Facebook - Part 2

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Anything Could Happen…

June 9th, 2009 By greg Filed Under: Interesting, Weird and Wonderful

Evan Williams’s first little idea shifted the culture.(You can thank him for the ubiquity of blogging.) His new business, called Twitter, will be entering your consciousness right…about…now. Why does this stuff happen? Because he lets it.

By: Max Chafkin

What is Evan Williams doing?

I ask myself this as I consume a second cup of strong coffee in a quiet San Francisco café. It is early in the morning on the first workday of the new year, and Williams is apparently blowing me off. For the past two weeks he has ignored my e-mails, phone calls, and text messages. We were supposed to meet this morning to discuss his next move; instead we have radio silence.

This is odd. Williams is the sort of person who can’t seem to do anything, no matter how trivial, without blogging, photo-sharing, or text-messaging the news. He founded Blogger, the website that introduced the world to blogging and now attracts some 163 million visitors each month. He has maintained a detailed personal blog for more than a decade–posting pictures, explaining his latest theories on business, and huffing about the cable company.His new business, called Twitter, takes it a step further: It lets exhibitionists, techies, and–a hint of things to come–marketers blast their latest doings to cell phones. So he’s not just a practitioner of hyperconnectedness; he practically invented the concept.

Eventually, Williams sends me an apologetic text message–we resolve to push back the meeting slightly–and then he does something else: He uses Twitter to send a text message to, oh, a few thousand people: “Late for my first meeting of the year and in need of a shave.”

Like so many technology entrepreneurs, Williams, whose friends call him Ev, is a software engineer. But unlike many of the most successful, he’s no genius when it comes to programming. His specialty is taking a tiny, almost nonsensical idea and turning it into a cultural phenomenon. “He’s like a master craftsman,” says Naval Ravikant, a serial entrepreneur who is an angel investor in Twitter. “There are entrepreneurs who are financial geniuses, and there are raw coders. Evan is the master of creating a product where there wasn’t one before.” If Williams’s art is the conception of inconceivable products, then Twitter is his chef-d’oeuvre.
What is Twitter? It’s hard to explain–Williams and his co-founders have wrestled with this–but it helps to begin in familiar territory: blogging. A blog is an online diary, in which someone holds forth on a topic, like vacation itineraries or the case against Roger Clemens. Now strip this to the core. A typical entry–say, a couple of paragraphs, some links, pictures, or maybe a funny YouTube video–becomes a 140-character plain text comment. (That’s the maximum length of a Twitter message–also known as a tweet–and the exact length of the previous sentence.) Instead of sitting down in front of a screen and typing a couple of paragraphs into a form, you compose your message quickly on your phone’s keypad.

Instead of having readers come to your website to check out your latest, you blast it directly to their cell phone inboxes. A recent selection of Williams’s tweets includes: “Considering making February external-meeting free,” “Relaxing my shoulders. Writing a little code. Drinking Guayaki,” and “Packing my warmest clothes for Chicago.” Each snippet is sent to his 5,644 (and counting) “followers,” as they’re called in Twitter-speak: the friends, acquaintances, and stalkers who have elected to keep tabs on his every move.

This is Twitter, in all its wildly popular, ridiculous glory. The service, which had a few thousand users at the beginning of last year, had close to 800,000 at the beginning of this one. Because Twitter allows anyone to send messages to thousands of cell phones at once and for free, new uses are popping up. JetBlue (NASDAQ:JBLU) and Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) use it as a kind of mailing list; presidential candidates use it to contact supporters; the Los Angeles fire department uses it as a de facto emergency broadcast system. As with all movements, there’s a backlash. The United Arab Emirates recently banned the service, and there are lots of cautionary tales about Twittering gone bad. (I had such an experience when, en route to an unfortunately named barbecue restaurant, I Twittered, and then hastily deleted, this gem: “Walking to Smoke Joint.”)

As a cultural phenomenon, Twitter is a comer–having been featured in an episode ofCSI, on MTV, and in nearly every major newspaper–but its status as a business is nebulous. The 14-person company is unprofitable (its single largest source of revenue last year was the subleasing of half a dozen desks to three small start-ups at $200 a desk a month), and there are no immediate plans for it to be anything otherwise. Although some technologists think Twitter could one day be a billion-dollar company, many others say it represents the worst of Web 2.0: a company that is built to flip, that does little of value and has no long-term prospects as a standalone enterprise. Williams and his collaborators don’t entirely dispute this notion. Co-founder Jack Dorsey, the service’s inventor, freely admits that Twitter is “useless, in a sense” and that many people are “violently turned off” by the idea of constant communications. But, he adds, “there’s a lot of value in seemingly useless things.”

This strange statement encapsulates Williams’s business philosophy. He believes that small ideas are almost always better than grand visions. That Twitter’s main function–telling you what your friends are doing–is included as a feature in Facebook, MySpace, and most instant messaging programs doesn’t bother him in the slightest. “I think features can make great companies,” he says. “You just have to choose them right.” Moreover, he argues, a product can succeed by doing less than a competitive product. Case in point: Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), which rocketed to popularity because of a single feature–the search box–while its chief competitor, Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), offered dozens of services, from search to stock quotes to horoscopes. Google operated for years without a business model before it figured out that it could throw off billions in cash by serving little text ads next to its search results. “Applying constraints can help your company and your customers in unexpected ways,” says Williams. “The default thing we do is ask how we can add something to make it better. Instead we should say, What can we take away to create something new?”
That an entrepreneur can look at something as silly as Twitter and say, Yes, this is the future, is remarkable. Technology inventors have a horrible track record of turning new behaviors into long-term financial successes–social networking pioneer Friendster was long ago lapped by MySpace and Facebook; the first search engines, Web browsers, and video game systems met similar fates. And it’s not as if Williams doesn’t have the money (he made a reported $50 million selling Blogger to Google) or the connections (Twitter’s angel investors read like a who’s who of Silicon Valley) to attempt something more ambitious.

But he doesn’t care to. And he probably doesn’t need to. Mass adoption of broadband and social networking have made finding customers cheaper, and a booming online advertising market has made it easier to turn a profit once you attract them. Moreover, a handful of acquisition-happy tech companies have shown a willingness to add services by buying tiny, money-losing start-ups for tens of millions of dollars. These may be signs of yet another technology bubble, but there are smart people, like start-up financier Paul Graham, who argue that technology start-ups are undergoing a fundamental change, becoming smaller, cheaper to start, and more numerous–in short, commoditized. We may be entering an era of the little idea, a time tailor-made for Evan Williams.
Williams grew up on a corn farm in Clarks, Nebraska (population 379). He’s a self-taught coder, having dropped out of college after only a year to start a company. But this wasn’t Bill Gates dropping out of Harvard to start Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT). The college was the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the companies–there were three failures in five years–were unambitious, money losing, and admittedly dopey. Williams’s most successful product was a CD-ROM for fans of the Cornhuskers football team. Finally, convinced he still knew little about how to run a business, he cut his losses, took a Web development job in California, and started writing about it.

Today, Williams is 35 years in age and unassuming in appearance. He talks quietly in the soft, flat tones of a Midwesterner. He’s handsome, but ordinarily so. In person, wearing a nice pair of jeans, a gray T-shirt, and a cashmere cardigan, he is subdued and guarded. When his bagel with peanut butter and banana is brought to our table sans banana, he seems to struggle mightily as he weighs what to do about it. Williams often speaks tentatively, revising, disclaiming, and qualifying his thoughts in a manner that most businesspeople would take as a sign of weakness. When I ask him a question on start-up finance, he starts with a disclaimer. “I was thinking a little differently before,” he says, pausing. “I wonder why that is?” A conversation with Williams can quickly devolve into an inscrutable merry-go-round of ideas.

But to meet him online is a different story. Many of the qualities that make Williams awkward in real life play beautifully on Evhead.com, the online journal he has maintained since 1996. Williams’s honesty, his tendency toward frankness, and his willingness to admit not knowing everything make him different from most business bloggers. They make him interesting.
As the name suggests, Evhead is a record of Williams’s thoughts, profound and otherwise. In the past months he has posted a picture of himself and his wife, Sara, with a stuffed black bear–as well as a thoughtful essay on how to evaluate a new software product and an untitled post that reads, “I’m awake at 5:37 (for two hours now). Thinking about so many things.” Even 15 years ago, an entrepreneur who did this would have seemed creepy or ridiculous. But to members of the Facebook generation, who meticulously groom their online profiles–posting photos while sharing everything from their political preferences to what’s currently in their Netflix queue–Williams comes off as likable, even humble.

Some 25,000 people, mostly techies and entrepreneurs, look at Evhead each month. (Many of these readers also follow his Twitterings.) Dorsey had followed Williams’s blog for years. He knew it so well that when he spotted Williams on the street in San Francisco, he recognized him immediately and decided to apply for a job. “It was the first time I’d seen him in person,” Dorsey says, as if he were talking about a celebrity he had never considered a real person. “I took it as a sign.” In the online world, Williams is seen as a truth teller, an engineer who’s not afraid to stick it to the suits and the venture capitalists. He’s someone who actually understands the process of invention and who values it more than he does the bottom line. To read his blog is to watch the growth of a human being: You see Ev nearly lose his company, bring it back from the dead, strike it big, struggle with the tech support for his new cell phone, and get married. In Williams, a new generation of entrepreneurs has a mascot.

It’s January 31, 2001, and Evan Williams is alone in his apartment, writing a blog post for Evhead. It’s a big one. His company, Pyra Labs, is on life support, and Williams has just laid off the entire staff. (His co-founder and ex-girlfriend, Meg Hourihan, quit rather than be laid off.) The trouble is partly the result of the Internet bust–the Nasdaq has been tanking for months, and Williams’s investors have told him he must make do with what he’s got–but it’s also, in a strange way, a result of his company’s unlikely popularity.
Williams and Hourihan started Pyra, in 1998, with a plan to develop and sell project management software. They did contract Web programming for Hewlett-Packard to pay the bills while they developed their product. So they could keep track of each other’s progress, Williams created a piece of software he called Stuff, which, it turned out, was a far simpler and more useful collaboration tool than the one he was building for Pyra. Stuff allowed him to quickly upload text to a webpage by filling out a simple form, and it organized the text by date. He and Hourihan joked that it worked better than their actual product. Only Williams wasn’t joking. While Hourihan was on vacation, in August 2000, he put it online as Blogger.com.
Blogger took off. Online diaries had existed since the birth of the Internet, but they had been difficult to maintain and organize and were therefore limited to serious techies. Blogger made communicating your thoughts to the world much easier and more satisfying: Fill out a simple form, click a button, and–bang–you’re a published writer. By 2001, Blogger had attracted 100,000 users and the beginnings of what seemed like a healthy buzz, even though it made no money and had no model for changing that.
So as he sits in his apartment and blogs, Williams finds himself in an odd place. He’s running a company that’s more popular and growing faster than he could have possibly imagined. It’s also flat broke. Several weeks earlier, Williams had written a post that begged users to donate money to keep the servers running. It worked: He raised more than $10,000 in $10 and $20 money transfers made through PayPal. Now he’s got to figure out how to save the company. Writing the blog post, which he titles “And Then There Was One,” he describes the layoff, wishes his former employees well–”Hopefully our friendships will survive”–and then finally addresses his customers: “I’m still fighting the good fight,” he writes. “The product, user base, brand, and vision are still somewhat intact.

Amazingly. Thankfully. In fact, I’m actually in surprisingly good shape. I’m optimistic. (I’m always optimistic.) And I have many, many ideas. (I always have many ideas.)”

With no personnel costs, Blogger hung on. In March, there was a $40,000 licensing deal with Trellix, a business software start-up whose founder, a Blogger admirer, read about Williams’s plight on his blog and decided he wanted to help save the company. By the late summer, Williams had a business model. He had been making next to nothing placing banner ads on people’s blogs. Now he would charge those people $12 a year to remove the ads. Meanwhile, Pyra–and the phenomenon of blogging–grew like gangbusters through 2001. By the middle of 2002, there were 600,000 registered users. In late 2002, Google came calling. Sergey Brin and Larry Page offered to buy Williams’s little company and let him run it inside their highflying (and still private) search start-up. Williams blogged the news of his acceptance while delivering a speech at a technology conference. “Holy Crap,” he wrote, linking the words to a minutes-old article on the sale. “Note to self: When you get off this panel, you should probably comment on this.”

The experience of shepherding Blogger through growth, then hardship, until he finally turned it into a real company cemented Williams’s philosophy of business. He would be an entrepreneur who looked for value in things that seemed worthless. Faith–in one’s ability, in one’s chosen path, and, above all else, in the fact that there are always opportunities ahead–was a company’s greatest need. Stick to your product, forget about scrambling for deals, and good things will happen.

The belief that faith is an important business attribute goes a long way in describing how Williams is able to see opportunities. “He has a stubbornness of vision,” says Tim O’Reilly, the tech luminary who runs publisher O’Reilly Media and who coined the term “Web 2.0.” O’Reilly was Williams’s first employer in Silicon Valley and an investor in Pyra. “There are so many me-too start-ups on the Web, so many people saying this will be the next big thing, but the successful entrepreneurs are people who see the world differently.” Williams’s closest collaborator, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, says much the same. “He has a tendency to wait just a bit longer than everyone else would, to give an idea more time,” Stone says. “It is patience and perseverance and hope–all those things rolled up into one.”
After leaving Google at the end of 2004, with his fast-appreciating stock and a world-class education in business, Williams resolved to tread water until the right opportunity came along. “While I think I’m likely to start another company sometime,” he wrote on his blog, “I’m forcing myself to be noncommittal at the moment. My goal is to develop some perspective, learn new things, rest, and explore.” He promised to travel and to think about how he would change his life.

He didn’t do much of either. His next-door neighbor, an entrepreneur named Noah Glass, was starting a podcasting company, and Williams began advising him in the weeks following his departure from Google. Advising turned into full-time work, and full-time work turned into being co-founder, seed investor, and, eventually, CEO. By February 2005, he had invested $170,000 and personally launched the company, now called Odeo, with a demonstration at TED, the invitation-only tech conference held in Monterey, California. That same day, a front-page article in the business section of The New York Times profiled Odeo and its famous founder. Williams, it seemed, was on his way to turning another weird technology phenomenon into the next big thing.

But Odeo had no real product–only a sense that podcasting was somehow going to be popular. The website that Williams unveiled at TED, an audio directory and a few simple tools for recording one’s own podcasts, wasn’t ready for the public until a few months later, and by then it had been overshadowed by Apple’s release of podcasting features for iTunes. Odeo’s strategy, if there was one, was to be a one-stop shop for Internet audio, offering a number of tools for podcasters and casual listeners. Being all things to all people required money, and there were plenty of eager investors who wanted in on Ev’s next big thing. He raised $5 million from the venture capitalists Charles River Ventures and a number of high-profile angels, including O’Reilly, Google backer Ron Conway, and Lotus founder Mitch Kapor. The company quickly started hiring, and by the end of the year, it employed 14 people.

While he was trying to come up with a strategy for Odeo, Williams was processing the lessons of the past few years. In the fall of 2005, he wrote what he calls “my best blog post ever.” It was called “Ten Rules for Web Startups,” and it has since become something of an Internet classic. (Google the title and you’ll get more than a thousand results, nearly all of which point to Williams’s post.) The lessons were lifted from his experience at Blogger, particularly the first one, “Be Narrow,” which urged entrepreneurs to “Focus on the smallest possible problem you could solve that would be potentially useful.” Other lessons were “Be Tiny,” “Be Picky,” and “Be Self-Centered,” which discussed the importance of company founders using their own products.

Even as he wrote his rules, he was ignoring them. He wasn’t even podcasting. As Odeo sputtered, struggling to gain new users, Williams began to see his problem as one of corporate structure. He had accepted millions of dollars in investment capital, built a team, and worked the media before he knew what his company was. Odeo needed to experiment–to play, even. “If we were just two guys in a garage, we could say, ‘I don’t know about that idea, but let’s see where it goes,’ ” he says. His solution was to organize what he called a “hack day.” He broke the company into small groups and told them to spend a day experimenting–not just with podcasting, but with anything that struck their fancy. It was Dorsey’s project that struck Williams’s. Dorsey had long been fascinated by the status function on instant message programs: the short, pithy postings that allow you to tell your online friends what you are doing. He built a prototype of Twitter in two weeks.

“Thinking twttr is the awesomest,” Williams Twittered in March 2006. With little fanfare it went live in July. Like Blogger before it, Twitter was introduced as an experiment, a fun little side project. Nonetheless, Williams was excited–more excited than he’d been about anything that had happened at Odeo. This got him thinking about the hack day that had led him to Twitter–and then about the two years in which he had struggled to build anything, despite having plenty of money and all the hype in the world.
How had a single experiment succeeded where an entire company couldn’t? And more important, how could he do more of them?
On October 25, 2006, Williams blogged his answer. He was buying Odeo, taking the odd–to some, almost unbelievable–step of returning his venture capitalists’ money. It cost him $3 million out of pocket, plus all the cash Odeo still had. It was a lot to pay for a failing Web company and an unproven prototype.

He called the new endeavor Obvious, a nod to a lesson learned from the success at Blogger–that seemingly silly and trivial ideas often look like great ones in retrospect. Obvious would be a workshop where Williams and his cohorts could experiment with ideas in an environment free from financial distractions. If an idea worked really well, he could spin it off into an independent company using outside investment. Otherwise, he could either keep it for Obvious or throw it away. “I don’t want to have to worry about getting buy-in from executives or a board, raising money, worrying about investor’s perceptions, or cashing out,” he blogged. The move was widely seen as heroic. “Odeo Buys Back Soul,” read the headline of gossip blog Valleywag.

Shortly after buying Odeo, Williams wrote a blog post that announced his intentions to sell the podcasting part of the company–a New York start-up paid a reported $1 million for the service–and focus on Twitter. The text messaging service had its coming-out party at the South by Southwest technology festival in March, where conference attendees eagerly began Twittering one another. From there it grew rapidly, reaching a hundred thousand users in a matter of weeks and garnering nationwide media coverage. In July, Williams formally spun off the company, raising several million dollars from Union Square Ventures, a New York City VC with a hands-off reputation. (Managing partner Fred Wilson, who, judging from his Twitters, really, really loves to eat at Murray’s Bagels, had been using the service for months.) Williams appointed Dorsey CEO and told him to focus exclusively on fixing Twitter’s reliability problems. Though Williams remains the single largest shareholder, he has taken pains to stay out of Twitter. The business model, he says, can wait until millions of people are using it.

Beginning on the first day of this year, Williams started working in earnest on Obvious. His work area is a small nook under a lofted conference room in Twitter’s San Francisco office. The building has served as a private home, a snowboard factory, and an underwear store. The soiled carpet is a sort of puke-green color, and the only natural light comes from a few skylights far overhead. To date, Williams has hired two contract engineers to build small software products; they are building an application that will allow users to write “notes to self.” Obvious isn’t particularly counting on this product–”It’s almost not worth talking about,” Williams says–but that’s the point. Williams wants to make product development less risky and more prone to the kind of spontaneity that created Twitter.

At the same time, he’s trying to find early-stage start-ups to roll up into Obvious. He says he would like to invest roughly $100,000 in each company. Everyone will work in the same office, which means he will eventually have to look for additional space. He’s also trying to hire an assistant: The job description warns that the candidate will be paid hourly “until you set up the payroll system for the company, and then we can discuss salary and insurance (once you set that up, too).”

The goal is to separate the creative environment of the start-up process from the regular work-a-day of running a business. “It’s all theory for now,” Williams says. “But we’re hoping that by setting up an environment with multiple projects at once, these happy accidents can occur.” If this sounds unbusinesslike, then that’s the point, too. Obvious is, in the broadest sense, a company founded on the idea that it’s hard to predict which ideas will work and which won’t. “It’s almost like a theater troupe,” says Stone. “The idea is to tinker around and to be willing to come up with flops.”

Like most good theater, Williams’s new company is at once disruptive and self-indulgent–an ambitious challenge to the Silicon Valley rule book and a test for all of those blog-worn theories. The company of little experiments is itself an experiment, and a chance for Ev to do something grand on his own terms.

Max Chafkin, Inc.

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Mash nominated for 2 awards at the ISP’s…

April 7th, 2009 By greg Filed Under: Mash in the Media

Following on from our recent Silver Award at the Field Marketing Awards, Mash have quickly followed this up by being shortlisted for two awards at the upcoming ISP awards in June through our excellent partnership with Branded Moments of Truth (BMT) and the hugely successful Get Real Fast Food Show with the School Foods Trust.

http://isp.org.uk/awards.php?pid=28

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Is Facebook Growing up Too Fast?

April 7th, 2009 By greg Filed Under: Interesting, Weird and Wonderful

200 million and counting…..

By BRAD STONE of The New York Times

When Facebook signed up its 100 millionth member last August, its employees spread out in two parks in Palo Alto, Calif., for a huge barbecue. Sometime this week, this five-year-old start-up, born in a dorm room at Harvard, expects to register its 200 millionth user.

That staggering growth rate – doubling in size in just eight months – suggests Facebook is rapidly becoming the Web’s dominant social ecosystem and an essential personal and business networking tool in much of the wired world.

Yet Facebook executives say they aren’t planning to observe their latest milestone in any significant way. It is, perhaps, a poor time to celebrate. The company that has given users new ways to connect and speak truth to power now often finds itself as the target of that formidable grass-roots firepower – most recently over controversial changes it made to users’ home pages.

As Facebook expands, it’s also struggling to match the momentum of hot new start-ups like Twitter, the micro-blogging service, while managing the expectations of young, tech-savvy early adopters, attracting mainstream moms and dads, and justifying its hype-carbonated valuation.

By any measure, Facebook’s growth is a great accomplishment. The crew of Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s 24-year-old co-founder and chief executive, is signing up nearly a million new members a day, and now more than 70 percent of the service’s members live overseas, in countries like Italy, the Czech Republic and Indonesia. Facebook’s ranks in those countries swelled last year after the company offered its site in their languages.

All of this mojo puts Facebook on a par with other groundbreaking – and wildly popular – Internet services like free e-mail, Google, the online calling network Skype and e-commerce sites like eBay. But Facebook promises to change how we communicate even more fundamentally, in part by digitally mapping and linking peripatetic people across space and time, allowing them to publicly share myriad and often very personal elements of their lives.

Unlike search engines, which ably track prominent Internet presences, Facebook reconnects regular folks with old friends and strengthens their bonds with new pals – even if the glue is nothing more than embarrassing old pictures or memories of their second-grade teacher.

Facebook can also help rebuild families. Karen Haber, a mother of two living outside Tel Aviv, logs onto Facebook each night after she puts the children to bed. She searches for her family’s various surnames, looking for relatives from the once-vast Bachenheimer clan of northern Germany, which fractured during the Holocaust and then dispersed around the globe.

Among the three dozen or so connections she has made on Facebook over the last year are a fifth cousin who is a clinical social worker in Woodstock, N.Y.; a fourth cousin running an eyeglasses store in Zurich; and another fifth cousin, living in Hong Kong selling diamonds. Now she shares memories, photographs and updates with them.

“I was never into genealogy and now suddenly I have this tool that helps me find the descendants of people that my grandparents knew, people who share the same truth I do,” Ms. Haber says. “I’m using Facebook and trying to unite this family.”

Facebook has also become a vehicle for broad-based activism – like the people who organized on the site last year and mobilized 12 million people to march in protests around the globe against practices of the FARC rebels in Colombia.

Discussing Facebook’s connective tissue, Mr. Zuckerberg recalls the story of Claus Drachmann, a schoolteacher in northern Denmark who became a Facebook friend of Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Denmark’s prime minister. Mr. Drachmann subsequently invited Mr. Rasmussen to speak to his class of special-needs children; the prime minister obliged last fall.

Mr. Zuckerberg says the story illustrates Facebook’s power to cut through arbitrary social barriers. “This represents a generational shift in technology,” he says. “To me, what is interesting was that it was possible for a regular person to reach the prime minister and that that interaction happened.”

As Facebook has matured, so has Mr. Zuckerberg. He has recently traded his disheveled, unassuming image for an ever-present tie and making visits to media outfits like “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” And he says Facebook’s most important metrics are not its membership but the percentage of the wired world that uses the site and the amount of information – photographs, news articles and status updates – zipping across its servers.

Facebook’s mission, he says, is to be used by everyone in the world to share information seamlessly. “Two hundred million in a world of six billion is tiny,” he says. “It’s a cool milestone. It’s great that we reached that, especially in such a short amount of time. But there is so much more to do.”

AS Facebook stampedes along, it still has to get out of its own way to soothe the injured feelings of users like Liz Rabban.

Ms. Rabban, 40, a real estate agent and the mother of two from Livingston, N.J., joined the site in November 2007, quickly amassing 250 friends and spending hours on the site each day.

But these days, she spends less time on the site and posts caustic comments about Facebook’s new design, which turns a majority of every user’s home page into a long “stream” of recent, often trivial, Twitter-like updates from friends.

“The changes just feel very juvenile,” Ms. Rabban says. “It’s just not addressing the needs of my generation and my peers. In my circle, everyone is pretty devastated about it.”

Ms. Rabban is not alone. More than two and a half million dissenters have joined a group on Facebook’s own site called “Millions Against Facebook’s New Layout and Terms of Service.” Others are lambasting the changes in their own status updates, which are now, ironically, distributed much more visibly to all of their Facebook friends.

The changes, Facebook executives say, are intended to make the act of sharing – not just information about themselves but what people are doing now – easier, faster and more urgent. Chris Cox, 26, Facebook’s director of products and a confidant of Mr. Zuckerberg, envisions users announcing where they are going to lunch as they leave their computers so friends can see the updates and join them.

“That is the kind of thing that is not meaningful when it is announced 40 minutes later,” he says.

The simmering conflict over the design change speaks to the challenges of pleasing 200 million users, many of whom feel pride of ownership because they helped to build the site with free labor and very personal contributions.

“They have a strange problem,” says S. Shyam Sundar, co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University, of Facebook’s quandary. “This is a technology that has inherently generated community, and it has gotten to the point where members of that community feel not only vested but empowered to challenge the company.”

Those tensions boiled up previously, when Facebook announced the intrusive Beacon advertising system in 2007, and again when Facebook introduced new service terms earlier this year, which appeared to give the company broad commercial control over the content people uploaded to the site.

Facebook responded to protests over the second move by promising users a vote in how the site would be governed.

But while Facebook is willing to give users a voice, it doesn’t necessarily want to listen.

Users are widely opposed to terms that grant Facebook the right to license, copy and disseminate members’ content worldwide. But Facebook says it has to ignore those objections to protect itself against lawsuits from users who might blame the company if they later regret having shared some piece of information with their friends. (Other Web sites have similar stipulations.)

While Facebook addressed the feedback on its unpopular design changes last week – partly by saying it would give users more control over the stream of updates that appear on their pages – it also said members’ pages would soon become even busier and more dynamic, updating automatically instead of requiring users to refresh their browsers to see new posts.

That’s a change that may irk users like Ms. Rabban, who don’t like how busy their pages have become. Facebook executives counter that it will help users share more information, and that they will eventually come to appreciate it, just as they have with previous changes that were initially jarring.

“It’s not a democracy,” Mr. Cox says of his company’s relationship with users. “We are here to build an Internet medium for communicating and we think we have enough perspective to do that and be caretakers of that vision.”

PEOPLE, of course, sometimes like to keep secrets and maintain separate social realms – or at least a modicum of their privacy. But Facebook at almost 200 million members is a force that reinvents and tears at such boundaries. Teachers are yoked together with students, parents with their children, employers with their employees.

Uniting disparate groups on a single Internet service runs counter to 50 years of research by sociologists into what is known as “homophily” – the tendency of individuals to associate only with like-minded people of similar age and ethnicity.

Facebook’s huge growth is creating inevitable collisions as the whole notion of “friend” takes on a highly elastic meaning. When the Philadelphia Eagles allowed the star safety Brian Dawkins to leave for the Denver Broncos earlier this month, Dan Leone, a gate chief at Lincoln Financial Field, the Eagles’ stadium, expressed his disappointment by referring to the situation with an obscenity on his Facebook status update.

Mr. Leone’s boss, who was his Facebook friend, forwarded the update to an Eagles guest services manager, who fired him. The team has since refused to reconsider the matter, despite Mr. Leone’s deep remorse and his star turn on countless radio talk shows across the country to discuss the situation.

“If you know your boss is online, or anyone close to your boss is online, don’t be making comments that can be detrimental to your employment,” Mr. Leone advises.

Facebook is trying to teach members to use privacy settings to manage their network so they can speak discreetly only to certain friends, like co-workers or family members, as opposed to other “friends” like bosses or professional colleagues. But most Facebook users haven’t taken advantage of the privacy settings; the company estimates that only 20 percent of its members use them.

Other problems are trickier, especially among true friends and family members. How, for example, can Facebook remain a place for teenagers to share what they did on Saturday night when it is also the place where their parents are swapping investment tips with old friends?

In the six weeks since Rich Hall, a 52-year-old theater manager in Mount Carroll, Ill., joined Facebook, he has reconnected with more than 400 friends and acquaintances, including former high school friends, his auto mechanic and former buddies from his days as a stock car driver.

In the course of his new half-hour-a-day Facebook habit, Mr. Hall also “friended” the 60 high school students he is directing in a school play, so he could coordinate rehearsal times. That led some of them to deny his request because, as he says they told him, their parents “found it creepy.” Along the way, Mr. Hall also found photographs of his 19-year-old son on the site, drinking beer at a Friday night bonfire.

“He denied it and said he wasn’t there,” Mr. Hall says. “I said, ‘Let’s go to this page together and look at these photos.’ Of course he did it. There are no secrets anymore.”

Dwindling secrets, and prying eyes, are at the heart of the Facebook conundrum. While offering an efficient and far-reaching way for people to bond, the site has also eroded sometimes natural barriers.

“People usually spend a lot of time trying to be separate – parents and children are a good example,” says Danah Boyd, a social scientist who has studied social networks and now works in the research department of Microsoft, which has invested in Facebook. “You are already seeing young people sitting there thinking, ‘Why am I hanging out with my mother who is reminiscing with her high school mates?’ You are seeing some reticence with young people that wasn’t there two years ago.”

For their part, Facebook executives say they are less interested in being cool than in being a useful place where anyone can go to share elements of their lives.

“The people who started the company weren’t cool. I’m not cool,” Mr. Cox says. “If you look at the people who work here, it’s much more nerdy and curious than cool.

“Cool only lasts for so long, but being useful is something that applies to everyone.”

MR. ZUCKERBERG hopes that being ubiquitous and useful translates to the bottom line.

Though Facebook is privately held and doesn’t publicly disclose its earnings, various press and analysts’ estimates of its 2008 revenues span from $250 million to $400 million. That range may not be enough to cover the company’s escalating expenses, and it hardly justifies some of the atmospheric valuations that have been placed on the start-up, including the $15 billion that Microsoft assigned to the company when it invested in it in 2007.

Facebook’s financial challenges aren’t unique. Popular free e-mail services like Hotmail from Microsoft and Gmail from Google have little in the way of profits to show for their vast audiences, aside from a few text ads that people rarely click on. Instant messaging networks like Microsoft Messenger and AIM from American Online are similarly popular but have never been hyperprofitable, for the simple reason that people do not want intrusive ads inserted into personal conversations.

Facebook’s approach is to invite advertisers to join in the conversation. New “engagement” ads ask users to become fans of products and companies – sometimes with the promise of discounts. If a person gives in, that commercial allegiance is then broadcast to all of the person’s friends on the site.

A new kind of engagement ad, now being tested, will invite people to vote – “what’s your favorite color M&M?” for example – and brands will pay every time a Facebook member participates.

“We are trying to provide the antidote for the consumer rebellion against interruptive advertising,” says Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer and Mr. Zuckerberg’s business consigliere.

Ms. Sandberg, who ran Google’s highly successful advertising initiatives before leaving the search giant to join Facebook, said her company’s revenue was growing despite a brutal downturn that is hurting other kinds of online advertising. She also puts one rumor to rest, saying the company is not considering charging members for any aspect of its service.

“We’re pretty pleased with the overall trajectory,” she says. “Our conversations with big advertisers have broadened in scope and we also have more people asking about how they can work with us.”

Facebook recently introduced advertising tools to let companies focus on users based on the language they use on the site and their geographic location. So, for example, an advertiser can now tailor a message to the Latino community in Los Angeles or French speakers in Montreal.

Despite the gloom permeating much of the advertising world, and the formidable challenges facing the site, some advertisers say they glimpse the future in Facebook’s brand of interactive advertising.

“Our clients all want to see if they can make this work,” says Al Cadena, the interactive account director at Threshold Interactive in Los Angeles, which represents companies like Nestlé, Honda and Sony. “Advertising used to be a one-way communication from advertiser to consumer, but now people want to have a dialogue. And Facebook is becoming the default way to do that, not only in the States but really for the whole world.”

Internet evangelists say that when a technology diffuses into society, as Facebook appears to be doing, it has achieved “critical mass.” The sheer presence of all their friends, family and colleagues on Facebook creates potent ties between users and the site – ties that are hard to break even when people want to break them.

Many who have tried to free themselves of their daily Facebook habit and leave the site, like Kerry Docherty, a student at Pepperdine University’s law school, speak of a powerful gravitational pull and an undercurrent of peer pressure that eventually brings them back.

“People gave me a hard time for leaving Facebook,” says Ms. Docherty, who quit at the end of 2007 but then rejoined six months later. “Everyone has a love-hate relationship with it. They wanted me to be wasting my time on it just like they were wasting their time on it.”

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Maddie’s Blog – Part 1

March 31st, 2009 By greg Filed Under: Maddie's Blog

Maddie and Holly and the famous Sock Monkeys

My name is Maddie George. I am 23. I live in North London. I like to spend my Saturdays exploring, laughing, and eating cake. I like the colour purple, I like The Beatles. I like cookery shows, and harbour an unhealthy obsession with 24 / Jack Bauer. I clean too much, I recycle and boss my boyfriend around more than he would like. My spelling is rubbish. I am normal.

On 22nd January 2009, less than 24 hours after finding a lump in my neck, I was diagnosed with Stage 2a Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a type of Cancer that affects the Lymph nodes (the glands in your neck, groin and armpits).

In a split second, my life was turned upside down, destined never to be the same again. I am a positive person but the thought of having and battling cancer was a massive shock to the system and more than I thought I could handle.
What does this mean? How will this affect me? Will I see my next birthday? How bad is it? Why do I not look sick? These questions muddled through my head one after the other. While Cancer is very rare, I couldn’t help but ask ‘Why me?’.

However, straight away, wonderful things started to happen and I couldn’t help but feel that actually, I am a very blessed, lucky girl. In the early days of my diagnosis some truly great friends and family gave me so much love and support, that the bad thoughts slipped away.

My friend Lucy rushed to my bed side and took on the role as my PA. My friend Mary turned up at the hospital unannounced to be with me. My brother sat by my bed, ready to provide whatever I needed. My Mum and Boyfriend dropped everything and raced down the A1 to get to me. My fellow Mashers in the office made a card with Jack Bauer on it. My housemates packed up some of my belongings and hand delivered them to me. And then there were the flowers, the gorgeous flowers that arrived from so many supportive faces.

The night I came home from hospital we had a mini party with some of my friends and family. All I wanted to eat was duck, so we got duck. All I wanted to drink was wine (unsurprisingly!), so we got wine. I started to think maybe if I was going to start getting my own way all the time, maybe this wouldn’t be so bad (!). As I looked around the living room, I couldn’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of happiness to see all the faces of wonderful people that were rallying round me.

From that moment on, I was determined to stay firmly on the bright side of life and fight for the silver lining at the bottom of all of this.

At the same time, my housemate Holly went to a Craft afternoon and made a sock monkey. When she got home, Holly gave me her monkey and it was love at first sight. The monkey just made me really, really, really laugh – it was so cute! It put such a huge smile on my face and made me so happy that I took it everywhere with me, everywhere. It was my good luck charm, my mascot, my friend. From then on, it was me and the monkey against Cancer together.

I found out I would have to have chemotherapy treatment which involves 6 hours in the hospital so toxic drugs can be fed into me and attack the cancer. 6 hours? How boring! Holly suggested that I start making sock monkeys while I was going through treatment to keep me occupied and keep me occupied. When Doctors told me that I would need 4 months of chemo, we realised that not only would I lose my hair, but that a lot of monkeys could be made!

Everybody needs a sock monkey...

The NHS kindly offer one free wig for all cancer patients but they made me look a bit like a shop mannequin (!) and were not very nice. I discovered that a beautiful looking wig could cost anywhere from £500 – £3000, a lot more than I could afford. And then it dawned on us. Everyone we’d shown had loved the sock monkeys and wanted one of their own. We could sell the monkeys to help raise money for the wig AND raise money for the Lymphoma Association AND spread the joy of the monkeys!

And so it was…Monkeys for Maddie was born…and I haven’t looked back.

The message behind the monkeys is that behind every dark cloud, there is a silver lining.

I’ll be keeping you updated on my progress through the Mash blog but in the meantime, please do visit us at http://www.monkeysformaddie.com/ to order your own sock monkey. We also NEED MORE SOCKS to monkey up so please post them to me at the address given or if you just want to say hello then please do at: monkeysformaddie@googlemail.com

The more colourful the sock, the more personality your sock monkey has!

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Fay Harvey does Mash proud in the Field Marketing Magazine.

March 26th, 2009 By greg Filed Under: Mash in the Media

The Best Reps

Here Frank Wainwright – in his Best Practice series in the monthly Field Marketing magazine - assesses the value that the best reps can bring to a temporary campaign.

Tactical field marketing and just about all experiential activities draw their staff from the same available workforce, a staff army who are often still referred to by some of the industry old guard as promogirls. More correctly they are promotional staff, field representatives and brand ambassadors.

The last term, brand ambassadors, is the preferred term for most agencies these days. It is a term which is designed to reinforce the quality message. It says “we don’t just sling bodies into the field for you, we provide level-headed brand advocates”.

People are imperfect and quality will definitely differ. So how can you tell the difference between an agency that provides true ambassadors and one that just says they do? There are checks you can make, and if you don’t make those checks then you risk sending brand loafers out where you’d been promised ambassadors. The checks can be performed as part of the pitch process.

In my experience RFIs often ask numerous wasteful questions about agency philosophy and internal procedure but ask virtually no useful questions about staff. Staffing questions will not only give you a realistic expectation of field performance but also show up more about the responsibility of the agency than 00 other bland questions.

“Where will the staff come from and why?” is a good place to start. Staff will sometimes be directly employed by the same agency that is devising the strategy. Sometimes they will outsource the job to a specialist staffing agency. Both routes have their merits. The next question should be “What is the employment procedure and how quickly do the staff get paid?”

Once a campaign is underway, speaking directly to reps in action on your work is invariably useful. The reps owe no allegiance to any one agency and a good performer will have been through plenty of employers until they have enough work to pick and choose. They will soon tell you about past bad experiences. A typical complaint is the waiting time prior to getting paid, a process that can drag on for months.

At the core there is a key best practice question for clients here too. All field and experiential marketing relies on cashflow and because this is a people business the knock-on effects of clients who don’t pay on time is more severe than in other forms of advertising. Agencies can be put under undue cashflow pressure and in the worst instances, pay for the reps who have carried out the work can be delayed.

Nevertheless there are definitely agencies that have a reputation by key regular reps in the industry as bad payers on a regular basis. These regulars are often the reps who love promotional work and understand brand values. They can make a significant impact on campaign success. These reps find their preferred staffing agencies and won’t go back to the bad payers. So, where they go is often an indicator of quality of both the performance and the administration process at the agency.

Top Masher :: Fay Harvey

Fay Harvey is a brand ambassador who takes on a wide range of work, choosing to work for three agencies in advance of the rest – Mash, Tribe and Method Two. She has been in the industry for 5 years, enough time to know where not to go.

Fay’s work for staffing agency Mash takes her to Dubai and Rome helping to host B2B events for airport supplier Arinc and on sampling/experiential activities for brands such as Jordans or The Natural Confectionery Company. Some of this work, including TNCC, originated through the agency Sledge who use Mash for much of their staffing. She estimates that she does 80 per cent of her work for Mash.

Fay sampling for the successful Jordans campaign

For Method Two, Fay has been working on a Wolf Blass wine sampling activity – work which has seen her attending rugby internationals this winter and will make her a prime participant in the forthcoming Ashes series this Summer.

For Tribe, Fay has been providing the public with knowledge of the plans for NHS development in London boroughs, gaining feedback for the authorities on the popularity of their plans.

This schedule is the perfect illustration as to why good promotional people enjoy their work. It offers enormous variety and scope. I spoke to Fay on a day when she was not working – also a guilty pleasure. “I really enjoy the work that I do” she says, “and to an extent I also get to pick and choose the days that I work”. Fay is full of praise for her current roster of employers, just as they praise her, and she will be nobody’s fool. She doesn’t go back to agencies that mess her around and she discourages others from doing so. Staff in the industry inevitably overlap a lot, and so better operators get to know where to choose to work. “Pay rates in the industry are fairly uniform”, she says, “so you choose where to work based on how quickly they pay and by who you will work with”. The reference to who you will work with intrigued me. “It’s about doing a good professional job as a team”, she says “with Mash you will see everyone on the same job working with the same positive attitude. You don’t get that everywhere. Sometimes there will be people there who don’t want to be. It can have the effect of holding the whole team back”. Mash, she points out, make themselves close to reps, using newsletters and running incentive competitions building a club atmosphere.

TNCC Activity :: Created by Sledge :: Implemented and staffed by Mash

I speak to reps on a regular basis and always ask them about their work in stores and stations and at events. Fay confirmed for me what I have heard on numerous other occasions, there are two types of rep available, brand ambassadors and brand loafers. As consumers we have all been on the end of positive and indifferent brand experiences.

The encouraging news for brand owners is that there are more and more genuine brand ambassadors available. They are creative people who see promotional work as a career that supports their other creative talents. Fay is a dancer, a musician who dislikes working in offices. Karen Laubscher, our 2008 field rep of the year combines sampling and sales work with her demanding parenting role.

Getting the best faces to your brand will make a huge difference to the success of the campaign. Setting out cashflow principles between yourself and the agency from the off and asking pertinent staffing questions at pitch stage is a good way of controlling and making sure that the clever creative ideas translate into positive impact at street level.

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A Spring in the step…

March 19th, 2009 By greg Filed Under: Interesting, Weird and Wonderful

It’s been threatening to spring for a couple of weeks now, but finally, gloriously it’s here. And the the sign? The guarantee that it’s the real thing? The London equivalent of the first swallow? Today we saw our first sunburnt office worker. Fearsomely lobsterish from brow to chin, he was an example to us all. To get that burnt, in that little time, he must have spent the entire weekend staring solemnly at the sun, swivelling minutely to catch every last degree of its effect, while lathering himself in chip oil. Truly a hero for our times.

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Mash open new Gym..

March 18th, 2009 By greg Filed Under: Interesting, Weird and Wonderful

In celebration of the launch of our new website, Mash opened the doors to the new staff gym this week…..

http://www.thecoolhunter.net/design/Wellness-Sky/

ahem…if only!!

for more cool stuff – check out thecoolhunter website.

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The MASH Blog

March 16th, 2009 By greg Filed Under: Uncategorized

Welcome to the Mash Blog, our psyche couch where we pour our thoughts, ideas and general opinions out in to the e-ether. We want to have a two way conversation and hope very much that our articles and postings will inspire debate, argument, conference and new ideas! You’ll initially find sections detailing;

Our recruitment initiatives that are being implemented through our brand champions.
Our latest Masher of the Month.
sMashing news March edition.
Meet the characters from the Mighty Mash.
Leyton’s blog on becoming a Dad!
Our thoughts on all things staffing and experiential related.
Interesting, weird and wonderful.

If there are topics that you think we need to cover off, that are not currently being discussed through our facebook page or through the blog, please let us know and we’ll add it on. We look forward to hearing from you!

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Leyton’s Blog # 1

March 13th, 2009 By greg Filed Under: Leyton's Blog

“The boy becomes a man”

A quick background::

I’m 33 years old, married, to my wife Emma.

What I like:

A nice restaurant, a fine glass of wine, going on holidays, a game of pool with my mates in Shoreditch, fashion, art, weekends away, scuba diving, films, business, current affairs and I try to maintain a gym routine that would tick our government’s weekly guidelines…

Post university, I moved to London where I still reside and for the last 10 years, I’ve embraced the life that our nation’s capital bestows this demographic with ease.

I’d consider myself private on occasions, I get annoyed at large shopping crowds, (go to Oxford Street on a pre Christmas Saturday afternoon and you’ll start to agree) exasperated as soon as I enter any element of London underground, (a poor service, overcrowding and constant delays…) and reality TV, it was so over post Big Brother One

Apart from this, I’m a happy go lucky kinda guy. I’m committed to my career, my wife, family and friends. A cliché I know, but a work hard, play hard mentality has been my staple diet this last decade.

I’ve no children.

But it is this last statement that has prompted me to write a few words as I’m going to be a Father, a Dad, a Parent… I’m going to become an adult; one of those grown up people that I’ve always known, but never really considered myself to be one.

I’ve acted as an adult on many occasions. For example, I’ve voted in two general elections, worked hard in my career, where I’ve made tough decisions, I have a mortgage…. I’ve even had a joint bank account with my wife before we were married. All adult behaviour, but until a baby is born, until I’m a parent, mentally I’m still a boy.

Now I’m not a writer, but I thought it would be nice to capture these moments, the emotions, the questions; so that in the many years to come I can look back in solitude, with my wife and or with my children and read aloud these words from a rambling Father’s history as I try to capture this wonderful journey today.

I’m going to be a father, I’m going to be a grown up. I’ve opened the door to my new world and I’m waiting to greet our new arrival with many mixed emotions…

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Masher of the Month

March 13th, 2009 By greg Filed Under: Masher of the Month

Every month MASH love to reward our top performers. The staff who go the extra mile in order to ensure the successful delivery of a campaign. We speak to fellow Mashers, Event Managers, Clients and also all the guys in the office here in order to select our shortlist. We then get all statistical and analyse recent evaluation/performance scores from recent campaigns, based on; Punctuality, Demeanour, Product Knowledge, Appearance and Professionalism and decide on our Masher of the Month!

So you see…it’s no easy street to stardom..but those that make it…..they simply never look back!!

The honour, prestige and downright celebrity status brought to our MOM’s by profiling them to the nation via the blog is obviously more than enough..:) but we don’t stop there….every winner receives £100 in Arcadia Shopping Vouchers to stock up on black trousers, black shoes…….erm..maybe not!

Let us introduce to you our latest Masher of the Month …..the first Masher of the Month on the new website, the best Masher in April…… – is that enough of an introduction Christiana?

“I’m so chuffed that I’m Masher of the month! Thank you )”

a) I am not a politician but if I was…………. I would quit!

b) In moments of weakness I……………….. try to think logically and/or call my best mates who double up as agony aunts.

c) You know me as a Masher but in another life I’d have been…… a jalapeno pepper farmer

d) In a nutshell, my philosophy is………… work hard play hard (sayings become cliches for a reason!!)

Look out for May’s Top Masher next month!

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