UPS Widget on Groundswell and Other News
GROUNDSWELL
The UPS widget project that I worked on earlier this year at McCann-Erickson got a mention on Page 34 of Groundswell. Published by Harvard Business Press in May 2008, the much-celebrated book by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff goes into detail about a world that is transformed by social technologies and how you can use them to work to your advantage. I am only on Chapter 5 at the moment but it is definitely coming across as a “must-read.” I found their breakdown of the Social Technographics Profile helpful for online strategy formulation. Traditional audience segmentation unfortunately do not reflect the current participation levels and groups on the Internet and thus are not particularly insightful for the kind of work we do anymore. Forrester Research has the most relevant data and that has been the foundation to the writing of this book by two of their senior analysts. (P.S. Charlene left Forrester recently to start her own consulting company Altimeter Group. Here’s where to grab a copy of Groundswell.
SEESMIC
Johann Romefort, CTO of Seesmic has abandoned Paris for the moment and will now shake his French lovely locks for San Franciscan admirers. Although I did interview him in London, we were interrupted by un chien et une abeille at Kensington Gardens. Although the whole thing was caught on video, I’ll spare myself the embarrassment of being attacked by a buzzing bee mid-interview and show you a picture of triumphant avoiders of the bee-sting!
Johann Romefort and Jackie Miao. London, July 2008
YOUTUBE STARDOM
I’ve been tracking YouTube music stars like Kina Grannis, David Choi, TheBathroomGirl, JillianMarieThomas and SinginDork888, because these folks are really really good! Check out David Choi’s cover of How Deep Is Your Love below. Enjoy the sing-song!
The Web’s Eventful Week in July
Last week was so eventful as far as the web world goes that it would be blasphemous not to make a note of it.
FIRST, THERE WAS THE IPHONE 3G FRENZY…
The crazy queues you witnessed have generated $330 million in sales over a few short days and caused a month-long inventory shortage. It is just a month’s wait if you really want one. However, If you find that you are being tempted to lie, cheat and steal to get one, don’t do it because there are always some on eBay.
FORRESTER LOSES TWO
Earlier in the month, Charlene Li one of my favorite analysts (co-author of Groundswell) announced that she was leaving Forrester and Friday was her last day. Coincidentally Peter Kim announced that Friday was also his last day at Forrester. He will be joining Jeffrey Dachis (founder of Razorfish, Inc.) to start a social computing endeavor. Their insight and presence as analysts will be missed, but I’m sure the wealth of information and skills that they have gathered at Forrester will be used to the fullest extent to excel in whatever they will be dabbling with moving forward. In short, we won’t be hearing the end of them.
Let us all hope that Josh Bernoff and Jeremiah Owyang will continue to stay with Forrester for a while longer, and that we didn’t just witness the beginning of an exodus of top-class talent from the IT research company that many of us really smart people have come to depend on for insight. Saying that, Forrester is hiring more researchers and analysts so if you would like to give it a shot now is the right time to send your résumés and CVs across!
JASON CALACANIS RETIRES FROM BLOGGING
An even more dramatic news last week was Jason Calacanis‘ announcement that he will be retiring from blogging. The CEO of Mahalo.com states that he will be maintaining an exclusive mailing list of no more than 750 people (so far that is the news) so for the hundreds and thousands of people who have fallen in love with Taurus and Fondue… this is your cue to go get your own pet.
SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES
Other than that, Twitter acquires Summize, FriendFeed has been getting a lot of coverage and a spin-off aggregator called Moopz is all-the-buzz. I thought I’d cover last week’s underground headlines for you in a neat and nice little summary.
What About User-Generated Advertisements?
I wanted to share this blog post, Letting your Community Create your Advertisements by Jeremiah Owyang. I think what Dell has done with their Regeneration campaign and the way they are pointing in terms of how the advertising industry will pick up from this is not something to be ignored.
Seesmic: A Video Hello from Jackie
You Have 1 Invite to Delete All Your Invites on Facebook
By now, it isn’t a big surprise that the number of application invites that are being released out into the ether have almost put most if not all its users off. I just ignored 370 invites for time-wasting random applications that do nothing more than illicit clicks that don’t actually coerce you into responding to a call-to-action worth defending. That and removing most of the applications that I’ve added in the past because it somehow appealed to my ego at the time.
Total time wasted to clean my account? One hour and counting.
Money earned or relationships made or severed as a result of adding or ignoring those applications? Zero.
Guys, this is an example of when an open platform means a cesspool of dung which creates more work for its users. One can disable all invites of course, but then one would also lose the chance of getting an invite to use an application of real interest. In addition, the total blockage of app invites on a massive scale would immediately put into question Facebook’s value if application developers are not getting traction out of their efforts, thus rendering Facebook useless as a revenue channel.
But of course, there are a few select applications that are actually pretty useful, for instance the virtual Bookshelf. It allows you to tap into a database full of books that you have read or may read and share thoughts and reviews with your friends. Saying that, besides the few applications that I find useful, I will continue to skim over and purge the majority of it.
Facebook is still in its early days and its revenue model have yet to prove its efficacy. Either the quality of the apps have to improve or behavioral targeting algorithms need to be introduced where app invites are concerned. This means moderation of some sort need to be applied to control what shows up. It is messing about, and spoon-feeding at its best, although, Amazon.com have benefited greatly from behavioral targeting.
Can Facebook really remain open, keep its user base and be profitable at the same time? That is something for you to think about before you spend some serious dollars to develop Facebook applications.
Fantastic Seesmic
A few months back, I went to a Seesmic party at the invitation of Johann Romefort (Had an amazing time meeting the Seesmic community). Johann is CTO and the technical brainiac behind Seesmic. Today is Johann’s birthday and everybody should go to his site and say “Bon Anniversaire Monsieur Cheveaux Bouclé!” God knows I am absolutely smitten with his cuteness but fortunately for you this post is not about my infatuation with his lovely locks.
If you don’t already know about Seesmic, this is my rather late attempt at giving French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur’s latest project some good ol’ promo. A micro-blogging web application, Seesmic enables you to have conversations with other users on the platform. It uses Flash video so you’ll need to have a webcam and an acceptably stable broadband connection to get in on the fun. I could dissect and describe all day about how it works, but it’s better if you tried it for yourself so do jump in and have conversations with people. It’s kind of like a video Twitter, except there isn’t a 140 second restriction on the length of the video.
I guess my point is, if Deepak Chopra, George Lucas, Cate Blanchett, Harrison Ford, and Steven Spielberg are on Seesmic, why aren’t you?
P/S: On a separate note, I just noticed Loic very quickly responded to Brian Solis’ PR Secrets post on Techcrunch calling it bullshit. Woa way to go Loic for the honesty! Read them both, the Techcrunch article first and then Loic Le Meur’s post second, then let me know your thoughts.
The Magic of LinkedIn
While everyone is busy talking about Facebook, let me throw in a bit of a likely curveball and bring up the professional social networking website LinkedIn. I did a search on someone I wanted to be back in touch with in 2004 and found her on LinkedIn. I signed up just so I could send her an email, but there wasn’t much going on in there and I was waiting for it to take off. I think the time for LinkedIn to be in the spotlight is now.
With 16 million registered users, they are a force to be reckoned with where your professional connections are concerned. I found most of my wonderful ex-colleagues sitting on this quiet business networking site. It looks like the LinkedIn team gave the website a facelift and beefed it up to anticipate an explosion in social-generated content; it is looking like it is on its way to being a platform and not just another website. I am predicting they will be more than huge following the enhancement of the site now that it is going to be a whole lot more than just a contact list-on-speed. Have a feeling there’s going to be more news on LinkedIn in the coming days and weeks so stay tuned…
Tweetmania
I was introduced to the Twitter phenomenon sometime in September by a coworker, but as a veteran web journalist I was skeptical and pretty much slagged it off as an annoying tool to validate obsessive-compulsive behavior. If it wasn’t for
After all, Facebook’s built-in tweeting widget would reach my social network if I felt like sharing between stretching sessions and working on the next web solution. But Facebook’s restrictive tweeting system couldn’t do what I wanted it to do. It presented me as a third person with a bizarrely solipsistic inquiry toward my own ego. A “
But I am essentially the same individual with finite minutes and hours in a day, my tweets should be syndicated to all the websites I have a presence at to maintain a sense of connectivity with my readers. While Twitter may not serve everyone, it seems to be the answer to those with a fragmented virtual presence who may want to maintain a consistent sense of dynamism without the time to slave away at individual website updates.
Do check out my tweets under “What I Am Doing” on the right, or get it on the fun at Twitter.com
Questionable Apps on Facebook
It begins with an invitation from your friend to see who your so-called Perfect Matches are on Facebook. The invite starts off by claiming that they’ve matched you with your perfect matches, at which point if you’re curious enough you’d click to install the app. After you have done so you are basically wrestled to choose 9 people to spam an invitation to proliferate the same madness, and upon completion of those invites the page reloads and shows you a list of your apparent “perfect matches” using a percentage scoring system.
The person that the app scored at first place was a magnificent 96% match with me.
This said person is however:-
a) engaged to be married,
b) physically the furthest thing away from my type,
c) character and personality clashes with mine I doubt we can have a conversation for more than 5-minutes without running in the other direction,
d) has no immediate interests in common with me, and
d) possibly the worse person the app could have matched me up with!
The second guy on the list is no less impressive. Ranking at an impressive 94% would mean that there can be absolutely no mix up with the fact that he was going to be the love of my life. Except that I thought he was gay the first time I met him, and when I was made aware that he was in fact “not gay” I still found his personality too effeminate for my tastes.
That’s just one side of the story, and you haven’t heard the other person’s side yet. I am sure if I feel that way about them, they must not be too excited about hooking up with me either. There are companies out there that are going about their businesses in such a distasteful manner that it threatens Facebook as an enjoyable platform.
Perfect Match has questionable credibility and their effort is no where near as sophisticated as a dedicated match-matching website like Match.com. Thus the limited function of the app would unlikely be able to calculate the probability of your compatibility with another Facebook user. Don’t be fooled…. while there are a lot of apps on Facebook that have entertainment value but this app is for lack of a better word a dud! It was designed to inspire click-throughs so that you can be lead to a page that serves you blinding ads on a paid services along the lines of astrology, numerology, tarot card reading, relationship feng shui, and all that kind of mystical hocus-pocus that claim to reveal the love of your life if you don’t mind parting with some money.
Guys, we all love Facebook but let’s get real for a moment. Grebooca’s Perfect Match just smells funky and it fails as a match-making application so far. This is bullshit scamming in broad daylight and endorsement of such activity just drags the platform’s standard down. Facebook should consider the state or intentions of the app prior to approving them, or they’re going to piss a lot of users off.
The Potential of Facebook with Ruby on Rails
People are joining Facebook by the herd, and if you’re not on it yet you probably haven’t heard or don’t care. However if you’re in any kind of B2C business that uses the Internet as a revenue channel, you should pay attention. The success of social networking websites in gathering viewers is something that cannot be ignored, even if you choose to be an anti-social digicrat. With 34 million users worldwide logged in July 2007, Facebook is expected to grow it’s numbers exponentially. Thousands of developers are creating plug-in apps on rails for an ever-increasing number of Facebook users to market their ideas, skills, and products. College dudes aren’t the only people making Ruby on Rails applications for Facebook. Companies have caught on to the potential of this platform and as a result we are seeing more mature applications showing up on Facebook.
One such example that I have come across is the Shopping 2.0 project by Hungry Machine LLC, which goes beyond purposeless graphical haggis and philanthropic esteem-feeding rate-me apps to more sophisticated efforts, where actual business intentions are integrated into the applications. The Visual CD rack is an app in the Shopping 2.0 suite that allows a Facebook user to build and show their CD collection using thumbnails taken from the Amazon.com catalogue. If a user chooses, “want to buy,” the link takes you to Amazon’s shopping engine. If you’re unsure how this is smart, Amazon.com has a very rewarding affiliate program that pays in commission dollars when click conversions turn into actual sales. I’m sure they’ve figured out a more sophisticated way to integrate the app seamlessness into Amazon’s model but one thing is for sure, Hungry Machines is definitely looking at commission dollars. If Hungry Machines simply developed this app for Amazon.com (which I doubt), that’s not entirely bad if you position your company as an RoR development firm, which is exactly what these coworkers from Evolution Health have done.
That is not to say that Visual CD rack will sell CDs. There still are variables like the fact that CD sales have plummeted since the idea of Napster came along and gone, and spawned dozens of other clonish P-to-P music sharing software. People are simply not buying CDs like they used to anymore. No matter how smart your rails application is.
Hungry Machines has also developed (without surprise), Visual Bookshelf, Visual DVD Rack, Video Games, Magazines and Gadgets which of course is basically the same app repackaged with different names because they access a different catalog database. These applications are in no way perfect in functionality but for what it is worth, the business idea makes sense and they are definitely paving the way for others who see the light in RoR. HM needs to work on IA and UA to perfect Shopping 2.0 in order to make the experience seamless enough to convert users into consumers.
In any case, this topic is way too big for me to attempt with one blog entry. I’ll be sure to touch on the subject again soon enough.
If you would like to learn how to create applications for Facebook, a good place to start is the Facebook Developer’s site. You might also like to take an online tutorial on Ruby on Rails, and research RoR in more detail on your own. Then the next step is really to just get down and dirty with it.
Who?
JACQUELINE MIAO
Web Strategist
PRINCE2 Project Manager
Location: London, U.K.-
