Facebook Send: Fresh Idea or Old News?

This article first appeared on the Three Ships Media blog.

In an attempt to declutter their ecosystem and vocabulary as well as disrupt email as the preferred method of sharing links, Facebook has rolled out a new feature they are calling “Send”. Send will allow users to send news articles or other types of information directly to a Facebook Group or to a specific friend’s inbox. The button has the same look and feel as the Like button, and Facebook is hoping that it will become a similarly ubiquitous way to share information.

If this all sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Facebook formerly had the option to “share” a website, and it maintains the option to “recommend” a website on one’s own wall. From a cynic’s perspective, there is reason to be pessimistic about this new feature. Will its usage merely mirror preexisting clicks on things such as “share” and “email to a friend”, or will it actually promote sharing and conversation that otherwise would not have happened? There is significant room for doubt.

However, cynics doubted the Like button, and that feature has turned out to be one of Facebook’s biggest triumphs, providing an easy-to-understand lingua franca for designating relevant content in an ever-expanding Internet. Additionally, it has been an enormous boon to Facebook, providing them with an unparalleled database of consumer information–all provided voluntarily.

Should Send take off, it will provide a similar treasure trove of demographics. Want to target a user base who are between the ages of eighteen and twenty five and “Liked” a specific movie page on Facebook and “Sent” the New York Times review of that movie to their friends? In Facebook’s world, it’s completely possible.

By integrating a Send feature that looks and feels like the popular Like button, Facebook is positioning itself to steal some of email’s thunder–and collect a vast amount of information while doing so.

What do you think? Is Facebook Send a groundbreaking idea, or is it merely a fresh coat of paint on an old tool?

Twitter missed a HUGE opportunity by not purchasing IntoNow

Twitter keeps billing itself as the "savior of live television," as its constantly-updating stream allows viewers to talk to one another in real time, encouraging live viewing instead of hours-later DVR (and commercial-skipping) playback.

If that's true, it just missed an enormous opportunity to build on this position.

Earlier today, Yahoo bought tech startup IntoNow for $20 million. IntoNow is a neat little mobile app that allows users to "check in" to TV shows the same way one would check in to a location via FourSquare. Watchers can then broadcast this information to their social graph, allowing them to easily figure out which of their friends are watching the same stuff they are.

Yahoo has made no secret about their desire to enter the television market, and companies such as Netflix are starting to get into content production instead of content curation and distribution. IntoNow provides Yahoo the capability to add a social layer on top of live TV as well as streaming video via its channels.

Perhaps more interestingly, IntoNow can recognize the soundtracks to television shows, allowing the company to send information to you before you even know that you want to use the app. While sending users a barrage of apps the minute the opening chords to "The Office" are played might be a big obnoxious, users might enjoy receiving game updates via their mobile device whenever the phone hears the Monday Night Football opening.

Twitter was also in the running to buy IntoNow, and it missed a huge opportunity by not doing so. It just lost a huge piece of its making-live-TV-relevant strategy. Imagine if you could check into a television show via Twitter and automatically be taken to a hashtag set up for the discussion of that show with other viewers, or if news anchors could more easily read viewer responses in real-time? It would certainly make Nielsen ratings a snap. It could be a huge boon to the service.

My guess is that Twitter failed to buy IntoNow simply because it does not have enough liquidity. It has been valued highly, but it does not have a great (optimistically, a more realistic description might be non-existent) revenue model yet and thus does not have a lot of spare cash to throw around. Yahoo, on the other hand, is fighting to stay on the brink of relevance to the Internet community at large and is willing to make some gambles in order to right its course.

Perhaps it's time for Twitter to sell to a company with large stores of cash (cough, Google, cough, Netflix) that can help it grow and expand into something that isn't easily replaceable; make no mistake about it, Twitter is currently a fad that could be swept over by a better idea any day now. This would give it sudden boost of capital that it could use to buy services to augment the platform, like it should have done today.

Twitter missed an opportunity today to make a buy that would help transform it into the holistic media source that its management claims it one day will be. It can't afford to miss too many more.

louis vuttons, alexander wang, and all that...but at the same time she plays marvel vs. capcom 3, listens to the pixies religiously, and had, like, a sixteen kill streak on black ops

Is there a new tech bubble?

Something I've been struggling with over the past few weeks is the issue of whether or not a new bubble in the technology sector is developing.

Twitter has been valued at $8 to $10 billion. Twitter hasn't opened their books, they've only promised investors that they are making money. Does this seem crazy to anyone else, especially considering that only 8-10% of the American population, depending on who you ask, are actually signed up for Twitter, with a far fewer percentage actually creating content with frequency?

Then, news breaks today that Color, a mobile photosharing app started by the creator of LaLa, received $41 million in seed money from investing groups Sequoia and Bain Capital. This is an app that not only produces no revenue, but just launched yesterday. So there's that.

That being said, there are several reasons why this bubble is dramatically different than that which happened in the late nineties:

• These investments are being made by private funds rather than individual investors.

In the late nineties, everyone who was anyone rushed to get an IPO valuation of as high as possible to get on the gold rush that was the dot-com investment boom.  And, of course, the banks were happy to facilitate such transactions.  However, this time, with the banking industry on its heels and public investors generally more wary than usual, seed money is being granted to start-ups by venture capital firms and private equity funds, thus limiting the systemic risk of a collapse.

• These investments are in the tens, not hundreds, of millions of dollars.

It's estimated that $300 million in investment capital was lost in Pets.com, the quintessential example of misplaced dot-com exuberance.  Aside from the astronomical valuations of Twitter and Facebook (Facebook's might actually be justified), a small portion of overall venture capital is being invested in startups such as Color.

• The market is still relatively new.

It is fair to these investment firms to say that nobody really knows the value of these technologies yet.  Especially when it comes to apps that deal with augmented reality and photo sharing (the latter of which has potential to have a breakout year), there are no definitive apps or experiences despite a relatively crowded marketplace.  Thus, there is significant opportunity for firms such as Sequoia to place what are essentially side bets on companies that may or may not have huge upside.  Which is, I suppose, what venture capital is.

I'm not ready to start ringing alarm bells yet.  However, it is somewhat distressing to see this much money poured into what are essentially beta tests with no model for revenue generation.  Fueling growth and innovation is one thing; placing unjustified bets just to make a name for oneself in the marketplace (cough, Bain, cough) is another.

-Taylor
africa to new york, haiti then I detour, oakland out to auckland, gaza strip to detroit

I can't tell if this is endlessly endearing or really creepy

Update: Google Announces Mobile Payments

As I discussed yesterday, this could be a big win for Google if they can get this right and popularize it in the areas where they roll it out before Apple has a chance to make a play.

Via Silicon Alley Insider

Rumor: Apple to omit NFC in iPhone 5

Reports from The Independent seem to suggest that the iPhone 5 won't come with NFC built in, rendering it unable to make swipe-based mobile payments (unlike the Nexus S, Google's NFC-capable flagship Android phone). Sides are currently split as to whether this is a good or bad thing, and Apple's reported logic is that they don't want to implement a feature that isn't 100% ready to go on an Apple device in addition to the current lack of industry standards with respect to NFC technology. This rumor comes on the heels of reports that Android devices have overtaken the iPhone in U.S. smartphone market share.

I'm not convinced that this isn't a bad move on Apple's part; however, after thinking about the key issues involved, I am less convinced (just over "slightly") than I was when I first read the news (DEFCON 3). Here is what I've been able to come up with:

Coca-Cola to help Maroon 5 crowdsource new song; will presumably be even more generic than others

In the latest example of social-media-as-art, Coca-Cola is setting up a promotion that will allow users to help Maroon 5 write a song in just twenty four hours. Maroon 5, notable for being one of the first acts to have a hit single (This Love) predicted through computer analytics software, is now one of the first to allow real-time fan interaction and feedback on chords, riffs, and lyrics. Social media-loving fans are expected to encourage the band to adopt Bieber-like haircuts, autotune everything, and invite Lady Gaga for a cameo.

Via Mashable