Technically Speaking

Why? Usually movies like this planned one - “Facebook The Movie” - are something that will end up on television and than have a cult following like that one pirates movie that they made back in 1999. Interesting for a moment in time perhaps, but I don’t see anything great coming out of this supposed Facebook the Movie.

Since it appears they are rolling along into pre-production and casting of this from what is being said online, I do agree that Micheal Cera should be playing the role of Mark Zuckerberg. It probably wouldn’t be a far stretch for him to play that role.

The question though is still “Why?”. I mean why not make a movie about TechCrunch? Or GigaOM? Or ReadWriteWeb Or VentureBeat? - heck, why not just title the movie “Blogs Of the New World Order“. You could slap all four in there, and have Allen Stern of CenterNetworks play the raving video maniac from NYC calling out all those wrapped up in the silliness of Valley madness. Allen, you know you have always dreamed of playing the heel, and here would be your chance.

Seriously, why don’t we just create another movie about the little ad data network that could. Yeah, my company Lookery. I already know who our CTO wants playing him, quite obvious by his twitter icon. As far as the rest of us, our CEO would be an interesting casting call, and our VP of Marketing would probably be pretty easy to cast. What about me? What about who freakin’ cares!

The point being, a movie about anything online will hold the interest of so few that live every day lives, that you’d be lucky to make any kind of money from it. Do you really think that most of the world really cares that Zuckerberg prefers Mt. Dew over Coke or that he picks his nose with his middle finger? No. And that is the kind of stupid personal stuff they are going to write into this.

Back to my example of “Lookery: The little ad data network that could” movie. The movie about us would be so trivial and interesting to so few that no one in their right mind is going to want to watch what we do or how we did it.

Same goes for Facebook the Movie, the interesting stuff is right here online; there isn’t a need to put it on screen anywhere. I mean social networking is cool - online. Social networking translated to a movie is kind of dumb. Same goes for the blog movie idea above, as well as the Lookery Movie. Just not right for movie or television movie.

If you want to meet with the real live people and in person - team Lookery, than you have to hook up with the entire crew in Boulder, Colorado next week. Now that is real life, and if you think that a movie deal should be in the works for every online company or social network, we’ll entertain you in person and entertain your offer. I think Lookery in the real will be more interesting than any movie version could translate.

Technically Speaking, yes - team Lookery is in Boulder, Colorado next week - we hope to see you not in a movie but in reality!

Many people are still skeptical of the Facebook economy. Living proof of that is how much money my company is paying out to our publishers in the month of July.

Oh, and it’s been like this for months now. It wasn’t a secret really, it was just the first time our CEO said I should share just how much money we are paying out. So I shared, and now I’m sharing it again.

$279,000 (approximately, the actual is a little higher!) is a pretty decent amount of money. Not only that, I have watched a couple of our publishers take their application writing skills and create full on companies (with real people working for them as employees) that make really good money monthly from running ads.

While the rest of the economy seems to be in a very downward spiral, the Facebook economy is doing quite well. There are plenty of bloggers out there that write stories doubting the actual value of Facebook as well as if you can actually make money from creating Facebook applications. I’m here to say “Yes YOU can!”

There are a few people in this world that have the “go get it” attitude and time to work hard at it. What they bring to the table is writing the future today. I’m not here saying it’s “easy” to make the kind of money the top guys make, but if you are willing to work hard, there is a new economy out there. You just have to be ready to bring it.

Don’t let the writers/bloggers lie to you and tell you otherwise. Living proof, speaking from the inside and laughing openly outwards at the bloggers/writers that think they know it all. They don’t know jack. The people I work with at Lookery have been hard at work this entire year now, and things are getting really exciting for us with each new cool thing we are letting the world know about.

Technically Speaking, my jaw drops all the time at the numbers I see every single day and at the ridiculous amounts of money that people are earning each and every month (and some daily!). What is keeping you from being a Lookery publisher? Isn’t it about time you started making some real money?

Quite interesting how a social network is now attracting all the top dogs even from what was one of the coolest places to work, Google. The real question is how long will this defection last, and what does Facebook offer to the cool top echelon of Google employees? One thing is for certain, Facebook has become a major place of employment for those wanting to work at the new cool place to work in the valley.

While they have created new jobs for those ex-Googlers that want to continue working at a company, many of the ex-Googlers have left to start their own startup. Funny thing is that Facebook has powered many a small company, mostly companies that have been formed around the openness of the Facebook development platform. So while only so many can work directly for Facebook, there are others like myself that have benefited from the growth of Facebook working at an ad network that launched last July that primarily was formed to help these developers monetize their new applications; or fb apps.

When we started we had no idea if the growth of the development platform would be as extraordinary as it has been. We have been along for the ride and our growth has been quite phenomenal from the inside looking out. Of course as I blogged earlier today on the official Lookery blog, we have had our sights on bigger social networks; even earlier than other ad networks would admit.

Technically Speaking, I think the wild Facebook ride will continue on through 2008 into 2009 and beyond. I just wonder how many more will go work for Facebook? I’m sure we will see some more big names make the eventual stop in for a desk at Facebook HQ.

Interesting story this morning about Facebook having a takedown notice issued to them for the game (Facebook Application) Scrabulous. Apparently this should be a sign that if you write a social networking game or application, you need to stay on this side of the intellectual property line. Mattel has a valid argument in this case. Scrabble has been around for many years now and is nothing new. The two brothers that worked on Scrabulous are very genuine decent guys. I don’t think their intent was to cross that line, but yet what happened is their fb app became very popular really fast.

Now on one hand, you would think that Mattel would be happy in the fact that it may have renewed increased interest in the old board game. Some would say that Mattel is just lawsuit happy and jealous. The fact remains, if you walk on the wrong side of the law, you do tend to get burned.

This should be nothing more than a warning for other application developers. The social networking realm is full of great ideas. It’s a great place to make a living if you can write a decent app that people all love to use. Social Networks such as Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, and Friendster all have opened up to let people write apps.

Many will say it is a free way to see what sticks to that wall without having to do any of the work. I’ll bet that all of the social networks knew it would be a goldmine. With Facebook taking the plunge, the others have all followed along since the risk was already overcome. They all saw what an interesting format this could be for them.

Technically Speaking, I’ll be in the bay area in the first week in February for a few days. I’ll be attending the Customer Service is the New Marketing summit on the 4th. Drop me a line if you’d like to meet in person. Cat5e

The big news today is the fact that Robert Scoble was banned from Facebook because he violated the terms of service (TOS) of the social network. Now even though he was doing some testing for Plaxo, the fact remains he still violated the TOS. Now some of you feel sorry for Scoble, but in a sense he knew the TOS doesn’t allow this kind of activity.

This brings up an interesting point about social networks. Once you join and click the “I Agree” box on their TOS page, you are bound to their service. Even though the majority of social networks are free, you are freely giving them data to do as they deem by their TOS. TOS is an interesting escape clause created solely for the company that binds you, the user of their free service, to them.

If you don’t read the TOS, it’s just like the old saying of buyer beware. Scoble bought into the whole social network of Facebook, but he thought he was above the law. He found out today he isn’t, and even though it’s a shame that he can’t port his own contact information (his own data, which he gave up his rights to by putting them in Facebook via their TOS), he should have known better than to try to circumvent their TOS. Even though he may have been NDA locked down by Plaxo in the testing phase, this still is only a mild excuse; such as “I was going 40mph in the 35mph zone because no one else was on the road.”

Many of you are probably in some sort of denial at this point in time. Some of you may even consider following Scoble to a data free zone that he is looking for. Good luck is all I can say.

This is an interesting question of privacy in some sense. In 2008 we are going to see more and more issues of this crop up. It’s not something that people have really given a lot of thought about until recently. There is probably billions of bytes of data online, private and public. In a sense, all of the data you put on the internet is public. There really is not a private place you can have data online.

One of the key items that will be leveraged here this year is advertising and data. My #1 prediction for 2008 was that there would be more money spent on advertising online. With this being said, the only way to truly maximize the ad dollar (or Euro) would be for the people doing the advertising to recoup their money spent. This will be done of course with targeting the customer base.

This gets into your data being used. We have heard reports of Google changing up the way Gmail works. But do you really blame some of these companies for starting to mine the data that is there? See above. Billions of bytes of data online. Floating out there in cyber la-la land for decade plus now. The thing is, most of the data floating around is not organized enough to make any sense of it. Someone (Google, Facebook, MySpace, etc… ) will be the ones organizing it this year. If not already, they are making plans to do so. What they say on one hand can easily be changed with - you got it - a simple change of their TOS! Didn’t believe me when I said the above - did you? TOS is an interesting escape clause created solely for the company that binds you, the user of their free service, to them.

What I see happening is there will be a big round of privacy advocates taking one side or another. This data snafu or being Scobled won’t go away anytime soon. This is only the first of many questions that will be raised in the data privacy wars in 2008. While the data may have been his in one sense, in another sense the conversation that Allen of CN had with Steve Poland sheds a bit more light on “who’s data” Scoble was really taking. I happen to agree, it’s a touchy subject - a gray area at best.

I say that because there is no safeguard’s in place where you can’t download one of your friends or anyone’s photos. There is no disabling feature on Facebook preventing you from going on a photo hunt. In fact there are a few fb applications that take your friends pic and use them in some cool way. Inside of Facebook, again the TOS keeps that cool. But what prevents you from taking it outside of Facebook and downloading it to your desktop. Nothing. As far as TOS goes, I see a new improved one coming from Facebook in the near future.

Technically Speaking, whether or not Scoble finds his own data-TOS-free for all place to play is going to be up to him. I personally don’t believe such a place exists unless you find or start your own social network that is invite only; private island of people that agree that TOS’ville and data hostage keeping is against their policy. Good luck on finding that place. It’s a Utopian dream at best. Vegas hotel