Facebook just launched their Listen with Friends feature. Now when you're scrolling in your Newsfeed you'll see a button that has a better call to action, telling you to Listen With ((Friend)). You can do this in your Newsfeed, your Ticker, and your Chat sidebar. 

The only problem with the Chat integration is this: out of my 130 "Online Friends" only 4 were listening to music (which of course a lot more of my friends weren't "Online" in chat as I never am, so those numbers are skewed). If Facebook is smart they'll move all of your friends who are currently listening to music to the top of the Chat sidebar, as I had to expand the whole bar to find all of my 4 friends who were listening to music. 

Maybe with this new feature more people will start listening to music through Facebook. Maybe not. (According to Facebook 17.5 million people are listening through Spotify, whereas Spotify says 10 million are - which is only a fraction of their 800 million+ users.) This key 3-area integration of the new feature at every point of contact on Facebook is ideal to raising the number of people consuming music, but only time will tell if Listen with Friends does its job.

What's also frustrating is that this feature only shows up some of the time in your Newsfeed. Most of the time I see people listening to albums. I can play each of the individual songs they've listened to as well as the whole album but I have no clue what they're listening to right now in my Newsfeed.

Another issue with Facebook's integration of music is that the social aspect of it is done in a bit of a clunky way. When you see that a friend has listened to a musician/band and other friends have listened to the artist as well it's displayed as "((Friend)) and ((X)) others listened to ((artist)) on ((music service)). While that's great to see all of your friends who listened to an artist in one place, what's not great is that you can't Like or Comment on that activity because the listening is lumped together. 

Personally, I know that I rarely listen to something through my friends. I'm more interested in listening to music similar to what I'm digging at the moment. What's a nice value-add is that you're able to see which of your friends are listening to music with a certain person. I can see that activity being repurposed for musicians/bands that want to hold a listening party on Facebook.

What I'd love to see is Edgerank for music, where you can see more of the music of the people you have similar tastes to. Facebook could implement this into your Newsfeed and their dedicated Music page if they wanted to. This is where Facebook's traditional Edgerank falls short, so it couldn't necessarily be implemented to include music as it's currently configured. The people that I am the closest with and/or interact with the most on Facebook aren't necessarily the people that I have the most in common with, musically speaking. (Yes, I enjoy Death Cab For Cutie a lot, but I have little interest in Orbital or Velvet Underground.)

But if I knew who I had the most musical tastes in common amongst my friends would I be closer with them? Most likely. This knowledge would spur more conversations about artists and bands, as well as lead to making plans to go to shows together. This becomes especially important the more divergent and obscure your tastes become. For instance, I enjoy a subgenre loosely called 'witch house' and I know of only 1 friend that enjoys it as much as I do. That friend is my go-to source for show info in additon to Vybe, which aggregates info about your favorite band/artist's performances, ticket sales, song/album/video releases. If Facebook was smart they'd start integrating features like this into their platform.

I'm glad that Facebook is giving users newer ways to connect with their friends over music. Hopefully they add some smart recommendations to their current social music offerings. Facebook may have a long way to go with refining Listen with Friends and other music aspects, but this is a good albeit broken start.

 

Originally from Facebook's S-1 filing in preparation of their IPO. Find their full S-1 here.

 

Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.

We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter.

At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.

Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

 

We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.

Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small — with the relationship between two people.

Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.

By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.

We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.

 

We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy. 

We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better  products and services. 

As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.

One result of making it easier to find better products is that businesses will be rewarded for building better products — ones that are personalized and designed around people. We have found that products that are “social by design” tend to be more engaging than their traditional counterparts, and we look forward to seeing more of the world’s products move in this direction.

Our developer platform has already enabled hundreds of thousands of businesses to build higher-quality and more social products. We have seen disruptive new approaches in industries like games, music and news, and we expect to see similar disruption in more industries by new approaches that are social by design.

In addition to building better products, a more open world will also encourage businesses to engage with their customers directly and authentically. More than four million businesses have Pages on Facebook that they use to have a dialogue with their customers. We expect this trend to grow as well.

 

We hope to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions.

We believe building tools to help people share can bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government that could lead to more direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.

By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.

Through this process, we believe that leaders will emerge across all countries who are pro-internet and fight for the rights of their  people, including the right to share what they want and the right to access all information that people want to share with them.

Finally, as more of the economy moves towards higher-quality products that are personalized, we also expect to see the emergence of new services that are social by design to address the large worldwide problems we face in job creation, education and health care. We look forward to doing what we can to help this progress.

 

Our Mission and Our Business

As I said above, Facebook was not originally founded to be a company. We’ve always cared primarily about our social mission, the services we’re building and the people who use them. This is a different approach for a public company to take, so I want to explain why I think it works.

I started off by writing the first version of Facebook myself because it was something I wanted to exist. Since then, most of the ideas and code that have gone into Facebook have come from the great people we’ve attracted to our team.

Most great people care primarily about building and being a part of great things, but they also want to make money. Through the process of building a team — and also building a developer community, advertising market and investor base — I’ve developed a deep appreciation for how building a strong company with a strong economic engine and strong growth can be the best way to align many people to solve important problems.

Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.

And we think this is a good way to build something. These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.

By focusing on our mission and building great services, we believe we will create the most value for our shareholders and partners over the long term — and this in turn will enable us to keep attracting the best people and building more great services. We don’t wakeup in the morning with the primary goal of making money, but we understand that the best way to achieve our mission is to build a strong and valuable company.

This is how we think about our IPO as well. We’re going public for our employees and our investors. We made a commitment to them when we gave them equity that we’d work hard to make it worth a lot and make it liquid, and this IPO is fulfilling our commitment. As we become a public company, we’re making a similar commitment to our new investors and we will work just as hard to fulfill it.

 

The Hacker Way

As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.

To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp.

The examples above all relate to engineering, but we have distilled these principles into five core values for how we run Facebook:

 

Focus on Impact

If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems.It sounds simple, but we think most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on.

 

Move Fast

Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.

 

Be Bold

Building great things means taking risks. This can be scary and prevents most companies from doing the bold things they should.However, in a world that’s changing so quickly, you’re guaranteed to fail if you don’t take any risks. We have another saying: “The riskiest thing is to take no risks.” We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time.

 

Be Open

We believe that a more open world is a better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact. That goes for running our company as well. We work hard to make sure everyone at Facebook has access to as much information as possible about every part of the company so they can make the best decisions and have the greatest impact.

 

Build Social Value

Once again, Facebook exists to make the world more open and connected, and not just to build a company. We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value for the world in everything they do.

 

Thanks for taking the time to read this letter. We believe that we have an opportunity to have an important impact on the world and build a lasting company in the process. I look forward to building something great together.

 

Long gone are the days of Facebook shunning Twitter. Now with the advent of apps posting to your Timeline with 'verbs', Facebook has quietly started to "see" items published from Twitter from a variety of sources - multiple 3rd party applications and even Twitter.com itself. What's happening now is that it's scanning the link and expanding the rich media so you can see the extra info from the link - photo, video, song, etc.

Case in point - a link to Spotify was shared on Twitter and pushed to Facebook via Selective Tweets. Because the link is from Spotify, Facebook recognizes that the multimedia should be expanded to show a 'play' image whereupon pressing the play button a song should play. It even goes as far to prompt me to open Spotify in order to play the song. 

This may seem like a small change to the user experience but it's a huge change for Facebook on the back end. What this really means is that Facebook has the capability to understand all types of files, expand the medium so their users can interact with it regardless of how it's sent over and understand the permissions that the link requests (i.e. if you need to have an account somewhere else, if another app needs to be open to function, if it needs to launch an app, what type of file it is etc.). 

In the grand scheme of things this means that while Facebook hasn't directly acknowledged its softening of its stance on working with Twitter, it is tacitly acknowledging that many people are syncing their accounts from Twitter to Facebook and that the information being sent in links is too valuable for their users and friends to not interact with. Basically, Facebook is creating a more viral experience so you as a user never actually have to leave Facebook to experience that multimedia link shared.

Even though it's a fairly new technology, Walgreens on Astor Place in NYC's East Village now accepts it. This literally was done within the last 24 hours as I went there yesterday and the checkout display now shows the new logo.

The only problem with this right now is that a very small amount of Android phones have this hardware feature. iPhone users won't be able to use this until the iPhone 5 if Apple chooses to include it in 1 year. Remember, Apple rarely breaks features - they perfect them. Copy & paste anyone?

Sidenote, Walgreens didn't do a very good job of informing their staff of this new feature. I went to take a photo of it and the cashier looked at me like I had 5 heads. I'm pretty sure she thought I was documenting her. As I explained what it was she was shocked to find out an iPhone couldn't use it but was happy to try it on her Droid. Her manager was standing right next to her, laughing at the situation. Comical indeed that a customer had to inform you of something corporate should have.

Regardless, Google Wallet is in major stores for you cutting edge tech nerds to try. I'm an iPhone geek so someone go try it out and let me know how it goes. ;)

A collaboration you never saw coming - The Beatles & Commes Des Garçons. It makes sense though. CDG has a rock n roll sensibility to their clothing and The Beatles have an iconic logo that lends itself to prints.

It's been weighing on my mind for a bit now. It's also being talked about more and more. I also had an in depth conversation on Twitter about it (read: not on Google+). I won't proclaim Google+ dead, because it isn't. It's not even on life support or any other bad cliche for a social network. The content hasn't grown stagnant because there's still a ton of interaction there. Google+'s problem? An identity crisis.

If Facebook is for your close friends & family and Twitter is for people interested in similar things, then Google+ is... both? Well, at least it's trying to be. Now with Facebook implementing smart Lists, granular subscription settings for individual friends with types of updates & frequency and the ability to Subscribe to the public updates of anyone that allows you to, why exactly is Google+ necessary?

Right now, it's not. It could be in the future. For the people that argue Google+ is great for longer conversations (a la Friendfeed) I counter this - so is Facebook now. For those that would volley back that you can't read a Facebook update - even if it's "public" - unless you're logged in, I counter that social networks aren't for creepers. If you're going to lurk then do the proper thing and take two seconds out of your oh so tremendously busy life to sign up for a service.

This still doesn't solve what Google+ is good for. The one thing that it's good for right now is social Games. There's a separate Game stream that you can post your updates to and no one in your main social stream will ever see it. You're able to incorporate your friends that play into your games, although most don't because most make friends with the people that are playing their games. More on this later.

So what exactly sets Google+ apart? Sparks. Yes, that's right, Sparks. Completely underused and almost thrown in as an afterthought, Sparks are what Google+'s DNA should be centered on. 

Imagine this:

You start talking about something that you love. You then see more people talking about the exact same thing in real time, sorted by affinity (friends, friends of friends, everyone else), proximity (those closer may be more relevant, you being at an event talking about it makes you & others there more relevant) and frequency (those talking about it more may show up more, those talking about it as much as you will show up more).

Right now Facebook sort of does this. It shows you which of your friends are talking about similar topics. This isn't always the most interesting or correctly grouped set of information. Twitter doesn't even do this. Twitter makes you search for topics and join in on the conversation. No one is really surfacing timely relevant conversations in order to create an interest community. If Google+ can nail this then there would be a reason for your normal offline friends and family to join you there. 

The problem with Google+ is that it's competing with Facebook for your mindspace. Twitter is in it's own game because it gives you a way to send quick short bursts of chatter. Both Facebook and Google+ ask more of you by investing more time into a longer-form conversation. Without offering any significant major difference from Facebook, Google+ is in the losing seat. I truly want Google+ to win, if not just for Facebook being around for way too long and it being time for a change. 

The landscape we live in is that products aren't judged by their longterm viability; they're judged by what they're doing right now. Google needs to stop trying to kill Facebook. Even though many are saying that's not what they're doing but Google has been quoted in articles as saying that is exactly what they're trying to do. Instead Google should be giving people what they don't know they want and need.

No one knew they needed a better search engine with relevant ads but Google delivered that (which is ironic now considering that searching for precise info and questions on Google can be a joke). Google should go back to their roots to improve on a horribly broken system. This time instead of search it's social networks aka the new search. 

While Huddle, Sparks and Hangouts are all cool they don't give us a different reason to use Google+ everyday. Go back to your roots Google. Change the DNA of social networking and change the world with Google+.

 

 

While it may not be the social music service you had hoped for, you can find and follow your friends from Facebook on Grooveshark to keep up with the music that they're playing.

 

In your Community Activity stream you can see what your friends are playing as well as who they follow. This isn't exactly the most social of streams. All you can do is hide your friend, play their song now/next/last or replace your current songs, and view all the songs they listened to. The thing about social is that it's not really social unless you can interact actively. 

What should happen is you should be able to comment on your friend's activity. Since there's already a Favorite option for songs (a heart with a +) Grooveshark should employ just a + underneath songs with a Comment button, that way you can "like" (+) someone's song selection. 

This is basic social integration. While I'm glad I was able to follow all of my Facebook friends, I'm a little annoyed that I have back to Facebook to talk to them about the song they played. Also, there's no way to find your Twitter friends. Right now no one is really doing social music well. This is the perfect opportunity for Grooveshark to capitalize on this hole in the market. 

Twitter isn't a social network in the way Facebook and Google+ are. In fact, Twitter's user numbers fall in between Facebook and Google+ - Facebook 750M, Twitter 200+M, Google+ 18M. Twitter also doesn't consider itself a social network. It actually calls itself a 'real-time information network'. That doesn't change the fact that its users expect certain things from Twitter as a network. Here's some things that Twitter needs to do to bring itself up to social networking standards:

 

Create a Like / +1 with ☆ Favorite.

Probably the most underutilized feature of Twitter, the Favorite is relegated to bookmarking items right now. It can still stay that way but once you Favorite an item it should show up in the Twitter Stream and notify the tweet creator. It should also exist as metadata underneath the tweet. i.e. 3 of your friends favorited this + 5 others - it would be 3 of your friends mini-avatars and a link on 5 others that if you mouseover it you see who else favorited it.

Facebook has taken the common word 'like' and owned it. Google+ has done the same thing with the geek term '+1'. Twitter has not one, but TWO mechanisms to denote affinity - the star and the word favorite. For their purposes both can be interchanged. The only other one that is left is a heart/love, but that's moot since Twitter already has something in place.

 

Attribute tweets to sources in addition to original tweeter

Tumblr currently does this by pulling the source of the post and places it at the bottom. For some posts it also pulls the favicon, which makes it look more legit. Twitter could do this to any links shared. i.e. if www.nytimes.com/link/more-link is shared then it should be easy enough to recognize that the domain nytimes.com is the source and their favicon.ico should be able to be pulled and placed in front of their name. They can also pull the page's Title as another option to identify the source. This can be placed next to the timestamp under the tweet - 16 minutes ago via nytimes.com. This becomes more crucial when shortened URLs that don't expand the tweet (like t.co) hide the original source. This leads to less credibility and possible spam/phishing. By adding a source link at the bottom of all tweets with links you also free up space in the tweet; I currently will attribute a tweet to NY Times by either saying /via @nytimes or placing (@nytimes) before the link. This uses 13 characters too many in a 140 character environment.

 

Publish my @mentions in a new tab on my profile

If someone leaves me a message on my Facebook wall then others can see it. If someone does leave you a message on your Facebook wall and modifies the privacy settings then only certain people can see it. If Twitter were to implement this then it's version would be much simpler - if a private user leaves you an @mention then only the people accepted by that user can see their @mention of you on your Twitter wall. I often want to know what other people are saying about the people I'm following or looking at their profile. Currently you have to do a search for that info.

 

Show my conversations / media shared with an account

If I go to a person's profile I want to see my past conversations with them in the sidebar. The sidebar already shows the accounts I follow that follow the person and accounts that are similar to that person. What would make it more noteworthy is if I could see all of the conversations I had with them, all of the photos and videos we shared together, any of the hashtags we participated in, any of the events we shared etc. Twitter is already showing rich multimedia info from many sources and tracking all of your conversations. Why not show them? Facebook already does this when you go to a person's page.

 

Create a photo/video/link area 

I want to see all the photos and videos someone has shared. This is standard for both Facebook and Google+. I can go to their profile and view their uploads. If Twitter can recognize when your account shares rich multimedia it can also sort it into visible areas on your profile. It already does this for your RTs and tweets. This will be even easier when Twitter's native photo uploading feature goes live for the whole network (Sidenote, why no native video feature Twitter? Your power users have smartphones where video is native.)

As far as links are concerned, this could be handled a couple of different ways. They can either be shown according to timeline in a tab on your profile or on the sidebar sorted by source. The links are the least of my concern and there really isn't a precedent for this so I'm more bearish on this than everything else.

 

Retweets

The retweet tab on your home page is wonderful but why can't I see it on an individual's profile? I can see how many people RT'd a tweet if I click on it. I should be able to see that metadata underneath the tweet on their profile (see Favorites for how I handled this). There should be a tab on their profile that shows their RTs. That lets me know what other people find interesting of theirs. The RT is the Facebook/Google+ Share. The RT currently shows up when your friend RTs something, but what about if a tweet is trending amongst your friends? That brings me to...

 

Newsfeed

Facebook currently uses an algorithm that takes into account how often you comment / like someone's post and surfaces posts that could be more relevant to you. Google+ tried to do this with posts you commented on that got more comments, but that's the wrong approach. Just because a lot of people are commenting on something you commented on doesn't mean you have an affinity for it. Now let's say a lot of the people I interact with often are chatting about something then that should surface to the top. Let's relate this to Twitter.

There are services that track who I influence and who influences me on Twitter. What this means in layman's terms: who I talk to, who I retweet, who I favorite, who I've listed, who I've private messaged (DM) and who has done all this to me. I should see more items of who influences me ranked according to what influences me the most to the least. This could be on a separate home screen tab next to Timeline, just like Facebook's Newsfeed. It could be called Affinity or something like that. 

 

Trending

Trending topics are interesting and sometimes keep me up to date on current events, but I have no clue which ones my friends are involved in. Trending topics need to have a section that shows me what interests my friends and what conversations they're having in TT so I can join in their conversation. 

 

Brands 

Twitter currently treats brand accounts similar to regular accounts (unless they're a part of the Promoted program). Facebook makes the distinction between a personal account and a business page, as does Google+. Facebook used to list the Pages you Liked but now that feature is gone. Instead they use these insights in their ads to show you ads of pages your friends have liked etc etc. Twitter is trying to figure out how to make their Promoted Tweets relevant. One way that these could be done properly is to promote a tweet of a brand that your friend has followed along with saying which of your friends follow the brand, which have RTed the message and which have Favorited it. This would create 4 separate Promoted Tweet products - Promoted Tweet with followers, Promoted Retweet, Promoted Favorite and Promoted MegaTweet (which would include all of the above in the metadata - intrinsically the most powerful of them all).

People like relevancy. There are already "ads" in the sidebar i.e. Promoted Account and Promoted Trending Topic. This is the same for Facebook. If Twitter mimics Facebook's mechanism of how Liked content gets shared in the stream then Promoted Tweets could work really naturally. Essentially, a Promoted Tweet would be just like a Retweet from the person you follow. You didn't ask for it yet you got it because you follow them.

 

It seems that Twitter is starting to take small steps to bringing their network up to speed with other social networks. It recently added native photo upload ability, albeit still in a small rollout. They are also rumored to be rolling out a status update box for people's profiles, much like how you can leave a post directly on someone's Facebook wall, with this you would be able to leave an @mention on someone's Twitter wall... or would you? Even though you'll be able to send them an @mention from their profile it won't show up on their profile. I addressed this above and hopefully they'll implement a public facing version of these Twitter "wall posts" as well as some of these other points. I love Twitter and want to see it become a more full featured network.