"Tomorrow's Web seems to be shaping up for a battle between two major players - Facebook and Google, with Apple and Microsoft holding down their own tangential fiefdoms, and smaller services, like Twitter and LinkedIn, chugging away with their utility-like products. Make no mistake of it - while there is room for innovation and success at these smaller levels, Facebook's goal is to own as much of the Web as they can, and Google would like to make sure they don't. An open Web, however you define it, is good for Google, presenting a myriad of opportunities for search ads everywhere, while a Facebook-controlled universe is not. And the latest rumors, spawning from a simple update by Digg's Kevin Rose hinting at a direct Facebook competitor, dubbed Google Me, have people wondering if Mountain View is preparing another major assault aimed to keep Zuckerberg and crew off the top pedestal."
- Kol Tregaskesliked for the title. 8^D Edit: Good article, too, Louis!
- Chieze OkoyeHehe, Chieze, yeah great title from My Gray! :-)
- Kol TregaskesReally? Another social network? Why? And can anyone create anything these days without it being the "killer" of something else?
- Kevin Pedraja"The internets is abuzz this morning after Kevin Rose dropped a potential bombshell rumor on twitter. According to Rose, Google is positioned to enter the social networking space very soon to compete against Facebook with a new service potentially called “Google Me.”"
- Kol TregaskesGoogle's listed services *are* connected already just not well. I'd like to see a fully connected social site from Google but isn't that kinda like what Buzz is? And putting it in Gmail is probably the best place to promote it, like Buzz. But long term, liek Buzz again, it needs to be separate.
And yes I love to see features from the likes of Wave and Buzz come across to other Google services.
- Kol TregaskesHopefully it ties up all the loose ends. The partial overlaps of Blogger, Reader, and Buzz are weird.
- raphaeLIt sounds like it's going to be a extended Google Profiles.
- Kol TregaskesI bet it will be integrated "into" Buzz. :)
- Aykın Çakaloz
Just two months after starting a flame war of sorts over whether it would acquire or go into competition with companies that were just “filling holes” in its service, Twitter is finally moving to fill one of the biggest holes the social network has had since it launched: the lack of a built-in link shortener. A post on the Twitter blog explains how the company has been shortening links in direct messages since March, in part to provide more security against phishing attempts — and will soon roll out the use of the t.co link shortener as a “wrapper” for all links.
The term “wrapper” means that every link that passes through Twitter will be shortened via the t.co system — and not just long links, but even links that have already been shortened by some other method, such as a competing service like Bit.ly or a white-label version such as the New York Times custom shortener. These links will still appear to users in the same way, but they will be shortened via t.co as they make their way through the Twitter system. When it comes to long links, Twitter hasn’t decided yet what they will look like exactly, as staffer Sean Garrett explains in the blog post:
A really long link such as http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048 might be wrapped as http://t.co/DRo0trj for display on SMS, but it could be displayed to web or application users as amazon.com/Delivering- or as the whole URL or page title. Ultimately, we want to display links in a way that removes the obscurity of shortened link and lets you know where a link will take you.
Garrett also explained that t.co links will be a maximum of 20 characters, so once the feature is rolled out to all users, links added to tweets will only use up 20 characters, regardless of their actual size.
The immediate response from many observers was to see the new feature as a Bit.ly killer, and it is clearly competition for that service, which was one of a number of link shorteners that sprang up to fill the void when Twitter first launched. But Bit.ly has moved on from its reliance on Twitter, as Betaworks founder John Borthwick described in a recent blog post. In any case, it’s clear that the real point of Twitter’s new feature isn’t to kill Bit.ly or any other service, but to accumulate data about the links that are shared on the network. As the Twitter blog post describes it:
Routing links through this service will eventually contribute to the metrics behind our Promoted Tweets platform and provide an important quality signal for our Resonance algorithm—the way we determine if a Tweet is relevant and interesting to users. We are also looking to provide services that make use of this data, an example would be analytics within our eventual commercial accounts service.
As Bit.ly understood long before Twitter did (or before Twitter did anything about it), the data underlying the links that are shared by users is far more important than the simple act of shortening a link. The analytical data that could emerge from seeing everything that is shared in tens of millions of tweets every day could produce an incredibly valuable storehouse of information about what stories or websites or content is getting the most activity, in real time. It’s about time the service started paying attention to it.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Lessons From Twitter: How to Play Nice With Ecosystem Partners
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Max Klingensmith
Yahoo’s New Features an Admission That Facebook Has Won the Social Race http://bit.ly/aWeeir
Yahoo is doubling down on its bets on social networking, but it is doing so by effectively outsourcing its social efforts to Facebook. The web portal this week is launching enhanced Facebook integration, along with a revamped personal profile feature called Yahoo Pulse, and also recently announced the addition of new Google Buzz-style social features in the company’s email service called Yahoo Updates. The new Facebook features are the result of an agreement that Yahoo signed with the social network in December to use what was then called Facebook Connect (now known as the Open Graph protocol).
The new features integrate Facebook status updates and activity streams into the customized user pages at Yahoo, including the home page and Yahoo Mail. Users can also share content on Facebook from any of the Yahoo content sites such as its sports hub, entertainment hub, etc. In addition, the site’s personal profile pages are now known as Yahoo Pulse, and the company says they will give users more control over how and where they share their content. Yahoo has been bending over backwards to talk about its new sharing features, including its Google Buzz-style social integration for email, hoping to avoid some of the privacy pain that Facebook and Google have encountered.
While the company no doubt hopes that its new features will encourage more people who visit the site to stay longer, they are also a tacit admission that Facebook has won the social race — one that Yahoo has not really been a factor in for some time. In a similar way, Yahoo has recently outsourced many of its existing services to others, including a deal with Match.com to handle the personals business and a partnership with Nokia for mobile email, not to mention the biggest outsourcing move of all: namely, outsourcing its entire search business to Microsoft.
In the final blow for Yahoo, a recent ranking of most-visited sites by Google showed Facebook the clear winner with 540 million monthly unique visitors, and Yahoo at number two with 490 million. Whether integrating Facebook sharing and activity streams will improve Yahoo’s position or simply accelerate the current downward trend for the site remains to be seen. The company appears to want to become a portal for the social web in the same sense that it used to be a portal for Web 1.0. — but half a billion users seem to have decided that they already have a portal for the social web, and it’s called Facebook.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Social Advertising Models Go Back to the Futurehttp://pro.gigaom.com/2010/03/why-newnet-companies-must-shoulder-more-responsibility
Like it or not, your personal email address says something about you. Gmail tends to be considered the cool email to have today. Apple’s .Mac addresses (now .Me) identify users who own Macs and don’t mind paying $100 a year for email and related services. AOL emails are tied to adults who haven’t changed their address since the dial-up days. And Hotmail is seen as old school.
Since its debut in 1996, Hotmail has soared to 400 million users world-wide. But it also lost users along the way—particularly in 2008—due in part to a general perception that Hotmail wasn’t as modern as other email services.
Starting this week, Microsoft Corp. will try to change the way Hotmail is perceived by rolling out a revamped version. The company, which bought the program in 1998, has scrapped its attempts to get people to use its site for social networking, acknowledging that companies like Facebook and Twitter are already doing the job. And it has cleaned up its once confusing nomenclature: Hotmail is the sole name for Microsoft’s Web email program.
To spread the word, Microsoft recently launched a massive marketing campaign, involving online, radio and outdoor ads running through the end of the year, that will cost the company tens of millions of dollars, according to Microsoft general manager, Brian Hall. Mr. Hall says that “The New Busy” campaign is intended to demonstrate how Hotmail’s organizational features help busy people with full lives. Part of the campaign will focus on reintroducing current Hotmail users to new features.
But should you really consider reviving your old Hotmail account or opening a new one? I’ve been using this new version of Hotmail for the past few weeks and I’ve found it handled large files with ease, performed browser-like tasks within the inbox and integrated third-party social networks and email accounts. Though the Hotmail name still conjures up frustrating memories of too much spam and the belief that storage was restricted, Microsoft has revamped its old email service into one that’s smart, robust and reliable. It deserves a second look.
Hotmail is still big on sorting emails according to your existing “Contacts” versus everyone else. This works well if you’ve taken the time to add all of your friends to the Contacts list, a procedure that takes a couple seconds per person and is done as you send emails to people. This prompting can be a bit of a pain, but if you haven’t done it, you might miss emails from people you care about. A Microsoft representative said that by the end of this summer, users will be able to opt out of this sorting.
At first glance, the new Hotmail doesn’t look dramatically different. But a closer look reveals intelligent organizational tools. Shortcut tabs at the top of the inbox display only messages from social networks (think of all those email notifications from Facebook and Twitter), pre-made email groups or contacts. Many other email programs only do this if users manually set up folders.
Another organizational tool is called Quick Views. It automatically sorts four types of emails into folders: Flagged, Photos, Office Docs and Shipping Updates. These categories come preset and cannot be customized.
Quick Views saved me from digging through my inbox for specific emails and from dragging certain emails into folders for saving. When I ordered gifts online for a friend’s wedding, the shipping notification emails from the delivery service arrived in my inbox and were also viewable in the Shipping Updates folder. Emails with attached Office documents were neatly sorted into the Office Docs folder.
Behind the scenes of the revamped Hotmail, Microsoft is powering all inboxes with Windows Live SkyDrive—an ever-growing, server-based storage repository that guarantees you’ll never be asked to clean out your inbox. (As with many Web-based email programs, Hotmail stores your emails on servers rather than taking up space on your hard drive.)
SkyDrive also gives Hotmail users more freedom when sharing photos: Images can be quickly uploaded to SkyDrive and shared with friends via a Web link. One message can include up to 200 photos of 50 megabytes each, or 10 gigabytes total. Meanwhile, Gmail limits attachments to about 25 megabytes per message.
When Word, PowerPoint or Excel documents are attached to any message received, they are opened right in the Web browser, without having to open another program. This works thanks to a program called Office Web Apps, which functions regardless of whether or not Office 2010 is installed on the computer. Just as photos are shared from Hotmail using a SkyDrive link, so, too, are Office documents.
Hotmail’s inbox now has a Sweep feature, which lets you move or delete all emails from a particular sender. (A similar option in Microsoft Office 2010 wipes out all emails sent prior to the last message in a thread.) Another option for tidying up your inbox is Conversation View, which sorts all emails sent in the same conversation into one group. Users can opt in or out of this, unlike Gmail, which offers only threaded emails.
Tough spam filters caught every Viagra-related email sent to my Hotmail address. And if you identify a piece of mail in the Junk folder that isn’t actually spam, Hotmail remembers this and sorts differently in the future.
Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, now plays a role in Hotmail. It’s built into the search box as an option for scouring Web content directly from the inbox. It can be accessed while composing a message: A small “From Bing” drop-down menu in the email you’re writing lets you search for content to add to emails, like maps, videos, images and movie show times. This content appears in a right-side panel and can be embedded in email messages with one click.
To keep people from straying away to different Web pages while using Hotmail, Web functions can be performed from right within its inbox. These functions include watching videos from YouTube or Hulu, or viewing photos from Flickr or SmugMug. I clicked on YouTube links in emails and watched videos in a handsome overlay screen. And if an email includes codes for tracking packages using the U.S. Postal Service, the package’s real-time shipping status appears within the email. A Microsoft representative confirmed that FedEx and UPS are in the works.
I added my Gmail account to my Hotmail account, so I could check several personal email messages on the same Web page. In a similar manner, Hotmail can pull multiple contacts from several networks—like phone numbers and emails from LinkedIn or birthdays from Facebook—into a single Contact list.
Hotmail may have burned you in the past, but this beefed-up new version saves you time and is a pleasure to use.
Edited by Walter S. Mossberg. Email Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's on-stage meltdown at the All Things D conference last week was so bad that people – including even Zuckerberg's most vocal ally, Robert Scoble – are calling for him to step aside and hire a new CEO.
These people are nuts.
They are nuts to think Mark should step aside.They are nuts to think Mark would step aside.
Yes, Mark has made mistakes. As a 19-year-old at Harvard, he said some demeaning things about Facebook users, treated business partners unethically, and may have even broken some laws hacking into a Facebook user's private email account. As the twenty-something CEO of a global company, Mark hasn't handled the media's obsession with privacy very well and he is plain awful at interviews and keynotes.
But, like it or not, these mistakes do not matter at all.
Facebook users don't know about them and they probably wouldn't care if they did. For them, Facebook is a useful product. 500 million people use Facebook each month. Half of them come back every day. The company's revenues, which are diversified in a way Google only dreams of, will push $2 billion this year – up from ~$800 million in 2009. Last month, when Mark looked more inept than ever, new user growth actually accelerated. Clearly, Mark's mistakes have not effected Facebook's ability to make good product.
Even if Mark's various foibles and failings did matter, we doubt very much Mark would step aside over them.
The very reason Mark started Facebook instead of doing Harvard Connection with the Winklevoss twins and Divya Narendra was that Mark wanted to control his own company. This impulse to be in charge led to every big decision Mark has made about Facebook since:
Facebook's org-chart is littered with whited-out names of brilliantly successful Internet executives who came to the company believing that they would someday be CEO. Point-in-fact: Facebook's current COO, Sheryl Sandberg, got the job because she was the one deeply experience candidate for the job who never expressed aspirations for the top job.
The fact is, Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg's company. He controls 3 out of 5 board seats and in November 2009, Mark re-jiggered Facebook's shareholder structure into one that mirrors The Washington Post Company's and Google's. After Facebook IPOs, Mark and his allies will control stock that grants them 10 votes each. Everybody else will get one vote per share. Mark isn't really CEO; he's king.
So no, Mark Zuckerberg should not and will not step down. The next CEO of Facebook will probably be his (unborn) kid.
Nevertheless, you won't see us or the rest of the media quit over-analyzing Mark any time soon. Like the vicious tweeting crowd at the All Things D conference, we are in awe of Mark's youth, power, wealth, and his product's popularity with users.
See Also:
Image: All Things D
Image: All Things D
Image: Asa Mathat | All Things Digital.
Image: Ethan Bloch
Image: Gizmodo
Image: All Things D
Image: Vogue
Image: All Things D
ZUCKERBERG LIVE AT D: The Twitter Story
Join the conversation about this story »
youtube still serves up as many video views every day as Facebook does in a month http://bit.ly/b9PrlM says @allfacebook
[Direct Link]RT @allnick: Facebook Surpasses 2 Billion Monthy Video Views http://bit.ly/bgCMZr
- Steve RubelHow Twitpic Face Tagging Does & Does Not Work (Yet) http://bit.ly/cMVMXe
Any of Facebook's over 400 million users will immediately recognize some new features on popular Twitter photo-sharing service Twitpic today as users can now tag people in their photos. In an blog post this morning, the two-year-old company announced it had passed the 10 million user mark that it sees 40 million unique visitors each month. The company says they are releasing their Face Tagging functionality "to show [their] thanks" to the community, but could it bring headaches and worries with it too?
Sponsor
Face Tagging literally works exactly like tagging photos on Facebook. While viewing a picture, the text "In this photo:" is displayed below it with a link to begin tagging the photo. By clicking the link, users can then pinpoint people's faces in the photo and a box will appear around the face, as well as a pop-up dialogue box in which to enter the person's name and Twitter handle. Once done, users hit the "Done Tagging" button to return to normal browsing functionality - just like Facebook.
Honestly, the only difference between tagging photos on Facebook and on Twitpic is that the "Done Tagging" button appears above photos on the former and below photos on the latter. While Twitpic's new functionality is a dead lift of Facebook's long-existing photo tagging feature, it is smart to copy the social networking giant. Why re-invent the wheel? Instead, Twitpic is giving users a familiar experience, making the process easy and intuitive.
When users tag a face in a photo, by default they can send a rather dry tweet announcing the tag and including the user name of the person tagged, effectively working as a notification. First of all, the inability to personalize this message is a bit of a downer, but you can always just uncheck the box and send out the tweet yourself. Secondly, by default it does this every time you tag a person in a photo. You thought Facebook notifications were bad? Just wait until someone tags a photo with ten people and unwittingly tweets the photo out ten times.
Additionally, the only way Twitpic alerts users that they have been tagged in a photo is via Twitter - so users could be tagged in hundreds of photos and not know it if the tagger chose not to tweet the tags. Users do have the ability to delete tags of themselves on other people's photos, but right now the only way of knowing of such photos is to be sent the tweet, which not everyone will choose to do.
In a phone interview today, Twitpic founder Noah Everett told ReadWriteWeb that additional features, like the ability to view photos you're tagged in, are in the works and should be out in a few weeks. The goal, he says, has been to launch the tagging feature and use user feedback to determine the next logical step.
That next logical step, for many users, may be privacy controls - something the new feature lacks. On Facebook, users have the ability to manage photos they have been tagged in and remove their association from a photo once-and-for-all. The only option related to photo tags for Twitpic users is the option to allow other people to tag their photos. Everett says they are looking into possible privacy controls, such as a blanket rule preventing anyone from tagging you, or specific user-based bans to avoid those "crazy ex-girlfriends", as he put it.
Personally, I use Twitpic mainly as a means to an end - I upload photos to the service for sharing on Twitter via a mobile application, which means I don't visit the Twitpic web interface too frequently. How am I supposed to know when I'm tagged in a photo if the user tagging me chooses not to tweet it? Even if I visit the Twitpic homepage, there is no way for me to view an aggregated list of photos I am tagged in and no system for notifying me of such photos.
Everett says they are looking into ways of notifying users, including email alterts, but hopes that eventually app developers will add the functionality using Twitpic's API. I guess the good thing is if someone decides to surreptitiously tag me in a photo, for now the general public has no real great way of finding it either.
The other important thing to note from the launch of Twitpic's Face Tagging functionality is that it is a new stand-alone platform for a third-party application to another service. What that jumble of words means is that when other Twitter-based photo sharing apps add this functionality, it will be nearly impossible for users to effectively aggregate their tagged photos (and other meta-data) across platforms. With the low barrier of entry to Twitter applications, it seems likely that Twitpic's competitors would adopt similar features to keep up.
I spoke with Thomas Vander Wal, father of the phrase "folksonomy" which refers to collective tagging of meta-data, and he shared some interesting insights into this situation.
"Since others have done similar things on other platforms (Facebook, Flickr) the [intellectual property] is fuzzy and Twitpic can't claim it, so others are free to jump in," Vander Wal told ReadWriteWeb. "It would be in Twitter's best interest to build a central aggregation point for this."
This is exactly why Twitter is rolling out annotations, which have been testing recently and should be out soon. The annotations will create a standardized framework for third-party apps to build from, making interoperability between services much easier. Everett said he actually spoke with people from Twitter today about "coming together" and "rolling [tagging functionality] into annotations."
Strangely, however, Twitter mentioned in April that they planned on having "trending annotations" and letting developers battle for standardization. It would make sense that meta-data for tagged photos could be added to Twitter's annotations, and if the services adopted the standard, aggregation would be simple.
If not, then the entrepreneurial community, "somebody like PixelPipe" as Vander Wal suggested, would need to create another third-party Twitter service that would handle this aggregation - not an ideal solution going forward. We can't blame Twitpic for this fate: what they're doing is good in terms of pushing the platform forward. We can, however, bring up the privacy issues they've have raised with their new service and its apparent lack of controls, but then again, it is a brand new feature and more functionality is on the way soon.
Tagging photo courtesy of the LA Times
Discuss
How Twitpic Face Tagging Does & Does Not Work (Yet)
- Sarah PerezHow Twitpic Face Tagging Does & Does Not Work (Yet)
- (jeff)isageek
Just one week after announcing Events grouping for photos, Twitpic is rolling out Face Tagging.
Just as you do on Facebook, you can now tag images of you and your friends and acquaintances on Twitpic. Below the image in question, just click the blue link reading “Add/Edit Faces.”
When you tag your pics, you’ll also have the option to tweet out who you’ve tagged. You’ll be able to add real names and/or Twitter usernames to the pics, and others can see the tags when they mouse over the picture.
Users will be familiar with the Facebook-like interface. Here’s what the feature looks like on the site:
Last week, the service added the ability to group your photos based on the event at which they were taken. In practice, this feature works a lot like a Flickr set, letting users organize, define and showcase their pictures quickly and easily and making the discovery process easier for both humans and web crawlers.
Twitpic has also just reached its 10 million users mark and is gearing up for more group and geo-location features from this service. To get a better idea of where Twitpic might be heading in the months to come, you can check out this video interview with Twitpic founder Noah Everett on the future of Twitter-based photo sharing.
Are these new features going to make Twitpic more interesting, fun and useful for you? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Tags: Photos, pictures, Tagging, twitpic, twitter
5 Incredibly Effective Branded Facebook Pages http://bit.ly/bCtmLw
Much has been said about Twitter’s ability to build brands, spread messages and create interaction. But Facebook’s business pages have been around much longer, are a lot more flexible and are part of a much larger platform too. Coca Cola’s tweets, made up of slightly creepy greetings to followers and public Coke drinkers, for example, are read by fewer than 30,000 people. The company’s Facebook page, which is filled with videos, active discussions, ad campaigns and all sorts of other goodies, has been liked by more than 5.7 million people.
Creating that kind of following though takes more than a well-known brand and about ten spoonfuls of sugar in every can. It also takes a smart use of the functions available to marketers looking to build their market with Facebook. Here are five brands that are getting it right:
Electronic Arts
One of the most valuable strengths of social media marketing is that companies aren’t just broadcasting their messages to their market. They’re letting their market talk about them among themselves. That’s something that EA Sports 2010 World Cup Edition uses to the full. The company, which is known for its computer sports simulations, was expected to bring out its new management game on consoles. Instead, it chose to use Facebook as a platform, providing a way for the site’s users to face off against each other.
Users can buy “packs” of players for about $1.50-$3 each but the revenue is unlikely to be the main reason that EA have opted for Facebook instead of Nintendo. Console games are more likely sell for around $50 each and points earned during the game can be used to pay for more team members. Rather than looking at cash for this simple game, the company is using Facebook’s horizontal networking — and its $300m purchase of app developer Playfish — to keep people talking about the company and maintain its awareness during the soccer World Cup.
The Facebook page for its main product is pretty effective too.
Dunkin Donuts
Electronic Arts’ new game is powered by a smart app, something that requires plenty of time and money to create. But businesses don’t need to go to that expense to create an effective Facebook presence. Dunkin Donuts doesn’t offer anything on its Facebook page that isn’t available to any other business wanting to make use of social media. Its wall though contains plenty of posts by keen fans, the admin staff have bothered to fill in the details on the info page — something not done by every business (we’re looking at you, Benetton) — and its events widget lists all sorts of local happenings that might interest customers.
Where Dunkin Donuts really excels though is in the steps it takes to reach out to its fans. Users are offered a “perk” for enrolling in the company’s app. Maurice, a talking coffee bean, offers a measure of fun. And most importantly, submitting a picture to the page’s wall puts users in the running to be chosen as a “fan of the week.” It’s a simple way to make customers feel that the Facebook page is about them, and not about the company.
Bushells Tea
A challenge for companies considering using social media to push their brands is the site’s demographic. Facebook started at a college and it still looks like a poor choice for firms looking to target markets whose members are middle-aged or older.
When Australian marketing firm Soap Creative was hired by multinational company Unilever to promote its local tea brand Bushells however, it chose to focus much of its digital strategy on Facebook. Without spending a dime on promotions, the page has quickly built up a following almost 20,000 at a rate of almost 1,000 new fans every month.
The company attempts to get around the reluctance of older Facebook users to engage actively on the site by promoting its presence as part of the conversation that comes with a cup of tea. According to Ross Raeburn, one of the people responsible for the campaign, Soap Creative has seen the self-moderation, community ownership and brand participation that they’ve come to expect from Facebook. The wall is active, the company is learning information about its customers missed by annual focus groups, and Bushells has succeeded in deepening the sense of brand loyalty held by its customers.
CM Photographics
Not all the most effective commercial pages on Facebook are pushing big brands or run by professional marketers. Chris Meyer is a professional photographer who advises other photographers about the benefits of Facebook marketing. The site itself has used him as a case study for the rewards its ads can bring after a $600 spend generated over $40,000 in bookings. But it’s not just his paid ads that are bringing results. His studio’s business page also has a surprisingly large following and an interactive wall filled with comments from customers and friends.
There are no secret tricks here. Chris Meyer doesn’t use an interactive app or even post videos. He just makes regular posts that are upbeat, human and which engage with his followers. It’s a strategy that might not work for companies so large that they struggle to present a human face, but for very small businesses, Chris Meyer’s friendly contact is a good model to follow.
Amnesty International
And finally, it’s also possible to make good use of Facebook’s pages without attempting to earn a dime. Amnesty International uses its Causes tab to publicize its fundraising efforts, the results of its recruiting, the level of its “karma” — a way of thanking supporters — and to list the causes it supports. Its YouTube plug-in makes sharing videos with friends as simple as sending an invitation and a Twitter feed helps to add instant news. Mostly though the page shows how Facebook can sometimes work as a broadcast system and the first step in a viral campaign. Amnesty adds the clips and offers its opinions on human rights issues, and its followers then share them with friends.
If there is a problem with Amnesty’s use of Facebook though, it’s the address. Facebook.com/amnestyinternational leads to the Belgian branch of the organization, a page which isn’t publicly available and which has posted little content. If you want to make the most of Facebook, it does pay to be open — and get your name right.
Facebook’s business pages then can be hugely valuable but the way they’re used does depend on the type of product or service you’re offering, the demographic of your market and the kinds of tools best used to engage and interact with them. There’s no one strategy that can bring results; only a number of tools, and a willingness to press some virtual flesh.
Adding real-time search and social search to the mix in the search engine world has created a number of new opportunities for marketers that want to do a better job of reaching customers. With new data sharing announcements happening fairly regularly, it can paint an interesting picture when you lay out the relationships between major social networks and search engines. It’s not unlike the search engine relationship chart from Bruce Clay I remember from several years ago documenting the relationships between Inktomi, Yahoo, Lycos, Alta Vista, Excite, HotBot, Direct Hit/Teoma, Northern Light and even Google. Not many of those are still around.
As the diagram above illustrates, the major data sharing for real-time search is between the social sites Twitter and Facebook and the major search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing. To be more specific:
Yahoo announced yesterday that they would significantly enhance their relationship with Facebook. According to Yahoo’s Jim Stoneham, VP Communities, “People who use Yahoo! and Facebook can now link their accounts to view and share updates with friends across both networks”. That kind of cross sharing relationship blurs the lines between social and search even more than the one–way integration of social media sites like Twitter and Facebook into Google and Bing search results.
Yahoo is expected to launch similar cross platform sharing functionality with Twitter and other social sites in the coming months according to MediaPost.
When search engines used to syndicate search results from different sources or even each other, it was important to know how to get web pages included in those sources so they would appear in search results where customers were looking. As the major search engines update their data sources for real-time search and even socially influenced search, there’s an opportunity for marketers to understand how their participation on the social web can continue to provide signal and even content for the major search engines.
It doesn’t take much to see that some of the solutions for inclusion and earning top visibility are technical and related to publishing platforms, feeds and certain types of formats. Others are qualitative based on network size, type and topical focus. In the end, what matters is not just the changes search engines make to gain market share over each other, but the ways in which consumers respond in their information discovery, consumption and sharing behaviors.
While the effect of real-time search on current marketing programs isn’t anywhere as near as substantial as search marketing or even social media marketing, it’s an area that smart marketers would do well to monitor and experiment with.
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Major Social Media & Search Engine Relationships
- Cesar SanchezPostRank Activity Streams: FriendFeed for your content! http://bit.ly/chbzJr
Knowing how and where your readers are engaging with your content is critical to the success of any publisher today. With so much activity happening off the authors site, discovering the fragmented conversations, connecting with the audience, and growing your presence on all the social hubs has been an incredibly manual and a time-intensive task. That is, until today, because we are rolling out a new beta feature on PostRank Analytics: Activity Streams for your content!
Think of it as FriendFeed, but for your content. PostRank aggregates over 10 million daily activities from over 20 different social hubs, which means that we see every tweet, bookmark, vote, and comment about your stories. PostRank already knows about all the content you publish (zero setup, just specify your RSS feed), which means that we can scan the millions of activities, and pull out just the conversations and actions which mention your content! Nothing to setup, just login into your PostRank Analytics account and you’re ready to go. A picture is worth a thousand words:
Did someone just vote on your story on Reddit, or Digg? Did someone mention your story on Facebook or MySpace, or maybe they shared it with their friends on Google Reader? Well, now you can find answers to all of those questions by logging in, or signing up for a PostRank Analytics account.
Oh, and the beta part is there for a reason – we’re just getting started with the activity stream, so stay tuned!
PostRank Activity Streams: FriendFeed for your content!
- Tac AndersonRead-Only Facebook Coming to Your Company? http://bit.ly/aOB3s7
Shared by Jesse Stay
Security teams that implement this are failing to understand "Employee 2.0". The idea being that employees in today's word take their work home with them and it is a 24 hour a day, 7 day a week job for many of them. Same thing for home. Just as employees are encouraged to take their work home with them, they should be just as encouraged to bring their home to work without consequences. If the job gets done, and the employee does excellent work, does it really matter?
IT managers using Palo Alto Networks firewalls are now able to switch Facebook into a "read-only" mode, thanks to an update released today. There is no relationship between Palo Alto Networks and Facebook - the changes are all within the customer's network. Previously, managers using Palo Alto Networks firewalls have had the option to block all Facebook apps (but not individual apps) as well as Facebook's e-mail and chat features. The update adds the ability to disable posting, making Facebook effectively read-only.
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Palo Alto Networks firewalls enable granular control over 1,000 applications cataloged in the company's Applipedia - regardless of port, protocol, or evasive strategy (so the company says). The firewalls connect to Active Directory or other LDAP based directory to assign permissions by group or by individual user. All of the application detection and user permissions take place on dedicated firewall devices to avoid bogging down servers with analytical duties.
Turning read-write applications into read-only applications may seem antithetical to the read/write philosophy, but we think solutions like this will help enterprises adopt social media and break out of a binary world where they can either offer full access to Facebook or other web applications or no access at all.
Managers could, for instance, grant full Facebook access to its social media team, partial access to a customer service team, and read-only access to its competitive research team. Access can also be assigned by time of day, so permissions could be relaxed during lunch or after business hours.
Social media is being put to use in many enterprises; Ford, for example, is spending 25% of its marketing budget on social media. Social media reputation tracking is a hot topic in marketing, too. Yet, according to a Robert Half Technology report published in October, 54% of CIOs surveyed say they block social media websites completely.
Chris King, director of product marketing at Palo Alto Networks, says "IT departments are stuck in an old world. In the old world, if an application has a business use, then it's safe and you allow it. If it doesn't have a business use, then it's a threat and you block it. That black and white world is gone. Facebook has business uses, but it also poses threats."
King hopes that Palo Alto Networks can bring IT departments into a new world, where the benefits of Facebook can be embraced and the threats mitigated. The company says its product can help prevent data leaks, improve worker productivity, and reduce the threat of malware spread through social networks like Facebook.
King also suggests allowing some use of Facebook in the workplace could improve morale. One idea he mentions, though he's quick to point out the product isn't currently being used by the military, is limiting soldiers read-only access to social media sites in the weeks before a deployment. This would keep sensitive information from being leaked, but allow soldiers to view pictures and status updates from home.
Another problem the company hopes to solve is the use of proxies to bypass firewalls and browsing restrictions. An increasing number of users are routing their Web traffic through public proxies or proxies on their home computers. King says, referring to the Robert Half report, that although 54% of enterprises are trying to ban Facebook, 94% of the companies whose network traffic Palo Alto Networks analyzed had employees actively using Facebook. We wrote about the company's research in this area last year.
Palo Alto Networks firewalls use their own AppID technology to identify applications based on an analysis of a number of parameters including application protocol detection and decryption, application protocol decoding, application signatures, and heuristics. This enables the firewalls to block applications regardless of what port the application is using. The firewalls can also identify many individual proxies, such as Ultrasurf and TOR.
All of this control sounds great for companies. However, if the technology works the way its supposed to, couldn't it also be used by governments, such as China and Australia, which restrict access to the web? Could it also be used by ISPs to restrict their customers activities? If evasive technologies can't stay one step ahead of control technologies it's good news for enterprises, but bad news for freedom of speech.
Still, it's hard to believe that any company or country can win the game of whack-a-mole that's afoot. Short of creating a whitelist of sites that employees (or citizens) can visit, there will always be holes in the firewall. But Palo Alto Networks' technology offering is far more interesting than that tedious game, and its success isn't riding on it. They just need to offer a better way for enterprises to manage the dizzying array of Internet applications and bring useful tools into the work place. And they seem to be succeeding thus far.
DiscussFacebook and Twitter Visitors Shop — and Spend — More Online http://bit.ly/96fWCH
Visitors to social media networks and services such as Facebook and Twitter shop more online than those who don’t go to such sites, according to comScore’s latest quarterly overview of the online retail economy, as reported by eMarketer. And in the case of Facebook, comScore’s figures show that the more frequently a user visits the social network, the more he or she spends online — $67 on average for heavy users of Facebook vs. $50 for a “light” user of the network and just $27 on average for a non-visitor (comScore defined a heavy user as anyone in the top 20 percent of visitors to the social network, as measured by time spent on the site).
The correlation between active visitors and spending habits online wasn’t as obvious for Twitter, however. While on one hand, comScore’s numbers showed that Twitter users tended to spend more than users of Facebook, heavy visitors to Twitter’s website — also defined as the top 20 percent in terms of time on the site — spent less on average than medium users or light users: $63 vs. $75 and $73, respectively (one factor that might affect these numbers is that a majority of interaction with Twitter comes through the company’s API, via third-party services and mobile apps).
Although $60-$70 may not seem like a huge amount for retailers to base their hopes on, the fact that visitors to social networking sites and services shop and spend more online than non-visitors is likely to increase their interest in the value of social media — and it could help explain why Facebook in particular has seen a rush of interest from advertisers: The network said recently it more than quadrupled the number of advertisers since the beginning of last year.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Social Advertising Models Go Back to the Future
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Olaf
Well, the open community can’t beat Facebook.
But companies using open technologies can – by building better products. Outside the echo chamber of web standards fanatics, the vast majority of web users don’t care about how the web works. They care about their user experience, where their friends are, and when something goes wrong, protecting their privacy.
When I read about Google Buzz (and other open-based products), it is repeatedly described as the open alternative to Facebook. Does this information help me (as a consumer) make a better decision about which product to use? No. That’s like telling the average cell phone buyer that the difference between the iPhone and Android is that the latter uses an open source operating system. When it comes to selling phones, Google relies on their search reputation and brand, not the openness of their platform.
Getting consumers to use your products, like any other retail interaction, requires offering something useful that is better than other alternatives. It is true that sometimes a backlash against one company leads consumers to switch to someone else, but they don’t “vote for the new guy”, they “vote out the old guy”. If users leave Facebook to use Google, it is not a victory for Google – it is a loss for Facebook.
When it comes to showing the value in open technology, very few efforts can show how being open makes products better. Even if OpenID solved all its problems, found a less offensive solution to the NASCAR problem, got providers certified and trusted, provided a legal framework for managing liability, educated consumers, and actually worked, it will still fail without the wealth of data offered by Facebook.
Why should publishers (content and service providers) choose a solution that doesn’t deliver actual consumer value?
In an attempt to address this, the OpenID community has been looking for ways to compete with Facebook. The OpenID/OAuth Hybrid proposal was one approach. Adding rich profile data was another (in the conceptual proposal for OpenID Connect). But these are all focused on enabling technologies, not products. Even if there was a complete open solution for every Facebook feature, it would still not offer a compelling value proposition because without actual data behind it, it is nothing but empty containers.
If Facebook asked me, I would recommend using open technologies because it is good for business (when available and applicable). But to everyone else I would recommend focusing more on the product and less about the openness of the platform. Open is certainly a selling point in the enterprise market, but it is not in the consumer market.
Two years ago the big fight was against the “walled-gardens” and user data, now it is about open standards. It didn’t make a difference back then (users didn’t care) and it won’t make one now. Facebook didn’t change their data policies because of what users wanted – they changed it because of what publishers demanded, and the publishers asked for data, in whatever shape or form Facebook wanted to give it.
The reason why the newly proposed OpenID Connect protocol is actually promising is that it focuses on mobility instead of federation. Instead of trying to build a fully distributed and federated identity framework, the proposal uses OAuth 2.0 to build vendor-specific identity solutions that are all implemented the same way. By allowing publishers to move from one compliant vendor to another, it lays the groundwork for future federation and distribution.
In other words, the fact that it doesn’t embrace discovery at its core, but starts with reliance on client registration and vendor specific relationship is an assets because it guarantees better products with built-in mobility. That mobility will allow publishers to take their business elsewhere if they don’t get the data and services they want.
Good technology enables better products. Being open is just the cherry-on-top.
Then of course, there is the other option: if you can’t beat them, join them.
Facebook has a new feature! (gasp) And this time it’s for all of us digital marketers out there utilizing Facebook Advertising. The new feature, which is still in Beta, allows you to know if the really expensive Facebook traffic you paid for actually converts.
The implementation is simple, and if you’ve already set up your Google AdWords for conversion tracking (and you should!) then it’ll look familiar:
<script src=”//ah8.facebook.com/js/conversions/tracking.js”></script><script type=”text/javascript”>
try {
FB.Insights.impression({
‘id’ : 123456789,
‘h’ : ‘abc123abc123′
});
} catch (e) {}
</script>
This will enable you to track contact conversions within the Facebook interface. Even if you have your web analytics set up to track Facebook conversions this will put the information all in one place and save time on report generation.
There is also a handy guide to using Facebook Conversion Tracking. They’ve done a great job detailing just about everything- except a pesky thing called a “Conversion Rate.” (Oh boy!)
A conversion rate can really look at any two factors, depending on what KIND of conversion you’re tracking. It’s typically calculated with the number of successes divided by the number of attempts. Within Facebook reporting, a conversion rate is the number of times the desired action (purchase, signup, etc) occurs divided by a modified number of impressions- or times your ad was shown.
It’s not simply Conversions/Impressions.
Believe it or not, Facebook adds in “Basis Points” to your Conversion Rate calculation. They do this because simply dividing your 10 purchases by the 800,000 impressions is going to give you a crazy Conversion Rate of: 0.0000125
Rather than make room in their reports for at least 5 zeroes, they modify the number of impressions by DIVIDING it by 10,000. The result on your 800,000 impressions divided by 10,000 is now a manageable 80.
Facebook then calculates: 10 / 80 = .125 or 12.5 %
While it seems sketchy at first glance, they’re really only making the report a little easier to read. Just remember you DON’T really have a 12% conversion rate!
If you haven’t been advertising on Facebook, you should definitely test it. I’ve seen it work both really well, and pretty miserable. There are a lot of factors, but one thing is sure- you won’t know how your audience responds until you start testing it! At least now you can see how those pricey, highly targeted Facebook ads are performing within their interface!
Having good analytics is a key to successfully growing a business. To provide you with even better metrics for your Facebook applications, websites, and Pages, we recently launched an improved Insights dashboard.
The new Insights dashboard is your single source for all your Facebook analytics needs for:
For example, you can now view analytics around specific stories liked on your website, or how many users commented on posts made on your Page (note that this is anonymized aggregate data and does not include personally identifiable information). From there, you will have a better idea of what your audience finds most interesting and capitalize on that content.
The Insights dashboard contains more data than before, as well as a host of new visualization tools, including the ability to view full screen, print, and save graphs. We've also released a new demographics visualization so you can get more information about the audience interacting with your application, Page, or website.
As a domain administrator, you can now access sharing metrics and demographic information per domain and per URL so you can optimize your content for sharing and better tailor your content to your audience. To get started, you will need to associate your domain with a user ID or a Facebook application or Facebook Page that you administer. You can do this by clicking the green "Insights for your Domain" button on the Insights dashboard and adding the meta tag that is generated to the <head> section of the root page on your domain. If your site utilizes subdomains, the root file of each subdomain must be claimed separately.
For application administrators, Insights now includes feedback for stream stories, referral traffic to your application, a breakdown of what user actions contribute to active user count, demographics on authorized users and active users, and the number of times permissions are prompted and granted.
If you administer a Facebook Page or have integrated the Open Graph protocol into your Web pages, you can now see analytics for referral traffic and stream stories in the Insights dashboard, as well as tab views for your Page. Insights will capture engagement with Pages regardless of whether an action was taken on or off Facebook.
In the coming days, we'll discuss the ways in which you can get even more analytics, and in a programmatic way. Until then, we'd love to hear your feedback on the Developer Forum.
Alex, an engineer on the Platform team, enjoys having better insight.
Last week we asked you if you are going to quit Facebook due to privacy concerns.
The top response was ‘Yes, Facebook has gone too far’ with 39.6%. That means almost 40% of respondents are going to quit Facebook or might have already! 24.6% did not care about Facebook privacy and 23.2% do not use Facebook.
So after deleting my Facebook account, I have moved on to tackling my system’s boot time. I am personally using a little application called Soluto. Stay tuned for my review of it. I learned that I had close to a 1 and a half minute boot time on my 32bit Windows XP SP3 machine. This made me wonder how fast other people’s machines are at start up and here we are with today’s poll:
Let us know what OS you are using in the comments. However, we are looking to see how long it takes for most modern computers to start up on average. By start up, I mean to get to a workable interface where you can launch applications or documents. What do you think is an acceptable boot time?
Got Questions? Ask Them Now FREE on MakeUseOf Answers!
Too long, but faster thanks for Windows 7.
- Kol Tregaskeswindows 7 made boot up time A LOT faster for me as well
- Holdenpagetrollük öğrenelim başkandan ahaha
- iclalhttp://www.facebook.com/figen.bekler attack of the clones
- mersennediyavol paşa benim profilimden aldın, hiç olmazsa like'lasaydın:)
- zebercet
If you want to see if Yahoo is censoring any of your photos go to the Flickr organizer here. Once you are there, click on “more options” at the bottom of the page. Where it says no privacy/safe search filter, change that to show restricted or moderate content. This will show you what photos of yours that Flickr is currently censoring.
Yahoo today announced that as part of their 2008 “Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) initiative” they are integrating with Facebook. Every time I hear about this so called Y!OS “open” strategy I’m puzzled.
So Yahoo will integrate with Facebook. But will they do it with the full version of Yahoo content? Or will they do it with the censored version of Yahoo content? At present Yahoo censors Flickr photos on the web institutionally. From the Flickr FAQ:
Note: If your Yahoo! ID is based in Singapore, Hong Kong, India or Korea you will only be able to view safe content based on your local Terms of Service (this means you won’t be able to turn SafeSearch off). If your Yahoo! ID is based in Germany you are not able to view restricted content due to your local Terms of Service.
So this means that photos of mine (like this 1874 painting from the Art Institute of Chicago) are effectively filtered out of view as indicated by Yahoo above.
Further, these photos are also completely stripped out of all RSS feeds even for all *USA* based accounts. So if I want to feed my Flickrstream into FriendFeed or Google Buzz these photos will be censored from that feed.
My Pal Merkley does some amazing work with fine art nudes. These are not pornography, these are elegantly structured intensely detailed productions. Right now there is only one way to see these photos of Merkley’s. You have to go to Flickr itself, change your default settings from “safe search” to allow moderate and restricted content and then I can see them on Flickr. But what if I don’t want to see them on Flickr? What if, you know, with a more “open and social Yahoo/web” I want to see these photos in my RSS reader or on Google Buzz or on FriendFeed or (apparently soon) on Facebook? Will I be able to see them? No, I will not. Because Flickr feels that RSS feeds must be sanitized of most of Merkley’s art, even for adults in the U.S. Even though I’ve designated on Flickr that I want to view this content. Even though I’ve certified that I’m over 18. Still, the only place that Yahoo will let me see these photos is in the official Flickr silo itself. (And not even then if I unfortunately happen to be from India).
Unfortunately Yahoo seems to be unwilling to have an open and transparent conversation about this problem. I’ve been permanently banned from the Flickr Help Forum for asking pesky questions like this. I posted a very respectful question about this subject to the Yahoo Corporate Blog (see screen shot above) and it’s presently be censored (er. moderated). The Yahoo Corporate blog has no problem posting comments that kiss up to them. But dare criticize them and your comment is “moderated.” How is this more open and transparent?
If Yahoo truly wants to make Yahoo and the web a more open and social place, then they should stop censoring places like India and Germany and Korea. They should also stop filtering RSS feeds in the U.S. Believe it or not, some people actually don’t find paintings from 1874 at the Art Institute of Chicago offensive, even if the nanny’s at the Flickr Censorship Bureau do. By the way, I tried to appeal Flickr’s censorship decision on the painting from the Art Institute of Chicago and they refused to uncensor it.
Apparently full frontal male nudity on Michelangelo’s statue of David is ok, but a tasteful painting by Lefebvre showing the backside of a woman is not ok. How’s that for a double standard.
Last week, comScore released its U.S. Online Video Rankings for April 2010. We noted that Vevo in particular saw big growth in its first couple of months on the Web.
But as Clickz this morning wrote, social networking site Facebook has shot up the rankings, too. With 41,335,000 unique U.S. viewers in April alone, the site is no match for Google Sites (which includes YouTube and Google Video), as the leader of the ranking for top online video properties in the United States boasts a combined viewership of more than 136 million users per month.
Facebook is climbing the rankings fast, though: comScore pegged its number of unique U.S. viewers at 13.3 million in April last year, so that means its viewership more than tripled in a year, according to the audience measurement firm.
Thus, Facebook has quietly nestled itself in the number 5 spot, just behind Yahoo Sites, Fox Interactive Media and Vevo. According to comScore, Facebook videos currently draw a bigger audience than known names like Microsoft, CBS, Hulu and Viacom.
Even if surprisingly few videos get viewed by users on average (5.6, compared to 96 on Google Sites and 24.7 on Hulu), the site seems poised for growth in this segment. With more than 400 million active users, the site could soon surpass Yahoo and Fox as one of the leading video destinations on the Web as far as the United States goes, and will likely fight a hard battle with Vevo for the number two spot in the rankings.
And as Clickz points out, a lot of the video content currently available on Facebook comes in the form of embedded YouTube units, but comScore counts views of those to Google Sites, so Facebook’s role in delivering video content to users is larger than the numbers actually suggest.
It would probably also help to stop hiding the ‘video’ page under the ‘Photos’ tab, which makes zero sense to me.
