January 2008
17 posts
Some thoughts on the Pew Internet Report, Teens...
The Pew Internet report, published in December ‘07, was a detailed study into the online behavioural characteristics of teenagers aged 12-17, focused on their social media activity, for example in blogs, chatrooms and social networks. It’s an interesting report and well worth reading if you’re in this field. A few key findings: 64% of all online teens are involved in content...
Facebook: Adds remove all tool for requests
In their continuing mission to fight spam and allow users to operate in a clutter free environment if they so wish, and probably in response to some unofficial request-clearing tools, Facebook have announced today (in my news feed) that they’ve added a ‘clear all’ option that becomes available whenever you have more than 25 requests. This is a good move for users, bogged down...
Facebook Developer Garage - Translations App,...
I had a great time last night at the monthly Facebook Developers Garage in London. Sun Microsystems hosted the event, and donated about 40 pizzas and two fridges full of beer - very cool. I arrived early, made use of the free wifi, and drew a pretty badge to show everyone that I was from an agency (red): The other colours were blue for developer, green for corporate and black for the mysterious...
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The Five Major Attributes of Widgets &...
In Learnings from the Widget Roundtable, Jeremiah talked to Ro Choy from RockYou who differentiated clearly between widgets and applications. He defined widgets as limited in functionality, often combined with creating user action outside the widget, e.g. getting them to go to another website. Applications, on the other hand, have full interaction, often with multiple pages and interactivity, and...
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User-to-User Paypal Integration in Facebook
Although I can’t find any official release from Facebook yet, my PayPal newsletter arrived in my inbox this morning proudly proclaiming that you can now use PayPal on Facebook. They’ve suggested it can be used for sharing money between friends who owe each other, and also for raising sponsorship money for charitable races etc. Click here to go to the application page, and here to see...
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Facebook's Extended Profile: GOOD for Marketers...
Ever since Facebook first announced that they would be introducing the extended profile feature, allowing people to ‘hide’ application profile boxes in an additional section to their profile, the social media blogs have been frothing at the mouth on how this is going to ruin the viral spreading of applications. I completely disagree. Facebook initiated the change because users were...
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BigThink.com: Niche Social Network, Intellectual...
This morning I came across bigthink.com, which is kind of a mix between YouTube and Facebook, but geared around ‘big ideas’; questions and statements on a range of meta and physical issues, such as faith, arts, business etc, with ‘expert’ opinion as well as user generated media either in response or as new ideas/questions. Although anyone can go, watch, read and comment,...
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The Value of Social Networks to Marketers:...
Although not many people are familiar with the term, ‘weak-ties’ are one of the main reasons why social networks are so powerful for marketers, and it is important to have an understanding of what they are in order to make the most of any applications or campaigns on social networks. Strong-ties are those that belong to close workmates, friends and family, the people we interact with...
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Clinton wants an official blog team - shows she...
Wired recently reported that Hilary Clinton wants to create an official government blog team if she gets in power. This just shows how much she doesn’t understand social media - she’s essentially saying she wants a full time team of people to blog the official government line on what’s happening. That’s not transparency, it’s just spin and PR. If she really wanted...
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Application Strategy: What's your Objective?
Before you build any application, it’s very important that you understand what your objectives are. Simply hoping for high usage is meaningless unless you understand what you are looking for in terms of ROI. As Facebook allows monetisation through advertising (unlike MySpace), or through direct purchases, it may be that you want as much interaction in your canvas pages as possible to...
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Facebook: Sponsored Groups No Longer Available
After my previous post comparing the benefits for brand engagement of the different options on Facebook - Groups, Sponsored Groups, Pages and Widgets, I decided to email Facebook to get some verification on the costs of the Sponsored Groups. This was the reply I got: Hi Joshua, Unfortunately at this time we longer provide sponsored groups as an advertising opportunity on Facebook. We do,...
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IPTV: is the Future Bitesized?
Ever since a friend leant me series 1 of the OC on DVD four years ago, my audio-visual consumption has moved almost entirely to watching high quality TV series on my computer, either from DVD or online/downloaded. I’ve also noticed this trend among friends and family, and there is other anecdotal evidence of this trend - take a look at A VC’s “What my kids tell me about the...
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Brand Interaction: Facebook Fan Pages, Groups,...
In response to my post, Facebook Pages: Are they or Aren’t they?, Jeremiah Owyang asked: So for brand interaction what’s better than Facebook Fan pages? Groups? Sponsored Groups? My reply was pretty lengthy, so I’ve decided to publish it as a post of it’s own: Hi Jeremiah, Thanks for your question. In most cases, I believe that widgets are the best way forward, as...
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Using the Social Graph to Maximise Invites
On my regular trawl of applications, I recently came across the ‘Addicted to ….’ series of apps, focused around TV series. I added the Scrubs version, a) because it’s a great show and b) because I wanted to take a look at the app. I was very interested to see their invite page: They’ve used the social graph of new users to find friends who have Scrubs listed as a...
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Facebook Pages: Are they or Aren't they?
At the beginning of November last year, Facebook unveiled their ‘Pages’ system, allowing companies, brands, organisations and individuals to create ‘official’ profile-like pages in order to interact with people on Facebook. This is similar to what brands could already do on MySpace, however in their own space rather than with a normal profile. However, they have some severe...
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Jeremiah Owyang, and the Complete List of the Many...
For those of you who don’t know about him, Jeremiah Owyang is one of the most important bloggers in the web strategy sphere. If you work in this area, make sure you take a look at his blog (and regularly - he updates a lot). Click here to read his Complete List of the Many Forms of Web Marketing for 2008 If you’re involved in web strategy in any way, then make sure you take a look at...
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The Purpose of This Blog
Hi. Welcome to my blog - one which I probably should have started a while ago, unfortunately I was too preoccupied with reading other peoples. I’ve always had a big interest in social networks, and communication - I was an avid user of Faceparty, and was constantly on MSN messenger when I was younger. I was also a big player of Ultimate Online through some of my teenage years (before they...