Tawheed Kader's Blog

The blogosphere, media, and the rest of us are all focusing on the wrong set of Facebook problems. The fact that Zuck thinks society is becoming more public (which it isn’t) isn’t the real problem.

The real problem is that social networks (such as Facebook, MySpace, Tagged, etc) are all failing to achieve the most fundamental goal that should be justifying their existence. They are miserably failing to answer the THREE most important questions any member of society tries to answer in the real world:

• Who should I start a company with?
• Who should I hang out with?
• Who should I make babies with?

All Facebook (and most other social networks) are today is a free service that wants me to brain dump as much information as possible, so that they can pimp it to Google and any other Ad-agency willing to pay for it.

We need to solve the actual problem

All is not lost. Facebook has done a great thing by building a social graph. It’s up to us (internet entrepreneurs) to utilize that and solve real problems — because it just doesn’t seem Facebook’s values are aligned to make any real impact at this point.

Not to jump to any solutions on how to solve my problem, but here’s just a few off the top of my head:

• Dating sites: tap into the social graph. tell me which friends of friends I should be dating (this is obviously theoretical, I’m married).

• Inc magazine: tap into the social graph, tell me which friends, or friends of friends, tend to like the same type of articles, or work in the same type of industry — if this person is a friend of a friend, its more likely that my values will be aligned with his.

• Foursquare: tell me which friends, or friends of friends tend to hang out at the same spots in my town. If a certain person also loves to get work done at the cafe, and is also friends with a random array of my close friends, chances are I should be hanging out with this person too.

• Ask My BrainTrust: they’re thinking hard about this already; they want to help people have private and meaningful conversations, only with the people that matter.

Tonight, I decided to invest in the full 1h20m and watch the Google Wave demo video on YouTube. I tend to analyze and think about things at the meta-level, and at that level, overall, nothing in the demo was all too surprising. Here are my thoughts.

The Wave UI

Google is largely an engineering driven company. I think if it wasn’t for the hip Product Managers running around trying to keep up with the PhDs, their UIs would be composed of mainly command line interfaces with maybe some SOAP calls if you wanted to get fancy.

With that said, I thought the UI they pulled together for the demo, albeit a little clunky in certain parts, was by and large quite impressive. The first thought that came into my mind when I saw the UI was “holy shit, that’s what Rikk and that other crazy guy was trying to pull for Plaxo 3.0“

At the time, we just couldn’t make the damn thing fast enough, nor intuitive enough, and here it was, in all of it’s glory, with the strech and contract, working perfectly.

Was it that we had sucky engineers? Has the web really matured that much that they can finally managed to make this UI fly (and fast)? Is it just demo magic?

I think Google pulled it off because the Web has really matured… I’ll tell you why, but it connects more with the next section, the Wave’s architecture.

Continued…

I had the most amazing time at BIG Omaha this past week. I remember the first time I heard about it, when I loaded up the site from some random tweet related to SXSW. The site read:

We’re bringing
forward-thinking,
creatives,
entrepreneurs,
and innovators
to Omaha.

Something about that just clicked. I had gotten bored of SXSW after going for two years, which left a void in me from getting my web-conference fix. I promptly booked my tickets and was psyched!

Although I immediately had extremely high hopes about BIGOmaha, I expected very little from Omaha itself. “Why’re you going to Nebraska?!” asked family and friends when I told them about my plans.

To my utter surprise, while BIGOmaha itself far exceeded my already high expectations, something magical happened: I fell in love with Omaha itself…and here’s why.

I did not take these pictures, which is why I am linking to the original photographer’s flickr page, feel free to compliment them for wonderfully capturing Omaha’s beauty

The thing that I loved the most about Omaha was it’s pure authencitity. Not just the place itself, but the people, the things, and even the concepts.

Maybe it was all the brick buildings, sure, they were old, but they showed their age with class, with character, almost like a broken in leather jacket instead of the crumpled faux leather most other small cities exhibit ….so authentic.

The restaurants weren’t your standard Chinese place, Italian place and Steak house, it was a plethora of restaurants, with distinct styles, outdoor seating, people buzzing, even some random kid playing the violin on the street corner.

And as for the concepts adding to it’s authenticity, take for example this two-screen theater only playing classics and indy films, started by a young entrepreneur that has never done anything like this before.

Or even these converted warehouse come lofts, all part of a revitalization project running over the past decade through Omaha’s downtown.

Sure BIGOmaha was great, but I think an even greater success was for Dusty and JS to show all of us a place where creatives and entrepreneurs are gathering and making things happen. BIGOmaha wasn’t just a conference to me, it was a wakeup call that you don’t necessarily have to be in San Francisco to drink tea, tweet and create the next web innovation that impacts the world. Omaha has a community of like-minded thinkers waiting to welcome you.