I’ve finally found some time to write up my reaction to yesterday’s Facebook Connect announcements.  We’ve been waiting since May for details on what Facebook calls “dynamic privacy” - and we found out yesterday that indeed - Facebook has implemented a methodology of making sure that if anyone ever changes their mind, and wishes to retract permission for someone to use their profile data (and presumably media and content as well) then all software systems tying into Facebook Connect have to flush that person’s profile (and/or data) out of their system.

This methodology requires that any vendor who ingests any Facebook profile data or media or content must (periodically) respect the status of the privacy settings set by the Facebook user and if those privacy settings ever CHANGE, then they have to react accordingly and respect the current privacy settings.

The most important thing is that as long as you respect those privacy settings (the DRM bits for people) then you (the software vendor) are free to store that data in your system.

This is big news.

I hope you heard what I just said, we can now STORE FACEBOOK DATA in our system!  That means our customers who wish to easily migrate Facebook users into their networks - can do so.  And they can migrate those user’s friends as well. So theoretically the viral effect that we’ve seen in Facebook apps (with this incredible swarming effect) can now happen OUTSIDE of Facebook as well!

So lets say we’ve built a social network for a sports team - and we launch the network right at the beginning of the team’s season.  And the team does really well that season, and footage of their winning games is posted on the social network.

Then fans of the team would link to this footage and discover this new place and go “Hey - I’d like to JOIN this network!”

All they’d have to do is hit this one button and their Facebook profile data, image, and set of friends - could automatically be imported into this coolio new sports network.  Then the fan could go through their list of friends and decide which ones they want to invite into this new sports network.

Now this is big news for us vertical niche social network vendors.  Our customers don’t EXPECT 1,000,000s of users on their networks.  They’d be happy with 50,000 or even 5,000 of the RIGHT people, than gobs of inappropriate people.  That’s what niche networks are all about.  Selective marginal-ism.

So by us providing a way for our customer’s customers to easily move into a new network, a viral effect can happen and ALL the most appropriate people can get into a new network - as fast as possible - which then greatly increases the likelihood of this new network succeeding and establishing critical mass for generating hits, conversations and traffic.

This push-me, pull-you conflicting set of factors is what makes launching and sustaining vertical niche network so difficult. You can’t base your business model on 100,000,000s of hits and banner ads, yet you need a critical mass of people and activity in a network to solve the “ghost town” effect.  Nobody wants to be on a network that has nobody there.

That’s what happened to Second Life.

So Facebook Connect helps us solve that problem. We have customers who have 100% of their potential customers on Facebook. We can now provide them with a mechanism of importing in those customer’s profile records and friend’s lists so they can sign them up - in one click.

Thank you Facebook, Dave Morin and Mark Zuckerberg.  In fact my whole family thanks you.

Great party too - Theivary Corporation shook the house.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 5:27 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.