Imagine 500 million people on Facebook doing one or two transactions a year, selling old TVs, furniture, textbooks, velvet Elvis paintings, and baby clothes to their friends on the network. Now imagine facilitating all of these transactions and taking a 5% commission. That, my friends, is the incredible un-tapped potential of social commerce, and it is completely up for grabs. For now. I’d like to use this post to explore some of the existing solutions, their philosophies, and how likely they are to take that coveted position of “being the pipes” of e-commerce on Facebook. Read the rest of this entry »

More like, how you will ruin your day with Facebook.

Actually, this isn’t about Facebook. It’s really about you and your entire identity online. For most of us, that means Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other “social media” web sites. I think most of us underestimate, if not completely fail to imagine, the real risk of our online blabbering (speaking of… add “Blogs” to that list of social media web sites). The event that ruins your day isn’t going to happen when you update your status message to say, “Just got to Cancun, suckaaaaas!! Looking forward to three weeks on the beach!” Actually, nevermind, maybe you will get robbed as a result of that status update. Face it, your 300 facebook friends aren’t really your friends. In fact, at least a handful have probably become straight-up criminals in this economy. But no, that isn’t what I had in mind. This vulnerability has been around since the beginning of social media. It’s a vulnerability in Facebook, it’s a vulnerability in MySpace, it was a vulnerability in Friendster, and it’ll be a vulnerability in the systems that are being launched tomorrow. Come to think of it, that isn’t quite accurate either. The vulnerability isn’t in any of those systems, it’s in you. The vulnerability that I’m talking about is plain old gullibility, and the exploit is made possible with social engineering, using all of the information you offer up with Facebook and the rest of your social media identity. Read the rest of this entry »

With the advancements that came out of Facebook’s ominously named “F8″ conference last month, there is a lot of buzz about privacy and security. What it all revolves around is essentially a new digital social contract between you and the services you use to socialize on.  A lot of people are talking about leaving Facebook right now, but few people I know have actually done it, because fear is mounting around the steps that are being taken to write, and rewrite, that contract.  I’m going to try to sum this up so my Grandma can understand the real-world implications of these changes.  Unfortunately, it won’t be brief.  The two Facebook features I’ll focus on are the “Instant Personalization” feature and the “Like” button. The “Like” button is part of a suite of tools that Facebook calls “social plugins,” but many people see them as the central point in Satan’s pitch fork. Read the rest of this entry »

Whether you should be concerned, or completely freaked out, really depends; how many of your customers visit your site or use your web app with an iPad? Amidst all this hubbub, and inquiries from my mother about the future of my development niche, I just couldn’t resist writing a post about Steve Jobs’open letter on Flash. The iPad came out and suddenly everyone has become hyper-aware of the fact that Flash content doesn’t work on any of Apple’s iP* (iPad, iPod, iPhone) devices. The true conflict here is blown entirely out of proportion, but it’s still fascinating because it’s obvious that Steve Jobs is on a crusade to bring about the demise of Flash. Why? Is it a giant corporate conspiracy? I like to think so, but I don’t know. Honestly, I think he just wants the internet to be the best that it can be. I think that the way he sees it, if the Web is a little pink Huffy, Flash is it’s training wheels. While Flash makes it possible for a lot of really cool things to be created quickly and easily, the web would ride much more fast and smooth if it wasn’t bolted on.

This post is intended to satisfy my mother’s fears, but if you’re afraid too, read on.
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