Bruce MacVarish Notes

Facebook Phone - A Social Filter Device

(Photo by Lucascepeda and modified with permission)

I believe we will see more and more application specific mobile devices over the next 24 months.  

As both consumers and business users deal with "social exhaustion" and look for help filtering the streams of information coming their way, some will seek purpose built, integrated application + mobile device solutions as their filter.

With all the chatter on the potential of a Facebook Phone, I thought I'd dig around for earlier thinking on the concept and reasoning.  

I found posts by Arrington, Rubel and Sanford helpful.   Some of their key points:

Michael Arrington on Facebook secretly building a Phone:

 

"Facebook is building a mobile phone, says a source who has knowledge of the project. Or rather, they’re building the software for the phone and working with a third party to actually build the hardware. Which is exactly what Apple and everyone else does, too.

Specifically, Facebook wants to integrate deeply into the contacts list and other core functions of the phone. It can only do that if it controls the operating system.

Two high level Facebook employees – Joe Hewitt and Matthew Papakipos – are said to be secretly working on the project, which is unknown even to most Facebook staff.

Both have deep operating system experience.

Hewitt helped create the Firefox browser and was working on Parakey before it was acquired by Facebook in 2007. Parakey, which never launched, was described as a “Web-based operating system.” Hewitt also created all of Facebook’s iPhone web apps and then native apps, but finally quit building for the iPhone in disgust late last year. But he knows operating systems and he knows mobile.

Papakipos also has a perfect background for this project. He was leading the Google Chrome OS project until June. He then quit and went to Facebook. Papakipos is considered a rockstar developer, and there are any number of jobs he’d be able to do at Facebook.

But that doesn’t answer the question of why he’d leave the Chrome OS project before it was finished. It would have taken something really interesting to lure him away. Something like a Facebook Phone, for example.

So what might this phone look and feel like? We don’t know yet. When will it be announced? Don’t know. But I’d speculate that it would be a lower end phone, something very affordable, that lets people fully integrate into their Facebook world. You call your friend’s name, not some ancient seven digit code, for example. I’d imagine Facebook wanting these things to get into as many hands as possible, so I’d expect a model at a less than $50 price. Pay your bill with Facebook Credits. Etc.

As for timing, the holiday season is always a good time to launch new products. But that may be too soon.

All we know for sure is that Hewitt and Papakipos are working on something very stealthy together. And we have a source that tells us that stealthy thing is a Facebook phone.

We’re also not discounting possible partnerships around this. Spotify was said to be working on a phone with INQ last year based on a shared investor, Li Ka-Shing. It turns out Li Ka-Shing is also a sizeable investor in Facebook. So an INQ/Facebook partnership on a phone certainly wouldn’t be a surprise."

 

and Steve Rubel speculated about how Facebook will need to pursue a Facebook Phone:

"...if the desktop was the battleground in the 1990s and the web was in the 2000s then mobile is where the battle for dominance will take place next. 

Consider these three data points, all of which are fresh...

• According to Mary Meeker, more people will connect to the Internet via mobile devices than PCs in five years
• Forrester reports that 17% of US consumers have smartphones. (That means that 83% don't.)
• And Pew says that 55% of Americans connect wirelessly (And 45% therefore don't)

And that's just the US. Combine these three trends on a global level and it's obvious that mobile is the future. Mobile is a far far larger market than mainframes, PCs or even the web. It will have lots and lots of winners in hardware, software and services. This is why I believe Facebook can't sit on the sidelines anymore.

They will be on every device, but they eventually will try to launch their own hardware too.

... and Jamie Sanford outlines why he sees a Facebook Pad / Phone on the horizon:

 

Let’s face it – Facebook is almost a complete OS in and of itself.  With a little development of a Lnux kernel to get a device booted and loading the Facebook environment, you’d be able to simply turn on the phone and be “in” Facebook.  Think about what you use your phone/pad device for now:

Contacts

You already have contacts in Facebook.  They may have phone numbers in profiles (they may have them hidden to you via privacy settings).  So, how hard would it be to simply build off of that for dialing?  Now all of your contact management becomes embedded in Facebook.  It becomes the hub of your human interactions and that is simply used as part of the FacePad.

Location-Based Services

Facebook announced last month that it was going to start integrating more of its location-based services into the platform.  Share your location and now you are leveraging a network of people to find information that is relative to where you are right now.  Did a Facebook friend of yours 'like' a certain restaurant you’re near?  Suddenly, that restaurant review has relevance because it’s not a stranger reviewing it – it’s a Facebook friend who you have some trust with already.  The value of location-based services with friendship affinity tied to it is tremendous in creating weight of a review.

Mapping/Navigation

Remember in June of 2009 when Facebook announced that it would start showing Bing search results in Facebook?  How far off do you think that Bing Maps are from being integrated into Facebook as well?  And what if these maps integrated the results of the location-based services mentioned above?  Yikes. 

Voice Chat

Last year, Facebook announced the Vivox voice chat functionality that was coming to the site.  Think of how this could now integrate into the FacePad.  It would be akin to having Skype built in and could leverage your network connection vs. airtime with the cellular provider.

Once again, why is this important?

I believe we will see more and more application specific mobile devices over the next 24 months.  

As both consumers and business users look for help filtering the streams of information coming their way, some will seek purpose built, integrated application + mobile device solutions as their filter.

Can a Salesforce Phone built in cooperation with RIMM be far behind?

 

UPDATE 9/24 - Om summarizes what he believes will be the user experience on the Facebook (INQ) Phone:

The Facebook layer, as Zuckerberg describes, will run on a thin, stripped-down version of Android. Though, if I’m Nokia, I would be making a beeline to Zuckerberg’s office right about now.

What Facebook has to do is not build the OS, but instead build a user experience based on HTML5. WebOS did a good job of building a mobile experience based on web technologies.

A consumer’s Facebook ID becomes more important than the phone number itself. Login with Facebook ID, and your social network auto-magically syncs up with the phone. (Android users have seen their Google phones do this since day one. Stacey finds it annoying.)

Facebook becomes the address book or the contact list for the phone, giving Facebook users an option to call, IM, SMS, or mail their network via the data connection. Since Facebook already has our phone numbers, it can make it easy to call other cell phones or landlines. (Again, not a big deal for Android users who have this feature at their disposal.)

As Clearspring CEO and one of our readers, Hooman Radfar, so aptly said, “Facebook is effectively a set of applications with an underlying common messaging and authentication infrastructure. So, by definition, Facebook also is a set of disparate applications (photos, inbox, chat) that is connected by a social layer.” That is why you will see Facebook apps will be separated into individual apps and subsumed into the phone experience.

For instance, Facebook photos will communicate directly with the camera and become the repository for photos, with almost no difference in the cloud and the local photo storage. Take a picture and save it to Facebook.

As Liz pointed out, Facebook can give phones presence-based intelligence based on location, scheduled events and meetings, and of course, the time of the day. You’ll see some of that in the new phone.

The news feed, too, will become part of the mobile experience. I’d say it would be a more evolved experience compared to Moto BLUR and other such efforts.

Using GPS chips, the phone will give you the ability to locate your friends. It can help get you discount coupons for local eateries and bars for example.  That is why I think Facebook Places is an important initiative for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company, and why it ended up acquiring the Hot Potato team.

 

Relevance-Aware Activity Streams

 

Liz Gannes of GigaOm does a nice job summarizing a recent interview of Twitter CEO Ev Williams. Williams provided a few significant insight into how he thinks Twitter (and by extension real-time activity stream apps)  is different from email and search.

 

"Blogging (Williams was previously the founder of Blogger) and Tweeting can be different (and better) than email, he said, because people who have something to say can find their audience. That’s a much better situation for both the publisher of the information and the consumer of it. So recipient-based media can scale better “in a world of infinite information,” he said.

That’s also a contrast to Google, said Williams, which serves more purpose-driven needs versus Twitter’s focus on “an interest-based world.”

“Google is very good at ‘I need to solve a problem, I need to buy something, I need an answer,” he said. “Twitter is more ‘I’m interested in many things, I don’t know what I need to know.’” Where Google is more likely to be gamed by a company like Demand Media, Twitter is a different beast.

However, there’s still the problem of filtering information on Twitter. “What we need to get much better at is scaling that system so you don’t have to pay attention to everything, but you don’t miss the stuff you care about,” Williams said. He said more such products were on the way.

Williams cited Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who said recently that more information is now produced in two days than was in all of time before 2003. Williams said automated streams of information from services like Fitbit and Blippy —  in addition to the proliferation of media — will only add to that problem.

Williams also said to expect forthcoming products that would help filter relevant tweets around events, similar to what it’s doing with location. This would go beyond the user-developed convention of hashtags, he said, though he didn’t elaborate.

Developing relevance-aware activity streams will require a flexible filtering experience that enables users to filter across a number of different topics or variables.  It seems that Ev hints at developing certain types of filters - for example filtering based on events.  

Does that mean we'll see a slow roll out of category based filtering tools versus a broader, user-driven filtering tool capable of coarse and/or fine filtering?  Will it be an open-friendly approach or closed?

Developing relevance-aware activity streams is an important step in the evolution of the real-time web.  

If, as Ev points out, recipient-based media can scale better in a world of infinite information, then the relevance aware filtering model must be able to scale as well.

(image from johnhaydon.com)

 

Mobile Social Cloud Communications

Microsoft created Project Muse to interview and engage 2,000+ users about their likes and dislikes of their mobile experiences.   These volunteers helped crowd-source the design of Kin 1, Kin 2 and Kin Studio - the "productized" results of the user research.

There were 3 big user pain points found in the Project Muse work.  They were users' needs for a mobile experience focused on:

• social connections

• self-expression

• multi-screen digital life

While Kin 1 and Kin 2 may have suffered from poor execution at the "whole product" level, Kin Studio received significant recognition for breaking new ground by improving the social experience, integrating mobile + cloud and redefining the mobile user interface.

I believe there's value in distilling Project Muse and Kin Studio down to a few design lessons and guiding principles for consumer and enterprise mobile + cloud social software.

Guiding Principles of Real-Time Mobile Social Cloud Design:

• Enable users to easily create, publish and share the "story-line" of their real life activities

• A user's story-line (pictures, video, texts, call logs) created on any device should be available from the cloud on any web browser

• Story-lines are activity-streams mapped and prioritized in time, by tags, by strength of ties and/or media

• Personalize and prioritize the real-time push of feeds

• Simplify the ability to share and aggregate news and social feeds

• Strong Ties before Weak Ties or Temporary Ties

• Archive Mobile Sensor Data to the Cloud

• Extend through 3rd Party Applications & Developers

• Enable & manage user identity (e.g. Contacts, CallerID) as a cloud service

• Engage end users early and often through user research and design iteration

What would you add?

"Strong Ties" and the Design of Social Communication Apps

In my earlier posts, I've outlined an on-going project focused on improving our conversations and relationships with the people most important to us - the people we consider our "strong ties".    

I believe there are plenty of applications nurturing our connections with our "weak ties".  Increasingly, we will see new user value found in applications and devices that improve our connections with our "strong ties".   

As a result of the project, I'm continually looking for market validation of the strong ties concept.  Thanks to this FastCompany article by Addy Dugdale - I came across the ON Service developed by Orange Vallee (a subsidiary of the Orange Group).  

I found the TED Global 2010 presentation by Giles Corbett extremely helpful and reinforced my product hypothesis that "strong ties" will continue to emerge as a design focus for new social communication applications and devices.

We're seeing similar conceptual maps of "strong ties" emerge from the social research completed by Orange Vallee and Google's Paul Adams'  work on real life networks.

Here's how Orange maps out the strong ties concept:

and here's how Paul Adams at Google maps out his view of the relationship of our "strong ties" to our friends and "weak ties":

(btw - watch for Paul's new book "Social Circles" )

So, the good news - for users and for the "strong ties" project - is that we're seeing players like Google and Orange market test the "strong ties" concept as a design principle for new social communication applications and devices.

Twitter Graph Relevance

John Batelle provides further proof of the value found at the intersection of network graphs and conversation analytics.   

We now have a number of graphs defined by aggregating links and conversations around social objects: web graphs ( e.g. Google), social graphs (e.g. Facebook), interest graphs (e.g. twitter), location graphs (e.g. foursquare).  

"In short, Twitter knows who you are connected to, and what you (and they) are interested in.

Fashion that into a graph - the same kind of graph that powered Google's graph of web links, or Facebook's social graph - and all of a sudden you have a pretty powerful organizing principle for relevance in the Twitterverse."

John Batelle, Twitter's "Public Interest Graph"

We will see more network graphs being formed around a number of new and different social objects.  In addition, new innovative ways to derive relevance from the social conversations across various network graphs will continue to emerge.  

As MG Siegler points out in his recent take on the Facebook vs. Twitter battle...

"Social networks ... lose because they fail to innovate. Because they fail to stay ahead of the curve."

Expect to see continued innovation focused on ways to aggregate and analyze real-time conversations across network graphs... and... a consolidation across the layers of network graphs.

Voice Cloud

"You can provision a phone line from the cloud in five minutes, you can connect any number of high quality sip phones to that cloud-based phone number. And you can use that phone and phone number from any internet connection you want.

I am so happy to see voice and data converging and moving into the cloud. It's the way I've always wanted voice to work. I think we are going to see a lot of big changes as a result of this convergence."

Fred Wilson, A VC, Union Square Ventures

Conversation Analytics : Patterns, Sentiment & Intent

Here is another proof point supporting my vision for the emergence of conversation analytics. 

Autonomy announces Autonomy Explore:

"Autonomy Explore connects to all customer touchpoints including web, contact center, social media and email to deliver a complete understanding of each customer and customer segment, as well as the overall customer-base. Powered by Autonomy's unique meaning-based technology platform, Autonomy Explore enables businesses to automatically understand, act on, and optimize customer patterns, sentiment and intent."

I have spent the last few years defining, designing and prototyping integrated multimedia communication analytics solutions for users, enterprises and contact centers.  The key elements of aggregating conversations across multiple user touchpoints and analyzing conversation patterns, sentiment and intent are all coming together.   

Get Ready.  We are on the cusp of a breakthrough in conversation analytics for enterprises, contact centers and individual users.

Floating Identification

 

"Getting rid of phone numbers means that we can just connect with someone by a unique ID. And that ID should be able to float on top of various networks, applications & services and protocols."

Bijan Sabet, General Partner, Spark Capital

(image: Floating Numbers)

Measuring and Managing the Real-Time Web

I recently read two posts --- one by @StoweBoyd (The False Question of Attention Economics) --- and the other by @JohnBorthwick (Charting the Real-time Web) --- that had me thinking (again) about the challenges of information overload and real-time streams in the enterprise.

Here are a couple of quotes from each post that I found interesting.... first from Stowe:

"I suggest we just haven't experimented enough with ways to render information in more usable ways... the only ones that will benefit in the next ten years will be those that expend the time needed to stretch the cognition we have, now, into the configuration needed to extract more from the increasingly real-time web."

Stowe Boyd, The False Question of Attention Economics

and also this one from John:

"As interactions online shift to streams we are going to have to figure out how measurement works. I feel like today we are back to the early days of the web when people talked about “hits” — it’s hard to parse the relevant data from the noise."

John Borthwick, Charting the Real-Time Web

Both posts highlight the need for better tools to measure, manage, filter and render the streams of information being generated as user interactions shift to the Real-time Web or Live Web.   I agree.  

In some ways, we need to apply to the real-time web a management maxim from the industrial economy attributed to a number of people including Deming, Grove, Drucker and Kaplan:

"If you can't measure it, you can't manage it"

There are a number of social monitoring and analytics solutions from companies like Crimson Hexagon, Radian6, Chartbeat and others.  For example, Chartbeat is focused on monitoring, measuring and analyzing real-time interactions across the web.  This video provides an interesting demo of real-time activity on Fred Wilson's AVC blog:

Yet, Chartbeat is a solution focused on monitoring, measuring and analyzing streams of attention from other people to my content / website / service.    It helps me understand certain (not all) flows of attention to me... and to my content.  

If we're to improve management of our attention allocated to the flood of information overload,  we need a "personal" chartbeat-like service focused on monitoring, measuring and analyzing streams of attention coming in to ... and going out from ... me 

To try and manage the real-time stream of information... of conversations... of how I allocate my attention, I will need better tools:

- First, to measure my individual incoming and outgoing real-time interactions, and 

- Second, to manage the most important and relevant real-time streams created from my two-way interactions with my most important personal/work/commercial relationships.

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