Why the Facebook IPO changes everything

It wont just make Mark Zuckerberg the 11th. richest person in the world (assuming the 100billion evaluation is close enough to the truth) – it will also change Facebook and therefore for many people there complete Web experience.

(check here to see the 10 richest people of 2011)

Why will it change Facebook? Because suddenly we will see a public company that will have to answer to their shareholders and therefore – like any public company –will have to monetize as much as possible (after all – that is why people invest in it).

So even though Mark Zuckerberg holds 25% of Facebook he will slowly be pushed out of the leadership of the company and more profit driven people will take over. Instead of slowly evolving the product over time we will see Quarter results driven rollout of new functionality and new ways of making money. Facebook will be everywhere and more and more will become the backbone of the Web – until people are fed up by too much of blatant capitalism in their face and leave for something newer, cooler and less infringing on their lives.

So just a normal product cycle that Facebook evaded so far because they are not a public company – but after all, now its time to turn a profit.

“A million Dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion Dollars.”

automate the web

Many times I come upon an activity that I do over and over again on the Web and sometimes I look for services to automate this one specific task. But wouldn’t it be great if you can automate all of these tasks through a single service?

If you haven't seen yet what ifttt.com provides go check it out immediately. It is amazing automation of the web – based on the simple concept of “if this then that”.

After you create a user login you can go ahead and create tasks that help you to get many recurrent steps you do daily on the web easily automated.

My first tasks tackle basic things like thanking new twitter followers or sending an email based on an RSS feed. But the possibilities are basically endless – here is how it looks like:

My Tasks defined in less than 5 minutes:

In this case two of them are based on recipes – these can be found in a library full of predefined tasks created by the ifttt community. One I created myself just because it took me too long to find a recipe (there are quite a few to pick from) – it was just point and click and worked immediately.

The number of triggers you can use is quite extensive – see the currently available services:

So whatever happens in any of these services can trigger a task that does something to one of these services – simple, easy to use and very powerful!

New Years Resolution #1–set permissions on my social networking sites

Permissions on social networking sites are tricky and usually either hard to find, constantly changing or many times I just forget how many Apps, Sites etc. I have allowed access to my content.

A nice site to help you (more as a reminder) is http://mypermissions.com

It doesn’t really do anything on its own but taking you to the settings sites on all the social networks you might be using from one page and therefore helps to do this in a rather fast and simple way and makes it easy to set yourself a reminder to go back and check on a regular basis (because those settings do change).