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.
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.
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.-
