social media Archive

All of the recent updates to Facebook might leave you feeling a bit confused. Allow us to demystify the new Facebook for you. Check out slideshare below:

Facebook: making stalking socially acceptable since 2004. (Or did it?)

“If you build it, they will come” seems to be the motto for Facebook’s latest changes and additions. Earlier, Facebook added new “Subscription” and “Friend Filter” options, hoping to change the way people add and categorize their friends. Today, Facebook rolled out a new News Feed — with more new features (including a new media and music-sharing platform) to come.

On first glance, the new News Feed looks like the love child of Google+ and Tumblr. Good-bye, “Top News” and “Most Recent” updates. Hello, one long, scrolling, “smarter” News Feed that features photos more prominently and adjusts highlighted content according to when the user last logged in. (For more frequent, regular visitors, the News Feed will simply show updates in chronological order, and users have the option to mark or unmark certain items as a “Top Story.”)

“Today’s updates are about not missing important updates in News Feed,” Keith Schacht, Facebook News Feed Product Manager, said to Mashable.

Okay, so that’s all fair and good. I like pictures and I want to stay in touch in my friends, so I appreciate the consolidation of updates. Efficiency is great. But here’s my issue with the new News Feed: all the creepiness is concentrated in the right-hand sidebar.

For convenience, let’s call it the Meta Corner.

Not only does the Meta Corner have Facebook Chat — which is only used by people you don’t want talking to you in the first place (otherwise you would have given them your number, email, or legit screen name) — and “People You May Know” (I’ll tell you who I know, Facebook), but it now features scrolling updates of every single action your Friends have taken in real time.  It is essentially “Most Recent” updates, except now it’s in your face 24/7.

Mashable describes this as a “news ticker.” But it feels more like a “TMI consolidator.” For example:

[Screenshot courtesy of Priya Mathew]

Clicking on any single item allows you to interact with the users, thereby creating “shared experiences with your friends,” Schacht says. (And company pages, I’d like to add.)

Or you can just sit there and passively monitor all your friends’ actions. I believe the proper term for this is “creepin’.”



When it comes to brainstorming new social media ideas, we’re always trying to push the limits of what’s possible. But pinpointing exactly what can be done is a tricky task when the digital landscape is constantly changing. New web standards, APIs, apps, social platforms, popular trends — the palette of possibilities is always expanding. Instead of “what can we do?”, we try to ask “what can we do now?”

Awesome ideas often get snagged on small technical issues that preclude some essential function. On Facebook, for example, the success of a campaign might be contingent upon interactions appearing in each user’s news feed. In a system as complex as Facebook, a huge amount of PR potential might be unlocked by a simple tweak in site’s code. Brainstorms reach new heights because ”we can do this now!”

So what am I talking about? Yesterday Facebook announced a new feature that allows users to tag Pages in photos. In addition to tagging friends, you can tag brands, musicians, public figures and any other Facebook entity with its own public Page. It may seem like a small change, but this opens up lots of doors for brands to increase their exposure and recognition online. Campaigns can revolve around users tagging products in pictures that will go on to be viewed by hundreds of friends. Brands can form symbiotic relationships by tagging each other’s products and build associations between complementary goods. I predict that we’re going to begin to see some of these things implemented very shortly by a wide variety of Pages. We’re excited to see what creative new applications will come from this little (and big) announcement.

Today’s social beat post focuses on two trending stories that struck us as especially strategic. Prepare to be strategized.

Britney Draws a Crowd

Britney Spears’ label Jive Records teamed up with Crowd Factory to drive sales of her latest album. The campaign linchpin was a tool called Social Offer. Think of it as a reverse Groupon. Instead of giving discounts to every member of a large group, Social Offer gives rewards to select individual who achieve certain “gamified” goals. In this case, the goal was to drive 10 friends (and potential CD buyers) to Britney.com. Upon pre-ordering the CD, users were able to share the pre-order link with friends through a module on the purchase page, which kept track of how many of those friends subsequently clicked the link. If a user met the 10-friend quota, she got a future 20% off the whole Britney catalog. According to Mashable, a whopping 30% of all traffic to the site’s album page came through the Social Offer module.

Toyota Buys into Social Gaming

Toyota formed an agreement with Electronic Arts to advertise its well-known Prius in the increasingly popular Monopoly Millionaires Facebook game, which now boasts over 6 million users. Players can choose the Prius as their game token and build EcoGreenhouses (instead of your standard issue house), which have a Prius parked outside. The beauty of this campaign is the spot-on strategic alignment between product and delivery vehicle (take the traditional silver car token as evidence). A study released by appsavvy claims that brand promotions within apps are 11.4% more effective than your typical banner ad. Put all of these things together, and Toyota has launched a pretty commendable social media campaign.

A few days ago, Digg.com founder Kevin Rose confirmed that he has resigned from his executive position within the company to pursue other projects [learn more about Digg]. This was not exactly surprising to those familiar with recent events within the Digg community. For months now, the social news site has been faced with a multitude of problems. Decreased traffic and profitability coupled with senior staff changes have created a lot of speculation about Digg’s future. A new page design meant to reverse negative trends unfortunately backfired, bringing the site one step closer to what many perceive to be an inevitable demise. Rose’s resignation seems to be an unfortunate sign that Digg, as we knew it, will never be the same. As TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington wrote in April, “Digg without Kevin Rose isn’t really Digg any more.”

Regardless of its impending future, I think Digg deserves to be recognized as a pioneer of community-based media (full disclosure: I’ve been a semi-regular reader of Digg for a while). Below is a video clip from The Screen Savers, a program that aired on TechTV (remember TechTV?), in which Rose debuts an early version of Digg. He explains that Digg was inspired by Slashdot, a popular site for tech enthusiasts. While Slashdot ran content submitted by community members, an editor ultimately chose which articles were published. Digg, then, was Rose’s effort to make a democratic platform that ran content procured entirely by users.

A controversy from 2007 highlights Digg’s commitment to community governance. Digg administrators removed links to a pirated encryption key at the strong recommendation of their lawyers. Although site had received a cease and desist letter, users balked at the intervention and harshly criticized Digg for going against its democratic principles. They were heard. The following is a blog post from Rose at that time:

“…after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be. If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.”

Legal considerations aside, Digg’s loyalty to its users is admirable. From inception to its peak, Digg.com is an excellent case study in fostering a vibrant online community. For some more detailed info about the business side of Digg and the inter-workings of its community, head on over to ReadWriteWeb for an excellent blog post.

Know of another site that pioneered social/community media? Tell us about it in the comments section.

A couple weeks ago, Apple released a new version of its flagship desktop application, iTunes. Oftentimes, differences between each version of iTunes are subtle enough to go unnoticed by the majority of casual users, but this time, Apple spiced up the app with some social functionality. It seems that Apple, with a reputation for constantly pushing into new markets, could not resist the allure of social media.

The network is called Ping, and has been described by Steve Jobs as “sort of like Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes.” Now that users have spent some time with it, we’re beginning to see a first wave of impressions. The verdict? Ping is nothing to write home about.

Katherine Boehret, in her Wall Street Journal review, called Ping “socially awkward.” While you can follow bands and other users, you cannot send messages, either publicly or privately. Ping does not notify you when someone comments on your posts, and offers no way of importing contacts from other networks. That last part alone could be a deal breaker, even without reports of rampant spamming.

Ideally, Apple would identify an opportunity to add value for customers, and design a service to deliver that value. But Ping seems to have been designed in reverse, capitalizing on the popularity of social networking to pull more revenue from the iTunes store (every mention of a band or song links to the iTunes storefront). The half-baked functionality points toward a lack of research about what users actually want from a social network, and what it needs to be successful.

That said, music lends itself extremely well to online socializing. With an already-faithful following of iTunes users, Apple could potentially become a significant presence in the social media sphere due to sheer brand loyalty. Of course, it wouldn’t hurt to look at some Facebook case studies.

Update:

Apple recently released some updates for iTunes and Ping. Users can now share music they’re listening to directly from their library, circumventing the previously tedious procedure of navigating to the Ping page. If Apple continues to make this type of improvement, users may begin to adopt the network more widely.

We are 140-character ideas. We are the pictures of your cat. We are blog posts about the economy. We are the collective knowledge that is Wikipedia. The Internet is a canvas, with which we paint the broad and fine strokes of our lives. It is a forward extension of our physical lives: a meta-self comprised of ones and zeros. We are all that is digital; if we weren’t, the Internet wouldn’t be either.

Taken by itself, this brief manifesto is vague and puzzling, yet somehow compelling. The existence of Diaspora, and its ambitious plans to become what some have labeled “the anti-Facebook,” is, in some ways, old news. It was covered by BBC News and The New York Times back in May, but as their summer work draws to a close, the four NYU students responsible for its creation report that they are a mere week away from releasing the social network.

But I should clarify: this release is not what you might expect. For all intents and purposes, the network will probably still be inaccessible to average Internet users. On September 15, the Diaspora project will release its source code to the public. That’s right — Diaspora will be entirely open source, giving users free range to scrutinize and modify the inner workings of the network, provided they have the technical know-how. Imagine Facebook doing that.

What this means is that those who adopt Diaspora will take social networking into their own hands, and no longer be subjected to undesireable privacy restrictions (or, for that matter, any restrictions at all). According to the Diaspora blog, an emphasis has been put on creating an “intuitive way for users to decide, and not notice deciding, what content goes to their coworkers and what goes to their drinking buddies.” Those worried about a complex interface can take comfort in a claim from the designers that they “have pushed back more technical features like plugins and APIs in favor of simple and high value features.”

Could Diaspora create serious competition for Facebook? While Facebook sports a lead of 500 million users, Dispora has leverage: a widespread dissatisfaction with Facebook, and demand for a viable alternative. Even the name “Diaspora” hints at this shift — a settlement of people away from their original homeland (read: Facebook). And while it may seem like a small detail to many, the fact that Diaspora will be open source spells a huge advantage over any commercialized social network. The collaboration and mutual support of an entire community with common goals holds enormous potential. The mention of Wikipedia in the above passage is no coincidence.

Because we haven’t seen a functional version of the network, it’s hard to say what exactly it will look like. However, the designers have written that they’re considering features like OpenID, voice over IP, and instant messanging protocol. When September 15 rolls around, we’ll be sure to keep an eye on Diaspora’s progress.

Special thanks to Megan Levi for inspiring this post.

Recently, Mashable hosted a Web Faceoff Series in which participants were asked to vote for their favorite networking site: Facebook or Twitter. Facebook won 48% to 40% but this was before a new contender was released into the online arena, Google Buzz.

On first glance, Google Buzz may just look like another copy-cat of Twitter, but upon further investigation, you may discover that the Buzz is more like a Twitter-Facebook superhero, combining the strengths of the two, without any of the weaknesses.

Unlike Twitter, Google Buzz is not restricted by the 140 characters that drive so many of us crazy, and like Facebook, links attached to the post will include a summary and image. Photo sharing is made easy by allowing simple incorporation of Flickr and Picasa photos and videos. Like Twitter and Facebook, Buzz is available on mobile, and yes, all of your information can be private or public, as you wish. Of course, the most compelling aspect of Google Buzz is the same as what compels us about Gmail, Gchat, and all things Google: simplicity with very few bugs. Since anybody who is anybody has a Gmail account, it seems logical that this social network will be the one to send Facebook and Twitter into the cyber junkyard of Friendster and MySpace. But that’s up for debate.

As failure-proof as Buzz seems to be, there are some major obstacles it will face. Although Buzz has already overtaken Twitter, it still has to contend with Facebook. According to a poll taken in September 2009 by Nielsen Online, users spent an average of 2 hours a month on Google, which was 3 times less than the time they spent on Facebook. Mashable is also currently taking a poll asking their audience who would win in a fight among Facebook, Twitter, and the Buzz, and the results so far show Facebook as the clear winner. A major issue against Google Buzz, with good reason, has been privacy. Because Google Buzz has access to your entire email contact list, it automatically follows friends you’ve most interacted with. But just because you always email your mom, that doesn’t mean you want her following your Buzz updates. However, Google has been extremely fast in responding to concerns and has outlined ways to privatize your Buzz posts or turn it off completely.

So what’s your opinion on Google Buzz? Below are a few thoughts from the RFI community.

“Google Buzz is seemingly the ultimate and most transparent social network but I can see the issue of hyper- transparency. Some users are uncomfortable with putting it all out there, and for Buzz to be maximized, it needs to know everything from interests to personal contacts.” Megan Levi, Social Media Analyst

“Good to see that Google is jumping into the social networking racket under the radar but launching Buzz the way they did feels slightly sneaky. For instance, before they fixed it they had all of your contacts pre-loaded as your ‘network’. Unfortunately this is made visible to anyone else in your network. That feels like a bit of a violation of my address book, and I was especially pissed off when I saw that everyone had access to my 10-year old’s email address. I figured out how to turn it off but it was a big blunder on Google’s part big time. It even put political dissidents and people in harm’s way.” Scott Schneider, Director of RFI Studios

“Personally, when I update Buzz, it’s a completely different update than Facebook or Twitter. This is going to people I know – and people that I know well. Here I feel I can really tell what’s going on in my life, without feeling like I am over-sharing… it’s not a 1000+ people that I might not even know.” Renee Barone, Senior Interactive Strategist

“Email is the most well-established, ubiquitous, open, and interoperable social networking platform that has ever existed.  With Wave, Voice, and now Buzz, Google is tearing down the walls between historically separate digital/social channels – and melding them into a seamless flow of content and conversation.  Facebook has made recent moves in this direction as well.  And both Google and Facebook are taking a page out of the playbook of the ‘poster’ child of email-powered social media – Posterous.” Tyler Pennock, SVP of Social Media