More Emerging Technologies

Every morning, I go to my RSS reader and pull out a few tasty chunks of content: usually about ten out of 500 or so items. I open each in a tab in my browser, then I go through the list and decide what to do with each of them.

This morning, three of my nine tasty content chunks were about Facebook. And I decided that I should post them here:

• Jeremiah Owyang comments on Wal-Mart’s sinking Facebook strategy and offers some sage recommendations for how to turn things around. Basically, he says they should rise to a new level of facilitated conversation.
• Wired’s Kendall Black has some tips from a Facebook native to share. Among her pearls of wisdom, “poke frequently.” I couldn’t agree more.
• Marketing Pilgrin’s Jordan McCollum has some great insights on using Facebook for B2B relationships and for being a Facebook entrepreneur.

Update: Whoops! I forgot to list Dave McClure’s insight: it’s the feed, stupid!

Jeremiah Owyang asked his Twitter network this late last night.

I’d like to be able to import RSS feeds and post items to a group’s page. Sharing content with people who share your interests is one of the best features of Facebook and it should be extended to interest groups.

What features do you think Facebook should add to groups?

When I was first getting into social networks, I noticed that a lot of people I knew had hundreds, even thousands of “friends.” I asked one girlfriend about how she knew all those people and she explained that a lot of them were just random strangers. This was especially true on MySpace.

Apparently, the number of people you count as cyber “friends” is a metric of your popularity. For many, it’s a manifestation of the same phenomenon that leads people to conduct smear campaigns before prom court is announced in high school.

Having never been terribly popular in school — hard to believe, I know, but true — I was pretty much oblivious to this phenomenon. Until recently, the only people I was friends with on Facebook were folks that I had met in real life. Since then, Robert Scoble has convinced me that it’s alright to friend — it’s a verb now — all comers. It’s a good way to reach out to your readers. Robert uses his Facebook as a hub to organize the copious content he produces all over the Web.

This raises a lot of questions about privacy and control over personal information. But those issues aside, it also brings us back to the hyper-friending phenomenon:

How many friends do you really need? Don’t the quality relationships matter more?
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A few days ago (I know, I know, I’m late to the party again. I prefer to say “fashionably late”…) Jeremiah posted a link to a white paper (PDF) he co-authored, titled Tracking the Influence of Conversations. It covers a lot of important concepts about measurement online, and how metrics are going to change—how they must change—going forward.

It’s well worth a read, especially if you’re new to the scene.

Going through the list of “important attributes” the panel came up with for measurement, I was unsurprised to note how many of them were in many ways completely nebulous. How do you track relationships? or relevance?

One of my favorite ideas is Stowe Boyd’s “Conversation Index,” which is a concept that’s very familiar to me. I started blogging in 2001 on LiveJournal, and on LJ there were two ways to figure out how important someone was: the ratio of friends (so, how many people read you vs. how many people you read) and the ratio of comments (how many comments have you made, how many have you received).

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The Sydney Morning Herald proudly proclaims Facebook to be an office time-waster that costs Australian business $5bn annually:

Richard Cullen of SurfControl, an internet filtering company, estimates the site may be costing Australian businesses $5 billion a year. “Our analysis shows that Facebook is the new, and costly, time-waster,” he said.

The report calculates that if an employee spends an hour each day on Facebook, it costs the company more than $6200 a year. There are about 800,000 workplaces in Australia.

Needless to say, that’s playing fast and loose with the numbers. Of course the article goes on to quote Office Space-like employees who “averaged about 15 minutes of work per day,” (though, interestingly enough, this particular person doesn’t credit Facebook for her off-time).

Internet time-wasting is no doubt something that’s here, and should be kept in check, but this story smells a little bit like hyperbole to me.

Yes, there’s unproductive time spent on Facebook. Of all the social networks, it is the most college-oriented, and college is famous for nothing if not procrastination. But experiments have shown that a little bit of time spent engaging on Facebook can lead to some incredible ROI, or some great community and awareness building.

If you’re in the business of having customers (get it? that’s everyone), don’t be so quick to write Facebook off as the devil. If your team is on Facebook, chances are your customers are, too. Don’t throw that connection away if you don’t have to.

If you’ve ever spent some constructive time on Facebook, leave a story or a link in the comments (I know you’ve got at least one, Jeremiah).

Both Dave Winer and Fred Wilson are celebrating the first signs of an open Facebook: feeds that let you subscribe to Facebook content from “the outside.”

As people have wisely cautioned, however, a little access to feeds doesn’t mean that the platform is “open” yet, nor is it likely to be as open as some would like in the near future. But it is a sign that the people running Facebook are still trying to make something that people can use, instead of something that traps them into it.

On the internet, being able to use something means being able to pair it with as many of the hundreds of other services out there. Facebook status messages and Twitter. Facebook tags, Technorati Tags, FlickR search. The list goes on.

I’m interested to see what happens as Facebook grows more and more into a platform within the web (the web OS?), but in the meantime, I’m going to go subscribe to some feeds.

The social utility Facebook anounced today that iPhone users can quickly flip through their Facebook contacts in an EDGE-compatible, easy-view application at iPhone.Facebook.com.

The “geeky, soon-to-be-loaded executives of Facebook” — as Steven Levy so aptly called them in this week’s Newsweek cover story — may not always listen to their users. But with this newest development, they have hit a home run.

This move reveals the big strategy in Facebook’s effort to remain eternally relevant. They are trying to become the “Facebook Killer” rather than letting a new service come along and siphon off all their early adopters. To keep those early adopters — a.k.a. people who use Facebook and would spend $650 on a 1.0 phone from Apple — happy, they’ve launched a widget that will keep us engaged with Facebook longer.

Bravo!

Update: Here are some other sites with great insight on the Facebook for iPhone:

• Profy.com
• Inside Facebook
• Laughing Squid
• TechCrunch
• CrunchGear

We’ve got a “blogging for talent” session coming up at the conference this September. Social media and recruitment is a huge deal, but it goes way beyond blogging.

Here’s a great idea from ZDNet’s Dennis Howlett about how companies can use Facebook’s platform as a recruiting mechanism.

Cool stuff!

Over the past week and a half, Steve and I have given several PRWeb sponsored Webinars on monitoring the online buzz via RSS. Toward the end of our latter two talks, I got into how you can bring your Google Reader shared items feed into Facebook with this nifty little widget by Mario Romero.

As soon as I started showing the inside of Facebook, a bunch of questions came in from participants who wanted to know all about the difference between Facebook and MySpace. I told them that they’d drilled down into one of my big biases, which is namely that Facebook kicks MySpace’s patoot.

It seems like every marketer and their mama wants to understand social networking systems. This is the main theme of the commentary on Sean Bonner’s great article responding to danah boyd’s article on the class differences between Facebook and MySpace.

[Please note that Bonner's article may not be entirely safe for work, or even open behind some office firewalls. This is because it's hosted at SuicideGirls.com, which purveys high-art pornographic images alongside social commentary and discussion.]

My short answer to our webinar attendees was that marketers are remiss not to have profiles on both sites. But I think that Facebook is stronger overall for business networking.

What do you think? Have you used MySpace or Facebook for business? What have the results been?

There’s an article (I almost called it a post - silly me) about Mark Zuckerberg, the guy who started Facebook, at the Economist.com that Teresa kindly pointed me to this morning. It’s an interesting summary of the Facebook phenomenon, if you’re not familiar with it.

But the part that caught my attention was one line right near the end:

Advertising, the obvious business model, does not seem to work well on Facebook, perhaps because people go there to socialise, not to shop.

Which raises two important questions:

1. How will Facebook make (more) money?
2. How do you advertise on Facebook?

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According to BBC News, the BBC is gleefully jumping into the increasingly crowded internet video space with a service/platform they’re calling iPlayer:

The iPlayer allows viewers to download a selection of programmes from the last seven days and watch them for up to 30 days afterwards.

Viewers interested in the iPlayer can register for the service on Friday and will then be invited to join. The number of users will increase over the summer, before a full launch in the autumn.

The first thing I noticed, of course, is that the BBC is playing off of Apple’s branding efforts, a flaw in Apple’s naming structure that Seth Godin recently pointed out.

But like most of the bigger dogs jumping into the internet video space, I think the BBC is likely to try too hard to keep the consumer for sharing video. YouTube and its ilk succeed because people get to share content with their friends. Otherwise what’s the point of watching TV on your computer? You might as well watch it on TV.

Internet video is not, and never will be equivalent to broadcast TV. Companies that avoid trying to draw those analogies—TV to internet video, Newspaper to blogs—will see more success in the free-floating world of the internet.

Also, the service requires apparently requires Windows XP and IE 6.0 so Mac users (and…Vista users?), you’re apparently out of luck.

Last Updated on 8/15/2007

Between the thousands of upstart Facebook developers and our very own (dare I say successful?) foray into Facebook applications with BlogTips, it’s becoming virtually impossible to ignore Facebook as a marketing platform.

And since Facebook is the magic everything-platform, there are already tons of great groups for discussing everything from the budding world of marketing in social networks to theories on web 3.0 (yes, 3.0 already!)

At this point however, navigating the group listings in Facebook is a bit of an exercise in frustration. The search feature is pretty limited, and unless you know what you’re after, it’s unlikely you’re going to find it.

So we’ve gone through by hand and compiled a gigantic, rolling list of the best of these groups. This is where the action is at on Facebook, so roll up your sleeves, clean out your keyboard, and get in on the discussion.

Or at the very least, you can look cool by joining them.

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We’ve added some new features to our BlogTips Facebook application:

1) Users can now submit tips from the application page as well as on their profiles.
2) We’ve provided an archive of past tips and the people that submitted them.

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It’s becoming rapidly apparent that integrating online applications and services with Facebook is more benefit than detriment. It looks as though Facebook is contributing directly to the growth of online services.

This raises some important questions for companies contemplating online community-building initiatives. Should you roll your own social network on your site? Or should you reach out to existing communities through an application?

Given the stats that show Pareto efficiency when existing services build themselves into Facebook and add value, perhaps the best decision is to do both.

My prediction: the first company to build software for DIY social network building that comes pre-integrated with Facebook will quickly rise to the top of the heap.

Bratz vs. Barbie has proven to be the seminal war in the rapidly changing toy industry. Today’s kids are more sophisticated. The toy industry must now compete with consumer electronics, fashion and entertainment purchases. The tarted-up look of MGA Entertainment’s Bratz dolls is a direct response to that demand. By contrast, Mattel’s Barbie seems positively wholesome.

Today’s WSJ reports on the latest front in this war: the Web. Both Mattel and MGA Entertainment are in the process of launching online social networking sites aimed at their 6-13 year-old market. Mattel has a social network in beta, while MGA’s site is yet to launch.
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As we continue to filter though “The BBS Vault,” bringing old classics to DVD at extra-high prices, we’ve been uncovering more snippets of really useful stuff to throw up for you.

If you like what you’re seeing, be sure to sign up for our Chicago conference.

This particular clip is of John Furrier, the Founder of PodTech, as he explains how the iTunes podcast directory ranks its listings, and gives a few suggestions on how to make sure your podcast doesn’t get pushed into obscurity. Have a gander:

As I understand it, John is telling us that the iTunes listings are based largely on consistency, the same way that Google tends to rank blogs. Post more often, podcast more often, and rise in the ranks.

I’m popping in from my vacation this week to draw your attention to an interesting article about Twitter from yesterday’s WSJ in case you missed it. Here it is!

mocoNews has some interesting analysis as well.

Nick O’Neill of AllFacebook.com thinks that our Facebook application is cool. We’re pretty proud of BlogTips and we’re really glad that Nick thinks it will make a successful Facebook marketing effort.

We’ve got 55 users so far, and a number of excellent tips have been submitted. I’ll be posting some of them later on this week.

UPDATE: Steve has asked me to add to this post that we can conceive and develop Facebook applications for clients as well. If you’re interested, contact Kim Larsen at (425)-556-1941 or by e-mail.

I got into a debate with Robert Scoble on my personal blog a couple of weeks ago. I pointed out the vast difference in the ways that we were using the online social network, Facebook. I even called him silly.

The truth is, in the past few weeks I’ve started to use Facebook the same way Scoble does. I’ve friended (and been friended by) a number of professional contacts. I even removed a few photos that I wasn’t sure people would take the right way. Robert doesn’t think those photos would have been a problem, but Wall Street Journal columnist Jared Sandberg seems to think differently. So do a number of the people he interviewed for his most recent column.

But “coolest self” photos are only part of the problem. As UCI anthropology professor Tom Boellstorff told Sandberg, “All these social relationships — apples and oranges — are getting crammed into one category of friends.”

I’ve always maintained that Facebook should allow people to create different profiles to display to the different categories of people in their lives. Rather than having different social networks for different parts of my life, I’d rather connect with all of my contacts in one place, but with a different emphasis depending on the type of contact.

I’m curious, how are you all using your social networking profiles? Professionally? Personally? Something in the middle?

And how do you judge professional contacts who share their personal photos on their social network profiles?

Jeremiah Owyang pointed this video out on Twitter this morning. I’m passing it along to our readership because I think it explains a concept that some are still getting to know in very easy terms.