Is Facebook the Promised Land?

There's no denying an exodus is underway. So far, I've seen Pat, Moshe, Alec and a host of other go over to Facebook from LinkeIn, all in the space of a week. Is it just me, or do you find this remarkable? I mean, not only for the abruptness of it, or the lemming like nature by which it's happening, but for what it says about Web 2.0 principles?

I went back and checked the original piece by Tim O'Reilly, and I found what I remembered reading :

The race is on to own certain classes of core data: location, identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and namespaces. In many cases, where there is significant cost to create the data, there may be an opportunity for an Intel Inside style play, with a single source for the data. In others, the winner will be the company that first reaches critical mass via user aggregation, and turns that aggregated data into a system service.

And when I read it, I remembered thinking : "Oh yes, that's part of the reason social networking is such an excellent idea. Since there's a bunch of information that exists between contacts, not simply IN the contact, there's real value in owning the data. " For instance, the service can tell you when a classmate joins the service, so that you can be connected.

Now, here's what I'm looking at. LinkedIn has something like 11 million users, and nearly all the fortune 500 is represented in that group by at least one leader. It's a big group, and it's a well known group, especially to business users. If there's a mass exodus to Facebook, doesn't it sort of suggest that the creation of these large databases of information isn't THAT hard to replicate? That the Web 2.0 promise of monetizing hard to replicate data using other people isn't as valuable as we thought? Now, if LinkedIn keeps going, and keeps going up in membership, we'll know just how valuable that data is. If not....

Over-compensation

The one thing I have noticed about myself is that, in a strange situation, I go back to what works. For instance, I practice Karate, and for fun, I attend a Judo class. If I'm in a Judo class, and I just can't seem to find a good way to throw my opponent, I just might punch him. Karate is good at that.

I'm here in San Jose (loving it, not loving the distance from family), and I think I'm going back to what works. Or should I say, I am continually amazed at the extremely high level of technical savvy out here, and I think I overcompensate by going back to my East coast roots - back to the money.

If I hear about another Web 2.0 company that's going to create some sort of social network virally, and then see someone wave their hands about monetizing through advertisements... I'm going to barf. Not that I don't like the services I'm hearing about, because I do. Not that I don't think these guys are wicked (like that Boston word?) smart, because they are. I'm going to barf because to the man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. To the valley entrepreneur, every company looks like MySpace. I just want to hear somebody out here say "I'm going to have this new website that's so valuable that I'm going to charge the mother f*ckers for using it." Just once. Humor me. There's somebody out there in downtown San Jose with the cajones to suggest that somebody other than Google AdSense pay for a service. It's almost this sort of pathological self-esteem issue, where they value the service less than the subscriber. No - sorry - it's probably more accurate to say that the service exists only to attract the subscribers, so I can do stuff to them later on, but don't really ask what that might be.

Sort of funny for a VoIP guy to say, huh? Free calling? VoIP? Hello? Internally, I'm quite clear about the dismal failure telecom companies are in technology, especially web technologies. But, declining ARPUs or not, I gotta love their business. People make a call, and they bill them. So, sweet. Lovey, let's open a bottle of bubbly and toast to our West coast brothers.

Business Drivers for VoIP Mashups

Don Van Doren is a regular columnist for VON magazine, and his recent article in his regular "Focus on Contact Centers" column put into a few short sentences what I believe are the business drivers for VoIP mashups. I believe that the next big wave of real time communications lies in the integration of technologies like VoIP and presence into the larger business process. This will increase business efficiency and customer satisfaction in a single move, and is a no-brainer for businesses of all sizes. Here's a concrete example: If my plane is canceled, I'd like an SMS message that tells me so, and says "Sorry your plane is canceled. Press SEND on your phone to reschedule now." When I press SEND, I call an operator that already has information on hand, and answers the phone with "Hello Mr. Howe. I'm sorry your plane is canceled. We can put you on a 4:30 or 7:30 plane. What one would you like?" That would be awesome service, and when you integrate real time communications with business backends, you can provide this service.

What Don said in the article was that there are three distinguishing characteristics of successful implementations of IP contact centers. I would amplify that by suggesting that successful VoIP mashups for enterprises would have the same three. I quote directly from his article:

1. They are customer facing. That is, the investment facilitates direct communications between a company and its customers or business partners.
2. The communication links... become embedded in an established or new workflow or process.
3. The effect of implementing the communication link is to reduce cycle times or latency by eliminating or reducing the time waiting to reach someone.
   

The canceled flight example has all three, and is therefore valuable to both the customer and the business. From the larger perspective, this is why I believe that with the advent of service oriented architectures, integration of real time communications into the business process will be successful and inevitable.