In an effort to remind people that it had a horse in the identity management race, MySpace last night announced MySpace ID – essentially a rename of the MySpace Data Availability project launched earlier this year to allow users to login with their MySpace credentials and import data on third-party sites. The news comes on the heels of last week’s near-simultaneous launches of Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect, two similar products from MySpace competitors (though the latter, it turns out, is more of an ally) While much has been written about the technical differentiators between these services –...
On November 20th I setup an advertising campaign on Facebook for my startup, CloudContacts. The ad setup program crashed a few times but eventually I was able to get the ad running. I selected men and women from 25 to 53 with a college degree as my initial test audience. Facebook told me that there were somewhere about 33 million users for the demographics I selected. Clearly this 33 million number is just profiles they have, not actual activity. Here are the campaign results: 81k impressions (majority of them in the first 7 days, nearly none since) 6 clicks...
In tough economic times, it's common to see references to Darwin. Revenue-weak companies must adapt or go extinct. With the web so ad-centric, expect to see more advertising embrace evolution to stay afloat. The New York Times has a story of two companies creating ads that attract more clicks. They aren't approaching the problem as you might expect, with confusing ads that look like buttons or offers for gadgets if you can punch the monkey. Instead, they're combining demographics, context, and a concept called A/B testing. The concept isn't new, though it hasn't been widely used in display ads. An...
Since we began tracking Facebook demographics in late May, weekly growth has held steady, usually in the low single-digits on a percentage basis. More importantly, it's fair to say that the company has successfully expanded overseas. With close to 128M users, the share of U.S. users is down to around 30% from 35% in late May: Over the last three months, Facebook has added members across all regions, with the strongest growth coming from Europe, South America, and the Middle East/North Africa: In Europe, growth has been especially impressive in Italy and Spain. I'm not sure when the Italian translation...
This is a screen from Ivan Boothe's slideshow. The cartoon is from Rob Cottingham's Noise to Signal Cartoons. I'm going to riff on Ivan's advice, "You Don't Have To Be Everywhere" (like Mastercard)After an organization has identified an audience, objective, and strategy, a question that often comes up: What social networks should we establish our presence on? How many social networks should we participate on? The first question is answered by Rob's wonderful cartoon that makes the point that there are different cultures and different types of users across social networks. Perhaps you need to look existing secondary research on...
Sling Media, makers of the Slingbox, have just opened up their television streaming site, Sling.com, to the public. The service, which not only is just like Hulu, but actually streams some of Hulu’s content as well, also allows you to watch any content you have on your Slingbox at home right in the browser. That’s a nice feature, but it’s hardly enough to make the masses watch visit Sling.com rather than Hulu. That will only happen if the masses can’t live without CBS content. In other words, it won’t happen…yet. That’s not to say Sling.com isn’t nice — it’s quite...
As more and more of my clients discover the terms social media and social web, they ask me how to use this new Web 2.0 concept of social. They are surprised when I ask them a few questions and find out they are already a part of the social web. Here are my questions: Do you have and use email? Do you have a blog or website? Do you allow comments on your blog? Do you have a forum? Are you on MySpace and/or Facebook? Do you Twitter or use a similar interactive, microblog program or service? Do you bookmark...
Can you learn about design research and user experience in a bar? Why yes! says Nate Bolt of Bolt|Peters, the brains behind User Research Friday. On Friday, November 7, we travelled to San Francisco, CA to check out this bi-annual event. The event brought together design research and user experience professionals for education, conversation and the all important networking. The big conferences can be great - CHI, IDSA, IXDA - but there was something great and very tangible about this short and fairly small gathering. 150 people gathered for 5 hours to learn and network - then it was...
This has been the year TV networks finally embraced the web. As 2008 wraps up, nearly every broadcaster posts its shows online within half a day of first airing them on TV. And the audience for such programming is growing, especially among desirable younger demographics. Twelve percent of teens and 11 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds watch online TV at least once a week, respectively, as compared to 4 percent of 35- to 64-year-olds, according to Knowledge Networks. But the major networks’ strategies aren’t cut from the same cloth. It’s instructive to consider each network’s overall strategy holistically, and we...
It seems like sources close to Governor Paterson are playing a game of "America's Next Top (Junior) Senator" the way they leak a new candidate to the media every couple of days. Today's contestant is the Charlie Rangel-supported Leecia Eve, an attorney who served as a policy adviser and worked on the presidential campaign for Senator Clinton. She also fits two of the demographics Paterson is said to be courting with the pick--an upstater (she's from Buffalo) and a woman (see photo). Now if only Eve found a long-lost Latino ancestor, she'd surely be a shoe-in. Eve was originally going...
Last December, when I was fundraising for the Sharing Foundation via Twitter, my colleague Kevin Gamble didn't want to get out of his chair to find his wallet in order to make an online donation. After using some Twitter donor solicitation techniques, he contributed.The tool I really needed was a way for Kevin to simply twitter his $10 donation to the Sharing Foundation. But, now he can - with a new tool called Twitpay. According to Killer Startups, will enable anybody send payments using the popular micro-blogging platform via pay pal. (Hat Tip PlanetNelson)Killer Startups describes how it works: This...
Social news community Mixx is seeing healthy growth ever since they left stealth mode. They got a nice traffic spike last May after CNN integrated ‘Mixx it’ buttons in their articles, roughly doubling their number of unique monthly visitors to nearly 1 million, and it appears their new community building features aren’t hurting them either. A screenshot from their Google Analytics account shows that the Digg-competitor is gaining traction, receiving over 5.8 million unique visitors last month. Compete (as usual) estimates lower numbers but shows a similar growth pattern, as does Google Trends. Quantcast seems to affirm the number of...
