SortiPreneur

Bubble 2.0 Talk

It's the meme that won't go away!

I've said it before, and I'll go on the record again:  It is not a bubble until the investing public gets involved!

Josh Kopelman has an amusing post on the topic today.  He notes:

We live our lives by routines.  In January, we all make resolutions for the new year.  In November, we give thanks for the bounty of the harvest at Thanksgiving.  And for those in the tech industry, in October we go to the Web 2.0 Conference and try to outdo each other with our declarations of "Bubble 2.0".

BarCamp Istanbul

Emre Sokullu is organizing BarCamp Istanbul on October 20th at the Besiktas Campus of Bahcesehir University.  His blog post and the BarCamp page cover the details.

Social Graph Thoughts

I have been trying hard not to use the phrase "social graph", and replace it with "social network", but it has been difficult as "social network" now describes the websites that help you manage your social graph.

It's clear that the best such application is Facebook.  At least, it was the first encarnation of Facebook.  More on that to come.

And now that Facebook is a platform, questions about what sort of a platform it is spring to mind.  For me, there have been two persistent questions, and today two friends of mine posted about them, making my job easier.

First, Baris looks at the economics of Facebook apps and comments:

The #1 app, Top Friends has 2.8M active daily users.  Can't easily tell how many monetizable pageviews they get per user per day, but even at this massive usage, it's hard to see them making more than $1000/day. That's $360K/year, again not bad, but not a slam dunk.

So, we know popularity <> earnings, and so far, popularity is the only success metric.  With these apps spreading, Facebook seems to be the only one who wins. Add to this that most of these are apps that spread when Facebook did not limit the number of invites you can send to your friends to 10/day.  To build a freestanding Facebook app doesn't seem to make sense.  Baris is hinting at the next generation of apps that squeeze additional value out of the social graph, and that may be interesting.

Second, Aydin points out the changing demographics of Facebook:

• Between ’06 and ’07 the proportion of 18 to 24 year olds on Facebook went down from 35% to 25%
• Between ’06 and ’07 the proportion of 35 year old plus segment on Facebook went up from 35% to 46%

Facebook has been used a certain way by its first gen inhabitants, who were defined by certain characteristics (see danah boyd's excellent study on this).  They were what made Facebook very very different.  The next wave (post-September 06) flocked because of these differences. We will see if they change Facebook.  My bet is that they will.

UnDisposable.org

Emre Sokullu, the founder of Grou.ps had developed a collaborative utility, UnDisposable, to keep his userbase records clean in Grou.ps.  It has now grown powerful enough to be used by Facebook, among others, to filter disposable email addresses.

It's a great example of how the power of masses and good will can be aggregated to create a useful tool.  Congratulations, Emre.