I never break news anymore. It’s near impossible these days to beat any of the mainstream tech blogs to the punch. However…

It *appears* that the super stealth startup Pumpkinhead has now launched as About.me. Looks pretty neat.

The founders of About.me include Tim Young (CEO of Socialcast) and Tony Conrad (Partner at True Ventures).

Original TechCrunch Coverage here.

Congrats guys!

**Update: Let the record show I was correct and three days in front of TechCrunch! :=) Also, cool story about the codename, “Pumpkinhead” on Quora:

Several years ago I worked on a project backed by a now prolific angel investor on the west coast. I found the idea extremely compelling, but the for a couple reasons the project failed to reach the next step. The most major reason was that our users were not totally comfortable with the new type of social interaction our model was predicated on: staying at someone else’s house (and thereby undermining the $120M+ lodging market). Fast forward a few years and it’s really exciting to see the concept validated by Airbnb.com (backed by Sequoia and gaining real momentum): the two concepts are almost identical. The difference is that Airbnb.com seems to be emerging just as people are becoming more comfortable opening up their lives – offline, as well as online*.

People tend to forget that it’s not only technology that evolves, but also users and their willingness to embrace new mediums at scale. Social dynamics often lag the models themselves (think Mercata). I recall a time not long ago when my parents would balk at the idea of paying for something online. Now they wouldn’t think twice about it. Times change. People change. Even announcing my location on Foursquare was not something I thought I’d be comfortable with. Now I am.

I have a feeling that our large friend counts on Facebook and willingness to publicly share our locations via Foursquare are also opening us up to new opportunities – and perhaps a new willingness – to connect offline.

I see a wave of offline engagement taking shape and it will be big; big because there is a void in many young people’s lives that screens alone cannot fill**. People are social creatures and they want connect with each other; if they can do so while also generating passive income and saving money, so much the better. I think Burning Man is a testament to this movement.

Offline + Marketplaces for Reallocating Resources

Aside from Airbnb.com’s “progressive” social dynamics, it also boasts an incredibly empowering marketplace model. Empowering in the sense that its community both saves and earns money via the reallocation of resources. Reallocating resources on a local marketplace level is a huge deal. Craigslist does it. eBay does it. New entrants such as Etsy, Homeaway, Kickstarter, and Meetup are the new offspring. But Airbnb.com takes it to an entirely new level. It takes a B2C model and reinvents it as C2C, similar to what Napster did with music.

Look for more of these types of platforms to emerge.

And Back to Offline…

As a final note, I currently have several friends looking for work. As they would attest, while Linkedin is great, sending an “in-message” is not the same as meeting someone in-person at a networking event. We would all do well to remember it.

*The poor economy probably helps, as does an ability to leverage the social graph to filter out those who might be perceived as overly creepy

**Perhaps Soctt Heiferman is right in taking a sledgehammer to his iPhone

In my thinking about how web technologies are evolving I think attempting to conceptualize or invent the next Facebook is nearly impossible. Massively disruptive startups “just are.” IMO it’s not possible to know what will be the next Twitter or Facebook because these types of platforms/applications are outgrowths of the current state of human interaction. Such technology arrives just at the right time to grow in tandem with new manners, social gesture and desires. I believe with we have moved past the brute force of functionality being the deciding factor of what we will use next. Instead, we find new technologies that suit a particular direction the world is shifting and that technology co-evolves with this shift.

So, my thought is to focus on what I think of as the “lowest common denominator”. What do all these platforms and applications have in common? Are there attributes so common, or so core to the platform, that any next-generation platform is also likely to use them?

In my mind, discovering and iterating on least common denominators create excellent positioning for startups. Such an approach would be largely platform agnostic, highly defensible and probably simple enough to grow rapidly and at tremendous scale.

Hmm.

My friend Peter delivered a great talk at Ignite Baltimore titled No One Cares About Your Crappy Web App.

Watch it.

Then go read Tim O’Reilly’s Work on Stuff that Matters,  watch Tim’s interview and checkout the response by ReadWriteWeb.

Finally read some of Umair Haque’s stuff writings, including: A User’s Guide to 21st Century Economics

It’s great to have folks helping keep things in perspective. Nice work Pete!

Below are the 10 most trafficked blog posts from this blog dealing with Facebook:

Burger King Reveals Facebook’s Valuation, or ‘Facebook’s Valuation in Whoppers’ (2009)

Why Accept a Friend Request? (2009)

10 Pros and Cons for Facebook Being the Next Google (2008)

How Much is a Facebook Profile Worth (2007)

How Facebook is Like a Shopping Mall (2007)

Facebook Paid My College Tuition (2007)

Facebook: A Social Network With No Networking? (2007)

Facebook Just Isn’t for Business; Get Over It (2007)

Is Your Facebook Profile Really Your Property? (2007)

Three Types of Facebook Applications (2007)

I loved this outside-the-box thinking by Jason Kottke on Facebook’s Valuation so I’m reblogging:

Burger King recently introduced a Facebook app called Whopper Sacrifice that allows users to delete ten of their friends in exchange for a Whopper sandwich. Watch the app in action.

What BK has unwittingly done here is provide a way to determine the valuation of Facebook. Let’s assume that the majority of Facebook’s value comes from the connections between their users. From Facebook’s statistics page, we learn that the site has 150 million users and the average user has 100 friends. Each friendship is requires the assent of both friends so really each user can, on average, only end half of their friendships. The price of a Whopper is approximately $2.40. That means that each user’s friendships is worth around 5 Whoppers, or $12. Do the math and:

$12/user X 150M users = $1.8 billion valuation for Facebook

That’s considerably less than the $15 billion valuation assigned to Facebook when Microsoft invested in the company in October 2007 and the lower valuations being tossed about in recent months.

While on Facebook this afternoon I stumbled across a few funny photos where someone had apparently used Photoshop to add UGG boots to a number of their friends’ pictures. In other cases, they had taken photos of celebrities wearing UGGs and added their friends faces. The results (pictured below) are comical but also suggestive of innovative advertising opportunities that brands would do well to consider…

A couple thoughts:

-Brands could easily build an application allowing their products to be mixed and matched on friend’s images (accessorize your friends).

-Brands could work with Facebook to create images of their products overlaid semi-transparently on photos. Imagine an UGG advertisement actually being the image of a pair of boots superimposed on a photo you are viewing. In this case, UGG’s would be superimposed on all your friend’s feet until you “x” out of the fake boots in order to view an ‘un-altered’ photo. Done well, the product placements might not even hinder the photo viewing experience

-Seeing your face superimposed on celebrities is fun and inherently viral. If the celebrity happens to be wearing UGGs, that’s genius marketing

-Eventually brands might compensate or ‘pay’ users in virtual gifts if brands are allowed to ‘doctor’ profile images or create social advertisements featuring a user’s photo with the brand’s product added into the background

This last point is important because it also highlights a trend I expect we will see more and more. While many web applications are beginning to embrace virtual currencies swapped between users, I think currencies get even more interesting when a third-party (advertiser) can get involved. eBay and Etsy have proven that by empowering users to with a platform to produce income, a businesses can achieve epic virality and engagement. Digg has a black market where users get paid to provide Diggs and strategy.

To quote from a recent comment on Howard Lindzon’s blog: “We need to start recognizing customers as assets”…

It is amazing how fast the world changes. 50 years ago the biggest asset for most companies was their equipment. 15 years ago the biggest assets for most companies were their employees. Today, in 21st century – the time of social networks, the biggest assets for new companies are their customers. All this suggests that an entirely new revenue models need to be created – models, where customers give and receive back something of higher value than their own contribution. The new companies’ role is to bring together people, who are able and willing to help each other. But how are they going to profit out of this? – by sharing profits with their customers.

I expect that brands looking to leverage the social capital of their customers will be a major trend going into 2009

From Alley Insider:

Slide, the company that makes Facebook’s most popular apps, says it’s done making new ones for the social network. Keith Rabois, VP of strategy and business development, told us this week that the company wants to concentrate on making the existing apps like FunWall and Top Friends better — and ultimately figure out how to generate real money from them.

…Read between the lines here, and you can see a slightly different story: Slide is saying that the great Facebook app land-grab, which kicked off a year ago, is over. And it’s ended up with the best property.

I find this development very interesting. You would assume that Max still talks to Peter regularly and by default Mark. If real opportunity were to be had on Facebook, Slide should thus be best positioned to take advantage of it. The fact that Slide is seemingly moving away from innovating on the Facebook platform either indicates that something new is coming to Facebook and Slide wants to re-focus resources there — or it means Facebook is in serious trouble.

Just an update for RSS readers becasue many have inquired what happened that resulted in my Facebook Account being deleted.

Nick O’Neill has a post at AllFacebook explaining what happened.

I have been in contact with both Ralph Lauren and Facebook and hope to be back soon. I will provide an update when/if that happens.

This past New Year’s I made Ten Predictions for 2008 on this blog, including a bonus, eleventh prediction…

Well that eleventh prediction has come true: I have been kicked off Facebook for what is, in my opinion, a really big mistake/misunderstanding.

Of course since I am the one who was kicked off I will leave it to someone else to cover the story (to avoid bias) and I will link to it when that happens Nick O’Neill has covered the reason at AllFacebook.com.

Needless to say, I have really not done anything wrong and I am confident my account will reinstated after additional consideration.

For those keeping track, overall my predictions 1, 4, 6, 7 and 8 have been dead-on (well Yahoo is still a question mark). Not a bad batting average so far!

Sam

Update: Nick O’Neill has covered the situation at AllFacebook