This is going viral, but we got it from Seth Godin’s blog via ViralBlog.
We especially like: “Gordon Norris joined the group: I like to stop suddenly in the street”
: >
Click the link above for a good chuckle.
Archive for the ‘Social Networks’ Category
Facebook: Oops, Sorry About That Beacon Thing…
If love means never having to say you’re sorry, than a $15 billion valuation must mean: push a user-infuriating strategy as far as you can until finally admitting you were wrong.
If you’ve been following the saga (here, here and here), Facebook’s Beacon pushed word-of-mouth social advertising to the very edge: activities that Facebook users took on other sites — including purchases on sites like Overstock.com and rentals at Blockbuster.com — would be broadcast to all of those user’s Facebook friends. To participate, sites only had to deploy a bit of code on their pages.
The fury occurred when Facebook originally defaulted to an opt-out process. If you didn’t explicitly cancel each data exchange as it was happening, your info would be broadcast out. It later back-tracked to make it opt-in, requiring users to agree to have their data shared — but again on a case by case basis. Today, it added total opt-out into its controls. With a single click, users can do away with the data exchange — forever and universally. Wrote CEO Mark Zuckerberg today:
…We missed the right balance. At first we tried to make it very lightweight so people wouldn’t have to touch it for it to work. The problem with our initial approach of making it an opt-out system instead of opt-in was that if someone forgot to decline to share something, Beacon still went ahead and shared it with their friends. It took us too long after people started contacting us to change the product so that users had to explicitly approve what they wanted to share….People need to be able to explicitly choose what they share, and they need to be able to turn Beacon off completely if they don’t want to use it.
So what’s left here? There’s a very good chance that Facebook’s 50 million users will continue to share their online activities (including e-commerce activities) with one another, albeit with greater control. If that’s the case, Beacon still has a chance to be an important step forward in word-of-mouth marketing.
The last time Facebook had a major privacy issue (with the launch of its NewsFeed, which sent on-Facebook updates to friends) once the problems were addressed it become Facebook’s signature feature.
Meanwhile, it may very well be that privacy concerns aren’t a worry for younger users, as pointed out by this blogger. Or that Facebook users didn’t even notice the hubub at all, according to this poll of Facebook users by blog Valleywag:
Beacon Backtrack End of Social Advertising — or Saving Grace?
We’ve been following the Facebook social ad controversy closely because it’s important to the future of advertising — including service provider ad strategies.
Today, Facebook turned its Beacon social advertising program from opt-out to opt-in — on an case-by-case basis. While many Web sites and online advertising approaches rely on tracking users to some extent, Beacon turned that tracking public by publishing the buying decisions that its users made out to their circle of friends. For instance, if a person bought a product on Overstock.com, all their friends would know about it too. The privacy concerns are obvious: what if you bought something embarrassing? Or purchased a holiday gift you don’t want your Facebook friends — including the one receiving the gift — to know about?
This has happened to Facebook before — in fact, successfully navigating a similar privacy brouhaha was crucial in helping the site grow to more than 50 million users. Last year, Facebook introduced its “News Feed” feature — the same capability that Beacon leverages — to automatically alert Facebook users about their friends online activities, such as posting a new photo or commenting on a page. Facebook users protested, and the site added new privacy controls to let users manage the information they shared. Today, the News Feed is a key feature within Facebook — in fact it would be hard to imagine the site without it.
Facebook is clearly hoping a nod to privacy will save Beacon as well. The site, along with participating partners, will require that users opt-in to sharing their e-commerce and off-site activities in their Facebook news feeds on a case-by-case basis. Previously, a pop-up box notified users of a potential data exchange and allowed them to opt-out, but it was small and disappeared quickly and if users missed it the information was automatically published. Facebook said it will not provide a universal opt-out for the feature, ensuring Beacon’s survival but ensuring at least some level of controversy may remains well.
So what’s the big deal? First of all, companies that rely on advertising should be thanking Facebook for continuing to challenge the online privacy status quo. The startup has enough good will to play the guinea pig and see how far it can go before users push back. Such efforts are required to explore the possibilities of advertising online. Facebook also should be applauded for the innovation of ad-related news feeds, which represent a unique new form of word of mouth or recommendation-based advertising, an ad-industry holy grail.
Beacon is an advertising 2.0 experiment we will continue to watch.
Routing Around Online Privacy Outages
Social networks and Web ad networks are — right now — defining the future of Web privacy and personalization, driven by concepts like social advertising and profile sharing.
Influential blogger Dave Winer cuts to the heart of the matter when it comes to the “balance of trust” between users and advertisers, which is really the key issue here, one that is being negotiated out across the Web right now. In a post asking for the ability to control his own personal data, Winer writes:
The leaders of Silicon Valley begrudgingly gave up their view of us as couch potatoes, now they think of us as generators of content they can put ads on (and pay us nothing). We still need to work on that respect thing.
Winer hits the nail on the head. The type of thinking he criticizes is a very heavy-handed grafting of old marketing values onto the new world of Web 2.0.
The Web 1.0 equivalent of this is email spam. Or SEO gamesmanship. It’s taking the golden goose and shooting it between the eyes for a quick meal.
What makes even bad, short-sighted ideas work on the Internet is sheer scale…spam works because if you send out several million emails for almost no cost, you’ll get some level of payback. Gaming search engines works because the pay off is so big and the chance of getting caught is low (and if you are caught, you simply move to the next shady tactic).
Billion dollar businesses — businesses built to last — aren’t built upon such short-sighted ideas. As Winer himself likes to say, the Internet “routes around” problems. If next-generation advertising fails to treat consumers with respect, users will find a way to route around that as well.
Social Network Traffic Surpasses Email
While some may see social networks as fads, from a pure “bits and bytes” point of view this should get the attention of service providers: for the first time last month, traffic to social networks overtook traffic to web-based email services in the UK, according to researcher HitWise.
Facebook Ads Change Game — For Better or Worse?
Facebook’s social ads launch this week was above all an *advertising* announcement — meaning: the most interesting thing about it is how it helps marketers reach consumers in new ways.
Service providers certainly need to keep an eye on advertising trends, but this isn’t as much a direct competitive gambit as many other Web 2.0 efforts. But I wonder if the ripples across the pond won’t end up being significant and far-reaching.
The premise is simple: Facebook Ads let companies build their own Facebook pages. Users on Facebook can link to those pages as “friends” (yes, brands as friends). The compan
y then sends messages (ads) to that person which are visible through that person’s network of friends. (Curious what a company Facebook page looks like — click on the Verizon page, courtesy of Read/Write Web).
At first blush, it’s an odd construct. Second blush too. Why would anyone do this? Why would anyone do many of the things we all do online?
The power, however, is that it takes the very power viral marketing idea of the “endorser” and puts it on Web/social network steroids. Suddenly, it becomes very easy to recommend commercial products to my friends. And it becomes just as easy to find out what my friends think about certain products.
The system also lets me create “content” about products and share that with my friends. Again, an odd concept. But in this context, content means things like lists or reviews. So for instance, Blockbuster is planning to use the system to enable people to share their list of favorite rentals with their friends, and use that Web of connections and information to drive more rentals.
“Nothing influences a person more than the recommendation of a trusted friend,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, in announcing the new system. “When people engage your page on Facebook, that’s going to spread information about your brand virally through the social graph.
More than 100,000 companies launched Facebook pages Thursday. Companies launching specific advertising campaigns tied to their new pages included Coca-Cola, Verizon and Blockbuster. In an ad campaign, an advertiser buys the right to append an advertising message to use recommendations and deliver more typical banner ads — but with the twist that the ads will include personal recommendations from Facebook users.
In addition, advertisers can leverage information from a user’s profile — including interests, location, relationship status and more — to further target their pitches.
Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang has taken to calling these social network recommenders “fansumers” — a play on “fan” and “consumer.” The power for advertisers is that “as consumers share their affinities, brands can advertise using trusted social relationships,” according to Owyang.
It remains to be seen how Facebook users take to having commercial products injected into their friend- and -conversation stream. It may not be as far-fetched as it seems. Consider how we all read Amazon comments or read blog reviews before buying new products today and extrapolate it out across the social network world’s so-called “social graph.”
If Facebook can combine user recommendations with social networks in a way that “fansumers” find interesting and delivers results for advertisers, it may just justify that much-touted $15 billion valuation just yet.
Open APIs vs Open User Data, Or What Really Matters at MySpace and Facebook
When Facebook launched its API platform earlier this year, the social network platform took off. By giving developers the ability to build their own applications that could be embedded within the social network, Facebook seemed to have found a a bit of gold. With a built-in audience, developers flocked to the platform. Users loved the new apps, especially how nicely they were integrated with the platform. And Facebook pulled in millions of new users and generated oodles of page views, all of which lead to talks with Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and others that have seemingly valued the company at a whopping $15 billion.
This week, MySpace followed suit, announcing at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco plans to open its platform up to third-party developers as well. From blog Read/Write Web, here’s what MySpace has planned:
1) In the coming weeks MySpace is launching a catalogue of all widgets and tools available on MySpace;
2) In “several months” they will make industry standard APIs available through a new platform where developers can try new things in a sandbox environment;
3) MySpace users will have the opportunity to participate in an opt-in beta test program, to determine usability;
4) Users will vote and ultimately determine which of the third party widgets get tightly integrated into MySpace;
5) MySpace will formally introduce the best widgets into the community, with what they term “highly developed integration”.
This is a bit different than Facebook’s “wild-west” third-party-app approach. With an audience used to voting (via “friending”), the MySpace strategy just might offer the right mix of openness and control, a concept with which Apple is wrestling right now in allowing third-party apps on the iPhone.
The “API wars,” however, call into question what “open” *really* means in the context of a social network. Is it just the ability for outsiders to add applications?
No. What is more important to end users and third-party developers — and what is really the social net owners crown jewel — is the “social graph” of connections between all the users on the site. A social graph goes beyond individual customer record or profile information to mapping the connections an individual user has — and not just the first degree, but several degrees deep.
In telephony parlance, if call detail records are an equivalent of a Web site user profile and the cookie tracking what an individual user does, than the social graph takes those records into “3-D” –essentially tracking a user’s extended universe of connections and seeing connections between multiple levels of users.
That, in a nutshell is what makes social networks so powerful.
So what does it mean to “open up” the social graph? It includes:
1) Providing individual users the ability to take their social data with them to other sites and applications
2) It provides third-party sites and developers with access to that data to leverage it in their own applications
3) It ostensibly would allow synching of social graph data between multiple sites, significantly lessening the “entry fatigue” of having to re-enter data at multiple sites
You’ll notice that in its plans to “open up,” MySpace, the world’s biggest social network, doesn’t mention sharing its users graph of social connections. Facebook, which has grown like wildfire this year and has the biggest share of attention in the social network market, has started talking about sharing its social data soon. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at Web 2.0: “It’s the users’ data. We want to [make it portable.] That’s the goal.” But he declined to give a time frame. Meanwhile, Google is rumored to be announcing its social network plans in early November. Given its huge advertising lead, and relative trailing effort in the social network area (its Orkut social net is a bust in the U.S., big in some overseas locales) to talk a lot about more open social network environments. Basically, it “wants in” to what Facebook and MySpace already own.
Do telecom service providers own anything equivalent to a social network’s social graph? At first thought, we’d say no, though as hinted at above call detail records are information-rich and enable telcos to track (and bill) for small actions at an individual level.
How service providers deal with the power of the Web social graph is a key competitive question moving forward.
Facebook Becoming A Communications Hub: IM Launched, VoIP Proliferating
Telcos may look at Facebook (and MySpace and Beebo and Twitter, etc) as interesting, faddish anomolies, or at most, something to copy and steal from (particularly in the mobile realm).
But as the social networking site continues to evolve, it is looking more and more like a communications hub. And that should put it directly on the Tier 1 carrier radar.
In the latest development, according to blog FaceReviews.com, the new Facebook instant messaging application is now live on the site. Built by Facebook (rather than it’s growing community of Facebook developers) , the IM application could keep its users on-site even more than they already are by adding a real-time communications element to the environment.
Not to be outdone, VoIP providers are flocking to Facebook as well with applications that let people do “click-to-call” meetups within the site or even conduct Skype-style peer-to-peer PC-and-headphone based calling.
For instance, VoIP pioneer Jeff Pulver, has begun positioning his long-incubated Free World Dialup project as a social media play, starting with a Facebook voice mail application. Another company, BabyTel, is rolling an Facebook-integrated VoIP application this week. Also on Facebook (live or in development): VoIP and click-to call apps from Jajah, Jangl, YackPack and Truphone, plus a nifty conference call app from Iotum. And that’s just the tip of the “social VoIP” iceberg. As a telco-competitive play, Facebook’s playback (or that of any other social network) is becoming crystal clear.
- Users create their home page/profile page on the site, bringing in everything that is (virtually) important to them, including:
- Users create their home page/profile page on the site, bringing in everything that is (virtually) important to them, including:
- All their friends and colleagues, who:
- Create a web (or social graph) of connections, comments, cross-posts and other inter-links
- As the social graph deepens, social network communities begin to rely more and more on this new environment as the (powerful yet convenient) hub for ALL its communications, starting with:
- Cross-linked comment posts, “wall” news feeds, etc., ultimately moving on to:
- Online-centric communications extensions like instant messaging or newer modes like Twitter and then taking that mobile with:
- Built in SMS cross-posting and mobile phone site-posting before ultimately adding:
- Voice-based communications including on-site voice mailboxes, voice “blast” capabilities, conferencing or voice-based group chat applications and ultimately voice calling in its all its glorious forms but largely VoIP-based and peer-to-peer with PSTN (public switched telphone network) terminations where and when they are needed.
That vision posits Facebook or other sites as a be-all-end-all communications applications hub — and chillingly relegates telcos as (their biggest fear) dumb pipes at the outer-end of the communications value chain.
Does Facebook have your attention yet?
