Facebook: A Modest Proposal

Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook jubilantly announced that the “next 100 years of advertising are here” early this month. Maybe he meant in internet time, since the next century of advertising didn’t even make it to next month.

Facebook’s Beacon platform makes sense in theory. Earlier this year, Jeremiah Owyang pulls research out of the Forrester hat indicating trusted peers are the biggest influencers on purchasing decisions.

(courtesy of Jeremiah Owyang)

I figured Facebook was in trouble when the rowdy UK rags started using headliners like “I’m in Privacy Trouble.. Bitch“. The problem is Beacon’s advertising capabilities are opt-in by default, which raised eyebrows almost immediately. Since most users weren’t aware of a need to opt-out, mayhem and hilarity(for me) ensued as described by Charlene Li of Forrester. This is classic, edgy Facebook – Mark Zuckerberg’s business card reads “I’m CEO .. Bitch”. Not a controversy-phobic bunch here, but they’ll need to fix this quick or others will.

So to figure out how to fix it, Zuckerberg et al need to understand the ramifications of what’s happening here. Let’s begin with unintended, walking billboard Charlene Li. She buys a book on overstock.com, and later logs into Facebook to this lovely surprise:

(courtesy of Cherlene Li)

Now as far as most people are concerned, a coffee table is benign enough. However, imagine if a Facebook user buys a book called “Coping with Herpes for Dummies”. Now that would be a fun conversation starter.

A number of blogs have begun conversations regarding privacy issues. Since those conversations have been initiated, I want to initiate the conversation about solutions. Fortunately, the fix seems pretty easy enough, as the mechanisms are already in place to properly manage this mess. Here’s how:

1. Stop the bleeding. Shut down Beacon until Facebook can retool Beacon.

2. Shut down vendor side notification. Allowing vendors to provide users with a dialog box allowing them to share a purchase is not the best control environment for Facebook. It only takes one cheater or glitch to break the system when you have a user base who will wail on Facebook via the blogosphere. Said another way, if Facebook has the responsibility to maintain users’ privacy, outsourcing their control environment places them in a compromised position by design. Vulnerability by design makes no sense.

3. Use the existing authorization objects. Anytime a user adds an application, Facebook prompts the user to authenticate the application. A plausible extension of that functionality may be to allow users to roll up purchases made at participating advertising partners into a queue. Users can then “authorize” the purchase to display it on their profile, or “ignore” it and it vanishes into the ether. There’s a number of methods of rolling this into the user interface, from finesse methods like using notifications allowing users to casually add when ready, to battering ram methods like log-in dialog screens. My own suggestion to Mark and gang would be to use notification mechanisms, which are unobtrusive yet are clearly visible on users’ home screens.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Would you be willing to click on notifications and authorize support for advertisers you’ve purchased from as part of the social contract with Facebook? If not, how would you propose Mark “I’m CEO .. Bitch” Zuckerberg solve it?

Update 10:44AM PST: The New York Times has an interesting article on the evolution of Beacon here. (Thanks again Jeremiah).

Best. Mashup. Ever.

Sales 101: How Not to Win Customers

If you’re a sales professional, or you’re the CEO of your own tech startup (i.e. a defacto sales professional), you’ll need to learn how to rally clients to your offering and turn them into long term fans. Most of the methods employed by sales and marketing wunderkinds stem from one basic idea. Simply put, you figure out what clients want, and then position your product or service around that. In other words, your job is to to focus on what they want if you want them to care enough to listen to you. There are some great books which will show you what to do, but also learning what not to do is also constructive beyond the schadenfreude value (I’m full of German references today). One of the best examples of what not to do comes to us from recording label fan boy extraordinaire Jermaine Dupree. His pedantic rant here on the Huffington Post is worth dissecting and learning from. On the surface, it is a blog post defending musician Jay-Z’s decision to withhold track singles and sell only full albums on iTunes. In reality, it is DuPree’s attempt to justify his own profits off a dying old media model while disguising it as a plea for artists and consumers. It’s also an awesome example of unintentional comedy.

Here are two particularly funny excerpts along with takeaways we can all draw from them.

“Jay[Z] made everyone realize that iTunes taking what we give them and doing what they want with it isn’t the way it has to be. He put the light on and made other people realize, “Oh these guys are just selling our music, they ain’t making it.” If anything, WE made iTunes.

Let’s put aside the poor grammar for a moment – the clincher is the last sentence. What makes iTunes a success is not Dupree and his apostles, but rather the customers. Music buyers are increasingly choosing digital music over CDs and the Wall St Journal reports the statistics bear the trend out. The retailers get it -they’re quietly reducing floor space allotted to music. Hence artists like Jay-Z will be completing for ever-shrinking floorspace while David Bowie and Trent Reznor who embrace the web will increase their visibility where it counts. The takeaway: Losing customer-centric focus will turn you into an anachronism, leaving you struggling for a bigger slice of a shrinking pie to grow your revenues.

“But Universal sells one out of every three records. All it’ll take is for Warner Music to say, “You know what, I’m with you,” for us to shut ‘em down. No more iPods! They won’t have nothin’ to play on their players! We can take back the power if we’re willing to sacrifice some sales to make our point.”

DuPree’s shockingly bad understanding of how ipods work is not the showstopper here, nor is his grade school logic. What’s hilarious is that he obliviously advocates violating U.S. Antitrust laws. His statements are even more puzzling in light of lawsuits filed against recording labels in both California and New York for price fixing. Besides, as a customer, I derive zero value from the music labels holding back choices. It makes me more risk averse, so I still may not buy the album, and now I won’t buy the single either. The takeaway: Mitigating competition by offering a better product is an amazingly effective way to maximize profits. Mitigating competition by colluding to limit their choices is an amazingly effective way to maximize class action lawsuits.

DuPree’s defense of his seizing the majority of profits from a record sale is a funny indication of the old media’s disdain for customers, and a good cautionary tale for sales and marketing professionals. Is it any wonder music consumers (particularly younger ones) and even artists are largely ambivalent about sharing music files?

Kindle me This

Dear Jeff Bezos,

Congratulations on launching the Kindle reader. I wish you the best and I would love to see this initiative succeed. I’m just one guy with a little known blog, but I’m probably right smack in the middle your target market: educated, bleeding edge tech adopter, and voracious reader with available disposable income. So I should be eager to pick up a Kindle. Heck, I even poured theough Engadget’s review with holiday glint in my eye.

However, I’m ambivalent about Kindle, because it seems the device benefits Amazon more than it benefits me. I’m drafting this open letter to tell you why I won’t be buying one, and more importantly, what you can do to change my mind. Robert Scoble was nice enough to give it a week at least; I don’t think I need that much time.

Here’s why Kindle isn’t going to stuff my stocking this Christmas.

1. The wifi and built in wireless connectivity is awesome, but I already have the ability to punch in a blog or wikipedia entry on my iphone. So I’m not eager to buy yet another browsing device; It has to pack more punch than that.

2. “No more lugging around tons of books” isn’t convincing. At best, I can plow through 3 books on a trans-pacific flight. Not a big deal – give me a real advantage to dead tree format, and I’ll buy into it.

3. Now having an RSS feed of all the blogs I follow would be great, but I can only get to blogs you’ve indexed. Not a problem with Michael Arrington, but what about my fiancee’s blog? Why not just use a generic RSS aggregator?

4. The whole 1980′s Radio Shack vintage flair doesn’t work for me. I’ve held it my hands and I’m not convinced it’s comfortable to spend hours on.

5. I can’t share a book I’ve bought – this is my biggest pet peeve. Now I know what your suppliers are thinking.. “OMGBBQ PIRACY!” Well, here’s a thought – if I purchase a dead tree format book, I can pass it along when I’m done with it without drawing comparisons to Captain Jack Sparrow.

6. As I said before, I’m an iphone user. So I was disappointed when I tapped the screen and nothing happened. Time to evolve. Apple and HP have.

7. While we’re at it, I’m also used to inuitive interfaces with polished pictograms which are easy to interpret. I’m disappointed in the unwieldy Kindle UI.

8. My second-biggest pet peeve: cost. So let’s do a break even analysis here: 9.99 per ebook, competing with an average price of say, $15 per book. That means I have to purchase 80 books to reach cost parity, and that’s assuming you don’t jack up the price of ebooks once we’re hooked. While we’re at it, I expect you will, because it’s smart business.

So now that I’ve told you why you won’t earn my business, what you can do to get me excited about it? I’m glad you asked. Here’s what you can do:

Change the paradigm.

Apply the cell phone model to the purchase of reading content. Provide the device at a reduced cost (perhaps half of what you’re asking now), and charge me a monthly fee. Give me access to your entire library as long as I’m a subscriber. Yes, all of it. Allow me to share “links” to good books with other subscribers, the way I’ve socialized sharing links to blog posts I like. If you’re worried about me “farming” content, limit me to say, 10 books a month. I’ll be ok with that. Then add a legitimate RSS reader, and keep the wifi/mobile network connectivity as part of the membership plan. Finally, make the device as slick as the iphone, both inside and out.

I think you’d have a hit on your hands if you do this. You’d probably sell out – and I don’t mean in a marketing sense, where you ship too few devices and use the “sell out” as a marketing gimmick. I mean you’d really cash in beyond your wildest projections. The biggest reason why you’d succeed is because this model gives me as a buyer a huge benefit: I would be willing to take a chance on books I’d normally pass up if they are only a click away with zero marginal cost. Think about it – you would not only dominate the book selling market, but you would truly open the floodgates for more esoteric authors to reach a wider audience who normally wouldn’t buy their books. Now that would be something.

So how about it Jeff? Are you bold enough to change the way people buy books?

Eric

Google’s OpenSocial Pitch to Developers

A standards war is brewing in the social networking space with Google’s introduction of OpenSocial. On one side of course is Google, and on the other, Facebook. Google’s new OpenSocial platform allows third party developers to write widgets once and use them on any participating network (Orkut, Linked in, Friendster, Plaxo, etc). The platform makes sense for Facebook competitors like Plaxo who compete for eyeballs and developers with Facebook; in fact Plaxo’s activity jumped upon announcing OpenSocial support. It makes sense for small developers who are working on a bootstrap budget and want maximum exposure. It makes perfect sense for Google most of all, since they derive their capitalization value from “platformizing” the web.

Contrast this with Facebook, whose capitalization value stems largely from keeping eyeballs and developers focused on its own application. Their revenue model is tied to Microsoft‘s high octane advertising sales team, which is now part of the equation thanks to Microsoft taking a 5% equity stake in Facebook. It makes sense – Microsoft‘ has excess sales capacity, and Facebook needs to rope in the ad dollars. Facebook creates barriers to entry by having developers code for it and skipping the smaller social networks. That’s why they’ve taken a completing approach of releasing developer tools which only work within their own proprietary network.

This latest move is classic Google. They benefit from the trifecta:

1. They immediately raise the value of Orkut, their own social network.

2. They tank the value of Microsoft’s new purchase, possibly buying a stake if the equity becomes a bargain.

3. They create a favorable framework for indexing social networks, used by Google search.

Tonight Google hosted an event for the bay area Facebook developer community, hoping to siphon off the developers with the promise that the smaller guys collectively are a more enticing market than the market leader. It was pretty interesting to see who showed up – attendees included folks from Ning, Plaxo, and Spock (CEO Jay Bhatti was in attendance) . Even more interesting, more established players Etrade and Ernst & Young LLP also sent people, indicating the Fortune 500 are at least keeping an eye on developments here.

Patrick Chanezon of Google and Dave McClure, the angel investor behind 500 hats led the presentation. Chanezon started off by defining terms – he referred to data providers as objects and social networks as containers. He immediately drew a distinction between personal social networks and enterprise containers. The implication was obvious: develop for a closed network and end up with sunk costs or develop with OpenSocial and obtain an express route to cash-rich salesforce.com customers.

On a technological level, the platform built upon widely accepted RESTful web services which can be called via Javascript. The core services they are aiming at providing involve 3 elements: People (“who I am”), Friends (“who I know”), and Activities (“what I do”) within a framework where the goal is “10 minutes to a social network application.”Chanezon also described an extensible architecture which allows for container specific possibilities. For example, Myspace contains data regarding each individual user’s favorite movies or music, and added a number of API calls beyond the standard set. OpenSocial adopter Flixster quickly included the additional Myspace container functions to feed off the data.

Some elements of the new platform still need to be worked out. Chanezon was quick to admit that the API governance and the security models have yet to be resolved. In addition, a demo from BuyFast highlighted an issue: each container may elect policies specific to the social network, which may result in developers trying to “match” users based on having email available in one container and only name in another. In other words, the connectors work but sometimes developers have to play connect the dots based on whatever info they can grab.

Additional info is available on the evening’s powerpoint slides here, and photos here.

CNN: The Most Busted Name in News

“We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” – U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961

As I watched the last democratic presidential candidate debate, I mentioned to someone on instant messenger that CNN likely rigged the debate to favor Hillary. It was a facetious comment, but I did think it was odd Clinton was handed all the softball questions and a crowd which supported her every move. As it turns out, I was right.

A conservative leaning blogger by the name of Dan Riehl started digging up a couple of strange coincidences, and soon the facts spilled over to other blogs here and here. Even the New York Times picked up on CNN’s stacking the analysis deck with Clinton insiders. Mark Ambinder of the Atlantic Monthly picked up on an odd question (“Do you prefer diamonds or pearls?”) supposedly undecided voter “Maria Luisa” asked Senator Clinton. Turns out the young lady outted CNN’s selecting scripting the question as the finale to the debate on her myspace page. Awesome.

It gets better – she’s not eligible to vote. On top of that, she’s interning for Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, so it’s not clear she’s just a regular gal as suggested. The picture to the right was from her bio on UNLV‘s website before it was removed which described a strikingly similar girl who is “an immigrant on a quest to become an American citizen.”

Dan Riehl also dig up information on another supposedly undecided voter, who apparently wasn’t so undecided back in 2003 when she served as a political director in the Arkansas Democratic Party. Yep, the same Arkansas the Clintons are from.

If the “undecided voters” aren’t bad enough for you, the discussion moderators even altered questions. I almost fell out of my seat when I saw CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux redirect a health care question into an abortion question.

As I see it, there are two takeaways from this, which I think we can all agree on (independent of your politics or political affiliations):

1. President Eisenhower’s advice above is timeless, and I’m glad people are outting the Clinton News Network playing favorites. Shame on both CNN for doing this and Hillary’s campaign for its tacit support of this sham.

2. On the Internet, everyone knows you’re a dog, contrary to the classic New Yorker cartoon. Yet another terrific example of Emergent Democracy.

Final score: Emergent Democracy 1, Cronyism 0.

RIP Email? Not So Fast..

Email was the original “killer application” and easily the most widely deployed Internet application out there by a wide margin. It’s vendor neutral, works great via low bandwidth, and is even easy enough for my mom to use. But poor old email is falling on hard times of late; it’s now officially the tech-cognoscenti’s favorite whipping boy (here‘s the article by Chad Lorenz which started this conversation). The ultimate “ouch” factor was a study noting that younger people “only use email to communicate with old people”. That one line zinger spread around the Internet faster than the MyDoom virus, and soon enough every websphere analyst and pundit was crooning to the same tune.

The 4 Pillars of Email Dissatisfaction

The anti-email tsunami seems to hang on 4 pillars. Here’s what they are and my humble take on them.

1. Promotes “broadcasting” general garbage rather than conversations – Spot on, marketing and PR need to be about targeted participation rather than blasting people. Just take a look at Brian Solis taking a bullet for the PR industry after a Chris Anderson rant to the “lazy flacks” in the PR industry. Both these guys are right on the money. If your PR consultant’s strategy consists primarily of blasting email lists, I suggest you smile politely and show them the door.

2. Poor indexing and searching. Again, spot on. How much do you waste each week searching your inbox? I’m flummoxed at how on earth Inboxes became the most widely distributed “database” on planet earth. If this describes your company, email me to get a wiki ASAP. Seriously, you’ll thank me later.

3. Not scalable. Only half true: on one hand, email the outbox has scaled absolutely brilliantly considering it was a messaging system never really designed to accommodate billions of people. On the other hand, inboxes don’t scale at all. I recently spoke to an IT manager who told me email is fine, since you can copy infinite numbers of people on an email. My reply was “you might get an infinite number of replies”.

4. Spam. Spot on, unless you’re this fellow.

I even work for a company who provides collaborative websites without all the email melodrama of blocking Nigerian scams and Viagra ads only to you’re your customer’s email fell into the spam bucket. I should eager to shovel dirt on email’s coffin.

Why Email Will Still Be around for a While

I’m not, because divesting a society of an entrenched technology is not a quick process. Earlier year, I worked with a CEO who implemented company-wide email for the first time in 2007, after running on personal employee emails. It’s unlikely he’ll move away from it, and he’s not alone. Email is etched into the corporate world’s DNA to far too great and extent. While we’re at it, if email is dead, why do social networks use an email address as a username? Surely, some communication will (and should) transition away from email, but in a complementary fashion rather that completely disruptive. That transition is simply not going to happen overnight. If you’re not convinced, then consider this: there are still 500,000 people in the United States who are renting their phones from AT&T.

Besides, killing off email right now makes no sense. It now serves a vital function: it is an accepted, vendor-neutral method of archiving relevant documentation evidence supporting a wide variety of traditional enterprise functions such as sales, marketing, human resources, and finance. All of this is just a fancy way of saying email is a CYA tool, and hence it’s not likely to go away as long as people need to cover their.. assets. Until something comes along which is ubiquitously accepted as a trusted means of documentation, email is here to stay.

Inbox 2.0 is a Mashup

The email last rites folks are kind of right: they are seeing the trees, but missing the forest. While teenagers in academia have entirely rejected email, existing processes in corporate environments will take hold in the professional sphere. Thus we have two different sets of needs served by two different sets of tools. What’s happening here is a bifurcation of messaging and communication – personal communications have become the exclusive domain of social networks. Enterprise communications has become a mixture of things: email, wikis/microblogs, and instant messaging. Each provides a unique advantage to the other forms of communication. The real question we need to be asking is how to mash up these inputs into a coherent inbox 2.0 which provides meaning to the user.

Super Happy Dev Chats 2007

I’m to semi-live blog my first trip to Super Happy Dev House in San Francisco. This post will essentially be a “living document” until noontime November 11, 2007, where I’ll probably clean up a whole lot of post rambling and finalize the whole thing with pics. I’ll be updating this storyline in batches (hence semi-live blogging), as sinking my head into WordPress to blog somewhat puts a damper on the cool conversations I’m having. Anyway, here is the stream of consciousness post..

3:15 PM Arrived at SHDH

Ran into 2 “Tims” downstairs and took a pic right outside the location. It looks like Will, who is hosting the dev house, has a really neat home – it’s essentially a big square box with a staircase right in the middle. The exterior kind of has the appeal of a warehouse, which is what this building originally was.

One of the Tims is working on layer 2 security stuff. I’m moving on, as I’m not terribly interested.

4:30 Met John

Ran into Jon Callas of PGP, and had a fascinating conversation about virtual worlds, designing social structures to support the world’s strategic goals, and inevitable scaling issue involved as the world grows. Here’s an impressionistic transcript of the chat:

4:45 Socializing World of Warcraft and similar MMOs

One of the issues Blizzard is having is that they are crafting social structures with input predominately from the 1%ers who are the hard core gamers. This leads to some design decisions where the majority of development team time is spent creating social structures and crafting the experience for places like Blackwing layer, which the overwhelming population of users will never see. The reason most of their time is spent on these people is strategic: one of Blizzard’s primary goals is to elevate gaming to the same cache that professional sports like baseball and football enjoy. While this may frustrate some players who disagree with that strategy, by all accounts they are executing well on their strategy.

Making sure females join your world is absolutely critical for a number of reasons. The women tend to encourage stickiness in a boyfriend or husband, so you get 2 players for the marketing cost of one. In additional, women tend to invite others more often to join them than their male counterparts.

Hardcore gamers are a drain on your system. While they may be loyal, they are also fickle, and use up resources (both technical and people resources). They will also demand an inordinate amount of dev time. Blizzard in particular has huge issues with the gold farmer market – they view it is cheating in the same vein as like using steroids in football. However, their key 1%ers are the ones funding it most of the gold available, and since they want to keep them happy as can be, they’re stuck in a dilema they accidentally created.

5:00 MMO platform decisions

Creating Macintosh clients for virtual worlds is critical to creating stickines, but more importantly to bringing over new players to your new virtual world. The reason is that Mac gamers are overrepresented in MMO communities mostly because their solo game choices are limited. Hence it’s likely a guild can’t bring everyone over to the new game unless Macs are supported, since the odds are at least a few key members will be on Macs.

5:15 Virtual World Economics

One attempt to curb the gold farming in World of Warcraft involves creating daily quests – quests you can only do once a day in certain places. While these rovide an entertaining way to spend time without creating vast amounts of wealth (and hence inflation), there is a design problem inherent in them also. The problem is they provide a reward of a few gold coins, which is not enough to offset the repair bill on damaged gear. Hence, the daily quests basically suffers from the AMT problem.

Fighting inflation in MMOs is a critical problem, which has several well know and easy solutions. For example, City of Heroes entirely eliminates coinage in favor of a skills only system. World of Warcraft intorduces a number of money sinks, like trasportation costs (why does flying on griphons cost money??), gear repair, and nontransferrable gear. The key to creating inflation controls is to make appropriate decisions and be consistent. Many players who purchased the WOW expansion pack were frustrated when they found profession development (armorsmith, tailoring, etc) to proceed slower in the expansion world. Breaking with inflation controls consistency introduces turnover risk.

5:45 Traffic control

One issue Blizzard is facing right now is that the older existing worlds feel like ghost towns whereas the newer worlds are crowded. They have tried to counter the problem by conjuring up specific quest locations in the old world nd creating pointers to them in the new world. However, the flow of traffic is a bit irregular, which makes places either rushed with flash crowds, or makes them feel like ghost towns.

6:00 The Second Life model

Second life is a libertarian anarchy experiment with scalability issues. Linden scaled horizontally as opposed to vertically (EVE online, WOW) so hence these latter ones stack really well.

While Blizzard did a great job at scaling WOW, they also introduced certain rigidity as compared to the consummately flexible Second Life. For instance, Linden Labs allows virtual world participants ot create their own textures and wireframes for physical attributes like hair. Anyone can upload a new design. The problem is, what happens if someone decides to upload a 5GB hairpiece? Linden’s decision to allow user creatable bjects hence places responsibility on Linden for performance, but takes control of that performance way from them. Hence dialup on Second Life is unfeasible.

Blizzard took the opposite approach: all the body types are exactly the same. Your hair is the same t level 70 as it was at level 1 – the world might change, but your hair won’t. However, WOW is playable on dialup and Blizzard can scale well since the only thing which needs to be stored on the servers is an array of data representing each player’s apperance.

The lesson to learn here is it is critical to map out the consequences of design decisions.

Linden provided objects with standard physics movement – dresses flow and weave in the wind and such. People creating their own objects apply these behaviors and end up with flowing hair in a way that seems unnatural. Blizzard created a worldwith the opposite problem. Everyone in a given race the same bodytypeand noone can change their appearance (add a tattoo for example). There is room for a middle ground, that represents an opportunity.

The porn question is a tough one to solve. Certain adults who are welcomed into an online world will inevitably do certain things people will always do things. You can enforce policy disallowing it in various creative ways. For instance, bars only admit 21+ people, regardless of whether there is real booze or not – and private areas allow for more freedom.

PVP decision on virtual world.. creating some degree of ambiguity as to what good and evil is creates all sorts of plot possibilities. While Blood Elves are the prettiest looking race in WOW’s horde, they are arguably the nastiest. The Tauren are different, and the trolls are simply campy. To have allowed the Draenei to join the horde and the elves to join the alliance would have muddled the waters significantly, and spread out the players who would like to explore the dark side, so to speak.

Question to ask yourself as you’re creating an online world: can you buy your way to the top or slog your way to the top?

To have an MMO take off, you have to have a storyboard property. For example, the Lord of the Rings online game has a shared universe and shared vision which binds together the participants. If starting with an entirely new universe, it makes sense to create media which allows potential user base to learn about the shared universe prior to the virtual world opening up for participation.

Fake Steve Jobs To Blogosphere: I Didn’t Mean to Do It.

DUDE, I INVENTED THE FRIGGIN IPHONE.

“Fake Steve Jobs” (aka Forbes magazine writer Dan Lyons) was recently outted in August as the author behind the wildly popular The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. Linked in recently sponsored a night with the real Guy Kawasaki conducting an open interview with Fake Steve Jobs (“FSJ”) this evening at the Computer History Museum. We were even lucky enough to have the sleuth who tracked him down in attendance: Brad Stone joined the conversation on stage during the interview. That’s Dan Lyons in the middle below with Brad to his right. Feel free to click on the picture for a small set of photos I took during the session.

I’ve taken a few snippets of the interview which turned out ot be a bit more of a stand up comedy routine. These notes were taken from my iPhone, mind you, so I’ve paraphrased a tiny bit in a few cases. Here are a few choice Q&A soundbites (from both Guy and the crowd) as Dan Lyons discusses everything from his unveiling to his relationship with Apple.

Did you leak your identity to sell more books?

No, I didn’t mean for the blog to become some kind of icon or something… it was accidental. I started FSJ simply because I wanted to learn how to use Blogger. I picked it up and dropped it after a while, figuring interest would die down once I stopped posting. The result was just the opposite: I kept getting emails from people asking why I stopped. I even received emails from people who wanted to encourage “Steve” to continue blogging.. they actually thought I was the real Steve Jobs!

The only attempt to cash in on the blog was this lame-o idea to sell Fake Steve Jobs t-shirts on Cafepress. The t-shirts are so camp, they’re worth buying simply for the comedic value of them. I sold a total of 4 shirts my first day, all of which were to Katie Cotton who works in public relations at Apple. I was totally expecting to hear from their lawyers after that. Somehow, amazingly, I never did.

Did you do any research on Steve Jobs to add to the authenticity of the blog?

Not at first, although eventually I did spend hours gathering info on Steve on the web, and also read up a bit. I started to realize how big this had gotten when the New York Times wrote a piece on Steve Jobs.

Was the unmasking intentional?

No way. In fact, I was on my way to a retreat in Maine to shut out the world and focus on writing my book when I got the call from Brad Stone. I told my wife the next few days would be crazy and she was pissed!

Brad, how did you figure out it was Dan?

(Brad hops up from the stage after Guy Kawasaki recognizes him and asks him to come up).

I was interested in playing sleuth and compiled a list of people who were likely suspects (including the real Steve), but I eventually dropped the matter entirely. My interest in finding out the writer’s identity re-surfaced once I started attending conferences and found everyone was buzzing about FSJ. Eventually I started putting the pieces together when I noticed similar writing patterns on the floating point blog. A big clue was the fact that the floating point blog was a naked broadside attack on open source software. *laughs*

What’s your take on the other fake blogs? There’s a fake Steve Ballmer out there now, among others.

Well, maybe the writer is a Microsoft employee or something – afterall, Ballmer probably figured if there is a fake Steve, there has to be a fake Baller too, right? although his running around on stage flapping his arms around probably is enough of a parody on Ballmer. No additional humor needed.

What’s funny about these fake blogs is that sometimes they’re picked up in traditional media as legitimate stories. The funniest example was the fake Al Sharpton blog, which defended Michael Vick’s recent dogfighting troubles. The story involved fake Sharpton stating that if a white quarterback coordinated fights between dolphins with spears attached to their beaks, the media would have given him a pass. As ridiculous as it sounds, MSNBC picked up the story and reported on “Al Sharpton” defending Michael Vick! *laughs*

Have you ever met Steve Jobs?

No, never. I get asked that all the time. People also keep asking me if a single day passes where I haven’t thought of Steve Jobs. When I think back,not a single day has gone by in the last year and a half where I haven’t thought of Steve. Isn’t that fucked up?! It’s like I have a man crush on him or something. *laughs*

But Steve Jobs is a facsinating personality in that he creates buzz regardless of what he does. I’m not talking about facebook buzz bullshit – this man has an actual company which makes real products! *laughs*

Even Forbes bought into the buzz. Believe it or not, they emailed FSJ once and wrote to me that while they don’t know who I am, I obviously know the silicon valley inside out, and they would liek me t work for them. (Note: Dan Lyons worked for Forbes at the time) So I figured I’d write back and ask them how much the job pays!

I’ve Caught the Web 2.0 Bug in a Big Way

So I’ve done what career counselors advise people to do – I’ve made a hobby into the next stage in my career, by accepting a role at Socialtext in corporate sales.  I’m thrilled to have joined this organization – this a company with fresh funding, fresh ideas (many of which will reach fruition in the coming months), and a new CEO who’s dynamic, focused, and determined to drive growth. It’s been great getting up to speed with the help of Kris Duggan, and Ross and gang have been good enough to school me in the foosball way in addition to the wiki way.  I’m convinced Socialtext has the ability to capitalize on a vast market opportunity. But don’t take my word for it, take Stephen Colbert’s. You know Enterprise 2.0 has arrived in the mainstream when it becomes a part of our collective humorbase:

  

Facetiousness aside, I’m quite impressed with the thought leadership and vision I found at Socialtext.  Funny enough just as I write this post, Mukund Mohan sent over a tweet to his network lauding Ross Mayfield’s Power Law of Participation as still visionary despite having been written nearly two years ago (an eternity in silicon valley, mind you!) If you haven’t had a chance to look it over, I highly advise reading it. 

While I’m at it, a quick blurb on Halloween, which was a blast: I was lucky enough to crash Cnet’s Halloween bash at the Holy Cow in SOMA (thanks to Terry Chay for the great pics!)  I first made a pit stop, and I figured I’d share it here in the tradition of Scobleizer’s fun-to-read Silicon Valley Moments post. I arrived at Twitter HQ after work to join a little office partying, after hearing there was a bit of liquor to be had. I arrived a bit late for the wine tasting and revelry, but I enjoyed eavesdropping on Blaine Cook’s chat with a couple of pals.  A geeky way to spend a Halloween night for sure, but I being a geek myself, I wouldn’t have it any other way.  Robert Scoble took a much clearer picture of the office front door, which I thought was pretty awesome:

 

Here’s two pictures from the foyer and from Blaine’s workstation (with Blain from Twitter dev on the right), courtesy of my iPhone: 

   

Yep, I’ve caught the Web 2.0 bug in a big way – I’m even streaming my wedding on the web in 2008. I hope you’ll join Ling ling and I.