Tag: facebook

• Facebook announces new cryptocurrency called Libra

  

  A new Facebook-supported blockchain and cryptocurrency, called Libra, was announced today. The goal: a new global currency. But unlike other cryptocurrencies, this one will be backed by a basket of government-issued securities and other investments.

  A new governing body called the Libra Association has also been formed, with its 28 founding members (see above image) contributing both capital (at least $10 million) and expertise. Going forward, they will help shape the network. It’s important to note that Facebook will have the same status as all other members of the Association.

  Here’s an excerpt from today’s WSJ:

  Facebook said Tuesday the network underpinning the new cryptocurrency would be governed by the Libra Association, an independent, not-for-profit organization based in Geneva. Facebook named more than two-dozen founding partners in that association, including Uber, Visa Inc. and a handful of venture-capital firms and blockchain companies like Coinbase.

  The other thing that differentiates Libra from other cryptocurrencies is that when it launches next year (2020), it will do so inside some of the most widely used consumer apps on the internet, including Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. That translates into somewhere around 2.4 billion active users.

  Many within in the industry are already speculating that this could be what finally brings the crypto ecosystem into the mainstream, which is, I guess, why companies such as Visa and Mastercard have already signed on to the project. I am also thrilled to see the Creative Destruction Lab listed above. They are a seed-stage program based out of the University of Toronto.

  If you’d like to learn more about Libra, here’s the official website and here’s a good solid overview by TechCrunch.

  Image: Libra

  2019.06.18

• How to manipulate attention

  

  This Toronto Life article about a 32-year-old who has managed to buy 10 homes in the city is very Toronto Life. At a time where many young people are struggling to afford housing, here is a millennial who has bought 10 of them (albeit with some partners). The underlying message: You’re not working hard enough.

  I am fairly certain Toronto Life writes these sorts of articles because they know they’ll enrage people. As Facebook has taught us over the last few years, getting people pissed off is good for engagement. And engagement is what drives advertising-based businesses.

  Here is an excerpt from a recent Time article by Roger McNamee (a former Facebook advisor):

  One of the best ways to manipulate attention is to appeal to outrage and fear, emotions that increase engagement. Facebook’s algorithms give users what they want, so each person’s News Feed becomes a unique reality, a filter bubble that creates the illusion that most people the user knows believe the same things. Showing users only posts they agree with was good for Facebook’s bottom line, but some research showed it also increased polarization and, as we learned, harmed democracy.

  If you take a look at the Twitter conversations surrounding the above Toronto Life article, you’ll see the reactions you would expect: Troll article. Yeah, but how much debt has he taken on? He had help from wealthy friends. Here’s how a 32-year-old is eroding housing affordability in Toronto.

  I appreciate all of this, but I will never understand the need to shit on other people because of their successes, regardless of whether they are self-made or were born with a competitive advantage. Billionaire isn’t a bad word in my books. I am a first generation real estate developer, but I wouldn’t be at all upset if my great-grandparents had decided that buying land in Toronto was a good idea.

  Here is a guy that moved to Canada for University. Lived in a basement with cockroaches after leaving his first job after school. Took some risks. And saved his money instead of doing bottle service at the club on the weekends. I can respect that.

  But again, these sorts of articles are bound to make a lot of people cranky. And Toronto Life knows that.

  Photo by Tiago Rodrigues on Unsplash

  2019.02.09

• #DeleteFacebook

  Earlier this week I deleted my Facebook account. If we were friends on the service and you can no longer find me, this is the reason why. 

  Part of why I did this certainly had to do with privacy. I read Brian Acton’s (WhatsApp cofounder) account in Forbes this week. And I have been following many of the discussions over the past year:

  Privacy legislation is perhaps the only thing that could pose an existential threat to a business that’s entirely powered by watching and recording what people do at vast scale. And relying on that scale (and its own dark pattern design) to manipulate consent flows to acquire the private data it needs to profit. –Natasha Lomas

  But at the same time, I’m still on and use Instagram and WhatsApp (both Facebook companies), and I use Twitter pretty much every day.

  So I am certainly not in a position to be smug about this decision. Hopefully this post does not come across that way.

  The simple truth is that I had more or less stopped using the service. I had long ago turned off mobile notifications and so it had become more of a hassle than anything else.

  Every now and then I would go on and find notifications and messages that I wasn’t responding to. 

  So it had finally reached a point where I thought to myself: Why keep my data here (by the way, you can download all of your data from the site) and why check it sporadically if I’m not really deriving any value out of it? Simplify.

  I enjoy Instagram because taking photos is one of my primary passions outside of real estate and design. And I enjoy Twitter as a source of news and mostly civil conversation. 

  I am easy to get ahold of. I don’t need Facebook for that. Any of the social links at the top of this page (if you’re reading this post on the web), will get you there.

  2018.09.29

• What motivates us

  Earlier this week it was announced that Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger have resigned from the company. Supposedly it had to do with weakening independence from the parent company, Facebook. But I’m not really in a position to comment on the specifics.

  Fred Wilson wrote a good post about the news this week. The point he makes is that it is extremely rare for founders to stay on, at least for extended periods of time, after their company has been acquired. So it is actually quite remarkable that Instagram’s two founders stayed on for 6 years.

  But what I really want to talk about today is this quote from Fred’s post: 

  “The truth is that many entrepreneurs don’t make for great corporate citizens. Entrepreneurs like to be in charge, to be able to move quickly without a lot of friction, and they like to feel a deep sense of ownership in what they are working on.”

  It stood out to me for two reasons. One, because I agree with it. And two, because it reminded me of Daniel Pink’s book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. His overarching argument is that motivation is intrinsic and that we are best driven by the following: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

  That sounds pretty similar to the things that entrepreneurs also seem to like.

  2018.09.27

• Our social connectedness

  

  Economists at Facebook, Harvard, Princeton and NYU recently analyzed anonymous Facebook data in order to study our social connectedness. The New York Times’ Upshot wrote about it here and it is a must read.

  There are a number of interesting takeaways from the study. One of them is that geography, distance, and political boundaries actually matter a great deal when it comes to our connectedness. 

  In other words, Americans are more like to be connected to someone nearby – within county or state boundaries – than they are to someone further away who may be infinitely more similar. This may seem somewhat intuitive.

  But at the same time, having a dispersed network also suggests certain things. Here’s the relationship that they discovered:

  These networks are important in part because of other patterns that are correlated with them. Counties with more dispersed networks — where a smaller share of Facebook friends are located nearby, or among the nearest 50 million people — are on average richer, more educated and have longer life expectancies. Places that are more closely connected to one another also have more migration, trade and patent citations between them.

  Counties that are more geographically isolated in the index are more likely to have lower labor force participation and economic mobility, and they have higher rates of teenage births. Some of the most economically distressed parts of the country appear to be the most disconnected: Among the 10 U.S. counties with the highest share of friends within 50 miles, six are in Kentucky.

  Again, it is worth checking out the full article. There’s also an interactive map to play around with.

  2018.09.21

• Learning about O-zones

  I spent this evening reading about Opportunity Zones, or “O-zones”, in the United States. 

  For a census tract to become an O-zone, it has to have a poverty rate of 20% or higher, or the median household income has to be less than 80% of the surrounding area. Governors are also only able to designate 25% of their eligible census tracts.

  Here is a map of the areas that have been designated as Opportunity Zones.

  

  Here is how these O-zones work. (All excerpts taken from this Forbes article.)

  The law’s engine is a new breed of financial product, the opportunity fund, that offers investors a trifecta of attractive tax breaks. Here’s how it works. Investors who sell assets have 180 days to plow their taxable capital gains into an approved opportunity fund, which must hold 90% of its assets in Opportunity Zone projects. To put money to work fast, the law requires that the funds invest all of their cash within some specified time frame. (The Treasury Department is still deciding on that and other crucial details.) Tax on the original reinvested gain isn’t due until 2026, and the taxable gain is cut by 15%. Meanwhile the new opportunity investment grows tax-free, like a Roth IRA, provided it’s held for at least ten years. (If it’s sold earlier, it can be rolled into another opportunity fund and remain tax-free.)

  Here is how it could get the real estate industry to take action.

  For real estate developers, O-zones offer cheap real estate and unlimited, untaxed upside if a neighborhood takes off. Developers must do more than stash cash in crumbling property. To qualify for tax perks, they must make swift and significant upgrades (at least equal to the cost of the initial purchase). With real estate projects come new office buildings, industrial districts, restaurants and affordable housing—all of which can lay the groundwork for an economic boom. “The real estate aspect is a great catalyst to attract new businesses,” says AOL founder Steve Case, an early supporter of the O-zone initiative, whose Rise of the Rest Fund invests in backwater areas. “But it’s the startups that will be the real job creators.”

  And here is how it could influence where new businesses decide to locate.

  “If Facebook could have chosen to locate itself in an Opportunity Zone, like the Tenderloin in San Francisco, the investors would’ve paid no capital gains on their equity,” says Parker, who presumably would have been one of the big winners. The promise of mega-returns could send VCs, investment banks and private equity firms scrambling to launch their own opportunity funds to create incubators, scour second cities for overlooked talent or move portfolio companies into O-zones. “It wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of Silicon Valley VCs started to tell founders, ‘We’d like you to go over the bridge to Oakland, or we’d like you to go to Stockton,’” Parker says.

  If you’d like to learn more about Opportunity Zones, check out the Forbes article.

  2018.07.20

• Attract and extract

  Chris Dixon’s recent piece on why decentralization matters is currently making the rounds online. It clearly explains the first two eras of the internet and how the third era is developing as we speak. Cue decentralized cryptonetworks.

  I particularly like how he describes the relationship that centralized platforms – like Facebook – have to their users and to their complements (other businesses, software developers, creators, and so on). 

  Here are two graphs from his article:

  

  In the early days it’s all about cooperation and doing everything you can to attract users. The platform gets more valuable the more users are on it and so the immediate goal is to build up the network effects and lock people in.

  But as the platform grows, the relationship flips (top of the S-curve). In Dixon’s words, it becomes a zero-sum game whereby to continue growing the platform starts extracting data from its users and competing with its complements.

  The promise of cryptonetworks is that they will do away with many of these negative externalities, but at the same time empower the kind of sophistication that we see today with centralized platforms.

  The venture capitalists are circling because a fundamental shift in the architecture of the internet will mean disruption. I’m following it because I want to understand how it may apply to real estate and the built environment.

  2018.02.19

• No is the second best answer

  

  In addition to email, phone, and text, we live in a world where you can also easily and directly connect with people on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Snapchat, Swarm, WhatsApp, Slack, as well as on many other platforms.

  As much as I love tech, I personally find this exhausting and far too distracting. So early last year I turned off all social media and messaging notifications – on both mobile and desktop – other than on the two platforms that I most commonly use. (Facebook and LinkedIn are not on this shortlist.)

  The result is that I am now missing (and consequently ignoring) a ton of direct messages. But as the saying goes, there’s no such thing as too much information, just poor filters. If you really want to reach me, I am not hard to find. You’re reading my public and daily journal right now.

  Zooming out from social media DMs, I am reminded of one of my all-time favorite Seth Godin posts where he talks about the value in saying no – which is, of course, just another kind of filter:

  No I can’t meet with you, no I can’t sell it to you at this price, no I can’t do this job justice, no I can’t come to your party, no I can’t help you. I’m sorry, but no, I can’t. Not if I want to do the very things that people value my work for.

  No is the foundation that we can build our yes on.

  And nobody should feel bad for saying no. A friend of mine likes to remind me that no is the second best answer. Yes is obviously the best, but a firm no is far better than an indecisive maybe that leaves everyone wondering what to do next.

  I should probably say no more often than I do. But I am working on it. Every now and then I remind myself that there’s huge value in saying no. Today’s post is that reminder and maybe it will be yours too.

  Photo by Kai Pilger on Unsplash

  2018.02.01

• Google and Facebook show

  This morning Fred Wilson posted this chart on his blog:

  

  What is clear is that when it comes to US digital ad revenue, it’s the Google and Facebook show, followed by everyone else. Microsoft/LinkedIn is a distant third. Fred calls it “the digital advertising duopoly.” And his view is that the tech industry needs to figure out new approaches to monetization that still allow free content to be consumed. 

  I’ve said this before, but Facebook buying Instagram for $1 billion seems like a bargain when you look at a chart like this and you see what they were able to do with the platform. Instagram’s 2018 revenues are projected to be bigger than every other company on the list minus Google but including YouTube.

  Also notable are the flatlining of Twitter and the projected growth of Snapchat. 2017 was a rough year for $SNAP. But it appears that somebody believes they’ll be able to turn things around with their app redesign and reconstituted ad platform. Be that as it may, it’s still the Google and Facebook show – at least for the time being.

  2017.12.28

• People you may know

  If you’ve ever wondered how Facebook figures out all of the people you may know, here is some reading material. 

  The short answer is that Facebook doesn’t just know the things you’ve told it about yourself, it also knows what other people have told it about you. 

  One of the ways in which this is done is through its so called “shadow profiles". These are profiles that get created when other people share information about you with Facebook. 

  For example, you may not want to share your work email address with Facebook, but if it’s sitting in someone’s phone and that person decides to share his/her address book with Facebook, then it could show up in your shadow profile.

  And if there’s a common data point, such a phone number, then Facebook can fairly easily link that work email address back to you and start suggesting people from your work that you may know.

  The scary part, of course, is that Facebook is getting your information without you explicitly sharing it with them. It could be coming from that person you gave your business card to at the bar.

  It goes to show you just how fierce the competition is for our attention. It may be an assault on our privacy, but more Facebook connections means a higher likelihood that we’ll stay engaged on the platform.

  Over the past year I have been growing increasingly intolerant of this demand for my time. Slowly but surely I have been turning off all nonessential notifications on my phone. 

  Very few now remain, which is why if you’ve been trying to reach me on Facebook, WhatsApp, LinkedIn or some other platform, and I’m not responding, it’s because there’s a good chance I’m not seeing the notifications.

  And let me tell, it feels liberating.

  2017.11.21