Facebook on location

Facebook is set to announce in 3 weeks it's new location based platform for the web world to show your friends where you're going. It's hard to tell with Facebook where the hell it's going itself, tagging and posting nonsense is a great way to build communities but not so great as a business model.

If you look at the big 3, Microsoft/Apple/Google, they are coining money out of office/icrap/advertising at such a phenomenal rate the clock must surely be ticking for Facebook to pull out the finger. Facebook still occupies the "limbo" revenue categories with the rapidly-paling Twitter and the ghostly Amazon. So many users, so much potential, so little hard cash??

The new location feature is also being heralded as a direct attack on social location newcomers Foursquare. A social check-in company that is growing at rates last seen by twitter. Although this makes sense for a social network to expand into a location social network the tech world is littered with such disasters i.e.

• Microsofts efforts with Bing, a dominant company entering a seemingly capital-intensive market and falling on their knees.
• Googles efforts with Nexus One/Buzz, although I do agree with companies attempting to at least spread the web rather than a shitty app store.
• Anything that AOL ever did including AIM.

So the jury is still out for Facebook. Can social be profitable? They are making some cash but volumes of users ain't cheap. A social checkin/coupon app/planner app/AR app/(insert other location implementation here) won't really result in huge revenue for them as they've already missed the boat. The worrying part is that selling personal data to evil marketers (!!) is still the only realistic way to produce cash.

Feedomania - the modern day stock ticker

So what to Twitter, Facebook, Blippy, Plancast, Foursquare, Playfire and nearly all the latest startups in the last 3 years have in common?

The feed

We seem to be stuck in some kind of parallel universe where information needs to be fed to us in a 1920s style stock ticker format. Vertical never ending lists that follow a thumbnail-text box with some useless information scattered along the edges.

Web services and real time web are partly to blame, they emphasise short concise messages that can easily be subscribed to but they fail to communicate any form of personality beyond the short text permitted.

Sure we had some web page atrocities created by MySpace where early attempts to personalise pages resulted in some truly buggy profiles, but we've moved so far into the sterile world of feeds that the web is rapidly becoming social stock market that impersonalises interaction and instead focuses on the boring extroverts we usually tend to avoid.

These list sites also seem to assume the only way to grow is to get more and more potential customers onto their lists without focusing on satisfying the existing base.

Take Facebook, I continually find myself getting requests from people I hardly know and possess no desire to. Eventually I capitulate and end up having someones boring updates i.e. "attending auditing lecture today, can't wait to see the gang" pushed through to my feed.

Since Facebook has my network, tracks my usage,  surely it realises that I'd rather see something more interesting from a close friend, say write-up on a music event they went to, a recipe, music they like, clothes they bought, a song they're learning, something happening at work with them. This kind of content generation should be encouraged rather than focusing on creating a web of people I grow less interested in day-by-day.

Look at blogging, relatively few people blog as use facebook but it is in essence a much more interesting way of communicating. It doesn't even have to be as dull as posting an article, you should be able to post email conversations to your blog, add IM conversations, recommend the place you went last night or say how shite it was.


So a plea to the real time web, stop making feeds, start making it interesting.