Forgotten Ideas: Twitter, Oct 2007

Newsweek--WaPo

Jacob Chapman

Oct 7, 2020

These are always sorted by most novel so if the first one isn’t interesting you can just delete the email.

David Hunt @davidrhunt

just saw the founder of Harman (Sidney Harman) speak at USC. interesting to hear the ideas of the person that started the company.

This is a really great video. I never knew this history. Highly recommended.

Richard Moore @Richoman25

Interesting idea... http://tinyurl.com/33dd3v

https://money.cnn.com/2007/05/24/technology/facebook.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2007052917

Imagine that when you shopped online for a digital camera, you could see whether anyone you knew already owned it and ask them what they thought.

I feel like Facebook hasn’t really done this yet.

Imagine that when you searched for a concert ticket you could learn if friends were headed to the same show.

But this is implemented in Facebook and it works fairly well.

Or that you knew which sites - or what news stories - people you trust found useful and which they disliked.

This kind of exists but generally Facebook friends don’t have very much information like that. There isn’t a good interface for accessing that information. Facebook is kind of like a locked box in some sense. Hard to query information—even your own info.

Or maybe you could find out where all your friends and relatives are, right now (at least those who want to be found). We want to make Facebook into something of an operating system so you can run full applications
Max Levchin, who co-founded PayPal, is CEO of Slide, which is putting its slide-show service on the new platform. "These guys are creating the opportunity to build Adobes and Electronic Arts and Intuits that live within Facebook," he says.

Facebook-as-a-platform has largely failed. Farmville might be the only true successful Facebook platform application. I think the biggest reason why all these things failed is because Facebook is largely a closed platform that makes money from your data.