Yesterday, we had a meeting with two facebook application developers in NOC office. One of them is Abhas.
He moved to the Bay Area to focus more on his latest venture in building web-applications and widgets. This new company called QBurst Technologies (http://www.qburst.com/index.htm) has already expanded to have a pretty large team.
Facebook and education
In the meeting he shared some of his ideas with us. One of them is to leverage the power of social network to help people who taking GRE, GMAT or SAT exams. Most of the students taking these exams face one problem which is lacking of exercises. The information of sample questions are very limited on website. If there is an application for people to contribute and share exercise questions on facebook, students will benefit from the common pool of sample questions. Facebook environment is getting more and more crowed and noisy. Too many small applications flying, but very few of them really make sense and create value. I feel the idea of gathering information of exam questions is great. The reason is facebook is most attractive to students, and helping students to get better grade definitely creates value.I feel that helping people to get better grades is just the first step to the revolution of education. For so many years, people are so used and confined within the concept of school education. However, most of the time, only 10 to 20 percent of the knowledge or skills could be useful after graduation. Apparently, school education is not effective and efficient enough and not the best the way to pass down knowledge and experience. If we look back, how did people pass down knowledge before the concept of school even exits. It is called APPRENTICE. In the future, web 2.o will play the role of virtual school in the form of apprentice. People contribute and share and most practical experience in certain industry through internet. We can foresee that there will be Stanford or Harvard Business school on the internet, and gradually the certificate from these virtual schools will be formalized and accepted by the society. Web2.0 schools still have a long way to go, but we can see that it is emerging. Facebook is doing a great job to change people’s mindset and prepare people to embrace the era of Web2.0.
Facebook and online dating
Finding a date is a pain point for more and more young professions in US, especially in Silicon Valley. So that there are quite a number of online dating website addressing this problem but none of them can solve this problem perfectly. eHarmoney
charges 50 dollars per month, although plentyoffish is free, the registered users may not be holding good intention. However, facebook posses a huge user base, and each user is grouped with network and university, the public profiles created are relatively more real than most of the online dating website. IamFreeTonight launched this application on facebook last July.
Facebook and social graph
There are one hundred plus “friends” on my facebook. Unfortunately, half of them have been “abandoned” by me. If there is an application which could help me to analysis my circle of friends and categorize them by industry, occupation, interest, skill set, ect, it would be great. The application should be able to analysis my social pattern. For example, Abhas needs three developers of application, but I am not sure who are interested in web application development in my network or my friends’ friends’ network. I wished that there would be a search function to tag and link people together. I heard that there is a Circle of Friends application on facebook, it will try it out, and see whether there are any room for improvement.
Wisdom of crowd
Whatever you think of doing, there must be someone doing it or has tried it already. It is especially true in Silicon Valley. The time I felt most inspired and most creative is the time when I talked with my friends in NOC program. Here are something interesting i heard of from my friends.
Zivity, a new adult social network start-up, has raised a $1 million round of seed capital from Silicon Valley investors — as it prepares for launch.
It’s not a porn site, such as the newer sites Eroshare (pictures) or Pornotube (vidoes). Rather, it likens itself to a mixture of MySpace and Playboy magazine with popularity/voting features thrown in. It says it focuses on pinup-like photography, or so-called “fine art erotica.” It invites regular woman — such as the local Starbucks barista — to submit photo shots.
Zivity is based on voting system. Paying subscribers vote on the images of women they like, and Zivity passes on a portion of the subscription revenue to the most popular women. There will be some free content to lure users, however you’ll have to subscribe to do things like leave messages for models. There will be blogs, and other social networking features. It is the first time that people take Porn industry to web2.0.
Something I want to do
Whatever you think of doing, there must be someone who is doing it or has tried it before, it is especially true in Silicon Valley.
I always want to build a platform to enhance to communication between VC and entrepreneurs. But my friend told me that AngleSof is doing a pretty good job.
I want to create something like Wiki of ideas, so that people are able to share ideas and check whether their ideas are applicable through the bidding or comment from insiders point of view.
