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Lesson for Open Source: Make it Look Good Posted: 23 Oct 2008 02:25 PM CDT Yesterday John McCrea posted on TechcrunchIT about his experience when attending the User Experience Summit for OpenID. Apparently a large portion of the event turned into a conversation about Facebook’s experience with developing Connect. One takeaway was that Facebook Connect is much further along then OpenID and any of the platforms providing a single login. While OpenID is pretty well defined, all implementations of the service have been overly complex, in turn confusing users. On the other hand, Facebook Connect is extremely simple and intuitive for users. If you take a look at many of the open standards and the services that have been developed on them, it is a rare occasion when you see well designed implementation. All too often we see implementations of new services, such as Google Friend Connect, but the service just doesn’t look good. Why on earth would someone want to integrate a service which looks like crap? They wouldn’t! If the open source alliance which is trying to develop better standards than Facebook can’t develop better looking services they are going to have some serious problems. If they were to make Google Friend Connect look extremely clean, I think it could have a really good chance of succeeding. For the time being Facebook Connect has the best implementation and it would be great if other standards followed Facebook’s lead when it comes to building clean user interfaces. Have you seen any solid implementations of Google Friend Connect or MySpace Data Availability?

LinkedIn Raises Another $22.7 Million Posted: 22 Oct 2008 11:37 PM CDT In the middle of an economic crisis, LinkedIn has sealed a new round of funding for $22.7 million from SAP Ventures, Goldman Sachs, and McGraw-Hill, according to the Wall Street Journal. This round of funding includes cash from strategic partners and not just venture companies. According to the Wall Street Journal, this round was actually part of the Series-D which was first announced in June. That leaves the company valued at $1 billion, a far cry from the $15 billion valuation Facebook was able to attract. According to the latest Nielsen ratings released today, LinkedIn has a quarter of the domestic growth that Facebook has and is growing at a much faster rate. According to Dan Nye, who spoke with Techcrunch, the company has been profitable since 2006. Why would they want this money now? Well they might as well have a nice stash of cash in order to weather the economic downturn. Is the company firing anybody at the company? It doesn’t look like it but the Wall Street Journal has said that the company has definitely slowed down its hiring. Then again, would the company really announced that it’s actively hiring in the face of the recent firing announcements? For those companies that are cash heavy, this period could turn out to be pretty valuable as they snatch up new employees and potentially entire companies through acquisitions. This is a sizeable round to follow-up from the $53 million raised a few months ago. Looks like we can bet on LinkedIn being around once this economy works through all its issues!

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