Be Unreasonable - Aydin Mirzaee’s Take on the World.

Welcome to FaveQuest, where it’s all about YOU! via kwout

A good friend, Allan Isfan sent me an invite to a new facebook application called FaveQuest. At first, I thought: “yea, like I need another facebook app…” I added the app for the heck of it and also because Allan is a friend… needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised

FaveQuest essentially entertains you without you having to do much. The problem with YouTube and all the other video sites out there is that you have to actively search for good stuff… FaveQuest will find all the videos that are of interest to you and play them. The other great thing about FaveQuest is that you can share interesting videos with your buddies. Except for the bOK application (Free Calls to your Facebook Friends), I haven’t recommended any other application. This is an application that you should check out!

Aydin.

Posted By: Aydin Mirzaee

Is the 5000 friend limit on Facebook a myth? not really. Renowned Silicon Valley blogger Robert Scoble, reached this limit a long time ago. Mark Cuban (billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks) just reached the limit. Jeff Pulver has about 4,200 friends and is fast approaching the limit. I would’ve assumed that with the weight that their names carried, exceptions could be made for them? Maybe 5,000 friends is all they need?

Aydin.

Posted By: Aydin Mirzaee

If you are like the other 8 million people around the world that have BlackBerries, you are in luck! RIM has recently added an integrated Facebook Application to its popular mobile phone. The BlackBerry Facebook application is based on the Facebook Mobile API, which is still fairly new.

To be honest, I am very impressed and delighted by RIM’s move to integrate Facebook into its phones. If you have a BlackBerry, just go to m.facebook.com (on your phone) and you will be given the option to download this application.

Aydin.

Posted By: Aydin Mirzaee

Many people applauded Facebook when they launched the Facebook Platform and allowed third party developers to build applications on their website. In fact, this was somewhat of a revolutionary move that contributed to Facebook’s estimated $15 billion value today. Naturally, all the other guys wanted a piece of this pie: MySpace, Six Apart, Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo, Oracle and the Undisputed King of the Web: Google. So, these companies teamed up and under the umbrella of Google and launched OpenSocial. OpenSocial is a platform much like Facebook’s, except its not a closed platform… i.e. the applications can be installed on any of the previously mentioned networks.

This move by Google and the rest is very interesting… At the end of the day, its just a classic case of ganging up on the center of attention and bullying it out of the way…. Fortunately, Facebook has the Giant Microsoft as a friend and investor and a few other backers… so its not alone in the game.

In a previous post, I mentioned how the most valuable asset that Facebook currently has is the intimate knowledge of its 50 million members and their relationships with each other. This is exactly what makes Facebook sticky. In other words, you wouldn’t leave Facebook to go to another social network as that would mean finding and re-adding all your friends. They have to be very careful going forward as its a chess game from here… Google has made the first move… but a good chess player can predict his oponnents moves. In this case, Google is slowly attempting to get Facebook to give up some preliminary assets (proprietary platform), before it goes after the main treasure: Facebook’s Social Graph.

Despite what most of the blogs and the web says, Facebook can’t give in to Google and risk becoming just another social network.

Aydin.

Posted By: Aydin Mirzaee.

I was surprised to find out recently that a lot of people still don’t know that they can update their Facebook status via text message (i.e. SMS). This is actually pretty easy and its a great way to make sure that everyone is spying on you all the time

All you have to do is send a text message to FBOOK (32665) and make sure that your text message starts with an “@” character…

So, for example, If I wanted to update my status to “Aydin is blogging now”, all I’d have to do is send the following text message to facebook (32665):

“@ blogging now”.

btw, you can tell if someone updated their facebook status from their cell phone if you see a small mobile phone icon right next to their status update…

Use it!

Aydin.

posted by: Aydin Mirzaee .

First of all, let me quote Steve Ballmer as he’s been covered all over the media for saying:

“I think these things [social networks] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people.”

Ever since he mentioned this a lot of people have been saying he’s wrong. Some people have been saying he ‘could’ be right. Well, I’ll go ahead and say it. He “IS” right.

Is Facebook doomed? Not necessarily. They could clean up their act before its too late. Let’s get to the gist of the matter. What have they done wrong? They gave 3^rd Party Applications too much power.

A lot of the people that I’ve talked to (original Facebook fans – not the latecomers: i.e. if you signed up less than a year ago, you’re a latecomer) agree with me that one of the major appeals of Facebook in the beginning was its clean cut and direct interface. It was very simple to navigate. If I wanted to see something on my friend’s profile, I could do it easily because both of our profiles looked the same.

MySpace on the other hand was all over the place (and still is – although, they’ve learned their lesson and are trying to change). You could go to some MySpace pages and your browser would freeze because of all the stuff that took over your screen… worse yet, you could get a seizure as a result of all the flashing lights and widgets… so, we all took refuge in Facebook.

Now Facebook allows 3^rd parties to develop applications… this is fine…BUT, they SHOULD NOT be allowed to drastically modify the way someone’s profile appears to others. Just today I wanted to write on my friend’s wall and I had to scroll down through about 10 applications, one super wall, one fun wall, and then finally to the regular wall… its become ridiculous… If someone wants to change the way their profile looks to themselves, that’s completely fine. However, they should not be able to change the way it looks to others.

Not only that, but I am getting invitations from about 10 different applications a day. Some of my friends get even more than that… Spam anyone?

Facebook’s most important asset right now is what they call a Social Graph. Their database contains info about us and who are friends are. That is the most important aspect of Facebook. I hope they are smart enough never to allow that information to be exported from the site because if they do, its all over.

Aydin.

Posted by: Aydin Mirzaee.

Starting from NYC…

I grew up in New York City and now live in Ottawa, Canada. Back in the day, Facebook was only for college students. In other words, you had to have a .edu email address or your university/college had to be listed on facebook for you to be able to sign up. Every time I visited New York, people asked me: “are you on Facebook?” But of course the only Canadian University that was on Facebook back in those days was McGill (mainly because McGill has such a big American population).

Facebook registered in Ottawa, Canada!

Wanting to see what this Facebook phenomenon was, I registered the University of Ottawa on Facebook. I went through the drudgery of listing all the classes & majors available at the school to get us registered. About a month later, the University of Ottawa was added! Success! I was the first person to sign onto Facebook in Ottawa. I needed to get more people to sign on. I started to tell friends about it and managed to convince a group of people.

The Nay Sayers…

Most people though said things like “why would I want to expose myself on the internet?” Most people didn’t see a point in giving away their privacy. Those that were into social networks were typically using Orkut, Hi5, and Friendster and did not want to change.

But, Facebook took over anyway! Why, you ask?

1) Facebook had a clean-cut and predictable interface.

2) Facebook was exclusive. It was only for University/College students.

3) Facebook was amazing for photo-sharing. You would attend a party and then get to share all those photos with your friends.

At the end of the day…

The Nay Sayers ended up being the biggest Facebook addicts… No names mentioned

Aydin.

Posted By: Aydin Mirzaee 

We all know Facebook started out as a college network. We all know that now it is an “everybody” network (to the dismay of many ). A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine told me that her mother added her on Facebook. I was amazed. A few days later, my father added me as a friend. Weird, but true. Well, what’s wrong with this anyway? Well, I like to think I have one of those cool dads, so in this case, nothing. But, do you really want everyone to see your party pics? Well, I guess, its a personality thing and therefore the answer is: it depends.

To think, now, things like this are possible:

In any case, Facebook is here to the rescue!

In the next little while, Facebook will announce that you will be able to classify your friends in different categories (i.e. business associates, colleagues, friends, close friends, family, etc…). Each one of the categories will have separate privacy features that will allow you to decide who gets to see what…

Good For Everyone? Not Exactly...

In general, this is good news. A friend of mine, though, was working on a startup company to implement this very feature. Well, Facebook beat him to it. That’s OK though… he has since been spending more time on his other project (which I think is more interesting anyway…).

Aydin.

Posted By: Aydin Mirzaee 

I love Facebook… no doubt about it… I was (and I show this off at every chance I get…hehehe) the first person in Ottawa to sign up for Facebook. But, let’s be realistic here… $10 Billion??? If this isn’t indication enough that the internet bubble is back then I don’t know what is…

So, where is this huge number coming from? Well, rumors are that Microsoft and some other guys want to put in up to $500 Million for a 5% stake in the company…

Just to put into perspective how huge this number is…

>> Facebook has about 300 employees… so, this means that each employee generates about $33 Million dollars of value???

>> If Mark Zuckerberg counted $1 per second, it would take him about 317 years to count to $10 Billion Dollars. Wow!

Aydin.

Posted By: Aydin Mirzaee

A few people I know were at the TechCrunch 40 conference these last 2 days. I wish I was there too! Oh well… hopefully next year

A lot of interesting products/services were announced at the conference. Some of the more notable ones were Flock and Cubic Telecom (founded by Pat Phelan). Come to think of it, though, Cake Financial had a pretty good product out there too.

What did catch my attention the most at the conference was Facebook’s major announcement that they will be partnering with Accel and the Founders Fund to provide up to $10 million dollars in grants to individuals/companies that want to create Facebook apps. The grants will range from $25,000 to $250,000. Very interesting proposition and very smart move by the three companies.

Bravo!

Aydin.

Posted By: Aydin Mirzaee