Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Two major topics were discussed this afternoon: 

New York's attorney general and state legislative leaders presented a bill on Tuesday aimed at protecting people from sexual predators on the Internet, and Facebook, MySpace, and Yahoo backed the effort.  The goal is to make sure that predators can't stalk minors.  It would require convicted sex offenders to register their e-mail addresses, instant message screen names, and any other online identifiers with the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services. That data would then be made available to social-networking companies and other online services so that they can then block access to sexual offenders and remove them from their sites. It would also ban many sex offenders from using social-networking sites. We talked about how effective these efforts might be, and whether there were privacy issues involved.

The second big story was Yahoo's results. A sharp drop in 4th quarter results, plus a disappointing outlook for next year added up to heavy losses in the after hours market yesterday.  Jerry Yang is going to focus on making the company a top starting point for consumers on the web, advertising revenues, and opening up the network to third parties… with three CEO's on the phone, we ask what Yang might do differently. 

 

 Squawk Box January 30 [22:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

It looks as if the Facebook platform team has taken action on the Forced Invites issue.  Moments ago, a new feature appeared on my profile: Ignore All Requests.

While I commend the Facebook team for responding, this is a sledgehammer approach.  Not all requests are used for inviting people to applications.  Some, for instance the Events request, are used to invite people to events.  Our application uses Requests to invite people to conference calls.

I hope there are further refinements coming.

UPDATE: It's a little less blunt than I initially thought, because it allows events and group invitations to be handled differently from application invitations.  See below.

What would be most useful, however, is to take the application invitation and add a block button to the invitation, as I've done in the example below.

UPDATE 2:  It turns out the wording is confusing. What Facebook means by Ignore All Requests is "Ignore all the current requests", and not "Block all current and future requests", which is how I read it originally.  As they've implemented this feature, it's a super feature. It just needs a less confusing name. 

ReadWriteWeb has picked up the story on Facebook application fatigue that I wrote on the weekend.  The culprit I pointed at was the use of forced invitations.  Some applications demand that users invite others at install time, before being allowed to use the application. 

That blog piece generated quite a bit of debate on the Facebook developers forum.  Many of the debaters admit that forced invitations are distasteful to them personally.  A smaller group defend the use of forced invitations, because they appear to be a successful short term tactic for creating momentum around your application.  Others argued that there is no proof that forced invitations are harming the Facebook ecosystem, and that there is no proof that people are using fewer Facebook applications.

To prove or disprove that claim, I ran a series of polls using Facebook's polling application.  Facebook application developer Chris Diraddo also ran a poll.  Here are the results:

1.

2.

3.

The first think you will note is wide variation in the results.  Because of limitations in the sample size allowed by the polling application, these numbers are accurate only to +/- 9.8%, 95% of the time.  That is to say, there's a variation of 10% on average, and 1 in 20 times, a complete anomalous result will be produced.  In addition, emotive bias may color these results.  Emotive bias is caused by only users who passionately care about an issue responding to a poll. 

Nevertheless, I find the results compelling. Polls 1 and 3 show a 56% and 61% refusal to install applications that require users to invite others.  Both of these offer the user the option to give a nuanced "it depends" answer, as well.  Many users may opt to use the app even if it requires invites, because of what the app does.  For these folks, forced invites aren't necessarily a black and white issue.  Poll 2, which forces a simple yes/no response, frames the issue in black and white terms.  One interpretation of these apparently contradictory results might be that while many people dislike forced invites enough to state categorically that they wouldn't use an application which required them, in reality their behaviour is different.

Nevertheless, we can conclude that the majority of Facebook users (even taking into account the woefully wide confidence interval of the poll) would refuse to install an application that required an invite.

The most contentious argument is that the actions of the small (but growing) number of developers using this tactic has harmed developers by turning users of Facebook applications in general.  Over the weekend, I published statistics from the Adonomics leaderboard showing that the top applications are seeing a pronounced decline in daily usage. In addition, numerous Facebook users freely admit that they now ignore "invite spam" from most applications. It seems that the population of Facebook users is now becoming fatigued with applications. 

While it would be difficult for me to do an analysis across the entire universe of Facebook applications to see which, if any, applications are experiencing a downturn, I can use the polling technique once more to find out whether users are using more or less applications than previously.

In October, Compete.com published August Facebook data showing that out of 22 million visitors in the month, 14 million interacted with applications.  That's nearly 64% of users.  It also appeared that throughout the early part of the fall, application growth continued. 

Fast forward to yesterday, when I asked a very simple question: Do you install Facebook applications?  These were the results.

Again, because of the regrettably small sample size that Facebook polls restrict users to, this data is only accurate to +/- 9.8%.  As many as 60% of Facebook users may install applications, or as few as 40%.  Even so, there has been a drop in application installation since August.

Could that be solely as a result of forced invites?  Not likely.  After all, growing awareness of privacy issues in some applications is likely also a contributor. However, any tactic as widely vilified as forced invitations is likely to turn off the user base as a whole, and it seems clear that we're seeing a downturn in application usage.  Perhaps it's not an absolute downturn.  Many applications are still growing.  Generally speaking, however, it seems that applications users are reaching the limits of their tolerance for fluff widgets and abusive marketing tactics.

Discussed on this morning's call…

Nokia has agreed to acquire Trolltech for about $150 milion.   Trolltech makes cross platform tools for developing graphical applications.  It's flagship product Qt allows you to develop software for Windows, Java, and Linux.  QTopia is a graphical platform for Linux. Companies like Skype, Adobe and Google uses these technologies today.  Nokia competitor Motorola uses QTopia in many of it's smartphone handsets as well.   According to the Q&A that accompanied the release, the key driver for the acquisition is Nokia's desire for cross platform development.  Nokia said "Trolltech’s technology will enable Nokia and third parties to develop software across platforms easier and more cost effectively; this speeds up innovation and brings new experiences to Nokia's device portfolio and onto PCs."  

TweetMeme. This is the service that launched yesterday which aggregates trends across "Twitter Space".  

Ribbit's Amphibian project.  Amphibian is a consumer telephony application the marries the web and the handset.  It sports features like visual voice mail, drag and drop call routing, and something they've called Caller ID 2.0, which fetches information about callers from the social network, as the call is coming in.  It's also extensible by third parties.  From where I sit, this is a tremendously ambitious project.  We talk about what it will take for it to succeed.

Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD.  At CES it looked like HD-DVD was going the way of the DoDo.  Just yesterday, though, news broke that the HD-DVD vendors will have huge ads at the superbowl, and Blu-Ray won't. They've also got aggressive pricing on players, and the price of the movies have dropped recently.  Dead man walking?  Or will this Zombie accomplish the miraculous and rise from the dead? 

 

 Squawk Box Jan 29 [25:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Several interesting stories worth following yesterday:

• mig33 announced a $13.5 million B round.  These folks are certainly on a roll, adding subscribers and raising money at a mad rate.
• Jajah joined the Microsoft Startup Accelerator program.   I guess we'll be seeing more integration with Jajah and Microsoft handsets. Perhaps the Jajah folks can also leverage this into a corporate sales strategy with Microsoft's help as well.
• TweetMeme launched a service to expose the significant topics of the day being discussed on Twitter.  It's a pretty interesting idea, and one that illustrates how quickly Twitter has evolved from mere status updates to a kind of nerve center information distribution.