Facebook apps and fbFund
Facebook’s efforts to develop startups that use its apps are really smart. It has created a $10 million fund called fbFund which helps small entrepreneurs in their first steps. Besides a short funding (not more than 100K), they provide some office space and some asessment from IT and PR experts.
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Addicted to Facebook
One of the results of my last trip to Silicon Valley is that I have become addicted to Facebook. Now I need to know what my Facebook friends are doing every time I connect my computer. It’s going to take me some time to get rid of this addiction…
Changes in politics: from filling meetups to developing social networks
During the Social Media and Politics program at Stanford we had the opportunity of listening to Will Bunnett, senior e-mail writer of the Obama4America campaign. He gave to us great insider information of what was going on behind the web sites created for the elections. You can summarize it in the following way: Winning elections is not any more about filling meetups and stadiums, but about developing active social networks in order to involve people.
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The Facebook Era
When I started working with social networks back in 2004, nobody really believed in them. Not even Google. Nevertheless, they have become mainstream. Almost all people under 25 are using them and older people are quickly signing up. Among all these networks, Facebook is clearly the leader and the fourth largest world site, which explains why Clara Shih’s new book is titled “The Facebook Era”.
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There is a lot of bullshit in Silicon Valley
The Silicon Valley’s ecosystem is great at saying how good you are. It’s like a bunch of consultants just telling you what you want to hear (without the nice wording from consultants). Luckily, when you launch, you have users and customers that will tell you “the real thing”.
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Spain’s social media monitor
Every once in a while I am going to write a post aggregating some general data about the Spanish social media. You can find these data on the Web but you have to search a lot for them, so I hope I can help some people doing so.
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Twitter is hype (as blogging was 2 years ago)
One of the things everybody agrees on here in the Valley is that Twitter is a hype and it won’t be so popular for ever. It’s true that there is a lot of creativity among people who build apps with its API and it is pushing other Internet players to do more real time things. But Twitter is not as big as it looks like lately.
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Spanish social network Tuenti cancels the service to thousands of users who did not prove they were over 14
Spanish social network Tuenti has cancelled the service to an unknown number of users (supposed to be in the thousands) who did not provide with any prove that they were over 14 years old. This is the result of an agreement between the company and the Spanish data protection agency, which was not very happy with the fact that many youngsters were giving too much information on this network.
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Spain in the Top 5 of social networks use
Spain is one of the countries of the world in which people spend more time on social networks. According to a recent study by comScore, a Spaniard spends an average of 5.3 hours every month on social networks, while world-wide it’s just 3.7.
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Can you imagine if a company owned e-mail?
If a company owned e-mail, you would probably have to pay for certain messages (if not for all), spam would not exist and you would periodically receive ad messages (if you had not a premium account). Not posible? Now think about the last time you used a toll-road and consider two social networks you are probably using: twitter and Facebook. How many direct messages have you sent today thru them? Aren’t they substitutes of e-mail? Aren’t they owned by private companies?
