So traditionally I’ve been a very do it yourself person. I wanted to be the person that didn’t have to rely on anyone, and thus far it’s worked pretty well. I can handle my day to day chores, as well as do my job, and most any side project of venture I take on I feel like I can accomplish pretty well. However, I recently asked my question if that was the best approach. While it’s good to be self reliant, the people at the top seldom do everything on their own. If I take notice of where I spend my time, most of it is on tasks that produce very very little value. Meanwhile there’s other tasks where I only have time to spend a few hours a week that produce much larger value.

In the coming weeks I’m going to be working with a friend to help his venture in a new partnership that someone has approached him about. This partnership is rather large and I’m not at liberty to disclose details yet, and while this is indeed great news for the site, the great news for users is the site is already fully available.

In short fotoviewr is one half of an online photo album, it doesn’t store your photos for you, but allows you to take your existing photos from flickr or smugmug (with other support coming soon) and instantly put them into a visually appealing gallery. To me the nicest thing about it is the variety. I’ve used piclens before, and while I love piclens to scroll through 1000’s of pictures quickly, that seems to be the extent to which I use it. I can’t use piclens to show off my photo’s to friends or family. While browsing through a standard flickr page isn’t a bad experience, it isn’t a good one. Fotoviewr really does seem to deliver the other piece of what is missing from online photo sites.

At a conversation today we got into a discussion about how ebay can compete with amazon. Which alone is enough content for an entire post, as they really aren’t playing the same game so not really competing. Instead I’d like to talk about where the conversation progressed to. To me the most interesting thing about ebay isn’t how they won the long tail, or how users are unhappy with the increasing costs placed on them. Instead its more at the level of where they really lost out.

Social advertising is a very different than traditional web advertising. The thing about social media advertisers, is users aren’t looking for a product. They’re already engaged in some activity, and don’t necessarily want to be drawn away from that. But that does not mean there isn’t value in it, it’s just a different form of value than search advertising.

When a user is searching from google, they are actually looking for something. They’re often looking for products, which is why advertising in its current form works great on search. It’s logical if a user is searching for shampoo, that proctor and gamble would want to pay to have their products show up on the right. This is vastly different from when I’m playing a racing game on facebook, and Ford shows me a commercial for their product, they’re not the same thing.

I find it extremely amusing that Microsoft and Apple are in many senses the very same company, at least in their actions, yet people feel very different about the two. For the average person they aren’t really a fan of Microsoft, and many love Apple. While I’m not really suggesting anyone should love Microsoft, why are people such Apple fanboys. Apple makes the same bad moves as Microsoft, they control their software and limit functionality in order to drive sales in the future.

Facebook applications to check out,

Windows: Digsby - Facebook Im on your desktop Fonebook - sync outlook and facebook iDeskbook - Browse facebook on the desktop Photosaver - Friends photos as your screensaver

OSx: Friend Photos Screensaver - Friend’s photos as your screensaver Facebook exporter for iphoto Adium - Chat with facebook support Photobook - Miss your camera at an event, just steal your friends album EventSync - Sync event calendar with iCal

I recently posted about web 2.5, and since that time have been diving into two sites that attempt to do this. The first is friendfeed, I’ve commented about it before. It’s overall a great site, however the community is still growing on it, and most of my personal friends are not on there, only those that I follow and interact with in a tech or professional community. And there’s the ability to go through and create an imaginary personality for friends, but for me that could take days, and while its still tempting I can’t quite commit that strongly. Yeah friend feed is great, but I find myself using it more for having a conversation with whoever is there, rather than using it to follow individual people.

Facebook’s development platform just over a year ago seemed like a genius idea, with an almost infinite amount of potential. While it’s still a very hot topic, and most sites these days when they lauch attempt to have a facebook version of their site or service available at almost at the same time. However, I believe we are already over the peak of this, as more controls are being put in place to slow viral growth, and users are spending less time on the site and engaged in the applications.

I’ve talked about web 2.0, talked about web 3.0, but today realized theres still a middle ground we have to reach in between the two. It’s quite a pain that I really have no idea when my friends do certain things online. While some use facebook for absolutely everything, this is most certainly NOT the best option. Throwing your data into their walled garden is one thing, but for this to be the one and only place you store your online data is quite stupid. Facebook will only open up when they’re absolutely forced to, and may not even open up then. To migrate ’notes’ or rather blog posts out of facebook, or all of your pictures, or you’re messages can be an absolute pain. Why not use a service built for just those things, such as a wordpress blog, or flickr/picasa, or twitter/jaiku? Well most people don’t because of the simplicity of facebook being the central place for your data and your friend’s data.

I’ve written many posts here about business, technology, and the like. The reason I’ve been so delayed in updating, in addition to the busyness of life, is because this post has been brewing in my head for quite some time. I just haven’t been able to sit down and actually compose it until now for some reason.

So many of my posts have been about the web and how things will change in the future. Well while in this post it is still strongly related I want to talk a bit more about the social aspect. Of how I feel the next generation will insight change in much of the world because of the web. With the web and all of its utilities, youtube, aim, twitter, email, people no longer feel they’re separated by thousands of miles. Also its allowed any old joe to take on the form of publisher. I’ll concede that my generation watches more television than any generation prior, that sex and STD’s are at a higher rate than ever before. But in large part I believe the whole of the generation is following and simply consuming then information put out by the generation ahead of them.