In a comment responding to my previous post, Lachlan Hardy asked me what continuing value Facebook had to me.

First, and most simply, none of the blunders they’ve made have directly affected me: none of the privacy violations invaded my personal privacy since I do my best not to have anything to hide, anyway. The closest thing to an invasive blunder Facebook has ever made to me, personally, was the inclusion of SuperPoke, Funwall, and that confounded Zombie application without including an “ignore forever and ever and ever” button.

I think during the initial wave of Facebook account deletions due to, Tara Hunt said something along the lines of “Facebook has made some lousy decisions, but they totally have me by the social graph”. Now, I’m paraphrasing (I wish I could find the original tweet, this was the closest I could find). But Tara’s and my shared sentiment about why we are still on Facebook is similar to why, for instance, I have an account on Pownce and Twitter but spend ALL of my time on Twitter: it’s where my peeps are at.

I can do the same thing and more elsewhere, but my stuff and more importantly, a great deal of my friends, are there.

Remember, I’m from a generation where I was on Facebook before it was open to non students. Remember, the majority of my friends outside of the social media/new media space are either recently graduated or still finishing school. Unlike most of the users of Facebook, who are more of a layer of very rich sod sitting just on top of the surface, I’ve got deep and twisty roots buried into photos, contacts, comments, connections, messages. And many of them are personal, not the casual “nice blog post” or “I think Scoble is a douchebag, too, who needs 8000 friends?” type exchanges that happen for many others.

Roots via Wikimeda Commons - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Roots_by_cesarpb.jpg

Now…I’m not interested in tangent-ing down the road of, “well, if the data was portable like it should be…”. Because it’s not portable. That’s Facebook’s M.O. and I accept that. We’ve got plenty of other opportunities to make it better. Then, Facebook can play catch up (or not).

So really, the value of ANY social network, be it Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, ZipKarma, my blogroll, or any other NETWORK OF SOCIAL CONNECTIONS, the value is in those connections, not the tools that the network provides.

In the case of right here right now, the majority of the people that I care about can be found on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Maybe this is why I chuckle every time someone tries to identify value in social media. I think value is the wrong word.

Value, to me, suggests that it must be for sale because something is only “worth” a certain amount if someone else is willing to pay for it.

I learned that lesson as a kid collecting comic books. It was during a collector “bubble”, and me and my friends were excited to have gotten our hands on comics that were “worth” hundreds of dollars. The reason this bubble was a bubble, though, was that much like many valuations they are arbitrary until someone is willing to shell out. People invested big bucks into comics, and since not many people were on the high end of the buying scale, the whole thing fell in on itself. Comics are still very popular, but people collect them for the enjoyment of them, not necessarily to own a “valuable” collection.

There will never be “value” to a social graph because a social graph’s “value” is highest to it’s creator. And even then, my friends aren’t for sale.

I don’t value Facebook. I don’t value Twitter. I don’t value LinkedIn or even my Blogroll. I appreciate Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all of the individual connections, nay, the individual PEOPLE that make up the social graph. In the case of Twitter, I totally heart twitter because of the WAY that it’s let me connect.

But Heart != value.

Heart = Appreciation++

Now that I’ve identified a new term to replace the overused and diluted term “value” with something more relevant in this context…on to the next task. Getting rid of “social graph” and “join the conversation”.

LinkedIn has announced an API to be released within 9 months. It’s already been expressed that 9 months is too far off, and frankly, a nearly 1 year response to a strategic move by a so-called competitor (that’s facebook, apparently) is straight up, unacceptable.

Hang on a second. what do facebook and linked in have in common? They both run in the “social networks” crowd, though I’ve never considered one userbase to mirror another. Lets take a look.

Facebook has been, through all of it’s incarnations, fairly “real time” due to the nature of it’s users and the way that they used the environment. Their profile reflected their favorite movies/music/books NOW. Their wall reflected commentary from friends from the previous week’s events. Their photos were tagged from the previous nights’ social event (with or without the obligitory red solo cups). Even the pre-twitter “status” line that asked what you were up to, though it never caught on as heavily as twitter, reflected “now” events. And the connections between one person’s “now” events and another person’s “now” events.

LinkedIn, though “social” in nature, had a niche in business rather than social record-keeping. Like a mix between a social network and a self-evolving AddressBook, the real value in LinkedIn was to keep the contacts that you already had in it, and let them update their own contact info, new and old work places, promotions, etc. But due to the less regular updating (at least I HOPE someone isn’t putting new stuff into their LinkedIn profile every 3 days. Thats a lousy employment turnover), I don’t find myself going back to LinkedIn looking for new information once an hour like many FacebookAddicts do. I don’t even find myself on LinkedIn once a day. Or even week. I don’t think I EVER go back looking for people. The only times I go to LinkedIn and log in are when it notifies me that someone has updated their info. When a new related contact is available. It’s a very reactive relationship, versus the addictive/proactive nature of Facebook.

So where does this API fit in? Is linked in going to create a marketplace for apps based on a userbase that, with the exception of recruiters, uses the network more reactively than proactively? That seems like a waste of 9 months, to me.

On the other hand, if it’s the resume data they are looking to make more portable, I’m all for it. But wait, it already is. Thanks to the implementation of the hResume microformat, each of over 11 million resumes is marked up for data portability (or at least a working draft of the model). What would be way sweeter than an API that takes 9 months to crank on? Smarter imports/exports using microformats. I’m looking at the Dopplr friend importer that uses hCards, and even the Satisfaction account creation tool. Both of these flows use existing data, and presumably could keep one set of data up to date based on another.

Based on the proof-of-concepts in both of these hCard tools, it becomes clear that these flows actually can work. This, in my opinion, should be much less complicated to do than an after-the-fact API and can be baked pretty quickly with the already existing technology. I think that LinkedIn would benefit greatly from making a DIFFERENT strategic move than Facebook as response, especially if their goal is to promote more pro-active usership to grow from the current re-active tools. After all, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Tags: hresume, linkedin, facebook, microformats, social networks, api

snowboarding was a blast. and so was my latest project, with it’s new case study just posted at http://www.weknowhtml.com.
Read all about XLNTads.com, Brightcove’s video player, and use of microformats in the case study and on the blog.

Been working to get back in the swing of things, more thoughts coming once I’m a little more caught up.

In the mean time, I’m really excited to be checking out the HappyCog Philly open house tonight and hopefully getting to bump elbows with some of my interactive industry mentors.

Tags: xlntads, case study, microformats, brightcove, happycog, zeldman, mall, santa maria

this weekend at creative camp we were talking about various professional/social networking tools, and how it’d be handy if there was a single sign-on solution for all of them.

one of the other presenters said, and i quote(paraphrase),

“If you made one place that managed my account login as well as personal info, so i didnt have to retype it every time, for:myspace livejournal facebook monster linkedin bloglines etc etc etc, not only would I use it but you’d probably make a million dollars.”

so yeah. of the bunch he rattled off, the only one with no api support at all to my knowledge is myspace. single sign on/standardizatoin of information IS a good thing. and profitable. cuz happy(and free(and open)) developers are productive developers, right?

Messina has been jabbering on about microformats forever. I recently got around to asking, “what’s the big deal”? Essentially, the content doesnt change but the packaging does. Formats like RSS, while effective, are inefficient because they require an additional packaging process: the generation of the feed. Microformats take the built in id and class properties of HTML elements and use them for their underlying purpose…no, not to style and format. That’s a secondary use. The primary function of id and class is identify an “object” within the DOM. ID’s for single objects, classes for recurring objects. Microformats exploit these identifiers in such a way that a web document itself acts as the publishing feed…a parser can go through looking for a standardized format for information such as calendar and address book info. no secondary republishing. and, every instance of support means that another developer has to do one less thing in making his data scrape work.

data standardization is good.

im weaseling a little bit of hCalendar into the app i’m building at work. my hope is that, when phase 2 rolls around, and it comes time to hook in syndication services, i can say “well, its actually mostly done already”. thats the kind of stuff that makes my bosses happy.