Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Mark Cuban hitting the 5,000 club on Facebook is all over Techmeme this morning.  His solution — dividing Facebook friends into real friends, acquaintances, and power friends — is an extreme case of a much more general need, which is to be able to categorize friends.  We already see this in the remarkable number of applications on Facebook that let you choose to designate some of your friends as your "top friends" or "best friends".  At best, these are bandaid solutions because they can't really address the core problem.  Facebook users need more sophisticated ways to decide how much information to reveal, to whom, and when.  They also need the converse: how much information do I want from which groups of people in my network, and when.  I really don't care, for instance, about Mark Cuban's clubbing habits and what he has for sale in the marketplace, since I live in Ottawa.  But I might be interested in his movie reviews or his musical tastes.

Facebook needs a solution like the iotum Relevance Engine, applied to the Facebook news feed and profile, rather than to a phone call.   

I try lots of social networking tools.  It's the business I'm in, plus personal curiosity.  However, I have learned that not everyone has the same interest I do.  So, I try not to spam everyone I know with invites to each new social network, unless I really use those networks myself, and feel I can give them an unqualified recommendation.  Typically that means that when I sign up for a new one, I look for people I know who are already using the network, and ask to link with them. That way I can find out whether the tool will be useful to me by networking with people who are already using it.  Most social networking sites have tools which allow you to find your friends who are already using that network, and separate tools to invite any that aren't.

Sunday night I loaded my gmail address book into Spock, and found a bunch of people using it.  So I sent them all link requests.  Then Spock informed me that a bunch more people I knew might also be using Spock.  So I sent them a request as well.  My thinking was that Spock might simply not be able to determine definitively whether some other members were also people I knew based solely on my address book entries, and that it would ask these other members of Spock to confirm whether or not they knew me.  Clever trick, right!  After all, people do change their email addresses. 

But that's not what they were doing.  What they were asking me to do at the time was to invite people who weren't already using Spock to join it.  The language they used was deceptive.  They abused MY trust to grow their network.  I unwittingly sent hundreds of mails to people, asking them to sign up to Spock. Moreover, the mail message they received was a confusing message that asks the other person to "accept trust". It reads:

Alec Saunders has added you as a trusted contact on Spock. By accepting trust, you will be able to search each others’ network, share contact information, and get news.

What does accept trust mean?  Is it like accepting God?

As a result I have an inbox loaded with people replying to Spock generated emails with one liners like "?", and "what's this", and "I'm not joining any more social networks". Spock team, how about being clear and replacing the words "By accepting trust", with "By joining Spock"?.

A lot of other people must have complained that Spock was being deceptive about their invitation process as well.  I tried it again this morning, and the language has changed from informing that others might also be using Spock. This morning it now reads:

Contacts With Incomplete Search Results
Spock has incomplete search results for 993 of your address book contacts.

Please select which contacts to add to your Trust Network. An email will be sent to each selected contact notifying them of your request.

That's a little more clear.  But what it really should read is:

Contacts With Incomplete Search Results
993 of your address book contacts are not yet Spock members, and have not yet claimed their Spock identities.  

Please select which contacts to invite to use Spock and become part of your Trust Network. An email will be sent to each selected contact notifying them of your request.

The whole incident has left a bad taste in my mouth. Social networks are trust networks. Right now I feel like the organization that's running this one wants to deceive me.

In case you’re wondering what a real winter looks like, here are some shots from yesterday and today.  These two were taken about 3 in the afternoon.  I had to go out and pick up a dinner guest in the afternoon.

This was shot through the windshield of the car.  Notice the streamers of snow blowing across the road, and the drifts piling up on either side.

In this photograph, we were stopped at a traffic light. Compared to the previous photo we were in a bit of a snow squall which was causing semi whiteout conditions. Note that the car coming in my direction seems to be in the same lane as me.  That’s because it is!  It was the only lane available to either of us. 

This morning I let the dogs out, and then snapped a quick photo of the snow drift piled up against the back door.  It was quite funny watching our shelties (18 inches at the shoulder) navigating 3 foot snow drifts.

Of course, many of the roads were ploughed over night, as was the parking lot at the iotum offices.  Have a look at the car parked at the end of the lot and the snow piled up behind it by the plough.

People have been pinging me to become part of their Spock network for weeks now.  Spock is a people search engine which gobbles up information about people on the web.  It combines Google-like search characteristics, a social network built around trusted contacts, and a social tagging scheme - think de.licio.us tags applied to people rather than web content.

I have been playing with it a little recently, and haven't yet figured out all you can do with it.  It certainly seems like a terrific tool for a recruiter or anyone else who might be combing a personal network looking for specific skills or knowledge.  LinkedIn has some of these characteristics now, but now all.  However, I wonder if they're simply too late to the party.  As one very close friend wrote me last night when I invited him:

Unless every other way we have to communicate has broken, I am not joining another Social Network. Sorry. All these do is generate more and more email.

Hmmm… perhaps it's time to think about the consolidation of social graphs.

This morning Ribbit launches.  Billing themselves as Silicon Valley's Phone Company, they're about to launch a true Voice 2.0 phone service. 

In a nutshell, they have:

1. Built a carrier grade switching infrastructure for managing voice traffic.
2. Added all of the other communications modalities you might us in your daily life as additional networks — that's IM, VoIM, etc.
3. Built a suite of services that a developer might need in order to take advantage of this platform, including billing, directory, media and call control. 
4. Exposed these services through APIs ranging from web services to flash and SIP.

What can you do with this?  The mind fairly boggles.  For example,  Ribbit makes transcriptions of voice mails as it stores them.  Now you can search your voice mail box using terms like "dinner", or "ACME meeting", and Ribbit will find the voice mails that match.

Ribbit's go to market strategy is smart too. Beginning with the highly popular SalesForce.com, they've built a natural integration of voice with CRM.  But they've also recruited over 600 third party developers to build applications on the Ribbit platform as well in order to allow them to take advantage of the long tail in communications applications. 

The most clever part of Ribbit's model, however, is billing.  By relieving the developer of the need to build and manage billing systems, and by presenting a single unified bill to the user, they have made it easy to build more services for Ribbit, and natural to buy more services from Ribbit.

Smart business model, aggressive and well executed go-to-market strategy, and providing real solutions to developers.  Hmmm…  could Ribbit be the company that finally is the disruptor that shakes up the entire telecom ecosystem - the first true Voice 2.0 carrier?