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Wishlist Wednesday – Facebook Connect for Retailers

Posted on September 9, 2009 by jessestay

I think we may be onto a tradition today. In celebration of @jesse mccartney’s birthday (see my last post for background), I’ve got one more wish. This one is for Retailers and how they can better integrate Facebook Connect. Specifically those with physical store locations – I think this one’s pretty cool, and would be really simple to implement! The idea is the ability to truly identify individuals visiting your store.

Here’s how it would work:

Customers download a custom app for their cell phone (this would probably be most effective on an Android or Palm Pre phone). This app connects them through Facebook Connect and logs them in to your store.

On your servers you identify the individual’s Facebook account (by simply storing their Facebook ID with their customer account) – you now know exactly who they are – their name, their location, their interests, and more.

When the customer visits one of your stores, their cell phone recognizes they are at that location (assuming they’ve given it permission to do so), and you’re able to identify the customer is now at one of your stores. Now, imagine the implications:
- The customer needs help – they push a little “I need help!” button on their cell phone. Immediately a CSR is notified, and they can send someone, to their exact location within the store, to help or answer questions. They can even greet the individual by name!
- The customer visits the cash register. The cash register realizes this and immediately brings up the customer’s name so the sales rep can greet them by name and even know a little of their past history with the company so they can help further.
- Your company could keep a list of influential bloggers. When they visit your store, you are immediately notified, and you can ensure they are getting the best experience necessary.
- More importantly, you now have a record of exactly how many people are visiting your store, who they are, various demographics about those people, and what they’re purchasing, if they’re purchasing anything.

Let’s take this a little further now. Imagine if your customers could track their friends that are also shopping at the store. They could organize shopping trips, see what others amongst their friends are buying, view the most popular purchased items amongst their friends, and more. Or perhaps you could release a coupon to individuals and only allow them to share it with 5 of their Facebook friends. There are so many possibilities when you think about actually being able to identify individuals, and their friends who physically shop at your stores.

When thinking Facebook Connect don’t just think virtual! I would use something like the above, and I know many others will too, especially in a privacy-controlled environment like Facebook. What other ideas can you think of, mixing GPS with Facebook Connect?

My Facebook Connect Wishlist (for WordPress)

Posted on September 9, 2009 by jessestay

Today everyone seems to be wishing me a Happy Birthday – it’s not really, but it is @jessemccartney’s birthday on Twitter, so I get all the “ZOMG Happy Birthday @jesse mccartney” Tweets from uber-excited fans. Some times I throw them a bone and tell them how much I love them as well. It’s fun to celebrate your birthday twice a year, so hey, why not? So I thought I’d celebrate @jesse mccartney’s birthday on Twitter with a wishlist of my own. Take it as you may, but my hope is that maybe it inspires you just a little bit to go out and create something, especially if you’re a Facebook developer. And if you don’t do it, I will. Eventually.

Here’s my wishlist. All of these are ways I can see Wordpess could be used to integrate Facebook, but no one has written a plugin yet to do what I want – please check out the documentation at http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Facebook_Connect for an overview on what you can do (it’s actually quite easy!):

1. A single, standalone “Connect with Facebook” button plugin – so many Facebook plugins for WordPress try to do too many things in one plugin. I want to be able to build my own Facebook integration. Add a little component here. Add a little component there. Nothing more. So, do do this, I need, at the very basic level a “Connect with Facebook” button that shows up somewhere on my blog just by installing a WordPress plugin.

You could take this further though. What if you also provided a script that reads the e-mail addresses of commenters and automatically registered them with Facebook so that if I ever wanted to do a to encourage my readers to invite their friends, they could very easily? The button could appear as an overlay that appears once for each user, and if they opt not to log in, never appears again. When the user logs in via Facebook you automatically register them with a Facebook ID.

That’s all the plugin will do. Its focus is simply login and registration and loading the basic Facebook Connect libraries, nothing more. If you want it to do more, use another plugin that builds on top of it.

2. TweetMeme for Facebook plugin – if you haven’t had the chance yet, go look at Mashable.com, now. See their Facebook share button underneath the retweet button? That’s what I want, but I want more. Here’s how I see it:

A reader reads an article. They want to share it with their Facebook friends, so they click on the share button.

WordPress, via a plugin, calls the stream.publish() to enable the reader to publish the article to their own stream.

Your plugin tracks the ID of that particular share, maybe even prompting the user for read permissions, and adds it to an array of shared IDs in an options storage in WordPress.

On every load of that particular article, each share’s likes are read, counted, and updated in another stored variable in WordPress.

The sum of all those likes is displayed in the share button, and other readers can also share to their friends and contribute to the number of likes for that article.

Of course, this would rely on the blog owner installing the Facebook authentication plugin above in #1

3. A “publish to Facebook” plugin that works – there are already lots of publish to Facebook plugins for WordPress. None of them fully utilize Facebook Connect though, especially the stream methods. What if I could publish a blog post, have it automatically also post into my Facebook stream, and at the same time, track every comment and like of that specific post and then post comments to the share button above, while listing comments of the particular post down below my blog post comments? Or, let’s take that further. If one of my friends on Facebook comments on the blog post itself, I also want that friend’s same comment to show up under the published stream item on Facebook as well. I think that would be incredibly useful.

4. A “leave a comment” plugin that works – I think the same could happen with comments. TechCrunch is doing this somewhat. A user that comments should have the option of publishing that comment to Facebook in the user’s stream. What also should happen though is that comment ought to be tracked. Now, when any of a user’s friends that are also previous commenters on that blog comment on Facebook, they also appear threaded underneath that specific blog comment on the blog. Or vice-versa.

5. A standalone friends widget – I want a friends widget just like the Google FriendConnect widget you see over to the right. It ought to come with a “subscribe” button, or “join my community”. When a reader subscribes, they automatically (unless they opt-out) get new blog posts for your blog added to their stream on publish, real-time. This would also work great if you develop RSS reader software, as you could also automatically subscribe the user to the blog in your reader. Again, it should be standalone though – people should be able to mix-and-match, and this would also rely on #1 above being installed.

6. An activity streams plugin – I would put this top on my list if I could (even though it’s at the bottom, because it’s the most code to develop). If you haven’t had the chance to yet, regardless of your political preference, go check out what HuffingtonPost.com has done with Facebook Connect. Log in with Facebook Connect there and you’ll see one of the coolest implementations of Facebook Connect I’ve ever seen. I wish they would release that to the open source community as a Facebook plugin for WordPress.

All the activity streams plugin needs to do is track activity of readers on a blog. A new view of the blog would appear, showing all of your friends who are also readers of the blog, and a historical news feed or timeline of what they’ve just read, what they’re commenting on, along with any other cool activity that may be pertinent. The idea is to help a blog’s readers discover new content on your blog. This plugin could track the most popular blog items, most commented, etc. and display those on the side for readers to discover. Each stream would be custom to that reader and their Facebook friends that read the blog. It could also have options to invite friends to come check out the blog.

This specific plugin could also integrate with #5 above and enable a reader to click on one of their friends, and see only the activity of that specific friend. Or, when inviting their Facebook friends to check out the blog, it could provide a way for each of those friends to subscribe and automatically receive new blog updates for the blog in Facebook.

The possibilities are endless, but I think you catch my drift. You can even package all the above into a single plugin, but I also want separate plugins. This stuff, to my knowledge, has not been developed yet, but it should. I want you to go out and build it before I’m forced to – these are free ideas and a great way to show your talent, get some free exposure here (I’ll write about each one that does this effectively), and a great amount of traffic from both Facebook’s plugin directory and WordPress’s plugin directory when you’re finished.

Let me know if you’ve written one of these – either let me know in the comments, e-mail me, send me a “Happy Birthday @jesse mccartney” or whatever. I hope I’ve started your brain juices flowing – I’m salivating at the thought! (mmm…brain juices)

Dave Winer to Bring Realtime RSS to Millions via WordPress.com?

Posted on September 7, 2009 by jessestay

Today in a very inconspicuous post by Dave Winer, he demonstrated that his new real-time RSS protocol, rssCloud, could very soon be available to the millions of blogs, real-time on WordPress.com. Dave Winer, who played perhaps the most significant role in defining the RSS standard and the subsequent RSS 2.0 standard through which most blogs are read today, is taking the long-known extension to the RSS protocol to the masses with some sort of relationship he has built with Automattic, the owners of WordPress.com.

rssCloud vs. PubSub Hubbub

rssCloud was defined in its early form in 2001 as a solution to provide a “next step” for RSS to get instantaneous updates from blogs or websites wishing to push information immediately to readers. The readers weren’t quite ready for the standard at the time (see the Guitar Scene in Back to the Future), so it sat stale until this year when real-time updates again came to front and center for getting and retrieving massive amounts of information as they happen through sites like Twitter. Dave Winer says he adapted it in order to provide a better, more open microblogging solution that works outside and independent of Twitter.

Here’s how Winer explains it works:

1. The Writer gets an idea.

2. He or she enters it into the authoring tool, saves, it goes to a file, a feed.

3. The authoring software sends an Update ping to the Cloud (which is just a bit of software running on EC2).

4. The Cloud checks to see if anyone is subscribing to the Writer, and finds that indeed the Aggregator is.

5. He updated! says the Cloud to the Aggregator.

6. The aggregator then reads the feed, finds the new stuff and informs the Reader.

After less than a second the Aggregator has the update and the user is reading the content, real-time.

Pubsub Hubbub works similar. With this protocol, you have a “hub”, rather than the cloud, and the content provider pings the “hub” for every new post. The reader can then request to be notified by the hub (or hubs) if there is any new data. Google has taken the initiative on this particular protocol and is utilizing FeedBurner as their initial hub. The protocol is also designed for mostly blogs, rather than microblogs, which seems to be the space which Winer is targeting with rssCloud.

What’s the difference? Quite honestly I’m trying to figure that out myself. It would seem that the major differences are that a) with rssCloud, feeds expire after 24 hours, so aggregators need to make at least one call a day to notify the Cloud that they want to be notified. This has the advantage in that the Cloud doesn’t have to continue pinging even when aggregators aren’t there, but also increases the number of calls an aggregator must make.

The other difference is that Dave Winer is an individual developer while Google is a big company. If you ask me that doesn’t matter much due to the fact that these are both open protocols and both seek to decentralize the control of our data. Google’s response is disconcerting though where they seem to try and discredit Winer’s protocol. The more of these protocols the better (also see the OpenMicroblogging protocol). However, it is very appealing to see an individual developer, the inventor of RSS, so-to-say, take a protocol that has been around much longer and adapt it to work with modern standards. I want to see Dave succeed, but I hope they all work together. This is a space everyone benefits, despite the competition. Keep in mind that Dave isn’t the only guy behind this protocol either – there is an entire governing board that manages this standard.
Competition for Twitter?

So with this potential development, what does this mean for WordPress? First, millions of blogs will now instantly be real-time in the same way Twitter is real-time. Second, where Dave Winer wants rssCloud to be targeted towards the micro blogging space this could very well mean WordPress could be looking at something in that area to compete with Twitter. I predicted this at the beginning of this year, remember?

Here’s what I see happening: Automattic will utilize its BuddyPress and P2 platforms to create a decentralized microblogging platform that utilizes rssCloud to provide real-time updates. Wordpress.com will be extended to enable “mini-blogs” which accompany your existing blog and provide real time status updates anyone can subscribe to. Clients like Seesmic, TweetDeck, and PeopleBrowsr will utilize the rssCloud protocol as Aggregators and allow you to view all this data in one place in ways you could never do before.

Dave Winer’s demonstration today is HUGE news for the blogging world and decentralized micro-blogging. I can’t wait to see what happens.

UPDATE: You can download the WordPress plugin for rssCloud here. StayNAlive.com is now officially one of the first rssCloud-enabled blogs on the internet.

A Man Without a Party

Posted on September 7, 2009 by jessestay

I’m going to stray from tech for just a post here and vent a little. I’m going to bring up a word I warn some may find offensive. I am not a profane man. I simply do not use profanity as I feel it degrades who we are and distracts from plain English. This word is the best term to describe the situation I am in politically though: Bastard. I’m a man without a party. I didn’t go anywhere I don’t think. I’m pretty sure my party left me.

I grew up in a conservative home where I was taught values of respect for our nation, honor for our liberty and this nation’s values. I grew up in a home where we uplifted and supported and strengthened our President because he was our President, and politics aside, he was the one leading and representing our nation to the world. I was taught faith in a supreme being, love for our troops, and gratitude to those that had served us before.

I was taught to pay my taxes, and to not be wasteful of the money I have. I was taught not to go into debt. I had trust in a government that would do the same. I was taught to be self-sufficient, and at the same time give what I had left over to the poor. A scripture I grew up with taught me to “succor those that stand in need of your succor”, and if I had not to give, “I [gave] not because I [had] not, but if I had I would give.” I was taught to participate in government, be a loyal citizen, to vote, and to volunteer where possible.

My parents taught me great values, and where they didn’t agree with a politician, they were careful to let me know why they didn’t agree, and let me make a decision based on that knowledge. I don’t think I remember my parents ever admitting to loyalty to a single party of choice. When we asked who they voted for, they would not tell us, because it was “none of our business”. They wanted us to choose. Their politics were individual decisions, and they wanted us to make our decisions based on values, not politics.

I grew up with both my Grandfathers being former Colonels, one in the Army and one in the Air Force. One of my Grandfathers, a Purple Heart-decorated Colonel with 12 kids and a very strong family, taught me at a young age to salute the flag when I wore the Boy Scout uniform, and to put my hand over my heart and stand when flags were presented other times. He taught me to sing the national anthem when it was sung, and to learn the words.

My other Grandfather, also a World War II veteran and double-flying-cross decorated Colonel taught me the value of faith, and how it can carry you through the worst of times. He taught me leadership, and regardless of political boundary, why remaining true to your values was more important than anything. He served in the Pentagon, met various Presidents and dignitaries, but no matter what, he went to Church every Sunday, stuck to his values, and respected his Nation with all his heart. He continued to teach these values to Cadets as he started the Air Force ROTC at Brigham Young University. He lead a family of 7 children and continued teaching those values at home, instilling the same respect in my Father, who taught these things to me.

Values. Faith. Respect. Liberty. Justice. Integrity. Honor. Charity. E Pluribus Unum – “Out of many, one.” I’m saddened to see not a single party supporting all of these virtues. I’m saddened that the what is supposed to be “the conservative party”, the Republican party, is ruining the image of our President’s office just as bad as the Democrats have previously. I’m saddened that our leaders have become corrupt, seeking popularity and politics instead of integrity, honesty, and virtue like my Grandfathers above. I’m saddened that children now have to seek Permission slips to see their President speak this week. I’m saddened that we’ve lost our core family values so much that parents can no longer teach their children values to learn on their own what’s right and what’s wrong.

The Republican party, whom I thought was my party growing up has deserted me. The Democrats are too far in the other direction. I’m saddened that I’m in actually what appears to be the majority of Conservatives at the moment. Where is our Party? I’m afraid my friends, that I’ve joined the ranks of the many Conservatives who belong to a leaderless Bastard Party. Maybe that is where I belong now, faith, values, virtue and all.

To the Whitehouse and President Obama: Thank you for this amazing opportunity to have my kids learn who their President is and what he wants them to hear. Sure, we’ll be talking to them when they get home about your speech, but what an amazing opportunity this is! Never in the history of this nation has the President had the technology available to do this, and this Conservative is grateful for it.

To the Republican party, my Republican party (or what I thought was mine): look at yourselves! Here’s a great video by John Stewart that describes the perception (in the image of Fox News, in this case) which you’re becoming:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c

Fox News: The New Liberals

www.thedailyshow.com

http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:item:comedycentral.com:246922

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