Kontagent Facebook Analytics (New Web Site) Launched

Long over due update here on Kontagent (Facebook Analytics).

If there is one thing I've learned about creating a marketing website with Kontagent is that... well, I shouldn't have bothered.

Not that we shouldn't be revamping our site, because the old one sucks and the new one is MUCH better (but far from perfect), its just that it has been an insane drain of our resources and time.

Made me realize why we decided to build Facebook Analytics and not Facebook Apps in the first place.

The lesson I learned (re-learned really) is that you should really pay attention to your team's DNA.

Do what you're great at, in our case building great Social Analytics for Facebook (and soon, MySpace and OpenSocial), and basically large systems (I work with a group of super-hard core Engineers), and outsource the rest.

The time we spent using our own resources to flesh out this website from conception to design to execution and revision, we could have probably saved thousands of dollars even by going with great local web design firm (or better yet, tap into any number of great international independent designers/firms that are cropping up everywhere from Russia to Brazil).

If you're a startup, there's a ton of great "virtual"/crowdsourced design and assistance services avaiable all over the web.  You'd be foolish not to consider them... I'll follow up with another post that lists some of my favs.

60% of FBFund Phase 2 Winners are Canadians!

Yes, this is a repost from our corporate blog... why? Because I'm lazy, and just stepped off a 12 hour flight from Asia. To top of all off, I need time to reflect on how kick ass it is that we just got a $250K grant from Facebook to further Kontagent's cause with the little sleep I'm going to have tonight. So there. =P

Here's the Lazy-Al re-post:

Congrats to all the winners , and a big thanks to all those that have blogged about the announcement!

This was a result of a ton of hard work from the entire team, and its been a fun process getting here. Thank you for all those that voted, Cat and Julia from the FBfund team, and the judges from the surprisingly enjoyable due diligence discussions from the partners at Accel and FounderFund.

An interesting tid-bit: did you know that the 3 out of the final 5 winners out of the 25 finalists are Canadian (including me and Jeff - both Canucks!).

Go Canada! =)

Digital Nudity: Discarding Privacy for Discoverablity

I've been thinking about the slow, but steady mind-shift that I've been going though as an inhabitant of the digital world. There is a growing generation of people, typically around my age or younger (sub 35) that is unwittingly trading off (or "trading in") privacy for the potential rewards of "discoverablity."

In order to create some context with this article, I should disclose a few things...

I was born in the late 70s. I am a geek, that grew up Toronto, Canada. I had a PC relatively early in my life - got a 2400 baud modem in my early teens, and actively participated in local BBSes, posted and chatted on many fidonet and usenet gateways, discovered the "real" internet and Linux in my mid-teens (mid 90s), was the first in my jr high school to drop some hard earned coin for the Newton and one of the earliest to get a cell phone in school, when they were still relatively rare.

The point is, I am a regular early adopter in most cases. Young enough to be foolish, yet old enough to be on the outside. This is the stance I am taking for the following...

I have always found it difficult to comprehend or participate in the highly distributed and (what I've found to be) exhibitionist like activity to blog one's thoughts. However, I found it valuable to post personal information to Friendster, when it was all the rage (circa 2003). It provided me with a sense of discoverability, such that my friends and former classmates could find and reconnect with me. Likewise, disclosing my work life on LinkedIn in a structured format made sense to me as it furthered my ability to be more discoverable/referencable to people that I might be able to do business with. As I was pushed into the Blogging world for the purposes of establishing a presence for myself and on the behalf of BubbleShare, I found the process to take much more effort, but it provided me with a way to again, become more discoverable. In this case, the discoverability related more to my thoughts than to my identity.

Part of the hope is that the thoughts are archived, indexed, and made searchable (forever) -- in the hopes that it will connect with others in some way that might add value to their lives and mine. Perhaps even spark a conversation, or something that might lead to a connection or business opportunity.

So in the end, all this desire of discoverability has always been consciously or unconsciously weighted and tamed against my deep desire to have a sense of privacy (and inertia/laziness of not wanting to "produce" and just lay in consumption mode).

In contrast, the generation that grew up in a world that has always had a cell phone as the de-facto communication device, broadband internet being a standard fixture in the home, IM being the default way of communicating and email being a secondary communication application, socializing on friendster/myspace/facebook being a part of everyday life growing up in their teens -- with their twitter and facebook status pages being updated every 30 minutes, 12 hours a day. It is easy to see how this generation that is currently 8 to 21 years old would choose discoverability over privacy, or even care about what public information they post to the world to be granted the ability to further their personal life-casting life-style.

The goal, it seems is no longer the protection of privacy but the amplification of one's discoverability and creation of one's digital status. No longer is it about keeping strangers away and at bay, but rather how quickly one can amass MySpace friends, or how much activity one has on their facebook profile. Cool factor is just as much represented by what one wears or does, places they frequent, people they hang with, in real life, as much as it is how one is represented in their social time line that is broadcasted from their status updates, or their twitter/facebook-status messages.

The common theme however, amongst all of these tools that have gained and maintained traction amongst these digital tools is their simplicity and low barriers to digital self-expression. Friendster and MySpace gave easy and structured ways to fill in the blanks for one's favorite TV shows, music, and friends. They made it easy to add photos and music tracks. Twitter and Facebook gave its users an easy alternative to blogging with micro-rapid content creation around status updates. IM and SMS is used in favor of email for its instant real time feedback and instant gratification of getting a response in (practically) real-time.

Relinquishing privacy for this generation is no longer a trade-off to enable and amplify one's discoverabilty. For many of them, privacy is a mostly irrelevant inadvertent casualty in everyday digital play and communications.