Facebook needs to grow in order to please investors with the coming and awaiting IPO this year. Facebook, just like Google and other tech businesses, is a data-driven company. Hell, they must have huge data sets. They’re such hot stuff in the information society, Facebook will have to host their data centers in the Arctic soon.

But back to the data business. Look at the metrics that Facebook regularly makes public; user engagement and time spent on site. More than half of Facebook users visit the site every day, and in the time spent on site parameter Facebook significantly beats other big competitors. These two figures represent key values that are supposed to grow in order to justify the current $100+ billion valuation of the company.

The new Timeline feature is a great example of how to keep visitors on site for longer. The Timeline is almost never-ending as you scroll down… much more exciting than the former boring profile, right? The same is true for the News Feed; the main page of Facebook. Interactive designers, engineers and social behavior scientists optimize this page. They test, measure, learn, improve and test again. The features that push engagement and time spent high stay on the site, the rest gets killed. And this cycle goes on and on.

So you might complain that your Facebook is cluttered with stupid pictures and cat videos, missing important updates. That might be the case. The pictures and videos – all the multimedia files in general – attract more Likes, Shares and comments, bringing back other curious friends eager to see the cute overload. It’s cheap but it pumps the numbers up on the graph.

Tip: in a hurry? Skip to “Let’s get to work”

Facebook and Pages

Facebook is the dominant social network in today’s world; the site allows musicians to fully harness the power of the social graph. What? Well, I mean Facebook friends. Why? Because music is a very social vertical. You would rarely go to a concert alone. If you like a song, it is very likely you will share this experience.

Facebook offers a special product that musicians can use to sell music, promote live shows and engage with their fans. It is called Facebook Pages. Facebook has also published a special manual for music artists and bands where you can find very useful tips.

How musicians’ Facebook Pages look today

To be honest, they look quite “MySpacey”. Artists and bands try to flood their pages with a lot of content without having a clear vision of how the page should look and how it actually works. It really reminds me of a MySpace over-decorated web site though. Facebook is a different story. The whole social network was designed with the focus on the users’ needs. Each element of the Facebook site is deeply thought-out and easy to use. Ok, enough theory.

Let’s get to work

Take a look at Facebook Page of Skafander and see what we can improve.

1. Keep it simple, stupid

   This is the most important rule and also the reason why Facebook has outgrown MySpace. In other words, less is more. Do not try to post everything you find interesting. Think about your fans, if they will find it valuable. If you are writing a text, keep it short and break it up into a few paragraphs. Sometimes you can see a really long story at the Info tab. Who reads it?

2. The Page and the tab are two different things

   Please note that the page, or the Facebook Page if you like, is the entire web page. The tab is a part of the page, every page usually has a few tabs. There are native Facebook tabs like Wall, Info, Photos, and then the administrator can also add a custom application tab like our own tab Concerts. Musicians often add different, so called, “band pages”. In most cases these tabs, despite being called “pages”, bring the MySpace touch and feel into Facebook. For fans this is a frustrating experience. There is simply too much content which is not presented in a user-friendly way.

3. Tune up your welcome tab

   The fan lands at your Facebook page and sees … Wall? If so, try to think about forwarding your fans to the Info tab instead. You can also create your own welcome tab using the Static FBML application. However, a basic knowledge of HTML is needed in this case. Otherwise just set up your default landing page at the page admin section (Manage Permissions):

   

4. Each tab should focus on a particular content type

   Do not mess up apples and oranges. Separate all your effort into tabs and put each type of content into one tab. The info tab presents a brief introduction and links to other tabs. Wall includes the latest news and posts from fans. Music tab offers latest tracks with easy Share and Buy options. Concerts tab shows upcoming live shows with Buy tickets links. Store tab offers merchandise; users can pay with Facebook Credits among other ways.

5. Avoid duplicating

   Duplicating creates confusion. If you take a look at the first picture, you get the idea. Should I share this or that one? Now there are two walls, right? How about Photos? So prevent fans from asking such questions. Just give them a single choice of tabs with clear labels. They will be happy to navigate easily through your Facebook page by switching the tabs.

Done. Now what?

If you have completed the steps mentioned, you have now got to the never-ending track of continuous development. Sure, sounds terrible but now it’s important to measure results and see what can be further improved. You want to get results, correct? So keep on making your Facebook Page better.

Originally posted at MusicThinkTank.

Well…I cooperated, on average, with one and a half co-founders, but unfortunately both working relationships died, the latter even before he fully started working on the project. During those years, I tuned the idea of a service, optimizing the service concept according to new trends. The primary goal, however, has always remained intact: to build something that really matters. Simple, easy to use, and useful.

And that is not easy considering the fact that people prefer to use services with no real value. Take a look at Facebook with more than a half-billion active users. The service is based on a philosophy that people need to share more. Personally, I prefer to share less – especially when others are increasing their “sharing” rate over time. Does the sharing make people happier? I strongly doubt it, unless you are a narcissist with no self-confidence. Never mind, Facebook’s valuation tops 30 billion dollars. A lot of money for…?

Take Zynga, a gaming giant that has grown – rather, exploded – inside the Facebook ecosystem in past years. More than 200 million users monthly reap what they sow, play poker, and rule the Caribbean while sitting behind a computer. They also spend money buying – wait for it – virtual goods. The addicts all over the world have explored the look and feel of this app. My message to them is: “Get real. Why don’t you go to Vegas and spend some real money playing real poker, you lazy (—)!”

Okay, cooling down now. Do you know what Facebook and Zynga have in common? Their No. 1 goal is to keep you on-site as long as possible in order to pump up their personal data warehouses. They will do whatever they can to fulfill their mission. Facebook will show you in the “Picture memories” section a picture of your kitten that passed away last week and you, crying, will be politely watching happy ads right below. Zynga will boost your little gambler ego just to sell you a brand-new product that you cannot touch, feel, smell, taste, or kick in the ass. Sad…frustrating…but true as both companies are in the ad industry.

We took a different approach. We chose Facebook as our primary distribution channel. Distribution is what Facebook is really efficient at. We add content (tour dates and concert tickets) and context (showing you concerts of artists and bands you like). We don’t want our users to spend more time with our application than is absolutely necessary. That is why we are now also collecting your email address – so we can email you when your favorite artist or band will be touring in your area. We move forward, step by step gathering your feedback and usage data to help us to build something, perhaps small at the beginning, that really matters.

So I really have to thank all the Silicon Valley Geeks on a Plane (led by Dave McClure) for (coming here and) making me yet more realistic. All local geeks should also thank to Jack DeNeut (Nelso.com) for organizing the event. I also appreciate Dan Franc who was, together with me, the only Czech speaker yesterday. Isn’t it a shame?

How many friends do you have? Not on Facebook, Twitter or FriendFeed, but in the real world? Have you ever met them face to face? Probably yes, right? What type of content do you usually share with them? Do you show them pictures from your vacation in Hawaii? Perhaps you talked about your frustration from buying high-priced live concert tickets on the secondary market. Maybe you recommend your favorite restaurant to some of your friends from time to time.

OK, now log in at www.facebook.com. Or use MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed, whatever. One of your so called “friends” shares a new picture of her little puppy. Simply cute overload, as some of you would say, but what the hell does it have in common with me? One more example that I “really” enjoy seeing is status updates. I love “Watching very funny video at http://tinyurl.com/snipr.by. Join me now!” You read the status update first on Twitter. Then it automatically show at Facebook and then, last but least, FriendFeed follows. God bless data portability in this form!

These two above mentioned scenarios illustrate a huge gap between handling the real world and treating the virtual space. To harmonize our offline and online presence, we need to change our attitude towards one of these two worlds. Most likely it won’t concern the real one

Social media is a new pill that we take each morning and evening. True, many people use it continuously 10+ hours a day. In the current state of social network the pill does not make our lives any better. What I can see is mostly a lot of noise, redundancy and irrelevancy. How to get rid of this? Adding some kind of semantic information to social networks could be a solution, at least in part. For instance I like the Link – Blogroll admin section of WordPress because it uses XFN specification for describing the social graph. The system asks me what the relationship is like when I add a new link.

It is definitely the way to go as more details about a certain relationship is given the higher content relevancy can be reached within the social network. Furthermore this is the direction we should take if social networks are supposed to represent the reality.

Another problem is caused by both people’s uncontrolled creativity and an easy access to digital technologies that allows us to share almost anything. Simply there is too much content on the web and especially inside social networks. Users need tools to cope with this information overload. Take Facebook and its redesigned homepage with the News Feed. I can pick my friends and add them to friend lists. By choosing a given friend list I can filter the lifestream. Moreover I can hide inappropriate friends or applications with a single click. To a certain extent these features provide a good help to me but not the perfect one.

So far the most efficient filtering system I have found at www.friedfeed.com. Each item in the FriendFeed stream is accompanied by a Hide link similar to the one at Facebook. But there is a difference. Except the basic hide functionality for hiding the unwanted or irrelevant content, the user can set up advanced Hide options.

I am really a big fan of this Hide feature. Let’s say you want to display only blog posts (or tweets) from TechCrunch.com that have at least one comment (or so called “Likes”) from any FriendFeed user. No problem here. Moreover you can set up multiple filtering criteria. This way you can clean up the displayed life stream so you see only the relevant content. One more thing I like at www.friendfeed.com is the stream item clustering. That means they put similar or equal activity items together (tweet and Facebook status update showing the identical message for example) into a single (though expandable) activity line. Ultimate redundancy killer!

The entire world of social networking is still very immature. We should be slowly heading away from Snowball effect games, Six degrees of separation experiments and “popular” quizzes to something more useful. Current social networks are more or less empty containers where selling ads are the last instance the providers rely on. It needs to be fixed.

This is the new deal. You enter the pub, have a seat and help yourself with a built-in self-service tap. So you don’t need to wait for a waiter anymore and can drink as much as you want. It’s simply the well-known on-demand model. Each table in the pub has its own tap mechanism. Taps are connected to a central cash desk which measures the beer consumption of each person, table and pub in the franchising network.

Because the consumption data are also being aggregated over the internet, in each pub you can see drinkers’ leader board on a big screen. You can also compete with other pubs in the network and see online where (in which pub) people drink most beer. Isn’t that amazing?

I just wonder if they build a Facebook application (perhaps FB Connect would be more appropriate) posting to News Feed messages like “John just finished his 10th beer”. They could also use Twitter API so you could automatically broadcast “I’m totally drunk”. Just make sure your wife is following you on Twitter in case you need a ride at 3 a.m.

But seriously, there have not been many innovative projects launched in the Central Europe region lately. This is an exception and I believe others will follow. The company behind the unique self-service tap system called “The Pub” is based, not accidentally, in Pilsen (Czech Republic) where the original Pilsener beer is coming from.

So far I like the concept very much. My biggest concern is the fact how intensively the online and offline worlds can cooperate. Of course they could go further and use a huge potential of the internet for increasing the awareness of their excellent idea by building the real world community with the help of virtual social networks and lifestream web services.

By the way, could you beat the current record of drinking 14 liters of beer during one session?

But do not get me wrong. I like FriendFeed as it saves my time and increases the communication efficiency. It is also a highly addictive substance but I have fortunately managed to use it wisely which means on-demand. I usually check the latest posts (read Scoble-Gray-Arrington show), then “Best of day” (Arrington-Scoble-Gray) and “Best of week” (Gray-Arrington-Scoble). I do it only if I have time and want to know what people are talking about at the moment. Just to make it clear: unlike the majority of FF users I am not refreshing friendfeed.com in 24/7 mode.

The most discussions are around what application is going to be the next big thing. Twitter experiences its traditional scalability issues as the servers can not keep up with a steep user growth. Thus our interests shift to FriendFeed that brings a new level of conversation comfort. Let’s go further: what platform is going to rule the world? Facebook, OpenSocial? How about dataportability and open APIs? What a brilliant idea: mobile web with a social dimension. But will it work? Is the web itself the future platform? All these questions and discussions about technology issues necessarily end up with the word “monetization” and a big question mark.

If we really want to find the holy grail of the internet (= the killer app), we should step back and think. I spend most money offline and do not think this is an exception. If I were building the web application, I would definitely monetize it offline. Grabbing a portion of the big offline market pie seems to be a more realistic goal than creating new virtual markets. In fact, that is exactly what we want to do with Live Concerts

Many web developers care very much for quantitative results of their work. To a certain extent I can agree. For example, I like colorful and wise presentations from Dave McClure who, among others, teaches at Stanford how to build successful Facebook applications. He encourages developers to measure the following:

• Acquisition – users come to site from various channels
• Activation – users enjoy the first visit
• Retention – users come back
• Referral – users like the product enough to refer others
• Revenue – users conduct some monetization behavior

As I said, I agree with these AARRR metrics in part. What I miss in these five points is a wide and solid foundation that goes a way beyond the virtual world. I believe we should not restrict our thinking to the “Internet user” but should rather take a “user” in general into account.

Let’s say we still do the restriction. We omit the offline needs of our users. What happens? It looks like we treat them as virtual beings capable of clicking the mouse button and typing on keyboard. Is this a healthy attitude? Not for me. By chasing the above mentioned AARRR metrics we would get tons of users for sure. I am just afraid that those users will be more likely addicts, not happy and well-balanced individuals.

Think of Facebook chat for instance. Some people even like it. In contrast I would definitely agree with Stanford Daily:

Facebook addicts can be almost certain that with a new IM feature on the way and membership rising by the millions, this may very well be the end of productive time on the computer as we know it.

My suggestion is: make users happy no matter if it is online or offline. How to achieve that? One of my tips is to design the web application as a mirror of the real world. Do not make up any virtual friendships and highly artificial online communities. Just think of people in your neighborhood and about their needs and desires. This is the only way of creating really valuable communities.

Furthermore do not force people to stay on your site all day long. Do not exhaust users like Facebook, Twitter or FriendFeed do. This rule seems to be a parallel to Jakob’s Law. Dion Hinchcliffe gives the description of the law in his tale about Web 2.0:

Online products and services are best designed when they take advantage of the fact the users spend most of their time on sites other than yours.

I will share some other tips in my next posts. Do you have also any? And more important, do you consider the web as a separate world? Or do you take both the web and offline world as a whole?

John Biggs from CrunchGear/TechCrunch was streaming right from his cell phone:

So what did we present? We are working on Live Concerts widget that will help people enjoy live music.

Many music fans like to go to live concerts. It is always a social activity as people tend to go to live shows with their friends. Based on individual preferences, the widget lets users know when their favorite artist or band is coming to town. If they don’t want to go alone, they can invite their friends. The same way, users get valuable recommendations and reviews from their friends.

Music fans can use the widget as a concert ticket search engine as well. They can buy tickets from various ticket sellers and thus get the most affordable offer. The Live Concerts widget is going to work on all major social networking sites, e.g. MySpace, Facebook and other OpenSocial based social networks. It will be available as a standalone application too.

Now show me the money! The worldwide concert ticket market is on the rise. Concert ticket sales were expected to reach 9 billion US dollars worldwide last year, up nearly 10% over 2006. This year it should hit 10 billion USD mark.

UPDATE: Our first TechCrunch coverage