Yesterday Facebook released a clever way to continue to download Google user data, despite Google banning Facebook from using their APIs. It looks to me like they aren’t going to try to stop Facebook from using this more manual approach. Instead, for now, it’s being escalated only via words:

We’re disappointed that Facebook didn’t invest their time in making it possible for their users to get their contacts out of Facebook. As passionate believers that people should be able to control the data they create, we will continue to allow our users to export their Google contacts.

That’s a nice swipe there in the beginning, about how they wish Facebook had spent time giving people a way to liberate their own Facebook data rather than building tools to end run around Google. That last bit though, about “people should be able to control the data they create” doesn’t quite hit the mark though in my opinion.

We’re talking about your Facebook friends list and their email addresses. You create your list of friends, of course, but you generally aren’t uploading email addresses to Facebook, your friends do. Still, I think there are excellent logic arguments for allowing users to download friends’ email addresses, too. More on that later.

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It’s hard to find a man more bullish on social than Bing Gordon.

The Kleiner Perkins partner will be spearheading the firm’s new sFund and, like John Doerr, fully believes that the era of social is just beginning. Just how much will social balloon in the short term? Gordon sees exponential-like growth, expecting the social space to grow 10 to 25x in the next five years.

“We think that social is going to be so big, the social category, I think it could be, the category growth in social could grow 10 to 25 times in 5 years and every company that’s out there has venture upside no matter how big they are right now…We want the freedom to get the venture style returns… but do it with the most interesting people.”

Sounds like KPCB— and its rat pack of hot-shot web companies (Facebook, Amazon, Zynga, etc.)— will need a bigger boat.

On Thursday, we got a chance to catch up with Gordon after the sFund announcement at Facebook’s Headquarters in Palo Alto. Over the course of our discussion, Gordon walked us through his thinking behind the fund, why Sandhill Road disagreed with his thesis and why their target investment range is 100 K to 100 million.

Interested in a slice of the $250 million pie? Gordon also told us the kind of conversation he’s looking for when he meets with entrepreneurs from the social field:

“What are you passionate about and how are you going to get to scale? When you’re on the social graph get to scale means take advantage of person-to-person pass along marketing…show us something where if your friends pictures are there it’s cooler and inventive. And then let’s get into discussion: social is still changing so fast, let’s learn together.”

See video above.

Bonus footage: As we learned on Thursday morning, the sFund’s first investment is a $5 million bet on CafeBots. There is not a lot of information available on this stealth startup, but it will apparently focus on the curation of the social layer, or FRM, friend relationship management. We talked to co-founder and CEO Yoav Shoham, to get a taste — or at least a vague idea — of what users can expect later this year when CafeBots goes live.

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The results are in, and as befits any good crowd-sourcer, I wanted to share them.

Yesterday I asked TechCrunch readers for some advice. Having quit Twitter, I’m looking for a new blogging platform that will allow me to continue writing longer-form blog posts (as I do now on WordPress), but with the benefit of social sharing that Twitter used to give me. WordPress is great as a writer’s tool, but it’s lousy for maintaining a conversation. Twitter is great for sharing, but it was distracting me from updating my blog, which is a problem when it’s one of my primary ways to keep notes for future books.

One compromise, it had been suggested, was Tumblr, and so that’s how I framed my question: Should I Move my Blog to Tumblr?. Many of you responded in the comments with some great advice, and details of your own experiences with Tumblr and similar services. I also received a ton of email, IMs and face-to-face advice from friends. And it all lead me to one inescapable conclusion…

No. I shouldn’t use Tumblr as a platform for my blog. And perhaps you shouldn’t either. Here’s why…

Actually, before I get into what I learned about Tumblr, here’s another thing I learned: a lot of you really like Posterous. Even our very own Mike Arrington has a Posterous, which he uses mainly to post photos of his life, his dogs, and the TechCrunch jet. There’s certainly a them-vs-us rivalry between the two services – with many praising Posterous’s ease of use when it comes to writing long blogs (which the services encourages you to submit via email) while others criticized its comparative lack of ‘community’: certainly Tumblr is better designed for sharing and reblogging.

If I were looking for a brand new blogging platform to replace just the writing aspects of WordPress, I’d certainly give Posterous a try. But I’m not – and that’s good news for Tumblr: the more advice I read, the more I realised that replacing WordPress is not what Tumblr’s supposed to do. In fact, the service actively discourages users from porting their old blogs over, offering no import tools whatsoever for users of WordPress, Blogger and the rest.

As Tumblr’s Mark Coatney replied to my original post…

“Think about what you want to use this for. My feeling, after having used both Posterous and Tumblr for Newsweek in my previous incarnation, is that you should use Tumblr if your primary need… is to share (rather than simply publish) information. [Tumblr is] a sharing network; a place where people can easily, and in a conversational manner, quickly exchange words, pictures, ideas.”

A nice analogy came from Edelman PR’s Brittany Dow who wrote…

“I love WordPress and although lately (maybe because of Twitter) I haven’t utilized it to its fullest extent, I would never port my content. Why? Because in a way they are pages of history. Would you port a Rembrandt into a Picasso? Maybe that’s an odd analogy but I hope you see what I’m getting at.”

Indeed. The point is that Tumblr isn’t WordPress in the same way that Facebook status updates are not Twitter.

Now, of course, I’m stubborn and being told I can’t do something just makes me even more certain that I want to do it. So just to make a point I trawled around Google and found Tumblrize, a WordPress plugin that allows you to cross-post individual WordPress posts to Tumblr. It also works with old posts, automatically cross-posting them to Tumblr (with the correct date stamp) whenever they’re updated. All I had to do was install the plugin on my WordPress server, open every single one of my old posts and re-save them, thus cross-posting them to my new Tumblr account.

It took a while.

But it was worth it: as I browsed through my new Tumblr, full of old cross-posts from my WordPress blog, I realised that Mark and Brittany were right. They are completely different platforms, and my old long-form WordPress posts just looked weird on Tumblr. WordPress is still by far the best way to write long-form text-heavy posts, while Tumblr provides a great way to share those posts with a wider community.

Point taken, I deleted all my old WordPress posts from my new Tumblr.

It took a while.

Having figured out the point of Tumblr, I was still keen to give it a try. Even if not a blog replacement, it seemed like it might still be a great, low-impact, way to share TechCrunch posts, newspaper columns, book extracts and the rest with interested readers, while also consuming and re-sharing things that others have shared. All that I need to do is start following my friend’s Tumblrs and – hopefully – encourage them to start following mine – very soon I’d have an awesome two-way, annotatable RSS feed that would still allow me to dedicate most of my unpaid attention to my blog. Hurrah!

No, not Hurrah! That other thing.

Boo!

You see, it turns out Tumblr makes it really, really difficult and time consuming to find and follow your friends. I’ve registered with dozens (hundreds?) of social services over the years and I can only remember one other (Last.fm) that didn’t offer an easy way to search, say, my Gmail contacts for other friends using the service. I’ve looked and I’ve looked and I’ve Googled and I’ve asked around and, no, it seems the only way to find friends to follow on Tumblr is to manually enter either their email address or username into a serach box. There’s no bulk way to do it. If Mark is right, and Tumblr is all about sharing and community then that’s an unforgivable – and frankly unfathomable – oversight.

Is it a user privacy thing? No – otherwise you wouldn’t be able to manually search by email. A question of priorities? Surely not – Tumblr has been around since 2007 and it’s not like it’s a difficult feature to implement. Posterous has it. Unless I’m missing a really good reason (or the feature is just really, really well hidden), the lack of a bulk friend-finder feature seems to be the single most idiotic omission on a service with ambitions to be the thinking man’s Twitter.

So, yes, I’d love to hear from someone at Tumblr what on earth their logic is for making it so difficult to follow friends. If I do, I’ll update this post with the answer, and perhaps reconsider Tumblr as my social sharing tool of choice. Until then, however, I guess I’m sticking with my WordPress blog and its trusty old RSS feed.

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A couple days ago, I wrote a post wondering if it wasn’t time to change Facebook’s social graph dynamic? Specifically, I called for a simplified system that had two layers: your friends and your followers. I think that their current social management system which relies heavily on friend lists is highly flawed. And guess what? Mark Zuckerberg agrees.

Tonight at a Facebook Developer’s Garage meeting at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Zuckerberg fielded a question about the service’s privacy controls. He said that the ideal solution for sharing different things with different people is to make a friend list. “But guess what? Nobody wants to make lists,” Zuckerberg admitted.

Exactly. While the idea behind friend lists is great, for the average user (in other words, 99 percent of Facebook’s 500 million users) it’s simply not something they’re going to do. Or even if they make them at first, it’s not likely something they’re going to keep up with. Facebook has tried to lower the barrier to entry a few times (most recently a couple days ago) but they are still simply too time-consuming to set up and maintain.

My solution is the two tier system: either someone is a friend and you have to accept them as such. Or they’re a follower — meaning they can opt-in to following your public updates without you having to okay them. When you update on Facebook, there would then be a big switch to decide if you want something to go to just your friends or to your followers (which would include your friends).

I see no reason why there couldn’t be an option to use lists that further filter things beyond that. But friend/follower would be the main list/function that everyone used.

Zuckberg is clearly thinking a different way to solve the lists issue. He thinks it still has to be something like friend lists, but done a different way. He noted that they have to come up with a way for people to control each thing they want to share, but do it in a way so that the tools are really easy to use.

Again, even with such a vague statement, I’m worried that this is going to be too complicated.

To be fair, it’s an insanely difficult problem Facebook is facing — and Zuckerberg knows it. He notes that after over six years of adding various privacy controls over features, things became “really hard to use.”

But he still believes in the idea of sub-groups of friends because the average user has something like 50 friends now — and people who use Facebook more often, have a lot more. Those users might not want to share all their information with even just those people. Or worse, he noted that ”the people who you are most afarid of seeing [some item] are on your friends’ list.”

He also spoke to the fundamental idea of friending someone and them accepting it as what they need to look toward going forward. He also believes the problem may simply come down to design. Again, the idea behind friend lists is correct in his mind — it’s just the implementation that isn’t. I still like my idea.

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