“It didn't make sense because unless you follow people or have followers, what is it?” the 30-year-old university professor says of his early mindset. Flash forward two and a half years, after a friend told Dallas to give the app another try, and he has 106,000 followers under the handle @dirka.

And Instagram itself has changed, becoming part of Facebook through a billion-dollar acquisition.

For users like Dallas, Instagram is a verb, and a well-paying one. For Dallas, one recent gig involved Toyota, who paid him to participate in an Instagram-oriented photo shoot. He’s been approached numerous other times, and turned down some of the offers.

“I’ve had to walk a fine line of, ‘Wow I’m really selling out,’ or, ‘I’m pulling a fast one on my followers,’” he explains.

And Dallas is not alone. He represents a sliver of the app’s 100 million users who are not professional photographers, photojournalists, or celebrities, yet have amassed a massive following through their keen eye and commitment to the community. To put it in perspective, Instagram cofounder Mike Krieger has only 65,000 more followers than Dallas. (Celebrities attract considerably more: LeBron James has 2.5 million).

But while it sounds like a dream come true—using a smartphone app to launch an Internet-based career on the side—Dallas has battled a common enemy in many heavy Instagram users’ paths: himself.

“I used to be kind of obsessed in a negative way," he admits. "Instagram kind of consumed me."

Before he had over 100,000 followers and before his Instagram presence became a revenue stream, he struggled with an issue at the very core of the photo-sharing app: the way it has latched onto its users and assimilated itself into our daily lives, for better and for worse.

With Facebook's backing, Instagram is here to stay, and the effects of its pressure to scan for, snap, and constantly think about shareable moments day in and day out is central to the way our digital existences bleed into our physical experiences.

"Instagram Is Not A Photography Company"

When Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom, a clean-cut towering Stanford grad, addressed a crowd at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco in May, he reiterated multiple times that the company he cofounded “is not a photography company.”

“Instagram is a communications company," Systrom said. "It’s about communicating a moment. It just so happens that that message happens to be an image."

His insistence of this point throughout the night’s Q&A conversation, moderated by Digg founder and Google Ventures partner Kevin Rose, bordered on the evangelical. Systrom showed an almost Steve Jobs-like marketing magic. He spoke as if the crowd needed convincing that Instagram was worth the $1 billion Facebook paid for it last April. They didn’t.

Instagram has no real competitors. Sure, there’s Hipstamatic and Flickr’s smartphone app and Twitter’s mobile photo-filter options, but none of these will ever come close to commanding Instagram's near-synonymous identity with photo sharing in the minds of its users.

We'll soon have physical evidence. There's already an Instagram-linked slide projector, and an upcoming Polaroid-made instant-print camera.

As Systrom said himself that night, “Anyone can make a filter app.” What Instagram did was different. It dug into our souls, and it’s part of our daily digital ecosystem on a private and personal level comparable only to Facebook, not coincidentally.

Part of its success was in the way Instagram took the hurdles of photography out of photo sharing.

For one, you can’t make an image horizontal or vertical; all photos are square. (Apple appears to be following Instagram's lead—a split-second preview of the next version of the iPhone operating system showed a square-photo mode.)

Within less than a minute, your photo is telegraphed to the world. With Instagram, photography became more than just easy. It became natural.

“I shared something, my photo got a bit of action, and it was awesome,” Dallas explains of the first photo he took after he re-downloaded the app a few months after deleting it on its launch day. “I got instant feedback."

It turned out some of his friends and Twitter followers had stumbled onto his account while the app remained off his phone. While he'd temporarily abandoned Instagram, it hadn't forgotten him—and that gave him a small following to come back to.

The feedback is the key to Instagram’s success and growth. It’s the reason communities with thousands of people spring up around hashtags in mere hours. But it’s also the source of the now-too-familiar narcissistic tendencies—that need to show everyone what you’re about to eat for lunch, for instance, and the negativity that comes with that.

Instagram is now yet another pillar of society’s continuously strained and conflicted relationship with social networks. For the photo-sharing app, the dangers lurk deeper than with Twitter or Facebook or Tumblr because with Instagram, our very experiences are our digital currency.

The devaluation of daily life to a struggle for likes and exposure and reaffirmation can force us to reconsider and reflect upon the reasons we love Instagram so much—or why, love it or hate it, we can't quit it.

The Conflicted Relationship With Sharing

After a few months of near-constant use, Dallas decided to take a break from Instagram.

“I actually stepped back for about four months,” he says. The app ended up taking away from Dallas's own experience of the very moments his followers were so keen to like.“Right off the bat, it made me very aware of my surroundings.... I was always trying to look for something epic to share.”

Dallas’s personal conflict exposes the potentially destructive relationship we can have with an app that also helps us connect in amazing ways.

"It seems that there are a few populations that are particularly impacted by these technologies," says Morgan G. Ames, a graduate of Stanford's PhD progam in communication who specializes in the ways new technologies impact our everyday lives. "One would be parents of younger children who can capture and share all aspects of the minutiae of their children's everyday lives.

"Some parents seem to feel a tremendous pressure to capture all of the 'important' moments of their child's lives, which can make their lives feel more exciting and important, but can also add a great deal of stress," she adds.

This kind of Insta-stress happens in other circumstances, too.

Take the food photo for instance. As early as August of last year, GQ’s Luke Zaleski wrote, “The best way to Instagram your food? Don't. It's time to go on an Insta-diet.” More recently, you have the Tumblr "Pictures Of Hipsters Taking Pictures Of Food."

This idea that people were so consumed with sharing their every moment—something people previously said about the Facebook status and the tweet—seems magnified with Instagram. Taking a photo of your perfectly composed food suggests that you think it's beautiful enough to share with the world—but not delicious enough to start eating immediately.

And food photos are only the tip of the iceberg. Think about every time you visit a famous landmark, ride your bike past a beautiful landscape, or notice how striking the light of the sunset looks against the clouds.

"Many photographs today are take-once and view-once (probably in the next few days), and have little value beyond that, at least currently," Ames says. "I can imagine archaeologists sifting through our digital remains sometime in the future and these photographs serving useful functions for them, but will we ever go back and look at our meals and shopping lists and pretty sunsets? It's hard to say."

When Systrom explains the ideas driving Instagram's popularity, he strikes a particularly interesting note when he says that life in the digital age is driven by staying in touch, that central desire of human nature that made us, in the pre-smartphone age, increasingly more separated from those we used to know as time goes on.

“Success to us in the future is where everyone in the world has the Instagram app in their lives,” he says.

Keeping in touch through Instagram is a fantastic solution to bridging the thousands of miles that separate us from friends and family members, but it’s also a very superficial and one-sided take on the social network. To go deeper, Ames suggest, you have to be willing to accept the fact that Instagram has cheapened the photographic image, and therefore by extension, lessened the value we get out of moments we're so eager to share.

"It seems that photographs are now more commonly being used as a stand-in for medium-term and even short-term memories as well," she says. "Even though the resulting photographs are cheapened, the pressure to take the photographs in the first place hasn't necessarily lessened."

Viewed through a social-network lens, if Twitter is an inside look into someone’s mind from a textual standpoint, and Facebook a view into that person’s world from a social one, then Instagram is the next frontier: the closest thing to participating in someone else’s physical experience, visually.

That’s where the pitfalls for all of us reside. Ames sums up the ambiguity of Instagram's value when pitted against the compulsions it fosters on a personal note.

"I rarely go back and look through these photographs I've taken—time and attention, as always, are the bottlenecks—and I sometimes joke, even as I take photos, that it'd be better if I just put the camera away and experience the world more directly," she says.

"Of course, I don't."

Image Control

When Dallas rejoined Instagram in late 2011, he felt refreshed. It was this new take on the app that let him approach it in a manner that reassured him he had the control, and 100,000 plus more followers without needing another break set that in stone.

Since then, Dallas’s life as an Instagram celebrity of sorts has pushed him far beyond what he imagined possible when, at his friend’s insistence more than two years ago, he put the app back on his iPhone home screen.

More recently, he was approached by Orchestra, the company behind iOS email app Mailbox, while it was in beta. It wanted to feature his and other Instagrammers' photos as a reward for users who hit “inbox zero”—a state of cutting through email clutter. (That's how ReadWrite first heard of Dallas's work.)

When Toyota approached him recently for a special vehicle shoot, they didn’t want the photos he could take with his Canon 5D Mark III. “They wanted me to bring my iPhone,” he says with a laugh.

“I’m still looking for awesome shots to share that are interesting and maybe inspiring, but I’m trying to not let it just be about Instagram,” he says. It’s a feeling not so unfamiliar to many of us in our daily lives who find ourselves in conflict with the obtrusive nature of a smartphone and the crisp click of a shutter-mimicking tone the moment a scene strikes us.

For Dallas, it helped to tell himself, “‘Hey, I’m at this cool spot, I need to be here right now, live in the moment.’" For him, the pitfalls of the app are avoidable through this self-meditation. “So now I feel like I’m bringing Instagram with me as opposed to I’m just going somewhere to Instagram.”

Just last month, Dallas visited some visually stunning spots in Arizona and New Mexico with friends, and brought along his Canon DSLR because he was less worried about Instagram authenticity and the idea of an immediate post.

After his trip came to a close, he shared a select few shots, specifically some astounding long exposure light images, with his followers, stressing to everyone that the shots were taken with his “big-boy camera” for pure pleasure.

“I wanted to experience those in my eye, to make those memories,” he says, “and Instagram came along.”

Photo of Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger by Nick Statt for ReadWrite; all other photos [except food photos] by Dirk Dallas

Over the next few weeks all Facebook users will be able to include a hashtagged phrase, like #royalbaby or #puppies, in their posts and then watch it become clickable. When a hashtag is included in a post, clicking on it will pop out a feed that aggregates others posts that have been tagged with the same phrase.

Just as water was the lifeblood of agriculture, content—photos, videos, links, status updates, and check-ins—is the lifeblood of the social Web. And those who would rule our digital worlds seek to have content pool up and flow at their command.

(Yes, in most cases, "content" is a loathsomely generic term. But it's hard to think of a better catch-all description that embraces all the varied material that flows between the Web's social services.)

Like water, the torrents of data generated by the billions of people online can never be fully controlled. But they can certainly be harnessed. And every node of connectivity between these networks is a potential flashpoint for border skirmishes.

Looked at in this light, it makes perfect sense that Tumblr went to Yahoo for $1.1 billion. Thanks to years of neglect of properties like Flickr, Yahoo was a social backwater. Without a pool of social updates to call its own, Yahoo would always be subject to the whims of Twitter, Facebook, and the rest. Now it is part of the flow.

Battle Lines

Just like water in the physical world—a scarce, well-guarded resource—these flows of content can turn contentious.

Just ask Instagram, which saw Twitter cut off access to its list of friends, and retaliated by requiring an extra click to see images. Or Path, which lets photos flow to Facebook but had the return flow abruptly (and quietly) cut off earlier this year. Or how, last year, Twitter snubbed Linkedin, a longtime partner, restricting access to the tweets that used to show up on users' online resumes.

To begin to understand these conflicts, it helps to start with a map. For that, we're borrowing a concept from hydrology—that of sources and sinks.

Sources And Sinks On The Social Web

Content must begin somewhere. These points of creation, like the upload of a YouTube video or the snapping of an Instagram photo, are sources.

It must likewise end up somewhere. The nexus of creation is not always the natural place of consumption. For example, on Path, the mobile-focused social network, a substantial number of users opt to share moments on Twitter, CEO Dave Morin recently told me. That may seem odd, considering Path's limitations on the number of friends you can add, but it allows users to reach more people with updates that aren't especially private.

And a large reason why Instagram became so big so fast—and was courted by Twitter before it was bought by Facebook for a billion dollars—was that it was so easy to share photos not just on Instagram but on those larger social networks. By establishing itself as a source to those sinks, Instagram emerged as a powerful pool of visuals in its own right. 

Foursquare, which began as a source for location check-ins posted out to Twitter and Facebook, may now be more important as a sink for other apps' check-ins—in particular, Instagram, where many photos are tagged with a location derived from Foursquare's vast database.

Precisely because these flows have value, they are points of leverage and vulnerability. Yet they also show the social Web's fragile interdependence.

Twitter And Facebook: A Sinking Feeling

The world's most important social networks have long battled over their lists of friends. Early on, Facebook invited Twitter to be one of the first apps on its platform. But in 2010, when Twitter added a feature to let people find their Facebook friends on its information network, Facebook abruptly cut it off. Since then, the two services have engaged in a tit-for-tat sparring.

After Facebook bought Instagram, Twitter cut off the ability to find friends on Instagram. Facebook did the same when Twitter launched Vine, its short-video app.

Yet while they fought over friends' lists, they never cut off a mutual flow of status updates. You can use Twitter to update Facebook—and, confusingly, you can opt to automatically send your public Facebook statuses out on Twitter, too. That's because while each service prefers to be the ultimate sink for content, it doesn't want its rival to become a more powerful source.

LinkedIn, lacking the leverage over Twitter that Facebook holds, went from being what Twitter called "the perfect combination" in 2009 to something incompatible with "delivering a consistent Twitter experience." After some worries that LinkedIn would feel less lively without tweets, the rift actually worked out for its media ambitions. It turns out that many tweets weren't that professional in nature, and LinkedIn has moved from being a sink for tweets to a purer source of work-related information. Which, of course, it is now trying to have flow to more sinks.

There are more twists and turns and intriguing dead ends in these flows of content. Did you know, for example, that you can't pin updates from Facebook to Pinterest—even if they're posted publicly on a brand's Facebook Page? Or that Google+ is a virtual island, rejecting crossposted material as "social spam"?

Here's where the Web's content flows stand as of 2013. For simplicity, we haven't shown every possible connection. And events may swiftly make this map outdated. Last year, it certainly looked different. Next year, we'll see new linkages and blockages. Like a fast-moving river cutting through the landscape and reshaping it as it goes, the only constant we can expect is change.

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

Photo by Saad Faruque; infographic by Madeleine Weiss for ReadWrite

Page's post, written with Google's chief legal officer, David Drummond, is headlined "What the ..." Zuckerberg's language is similarly frank, referring to "outrageous press reports."

(See also: Congratulations! You've Been Auto-Upgraded To Citizenship 2.0)

Page and Zuckerberg both said the government did not have "direct access" to their servers. The Washington Post, which broke news about the PRISM program, reported that government agencies were "tapping directly into the central servers" of Google, Facebook and other companies.

But both CEOs' statements hint that there's something they're not saying. Page and Zuckerberg both call on the U.S. government to be more "transparent" about secret requests for user data, requests that the government can legally make under established procedures.

Some are suggesting that instead of tapping directly into company servers, the NSA is collecting data from Internet service providers as it flows over the Internet. Such collection has been going on for years—before the reported start of the PRISM program. 

President Barack Obama said in a press conference Friday that the data collection wasn't targeted at U.S. citizens and "helped prevent terrorist attacks.

(See also: Can Zynga Bounce Back With Online Gambling?)

Zynga's recent efforts to stem its bleeding have included a management shake-up in April and some changes to its board of directors. Now it's time to see if drastic cost-cutting and a reorientation toward mobile can save the once high-flying purveyor of Farmville and related social games.

Like the once bittersweet, respectful and sometimes resentful interactions between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, so is the prickly, contentious and mutually beneficial relationship between teens and Facebook. It's complicated, yes, but teens and Facebook - despite what you've heard - are practically joined at the hip.  

I Hate You! I Hate You! Can I Borrow the Car?

Facebook would be wise not to ignore teen's complaints regarding the service - complaints that span peer pressure, image, prying parents, privacy settings, advertising and access. Nonetheless, for teens, Facebook has become a pillar of daily life, like school and parents.

A recent Pew Research report on teens and social media launched the blogosphere into a giddy, frenzied panic. Teens are "abandoning" Facebook, several sites claimed. This is false - likely the result of a limited reading of the report's data and a too-eager willingness to parrot an Associated Press report which stated that "teens are migrating to Twitter."

Twitter is booming as a social media destination for teenagers who complain about too many adults and too much drama on Facebook.  

Here are the facts: nearly every teen in the U.S. is online and the vast majority of them are on Facebook - first and foremost. Nothing else is close. Indeed, the very same teen focus group complaints likely only reveal the pre-eminence of Facebook in teenager's lives.  

What Are You Doing? Nothing.

Fully 95% of American teens are online and of those who use any form of social media, an incredible 94% have a Facebook account - a slight increase from 93% in 2011.

Teens aren't simply signing up for a Facebook account, of course. The data show that teens rely upon Facebook in numbers radically higher than any other social media platform, including Twitter. Note also that Google's much promoted Google Plus registers at only 1% as teens' preferred choice. 

I'm In Charge

Two primary reasons many analysts claim teens will abandon Facebook is because of the site's confusing privacy policies and, possibly more concerning, the fact that teens' parents can see everything they post. In fact, neither of these are much of a concern.

Pew's data shows that nearly 90% of teens say Facebook's privacy settings are either "not difficult at all" to manage or "not too difficult." A surprisingly high 61% of teens have reviewed their Facebook privacy settings within the prior month of the survey - and nearly 80% of teens within the prior year.

Turns out, the granularity of Facebook controls are welcome. For example, 60% of teens keep their Facebook profile "private" - restricted to approved friends and family access. Further, only 16% choose to have their location automatically included in their updates. Teens are in control of their Facebook profile. Twitter, by contrast, is more likely to be viewed as fully "public" by teens. 

With respect to mom and dad seeing what's on their profile, that also isn't much of a concern. Only 5% of teens "limit what their parents can see" on Facebook.

The vast majority of teen Facebook users say that their parents and other adults see the same content and updates that all of their friends see, suggesting that having multiple Facebook accounts is not a common practice.  

Everybody's Doing It

The average number of friends for teens on Facebook is 425 - compared to 171 "followers" on Twitter. Teens are not likely to abandon these relationships - in part or en masse. There is simply no bigger, better or more robust alternative to Facebook. There is also a mutually beneficial "network effect" for teens on Facebook - that spurs social media across the web. Approximately three-quarters of teens surveyed have 150 or more friends in their Facebook network, and 20% have over 600 friends.

A close reading of the data reveals that the more friends a teen has on Facebook, the more their overall online social activity increases - across all social media sites, not just Facebook. No doubt, Facebook is seeking new methods of tracking and monetizing this enabling activity. 

This is not to suggest that Facebook cannot be disrupted nor displaced. Nor that teens are sublimely happy with all aspects of the platform. Rather, that significant chunks of their online identity, friendships, and socialization activities are inextricably tied up with Facebook. They are not leaving.

A recent article in Huffington Post captures the relationship teens have with Facebook - unlike so many other social media services:

“I’ll wake up in the morning and go on Facebook just… because,” [fourteen-year-old] Casey Schwartz says. “It's not like I want to or I don’t. I just go on it. I’m, like, forced to. I don’t know why. I need to. Facebook takes up my whole life."  

Teens may have a complicated, trying relationship with Facebook, but do not expect them to leave the service - or limit their use. For teens, Facebook is not only a destination, but a way of life.

Lead image courtesy of Reuters.

Survey methodology.

Social driving app Waze wants to make that process much, much easier.

On Thursday, Waze announced new features that lets users navigate to any Facebook Event with single click. If you are logged into to Waze via Facebook Connect, you can just click on the event and Waze will direct you to the party. 

If you RSVP to a Facebook Event on Waze, directions will appear 48 hours prior to the event. If there is no address listed in the event, other guests can input the correct address. Waze will also show you the locations and timing of your friends who have RSVP’d to the event, allowing you to track their progress. (You don't want to arrive too early, do you?)

"One-tap navigation to Facebook Events is only the start… drivers will enjoy much more in upcoming versions soon," promised Yael Elish, VP of product and marketing at Waze in a press release.

Maybe There Is Something To This Social Driving Thing

When I first mentioned Waze on ReadWrite, I was a bit skeptical. Social driving could not be a good thing, I thought. Paying attention to you smartphone while driving could be bad for your health. Waze looked interesting, but not the type of app that would capture millions of users and have to fend off billion-dollar acquisition offers (or, at least rumors of those offers) from the likes of Apple, Google and Facebook. 

I was wrong. 

Waze now has 49 million users, its crowd-sourced maps technology is in high demand and many people are addicted to it. Social driving can save you time, keep you out of accidents and reduce the risk of being pulled over for speeding. And now it can lead  you easily to Facebook Events. 

The Facebook Connection

Recent rumors had speculated that Waze would be acquired by Facebook for $1 billion. Talks have apparently broken off as most of the Israel-based Waze team didn’t want to move to Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif. campus. (Waze also has an office in Palo Alto, Calif.).

Still, except for the whopping price tag, the acquisition would have made a lot of sense. 

All of biggest consumer technology companies have some type of mapping technology. Apple and Google make their own maps. Microsoft teams with Nokia for its maps and Amazon also licenses maps from Nokia for its Kindle Fire tablets. Facebook has nothing in its technology stack for navigation or location (it does integrate some Google Maps for addresses). 

Waze would have been a complimentary piece to Facebook's developer tools as well as a boon to its core platform (for things like Facebook Events, as today's recent Waze update shows). Facebook has gone out of its way to give developers more tools to build on its platform, naming a series of preferred technology partners and buying mobile cloud services company Parse. The ability to add a software developer kit (SDK) for maps through Waze straight into Facebook’s platform would have been a real boon to the social giant’s app ecosystem.

If Facebook cannot close the deal, Waze becomes a tantalizing fruit to be plucked by one of its rivals. That would be a shame for Facebook. As Waze has shown with its Facebook Event integration, the two might have made brilliant partners.

(See also Facebook Rumored To Purchase Traffic App Waze For $1 Billion.)

Reports are out today that Facebook is no longer in talks with Waze for a possible buy. Reasons for the break down in discussions are not clear, but the rumor mill is claiming that Waze may not have wanted to relocate to California. Of course, maybe Waze got a better offer from one of the other companies that have been rumored to be knocking at their door: a list that once included Apple and, most recently, Google. But wait, now Apple denies ever making any play for Waze.

(Check out Waze Mapped As The Billion-Dollar Treasure.)

Waze is the hotter than the Sun these days, but after a no-show from Apple and now a fall-out with Facebook, is the mapping company just another flash in the pan?

What gives?

On the one hand, some of this disparity just comes down to hope. It's easy for investors to pummel Facebook and Google for not mixing a magical mobile advertising elixir, especially when such companies are struggling to increase mobile revenues without cutting too deeply into their desktop advertising revenues. Hence, as Benjamin Schachter, an analyst at Macquarie Securities, told Businessweek, "The battle for [Facebook] is: Mobile’s growing fast, desktop is slowing. Is mobile’s growth enough to make up for the declines in desktop? That’s clearly the key issue." 

Sure. But why isn't this an issue in the private markets?

For public companies like Facebook and Google, analysts like Richard Greenfield of BTIG Research ask: “How many mobile ads can you put into the mobile News Feed before you start to irritate users?" They recognize mobile will be big, but getting to big revenues is a delicate balancing act.

In the private markets, there doesn't seem to be the same level of concern. As I've written recently, the primary drive seems to be to generate lots of adoption, with little thought for revenue. Mobile is still Wild West enough that adoption is enough to generate outsized valuations. It's easier to make a lot of money on a company sale than it is to make lots of money through product or services sales. 

And no, it's not just because 98% of investors are dumb.

Meanwhile, in the real world, companies like Google are starting to make real money in mobile. Despite concerns that Google was poorly monetizing mobile search and click-through rates were Lilliputian, last quarter Google's mobile advertising business started to hum. This despite the fees it must pay Apple for search-related ads on iOS devices (as much as 25% of Google's mobile advertising revenue), the lower click-through rates on mobile (roughly half those of desktop) and threats from app-based searches.

But maybe this simply reflects a market in so much flux that no one really knows how to value it, or even who is winning. As analyst firm IDC notes:

Marketers spent $2.8 billion in 2012 on mobile search ads, compared with $1.6 billion in 2011 and $0.7 billion in 2010. Growth rates have slowed significantly, down from 195% in 2010 to 127% in 2011 to 68% in 2012. Google still dominates the market with gross revenue of $2,166 million, and a gross market share of 79%...

Mobile ad networks are losing market share to publishers [like Facebook and Pandora], and we expect them to lose even more going forward. Networks, especially independent ones, are entering a difficult phase, in which, with an ever smaller share of revenue, they'll have to compete with publishers, which will only grow in strength.

In other words, the market is big, but it's slowing down in some areas, picking up in others, and no one really knows who is going to win.

As such, paying $1 billion for Instagram in the hope that lots of pictures will turn into lots of revenue may actually be a sane strategy. At least, it may in the face of so much uncertainty about other areas of the mobile market, particularly shifting trends in mobile advertising. In sum, perhaps valuations on mobile businesses are so incongruous because there simply isn't yet a good baseline to determine what success looks like in mobile.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Why the sudden interest? For Google, it could be a simple absorb-the-competition play, or a chance to acquire Waze's social media features for it's own Google Maps. Whatever the reason, Waze is going to be on everyone's map now.

(See also Facebook Rumored To Purchase Traffic App Waze For $1 Billion.)

If you haven't been following along, in April I decided to commit myself to a simple behavioral experiment. I pledged to not "like" anything on or off of Facebook for a month, no matter how tempted I was (and believe me, I was tempted often).

My hypothesis was that at the end of this 30 day cycle I would be free of likes and that my detox period would be over. That isn't the case. I still actively have to stop myself often from hitting that button, and it troubles me quite a bit. It was so simple and I did it for so long that it has burned into my internet muscle memory far more severely than I had anticipated.

I've learned several things along the way, but when I started this trial I wanted to answer one primary question:

Who exactly is benefitting the most from me hitting the like button?

While this experiment didn't provide me with a direct answer to this question, it did force me to think long and hard about the probable ones. I've concluded that the following parties benefit from those billions (yes billions) of likes each day:

• Me: I'm not going to claim I get no value. Facebook has an algorithm that shows me people and information that I'm more interested in based on my like behavior. It's not always spot on, and it irritates the shit out of me when I see this kind of stuff, but nonetheless it has a smart engine that shares timely content from people I care about.
• Brands: Likes feed brands who are trying to understand how they can refine their content distribution (copy, timing, targeting). They also increase the visibility of branded content through all sorts of Edgerank-y goodness. The fact of the matter is, I don't care about making my favorite brands better marketers. I care about my favorite brands continuing to make products that I like. In other words, these likes don't help me.
• Facebook (Part 1): Facebook makes the majority of its revenue from selling data. Yes, that manifests as selling ads, but in reality the company is selling the data that drives who sees ads and who buys them. Every single time I hit "like", even if it's on a friend's baby picture, Facebook is growing its data stockpile that is being refined for their advertising customers. Sure, you could claim I'll see more relevant ads if I help Facebook understand my tastes, but ultimately these likes don't help me.
• Facebook (Part 2): When I give my friends likes, a little Pavlovian red flag goes off in their browser windows and it pulls them back into Facebook. There they spend more time, see more ads, and see more ads, and see more ads. While directly my likes may help my friends' important posts rise to the top, it also trains them to crave likes and potentially augment their sharing behavior to earn them more likes. Again, these likes don't help me.

Above are just four benefits yielded from "like" behavior. The obvious problem is that only 25% of the these items are benefitting me. And that's being generous since I didn't list off countless other beneficiaries. Call me selfish, but the ROI of the like button isn't high enough for me to continue using it. Therefore, I plan to continue abstaining from it.

Although I started this experiment around a single element of Facebook, it's led me to question the value of the many services the social network provides. Facebook has in many ways become the "big box" store of the internet. And while I do shop at such places in real life for certain commodity items, I don't really want to go there for all my many specialty needs. I don't want to speak for anyone else, but I personally don't want a big-box internet experience. For me, the web is about discovery, being bombarded with choice, and finding niche experts.

Refraining from likes has been a trivial experiment. I know that there are far more important behavioral issues online worth exploring (cyber bullying, crowdfunding, and citizen journalism just to name a few), but I hope that this small example of personal reflection on digital habits encourages you to do the same. Think about how you're spending time on the internet, who its benefitting, and what's worth testing in your own digital world.

And don't like this post. I really mean it this time.

Lead image via Flickr user Djenan, CC 2.0

I'm sure the benefits of social business are dramatic and undeniable, but am I alone in being totally creeped out at what seems to be an obvious invasion of privacy? I don't know about you, but I'm just not ready for companies - even companies I choose to do business with - to closely follow everything I do and say. Even if other humans aren't involved.

Do You Want To Be Connected To A Machine?

At a recent executive event in San Francisco, Benioff entertained customers and journalists wtih a video featuring Beth Comstock, GE's high-profile CMO, claiming her "core belief" is that "business is social." But she didn't just mean people communicating with people, she also meant people communicating with machines. 

The big question for GE, Comstock said, is "how do we connect our customers/employees to our machines?" GE's goal is to combine data from customers and data from its machines - connecting machines to social networks is very big.

The video demonstrated how GE was connecting jet engines to social networks to alert mechanics of their diagnostic status. "If you're in business," Comstock said, "you need social because it will get you closer to your customer… Feedback - that's a marketers dream."

Sounds great, right?

The Menace Of An Internet-Enabled Toothbrush

But consider Benioff's example of the Internet of Things driving social business. He cited Philips' Internet-connected toothbrush that records the time and duration of brushing. With one of these babies, when you go to the dentist and he asks, "have you been brushing" and you answer "yeah," the conversation doesn't end there, Benioff said. The dentist could reply "Let's have a look" and see exactly how much brushing you actually did.

That thought terrifies me. While such a scenario might indeed help keep my teeth from falling out, it's also profoundly creepy and invasive. After all, what if my dental insurance provider got hold of the data, and decided it wouldn't pay to fill that cavity because I didn't brush long enough?

As Benioff correctly noted, the "biggest part is trust." "With all that data about you out on the network, it gets down to another level of trust with the vendors you choose to let be a part of your life."

I trust my doctor with a large amount of intensely personal information - augmented by pretty specific laws and industry practices. For some reason, I'm less comfortable giving my dentist the same degree of trust. Philips and Salesforce? Absolutely not!

How Much Should Your Shirt Salesman Know About You?

Another participant at the event, male-apparel retailer Trunk Club, is also leveraging user information to help "guys that just dont like to shop" said COO Rob Chesney. Trunk Club's goal is to make "it really easy for you to look great" by not just tracking what he's already bought, but whatever other information may be available online. When a customer contacts Trunk Club, "we pull up this guy and find out what is he all about. We see all his social media info. "It's the future of service-oriented retail."

Not for me.

Chesney noted that having this kind of info could help Trunk Club sell higher end clothing to a customer who just got a promotion - an event it might learn of Facebook. That might not be so bad, but what is the company going to do if the customer gets laid off? Offer condolences and try to sell them cheap t-shirts? Awkward to say the least.

Social.com: Salesforce's Facebook & Twitter Tools

Salesforce also pitched its new Social.com tools, designed to help other companies operate this way. Salesforce rolled out the ability to run Facebook campaigns that target users based on what they've posted and linked to on their own Facebook pages.

On Twitter, the idea is start "buying in the moment" - spreading promoted tweets even as the larger Twitter conversation is trending. The promoted tweet shows up any time someone tweets with a relevant hashtag.

To make that work, of course, you've got to be monitoring all the time. "You can't be relevant if you're not listening," explained Facebook's Fergus Gluster (yes, that's his real name).

Jonathan Nelson, CEO of ad agency Omnicom Digital, said that these innovations are a key step toward closing the loop linking real-time advertising to real-time buying. The key, he said, is delviering "the right message for the right person at the right time."

Ironically, in a small panel discussion for journalists, Nelson noted that the "suppression of advertising" when it's not appropriate is "more than half the battle."

That's a key part of reducing the creep factor. 

Finally, just so you know, I'm not alone in worrying about these issues. Another panelist, Altimeter Group's Susan Etlinger, admitted that "as a consumer, I don't particularly want to be targeted." The key, Etlinger said, is to build a relationship over time and "be relevant when the consumer needs us, not when we need them." 

That's a step in the right direction. But if companies they really care about not being creepy, they'll learn to respond quickly and effectively when asked, and otherwise stay out of my face.

Photos - except for the toothbrush - by Fredric Paul for ReadWrite

Between 1994–2000, Yahoo! dominated the consumer Internet industry and much of the world’s attention. The company’s exclamation mark (sometimes called a "bang") cast a long, purple-hued shadow across the globe, as users flocked to its ever-expanding array of services, and online and offline companies of all sizes threw money at it (almost literally) to gain prominent visibility among its massive, segmentable audience. Yahoo!’s page views rocketed; revenue rocketed; profits rocketed; stock price rocketed; market capitalization rocketed. Yahoo!, it seemed, could do no wrong.

Then, the world changed. Radically.

What Happened To Yahoo!

Consumer behavior shifted, with individuals the world over flirting with, and then devoting themselves to, myriad other online services. The business cycle changed and companies chose/were forced to reduce or eliminate their online advertising budgets. Then, when Internet advertising budgets returned a few years later, business behavior adjusted again, with marketers broadly diversifying their spend across the Web (following those same migrating users). And, perhaps most significantly and most representative of both of the previous issues, Google emerged, presenting consumers with a slate of invaluable (and competitive) services and companies with a nearly perfect mechanism/venue through which to market their offerings.

Needless-to-say, the 2000–2013 period has not been nearly so kind to the purple giant-of-yesterday — not to its metrics, its business, its stock or its market capitalization.

Throughout its rollercoaster-of-a-life, however, Yahoo! has remained shockingly static at its core, with a (still) massive, segmentable audience consuming an enormous volume of free content and services, surrounded by advertisements of all shapes and sizes. That those content/service offerings now include Fantasy Football and photos from Flickr, rather than, say, news and NASDAQ quotes, is nice, but irrelevant, as is the fact that the company now offers rich media and video ads, as opposed to just sponsorships and banners.

Those are incremental changes to the story — variations on the theme; because, the fact of the matter is that — apart from its early days of minimal competition and “easy money” — Yahoo! has struggled mightily to engage its users in fundamentally new ways; unlock the true value of its global user base for its advertising clients; and, bring to market any lasting innovation that even hints at shaking the status quo all over again.

In not so subtle ways, this reminds me of Facebook. A lot.

What Facebook Is Doing

Like Yahoo! in its early phase, Facebook hit the ball out of the park from the outset, and, it seems, hasn't yet stopped running the bases. From the ivy covered confines of Harvard University, Zuckerberg & Co. now attracts more than one billion users to its site globally; has enabled hundreds of billions of friend connections; sees hundreds of millions of photos uploaded daily; and, generates several billion dollars of revenue annually. Not bad for its first nine years, right?

And yet, since its astounding opening act, Facebook has bestowed upon us:

• Gifting - blah.
• News Feed algorithm changes - yawn.
• Suggested Posts - meh.
• Messaging - join the club.
• Sponsored Stories - ummm.
• Graph Search - niche.
• Poking (again) - ha.
• Timeline - zzzzz.
• News Feed design changes - argh.

What's next, a new color scheme? A new font?

What Could Happen To Facebook

Suffice it to say, the company is not exactly setting the world on fire with these efforts; more importantly, these are not (individually or collectively) doing much (if anything) to materially enhance Facebook's relationship with its users; substantively increase the level of dependency felt by its advertising clients; and/or fundamentally alter the trajectory of its franchise or business. Said differently, where is Facebook’s second act, like Android (acquired, transformed and massively scaled by Google) or iPad? Where is its money-printing AdWords product? Where is its PayPal (acquired, and massively scaled by eBay)? Where its its quantum leap forward? Where is its disruptive force?

None of this is to suggest that Facebook has, in any way, “failed;” nor is it meant to take anything away from the extraordinary space that Facebook has carved out for itself in our collective universe. Similarly, I do not mean to imply that Facebook is necessarily destined to follow in the path of Yahoo! (after all, it would be damned near impossible to repeat all of those mistakes).

That said, it is, hopefully, a wake-up call, because — at least to this observer — the company and its business seem far too focused on tweaking the edges of its past creation(s) instead of changing the world all over again for both its users and advertisers. And that, as history might suggest, is a very risky path to enduring success on the Web.

Beware the “!,” Facebook. Beware the “!”!

When asked about the acquisition, a Facebook spokesperson told me: "We don't comment on rumor or speculation."

The Israel-based Waze claims 30 million users and bills itself as the world's "fastest-growing community-based traffic and navigation app." Waze users allow the app to send their driving details to others in the area - for example, how long their commute is taking. Users can also provide additional details on their commute, report accidents and offer driver tips. 

Waze users can share their driving activity with Facebook friends from within the app. Waze has long utilized Facebook to help promote its service - though users do not require a Facebook account.

Waze is considered a direct competitor to Google Maps, whose service also offers real-time traffic data. If Apple does not acquire Waze, it could be due to Waze's insistence, according to Bloomberg, that its ongoing development remain in Israel and that its brand be maintained.

This is less likely a concern for Facebook. When Facebook acquired the popular photo sharing app, Instagram, last year, it allowed the start-up to maintain its identity and has for the most part let it take charge of its development and user base. While many initially questioned that $1 billion purchase, Instagram has continued to grow - and remains popular with younger users.  That said, Facebook has moved development of two other Israeli companies it acquired to the U.S. 

Waze claims that by tapping its community of users, it can provide the best real-time traffic data, road conditions data and even provide users with alerts - based on social sharing - of the cheapest gas prices and quickest routes for a group to take to a particular destination.

Facebook, which has recently adopted a "mobile first" strategy, can certainly dramatically increase the Waze user base. Its recent earnings report revealed 189 million mobile-only users and 751 million "mobile monthly active users." 

In addition to its users, Waze relies upon a community of designated "map editors" to improve its overall value, map detail and real-time routing service.  It is not known how this aspect of the service will be impacted by a Facebook acquisition. 

(See also OpenStreetMap: The Maps In Your Apps Are About To Get A Lot Better) 

According to Forbes, Waze and Facebook have signed a term sheet and a deal is expected for between $800 million - $1 billion. Apple is unlikely to counter because, according to Waze CEO Noam Bardin, it has built a mapping service that is too dependent upon its "GPS partners" and less inclined to tap the Waze community. While some Waze data has been used in Apple Maps, Apple primarily relies upon traditional mapping companies, such as TomTom, for its data. 

To date, Waze has received $67 million in VC funding. If purchased, it will likely be viewed as a major win for the budding SoLoMo (social-local-mobile) ecosystem. For more on Waze, here is a helpful video.

The feature was first announced as 'Trusted Friends' in October of 2011. "However, we were only testing for the first part of last year [2012], and the feature actually wasn't available for much of 2012," Frederic Wolens of Facebook Policy Communications told ReadWrite in an email. "The bulk of our work was making this more proactive (allowing you to select your friends ahead of time) than reactive (selecting your friends after you couldn't get into your account)," he added. 

The Joy Of Facebook Hacking

While there may be some benefits to this feature, Facebook already has two-step authentication, making Trusted Contacts unnecessary in the likely event you can access your email and just use the normal password recovery option. More to the point, Trusted Contacts also pose a big risk. How much can you really trust those Trusted Contacts not to abuse their power?

Remember, it takes only three of the Trusted Contacts' codes to get into your account. That's good, right?

Right.

Unless the friends you choose have an affinity for the art of the Facebook hack. In my college years, when shared computers were often accessible in dorm rooms and campus hangout spots, Facebook hacking wasn't just a prank, it was an art. The rules were simple: If anyone left their account open on any computer that wasn't their own that person's Facebook account was fair game. (Sometimes, even that simple rule was bent by the less honorable.)

What typically ensued was a chaotic, hilarious and often line-crossing exercise in testing the limits of friendship. The hack quickly transcended crude status updates and moved into true social media sabotage. Facebook hackers would change birthdays, send unwanted friend requests and write embarrassing notes on walls.  

For me, the whole ordeal culminated in a prank where I created a fake profile of my victim, replicated his post history for a week in secret, and then began friending everyone we knew. I mimicked his behavior so well no one figured out it was me for a good day or two. It remains one of my proudest Facebook hacks - and the epitome of my juvenile social media behavior. 

Breaking In

First off, let's run through how a trio of your Trusted Contacts could access your account without you knowing about it. 

After opening Facebook in a different browser or private browsing mode, a Trusted Friend would  click "Forgot your password?" From there, they would identify the victim by name in the Find Your Account field, saying that they no longer have access to the email accounts listed. That lets you put in any email address - and the process moves on without requiring further authentication.

By entering in only one of the Trusted Contacts' names — in the event that you're the one doing the hacking, it can be your own name — you can access the code portion of the page. With three codes collected by visiting Facebook.com/recover and claiming the person has reached you by phone, you're immediately brought to a new password screen where the Trusted Friend can reset the password and gain access to the account. 

Sounds like it would be a lot of work, and it certainly is when I tried it myself on my own account, but you are essentially handing over the ability for three people, or just one who convinces two others to give them the codes, to change your password without any new authentication required on your end. Granted, you can revoke access to a Trusted Contact, but only from your account.  

Who Can You Trust?

Obviously, the best precaution is to pick people you're confident won't prank you. But there are also a certain types of Facebook user who should never get this kind of access. 

For one, don't trust anyone who infrequently uses Facebook or who likes to condemn the social network and those who indulge too much in it. The first sign of a weakness for Facebook hacking is disregard for the damage a "Liking" spree can do, or downplaying the importance of Facebook birthdays. These people find it hilarious when dozens of people begin mistakenly wishing you a Happy Birthday. 

Conversely, people who use Facebook too much may be just itching to pull off the perfect Facebook prank - and they'll know the the best, most believable ways to impersonate you.

One smart approach might be to pick two people that dislike each other, making it unlikely that they'll work together to mess with you. 

The simplest solution: Don't use Trusted Contacts. The feature adds a layer of defense against strangers attacking your account, which could be reasonable considering this year's surge incidents of malicious hacking. But it also seems like a sly attempt to push the boundaries of Facebook's importance in our lives. 

But by "trusting" your friends enough to give them a key to your digital life, you may be taking an even bigger risk of being pranked, if not actually hacked.

Mobile ad revenue for the quarter ending March 31, 2013 was $375 million, accounted for 30% of the company's total ad revenues. That is up from 23% in the last quarter of 2012.

COO Sheryl Sandberg claimed that Facebook ads helped drive "25 million" app downloads. (Essentially, developers pay to promote their app inside a user's Newsfeed. Click on the ad and go straight to Google Play or Apple's App Store.) Zuckerberg added that, "I think it’s clear now that we can create a lot of value for [developers] by providing identity. We’re starting to see real revenue from mobile app installs.” The company said 40% of top-grossing iOS and Android apps were promoted on Facebook.

Facebook boasted 751 million mobile "monthly active users" - a 54% increase over the same quarter last year and 71 million more than it registered in the fourth quarter of 2012.

In fact, the now company claims 189 million mobile-only monthly active users, up from just 83 million a year ago and 157 million in the last quarter of 2012

The first quarter also saw the debut of the Facebook Home launcher. So far, though, Facebook Home has fewer than a million downloads and only a 2 (out of 5) rating. Sales of the HTC First smartphone, which has Home embedded, have been rumored to be minimal. On the earnings call, Zuckerberg described both Home and the company's new Graph Search as "long-term investments." 

Facebook did not break out mobile usage by geography or platform (e.g. iPhone vs. Android), nor did it  separate user data by age or other demographics. Sanderberg, however, did say that the company's mobile ad business was doing particularly well in Asia. 

Do Kids Still Like Facebook?

Overall, Facebook brought in $1.46 billion for the quarter, generally in line with Wall Street expectations - and a 38% increase year-over-year. Revenue from advertising hit $1.25 billion, a 43% increase year-over-year. Advertising accounted for 85% of Facebook's total quarterly revenues, with payments and fees delivering the remainder.

Revenue aside, many of the rumors circulating around Facebook concerned worries that the world's largest social network was beginning to lose members, particularly young users in the U.S. and other developed countries, and that existing users were becoming less engaged. On the conference call, CFO David Ebersman was asked if "kids still like Facebook." He responded by stating that "Facebook is awesome for everyone, regardless of age. And, yes, kids still like Facebook." Ebersman also claimed that, "Younger users are more active and engaged than other users... as for competitors, this is not a zero sum game."

While Facebook did not fully address these questions, overall the Facebook user numbers looked relatively healthy:

• 665 million "daily active users" on average for March 2013 - a slight increase over Q4 2012's 618 million, and a 26% increase year-over-year
• Monthly active users were 1.11 billion as of March 31, 2013 - a 23% increase year-over-year and up slightly from 1.056 billion in the fourth quarter of 2012.
• Instagram had 100 million monthly active users during the quarter

See also Facebook earnings summary and earnings slides (pdf).  

Facebook's stance: before going public last May 18, "...it had no obligation to publicly disclose internal projections on how increased mobile usage and product decisions might affect future revenue," reports Reuters. In other words, Facebook thinks the investors collectively suing it are trying to enforce an SEC rule that has been ignored for decades - just because the stock ended up tanking after the IPO. The lawyer representing the plaintiffs has not responded. 

I’m two weeks into not “liking” anything on or off of Facebook (don’t worry — I’m past the point of shivering and vomiting all night). I’ve kept an eye on my behavior as well that of others, and I wanted to share my observations at the “midpoint” of this experiment.

First and foremost, although I positioned this as a short-term experiment ending in April, I currently feel as if this behavior change may continue beyond that. I’m a bit surprised at how quickly I was able to break away from a behavior that I was performing on a daily basis, countless times a day.

I’ve come very close to clicking that button hundreds of times. But I’ve consistently stopped myself at the last second. The vast majority of near slip-ups have happened on Facebook, not on third-party websites. The latter have been very easy to give up because, unlike my Facebook friends, I know that the authors of various blog posts don’t see — or don’t care — that I’m liking their work.

There are three specific observations that I really want to highlight from just the last three days:

Liking before thinking: The first post in this series, "Please Don’t Like This Post," received nearly 300 likes. I know that a small portion of those likes were ironic. In other words, I told people on the Internet not to hit the big red button, and they of course hit the big red button.

But I suspect the majority of the folks who liked my post did so out of sheer muscle memory. They read something that resonated with them, and before even thinking through the fact that the post was criticizing an action, they took that very action. To me this crystallizes the lack of investment a like requires. It literally happen faster than the time it takes to really let a piece of writing sink in.

Polite teasing: Several people within my Facebook network have clearly taken notice of my experiment, and have poked (pun intended) fun at me. I only mentioned my experiment twice, and both posts yielded quite a bit of discussion. Since then at least 15 people have made comments related to the experiment. The teasing was mostly in the vein of, "Make sure you don't like my comment" to "great post Len, I made sure to like it, just for you."

The theme of their jabs isn't really the point. What I found interesting was that so many people have clearly noticed what I'm doing. Perhaps I’ve touched a nerve? Maybe I’m pointing something out that makes people rethink their own behavior? I don't think many people are on board with I'm doing, but it certainly is getting my friends' attention.

Like Craving: Despite the fact that I’ve not been giving out likes, i’ve still been curious about who’s giving them to me. That rascally red notification flag pops-up and my attention immediately still goes towards seeing who has liked my posts and which one in particular captured their attention. Just as easy as it has been for me to stop liking other people’s posts, it’s been very difficult to ignore who is doling them out to me.

Stay tuned for the epic conclusion of this experiment in a few more weeks. And again, I encourage you to either join me in this experiment, leave a comment below, or... do absolutely nothing.

Just don't click that button.

Lede image courtesy of Shutterstock

(See also: What Happens When Almost Anybody Can Build A Mobile Business App?)

In tech jargon, outfits like Parse are often called "backend as a service" (or, worse, BaaS) companies. But they could be better described as mobile cloud-service companies. They offer services designed to easily tie mobile apps into the cloud, providing a host of automatic "backend" functions such as data storage and connections to social networks. That allows developers to focus on the core elements that make their apps sing instead of doing a lot of complicated integration with cloud systems.

One of the companies paying closest attention to Facebook's move is Boston-based Kinvey, one of Parse’s biggest rivals and a startup eager to see this cloud-service market really hit the big time.

What This "Validation" Means

Over the space of a few months in 2011, three startups effectively created this app-service automation market. Parse, StackMob and Kinvey promised easy cloud integration to mobile developers, but lookalikes quickly surfaced. Cocoafish (acquired by Appcelerator, Tiggzi (now Appery.io), FeedHenry, Applicasa from the startup end, new services from the likes of Sencha (Sencha.io) andeven Apple (iCloud) joined the fray. IBM and SAP now also offer similar cloud solutions.

(See also: Parse Offers "Backend as a Service" to Mobile Developers)

Some critics wondered if the industry segment had become too crowded and if all the outside entrants would doom the three original backend-service providers. They were small, their business models were unproven and their stories (i.e., “we provide backends so you don’t have to") were quickly in danger of being drowned out by competition claiming the same thing. There was a time in 2012, before it raised its first venture funding, when Kinvey had serious doubts if it would make it.

A map of the BaaS ecosystem from Kinvey from February 2012

Then these companies, which initially had started as developer tools, started turning into actual businesses. StackMob and Kinvey found that big companies were really interested in their services. Parse started attracting brands like the NFL's Green Bay Packers, Hipmunk, Armani and the Food Network.

(See also: Bringing Enterprise Data To Your Mobile Workers)

It's no coincidence that Facebook named Parse, StackMob and Kinvey (along with the likes of PhoneGap and Sencha) as preferred technology partners last week. These are companies with useful skill sets. All three have done extensive work with Facebook in the past. 

Many in the tech community associate “validation” of a new technological or business approach with startup venture funding or outright acquisition. But the likes of Parse arguably found validation much earlier, with the arrival of big, high-profile customers. 

“Lots of people are saying [the Parse acquisition] ‘validates’ the space,” said Sravish Sridhar, CEO and co-founder of Kinvey. “I disagree. The space was validated when brands like J&J, Aetna GSN and Cadillac began trusting their data and apps to BaaS."

Sridhar has a point. But until Parse sold out, none of these startups had entered the "big money" realm of tens of millions in funding, revenue or acquisition. In that sense, the Facebook-Parse deal has definitely lifted the prospects of StackMob, Kinvey and the rest of their competitors.

Where Do These Startups Go From Here?

Parse reportedly had a long line of suitors. Facebook won the bidding, but Dropbox, Google and Yahoo also all apparently had interest, according to Wall Street Journal reporter Evelyn Rusli. A variety of other companies have also shown interest in the backend-service startups, including Salesforce (customer relationship management), Intel (chip manufacturing and developer tools) and classic enterprise service providers like IBM and SAP, which have acquired mobile enterprise application platforms (MEAPs) in the past. 

Dropbox had also bid for Parse-- didn't meet fb's offer though.. google & yahoo also expressed interest ---

— Evelyn Rusli (@EvelynRusli) April 25, 2013

When parsing what the Parse acquisition means to companies like Kinvey and StackMob last night, Kinvey’s head of marketing Joe Chernov turned to Sridhar and said, “Do you know of any other tech space that has so many different kinds of big companies wanting to acquire its vendors?"

It's a good question and one that should have the likes of Kinvey and StackMob hi-fiving, jumping in their seats and making plans for happy hour. 

Twitter will be the next company to watch. It recently bought Boston-based Crashlytics and Bluefin for a total a little less than $200 million. Twitter is beefing up on its own application ecosystem (see: Vine and Twitter Cards) and could very easily find a place for backend services in its app efforts.

Already, Parse has attracted interest from familiar names like Sesame Workshop, which makes a Cookie Monster app, and Carnival Cruises, which used Parse's cross-platform tools to build its Ship Mate app.

The acquisition suggests that Facebook wants brands like these to go beyond building Facebook pages and running ads to creating mobile experiences which generate activity on Facebook users' profiles and news feeds. 

With this buy, rumored to be worth around $85 million, Facebook dives headlong into the nascent game of providing the technical underpinnings for apps, also known as the back end. Parse's peers in this emerging mini-industry are companies like Stackmob, Kinvey, and Cocoafish, the latter of which Appcelerator acquired last year.

Parse has an enthusiastic community of developers—and for good reason. The developer platform subtracts some of the nastier requirements of building apps, like server maintenance—ick! Instead, it lets app builders concentrate their energy around what matters - namely, developing an awesome user interface, or front end. 

We spoke with former Hipmunk mobile developer and user-experience guru Danilo Campos about what the acquisition means for developers loyal to Parse. 

"I hope the incentives are aligned such that Facebook wins when developers win," Campos said. "It's easy to get antsy when a [big company] buys up a gem. But I think Parse's leadership is damn smart and if anything can navigate these waters for the best outcome, it's them."

Facebook refused to comment on the deal's terms beyond saying that "this is an acquisition - not a talent deal." Facebook has bought some design- and mobile-oriented companies primarily to hire their talent while abandoning their products. That's not the case here: Parse and Facebook says current products will be supported.

According to Facebook's blog:

Today, we’re making it even easier to build mobile apps with Facebook Platform by by announcing that we have entered into an agreement to acquire Parse, a cloud-based platform that provides scalable cross-platform services and tools for developers. By making Parse a part of Facebook Platform, we want to enable developers to rapidly build apps that span mobile platforms and devices.

It remains to be seen if Parse, under Facebook's wing, will maintain or extend support for competing social platforms like Twitter. Still, Facebook didn't seem keen on messing with the Parse's existing well-loved products and services.