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Wordcount: 1,658 (short one)

Location: Mahalo HQ, Santa Monica

Mood: Quixotic

=========================================

Last Wednesday, 10AM, Las Vegas.

The South Point Hotel and Casino, a couple of miles off the strip. The

kind of hotel where you can get steak and eggs for $2.99–24 hours a

day.

Cashier: “How would you like your $200,000, Mr. Calacanis? Chips?”

Me: “That would be perfect.”

A huge security guard carries my “bird cage”–lingo for a clear white

case used for carrying poker chips–to the set of “PokerStars’ The Big

Game,” the most expensive poker show ever created.

Two hours later, I’ve got sick cards and I’m facing the most famous

poker player of all time, Doyle Brunson.

Me: “All in.”

Doyle: “I. Call.”

To myself: F@#$ me–I guess I overplayed my [INSERT CARDS HERE].

[Note: I can’t say anything else about the hand due to my contractual

agreement. I can say that I feel I played well on the Big Game, which

will be airing on June 14th on Fox. 🙂 ]

Overplaying your hand

=================

The biggest mistake most new players make at poker is overplaying

their hand. They spend so much time thinking of the ways they can win

that they forget all the ways they can lose. Overplaying hands can

affect even the most seasoned players, especially after they’ve won a

couple of hands in a row.

Over the past month, Mark Zuckerberg, the hottest new card player in

town, has overplayed his hand. Facebook is officially “out,” as in

uncool, amongst partners, parents and pundits all coming to the

realization that Zuckerberg and his company are–simply put–not

trustworthy.

Casual gaming company Zynga is reportedly developing plans to get over

their Facebook dependency. I predict a complete heads-up match with

Facebook–Zynga’s now been double-crossed not once but twice by

Zuckerberg. (The first double-cross was when Facebook stopped letting

applications like Farmville easily market themselves on profile

pages.) Instead, Zynga and others were told to advertise their apps if

they wanted distribution. OK, I’m guessing that evaporates 20-35% of

an app developer’s margin.

Now, Facebook is reportedly forcing developers to use their virtual

currency–for a 30% cut. These two moves have to take at least 50% of

the margin out of Zynga’s business.

Last year, when I realized that Zuckerberg was an amoral,

Asperger’s-like entrepreneur, I told Zynga CEO Mark Pincus that

Zuckerberg would try and slit his throat. I knew this because I

watched Zuckerberg screw over his users again and again in terms of

privacy, and I heard about the stories of him screwing over his former

employers at ConnectU and his early partners at Facebook.

The money quote from Business Insider’s scoop comes from Zuckerberg

himself: “they made a mistake haha. They asked me to make it for them.

So I’m like delaying it so it won’t be ready until after the facebook

thing comes out.” He stalled and sandbagged ConnectU–then

Zuckerpunched them! Of course, the person he said this to was his

partner–Eduardo Saverin–who he reportedly screwed as well.

Read all here: http://bit.ly/bmRip3

Add to all this that Zuckerberg was stealing every tiny innovation the

second Evan Williams and the team over at Twitter released it, and

Zuckerberg is clearly the worst thing that’s happened to our industry

since, well, spam.

You’re Zucked!

=================

Yes, that’s the new catch phrase for when someone either steals your

business idea or screws you as a business partner.

Who’s been Zucked and how? Let’s take a look back:

1. FourSquare was Zucked when Facebook stole their check-in feature.

2. Twitter was Zucked when Facebook stole their public facing profiles.

3. Facebook users got Zucked when the site flipped their privacy

setting–three different times!

4. The co-founder of Facebook was allegedly Zucked when he was kicked

out of the company he helped found.

5. The founders of ConnectU got Zucked when he allegedly screwed them

over by not delivering their social network and then launching

Facebook at the same time–and joked about it!

6. Harvard reporters reportedly got Zucked when Mark hacked their

accounts to try and stop a negative story/investigation about him.

You can only screw people for so long before it catches up to you. The

entire industry went from rooting for Zuckerberg to hating him and

Facebook–in under 18 months.

Peter Rojas and Matt Cutts have turned off their Facebook pages, and

more intelligent people everywhere are talking about doing so.

Zuckerberg represents the best and worst aspects of entrepreneurship.

His drive, skill and fearlessness are only matched by his long

record–recorded in lawsuit after lawsuit–of backstabbing, stealing

and cheating.

A look at last week’s headlines shows the trend:

Facebook’s Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline

Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook

http://gizmodo.com/5530178/top-ten-reasons-you-should-quit-facebook

Yet another Facebook privacy risk: emails Facebook sends leak user IP address

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/05/07/yet-another-privacy.html

A Stunning Infographic on Facebook’s scary privacy evolution

http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/

Facebook’s “Posts By Everyone” Feature: Do People Realize They’re

Sharing To The World?

http://selnd.com/96avG4

Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative | Epicenter |

Wired.com

http://bit.ly/aoNxf0

Senators Call Out Facebook On ‘Instant Personalization’, Other Privacy Issues

http://tcrn.ch/907D27

Facebook’s email days: “I’m CEO bith@#$%!”

http://bit.ly/ba5wRY

Facebook’s new features secretly add apps to your profile

http://bit.ly/bHXpH5

The Day Facebook Stole My Page

http://bit.ly/ar4A4As

Facebook is Dying – Social is Not

http://bit.ly/atwbzX

Facebook’s “Evil Interfaces” | Electronic Frontier Foundation

http://bit.ly/9ww6g3

I’m not making this up people.

The Stakes

==================

We’ve fought for years to create an open web, and we would be crazy to

give our future over to a selfish little kid who has no problem

stealing any innovation he catches from the corner of his eye from

other entrepreneurs.

Didn’t anyone read “Tom Sawyer”? We’re whitewashing Zuckerberg’s fence.

People are creating fan pages on Facebook and then paying Facebook to

send them traffic. Let me explain this one more time: You’re PAYING

Mark Zuckerberg money to send traffic to HIS SITE. Think about it.

Oh yeah, and while he’s taking your money and page views, he’s

convincing everyone that they don’t need their own customer’s

information: Just use Facebook Connect!

Oh yeah, and if you’re stupid enough to give up your customer database

to Facebook, he will pay you back by screwing over your user’s

privacy! Yes, that’s right: give up your customer database, pay for

traffic to build Facebook’s page views and, by the way, if you would

like to use a virtual currency, Zuck will take 30% of that as well!

Are we blind? It’s a trap! It’s a trap!

Zuckerberg’s crowning achievement is, of course, to show his utter

disdain and contempt for the industry by not only claiming–but

naming–his master plan “The Open Graph.”

An alternate path

==================

There a people and organizations in our industry–heck, our

world–that believe in being fair and respectful to competitors and

consumers alike. They don’t see the need to reverse open standards.

Rather, they embrace and expand them. Facebook is not good for our

industry, and as talented as Zuckerberg is, he is hopelessly misguided

and has a horrible ethics problem.

The Internet is the fastest growing medium–heck “thing”–in history

because it was designed to be open and fair. If you have a level

playing field people can invest in it. That is why the United States

has been such an amazing place to invest in a business and places run

by dictators are not. At any point your investment in Facebook can be

taken from you. At any point they can change the rules, and history

shows that dictators tend to changes rules in their favor–not the

other way around.

Facebook taking people’s topic pages out from under them or their

forcing folks into their virtual currency is no different than a

dictator in a 3rd world country telling an outside investor who just

spent millions putting in wireless phone network that their taxes have

just doubled–conveniently to a level that is almost exactly their

profit margin.

Anyone who trusts Facebook to do the right thing for the industry,

their customers or their application partners simply needs to look at

their history. Remember Frank’s First Rule from “Scarface”: “Lesson

number one: Don’t underestimate the other guy’s greed!”

The Web and HTML grew into the juggernaut they are today because

they’re based on open standards that everyone can buy into. No one

player has control or dominance over anyone else. Facebook’s very

obvious goal is to use the their social graph dominance to control the

future of advertising and attention on the Web. Why on Earth are we

supporting this?

The Social Graph will only reach its potential if it is truly

open–not controlled by a spoiled little kid with questionable ethics.

It’s time for the good people of the world to stand up against

Facebook. It’s time to build and support OpenID and the creation of an

truly open social graph. It’s time to force Facebook to allow open

data portability. It is our data, after all. The road map for the open

web has been laid out and supported by the “good guys/gals” at OpenID,

Google, Twitter, Open Social and countless others who don’t feel the

need to control the industry and manipulate our customers.

The more we feed the monster that is Facebook, the more we lose.

A Facebook Boycott?

====================

I’d call for a boycott of Facebook, but they’ve actually beaten me to it!

The enthusiasm for Facebook has soured with early adopters, Facebook’s

biggest partners and the French all pilling on. (Hey, you’re nobody

until the French hate you, right?).

In the words of Warren Buffet, “Look for three qualities: integrity,

intelligence, and energy. And if they don’t have the first, the other

two will kill you.”

Facebook has been overplaying hands for a long time and there is a

chance they might now get felted.

Stop Facebook, Save the World!

best regards,

Jason

PS – You may have read on TechCrunch that Mike Arrington and I have

parted ways and that the TechCrunch50 conference is over–dead! It’s

true… tear drop! 🙂 However, I’m starting a new conference called

the Launch Conference which will debut in early 2011. It will be the

same exact as TechCrunch50, except I’m going invest all the profits

from it in the companies that present. More at

www.thelaunchconference.com as it becomes available. It will be epic,

and you will be attending. 🙂

PSS – If you want to go to Mike Arrington’s new version of TechCrunch

50 it is called TechCrunch Disrupt–and I will be speaking at it! You

can signup with a 10% discount at this Jason Nation link:

http://bit.ly/aSfWxm

PSS – Open Angel Forum is coming to Boston, London and Seattle in 2010

thanks two our two national sponsors Symantec and Silicon Valley Bank.

If you have suggestions for angel investors please email boston at

openangelforum.com (or london@ or seattle@ etc).

PSSS – Had a great interview with Joel Spolsky of Joel on

Software/StackOverflow fame last week. You can watch it here:

http://bit.ly/b8PDAX

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