To quote Dennis, he was asking: “What is the situation on the open/closed nature of Facebook? I’m thinking about this from the business perspective. Business will not really want to be participating in these totally open networks.”…”There doesn’t seem to be a very good way of being able to do all of the things you would want to do with Facebook but within a controlled environment. So maybe the situation is that Facebook is a great metaphor for what can be done but maybe it’s not the thing for the future. I just wonder what other people think about this.”

This got me very excited as allowing a controlled environment where you can keep groups of people separate is one of the key benefits of Phuser! It has also been incredibly complex to code which is probably why you don’t see it on many websites.

I got in touch with Dennis and had a long chat with him the other evening. After giving it a bit of a test he was happy to write it up in his ZDNet blog.

It is great for us that the discussions are looking at how businesses could use social networking and social software and thinking about what business value. We designed this control into Phuser as we think many groups of people will value being able to make their team discussions and planning private but still use the same website for multiple teams and projects.

My next break came a month ago when I watched a talk given to Google by Suw Charman. About 13.5 minutes into the video she sounded like she could be talking about Phuser! I realised Suw Charman was someone who understood what kind of service we offered so I made contact. She was kind enough to meet me for a chat over a coffee.

I explained the problem we were having – that we had shown that Phuser could work as we intended, for groups of people to plan and discuss privately. The trouble was we had no easy way of introducing new people to all the joys of Phuser so that they could quickly understand how it works. This came back to the problem that there was no public side to where new people could play around and get to grips so that they had the confidence to start their own Private Phuses. 

Suw had a very good analogy explaining how websites like Phuser need to be public in a similar way to buildings like hotels and company headquarters. You enter the building into an open public reception area where people can see what is happening and they can see other people. You then have progressively more private areas like bars or conference rooms and finally you have the most private area, offices or bedrooms. With Phuser we were dropping people straight into the private areas where they couldn’t see anyone and were expected to know what they were doing there!

Looking at it like that I could see the problem we had created. For those of you not familiar with Phuser the private areas are called Phuses. Each phuse is like a mini-forum or shared space where you choose who can see it. They are great for making private plans with friends or family and work especially well for cross-border business projects where the team is not in the same place or even time zone but you also need time critical responses. This is where the SMS part of Phuser comes in. You can build each Phuse up with tools for things like finding out when everyone is free or sharing files or photos.

The best thing about Phuser is that you can keep your networks completely separate. You can have two Phuses with different groups of people and neither will know the other exists. Great for client projects which need to be separate or for keeping your friends and family life apart. This idea of separate networks is something Facebook is currently struggling with.

After talking with Suw it became clear how we could have a more public side to Phuser and we set about adding a new feature: Open Phuses. Open Phuses are different to the Private Phuses in that, instead of selecting who is part of the Phuse, anyone in your network of people can join them and take part. Besides helping new users see what Phuser is about they have useful business and social uses for company events and information or discussions with your friends.

To ensure that every new person joining Phuser had something to look at and get involved with we called on our company spokesperson, Mr Phuser. He is now part of every new person’s network and he has created a number of Open Phuses about his varied interests (like cheese). When people are ready to use Phuser privately all they have to do is remove Mr Phuser from their network and they are just left with their real contacts. He doesn’t get offended as he has plenty of other friends. 

Thanks again Suw! Your advice has had a significant effect on our sign-ups and traffic!

The whole Facebook/Twiter/Pownce/Jaiku storm kicked off and we were going nowhere. Here we had a service which offered more privacy and control over your network than these sites, as well as easy ways to discuss and plan with any group.

Looking for inspiration I contacted Stowe Boyd who by coincidence was going to be in  London the next week. He was happy to meet up and chat over dinner before we went to the Library House after party at the IMAX. I hadn’t met Stowe before and found it a pleasure to talk with such an affable veteran of the industry.

I explained how Phuser is this great private social website with practical tools to save you time, frustration and money when planning with a team but that we were struggling to get any traction in the market. Stowe hit the nail on the head: our best strength, privacy and control was also our greatest weakness. There was no public side to Phuser and it was killing us. Without a public side there was no way for the good word of Phuser to spread virally.

Stowe also had another good point. Entrepreneurs don’t like to backtrack and reassess the fundamentals of their ideas. But, as they say, when you find you are in a hole, stop digging.

In a further bid to help Stowe kindly offered to buy as much equity as he could afford with the contents of his wallet:

Thanks again Stowe! It took a while to sink in but when it did it set me on a mission.

The first thing I would like to make clear is that I know I can just unsubscribe from Twitter. But that is not the point.

The point is that SMS (that’s text messaging to us Brits) is endangered. For me SMS has always been a very personal thing. It is truly great, when I get a message I know it is something important or interesting from someone I know. Something I will value.

The other day I was cycling into work listening to music on my phone converged device. I have an O2 Orbit and with the handsfree kit it works splendidly as an MP3 player. This also means I can take calls on the move and know when I receive SMS. For those concerned about my safety as I listen to music while I cycle, my journey is six miles on a disused railway track. So as I was cycling to work I heard an SMS arrive. Thinking is was something to do with a colleague or family I stopped, dug out my phone and read my important message:

“Scobleizer: Well, I’m tired of talking about iPhone. Hopefully something more interesting will come up soon.”

Thank God I stopped! What would I have done if I hadn’t know that right then? I felt fulfilled by technology and proud my ability to keep my finger on the pulse of Scoble’s every thought. Wow.

So this is the future? Every messaging medium turns into a continuous stream of micro comments. Facebook is doing it, Twitter, Pownce. What, I ask you, is the value? Answers in the comments please.

This got me to thinking about what Kathy Sierra was saying about Getting Things Done and my previous blog entry about when email was great.

I am so conditioned now to react to all of these distractions that in my work day I don’t realise they are even happening. At least when I was cycling I was moving along making progress and when I stopped to read Scoble’s Twit I realised I had stopped, dug around for my phone, unlocked the keypad, read the message, got no pleasure, reversed the last three step and got moving again. This is what is happening all the time in work places around the globe and it must have an effect on people, the amount of hours they work and the economy. Perhaps food for another blog entry.

I suppose I have the small consolation that I didn’t get three points on my license because of Twitter, like Mike Butcher. Poor sod.

The first, choosing a date, was surprisingly easy. I created a Phuse and added the other five people to it. We immediately had a private place to put all of our chat. In the old days this would have been a whole bunch of emails. I added a Date Decider to the Phuse, suggested a date and asked for other date suggestions. A couple more were added by the others and we all said whether they were good or bad. It was obvious which one to go for and so our trip was underway:

Next I got some good tips on cheap flights from the others and after a bit of discussion over a few days (all in the Phuse) we had booked our tickets. The discussion continued as we decided what to do, where to stay and whether to hire a car. We were able to share the load as everyone booked either the rooms, car or the essential Guinness Brewery tour!

What would have been 88 emails over a couple of months was all on one page and really easy to refer to. I wanted to know when there was something to look at in the Phuse so I set Phuser to send me an SMS everytime there was a new update.

Phuser really came into itself once we were off and away from any computers. I set up Broadcast so that we could stay in touch easily by SMS. All any of us had to do was send an SMS to Phuser (+447624806185) and start the message with the keyword I had chosen (Dublin). Phuser then relayed the message to the other five phones (three French, two UK and one US). No fiddling and only billed for the one standard rate SMS to Phuser. This was great for meeting up as we all landed at different times as well as when we split up into groups. Try doing that privately in Twitter!

After we got back Phuser had one final task. I added a Photo Album to the Phuse and we all uploaded our pictures. My favourites are the ones of us jumping into the icy cold waterfall in the Wicklow Mountains. It was very inviting:

You won’t see us in our underwear on the internet though! Those photos are tucked up privately in our Phuse. This one sums up the trip nicely

The second is even more perverse. I have a Motorola phone which Vodafone have messed about with so that one of the key buttons always activates Vodafone Live with one press and without warning. The button can’t be re-programmed and you can’t access the GPRS settings. I regularly hit this button by mistake and have to cancel the connection. This is annoying in the UK but doesn’t cost anything. While in Mallorca I accidentally hit this button and activated a 3 second GPRS connection for which I was billed £1.50 because of roaming charges.

I strongly object to things like this which allow companies like Vodafone to make money. I am in the early stages of running a service company so I am also fascinated by how customer service deals with this kind of issue. I have had problems with Vodafone before where I have discovered billing errors. The last incident they had been billing me incorrectly for six months. When I called up they acknowledged the error on the current bill, I then asked them about the previous bill which they checked and found the same error. I then had to prompt them to look at the bill before that and suggest that maybe it was their duty to find out how long it had been going on for and refund me. I don’ t know if this is policy or their staff just not being on the ball but either way I felt annoyed that I had to help them give me my money back.

I noted that they have never pointed out a billing error to me and then tried to find out whether they would investigate whether I was the only person with this problem. My reasoning being that if they had 10m customers and had incorrectly billed 10% of them with 10% of my ‘refund’ they would have taken £6m in clear profit. The customer support person helpfully pointed out that globally they have 60m customers. So how easy does that make if for a company like Vodafone to make money which is not rightfully theirs? He then tried to persuade me that the UK billing system had to handle millions of customers and there were going to be errors. The phuser team have built a system which is designed to scale into the billions. All he seemed to be saying was that the Vodafone billing system QA team were not up to the job.

Assuming that Vodafone have some kind of company structure where certain people take certain responsibilities I wanted the name of the person responsible for making sure they would investigate whether they hadn’t incorrectly billed 1m other customers for £60 with the same fault as mine. What I found out from my investigation is that customer services are kept at arms length from the rest of Vodafone and it is very difficult to get to the inner core of Vodafone who might be able to answer this kind of question; you can however write a letter to an anonymous P.O. Box. I ran out of energy at that point and never wrote although I imagine you have received a carefully crafted response apologising and reassuring me that it was being taken care of.

Next: Mallorca Vodafone refunds

A lot of us can only endure this regime because it has happened slowly, like a frog slowly cooking at the water heats up. Twelve years later I still find that the most important email is that sent by people I actually know. The trouble is that it is hard to approach correspondence with the same enthusiasm knowing that there will be other distractions. The final straw is that, no matter what you do, it is still possible to lose some of the few gems amongst the rough to spam filters. At this point it feels like it is utterly failing.

Instant messaging hasn’t succumbed to this because you agree the connection to the other person and if you don’t like them you can block them. Email has no such agreement. This is what has driven the ultimate aim for phuser – to replace email for the people you know and care. We also want to make it more useful by joining all content related to a particular context and adding tools. Ze Frank covers this transition in his own style. Email also has many other problems and Robert Dewey has some good ideas on how email could be improved. We will never get rid of email (unless you are Prof. Don Knuth), it has taken on too many uses, but what I want is to be able to lift out from email all of the real people in my life and put them in phuser so whenever I log in I have that buzz I had back in 1995.

“The Risk Master is the entrepreneur”

I would just like to say I am Risk Master! See me take chances…

The way I see it there are a number of similarities between the web industry now and the car industry at the turn of last century. Like the car we are living though something which is revolutionising people’s lives and a lot of companies are trying to stake their patch of land.

There are companies with early success like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon and eBay who have become household names like Ford, Mercedes, Volkswagen, Austin and Fiat. After these a second wave of websites sprung up with smaller successes, anything from MySpace, Flickr and Photobucket, Blogger and Wikipedia. In the same way many smaller car manufacturers started: Chrysler, Chevrolet, Dodge, Cadillac, Audi, Porsche, Alvis, and hundreds of others.Then over the next half a century the car market matured and developed, manufacturers defined their own niches: prestige, agricultural, military, sports, affordable. Some went bust, some were bought up and made into huge groups like General Motors and British Leyland. The technology improved and so did the reliance on the car. The market and supporting markets evolved.
There were brake manufacturers, coach builders, upholsterers, rubber and metal producers, lights and windows makers, even ball bearings, oil and fabric. The web has the same phenomenon occurring. You can now make a living from eBay or reselling through Amazon. Thousands of people are employed making servers, creating tooling software like PHP, ASP and Java and thousands more pay the rent from using those tools to create.

The difference with the web is that things are moving at a much greater pace. Changes in the automotive industry which took a decade can take a year on the Web. How many of you could go back to dial-up or a CRT monitor? I predict the following:

1. A large number of companies will go to the wall, it is just not possible for the market to sustain, for example, a dozen social networking sites just about books.
2. Consolidation – some companies will realise it is better to group with similar companies rather than go bust
3. There will be a lot more merging and integration – in the 1960s Lucas made lights for a great number of car manufacturers, Bosch still lead in producing ABS controllers. We will get more mash-ups between services as components become part of larger systems – like we want to use Flickr, Skype, Messenger, YouTube and VOIP in phuser and already use PayPal and WordPress.

I know this is a bit rambling but the main point I want to make is that although the web is a recent revolution and seems new, this type of thing has happened before and through astute comparisons it is possible to predict some of the future.

I remember a few years ago the US Mail was trying to get a law passed so everyone had to pay 1 cent for every email sent. Now with buying on web the delivery market is booming. I wish I had invested in those clever cardboard packages Amazon uses, or cardboard itself.

This is a huge area for discussion so send me some comments and let’s discuss!

Like any good networker I had printed off the list of attendees and highlighted the people I wanted to meet from the mobile and social networking blogs I have been reading. Unfortunately in a room of 200 people you have never met with tiny name badges it is really hard to find the few people you are looking for. Not to mention insulting all the people whose badges you look at and then walk away. So if you are reading this Katie Lips or Sarah Blow, I wanted to enthral you with all things phuser but I’ll do better at the next event, like maybe dropping you a line beforehand. I did get to meet Deirdre Molloy of Chinwag who was splendid and very briefly the ever popular Sam Sethi who was also a panel member and had some good ideas.

The MoMo discussion itself was very interesting. The poser was to the effect “If Bubble 2.0 happens what is likely to cause it?”. In summary these were the suggestions by the panel and audience (which I haven’t attributed but ask me if you want to know):

1. A shortage of skilled people.
2. Who needs VCs anyway? You can get a start-up off the ground for £300k these days rather than £3m.
3. £10m investment takes the same effort as £1m for a VC so there is less incentive to make small investments.
4. Management team is key, an A+ management team with a B- idea is better than a B- management team with an A+ idea
5. With Bubble 1.0 websites didn’t work, Bubble 2.0 will be about good design and then finding ways of selling it.
6. There is a valuation gap between what VCs and entrepreneurs think companies are worth. You need marketing spend and power to attract attention to new ideas these days.
7. Is there an Ambition Gap in the UK? There used to be but it is getting better.

One thing which got me thinking was an idea Sam Sethi mentioned (attributed to Tony Fisher) which is “The Four Screens of Life: PC, TV, mobile and car”. Sam advised devising a strategy for rolling out to each. Luckily phuser lends itself to any screen however I hadn’t thought about car screens before, they weren’t quite around when my car was built. I like the idea that you could have Joanna Lumley or Eddie Izzard reading phuser messages to you while you drive.