I have spent most of this morning reading reactions and thoughts about Facebook’s “Open Graph” via Techmeme, Tumblr, Twitter and comments to my post and Fred’s post. All of it has me convinced that the power of the web will be stronger than any one company. That is with one important caveat: what we can do on the web has to stay as open as it is today! This is why I believe the real fight is not with or between Google or Facebook or even Apple. The real fight is for net neutrality and against...

Hats off to Mark Zuckerberg and the entire team at Facebook. They are managing that most impressive feat of innovating at scale. They are also incredibly ambitious in what they want to accomplish. The goal seems nothing short of one identity and one graph to “rule them all." With over 400 million users worldwide and a sign on system that is being widely adopted this ambition doesn’t seem crazy. Especially when you layer on top of this the possibility that soon many of these users might have F...

The big news of course isn’t multitasking, or unified inbox, but iAds and GameCenter. These are aimed squarely at making the iPhone (and iPad) a monetizable and viral platform to rival Facebook. Still this strategy seems flawed by being tied entirely to Apple Hardware. What percentage penetration of the handset market can Apple possibly achieve? Facebook on the other hand can reach any user on any device. Well … any device other than the iPhones (and iPads), where Apple can of course exercise...

Yesterday Heyzap announced the launch of their platform for taking social games from Facebook to the rest of the web (coverage by Venturebeat and Techcrunch). This represents not only a terrific opportunity for both Heyzap and social game developers, but is also a perfect illustration of the lean side of the current fat versus lean discussion that has been unfolding between Ben Horowitz and my partner Fred Wilson (Ben’s response to Fred, my take). The Heyzap team did an amazing job over the l...

Each has more than 100 Million credit cards on file to enable 1-click purchases of content, apps, and virtual goods. When I compare doing anything involving payment on other platforms the experience is cumbersome to the point of being useless. My 10-year old son had no trouble hijacking my Kindle, finding the store and getting a book for himself. And that’s on the Kindle! On his iPod touch he blew through the app budget we had set for the month within the first two days of having it. It will ...

I have written about privacy on this blog several times before. This week the topic seems to be front and center again with Eric Schmidt stating in a CNBC interview that “[i]f you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place” and Facebook introducing new privacy settings, which default to sharing with everyone. I love how this topic keeps coming around and believe it will continue to do so for a long time. The reason is that the persona...

The latest salvo in the fight for owning users’ identities revolves around URLs. Google just earlier this week promoted profile search and with it URLs of the form http://www.google.com/profiles/awenger (when I signed up for gmail a long time ago I thought shorter would be better – now wish I had chosen albertwenger, as I have on most other services). Facebook is clearly getting ready to launch their version more broadly and is apparently asking users whether they would pay to have a specific...

Twitter had some issues this weekend with folks sneaking Javascript code into profiles to effectively create self-replicating Twitter worms. These worms were exploiting a hole in which Twitter was not doing enough scrubbing of user inputs for the CSS customization of a profile page. While this was clearly a security flaw and had to be fixed, it does result from a basic philosophy which aims at maximum flexibility in how people use Twitter. This stands in fairly stark contrast with the very ti...

Maybe yesterday was a big news day or maybe this has been known for a while and I simply wasn’t aware, but I thought that Google’s announcement yesterday of the Google Friend Connect API was a big deal (and yet seemed to pass virtually unnoticed – was off Techmeme within hours). When Friend Connect was first announced, I was pretty negative about how they had chosen to implement it. I did hedge at the time by saying “at least in its current incarnation” – and now Google has shown that they ar...

Yesterday, I met with someone launching an exchange for privately held companies . The idea is to have a marketplace that is somewhere between the inefficient one-off negotiation of secondary sales on one end and going public on the other. Pretty quickly our discussion turned to the disclosure of information about these private companies. One of the reasons given for being a private is so as to not have to disclose a lot of information to others (including potential competitors). So how do yo...

I have spent most of this morning reading reactions and thoughts about Facebook’s “Open Graph” via Techmeme, Tumblr, Twitter and comments to my post and Fred’s post. All of it has me convinced that the power of the web will be stronger than any one company. That is with one important caveat: what we can do on the web has to stay as open as it is today! This is why I believe the real fight is not with or between Google or Facebook or even Apple. The real fight is for net neutrality and against...

Hats off to Mark Zuckerberg and the entire team at Facebook. They are managing that most impressive feat of innovating at scale. They are also incredibly ambitious in what they want to accomplish. The goal seems nothing short of one identity and one graph to “rule them all." With over 400 million users worldwide and a sign on system that is being widely adopted this ambition doesn’t seem crazy. Especially when you layer on top of this the possibility that soon many of these users might have F...

The big news of course isn’t multitasking, or unified inbox, but iAds and GameCenter. These are aimed squarely at making the iPhone (and iPad) a monetizable and viral platform to rival Facebook. Still this strategy seems flawed by being tied entirely to Apple Hardware. What percentage penetration of the handset market can Apple possibly achieve? Facebook on the other hand can reach any user on any device. Well … any device other than the iPhones (and iPads), where Apple can of course exercise...

Yesterday Heyzap announced the launch of their platform for taking social games from Facebook to the rest of the web (coverage by Venturebeat and Techcrunch). This represents not only a terrific opportunity for both Heyzap and social game developers, but is also a perfect illustration of the lean side of the current fat versus lean discussion that has been unfolding between Ben Horowitz and my partner Fred Wilson (Ben’s response to Fred, my take). The Heyzap team did an amazing job over the l...

Each has more than 100 Million credit cards on file to enable 1-click purchases of content, apps, and virtual goods. When I compare doing anything involving payment on other platforms the experience is cumbersome to the point of being useless. My 10-year old son had no trouble hijacking my Kindle, finding the store and getting a book for himself. And that’s on the Kindle! On his iPod touch he blew through the app budget we had set for the month within the first two days of having it. It will ...

I have written about privacy on this blog several times before. This week the topic seems to be front and center again with Eric Schmidt stating in a CNBC interview that “[i]f you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place” and Facebook introducing new privacy settings, which default to sharing with everyone. I love how this topic keeps coming around and believe it will continue to do so for a long time. The reason is that the persona...

The latest salvo in the fight for owning users’ identities revolves around URLs. Google just earlier this week promoted profile search and with it URLs of the form http://www.google.com/profiles/awenger (when I signed up for gmail a long time ago I thought shorter would be better – now wish I had chosen albertwenger, as I have on most other services). Facebook is clearly getting ready to launch their version more broadly and is apparently asking users whether they would pay to have a specific...

Twitter had some issues this weekend with folks sneaking Javascript code into profiles to effectively create self-replicating Twitter worms. These worms were exploiting a hole in which Twitter was not doing enough scrubbing of user inputs for the CSS customization of a profile page. While this was clearly a security flaw and had to be fixed, it does result from a basic philosophy which aims at maximum flexibility in how people use Twitter. This stands in fairly stark contrast with the very ti...

Maybe yesterday was a big news day or maybe this has been known for a while and I simply wasn’t aware, but I thought that Google’s announcement yesterday of the Google Friend Connect API was a big deal (and yet seemed to pass virtually unnoticed – was off Techmeme within hours). When Friend Connect was first announced, I was pretty negative about how they had chosen to implement it. I did hedge at the time by saying “at least in its current incarnation” – and now Google has shown that they ar...

Yesterday, I met with someone launching an exchange for privately held companies . The idea is to have a marketplace that is somewhere between the inefficient one-off negotiation of secondary sales on one end and going public on the other. Pretty quickly our discussion turned to the disclosure of information about these private companies. One of the reasons given for being a private is so as to not have to disclose a lot of information to others (including potential competitors). So how do yo...