How I Read Blogs
I often hear people say, “I can’t keep up with all the blogs.” Well, you don’t have to. I’m surprised that so few people use RSS readers even though they have been around for a long time. Without some type of aggregator, it is not practical to keep up with all the blogs you are interested in. Who could remember to revisit more than a dozen blogs on a regular basis? Even if you do revisit them, it does not mean that they have something new for you to read. Your friend’s personal blog may not update that often, but whenever it does, you might want to read it. How can you be sure that you read it when he posts something every month or so? The answer is RSS reader.
When you visit a blog, you should be able to see a little RSS icon somewhere on the page or in the address bar. If you click on it, it should prompt you to choose your RSS reader. I use Google Reader because it allows me to see all the blog entries within a Web page. I don’t need to install any special application. It also works well with my iPhone. (When you visit Google Reader on iPhone Safari, you get the mobile version of the site.)
Once you have RSS reader configured, this is the only place you need to visit on a regular basis. All the new blog posts will come streaming into it. Add your friend’s blog to it, you will see it as soon as he posts something, even if he posts only once a year.
I add to my RSS reader liberally. If any blog looks remotely interesting, I add it. Right now, I have 128 blogs in my reader. Most of them do not update so often, so my main window is usually filled with entries from popular blogs. The list only displays the name of the blog, the headline, and the date/time, so I can scan very quickly, and I only click on items that sound interesting. Even if I don’t read any of them, just by scanning through the titles, I can get an idea of what’s going on in the world.
Every now and then, I review the list of blogs. If I see blogs with a hundred unread posts, it’s a good indication that I wouldn’t read any of their future posts either, so I remove them.
Google Reader allows me to create categories. I have categories like “Economy”, “Friends”, and “Technology”. If I’m interested in what’s going on in the economy, I click on that category to see only the blogs related to economy.
I rely on my bloggers to deliver news to me, so I rarely use news websites as a way to get a sense of what’s going on. Most news websites allow you to customize your view based on news topic (e.g. politics, finance, health, entertainment, etc..), but that is not particularly a good way to filter news items. For instance, I’m not a sports fan, so I generally ignore news about sports, but every now and then there are news events in sports that grab my attention. For instance, some famous athelete might launch a Website that is interesting from a point of view of user-experience. Different people see different things in the same fact or event, but those differences are not easily categorizable or even identifiable. This is where bloggers come in handy; they function as intelligent information filters. They are your information brokers and advisors.
—posted by Dyske » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page
Statistical Bootstrapping — a Product Development Strategy
I’m pretty convinced that this digital world is all about creating something viral. “Go viral or go home,” as I heard someone say on the Web. But going viral is largely a matter of luck. So, as a business, the luck has to be managed in a statistical manner. In other words, we need to spread the eggs everywhere, instead of putting them all in one basket. This means that every project needs to be low budget (low enough for you to afford many of them). Avoid ideas that cost a lot of money. And, if the market bites any of them, you try to narrow down your choices around it. Once there is a big hit, you take the next logical step to grow/expand it, or use it as a launching pad for other ventures; and this time, you can increase the budget of each project. I would call this statistical bootstrapping. (Maybe there is already a name for this strategy. Let me know if you know it.)
Venture capitalists have been managing their investment risks in much the same way; the only difference is that I’m suggesting that we all adopt it even as an individual. And, when we individuals do it, it must be bootstrapped because of the lack of funding.
Even if something goes viral, if you don’t have a proper plan in place to take advantage of the success, it would just fall flat. Trying to figure out, after the fact, what the next step should be, wouldn’t work. So, even before you take on the project, you have to have a plan for what the next step should be. In other words, forget Plan B, think of Plan A2. (If Plan A doesn’t work, forget Plan B, just discard Plan A altogether.) This sounds like common sense, but I see many stories of success where they had nothing planned for an encore. They went up, exploded spectacularly, and disappeared like fireworks.
Because of the efficiency of the Internet, the cycle of producing, distributing, and analyzing our products is very quick these days (especially for digital products). The number of products being produced every year is astronomical. In this type of environment, it’s not wise to pour money into something that has not gone through this cycle on a smaller scale.
One of my clients just premiered a TV show which was based on a YouTube hit. The network is quite happy with its rating. This is a good example of putting money into something that has gone through the cycle at a smaller scale. I believe this type of approach will be more common in the future. I think pouring money into something just because someone really “believes in” it, is a thing of the past. There is no need to take that kind of risk anymore, when the risk can be managed more statistically. No need to believe it, just test it on a smaller scale.
You might argue that certain things cannot be done on a small scale, but when you haven’t had a track record of success, you shouldn’t be trying to direct a blockbuster Hollywood action movie anyway. Scale should come naturally as you become more successful. At first, we should think big, but do small.
Once we have a successful product on our resume, it should become much easier to raise funds too. We would then be in a privileged position, and this can reduce the amount of competition, and increase the probability of success. Then “bootstrapping” becomes less necessary.
I might be wrong here, but this is my current strategy anyway.
—posted by Dyske » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page
Originality Is Overrated
Years ago, I wrote a short essay about how originality is overrated (and execution underrated) in the Western culture. I see original/unique ideas as a very small part of the game in creating something successful.
The other day, I was thinking of how similar the fundamental idea is between Twitter and the site I created in 2001 called URLDJ.com (I shut it down a while ago.) In both cases, the primary function is to use human beings as a filter for information that is relevant to you as a reader. In URLDJ, you “subscribed” to (as opposed to “follow”) particular “DJs” with whom you shared interests, and the DJs would post links to their pages with brief descriptions.
Each DJ had a profile page that described who he/she is, and a series of links in a reverse-chronological order, which is essentially the same as Twitter’s profile page. The idea was (like it is with Twitter) that the universal home page was not the most important page. Individual profile pages or custom home pages were designed to be the access points for the readers. URLDJ offered a way to select (or filter out) DJs for the home page, so that you would only see the DJs you liked, which is basically what you see on Twitter after you login.
In retrospect, here are the factors that lead to URLDJ’s demise:
1. I should have let anyone create a DJ account. This is the biggest mistake. If I had done this, URLDJ might have been moderately successful. Even Twitter has a problem where many accounts are active for a short period of time, and they go dead. As easy as it is to share links and short comments, it’s not for everyone. It requires a specific set of natural inclinations. If I had let anyone create a DJ account, I would have been able to find DJs with these natural inclinations, and some of them could have thrived. I believe someone had suggested this at the time, but I disagreed.
2. I should have publicly displayed the number of subscribers. At the time, I felt like this should be private information, but this is a key factor that drives everyone to spread the word about Twitter. It’s a vanity factor that works well. Many people are striving to get hundreds or even thousands of followers, and this naturally promotes Twitter itself.
3. Timing. I think another key factor that made Twitter so popular is its use of mobile devices. At the time URLDJ launched, this wasn’t possible because the technology was not common, and also because people weren’t ready for it. So, it would have been a bad idea anyway. This shows how important the timing is. eMusic is a good example. They were one of the first online music retailers, and obviously they were way too early. Apple came in much later with the optimal timing.
When URLDJ first launched, I found another site which was doing essentially the same thing (I forgot their name/URL). I would imagine that many people (probably hundreds of people) had the same idea at the time. If true, the greatness of idea itself contributes only a few percents to the final success. The rest is all execution. Twitter had a combination of features and design that struck the right chord with the masses. It is also interesting to note that complexity and sophistication do not necessarily add to success. Twitter’s 140-character limitation, for instance, added to their success. What matters is having just the right things and doing it at the right time.
—posted by Dyske » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page
Typekit’s Advantage Is Its Licensing Model
One of my readers asked me some questions about my post regarding Typekit, so I want to share my responses here.
Regarding the “in-between” parties involved in the business of selling fonts:
Without a service like Typekit, you would need 2 in-between entities. A foundry who would market/promote/distribute your print fonts, and a service like Typekit who would safely and centrally distribute your fonts on the web. Many foundries use online stores like myfonts.com, so if you are a designer of these fonts, you already have 2 in-between entities. Adding a web distribution service would make it 3 in-betweens.
As I said in my comments, what is revolutionary about Typekit is that it’s a SAAS model, meaning the fonts are distributed from their central server with a proper mechanism to keep track of the usage and billing. I don’t know the details of @font-face and EOT-fonts, but they are just embedding technologies. They would not keep track of usage. If true, they are quite different from what Typekit is offering. Typekit is a subscription service like Rhapsody; they offer a different type of licensing model for the artists/designers.
Typekit’s SAAS model would enable licensing models which are based on usage. Right now, you as a type designer are getting paid by the number of designers who purchase your fonts. So, if some super-famous designer purchase your font, and use it for 1,000 different clients, you get paid the same exact amount from this designer as another designer who used your font only once. Licensing model based on usage would be similar to what music composers/song-writers have had for TV commercials and radio plays; it is a lot more lucrative. Even if small independent designers wouldn’t use Typekit, the usage fee from big design firms with high-profile clients would probably generate a lot of money for the type designers. Typekit might turn out to be like iPhone App Store. There might even be a gold rush at first for some font designers.
It is not easy for individual font designers to set up a SAAS mechanism on their own server with a system to keep track of usage and automatically charge and pay based on usage, and to ensure that the server would never go down. This is the part that sets Typekit apart from the rest, not their embedding technology.
Typekit’s licensing model effectively passes the responsibility of licensing to the end users, not to the designers. In my opinion, this is a much better business model for font designers. Think about it: We could create a variety of licensing models. We could charge per site, per page, per visitor, or per hits. Whatever would make sense. Right now, we only have a per-designer model, which is quite unfair for the font designers.
When we purchase stock photos or illustrations from places like Getty, it’s not the designers who license them; it’s the end users (such as magazine publishers, website owners, and advertisers). Why shouldn’t this be the same for font designers? If your font becomes really popular where a big corporation like Microsoft uses it on their massive advertising campaign, why shouldn’t you be paid for the usage? With the current licensing model, you as a font designer would get paid for several copies of your font for the designers in charge of the advertising campaign; that’s it! Meanwhile, the composers who wrote the music for the TV commercials and the photographers who licensed the use of his photos would be paid for the usage. They’ll be making a lot of money.
This is the revolutionary part of Typekit’s model. It could fundamentally change the business potential for font designers. Font embedding technologies cannot do this. It’s the SAAS model that changes everything.
In fact, other businesses like large font foundries could offer services similar to Typekit and compete with them. I believe Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, and Linotype are in a good position to do so.
The business of type design as it is now is not really a business, mainly because the licensing model is flawed. To my knowledge, there are no type designers making hundreds of thousands of dollars just designing fonts, regardless of how popular their fonts are. On the other hand, there are many photographers, musicians, writers, software developers, and even chefs making millions of dollars. If the business of type design could be like the rest of the business, it would be a huge improvement. In order to get there, we need to change the licensing model. Distributing the fonts using @font-face or EOT-fonts does not change this fundamental problem.
So, Typekit is taking the right step towards it. Nobody else is (that I know of). That’s why I’m excited about it.
Addendum (I know it’s getting long)
If I were to submit my own font to Typekit, I think I would prefer a licensing model that would allow me to make enough money from the Web usage alone, and make the print-version available for free, to encourage the use of it for the web.
Here is an example. Suppose I have a font called “DyskeSans”. Suppose I am selling the printer-font for $100 (for each designer). And, suppose the font is relatively popular and I’m making roughly $1,000 every month from the sale of it. If I were to sell this font via Typekit, I would prefer a licensing model that would make me roughly $1,000 a month only from the web usage. For the sake of the argument, let’s say it’s 1 cent per each web-page view (100,000 page views per month).
An alternative would be to charge for both web and print, but reduce the prices on both. For instance, I would make the print version of the font $50 and 0.5 cent per page view (or 1 cent for 2 page views). Either way, I would make the same amount of money.
But what if one day, Bank of America decides to use my font as part of their brand? Suddenly the usage of my font shoots up to 1 million page views per month. With the former licensing model, I would make $10,000 a month, whereas with the latter model, I would make $5,000 a month. Suddenly I would want to switch my licensing model, but it’s too late because Bank of America has already bought into the original license agreement.
—posted by Dyske » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page
Graphic Designers vs. Chefs
Top Chef Masters
As I was watching Top Chef the other night, I felt envious of chefs because the success of their job is not defined by satisfying one particular customer. If 7 out of 10 customers loved their food, that would be a success. There will always be some people whose tastes are incompatible with those of the chefs. With graphic design, we don’t have this statistical cushion because the success of our jobs usually comes down to whether we satisfy the taste of a single person (or a few at the most). This aspect of graphic design is more stressful than the restaurant business. Each client is paying thousands of dollars for our service. For each given project, if we fail to satisfy the key person, we are in trouble. If the same amount of pressure was distributed among hundreds of people paying a small amount each, our success would be measured more democratically. This is a much easier situation to manage.
Trying to satisfy the taste of one particular person is very unpredictable unless you know him very well from the start. And, the outcome of a job can become rather unfair or unjust. Even if we do a great job by a more objective standard, the client might disagree and hold us accountable for his dissatisfaction. In general, it is futile to fight the client in such a case because it is not easy to establish or prove indisputable objectivity in graphic design. This is yet another reason why it is important to establish the right kind of client relationship from the start. Because we cannot control our outcome democratically (as chefs can in the restaurant business), we need to control what kind of client we should work with. That is, much of our success is determined even before we start the job. Here, what Milton Glaser once said rings very true: “Extraordinary work is done for extraordinary clients.”
—posted by Dyske » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page
Graphic Design Is a Feminine Business
I consider graphic design a feminine business because you cannot approach clients directly; you have to seduce/attract them passively. Now, you might find this offensive, but that’s probably because you are assuming “passive” as being inferior to “active”. I don’t. (Considering passive as being inferior to active is a Western prejudice.)
This passive nature of graphic design makes the promotion of it quite challenging. If you are a good salesman, you might be able to win new clients by directly approaching them but this often leads to tricky client relationships, starting off on the wrong foot, so to speak. Graphic design is a business that requires a certain amount of credibility, like doctors and lawyers. If some doctor cold-called me, I wouldn’t trust him. I’m sure most of you wouldn’t either. The same applies to hiring a graphic designer. You have to find one through your usual means of establishing credibility. Most of us rely on referrals from the people we trust.
As a designer, if I were to start a relationship with my client with cold-calling, she would be more likely to doubt my credibility all through the project, which would make the job more difficult to manage. Graphic design projects are much easier to manage if my clients have a certain amount of respect for me, because the nature of the business is highly subjective. For this reason, I’m careful about how I start my relationship with my clients.
—posted by Dyske » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page
Forget Advertising, Hire Bloggers
The general consensus among the people I know is that advertising rarely works. The same amount of money would be much better spent on creating a blog on your site and hiring bloggers to write for it. I’ll explain here all the advantages of blogs over advertising.
Long-term vs. Short-term Investment
The biggest problem with advertising is that it is a very short-term solution. As soon as you stop advertising, the traffic to your site drops back to where it used to be. You could spend $5,000 in a month, and once it’s over, there is no lingering benefit. It’s like $5,000 evaporating into thin air.
Blog posts keep paying off. Each blog post may attract only one visitor a day, but it can keep doing so for years (provided that it has some timeless quality to it.). If you have 100 posts that can bring in 1 visitor a day, you will get 100 visitors a day. That is a lot of qualified visitors. If we are to pay a professional blogger $25 for each post, $5,000 would buy 200 posts, which means you could potentially get 200 visitors a day from the same investment. Remember: This goes on indefinitely without any additional money. With advertising, your $5,000 is gone in a month, over, period.
Luck
An effective advertising campaign is like hitting the jackpot; you have to be very lucky to generate enough profit to cover the cost of your advertising campaigns. Advertising works only in very specific situations, like the perfect storm. One of my clients told me that a lawyer he knows tried Google AdWords to target a very specific area of legal practice and worked well for him. Because the profit margin for lawyers is big, they do not have to attract many clients to pay for the ads. Even one client could potentially pay for a $5,000 advertising campaign. If you get two clients from the ads, you are in good shape. But even this involves finding the right keywords that many people happen to be searching for. What if the right keyword that you found is not your area of expertise, or the area that you would rather not get into? What if it attracts people who have no money? You also have to be able to find the right keywords relatively quickly. If you take too long to find them, you can lose a lot of money in just experimenting with different keywords, which makes recouping of your money more difficult. You see what I mean by “the perfect storm”?
With a blog, you are less dependent on luck because your investment is spread over a long period of time so you have time to tweak and perfect your strategies. Change your focus/angle/tone. Hire different bloggers. Also, some of your old posts may suddenly become relevant because of recent events. As long as your blog posts have some value for the readers, search engines will send visitors to them. In fact, not getting any visitors would be quite rare.
Respect and Authority
You cannot buy respect or authority with advertising, but you can with blogs. If your blog is insightful, entertaining, useful, and/or helpful, you can earn the respect of your readers. In this sense, blog is a tool of public relations, not marketing or advertising. It’s a “pull” medium, as opposed to “push” like advertising; the former always command more respect. When Web surfers are looking for credibility on the Internet, they try to “pull”; they do not trust information that was pushed on them.
Blog Content Is Self-generating
As your blog becomes more popular, your existing content will generate more content for you automatically. Search engines index and scan blog comments too. If your blog posts are thought-provoking, they will invite comments from the readers. These comments are free contents that draw more visitors to your site. In this sense, investing in blog posts is like buying stocks that pay dividends.
Furthermore, the more popular your blog becomes, the cheaper it will be to hire bloggers, because your need for bloggers becomes symbiotic with the needs of the bloggers to promote themselves. You will be able to find writers who are willing to contribute blog posts cheaply or even for free, because you are giving them free advertising for their writing business.
Free Contributions
If your blog becomes really popular, some people will start feeding you interesting information, or even a piece of writing that can be posted to your blog as is. At this point, you are in a privileged position; your competitors would have a hard time keeping up with you, because you have access to information that they don’t have.
Links
Nobody would link to your banner ad. Why would they? (Unless they are criticizing or making fun of it.) Links to your site are quite valuable on today’s Internet where Google’s PageRank determines the value of your website. PageRank is an algorithm that determines the significance of your web page based on how many people link to it. A good blog post can generate a number of links to it. No banner ad could do this. And, if your blog posts are relatively timeless, they can keep generating links for years.
Some people buy links to their sites from blogs. This seems silly to me. If you have your own blog, you can spend the same amount of money on hiring bloggers. A quality blog post can generate many links. With the cost of buying one link, you could buy a post for your own blog to which many others could link, and continue linking for a long time.
Conclusion
I could probably come up with more, but it’s probably not necessary because the advantages of blogs over advertising is overwhelmingly clear. The timing for starting a commercial blog is perfect too. There are many writers and journalists who are unemployed, and who would be happy to make some money on the side while they look for real jobs. Professional blogging is a flexible job. Writers can do it from anywhere any time. Many news organizations are now going out of business partly due to the fact that they are competing with blogs. It would make sense for blogs to hire these unemployed writers and journalists. This way, the loss of quality in these newspapers could be compensated by the rise in quality for blogs.
—posted by Dyske » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page
The Reality of Online Stores
When I speak to clients who are interested in starting an ecommerce website, I try to be as pragmatic as possible, and even play a devil’s advocate a little. I go through a reality checklist with them because some of them have a completely unrealistic idea of what ecommerce is. The most popular misconception is that shoppers will come if you open an online store, just as they walk right into your store when you open a retail store. I always tell them that opening an online store is very much like opening a retail store on 1,234th floor of a 10,000-story skyscraper. Just opening a store on the Internet does not automatically bring any shoppers. Every shopper that comes into your online store is a result of your marketing effort. If you made no marketing effort, you will get zero customers. In this sense, a big part of the rent you pay for your physical store is actually a marketing budget. So, taking the store to the Internet does not necessarily save you any money because you would need to spend a lot more money on marketing and promotion.
Most people do not know what percentage of website visitors actually buy something. According to my research and my own experience with my clients, small online stores convert less than 1 percent of their visitors to customers. Even large online stores don’t do that much better either. (I believe 2% would be considered successful.) 1 percent is 1 customer out of 100 visitors. If your site can draw 100 visitors every day, I would say that is a pretty popular site. These days, it’s hard to get much traffic to your site especially if your site is new. We are all fighting for our shares of eyeballs on the Internet. Every year, new promotional schemes are invented, and the old ones become ineffective and obsolete. It’s pretty tough out there.
If you are not a celebrity, or if your business is not well-known, then building traffic of 100 visitors a day can take years. If your site or your product becomes a viral phenomenon, you could get thousands of visitors a day in no time, but that rarely happens, and you certainly would not want to count on that.
You could run online advertising campaigns to draw visitors to your site (e.g. Google AdWords), but this is often very costly. You could spend thousands of dollars in a matter of weeks, and as soon as you run out of money, the traffic drops back to where it used to be. Personally, I have never met anyone who had any success with advertising (online or print advertising).
Entrepreneurs need to be optimistic, because too much self-doubt can negatively affect not only themselves but also their partners, employees, and customers. So, to some degree, unrealistic expectations are unavoidable. But at the same time, I hate the feeling of selling shovels to gold-diggers, knowing very well that most of them would not make any money. It’s hard to play ignorant. This is why I play a devil’s advocate.
Many website developers ignore this part entirely, and try to sell all the bells and whistles of ecommerce to someone who wants to start an online store. Many of these sites would not make enough money to recoup the cost of the development. Think about it. Even if you are lucky enough to get 100 visitors a day to your site, only 1 person would actually buy something. If the profit for each purchase is $10, you would make $300 a month, which is $3,600 a year. That’s not much. You also need to keep in mind that most websites do not last more than 5 years because the technologies on the web evolve very fast. So, $18,000 is the total profit from this website. You then need to subtract the amount you spent on building the site (and your own labor too). Not very profitable, is it? Remember, this is based on a very optimistic scenario of 100 visitors / 1 customer a day.
Given this depressing reality, I always advise my clients to spend the least amount of money to build the simplest possible ecommerce site. For instance, instead of building a full-blown ecommerce site with hundreds of products, an inventory control system, and integrated payment processing system, just try selling a small number of products using PayPal or Google Checkout. Take full advantage of the fact that you can dynamically scale your store on the Web. (You cannot do this with physical stores.) Test the market potential this way, and if the result looks promising, then scale it up from there gradually. Adding PayPal or Google Checkout to your site is simple. It should not add significantly to the cost of building a website without ecommerce.
—posted by Dyske » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page
Typekit – the Future of Web Typeface
This evening, I went to a meetup for Typekit and met the people behind this potentially revolutionary product. If everything goes as planned, Typekit will allow us to use any fonts on our Web pages. Right now without Typekit, we have a very limited number of fonts we can reliably use; the rest of the fonts have to be created as images. So, this would be a welcome change.
In the last 15 years or so, Web browsers have dramatically improved, but the limited availability of fonts has remained the same. In the end, this problem comes down to one thing: licensing. It was never a matter of technology. If it weren’t for the licensing issues, fonts could have been distributed to the visitors of your sites in a number of different ways. (Or, Microsoft could have given away thousands of fonts for free with every installation of Windows or Internet Explorer.) The problem from the get-go was how to resolve the licensing issues.
Interestingly enough, typeface is not copyrightable. It’s like cooking recipes. The only way that typeface can be copy-protected is to sell the fonts as a piece of software. But, you could open a font in a program like Fontographer or FontLab, slightly modify it, and release it under a different name. As far as I know, this is legal. [Correct me if I'm wrong.] Technically speaking, a company like Typekit could probably batch process thousands of well-known fonts in this manner and release them under slightly different names, but this would naturally anger many people, and would never get the support of the design community.
Because typefaces are not copyrightable, typeface design is not a thriving business. Not many people are full time font designers. But Typekit can potentially change this. For me, this is the most exciting part of it. Because the fonts are distributed on demand from Typekit’s central server, it is easy to keep track of licensing and usage. They would be able to tell which fonts were used, where, and how often. It’s sort of like submitting your own music to a subscription-based music service like Rhapsody. Independent typeface designers might be able to submit their fonts to Typekit and make money based on usage.
I asked Jeff Veen, one of the founders of TypeKit, if they are going to accept font submissions from individual font designers; he sounded open to the idea. But for now, they are working with font foundries. Foundries play a role similar to record labels. They market and distribute fonts for font designers, but if Typekit can do it directly, this could work better for many type designers. If you could eliminate some people in between, you might be able to actually make a decent living as a font designer. (No offense to foundries.)
I think Typekit will be a successful product. It would be a quick and easy way for design firms to create a design that would stand out from the rest. It would be SEO friendly too since we wouldn’t have to use GIF images for any type. We could also give quick face-lifts to the existing websites, since the implementation of it is very simple.
—posted by Dyske » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page
Why Facebook Introduced Username
I was pretty sure the reason why Facebook introduced “username” was because they wanted to add Twitter-like (or MySpace-like) public interface for each user. They have Fan Pages, but they are not designed for personal accounts (they are more for businesses or public figures). This is why I got very serious about securing the username “roxanne” for my wife (my own name “dyske” is too easy.), and I succeeded.
Now some rumors are spreading about this public feature of Facebook, called “Everyone” button, which will allow you to publish your status update to the general public. The idea is that your username URL would be the public access point. If you go to
http://www.facebook.com/dyske
you would see my public status updates, that is, assuming that you are not my “friend”. (If you are my “friend”, you would see everything: both public and private updates.) And, this page would act just like your Twitter page does. It’s a good idea. It would greatly enhance the value of Facebook, while still keeping the valuable aspects of the semi-private communication (among your friends).
Without these public features, username URLs would be rather useless. Those who are already my friends would not need to use the URL. And, those who are not my friends, should not be sending me friend requests anyway, which means I should not promote my personal URL. Then, why would I need one?
Facebook probably did not want to announce these features before the opening of username registration, because if they did, the competition for securing usernames would have been much more intense (and therefore taxing on their server).
—posted by Dyske » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page
