Spot Zuckerberg, keep Rs.10,000

Here is the announcement by Techgoss. Techgoss will offer Indian Rs. 5000 for the first, exclusive photos of Mark Zuckerberg in India. Another Rs. 5000 for a detailed story on his stay in India. No questions asked. Anonymity guaranteed.

Now what the hell is Zuckerberg doing in India? Seeking some peace after the flutter amongst the Facebook pigeons created by entry of ex-Google fat cat Sheryl Sandberg? Has she begun thinning the ranks at Facebook? Heard that co-founder and CTO Adam D’Angelo, a long time pal of Zuckerberg is leaving the company. For the record, D’Angelo is feeling tired and burned out and wants to take some time off. Oh, really? You hardly take time off when you are in your twenties. Not from the company that relocated itself from Boston to Palo Alto just because D’Angelo was studying computer science in Caltech.

Now is this a sign of good or bad times for FB? Ask Zuckerberg when you spot him around some Bangalore tech alley.

.

Are you really sorry, Facebook..?

Mark Zuckerberg says something like this on the Beacon Fiasco in his Facebook blog. The only sentence that conveyed something close to remorse in that smallest font, full-page piece is “I'm not proud of the way we've handled this situation and I know we can do better”. Does that sound like an apology to you…? Not really.

To me it sounded like the tone of someone big who never thought he would get caught. Yet here he is, caught with his fingers in the "Big Brother" jar. May be Mark thought it's okay to break the law until it's discovered, then just haul out PR people until it all blows over – in doing that, he's only following the other moghuls that went down that road before him. They are made of sterner stuff. Even after they get caught, the instinct is to spin and fudge and brazen it out. No wonder Microsoft has partnered with them and got straight into business – of infecting them with its wild ways. It's a match made in heaven. These guys are a bit like Google too, only their slogan isn't "Don't be evil" -- it's "Don't get caught."

Business models are known to align the enterprise interests with those of its customers. The happier customers are, the more money they make. Facebook's business model is the opposite. It pits Facebook against its customers. The amount of money that Facebook can make is defined (and constrained) by the degree to which its users will allow themselves to be exploited.

But how different is Facebook from other big players? Not much. Is it any different from Google handing over search data to China, or Microsoft crushing opposing browsers beneath its heels, or Du Pont denying that CFCs destroy the ozone layer, etc.?

"If Facebook is so ass, why not just stop using it?" I ask the world. I am not expecting candid answers though....

.

Social Networking - still a business ?

This question crossed to my mind as I was reading Larry Dignan in ZDnet.

Larry says “The future of social networking [SN] is coming into focus and it looks like Facebook-ish features will be increasingly be integrated into your everyday applications”. He cites Yahoo and Google integrating SN features into their email apps, Oracle’s attempt to stick it into their Fusion App and those of some other enterprise applications as well.

Then he reflects a bit before concluding - increasingly, SN is looking like a feature more than a business. Facebook may still be around just as Google does in the search scene, but for many lesser SN sites, it could well be an unsung existence or eventual fold up.

John Murrel of Mecury News puts it best – “now it's practically a given that your time online is social time. Between commercial and peer pressure, you're expected to maintain both a public presence for general interaction and a semi-private sphere for friends and family, both updated in real time with your activities, opinions, latest interests, location, and cultural tastes. The vehicles for this presence were homepages at first, then blogs, and now the widget-laden profiles on the SN sites, along with an endless flow of pinging, poking and tweeting. It's sort of funny that a system built by notoriously socially awkward geeks has turned into a mammoth, never-ending cocktail party. But that's where we are, and right now, billions are being bet on monetizing the world of constant acquaintanceship”.

Pretty close !