"On balance, though, Microsoft's done a fine job integrating Facebook's key features and giving Twitter an even more elegant interface than the service's native browser-based one.
Where's Sony in all this? The company just announced on its official PlayStation blog that upcoming firmware update v3.10 will add Facebook and Twitter functionality to the PS3's XMB interface."
A few years ago I tried to start a company called Anatomy Ads. We tried to create a social advertising network. This company failed as a business. You can read a lengthy post about what we did and what happened here.
But it didn't fail as a concept. Someone, somewhere, is going to invent a social ad platform that works. It's just a matter of time. What I wanted to address is everything that we did right, and why there is an even greater opporunity to do it again—and do it right.
When we started, there was a [now defunct] company called TipJoy which billed itself a "a social micropayments service." It was the closest analogue to what we were trying to create. TipJoy allowed you to leave a tip for someone else, usually a blogger or some other kind of creative person creating new media content. If you were a blogger, you'd put their widget on your site and people could leave you tips. All your readers had to do was fill out a tip amount and register their email address. TipJoy would send them an email and ask them to pay for their tip. It let people tip first and pay later. It was very simple. In a lot of ways it was a Web 2.0 version of the PayPal "Donate Now" button.
I thought it was an interesting idea immediately, but noticed there was a problem. There was no real incentive to leave a tip other than the warm fuzzy feeling you might get for doing so. Unforunately, that's not enough for most people. Leaving a tip for a blogger isn't like leaving a tip at a resturant. If you don't tip them, no one is going to spit in your food if you come back. On the web, no one even knows who you are. Moreover, it's just not customary to do so. You're asking people to change their behavior and you aren't giving them an incentive to do so.
We looked at this and thought about what might happen if we gave people a real inventive to "leave a tip". What if you gave people impressions. What if you gave them a voice on the blogs and websites they admire so much. Would that be enough? How many people would be willing to pay a dollar to get on Mashable even if they didn't know how many impressions they would get?
These were among some of the questions we tried to answer with the Anatomy Ads platform, and we ran into problems:
Part of what made TipJoy work at all was that it was so simple. They took the PayPal model, made it a little bit easier and more user friendly, and created a business out of it.
Simplicity is what has got me thinking about the idea of social micropayments and tipping again. Now we've got single sign-on services like Facebook Connect, Twitter OAuth, OpenID, MySpaceID and Google Friend Connect. What if you allowed people a quick way to create ads, testemonials, or leave shoutouts using Twitter and Facebook? Could you make social advertising work?
Lo so, non posseggo un lettore Blu-Ray e – di conseguenza – non potrò usufruirne: sta di fatto che il prossimo 17 novembre (in occasione del 10° anniversario) uscirà una confezione speciale di Fight Club — il film di David Fincher, ispirato al romanzo di Chuck Palahniuk.
Il prodotto è supportato da una community attiva anche su Facebook (e che propone un sito promozionale cui si può accedere via Facebook Connect), com'è giusto che sia per qualcosa che ha stimolato un'ideologia post-decadentista.
FROM THE GEEK:
“A distributed social network traditionally refers to an Internet social network that is decentralized and distributed across different providers, with emphasis on portability and interoperability.” --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network
TRANSLATED FROM THE GEEK:
Dude walks into a bar and orders a draft. Bartender says, “Hey, Joe, how you doin'?” Dude asks how the bartender knows him, and the bartender replies, “Your friends from Bob's Pub on 52nd come in here all the time. You want me to let the guys at the office know you're here?” “Uh, no, thanks.” Joe replies. “No problem, Joe.” says the bartender, “Here, try this new draft we have on tap - your buddy Pete raved about it!”
Most sites that allow you to share information, post comments, review stuff, etc., require you to log in to do so. These sites may already know who you are when you get there if you are already logged in somewhere else like Facebook or Google, or have what is called a universal ID like OpenID.
Say you are visiting a site that supports distributed social networking. If you have an OpenID, the site already knows certain things about you – things you allow any site to know about you, like your name or email address. You can then share the site or site content with other people in your network. You can also see how other people within your network have interacted with the site by reading their reviews, comments, and so forth – just as they will be able to see how you have interacted if they visit the same site later on.
--DeGeek
I just had an unbelievable debugging experience with our facebook connect site:
One of our pages includes three main elements:
I had the page working fine in all sane browsers, and went to verify that everything was kosher on internet explorer. You're really not going to believe this.
I tested the page in every different way, and those steps had to be performed in exactly that order to reproduce the effect, but it consistently disabled all text areas on the page. Debugging javascript in internet explorer isn't the most enjoyable experience - the IE javascript debugger is a major downgrade from firebug. I tried using firebug lite, but the above sequence actually DISABLED THE FIREBUG CONSOLE!?!?
The Solution: <div style="overflow: hidden; width: 1px; height: 1px;">
<form>
<textarea id="ajax_fix"></textarea>
</form>
</div>
Then, I appended the following callback to FB.Connect.streamPublish (which gets called after the dialog is closed): if ($("ajax_fix")) {$("ajax_fix").focus();}; . . . and problem solved. I still don't believe it. It's clearly a ridiculous hack. I just don't know whether to feel dirty for putting it in or triumphant for getting it to work.
Hey look, it's just like Test Tube Telly, over on Hulu...they've got scheduled Facebook events to promote their 'premieres' (online shows on Hulu that preview TV broadcasts) planned too. Basically, they seem to be banking on the shared viewing experience that FB offers, and think the live chat element is the way forward. Not sure from where I'm sitting.
Thought this would be interesting to listen to. Turns out that Facebook accounted for 1.2m visits to ITV.com, or around 3-4% of traffic. That's much, much more than the referral strength of Twitter, facebook and MySpace put together for channel4.com, which is interesting: what are ITV doing to make Facebook astrong platform for referrals? He doesn't mention anything particularly innovative here, but it's clear that making Facebook Fan pages for every one of the top programmes is a priority, and owning them internally.
A few of us are going to be attending the next Facebook Developer Garage, and hopefully we can get some interesting points of view from the assembled there.
This is the most fun application of Facebook Connect I've found so far. Be warned though, it's quite addictive. You may want to leave it till the afternoon :)
http://www.theprofiler.be/ It's hard to describe, but this summary tries: Use The Profiler to visualize what's behind your profile picture, and discover what goes on in your friends' heads. It's not as spooky as it sounds... Andy
