So, Home is here. Facebook is coming out with a smartphone and it sits squarely at the center of the company's vision. The service is moving from a web application and service DNA to an OS DNA.  Considering how the connected world is moving away from central devices (PC, Laptop) to edge devices (phone, tablet, nike fit, withings), this makes a ton of sense.

However, I find it unfortunate and dangerous that this is happening with the two leaders of the movement (Google and Facebook) as public companies, with quarterly earnings targets.

The future is one that the Net (or the connected world) is constantly with us.  That is a given. Previously, only your phone was with you and it was part of a relatively dumb telco infrastructure. Now, the Net is aware of every single move.  

I am not a privacy activist (although I appreciate their work).  I generally would not mind the above issue, if it is helping my life in meaningful ways, the way that early Facebook was about utility.  But now it's about advertising.  And, I am afraid that this hyper-awareness will result in an increased invasion of capitalism in our lives.

I was expecting more utility from Facebook with it's critical mobile move.

I have been thinking of the "apps breaking the web" meme over the last couple of months.  The issue is adjacent in my mind to the "mobile strategy" topic I recently blogged about.  And there has been a collection of smart writing on the issue from Anil Dash, Scott Hanselman, Semil Shah and most recently, Felix Salmon, who are exploring the effects of not just native apps, but also large consumer content services, on the networked structure of the internet.

As I think of the topic, it's now becoming clear to me that the constant breaking of the chaotic network structure is in the nature of such chaotic networks.  The needs are driving progress and progres keeps moving the intelligence and contecxt of the network from the center to the edges back to the center, and so on…

You can see this in the usenet > aol > geocities > typepad > facebook > twitter pattern.  We are now going through a centralization period, where Facebook (with its identity layer ownership) and Apple (with its App distribution power) are consolidating the intelligence and the context of the network. The needs of the users, and the reality of pwerful computers in everyone's pocket with a fat pipe to the sky, will allow innovators to push it back to the edges.

It's this innovation cycle that has been creating enormous value, as it keeps finding new solutions to new problems.

It feels like the overarching theme in technology startups
in 2012 was “mobile”, with mobile wisdom and sexy statistics echoing in the
news, blogs and conferences.  The
discussion was marked with numerous milestones, such as the successes of Angry
Birds, Instagram, Uber, Spotify, Hotel Tonight, and most recently, the
proclamations of eBay and Etsy about how mobile has arrived in the holiday
season.  We have VCs that put “mobile” on
investment strategy slides, and discussions by entrepreneurs about the
challenges of mobile development. 
Thinkers like Fred Wilson are also weighing in with their experiences.

I personally find the discussion quite frustrating.  It is not clear to me what mobile really
is.  It used to be a clear distinction:
mobile was your phone and web was (accessed through) your computer.  This has now changed.  We have high-powered computers in our
pockets, with improving form-factors (iPhones and most Android phones have
large enough screens and pinch zooming) and innovative interfaces.  Add to this the tablet, which, in my
experience, really belongs on the coffee table at home and the senior
executives briefcases in the office.

At the product level, there’s further confusion around apps and mobile web.  To me, it feels like apps emerged due to the
frustration around mobile data speed. 
We’d seen this on PCs before.  The
need goes away once the web is fast enough (just ask Salesforce.com).  However, Apple and Google love to get in
between us, and the tools we use, and are continuing to encourage the app
world. I continue to believe native apps break the web and am counting the days until
they go away.  (This last point excludes
the apps that are obviously native-appropriate, such as mobile games, and pure
mobile needs like Moped, Wunderlist, Uber, Instagram, etc.)

It will be a good day when the whole noise around “mobile”
starts to go away.  To me, there are
unmet needs and points of friction, and the current paradigm (that Meeker
explains so well, especially with Slide 9, which is the reason for this post) with proliferation of diverse mobile devices, will inspire
brilliant engineers to come up with products and services, that make use of
these powerful devices all around us, irrespective of the form factor, that are
connected to the sky with a fat pipe.

Through this process, some startups will have to focus on
one type of device, and others, another. 
Lately, the challenge has grown for many startups because they feel
compelled to parallel develop on and optimize their product for multiple device
types.  The ante at the table is now a
great website, a great mobile site, and iOS and Android apps. In most markets,
the competition is fierce enough that under investing in any of these may cost
valuable early traction.  If you have
ever run a product team, you know how difficult it is to do this.

And, it is this challenge that will move us away from
multiple development needs for different device types.  Engineers will create frameworks that will
simplify this task, and we’ll go back to simpler development models (remember
X-browser optimization challenges. 
That’s history now).

 To conclude, I think a lot of the current mobile discussion
in startup-land these days is noise.  We
are just in transitional period with multi-device product paths.  However, the core challenges around product–market fit are similar to what they have always been.  If anything, the ways you can solve a problem
today are more numerous, with the immense processing power we now have in our
pockets and the fattening pipes to the sky.

It is a great time to be focusing on what problem you want
to solve next, rather than “what your mobile strategy is”.

As you can surmise by taking a quick look at my personal investment portfolio, one of my investment types is in Turkish adaptations of businesses that have reached critical mass and success in more developed markets.  In the internet business, this is now being called cloning, and has met with quite a bit of criticism.  

I will not go into why I think that is largely a meaningless debate (many definitions are too loose).

However, I do think there's an important point to keep in mind if and when you are cloning a proven business model.  It is not going to be enough to clone the model, website, etc.  You need to clone the essence of the business; what really made it successful.

If you are working on a Zappos clone, you need to focus on the customer service centric way Hsieh built his company.  Cloning Amazon or Netflix will require relentless concentration on metrics and operational excellence.  Groupon's early success (prior to Citydeal acquisition) was tapping into the community bonds in its geographies by a very human voice on the platform.  

If you are not successful cloning your source of inspiration's DNA, no amount of copy-pasting will be enough.

There's a good post from John Battelle, who has been very impressive with deep, insightful analysis lately, on Twitter's decision on focusing on monetizing the interest graph.  This means that Twitter will be very supportive of ventures who build on Twitter which enhance the interest graph, but antagonistic agains those who are, in parallel, destinations with their own (interest-based) community ambitions.  John points out Tumblr and Instagram as recent victims.

I don't think I can blame Twitter. It now has 100m+ actice users, shareholders who have come in at massive valuations, and a responsibility to start filling underneath the financial assumptions behind thoes investments.  I also think Twitter has an equally viable option to remain a true, neutral platform.  But that takes longer.  Look at what happened to shares of Facebook. Platform businesses take a long time to effectively monetize.  If the internet was a private company, it would be laden with much more friction today.