TechCrunch: Facebook To Lift 5,000 Friends Limit

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During the past year as I became consumed by Facebook, Facebook has become my portal for business communication. An increasing number of my business conversations have been taking place inside of Facebook. A cornerstone of this strategy has been my ability to continue to add new contacts as they join the Facebook community.

On March 14, 2008 my strategy of using Facebook for business became challenged when I first reached the 5,001 friends limit. And while I thought it was cool to be at 5,001 friends, that feeling lasted only a few minutes when someone told me they tried to add me as a friend and they got a message that in effect “Jeff has too many friends.” (Humm...How could any ever really have too many friends?)

Back in March I reached out to my contacts at Facebook for help since I was told by Mark Zuckerberg back in November that “5,000 was only a number” and I was lead to believe it was easy to get past this limit.

And then I received the following message from Facebook:

“So it turns out that we're not able to increase your friend limit past 5,000 :( We won't always have this limit, but it is that way for technical reasons now.

One of the goals with launching Facebook Pages was to address this type of need for people who have a large fan base, such as politicians, celebrities...and you! We figure most people don't have more than 5,000 real friends, so Pages is an alternative option for people and businesses who use the site for commercial purposes. This could be an option for you until we address the Profile Page friend limit. There is a mechanism that helps convert a Profile to a Page. Let me know if you want to do that.”

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Since the middle of March, when I had the time, I spent time reviewing my friends and removed some so I could make room for new contacts. This continues to be an ackward and time consuming process. And to date, I haven’t been able to find the time to remove more than 400-500 people. At the moment I have 422 outstanding friend requests and I’m not able to add anyone new until I start removing people again and this is something I just don’t want to be doing.

I’m glad I resisted the offer to convert my profile into a Facebook page since I would have given up some of the personal nature of my profile. I just hope that the 5,000 person limit is removed sooner rather than later.

Tags: Facebook, Social Media, Michael Arrington,Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 04:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chicago’s NBC5 Street Team attended the breakfast I hosted this week at Duffy’s Tavern in Chicago. I enjoyed meeting both Blagica Bottigliero and LeeAnn Trotter and catching up with both of them. LeeAnn interviewed a number of the people who attended the breakfast and her segment covering the breakfast will be airing in the near future.

Friends can follow Chicago’s NBC5 Street Team on twitter over at - http://www.twitter.com/nbc5street.

Blagica Bottigliero: From Facebook to ‘Real Life’

“LeeAnn and I attended ‘Breakfast with Jeff Pulver and Friends’...Using Facebook and word-of-mouth as the means to invite people, Jeff gets likeminded folks together to eat breakfast, chat, and tag one another. Did I say tag? Yup.

Jeff uses social media methods to communicate in ‘real life’. Each of us wore a main sticker with our ‘tag line’ (mine was Mixing Business with Activism). From there, we met fellow breakfast goers, networked and wrote on their ‘wall’.

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Tags: breakfast, Personal Social Media Toolkit, Chicago, Blagica Bottigliero, NBC5, social media, facebook, Social Media Breakfast, Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

On Wednesday, May 21st I will be in Tel Aviv and hosting my third Breakfast with Jeff Pulver (and Friends) in Tel Aviv from 0900-1100. Readers of my blog are invited to join me.

To RSVP, please visit this event on Facebook. If you are not on Facebook and would like to RSVP, please send email to: jeffp@pulver.com.

Everyone attending this breakfast will receive a "Personal Social Networking Toolkit."

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Readers of my blog are invited to join me on both twitter and Facebook.

Tags: breakfast, Personal Social Media Toolkit, Chicago, social media, facebook, Social Media Breakfast, Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 07:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The next edition of the Jeff Pulver Show, my LIVE (unscripted) Internet TV Talk show on pulverTV will be airing on Thursday May 8th at 2PM EDT / 1800 GMT. During the show I will be talking about a few things including both Iron Man and “Life 3.0.”

You can catch the show on both Utream.tv and BlogTV.

If you would like to be an in-studio guest on a future next show, please drop me an email or send me a message on Facebook.

Archives of past shows are available at: pulver.tv.

Friends of pulverTV can now join the pulverTV group on Facebook.

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Tags: Internet TV, facebook, Social Communications, Social Media, Derrick Kwa, pulverTV, Andrew Lipson, Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 01:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hours after posting my recent blog post about ”The Digital “Me” and Life 3.0, I received an email from my friend Tal Muskal who is a co-founder of Semantinet about a video interview that Robert Scoble had just posted that he did with Tal Keinan the other co-founder of Semantinet.

It was a total coincidence, but it turns out that this video interview provides an interesting vantage point into some of the points of my blog post and shares an alpha look at the way that Semantinet would describe Jeff Pulver from a Life 3.0 perspective. (Turns out that I was the subject of the search that Tal demonstrated during the interview.)

I have been a fan of Tal Muskal and Tal Keinan and their vision since the time I first met them and I am proud to be one of the early investors in the company.

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Tags: Social Media, The Digital Me, Tal Keinan, Tal Muskal, Robert Scoble, Semantinet, Semantic Web, Life 3.0, Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 01:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

During the past couple of weeks, I have had a number of meetings with people who I met for the first time but who told me in effect that they felt like they knew me because they “read me” online. I wasn’t sure if this meant that they read my blog, visited my home page, watched past episodes of my show on pulverTV, if they found me on Facebook, watched some of my Qik Videos, saw my Flickr photos, if they were following me on twitter, found me on LinkedIn or one of a number of other networking platforms that I have tried out over the years. And when I asked that question, it turned out to be a number of things, but never all of these things and never in the order that I would suggest someone follow if they were trying to get to know me.

And this lead me to thinking about how easy (and hard) it is for people to really get to know us these days. One of the challenges is that from time to time I get busy with things (like hosting breakfasts) and I don’t always invest the time to update my profiles and make an effort to make sure that the information that is available is always the most current. And no one knows how much weight I would put into one platform or another when defining the digital “me”, especially since the weighting would change, depending upon the context of the reason why someone was trying to get to know me.

So just in case there is someone who is trying to better understand The Digital “Me”, this is the way I would approach this:

For a quick background - please read the “About me” section on my Facebook profile, (based on ”The Quick Jeff Pulver Biography”) and spend 3 minutes visiting my home page. Facebook friends have the advantage of being able to get my status updates which by far provides more accurate context for things that are going on in my life than just about anything else. While not all of my status updates carry the same weight, they are a reflection of where I am, what I may be doing and who I may be with and sometimes what I am thinking about.

I would then recommend visiting my blog but this isn’t always a great reflection of what I am up do since at any moment in time there are a variety of things which I may have recently blogged about and it is possible that none of my recent posts provides the context and content that would help someone really get to know me.

Each year there are a number of blog posts that if I made sticky would do a much better job in defining me than the random blog posts that one will find. This is a list of a few sticky blog posts from July 2007 that is a better reflection than a random sampling of blog posts. (Note to self - post some more “Sticky” blog posts.)

Once reading my profile and some blog posts, I would then visit the video archives of The “Jeff Pulver Show” and take a look at: (1, 2 and any random recent show and some my early shows.) Watch one or more of my Qik videos, check out some of my videos posted to YouTube and collectively you will get to know a side of me. Then find me on twitter and you might have a better understanding of the context of some my updates. (There usually is a correlation between my Facebook status messages and related twitter updates.)

Of course this doesn’t highlight anything I might have commented on in other people’s blogs or other conversations that I may be an active part of. So in that case, after doing your “research”, if you had any specific questions, I would recommend just sending me a Facebook message or sending me an email.

So it turns out that getting to know the Digital “me” requires what seems to be quite an effort and is not a real efficient way of getting to someone, especially due to the randomness of the content and the original context of why someone is making an effort to get to some someone.

But this is how I would generically define myself, at least for a moment, at least for today. And collectively this is an area which I am now exploring that I am starting to call “Life 3.0.” As the semantic web continues to evolve, the meta data associated with the ways we defines ourselves will become increasingly valuable.

And I have to ask myself, how do YOU define the Digital YOU? Is there one place on the Internet that properly contains all of the elements that are a proper reflection of who you are and how you want to be understood by others? Just wondering...

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Tags: Social Media, The Digital Me, Semantic Web, Life 3.0, Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 09:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

On Wednesday, May 7th I will be back in Chicago and hosting the second Breakfast with Jeff Pulver (and Friends) in Chicago from 8-10AM at Duffy’s Tavern. Readers of my blog are invited to join me.

I’m looking forward to catching up with friends from the greater Chicago area joining me for breakfast and great conversations.

To RSVP, please visit this event on Facebook. If you are not on Facebook and would like to RSVP, please send email to: jeffp@pulver.com.

Everyone attending this breakfast will receive a "Personal Social Networking Toolkit" described below:

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Readers of my blog are invited to join me on both twitter and Facebook.

Tags: breakfast, Personal Social Media Toolkit, Chicago, social media, facebook, Social Media Breakfast, Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 05:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The next edition of the Jeff Pulver Show, my LIVE (unscripted) Internet TV Talk show on pulverTV will be airing on Thursday May 8th at 2PM EDT / 1800 GMT.

You can catch the show on both Utream.tv and BlogTV.

If you would like to be an in-studio guest on a future next show, please drop me an email or send me a message on Facebook.

Archives of past shows are available at: pulver.tv.

Friends of pulverTV can now join the pulverTV group on Facebook.

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Tags: Internet TV, facebook, Social Communications, Social Media, Derrick Kwa, pulverTV, Andrew Lipson, Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 05:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Friends of mine should enjoy seeing the movie “Iron Man.” And yes, you should stay until the very end, past all the credits to watch the teaser for the sequel dealing with “The Avengers.”

Despite the hype, the movie delivered everything I was looking for plus more. This iteration of a Marvel Comic book movie worked better than any of the others I’ve seen in the past. The special effects in this movie are a step above anything I’ve seen in a long time.

Yes, Robert Downey Jr. was great in the movie. Robert Downey Jr. IS Iron Man. But in my mind, his unnamed co-star were the technology innovations embedded in the movie. I would give an Oscar to the person who was responsible for developing the next-generation user interfaces and the framework for rapid prototyping.

And while the CGI effects were great, my mind was blurring while watching the movie when I was trying to figure out how “real” the technology used in the building of Iron Man was as compared to how far away it might be given the current-day advances in nano technologies. For all I know, all of this may be closer than we think.

Tags: Robert Downey Jr, Iron Man, Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Since the launch of Facebook, I looked to Facebook primarily as an asynchronous communications platform. A platform where I could update my status, share it with friends and have that affect the way I communicate with them and the way they communicate with me. During the past year, Facebook has become the platform that I use as my primary communications channel.

With the introduction of Facebook Chat, Facebook is also a synchronous communications platform which represents a subtle shift in how I and I am sure others will be approaching Facebook in the future.

Since the introduction of Facebook Chat, depending upon the time of day and day of the week, somewhere between 3 to 7 percent (150 to 350+) of my friends are online. I have enjoyed the spontaneous nature of chat and have found it to be another great touch point and another great way to stay in contact with friends across multiple time zones. What I find intriguing is that I continue to have chat conversations with people who I otherwise don’t message with on a regular basis. I have also had several instances of a conversation which started on twitter moving to Facebook Chat.

With Facebook shifting from a platform for asynchronous communications to a platform that supports both synchronous and a synchronous communications, this is becoming a place much closer to the space I expected Facebook to one day occupy. It will be real interesting to watch as Facebook opens up their API to support asynchronous communications and the types of applications which are developed as a result of it.

Tags: Facebook, Social Media, Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 04:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Robert Scoble will be joining me at “Breakfast with Jeff Pulver (and friends) in Seattle”, the only breakfast with “Real-Time Social Tagging” that will be taking place on June 11th.

Robert first experienced a breakfast with “Real-Time Social Tagging” when he was one of my guests at the breakfast I hosted in Israel during COM.vention.

Friends are invited to RSVP to this event on Facebook. I’m looking forward to what will be a fun morning in Seattle.

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Kfir Pravda (http://pravdam.com/) discussing “Real-TIme Social Tagging:”

To better understand the dynamics of “Real-Time Social Tagging”, please see Tom Eveslin’s recent blog post: Third Life: Social Networking Breakfast with Jeff Pulver and David Kirkpatrick’s story in Fortune: Geography, social media and breakfast.

Upcoming dates for Breakfast with Jeff Pulver (and friends):

May 7th - Chicago
May 13th - NYC
May 21st - Tel Aviv
June 5th - London
June 11th - Seattle
June 12th - Vancouver

(More dates will be announced in the near future.)

Tags: breakfast, Personal Social Media Toolkit, Seattle, social media, facebook, Robert Scoble, Kfir Pravda, Social Media Breakfast, Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 07:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Join Dave Troy, Ann Bernard are putting on SocialDevCamp East, a Barcamp-style event focused on the future direction of social media and the web which will be taking place on May 10th in Baltimore, MD.

Find SocialDevCamp on Facebook and also at the BarCamp Wiki.

SocialDevCamp East is taking in Baltimore at the University of Baltimore, 2 blocks from Baltimore's Penn Station, convenient to Amtrak, MARC, and light rail. The event starts at 8:30am on May 10th.

Tags: SocialDevCamp, facebook, Dave Troy, Social Media, Ann Benard, Joel Mark Witt, WhyGoSolo, twittervision, Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 07:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just wanted to provide an update on what has been happening on PrimeTimeRewind.TV.

We have been adding features (and fixing bugs) on a weekly basis.

Some of the latest features we have added include:

The "channel chooser” - If you scroll down to the bottom of the screen, you will see the list of channel appear. You can click on any of them to take a shortcut directly to your channel of choice.

RSS - We have added support for RSS. You can now subscribe to the general PrimetimeRewind RSS feed, and get alerted every time an episode or a show gets added (or removed), when users comment on a show and a lot more. You could also subscribe to show specific RSS feeds, and get just the show related features.

Twitter - We have created a Twitter account called PrimetimeRewind. Simply follow this account (http://www.twitter.com/primetimerewind) and get informed via twitter every time a show is added, someone comments and other events on PrimeTimeRewind.

You can also choose to integrate PrimeTimeRewind with your personal twitter account (choose the Twitter tab after clicking on Personalize on your facet on the cube). By choosing to do so, PrimeTimeRewind will automatically send Twits on your behalf whenever you are active on PrimeTimeRewind, thus helping you to share your experience with your friends.

I hope you check these features out and also start following PrimetimeRewind on Twitter.

And I would appreciate hearing your thoughts, suggestions and ideas for ways that we can continue to improve the service. Please feel free to send email to: jeffp@pulver.com

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Tags: Internet TV, Amit Shafrir, PrimeTimeReWind, ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS, TNT, Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 06:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Ever since I started this thread about a “Life Major” in late November, 2007, I have enjoyed reading the conversations that this topic has generated.

I remain amazed how at a young age, just about everyone who attends university in the United States has to pick a major and make it their core focus for the time they spend at university. How does anyone at 18 or 20 know what it is that they really want to do for the rest of their lives? In fact, there are quite a number of people I know who are 35-40 years old who don’t know what they want to be doing for the rest of their lives. And I wonder how many of us who went to university and got a degree for one speciality actually decided to stay in the business sector of our chosen profession 10 or 15 years after university? As far as I can tell, not many.

Yes going to university offers us the chance to mature, take on responsibility, to be social and if we are lucky to learn a thing a two. And in my book there is a big difference between “learning” and “studying.” From my own personal experience, things that I learned in school, I still know today. And things that I just studied I never really knew. I just didn’t realize it at the time when I was going to school.

While I was in high school, I started a DJ entertainment company and I started my first computer consulting company. And both generated a source of revenue while in High School and while I was going to college. And while I graduated with an accounting degree, in less than two years after college, I discovered my first life major and it wasn’t in accounting. I made the decision to start a software company and ended up spending the next seven years focusing on the world of spreadsheets (Lotus 1-2-3), real-time market data and fixed-income securities. While I never studied Calculus in college (or high school) I ended up teaching myself the math I needed in order to feel comfortable developing @ functions that did a lot of complex math which was needed when working with fixed-income securities.

And whether you discover your life major in high school, university or some time afterwards, it is up to you to find your passion and turn that passion into your profession. And the act of discovering your life major isn’t an easy one. But only you know what you are passionate about and only you can make the decision to follow your heart and follow your head and empower yourself to turn your passion into your chosen profession.

In the end, it all comes down to you. You can’t outsource your future. You are responsible to yourself. One of the most liberating feelings you can experience is to discover your Life Major and do something about it.

And one day you make wake up and ask yourself…how did I get here? :)

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Readers of my blog are invited to join me on both twitter and Facebook.

Tags: college, Life Major, Social Media, Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 09:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

During the past ten years, what I look for in a startup has changed.

These days I no longer actively look for an opportunity to participate in the “A” round or “B” round of a startup, although I still do that from time to time. My recent investments in both Seesmic and twitter are a reflection of this.

During the past couple of years, my core focus has shifted from making investments in companies and their mission to making investments in people and their vision. And I focus on what I consider "early-early stage" opportunities.

These days when I’m making a decision about a startup opportunity to invest in, I put the people first, I consider their vision and then weigh-in on my take on their ability to be a disruptive force in their chosen market space. As someone who believe that we are living in an industrial revolution that our parents and grandparents never experienced, I’m looking for people (and teams) who look to leverage “the Internet” and are building software/application/services that do something different and something that wasn’t either practical or possible to do before. Having the vision is one thing, but vision without market timing is a recipe for failure. That said, some of the most interesting companies I’ve met with were with people who were early in one market segment and were inspired to use their experiences to morph themselves into something else.

I make it a point to get to know the people I’m investing in and once an investment is made, I make myself available to help whenever asked. It just happens that the majority of my recent investments turn out to be early-stage Israeli Hi-Tech Startups.

While sitting in the lobby of a hotel and having 16 back-to-back meetings may be a long day for some people, it is something I especially look forward to doing whenever I visit Israel. I enjoy being consumed by an energy that is just present when I’m in Tel Aviv. While I have met with startups in many places around the world, there is just something special I feel whenever I’m meeting with early-early stage Israeli startups.

When meeting with an early-stage startup looking for funding, if I am interested in the company, I look to connect with the founders and find out the inspiration behind the company they are creating. I try to understand the problem they are solving and the opportunity they are seeing. I also look to see how as a team they get along, work off each other and I try to get a feel of their creative energies. I look for teams where each member is watching each other’s back and a core team whom I feel will be together for the long term. I look for people who are both smart and creative who can be focused when necessary and whose personality allow themselves to be open to change directions and re-map themselves when needed. I invest in people first and ideas second. I am not a fan of structure but I appreciate the need for it…sometimes.

I will be back in Tel Aviv the week of May 19th and I am looking forward to meeting with early-stage Hi-Tech startups. If you know of someone who I should be meeting with, please feel free to contact me.

Tags: Tel Aviv, startup, Israel, Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)