Power to the people

The future of Facebook aplications is not clear enough. Currently the usage is declining, only the gaming applications are going up. So, you should consider making one.

I wonder what will be next?

Like Twitter, Facebook has recently added a feature called “Mobile Texts” which allows you to update your Facebook status via SMS. Exhibionists all over the planet now can let their friends know if they’re “just about to throw up on the Stratosphere Roller Coaster in Las Vegas” or “Spanking boyfriend for poking nasty whores on Facebook”.

Just send an SMS to 32665 (it’s FBOOK in alphabet), in the format @ STATUS, e.g. : @ I’m sleeping
There are also some other options included in this “Mobile Texts”, like getting a friend’s cell number from their profile (send cell George Clooney for this option, if Clooney is your friend) or, be surprised, POKING. (poke George Clooney)

You can tell if someone updated their Facebook status via SMS if there’s a mobile icon next to their Facebook status message.

Starting today, according to Alexa graphs, Facebook has more daily visits than mySpace.

There is one simple explanation for this: Facebook applications. Starting this summer, Facebook has received more hype than any Internet service ever. Applications will put Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg the rulers of the world. Watch and learn.

Have you had an idea for an Internet social service recently? Or you may be working on such a project right now? In most cases, you should stop everything and make a Facebook application first. There is a solid network of friends on Facebook already. Just give them a nice gadget to use. The things have never been simpler.

The simple truth.

There are so many theories out there that are trying to describe the phenomenon of social networking on the Internet. Sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, epidemiologists, communists… you name it. These analyses are written in books, 300-page pdf reports, PhD theses, student reports. They are also very useful for filling technology columns in papers and magazines, because these deep and profound texts improve credibility of their editors.

There is no need to write quantum theories about social networking. It is dating.

From their earliest phase of living in groups, humans had laws written by mother nature.

Human beings are being born with various genetic mutations. Some of those combinations turn out to be better than the others. Those with best genes were the chosen ones to mate. We had alpha males and alpha females and everything was clear.

Then came the civilization where these laws seized to exist. At least on paper. In our society, everybody can mate and have kids, alpha or beta, we are not animals anymore, right?

Wrong.

These laws still exist, and they are visible in all sorts of human behaviour.

So what’s the problem with classic dating sites? Well, putting your image and your profile on those sites, you have loudly shouted “I am beta male/female, I am desperate” to the rest of the world. To most people, this is the first impression.

Not much time has passed from the period people lived in small tribes of 30. Only a 10.000 years. Maybe the civilization has improved, but the basic human replication instincts remained. In these tribes, beta males and females had no chance of passing their genes, so being perceived as beta remained one of the greatest fears of humans, even today.

The majority of people secretly craved to put their profile on dating sites but they all unconsciously beleived one thing: if some of their friends find their image on those sites, they would lose chance of mating any attractive male or female from their circle of friends forever and their genes would be shift-deleted from this world.

But then came the social networks. Places for connecting people about friendship, photography, video, cooking, sport, and any topic available.

If you put your profile and photo on these networks, you are not beta. You are not desperate. You are just there for friendship, hobbies, mutual interests etc. So now you can browse the profiles of these hot men and women, connect to them, start speaking about music, art, religion, because that’s what the network is about, and eventually you can have sex with them. All that from the confort of your home, without being perceived as desperate to the rest of the world.

Social networking. The greatest invention since Mr Rodney Tricycle said to himself “I’m tired of walking everywhere, I think I’ll invent a machine with three wheels and a bell and name it after myself”".

(Credits to Blackadder for last sentence)

This morning I got an email from a friend of mine. It was an invitation for a social network called Tagged.com. A straightforward designed email with a witty question: “Is she your friend?” The button “Yes” just craved for click. So I clickety clicked on it. Curiosity killed the cat.

Upon selecting “Yes” option a web page opened with a short form containing very friendly copy in inline help. I filled out the form as this looked like something different and I always like to research new stuff. As I was about to join the 126th social network on planet Earth, I got the screen that offered me an option of finding all of my friends that were already on the network. All I had to do is enter my username and password from Gmail or some other (Yahoo, Hotmail…) account and it would do it all automatically for me. Very useful, I thought. So I entered my Gmail user and pass:

Well the next screen was a big surprise. It listed all the emails from my Gmail account, even from people I wrote to once in a lifetime. Each of them had a checkbox checked by default. The big, red button that was saying “Next” was just a click away.

In the moment I realised that clicking on that button will cause all of them to receive tagged.com invitation emails with my name as a sender. What a witty way to harvest millions of users worldwide, don’t you think?

I unchecked all of the emails and went into the network. Classic mySpace layout. No big deal. But then I started to think about that emails screen. Ok, I am from the web business and I knew it was a setup. But how many people all over the planet just clicked the Next button? Suddenly I saw the Matrix. This is the fastest way to involve “innocent” people into social networking business, people that haven’t yet heard of mySpace or Facebook!

Later during the day I heard a lot of my friends were receiving emails from tagged.com these days, and I did a bit of investigation.

It turned out that the company tagged.com has raised 7 million dollars in venture capital, so this is definitely not another Joe-from-the-hood-viagra-pimp-adsense-spamming-mission but something much bigger. Then I searched for people’s opinions on blogs and realised that these emails started circulating in October 2006. It seems that this Gmail account searching option was introduced in tagged.com system at that time.

The next logical step was to visit Alexa.com and see their traffic graph:

This enormous viral spreading has started at the same time they introduced this subtle spamming method. “The tipping point” is clearly visible, so my question is where does this lead? Here is the comparing graph of mySpace.com and tagged.com:

This quiet spamming trick got them approx. 1/6 of mySpace traffic in very short time. The service has been active for a few years but it was not massive until a few months ago.

I think much of these 7 million raised in ventures are spent on lawyers, to ensure all privacy policies are bullet-proof and to blame the users and their ignorance for this spamming “side effect”.

I imagine what will happen very soon. Hardcore spammers from all the basements and underworlds will create sites that will ask users for Gmail password and soon our Inboxes will be overflowed with invitations for “Chicken soup lovers network no. 386″. Maybe Google and others will have to modify their systems in order to prevent this.

It seems that these service integration trends on the Internet are a true heaven for creative spammers. Are we looking at the beginning of the Web 2 bubble boom? I hope not yet.