Some exquisite whining going on at Valleywag yesterday, with an anonymous Facebook developer going on and on about how he and his crew had diverted precious resources to developing a Facebook application — only to get the proverbial rug pulled out from below their feet.

Specifically, there is some first class whinging about how the first set of developers had an ‘unfair advantage’ because of how Facebook had structured the viral component of their applications. One of these components involved being able to blast all your friends with notifications that you had a new application set up. Now, you’re not able to do more than 10 friends a day.

What’s worst is that the developer starts going on “in paranoia extremus” about how this was perhaps planned out, and that they knew that that initial apps were going to explode, and hey — isn’t that Zuckerman’s girlfriend’s roommate’s second cousin twice removed’s uncle helping develop one of those first sweet apps … and doesn’t he, like, secretly own 60% of Facebook through that famous and little known “IOU” that Mark Zuckerman ran up that one time? You know, because he was caught doing that thing on campus when no one was looking? You know! That thing with the pants.

Right. And the FBI is using Facebook to spy on us all.

Look, I sympathize with *wanting* a “level playing field”. I’m all for being equal. But, I also realize that when you’re playing in someone else’s sandbox, you play by their rules. If they want to change them, tough noog’s — you’re S.O.L. and you know what? You should have prepared for that AND any future changes. Like Facebook suddenly switching off their API, or even charging you for it.

Furthermore, do you really think that its a conspiracy that is driving the changes at Facebook? How about looking at it from a user’s point of view. I thought being able to spam all of your friends was annoying both from an installer of of applications, but also from being on the “shared” point of view as well.

And if I’m annoyed by it, *maybe* Facebook was getting some negative feedback on it and wanted to get down on the issue quickly before it became a firestorm of controversy. I can see it now “Facebook 2.0 allows Spam! Please Digg this!” You know. Like the last one. Around privacy? You know — how it reached the mainstream media as well?

Yeah, I bet Zuckerman wants a repeat of those shennanigans.

Lastly, it looks like Liz Ganes at GigaOM has the scoop with some thoughts and interviews with another Facebook developer, and she shares the same sentiments: Facebook developers don’t have the “right” to do anything, least of all spam users.

At the end of the day this is nothing more than a classic case of sour grapes. iLike had a “first mover advantage” in a way that every developer is green with envy / kicking themselves with. The rules have changed? Boo freakin’ hoo. Time to get back to work about making an application that is so useful people will actually *want* to share it with their friends.

I love studies and I love experiments.  I don’t love reading through piles of boring data — but I like the idea of having an idea, testing it out, and then having something to show for it.  Sure, it might not be all that rigorous, but at least its there, and you’re saying something with some order of proof — rather than just blowing smoke out of your proverbial sphincter.

Take for instance this study at the Pennsylvania State University.  They studied how important branding was with Search Engines.  While they don’t make any of their methodology available (therefore making it hard to really assess the strength of a study), I think there’s a great point.

Branding plays a *big* role in a great many things, and search engines are no exception.

Specifically, something marketing folk like to call “top of mind awareness”, or “top of mind recall”, but also how people think about, re-arrange and re-order their perceptions of things.  And in this case, its search engines.

The summary is that they took identical search engine results and ascribed the results to four different search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, MSN Live Search, and some in-house search engine.  When asked which results were the best, its absolutely no surprise that people favoured the ones labeled “Google” and “Yahoo” even though the search results were identical.

And I think this highlights the absolute futility in trying to unseat Google or even Yahoo as a search engine.

Even if your results *are* better, you are fighting a battle of perceptions and reputation.  Its not just an issue of building a better mouse trap.  The “install” base for Google / Yahoo is just overwhelming, and sad to say — they got there first.  If you need a better example of a mediocre products trumping better ones, business history is littered with them.  Look no further  than Microsoft and Apple.  The qwerty keyboard.  Man, it goes on.

Now, that’s not to say that you can’t make a good living or a good company with an average search engine.  Don Dodge’s math pegs 1% of the search market as being worth about a billion dollars.  My math isn’t all that great, but even if he’s wrong by a factor of ten … that’s still 100 million dollars.

If you’re willing to settle for being a 1% company, then that’s fine.  I hope that’s fine with Ask.com, for example or Mahalo.  But unless there is a seismic shift in perceptions, probably both of the search industry at large *and* your company,  you’ll never unseat Google.  That is to say, there would need to be the public perception (fomented by you — or not) that there is something seriously wrong with Google, COUPLED with the perception that your search engine is the answer.

If you can’t do both of these things, then be happy with your share of the search engine pie.  Even small pieces are worth a lot of cash.

So, in contemplating the latest tech issues that are floating around the blogosphere, a thought came to me during my morning constitutional. Disclosure is a Big Thing amongst bloggers, and perhaps even so amongst bloggers with influence. Witness the hubaloo over the weekend where Federated Media’s attempts at “Conversational Marketing” (and rather old attempts at that — Valleywag needs to improve the quality of its bird-dogs, methinks) created a giant stink … and some of that had to do with disclosure.

And I think the issue of bias, truth, and disclosure is going to be one of those perennial topics that bloggers love to get riled over. Probably because there is a perception that blogging is somehow, or ought to be, more truthful, more honest, more sincere, and have more integrity than other publishing mediums. When a blogger says something or does something contrary to that, there’s a conflict in perception, and the bigger / more beloved / more hated the blogger, the bigger reaction.

But how about this angle on things.

I blog about technology, web startups, social media and all manner of things. I’d like to think that my opinion has a certain amount of currency amongst the people who read this site, or who subscribe to my feeds.

But do you ever wonder if I have a vested interest in blogging about what I do blog about? And, no, I’m not talking about advertising, like Federated Media.

Rather, have you ever wondered whether I actually hold a position in any publicly (or even, let’s say, privately owned) companies that I may have blogged about? Do you think that might affect what I write about? What I “cover”? What I don’t? What I write positively about? What I write negatively about?

It should. And, maybe it should get you to start thinking about what your other favourite bloggers own.

For example, would it shock you if I told you that I hold shares in AOL, which owns Netscape, a direct competitor to Digg, of whom I have criticized endlessly?

(I don’t, so don’t worry).

Disclosure on this kind of level, as far as I know, happens when its convenient for bloggers, or when its topical. For example, Mike Arrington has told us on loads of occasions that he is involved with the startup, DayLife. That is a clear potential bias for his coverage, but he tells you right off the bat.How about the ones he doesn’t tell you about? And, not to single out Mike, but what about your other favourite bloggers?

And let’s be really clear and “transparent” about this argument. How about the biggest players in the business who we all love to blog about? Who owns shares in Microsoft? Google? AOL?

How about Apple?

Could anyone who owns shares in Apple — and let’s crank up the hyperbole for a second, and say, “what if your IRA is counting on it?” [or, if you live in Canada, RRSP] — really and truthfully write an honest review about its chances pre and post iPhone? Isn’t it in their best interests … even on a subconscious level — to either not write about it, or generally agree with the reviews at large that its going to be the next biggest thing since Jeebus?

So, here’s where I come in.

“What does Tony own?” … you might ask.

Well, I’ll be completely honest. I *do* own shares of Apple. Not a lot. And I mean, *really* not a lot. But, that’s an investment that I made because I believe in Apple’s long term growth, and more importantly, the svengali powers of Steve Jobs.

My own take on the iPhone is that it doesn’t really matter what it *doesn’t* have. The magic was in the marketing that lead up to this point, and more importantly, everything it *does* have. And from a company point of view? Apple is going to keep up making more and more of these things. And by “Things” yes, I mean newer, better, versions of the iPhone — just like the iPod (and therefore, it really doesn’t matter what it doesn’t have). But also other things that people are going to fall in love with.

Steve Jobs — I swear, you better not have a heart attack any time in the next 10-15 years! ;)

But that’s it.

I don’t own shares in Microsoft, or Google or anything else. Maybe I should.

But in thinking about things, it really got me thinking.

“There is absolutely no way I can write anything honest about the iPhone. I mean *really* honest.” Because I’d love for it to do well. Gangbusters well. So Apple stores can increase their revenue per square foot even MORE (did you know that Apple stores have the highest revenue per square foot in all of retailing?) Part of me wants it to fail, because I love schaedenfreude much as the next man — heck, possibly more. But I can’t revel in it fully — or even be myself — because of what I own.

So there you go. Its out there. I own a few shares of Apple.

But, what do your favourite tech bloggers own? And do you think its going to bias their coverage of tech companies now — and in the future?

Oh, good God, what a conundrum.

Kevin Rose’s new pet project is a little sumpin’ sumpin’ called Pownce. The elevator pitch seems like its Twitter / Tumblr mishmash with file sharing … I think.

At any rate, I *want* to keep an open mind with this little project because I haven’t gotten my grubby paws on an alpha invitation — and, based on my prior reputation with Kevin Rose’s main project, I probably won’t get one for a while (unless I’m thinking too much of myself, insofar that anyone at Digg even knows of this blog or me).

But based on all available information thus far, it looks totally underwhelming.

I don’t know if its Truemors type underwhelming, but …. the proof of the pudding is in the tasting, as they say.

If you’re interested in a sample page of what Pownce looks like, check out the following pages:

• Jay Adelson
• Leah Culver
• Kevin Rose
• Robert Scoble

One last germ of a thought:

If this does become successful, I wonder if it will be in spite of its technology, which doesn’t seem all that impressive based on the description and from what I’m seeing. Rather, I wonder if it will be successful precisely because of why Truemors was “successful”, why Mahalo gets 90% of the press its getting, why Spock needs more users, or even half of the reason why Digg is the darling of the web2.0 set.

Yeah — you know why it is … the “celebrity geek” effect.

And more power to Kevin Rose if he can pull it off. You can’t begrudge a man for wanting to leverage all that time on G4TechTV into something meaningful, I guess.

Yahoo is finally integrating Flickr results for its image search.  My first thought was “yay — its about time they did something to integrate that property into yahoo proper — peanut butter manifesto’s notwithstanding”.  My second thought was, “I wonder how what Flickr is doing could influence how Yahoo sorts its searches?  Better yet, could it actually *improve* a search engine’s results?”

I think the answer is “… maybe!”

Well, this is an idea that Thomas Hawk goes into much greater depth with, but basically Flickr already has algorithms to determine popularity and relevance.  This is governed largely by the way that images are sorted and tagged and viewed by the community at large.  In fact, the community itself determines the relative importance of each photo, which in turn, has an important effect on how Flickr sorts through those photos and the order in which it serves them up if they are searched through.

Could Yahoo! learn a thing or three about this?  Sure.  And Thomas makes some great points about it, but suffice it to say, its a similar, but very different way of understanding importance.  The current model of determining relevance has to do with many different factors, but one of the principle ones involves the pattern of inbound links to a given page for given keywords.  Link structure and the evolution of that over time is what has driven how search engines do what they do.

But for results and data that are derived from social networks, like Flickr in Yahoo — its a bit different story because of the users tag, or even, internally rank (vote?) for specific photos for a given tag.

I think this introduces an entirely different dynamic, because acquiring inbound links in the World Wide Web at large seems like a very different kettle of fish than acquiring the same kind of positive ranking in the factors which matter in a social system. 

But is this an improvement over the way that Search Engines have done things?  I think the answer could be yes.  After all, Matt Cutts at Google has said that Google is trying to dabble with how humans can help the algorithm do what it needs to do.  And what are social networks if not human activity that involves adding, sorting and tagging information in ways that can be infinitely measured and quantified?

Which begs the question, of course:

If social networks can improve the search results of certain topics (and this is a huge presumption), does it make sense for search engines to start acquiring those social networks? 

Not for a content play — but so that it can examine how certain social networks *do* rank data, and so they can have access *to* that, but also, and literally, own the content of those search results?

I have no idea.  But if Google suddenly snaps up Facebook for people search, please reference me in any future posts you might do. ;)

Spock.com, is a startup that I briefly touched on some time ago.  Sure there was a bit of controversy around some verbal gaffe’s the founders made, but there hasn’t been too much positive buzz around this application in a while.  Read/Write Web has a new review which is largely positive.

Having had a chance to use it now for a few weeks, I don’t disagree with the review.  In fact, its software is intuitive, and, potentially useful.  That is, I say “potentially”, because Spock.com is one of these Web2.0 application that *really* requires large scale macro-type network effects to work.

This is what I mean.

The real power in something like Spock won’t be for people who are well known/ celebrities.  Spock.com does that well.  But on the other hand, do you really need a fancy search engine to tell you that George Bush has twin daughters?

No, the real strength will be in its ability to find everyone *else*.  Friends you may have heard about, potential employers, employees, or even people you may have read about online.

To do that, it really requires a lot of data.  Lots of people inputing their own profiles.  Lots of people adding others.  And this is because although its able to mine data from social networks, like LinkedIn or MySpace, the fact is that there are still loads and loads of people that *aren’t* on those sites.

Sure, Spock.com could bank on the fact that social networking usage will rise to a high enough level that it self-populates its own database past the tipping point — but is that a viable strategy?

More to the point: what about all the non-networked information about people that is already out there?  Case in point: Mil Arcega, the guy that I was trying to look for last time.  Now, he is a former reporter for a local news station out on the West Coast.  Not exactly an unknown … but the only thing I could find was a MySpace profile on the guy, and I’m pretty sure (I really hope, rather) that it wasn’t him.

The fact that I pointed out which still remains true is that if you Google his name, there are loads of information on him.  Its just not in a social network.

I’m all for web applications that are useful.  Spock.com has a lot of potential.  It just needs to increase the available data that it has to make it useful.  Should they consider paying people a la Mahalo/ Jason Calacanis?  Or should they just bring on a Celebrity blogger like Guy Kawasaki to drum up enough buzz? I don’t know when that tipping point will occur — but it should do everything in its power to make it so.  Because without it, its really not as helpful as it could be.

Footnote: I have a WHACK load of invitations for Spock.com now.  If you’re interested in checking it out, just leave a comment and I’ll try and send everyone an invitation.

As a bit of a follow up to the fooferah around Fred Wilson Can Kiss My Ass post over here, regarding whether Digital Natives do or don’t exist, there’s an interesting article on Digital Natives at the Library. A few weeks ago you might recall a whiny cacophony of bloggers proclaiming just because they were old didn’t mean that they couldn’t be a digital native. Which I thought was a bit funny, as it seemed to be a situation of them protesting a little bit too much

At any rate, while the article is thought provoking, taken together with the commentary, it certainly does provide a further picture of what a digital native is, that is to say someone who was born with and grew up with computing — and how they are different than digital immigrants. The article tends to focus on gaming, principally.

For example:

• Going to school with no physical books, only PDF’s
• An emphasis on learning by trial and error, rather than by didactic teaching methods: Helping students learn by overcoming roadblocks, rather than before they begin.
• “Natives have a different relationship with language and visual representation; even a different understanding of interpersonal conduct .. . To people in this world, digital avatars aren’t abstract. Many children spend more time in game worlds than their own neighborhoods.”

Interesting stuff, and further reinforces my own opinion in that that digital natives do exist, and I am not one of them — and neither, do I suspect are many of you. While I might share a few things in common with digital natives, I think its easy to see that a ‘traditional’ environment is quite different, and therefore, will have different effects on how one interacts with things, learns with things and deals with others.

Its hard to imagine, for example, what it would have been like with something like the World of Warcraft to play with as a 10 year old — or other immersive virtual environments if I was younger. The closest thing that *might* have existed were BBS’s, but even then, the always-on environment was an utter impossibility for most people unless you had a dedicated line for dial-ups (never mind all the psychedelic 8 bit ASCII graphics).

Which brings me back to my original point.

While its a thought provoking article on what makes Digital Natives digital, didn’t anyone else find it terribly ironic that Digital Natives would probably never go to library in the first place?

I’ll be honest. I started going to university at the cusp of this kind of Digital revolution myself (and that was 10 years ago). Then, as now, I will readily say that I have never had to physically go through many, if any, medical journals to do any research. The medical indexes have always been available online to me, and so are many of the important medical journals.

Its virtually unfathomable that there was once a time when you had to manually trudge through stacks and stacks of journals to find an article and photocopy what you need.

And if that’s the case, I can’t imagine what its like for students who can just look anything up on Wikipedia to find a short (probably) unbiased introduction to a topic complete with references and further links.

Interesting Read: “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants”  a bit of a scholarly look at the phenomenon … from 2001.