Archive for April, 2010
Facebook – one “Like” to rule them all!
Apr 26th
I have not done a good job of following all the changes on Facebook in the last week, but few people have, because there have been many changes, both on the public user side and on the developer side. Many of these changes have been mentioned on the F8 conference, you can check videos here.
And here are few of the changes that i managed to catch:
- Social plugins – by adding just a simple line on HTML to your websites, you can drive engagement – particularly with the Like button and the Activity Feed, which shows users what their friends liked on your sites; and even automate Recommendations of your websites’ content.
There is one very interesting fact about the on-site embeddable “Like” feature – it is supported by RDFa – which means that anyone who wants to use this functionality must also mark-up their pages with semantics, pushing the Semantic Web movement a big step closer towards getting semantic mark-up throughout the Web.
Still, we’re talking just a simple line of HTML. This is all it takes to make you more social than you were before. Thus Facebook gets a broader sense of our little finger-patterns from all over the Web. Implications? Very significant:
“For example, if you like a band on Pandora, that information can become part of the graph so that later if you visit a concert site, the site can tell you when the band you like is coming to your area. The power of the open graph is that it helps to create a smarter, personalized web that gets better with every action taken.”
- Open Graph Protocol – this one is everything that Google’s Orkut was planned to be, but alas, could not. This protocol turns your pages into “objects” that users can easily add to their profiles. “When a user establishes this connection by clicking Like on one of your Open Graph-enabled pages, you gain the lasting capabilities of Facebook Pages: a link from the user’s profile, ability to publish on the user’s News Feed, inclusion in search on Facebook, and analytics, through our revamped Insights product.“
- The Graph API – supercharged with Facebook’s recent adoption of OAuth2.0, this redesign of the core API is more powerful than it is predecessor. A robust search feature lets you look up people and events, both in public streams and in personalized ones. Real-time updates let you subscribe to updates of user data.
- Community Pages – these are pages on different topics of interest, owned by the people who love them – for example, you can have a community page about “Sushi”, with data from Wikipedia.
For a deeper explanation of all this, you can check out Scobleizer’s breakdown of why this is significant and what it means for Facebook. Also, i recommend you to see Pandora’s CTO sharing how these might impact the music genome project:
FYI: Facebook is swiftly approaching 500 million monthly unique visitors per month. There were 484 million worldwide uniques in March, up 64% from this time last year!
On average, people log-in about 11 times a month, an increase from 8.5 times a month a year ago.
Mobile internet to beat desktop internet in 5 years – says Mary Meeker (…did not we all expect this?)
Apr 20th
Mary Meeker, analyst of Morgan Stanley, has produced a very interesting, practical and intelligent slideshare of Immediate Internet Trends. Be sure to not miss this! If you do not have the time right now, bookmark it and look it up later, because it contains very valuable information, even incorporates the stock market.
- Mobile internet will have become bigger than desktop internet by 2015, though i and other people as well think that this is going to happen sooner, having in mind the advances smartphones have made and everybody’s attention over the iPad.
- Five countries – USA, Russia, China, India, Brazil – compose 48% of users.
- US online penetration in e-commerce is at 4-6%, and still rising
- Apple’s leading the mobile internet charge (this one is not very surprising)
- Another not really surprising fact, but an important one for sure is that overall, Japan owns mobile e-commerce: NTT DoCoMo, the dominant mobile services provider, introduced a mobile payment model at least 5 years ago.
So there you go, 87 slides full of fun, but also important stats inside. And again – don’t miss it – it is an easy and incredibly useful read. Be quick and smart and take advantage of this… you have 5 years to take over ;) Business Insider sums it up like this: “The bottom line? Apple, Google and Facebook win”
The long-anticipated Twitter ad platform to be launched this Tuesday
Apr 13th
Twitter are finally launching their advertising platform this Tuesday, just one day before its first developers conference. The ad model is called “Promoted Tweets” and will be launched on Tuesday afternoon, starting with promoted tweets within Twitter Search results.
The platform’s first customers include Virgin America, Bravo and Starbucks. Advertisers will be bidding on keywords on a CPM basis initially, but later on Twitter intend to launch a “resonance score” metric that will analyze how much impact sponsored tweets have, based on favorites, retweets, views, etc.
The beginning is now with search and it is planned to expand till the end of 2010, depending on how users react to this new model.
Quoting AdAge and The New York Times, Mashable say that “the platform will allow businesses to insert themselves into the Twitter stream in order to rise above the noise”.
There is something that sounds disturbing in this commentary, because it is exactly that same “noise”, also referred to as “social conversation”, that made consumers listen to and trust on brands again and thus allowed them to create and promote communities of brand advocates.
Mashable compare Promoted Tweets to Digg Ads, but really let’s not forget why people started loving Twitter – simple way of communication, simple interface, no ads…
Crish Bruzzo, vice president of brand, content and online at Starbucks said: “When people are searching on Starbucks, what we really want to show them is that something is happening at Starbucks right now, and Promoted Tweets will give us a chance to do that” – let’s not also forget that brands used TV ads to do just that and definitely lost impact, just because consumers don’t want to be broadcasted at, consumers welcome interactive communication.
Dick Costolo, who is Twitter Chief Operating Officer shared: “We wanted to do something that just enhances the conversation that companies are already having with their customers on Twitter”.
As an idea i find this great, but i do not think that Promoted Tweets will be the best solution. Just because at this term Promoted Tweets sounds to me more similar as a model to Google Adwords for search, which does not enhance communication, but just ads broadcasting.
Though Twitter have been after a monetization model for so long, i believe that when something works well and that much people love it, you should not try to monetize it in exchange for user-experience. …unless of course you incorporate some revenue sharing model.
I imagine two alternative options – keep this model, but add revenue sharing to it or forget the whole idea and monetize on advanced metric platform to measure reach and impact on what is currently going on with brand communication and thus let brands optimize, re-think and re-consider their social efforts.
What do you think?
Metal City: interactive universe promoting a metal band’s new CD
Apr 12th
Population: Declining is the new album of a Canadian metal band. For its launch the band’s decided to go bigger than just Myspace. On their behalf, interactive company Grand created HailtheVillain.com, which lets you sneak a peek into the band’s imaginary universe.
Here is a demo vid outlining most of website’s features.
Hail The Villain from Grand Creative on Vimeo.
Hail the Villain is an interactive exploration of a fictional city named Metal City. Horrific human vices play out graphic novel-style as you are investigating an accident that happened in the city.
Of course it is nicest to play with your headphones on. While you struggle to figure out the point-and-click action, Hail the Villain’s ambient music plays in the background, adding a sense of film-noir to the drama. You also have the option to explore with webcam on/off, though it is not clear to me why you need this.
During the gameplay you can dig in everywhere to find out more clues; don’t miss accessing the radio if you want to check out samples of the band’s new tunes.
There surely is a lot to do in Metal City. However, if this experience is too immersive for you and you just want tour dates, merchandise, all this is available on the home page, where you can choose whether to enter Metal City or not.
Don’t miss to check out the website, even if you are not a metal fan, i am not, too, but this is not the point. I certainly give major creativity points to Grand for the interactive experience they created.
