook a unique competitive advantage.
But Zuora is betting on a computing trend: that as more applications move to the cloud in coming years, the natural corollary is that developers will follow the money and necessarily move in the same direction.
Even on Facebook.
"There are 140 new applications a day on Facebook because it's so easy and so viral a platform," Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo said. "But is anyone making money on Facebook?"
Probably not many. While developers have built profitable businesses on cloud-based platforms, such as Amazon Web Services, Salesforce.com's Force.com, and Google AppEngine, the same can't be said of Facebook. That's a source of no small amount of frustration for developers hemmed in by Facebook's restrictions on placing ads on the service (not to mention the relatively low advertising rates for in-application ads on the service.)
That does not preclude the possibility that someone will find a way to unlock the potential of the so-called Facebook Economy. But so far, it's more of a scenario than a reality. Tzuo, who is about to give it a shot, argues that if each active user on the service had a $1 monthly subscription, that scenario could turn into a reality with more than $1 billion in annual subscription revenue.
So it is that on Monday, Zuora is debuting a cloud-based service at the Demo conference. The product, called Z-Commerce, consists of different modules that a developer can use to set up and manage a subscription service on Facebook. Z-Commerce also comes with pre-built widgets that can get plugged into existing Facebook apps without the need for additional code work.
For its part, Zuora assumes responsibility for the back-end arrangements, including billing and payments. The ambition is large: to attract enough Facebook developers to the idea and transform their applications into subscription services. If enough of them conclude that this is an idea whose time has come, Tzuo believes that Facebook can actually evolve into an enterprise cloud computing platform.
A tall order, to be sure. Still, I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg wouldn't have any issues if that came even halfway true.
Today the Rocky Mountain News publishes its final edition after nearly 150 years. Elsewhere, newspaper publishers everywhere from San Francisco to Philadelphia face equally grim prospects.
The reasons have been well chronicled by others like Poynter Online and I won't waste time rehashing familiar arguments and analyses. But one complaint about newspapers is that they increasingly are out of step with their readers, who for too long were ignored at the bottom rung of a one-way hierarchy which defined their relationship.
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg: "Openness and transparency isn't an end state. It's a process to get there."
It was only a coincidence, but the Rocky Mountain News announcement came on the same day that Facebook declared that it would embrace a community-driven process for governing. Responding to a controversy earlier this month over changes to its terms of service, Facebook said it will henceforth put any proposed modifications to its membership up for public debate in a "notice and comment" forum.
Not everyone was impressed by the announcement. Marshall Kirkpatrick posted a scorcher over at ReadWriteWeb, dunning Facebook's management for losing its grip. But if I read Marshall correctly, he's not slamming the company for its bid to be more transparent. Rather, he's arguing that Facebook still hasn't fully absorbed the real reason behind the flap.
What's delusional about the company's position? Multiple company officials on the call today said that the controversy showed how much of a sense of ownership users have over Facebook and that they wanted a sense of participation in its governing. (You complain about us because you love us!) We'd argue that it is pretty clear people have a sense of ownership instead over their content and want Facebook to keep its hands off. Ownership of content, not the lack of input on policy, was what people were upset about.
Fair enough. And voting may not be the best idea out there. Still, I think Facebook deserves credit for at least trying. Listening to the conference call on Thursday, I found myself wondering whether some of the very decades-old newspapers now going through a horrid time might have fared had they found a way to similarly engage their readers once the Internet went commercial. How long, for instance, has it taken for newspapers to let its reporters begin blogging? How about the inclusion of reader comments--let alone taking feedback on how to make coverage more relevant to the community's needs? Or reader blogs, for that matter? (There still aren't many of the latter.)
There are obvious differences between Facebook and a big city newspaper and I'm not suggesting that the cure here is simply to sprinkle some Web 2.0 fairy dust and everything will be as it was 25 years ago. But Facebook is also a media company and as Larry Magid smartly writes, its 175 million users are the ones who supply the content. Giving them a voice in policy making, whether to quell a brewing storm or to get out ahead of the next one--that's less interesting to me than Facebook's willingness to experiment.
It's not a perfect system and there doubtless are going to be rough spots ahead. Still, I'm going to cut them a break. It's easy to be cynical about the motivations but if Facebook has found a way to offer up more transparency and yes, even as Marshall suggests, participation over governing, then the company has hit upon a formula that will keep it relevant. Wish The Rocky Mountain News and its industry cohorts would be able to say the same. Sigh.
Update, 12:33 p.m. PST: A Brooklyn blog reports that The New York Times next week will begin neighborhood blogs. Thanks to a pointer from TechCrunch, where Jim Schachter, the editor for digital initiatives at the Times, confirms the pilot program. Schachter also asks the following:
Can we create a combination of journalism, technology and advertising that people who don't work for us can adopt? How much or how little oversight by us would be needed to keep the quality high? Would people pay to be associated with us? Would there be enough revenue that some split between us and a non-NYT blogger would work? I'd love to know what readers here think.
I hate it when someone else beats me to a post, but no sense crying about it. Besides, David Kirkpatrick sums up the situation far more eloquently than I ever could:
"All those people on the blogs and in the press who are obsessed over Facebook's valuation are really a bore. Anybody who thinks Microsoft's $15 billion valuation ever was a real common-stock valuation doesn't understand much about finance. And nobody but Microsoft would have wanted to lead a round at that valuation--getting into Facebook had unique value for the company which most of all wants to prevent Google from making further inroads into its business."
"It may still prove to have been a brilliant stroke for Microsoft--the software giant is in the door with search on Facebook just when Facebook is the platform where more and more of the Internet's content is being created. There's a special characteristic to all that data--it is not searchable by Google. A nice score for Microsoft for a mere $240 million. Who cares how much of FB it got in return? It kept Google out."
Kirkpatrick, who is working on a book about Facebook, maintains a must-read blog about the company on--where else?--Facebook. (Talk about eating your own dog food!) He makes the correct point that when Facebook closed its deal with Microsoft back in fall 2007, that still was during the bull market's heyday. So when you wake up, check the news aggregators and find yet more mindless musing over the "news" that Facebook--or any other tech company for that matter--is worth a lot less in February 2009, you have to wonder whether these folks have been paying attention.
Still, the fascination remains for the chattering classes. When the conversation turns to Facebook (and Twitter, as well,) the bloviation-fest is nonstop. Especially regarding possible investments from venture firms.
It's easy to understand the valuation obsession. It's another holdover from a recent past that now seems forever ago. You remember those days, back when the economy was working? Back when the blogosphere was perpetually fascinated by widgets and irrelevant Web site tweaks? But I'm with Kirkpatrick on this one. It's boring beyond description. No matter. As the recession-depression rips through the economy, there's important news to consider.
I'm an unabashed New York Times fan boy. Warts and all, it remains the best edited daily newspaper in this country. Disagree? Then come find me on Twitter and let's mix it up. (My handle is "coopeydoop").
You won't have a chance to do the same with many Times reporters and editors--on Twitter or any other social network, for that matter. Batting it back and forth with the hoi polloi just isn't part of the drill. Not, mind you, because they lack for opinions or have no stomach for engagement.
The Poynter Institute reposted the text of a memo from Craig Whitney, the paper's assistant managing editor, to his newsroom, in which he urges extreme caution in how Times employees use Facebook and other social-networking sites. For starters:
"One of them is that outsiders can read your Facebook page, and that personal blogs and "tweets" represent you to the outside world just as much as an 800-word article does. If you have or are getting a Facebook page, leave blank the section that asks about your political views, in accordance with the Ethical Journalism admonition to do nothing that might cast doubt on your or The Times's political impartiality in reporting the news. Remember that although you might get useful leads by joining a group on one of these sites, it will appear on your page, connoting that you "joined" it -- potentially complicated if it is a political group, or a controversial group."
Whitney is an accomplished Times veteran whose work I've admired over the years. But this memo sums up some of the very reasons why so many believe the mainstream media is doomed to irrelevance.
The Times achieved primacy in American journalism by getting the story (usually) right and delivering the news with depth and nuance. By itself, the formula that worked so well for the Times in the 20th century may not be enough in the 21st. That's because the fragmentation of media has created a multiplicity of voices on the Internet, some good, others less so, where the authority of the Times depends on more than a prototypical article.
So it is that the decision to separate the Times from its public strikes me as completely arbitrary. What's more, it makes for an utterly boring one-way conversation--and that's no conversation at all. Whitney may not want the chief White House correspondent riffing in public about the failings of the 43rd president, but how about a little give? For instance, I'd be shocked if Frank Rich does not think George Bush was an abject idiot. Or that William Kristol does not believe Bill Clinton remains a skirt-chasing hippy hedonist. Seems they also ought to have the green light to tweet to their hearts' content.
But it's not just Facebook and Twitter. Consider the following:
"Be careful not to write anything on a blog or a personal Web page that you could not write in The Times -- don't editorialize, for instance, if you work for the News Department. Anything you post online can and might be publicly disseminated, and can be twisted to be used against you by those who wish you or The Times ill -- whether it's text, photographs, or video. That includes things you recommend on TimesPeople or articles you post to Facebook and Digg, content you share with friends on MySpace, and articles you recommend through TimesPeople."
In other words, don't write anything that's passionate or pointed in ways that might stir people beyond what the Times provides in its news columns. Pardon my sarong but that's like serving up a diet of rice cakes to people hungry for General Tso's chicken.
Three Massachusetts Institute of Technology students who have been barred by a court order from discussing subway card vulnerabilities are now free to say what they want.
The University of Michigan released its annual ACSI scores for the PC industry, and Apple took top honors for the fifth straight year.
Plus, it isn't your usual Nokia jingle, but a campaign to promote condom use in India sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is off to a strong start.
Listen now: Download today's podcast
Today's stories:
U.S. mobile-phone sales take a hit
Android security team appeals to bug hunters
Georgia cuts access to Russian sites, TV news
Overheating iPod Nanos? Japan investigates
Apple extends MobileMe accounts--again
Palm leaks Treo Pro photos and videos
In a kulturkampf between old and new, several hundred youthful Facebook activists are increasingly under pressure from Egyptian authorities.
Earlier in the year, a group of young Egyptians used Facebook to organize support for a strike by textile workers on April 6. To put it mildly, Egypt's authoritarian government did not welcome this extension of civil society into cyberspace.
They liked it even less when the so-called 6 April Youth Movement, as they call themselves, met for the first time in late June at a Cairo gathering where they were feted by the local journalists' syndicate.
In their speeches, the young men and women expressed their dreams for their country calling for collective brainstorming to decide on their next step.
The idea of forming a new political youth movement was blessed by some representatives of the older generation who attended the meeting, such as George Ishaq Kefaya founder and former coordinator, judge Hisham Bastawisi, deputy head of the Cassation Court, and MPs Anwar and Talaat El Sadat.
Reading that passage, I was reminded how first-time political activists in this country used Meetup.com and blogs to rally support for Howard Dean in the 2004 Democratic primaries. But open political discourse in Egypt--especially when critical of the regime--is more fraught.
Push came to shove last week. Some of the Facebook youth, as they're being called, rallied at a local beach in Alexandria to sing songs and fly kites (with the colors of the Egyptian flag) to celebrate the anniversary of the Egyptian revolution. That's when the authorities moved in and arrested them. Here's a video shot just before state security goons took them away.
Here's what Al-Ahram Weekly reported:
"A truck packed with Central Security personnel arrived and arrested 14 of the 30 demonstrators while the rest managed to flee," Gamal Eid, executive director of the Arab Network for Human Rights Information, who met the arrested group while in custody, told Al-Ahram Weekly. "They were beaten by plain clothes security personnel and taken to Al-Raml Police Station where they were referred to the prosecution which accused them of assembling, hampering traffic, and attempting to topple the regime." The arrested denied any links with political parties or the Muslim Brotherhood. "They told investigators that they did not advocate destructive ideas, let alone toppling the regime. They said they would not even incite people to stage a civil disobedience," says Eid."
Also, here's more on the same topic from Almasry Alyoum.
Facebook has had at times--what's best way to put this?--a contentious relationship with its 400,000 or so developers. But now, Facebook wants what CEO Mark Zuckerberg describes as "meaningful" tools on the service. He's going to need to need that legion of developers if Facebook is going to substantially grow. On Wednesday, the company debuted Facebook Connect, a program designed to allow users to access and feed their Facebook profiles and friends on any Web site.
In theory, that's a big deal. As with everything, we'll need to see how it plays out in practice. My CNET News colleague Dan Farber offers a good take where he notes that "underneath the "make the world a better place" is the fact that both Facebook and Google, as well as Yahoo, Microsoft, MySpace and others, want to be the portal for the masses."
Earlier Thursday, I sat down with Webware editor-in-chief Rafe Needleman, who was at Facebook's campus to cover the announcement. You can check out our conversation by clicking on the video link below:
Marc Andreessen
(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News.com)The rumors have been floating around for a while, and now Mike Arrington is reporting that Marc Andreessen is going to join Facebook's board of directors. (Kara Swisher had the original news break back in May.)
Best known as the founder of Netscape, Andreessen these days is involved with Ning, which supplies a platform for "white label" social networks that you can brand as your own.
We'll try later to get more clarity about how all of this is supposed to shake out.
If the move indeed goes down, Facebook will pick up a plugged-in entrepreneur who can share war stories about the successes and mistakes that defined Netscape's relatively brief moment in the sun before Microsoft got serious about competing. The good news for Mark Zuckerberg is that Facebook doesn't (yet) face a rival on that scale.
In the latest bloviation-fest (see Techmeme) over how to integrate user profiles and friends lists from social networking sites, Facebook's getting creamed.
So much for being everyone's darling
(Credit: Wikimeida Commons)If feels like almost yesterday that Leslie Stahl was cooing over Mark Zuckerberg. And how about the crowd rallying behind their boy when Sarah Lacy tried to ego-hog his keynote interview at South by Southwest.
But that's ancient history now and Facebook is coming off badly since it began blocking Google's Friend Connect last week. And just to make sure that we didn't forget that Google was on the side of the angels, the company's put up a detailed primer over the weekend of how its code doesn't do any evil. (We're from Google and we just wanna help.)
Google: Google Friend Connect only reads a small amount of user data from Facebook, and does so using Facebook's public APIs. We read the Facebook numeric id, friendly name, and public photo URLs of the user and their friends. We read no other information.
All the while, Facebook's mostly missing in action. After issuing a vaporware post briefly describing the features Facebook's leadership has remained in a veritable bunker while the blog echo chamber continues to scream with rage.
Even a Microsofter like Dare Obasanjo is getting into the act with a sniffy comparison of the (apparently insufficient) approaches adopted by Facebook, MySpace, and Google. (You know things are getting bleak when a guy from Microsoft starts tut-tutting about interoperability.)
Steve Gillmor makes it plain in the first paragraph of his post about this novella:
Facebook finally has a real problem to deal with - an exceptionally rational and well-thought-out strategy by Google that puts the leading social media cloud in the path of a wave of angry users. The only thing Facebook has going for it is that said users don't yet know they're angry.
He's got that right. I don't have a dog in this fight, but it's plain to see that Facebook is letting the conversation slip away. We've seen this before. This is just another chapter in Silicon Valley's endless saga of power grabs and some guys are getting painted with white hats, others with black hats. Right now, COO Sheryl Sandberg ought to be holding her lieutenants' feet to the fire. When billion-dollar enterprises like Google or Microsoft have no trouble painting themselves as being on the side of the people, you know you're in trouble. Meanwhile, yesterday's fan fave is now widely portrayed as a clueless bully. As Loren Feldman's sock puppet send-up is wont to say, "fascinating."
