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Over the past few days I’ve written about startups who put all their eggs in one basket and what it could meet for their ability to continue as a going concern. Today I noted that TwitterMass is up for auction — what happens if you buy the app and then Twitter announces the same offering?

Last night I spoke with a friend and most of the discussion centered around the issues the auto industry is facing today. My friend asked if anyone would have thought five years ago that Chrysler would be in bankruptcy and Daimler would partner with a valley startup. What about GM we wondered – the company has just announced 1,100 dealers will close and tens of thousands will be out of jobs. Oh yea, Chrysler is closing 800 dealerships around the country next month as well.

Am I suggesting that people shouldn’t open car dealerships or create applications on Twitter/Facebook/etc.? Of course not. What I am suggesting is that you do the homework to calculate the risk involved with the business plan. If an application takes little effort, the point of risk calculation is moot. In the TwitterMass example, the app took two weeks to build. If the application was to grow and staff or funding was required, at that point the risk calculation should take place.

The percentage of risk goes down when you can build your application to leverage a technology or platform in addition to your unique offering. In the car dealer business, an example might be offering used cars along with new to minimize risk of losing a new-car dealer license as has happened with GM and Chrysler.

We’ve written about the Flock social browser a good number of times here at CN including the launch of the 2.0 version. Tonight’s launch of the Flock 2.5 release builds upon the “socialness” of the previous releases.

What I found most interesting in the new Flock release is the ability to drag-and-drop items from one network to another. If you want to share a photo from Flickr to your friends on Twitter, you can just drag the photo to the Twitter window and a message will be created with a link to the image. The Twitter integration continues with the ability to save searches into a sidebar for each viewing. It’s almost as if Flock has integrated a mini-desktop app (e.g. tweetdeck) with the full browser functionality.

The new “Flockcast” functionality is also a great addition. Flockcast allows you to broadcast your items to multiple networks. If you share a Flickr photo, you can select to share the item to Facebook as well. Flock says this can also help bloggers because content uploaded to a blog via Flock can be broadcast to multiple networks at once using the Flockcast option.

Flock has also announced that it has integrated Bebo into the browser. Flock self-reports that the browser is used in over 14,000 cities and over 192 countries and territories.

Lastly the new Flock browser has integrated Facebook chat so you can converse with your Facebook friends directly from the browser. The drag-and-drop functionality I noted above is also available with the Facebook chat option.

The updates should be well received by loyal Flock users as they increase the ability to share content along with usability improvements that should increase overall usage.

Chris Nuttall at the Financial Times has commentary from CEO Shawn Hardin.

Social network app development firm Sprout has announced a new program today named F3. The Sprout F3 program costs $50,000 and includes the development of a Facebook fan page, Facebook Connect application to connect back to the company’s website and a Facebook application which the company says will connect into the Facebook news feed and realtime stream.

The release indicates that some new assets will be built for the app but I fear that it will be, at least, partly cookie cutter. The sales PDF shows an asterisk next to the words ”from scratch” but there is no additional note in the document. The Sprout F3 program is a smart idea to help get new customers in the door — naturally the clients will need either more services or long-term maintenance which will be billable. Reporting is included in the overall budget.

Another company in the Facebook app development space is NY-based Buddy Media.

Note: As you read this post, I’d ask that you read it in the mindset of a mainstream Internet user.

Currently it seems the top three services fighting for the “real time feed” crown are Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook. Dave Winer recently asked what FriendFeed would be if it didn’t pull in Twitter – the answer is simple: a service with very little activity. But for all three services, I find that there is nothing but confusion over the structure of how the three services work together and can imagine that mainstream Internet users face the same issues. I will use Friendfeed in the examples below because it faces the most mainstream issues but there are similar issues with all three services.

In terms of initial content inflow, Facebook and Twitter mainly gather their content via comments (e.g. “my dog just peed on the carpet”, “i had a roasted turkey sandwich for lunch”) while Friendfeed mainly gathers content by pulling in the comments from Twitter and Facebook and then applying a layer of content aggregation on top of that. Of course many populate their Twitter feeds via aggregated links which complicates the issue even further.
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Back in December I provided results from advertising on Facebook. While the results weren’t great and the company billed me just over $1 last month, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg says the company, “…could not be doing better financially”.

Over the past week companies including Seesmic have launched desktop applications which allow you to access your Facebook “stream” on your desktop without ever visiting the facebook.com website. Steven Hodson has a good overview of the new Seesmic application.

These new applications are similar to the crop of Twitter applications that allow you to interact with the service “off-site”. Most power users appear to use an off-site service when interacting with Twitter. I can only assume we will see the same pattern with Facebook and off-site interaction. I am not sold that these desktop applications have a chance to actually be solid revenue generators but we will leave that discussion for another day.

My question to Facebook is…where are my ads within these new desktop applications? Are they sent as a package with the feed to the desktop applications? If advertising is the model that Facebook intends to use going forward, I would have thought ads would be included in the desktop stream from day 1. I will admit that I haven’t downloaded the Seesmic desktop application but in all of the reviews I have read, there has been no mention of advertising within the stream.

Assuming ads are not currently part of the desktop applications, when they add them, will we see the same sort of backlash that Facebook has experienced with Beacon and more recently with the terms of service changes? The numbers of Facebook users using the desktop applications is low today and will be for the short-term but as that number grows (especially with power users), Facebook will be forced to push out more ads into the stream – or they risk losing the $1 that I paid them last month since users will never have the chance to engage with my ad unit.

This morning Facebook announced the launch of Facebook Connect for Mobile. During the presentation, Seesmic CEO Loic LeMeur announced the launch of Seesmic for Facebook. Basically Seesmic is growing today – it’s no longer just videos only. The Twirhl name is going to be replaced with Seesmic over time. Seesmic for Facebook is starting out as an Adobe Air client that reads your social stream. Over time Loic tells me the video component of Seesmic will also be integrated.

I was able to capture a quick video with Loic about the new launch today.

I am live blogging the SXSW Panel with Dave Morin from Facebook, "The search for a more social Web." To see the latest content, please refresh the page until I note that the post has completed.

comments are all from dave morin…

• never been a better time to be working on the web. walks through how we have apparently been social all the way back to the time of cavemen.
• takes us through a history of how we were social – though email, chat, etc
• at facebook we have been trying to map out the most social web over the last few years
• as time has gone on, the graph has changed a little bit
• the graph is becoming much more interesting – we’ve created this better stream of infomration
• the stream is an important concept and a template for the future
• with facebook connect i can connect to more things
• obama is in his stream
• public profiles are all about connecting with people who care about you
• gary vaynerchuk speaks about his new facebook profile – nothing you haven’t heard from him before
• back to dave – you have more control over the stream than ever before – this is the new homepage he is demoing
• all new concept – the publisher – looks exactly the same to me as before
• shows off highlights – which is the right side of the new page and highlights whatever is hot in your network
• now he changes to facebook connect – wants you to take the core facebook experience with you – take the identity with them wherever they go
• six thousand sites using facebook connects – pimps techcrunch says the conversation is more authentic than ever before
• pimps boxee, joost, geni and aardvark which is some social search
• talks about facebook connect for the desktop with xobni and soon iphoto
• loic lemeur talks about seesmic.com/facebook – it’s adobe air – brand new

next steps towards openness

• they are making more apis open than ever before
• embracing openid with chris messina
• they want to take a leadership role in openid
• big commitment to opensource

NEW ANNOUNCEMENT

facebook connect for iphone – basically you can now connect iphone applications to your iphone

• playfish demo – play your games with your facebook friends
• sgn social gaming network – more games – agency wars is their new game – you play against your friends
• tapulous – more games with facebook connect – they wanted to be more social
• urbanspoon – rest. guide – 1 million in their db
• flixster – he cant find anyything he wants to see – but now zip zap if you have an iphone – you can connect to your friends – Movies 2.0 went live today in the app store
• more too – zynga, gary’s game and more coming soon – citizen sports, goodrec and limbo

fbFund – new round of funding for facebook connect and the iphone specifically

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