Here’s the thing, it’s nothing new! Sony Ericsson had a video calling phone more than a few years ago. A colleague at Yahoo! reminded everyone about this with his tweet and link to some Germans on YouTube making avideo call using the Sony Ericsson k-800.

The difference is that the experience is way better now than it was then. The resolution, the camera’s and wifi mean that you’re not dependent on network access and it can be a pretty good experience. That’s all pretty big. Overall the technology is ready for mainstreaming, and Apple is great at releasing a technology when it’s ready for mainstreaming.

Launch a service too early and it’s restricted to the UberGeeks’s of the world. I have friends who had Sony Ericsson phones with video calling capability, problem was as most of us weren’t ready for the calling capability these friends spent most of their time using the phone and texting rather than video calling. It’s like people using email in 1991, facebook in 2001, twitter in 2008 etc. If the network isn’t ready for the technology it’s not going to really get adopted. I call this my technology mainstreaming theory and I’ve drawn up a little visual explaining the principle and how this might apply to video calls. Apple is potentially right on the money, launching right when the technology is ready for mainstream, I expect Android to follow suit quickly, and the fine folks at RIM, Windows to lag a bit – don’t even get me started as to when Nokia and Samsung will catch on.

(Note – if you have trouble seeing this, click on it for notes on the flickr page)

This seems to be a general trait with Sony Ericsson, they seem to be great at creating things when the technology is there, rather than when the technology has matured to a point where it becomes a really good experience. Which is what Apple’s doing here and done since their foray into smart phones.

As well, by launching Facetime as an open standard Apple’s hoping other phone manufacturers will build on it, but I’m sure they’re banking on most people wanting to buy and use the video calling capabilities on the iPhone 4. Not a bad bet by Apple.

Now this is Jim Joyce, an umpire who made a mistake on a baseball play that costed Armando Galarraga a perfect game, he’s contrite, he says things like “I missed it… I kicked the sh*t out of it, nobody feels worse than I do, I took a perfect game away from this kid”…:

When you mess up, take responsibility and apologise. Be honest and upfront and say you’re sorry. Joyce did this, he found Galarraga and apologized after wards and everybody was big and understanding.

Zuckerberg and Facebook continually do things with privacy and instead of being honest and quick with an apology they act defensive and put the blame on users rather than accepting the issues on their site. This is one of the reasons why my pictures will be on flickr, my blog posts will be here and not on Facebook and my status messages will be on twitter and linkedin as well as facebook. I’m not naïve, I’m not going to quit Facebook, it’s too big a part of my communication with people, but it won’t be the only place I store information and a lot of this decision has to do with the way the company handles themselves and their apologies.

Let me explain, a product is something that stands on it’s own two feet. Something that can grow, innovate and develop in to a really successful, scalable big business.

A feature is something that is nice but is really part of a suite in another product. So for example a lot of companies building twitter clients are feature builders and when twitter buys a service and integrates it into it’s suite or when twitter creates their own client the service suffers.

Sure there are nice ones like Tweetdeck and others which are extending themselves and building out browsing across platforms to try and establish themselves as products but a lot of these companies are just building features.

When I hear that Facebook is launching locations or Yelp is launching check ins, I wonder if LBS companies really launching a new product or are they basically doing R&D for larger companies?

If the goal of the company is to flip, i.e. to be bought by a big brand in a short amount of time, then companies need to make sure they’re building the best service around so that the big brand doesn’t acquire a competitor. If the goal is to be huge and to change the world maybe some of these companies need to re-examine their business models.

Two bloggers/business folks I trust, were on either side of this issue last week
First, I came across a tweet by Umair Haque last week which said:

“every great company reaches a transition point: founders must cede to professional ceo’s. that’s facebook’s real problem. google did it.”

I don’t agree. We had a bit of friendly back and forth on twitter which ended with a great analogy of comparing Zuckerberg to Jobs as being like comparing NWA to T-Pain.

Another blogger/entrepreneur/investor writing about a similar problem was Ben Horowitz (of Andreesen Horowitz) who wrote a blog post about how worrying that whether an executive’s ability to scale is can be corruptive.

Let’s look at this specifically (in the case of facebook and Zuckerberg) and philosophically.
In the case of Facebook – Zuckerberg might not be Steve Jobs and he might not be Gates or any other founder-turned-exec who managed a company that he founded and turned it into a multi billion-dollar company. Doesn’t matter, what matter’s is that he has a solid advisory group around him as he learns. Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook COO) is pretty frakin smart, as is Marc Andreesen, Peter Thiel and the folks at Accel and Greylock who are either investors or advisors in the company. Not to mention the numerous managers and leaders that Facebook has brought on board from Google and other large well established players.

To say that Zuckerberg is running the ship on his own is like saying that Jobs didn’t get any assists from the likes of Jonathan Ive or the other designers/engineers/leaders within Apple, not true.

Philosophically speaking, people learn throughout their whole life, as young people we learn with mentors and structures to help us learn the lessons others have learnt before us. Or we learn through experience. The first time entrepreneur or the executive learning to lead. And we continue learning throughout our lives, whether as a pensioner learning how to put videos on YouTube, or a grandparent figuring out Skype.

It’s not always easy or intuitive but that doesn’t mean that skills can’t be learnt. What people need are people to mentor them and the structure to learn effectively.

Leave it to those crazy French Canadians to try an experiment like getting all your news from social media for five days (coverage from the Guardian and The Toronto Star). The problem with this experiment is that Social media as a tool depends on your connections. More so today than ever before, who you friend and follow is really important to how successful you’ll be using social media for anything.

Recently, Facebook launched customised news channels, where you can friend and follow CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times and other outlets, as well as individual contributors like Katie Couric and CNBC’s Nicole Lapin.

If you’re following CNN, the Guardian, BBC news and other news outlets on Twitter I think you’re likely to be pretty informed. But it all depends on who you follow! If you’re not connected, not following, not friending then don’t rely on the medium for your news.

The same goes with any task oriented participation through social media. If you want to get a job through twitter, follow people in HR, conduct searches for words like “job” “hiring” etc. Use Linkedin for the job hunt and you should be okay using just social media for leads (I’d never just use any one medium for a task like this, but that doesn’t change the fact that you could do it pretty successfully).

The lesson is social media can be good for almost anything, but if you don’t participate and commit, it’s likely to be good for nothing. It’s a tool, and like any tool it’s only as good as the person wielding it.

Seeing myspace bring in former facebook staff do I think it’s going to help myspace take over facebook? No. Seeing AOL bring in former Googlers do I think it’s going to help AOL take over Google (or MSN or Yahoo!)? No. Seeing MSN bring in former Yahoo!’s do I think it’s going to help MSN search take over Yahoo! search. No.

People work together with products and markets. You can’t just swap the market by swapping over the people. It doesn’t work like that. People leave organisations for reasons. Van Natta left facebook because (IMHO) facebook brought in someone better. People get stale and it’s hard to re-innovate or reinvent to create the next wave of success. Just cause someone had success at a competitor doesn’t mean they’ll have success with you. All it means is that they understand what the competition did well.

I believe to truly take market share, bring in someone who doesn’t have the same “we did things this way at the competition” crutch. You need someone who can look and see what the competition does well, but also where the competition is weak. You need someone who can think laterally and spark innovation rather then just jockey for position.

I was listening to Sheryl Sandberg’s talk at the Entrepreneur’s corner at Stanford. She’s super smart and it’s a good talk. With a background in international aid and development in the Clinton White house, Sales and Ops at Google and now COO of Facebook – nuff said. Go listen to the podcast / watch the video.

There was a question from the crowd where someone had heard someone from Cisco ask and answer the question “If you’re choosing between innovation and execution which do you pick? Execution.” The person in the crowd asked for Sheryl’s thoughts. She said she rejects the question and wants both (like when her four year old says “I don’t want to choose between ice cream and cake I want both”).

My take is that you want innovation when it’s time to innovate and execution when it’s time to execute. When we’re in a recession, when we’re struggling we need some serious innovation. When you’re starting a brand new company you need to be innovative, when you’re stagnating you need to innovate. When you’ve got the business model firing and things are working then execute like crazy.

5 years ago, barely anyone was on facebook.

10 years ago, if someone told you they didn’t have an email address, you probably didn’t give it a second thought

10 years ago, AOL, Alta Vista and Yahoo! were the internet.

I used to be thankful that I was born in this age, beyond rotary phones and Morse code. But lately I’m starting to wonder what the world will be like for my children when they are my age now.

Today, I made a small change to commenting on my blog – using js-kit so people can now comment using their facebook id, their yahoo id, their open id or as a guest with other info. Tomorrow, I might make some other changes, and who knows what this time next year will bring. That’s the speed of change we’re moving in right now.

This is about platforms platform. Things are being built on top of twitter. I rarely use the twitter web interface to interact with twitter, I user tweetdeck, I used twitterfox in the past and I’ll probably use a couple of other tools. In fact businesses are being built around twitter, like stocktwits which, according to the WSJ is going to start charging users 20 USD/ month. Howard Lindzon’s a smart guy, he’s started and sold businesses before, and I trust this will probably be another win for Howard.

Facebook is also trying to be a platform, opening up Facebook connect so users can login to sites using their Facebook login is a pretty sweet move. A lot of sites are already incorporating this technology and I’m sure others are all over this. There are also a number of businesses that are trying to leverage facebook’s platform capabilities.

The iPhone, Blackberry, Google and yes Yahoo! too are all trying to open up to applications and become platforms. It’s a very cool movement but I think it’s one that’s not completely understood yet. Like network effects, where you need people to be using the channel to make it a worthwhile experience, application effects mean that you need a number of smart, cool interactions before the platform is legitimate and not just trying to be a platform.

Window’s did this extremely well in the 80s when so many applications were built to work on Windows. It will be interesting to see which platforms app developers will chose to be the success stories of the next ten years. There’s been a lot of discussion, analysis and work done on the effect of network effects but I can’t really see a lot of work on application effects, would be great to see some analysis and theory on what makes a platform application worthy.

Now if facebook had begun by only introduced a limited function for free, with no picture posting, no messaging (only wall writing) no apps, and then said if you’re a pro user (for 20 USD per year) you can do all these things, I might, might have caved.

I believe in the freemium model, named by Jarid Lukin on Fred Wilson’s blog, and I think this is a great business model. But I don’t think you can reverse introduce a freemium model. It needs to be there from the beginning of the business or not at all.

I like a lot of services that give themselves away (twitter for example) and try and worry about the business model later. Google does a good job of this, where they create new products and worry about monetisation later. But Google can do this as they have a cash cow called search. So what if all their other products bleed cash for a couple of years, net profit is good. Start-ups don’t have this luxury so I find it confusing when start ups start without a monetisation strategy. How is this sustainable? This point is especially true during a down turn when eyeballs aren’t worth what they used to be.