Since the beginning of the web, search engines have represented the center point of a users experience with the Internet. I think (and I’m not the only one) that this long-standing trueism may no longer hold. This hasn’t happened since the web overtook AOL, Compuserve, and others, so of course there are many skeptics. But in December Facebook had more traffic than all the Google properties combined. And today the Chronicle wrote about how mainstream news sites are seeing, for the first time, more traffic coming from Facebook than Google.

Being “downstream” of Google has never been contentious - you build a web page and you need to show up on search engines because that’s how people find things on the Internet! Being “downstream” of Facebook has always carried a lot more baggage.
With Facebook, you hear comments that you would never hear about the general web. Things like, “this category is really just for late stage companies,” or the concept of “social network fatigue.” Like there is “web fatigue” or that a category on the general internet would be closed off to a new, innovative, startup. That’s ridiculous.

Of course, the tricks of the trade that worked two years ago have changed, but that is pretty much true everywhere. This was really brought home when a fellow entrepreneur mentioned the other day that Google makes it near impossible for startups to enter a category in SEO. Due to the way Google values “link-aging” and massive sites linking to each other, incumbents are at a massive advantage. In addition, thanks to the mass number of keyword arbitragers, Adwords is no longer the low-cost targetted channel it used to be.

So just for fun, let’s look at what is actually different when you build with Google (ie search) versus Facebook (ie social networks) in mind.

If you’re building your product for Google:

• Customer Acquisition - Google adwords, a highly competitive market largely saturated
• Activation (getting a unique user) - Google accounts or opensocial, both of which have done relatively poorly in our tests.
• Viral/Organic - Search engine optimization, an opaque and constantly changing “primary” channel for potential organic customer growth. Difficult but possible.
• Retention - Nothing particular to Google. Search engine optimization?
• Revenue - Optionally opt for Google checkout, which has been a mediocre product so far.

If you’re building your product for Facebook:

• Acquisition - Facebook ads, a less expensive, less competitive market with better targeting by demographics. Although for strict “intent” like ecommerce purchasing it can underperform. For games like ours it’s a no brainer.
• Activation - Facebook connect or authorization flow of fb apps. We saw activation jump by 4x via typical email/password.
• Viral/Organic - Feed & invite optimization (viral, viral, viral!), an opaque and constantly changing “primary” channel for acquisition. Very much analogous to SEO, but with more control in the hands of product builders. Although more difficult than two years ago, a much better market to be in than SEO.
• Retention - Internal bookmarking, games/app dashboard. Thin but they’ve got something.
• Revenue - Optionally opt for Facebook payments. Early, but we’ve seen good results in their alpha and their team has been very responsive.

Here’s the way I see it. Lots of tactics work no matter which you are building for. You can ask for an email address on Facebook or the web. You can charge with paypal or credit cards, etc. It still boils down to whether you are building a great product people want, and that they want to pay for.

My experience in a previous startup selling consumer products at retail has made me think of any “platform” as ostensibly a channel for users. The caveat to all of this is to be careful about how reliant your are on any single channel, whether Facebook or Walmart. I’ve heard of a single Google recalibration to page-rank knocking traffic by 30% or more, and I’ve heard similar about Facebook.

But that doesn’t always mean the most open channel wins, it is often the opposite. The iPhone is much more strict than Android, yet you would likely still pick the iPhone because of the growth of that platform. And the iPhone platform is much more onerous than Facebook in most regards. If you are focusing on “growth” (and who isn’t) - Facebook can’t be beat in the current ecosystem.

Hi, My Name Is Mike And I Was A FishVille Addict

I’ve never really understood why games as an entertainment medium elicit this kind of cultural shame.

When I was 13 I got really into comic books. I started spending most of my money on it, perhaps all of my spare money. I was showing up at the comic book shop the day a new issue came out. I worked at a comic book store for trade and maniacally collected every issue of my favorite series. It took no more skill to read a comic book than to play Fishville, but it was fun to lose yourself in that world.

It was called a hobby, and it was fun even if the serial nature of the books (”Tune in next week to find out how Batman gets out!”) was meant to keep me hooked. It’s not smoking, or drinking. It is entertainment.

When a person gets into other entertainment mediums he’s a movie buff, music buff, comic book buff, or a sports fan. Think about the pride people have in how much they love music. Somehow people who play games a lot get some kind of shame and then label it a crazy addiction. I’m not sure I really understand or care to understand the cultural elitism.

Don’t worry Mike, you clearly liked having those fish taken care of, and felt bad to let them go to waste. A little escapist nurturing now and then is perfectly fine, I won’t judge.

I bought my first Android phone the day the G1 came out. It lasted three days.

I bought the Motorola Droid and it lasted almost a month, until I finally realized I just couldn’t do it over breakfast with fellow former Droid owner Bijan last week.

First, what is better:

Email, for Gmail users, is the best experience on any phone. Also Calendar, Maps, Google Listen (I love podcasts including TED and TAL), Google Voice, and several others are just better than anywhere else. I also found Android innovating where I wasn’t expecting. Such as a feature to tell you exactly what percent of your battery is being used by what app, or the ability to return purchases from the App Store (ahem, Market) within 24 hours.

The killer (as in dead) feature:

However. There is something horrifically and terribly wrong at the task management level of Android. What you never want happening in any user interface is to initiate an action, and have nothing happen. In a mobile phone, that is even more critical - especially when you wait 10 seconds and then are met with “Force Close?”

How often does this happen? In my few weeks with the Droid it was happening several times daily. Often when doing something as simple as typing out an email there would be intermittent freezing. I disagree with Stewart Alsop’s overall characterization that the hardware is close but the OS doesn’t work — but I absolutely think he nailed the worst thing of all. After four days I picked my iPhone back up and knew whenever I clicked or scrolled it would respond and that makes a huge difference.

That wasn’t the only thing. For instance, apps were generally unpolished, the keyboard is useless, the battery cover falls off every ten seconds, and someone should tell Motorola that no one wants a masculine phone. Even guys want something sexy, a sports car not a Hummer.

But as I was returning my Droid I picked up an HTC Droid Eris and found that it felt great. Also, the HTC TouchFlo approach added all the OS-level UI polish, and some base apps (like Twitter) that I would have wanted. But, alas, HTC has not yet released a Droid phone with a keyboard.

But if HTC, or someone else (Google perhaps) releases an Android phone, with a keyboard, and software updates can manage to keep the thing from hanging then I’ll be back on Android for good.

(ps - do I have to return the t-shirt that arrived today?)

Music Hack Day Boston was one of the better little events I’ve been to in a while. Mostly because it actually felt like people were getting things done, there was soldering and coding and deals — it felt like the opposite of a chatter-fest. I was happy to have been able to contribute in my very minor way by speaking on a panel about Starting a Music Business.

For those who run events, you should chat with Jon Pierce and the rest of the group about what they did, or read Anthony’s little sum-up of the event.

A little while ago Brad Feld turned me on to the book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Basically, it’s a book, about comic books, that is about entrepreneurship.

I have no idea if this passage is going to translate for those that have not read the book, but it is as good a piece of startup advice at the early idea stage as you’ll hear. The context is that the two main characters, Joe & Sammy, are discussing what kind of superhero to create in the heady days just following the launch of Superman. To translate, think about that energy around creating a social network a few years ago, or a social game right now.

“And no matter what we come up with, and how we dress him, some other character with the same shtick, with the same style of boots and the same little doodad on his chest, is already out there, or is coming out tomorrow, or is going to be knocked off from our guy inside a week and a half.”
“So…” Sammy said. “So…”
“How? is not the question. What? is not the question,” Sammy said.
“The question is why?” Joe asked.
“The question is why.” Sammy said, ”Why is he dressing up like a monkey, or an ice cube, or a can of fucking corn.”
“To fight crime, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes, to fight crime. To fight evil. But that’s all any of these guys are doing. That’s as far as they ever go. It’s the right thing to do, how interesting is that?”
“I see”
“Only Batman, you know… see, yeah, that’s good. That’s what makes Batman good, not dull at all, even though he’s just a guy who dresses up like a bat and beats people up.”
“What is the reason for Batman? The why?”
“His parents were killed, see? In cold blood. Right in front of his eyes, when he was a kid. By a robber.”
“It’s revenge.”
“That’s interesting.” Sammy said, “see?”
“So we need to figure out the why.”
” ‘What is the why.’ ” Sammy agreed.

It’s not the how. What is the why.