Rocking the social networks
Google is experimenting with new voting engine for the search results. Users have the following options:
It’s all experimental and in testing phase.
Emphasis is on the social note. However to work properly I believe it has to be tightly integrated into existing social networks. Ideally, search results should not be influenced by the whole internet community, but only by the preferences of the close friends group.
What I’m going to do today, is to show how company can integrate their existing services with Facebook.
Company that I’ll take as example is Box.net. Company was founded in 2005, they are specialising in online storage solutions and they were the first company to provide this service. For those who don’t know, online storage means that you can store, retrieve and share you files on the web and access them from anywhere. All you need is a web browser. Box.net also provides an open API for accessing the data. Company has 1.2 million users with over a million files served each day.
To expand and get more users Box.net wrote an application for Facebook, which allows accessing and using Box.net services directly from your Facebook account.
All you have to do is to add their application (if you don’t have an account with Box.net, they allow you to create one immediately, registration process is very simple an literally takes 10 seconds).
There’s very subtle, but yet effective viral marketing item. If you invite your friend to Box.net application, you’ll get extra 20MB of storage for each friend you invite.
Using the service is pretty straightforward:
User interface is minimalistic and very intuitive:
Overall impression is very good, and the service is quite useful. If you want to share something between your friends this application is a must have. I may try to be picky here and note that 20MB for free these days isn’t the greatest deal, but the ease of use and convenience might overweight the limitation. If you need more storage, pricing is very attractive and is only 2$/month for extra 2GB.
It also serves as a good example on how easy is to expand your business into Facebook arena and start enjoying the growing user base. Box.net already attracted over 71,000 users with over 1,400 active daily users. Box.net themselves recognise the importance of this move and I’m happy that Facebook application pool has really useful applications, besides all the fun stuff.
In continuation on my previous post about social networking portfolios. Here’s an article describing why a reporter needs to use Facebook and more, why a reporter needs two Facebook profiles:
With a Facebook “page,” a journalist can collect followers or fans of his/her work. For example, here’s a page for ABC’s Sunlen Miller, who is covering the Barack Obama campaign. (Note: You’ll need to be logged in to your Facebook account to see that page.) Miller’s page features notes and photos from the campaign trail, links to ABC News coverage, and anyone can “Follow this reporter,” which is sort of a variation of becoming a “friend.” Followers of Miller’s work can send her a message, or write on her “wall.”
Yesterday Facebook and ABC announced a partnership to bring political coverage to Facebook:
ABC News and Facebook have formally established a partnership — the site’s first with a news organization — that allows Facebook members to electronically follow ABC reporters, view reports and video and participate in polls and debates, all within a new “U.S. Politics” category.
This partnership is primarily focusing on political news, but that alone wouldn’t be enough for Facebook users, so ABC and Facebook jointly sponsoring and organising Democratic and Republican debates in New Hampshire.
Now, this may look as a partnership to bring massive news (political) source into one of the most popular online social network, but is that it? If you think about it, Facebook has 57million active users, with 50% of them logging in to Facebook each day and spending at least 20 minutes on the site. There’s groups, there’s polls, there’s people chatting, there’s custom applications… And you bring politics on top of that.
I see at least two immediate areas of influence:
I guess it’s really hard to predict where this is all going, but definitely it is going to be the new way of doing politics.
Now you have to thank Alexey, who installed the polls things, and here’s a question for you:
Loading …Beware, early social adopters! The giants are finally awake and are closing on each other on the social arena.
Google with OpenSocial, Microsoft with Cloud OS and IBM with Lotus Connections are exploring the domain from different angles but unavoidably arrive at the same point.
It is interesting that new Microsoft visionary Ray Ozzie who outlined a major change in company’s direction, is the Lotus Notes original creator. Lotus was later purchased by IBM and is being transformed into IBM social enterprise product Lotus Connections. It is a small world.
And finally a little spot the differences game. Social enterprise from Microsoft and IBM.
Presentations are taken via excellent LotusConnectionBlog.
I have to admit I am fascinated by facebook poke. And for the very simple reason – poke is a very social thing that did not and does not exist outside of social network context.
Since poking developed inside facebook, it is important to understand mechanisms behind poke to understand how social network works.
When an individual joins the group, it has two basic ways to get around unfamiliar environment – “trial and error” and “imitation”.
Trial and error treats the group as a part of the environment and explores it from the outside. Individual learns by acting and measuring subjective feedback from the action.
Imitation is much more powerful and robust as a social interaction. User acknowledges being part of the group and trusts the group. Instead of spending a lot of effort to establish what is socially acceptable using trial and error, users start imitating other users. After all, we are natural born imitators – why don’t we do what we do best?
In every dynamic group there will be still a fair amount of trial and errors and most successful attempts will set new trends. But there is no truly social interaction and there is no truly social network without imitation.
Let’s take poke. After a new user joins facebook and acquires a few facebook friends, she will be poked. Outside of facebook being poked (whatever the equivalent might be) by a complete stranger is at least confusing. Inside facebook one quickly learns that poking is normal and acceptable thing. If poking is normal, is there one way to use poke?
Facebook informs that poke is a cool feature without specific purpose. The same page suggests to invent own meaning of pocking. So in a best social sense, poke has provided facilities and left the usage and interpretation to the users. Some users set trends and the others follow.
Reflecting the diverse audience, there are currently 500+ user groups around meaning and usage of poke on facebook, ranging from pancakes to sex invitations. To be fair the pancakes group only managed to get 252 users against 332 thousands of “sex poke” supporters.
However, there are hundreds of poke usages that are a little bit more useful than pancakes invitations. The beauty is interpretation is entirely dependant on your friends demographic. And it could be a good idea to check what poke group they are on before poking back.
But remember that sometimes a poke is just a poke.
So what is your poke?
Loading …Since we’re in social networking, we have to use social networks to promote ourselves, right? I was reading about various strategies to promote a blog. And found an amazing article by Dave McClure.
In short, Dave recommends the following seven steps for promoting your business/organisation using Facebook:
I want to identify what is an optimal set of social networks one should join and participate in.
First, let’s identifyuser groups we’ll be selecting portfolios for. We can’t use “one size fits all” approach here, especially when talking about social groups.
So, most obvious selection is by age, let’s start with three groups (G):
Second selection group is based on occupation (O):
And thethird, and last at this moment, is by income (this should be based on national average and abviously vary between countries, but the grouping remains the same) (I):
Now here comes an interesting bit, how do we select most common combination? After I’ve done some research I came up with only two selections that make up two large distinct groups:
This is just my feeling which is not based on anything at the moment, so I’d really appreciate if anyone could point me to some statistical data.
I’ve mapped this to some statistical data I could come accross, and the second group is much smaller in all popular networks. Both groups follow similar distribution pattern in most of the large networks. The only real differentiators I’vespotted were LinkedIn and MySpace. Therefore I think the portfolios should look like this:
First group:
Second group:
Surely these lists must be customised for each case, depending on one’s preferences and interests, but I believe these could serve as initial kick off point.
Syrian government blocked access to FaceBook on Friday in an attempt to control political activism on the internet.
Thousands in Syrian use Facebook to communicate with relatives and friends abroad. The social network also links groups with political and cultural interests. Syrians who have pages on the site include businessmen with links to the ruling class and pro-government commentators.
Seems that the major authorities concern is the articles posted by activists that criticises the government.
Found an interesting post at BlogMaverick. Mark discusses whether OpenSocial can compete with FaceBook API. At the moment OpenSocial is unified API for participating online social networks that allows developer to write applications that would work across the board, ie on all participating platforms. Facebook however has its own API, and is not part of the OpenSocial group.
Whether this is good or bad time will show.
Mark argues that Facebook stands above other social networks because it enforces real identities:
When you go to my Facebook profile, you get the real me. Thats not to say I answer every profile question. I don’t. I’m not going to disclose everything about myself. However, the data that is available about me is the most comprehensive, self maintained database record about me on the internet or probably anywhere. Access to that information times the however many tens of millions of Facebook active users is worth a lot of money.
As a consequence the information about users is so much more valuable, especially if combined with search engines:
So back to Yahoo and the Facebook API. I thought that if you put the 2 together, enabling Yahoo to access the Facebook database of users within the current API constraints, Yahoo search and ad serving would improve considerably. Expand the Facebook database with an opt in option to add further personal data that could be used FROM WITHIN THE YAHOO WEBSITE, the results for Yahoo could be extraordinary. A Yahoo searchbox within Facebook , or a search from a Yahoo site that recognizes you are the owner of a Facebook profile and customizes the results according to information culled from your profile would be incredibly powerful.
In order for this to happen Facebook needs to open their API, so the application could exist outside the Facebook domain.
Tim O’Reily has made some valid observations on his blog, yet I’d like to disagree with some of them:
A framework and a set of Google Gadgets for building “social applications” misses the point. We don’t want to build more applications that look like Facebook applications. It isn’t about a social UI. It’s about deeper re-use of social data to enliven any application.
I personally think that these two (reusing social data and developing more applications to improve that data) are equally important. Moreover, extracting social data for use in searches and other activities might bring some security issues and put off those concerned about privacy.
To summarise I see tree problem areas here:
All these three should be addressed separately. I guess Google is doing well with OpenSocial on the third, whereas social profile aggregator sites are targeting the first. Second one is rather tricky, because it touches very sensitive area of privacy.