Outside Perspective | If you could do exactly the same things every day but make people's lives better, would you?

Pinterest Raises $200mm at $2.5bln Valuation

The buzz around the valley this morning is Pinterest’s completion of a $200mm raise led by Valiant. Pinterest, the quasi-social scrapbooking site is a fun way to bookmark the things you love and dream. While this may not mean much to their users, it means a whole bunch to the rest of us in the valley (or those peering in from abroad).

Be Persistent

As users of social networks, we generate an incredible amount of data – Ellis Hamburger’s article yesterday highlights some Facebook stats: “Every day, we get 2.7 billion likes, 2.5 billion status updates / photos, and 300 million photos.” But to what end? This was one of my first goals when designing Notey - I wanted to address the lack of persistence, I wanted to make our words stick.

On ‘Social Networks’, information flows quickly off the news feeds and though EdgeRank resurfaces it slightly longer, it’s quickly out of sight and out of mind. So while Facebook is looking to change our behaviors (slowly) with Graph Search, it’s no wonder a site like Pinterest that beautifully resurfaces data would be successful.

People First

Some might think this is a trend towards monetization – one driven by shareholders and endorsed by businesses and brands but this is more importantly what we as users want. We didn’t want another social network… but..okay.. well it’s convenient and it’s there anyway. We don’t want 1,000 sites to consume information (think ‘review’ sites or those where we dream) – we want to streamline our behavior and we want our data to be persistent.

Beacon of Hope

As a user and new startup founder, thank you Pinterest for being a beacon for ‘what users want’ and validating the space that I’m in. I’ll be persistent.

The first in what I hope will become a series of intelligent blog posts, I’m excited to express aimlessly and to no specific audience my views on a wide range of topics from social networking, to digital advertising, running long distances and to who knows – fried chicken.

Graph Search

To mark this occasion, I thought it fitting that I resurface a great article from Ellis Hamburger on Facebook’s swanky new Graph Search. Here’s a quick synopsis:

Graph Search while great in theory is hindered by practical matters:
- Great for finding Photos & People.. not so good for other things
- Based on ‘Likes’ – but there are no/few incentives to ‘like’ things
  - In an effort to encourage Brands to advertise, they discouraged users from inputting data
  - The more you like, the less social your newsfeed becomes (i.e. it becomes more branded)
  - Very low correlation between ‘liking’ something and actually liking something
- Plenty of Friends ≠ plenty of data

Facebook’s not the place where you browse your friend’s experiences or where you share what you’re really interested in. Ellis sums it up with saying that Graph Search’s success will be defined by how much more people put into Facebook.

More for Less

I’ll continue to check into my newsfeed and see what people are doing. I may ‘Like’ a page here and there but it’s unlikely I (and others for that mater) will be increasing my level of interaction or engaging more with Facebook (ignoring the fact that I’ve now started Notey). The reason is simple – branding and behavior modification:

Branding: What is Facebook to you? Is it where your family is? Your high school friends? Do you play games on it? Are you a FB creeper? Whatever it is to you – it’s going to stay that way. You will continue to use it as you have been and so will those around you. You are open, willing and interested in finding fun experiences and engaging with new products in different ways. As a startup, I’m always on my toes (and working and not sleeping and stressed out) but I take (some, though limited) solace in this psychological reality care of Al Ries and Jack Trout.

Behavior Modification: Have you ever tried to quit smoking? Lose weight? Get your kid to play piano? Behavior modification is a tricky thing and can only be done with small moves over a long period of time – and in the time it takes Facebook to modify our behaviors, there are many other places to go, people to meet and things to do.

Will you put more into Facebook or will you look for something else?