Third-party commenting engines like Disqus, Facebook Comments or Intense Debate make it easy for you to enable commenting on any website /blog but there’s one downside – some of these commenting engines are implemented in JavaScript and hence search engines may not be able to read /index the comments that visitors are writing on your web pages.

In other words, your web pages will rarely get any SEO boost as comments are rendered in JavaScript within an <IFRAME> and hence the text is not visible to search engines.

That seems to have changed recently at least in the case of Google. [Update] This was later confirmed by Matt Cutts - "Googlebot keeps getting smarter. Now has the ability to execute AJAX/JavaScript to index some dynamic comments."

Googlebots, or the spiders that crawl web pages,  are now reading Facebook comments on websites just like any other text content and the more interesting part is that you can also search the text of these comments using regular Google search.

To give you an example, here’s a comment from Robert Scoble that he has previously written on a TechCrunch page using the Facebook comments system..

..and here’s the same comment available through Google web search. You can in fact use search queries like “commenter name * commenter title” (for example – “Robert Scoble * Chief Learning Officer at Rackspace”) to discover all comments that he or she may have written on various websites that use the Facebook comments platform.

If you have so far avoided using Facebook comments on your website /blog just because of the SEO factor, you may want to reconsider your decision now.

However I am not too sure if Google would pass any juice to any of the website links that some people may be dropping in your comments. Also, moderation of Facebook Comments is all the more important now as the comment text is part of the page content itself and you don’t want to be in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines just because of those angry comments that do not use very civilized language.


This story, Google Begins Indexing Facebook Comments, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on October 31, 2011 under Facebook, SEO, Internet.

3 key points you need to know about Facebook Timeline, gleaned from two previous "lifestreaming" products: FriendFeed and Memolane.

Facebook's new Timeline, currently in a limited developer release but set to be unveiled to its hundreds of millions of users any day now, is going to shake up the social networking landscape. It's going to bring lifestreaming - formally a geeky activity based around RSS feeds - to the mainstream. In my view, Timeline is the smartest and most significant thing Facebook has done since launching a developer platform in May 2007. I think it's that important.

So where did the inspiration for Timeline come from and why is it going to be such a big deal? We can see the future just by looking at two earlier lifestreaming products: FriendFeed and scrappy start Memolane.

Sponsor

Steve Jobs once famously said, quoting Picasso, that "good artists copy, great artists steal." Sure enough, as with most game-changing things on the Web, Timeline is not an original invention by Facebook. Although Timeline wasn't directly stolen from anyone, it was clearly influenced by FriendFeed and Memolane.

One of the strongest inspirations for Timeline came from within Facebook itself, in the form of a startup it acquired in August 2009: FriendFeed. Co-founded by Bret Taylor, who is now Facebook's Chief Technology Officer, FriendFeed was a social media aggregator that was much beloved by Web geeks.

FriendFeed was always far too geeky for mainstream users, however to his great credit Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spotted its potential. At the time Zuckerberg called FriendFeed "a simple and elegant service for people to share information." (emphasis ours) Well, two years later and it just so happens that sharing information is a key reason why Facebook is introducing Timeline.

Yes, Facebook's Timeline is ostensibly focused on an individual's personal history - kind of like an online diary. But that's really just a front for the real purpose of Timeline: to expose your entire content history to your friends and public subscribers.

It's not just the sharing that's key, it's making that content more social. ReadWriteWeb did one of the earliest interviews with FriendFeed's founders, Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit, in February 2008. Something that Buchheit (who in the past had created Gmail for Google) said back then is more relevant than ever today, with Facebook's Timeline. Buchheit said that FriendFeed was "trying to go beyond simply aggregating to actually creating a pleasant social experience around the content." (emphasis ours)

So that's key point number 2 about Timeline: Facebook expects to make that content more social. That goal is supported by other Facebook initiatives this year, such as the real-time updates ticker and automated sharing from apps like Spotify and Washington Post.

Let's move now to a startup that wasn't acquired by Facebook, but which earlier this year launched a timeline service that is very close to what Facebook introduced later in the year. That startup's name is Memolane and we gave it a favorable review in January.

After Facebook announced its Timeline, Memolane CEO Eric Lagier tried to differentiate his service as a "Timeline of Your Life (more than just your Facebook posts)." Regardless of how Memolane is different from Facebook Timeline, he hit the nail on the head with his point that "time is the perfect tool to organize social media."

That's key point number 3 about Facebook Timeline: it organizes a lot of your social media activity, at least that which occurs on Facebook or on its third party partners like Spotify.

Incidentally, you have to feel for Memolane. An 800-pound gorilla just sat squarely on its little niche of the Web. Memoland is rather ominously "down for maintenance" as I write this, although its Twitter account reassures us that it is "preparing for some exciting things coming your way" this Tuesday. Here's hoping Memolane innovates itself into an exciting new direction with the timeline concept, because of course we love scrappy startups here at RWW.

Lifestreaming is Going Mainstream
There were many other products that Facebook probably took inspiration from for Timeline. Nokia Lifeblog and Six Apart's Vox are two that come to mind (to see how times have changed, read our mid-2006 analysis comparing Vox with Facebook). But the key points are clear from FriendFeed and Memolane:

Timeline is all about sharing personal content.
Timeline is also about making that personal content much more social than it is on your old Facebook profiles.
That's because a timeline is a highly effective way to organize social media content (making it easier to like, comment on and re-share).

The over-riding lesson from Facebook Timeline is that lifestreaming is going mainstream. At the beginning of this year, digital design consultancy Fjord predicted this would happen: "in 2011 we will see increasing numbers of people uploading aspects of their life to the cloud. They'll be able to combine this across multiple online services, generating meaning from data already online."

Of course Fjord wasn't to know that Facebook would implement Timeline and effectively position itself as the center of a huge trend. Which is what Facebook Timeline has done and why Facebook - and lifestreaming - is going to be very big.

Discuss

Just when you think there couldn’t possibly be any more information coming at you on the social web (and I am using the term “information” very loosely), another source pops up. First it was just Facebook messages, then it was following people on Twitter, now there’s Google+ and LinkedIn and Instagram and half a dozen other newcomers — all producing streams of activity that compete for our increasingly scarce attention. David Shing, the “digital prophet” for AOL, said this week that he expects unfriending and unfollowing to become a major phenomenon, and I know just what that feels like: a friend unfollowed me recently, and it got me thinking about this attention economy we are living in.

As anyone who follows me through Twitter or any other social network probably knows by now, I am pretty active on a number of different services for a variety of reasons. I don’t use LinkedIn very much — mostly because it feels like a site where you go to post your resume, rather than a place you go to have a discussion with people about something — but I post links there when I have a new blog post, and sometimes check out LinkedIn Today for industry news. I mostly use Facebook for social reasons, to keep in touch with family, but I post links there too. And I am a fan of Instagram for photos, for reasons that Om has described, and have been trying to post more to Google+ as well.

Am I part of the solution, or part of the problem?
The result of all this is two-fold: I wind up posting many of the same links — to my blog posts, as well as to photos and other things — to multiple networks, because I don’t know which of them my friends and followers (and potential readers) are using the most. Like me, I suspect many of them use multiple networks for different purposes. And I often re-post links in Twitter, because as Bitly has shown with its link analytics, the “half-life” of a tweet is remarkably short, and so many people may not see it. The other effect of this is that in some networks, such as Google+, I don’t participate as much as I should, and I sometimes get criticized for just posting links and then not sticking around.

I try not to clog up my stream with unnecessary things, and I try to make my activity on any network a mix of professional and personal, with humor and conversation and photos mixed up amid the blog posts and other industry-related things. I think it helps when people, including journalists, are human in that way (although not too human, hopefully). But I can see how my stream could be noisy for some — and it certainly has turned out to be for one friend, who said recently that they were forced to unfollow me. I’m not going to name them because it’s not really important who they are, I’m more interested in their reasons; they said they unfollowed me because:

I’m frankly tired of people who talk about themselves or promote their work. Repetition just makes it worse. Bombarding me with the same content multiple times in multiple channels makes you uninteresting to me.

I was somewhat taken aback by this, I admit. I assumed people would just ignore the tweets or messages they weren’t interested in, as I do when I come across things in other people’s streams that I don’t find relevant. But when I asked this friend to explain, they described something that I thought was probably pretty common for some people — and something that might possibly become more widespread, as Shing described in his recent interview with The Guardian. In effect, this person said their attention was a precious resource, and that I (and presumably others) were wasting it:

Twitter is no different from any medium in this respect – I only follow what deserves my attention. Diluting my attention stream is a great way to tell me that you do not share my concern about allocating it.

Information overload and Shirky’s “filter failure”

I think this is a feeling we probably all have now and then, thanks to what some call information overload and Clay Shirky has called “filter failure.” Maybe we feel it when our inbox is filled with messages that have been sent by someone clicking “reply all,” or maybe when we get inundated with Facebook messages and photo tags, or — on the far end of the spectrum — when we try to follow someone like Robert Scoble on a new social network like Google+. The uber-blogger and social-media maven described recently how his own wife deleted her Google+ account because of the signal-to-noise problem caused in part by Scoble himself.

Facebook has only added to this phenomenon with its new “ticker,” which scrolls by as you watch the page, with every “like” and message and Spotify song appearing and then disappearing. Facebook seemed very proud of its new “frictionless sharing” social apps, but many expressed concern about the volume of noise that would be created — and I think rightfully so. In a way, these concerns are the same as the ones my friend has: where do I spend my attention? There is a finite amount of it, and so at some point we have to choose where to allocate it. I spend less time on Facebook in part because I have too many “friends” there and the signal-to-noise ratio is quite low.

How do we solve these kinds of problems? I don’t really know. Filters such as Circles and Facebook lists — or even a new network like Bill Gross’s Chime, which lets you follow only part of a person rather than everything they post — might be part of the solution, but they also just increase the flow. Do we have to get ruthless with our friend and follower lists, and prune them even if we risk offending someone? Perhaps. All I know is that the problem isn’t getting any better — if anything, it is getting worse.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users John Lambert Pearson and Kevin Dooley

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Facebook said Friday it will shut down Beluga, the social text messaging service acquired by the social networking giant in March 2011.

This is not an unexpected move: GigaOM first reported that Beluga’s future was up in the air in August, when Facebook debuted the Facebook Messenger mobile app. The development of Facebook Messenger was led by Beluga’s three-person founding team, Ben Davenport, Lucy Zhang and Jonathan Perlow. As we wrote then, “It would be a bit sad to see Beluga go, but with the new debut of Facebook Messenger — a fully featured project that has been the top priority for Beluga’s founding team for nearly six months — it would not be especially surprising.”

The end of Beluga is now officially nigh. The company explained the move in a blog entry posted on its website that reads in part:

“Now that Facebook Messenger is available everywhere, we’ve decided to stop offering Beluga as a separate service. You can keep using Beluga for now, but we’ll be phasing it out over the next few weeks:

Starting November 11, you’ll no longer be able to use Beluga to send messages, but you can still get to your old messages on the Beluga app and website. If you want, you can also download an archive of your pods.

On December 15, the Beluga service will shut down completely, and you’ll no longer be able to access your old pods or messages.”

Facebook Messenger, meanwhile, has been expanding significantly. The company says the app is now available worldwide in 22 languages, and it’s available on iOS, Android and BlackBerry phones.

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There's an ongoing business axiom that defines customer service: "the customer is always right."

Publicly, this may be the proper posture. People like Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos and the author of the best-selling business book, Delivering Happiness) built his first business on making customers happy (the company was LinkExchange - which he sold to Microsoft for $265 million) and pushed the concept even further with Zappos (the online shoe store), which was also sold (but this time to Amazon was over one billion dollars). That being said, there are instances when the customer is not always right. In fact, let's be honest: sometimes the expectations of consumers is so far beyond the pale that anything the company does to try to please them will be met with grumbles and complaints.

The majority of customers simply want value.

They want their products or services to do what it says it will do - reliably. In this day and age, the challenge is that brands are being held to task in the online channels. Any individuals can complain in text, images, audio and video, instantly and for free online for the world to see. If you're in line at your favorite retailer and you're wondering why they don't open up a second cash register, you're just a tweet away from holding that company responsible for their store policies. The other day, I was reviewing the Facebook page for a major airline and there was one complaint that stood out: "I'll never fly with you again! I was stuck at the security line for over two hours!" What does security have to do with the airline? (Answer: nothing). Have you ever been on TripAdvisor (the popular online destination that rates hotels)? You'll see a constant stream of one and two-star reviews where individuals complain about things like a lack of chocolate on their pillows or not enough channels available on their TV (while at the same time commending the hotel for having a nice staff, clean rooms and a cheap rate - the main reasons the majority of people would chose a hotel).

Are we quickly devolving to the sad state of: "you can only please a few of the people some of the time"?

The evolution of customer service and brand loyalty is a topic that has captured the imagination of Fred Reichheld for over twenty years. In 1996, the Bain Fellow published his first book, The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits, and Lasting Value. Recently, Reichheld (along with co-author, Rob Markey) published a newly updated version of his 2006 seminal book, The Ultimate Question (now titled, The Ultimate Question 2.0). So, just what is the ultimate question that every business should be asking...

"How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?"

If your company is doing well (and this doesn't mean you have to be perfect), your customers become your brand champions. They become the evangelists. They become the marketers. They are the ones who get your ideas to spread. "It turns out that people won't enthusiastically recommend your business to a loved one unless you have treated them in a very special way," says Reichheld via Skype. "It goes beyond the brand and loyalty. Social Media has made the model more apparent to businesses, but the roots of this concept go all the way back to the bible. It goes back to the idea that a name and a reputation are worth more than silver and gold. We created the Net Promoter Score system around the ultimate question to help businesses know - day by day - whether they are building their reputation or diminishing it."

Big or great?

While the simple and immediate feedback loop of deploying the Net Promoter Score (a system that allows customers to grade a brand on a scale from one to ten with a few, short questions) has been adopted by many businesses, the final results also empower a brand to think differently about the types of customers that they can be successful with. "There is no brand that is right for everyone," continues Reichheld. "A brand should be working very hard to make sure that the people who are buying their product or service are the people who it was intended to be sold to. They need to have a very clear focus. This means that when they get a Net Promoter Score of a nine or a ten from a customer, it's because they picked the right customer and they are appreciated for what they have to offer. Sadly, what we see historically is metrics around 'bigness,' meaning how many customers or how many units sold? What we should be looking at is a metric around greatness, not bigness."

So, is the customer always right?

"I don't think that the customer is always right any more than I think that the employees are always right or that a shareholder is always right," conceded Reichheld. "You do owe it to your business to understand the root cause of the feedback and what implications it has on your decision making, prioritization and your actions. But, there are criminals out there that are your customers. You want to keep those customers away. Not just from your cash registers but from your employees too, because they are abusive and they make life hell for everyone in your business. The Net Promoter Score is based on the golden rule that we should treat others the way we would want to be treated in their shoes, but it takes a lot of deep thinking to do this right. It's not superficial. Think about what actions a business takes when it gets a zero or a one score? The business should dig in to figure out what's wrong, try to fix it and understand how it feels to be in the customer's shoes, but it doesn't always mean that they are the right customers for your business."

The complete audio conversation between Reichheld and myself will be published this coming Sunday (October 30th, 2011) as episode #277 of Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast.

The above post is my twice-monthly column for the Montreal Gazette and Vancouver Sun newspapers called, New Business - Six Pixels of Separation. I cross-post it here with all the links and tags for your reading pleasure, but you can check out the original versions online here:

Montreal Gazette - Companies should focus on greatness, not 'bigness: ' author.

Vancouver Sun - The customer is (not) always right.




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Hi everybody.

I’m Rich. I work at 10 Yetis PR Agency. (‘Hiiii Rich’, you say in a soothingly choral sort of way).

And I’m an addict. (You clap empathetically, looking at me with a knowing approval and compassionately tearful gleam in your eye).

Read more on Are you addicted to early adoption?…

Facebook is getting complicated. The social network just introduced the category of "trusted friend," not to be confused with the prior categories of "close friends," "acquaintances," "restricted" buddies, and authorized stalkers. Trusted friends are like super-friends. They have special powers! More »

Google made Google+service available for Google Apps users earlier today with much fanfare, but for me personally it was very disappointing.I have two google apps accounts which I use regularly - one for my gaming blog, one for my work - apart from my gmail account. Now google gives me the option to transfer all me activity to one of my apps accounts which is a moot point.Sure, there might be a lot of people who would love this feature but I expected the search giant to follow a more comprehensive approach when rolling out their social networking feature for google apps accounts. I thought I would be able to access my same google circles no matter what email id I logged in to, now that I can login to multiple gmail and apps ids.Facebook lets you enter your 'other email ids' and lets you login with any one of them. I thought this was a brilliant feature, since I would be alerted of any attempt to reset password of my Facebook account on all email ids. I though Google would follow a similar approach given the number of gmail ids that are hacked for various reasons. If there is a way to connect these email ids it's through G+, so if my gmail id is hacked I can easily recover them from my apps account instead of having to remember things like the day I opened my account and 20 most contacted people (which includes people I haven't been in touch for a while by the way).Instead Google goes ahead and tells me that I can import all my contacts and circles to apps account which doesn't help me all all. Doesn't Google see the amount of info that is waiting to be used if the accounts are integrated? How about automatically creating a circle for people who use email on the sub-domain let's say *@gamebashing.com and are in my inbox instead of going ahead with such a shortsighted approach?Google... are you listening?PS: I clicked on the share button/link on the top blogger bar above this post, but I didn't see a way to share it to Google+. What the hell Google?

Facebook just announced plans to build a giant data center 60 miles south of the Arctic Circle in Sweden. Of course. Any evil, world-dominating corporation worth its salt must have an Arctic Doom Base. More »

The perfect life, that’s what I called it – the phenomenon that has spread across the two social networks I frequent. Facebook Photos is nothing new and has come up here as a subject for discussion earlier. But its rise has been meteoric, just like the social network. The best vacations, the coolest friends, the hottest parties, the snazziest gadgets, seems everyone can haz it. Twitter is not far behind. People, almost like brands, out to show their best side. Made for Facebook/Made for Twitter/ Lies of Life, call it what you will. Of course condolences would pour in if someone had a distressing update. Either outrage against the wrongdoer if any, or at least a +1 to show solidarity. Unfollow, unfriend you’d say, but these are not bad people, they just have a perfect life. Unfortunately, the networks work as emotion aggregators too, forcing me to vent once in a while. [image source Check it out for more awesomeness ] And yes, I generalise.

I have wondered about the motivation. Maybe we like to share happiness more than sadness by default. Maybe sadness is a private thing we choose only to share with dear ones. (do you think there’s a social network idea there? A mutant version of Path) Maybe the algorithms ensure I see only the happy ones. Or maybe it’s indeed true that our vanity stops us from showing that we have been humbled, beaten, saddened by a human hand or a twist of fate.

A few minutes after I tweeted about the perfect life, I got a message on the blog (deleted now) from an old dear friend S, who had gotten in touch after quite a while. In the long years before a virtual home, when a real diary was a lifesaver, hers would probably be the name that was mentioned most, before the rise of the  thenceforth omnipresent D.

S isn’t on twitter, so she would have no idea of the coincidence. She was happy about the progress I was making, doing the things I love to do and generally having fun. And that led me to wonder if I, in my own limited way, was also feeding the perfect life network. So here’s setting the record straight. In case you see my vacation photos, restaurant visits and general attempts at humour and think that the story begins and ends there, you couldn’t be further from the truth.

As many of my posts would indicate, I have multiple ‘missed life crises’ – singer, author, theatre actor, h3ll, even cricketer, and perhaps a few more too, all skills I have either displayed to some degree or think I possess. I think way too much for my own good and am forever irritated at the inequity of life (in terms of those more unfortunate) and not being able to do much about it. I am constantly trying to shed baggage and sometimes failing miserably. My feelings of insecurity would be legend if they were a published work. Thankfully D exists. There is more, but that’s enough fun at my expense. The silver lining is that I’m learning through it all. Meanwhile, all I’m trying to say is that the grass on the other side is probably photoshopped. If it’s not, they’ve probably worked hard to make it this way. And we can too, if we try. Please smile now, and mean it. Or I’ll have to ask you to Like the post

until next time, open source happiness

PS: It was only recently that I gave off my fakemytrip.com domain to mygola. I had bought it thanks to an irritating status on FB, and had a 4sq based idea around it.

Scrappy outsider startup Unthink.com, which bills itself as the “anti-Facebook,” is opening up its doors today, allowing in its first round of beta testers. The Tampa-based company with $2.5 million in funding from DouglasBay Capital sees itself as a more open, more honest form of social networking – one where its users are the owners of their data, and not the product being sold to advertisers.

Unthink is the kind of startup that could only come from outside of traditional tech hotspots like Silicon Valley or New York, as there’s a certain level of audacity, and perhaps even ignorance, that you need in order to think you have a shot at displacing social networking giant Facebook and all of its 800 million users.

And taking down Facebook is the core of Unthink’s marketing campaign. In fact, the majority of Unthink’s message is about what it is not: it’s not another social network, it’s a social revolution. Unthinkers are not users, they’re owners. Unthink is not in control, you are. And so on. It even has its own manifesto, deeds and covenants.

“If we want to be free, we have to control our own communications…we have to claim that power,” CEO Natasha Dedis shouted with vitriol to the crowd at September’s Tampa Bay Barcamp (the un-conference), before delving into all the ways that Facebook does its users wrong.

She explained that the idea for Unthink came to her when her son wanted to sign up for Facebook and she read the terms of service. They were not something she wanted to agree to because they could change at any time. But for her son, that decision was met with a lot of anxiety. “He was really stressed about it, like he didn’t have a choice – he had to be on Facebook.” It was either be on Facebook, or be a pariah in school, she said. Whichever decision Dedis made, she felt like she was being bad mother.

(Above: a profile after sign-up)

On Facebook, your personal data, your posts, your likes – in short, all your social networking activity – is used to provide advertisers with a way to directly target precise demographics. Some may call it genius, but for others like Dedis, it feels exploitive.

“The number one thing that had to be ‘un-thought’ about social media, is who does it belong to? We need to own everything that we put on our page. We can be as private or as public as we want, as long as it’s our choice,” she said.

On Unthink, user data isn’t sold to brands. Instead, users choose a brand to sponsor their page, by way of an ad dubbed “iEndorse.” The idea is that a user will select a brand they feel some affinity with, and will then become an advocate for that brand. Users who don’t want to select a brand have the option to pay for the service instead ($2/year).

Brands also have a different way to communicate with fans than they do on Facebook, where messages are spliced into a users’ News Feed. On Unthink, there’s a separate section on users’ profile pages just for communicating with businesses. Users decide what companies they want to communicate with, what type of messages they want to receive and how often they want to receive them. Then, when they choose to interact with a brand, they’re rewarded for their engagement with points that can be used towards discounts and offers from the brand in question.

Upon signing up for Unthink, as I did today, you’re offered an app that will export your photos and videos from Facebook. You’re also asked to fill out the standard social networking questions (name, date of birth, gender, etc.) and are then directed to your own personal profile page.

These pages are split into sections, each with a dedicated purpose and easy-to-customize privacy controls. The top section, “iUnthink” is your public microblog, the middle, your social section, the third, your lifestyle section for connecting with brands (this part will launch in a few weeks), and the bottom, your professional section for connecting with business colleagues.

Oh, that’s right. Did I forget to mention?

Despite its anti-Facebook manifesto, Unthink actually wants to displace Twitter, Groupon and LinkedIn, too. If anything, however, it’s Diaspora done right. Hey, if you’re going to appeal to the “I don’t want corporate control of my data!” crowd, you may as well go all in.

Will Unthink take down Facebook? Not likely. But it’s fascinating to watch someone try on this scale.

Unthink is launching into a limited beta today. If you know someone who’s in, they can send you an invite. TechCrunch readers can email techcrunch@unthink.com to get to the head of the list.

(Above: full-page profile. Note that ticker would normally be at bottom)






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Facebook’s advertising machine is growing fast, and it’s growing big: estimates put 2011 ad revenues at some $3.8 billion. But it’s also a system that is always being tweaked as the company tries to turn its vast trough of users into more cash.

The latest changes, you may remember, are an attempt to convince advertisers that they should be focusing on engagement more than click-through rates — what Mathew characterised as an appeal to “forget about clicks”. From the outside, it may be difficult to understand why this matters — but here’s some data that might shed some light on what Facebook is doing and why advertisers love fan pages so much.

Courtesy of social analytics firm Campalyst, we have information on a campaign run for Blue1, a Finnish subsidiary of Scandinavian Airlines. Through August and September, Blue1 ran a campaign across three different channels: a Facebook page with regular status updates; Facebook ads targeted on potential customers; and more traditional display ads.

Here’s what they found: branded fan pages — and the updates that users see — are vastly more successful than other ways of advertising on Facebook.

To be more exact, Facebook Pages convert people into customers at a far higher rate than other forms of advertising. The conversion rate is four times higher than ordinary display ads and more than six times higher than traditional Facebook ads. And when they do convert into purchases (airline tickets in Blu1′s case) people who are fans spend more: an average of 30 percent more in this case.

This makes sense, of course: somebody who visits a fan page has already declared their interest in a given topic, and so they are clearly more likely to purchase. But it’s also interesting in terms of how Facebook limits access and visibility, because the most important way to get people to visit a fan page is through status updates that appear in news feeds.

Here’s another intriguing stat: these click through rates are achieved despite the fact that — at best — only a third of fans actually see updates in their feed. On an average day, just 14 percent of users who are already fans of a brand will actually see updates that brand makes.

Given all of this, it’s not hard to see why Facebook has been slowly expanding the data available on fan pages and encouraging people to look at engagement stats while at the same time reducing the ability of those pages to inject themselves into the news feed. Now it can charge advertisers to get into people’s streams with what it calls Sponsored Stories.

“What Facebook did with the Sponsored Stories was give brands a tool to pay for reaching more people and boost the reach of their fans through the fan pages,” says Campalyst CEO Jevgenijs Kazanins.

“Effectively, they are saying that reaching fans in the stream is hard (and it became even harder due to changes in the stream) but there is a way to increase it by buying Sponsored Stories.”

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Facebook isn’t a true PayPal competitor, but it’s taking some steps toward becoming an online payments provider outside of its Facebook properties. The social networking giant has begun testing the use of Facebook Credits on two games, Uno Boost and Collapse! Blast, both available on gaming portal GameHouse.

In the test, users of those games will have only one choice of payment option, Facebook Credits, instead of the usual GameHouse options of paying by credit card or PayPal. Players will be able to integrate their game experience of these games on both GameHouse and Facebook and pay for goods from one funding source. Facebook and GameHouse, a unit of RealNetworks, are looking to see how players react to the option, which will determine how each proceeds with Facebook Credits.

This could be a big springboard for Facebook to become a major payments player if it aggressively takes its Facebook Credits to other properties on the web. It’s already made Facebook Credits mandatory for gaming apps on Facebook as of July 1 and an option for other Facebook apps. It recently extended credits to mobile app developers who want to build HTML5 apps on its mobile platform. It was also allowing people to pay using Facebook Credits for things like Facebook Deals. If it can leverage its relationships with Facebook Connect publishers, it can offer a fast and easy payment alternative to credit cards, PayPal or other phone billing options.

Facebook would likely have to lower its cut of transactions, which is currently 30 percent for Facebook developers, if it wants to move beyond virtual goods. But if it got it down to a percentage that was competitive, say around 5 percent or so, it could build off the many Facebook users that already have Facebook Credits. Websites like GameHouse, as well as independent game developers, may stand to benefit if they can drive more transactions with the help of Facebook Credits.

As I wrote before, this could be a stepping stone to Facebook Credits becoming a larger payment service. Right now, it’s not really participating in that battle, but if it can tap its existing relationships with more than 800 million users it might be able to put together a formidable mobile payment competitor. As Erick Tseng, head of mobile products for Facebook, told the crowd at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference last month, the social networking giant is increasingly becoming a mobile company. It stands to reason that Facebook would love to see how far it can take Facebook Credits and make it into a tool that can start with online mobile transactions for virtual goods but could transition into something bigger, first with purchases of physical goods online and then, who knows, perhaps into offline transactions.

That’s a long ways off, but it’s not unheard of. PayPal is making the transition from an online payment company to one that is now poised to target point of sale transactions. Facebook obviously would need to do a whole lot of work to follow in those footsteps. And it has a lot of hurdles in becoming a major payment player: Ogilvy & Mather conducted a survey and found that Facebook was the least trusted option for mobile payments trailing Visa, MasterCard, American Express and PayPal by a wide distance.

But I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook is eyeing this market. Mobile payments is booming now and expected to become a $670 billion market by 2015. But it starts with small tests like the one with GameHouse. GameHouse president Matthew Hulett said the test will help drive more users to GameHouse as it tries to expand its business to both social and mobile. He said he’s looking forward to bringing Facebook Credits to its 75 mobile apps as well.

“People already have cash balances on Facebook and the amount of friction this reduces is so much greater for us, we haven’t seen any negative impact on us using Facebook Credits after the mandated date of July 1 and I’m very confident consumers like to pay this way,” he said.

Hulett said he believes though its early Facebook Credits could be a big driver of revenue for Facebook, similar to how PayPal has become the main engine of growth for eBay. That will still be ways off, but if Facebook plays its cards right and learns important lessons along the way, it might not be a stretch.

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According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, the music service Google is close to launching will include sharing features via integration with its Google+ platform, which isn’t that surprising, since Google has said the new social network will be part of everything it does. For Apple, however, the new social features in Google’s offering will reinforce what Spotify and other music services have already made obvious: Apple and iTunes are falling behind in the social-music race, which could have significant consequences for the company as the music industry continues to evolve.

By any measure, iTunes is still the 800-pound gorilla of the digital-music industry: More than 10 billion songs have been downloaded since Apple launched the service in 2001, and some record labels and music publishers now get a huge proportion of the revenue they make on their artists from iTunes. By launching the service — along with the iPod, which turned 10 years old on the weekend — Apple effectively re-engineered the entire music industry, convincing the major labels to use it as a conduit to reach music lovers who were busy downloading whatever they could get their hands on.

Obviously, that kind of power means iTunes isn’t going away anytime soon, and it will continue to be the main choice for record companies who want to monetize an artist. But the music business is changing — along with virtually every other form of media and content — as a result of the increasingly social nature of the web. And in that particular race, services such as Spotify are winning, in part because of their integration with networks like Facebook and their focus on streaming over buying.

Streaming and sharing is the new downloading
Facebook and Spotify have gotten a lot of criticism since the social network launched its “frictionless sharing” features, which allow services like Spotify to publish sharing info to a user’s Facebook page without having to ask permission every time. Many users have complained about this behavior — and that Spotify requires that anyone signing up have a Facebook account to connect to — and some have no doubt cancelled their accounts, but they are likely in the minority. In the end, this new kind of sharing, which shows links to what friends are listening to in the “ticker” stream on a user’s page, could be a hugely powerful driver for the industry.

And what kinds of weapons does Apple have? It has its massive market dominance — and it has Ping. Remember Ping? Apple’s music-based social network launched last fall, and was designed to do something similar to what Spotify and others are now doing: make it easy for users to share their activity and convince others to buy music. Except that Ping almost instantly looked like a social network from the late 1990s rather than a contender for the music-sharing future: as GigaOM’s Cyndy Aleo argued at the time, it looked lame in part because it wasn’t connected to anything else, and it made sharing surprisingly cumbersome (for his part, Om said that he thought Ping was part of “the future of social commerce”).

Ping shone a spotlight on one of Apple’s major weaknesses, which is a lack of knowledge or experience with social networks or social behavior. The company’s products are famous for their brilliant design and usability, but virtually none of that applies to things like Ping or Apple’s Game Center network (or to iTunes itself, arguably) since both seem more like ghost towns and afterthoughts than powerful competitors.

Twitter integration may not be enough
In an attempt to bolt on some form of social behavior, Apple added support for Twitter to Ping, and more recently it has integrated Twitter into many of its apps and services through iOS 5 — a ground-breaking move, since it rarely gives that kind of preferential treatment and real estate to a third party. (It tried to negotiate a Facebook deal but was rebuffed, presumably because of Spotify). This was a smart decision, since Twitter accomplishes much of what iTunes and Ping do not: Users can easily send out links to what they have bought or are listening to, and those links appear in the “media pane” at Twitter’s website and can be easily clicked on.

Despite this, however, it still feels like Apple is fundamentally playing catch-up in an industry that is moving rapidly towards sharing and streaming of music rather than simply purchasing, a la iTunes. With social services like Spotify and Rdio and MOG — not to mention Turntable.fm and Soundtracking — it is all about sharing music with friends rather than just acquiring it to keep forever. So how is Apple going to compete in this new kind of landscape? It will soon launch a streaming feature called iTunes Match, but the social element continues to elude it.

For the time being, at least, iTunes will remain the store of choice for many when it comes to buying music. And those who see their friends listening to music via Spotify and want to buy the same track may go to iTunes to do so — but then again, they might not. And if Google and Facebook integrate support for instant payments via Google Checkout or Facebook Credits, what kind of draw will Apple or iTunes have for new users then? The market dominance that Steve Jobs so brilliantly executed continues for now, but that dominance looks more and more precarious every day.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Josh Lindsay and Yodel Anecdotal

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It looks like adding a suggested user list to Google+ has finally paid off in solving its “Mark Zuckerberg problem.” Facebook’s CEO is no longer the most popular person on Google+, having just now been passed by Google CEO Larry Page. Zuckerberg has been the most followed...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Is this a contrarian view? I can’t even tell any more. On one hand, Google Plus now has 40 million users, it’s the fastest-growing social-networking site in history, and its users have uploaded 3.4 billion photos. On the other, Google is mum about how many of those users are actually active; some say that its traffic has declined significantly from its peak; Google’s own management didn’t much use it, until recently; and many agreed with Google engineer Steve Yegge’s lengthy and viral rant about how they have screwed up Plus.

Not me. I think Google+ is a hit in the making. I hardly use it myself any more — indeed, my last post there, more than a month ago, was “Sadly, it seems G+ has degenerated in my mind into little more than the place I go to complain that Twitter seems to be down” — but I’m no representative sample. Heck, I don’t really use Facebook either, except to mindlessly echo my Twitter stream.

(We pause here briefly so that bloggers everywhere can recover from their exposure to the mindblowing notion that perhaps one should not treat one’s own anecdotal experiences as universal truths.)

When Sean Parker pointed out that all your friends are already on Facebook, Vic Gundotra retorted, “Your mom and friends, guess what, they are already on Google.” As MG said some time ago, that little black bar on top of their home page and search results is their secret weapon. It gives Google an unparalleled ability to lead horses to their water. But can they make them drink?

I think they can.

Think long term. Google does. When Google initiatives flop, they’re usually pretty much dead within a month of arrival, a la Buzz or Wave. But when they get any traction, Google is excellent at pushing them uphill, bit by bit, year by year, with a relentless tide of data-driven iterations, all the way to the top of the mountain. When Chrome launched, a lot of people (including me) were bemused: why a new browser? Weren’t Firefox, Opera, and Safari more than good enough? Now it’s on track to overtake Firefox, and maybe one day even IE. When you consider the commitment Google has made to Plus, you have to figure that G+ today is a mere crude and clumsy approximation of what it will be a year from now.

And what it is today is pretty damn good. (Especially now that they’ve (more or less) stopped machine-gunning themselves in the foot, by publicly backing down from their stupid and ham-handed real-name policy.) There are already a bunch of things G+ does better than Facebook. Photo sharing. Group video chat. Allocating people to Circles. Sharing Circles with others.

…Wait, there’s sort of a theme, isn’t there? Groups. Circles. Handcrafted subsets of your friends, your acquaintances, and the people you follow. Videoconferencing with a group of your co-workers; literary discussions with the members of your book club; debates about the price of a new roof with the other members of your local community center; ongoing scheduling of your World of Warcraft guild; news from the leading lights of the political party of your choice; any of the hundreds of kinds of little or large groups of people that form and dissolve all the time. That’s what Google Plus is good at, and Facebook isn’t.

Mark Zuckerberg famously said, “Guess What? Nobody Wants To Make Lists” — but everyone lists and subdivides the people they know all the time: in their head, or on paper, or in the To:  and CC: fields of their emails, for innumerable social reasons. They’ll do so online, too, if it’s easier and a more core part of the experience than it is at Facebook. I believe people want to connect to both broad-brush swathes of people — everyone they know, everyone they work with, everyone they went to school with, friends of friends — and more carefully defined groups, with finer control over identity and membership.

Can Facebook seamlessly do both, and be all things to all people? Maybe, but that’s not the direction they’re going. Ironically, they’re doing things “the Google way,” betting on sweeping algorithmic solutions with their Smart Lists and Top Stories, while Google seems to be building G+ “the Facebook way,” around personal curation and social selection. The key difference is that, as moot aka Christopher Poole said the other day, our identities — and our relationships — are prisms rather than mirrors, multi-faceted rather than black & white. Google Plus acknowledges this in a way Facebook doesn’t, and that’s a big part of why I believe it will ultimately succeed.

Facebook has quietly released a new feature in Facebook for iPhone 4.0 update that could create new opportunities for marketers. If users click or enter a URL that uses the fb://page URL scheme and have the official Facebook for iPhone/iPad app installed, the corresponding Facebook Page will be opened in that app. Before the 4.0 and later software updates, fb://page URL scheme links would load a blank screen in the apps.

For example, if you click the link of or enter the URL fb://page/7844589738 in an iOS device that has Facebook for iPhone/iPad installed, that app will launch and bring up t he official Facebook Page for InsideFacebook.com (7844589738 is the Facebook ID of the Page for Inside Facebook). Marketers could distribute URL scheme-linked text via email or mobile site, and users wouldn’t notice the strange URL, they’d just click on a link and suddenly see the Facebook app open.

This new functionality could let marketers instantly bring users to their Page where they can Like it or write on its wall, rather than forcing them to open the m.facebook.com site where they might not already be logged in. Marketers could attach this link to a QR code to promote their Page and gain Likes from iOS device users. The fb://page URL scheme could become even more important if users gain the ability to access Page tab applications from mobile devices in the future.

 

iOS URL schemes allow specific first- and third-party iOS applications to be launched with special URLs. They can also be used to immediately perform certain functions such as setting a recipient for a new text message, showing directions in Google Maps, or add a shortened URL to a tweet in Tweetie or Twitterific. However, if the user doesn’t have the corresponding app installed, neither the app or a browser version will load.

Previously, URL schemes could be used to open a specific photo album, Event, or user profile in Facebook for iPhone. With the latest major Facebook for iPhone and iPad software updates, official Pages and Places Pages can now be opened with URL schemes as well. Page use the “fb://page/[Page ID]” URL scheme while Places use “fb://place/[Place ID]“.

There may be a URL scheme suffix that allows the info or wall tab to be loaded specifically, though none of the logical suffixes I tried worked. Android devices have their own URL scheme, and some developers have found ways to open user profiles in the Facebook for Android apps, though I haven’t seen a solution for opening Pages.

Facebook for iPhone/iPad has 52.3 million daily active users and 92.7 million monthly active users according to AppData, many of which stay logged in on the app at all times. This creates a large audience that can utilize the Facebook Page URL scheme to quickly gain access to a Page from a logged in state, allowing them to Like it or leave a wall post.

iOS app developers could use the Page URL scheme to send their users out of their app and to their Page so they can gain Likes. Similarly, marketers could distribute a Page URL scheme as an “iOS only” link to gain Likes.

In the physical world, marketers could also tie the URL scheme link to their Page to a QR code and display in their brick and mortar store or distribute through print materials. Users could then scan the QR code to launch their Facebook app and Like the Page. This could become a way to speed up in-store promotions where users who show they’ve Liked a business’ Page get a discount or free gift.

Those trying to take advantage of the URL scheme functionality should be sure their audience is likely to have an iOS device with the Facebook app installed. Otherwise providing a standard browser link that’s accessible across devices and to those without the Facebook app is a safer bet, even if it means users may have to log in to Facebook again before they can Like the Page.

Facebook recently launched its mobile app platform that allows users to access canvas apps built in HTML5 from their mobile devices. Page tab applications cannot be accessed from mobile yet, judging by the fact that some Page tab app developers such as RootMusic have begun building in HTML5. Once Page tab apps are opened to mobile, Page URL scheme links could become a powerful way to drive traffic to them as well as helping Pages gain Likes.

[Thanks to Sam Cornwell for the tip]

Online social networks are everywhere these days, a truly global phenomenon. But where are the different social networks having the most success in terms of popularity? That is what we’ll try to answer in this post.

We have included 11 social networks in this survey: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Orkut, Tumblr, FourSquare, MySpace, LiveJournal, Hi5 and Bebo.

Please note that this isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list covering all social networks out there. There are literally hundreds of them.

To map popularity, we’ve used Google search statistics (their Insights for Search tool). This will give us a good indication of the interest – or popularity, if you will – of a social network in a given region. We’re basing this survey on search results from the past 90 days, so it’s a reasonably large, up-to-date sample. After all, we want to know the situation right now.

A few initial observations
We’ve gone through and summarized some of the information for you, but please feel free to scroll down and check out the individual social networks you’re interested in.

Top countries for each social network (in terms of interest)

Facebook is most popular in Turkey and Venezuela.
Twitter is most popular in Venezuela and Brazil.
LinkedIn is most popular in the Netherlands and India.
Google+ is most popular in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Tumblr is most popular in the Philippines and Brazil.
FourSquare is most popular in Indonesia and Malaysia.
MySpace is most popular in Puerto Rico and Myanmar (Burma).
LiveJournal is most popular in Singapore and Russia.
Hi5 is most popular in Thailand and Romania.
Bebo is most popular in Ireland and New Zealand.
Orkut is most popular in Brazil and Paraguay. The interest shown for Orkut in Brazil far outstrips that of any other country.

It’s worth pointing out that this doesn’t necessarily mean that the majority of users come from these countries. We’re talking about sheer interest in a service. The size of the local user base will depend on the size of the Internet population in that country.

Also note that we haven’t compared the social networks against each other. This is a survey that examines where each social network has managed to garner the most interest in its service.

Some standout countries in this survey

Brazil is in the top five for Twitter, Orkut, Tumblr and Bebo.
Singapore is in the top five for LinkedIn, Tumblr, FourSquare and LiveJournal.
The United States is in the top five for LinkedIn, Tumblr and MySpace.
The Philippines is in the top five for Tumblr, FourSquare and LiveJournal.
India is in the top five for LinkedIn and Orkut.
The United Kingdom is in the top five for LinkedIn and Bebo.
Indonesia is in the top five for Twitter and FourSquare.
Venezuela and Turkey are in the top five for Facebook and Twitter.

That was just a brief summary. Why don’t you go ahead and have a look for yourself? We’ve listed the results for all the included social networks here below. We’ve also included direct links to Google Insights for Search if you want to dig even deeper into the results and play around a little.

Facebook

Countries with the highest interest in Facebook:

Turkey
Venezuela
Tunisia
Colombia
Dominican Republic

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Facebook here.

Twitter

Countries with the highest interest in Twitter:

Venezuela
Brazil
Indonesia
Turkey
El Salvador

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Twitter here.

LinkedIn

Countries with the highest interest in LinkedIn:

Netherlands
India
United Kingdom
Singapore
United States

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for LinkedIn here.

Google+

Countries with the highest interest in Google+:

Taiwan
Hong Kong
Nepal
Finland
Honduras

(Ok, Hong Kong isn’t a country per se, but Google Insights for Search lists “regions”, which don’t always correspond to countries.)

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Google+ here.

Orkut

Countries with the highest interest in Orkut:

Brazil
Paraguay
India
Haiti
Oman

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Orkut here.

Tumblr

Countries with the highest interest in Tumblr:

Philippines
Brazil
Australia
United States
Singapore

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Tumblr here.

FourSquare

Countries with the highest interest in FourSquare:

Indonesia
Malaysia
Singapore
Thailand
Philippines

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for FourSquare here.

MySpace

Countries with the highest interest in MySpace:

Puerto Rico
Myanmar (Burma)
United States
Jamaica
Trinidad and Tobago

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for MySpace here.

LiveJournal

Countries with the highest interest in LiveJournal:

Singapore
Russia
Belarus
Ukraine
Philippines

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for LiveJournal here.

Hi5

Countries with the highest interest in Hi5:

Thailand
Romania
Peru
Laos
Portugal

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Hi5 here.

Bebo

Countries with the highest interest in Bebo:

Ireland
New Zealand
United Kingdom
Brazil
Australia

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Bebo here.

Final notes
As you noticed, we only included a limited list of social networks in this survey. For example, we didn’t include social networks that are regional by nature, i.e. don’t have a global focus. There are plenty of country- or language-specific social networks that are successful in individual countries, for example VKontakte in Russia and the Russian-speaking countries of the former Soviet Union, Mixi in Japan, RenRen and Qzone in China, Hyves in the Netherlands, etc.

If you’re curious, you can check out a similar survey we did three years ago, in August of 2008. We thought an update was long overdue, since things change so rapidly in social media.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

Facebook wants to help you find a job. The social network announced on Thursday that it has teamed up with the U.S. Department of Labor and three employment-related agencies in an attempt to decrease the country’s 9.1% unemployment rate using social media — a project that may eventually include a Facebook jobs posting system.

The new partnership brings formal job hunting content to Facebook — which some recruiters already prefer over LinkedIn — for the first time.

As part of the initiative, Facebook has launched a new “Social Jobs” portal that makes easily accessible educational content and tools from its partners at the Department of Labor, National Association of Colleges and Employers, DirectEmployers Association, and the National Association of State Workforce Agencies. It plans to promote this page in the 10 states with the highest unemployment rates and Puerto Rico.

Facebook has also promised to conduct surveys about how job hunters, recruiters and college career departments use social media.

The most interesting aspect of the new partnership, however, is a plan to inch Facebook into job listings territory. Facebook’s statement announcing the partnership mentioned “systems where new job postings can be delivered virally through the Facebook site at no charge.”

What shape such a job posting system would take, and whether Facebook has any solid plans beyond research to pursue one, are still not clear. A job board that lives on Facebook could put the social network in direct competition with sites like LinkedIn and Monster.com.

“We’re not going to limit ourselves to what’s possible today,” a Facebook spokesperson told Mashable. “Instead, we’re going to devote resources to develop the innovations that are going to help the job seekers of tomorrow. We’re going to invest in research in new technologies that will deliver jobs virally at no charge and expand opportunities for people to create social job searching experiences online.”

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, ilbusca

More About: Facebook, jobs, trending, U.S. Department of labor

First came the email ghostwriter. Then Oprah and Saturday Night Live and a new mansion. Now Mark Zuckerberg has moved up to the next celebrity accessory, his own security guard. More »

The following is an excerpt of an entry in our Facebook Marketing Bible. The full version contains a detailed walk-through of how to measure the lifespan of your posts through Insights, and how to optimize for gaining new fans or link clicks. 

Facebook’s new Page Insights and some third-party tools can help you determine the lifespan of your Facebook Page updates. When your updates stop receiving Likes and comments, it may be time to post a new update to make sure you’re consistently engaging your fans. Here we’ll walk-through how to find your optimal Facebook Page publishing frequency.

PageLever ran a limited study of 20 posts from five Facebook Pages with over 1 million fans. It found that that average lifespan of a Page post in the news feed was 22 hours and 51 minutes. The median lifespan was 19 hours and 30 minutes. These figures were based on when posts ceased to receive Likes and comments. Posts continued to receive impressions for a slightly longer period of time, but the bulk of feedback occurs within the first 20 hours of a post’s lifespan.

Third-party tools such as PageLever and EdgeRank Checker can track the activity on a post by the hour so you can easily get an accurate, personalized assessment of the life-span of your Page posts.

If you don’t want to use or pay for a third-party tool, assessing the lifespan of your posts is more difficult as Facebook does not report Likes, comments, or clicks by hour, just by the day and per post. However, there is a manual way to gather this data.

To do so, visit your Page and click the Insights tab in the left-sidebar navigation menu. At the bottom of the main Insights tab in the Page Posts section…

Instructions for tracking the lifespan of your posts through Insights and optimizing for news fans or link clicks can be found in the full version of this article. This is available in the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s comprehensive guide to marketing and advertising through Facebook.

About 56% of Facebook users who are aware of changes to the social network dislike them, according to a new poll.

A telephone survey of 2,000 people conducted by USA Today and Gallup found that 26% of people who use the site daily are “very concerned” about privacy vs. 35% who use it once a week. Those figures are significant in light of Facebook’s new Timeline feature, which gives users the opportunity to share their histories on the site and gives Facebook more targeted information for advertisers. Facebook’s schedule to roll out Timeline is unclear.

Facebook’s changes, however, are apparent to daily users, but not as much to the general public. Only 34% of the people surveyed were aware of the changes, although 87% of daily users were. Of users who were aware of the changes, 56% didn’t like them; 36% liked them. Those figures track closely to Mashable‘s poll of 3,200 users on Sept. 30. In that poll, about 59% of users said they couldn’t be bothered to fill in their Timelines.

The survey shows that although Facebook may be a ubiquitous part of millions of people’s lives, for many it’s still merely a curiosity.

What do you think? Do you like Facebook’s new changes? Let us know in the comments.


The New Facebook Profile: Timeline


Timeline is a radical departure from previous versions of the Facebook user profile. The most prominent feature is the addition of a cover photo at the top of the page. Users can change this to whatever they'd like it to be.
Click here to view this gallery.

More About: Facebook, Gallup, timelines

Are you a techie looking for work? We recently offered some tips on landing jobs at Google, Apple and Facebook, but there are more companies in the Valley than those three. And you might be wondering what the culture is like at each of these companies, as well as at LinkedIn, Twitter, Eventbrite, Gaia and Tagged.

Back in August, we brought you word of awesome perks at various startups; now, we bring you perks at a number of Silicon Valley’s largest and finest. From yoga to catered lunches, 401(k)s to dry cleaning, sports teams to vacation days, these tech companies seem to understand that quality of life affects productivity — and that having to run fewer errands after work means you’re more likely to stay at the office.

Check out the infographic below from ResumeBear for a breakdown of who offers what perks. Do you work at any of these companies and take advantage of any of these perks? Let us know in the comments below.

Social Media Job Listings

Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we publish a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the top social media job opportunities from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!

Interactive Designer at Weber Shandwick / Powell Tate in Washington, DC
Digital Producer at Adkeeper in New York
Software Engineer — Front End at Yelp, Inc. in San Francisco

Infographic courtesy of ResumeBear

More About: Facebook, features, Google, infographic, job search series, jobs, linkedin, mashable, Tech, trending, Twitter
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Facebook’s gone through some profound changes lately, which is exciting to us, but leaves others in a profound state of anger and frustration. Like it or not, all is not perfect with the world’s largest social network, and here’s an infographic by a company that’s more than happy to point out Facebook’s shortcomings.

This “Facebook Wall of Shame” was created by WordStream, Inc., a provider of search marketing software and services. Apparently Facebook‘s release of its iPad app left the company cold. For instance, WordStream points out how some critics who reviewed the Facebook iPad app called it “too little, too late.”

SEE ALSO: Mark Zuckerberg: “The iPad’s Not Mobile”

That iPad app’s release must have been the last straw for the company. The result? This hard-hitting infographic smackdown that reveals what WordStream calls “Facebook’s errors in judgment.” Take a look at this litany of complaints, and let us know in the comments which ones you think are justified or not.


Facebook for iPad Login Screen


The first step to Facebook for iPad is logging in.
Click here to view this gallery.

More About: Facebook, fail, infographics

Two days back my wife called me when I was in office. I said, “Rekha, I am in a meeting. Can I call you back?”

“Sure.”

And after ten minutes she called me again. I cut the call and messaged her that I couldn’t talk since I was still in the meeting. She just SMS-ed an “OK”.

After half an hour, she called again. This time I was angry and said, “Rekha…I am still in the same meeting. Don’t you understand, I am at work.”

My wife replied: “If you are in a meeting why are you commenting on your ex-girlfriend’s status updates?”

Damn! These Facebook newsfeeds. I muttered under my breath but only let out a “Hmm….”

“You have time for her, but not for me?”

“Hmmm…oh that? I was in a meeting….a boring one….so was just fiddling around with Facebook while the meeting was on.”

I waited long for a response. After a while she replied: “If the meeting was boring and useless, why not come out and talk to me?”

I tried to explain to Rekha that coming out of the meeting wasn’t a possibility but if she could come online I would be able to converse with her even if I was in a meeting. And for the sake of our four and a half year daughter Rhea, we agreed to disagree that this was the correct approach.

One thing is for sure, this Facebook is going to ruin my married life. But I am not worried much about that. I am more worried about all those boys-wanting-to-be-men who will be winding up their love affairs with a ‘it is not about you, it is about me’ comment and then start identifying the girl they want to marry and live a life with.

I can almost foresee detective companies coming up which would specialize in Facebook investigations. Companies with tag lines such as ‘Helping find the Real Him via Facebook’ or ‘Saving girls from assholes, one asshole at a time’. Shop signs such as the one showed in the picture aren’t far away.

I can foresee the girls parents visiting a private detective firm titled ‘Fancy Facebook Investigators’ and having a conversation such as this:

“We are planning to have our girl married off to a boy from Delhi.”

“Sure. Let me know how we can help you.”

“The boy’s name is Prashant Saxena. And we want to find out if he is a good fit for our innocent daughter.”

“Hmm….do you know his Facebook ID?”

“Yes…our daughter has alreday started chatting with him. His ID is: prashant.saxena.”

“And his email ID in Facebook?”

“His email ID is prashant.saxena@gmail.com”

“Thank you. Consider your job done. We will need at least 15 days. If we find him not good for your daughter, we will not just give you the proof of his past but also generate proof in the present.”

“How much will this investigation cost us?” The cost concious lady of the house will speak up.

“Madam, just think about it for a while. How much will you be willing to give to ensure your daughter has a good married life?”

I won’t go into how much these detective agencies will charge the hapless parents, but they would make a killing for sure.

And once the parents exit the scene, one young trainee will be put on the job. He will immediately use one of his Girl IDs and send a friend request to Prashant.Saxena. Being already deprived of Friend Invites from girls, the poor Prashant will will immediately accept it and fall into the trap.

Side Note: It would be great to find out what percent of the total friend invites sent out in Facebook every day are sent out by girls. I wouldn’t be surprised if it is only 1-2%. I am sure 98% of the Friend requests are sent out by the men. If there is a girl out there, the men will find her out and send her the request.

The young trainee will then go thro’ Prashant Saxena’s life history on Facebook and find out that he has changed his relationship status with different girls at least 3 times in the last four years. Based on the status updates and the comments, the young Trainee will also form a report on the kind of relationships Prashant Saxena has had with these three girls.

With the report in hand, he will go to his reporting manager to discuss the future action plan.

“Sir, Prashant Saxena has had three girl friends in the last four years. And they were all very intense relationships. Here is the report.”

The trainee’s reporting manager will go thro’ the report and finally look up and say: “This is proof of the past. We also need to prove that he hasn’t changed. Start chatting with him and get some proof of his intensions.”

“Will do sir. Just so you are aware I will be using either Priya Dixit’s or Neha Gupta’s profile for this assignment.”

“Sure. As you wish. You my man! Or should I say girl?!”

After the go ahead from his reporting manager the trainee will get onto the task of exposing Prashant’s present intensions.

This is how his initial chat conversations with Prashant start:

Priya Dixit: Hi Prashant

Prashant Saxena: Hi Priya, sorry but do I know you?

Priya Dixit: Hmmm….does that matter?

Prashant Saxena: Obviously not. It doesn’t matter but it helps.
(In such instances, a man is forced to take this stance. How many times in a lifetime does a man get a Hi from a girl anyway?)

Priya Dixit: You don’t know me. But I know you. I studied in the same college as you.

Prashant Saxena: Is it? How come we never met?

Priya Dixit: I was scared to approach you. You were so popular.
(Who doesn’t want to hear that he/she was popular in college)

Prashant Saxena: That I was. What did you study there?

Priya Dixit: I did BA Economics

Prashant Saxena: Wow. Where do you stay?
(For a man the territory is important. If there are little chances of meeting in person he won’t waste his time)

Priya Dixit: I stay in Noida. And I know you stay in Delhi….your FB profile says so.

Prashant Saxena: Yes, I stay in Delhi. Smart girl.
(A well-trained man knows that girls like to be called smart & beautiful)

Priya Dixit: Thanks. I was home alone and was getting bored so thought I might as well gather the courage to buzz you. Hope I am not disturbing me.

Prashant Saxena: No…no…not at all. In fact, I myself am bored.
(The logs in Facebook servers are proof that a man has never been too busy for a girl)

Priya Dixit: Thanks. You are a nice person.

Prashant Saxena: Thanks. Is that your real profile pic? You look pretty.

Priya Dixit: Yes of course. Why would I use somebody else’s pic?

Prashant Saxena: No just checking.

Priya Dixit: So…what else?

Prashant Saxena: What do you mean bored?

Priya Dixit: Ever since I have broken up with my boy friend three months back, life has become dull. No thrills.

Prashant Saxena: Ah! You have come to the right person.

Priya Dixit: What???!! What do you mean?
(Real girls have to do this. After years of chatting a man starts suspecting if the girl comes easy)

Prashant Saxena: Was just saying that I know Delhi-NCR region in and out. So you have come to the right person.

Priya Dixit: Better. I thought you were meant something else…you know what I mean.
(During investigations, it is the job of the trainee to lure the man into the trap by giving enough hints)

Prashant Saxena: I know what you mean. But I generally go slow.

Priya Dixit: How slow?

Prashant Saxena: As slow as the girl wants.

The chats continue for around ten days and in these ten days Prashant Saxena starts feeling that he has known the girl for ages. And when in this comfort zone he commits the blunder.

After fifteen days, the Detective agency sends its report to the girl’s parents. This is how the report looks.

Same day Prashant Saxena’s parents get a call from the girl’s parents that they aren’t interested in pursuing the relationship. Prashant is informed the moment he is back from office.

After dinner, a dejected Prashant logs on to Facebook and finds that Priya Dixit has removed him from her friend list. But wait….now Priya Dixit is friends with one of his Facebook friends and future brother-in-law Keshav Bajaj…..talks are on and Keshav might end up marrying his sister Deepika Saxena.

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Funny Articles On: ba economics, correct approach, ex girlfriend, Facebook, Love affair, married life, Men, private detective, Relationship, Relationships, shop signs, status updates, time shop

Jonathan Rick is a social media strategist in Arlington, VA. You can follow him on Twitter @jrick and read his blog at JonathanRick.com.

The pace and power of web-fueled innovation is stunning. One day we’re swearing by Outlook, the next, we can’t live without Gmail. These changes exemplify the beauty of the Internet — the possibility that greener pastures are but a click away.

On the other hand, the list of tech innovations that could have been is quite long. Before we get into those, a few caveats:

Some of the companies below may not have missed the boat so much as skipped the ride. Oftentimes, these businesses simply chose to perfect their core businesses instead of tacking on new features.
None of these companies has been “MySpaced.” To the contrary, each remains well-regarded and innovative in its own right.

So, how did tech companies miss the boat?

1. Google Docs missed the SlideShare boat. Sure, Google Docs can display PDFs and PPTs, but documents are slow to load, maximized by default, and can’t easily be shared or embedded. By contrast, SlideShare is known as “YouTube for documents” because it’s fast, user-friendly and social.

2. Google Docs missed the Dropbox boat. The search giant passed on adding synchronization to Google Docs (or GDrive). Meanwhile, Dropbox pioneered this feature, for which it’s now the gold standard. And, in an ironic twist, during a five-day, company-wide hackathon, Dropbox developed the ability to sync its accounts with Google Docs. (Although Google may soon unleash a Dropbox killer.)

3. Microsoft Office missed the Google Docs boat. Only after companies, governments and non-profits had “gone Google” did Redmond release a cloud-based, collaborative version of its cash cow, Office (along with a few videos that contrast Office with Docs).

4. iTunes missed the Spotify boat. Apple cornered the digital music market years ago, but besides the all-important $0.99 per song price tag, Cupertino never really innovated with iTunes. Specifically, the software’s lack of social and streaming services created massive opportunities that Spotify — and Pandora, Amazon, Google, and Facebook — pounced on. Apple now is playing catch-up with Ping (pathetic) and iCloud (promising).

5. Mapquest missed the Google Maps boat. When I was in college, “Mapquest” was so popular that we used it as a verb. Today, it seems the only people who use this site are those who still have an AOL email address. The reason: thanks to relentless innovation (mash-ups, Street View, GPS-enabled mobile apps), Google Maps has presented itself everywhere you want to travel.

6. Google Latitude missed the Foursquare boat. Ironically, the founder of Foursquare was a former Googler who left because Mountain View wouldn’t allocate enough resources to his team, “leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space.” Google still hasn’t made it with Latitude, whereas Foursquare’s points system, partnership with American Express, and merchant features have generated growth of a million users per month. (Perhaps this is why Google may want to buy Foursquare instead of compete with it.)

7. Facebook missed the LinkedIn boat. When I learned of LinkedIn, I thought, can’t you already do this with Facebook? Well, yes, but not without some hassle. Reed Hoffman, LinkedIn’s founder, recognized that, while we want to be hip in our personal lives, we strive to be practical and maybe even a little boring in our careers. This is why we use one email address for pleasure and one for business, and why we use Facebook to socialize with friends and LinkedIn to network with colleagues. Recognizing this, Facebook continues to hype its business pages, while such professional credibility comes naturally to LinkedIn.

8. Facebook missed the Twitter boat. When I learned of Twitter, I thought, can’t you already do this with Facebook? Indeed, at its core, Twitter is merely the Facebook status update. Yet Facebook lacked Twitter’s simplicity and pith, a void that ascetic Twitter founder, Jack Dorsey, was keen to fill. Apparently, 100 million people agree.

9. Blogger and WordPress missed the Tumblr boat. Finally, when I learned of Tumblr, I thought, can’t you already do this with Blogger or WordPress? Just write shorter. Again, you could, but not with Tumblr’s base-bones simplicity, dynamic community and effective reblogging feature. Microblogging, it turns out, is different from blogging. (No doubt, this is why Blogger just announced Dynamic Views.)

10. Yelp missed the Foodspotting boat. Even though Yelp remains the top social network for restaurant reviews, it overlooked an essential facet of the dining experience: pictures. Foodspotting seized this opening, made it mobile, and now is expanding its focus beyond foodies.

So why do these examples matter?

The beauty of the web is that it dramatically lowers the traditional barriers to entry, so an entrepreneur can penetrate an already saturated market. For instance, despite heavy competition from the likes of LinkedIn, Yahoo, Facebook, Google-owned Aardvark, and Answers.com, Quora plunged into the Q&A fray. In short order, it carved out and capitalized on a niche.

Examine the above list and you arrive at an under-appreciated conclusion: Internet innovation is so fierce and constant that it undermines the notion of zero-sum market share. Instead of vying for a piece of the same fixed and static pie, webtrepreneurs bake whole new pies. Not for nothing does Jeff Bezos insist that the Kindle comprises a “different product category” than the iPad. Just because a company maintains a seeming monopoly on a market doesn’t mean the market is devoid of opportunities. When there’s an innovator, there’s a way. With the web, Goliath is always vulnerable.

Sure, tech giants are somewhat limited. Just reference the lawsuit from the Justice Department, the investigation from the Federal Trade Commission or the hearing from Congress.

Internet innovation comes in tidal waves, big and bold. By contrast, when’s the last time your microwave got a radical upgrade? Or your shower head? And how’s that electric car coming along?

In the end, the web’s rising tides lift the only ship that matters: the user’s.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, aluxum

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Facebook is granting all developers access to a new application authentication flow today that was announced at f8 last month. Developers can now add a description of their app that will be displayed in a redesigned publishing permissions dialog. Extended permissions have been broken out into a second authentication step that explains why an app needs certain data, and lets users revoke specific permissions. Data about publishing permissions dialog impressions and accepts, sources of users, and extended permissions conversion rates are now included in Facebook’s app Insights analytics tool.

The changes will make it clearer to users what permissions they are granting applications, and give them more control of their privacy. The two-step authentication process could increase app install friction in a way that could hurt app growth. However, in the long-run, the revised authentication flow could increase user confidence in the Platform such that users become more comfortable experimenting with new apps.

Facebook has also changed the way it measures active user counts to only publicly report authenticated users, rather than all users. We’ve written a separate article discussing how this will cause a one-time dip in active user counts that does not actually mean apps have lost users, and explaining how this impacts our AppData tracking service.

Redesigned Permissions Dialog
Previously, users only had to accept one extended permissions dialog to give an application publishing privileges and access to their data. The permissions dialog didn’t explain what that data would be used for, or what the app would publish to a user’s profile. This meant users would sometimes grant privileges they didn’t understand and would get angry when they saw the app had published on their behalf.

The redesigned authentication flow aims to solve this problem. First, users see a dialog asking for permission to install the app and allow it to publish Open Graph activity. It shows users:

The name  and logo of the app
A tag line about the app
A privacy selector for choosing who it can share with
A list of the data types it requires
An “About this app” description of its purpose
Open Graph aggregations previews that show what it can add to a user’s profile Timeline
A link to the Facebook terms of service and privacy policy
A tiny link to report the app as spam
Friends who’ve installed the app
A “Log In and Add t0 Facebook” accept button

Developers can configure what appears in the dialog and the default privacy setting by entering the Developers app and selecting Settings -> Auth Dialog. Once they’ve properly configured the dialog, they can implement it by enabling “Enhanced Auth Dialog” in the Migrations section of the Developers app’s “Advanced Settings”. Facebook says all apps will be migrated to the redesigned dialog by the end of 2011, though it hasn’t released exact migration dates.

Open Graph app developers reorder the aggregation previews. These previews of what an app will publish represent a significant step forward in increasing transparency in the app install process. Facebook could further improve transparency by including a sample Ticker or news feed story from the app in the previews.

Separate Extended Permissions Dialog and Authenticated Referrals
Apps requiring additional, optional privileges such as the ability to publish check-ins or post to a user’s wall will display a second extended permissions dialog after users complete the initial install dialog. This step includes clear descriptions of what each permission means and the option to deny the app these non-essential privileges. Below, the dialog is an explanation provided by the developer for why it requires these permissions.

Before the redesign, users had to grant apps all the extended permissions and then dig into their app privacy settings to revoke certain permissions. This can now be handled as users install an app. Developers should reference the tutorial Facebook posted this week to ensure their apps run properly if some permissions are revoked.

This granular control may improve app install rates from users who are sensitive about a certain type of privacy, such those who don’t want to provide contact information or have content published to the stream on their behalf.

Authenticated Referrals is another option available in the Auth Dialog settings that when enabled causes users clicking a link to an app to see the authentication flow in-line being being brought to the app. This is useful for apps that require user data or permissions to function. It allows them to remove the awkward pre-permissions landing page and provide a personalized experience when users first arrive.

Authentication Data in App Insights
App Insights now displays impressions and accepts, sources of users, and the what privacy setting users are selecting for the authentication dialog and authenticated referrals. The authentication conversion rate will help developers determine if they are asking for too many or unnecessary permissions, or that they need to reword their their explanation for asking for permissions.

Extended permissions are each listed separately in Insights, and display their impressions, click through rate, and how many times they’ve been accepted. Developers can then identify extended permissions with low conversion rates that they may want to stop asking for.

The way applications use or abuse the permissions process has been a problem for Facebook in the past. Without enough transparency, some users would end up regretting that they installed an app that published or content or used their data in ways they didn’t want. They might then blame the Facebook Platform rather than the developer, leading them to avoid using applications in the future.

This increase in transparency and enhanced granular app privacy controls should give users a much clearer sense of what and with who they’re sharing. With time, Facebook may be able to remove the privacy stigma around apps and create a Platform more users want to engage with and more developers want to work on.

Today, Facebook announced that, along with the redesigned permissions dialog it introduced at f8, it’s also making a change to the way it counts active users on canvas applications to only count those who are logged in as active users. This means that users who hit the permissions dialog but choose to not authenticate the app, or who visit the app without logging in (for those apps that allow that behavior), will no longer be included in active user counts.

Thus, because most apps at least have users who see the permission dialog but don’t log in, we are expecting to see a one-time decline in those stats as documented on AppData.com associated with this change. This will appear in AppData starting 15 October. It’s important to note that this change doesn’t correlate to any actual change in traffic to apps. The numbers will now simply no longer include users who don’t log in. Facebook says this change will not affect Connect apps or Page tabs.

Since the Facebook Platform launched in 2007, Facebook has updated the methodology it uses to count active users for platform applications a few times. For example, last August, Facebook tweaked its formula to no longer include people who like or comment on feed items shared by applications. As we said at the time regarding that change, “We think this change to the way Facebook calculates active users for applications makes a lot of sense. People who like or comment on stream content published by an app shouldn’t be counted as active users like canvas page viewers are.”

Similarly, we think this update by Facebook is a good one, as it will mean that the active user counts now more accurately reflect actual “active usage” of applications. People who choose not to log in to applications, but bounce from the permissions dialog, should not be counted as active users.

I have always admired Yahoo’s Chief Trust Officer Anne Toth, given she has done a great job articulating privacy issues at the Silicon Valley Internet giant. It is one of the areas where Yahoo truly shines.

But I really like the way she quit Yahoo after more than a dozen years there, with a very adorkable and classy status update on Facebook. It’s done with respect for the company and a lot of humor.

I don’t need to say more, except read it:

It’s official — I’ve broken up with my partner of 13 years. Yahoo!, I want you to know that it’s not you. It’s *me*. Really. After 13 years, I am just not the same person I was when we met. It’s not a midlife crisis. It’s just time to move on. Try new things. You’ll always be my first…Internet company. You changed my life and I will remember you forever. I know you’ll have a hard time adjusting at first, but once you find a new privacy person, you’ll forget about me in a heartbeat. Company’s are fickle that way. But we had something really special. A unique bond. I hope you’ll remember me for giving you the best years of my life.

Earlier this month we told you how Napster founder Sean Parker tipped a West Hollywood waitress $5,000 during a big night out with friends. Turns out Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was one of those friends, and the night ended with him and Parker in a drunken "screaming match." More »

Talk of government regulation of web entities has been all over the news lately, from the near daily privacy complaints to Google’s antitrust woes to questions about how the Fourth Amendment applies to email. While these are important discussions to have, almost every attempt to shoehorn current practices into existing legal frameworks suffers from a common problem: Yesterday’s laws are antiquated in a web-driven world that rarely sits still.

Software development is always evolving and advancing, and business models and cultural norms evolve along with it. Entirely new capabilities spring up regularly, and business models can change overnight, meaning a law written to address a specific concern can fast become obsolete or, perhaps worse, a hindrance to innovation. Three recent situations illustrate what I’m talking about.

Netflix, Facebook and privacy
I’ve discussed the issue of online privacy in numerous posts, and two considerations strike me as absolutely critical. One is that in the free-to-consumers-but-ad-supported business model that underpins most social media, data is the currency. Failure to recognize this and allow certain freedoms could cripple not only the user experience, but also the high rate of analytics innovation that companies like Facebook produce.

Another — probably even more important issue — is an apparent failure to acknowledge that social norms are changing with regard to how willingly citizens share their information. My colleague Ryan Lawler wrote about a prime example of this disconnect earlier this week, in the form of congressmen debating the decades-old, reactionary and wholly archaic Video Privacy Protection Act that currently prevents U.S. consumers from automatically displaying their Netflix rentals on Facebook.

That law, which prohibits companies from publicly sharing viewer records, “was enacted in the wake of the Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination hearings (after Bork’s video rental records were released to a newspaper by his local video store).”

The problem — aside from the its reactionary and therefore inherently inflexible foundation — is that the law was written in an era when video stores still existed (and were the primary method of renting movies, in fact) and well before the advent of social media. In the latter world, automation and APIs rule, and many users really do want what Facebook calls “frictionless sharing.” Certainly, many more will want it in the future. That might not comport with many congresspersons’ views on personal privacy, but it’s reality.

Google’s violating antitrust laws in what market, exactly?
The recent congressional inquiry into Google’s trade practices highlights the bad fit between traditional antitrust law and the web. Mathew Ingram has written a lot about why the questions about Google’s search dominance are misguided, addressing the question of whether there’s such a thing as consumer harm when we’re talking about free products that no one is forced to use. That point alone highlights a big difference between the web and traditional businesses, but there’s another consideration that’s even more damning.

However, as Mathew also points out, the web world is one of constant disruption, and Google, despite its considerable size, is constantly fighting to define its place in the ecosystem. Antitrust violations require abusing one’s power in a particular market, and Google doesn’t operate in a clearly defined market of any sort. In its inquiry, Congress focused heavily on search as the relevant market, but that’s fast becoming yesterday’s news. As Google continues losing traffic to Facebook and other platforms, search becomes part of a broader effort that includes social elements, location services and other components.

This raises questions around how to define the market in which Google actually plays, and whether it’s actually even in the lead. Sure, there’s search for the sake of search, but if Google’s search engine is part of a greater platform market that aims to connect users with relevant information, services and other people, then it’s arguable that Google doesn’t have a monopoly position at all.

No warrant needed for tweets
Then there’s the old argument over what web-based activities are covered by the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure. This issue reared its head again when we learned that Twitter, Google and an ISP called Sonic.net had been forced to turn over information about a particular WikiLeaks supporter. The law in question, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (or ECPA), was enacted in 1986 — ages ago in technology terms — and services such as Twitter fall far beyond its scope.

There’s a fair amount of momentum to amend the act (something attorney Nolan Goldberg and I discussed during a chat at Structure 2011), but you have to wonder how thoroughly that actually can be done. We still don’t really know how it applies to email, especially of the web-based variety. But in the past few years alone Facebook, Twitter, text messages and other communication methods have usurped email’s dominance.

Assuming an amended ECPA fairly addresses today’s forms of electronic communications, it will take some careful wording to account for tomorrow’s methods that have yet to emerge. The alternative, given the pace of innovation, is a constant battle over what communications are constitutionally protected, which only serves to hinder adoption and stoke fears over undue government surveillance.

There’s no easy answer
Unfortunately, while it’s easy to criticize existing laws, figuring out a workable strategy for regulating the web is difficult. Laws and regulations by nature involve establishing boundaries so those of us tasked with following them know what we can and can’t do. But because code can be edited, added and rolled back with relative ease, nothing is ever static — and we don’t always know what we’ll be doing next.

Image courtesy of Flickr user RecoilRick.

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Angry Birds creator Rovio Entertainment may go public as soon as next year and is worth around $1 billion, according to Rovio’s chief marketing officer.

Peter Vesterbacka, Rovio CMO, told Bloomberg Television that the company will launch an IPO “maybe a year from now.”

Vesterbacka also said that Rovio’s market capitalization, which had been estimated at around $1 billion is actually “a bit north of that.”

Rovio earns its revenues from in-game purchases and Angry Birds merchandise, including plush toys and baby products. The company is also planning an Angry Birds movie and TV programming.

The company has expressed its intention to go public before but has never been clear on a timeframe. It would presumably join other social media companies, including Zynga, Groupon and Facebook, that plan to test the stock market with an IPO.


1. Smartphone Apps


Where the revolution began: Angry Birds first released the game onto Apple's iOS in December 2009.
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Today we talked about internet oversharing. It is annoying! And yet it is everywhere these days. This sparked a conversation about everything from blogs to Facebook (that whole wide gap!). Can't we just scrap it all? Apparently not, says a commenter. More »

Facebook has yet to create an easy and obvious way for users to Like the Pages of musicians they listen to, costing artists significant marketing opportunities. Since the listening activity of Spotify, Rdio, and other music service users began being automatically shared to the social network late last month, Facebook Pages of musicians have not been gaining fans any faster.

Musical artists and record labels should push Facebook to implement a better retention mechanism that helps them convert listeners into fans who they can then reach with marketing updates through the news feed. This could come in the form of a Like button for an artist’s Page on feed stories about users listening to them, or a a “Recommended Musicians” panel that suggests users Like the artists they listen to most.

Until then, Facebook is gaining compelling feed stories about listening habits and data it can monetize through ad targeting without returning the favor to musicians.

Musicians Need Likes, Not Listens, to Make Money
Currently, to Like an artist they have been listening to, users have to find a story about their listening activity in the news feed, Ticker, or Timeline. The use can then click through the artist’s name to visit their Page and Like them. A lesser known method is to hover over the artist’s name and use the Like button in the hover card. The hidden buttons and high friction flows mean only users already intent on Liking an artist will become fans.

Facebook’s music partnerships are making some money for musicians by driving usage of streaming services that pay out royalties when an artist’s songs are streamed. However, these royalties can be just a fraction of a cent per listen. Artists depend on concert ticket and merchandise sales that Facebook’s music apps aren’t helping them increase directly.

Many artists use their Facebook Pages to promote their tours and merchandise lines in the news feed, but only fans receive these updates — not listeners. However, the 20 most popular musician Facebook Pages and the Pages of a dozen smaller artists we checked showed no increase in the rate of new Likes starting on September 22nd when the music partnerships launched. Therefore, it’s important that Facebook make it easier for users to Like the artists listen to.

How Facebook Could Improve Listener Retention for Pages
There are several ways Facebook could do this. This simplest and probably the most effective way would be to add a prominent, one-click “Like this artist” button to stories about listening activity, as mocked up below. When users see who they’ve been listening to on their profile Timeline, or discover a new artist by clicking through a story about a friend’s listening activity, they could then instantly become a fan.

Facebook could also create a “Recommended Musicians” sidebar module that could be displayed to users while they browse the site or on the Music Dashboard that aggregates their network’s listening activity. It could show Like buttons for the artists they or their friends have been listening to most. There’s already a Top Songs module in the Music Dashboard that could be augmented with a Like button as I’ve mocked up below.

Getting more users Liking musician Pages could also benefit Facebook. These Likes fill a user’s new feed with rich content that increases return visits and time-on-site. They provide advertisers with something to target that can be indicative of a potential customer’s lifestyle. Finally, musicians own 37 of the top 100 most popular Facebook Pages, which shows how central people see music to expressing their identity — one of Facebook’s overall goals.

There are some issues with reducing friction in the musician Page Like process I’ve described. Placing a Page Like button near an activity story’s Like button could cause confusion. Also, Facebook not want to drive more Likes to a category of Pages that already has lots of fans. Still, these are users who are already listening to an artist — it’s not far fetched to think they might be interested in Liking that artist’s Page if given a chance.

If Facebook want to keep musicians from bringing their content and fans to another social platform happy, and compensate them for the engaging listening activity stories they power, it should bridge listening and Liking.

Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook "timeline" just went up, and it paints the billionaire mogul as a harmless dork. Rock, paper, scissors tournament, check; fleece and gym shorts in Morocco, check; weird self portrait , check. But Obama thinks he's dope. Of course. More »

Zynga may be best known for its hit online and mobile games — household names such as FarmVille and Words with Friends — but the company has its eye on a much bigger prize. On Tuesday, Zynga held “Zynga Unleashed,” its first major press event at the company’s expansive new headquarters in San Francisco to give the public a look at the size and scope of its ambitions.

“We’re not trying to be the company that makes the next hit game,” Zynga’s founder and CEO Mark Pincus said. “We’re trying to do something broader than that. We’re trying to make a platform for play… We want to inspire you to connect with more people in meaningful ways, similar to what Facebook’s doing but at a game level.”

Project Z unveiled
As part of that mission, Zynga unveiled Zynga Direct, which Pincus said is an over-arching strategy that has been in the works for two years to let Zynga establish a direct relationship with its users — as opposed to accessing them through a third-party platform like Facebook. The first move in the Zynga Direct strategy is the upcoming launch of a social games platform, which has been codenamed internally Project Z. Project Z isn’t launching now, but starting Tuesday, users can reserve “gamer identity tags” known as zTags at ztag.zynga.com.

Zynga Direct's zTag signup page (click to enlarge)

At the press event, Zynga COO John Schappert described Project Z as “a platform that leverages your incredible network of Facebook friends to play in an environment made just for games.” Within Project Z users will be able to play any Zynga game within the same environment on any browser. Since Project Z is enabled by Facebook Connect, it’s not completely independent of third-party platforms, but it is certainly a major autonomous step for Zynga.

Also on Tuesday, Zynga announced several new games, including CastleVille, Hidden Chronicles and Zynga Casino featuring Zynga Bingo. The company also said it will soon have three HTML5 games that run on Facebook’s new HTML5-powered mobile site.

Showing financial strength — very quietly
Since the company has filed its S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission in anticipation of the initial public offering of its stock, Zynga is currently in a “quiet period” that forbids its executives from talking about business or financial details. But while Zynga kept the conversation purely focused on its products, and not the massive amount of money they pull in, the company is clearly keen to show off the way it has been reinvesting its sizable revenues into new initiatives.

Zynga currently has 1,700 employees, half of whom are engineers, and company CTO Cadir Lee said it is investing heavily in technology development and infrastructure. “We’re one of the world’s largest users of public and private cloud computing,” Lee said, adding that Zynga “has been known to deploy 1,000 servers in a week.”

That certainly sounds like a lot, but for a company looking to raise up to $1 billion in its planned IPO, it is actually right on track. One thing is clear: There’s a lot of serious money behind all of Zynga’s fun and games.

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The real-time search engine Topsy, which has until now indexed Twitter, today adds public Google+ posts.

In what it says is an improvement on Google’s newly added Google+ search feature, Topsy says it ranks search results by trying to determine which users and posts are most globally and recently relevant for the query, rather than whether a user is close to or within the searcher’s Google+ network.

Google isn’t handing out much access to Google+ to developers yet, so Topsy is crawling the site’s public posts. That’s different from how Topsy indexes Twitter, which is through an agreement to use the official Firehose of all user tweets.

It’s unclear how many people are using Google+ these days, though user registrations seem to have ballooned up to at least the 50 million mark. According to Topsy’s observations, the number of public posts and comments on Google+ had grown to two million per day as of last week, up from 200,000 when it opened to the general public.

It should be possible to use Topsy search to get a better idea of how big Google+ is — or at least how big public behavior on the site is. For instance, Topsy execs told me Google+ was already getting 100,000 videos posted per week, compared to 200,000 posted on Twitter. After I mentioned how much it seems Google+ people like to bitch about Facebook, they found 82,000 mentions of Facebook on the site in the previous day.

Those numbers change every day, but now that Topsy’s Google+ search is open to the public, users can check for themselves.

Topsy has worked on, but never released, search for public Facebook posts, which it said Facebook makes difficult by throttling API access and other means. The search start-up might next release search for sites like Quora or blogs, the execs said.

Dungeon Masters, start your engines. Dungeons & Dragons, the original table-top role-playing game, is coming to Facebook.

Atari has created a new social game for Facebook called Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of Neverwinter.” Players can customize their own characters, find loot and fight ghastly, digital beasts.

The app looks much like a top-down strategy game — and somewhat similar to the actual style of the tabletop version.

While the game is known for long sessions and user-created narratives, Heroes of Neverwinter offers short bursts of gameplay and a largely standardized plot from the game’s creators. Fans of the slower, more complex original might decry this as breaking from the game’s roots, but it’s probably a smart move to appeal to social gamers who are, for the most part, casual users who play for shorter periods of time.

The game will feature more than 50 dungeons, 40 monsters, 30 skills and hundreds of items. Gamers can play solo, recruit friends or even become a sort of digital Dungeon Master and come up with their own mini-narratives as side quests.

Heroes of Neverwinter, which is currently in open-beta, joins a group of other games targeted to nostalgic players. Oregon Trail received a social gaming update for Facebook, and The Sims Social has been one of the top Facebook games since its launch at the end of summer.

It’s good to know Heroes of Neverwinter hasn’t foregone the traits that made its tabletop ancestor so popular. But will it be able to attract new users without alienating its base? If a sentence like: “Legions of Halflings, Dragonborn, and Eladrin will sharpen their blades and ready their spells as Facebook players around the world create their unique heroes and set forth for adventure!” appeals, this social game might just have some legs.

Will you gear up for Dungeons & Dragons as a social game? Let us know in the comments.

More About: Facebook, Gaming, social gaming
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Facebook for iPad (click to enlarge)

Facebook for iPad is finally here. On Monday the social networking company debuted its long-awaited native application for the iPad, capping off months of speculation of the whens and hows of the potential launch.

The app’s interface is made to be especially fitting with the iPad experience, particularly when browsing photos. “Give the screen a swipe to page through albums. Pinch a picture to zoom in,” Facebook mobile engineer Leon Dubinsky wrote in a blog post announcing the launch. “Photos really shine on the iPad. They’re bigger and easy to flip through, like a real photo album.”

The app, which Facebook says is available in the Apple App Store now, also has a few new features for the iPad, including the ability to chat with friends, play Facebook games in full-screen mode, and watch high-resolution videos in the app.

Along with the iPad app launch, Facebook said Monday it has made several improvements to Facebook for iPhone and Facebook’s mobile website, m.facebook.com. “In your next update, you’ll see a simplified navigation, faster search and access to more games and apps,” Dubinsky wrote.

Here are some screenshots of Facebook for iPad (click to enlarge):

    

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Despite the challenges social media presents for human resources professionals, it plays a growing role in talent recruitment. The big question, though, is where to find talent.

While employers continue to use professional networking site LinkedIn for recruiting, especially when hand-picking for executive positions, they prefer interacting with students and graduates via Facebook rather than LinkedIn, according to a study by online recruiting research lab Potentialpark.

For the study, Potentialpark surveyed more than 30,000 students and graduates worldwide and analyzed the online career presence of more than 500 companies in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Since the data has not yet been published online, Mashable spoke with Potentialpark about its findings.

Within the European survey respondents, 48% said they prefer to connect with recruiters via LinkedIn, while only 25% said they prefer connecting via Facebook. When asked to explain their reservations about Facebook, the majority of respondents said Facebook is “not the right place” to interact with employers or that they are “uncomfortable sharing private information.”

These findings aren’t shocking, as privacy seems to be a common theme when it comes to employment and Facebook. But these reservations aren’t keeping employers from getting active on Facebook. Potentialpark found that more than one-third of the top 100 employers in Europe have a Facebook Page for recruitment purposes, many of them with more than 1,000 fans.

So, why are employers so interested in connecting with recruits on the world’s largest social network if candidates seem creeped out by Facebooking with recruiters?

Potentialpark interviewed HR professionals about their motivation to be active on Facebook and found that they had multiple reasons for involvement. Here’s an overview of reasons why recruiters cited a preference for Facebook when dealing with young talent:

1. It’s more engaging. With Facebook, employers can follow a “let them come to us” strategy by setting up a business page for recruitment and career purposes. Recruiters noted that the interesting content on pages leads to comments, discussions and more personal interactions. With LinkedIn, the communication is very much one-way in the recruiting world, as employers proactively search for candidates and message them.
2. Facebook is where the action is. Recruiters perceive that few students and recent graduates actively update their LinkedIn profiles, whereas they are quite active on Facebook. Therefore, it just makes sense to connect with them where they already hang out online.
3. It’s free. Employers like that Facebook enables them to upload advanced recruitment content, such as testimonials, videos, pictures or a job search — and it’s all free of charge. This broad range of tools enables a company to showcase itself as an attractive employer.
4. It’s a bigger network. Facebook offers a larger audience, with more than 800 million active users worldwide, compared with LinkedIn’s user base of around 120 million members.
5. It’s more open. Facebook is free for all members and requires no premium accounts to use certain features. As a result, it’s a more open network than LinkedIn.
6. The Like button. When it comes to career website integration, Facebook takes the cake — Facebook feeds and the Like button are easier to integrate.
7. It’s better for branding. Recruiters report they tend toward LinkedIn and other business networks for networking, screening and recruiting. However, when it comes to employer branding activities and talent communication — especially with students, graduates and early career professionals — many prefer Facebook.

Having an active presence on Facebook is certainly a great start for employers looking to attract and communicate with young talent.

Do you think Facebook trumps LinkedIn when it comes to interacting with employers? Tell us in the comments below.

Social Media Job Listings

Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we publish a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the top social media job opportunities from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!

Social Media Specialist at The Madison Square Garden Company in New York
Senior Vice President – Digital at Edelman PR in Los Angeles
Senior Social Media Manager at DocuSign in San Francisco

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, ilbusca

More About: Facebook, features, job search series, linkedin, mashable, Recruiting

Facebook user Benito Apolinar, who hails from the great state of Texas, had posted a loving status update to his Facebook page on the anniversary of his mother's death. Then he waited for the "likes" to roll in. You know how that is: One finds a strange sense of fulfillment in near-meaningless clicks of approval from friends and acquaintances and friends of acquaintances. More »

Facebook’s business is built on trust, but that trust has been shaken over the past few weeks by criticism and speculation regarding how it uses browser cookies to get data about users.

A lack of thorough documentation explaining what each of its cookies does has led some observers to assume that the company is tracking offsite browsing behavior in order to target ads. Facebook needs to provide explanations for both the average user and privacy researchers about how exactly its cookies work in order to prevent these press flare-ups from giving users a negative impression and bringing on regulatory scrutiny from governments.

Some bloggers claim cookies left by Facebook and third-party sites that integrate its social plugins indicate that the company is tracking users’ web browsing behavior, then using that data to target ads in a way that violates user privacy. Facebook has refuted the claims, saying that users agree to receive the cookies and that the cookies are used to enhance site security and power the social plugins, not create a profile of a user’s offsite behavior to better target ads against.

Unfortunately for Facebook, the claims are still giving off a negative impression of the service and sparking complaint letters to government agencies from privacy advocate groups. A patent application for the company’s social plugins that included language about tracking and targeting ads has also helped fuel the controversy.

While Facebook does currently include some explanation of how it uses cookies in its privacy policy and Help Center, this information clearly isn’t complete, comprehensible, or prominent enough to deflect criticism. Facebook engineer Gregg Stefancik, who has responded to critics on blog comments, even noted “we haven’t done as good a job as we could have to explain our cookie practices.”

Facebook could have avoided much of the crises by being more transparent about it how it uses cookies. We believe Facebook should consider drawing up two dedicated documents explaining how it uses cookies and tracks offsite activity. Much like its “re-imagined privacy policy”, there could be one simple version designed for the average user and a second detailed version for privacy advocates. The company also needs to demonstrate that is doing what it says it in a way that observable by outside parties.

Cookie Criticism: The Issues to Date
Since the launch of social plugins and before, Facebook has left cookies on the browsers of people who sign up for accounts as well as anyone else who visits Facebook.com. These cookies are used to protect the site against hacking attempts and to show logged in users what their friends have Liked on third-party sites, the company has repeatedly said.

Facebook’s privacy policy says the following: “We receive data whenever you visit a game, application, or website that uses Facebook Platform or visit a site with a Facebook feature (such as a social plugin). This may include the date and time you visit the site; the web address, or URL, you’re on; technical information about the IP address, browser and the operating system you use; and, if you are logged in to Facebook, your User ID.”

The Help Center follows with more detail: “We use cookies to make Facebook better and easier to use, to provide you with a more personalized experience, to improve the ads that you see, and to protect you, others, and Facebook from malicious activity. We do not use cookies to create a profile of your browsing behavior on third-party sites or to show you ads, although we may use anonymous or aggregate data to improve ads generally.”

In May 2011, The Wall Street Journal reported that Dutch security researcher Arnold Roosendaal discovered that sites integrating Facebook’s social plugins were leaving cookies on the browsers of users who had never visited Facebook.com and were transmitting browsing data back to Facebook. Facebook said this was a bug and that it discontinued the practice of social plugins leaving the “datr” cookie.

On September 25th, 2011, Nik Cubrilovic wrote that Facebook was maintaining several cookies on the browsers of users even after they log out, and that these cookies include a User ID and could be used to target ads.

Facebook engineer Gregg Stafancik responded that the cookies were used for security purposes, not ad targeting, stating that “generally, unlike other major Internet companies, we have no interest in tracking people. We don’t have an ad network and we don’t sell people’s information.” He then outlined how Facebook uses its cookies:

The logged out cookies, specifically, are used primarily for safety and security protections, including:
– Identifying and disabling spammers and phishers
– Disabling registration if an underage user tries to re-register with a different birth date
– Helping people recover hacked accounts
– Powering account security features, such as login approvals and notifications
– Identifying shared computers to discourage the use of “Keep me logged in.”

He repeated that the cookie that identifies a user was the result of a bug. He noted “thanks, again for raising these important issues. We haven’t done as good a job as we could have to explain our cookie practices. Your post presents a great opportunity for us to fix that.”  The information Stefancik detailed in the comments of the post about how cookies are used for logged out users currently appears in the Help Center, although it’s unclear if it was added here since Cubrilovic’s post was published.

On September 27th, Cubrilovic wrote that Facebook had fixed the bug causing the cookie containing UIDs to be retained after log out, and that this cookie was now destroyed after log out.

On October 1st, Uncrunched published an article titled “Brutal Dishonesty” outlining how Facebook had said it does not track users, but that on September 22nd filed a patent application that includes the line “A method is described for tracking information about the activities of users of a social networking system while on another domain.” The language in the patent indicated that the information at least had the potential to be used to target Facebook ads.

A Facebook representative commented on the post in an official capacity to say that the patent merely describes how Facebook’s social plugins work to show logged in Facebook users the Likes of their friends without them having to log into Facebook again on a third-party site. The comment downplayed the idea that Facebook is currently using the data to target ads — although we don’t have a way to independently verify if it is or isn’t, or that it won’t in the future.

On October 3rd, Cubrilovic wrote that he had discovered the datr cookie was still being left by some Facebook-integrated third-party websites. In response to Facebook’s claim that it doesn’t track users, he wrote “I believe them when they say this and that they are not hiding anything, but I also believe that our definitions of tracking differ. If you set a cookie on a users machine from one website, and then read that cookie from that person’s machine from another website, that is tracking.”

Stefancik then commented on the post on the morning of October 4th to say that “as we discussed last week, we are examining our cookie setting behavior to make sure we do not inadvertently receive  data that could be associated with a specific person not logged into Facebook. We have been made aware of 2 instances in the past 2 weeks related to cookies which needed to be addressed. What you describe in this post is not a re-enabling of anything, but a separate issue involving a limited number of sites, including CBSSports. We have moved quickly to investigate and resolve this latest issue which will be fully addressed today.”

Facebook Needs Documentation to Refer to
The fact that Facebook had to comment directly on three blog posts in an attempt to debunk speculation shows there is a lack of clear documentation explaining its use of cookies. By publishing its responses as governing documents and making them easy to find, Facebook could address users’ questions before they draw their own, sometimes-negative conclusions about the company’s intentions.

We should note that a wide variety of other web companies, specifically online advertising service providers, have aggressively tracked and in many cases inappropriately used information about users, often aggregating and reselling user data without the user having any idea of what they are doing. Facebook wants to be seen as above the controversies surrounding the industry — and because so many users opt in to share their data to Facebook by joining and using the service, that claim appears to by and large be true. Yet the combination of unclear explanations, past issues, and the patent are getting in the way of its effort to explain its case.

The onus is now on Facebook to fully explain how it does and does not track users across the web and use that information back on Facebook — and prove what it says through the technology that it deploys across the web.

If this then that – or ifttt – is a tool that allows you to connect various other tools together to create rules or tasks. It allows you to connect 17 channels, including SMS, Facebook, WordPress and Dropbox, offering 1040 possible task combinations.
The most popular ‘recipe’, a task designed and shared by others, will give you an idea of how ifttt works. This recipe allows you to connect your Facebook and Dropbox accounts so that when someone tags you in a photo on Facebook, the photo will be added to your Dropbox folder (cloud storage allowing you to access your files on different devices).

Here are ten ifttt recipes for journalists:
1. When you receive an email from a key contact or your editor, you receive an SMS
You no doubt receive scores of emails but there are some senders that are more important to hear from than others. This recipe allows you to set up a key contact, such as a source or your editor, and receive a SMS whenever that person emails you.

2. When you post a link to Delicious, add to Dropbox
If you use Delicious to bookmark interesting stories, this recipe allows you to also save the links to Dropbox. For example, I am interested in new smartphone apps so have set up a connection so that any Delicious bookmark that I tag “app” is posted to a folder in my Dropbox account.

3. Post Google+ posts to your Facebook page
Google+ adds additional responsibility for anyone in the newsroom tasked with managing social media.
It is widely recognised that non-automated posts are best when it comes to Facebook and Google+. This recipe allows you to write a link post in Google+ and automatically post the link to your site’s Facebook page. You can also create a rule to post status updates.
To do this you need to set up an RSS feed of your Google+ account. Copy your Google+ ID, which is the long number in the URL of your Google+ profile, and paste it on the end of http://plu.sr/feed.php?plusr=. My Google+ feed is therefore http://plu.sr/feed.php?plusr=107031542976965456407, for example.

4. Create an Evernote every time you star an item in Google Reader
If you use Google Reader as your RSS feed reader and want a quick way of saving key articles to Evernote, this is a solution.

5. Post to Instapaper (or Read It Later) every time you star an article in Google Reader
If you use Instapaper to read articles later this is a quick way of posting from Google Reader.

6. Post a ‘favourite’ tweet (with links) to Instapaper (or Dropbox or Evernote)
When you come across a tweet with a link and want to save it for later you may well click star to make it a favourite. This recipe allows you to save those favourite tweets and post the linked articles to Instapaper. Alternatively, you can also set this up to save to Dropbox of Evernote.

7. Add favourite Flickr photos to Dropbox
If you post stories you write online, you may well use Flickr images with creative commons licences. Flickr allows you to indicate favourite images that you come across and may want to use at a later date. This recipe saves those images to Dropbox. Alternatively, you can set this up to save favourites to Evernote.

8. Send me an email (or SMS) to remind me about a daily meeting, weekly or monthly task.
If you have a daily or weekly meeting or task to carry out, ifttt can enable you to create reminder.

9. Send me an email (or SMS) every time a certain person tweets
Twitter is a great source for journalists but it is easy to miss a tweet from a key contact. Perhaps the key source is a person or company that only occasionally tweets and when they do you want to be alerted immediately. This recipe allows you to receive an email when an individual tweets. You can also set a rule to receive an SMS.

10. Send me an email every time a keyword is mentioned in an RSS feed
This is a recipe I suggested in a recent Journalism.co.uk tip of the day. It is a way you can set up an alert when a keyword is mentioned by a particular news provider.

If you are a journalist and have a favourite ifttt recipe, share it in the comments session below.Similar Posts: #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – use ‘if this then that’ for story alerts App of the week for journalists: Evernote – A must-have app ‘like having a second brain’ App of the week for Journalists: DropSync for Android – syncs with DropBox Tool of the week for journalists – ifttt, a promising app for dealing with data How to get the most from Google News feeds

The social network's 'jokes in the pub' analogy, defending its decision not to take down pro-rape pages, is offensive
It doesn't matter how hard I study Facebook's terms and conditions, I still can't find the bit where it says: "Like Humpty Dumpty, Facebook is at complete liberty to interpret the words used in this document in any way it sees fit." And yet that's obviously what Facebook executives have been doing: making words mean what they want them to mean, or else they'd have removed the pages that promote rape and other forms of violence against women months ago.

The specific clause in Facebook's statement of rights and responsibilities that's supposed to protect groups against violence and hate speech instructs the user: "You will not post content that: is hateful, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence." However, Facebook has now defended the numerous pages that clearly violate these terms by claiming: "Groups that express an opinion on a state, institution, or set of beliefs – even if that opinion is outrageous or offensive to some – do not by themselves violate our policies." Which is strange, because if a page entitled "Roses are red, violets are blue, I've got a knife, get in the van" isn't hateful, threatening or gratuitously violent, I don't for the life of me know what is.

It was back in August that feminists first began to notice the proliferation of pro-rape pages on the popular social networking site. Two months later over 176,000 people have signed a US-based petition calling on Facebook to take them down, and nearly 4,000 people have signed a UK-based petition calling for the same. The Facebook pages, such as the one cited above and others that include "You know she's playing hard to get when your [sic] chasing her down an alleyway" still remain.

Facebook's initial response to the public outcry was to suggest that promoting violence against women was equivalent to telling a rude joke down the pub: "It is very important to point out that what one person finds offensive another can find entertaining" went the bizarre rape apologia. "Just as telling a rude joke won't get you thrown out of your local pub, it won't get you thrown off Facebook."

And in some ways they're right: telling a rude joke probably wouldn't get you thrown out of your local pub. I'd suggest, however, that propping up your local bar while inciting others to rape your mate's girlfriend "to see if she can put up a fight" would not only get you thrown out, it would in all likelihood get you arrested as well. Still, at least you could log on once you got home and post your offensive comments on Facebook instead, safe in the knowledge that they wouldn't do anything about it.

What Facebook and others who defend this pernicious hate speech don't seem to get is that rapists don't rape because they're somehow evil or perverted or in any way particularly different from than the average man in the street: rapists rape because they can. Rapists rape because they know the odds are stacked in their favour, because they know the chances are they'll get away with it.

And part of the reason rapists get away with it, time after time after time, is because we live in a society that all but condones rape. Because we live in a society where it's not taken seriously, and where posting heinous comments online that promote sexual violence are not treated as hate speech or as content that threatens women's safety, but are instead treated as a joke and given a completely free pass.

By refusing to take these pages down, and by resorting to such a ridiculous and quite frankly offensive "rude joke" analogy to justify their decision, Facebook executives have made absolutely clear where they stand on the issue of gender hate crime. It's fine to post hateful or threatening content on their site, just as it's fine to post content that incites violence. Well, as long as it's primarily aimed at women, that is.
FacebookInternetRapeGenderSocial networkingFeminismWomenCath Elliottguardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Napster co-founder and former Facebook president Sean Parker is appearing in our newsfeeds with increasing frequency these days.

First, there was the Forbes cover. Then there were the Facebook ads asking users to “Like” Sean Parker on Facebook, which Gawker discovered was part of an effort to build up buzz for an upcoming blog. On Monday, we learned Rhapsody had signed an agreement to acquire Napster, the music-sharing site he helped start (though there is some dispute about his exact role, and whether he was a co-founder of the business along with creator Shawn Fanning) at age 19.

Parker sent his first tweet Monday afternoon, apparently apologizing to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for joining a rival service. It reads: “Sorry Zuck, I had to do it eventually. (Actually @scooterbraun made me do it.)” Scooter Braun is Justin Bieber’s manager.

As The Next Web points out, Parker has been planning his Twitter debut for some time. His account already has verified status. He has amassed 3,600 followers and counting at the time of this writing.

The question is: Why now? Is he seriously invested in his forthcoming blog launch? Or is he suddenly interested in making himself better known? One possibility: It was revealed last week that Parker is working on a new live video startup called Airtime, so his social media presence may be all about promoting an eventual product launch.

In the meantime, we wonder how many followers he’ll have by the end of the day Monday. My bet: 60,000.

More About: Facebook, napster, sean parker, Twitter
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Facebook has overhauled its Pages Insights analytics tool and added a new metric to gauge the health of a page: “People Talking About.”

That statistic, which users will see on Pages below the total number of “Likes,” will be one of four tracked by Pages Insights. The idea is that users will understand a Page with a high People Talking About rating is one that has compelling content. Likewise, content creators will be motivated to make their Pages more comment-worthy.

People Talking About (that might not be the final name for the metric; at press time, Facebook wasn’t sure) will measure user-initiated activity related to a Page, including posting to a Page’s Wall, “liking,” commenting, sharing a Page post or content on the Page, answering a Question posed to fans, mentioning a Page, “liking” or sharing a deal or checking in at your Place.

The other metrics, which are designed for administrators of brand and media Pages, include “Likes,” “Friends of Fans” and “Weekly Total Reach.” While “Likes” is self-explanatory, Friends of Fans is the actual number of friends your fans have, and weekly total reach is designed to be an accurate assessment of how many total people have posted something about your Page, how many news organizations (within Facebook) have referenced it and how much viral distribution elements of your Page has gotten.

David Baser, product manager for Pages Insights, says that despite a raft of new activities that Facebook will be introducing soon under the Facebook Gestures banner, those four metrics will remain and the “Like” will maintain its ranking as a top measurement. “Likes are an expression of identity,” Baser says. “It’s a user saying that I have a relationship with this brand.”

In addition to tracking the four metrics, Pages Insights will also offer a deeper dive into data around specific updates. Facebook will list your last 500 posts (the company began tracking them in July) and count the total number of engaged users, People Talking About it and virality. The latter measures the percentage of users who commented on the post.

Sentiment, however, will not be part of the calculation. Whether a user is lauding a comment or trashing it, it will count the same.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, ilbusca


Facebook Insights Main Page


Facebook's primary Insights Page will measure "Likes," Friends of Fans, Weekly Reach and "People Talking About" the Page.

Facebook Insights: Reach


Facebook will now offer a deeper dive into your Page's reach.

Facebook Insights: Post Analysis


Facebook will also offer more visibility into how your post performed, including its "virality," i.e., the percentage of people exposed to the update that commented on it, "Liked" it or had some other kind of interaction with it.

More About: Facebook, Pages Insights

There are some people who think Facebook has become too complicated. There are other people who agree with those people.

Mashable Comics are illustrated every week by Kiersten Essenpreis, a New York-based artist who draws and blogs at YouFail.com.

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4. It Was All Just a Huge Misunderstanding




5. Stand-Up Web Developers




6. HOW TO: Survive Those Awkward Online Moments




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8. The 19th Annual Internet Meme Convention




9. Online Predators




10. HOW TO: Parent a Digital Native




More About: comics, Facebook, humor, mashable comics

Google, Apple and Facebook are the tech trifecta, so we found facts that could help you land a job at one of these companies. No doubt, there will be stiff competition: Nearly one in four young professionals wants to work at Google, for instance, but there’s more room in the Googleplex for software developers. Facebook gets 250,000 applications a year and sifts through them to find the cream of the crop, preferring those who build things, whether they’re apps or organizations. And Apple wants, well, Apple fanboys to help create the next generation of gadgetry, but you ought to have a reference from an existing Appler.

The tech field is booming, and the industry needs bright young talent to keep innovating. Some facts:

An IT manager can make more than $110,000 a year
Android app developers are especially coveted
Data mining and statistical analysis are ideal collegiate specializations

So, if you’re like most other young professionals and are looking to nab a job at any of those three companies, take a gander at the infographic below. There are tips on how to optimize your resume, how to land an interview and how to impress the HR team. If you’ve landed a job at any of these companies, feel free to offer tips and insights in the comments below.

Social Media Job Listings

Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we publish a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the top social media job opportunities from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!

Marketing Manager: New Product Development at The Motley Fool in Alexandria, Virginia
Lead Developer – Director of Technology at Attention in New York
Product Manager – Local Business Products at Yelp, Inc in San Francisco

Infographic courtesy of MastersDegree.net

More About: apple, Facebook, Google, infographic, job search series, Tech
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Facebook’s new Timeline design gives users a large “cover photo” space at the top of the page. We think this revamp is a great opportunity to get creative with your profile presentation.

We recently asked the Mashable readership to share how they’ve played with the new design. Here are 10 examples of Facebook Timeline cover photo designs we think are particularly creative, and that offer a witty take on the new layout.

SEE ALSO: How to Enable the New Facebook Timeline NOW | HOW TO: Make the Most of the New Facebook Timeline Cover Photo

Take a look through the image gallery below. Share your new Timeline designs in the comments and don’t despair if yours didn’t get chosen this time around. Our coverage of the new Facebook continues, so keep your submissions coming!


1. Ekkapong Techawongthaworn



Playful and fun, we're big fans of Ekkapong's rainy creation.


2. Andrew Grojean


This is a cunning way to keep the old Facebook design.


3. Mathew Barker


Mathew makes us smile with a big photo / little photo visual gag.


4. Rodney Hess


This concept is simple, but very effective.


5. Victor Zapanta


A profile within a profile within a profile...and so on.


6. Mohammad L. Azzam


Here's some mini-me fun from Mohammad.


7. Vinh Nguyen


Vinh offers an imaginative take on the "Timeline" with a look into the future.


8. Lawson Hembree V


Lawson sees his profile pic as a snapshot, with more images spanning out across the cover photo.


9. Maggie Lin


Maggie is mixing up her social networks with a Facebook / Google+ profile.


10. Ekkapong Techawongthaworn


The low placement of the profile pic box doesn't necessarily lend itself to a full body shot, but Ekkapong found a good way to work around that.

More About: Facebook, features, gallery, photography, trending
For more Dev & Design coverage:Follow Mashable Dev & Design on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Dev & Design channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

'Why do you keep doing this to me?' I shout at my phone
It is Saturday morning and I have been sent to the fish shop. We are having people to stay for the weekend, and more people to dinner. The woman behind the counter is trying not to smile as she reads out the total. "It's not actually that bad," she says, biting her lip.
"Well, it's not as bad as I'd feared," I say. This is a lie. My phone dings twice in my pocket, but when I pull it out and look at it, I can't figure out what it wants from me.
"How was the fish shop?" my wife asks when I get home.
"I didn't let them see me cry," I say.
"Don't say how much," she says.
"I just hope I bought enough," I say. "I was trying to up the recipe from six people to eight in my head, but my phone kept..."
"Actually, we've got 10 coming."
"Ten? We're incapable of having 10 people to supper. We haven't even got 10 forks."
"It'll be fine."
"That's easy for you to say, because you don't have to..." My phone dings in my pocket. "Why do you keep doing this to me?" I shout.
"What are you talking about?"
"It's my phone," I say. "It's been dinging for three days, but when I look at it there's nothing."
"Relax," she says. I take my phone to my office and try to figure out what it's trying to tell me. I have no new messages, no texts, no missed calls, no emails. The battery isn't running low. And yet it continues to ding, at random intervals, for no reason. Only hours later, while cooking, am I struck by a thought: "Facebook!" I say.
"What about it?" my wife says.
I check my phone, which I discover is logged on to the middle one's Facebook account. Could it be that I'm receiving a notification whenever somebody in Year 9 breaks up with someone? I call the middle one into the kitchen.
"Yeah?" he says.
I hand him my phone. "Please sign out of your Facebook account on this," I say.
"Are you crazy?" says my wife, who has been unfriended by the middle one for posting arch comments on his wall.
"I understand the importance of spying on our children," I say, "but I need to stop this dinging."
He hands back the phone. "Done."
"How's your girlfriend?" my wife says.
"I don't have a girlfriend," he says.
The next day, with the dinner party safely behind us, we are having a late lunch. Only one of our house guests, Anna, is present. All of the children apart from the oldest have left the table.
"So when do you write your column?" Anna asks.
"First thing in the morning," I say.
"And what's it going to be about, this one?" she says.
"No idea," I say. "Nothing's happened to me."
"You don't seem very panicked about it," Anna says.
"He's panicking on the inside," my wife says.
"A little, but over the years I've learned to manage the stress that comes with..." My phone dings in my pocket. "Christ!" I scream, rising from my chair. "Can you not leave me alone for one second? If it's not Facebook, then what the hell is it?"
"Who's he talking to?" Anna asks.
"While you're up," the oldest one says, "pour me some apple juice."
That night I wake up at 4am with a brilliant idea for a column. I've already composed the first paragraph by the time I realise that the anecdote about sharing a taxi with a horse was only a dream. In the terrible silence that follows, I hear my phone ding twice from the pocket of the trousers draped over a chair in the bathroom.
Mobile phonesFacebookFamilyTim Dowlingguardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Timelines Inc., a small venture capital-backed Chicago company that operates the Timelines.com website, has launched a trademark-infringement suit against Facebook on Thursday, claiming that the latter’s recently announced Timeline feature could “quite possibly eliminate” its entire business.

Timelines.com is a website that basically allows people to record and share personal or historic events, and contribute descriptions, links, photos and videos related to those events, people, companies, bands and whatnot (i.e. Cuban Missile Crisis, Al Capone and Pink Floyd).

The suit essentially claims that Facebook’s Timeline service (see their blog post announcing the feature) has the potential to put Timelines Inc. straight out of Compton business.

From the complaint (also embedded below):

This matter seeks to protect Timelines, a small company headquartered in Chicago, that has been in business for almost five years, from being rolled over and quite possibly eliminated by the unlawful action by the world’s largest and most powerful social media company, Facebook.

Facebook has announced its intention to use and, indeed has already begun to re-direct Internet traffic, using Timelines’ federally registered “TIMELINES” trademark as the centerpiece of Facebook’s new product offering going forward, a move that, given the size and reach of Facebook, will essentially eliminate Timelines and leave the public with the confusing impression that plaintiff Timelines is somehow affiliated with Facebook.

In the event that Facebook is permitted to move forward with release of its “Timeline” product offering, consumer confusion with Timelines’ existing “Timelines” website will invariably result.

The suit also claims that Facebook hijacked the URL Facebook.com/timelines, which used to lead to Timelines’ Facebook page (and is, ironically, still linked to at the top of the Timelines.com website):

Facebook’s “Timeline” offering and its misdirection of users attempting to access Timelines’ offering is intended to prevent Internet users from accessing information about Timelines.com and to allow users to instead use Facebook’s “Timeline” offering.

Timelines is the owner of the registered trademarks “Timelines” (U.S. Reg. No. 3,684,074), “Timelines.com” (U.S. Reg. No. 3,764,134), and “Timelines & design” (U.S. Reg. No. 3,784,720).

We’ve reached out to Facebook for a response to Timelines’ allegations.

View this document on Scribd






Crunchbase





TIMELINES
FACEBOOK






Company:
Timelines


Website:
timelines.com


Funding:
$3M



Timelines, Inc. provides services that enable people and entities to discover, record and share history using the web. The company’s platform is uniquely built to chronicle events (using descriptions, photos, videos, and locations contributed by multiple users), and then enables people to relate these events to each other based on time, place or topic.

Timelines offers three services:

Timelines.com, for individuals and entities that want to reach and interact with a broad audience about publicly shared events;
Timelines...






Learn more





Company:
Facebook


Website:
facebook.com


Launch Date:
January 2, 2004


Funding:
$2.34B



Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks.

The original idea for the term...






Learn more

Eight years ago on this day in 2003, I started Blogging.

Here's some basic info about what has transpired in eight years here at the Six Pixels of Separation Blog: over 2700 Blog entries, over 20,000 comments and over 270 audio Podcasts. If you have read or listened to only one percent of all of that content, you'll know that both acknowledging this milestone or speaking about the numbers (how big/how many) is not my style. But, when I woke up this morning and saw the date notification in my Outlook, it gave me pause. It wasn't a sense of pride or accomplishment, either. The only question that continually popped into my brain was: was all of this Blogging worth it? And, the answer is obvious: yes.

Yes it is.

Starting this Blog was (and still is) without the question the single most important thing I have done in my professional life. It has changed me. It has changed the way I learn and grow and it has changed how I think about the world (and business and marketing and media and beyond). In spending some serious time soaking in this anniversary, I listed out why Blogging was (and still is) the smartest thing I have ever done.

8 Reasons Why Blogging Still Rules:

It's slow. I'm in no rush. Most brand are. They think that Social Media is cheap, fast and easy. Blogging has taught me that nothing could be further from the truth. In 2008, I wrote a Blog post called, In Praise Of Slow, that evolved into a much longer and important piece of my first business book, Six Pixels of Separation and the idea still rings true. Blogging has taught me the merits of building true relationships between an audience and content... and that takes time. Lots of time and effort. As fast and simple as it is to publish content with a Blog, success with a Blog as an engine of Marketing is a slow process. And, like a great cup of tea, the process is worth it if you have the intestinal fortitude to see it through.

Critical thinking. People like to think that Blogging is about the discourse (the comments, trackbacks, links, likes and tweets). While this makes up an important piece of the Blogging puzzle, the main reason I Blog is to publicly think about New Media and my media hacking ways. To be blunt: it's a selfish act. The only part that isn't selfish is that I publish it for the world to see, comment on and criticize. But (to be blunt again), that is selfish too, because everything that everyone tacks on to my Blog posts make me think more (and even rethink my initial positions). The simple act of Blogging forces me to think in a more critical way and to get that thinking down in writing. The writing part is (obviously) the hardest part of critical thinking. Putting your thoughts into words is not easy.

The people you meet. People often talk about stepping away from the computer to enjoy the conversation and meeting of people in the real world (more on that here: The Real World). My Blog has allowed me to not only meet, but become very close friends with people I would have never met otherwise. When I was a kid, I often wished that someone at my school liked comics or martial arts as much as I did. Now, we take for granted how easy it is to meet and connect with fellow, like-minded individuals. I don't take our connectivity for granted. Ever. Blogging has allowed me to meet and connect with people by removing the challenge of geography. While I don't often get to press the flesh with certain individuals often enough, I enjoy waking up and hanging out online with friends like Seth Godin, Amber Naslund, Julien Smith, Hugh McGuire, Liz Strauss, Christopher S. Penn, Mark W. Schaefer, Hugh McGuire, Tamar Weinberg, C.C. Chapman, Arjun Basu, Joseph Jaffe, Tom Peters, Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen and countless other (just look at my Blogroll on the left for more or who I follow on Twitter or Facebook:) I have coffee with all of these people each and every morning - whether they know it or not.

Writing (and reading) as art. This concept was really driven home to me after reading the book, Linchpin, by Seth Godin. Some people paint, some people scrapbook and others twiddle on a guitar in their basements. I write about business, marketing and media hacking. That is my art. For years, I thought it would sound either pretentious or ridiculous to say that writing about business is an art form. Well, this is my art. Take it or leave it.

Personal branding. Really, it's about reputation. It's easy to say something. It's easy to do something. It's hard to build a real reputation that is based on who you truly are for the world to see. This Blog is as real as it gets. It has been a tool, platform and space for me to demonstrate how I think. I believe the results are reflected in how Twist Image (my marketing agency that I own with my three other business partners) has grown over the years. I also believe that there is no better resume than this Blog to define me. I wish more people understood the power of having a living and breathing ongoing publishing platform that allows you to demonstrate how you think, that anyone can access from anywhere.

My place to go. I'm hooked on Arianna Huffington's line: "Self expression is the new entertainment." People often ask, "when do you find the time to Blog?" All I can think to myself is, "when do you find the time to watch half of the television shows and movies that you've watched?" By definition, I'm much more interested in active media than passive media. So, while you're relaxing and watching a sitcom, I'm relaxing and writing a Blog post. This is my place to go. My Blog is my treehouse. This is where I go for fun.

It keeps me regular. I made a commitment to publish six pieces of text-based content and one audio piece each and every week. You can use all the Metamucil you want, my Blog keeps me regular. Knowing that I am committed to creating and publishing this amount of content makes my ears perk up. It keeps me open to uncover new and interesting topics to discuss. The regularity and consistency of the Blog has forced me to keep that "nose for news" that I first developed when I started off in professional journalism during my late teens.

It connects me to you. Think about life before Blogging. You would be waiting for a new book to come out or for a published piece in a newspaper of magazine. No more. Blogging connects me to you. You don't need to read it every day and you don't even need to leave a comment, and yet it still connects us (some more than others). I Blog in the hopes my thoughts resonate. I Blog in the hopes that it creates a level of discourse. I Blog because I'm tired of "top 10 reasons"-types of Blog posts. I Blog in an attempt to raise the bar. I Blog because it connects me to people like you... the exact kind of people I have been waiting my whole life to meet.

Why do you Blog? Better yet, why don't you Blog?




Tags:

active media

amber naslund

arianna huffington

arjun basu

art

blog

blog anniversary

blogging

blogroll

business

business book

cc champan

christopher s penn

comic books

content

critical thinking

discourse

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hugh mcguire

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julien smith

linchpin

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There’s been a lot of attention paid recently to the new “social reading” apps that were launched by a number of publishers and content companies — including The Washington Post and The Guardian — at Facebook’s f8 developer conference. Some of that has focused on the “frictionless sharing” that these apps enable, where all of a reader’s activity from the app is shared through the social network, and we’ve pointed out the risks of putting so many eggs into a basket controlled by a large platform owner. But there’s another aspect of these launches that’s troubling, and that’s the pride so many publishers seem to take in having produced a Facebook app, as though it’s the pinnacle of media innovation.

Don’t get me wrong; obviously, creating a nice-looking Facebook app the way The Guardian has takes some skill, and I’m not demeaning that ability by any means. (I don’t like the look of the Washington Post or Wall Street Journal  apps as much, but that might just be a personal preference.) But how much time and effort could these kinds of apps possibly take? There are plenty of people who have created functional Facebook and iPhone apps in a weekend, and some pretty good-looking ones in a matter of weeks. Is something like that going to make a big difference to an entity as huge as the Washington Post or the Journal? That seems unlikely (I realize that most of these apps involved a lot of work and probably took much longer).

Creating a useful or even fun app that allows people to share your content is great, whether it’s a Facebook app or an iPhone app or an app that runs on Amazon’s new Kindle Fire tablet. And Washington Post publisher Graham is quite right that reaching out to readers wherever they are and trying to engage them around your content is a good idea. Experimentation is also a good idea, especially for newspapers — which aren’t typically known for that kind of thing. But if all you are doing is creating widgets for people who live inside a specific walled garden, then I think you are missing the boat.

Why play in someone else’s sandbox?
As I tried to argue in my previous post, doing this is no different from setting up a presence inside AOL or CompuServe, or distributing those “multimedia” CD-ROMs that newspapers were so enthused about back in the late 1990s. Having a Facebook app does take advantage of the social-sharing activity that has become a bigger and bigger part of the media landscape over the past few years, thanks to Twitter and other tools, but in many ways it’s no different (and in some ways worse) than having a Twitter button or a Facebook “like” on your content — which has effectively become table stakes for media at this point.

So what does innovation consist of? For a start, it involves rethinking not just where your content lives, but how it’s created and what it consists of — in other words, taking apart your business to really look at what has changed thanks to the web and social media, and how you can adapt to that. No app is going to do that for you, and tinkering around in a “lab” probably isn’t going to do it either.

Some media outlets are trying to do this, and rethinking aspects of what media companies do: Forbes, for example, — has blurred the line between “professional journalists” and other content producers, including those who primarily do marketing or advertising-related content. In the new Forbes, posts from marketers show up alongside posts from staff writers for the magazines, just as blog posts by unpaid contributors at The Huffington Post appear alongside those from paid staff. Not everyone likes the gray area Forbes is living in, but you can’t say editor Lewis Dvorkin isn’t trying to rethink his business.

The Atlantic and some other publications, meanwhile, have been focusing on things that don’t even involve what most people would consider journalism — such as live events that are related to the content they are publishing. That’s helped turn the company’s fortunes around, just as similar real-world events have for other content companies like the non-profit Texas Tribune. And the Journal-Register, which I’ve written about before, is rethinking how its newspapers work from all kinds of different angles, including the launch of a “community newsroom” at one of its papers.

Why not think of your paper as a platform?
But The Guardian has taken by far the most dramatic steps of any newspaper in rethinking what its business consists of, with what the paper called its “open platform” project, which launched last year. Instead of spending all its time trying to put walls or sandbags around its content and control where it appeared, the Guardian released an open API that allowed outside developers to make use of its content — provided they agreed to either pay for the data, or form an advertising partnership with the paper. Instead of doing a deal just with one platform vendor like Facebook, they made it possible for anyone to become a partner.

More importantly, The Guardian‘s approach — along with other innovations like the crowdsourcing effort behind its feature on MP expenses in 2009 — was driven by a fundamental rewiring of the way it thought about its purpose and function as a newspaper. Editor Alan Rusbridger has talked about a “mutualised” newspaper, one that includes its readers as partners in discovering and reporting the news, and one that doesn’t think about itself in terms of what particular medium it uses to distribute that news. In other words, not a “news-paper” company at all, but just a news-distribution company.

The Financial Times  hasn’t done anything quite that radical, but it has broken its own ground by pinning its online future on a fully open HTML5 version of the site that works on virtually any device, because all it requires is a browser. That feels a lot more innovative than rolling out a Facebook app or an Amazon app so that readers who use one specific device can interact with your content inside some walled garden.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Sandy Honig and Jeremy Mates

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Facebook and the future of our online livesNewNet Q1: Content Farms and Niche Networks on the RiseContent Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

If you didn’t watch Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook announcements last week — and of course the vast majority of Facebook users did not — you may be in for a surprise. Aside from the dramatically redesigned Facebook Timeline profile pages, which roll out in the coming weeks (and which I’ve grown to love), Facebook’s new system to auto-share what you do around the web may catch many Facebook addicts off guard.

In fact, even those people who know exactly how this new feature works may need to be on guard against sharing some seriously embarrassing updates.

For those not in the loop: Facebook is making sharing even easier by automatically sharing what you’re doing on Facebook-connected apps. Instead of having to “Like” something to share it, you’ll just need to click “Add to Timeline” on any website or app, and that app will have permission to share your activity with your Facebook friends.

What activity, you ask? It could be the news articles you read online, the videos you watch, the photos you view, the music you listen to, or any other action within the site or app. Facebook calls this auto-sharing “Gestures.”

Can you see the possible issue here?

I’m pretty familiar with this auto-sharing function since it’s been a feature of The Huffington Post for a good while now. The way it works there: Once you join the site, every article you read is shared with your friends via an activity feed (unless you switch that feature off).

So right now I can see that someone I know professionally read “Scarlett Johansson Nude Photos” and a male colleague, who will remain anonymous, recently read the following:

1. “Conan O’Brien Stares At Nicole Scherzinger’s Cleavage”

2. “Heather Morris On Breast Implants”

3. “Perrey Reeves Shows Off Bikini Body (PHOTO)”

Now Facebook is bringing this functionality to every application out there.

I’m not saying this is a bad idea as such, but people need to be aware of what they’re signing up for when they add apps to the Timeline. Even my tech-savvy friends seem to set up these auto-share apps, completely forget about them, and return to doing things they wouldn’t necessarily want to share with all their friends.

Heck, I even find myself doing it.

Just a few days ago I added the Washington Post Social Reader app to my profile — this is one of many new news apps that auto-shares what you’re reading with your friends. Later, I returned to the app, forgot about that feature, read a ton of articles and realized they were all on my Facebook Timeline.

Now I didn’t read anything particularly saucy like my HuffPo friends did, but even that slight lapse was enough for me to uninstall the app completely.

So what can you do to avoid a Facebook privacy faux pas? Be aware that whenever you click a “Add to Timeline” button on a website or app from now on, you’re giving that app permission to post your activity to Facebook.

Most of the time you might be fine with this — like sharing the music you listen to on Spotify with friends (unless you like Rebecca Black) — but other times it might be worth disabling this function after you approve the app.

SEE ALSO: The New Facebook: How to Take Control of Your Privacy

Also note that when you add an app to your Timeline, you get the option to share your activity with “Public,” “Friends” or “Custom.” By clicking “Custom,” you get the option to hide your activity from everyone but yourself — see the steps below for more information on controlling your privacy with the new sharing features:


Adding an App to Your Facebook Timeline


Whenever an app wants to add updates to your Facebook Timeline, this box will appear.

Controlling Who Sees Your Activity


Clicking the people icon next to "This activity is visible to:" lets you control who will see your activity from the app. You can share your activity with the Public, Friends or specific Friend Lists.

Custom Privacy Settings for Gestures


If you click "Custom", you get more privacy options, including the ability to block certain people from seeing your activity.

Only Me Privacy


If you feel uncomfortable sharing your activity from the app, you can select "Only Me". This means that your will see your activity from the app on your Timeline, but no one else will.

Should you worry about Facebook’s new Gestures functionality? No, but even the most technical among us should be aware that sharing everything is not always wise, and that selecting the right privacy settings can protect you against any mistakes.

READ THIS NEXT: Facebook Privacy: 3 Fights to Expect When You Get the New Timeline

This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication.


The New Facebook Profile: Timeline


Timeline is a radical departure from previous versions of the Facebook user profile. The most prominent feature is the addition of a cover photo at the top of the page. Users can change this to whatever they'd like it to be.

1987


In 1987, my sister was born. Facebook knows these life events and includes them in your timeline.

Being Born


You can even add a picture and context to your birth, which starts the Timeline.

Timeline Interface


The Timeline is a two-column interface with top photos, status updates, friends and more.

Map


Facebook has added a feature that lets you see where you have visited. This is powered by Facebook Places.

Photos in the Timeline


Here's how photos are displayed in the Timeline.

Friends in the New Timeline


Here's what the Friends page looks like.

Changing Settings


Some of the new Timeline's customization features.

2009


More of the new Timeline

Getting Married


You can add life events, such as getting married, to your profile through the Publisher Bar. You can also announce that you broke a bone, got a new job, etc.

More About: Facebook, facebook timeline, privacy

Facebook is now closer than ever to becoming the phone book for the internet. The site recently launched a Directory of people, Pages, and Places to allow users to find friends and official entities by name. The People Directory displays an alphabetized list of all users who’ve made public search listings available in their privacy. In addition to browsing by first letter, the Pages and Places Directories surface the most popular presences first for speedy discovery

Until now, users could only find people, Pages, and Places through search, the personalized Find Friends feature, and the buried Pages Browser. Directories will assist users that are looking for things with common names or that they’re not positive about the spelling of. Though certainly slower than search, it could become a powerful last resort for people intent on finding someone or something on Facebook.

Facebook hasn’t found much success with directories in the past. In July it finally deleted its already unlinked App Directory following years of low usage and its categories becoming inaccurate. The Page Browser that helps users discover Pages to Like still exists, though it’s very difficult to find without a direct link despite hosing the management system for invites to Like Pages.

One of Facebook’s goal with the Directories may be to challenge third-party search engines as the preferred way to find information about businesses. This is because advertisers are willing to pay higher prices to appear when users are making decisions about which local business or restaurant to visit.

Once users arrive at a Page or Place, their standardized layout of those webpages makes them effective for this. Google Places search results are a already a highly efficient way of finding a phone number or business hours, though. The Directories could find their niche by making it easier to find a description, photos, and recommendations from friends of a business.

The product handles some use cases its own search engine isn’t as apt for. Still, Facebook will need to significantly improve its search engine, possibly by working more closely with Bing, and tie it in with the Directories the company wants to actually dissuade users from searching for businesses on Google.

With more users, Pages, and Places joining the site every day, Facebook need a better way for users to track down people and things they care about. The Directories might not be the most elegant solution, but it gets the job done.

People Directory
The People Directory is arguably the most useful since finding long lost friends is a core value proposition of Facebook. If users don’t have mutual friends, haven’t previously connected through email, and don’t share a characteristic like a hometown, it can be difficult to track someone down using the Find Friends feature that imports one’s email and social contacts and provides suggestions.

With the People Directory, all a user needs is someone’s name. They can then sort by letter, and then select ever narrower ranges of names to browse. This can eventually lead to an entire page or even multiple pages of people with the same name. They can then click through each to see if its the person they’re looking for.

While seeing 25 results on a Page means users might need to do less browsing than with search, they also don’t see the profile picture or network of each result, meaning they have to click through each.

Pages and Places Directory
As users don’t have pre-existing connections to Pages or Places that they can import from email or other services, the Pages and Places Directories can help users locate the Facebook presences of things they care about.

Rather than just show all Pages and Places in strict alphabetical order, those with the most Likes or check-ins that fall in the selected letter range are displayed first, before the alphabetical list. For example, if a user clicks on ‘D’ in the Pages Directory navigator, they’ll then see the Pages with the most Likes that start with the letter ‘D’, followed by narrower ranges of Pages such as “Debbie’s Friends Fund – Decor For Your Day”.  This significantly speeds up the process of finding more popular Pages and Places.

There don’t appear to be publicly accessible links to the Directories yet, so their designs may not have been finalized. Still, there are a few ways the product could be improved.

Currently, users have to click through every People Directory result of someone with the same name or Pages directory entry with an ambiguous name to find what they were looking for. Facebook could solve this by displaying hover cards of profile pictures, mutual friends or Likes, and other information when names are hovered over. The ability to browse Pages by category or Places by location could also provide a better discovery experience.

With these changes, the Directories could help users from more connections, which is key to Facebook’s user retention strategy. After all, those with few friends or Likes have sparse news feeds and receive few notifications, and therefore don’t return to Facebook often.

[Thanks to Eti Suruzon for the tip]

Strategies for gaining for fans for your Page or Places can be found in the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s comprehensive guide to marketing on Facebook.

It started, innocently enough, with a lobster. Then Mark Zuckerberg killed a chicken. By the time the Facebook CEO escalated to a pig and a goat — "he cut the goat's throat with a knife," a friend reported — the media took notice. But it was too late. More »

The Facebook iPad application has become a hostage in a tense negotiation between Apple and Facebook.

At f8 last Thursday, music services such as Spotify, Vevo, Rdio and Mog gained the ability to publish the listening activity of their users to Facebook’s new home page Ticker. The exposure to the friends of their users through the tickers has led to big gains for some music partners.

Most significantly, Spotify has gained one million new monthly active Facebook-integrated users since f8 to reach 4.4 million MAU. It spiked from 1.12 million to 3.25 million daily active users the day after f8, and appears to be settling back to roughly a quarter million new DAU. Rdio, MOG, and Deezer have also seen significant gains in their numbers of Facebook-integrated users.

The total user growth for these services could be even higher. Exposure through the Ticker could be encouraging more users to sign up but not necessarily integrate their accounts with Facebook. This won’t be the case for Spotify, though, as it now requires new users to have a Facebook account, even if they don’t grant the app publishing rights.

Our AppData tracking service for Facebook apps only records users who grant these apps access to their Facebook accounts, so these figures should be interpreted as representative of recent user count changes rather than as absolute total user counts.

With few other Open Graph apps contributing stories to the Ticker, the home page redesign and new ability to publish activity without users having to explicitly share each listen is creating a bonanza for music apps that were prepared for the changes. The redesign appears to have rolled out already to all US users, although we’re not sure what the total potential user base was here.

Spotify in particular was poised for explosive growth, as it already had the largest user base with 2 million paying customers compared to the next largest competitor Rhapsody which has 800,000. Spotify had also been aggressively pushing users to connect their Facebook accounts in order to view the playlists of friends via large prompts on the app’s homescreen.

Spotify is falling from its peak the day after f8, with 1.61 million DAU yesterday and 1.48 million today. Still, user counts are stabilizing and so the service could come away with as many as 30% more Facebook-integrated users than it had before f8. Spotify is also the top “Featured Music Service” in Facebook’s new Music dashboard. The rapid growth of Facebook-integrated users has big implications for Spotify’s bottom line, as CEO Daniel Ek said those who connect their Facebook accounts are twice as likely to become paying customers.

Rdio, the music app we’ve seen the most of in the Ticker besides Spotify, has shot up from 23,000 to 29,000 Facebook-integrated MAU since f8. Its DAU count spiked from 3,800 to 8,000 the day after f8, but is now rapidly declining. Dedicated Rdio users might be seeing so many of their friends using Spotify thanks to the Ticker that they may considering switching services.

Mog saw strong growth from the release of its free subscription tier the week before f8. Since the conference, it has mildly grown from 32,200 to 36,800 MAU, with DAU fluctuating between 3,000 and 3,500.

Vevo, the ad-supported music video wing of YouTube, has seen strong sustained growth since f8, jumping from 85,00 to 94,000 MAU. Unlike the other apps, DAU continues to climb, building on an initial spike from 7,700 to 10,100 to now reach 10,300. Lesser known partners Earbits and Songza also saw some growth since f8.

Meanwhile, some of Facebook’s music partners have lost Facebook-integrated users since f8. This could be because they didn’t have Ticker integrations ready, their integrations broke down, or they’re being outcompeted by those with functioning integrations.

SoundCloud, iHeartRadio, and Deezer all lost DAU since f8, or have fallen lower than their initial DAU count following a spike the day after the conference. With music suggestions coming straight to the news feed, users may be seeking out less internet radio and free streaming services.

It will take a few weeks for more of Facebook’s music partners to launch their Ticker integrations. The same goes for users experimenting with the services they see their friends using and choosing the one that fits them best. Once other listening apps as well as reading, video, and non-partnered lifestyle apps get their Open Graph publishing set up, there will be more competition in the Ticker and the bonanza for the music partners who were ready at launch may end.

Until then, though, it appears that Spotify will strengthen its lead  as the Ticker bombards Facebook users with implicit social recommendations for the service.  As users may not want to simultaneously run multiple music desktop and web apps, Facebook’s recent changes could produce a “winer-take-all” scenario where users choose the music service used by the most of their friends, and right now, that’s Spotify.

Mumbai. Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan is all set to join Facebook after joining Twitter. However on Facebook, he is going to be more active and personal with his fans. King Khan is all set to send out personalized birthday wishes to his fans by posting messages like “Happy Birthday my sweetest friend” on their Facebook walls through a Facebook application.
But this is not going to be free for the fans; they will have to shell out some money to see SRK post some finest birthday wishes.
“Just 500 rupees,” informed Chanchal Pandey, the publicity agent of the Bollywood superstar, “Fans have to authorize an application named SRKsays and make a payment of 500 rupees through credit card, and their job is done. The application will find out their birthday as per their Facebook profile information and post a birthday message on their wall on behalf of Shahrukh.”
The application will post personalized and unique messages on the Facebook walls that will appear to have been posted personally by Shah Rukh Khan from his personal profile. A sample post could look something like this:
Shah Rukh Khan’s Facebook application wishes you a Happy Birthday
The application will also broadcast an update on the Facebook ticker that will read something like “Manish Kumar was just wished by Shah Rukh Khan on his birthday” so that other users are tempted to use the application as well.
When contacted by Faking News, King Khan confirmed the development and hoped to connect with his fans on Facebook on a daily basis. He also termed it as “democratization” of his celebrity status.
Shahrukh Khan dancing at a wedding party
“See, I have been taking part in weddings of the rich and powerful and acting as if those rich people were my personal friends. But the truth is I did that for money,” SRK candidly admitted, “Now if I can act like personal friends of the rich and the powerful, why should I deny the same rights to my fans who are not so rich and powerful?”
Shah Rukh claimed that 500 rupees that he was charging was a modest professional fee that his fans should pay for this “service”. In return, fans will get a memory that they can cherish for whole of their life.
“Their Facebook friends will be jealous, and they can frame the screenshots of the wall post to show it off to their non-Facebook friends,” SRK’s publicity manager explained.
Facebook experts believe that the latest campaign by Shah Rukh Khan is going to be a runaway success and he could earn substantially this way, more than what many other actors earn through box office collections. However some experts foresee trouble for SRK.
“Is this application going to be exclusively for Indian fans only? What if Facebook users from Pakistan are going to authorize this application? We could see another political controversy with parties like Shiv Sena opposing this move,” a Facebook expert warned.
Experts also foresee other celebrities, especially Salman Khan and Aamir Khan, joining Facebook to launch similar applications. While Salman’s application could give birthday bumps to users, experts believe that Aamir will wait till Facebook becomes perfect and launches its new Timeline for every user.
Unconfirmed sources suggest that model Poonam Pandey too could launch a Facebook application that will post her semi-nude pictures on walls of users for free.
Possibly Related News:Mayawati joins facebook! Exclusive snapshot of her wallFacebook launches Facebook Tsunami to take on Google WaveHoneymoon picture on Facebook receives “Hang Kasab” commentEarliest facebook users oppose immigration of orkut usersNow Salman can “burn” Shahrukh; Madame Tussauds to sell celebrity wax candles

As most of the world knows by now, Facebook began rolling out new “features” on their social networking service this week. Besides the ability to go back to 1950 and note the first time you drove an Edsel, the other big change is that now you will be able to share what you are doing without clicking anything – it’s “frictionless”. You should take a moment and read Dave Winer’s post which looks at why you should logout of Facebook and Dan Lyons hilarious post about how all of our lives have been changed forever.

When I watched the livestream of the Facebook announcements, I immediately commented wondering how long before a wife divorces a husband because she sees that he is browsing Victoria’s Secret for panties that are a different size than she wears. I still give it about a week before the first stories of inappropriate business are posted. Back in 2007, a man was fired because his employer-provided GPS showed him leaving work early.

It looks like an example of what is to come on Facebook hit eBay this weekend. Found via Darren Stuart, a man in Swindon in the United Kingdom is selling a Tom Tom Go model 700 GPS receiver on eBay. This might be the most hilarious auction I’ve seen – of course the story is a bit emotional as the man found out that his wife is/was cheating on him. The auction is currently at a price of £10,000,000 which is just over 15 million USD.

From the auction (read the full description on eBay):

This was my wife’s, may her knicker draw be infested with the fleas of a thousand Camels…The Go 700 was once the top of the range Sat Nav from TomTom, with an internal Hard Disk Drive instead of the traditional SD Card, and had full Bluetooth and Wireless capabilities.  I bought this for the back-stabbing harlot, some four or five years ago, before she met Nigel with the Little Penis, and it cost me over £400…

Her infidelity was discovered when I took her car for an MOT, and while waiting, I was tinkering with the Sat Nav and noticed that all her recent journeys had all been to Nigel’s…So, like any normal human, I reprogrammed Nigel’s address to one in a town far far away…

There are over 100 questions posted on the auction and the seller has responded to all of them. The auction ends on September 28th so you have a few days to decide if you want to up the bid from $15 million.

Find more stories about: eBay, Facebook, gps, social media, Social Networking
This story posted on CenterNetworks.

90’s Internet: Nobody knows you’re a dog. 2011 Facebook Timeline: Everyone knows you’re a dog.

Lori Fena via Twitter

Thanks to the integrations Facebook launched with Spotify, Rdio, and many other music services at yesterday’s f8 conference, users are now finding out what their friends are listening to in the home page’s Ticker. To make it even easier to discover music, Facebook has launched a “Music” dashboard that shows users trending albums, top songs, featured music services, and a stream dedicated to the recent listens of all of a user’s friends. Clicking through to a playlist appears to be one way to activate the dashboard and make its bookmark appear in the home page’s left sidebar, though this direct link also works.

The Music dashboard will allow users to actively and efficiently seek discover new music in addition to passively seeing what friends are listening to while browsing the news feed. The “Featured Music Services” panel could be an important driver of growth for Facebook’s lesser known music partners, and it could also become a way for Facebook to monetize music by charging for placement in the panel.

Rather than showing bookmarks for individual music partners, it seems that Facebook has decided to aggregate all the services into a single hub. In the future, it could gain more engaging features such as the ability to set up simultaneous listening between friends similar to Turntable.fm. It could also serve as a payment portal through which users could buy their subscriptions to partnered music services with Facebook Credits. This would provide a direct way for Facebook to get a cut of the revenue partners are earning from the exposure and user growth they get on the site.

It’s unclear whether the Music dashboard would preclude partners from developing native versions of their services that live within the Facebook chrome as canvas apps. Such apps could silo users, and make them less likely to discover music from friends that use a different service than them. With the dashboard, a Spotify user could see a friend was listening to something on Rdio, click through the story and download Rdio, find it better fits their design and music library needs, and end up becoming a paying Rdio user.

However, Facebook also allows users to discover a song from a service they don’t use and rather than having to download that partner’s app, they can play the song in an app they already have. For example, a Spotify user could see a friend had listened to a song on Rdio, click the play button in the Music dashboard story, and use the small link in the prompt to launch or download Rdio to instead listen on Spotify. The relatively small size of the link to play a song in one’s native service could be Facebook’s way of getting users to try out multiple services, and prevent an app with an early lead such as Spotify from pulling back users who might have been prepared to try a different service.

Current Dashboard Features
The Music dashboard dynamically displays different content depending on the recent activity of a user’s friends. The Friends’ Music section of the dashboard shows full size rich media stories about the listening activity of friends, complete with play buttons on songs that launch their corresponding desktop or web applications. Most of these stories otherwise only appear in the Ticker as simple text activity stories that must be hovered over and expanded to reveal play buttons.

With the Playlist section, Facebook will reward music services that make it easy to create and publish mixes. As playlists automatically continue to play without users have to select the next song they want to hear, this section of the dashboard will facilitate a laid-back listening experience. It could also get users to burn through the free listening time users get with the unpaid tiers of some music partners, which could lead users to hit their limit faster and get them to buy subscriptions.

Users have begun to receive notifications when a friend sees a story about their listening activity and clicks a play button on of the songs. These notifications direct users to an Activity section of the Music dashboard, which encourages them to comment in order to start a conversation about a song them and a friend both listened to. Right now this is the closest thing to real-time social activity around music, but simultaneous listening or dedicated listening Chat could be on the way.

As part of its partnerships, Facebook may have promised free placement in the Featured Music Services panel in the right sidebar of the Music Dashboard. This could give services that haven’t gained any users in a network a way to gain a foothold and begin growing through exposure in the Ticker. However, Facebook could also opt to charge music services for this real estate. We’re waiting to hear back from Facebook about how services are chosen for placement.

Even without more engaging features, the Music dashboard could become stop on users’ routine browsing flow around Facebook. While the Ticker may remain the primary way users discover new music because of its prominent presence on the news feed and its eye-catching movement, that Music dashboard could become the place users to go to find something to listen to right now.

Facebook sucked up most of the oxygen in the technology world on Thursday, with the launch of a series of fairly radical transformations of the giant social network, which now reaches about 800 million people (we’ve collected our coverage of the f8 conference here). So where does that leave Google and its Google+ social network, or Twitter and its goal of becoming a real-time social newswire? Facebook’s changes have clearly upped the ante for Google, which desperately needs the signals that come from social activity to feed into its search and advertising algorithms, but Twitter is playing a somewhat different game, and Facebook seems more like it could be a partner rather than a competitor.

At Facebook’s last f8 conference in April 2010, the social network launched its “open graph” platform and plugins, which allowed any website to create Facebook “like” buttons and widgets and connect those to its content — and millions of websites have done so in the months since that announcement. In a sense, Facebook extended its tentacles outward and grabbed hold of activity that was occurring elsewhere on the Internet, then incorporated that into the site and showed it to users. Masterminded by CTO Bret Taylor, this was a fairly massive shift in what the site was about. No longer did people have to go to Facebook to interact with content; they could do it anywhere.

The latest changes are partly about reversing that process, and creating more reasons for users to spend time on Facebook itself and engage with content there. Social apps like the ones launched for Spotify and Hulu let users watch movies and listen to music within Facebook; social-reading apps like the ones launched by The Washington Post, The Guardian and News Corp.’s The Daily let users read stories from those publications within Facebook and share them with others; and other social apps let users share their physical activity and so on. All this takes place on Facebook — which is a risk for media companies, as I tried to outline on Thursday.

The introduction of “frictionless sharing”
In addition to the launch of social apps, Facebook changed the way sharing of that activity happens, and effectively removed the necessity for publishers or services to use the “like” button — a fairly significant move, as MG Siegler noted at TechCrunch. As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg described it, the need to click a button to share things was getting in the way of users sharing, so the new process (where users give an app or service approval once and then all their activity is automatically shared) creates what he called “frictionless sharing.” Items a user is reading or listening to or otherwise interacting with simply show up in the new “ticker” section of a user’s page.

These substantial changes to the way users interact with Facebook and Facebook-based apps are a significant threat to Google in trying to grow its Google+ network. Before the new features were launched, as well as others that came before f8,  Google’s new offering looked pretty competitive: the addition of “Circles” to create groups of specific friends was something Facebook didn’t really have (although it has had Lists for some time), and it made it easy for people to share photos and other content. It also had the advantage of being an “asymmetric” network like Twitter, which meant that anyone could follow another user without having to get their explicit approval.

Then Facebook launched “smart” lists, which make it easier to group friends and connections on the network, and just as quickly launched a “subscribe” feature that added an asymmetric aspect to the service — allowing users to get updates from people even if those other users weren’t their friends. Now, the social apps and frictionless sharing have upped the ante even further: what does Google have that can offer these same kinds of features? Although Google+ has an API now that allows developers to connect their apps and services to it, there are no “social apps” for Google+ yet, and no services that can feed content into the network as seamlessly as those from Spotify and Hulu.

Even when those apps appear, which they undoubtedly will, Facebook has something Google doesn’t have and may never have: namely, 800 million users who spend huge amounts of time on the site — according to Zuckerberg, the network saw over half a billion users in a single day recently. Google may be huge, but the idea of it as a social network is still relatively new, and so it has an uphill climb even to gain awareness with non-geek users, let alone chip away at Facebook’s dominance. There will be a certain contingent of users who resent the fact that Facebook is trying to take over their lives and become “the consumer OS,” as Salesforce chairman and CEO Marc Benioff put it, but their numbers might be too small to make a real difference.

Google gets frozen out, but Twitter plays a different game
The risk for Google, as we’ve described before, is that through these new services and features, Facebook starts to accumulate an even larger body of data about the activity of those 800 million people — and about their desires as well, since the network is expected to launch a “want” button soon. That is gold for an entity like Google, not only because those signals are important for search but because they are increasingly important for advertising. And there is virtually no chance that Facebook is ever going to share any of that information with Google, or provide it in a form that allows for easy scraping.

And what about Twitter? As I’ve argued in other posts, I think Twitter is playing a different game — one that Facebook may be trying to get into with some of its changes, but isn’t well-suited for. In a nutshell, Twitter isn’t a social network at all, and never really has been. It allows for social behavior around information, but it is not in any sense a one-size-fits-all social destination with timelines and social apps and games, and all the other things Facebook (and Google) want to offer. It’s designed to do one thing well: short bursts of information, like a real-time social newswire. And it can target users based on that.

Real-time news isn’t something Facebook is very good at. It may talk about changes to its news feed making it “your personal newspaper,” but that news is still mostly about friends and what they are doing. The addition of news sources via the subscription feature — and the rollout of social apps from news publishers — may change that mix somewhat, but it’s not going to provide what Twitter provides. There’s also the risk that Facebook’s frictionless sharing simply produces too much noise for many users, as the site tries to be all things to all people. So long as Twitter focuses on doing one thing well, that will be its ace-in-the-hole. Google, however, badly needs some more cards.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Tambako the Jaguar and See-ming Lee

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NewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bangPost-IPO strategies for LinkedInPlayers and Strategies for Real-Time In-Stream Advertising

While the focus of today's Facebook announcements was the new Timeline profile, the Read, Watch, Listen media sharing apps have generated a lot of interest too. These so-called "social apps" haven't been widely launched yet, but you can get a sense of what they will do by adding a couple of brand new newspaper social apps to your Facebook profile: The Guardian's app and one from Washington Post.

Be forewarned though, with these apps you're automatically sending anything you read into your Facebook news feed. No "read" button. No clicking a "like" or "recommend" button. As soon as you click through to an article you are deemed to have "read" it and all of your Facebook friends and subscribers will hear about it. That could potentially cause you embarrassment and it will certainly add greatly to the noise of your Facebook experience.

Sponsor

The Washington Post Social Reader allows you to read news from the Washington Post, plus various other sources.

The app's homepage states that "once you're using the app, the stories you read will be instantly shared with your friends, and your friends' reads will be shared with you." The emphasis is ours, because you should be aware that everything you read is sent straight to your Facebook news feed.

When you add the app, you have to give permission for it to "Add to Timeline" every time you land on a story.

If you do actually read the article, it's done inside of Facebook and you see a sidebar showing what others are reading.

The Guardian app, which you can add to Facebook by clicking here, is slicker. The design of the app feels very much like The Guardian's actual website. As a publisher, I guess that does scare me a little. Because, that's right, there are no ads from the publisher within Facebook. Although, it's not much different from making your content available as an RSS feed and to apps like Flipboard.

As a user, whether I want to use Facebook as my daily news reading platform is another matter. Time will tell.

So to reiterate: anytime you read something in a Facebook app like The Guardian and Washington Post, it automatically gets put into your timeline and made available to friends and subscribers (who you may not even know).

That has the potential to make your Facebook news feed very noisy, although it also explains why Facebook is attempting to create a newspaper-like experience on your Facebook homepage. I had misgivings about that, just as I have concerns over how much information this adds to my Facebook news feed. Is it really necessary to share every single thing I read or (just as likely) stories I click on and end up not fully reading? If "read" in Facebook was a button, I would be much more selective.

Perhaps this is just the way Facebook is heading: everything automatically flows through your timeline. Every article you read, each song you listen to, anything you watch. That's kind of scary, although it also means that more is automated. Which means less manual updating, so maybe it'll turn out to be a good thing.

How automated "read" updates pan out will depend on how Facebook's users react to this. It's going to be controversial. Because think about it: how long before one of your friends reads something in a Facebook social news app that they would've preferred not to display in their News Feed?

Discuss

Facebook’s bold list of changes, announced Thursday, will put more pressure on advertisers to come up with compelling content and integrate themselves further into consumers’ lives. The big loser? The “Like,” which will have a smaller role in marketing, industry analysts say.

One big change is that Facebook has added a control in the top right of each story that users can check to unmark a top story. Facebook will use that information over time to automatically edit the feeds. Since users now have more control over their news feeds, brands with boring or irrelevant updates will have lower visibility. (They will still show up in the Ticker, however.)

Marketers, who have been told for years that they’re actually publishers now, will have to put that into practice, says Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, a digital marketing firm. “Facebook is a channel, albeit a collaborative one, that needs to be programmed,” says Schafer. “We need to get people to share and interact with more content.”

How to do that? David Berkowitz, senior director of emerging media and innovation for 360i, says Facebook will now be about branding actions. “Before on Facebook it was about getting people to ‘Like’ the brand,” he says. “Now, it’s about getting people to take social actions enabled by that brand.” For example, if a consumer posts an update about a run they just took, that’s a prime opportunity for Nike. “If your run is powered by Nike, you might still wear Adidas,” says Berkowitz, “but Adidas will have to find something else that’s social about its brand to become part of your story.”

Nir Refuah, vice president of McCann Digital in Israel, says that with Facebook’s redesign, consumers will be creating a “digital autobiography” in which brands will have to integrate themselves. “First Facebook became the digital ID of everyone, and now it will try to gather our whole life story,” says Refuah.

The emphasis on lifestreaming rather than merely using the platform to amplify a message means that apps will become more of a vehicle for branding. But, like the marketing messaging, Schafer says apps will also have to be genuinely interesting to consumers and their friends. “Apps with utility that allow you to consume more or participate more will be more important,” says Schafer.

Thinking of marketing as storytelling isn’t a new concept, but the redesign will extend the metaphor. Sponsored Stories, an ad unit Facebook introduced earlier this year, are a good example, Schafer says, of marketing messages that could be of interest to consumers and their friends. How? Instead of offering basic information, like “Jim checked in at Starbucks,” Schafer suggests that something more specific such as “Jim checked in at the Starbucks on 14th Street and ordered a cappuccino,” might be a relevant part of that consumer’s life that day and of interest to friends.

The change will require new thinking from marketers who had merely tried to accumulate as many fans and “Likes” as possible. Jenna Lebel,managing director of strategy at Likeable Media, says the “Like” is “a little less relevant now,” and that marketers will have to work harder to earn their place in news feeds. “Your content is going to need to be absolutely amazing,” she says.

Colin Murphy, social media director at Skinny, a digital ad agency, thinks overall, the changes are a challenge to marketers and agencies. “He really threw down the gauntlet today,” Murphy says of Mark Zuckerberg. “You actually have to deliver something of value to a customer rather than just being a person spamming.”

Here’s a look at the new Timeline, and you can view images from the event below.


Andy Samberg and Mark Zuckerberg




Beast's Facebook Page




Ben Parr and Jennifer Van Grove




F8 programing team




Zuck Dog




Beast




Before f8 Keynote




"I'm not really friends with these people"




Andy Samberg




Andy Samberg




Timeline Mobile




Mark's Timeline




Mark Zuckerberg




A View of Timeline from the Audience


Courtesy of Robyn Peterson

Mark with Timeline




Zuckerberg's Cover




Timeline




Timeline




Timeline




"Any Verb, Any Noun"




Reed Hastings




Reed Hastings




Spotify CEO Daniel Ek




Spotify CEO Daniel Ek




Watch Netflix and Hulu from Facebook




Nike+




Mark Zuckerberg and Words With Friends




Washington Post Social Reader




Running and Eating




Brett Taylor




Brett Taylor




Chris Cox




Chris Cox




Facebook Memories




Mark Zuckerberg Closes F8




Mark Zuckerberg Closes F8




More F8 Coverage:

Facebook Changes Again: Everything You Need To Know
Prepare Yourselves: Facebook To Be Profoundly Changed
Facebook Now Has 800 Million Users
Facebook Timeline: Here’s What It Looks Like [VIDEO]
Facebook Open Graph Seeks to Deliver Real-Time Serendipity
Yahoo Hooks Up With Facebook for Socially Curated News
Facebook Adds TV & Movies to the Stream
What Do You Think of the Facebook Changes? [OPEN THREAD]
Facebook Reveals Major Updates at F8 [LIVE BLOG]
Facebook Timeline Redefines User Profiles
Spotify Comes to Facebook [PICS]

More About: Advertising, Facebook, Marketing
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For the past few days I have been reading about various music services such as MOG, Rhapsody and others being part of the big Facebook re-launch. They were, except they ended up being an afterthought. Somewhat predictably, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg brought Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, on stage. Spotify got the big billing while competitors were relegated to little icons on a single slide.

Spotify, which announced general availability today, is tightly weaved into Facebook and is betting that Facebook’s global audience is going to turn the music service into a powerhouse. The on-demand music service shares investors with Facebook, both DST Global and Horizons are two common investors in the two companies. More importantly, Zuckerberg is a fan of Spotify and he uses that to listen to Green Day.

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After last year’s f8 keynote, my initial thought was pretty straightforward: I Think Facebook Just Seized Control Of The Internet. Between the Like Button, the Open Graph, and the Open Graph API, I felt like we were shifting from Google being the fabric of the web, to Facebook taking over. A few days later, a now unpaid blogger declared it: The Age of Facebook.

Both of these declarations pissed a lot of people off.

Facebook is the new AOL! Walled garden! The end of open! Blah. Blah. Blah. While everyone else has been busy whining — including plenty of competitors — Facebook has been kicking ass and taking names. And today is proof of that.

For the past year, Facebook has been working on the beautiful re-imagining of the Profile, which they call “Timeline“. I just got it enabled on my account. Going back in time and seeing the past several years of my life displayed in this way is nothing short of profound. Facebook has used software to make something meaningful. Something emotionally powerful.

Because of this impact, some people will undoubtedly hate it. But more will love it. It’s incredible: Facebook has become a tool that’s a reflection of who we are. Just in case it wasn’t painfully obvious already, they’re far more than just another web startup that will flame out in a few years. They are the real deal.

And they just made their competition look rather foolish.

All we’ve heard about in the blogosphere the past few months is how Google+ could take down Facebook. How Google actually did something halfway decent in the social space — watch out Facebook! And look — now Facebook is even copying them!

Please.

I have no doubt that some of Facebook’s little moves over the past few months have been in reaction to Google+. But focusing on that is silly. Those are tiny features compared to what Facebook just unveiled today. They weren’t even worthy of being on stage at f8.

While Google was busy rushing to get a social network that could compete with Facebook out the door, Facebook was thinking about the next phase of social networking. They were building the next Facebook! Google+ does compete with Facebook — the old Facebook. It does not compete with what Facebook launched today.

In that regard, Facebook pulled an Apple. Apple releases something, and everyone in their space rushes to do the same thing. But they never realize that it’s a losing position. They’re skating to where the puck has been. Apple skates to where the puck is going to be. Facebook is skating to where the puck is going to be.

Also reminiscent of Apple: when Facebook unveiled the Like button last year, they were hardly the first to do a button. But they were the first to do a button in the correct way. One click. Done. Suddenly, everyone needed this one-click button.

But while all the competitors were busy making that button, Facebook was busy making the button obsolete. Today’s Open Graph changes represent a world where the button isn’t needed. Sure, it will continue to exist for certain types of content. But it will be more like an on/off switch.

With the new Open Graph, you’re sharing stuff as you do it. You don’t have to think about it. You’re listening to music on Spotify and it’s being shared with your friends automatically in the Facebook Ticker. The only button you hit is “play”.

Obviously, that’s not ideal for all content. But for some of the best content, it’s beyond ideal. The idea of hitting a share button to push your favorite song to Facebook is stupid. Enjoy the music, don’t worry about having to remember to share it. That’s how this should work.

There’s one massive problem in the social space: everyone is competing for the same user time. But most services compete by piling on features that erode that time even quicker. They’re offering up services that if I use, it means I’ll have even less time to actually enjoy life. That’s not a sustainable model. Being “social” online has become far too much work.

Facebook has clearly been thinking about this problem. And now they have a way to tap the power of social without thinking about it. That’s the future of the space. It’s not about needing a share button. It’s about not needing a share button.






Crunchbase





FACEBOOK






Company:
Facebook


Website:
facebook.com


Launch Date:
January 2, 2004


Funding:
$2.34B



Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks.

The original idea for the term...






Learn more

Building off the now-common Like button that it launched last year, Facebook is introducing a new social plugin today called the Recommendations Bar. It’s designed to deliver additional recommended articles to readers right as they finish each article.

While Facebook’s recommendations box plugin has already driven this behavior, there has not been a slick interface to help readers move to a new recommended story once they finish the first recommended one. In most implementations to date, the user has to click back to find more stories in the recommendations box.

The new plugin lives at the lower right corner of each browser window of a page that has the plugin installed. It floats down as users scroll, basically like how other toolbars work. When a user first loads a page — say, an article on CNN — the bar is collapsed and only shows the option to Like the page. But as the user spends more time reading the article and scrolling down, the plugin will expand and show additional articles to read on the site based on the criteria below.

The expanded view also shows an “Add to Timeline” button. If the user clicks on it, the story will be shared back to Facebook and placed within the (new) Timeline profile. Although it might not be obvious to the user at the time, they are also enabling the plugin to share a “read” action back to Facebook every time in the future that the plugin is activated on that particular site.

Users can either turn off the feature by clicking again on the “Add to Timeline” button on the bar, or by adjusting their privacy settings on their home site, according Faceboook product manager Austin Haugen.

As the Facebook documentation outlines below, developers have the following options for defining exactly when the plugin bar will expand:

onvisible - the plugin is expanded when a user scrolls past the exact point where the <fb:recommendations-bar /> tag is placed on the page. This is the simplest option and will work best if you place the tag right at the end of your article’s main content. This is the default.
X% - where X is any positive integer less than or equal to 100. This specifies the percent of the page the user must scroll down before the plugin is expanded. For example: 100% would indicate that a user needs to scroll all the way to the end of the page before the plugin expands. 50% would be to the mid point of the page.
manual - use this option to manually trigger the read action. When you want to trigger the action callFB.XFBML.RecommendationsBar.markRead(href); in JavaScript. The href parameter is optional and will default to the current page if not set. If provided, it must match the href parameter on the XFBML tag. The manual trigger is useful when you have more a multi-page article. For example on a three page article, you would addtrigger="manual" on pages one and two and never call the ‘markRead’ JavaScript function on those pages.

In addition, a read_time parameter will tell the plugin to wait a customizable number of seconds before it expands. It’s set to 30 seconds by default.

Facebook will then take all “read” stories data and figure out how to display them in users’ Timelines and in their friends’ news feeds.

Overall, the bar should help each user find more interesting stories from their friends while reading news stories on a site. For example, a user might get to the end of an article about government budget issues, and see a recommendation from a friend about a related opinion piece on the topic. The result is that the user stays on the site longer than they otherwise might, finding more useful information while bringing the site more engagement. The plugin also could generate additional traffic through the sharing back to Facebook. However, the opt-in once aspect of the feature might surprise some users.

Facebook will soon allow its users to integrate all of their music, media, and lifestyle actions and interactions with their profiles, Mark Zuckerberg announced at Facebook’s f8 conference today. Connecting profiles to services like Spotify will allow users to fill out their own curated “Timeline,” so friends can see each others’ media activities both as individuals and aggregated over their entire network, a move that will explode the amount of content on the site.

The new arrangement is part of two new Facebook initiatives, one of which is the Timeline. Users can fill in their Timelines with both content pulled in from other services—say, an article “liked” on Ars Technica or a game played—as well as “real world” activities like photos or status updates. The real world content can be filtered by date into the timeline, so users can fill in their backstory on the site with everything that happened before Facebook existed: moves to a new city, first words as a baby, or every single relationship breakup pre-2004.







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Among the news announcements at Facebook’s giant f8 developers conference on Thursday (we’ve collected the news in one place if you want to catch up) was the launch of social apps for media consumption. This included music apps like Spotify and video apps like Hulu, but also news-reading apps from a series of media players — including newspapers such as The Washington Post and The Guardian, as well as digital-only outlets like News Corp.’s The Daily and Yahoo News. Although Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg championed these apps as “rethinking the whole way the news industry works” through social sharing of content, it seems more like those media outlets have signed over a big part of their destiny to something that feels like an AOL-style web “portal.”

The apps themselves are very similar to what the Wall Street Journal recently launched with its “WSJ Social” app (the Journal wasn’t part of the official Facebook launch, and says it came up with the app on its own). It’s a digital reader that lives inside the social network and allows logged in users to read stories (unless they happen to be behind the Journal’s paywall, of course) and also lets other Facebook users follow that reading activity — turning their friends into real-time “editors” of the content they see. As with the other apps Facebook announced, that reading behavior will also show up in the new “ticker” view of users’ activity (if users agree to allow this to happen).

A cross between a Facebook page and a newspaper
So the Washington Post social app, for example — known as Social Reader — looks like a cross between a traditional Facebook page and a stripped-down version of a newspaper page, with blocks for articles and images, and then beneath that the faces of people who have shared an article (the articles also have the time that they were published or updated in red, which is unusual for a newspaper website). And the app features a “trending now” box that shows which articles are the most read or shared at that time, and the stories that appear in the newspaper view are chosen based on algorithms powered by Trove, the news-recommendation service the Washington Post launched earlier this year.

Among the obvious reasons for media companies to hitch their digital wagons to Facebook’s star are the sheer quantity of potential readers who are using the network: According to Zuckerberg’s keynote on Thursday, Facebook recently crossed a new milestone when over 500 million used the site in a single day. As Alisa Bowen, general manager of the WSJ Digital Network put it, the newspaper created the app so that it could “reach people where they are” — and the sharing that’s built into the platform can accelerate that process immensely. Media companies could also theoretically learn things about what content their readers prefer (as well as what times they like to read, etc.) by looking at the analytics that Facebook provides about users’ behavior.

Those benefits, however, would be just as available to media companies without having to create apps that live inside what Ethernet inventor and web guru Vint Cerf recently called Facebook’s “walled garden.” In fact, if there’s one thing that makes the current partnerships between content companies and Facebook different from the deals they struck with AOL and CompuServe and other online “portals” in the early 1990s — a comparison some made when the WSJ launched its app — it’s that most of them already have full-fledged and highly trafficked websites of their own. In the early 1990s, one of the reasons to hook up with AOL was simply that no one really understood the web at that point.

And as The Huffington Post and some other new-media entities have already shown, many of the advantages Facebook was selling with its app pitch — the sharing, the analytics, the user experience, etc. — are already available with the Facebook open-graph API and platform, which the social network launched at its last f8 conference. In addition to the ubiquitous “like” button and other widgets, that allowed the Huffington Post and other sites to show who among your friends had read or commented on a particular article, and made it easy for users to share those articles themselves as well, including posting that activity back to their Facebook wall as status updates.

Not everyone wants to play inside the walled garden

It’s interesting to note that one media partner announced by Facebook has taken a very different approach from the social-reading apps that live inside the social network: Yahoo News — which just happens to be owned by another large (if somewhat faded) web portal — chose to use the new Facebook social platform to do something very similar to what the Huffington Post and others have. So instead of forcing users to remain inside a Facebook page, clicking a Yahoo link takes you to a webpage at Yahoo’s site with social features embedded in it, such as a filmstrip-style view of all your friends who have clicked the same link. That way, Yahoo keeps the traffic and engagement.

So what do the new social apps offer that the existing platform doesn’t? The most obvious answer is that it pulls all that reading and sharing activity back into Facebook’s garden. Instead of readers just browsing through the Washington Post or Guardian site and links appearing on a Facebook page when they “like” something, users are now being encouraged to go to a specific Facebook page and spend all of their time inside that page, reading and sharing and commenting. That activity exists only inside Facebook (for now, at least) and is only visible to logged-in Facebook users.

That’s an awful lot of power and control to hand over to a service that holds on fairly tightly to the data produced by its users. Yes, Facebook provides huge potential audiences, and there are benefits to knowing who your readers are at all times — just as there are benefits to handing over control of the comments on your newspaper’s website to Facebook. But there are risks to doing this as well, as I’ve pointed out before. Facebook can be a very powerful friend for media companies in all kinds of ways, but they need to remember that this power exists for the benefit of one company: Facebook.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Giuseppe Bognani

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Facebook didn’t confirm any new growth numbers this morning at its developer conference, but did say that it saw at least a half-billion users access the site in a single day last week.

The most recent statistics from Facebook in June said that the company had more than 750 million monthly actives. (However, in a spoof at the beginning of the conference, SNL actor Andy Samberg, who was pretending to be Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, did show a chart suggesting the site has more than 800 million actives.)

Facebook has long said that at least half of its monthly actives log in on any given day. So if it has more than 800 million monthly actives (or people who have logged in at least once in the last 30 days), it wouldn’t be surprising to see more than 400 million users log in on any given day.

Facebook has updated its mobile site m.facebook.com with the hybrid news feed launched for the web version of the site that it had launched on Monday. Since the Facebook for iPhone and Android apps both pull the news feed from the mobile site, the 93 million daily active users of the two apps now also see a single feed with Top Stories followed by Recent Stories. Users of these mobile interfaces no longer have the option to view separate Top News and Most Recent feeds.

For most users, there’s now no escaping the sweeping changes Facebook implemented this week. While those who never realized they could switch between relevancy-sorted and reverse-chronological feeds will now be more likely to see fresh, compelling updates, others who grew accustomed to bouncing between the feeds may be displeased that they need to alter their behavior.

At the top of their feed, mobile users will see now Top Stories, followed by Recent Stories, and finally “From Earlier Today” which includes older Top Stories and Recent Stories. Since the two popular smart phones apps pull the news feed from the mobile site, Facebook was able to make just a single code changes to update both the iPhone and Android app interfaces without requiring users to download a software update.

Facebook uses a variety of signals to determine what updates become Top Stories, denoted with a blue triangle in the top left corner. On the web version users can mark and unmark updates as Top Stories. Mobile users don’t have this option, and must accept the decisions of the EdgeRank news feed sorting algorithm.

However, users can filter the news feed according to type of update, such as Status Updates, Events, or Photos. Facebook has also made its new Smart Lists available as mobile news feed filters in addition to all of a user’s manually built Friend Lists. These give users some options if they’re not content with what they’re seeing in the new default “All Stories” feed.

The hybrid news feed feels a bit more natural on mobile, where a quick, lightweight experience works better than having a ton of options like on the web. While many users are still complaining about the web interface changes and the introduction of the Ticker, we believe some of the announcements made later today at the f8 conference will illuminate the importance of the recent redesign.

Users shouldn’t expect the mobile changes to stop, as we hear Facebook may release a major redesign of its popular smart phone apps. It might also launch the standalone mobile photos app that leaked in June. We’ll be providing deep analysis of what the announcements at f8 mean to users and developers, so check back later today.

The verdict is rolling in. Commentator after commentator is ruling Google+ a failed experiment.

Dan Reimold, Google+ Social Media Upstart ‘Worse Than a Ghost Town’

Google+ is dead. At worst, in the coming months, it will literally fade away to nothing or exist as Internet plankton. At best, it will be to social networking what Microsoft’s Bing is to online search: perfectly adequate; fun to stumble onto once in awhile; and completely irrelevant to the mainstream web. To be clear, I do not buy the beta argument anymore. G+ still being in beta is like Broadway’s “Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark” still being in previews. It has premiered. Months have passed. Audiences have tried it. Critics have weighed in. It is a show — just not a very entertaining one. Worse Than a Ghost Town As it stands, my Circles are sparse. The stream of updates has basically run dry — reduced to one buddy who regularly writes. My initial excitement about signing on and inviting people to join me has waned. Nowadays, I apparently get tired just thinking about it.

I paraphrased Rainbow Russell in the title, saying its not even haunted, because it’s a ghost town that was never really inhabited.

And this is another proof of the Rule Of Switching:

To get someone to drop an existing application that does X for a new application that does X, the new application must do X an order of magnitude better, because the costs of switching are too high otherwise.

I also known as ‘is the juice worth the squeeze?’

And, of course, with social apps the costs are the highest.

What do we expect Google will do? The only caveat I have about the imminent death of Google+ is what I wrote at the time of the launch:

Stowe Boyd, Life Is A Mosaic, Not A Monolith

Apps are the tiles of the new mosaic, our composite life online.And Google+ is a deft straddle, with one foot in the old world and the other in the new. Google+ is currently a browser based system, but it is relatively easy to imagine the core functionality implemented in a next generation Android, and all the tools — like Circles and Hangouts — accessed as complementary apps, along with dozens or hundreds of others built by Google or a growing ecology of developers.Of course, Apple will respond in kind, and is perhaps a step or two ahead with its Twitter partnership, and its plan to integrate Twitter into iOS 5. So we can expect a similar flowering of iOS 5 apps that build on a core of social capabilities, and that will allow app developers to leverage profiles, following, streams, and other foundational social componentry at the OS level.By lowering the core elements of sociality into the infrastructure, Google and Apple will be setting the stage for a new generation of app development, and therefore, user experience. Which will mean an acceleration of the transition for us, as users, from monolith to mosaic.Google+ shows that Google is going to make that transition, and it will be Apple and Google that will be defining the next ten years of the social revolution, as a result. Facebook and Microsoft may be fated to fall into each others arms, just to catch up, or survive at all.

Of course, the failure of Google+ as a monolithic competitor to Facebook, today, doesn’t bode well for Google’s future efforts, when it might be able to shift into a different modality, with apps as the tiles in a mosaic. 

They better roll out a socialized version of Android pretty quickly, or they will have fumbled the future again.

related

The Influencers Verdict: the Google+ example (loiclemeur.com) — Loic says its too early to tell if Google+, you need to wait for the average people to use it not just early adopters , he’s having a great time in Google+, and asks Reimold ‘who are you, anyway?’. Not convincing to me, Loic.
What Facebook needs to do in order to populate the Subscriptions ghost town (thenextweb.com) — Macale suggests that Facebook Subscriptions is an attempt to adopt Google+ semantics, and its not being adopted widely: a failure, or too soon to say?

Godfather Anna #facepalm #facebook

Previous selection here.

his is a column about a pair of Internet entrepreneurs, the start-ups that they founded, and the tremendous worldwide convulsions they unleashed in 2010. Like many high-tech mavens, the two men in question have many qualities in common. Both are coding gurus of the highest order, brilliant but socially maladroit, elusive and reclusive. Both are at once mono- and (at least somewhat) megalomaniacal. By the time you read this, either one may well have been chosen as Time’s Person of the Year; both are on the magazine’s short list. Yet for all their similarities, there are striking differences, too. The other day, one of them—the 26-year-old American whose company has made him a billionaire—pledged to give the majority of his wealth to charity. Two days earlier, the other—the 39-year-old Australian whose firm has made him an enemy of the state—was thrown in jail.

The difference in reactions toward the two depends on whose privacy is threatened.

The tragedy—small in the scale of things, no doubt—of this film is that practically everyone watching it will miss this point. Practically everyone walking out will think they understand genius on the Internet. But almost none will have seen the real genius here. And that is tragedy because just at the moment when we celebrate the product of these two wonders—Zuckerberg and the Internet—working together, policymakers are conspiring ferociously with old world powers to remove the conditions for this success.

An otherwise brilliant movie, Lessig's point is well taken. 'The Social Network' is about characters more than the business aspect. In spite of the fact that this country is pro-business, the only example you will hear frequently of a business movie is 'Wall Street'. And even that isn't exactly a good one.