And speaking of booze, how come there's a field for declaring I'm an alcoholic (opensocial.Enum.Drinker.HEAVILY) but no way to tell people I smoke pot? Why are the only genders male and female? Have the people who designed this protocol really never made the twenty mile drive to San Francisco?

photo © 2007 Kecko | more info (via: Wylio)

Una delle prime remore che affligge le persone in azienda che vorrebbero sponsorizzare l’apertura di spazi conversazionali come forum o branded community, è il timore di trovarsi a doversi difendere da coloro che “sporcano” per incuria, o per “profanare” volutamente il “luogo”.
Nel paesino montano in cui passo qualche weekend ho notato questo fenomeno: normalmente è impeccabile dal punto di vista della pulizia urbana, ma quando durante le feste o i ponti viene preso d’assalto da vacanzieri “occasionali”, la quantità di cartacce in giro aumenta più che proporzionalmente al numero di turisti presenti.

La mia teoria è che in tempi normali la forza congiunta di “senso del bene comune”, sorveglianza informale e naturalmente un minimo di pulizia ex-post, tenga facilmente la cartaccia sotto controllo. Quando invece il numero di visitatori “senza senso di appartenenza” (quindi senza nessun interesse al luogo nel lungo termine) supera i “residenti continuativi” l’equilibrio viene infranto.

Nelle community online avviene più o meno lo stesso: in quelle compatte, popolate e motivate, le forze che contribuiscono a consolidare e migliorare la community prevalgono naturalmente su quelle che tendono a peggiorarla, grazie al “senso del bene comune” e al sistema di valorizzazione continuativa interna dei membri contributori, mentre la moderazione fa solo funzione di “polizia locale”, che deve tenere sotto controllo pochi atti isolati messi in pratica da malati mentali, narcisisti, esibizionisti, litiganti di professione, infiltrati, doppiogiochisti pagati.

Ma il mantenimento nel tempo di questo risultato di equilibrio è tutt’altro che scontato: basta un minimo affievolimento del senso o nel valore del luogo come bene comune tra i residenti, oppure un calo del numero dei monitoranti, per infrangere l’equilibrio ed esporre il luogo virtuale a ondate di hooligan provenienti dall’esterno.

A maggior ragione, nel caso della creazione ex-novo da parte di un’azienda di un luogo di scambio, va valutata molto bene la capacità intrinseca all’autodifesa, che dipende appunto dal livello spontaneo di coesione raggiungibile attorno alla volontà di mantenere quello spazio funzionante nel lungo periodo, funzionale al valore percepito, e la attivazione come “vigili volontari” di parte dei partecipanti.

Non mi meravigliano i facili risultati degli attacchi di Greenpeace alle multinazionali sulle fan page di Facebook: molte di queste pagine sono popolatissime in senso puramente numerico assoluto, ma molto deboli quanto a coesione e senso di luogo comune, con ben pochi “vigili volontari” disponibili a prenderne le difese.

Vi siete mai chiesti se un luogo è pulito perché viene meno sporcato o perché è meglio ripulito? Ecco.


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Facebook has continued to ramp up its virtual currency offering, Facebook Credits. Earlier this month, the company made it easier for the 70% of its users outside the U.S. to purchase credits. Today, Facebook Credits will be available in the form of gift cards at both Walmart and Best Buy stores across the country.

The new offering is just in time for the holiday season, so now you won't have to choose between Mafia Wars or Farmville for your Facebook game addicted friends.

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It's been just under two months since Facebook began offering its Credits as gift cards in Target stores but, as Reuters points out, "landing on WalMart and Best Buy shelves should vastly expand the availability of its fledgling currency - at the end of 2009, WalMart had more than 3,600 stores in the United States."

Reuters reports that cards will be available in denominations of $10, $25 and $50 at Best Buy and $5, $10 and $25 at Walmart with a $50 card available at Walmart.com.

Facebook Credits can be used on more than 150 games and applications and help comprise a virtual goods market that the New York Times estimates to reach $835 million this year.

The big question might be, how will the Facebook Credits gift card compare to the Farmville gift card sitting next to it?

Discuss

You'll soon have 20 new ways to buy your Facebook Credits today, as Facebook has selected PlaySpan's Ultimate Pay as an additional payment provider.

Before today, you could buy your virtual currency via PayPal, credit card or mobile phone, as well as earn Credits via certain games and apps. But the addition of UltimatePay will help power a variety of additional payment methods, aimed at expanding the global reach of the program.

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These new payment methods will include store-bought prepaid cards such as PaySafeCard, Wallie-card in Europe, MyCard and Gash cards in Taiwan, as well as payment services that are popular in specific countries, such as bank transfers in Germany, Brazil's Boleto Bancario, and Russia's Webmoney.

Making it easier for those outside the U.S. to buy Facebook Credits is a smart move for Facebook. Over 70% of Facebook's users fall into that category, and having a globally-available payment system lowers the barriers for people to buy credits.

A recent New York Times article estimated that the virtual goods market is expected to reach $835 million on Facebook this year. If Facebook and PlaySpan can make it even easier for people to participate in a global Facebook economy, that number is likely to be even higher.

Discuss

Ok, anche voi date il contorno triste con tre foglie di insalata che magari costa quattro euro? Siete patetici. Se all’estero mi fanno un piatto unico con cui ci si può saziare a dieci euro, potete farlo anche voi. E il coperto è ridicolo, è davvero ora di eliminarlo.
Piantatela con questi siti che vorrebbero essere di impatto ed emozionali in Flash, servono solo per accontentare il vostro ego e quello dell’artista frustrato che vive nel Flash designer. Il 90% dei clienti vi visita di fretta, molti dal cellulare, e semplicemente cerca il vostro numero di telefono, il giorno di chiusura e l’indirizzo. L’unica emozione che potete trasmettere è attraverso i vostri piatti e la vostra cucina: della vostra wow-animazione-wow di primi piatti che sfuma sui secondi non ce ne frega nulla. Piuttosto, fattelo in WordPress, almeno sarà indicizzato, sarà leggero da navigare e già ottimizzato per i cellulari (magari arriveremo al vostro sito cercando un piatto o una ricetta). E fate commentare il sito ai clienti, scoprirete che potete migliorare il servizio (ma al 90% degli esercizi italiani questo non serve, pensa di essere comunque il massimo in zona, senza discussione).
E mettete le indicazioni per raggiungervi, santo cielo! E’ l’unica cosa (oltre al punto 4) di cui ci frega qualcosa: un link a Google Maps, preferibilmente. Evitate di fare voi mappe con Photoshop, il vostro artisticume nel fare cartine geografiche è controproducente.
Linkate dal vostro sito al vostro profilo (se non ce l’avete, fatelo o controllatelo) sui vari network di recensioni e incentivate a scriverne di nuove. Parlo di 2spaghi e altri sul genere che fareste bene a conoscere quanto prima. E’ l’unico modo con cui si sceglie un ristorante nel 2010, oltre a chiederlo ai propri amici, e non certo leggendo il vostro autoincensamento su quanto siete bravi a cucinare.
regalate un po’ di social gift ai vostri clienti, risparmiando invece i soldi per un esperto di social media: un caffè a chi vi twitta, un dolce a chi è vostro fan su Facebook, remunerate il vostro sindaco su Foursquare (vedi) con un piatto gratis. Se non avete capito di cosa sto parlando, fate copia-incolla del punto 5 in un cartello e mettetelo alla cassa: capiranno loro.
Il Wi-Fi: o lo mettete gratis, o risparmiatevi lo sbattimento di farlo sapere che c’è con quel altisonante Wi-Fi Zone. Le aziende che vogliono fornirvi “chiavi in mano” servizi Wi-Fi da far pagare ai clienti, alla fine sono le uniche a guadagnarci. Voi non venderete nemmeno un minuto di connessione, e i clienti si incazzeranno con voi dopo aver sperato che fosse gratis.
Se poi pensate che il Wi-Fi gratis non farebbe sloggiare rapidamente i clienti, che il baratto tweet con il caffè non è conveniente, che quelli che scrivono male di voi nei social network sono i vostri concorrenti, be’, forse è meglio che vendiate la baracca finché siete in tempo.


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When Facebook introduced us to Facebook Places last week, it rolled out a new version of the iPhone app to bring the new feature to many of its mobile users.

While Places took center stage, a number of smaller features and tweaks were added to the latest iPhone app, not the least of which is the ability to play with your privacy settings on a post-by-post basis.

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Privacy On The Go
With more than 100 million Facebook for iPhone users, using Facebook on to go is a popular feature, but up until now it had one major flaw - anything you said was broadcast using your default privacy settings.

That meant, if you had a status update you didn't want to share with everyone, you better wait until later. That group of friends you defined specifically so you wouldn't mix business with pleasure was only good for when you were sitting at a desktop, not out in the world. Now, when you open the status update box in the iPhone app, a small lock icon appears, and tapping it opens up a list of custom friend lists and pre-defined privacy settings, like "Everyone", "Friends of Friends" and "Friends Only". The feature follows last month's addition of mobile privacy settings on Facebook's mobile website, which means you can now define custom friend groups and post to those groups while you're out and about.

Tagging and Beyond
According to the Facebook for iPhone page, beyond Places, "updates include more granular privacy settings, a snappier inbox with support for threads with multiple users, and improved performance when commenting, liking, or posting stories."

In addition to these, we've also noticed that profiles and pages tagged in status updates are now shown in the Facebook app, making it easier to navigate. Last week, tagging was made even easier (from the website, not mobile) with the addition of an auto-suggest feature to the status update box. Now, navigating to those pages from the iPhone app is possible as well.

The increasing ease with which we can tag people, places and things in Facebook (as well as "like" them, of course) seems to be pushing the site further and further in the direction of making recommendations based on any number of characteristics. We are now not only connected with friends by way of our on-site friendships, but where we check in with them and how much we tag them at different places. And we're also connected to activities and products, by way of tagging those items in our updates.

We're waiting to see how all of this tagging affects our overall experience, such as the relevance of what status updates we see in our stream or what ads are displayed based on where we check in.

Discuss

Leading up to Facebook’s location announcement, there were two schools of thought. Either you thought Facebook Places was going to destroy Foursquare. Or you thought that this new service would help the startup by bringing more awareness to the location field. It appears that the latter is happening.

“Just heard from The @HarryH that today was @foursquare’s biggest day ever in terms of new user signups,” Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley just tweeted out a few minutes ago (@HarryH is the Twitter name of Harry Heymann, Foursquare’s engineering lead).

I’ve long been in the camp that believed Facebook’s entry into the location space would help a lot of these other check-in startups — at least initially. Thanks to the Places API, Facebook is currently serving as a platform for services like Foursquare and Gowalla. And thanks to their 500 million users, Facebook is introducing the concept of location to millions of new users. It shouldn’t be surprising that some of those users are now interested in Foursquare after yesterday’s announcement (and subsequent tidal wave of press).

But.

All that said, Foursquare does have to be concerned about what Facebook is going to do in the future. Right now, Facebook’s location offering is very bare-bones, but you have to believe they will flesh it out more as time goes on. In particular, you can expect them to partner with businesses to offer deals and other incentives to Facebook members. You know, the kind of stuff Foursquare is doing.

Foursquare clearly has a plan for how they’re going to evolve going forward and stay ahead of Facebook. But they need to execute and make sure they can scale with all this new growth.

Earlier today, in an interview with the LA Times, Crowley revealed the service has about 2.8 million members right now. Given his statement tonight, you can expect them to hit 3 million shortly — perhaps even next week. Now it’s a matter of keeping those people around and engaged.

CrunchBase InformationFoursquareFacebookInformation provided by CrunchBase

In tutto sto casino contro l’accordo Google-Verizon, ci si scorda che tutto ciò è un segno di debolezza da parte di Google. Non tanto tempo fa non si pensava che Google avrebbe lanciato addirittura una propria compagnia telefonica? Poi, il flop del Nexus One deve averli piegati a più miti consigli, e a comportarsi come una Apple qualunque, che con gli operatori fa accordi (anche se Apple non in violazione della net neutrality, va detto). Tra l’altro, cosa succederà il giorno in cui Facebook dovesse lanciare il prorio Facebook phone e vendere con gli operatori abbonamenti a 10 Euro al mese per l’accesso a Facebook e basta? E’ solo una mia impressione, o Google è, dei tre grandi (FAG, Facebook, Apple, Google), quello messo nettamente peggio per quanto riguarda Internet in mobilità?


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As Facebook becomes more and more popular, the social network giant is putting more emphasis on the real-time feed. In other words, the activities of your friends displayed in reverse chronological order on your Facebook homepage. In the old days of Facebook - and indeed traditionally with social networks like MySpace and Friendster - you'd visit a person's profile page to see what they're up to. Facebook changed this paradigm in September 2006, when it introduced the news feed as the primary way to keep track of your friends. In October 2009, that feature was re-named the "live feed" and Facebook introduced a more filtered news feed for your homepage.

With these evolutions, do you still browse your friends' profiles on a regular basis? Or do you mostly rely on the live and news feeds to consume content on Facebook? We posed that question to our community on Facebook and Twitter.

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Before we check out what our community thinks, it's important to note that Facebook is also making other changes that bring the real-time feed to the fore. This week Facebook will remove "application boxes" from your profile page, meaning that you can no longer feature highlights from third party web applications on your profile page - for example a box showing what books you're currently reading. One of the upshots of this change is that more emphasis is placed on real-time content, because content won't stick around as long on your profile page without boxes. Your review of a book becomes a part of your news feed for a day or two, then slips off your profile page forever. Whereas with a box, it could stick around for weeks and even months.

Survey Results
We asked our community: How many of you visit the profile pages of your Facebook friends on a regular basis, or do you mostly rely on the News Feed?

The responses on our Facebook Page indicated that most people rely on the news feed and rarely visit people's profiles. Further, the responses implied that a visit to a user's profile is more likely if they're a close friend or family.

Mark Coates put it this way: "mostly the news feed for the vast majority. Less than 2% get visited regularly."

Lisa Ellwood said that she uses the news feed "mainly for people I don't really know that well and I go to the profiles of actual personal friends."

Kris Lowe perhaps summed up the pervading feeling best:

"Mostly the news feed, but I also check out friends profile pages when I find myself wondering how they're doing, what they're up to and/or haven't heard much from them lately. The latter is useful both for real life friends and family on Facebook and professional contacts on Facebook."



Over on Twitter, there was a similar sentiment. @TheRogueAgent's response reminded us that the increasing usage of smart phones may be a key reason for the Facebook feed's predominance. "Always the feed," he tweeted, "always from the mobile."

@EricaNaone reinforced that the feed is best for most friends, with the profile page only important for a few. "I visit the profiles of 5-6 friends regularly," she said, "For the rest, it's news feed." @NaomiHagelund similarly noted that she relies on the news feed, "except for 3 or 4 people."

For @ZachGersh, the simplicity of the news feed experience is what counts: "I don't need a huge profile cluttering up what I actually care about." He added that "simplicity is what makes Twitter so powerful."

It's not just simplicity, but saving time in this information overloaded world. @MissPieces complained that "profile browsing is too time consuming!"

A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss
So there you have it, most ReadWriteWeb readers use the Facebook news feed to consume information from the site. They rarely visit a user's profile page. If they do, they're more likely to if that user is a close friend or a relative.

Perhaps it shows my blogging roots, but I think it's a shame that profile pages are losing their luster. I like to think that my Facebook profile page shows something about my social persona - with its books and music box (at least till end of this week!), random Foursquare check-ins, arty updates from my lifestream blog, and so on. Maybe I'm a bit too full of myself, thinking that these things are of interest to my Facebook friends. But I don't think that's it, because I also like to visit other people's profile pages and see what makes up their social personas.

It's clear though that I'm in the minority. The rolling stone of the feed gathers no moss, but meanwhile your profile page is beginning to look like the front cover of REM's classic album 'Murmer.'

If you haven't had your say yet, tell us in the comments whether you mostly use the Facebook feeds or whether you have a soft spot for the good old profile page.

Discuss

In theory, Facebook's new question and answer feature has a million possibilities for users, app developers, advertisers and search engine marketers. But the feature's significance will largely depend on what the promised Application Programming Interface (API), the technical platform that lets outside developers build on Facebook data, will let developers do.

Will marketers flood Facebook with automatically-posted queries and self-promoting answers? Will advertisers target specific users based on their queries? And crucially, will developers be able to tap into the Questions database for use outside Facebook's walls?

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Facebook has already made Questions available to about 1% of users, but the API is not available yet. Before it's released, Questions will only be useful to users asking and answering questions, and the usefulness will depend entirely on how good Facebook is at matching new questions to already-answered questions and otherwise moving users through the process of querying, searching, receiving answers, et cetera. Early users have already complained that the Q and A process is clunky.

But once the API is released, developers will likely be able to present the feature in Facebook apps or possibly even outside of Facebook. And Questions will become a new treasure trove of information for Facebook's corporate friends.

The Facebook Questions API will probably resemble APIs for other Q and A services such as Cha Cha and Yahoo! Answers. Cha Cha, which has its own Facebook app, lets developers query the API with a question and get an answer instantly, query the API with keywords and get a list of the most popular answers, and find out what topics are currently trending.

An API that searches questions for keywords is likely to be on advertisers' wish lists. Ask "What car should I buy?" and Ford may chime in with an answer, along with your friends and other Facebook users.

The Yahoo! Answers API has an interesting function, getByUser, which lists questions from specific users. This functionality could be key for Facebook advertisers, who will almost certainly use queries to target individual users. Advertisers could add keywords from your queries to the information you have listed in your public profile and public status updates, to start. And you can image another level of sophistication. Post a query - "What bands are rad?" - and you may soon see a Facebook ad: "Want to know what bands are rad? Download NewRadBandSuggestions!"

Facebook has confirmed that an API will become available but has not said when. Developers and advertisers: What API functionality would you like to see?

Discuss

By this point everyone and their mother knows that Google is trying to create a Facebook-type social networking service. It’s been confirmed by Quora’s Adam D’ Angelo, given an ETA by a source internal to Google, and a name, “Google Me” by Kevin Rose.

And now the The Wall Street Journal reports that Google is trying to get a piece of the Facebook pie, the filling of which is primarily composed of social games, hence the rumored discussions with the newly acquired Playdom, and EA, not to mention Google’s recent $100 million investment in Zynga.

At this point just about the only person who is still in denial of the existence of Google Me is Eric Schmidt. Schmidt, when asked by the WSJ whether hypothetically Google would create a service which resembled Facebook’s replied, “The world doesn’t need a copy of the same thing.”

Schmidt went on to state that Facebook was actually good for Google because “Facebook users use more Google products than any other users” which is a valid yet somewhat misleading statement, as the 500 million strong population of Facebook is greater than the United States.

Schmidt also referenced our scoop on Google’s hooking up with Zynga, proclaiming “we haven’t announced it” but “you can expect a partnership with Zynga.”

Schmidt’s “The world doesn’t need a copy of the same thing” attitude might have served Google well earlier this year when its reported “Twitter killer” Google Buzz did not actually kill Twitter.

Facebook did not comment directly on Google’s foray into social, but politely rejoindered that it is looking “forward to seeing what others have to offer” all the while keeping much of its own platform closed to Google searches.
 
 
Image: Andrew Nilsen/SF Weekly

CrunchBase InformationEric SchmidtGoogleFacebookZyngaInformation provided by CrunchBase

Facebook is standing at the foot of a virtual cash mountain. The social networking behemoth recently announced a plan to expand the Facebook Credits program beyond its beta confines. A network-wide rollout of the virtual currency application would streamline transactions online and, in effect, pave the path to the world's first global currency.

It's also going to help Facebook scale one of its last major economic hurdles -
monetizing its millions of international users. Now translated into more than 100 languages, Facebook will do more than $1 billion in revenue this year. It has surpassed the 500 million member mark, with a surge of interest across Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and points beyond. In fact, adoption rates have soared exponentially in the last year.

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Chris Birk (@cjbirk) is director of content and communications for VA Mortgage Center.com, the nation's number one dedicated VA lender, and Growth Partner, a unique firm that provides angel investment and online marketing expertise to emerging companies. A recovering journalist, he also teaches at a private Midwestern university. He blogs at Write Short Live Long.

Here's a quick look from Nick Burcher.



Country



Number of Facebook users March 2009



Number of Facebook users 31 March 2010



12 month growth %





Taiwan



205,500



6,107,100



2,872





Philippines



1,026,300



11,561,740



1,027





Thailand



284,340



2,895,320



918





Brazil



395,940



3,602,100



810





Indonesia



2,325,840



20,775,320



793





Czech Rep



444,120



2,421,720



446





India



1,561,000



7,809,800



400





Mexico



2,142,080



9,208,560



330




In all, international users comprise about 70% of Facebook's total user
base, but the company has so far lacked a consistent mechanism for turning
those more far-flung users into dollars. Banner advertising in most cases
doesn't provide a worthwhile return on investment internationally. At the same
time, bandwidth costs have forced the company to take a loss in hyper-growth
countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.

Enter the power and mind-boggling reach of Facebook Credits. As Chris Morrison at Bnet and others have pointed out, the full-scale credits program will clearly lower the adoption barrier for millions of international users, who will be able to buy credits from a single point of purchase and spend them on games and apps across the network. Facebook earns a 30% cut of the revenue; there's going to be a lot of that.

Looking back, the credits program got a bit lost in the privacy kerfuffle that came out of the f8 conference. The implications of rolling out the program may also revive another popular source of frustration for users: playing makeover. With Facebook's new concentrated push toward virtual currency, could a new layout be coming sooner than expected? Many of the company's 500 million users are just getting used to the new one unleashed on the public in February.

At the same time, the potential implications of a virtual global currency are staggering, if not difficult to pin down precisely. Facebook users have already shown a willingness to shell out for virtual goods in online games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars. The software company behind these, Zynga, is expected to make more than $450 million this year, the bulk from virtual purchases.

With a beefed-up Facebook credits program, users both domestic and abroad may soon be purchasing real goods through companies that utilize Facebook Connect. It isn't difficult to imagine going to the Crate & Barrel website and purchasing a wedding gift with Facebook Credits.

Consider what one-click purchasing could do for targeted Facebook ads: Advertisers and social marketers might have unprecedented access to real-time data on spending patterns and international purchases. Mobile carriers stand to benefit, too, as international consumers are increasingly more adept at using smartphones for
financial transactions.

A virtual currency could also be a boon to entrepreneurs in developing nations. Consumers could use credits to purchase directly from artisans in Brazil or Thailand.
That may require Facebook to ultimately abandon the dollar as its exchange root,
but it certainly presents a unique opportunity for micropayments to blossom.

There's increasing chatter about Facebook giving Google a run for its money. But in
some ways it may also carry the torch once wielded by PayPal, which held a
similar vision of a truly global currency.

Discuss

Miio is a new microblogging service which is a bit like a mashup between Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and an RSS reader. Now typically, we don't like describing services as a "it's like a this plus a that," but Miio is precisely the kind of service that needs a little help in the "what this is" department.

Don't get us wrong, the concept itself isn't bad: a discussion board built around interests as opposed to popularity. It's just that the execution makes the service seem a little confusing.

So what is miio? That's what we're trying to figure out today.

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Miio Members: Find New Friends

When you first sign up for miio, you can search for friends across your social networks and email accounts or you can skip that step and just search for other miio users who share your interests. This is perhaps the key feature in miio that differentiates it from many other social networks: it's not yet another site where you have to (either manually or automatically) re-create your social graph. It's a place to meet new people who share your interests.

Now whether you're supposed to chat them up or hit on them when you meet them is something I wasn't too clear about, given that miio asks for your "relationship status" and what you're "looking for" (friends, dating, chatting, "whatever") via your profile page. Those seem like features borrowed from Facebook, and frankly, if miio just wants to be discussion site, it could do without them.

Miio's Twitter-Like Dashboard

The miio Dashboard is reminiscent of Twitter, with its "replies" and "messages to me," the latter very much like Twitter's own DMs (direct messages). But unlike Twitter, you don't just follow tweets, err...posts, limited to 140 characters or less. Users can write as much as they want. And like Facebook, those status updates can be links, photos, videos, etc. as well. They can also be questions, which then puts miio up against Q&A sites like Quora, for example.

Miio RSS

In fact, updates can even be RSS feeds thanks to a profile setting which lets you publish RSS to miio. Already a number of "members" have created miio accounts with RSS feeds - as you can see here by searching for *rss*. However, given the high profile nature of some of these accounts (ABC, AP, BBC, CBS, Huffington Post, etc.), it looks like miio created these accounts itself for others to follow, which is actually a handy feature.

From the Public Timeline or Search page, you can filter out whether or not you want to see RSS updates or whether you want to see just text updates, just photos, just videos, just questions and so on. If you switch the setting to "RSS only," miio could effectively function as a lightweight RSS reader for those who don't really do RSS.

Miio Groups

There are also groups within miio, where you can discuss items of interest to you whether that's sports or iPads. But given miio's "early adopter" mindshare, the biggest groups seem to be tech-focused ones like those discussing iOS, startups or even miio competitor Google Buzz.

Final Thoughts: Too Much of a Good Thing, miio Needs to Diet

Although miio gets some things right, simplicity is not one of them. It's not clear yet what exactly miio wants to be when it grows up, why there's a need for this service and who should use it.

Our advice to miio, ditch the advanced feature set (it's overwhelming!) and focus on doing just one thing and doing it well. Groups, perhaps. Google Buzz lacks a "groups" feature and although FriendFeed has them, that service lost quite a few members after its Facebook acquisition. Do discussion groups and do them better than anyone else. And don't allow top followed members to dominate discussions like on Buzz, FriendFeed, Twitter and every other "social" service out there today. Make it more democratic.

And simplify, simplify, simplify. Twitter worked because it was basic and easy. That's how miio should start too. It can add in advanced filtering, location-based services, metadata and all the rest later on, if necessary. (Or perhaps not at all).

With a redirected singular goal like this, miio could have a chance at attracting not just the tech geeks who sign up for anything shiny and new but those who just like to go online and chat about things they're into, no matter what those may be. Obviously, the folks behind miio have the technical know-how to build a great service, now they just need to establish a sharper focus. Good luck, miio!

Discuss

Today, Facebook is releasing its first official SDK for Android, offering developers on Google’s mobile OS an easy way to tie their Android native apps to Facebook Platform. As AllFacebook noted last week, this SDK is actually more advanced than the iPhone SDK because it features Facebook’s Graph API, which was unveiled at its f8 developer conference last month.

According to the post on Facebook’s Developer blog, the SDK also uses OAuth 2.0 for authentication and the ability to publish stories to Facebook using Feed forms.

I spoke with Facebook’s Steven Soneff about the SDK at Google I/O last week, where Facebook was offering a developer preview. Soneff said that there have been ways to integrate Facebook into Android applications before now, but that these have really been hacked together from the iPhone SDK, and weren’t officially supported by Facebook.

Hopefully this is a sign that Facebook is taking Android a bit more seriously. Facebook’s iPhone SDK launched over a year ago. And the official Facebook application for Android has always felt inferior to the iPhone version — it has been improving, but it still has a ways to go.
CrunchBase InformationFacebookAndroidInformation provided by CrunchBase

“We put a bullet in that thing.”

That’s how Sean Parker fondly looks back at Wirehog. According to him and author David Kirkpatrick it was a side-project that Mark Zuckerberg found equally as interesting as Facebook itself. According to both of them, it was also the thing that almost killed Facebook.

The two made the revelation today on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York. Both were on the stage with our own Michael Arrington to talk about the state of Facebook, as well as Kirkpatrick’s new book about its history, The Facebook Effect.

So what was Wirehog? It was a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing service that hooked up to Facebook. When it launched in 2004, it was Zuckerberg thinking ahead of his time, Parker says. It was an app that worked on top of Facebook. This was well before f8, before the Platform. It existed until early 2006 when, according to Kirkpatrick, it died “because Sean killed it.“

Parker, of course, had a history with file sharing services — he was one of the founders of Napster. About Wirehog, Parker says it was “a great idea, if it were legal.” “I had seen that movie before. We would have killed the baby in the cradle.”

You can read more about Wirehog on Wikipedia, or check out Kirkpartrick’s book when it goes on sale — he goes more into it.

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On stage today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City, Facebook’s vice president of product Chris Cox announced that starting tomorrow, Facebook will be rolling out “drastically simplified” and improved privacy controls. He didn’t give any details, but did suggest that they should alleviate some of the recent privacy problems Facebook has faced.

Ever since the recent wave of privacy backlash began following Facebook’s f8 conference, Facebook has been saying they were listening to feedback and would respond. No less than CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been talking about the issues very publicly. He has said they “missed the mark” and “made a bunch of mistakes.” He also has said they are working on a “simpler way to control your information.”

That starts tomorrow, apparently. Stay tuned for more details.
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AllFacebook boasts a nice feature where you can see what the top performing Facebook Pages are – meaning which Pages have gathered the largest following to date. The problem is that there’s apparently a significant lag, and that the data presented is therefor inaccurate (for example, it undercounts the number of fans of the popular Texas Hold’em Poker page by nearly 1.5 million).

Enter Fan Page List, which is entirely dedicated to ranking the most popular Pages on Facebook as well as rankings for various categories, such as Actors, Politicians, Movies, Games, TV Shows, News, Athletes and more, in real time.

One of the categories that is the most interesting is the list of top brands on Facebook.

Let’s have a look, shall we?

The most popular brand on Facebook is … Facebook, with just over 9 million fans. The only other Internet / technology brands in the top 25 are YouTube (#4 with 5,082,029 fans) and Google (#21 with 1,269,926 fans). Food and clothings brands seem to do much better.

In case you’re wondering why Apple is nowhere to be found in the top brands ranking: the Cupertino company doesn’t even have a proper Facebook Page to begin with (it looks like facebook.com/apple was taken by someone else). Microsoft does, but only comes in at #99 with 117,444 fans. But hey, at least they still made the top 100 list, right?

Here are the top 10 brands on Facebook (for the full list, go here):

1) Facebook (9,024,542 Fans)
2) Starbucks (7,217,370 Fans)
3) Coca-Cola (5,529,595 Fans)
4) YouTube (5,082,221 Fans)
5) Disney (3,475,487 Fans)
6) Victoria’s Secret (3,436,811 Fans)
7) Converse (2,743,227 Fans)
8) McDonald’s (2,260,698 Fans)
9) H&M (2,045,964 Fans)
10) MTV (1,871,241 Fans)

PS: you can get that T-shirt here for $19.99.

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Kurrently, a new search engine that combines Twitter and Facebook status updates into one blazing fast stream, launched recently, and from what we can see, it might just put its competitors to shame if it can scale.

Developed in three weeks by Gilbert Leung (who according to Jay Baer apparently is now interning at Microsoft), the self-refreshing combined search results have three speeds – slow, fast and halt. We tried a variety of searches and all of them returned relevant results (see screenshot below). One of the most interesting things about the Facebook integration is how robust it is in bringing in links that are shared on the social network, including associated thumbnails.

We’ll say it flat out – with a caveat of it not having been tested against server strain – Kurrently’s dead-simple search engine is right now the best we’ve seen for real-time keyword search on Facebook and Twitter. Kurrently beats Twitter search (of course there is no Facebook integration there), Google / Bing’s integration of social search or Topsy when it comes to aggregating in real-time. That said, for historical searches, Topsy is still the best option to us.

Oh, and we love the name as well (and can’t wait for a Kurrently-Klout partnership)! Here’s some results for “iPhone”:

h/t Sage Brennan

Quali sono le caratteristiche di una startup che opera nell’area dei social media, del web 2.0, del software as a service e via dicendo? A me vengono in mente le seguenti:

Bassi costi di avvio
Spesso la startup ha per oggetto un servizio tecnologicamente facile da produrre e le risorse necessarie sono rappresentate principalmente dal tempo di chi lavora per progettare il servizio, sviluppare l’applicazione, costruire una community di utenti. Il resto è da considerarsi essenzialmente una commodity: si usa quasi sempre software open source; i costi per hosting e connettività sono molto bassi; ci sono molte aziende che regalano alle startup i propri prodotti (es. Microsoft), server virtuali e banda (es. Telecom Italia, Sun, Top-Ix).

Basse barriere all’ingresso
Le barriere all’ingresso sono normalmente molto basse sia per via dei costi di avvio che per l’impossibilità o inutilità di ricorrere ai brevetti. I motivi sono molti: risulta difficile proteggere un pezzo di interfaccia web dimostrando la sua unicità; in Europa, il software è considerato un’opera dell’ingegno come una canzone o un testo letterario e quindi non è brevettabile; i brevetti sono molto costosi soprattutto se si aspira ad ottenerli per tutto il mondo; basare sulla tutela della proprietà intellettuale la propria strategia competitiva significa anche essere disposti a spendere molti soldi in costosi avvocati specializzati.

Crowdsourcing del product management
Non è necessario investire risorse in ricerche di mercato, in quando gran parte del product management può essere fatto online: gli imprenditori 2.0 più intelligenti mettono in campo da subito una strategia di ascolto e di coinvolgimento degli utenti più attivi facendo leva sulla loro disponibilità e sulla voglia di dimostrare la propria competenza per vedersi riconoscere un ruolo. Esistono anche alcune piattaforme specializzate nel gestire questi processi, come Uservoice.

Perpetual beta
E’ possibile partire con un prototipo imperfetto e farlo evolvere gradualmente, consolidando sia l’esperienza d’uso del servizio che gli aspetti tecnologici. D’altro canto, è inutile inserire da subito decide di funzionalità che gli utenti non useranno mai, mentre è molto più efficiente aggiungere un tassello alla volta. Allo stesso tempo nelle fasi iniziali è prematuro preoccuparsi troppo di aspetti come la scalabilità di una piattaforma quando questa ha solo poche migliaia di utenti.

Creazione di sistemi aperti
Le aziende che si muovo in territori che non hanno ancora dimostrato di generare business e profitti, tendono a mettere in comune i propri patrimoni di dati rendendoli accessibili tramite web services. Lo hanno fatto con successo Facebook e Twitter e oggi è una strada che percorrono in molti con l’obiettivo di costruire degli ecosistemi in cui assumere il ruolo di piattaforma abilitante. Un esempio da seguire in quest’area è sicuramente Foursquare, che ha adottato una filosofia di apertura totale.

Capitale sociale
In molti settori, la fase di startup serve a industrializzare una tecnologia e a brevettarla costruendo così il capitale di conoscenza da monetizzare con l’attività aziendale. Nell’area del web 2.0, spesso e volentieri il capitale da costruire è sociale consiste nell’aggregare un numero sufficiente di utenti attorno al servizio per generare una massa critica che permetta di innescare l’effetto rete. Gli utenti e i dati che essi generano sono il vero asset della maggior parte di startup 2.0, anche se spesso gli imprenditori non ne sono pienamente consapevoli.

Simbiosi
Una strategia molto comune per sviluppare una comunità di utenti in tempi rapidi è utilizzare la base utenti di altri servizi, come Facebook o Twitter. Si pensi, per esempio a Zynga, che ha sviluppato una serie di giochi accessibili unicamente da Facebook, oppure a tutti quei servizi e applicazioni che sfruttano le api di Twitter. Si tratta di una vera e propria forma di simbiosi in cui c’è un reciproco beneficio: la startup accede a un bacino molto vasto di potenziali utenti; la piattaforma diventa sempre più centrale e indispensabile nell’ecosistema.

Che cosa è possibile aggiungere a questa lista?

Facebook just shook the tech world by announcing several major initiatives that collectively constitute an aggressive move to weave the social net on top of the existing Web.The rumors were that the leading social network would launch a "Like" button for the entire Web. Instead, Zuckerberg & Co. unveiled a bold and visionary new platform that cannot be ignored.

The bits of this platform bring together the visions of a social, personalized and semantic Web that have been discussed since del.icio.us pioneered Web 2.0 back in 2004. Facebook's vision is both minimalistic and encompassing - but its ambition is to kill off its competition and use 500 million users to take over entire Web.

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Whether we like it (pun intended) or not, we have to understand what this move means. It impacts users, publishers, competitors and, of course, Facebook itself. In this post, we summarize what Facebook announced and ponder the impact this will have on everyone.

Facebook Open Graph: Publisher Plugins
The Open Graph is a set combination of publisher plugins, semantic markup and a developer API.

"This new API turns Facebook into a read/write storage of user's tastes."Login with Faces & Facepile: The simpler publisher plugins enhance Facebook Connect. They makes it easy and compelling to sign in by leveraging Facebook cookies and showing faces of Facebook friends who are already members of the service.

Like Button and Like Box: These plugins add the liking feature to any content, typically the whole page. Both can be enhanced with semantic markup, described below. But the very basic intent for these is to get users to Like on the site and post a link to Facebook, which is then permanently stored on a user's profile and points back to the original site.

Activity Feed and Live Stream: These plugins show static and dynamic activity on the site. Activity Feed lists recent likes and comments from the site, while Live Stream shows a real-time view of activity on the site and is intended for interactive events.

Recommendations: This plugin surfaces personalized recommendations for the user based on what friends and everyone else is liking on the site. It is intended to drive the users to other pages on the site.

Facebook Open Graph: Semantic Markup
Facebook announced simple, RDF-based markup to make the plugins smarter. In a nutshell, the markup enables publishers to say what object is on the page - a movie, a book, a recording artist, an event, a sports team, etc. This automatically enables semantics, that is, an understanding that the user is not just interacting with a webpage, but that he or she is liking a specific kind of thing. Semantics then leads to bucketing of the objects into categories like books, movies, music, etc., and gives rise to all sort of applications, including personalized recommendations.

Perhaps even more importantly, the markup helps Facebook connect the users across common interests across different websites. For example, if both Pandora and Last.fm annotate a page about The Beatles using Facebook's markup, then users will be able to see their friends, who like the Beatles across different sites. This is very significant, because the data around friends is sparse and scattered around the sites. Previously, Facebook would surface this data in the stream without persisting it. Now, the information about a friend's likes of movies, music, books, recording artists, events, sports team, etc. will be permanent on Facebook profiles and readily available in context around the Web.

Facebook Open Graph: New API
The new Facebook API is elegant and streamlined. It makes it easy to access user information (with permission of course) such as profile, friends, etc. All of the calls are REST based and return JSON objects. For example, my profile information can be fetched like this: http://graph.facebook.com/alexiskold. The authentication is based on OAuth 2.0 protocol and makes it simple not only to connect, but to also prompt for permissions to access user information.

This new API turns Facebook into a read/write storage of users' tastes. And not just one user - all Facebook users.


Implications for the Users
With this release, Facebook asks users if they are willing to trade off privacy for personalization. To be clear, no personalization is ever possible without users telling a system about their tastes. What Facebook is asking for is necessary in order to then create personalized Web experience. Whether users want this sort of thing is a different question, but assuming that you want to know more about your friends you will.

Friends' interests around entertainment, sports, travel, etc. will be categorized and available. It will be easy to figure out what your friends are into both on Facebook and around the Web. In addition, Facebook is going to be using its own engine to bring you recommendations for related content. This will further accelerate the discovery and cross linking between friends. This will likely further impact the amount of search people do around the Web. As Fred Wilson pointed out - passed links replace search.

Yet, the crux of user implications is neither of the above, but one single issue: privacy. It is unclear at this point that this issue is a concern for actual Facebook users, but it is clear that tech world is raising its eyebrows: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Dave Winer, Jeff Jarvis and many others expressed their concerns. People are saying that not only Facebook will know too much about us (because Google is already there today), but that it will be able to control too much.

Personally, I am skeptical that the average Facebook user is going to care all that much. People are notoriously naive about being watched on the Web, and this is likely to be no exception. More likely than not, Facebook users will enjoy the personalization aspects of the new platform and won't think much about it - until Facebook starts openly targeting them.

This was not been part of f8 of course, but Facebook is likely to use the information for targeting. After all, advertising is a major part of its monetization already so why won't it make it even better? If this targeting is too spot on, lots of users will probably get annoyed. Facebook is likely to sooth them via Facebook credits and heavy discounts, negotiated because of their massive volume.

How exactly users react remains to be seen, but they will probably like the new Facebook more because of increased relevancy and interaction with friends around the Web.


Next page:Implications for Publishers

Implications for Publishers
On the surface, this Facebook offering is a no-brainer for publishers. Who does not want more social activity on their site? However, in reality this is far from a slam dunk. To understand why, consider two types of sites: sites that are either social networks or have social networking integrated, and the sites that have their own commenting and ratings systems. In the first camp you will find Last.fm, Flixster, Goodreads, etc. None of these sites were a launch partner, understandably so. Social connections around music, movies and books are their bread and butter as are the ratings, reviews and recommendations. If they switch to Facebook for all of this, what do they have left?

So any site that already has social networking built in has to decide to abandon that before jumping into the Facebook Open Graph. The even worse problem is the ownership of ratings and comments. Are publishers really ready to give that up? Nobody seriously thinks that users are going to be rating through Facebook and then through the site again. So how is this going to work? It is unclear at this point, but it's likely publishers will ask for ways to replicate or export comments and likes that users sent to Facebook via their site. Perhaps an open API that allows publishers to manipulate the data is the answer, but it is easy to see how some publishers would be very concerned.

"You don't need to look too closely to see that Facebook is creating a feedback loop, which includes it, users and the rest of the Web and excludes its competitors."However, if you run a website like eCommerce or a blog or a service like Pandora that currently does not have a lot of social built-in, this offering is a no-brainer as it will instantly start recycling your pages through the massive Facebook power of passed links.

Implications for Competitors
This is aggressive and brilliant move by Facebook - and Twitter, Google, Yahoo, MySpace, AOL, eBay, Amazon and others, except for Microsoft, should be really worried. It appears that Microsoft is content with just partnering with Facebook, perhaps rightly so. Possibly a Bing deal is in the works, which would make a lot of sense.

For all other players on the Web, the worry is that Facebook is trying to close the loop in exclusively owning user eyeballs. Apparently Facebook is not content with just connecting people; it wants to connect people and things. And not only that, it wants to do it around the Web. And not just any people - friends. You don't need to look too closely to see that Facebook is creating a feedback loop, which includes it, users and the rest of the Web and excludes its competitors.

There are several things that other big players might try to do, the worst of which is to try to mimic Facebook. The "me too" that we've seen way too many times recently has not worked, and will not work now. The second best choice is to try to block it. As strange as it sounds it might just work. Between publisher and user issues there are a lot of concerns, and a carefully orchestrated and coordinated campaign may seriously hurt this initiative. Remember, Beacon was brought down fairly quickly by a combination of user backlash and derogatory press.

The third option - to embrace and extend this platform, to innovate on top of it - is likely to be the best move. Innovation has always tr[…]

Yesterday, Facebook launched a new widget called the "Facebook Like Button," which, simply put, brings the Facebook like button to the entire Internet. Website owners can implement the new button on their site using a small bit of code. In fact, you don't even have to be a developer to make your own like button - there's a little wizard that generates the code for you. Then it's as easy as copy-and-paste to get the button onto your site.

However, there's a small problem with this new, easy-to-use new tool: it's possible to trick users into liking anything - even pages they've never visited!

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"Likes" - A New Tool for Spammers?

As Arnab Nandi, a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Michigan, recently discovered, it's simple to create a like button for a page you're not even on.

Using the wizard provided by Facebook, you can create a button for any URL you want and embed it on your site.

Why would anyone want to do this, you ask? While no self-respecting webmaster would want to deceive a visitor to their site, says Nandi, an "enterprising spammer" certainly would. By tricking site visitors into "liking" something by mistake, spammers could immediately place their links into that person's News Feed, a feed seen by all of that person's friends. And since an average Facebook user has 130 friends, even tricking a handful of people into doing this gives the spammer access to hundreds, potentially thousands, more people.

Nandi already coined a word for this new hack: "News Feed Spam."

And yes, it will exist.

How the Button Works

Creating your own evil like button is incredibly simple, as we've demonstrated below. Nandi uses the "safe for work" example of "liking" the Britney Spears site in the example on his blog, but we know that our readers don't want that affiliation in their News Feed for even an instant, so we created a much safer example for you to try by using our own Twitter account as the "like" target. (Really, we promise!).

Although you can remove the "like" from your News Feed after clicking, when you "like" something on Facebook, the affiliation is now attached to the Open Graph API. That means that your "like" data is associated with your profile, even if you remove it from showing in your News Feed.

In any event, all we did was fill in the necessary info into Facebook's wizard and we got code for the button below:

(NYT readers, visit the original site for the demo).

If you click that button, you'll see that you just "liked" ReadWriteWeb's Twitter account, not this post or this website.

So the question now is this: did Facebook make the "like" button too simple? Should the button display more info about the target of the like so you know what you're getting into? Will this problem become so widespread that people begin to fear "liking" things across the net? What do you think?

Image credit for original post: Zazzle

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Over the past several months, Facebook has been testing and rolling out new features for Facebook Credits - a virtual currency that collected and exchanged users' real-world money for on-site credits that could be used in many of the site's applications and social games.

Since its launch in May 2009, the system has rapidly evolved, and Facebook has now revealed their exact revenue split with game and app developers who integrate Credits. In a blog post today, product marketer Deborah Liu wrote, "Facebook will collect 30 percent of currency spent by users... We are committed to investing heavily in the ecosystem and will explore a number of ways to improve the program and increase conversion and net revenue."

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This 30% cut is the same percentage that Apple's App Store takes from developers who submit paid apps and games for users of iPod and iPhone devices, and also the same percentage adopted by the Kindle Store.

Many of Facebook's most-used apps are partners in the closed beta for Facebook Credits, including Crowdstar, Playdom, Playfish, RockYou, 6waves and Zynga - makers of the infamous, popular and lucrative game Farmville.

Also, since last week, some users have been allowed to buy credits using Paypal, making the system even more viable for casual online gaming and social apps. This option has been rolled out so far to a small percentage of users and will be seen by more users within the next few weeks.

If the Credits program can be successfully rolled out for all users and applications, developers and Facebook are looking at a huge influx of cash - and users risk spending a lot more than just time on the site.

"By providing a single, cross-application currency," wrote Liu, "our goal is to making transactions simpler for users, leading to a higher conversion rate for developers.

"Specifically, our early testing has shown that users paying with Facebook Credits are significantly more likely to complete a purchase than the average Facebook user." This fact will surely please Facebook's investors - but what are the implications for Facebook users themselves?

Are users being manipulated unethically by an enormous and powerful marketing machine into spending more time - and now, more money - on applications of little real value? Or has Facebook simply found yet another way to make an honest buck on the Internet?

Let us know your thoughts and opinions in the comments.

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At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this morning, Facebook announced Facebook Zero, a new stripped-down mobile version of the popular social networking site. Zero, which will go live within the next few weeks, will allow users on slow connections and basic phones to access the service through a very basic version of the site. By default, Zero will not feature any images or other bandwidth-heavy features. Facebook also plans to offer a more feature-rich version of Facebook Zero through deals with select mobile carriers.

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Given that over 100 million Facebook users now access the service's mobile site, it makes sense for the company to try to cater to the widest possible variety of potential users.

With Facebook Lite, the company already offers a very basic version of its service for desktop users on slow connections. This version is mainly aimed at users in the developing world.

If you try to go to zero.facebook.comright now, this message will appear: Sorry, your carrier does not support zero.facebook.com. As Robin Wauters notes, chances are that Facebook plans to offer carriers the most basic version of Zero for free. Mobile operators will be able to charge for the premium version. It's not clear if Facebook plans to take a cut of these fees.

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