Facebook VP: “We want to be the next killer app in web advertising”
Rough times for Facebook. Despite the latest changes, the social network is being hammered (yet again) on privacy concerns.
If this media backlash will affect it´s user base and advertising business, is yet to be seen. But I´m sure Zuckerberg is not pleased with how things are going.
His appearance at D8 yesterday was a complete mess. Instead of being clearly apologetic for what Facebook is doing wrong, he insisted that sharing as much personal info as posible is a legitimate business model. They´ll keep on pushing people to share.
I recently had the chance of talking to Facebook VP of global sales, Mike Murphy, about this and other issues. We focused on FB business but privacy inevitably came up. And he was as evasive as Zuckerberg in most of the questions. An irony when Facebook philosofy is all about sharing.
The full interview, the first Murphy gives to a Spanish newspaper, was published today in EL PAÍS, along with a monographic about the social network.
Here´s an extract with some of the other topics we talked about:
Question: Is the privacy problem getting out of control?
Answer: User trust is what our business is built on. More user control exists on Facebook than any other website about what information is shared and not shared. But where we missed the mark is on the simplicity, so for a user to go on and know exactly what the decisions they are making within privacy mean, that´s the real important movement that we need to make.
Q: But the allegations published in The Wall Street Journal, about Facebook sharing personal data from users with advertisers, were pretty serious.
A: What happened in the past, happened in the past, and that´s something that we fixed. But the fact that we use explicit words that you use on Facebook to target ads against, versus implicit information about what you did type into a search box or other web pages, make what we do much more safe.
Q: You are a six-year old company with about $500 million in revenue. Google is a 12 year-old firm with almost $25 billion in revenues. Can you achieve that?
A: We´d love to, but we´ll see. 24 billion is a big number. I´m not skeptical, but it´s hard for me to predict the future.
Q: Are you confident that you´ll become a 1 billion dollar company this year?
A: We really don´t talk about the exact numbers. I feel good about the fact that we were EBITDA profitable for eight consecutive quarters, and I´m convinced that trend will continue.
Q: Are you finding it hard to monetize because most companies, especially large firms, still don´t get Facebook from an advertising perspective?
A: In the last 5 years of digital advertising, marketers have been trained to believe that the only thing they need to measure are impressions and clicks. We believe that the emotional connection that can be created on a Facebook page and our platform creates a real opportunity. So the better we are in providing tools to marketers like pages, analytics, drag-and-drop apps on their pages, tools to bring our functionality from Facebook onto their website, the more socially experience it becomes, and the more opportunity we have.
Q: Will Facebook go public soon?
A: I don´t expect that anytime soon. That´s something that Mark has been fairly vocal about.
Q: You recently closed a 5-year agreement with Zynga. Five more years of Mafia Wars, FarmVille… was that really necessary?
A: I think it is strategic for Facebook. It was a signal to the developers that we are interested in creating an environment for them to succeed. Companies like Zynga need to continue to come out with great interactive, engagement games.
Q: Do you see location becoming an important revenue source for Facebook?
A: We are focused on launching a location product. But our thought was that instead of us building out specific applications we are building a layer of location that allows developers to be able to build on apps. We haven´t been focused on how to monetize location or what it means for marketers.
Q: Google is moving into mobiles, TV, applications… do you want to be the new Google of web advertising in the next 2-3 years?
A: Our hope isn´t necessarily to be the next Google. But we want to be the next killer app in web advertising that provides the type of value that Google has been able to bring within the search platform.
Dos visiones sobre la privacidad de Facebook
¿Puede el problema de la privacidad hundir a Facebook?
Si algo ha quedado demostrado esta semana, con el efecto boomerang del cambio de política de privacidad, es que Facebook va camino de perder por completo la confianza de sus usuarios.
Sí, en parte es injusto. Google o cualquier entidad financiera tienen en sus manos tantos datos privados de nuestras vidas como los que posee la red social.
Pero el error de Zuckerberg en esto de la privacidad está siendo de principiante. Facebook ya no es una start-up. Tiene más de 400 millones de usuarios y va camino de convertirse en una compañía de 1.000 millones de dólares de ingresos al final del 2010.
Cuando alcanzas este volumen, ya no vale lo de lanzar una nueva funcionalidad, esperar la reacción de la gente, cambiar lo que no guste y vuelta a empezar. Al menos no vale en algo tan delicado como la privacidad. O lo haces bien a la primera, o estas fuera.
Jason Calacanis grabó este vídeo el pasado diciembre. Creo que, a pesar de todos los cambios desde entonces, sigue reflejando lo que muchos usuarios de Facebook pensamos sobre el tema de la privacidad.
Y este es el poco convincente Mark Zuckerberg de esta semana. Al hilo de sus palabras, interesante leer las reflexiones de Daniel Lyons en la renovada Newsweek sobre lo mal que funciona la maquinaria de PR en la red social.
O algo cambia pronto, o Facebook tendrá que ir olvidando sus planes de dominación.
An interview with Foursquare co-founder, Dennis Crowley
Get Facebook, Twitter, gaming and location, mix it all together, throw in a smartphone and you´ll get something very similar to Foursquare.
Foursquare is today´s hottest social network and it´s growing fast. Already 1,5 million registered users in just a year, and adding 50% more each month, according to co-founder Dennis Crowley.
I had the chance of interviewing Dennis recently. We spoke for an hour and he shared some great ideas on how he´s planning to develop and transform Foursquare in the next months. The full interview was published today in EL PAÍS (Spanish).
Key takeaways?
- He thinks Foursquare could reach 10 million users by the end of 2010. My take? They will make it. The question is: will they maintain double-digit growth in 2011, once the novelty effect is over?
- Dennis admits the gaming layer (yes, the mayorships, the badges, the annoying Twitter messages…) might be putting off some new and existing users. They want to change that. My take? Do it soon, or Foursquare will vanish. At least in the web (not in the mobile app), I think it´s closer to be perceived as a dumb Zynga game rather than a value added service.
- He believes the future of Foursquare is becoming more of a discovery and recommendation-type engine and not just a fun social network. My take? Definitely. I´ve been playing with the Foursquare iPhone app for a while, and that´s where the real value lies. Not in telling your friends you are the mayor of a pet shop…
You can read the nitty-gritty of the interview in EL PAÍS. Below are some additional questions we didn´t have room to include. Dennis will be in Spain in June, attending the HiT Barcelona event. By then, the mistery of the sale or the additional funding will be probably solved:
QUESTION: Do you see Foursquare as a social network in itself or more as a functionality within an established social network?
ANSWER: I used to think that we could piggy-back off someone else’s social graph, from all your Twitter and Facebook friends. But we are finding that Foursquare´s social graph is different. It is about sharing very personal pieces of information. And that tends to be something people want to be a bit tight about who they share it with.
Q: A lot of Facebook and Twitter users don´t like seeing location messages from Foursquare in their timelines. They complain about it. Does it worry you?
A: Wee see that from some users. But it´s ultimately the user decision if they want to do that or not. We ask them to opt it or not. Some people turn it off, some turn it on. If we were forcing users to do it, it would be a different issue. But everything that we do is about opt in: share as much or as little as you want. We see people pushing stuff on Twitter and if their friends complain about it, they turn it off. It´s a very personal thing.
Q: But one of the reasons you are growing so much is because the Facebook and Twitter effect. If we don´t link these services, don´t you think your growth will be affected?
A: Yes, I think so, but that´s just a tiny part of what´s pushing us. Twitter and Facebook are great as an advertising-type service. But we find a lot of our users come from word of mouth. We see people using this in bars, restaurants, movie theatres, and that´s how people spread the word to other users.
Q: What new functionalities are you planning to add in the next months?
A: The priority is taking the data that we have and playing 
it back to users. People are giving us a nugget or two of data every day: the coffee shop they go, where they have breakfast, the park they go… What we´ll do is to look at this data, analyze it, and suggest new things to do based on their preferences.
Q: The gaming part, earning the badges, the mayorships… all of that is now a central part of Foursquare. Is this where you want to go moving forward?
A: The scoring system is not exactly what we want it to be, and we are revisiting a lot of the stuff. We realize that people can get tired of the gaming system and the badges. That´s part of what we are working on. We need to make the Foursquare experience fresh. As a game, is not a great one, it gets boring after three months or so. But what we need to work on are things like social recommendations, helping you figure out where you should be going next and people you should be meeting up with. It´s about helping you expose interesting parts of a city.
Q: A sort of interactive city guide made by friends…
A: Yes, my career has been focused on working with city guide-type products. They are about how you make a city easy and interesting to explore. We are on that path.
Q: But, still, you are in a very niche market of young, technology savvy, smartphone owners. Do you see this as an obstacle?
A: It could be, but that´s what people thought about Facebook and Twitter. These companies have busted against these roadblocks over and over again. People said “no one is going to share their status update”, and now you have 125 million in the world doing it; “why would you put photos online”… people have been asking the same questions for years, and eventually there´s a breakthrough company that convinces people that is important to do it.
Q: So you think you could be the next Facebook or Twitter.
A: I can see a world where Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare coexist. We are all doing slightly different things. But we have a long way to get there. We are just over a million users. If we keep our growth, we´ll more than double that every two months.
Q: Location based services are a big opportunity in mobile marketing, but still most of the companies in this space don´t make any money. Why?
A: The space is very new. Does Facebook turn a profit? They might do it this year. Does Twitter turn a profit? Not yet. This is a classic thing. You take you best stab at starting a company and you hope at some point there´s some way to monetize it while still preserving what makes the product great.
Foto 1: Carlo de Marchis
Foto 2: James Duncan Davidson
Internet, ese demonio
Regresamos con una foto, la de la izquierda.
Corresponde a la portada del Daily Mail del pasado miércoles día 10… y ya veo la luz que se os acaba de encender: “tabloide, peligro”.
El Daily Mail es el segundo periódico más vendido en Reino Unido (2 millones de tirada diaria), por detrás de The Sun. Es lo que se llama un “tabloide intermedio”: mitad noticias “serias”, mitad basura.
Llegó a mis manos en un vuelo de British Airways (sí, Mr BA da *sólo* tabloides a sus pasajeros…). El titular a toda página le deja a uno temblando: “Facebook bajo ataque”
El artículo lo podéis leer aquí, pero os ahorro el trauma con este breve resumen.
Según el Daily Mail, Facebook en un nido de pedófilos en busca de presas. Recientemente, una adolescente británica fue captada y asesinada por un lunático que contactó con ella vía Facebook. Desde entonces, hay una cruzada contra la web.
En la pieza del Mail, un “experto criminólogo” escribía un texto de apoyo titulado, “I posed as a girl of 14 on Facebook. What followed will sicken you“.
Lo que seguía explicaba cómo se hizo pasar por una adolescente en la red social. “Pasaron 90 segundos”, dice, “cuando un extraño ya me había hecho propuestas sexuales de todo tipo”.
Temazo, dirían los del Mail. Si no fuera porque el artículo del “experto” resultó ser falso. El criminólogo nunca había entrado en Facebook y ésta se plantea ahora demandar al Mail. El tabloide se ha disculpado. Pero la presión sigue.
El Ministerio de Interior británico quiere que la web instale el llamado “panic button“: cada vez que un adolescente crea encontrarse ante un agresor sexual al otro lado de la pantalla, clic, le da al botoncito y recibe asistencia inmediata de un experto o incluso la policía.
La historia es surrealista. La seguridad de los menores es crucial. El “panic button” no es descabellado. Pero imaginemos por un segundo que los lunáticos contactaran por teléfono a sus víctimas. O les escribieran cartas de puño y letra. ¿Criminalizaría alguien al “teléfono”? ¿Cargaría el Daily Mail contra el servicio de correo británico, el Royal Mail? Sería absurdo.
¿Por qué la sociedad, de la que los medios son altavoces, criminaliza entonces Internet y las redes sociales? La respuesta está en parte, creo, en los llamados “tecnology scares“, los “miedos a la tecnología”, al avance, a la incertidumbre del progreso.
Al leer el artículo del Mail, me acordé de otro realmente bueno que os recomiendo y que explica muy bien esta teoría. Estrito por el psiquiatra Vaughan Bell, colaborador de Wired UK, recorre la historia de los technology scares aplicados a los medios de comunicación. Unas muestras:
- En 1565, el científico suizo Conrad Gessner advirtió de los problemas que traería la imprenta, “una inundacion de información que sería perjudicial para la mente”, dijo.
- El estadista francés Malesherbes advirtió que las páginas impresas aislarían socialmente a las personas, al no obtener las noticias en la plaza del pueblo leídas en alto, como antes.
- Cuando la radio llegó, se le acusó de causar distracción y problemas escolares a los niños…
¿Suena familiar? Podríamos encontrar un “miedo” asociado a casi cualquier avance tecnológico, desde la invención de la rueda al ferrocarril.
Ahora le toca a Internet, el nuevo demonio. Un filón para los medios de “usar y tirar”.
Para más disfrute, no os perdáis el artículo de Bell.
Twitter crece en España el 1591% en un año
Según datos de comScore, Twitter registró en Mayo del 2008 algo menos de 35.000 visitantes únicos en España. Un año después, supera ya los 589.000, un crecimiento del 1591%. No hay datos de Junio confirmados, pero dada la tendencia, superará con creces los 700k usuarios únicos en Julio.
Empezando de la nada no es difícil registrar tal nivel de crecimiento. Pero lo interesante es cuando se compara con otros servicios complementarios dirigidos a audiencias similares. Twitter superó en abril a LinkedIn, una red social profesional con mucho más camino labrado previamente. La diferencia el pasado Mayo superó los 300.000 usuarios únicos entre ambas webs.
Eso sí, hay que relativizar. LinkedIn es una red que da beneficios desde abril del 2008 y Twitter, con suerte, empezará a ver sus primeros ingresos este trimestre ($400.000). Si en la ecuación incluimos el tráfico de Facebook y Tuenti en España durante el último año, las diferencias son abismales.
De todas formas, las cifras de visitantes únicos mensuales sólo indican una tendencia general. Para saber qué se cuece entre líneas, es bueno analizar los datos de engagement (tiempo medio de permanencia por visita, páginas vistas…). Adrián Segovia tiene acceso a esos datos de Nielsen y los comenta en este otro post muy completo.
Flickr incapaz de batir a Facebook Photos
comScore nos deja unas impresionantes estadísticas sobre las webs de fotos más visitadas en EE UU. Facebook Photos bate de lejos a Flickr, Photobucket y Picassa.
El pasado enero, Facebook Photos recibió 33,6 millones de visitas únicas. Flickr, que probablemente arrebatará el segundo puesto a Photobucket, logró 21,9 millones. Picasa se descuelga muy lejos con 8,1 millones.
¿La explicación de la gran ventaja de Facebook a partir de Septiembre?: añadir una pestaña con la sección de Photos en la página de inicio de cada cuenta. Tal es su poder. Después de ver estos datos, me convenzo más de una cosa: ¿para qué va a comprar Facebook start-ups y aplicaciones cuando puede desarrollarlas por sí mismo con rotundo éxito?
“Photos” es un claro ejemplo. Antes también lo fue Facebook chat. Y ahora, después de los rumores de compra de Twitter, ¿por qué no una aplicación de microblogging de Facebook?
Via Techcrunch
