A VC - Latest Comments in A New Approach To Facebook

Re: A New Approach To Facebook

prefabrike — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 15:21:48 -0000

I hate Facebook. I have an account, but I seldom log in. When I do I find myself going through my messages and deleting most of them and hand-picking, very selectively, which ones I read. Then I leave and don't return for a few more months.

Twitter is much better for the type of information I provide. Facebook is cumbersome and stupidly juvenile. Vampire bites, hugs and kisses, and crazy crap that wastes my time.

For business, I'm convinced Facebook is a lousy way to spend your resources. But if you truly want to make friends, or keep tab of your existing friends while playing virtual tennis and such, then Facebook is probably worth it. I don't have that kind of time.

Re: A New Approach To Facebook

Mark Schmulen — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 23:25:17 -0000

Hi Fred,

You may want to check out http://nutshellmail.com to help you manage Facebook. Instead of receiving a bunch of one-off email notifications that simply distract you and clutter your inbox, NutshellMail sends you consolidated digest on a schedule that you can define. I receive three NutshellMail digests a day that efficiently alert me of new activity from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace and even my junk email accounts. Each notification provides a direct link back into Facebook, but i can also update my status through email and add events to my Outlook calendar. The Twitter feature tracks all my activity and enables me to follow or unfollow users, retweet messages, send dm's and @ replies.

If you find that your social media activity is hard to manage, NutshellMail may be a good option for you. For full disclosure, i am one of the co-founders and would love to get your feedback.

If NutshellMail is not for you, I recommend Digsby or Seesmic desktop, but they can be overwhelming for casual social networkers.

Cheers,
Mark

Re: A New Approach To Facebook

fredwilson — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 09:20:21 -0000

That's a very interesting point al. I had too many "friends" in FB so I ignored the service entirely

Now that I've narrowed it to 50 something I love it

Re: A New Approach To Facebook

Alan Warms — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 08:59:40 -0000

This is where I think the new FB design has failed. It used to be for me that i used twitter to follow tons (not tons, less than 300) of people i knew and didn't knew, and I understood what i was getting and what it meant. FB was great in that you could follow wall to wall interactions with friends and really see what was happening.

With the new interface, all the status updates are coming so fast and furious from everyone and dominating the experience that the other stuff is lost. Why every one I know hates the new interface. In doing the redesign they've lost a lot of that differentiation w twitter. Good for twitter, bad for fb. If it was old design my guess is you would feel less need to make that happen.

Re: A New Approach To Facebook

Claire — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 14:04:55 -0000

I also treat Facebook as more personal than twitter or other netorking sites I am on. However, I do have enough friends from different parts of my life that I watch what I say. Yet I have the same interest that many do to restrict privacy settings by category of connection. I think that if Facebook could get the privacy settings right, so you truly could limit certain photo sharing (with labeled kids) to your family, allow your neighbor to see your status updates, and maybe have the near and far work connections have some otehr set of rights, that would be a huge differentiator for Facebook. I appreciate the "reconnection" side of Facebook. Someone invited my entire high school class on, and I would miss the adult humor of some of those folks I knew "back when" were it not for the connectivity of FB. A large number of the folks I am connected to on FB will never (at least not in the next few years) be on Twitter or FriendFeed or sites that to them are "avant garde." FB is a "place," unlike Twitter. Those who have a blog of their own can get that connectivity in that place; for many who don't Facebook is a place of community. I play Wordtwist w/the same 4-some (VA, DC, PA) and Lexulous (CA) pal. If I didn't have this place, these casual interactions would fall away. I also know that dropping "real world folks" that I interact with has its repercussions - those with a bigger public persona may almost have it easier than "average" folks.

Re: A New Approach To Facebook

Chris Baskind — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 03:49:09 -0000

I've let the air out of the tires everywhere but Twitter. We're overloaded (I am, at least). Closer, better relationships, please -- even if it means fewer of them. Your approach seems entirely reasonable.

Re: A New Approach To Facebook

fredwilson — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 21:51:13 -0000

Twitter is well aware that they need to offer similar functionlity

In the meantime, you can get it in tweetdeck

Re: A New Approach To Facebook

ShopWurld Nbg — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 18:48:40 -0000

A company called ShopWurld" has combined the best of both worlds by integrating the social networking aspects of FaceBook and MySpace with the networking aspects of network marketing to create a new and exciting home based business / fundraising machine that is already changing the landscape of how charity and non profit organizations raise money. As you mentioned, you have approximately 1,300 friends / pending friends with FaceBook. If those same 1,300 friends were in your ShopWurld Network, you would be receiving a monthly residual check of between $800 - $1,000. The really kool thing about ShopWurld is that it requires NO investment, NO selling, NO inventory, and NO risk!

Re: A New Approach To Facebook

fredwilson — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 11:50:23 -0000

Thanks. Fortunately updating both works well for me since I want all my tweets (other than replies) to go to both

I totally agree that this is clunky right now.

I'm trying to get a vanity url for my FB public page too and apparently you have to ask FB for it right now

Re: A New Approach To Facebook

Colin Devroe — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 11:20:39 -0000

Again, just catching up here. (no, I'm not reading through 151 comments before I post this) This very same thing is/has been happening to me lately. On Facebook for sure. On Twitter about a year ago. I used to follow everyone back on Twitter until I reached about 300 followers. Then it was just noise. Twitter had absolutely no value (for me). So, I unfollowed everyone. Then built up my list to what it is now (about 60 people that I actually know, interact with on a daily basis, work with, etc.). If I were to follow back the nearly 1,800 people that follow me, Twitter would no longer be valueable to me.

The same thing was true on Facebook until I was able to classify people on Facebook as Friends, Family, Oldschoolers (people I went to High School with), Viddlers (people that are Viddler members), etc. This allows me to sort through and find the stuff I'm looking for much more quickly.

Brightkite, which I love, does this same thing for me in a way. I can choose, on a person-by-person basis, what shows up on my 'stream' from them. I can choose to see their check-ins, their posts, their photos, or nothing at all. I can also choose if I'm notified of any of those things via SMS or email. Extremely granular options which makes Brightkite much more valuable to me than Twitter. The popularity of Twitter is what keeps me there. I call this community pressure. Even though I'd rather use Brightkite than Twitter (based on features alone (and geo-tagging)) I use Twitter because that is where everyone is.

(Sorry this is so long, but it is a topic I've thought A LOT about.)

If Twitter were to add either Facebook's "friend categories (or lists)" or Brightkite's granular (is this the right word?) options to allow me to still be a friend with someone but not see their updates when I choose not to - - I think that'd be very, very huge for most people. Including me.

At Viddler we've chosen to add Facebook's approach which we call "buddy lists". Currently I have one for Friends, Family, Co-workers, and Viddler members. This allows me to share videos with an entire group of people very quickly.

Re: A New Approach To Facebook

sarahintampa — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 10:54:04 -0000

If you mean this one (http://www.facebook.com/app..., the most popular of the Twitter apps, it will.

However, it will update your personal profile with your tweets as well!

That's the problem with these "public profiles" - no separation between the public fan page and the personal profile.

Only 2 workarounds: 1) Create a separate acct for managing your public profile (fan page). Note: violates TOS, as I understand it.

2) Create a business account.

Re: A New Approach To Facebook

fredwilson — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:43:11 -0000

Sarah

I read your post when you wrote it but I went back and re-read it just now

It's a great piece of reporting and analysis

Thanks for doing it

Do you know if the twitter facebook app will publish my tweets to my "public
page"?

Re: A New Approach To Facebook

Amnon Levav — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:47:10 -0000

This is amazing - just the right approach. I think it will work - especially if others adopt it.

Re: A New Approach To Facebook

sarahintampa — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 10:36:08 -0000

They changed it to "public profile" in the latest update (instead of fan page). You would be surprised how difficult it is to make it useful. Good luck finding apps that work on it or adding any sort of automation to it without completely screwing up your own *personal* profile in the process.

For ex, make an adjustment to the "notes" app and it affects both your personal profile & fan page at the same time. None of the page-aware apps (of which there are few) can associate themselves with just a fan page or just a personal profile. If you add them, they tie into both.

Public profiles outside of those purchased under business accounts are the most useless thing on FB.

Re: A New Approach To Facebook

sarahintampa — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 10:31:37 -0000

You can't. Which is why FB fan pages are broken. I discovered this too when researching the post for RWW.

Re: A New Approach To Facebook

bussgang — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 10:30:41 -0000

Thanks, Fred. It sure is tough to let go!

------------------------------
Jeffrey J. Bussgang
Flybridge Capital Partners
500 Boylston Street
Boston, MA 02116

E: jeff@flybridge.com
T: 617 307-9295
F: 617 307-9293
Blog: www.seeingbothsides.com
Twitter: www.twitter.com/bussgang
URL: www.flybridge.com

** Please note address change **

Re: A New Approach To Facebook

sarahintampa — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 10:28:14 -0000

Just to jump in here - I have been struggling with the same problem as Fred & I don't think Personal fan pages are the answer (here's why, if interested: http://www.readwriteweb.com...

I was really hopeful that the New Facebook would provide a solution but it did not. It basically boils down to this: Facebook does not mirror the relationships and connections we have in real life. There are things I tell some people and there are things I tell everyone, for example. But on Facebook, when I post to my wall, everyone can see it. If I don't want some people to see those things, I can turn off "wall viewing" privileges for those folks via the settings, ***but then how do I communicate with them***? FB has no good answer for that outside of using public profiles (aka fan pages...which are broken and useless.

A simple solution to this problem would be to let us customize which things are public status updates vs private ones. For example, I could mark my imported activity from Google Reader and Flickr as public. Some status updates, though, I may want to be private. A simple checkbox on the status update box would solve this problem.

As for deleting people, it's interesting that we (us grown-ups, that is) struggle with this. The Gen Y'ers on FB delete people all the time as they grow apart. Why is it so hard for us to do the same?

Re: A New Approach To Facebook

fredwilson — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 10:06:20 -0000

I don't have much to offer when it comes to kids and Facebook other than

1. let them have a Facebook account. My son Josh has had one for at least a
year and his bar mitzvah is coming up next month
2. don't feel like you have to watch what they are doing there
3. make sure they understand the risks they are undertaking with social
networking (and sex, and drinking, and drugs, and driving, and .....)
4. trust them to do the right thing until they prove they can't be trusted

Re: A New Approach To Facebook

bussgang — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 06:27:28 -0000

Thanks for doing this, Fred - among other great things your blog post did, it enabled me to discover the "Friends List" feature, which I had never used.

As the father of three who are on the verge of fbook age (my daughter insists she should get an account for her bat mitzvah next year), I'm curious about learning more about why your daughters didn't want to friend you and how to navigate that very sensitive issue of your public personna melded with your kids' private/public lives.

Re: A New Approach To Facebook

Noah David Simon — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:33:32 -0000

the real interaction is not on twitter. it is on your blog... and the one on one is all on facebook. you know that... that is why you are filtering out the junk. I follow everyone on twitter through friendfeed and when I want to talk to them it is on facebook. I don't need to be your friend to do that. but I know you pay attention to your blog.

can we still send you facebook emails if we are not a friend? lol. you can customize that as well.

Re: A New Approach To Facebook

fredwilson — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 23:13:18 -0000

I did. They were not interested in clueing me in. I wonder why :)

Re: A New Approach To Facebook

leigh — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 23:05:32 -0000

wow if i ever was to bother getting married you would definitely get an invite :)

Re: A New Approach To Facebook

rachel — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 20:54:59 -0000

ask your kids...i'm sure they are experts on the privacy feature.

Re: A New Approach To Facebook

fredwilson — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 20:36:20 -0000

I don't know the answer to that

Re: A New Approach To Facebook

fredwilson — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 20:34:51 -0000

thanks