May, 2010

Technology — 17 Comments
25
May 10

Leaving Nokia And Going Droid

image

A few days ago, I succmbed to pressure from Joel and got a new phone,the Motorola Droid (The GSM version is called Milestone but I prefer the name Droid. Sounds hardcore)

Although I really like my new phone, I am still sad. For the fist time since I got my first phone 8years ago (6210) , I am not using my beloved Nokia. I am a huge fan of Nokia and in the early days before they went haywire with models, I knew almost all the models they had by heart. In those days, if I wanted to get a new phone, It was either Nokia or Nokia. I did not even consider any other manufacturer. This time around, I tried looking for every reason to buy a Nokia but I could not justify it. The reason? Apps.

I wrote a while back that what we know as telephone is dead. My argument was that a great majority of the activities we peform on our ‘phones’ are non voice related. This is where Apple got it right and Nokia has wobbled on in the last 3 years. Because of the fragmentation of the OS on Nokia phones, apps that make the smartphone smart are not available. (Developing for Nokia is 4th choice since it will take almost the same cost and man hours to develop for one of the fragments with far less reach.) The few available are a chore to download. What Nokia needs to do is simple, decide their positioning and cater for it. They cannot be both an expensive and a cheap brand. Having one million models of phones is very inefficient. iPhone users have shown they do not really care if all their classmetes have the same model of phone as long as it is cool.

Nokia, what I believe you should do is divide your phones into two categories. The smart phones and the not so smart phones. For the smart phones (not more than four models please) quickly decide on an OS and go with it. I think there is still space for 2 more players (you guys and WebOS). Android is taking the advantage you guys should have had against the iPhone- one software with different models of phones. Luckily, your brand is still very strong and you have a good distribution reach. When you guys have that OS thing sorted,  $5m and get the best 100 apps on your platform. Yes, pay people to develop their apps . hopefully, things will pick up from there.

One I can be productive on Nokia (Googla Apps, Project Management, OnePage, Twitter, To do’s, etc) I promise to return.

Until then,  I have gone Droid.

——

98% of this post was done with my phone including getting and posting the image. The last sentence just kept cutting off so I completed it online.

Technology — 49 Comments
18
May 10

An Open Letter To Mark Zuckerberg: “Don’t Do A Mugabe To Facebook”

Dear Zucky,

In recent weeks, the tech news has been awash with so much negative PR of your company due to the recent changes made at Facebook, and some stunts you are pulling. I have not seen a consistent public vilification of a single person since Tiger Woods. Your users are really really pissed with you. The amount of money Diaspora has raised has shown you something, people are prepared to pay to take down Facebook. My man, this is not a good thing. I am writing this letter to you as a fan of the great company Facebook which you have built. My love for and belief in Facebook led be to write an earlier blog post in which I suggested ways Facebook can make money when the world said you guys were struggling to make some dough. This letter is my own effort to prevent you from doing a Mugabe* to your wonderful company with so much potential.

Privacy Changes

viewing the  source of the image below shows clearly the radical privacy evolution Facebook has undergone. There are few things I would like to point out.

Your browser may not support display of this image.

When I joined Facebook in the earlier days (2007), I was required to indicate how I knew the person I was adding. If I was not sure Facebook advised against it. Fast forward to today, I am continuously peddled the profiles of people whom I have no friends in common with on my 1, 953 Facebook friends list.

At your Facebook developer conference years ago, you claimed what kept you up at night was allowing people have the ability to as much privacy as possible while sharing what they wanted to whom they wanted. Fast forward to this year’s f8, where you said while your friends played and thought of being lawyers and doctors when they grew up, what was on your mind was how to make everyone’s information accessible to each other. Now, that is the greatest turn around since GW Bush Sr. said “Read my lips, no new taxes” then of course we all know what happened.

The open graph, the ‘like’ button, instant personalization and Privacy

In your quest to bring in revenue to justify your 716 million investment and keep Facebook afloat, you have decided to introduce the greatest advertising scheme* since Google, the like button. That move alone has put your competitors on a massive offensive. Your so called making the web ‘social by default’ is just a smokescreen to monitor the browsing habits of your over 400million users.  Don’t you think you should explain this clearly to your users?

* If you are logged into Facebook and you visit this site and any site (CNN, Pandora, Techcrunch porn sites :) ) that has implemented the like button (you do not need to visit the site from Facebook) Facebook knows of this and stores it. Since it has more information about you than yourself, they can deliver a better targeted advertising to you on those websites than Google. If you are an advertiser, who will you advertise with?

Stealing Fan Pages

What’s with the recent decision to seize popular (formally fan) pages and turn them to community pages? It is bad enough you make us pay to send traffic to your site but to go ahead and reward us for making our fan pages a success by seizing them is a very terrible strategy. It is wrong and very improper. If you claim the user should not have created the fan page in the first place, why do you not seize the less successful ones? What happens to the money the person used to promote the fan page all these years?

Facebook is not a charity and is in business to make money.

I fully understand the pressure you have been under to justify the huge investments made into you company. I would also be desperate to make a good return on investment especially having collected 200 million dollars from some Russian dudes. I completely understand all these recent moves are in a quest to squeeze out some juice. But while you go seeking that cash, I would like to point out that you seem to have forgotten some core principles that make great companies great. You have forgotten that with great power comes great responsibility. You cannot justify making changes that would affect 400 million people without regards to what they think or feel. I believe people are not necessarily  upset with the lack of privacy but the inconsistency of the rules of participation on Facebook. You told people it was ok to put pictures of their little sons and daughters an share it with only family members only to let the pictures become public and get them indexed by Google and co.

The most important asset of any company is not their engineers who can always leave but the goodwill and  trust of their customers and people. Zucky, you are recklessly betraying the trusts of your users which I think is very very risky. You should realize you are no longer seen as the teenager that built a popular website but an adult trying to take over the world.

So how then can Facebook make money?

On Facebook, the users are the products while advertisers are the customers.

I completely agree that Facebook has the right to make money but you see, Facebook’s products users are living things and can vote with their mouse.you cannot peddle them to advertisers without regard for what they think or how they feel. The question I will ask is have you tried making your users customers and they refused? Let me once again suggest ways I think Facebook can make money. First of all give your users the choice to become customers, which means providing premium services they would like to pay for.  Some premium services I think might be successful would be

  1. Sell Privacy: Yup. Make Facebook public by default and allow users customers to make any privacy adjustments they want. If it is that important, they will pay for it. The risk is that it might seem like blackmail so you could couple the offering with other premium features.
  2. Unlimited friends: Give customers the option to have unlimited friends.
  3. No Ads: Allow premium customers the ability to block ads.
  4. Priority news feed. Guarantee the delivery of news to premium users’ friends. Majority of users have no idea that many people do not see their stories.
  5. HQ photos: Yes, high quality photos.
  6. A ‘’premium badge’: Human beings are egoistical, people will become premium users just for this.
  7. Fan page owners can actually reply fans. you can make that feature premium only

I am sure you will find millions of people willing to pay $9.99 a year for these features. You currently do not make $9.99 per user so this will be a bad ass return. More so, you would have the conscience to aggressively monetize the users that would rather remain products nor customers.

Like I said in the beginning, I hope you do not do a Mugabe to your company. You are light in our generation and I would really be sat to see that light become and uncontrollable fire that has to be put out. I wish you l the best as you tackle the latest firestorm.

Regards,

Oo Nwoye, (OoTheNigerian)

*Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe and independence hero successfully made his country’s economy the best in Africa, then made it the worst.

Technology — 43 Comments
2
May 10

Why Your Facebook Ads ‘Don’t Work’.

mafia

The reason Facebook ads do not work is because they squander the money of advertisers, simple!

Last year, I sent a tweet showing  his this screenshot of my Facebook page that had 3 Mafia Wars adverts in one go. That is Facebook wasting 2/3rds of advertising money in one go if doing a CPM.

Another example: In the past 2 months, I have been seeing an ad from GroupSpaces.The first time I saw the ad, I clicked on it to see what it was all about and saw they were recruiting. I saw the ad again and I ‘liked’ it. When Facebook  kept showing me the ad, I disliked it and flagged it as repetitive, hoping it won’t be shown to me again so I could save the guys some money.  2 months and over a hundred impressions later the ad is still being shown to me. By repeatedly showing me an ad I have seen and clicked on, Facebook has wasted Groupspaces money more than a hundred times over with me. The advertising story of Groupspaces is the same with Startupers whose ads I have seen forever.

Ideally, Facebook advertising should be very efficient (unlike Google Adwords) since they know everybody who has seen and clicked an ad (you have to be logged in to see ads) but that is not the case because they deliberately squander the money of advertisers to increase their revenue. The faster you they spend your advertising credit, the better for them. This is plain wrong!

At least when next it seems your ad on Facebook does not seem to work, you know why.

Update: Co founder of GroupSpaces, David Langer, seems quite happy with their ad campaign on Facebook, he says they are fairly competitive with job boards. I still think FB ads can be more efficient if Facebook gives advertisers more options. e.g “Do not show an ad to someone that has clicked it previously”. “Do not show an as to a person more that 4 times”.