IanSchafer.com

Facebook May Not Be Skynet, But It Is Getting Smarter. And That's Bad For Google.

Remember the computer network in THE TERMINATOR that progressively got so smart, it became sentient and thusly attempted to annihilate the human race? That network was called Skynet, and its goal was to remove the possibility of human error and slowness of reaction time to guarantee fast, efficient response to enemy attack.

Today, at F8, the annual Facebook Developer Conference, Facebook announced its open graph initiative to take Facebook to its next logical evolution -- everyplace other than Facebook. The initiative is designed to use people's social interactions (when logged into Facebook which is like always, natch) to shape their experiences across every possible connected environment. On the Facebook blog, Founder Mark Zuckerberg stated that "the power of the open graph is that it helps to create a smarter, personalized web that gets better with every action taken." Imagine visiting Pandora and it would already know how to program your station. Or visiting CNN and having it know what kind of news to display to you first. As a consumer, there are potentially many benefits of the initiative, making many experiences you have more and more relevant the more interactions you perform.

In order to make all of this happen, a significant amount of non-personally-identifiable data will be collected from consumers and made available to approved developers and publishers (75 at launch). As you might imagine, there will probably be some backlash from people concerned about privacy (heck, people made a fuss over the census). But the promise here is that your experience on the web will be better, thanks to Facebook and its delivery of more customized, relevant content. There's a nifty little chart that explains it here.

This is all a very big deal if it's successful. Bigger than you think. And It makes Facebook a direct competitor to Google. Facebook has managed to succeed where Google has failed -- turning your social behavior into actionable intelligence. Google's major attempts at insights into webwide consumer behavior (Orkut, FriendConnect, Checkout, Buzz) have not had anything close to the success that the Facebook platform has had. The intelligence collected from relationships with others, social micro-interactions (e.g. 'likes', 'shares', comments, updates), location (yup, Facebook's working on that) and even transactions (see Facebook Credits) will be inherently more valuable to advertisers than clickthrough and search behavior (as advertisers get smarter themselves about what those kinds of behaviors mean to their bottom lines). And make no mistake, this data will be collected en masse. Facebook expects to serve 1 billion 'likes' in just 24 hours. By applying this kind of statistically significant intelligence to its Engagement Ads, Facebook can deliver even more efficient, impression-generating advertising for its customers.

And what the open graph suggests is that what happens off of Facebook may be even more important as what happens on it.

It seems to be an inevitability that all of this intelligence will one day soon be applied to power a socially-targeted ad network as big (or bigger than) Google's AdSense. It would be a network that would theoretically deliver even better results for advertisers, resulting in higher CPMs/CPCs/CP-whatevers that can deliver higher payouts to publishers, making a choice between the two platforms a not-too difficult one for those publishers.

Facebook took a huge step today towards becoming a lot smarter, and a lot more powerful. If you're an advertiser, you should take the cue. Start getting smarter about how social relationships and interactions impact your business. The brands that figure this out first will be the ones that are ready to take advantage of the new Facebook open graph initiative, and the inevitable developments that will ensue.

At a recent dinner, a group of friends of mine discussed whether or not Facebook's market capitalization would ever eclipse Google's. If this plan is successful, it may not be a question of if, but when.

Oh -- and if it does (and achieves sentience)? Please don't annihilate humanity, Facebook. We wouldn't be fans of 'like' that. BONUS SNARKY CONSPIRACY THEORY: Former Facebook Chief Privacy Officer (and genuine, great guy) Chris Kelly is running for California Attorney General. California's Governor is Arnold Schwarzenegger. Ahnold was THE TERMINATOR. Circle. Complete.

UPDATE: Adage weighs in on this, and I have some comments in there too.

Why Google's Acquisition of AdMob Isn't Just About Advertising.

In case you missed it, Google acquired mobile ad network AdMob for $750 million in stock.

There is a lot of speculation on why, but the obvious reason is that Google wants more direct access to what they are betting heavily on -- that mobile is the next great advertising medium. They've made a huge bet on mobile with Android -- which is an obvious move to own the mobile search ad market, but now they've got their hooks into the mobile display ad market as well.

But what many might be missing could be the biggest reason Google bought AdMob: the data.

With the acquisition of AdMob, Google now has access to usage data of many of the most popular mobile apps -- especially the apps in the iTunes App Store. For iPhones. If Google is taking on Apple for mobile OS market share, they just scored a huge competitive advantage. Google will know more details than ever about how people are using iPhone apps, how they are engaging with advertising within those apps, and users loyalty to those apps.

Dashboards like the above only provide a window into the beginning of the mining that Google is likely about to do on their mobile handset competition. There has already been lively conversation about just how much of our personal data Google has access to. Now, even if you don't own an Android phone, Google will be able to collect data.

Until there is enough mobile display advertising to sell to generate healthy-enough revenues (Shazam, anyone?), it may be the access to the data that generates the biggest return on Google's investment.

Google's Ironic Billboard Similarity.

In all this Google vs. Microsoft talk, I find it funny/ironic that these two billboards look so similar.

A little tooooooo ironic. Yeah I really do think.

DMCA Takedown on Google.

I have never seen this before on Google. Have you?

Can we expect to see more of this?

Google Earth Comes to the iPhone.

Google has officially released the Google Earth app for the iPhone, available now in the iTunes store, and it's beautiful.

Here's a video walkthrough from Peter Birch, Google Earth's project manager.

Click here to download the app for your iPhone from the iTunes App Store.

Upcoming Events You Should Consider Attending.

The next two weeks are flush with events in NYC, orbiting around the sun of Advertising Week.

I'll be flush with events too, so here's a heads-up on how you can catch me...

Monday, September 15th

Social Ad Summit

Tribeca Rooftop, NYC

11:15am - 12:00pm

Branded Experiences on Social Networks

Large brands spend billions of dollars every year on advertising. Hear from a few of those large brands about how much they are allocating to social networks. Find out what has worked and what hasn’t as well as the hurdles for brands getting on social networks.

Thursday, September 18th

OMMA Global

Marriott Marquis, NYC

4:45pm - 5:30pm


Getting Social Sites to do your Work for You

Are you looking to precisely target based on demographics or activity? Targeted ad networks are showing promise for delivering more precise demographic segments for marketers than the big global networks. Could the same be true for vertical social networks? Social shopping, reviews, and more targeted groups can provide better engagement for those people you want to reach.


Moderator:

Brant Barton, Founder, Bazaarvoice


Speakers:

Adam Cahill, SVP, General Manager of Carat

Michael Carrier, CEO, StyleHive

John Riordan, Director-National Sales, Yelp.com

Ian Schafer, CEO, Deep Focus

Thursday, September 22nd

MIXX 2.8

Crowne Plaza Hotel, NYC

4:45pm - 5:30pm


The Self-Service Revolution


It sounds too good to be true: A completely automated process for setting up and executing highly-targeted ad campaigns. But how do we separate the hype from the reality? In this interactive session, you'll hear from marketers and platform-providers working together to define the automated future.

Moderator:

Michael Wolf, Partner, Farrallon Point, Inc.



Panelists:

Dan Ballister, Chief Operating Officer, TRAFFIQ

Aaron Finn, President & CEO, AdReady

Ian Schafer, CEO, Deep Focus

Jay Sears, EVP, Strategic Products & Business Development, ContextWeb

Tuesday, September 23rd

Advertising Week

Paley Center (formerly the Museum of TV and Radio), NYC

12:00pm - 1:00pm


Social Media: Giving Voice to Social Causes



The explosion of social media has created countless new ways for advertisers to engage consumers. It’s also created countless ways to promote social causes and increase civic engagement. Whether it’s social networks like MySpace and FaceBook or bloggers, widgets, twitter, or friend feed, these powerful tools can and are being used for the greater good. This panel brings together the best of the best to discuss where social networking meet social change.

Panel:

Moderator: Bob Greenberg, Vice President, Corporate Brand Marketing
Panasonic Corporation of North America

Douglas Atkin, Chief Community Officer, Meetup

Chris Colborn, Chief Experience Officer, R/GA

Lexi Reese, Head of Media Platforms, Google

Ian Schafer, Founder & CEO, Deep Focus

My Upcoming Speaking Engagements.

Want to keep up with all of my speaking engagements? Well why didn't you just say so?

Just keep an eye on my Google Calendar. I'll keep you up to date.

(Note: Skip to June. That's where they begin...)

Was Anyone Thinking Ahead About the 2008 NBA Draft Lottery?

I was engulfed in work tonight, and realized that I missed a night I've been waiting for for a while -- the 2008 NBA Draft Lottery. As a Knicks fan, it's all I had to look forward to this season.

11:43pm: Where did I go first? ESPN.com. And no list of the lottery results on the homepage. Ah, but there was a small link to the story about the draft. But no list of the results. Argh!

Google Search on 'nba draft lottery results'? Turned up nothing. Nothing!

So then I go to NBA.com.

A link to a video recapping the top three picks. But I WANT A LIST! It was only until I got down to near the bottom of the site (which I only realized existed by doing a Firefox 'find text' function) that there was a link to the results.

11:51pm: Going back to those Google results made me realize that I missed the fact that Yahoo's coverage of the results were, in fact, indexed -- but it was the very last result on the first page of results.

This was way too hard to find. So maybe I can help everyone by just posting the list here. Maybe I'll linkbait have better luck getting indexed by Google than NBA.com did:

Results of the 2008 NBA Draft Lottery

SECAUCUS, NJ, May 20 – Following are the results from the 2008 NBA Draft Lottery, which was conducted Tuesday at NBA TV’s studio in Secaucus, New Jersey. The Chicago Bulls, who had a 1.7 percent chance of obtaining the first selection, will have the first overall pick in the 2008 NBA Draft, which will be held in New York City at The WaMu Theater at Madison Square Garden on Thursday, June 26, 2008.

1. Chicago

2. Miami

3. Minnesota

4. Seattle

5. Memphis

6. New York

7. LA Clippers

8. Milwaukee

9. Charlotte

10. New Jersey

11. Indiana

12. Sacramento

13. Portland

14. Golden State

Following is the order for the remainder of the 2008 NBA Draft:

15. Atlanta (To Phoenix)

16. Philadelphia

17. Toronto

18. Washington

19. Cleveland

20. Denver

21. Dallas (To New Jersey)

22. Orlando

23. Utah

24. Phoenix (To Seattle)

25. Houston

26. San Antonio

27. New Orleans

28. LA Lakers (To Memphis)

29. Detroit

30. Boston

2008 Second Round Draft Choice Order:

31. Miami (To Minnesota via Boston)

32. Seattle

33. Memphis (To Portland)

34. Minnesota*

35. LA Clippers

36. New York (To Portland)

37. Milwaukee

38. Charlotte

39. Chicago

40. New Jersey

41. Indiana

42. Atlanta (To Sacramento)

43. Sacramento

44. Philadelphia (To Utah)

45. Toronto (To San Antonio)

46. Portland (To Seattle via Boston)

47. Washington

48. Cleveland (To Phoenix)

49. Golden State

50. Denver (To Seattle)

51. Dallas

52. Orlando (To Miami)

53. Utah

54. Houston

55. Phoenix (To Portland via Indiana)

56. New Orleans (To Seattle via Houston)

57. San Antonio

58. LA Lakers

59. Detroit

60. Boston

* Pick may be conveyed to Detroit.

When ‘ Open ’ Isn ’ t Really ‘ Open ’ . The Battle to Own Your Code — And Your Creativity.

Oxford University Professor Jonathan Zittrain in his new book, The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It, according to NetworkWorld, states that:

...today’s Internet appliances such as the iPhone and Xbox hamper innovation. That’s because these locked-down devices prohibit the kind of tinkering by end users that made PCs and the Internet such a force of economic, political and artistic change.

Zittrain argues that if the cybersecurity situation doesn’t improve, we will migrate to a different kind of Internet. The new Internet will have as its endpoints tethered appliances such as iPhones, which are controlled by their manufacturers, instead of open, changeable PCs attached to an open network that can foster the next round of disruptive innovation.

A bold statement. And he's got a point.

Now these devices are innovations unto themselves, and some even are positioned as development platforms. Take the iPhone, for example. Apple just released the latest version of their Software Development Kit (SDK) and developers everywhere are coding away, looking to build the next great iPhone application.

But in classic Apple style (i.e. heavy DRM within iTunes), Apple remains the gatekeeper. Applications can only be distributed via their App Store, and will only be distributed if approved by Apple. Apple will explain that this is for security and quality-assurance reasons, but it still puts them in control of what's available, with the ability to shut an app off if they so desire. So yes, you can be as creative as you want on their platform, but it's up to Apple if anyone is going to see it at all, or in perpetuity.

There's a similar situation going on with Google's new App Engine (the preview version was launched on 4/8, then taken down on 4/9). Google's vision is that instead of freely building apps with their API, you can develop applications using their APIs and host them on their servers, free of charge. Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud and Salesforce's Appexchange are also providing similar opportunities for developers. Sounds great, right? But there's a catch, as ArsTechnica reports.

Perhaps the most blatant downside is being locked into Google's platform. Existing projects will have to be ported or written from scratch, and those that rely on traditional relational databases will probably have difficulty making the transition. Even more difficult would be transitioning your application to your own servers if you choose to leave Google's tender embrace. Once you've created an established application on top of Google's authentication service and stored all your data within the company's datastore, removing all this code and data and moving it to another location would appear to a be fairly onerous task.

Once again, applications -- and even more importantly, data -- are locked into someone else's platform. And this is precisely what Jonathan Zittrain is talking about.

This is a disturbing trend and runs afoul of what led to the creativity that yielded many of the most popular websites of the last few years. Imagine if Warhol was free to create any art he wanted, but someone else owned the canvases and could destroy or bury them at any point if his art offended someone? That's what's going on here.

It doesn't seem that this is a trend that will let up anytime soon as companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon have way too much to gain by housing and hosting application engines. Doesn't feel like 'do no evil' anymore does it? And a little more 'PC' than 'Mac', if you ask me.

Food for thought...

Recognizing Memeoganda.

The onset of digital media has enabled communication, information, and news to flow quicker than ever before. The sheer velocity of information has had devastating effects on the newspaper industry (at least the printed elements) and consumers have changed their behavior to adapt.

No longer do we have to wait until the 11pm local newscast to find out what happened in our city. We don't even have to respect the anchorperson's request to stay tuned until after the commercial break to hear about a news story. We can just go to any number of websites to get that news before that brief break is over.

When an online news source breaks some piece of information (with our without fact-checking), blogs swoop in to comment, and news aggregator (i.e. Digg) users vote stories up, and they become 'the news'. And the more news becomes endorsed by the people reading it, the more 'true' it feels. Fact-checked or not.

I recently saw a panel at SXSW on the online behavior of teens and tweens, and when a few of the teenaged panelists mentioned that they got their news from Digg, it made me shudder. As great of a tool as Digg is for finding interesting pieces of online content, it's not a news source. Just an 'interesting content' recommendation engine.

But even journalists and professional bloggers use recommendation engines. They're out there; techmeme is an example. And sometimes those recommendation engines are other journalists and bloggers. In this new era of online journalism, these recommendations have become known as 'memes'. Wikipedia defines a 'meme' as consisting of any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods and terms such as race, culture, and ethnicity. Memes propagate themselves and can move through a "culture" in a manner similar to the behavior of a virus.

While memes often reflect important topics, they also have the potential to create stagnant monologues that doesn't necessarily get us anywhere -- eventually just turning what should be solution-deriving conversations, into noise. That's when memes make the leap from becoming units of cultural information and legitimate conversation to being momentum-generated waves of propaganda. Or, as I will business cliche-ify, memeoganda.

What used to be called 'trend pieces' are now being ripped from the headlines of blogs and even other publications. The biggest culprits tend to be traditional (especially print) media, and overzealous bloggers (in fact, I randomly stumbled upon this post by Mark Evans on the topic of blog topics via Techmeme) looking to capitalize on popular conversations/memes.

When journalists in traditional publications stop having original things to say, or just have the same ruminations on existing problems without offering up solutions, we get classic memeoganda. Lately, I've seen examples of memoganda regarding the ad industry ranging from the 'death of ad networks' to 'facebook's demise' to 'google click volume' to 'the death of the music industry' to even the state of the economy/recession.

These trend pieces get written so quickly and so close to each other, that while they may raise awareness of important topics, they water down the depth of the coverage, and result in a stream of 'also-ran' stories.

I started writing this blog post last night, and right on cue, this morning Techcrunch tells us about a new startup called Publish2 that will make memoganda even easier by providing journalists and newsrooms with their own Digg-like resource for finding out what's hot.

You know, maybe it's just me, but I yearn for the days when journalists broke hot stories rather than write about stories that are already hot. Memeoganda is sucking the life out of investigative journalism and seems to be more about finding new and exciting ways to conjure up ad inventory than to publish content with depth and meaning. And while stories that yield more ad inventory (read: linkbaiting) can be good bottom-line revenue band-aid, they are not the solution to mainstream journalism's woes.

The long-term answer is to strive to be the best at what you do. Break the news that matters. Investigate the broken news deeper. Don't fall prey to the easiness of spreading memeoganda.