Whenever I try out a new product, I always try to ask myself what question the designer was trying to answer by building it. When I first started using Path, the core question behind it seemed clear to me:

What kind of information would you share if you could keep it within a network of people you really trust and like?

I think the answer is simple – you’d probably be willing to share a lot, including location, what you’re thinking, the people with whom you’re hanging out, and whether you’re asleep or awake. In my last weeks using the new Path, I think they’ve succeeded in creating something that feels useful and interesting of your Facebook graph has become too big and spans too many parts of your life. A few quick thoughts.

Features that feel creepy in a large social network like Facebook don’t feel creepy on Path. When I saw the first, “Person X visited your Path” message in the tray, I was a bit taken aback. It seemed weird to have that kind of insight. But once I realized the people visiting my Path were close friends, it didn’t feel so weird. I kinda liked it, actually.

Choosing which friends to include on Path is hard. Because Path feels like the product is geared around feeling comfortable sharing with a tight trusted group, it really matters who you include. I’ve been sitting on a bunch of Path requests because I’m not yet sure which people to invite.

Many people I know have Facebook graphs that span work colleagues, casual acquaintances, school friends, close friends, and others. Having an amalgamated graph with different contexts generally leads to people thinking harder about what to share on Facebook. I know that my sharing habits have changed as my graph has grown – I share less and the things I share are (I hope) interesting to a large chunk of my Facebook friends. I’ve already seen my small group of friends sharing things on Path that they weren’t sharing on Facebook. It will be interesting to see whether people with large social graphs opt for something like Path or go back and curate their existing friendships on Facebook to facilitate context-appropriate sharing.

As always, comments are open or you can message me on Twitter @chudson if you prefer.

Yelp has succeeded by becoming the de facto place to review restaurants and places of interest. You don’t need “friends” on Yelp to get value from the system as it depends on a combination of crowd feedback and good SEO to show up when you’re trying to get a read on places to go. Yelp has done really well in proving out the business value in creating an advertising and editorial relationship with local businesses. They’ve done such a good job, in fact, that they’re filing for a sizable IPO. But Yelp is becoming difficult to use for me for two reasons. One, the reviews are becoming too wordy – there are too many 500 word preambles about everything that happened prior to visiting the place before you get to the meat of the review. That’s too much reading for too little value. Second, reviews (over time) seem to converge on 4 stars. That’s not a problem with Yelp, it’s more a consequence of a 5-star review system – maintaining 5 stars is virtually impossible and who wants to go to a place that can’t at least hold 3 stars? That being said, Yelp is still useful for many and continues to grow.

While foursquare is valuable to me, I am not willing to open up my real-time foursquare checkin activity to the world and the service has been pretty uninteresting if you don’t have friends on it (until today). I would have to say that foursquare is one of my favorite social networks. The downside of being a double opt-in / symmetric friend network is that the service is really only fun if you have other friends on it. They don’t have a real “follower” model – the data you get as an active user is a function of what your friends choose to do. But foursquare is gathering a lot of data. Ask a lot of location-based services companies whose places graph is the best and many of them will tell you that it’s foursquare. So they are doing a really good job of activating and engaging the community of people who like the product. But most of this data and insights is locked up in the service and accessible to those who are active participants. I believe that the non logged in user homepage is the first step toward making the service more useful to a wide range of users. It will expose (and make useful) a lot of the data they’ve collected.

The other step I see foursquare making is the level-based badging system. This provides them with a really unique opportunity. It could (potentially) mean a lot more to me to see the top-rated or reviewed sushi restaurants from people with the high-level “Bento” badge on foursquare because at least I have some sense that person has visited a number of sushi restaurants and should have a point of view. That’s not something that’s easy to get from Yelp today.

So, for what it’s worth, I think Yelp and foursquare are on a long-term collision course around being the authoritative source for local recommendations and reviews. If you have thoughts or comments, feel free to leave them below or message me on twitter @chudson

I think the Beluga app is beautiful and well done, but I can’t seem to figure out where it fits into my mobile needs. Below are the core mobile tools that I use – if you’re a Beluga user and have some good use cases, do let me know:

Mobile IM (Meebo) – I use Meebo for mobile IM. Mobile IM fills an important gap in my communications life – it gives me the flexibility to extend a service I already use heavily (desktop IM) while on the go and makes use of the buddy lists I’ve already created. And it works on Android and iOS, which is key for me.

Text Messaging – Text is my mobile-only channel of choice. It comes right to my phone. It’s fast. And it’s high-quality signal as I only hear from people who have my phone number. Pretty clear and strong use case for being able to message on the go with text messaging.

Situational Group Texting (GroupMe, Fast Society) – I also get the use case for GroupMe and Fast Society. I travel a decent amount and also have groups of people with with whom I want to communicate for brief periods of time. For example, I’m planning to use one of these services when I’m down in Austin for SXSW to keep up with a group of guys I know. I’ve also used both services for weekend trips with friends where everyone wants to keep in touch and allow everyone to see the what’s going on. These aren’t services that I need to use every day, but they do serve an important purpose.

Overall, I feel like my mobile messaging needs are being pretty well met. I’m not sure where Beluga should fit in my mobile messaging needs, but I also didn’t see how GroupMe and Fast Society would fit either until I had that ah-ha moment.

As a matter of background, here’s my foursquare usage by the numbers:
-I joined FourSquare on March 14, 2009, or about 607 days ago at the time of this post
-To date, I’ve had 1,766 checkins, or almost 3 per day. My check-ins tend to come in bunches, so that 3 per day average is not really indicative of my usage pattern.
-I’ve unlocked 25 badges and left about 15 tips at places I’ve visited

I would describe myself as an active user of Foursquare and a reasonably enthusiastic one. I don’t know that Facebook was targeting people like me with Places – there are far more people who are on Facebook and not using foursquare to be won than there are people on foursquare for Facebook to steal. That’s the opportunity for both companies – convert the large swath of people who aren’t using either service. Below are a few reasons why I haven’t dropped foursquare for Facebook Places:

1. I use foursquare like I use Twitter – I don’t want to syndicate everything to Facebook. I consider my usage of foursquare and Twitter to be very similar. I’m very chatty on both services and generate a lot of stuff (not all of it interesting). I just don’t believe my friends want to see my every check-in in the same way that I don’t think they want to see every tweet. If I have a check-in that I think is particularly cool or noteworthy, I will syndicate it to Twitter or Facebook. And I have noticed that cool check-ins syndicated to Facebook from foursquare do generate comments, likes, etc. But unleashing the firehose of 3-4 check-ins per day and many more than that when I’m in a new place would probably feel like noise on Facebook.

2. I am more liberal with my Facebook friend requests than I am with my foursquare friend requests. Maybe it’s because I’m in my 30s, but I simply don’t want everyone I know to know where I am at all times. So I’m actually pretty picky with accepting foursquare requests. Everyone in my social graph on foursquare is a real person I actually know – that’s not necessarily the case on Facebook. The people on my foursquare graph are largely people I know well and who also use the service – it’s safe for me to assume that they’re both open to publishing their own location data as well as finding mine interesting. Because my foursquare network is smaller and purpose-selected for sharing location data, I don’t have to worry about check-ins being spammy or noisy – that’s what those people are there to see / hear / generate.

3. I’m not actually looking to “get anything” out of my checkins – I just like it and think it’s cool to both share where I’ve been and keep track of it myself. I’ve seen some compelling articles about how deals, discounts, prizes, or the “give me something for checking in” motivation will be what makes customers actually use a service here. I’m not motivated by that stuff. No check-in product out there can claim to have invented loyalty programs – businesses have been thinking about how to motivate customer loyalty for a long time and check-ins are just one other way to measure visit frequency. And I don’t check in to get free stuff most of the time – I think of it more as a nice reward or bonus. Check-ins are for entertainment for me and most entertainment products don’t save me money, they cost me money. The whole coupons / rewards motivation and why I’m not completely sold on that warrants its own post.

4. Foursquare works fine and I see no reason to switch. This goes in the “duh” category. I just like the product and even a reasonably compelling substitute in Facebook Places isn’t sufficiently compelling to make me switch. It just doesn’t fit my use case or usage patterns.

Anyway, I know I’m probably a “power user” of foursquare by most accounts, so my experience should be viewed through that lens. However, if you used to use foursquare and have switched to Facebook Places, I’d be curious to hear why. Comments are open as always.

I continue to be a strong believer that the ultimate path for Facebook Connect is to have that service paired with an ad network that works off Facebook – users who sign in with FB connect on 3rd party websites will see ads that are not only based on the context of the page but on their behavior and preferences from activities on Facebook. Facebook already has a lucrative display ad business on its own site and it seems pretty clear to me that advertising is going to be a core, if not the primary, revenue stream for the company. Provided that is the case, I understand the benefits of Facebook pushing Facebook Connect broadly as a precursor to an off-Facebook ad product.

So what’s the development path for “Sign in with Twitter” at the end of the day? Twitter still hasn’t unveiled a business model, so it’s hard to figure out how it fits into the big picture. Maybe it isn’t part of a grand plan. But the more I use Twitter, the more I see it as a great distribution / publishing platform. If Twitter continues to go down the road of focusing on their platform as a way to distribute and broadcast short-form content, I can see their 3rd party sign-in service as a way to turbocharge the distribution of content on news, blogs, and e-commerce sites. But I’m not sure what that ultimately does for Twitter.

The one thing that does make sense to me, though, is that Twitter is working as a distribution source for blogs and news sites and I suspect they would embrace and welcome a lightweight service that helps them a) know more about who some of the people are who enjoy consuming and distributing their content and b) makes it much easier for them to get more reach for the things they produce.

What do you think? Any thoughts on how “Sign in with Twitter” fits into the big picture for Twitter?

If you’re going to work on a feature that ought to exist (filling a hole, so to speak), you might end up in a single or zero winner situation – It seems to me that the danger of building an application on someone else’s platform that you think ought to exist is that there’s likely only going to be one (or possibly no) winners in the end. If it is in fact a hole, there’s probably one company that the platform owner could anoint as the winner and either give that company preferential treatment or acquire the company itself. Even worse, if it’s an obvious hole, the platform might build it on their own, leaving everyone out in the cold.

If you’re really just filling a hole that the chosen platform just hasn’t gotten around to filling, that might be okay if you’re in a build-to-flip type of opportunity. If you’re trying to build something sustainable, it seems like this is a tough way to go.

It’s very dangerous to build on platforms where the platform itself hasn’t figured out it’s own monetization strategy – I’m surprised nobody talks about this more often. If the underlying platform on which you’re building hasn’t figured out its own monetization strategy, you’re taking a lot of risk with your own business. Until you know the strategy and business model for the platform you’re on, there’s always the risk that your product and strategy could become obsolete once they do figure out a business model. Even worse, your chosen model could end up being at odds with their own strategy.

Make sure you understand the cultural orientation of the platform on which you’re building – Some platforms are really about letting a thousand flowers bloom (Facebook) while others are more tightly controlled (Apple). With that cultural orientation in mind, it’s hard to be surprised when Apple does something with the iPhone / iPod / iPad platform that feels like a land grab – they have a history of exercising tight control.

This is what makes the Twitter situation so interesting to me. They have historically (as in the last few years) been all about letting innovation flourish. It appears that they now might be changing their perspective. Living on someone else’s platform requires that you understand this stuff really well.

My Gmail inbox is really a catch-all place for communications. Its composition includes transient and long-term relationships, business and personal communications, and a host of other things that I file away for later review. I tend to treat my gmail Inbox like a big junk searchable junk drawer -it’s a good place to keep stuff for later use.

That being said, if you wanted to bootstrap a social graph from my inbox behavior, you would need to understand a few things:

Context – For any given person with whom i communicate, what’s the context? Are we friends? Colleagues? Business associates? Alums from the same school or program? All of this matters as it determines what I might want to share with them.

Flow – What’s the direction of the communication? How often do we communicate? Is it unidirectional or bidirectional? Take Amazon, for example. I receive and read a lot of email from Amazon. But I nee wrote back. I also have people in my inbox who send me lots of interesting stuff, but it’s mostly a broadcast relationship. Raw communications volume is not necessarily a good proxy.

The two issues above can easily be solved by making a system opt-in. That alleviates the need for Google to try to infer context and flow as I can do that heavy lifting for the system by choosing which people to include and invite.

The reality, though, is that Google is a bit late to this party. Let’s dissect the situation. Google’s best and biggest social graph (or the biggest and best social graph that they can access and index) is Gmail. They can’t get at Facebook or Twitter, so they have to work with what they have. While an opt-in system, would have been more privacy-friendly, it almost certainly would slow adoption and growth. Inviting people to something new is time consuming. And a service like Buzz isn’t interesting or useful until you have enough people on it, sharing information, and engaging to make it feel vibrant. So if Google wanted to try to catch up in social content sharing, the fastest path would be to put it in Gmail and make it default opt-in.

I’m also waiting for Google to start looking at what I’m doing in Gmail and starting to insert contextual Buzz prompts. For example, how long will it be before I’m sending out a link to a cool YouTube video to a group of friends and I get a prompt to post it to buzz in addition? The same is true of Picasa photos, Flickr photos, or any thee piece of web content. Gmail Labs already has some handlers that can detect and display certain types of content – why not apply those to Buzz?

In th end, Buzz will work of it drives traffic to content sites or helps people engage around content.

Facebook vs Application Developers
I (obviously) have a vested interest in how this plays out given my work with Serious Business. Nonetheless, I’m fascinated to see how Facebook, with its growing might and clout, manages its relationship with the developer ecosystem that is both growing on the back of and driving the growth of Facebook. There are literally billions of dollars at stake here. Will developers abandon the Facebook platform and look for greener pastures? Will Facebook look to extract too much from the developers who live on and create value for the Facebook platform? This will be interesting, I’m sure.

Google vs Content “Farms”
This one is very interesting to me. What was once a fairly stealth industry of content farms and sites building content specifically tailored for Google SEO has come into the limelight of late. What will Google do? Is it a threat they want to police or a necessary evil given their ubiquity?

Apple vs iPhone Application Developers
There are clearly a number of iPhone app developers who are complaining about Apple’s approval process and restrictions about what app developers can and cannot do. Is it possible that Apple could push developers to look elsewhere, namely Android? Will the Google Nexus One move developers en masse to the Android platform? Or will developers grin and bear it so long as the iPhone is the dominant platform?

AppleTV vs content owners
I’m hoping to get an AppleTV for Christmas (fingers crossed). I’m very curious to see whether the AppleTV turns into iTunes 2.0 with Apple capturing a large chunk of the margins for the responsibility of delivering a hardware + software experience that gets consumers to sign up in meaningful numbers. Will content owners push back? Can they?

Twitter and the Twitter App / Service Ecosystem
One of my favorite things to watch. Twitter has raised a ton of money. And they have app developers who have built really interesting applications and services on top of Twitter but have yet to monetize. Will Twitter acquire some of the most promising development shops? Will they change the terms of service to put those folks out of business? Something in between? I’m curious.

What do you think? What’s on your mind for 2010?

This is not a comprehensive analysis, just my early thoughts.

Twitter is for sharing links, Tumblr is for sharing media – With all of the caveats that apply about anecdotal information, my experience has been that my universe of people on Twitter use the service to do a few discrete things – they share links to interesting content (basically a filtered feed reader on steroids), they share interesting quotes / comments that they encounter in their everyday lives, and they use it as a way to share social kudos with others via re-tweeting and public @messages. My usage of Tumblr is totally different. Whereas the call-to-action when you log into Twitter is to tell the world what you’re doing or what’s going on, the CTA on Tumblr is really different – check out the UI you encounter when you log in:

The prompt for Tumblr is to share something, but they present you with a myriad of different kinds of content types that you can choose – pictures, text, quotes, audio, video, etc. The well-done iPhone application also gives you the same experience. The only conclusion I can draw from this, as a user, is that Tumblr is about sharing media, not just links. And that’s what I’m using it to do.

Twitter is about trying to spark a reaction or conversation, Tumblr feels more about self expression – A lot of what I see on Twitter is people sharing things (links, comments, quotes, pictures, etc) that they want to see distributed more broadly. Whether it’s a blog post, a news article, self-promotional / brand building plugs, startup advice, historical quotes, or whatever, the goal is the same – to launch it into the Twittersphere and have others spread the word via RTs and @ messages.

The UI of Tumblr really seems to de-emphasize this idea of re-sharing content. Sure, they have a “reblog” function that allows you to post something that you find to your own tumblog. But it’s not a front-and-center feature nor does it appear to be a big part of what I see people doing on Tumblr. The UI of Tumblr also is heavily oriented toward customizing your theme, which is not something Twitter pushes nearly as heavily.

Do you use both services? What do you think?

1. Facebook has much higher engagement than Twitter, whether you measure it by time spent, frequency of login / usage, intensity of interaction, or any other meaningful metric. This makes sense – social networks have more opportunities to engage users than communication utilities do. Rightly or wrongly, my perception is that Facebook users spend a lot more time on Facebook and engage more deeply on that platform than Twitter users do on average. Why do I believe this? Well, I think that one of the primary reasons people continue to hang out on Facebook for ungodly amounts of time is that Facebook does an amazing job of creating context out of content via the use of metadata. For example, looking at pictures on Facebook is often times more interesting than looking at them in other places because you’re likely to get photos that are tagged with socially-useful information (names of people, links to those people’s profiles, comments from other people etc). The same can be said of posted items, status updates, videos, or just about any other type of web content. While Twitpic and other services are great for sharing photos on Twitter, I don’t believe those services create the same kind of social metadata that a well tagged Facebook photo album does. Part of the cool part of consuming content on Facebook is that it offers the opportunity to discover new people who are friends of friends and to better understand your friends’ social patterns.

Another somewhat subtle difference is the way in which both networks make use of passive or casual users. On Twitter, if you’re not tweeting or people aren’t @replying to you, you’re effectively invisible to many people on the service. To some degree, Facebook gets around this problem (to a limited degree) by allowing users to create metadata that involves users who are not active users of the service. For example, tagging a full photo album with friends of yours who are not active on Facebook creates an opportunity for them to be re-engaged when they’re notified about being tagged or when someone else comments to them directly.

Why is this relevant to games? Well, at the end of the day, games (free-to-play games in particular) need engaged users to work. If you have a platform with a lot of registered users who do not engage regularly, that does not strike me as the most fertile place in which to create a games ecosystem.

2. Facebook has an incredibly short loop between discovering games and engaging with them – games can be played “in-stream” in the current Facebook UI. One of the best thing for social games developers working on the Facebook platform is the opportunity to leverage all of Facebook’s communication channels to acquire users. Whether it’s the newsfeed, a notification, or an invite, there are tons of ways to engage game players on social networks. What’s even better, though, is that those users are one click away from playing your game in what looks and feels like the same native experience. Playing Facebook games doesn’t require you to leave Facebook – you just click from within Facebook to an iFrame or other page that looks and feels like you’re still in Facebook (including the Facebook header and nav bar), play until you’re bored or out of energy, and then go back to browsing your news feed or chatting with friends. This both makes user acquisition fairly easy for developers and makes game discovery easy for consumers.

Twitter does not today have this luxury. People access Twitter through a variety of ways (mobile, desktop applications, web apps, IM, etc), none of which provide a consistent UI or discover paradigm. And there isn’t any way to play Twitter games in-stream – most of the games that I’ve seen show up in my Twitter stream require the player to go to a 3rd party site to create an account or otherwise perform game actions. Having to click away from what you’re doing to play or interact with a game introduces more friction than is found on the Facebook platform. It also makes content discovery more difficult – without a graphically rich news feed in which players can “brag” or show what they’re doing, I have to believe it’s harder to show prospective users what the game is like and why they should play.

On a related note, it’s taken Facebook developers a long time to figure out the right balance between invites, notifications, and newsfeed items as promotional channels for their applications. Twitter really gives you three options right now – @replies, twitter “status” updates, and DMs. I’m not sure either any of these is necessarily appropriate. I can see the value in DMs as a user-to-user notification system for players who are in games. And I can see why @replies would be a good channel to leverage if you’re a game developer. But do most users want game-related @reply messages? I don’t know. For games like foursquare where the information being published in status updates (location) is generally consistent with what users share naturally, maybe that works.

Feel free to add your thoughts below. Thanks for reading.