On new facebook

Facebook finally bit the bullet and migrated everyone over to the new design. There has been some squawking from a small number of users and developers who are moaning they no longer have access to the profile page.

As we are developing a facebook app I’m in a good position to comment. My first thought when seeing the new design was that it wasn’t a massive deal. You still had the option to send updates to the news feed and it was my guess that the boxes page would still get a decent amount of traffic. From our perspective the greatest part of the new design is the ability to create a tab.

The trick is to design your app so people actually want to display it prominently, seek it out and tell others about it. I have been reading some books about marketing in anticipation of our launch. Stuff like Purple Cow, The Anatomy of Buzz and Beyond Buzz. I’ll spare you the dollars because they all say pretty much the same thing: products must be inherently viral, it’s not something you can slap on at the end. If you haven’t been thinking about the users from the first time you put down code then you are in trouble.

For us it guides everything we do and having that clear touchstone makes decision making far easier. Now we have different classes of users but anything we do with the app has to benefit one or more of them and cannot cause annoyance to any of them. You cannot compromise. If you start designing something with features that users have to put up with your product is not going anywhere.

The Curse of Google

I also think you have to bite the monetisation bullet early. Many web startups suffer from what I call the curse of Google. This is the idea that you can build a great product and someone else will figure out how to monetise it. Google were lucky that Bill Gross came up with paid search because in their initial paper Brin and Page baulked at the idea of advertising. Now Google implemented advertising in a better way than GoTo by separating the organic results from the ad but the basic concept was Gross’. Google doesn’t suffer from the curse but everyone trying this path after them does. I cannot think of another startup which has had a meteoric rise then cracked a solid business model down the line. I can think of a lot that haven’t. Napster was just as revolutionary as Google but without any business model it burnt pretty fast. Others like YouTube and Hotmail have managed to get bought by a larger company who could cover the costs in order to get a good position in an emerging market.

It doesn’t work for us because we are not hackers. We have to raise our own money to build the software and I wouldn’t be comfortable asking people for money, and putting my own money, behind something which does not have a clear path to revenue. Being so business model focused makes us different from other startups but we can’t afford any other route.