Dear Facebook Case Comp Judges: Give Us Some Credit

I spent the last two hours looking through Mashable, TechCrunch, and a variety of other social media news sites for articles that I've already read. Why? Well, since my Facebook Case Comp team submitted our presentation in April, I've seen roll out after roll out of new Facebook features that uniquely resemble our case. Let me set the record straight. I don't think that Facebook stole our ideas at all. In fact, I believe they were already working on SOME of these features as we were doing the research ourselves - this becomes obvious to me only because it takes a while to roll out new features and some of the things we had "suggested" came only weeks after we pushed out our presentation. So, the claim at hand is NOT that Facebook stole our ideas, but that my group didn't get the rightful recognition or award that we should have in this small Facebook Case Comp. So in the last two hours, I was able to salvage a couple articles that highlight our Facebook developments, titled "Facebook for All."

Take my this article for example: Zynga Gunning Up and Lawyering Up for War Against Facebook with Zynga Live - http://goo.gl/ZHpr. Not exactly the most ORIGINAL idea, I know, but nonetheless it was not a part of Facebook's profit strategy before our presentation. We should have gotten recognition for our vision in attempting to integrate credits into native Facebook games. We even mentioned how these games relied on the FB platform and that they would easily be able to leverage the likes of Zynga to profit from the users. We went a step further to discuss the e-Commerce side of this, which was discussed in another article by Mashable.

In this article titled "5 Ways Facebook's Open Graph Will Impact E-Commerce" - http://goo.gl/3f8Y, Mashable's Mitchell Harper discusses Facebook's expansion into e-Commerce to drive more traffic to online stores - just as we had be demonstrating in our revamped Facebook Pages, which would act as a virtual store front for businesses and artists. Well, we didn't necessarily describe the possibilities of Open Graph and a universal "Like" button, but our ideas and methods for profit generation were spot on. Facebook needed to appeal to the business and drive more traffic to increase users and ads - where the big money is.

Ok, so you may be thinking on of two things now. 1. I'm crazy and anyone could have come up with this shit or 2. My team DID deserve its rightful recognition. Well, let me bring one last thing to your attention. In this article by Mashable called "Facebook to Roll out Q&A Feature" - http://goo.gl/rWSw, it seems as if Facebook is taking the same route as our "Facebook Questions" on slide 22. Man, I guess you could call this the straw that broke the camel's back and the reason why I'm writing this post only about 10 hours after Mashable's article on the new feature. It takes the exact premise of our Facebook Questions and renames it. Yes, it may be a trend since sites like Aardvark, Quora, and Mahalo have demonstrated SOME kind of success, but not enough to spread massive adoption like LBS has. This idea was, in essence, my "secret weapon" that I was sure the judges would like, but I guess it wasn't enough to sway them. Now, when Facebook makes millions off of this new feature, who can say they knew FB would go in the direction of Q&A or "social search." Well our team certainly can.

Here is my question. If our presentation was so precise and so close to what Facebook has been rolling out in the last month or so after the case competition, then why not award us at LEAST 3rd place or some consolation prize for being spot on? Damn, they could have hired our team and Facebook would have gone in the same direction it is going today. We all deserve seats on their executive board or something. Judges, did you think I had some kind of insider knowledge and that's why you couldn't give us fair recognition? Take another look at the slide. Take a CLOSE look and tell me to my face that Facebook implement most if not ALL of what we had suggested in the case competition. I guess I should be flattered that they are implementing all our ideas in new features and rebuilding existing features, but it still leaves a bitter taste.

Times like this just make me want to Quit Facebook, which doesn't seem like too bad of an idea right now. It is in 3 days, I guess I have some time to think about it.

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