Home - Stay N Alive

What Buzz Needs to Make a "Sting" in Facebook

Posted on February 14, 2010 by jessestay

There’s a new Buzzword in town that’s “Buzz” lately and as I mentioned earlier, some are already calling things “dead” because of it. Most of this is due to the size of Google, the masses it can reach, and the overall usefulness of the service. Personally, I think all the “dead” articles are all a ruse to build the numbers of those praising the service and feeling a need to abandon others, as well as gain favor with the Google team as they see strong potential in the service. While there’s no argument there’s potential in the service (and I’m even spending more time over there and strongly hope for its success), it is far from a “Facebook killer”. While I mentioned why before, I feel qualified, and I’d like to spend some time sharing some things it needs to get on level grounds to Facebook.

Buzz Needs a Central Place for all Social Activity

I’ve said this before – Google needs a central place for everything “Social”. Facebook has grown so well because it has this organization. I’m still unclear if Google is trying to make Buzz this place, or if Orkut, or another product should be that. Contacts are not that place – Contacts should be the source of social graph data, but are not social connections. Social connections can come from much more than just contact data – people search, other peoples’ buzzes, as well as other Social Networks can all be sources for Social Contacts between Buzz (see the need for Facebook import later).

Buzz Needs a Stronger API

One of the reasons Buzz has such strong potential is because of its foundation on open architectures. There is so much more that can be done however – I’m sure they’re working on some of these, but I’d like to share my thoughts, in hope that if they haven’t been thought of, they can be added. For instance, currently there is no way for any 3rd party app to gain access to the cool comments architecture Buzz posts get in Gmail. What if I could get FriendFeed, or even SocialToo e-mails in the same format? Buzz or Gmail could open an interface to this, perhaps built on top of SMTP (an SMTP header would denote it’s a formatted e-mail), Salmon, and OpenSocial standards, to give developers access to this UI. The great thing about it – if Buzz sends new Buzz updates in an SMTP-supported format, other e-mail clients could adapt these standards as well. It would no longer be limited to just Gmail to see these formats.

I think it goes without saying that we need better ways to read, analyze, and discover the data, as well as social graph connections on Buzz. I’d like to be able to track who’s posting about what, how many likes or how many comments there are for specific posts mentioning specific keywords or links. I’d like to be able to track who has followed an individual and who has stopped following an individual on Buzz. I’d like to be able to embed Buzzes on 3rd party sites. I’d like an FBML-like interface to integrate and customize content right in the Buzz environment. I’d like RSS for every search I do, along with the ability to share searches and get notifications on new items from those searches (I believe Steve Gillmor calls this “Track”).

Buzz Needs Groups and Events, Deep Integration Into Those Events and Groups

To say just a social stream service is comparable to Facebook would be like saying Notepad is comparable to Windows 7. It’s just not a fair comparison. One is a feature of the other. If Buzz really wants to compete (and I’m not saying they do), they need deep integration into Groups, Events, business Pages, and more. They need the ability for groups of people to all collaborate around a single event, Buzz around it, share it with their friends via Buzz, RSVP via Buzz and Gmail, etc. Google Calendar just doesn’t do this yet.

Groups are another key component. E-mail is too private. They need to enable “Groups” in Buzz that do more than just Buzz. They need to enable sharing of photos, events related to that Group, and encourage communication amongst Group members. They need to put that into a people search enabling you to find old High School friends and acquaintances through them. Google already has some of the basics for this, but I argue they aren’t yet integrated across Google services yet, and are a bit more private an environment than what Facebook encourages. The challenge Google will have is maintaining the “public feel” that Facebook groups and events provide, while maintaining the “silo’d feel” Facebook provides at the same time giving people a sense of security. This will be no easy challenge, and may take a silo’d environment like Orkut to do completely successful.

Buzz Needs Better Privacy Controls

At the heart of most Buzz controversy currently lies their relaxed privacy controls. Originally they automatically followed people for you, giving others potential access to your private list of contacts. Your Google contacts were also all visible on your Google profile just by enabling Buzz. Google has since enabled you to disable this, and has turned the “auto-follow” into more of an “auto-suggest”, but there is still so much more that I can get from Facebook that Google is lacking in regards to Privacy.

For instance, on Facebook, I get to decide how much of my own profile is visible to certain friends. I get to decide if it’s visible to friends of friends. I can even go to the extent of selecting specific lists I want to be visible to, and certain other lists of friends (or individual friends) I don’t want it to be visible to. I can specify specific components of my profile I want visible to those lists. I can set profile-wide settings that remain protected by the privacy settings I set, as well as specific targeted profile elements that remain protected by these privacy settings. Facebook gives me complete control over what my friends see and don’t see. With Google Buzz, not only is it all out in the open, but you’re revealing much more than your social contacts – you’re revealing e-mail addresses and Google account information. It’s wrong the way Google approached this from the beginning, and I argue, even a little bit evil, whether intended or not.

Buzz Needs Lists

Which brings me to my next point – lists. Lists have much further ramifications than just privacy settings. On Facebook, I can click on the “Friends” link on the left-navigation and immediately have access to lists I have organized of my friends. I can view the posts of just my close family members, or just the posts of the news makers and use it like a news reader. Or I can look at just the latest comments of all my friends, or even a summarized view of the top posts for the day. Buzz really needs this to be even remotely useful. On FriendFeed, I have a list of “Favorites”, which I use most of the time to get the most relevant content from those I actually know, and then I can skim the rest of those I follow occasionally.

On every Social Network I belong, it should not be about giving, but how you receive content. Each and every Social Network has the responsibility to empower its users to receive content in the way they want to. Facebook has mastered this (although I argue FriendFeed has done, to an extent, even more than Facebook in this area). No one should feel the need to unfollow me because I post too much, or post one or two things they don’t like. They should be able to read the content in the manner they like, and filter out what they don’t like, without the ugly unfollow. Lists are just one component of this.

Buzz Needs Better Filters

The other part of being able to receive content the way you like is via filters. Each and every application that interfaces with Facebook has to identify itself. This enables users to filter based on application if they choose to. If I don’t want to receive Farmville posts, I just hide everything from Farmville, and I’ll never see another field plowed or beet grown again. People argue they’re worried integration with Facebook will enable the Farmvilles to gain access, but the thing is, without filters, the Farmvilles will use Buzz regardless, but without Filters you will have no way to stop them. Facebook has completely mastered this, and I can’t do this on any other service.

In addition to application hiding, I should be able to filter by feed type. If I don’t want to see someone’s Twitter feed, I should be able to hide just their Twitter feed. If I want to block all Twitter posts from showing, I should be able to do that. If I want to hide a user but not unfollow them, I should be able to do that. I shouldn’t have to worry about making anyone feel bad by unfollowing or blocking them. I should be able to just control my feed in the way I want, just like I do on Facebook (and to an extent, FriendFeed).

Buzz Needs the Ability to Import my Facebook Contacts

Lastly, in order to compete with Facebook, Buzz needs my Facebook friends. They’re not going to get those through my Gmail contacts. Most of my Facebook friends are not in my Gmail Contacts. The only way they’re going to gain access to my Facebook friends is via the Facebook API. It’s time for Google to suck it up, work with Facebook, and find ways of integrating my friend list from Facebook into the Google environment. We’ve waited too long for this with Google Friend Connect, and surely there’s a win-win option for both companies to allow this and work together. Win-win for them is win-win for the user.

Let’s look at Aardvark (recently purchased by Google), for instance. If you log into Aardvark with your Facebook login, it will immediately detect who in your Facebook contacts are also on Aardvark, and immediately add them as friends on Aardvark. The site, Digg.com also does this well – all my Facebook friends are automatically added as Digg friends as they log into Digg through Facebook. There should be no problem with Buzz following Facebook’s developer terms of service and integrating this into their own environment. Facebook provides hooks into its APIs for doing this exact thing.

Assuming it agrees with the Facebook developer terms of service, Google could even submit each user’s contacts to Facebook and immediately prompt each user in your contacts list to connect on Facebook. This would be win-win for both companies, as it would encourage the users of both services to build contacts in each and grow each service. Considering Youtube and Aardvark have both integrated the Facebook API (Youtube could do much better), I don’t anticipate any issues with them doing this. I will interpret any lack of Facebook integration as a failure on Google’s part, and Google itself playing politics, not Facebook. So long as you play by their rules, I’ve never heard of Facebook deny a developer.

I really hope the Buzz team reads this. I have a lot of experience in the Facebook environment. I know intimately how Facebook works as an author of 2 books on the subject and writer of a plethora of documentation about Facebook on various sites around the web, as well as a developer of numerous apps on the Facebook API and consultant to many others. Frankly, as a user and developer, I want to see both companies succeed. The more Buzz succeeds, the more Facebook will compete and provide a better service. The more Facebook competes, the more Buzz will compete and provide a better service. Users win in both scenarios.

If Buzz is really trying to compete with Facebook, these are the things they need to implement to get my attention.

Horton’s Megaphone – The Competition for Discovery

Posted on February 11, 2010 by jessestay

There’s a lot of “Buzz” going around lately about Google Buzz being a Facebook or Myspace killer. Jason Calacanis, Mahalo founder and lover of Tesla, goes to the extent of saying with Buzz, Facebook lost half its value. Thomas Hawk, an amazing photographer and avid FriendFeed user, stated on FriendFeed that Google Buzz is going to “Kick MySpace’s A**”. While I don’t doubt that Myspace is already having difficulties, I really don’t see Buzz being competition at all for the Facebooks or Myspaces or even Orkuts of this world. It’s a matter of apples and oranges, or metaphorically speaking, just dust in an elephant’s trunk.

There’s a term I like to apply to the Twitter, Buzz, and FriendFeed phenomenas when compared to Facebook and Myspace and Orkut that I call, “Horton’s Megaphone”. We all live in a personal world of friends, family, teachers, doctors, and pets. That’s our reality. We live in it from day to day and it is what we are most familiar with. Yet, there’s another reality we all want to be a part of. Without being heard we’re at risk of missing out on career opportunities, growing our businesses, or maybe even fame or fortune. There’s a need beyond this current reality to get word about ourselves out to other realities beyond our inner circle of friends and family. It’s a competition for discovery about who we are.

This is where Horton comes in. In the Dr. Seuss book, “Horton Hears a Who!”, we see a completely different reality from our own, the “Whos”, whose entire reality exists in just a small speck of dust within our own. They have mayors and doctors and family and friends and neighbors, and live a grand life. But when tragedy strikes they are stuck trying to get an alternate reality to hear them. Their final survival ends up relying on their voices, a megaphone, and an elephant named Horton who had the heart to listen. “We are here! We are here! We are here!” they shouted in desperation through that megaphone, trying to get the attention of reality. Sounds familiar.

Buzz is simply that megaphone used to create contact with the real world. It’s a way we can get word out to alternate realities beyond our own to ensure our own survival as individuals, businesses, and organizations on the internet. Buzz, Twitter, and FriendFeed are where your own realities get to speak with other realities you would have never come in contact with before they existed.

There is no way Facebook should feel even a little bit threatened by Buzz (unless they’re trying to grow FriendFeed). They are two entirely different communication mediums. On Facebook I don’t need a megaphone to communicate with my close friends and family, which it was designed for. On Buzz I can’t find old friends from High School or even Elementary School, or old clubs or groups I used to belong to like I can on Facebook. I don’t have groups or shared events or life photos of all those close friends and family. Facebook is where real life happens. It’s the Elephant, the real world, reality. Some call it a “walled garden”. I call it reality, where everybody knows your name.

Buzz is (and Twitter and FriendFeed are) just an entity of individuals, most which do not know each other and each having their own realities, all trying to compete for the attention of real life. It’s a different type of communication. On these platforms it’s a competition for attention (which is why everyone wants to compete for the highest number of followers). On Facebook (and Myspace and Orkut to an extent) that competition is already won.

Facebook has the holy grail of networks right now – real life connections and relationships that are all able to connect and share with one another. It is where each and everyone on Buzz wants to be. The real value is in those real-life connections. Otherwise we are all just specs of dust in an elephants trunk.

“We are here! We are here! We are here!”

Create for a Cause

Posted on February 4, 2010 by jessestay

Recently here in Salt Lake City we had the opportunity to have Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google visit. While I didn’t have the chance to see it, reading about it, he seemed to talk about a common worry I hear throughout this State. Here in Salt Lake City and around the area we have a lot of successful businesses! From my Uncle’s Freeservers.com, to Omniture, to Mozy, to Novell, Wordperfect, and many others, there’s no shortage of success in this area. It’s a hotbed of talent and technology the world doesn’t give enough credit for. The problem is that we have no Yahoos or Googles or Facebooks or Microsofts to give us credit for that success. We have no home-grown success story that didn’t eventually sell out for big bucks to one of the big West Coast companies. I think this is a common problem for many areas. Why is this?

Eric Schmidt tried to come up with his own reasons in response to Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, who (Hatch) stated, “We get a corporation going and it has some tremendous ideas and all of the sudden someone comes up from Silicon Valley and buys it and takes it back there.” Schmidt responded, saying, “I don’t know whether [improving the situation means] globalizing the business. I don’t know whether we need more venture capitalist presence in Utah or maybe just more experience building the businesses from the startup. It’s not that businesses aren’t getting started, it’s that once started they aren’t growing the businesses fast enough.” So what is it that keeps the Googles or Microsofts from staying in Utah (and other states) rather than staying here and growing to compete with the big guys?

I’ve suggested the PR problem before. That’s just one problem Utah has – a lack of enough tech bloggers to get the word out to Silicon Valley. One other common problem I see in Utah is we get greedy. I’m not even saying that’s a bad thing. Too many Utah startups are focused on the money rather than an underlying cause that motivates their revenue stream. That’s part of the reason Utah businesses have been successful – we have some of the smartest business people in the world right here. Even Eric Schmidt confirmed that, stating that “Utah is one of the best places to do business.” We know how to make money! Unfortunately that’s what differentiates us from the West Coast companies like Google however.

I argue it all revolves around cause. Let’s look at Eric Schmidt’s company itself, Google. Everything they do centers around one central cause, “Do no evil”. It doesn’t even matter if they have purpose. Everything they do must be done “the right way”, even if they lose money from it. Some even argue this has become a PR pitch for them as well. Google is willing to lose money for their cause, yet they are also making money because of it. It’s an amazing strategy.

Facebook also does this well. I’ve done a lot of work with Facebook with 2 books on the company and several apps written around their platform. When you interact with them and their employees, you get a common theme from them: They are doing all they can to enable people to share in bigger and better ways. Their vision is to help you share without risking privacy. Everything they do revolves around that – their revenue model is built around their cause.

Twitter is building “the pulse of the internet”. They want to enable better communication between anyone in the world. They’ve forgone revenue to ensure that takes place (yet they’ve been able to raise a ton of capital, I realize, but I argue that’s part due to their cause).

I see the same thing from company to company in the Bay Area and even up in tech hotbeds like Seattle (home of Amazon, Microsoft). These guys all drive revenue based on purpose! While there are currently a few exceptions, I don’t quite see this in Utah and other states, especially amongst the larger startups. It’s all business.

Eric Schmidt also stated that “It’s not an attitude problem, it’s an availability problem. To me, it’s recruiting new talent into the state and growing new talent. It’s really people and expertise and that’s the way to make it happen.” Guess what drives and keeps talent? Motivation. If people have cause to work for they come, and they stay, and they work hard at it. I remember at BackCountry.com (a Utah company), our mantra was “We use the gear we sell”. Employees loved that because all kinds of incentives were given to get employees using their cool gear, and the employees loved that!

80% of Utah’s population is in the Salt Lake City area. Schmidt suggested this was an incredible opportunity for people to connect. I think we just need motivation to encourage that connectedness. Motivation is what makes the Googles and Facebooks and Microsofts of the world.

If you’re a startup, anywhere, what are you building on top of? Where are your foundations? Are you building for money or for purpose? I know as I build my business I’m going to be thinking much, much more about changing the world and less about the money I make as a result of that. The money will come naturally. That is how you build Google, and keep it there.

What’s your cause? What businesses do you think do this well? Please share in the comments.

EDITORS NOTE: 2 Companies in Utah that I think are doing really well at this are Phil Windley’s Kynetx and Paul Allen’s FamilyLink. When you interact with them you can sense their cause. It bleeds through the company. People are sacrificing time and money just to be sure their cause is getting through. As a result, Paul Allen’s company was recently ranked one of the fastest growing companies on COMScore, and recently, according to Compete.com, surpassed his old company, Ancestry.com in traffic. Cause eventually pays off! I encourage you to learn what they do – they won’t be going away any time soon.

Source of Eric Schmidt Comments: http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_13630231

Twitter, The New Micro-Spammer and the Need to Fix CAN-SPAM

Posted on February 2, 2010 by jessestay

Marketers seem to never learn. Time and time again they have tried to sacrifice loyal relationships with customers in order to take the easy road in hopes to get the small percentage out of millions that might convert into one-time sales. Affiliate marketing is ripe with these people hoping to “get rich quick”, without regard to how it is done. I some times wonder if these people would sacrifice their own souls in order to gain a quick buck. It would certainly seem so as we have been inundated with junk mail and e-mail spam, viruses, worms, porn, and other tools intended to spread what they’re selling to mass audiences in as fast a manner as possible.

Technology has sought hard to stop such problems. We have anti-virus solutions that stop the malware, but evidently it’s not good enough, because viruses and worms and malware still spread. Google’s Gmail has excellent spam filtering software for e-mail, as do other services such as Yahoo Mail and Hotmail. Yet, I still get spam e-mail. There are even services which try to stop the amount of junk mail you receive, yet even that isn’t fool proof. It seems no matter how much technology we throw at it, the spammers will always find a way to circumvent the process.

Government is doing all they can do as well. Here in the United States, CAN SPAM act makes it easy for government to prosecute against spammers. The act was meant to thwart the problem in the early 00’s where e-mail spam was running rampant. The marketers all complained, claiming it would reduce the amount of money they could make, worries of economic crisis ensued. But after the act went into place, marketers began to realize they were actually seeing more money than before because they were actually focusing on people that were interested in their product, rather than people that weren’t. I admit a lot of my spam went down at that time.

Enter 2010. Twitter is almost a standard. Facebook is almost a standard. We are seeing the era of micro-messaging take form, and it doesn’t seem this era is going away any time soon. As with any new communications technology, so come the spammers that come along with it. As I can attest from my own company, the spammers are now out of control on Facebook and Twitter and almost any other service that enables micro-messaging, and they’re fighting their best to stay on top of it all. I admit they’re probably doing all they can, too.

On SocialToo in just the last month, we have already automatically marked near 3,500 DM messages as spam out of a total of 3,500 users that utilize the service. Since we implemented the service just a few months ago we’ve marked near 8,500 DM messages as spam. And that’s just DMs on Twitter! Considering there are in the 10s of millions on the service and DMs aren’t the only means of spam, you can see the problem Twitter and Facebook are facing.

It was this reason I added these spam filtering services on top of SocialToo. I too want to do what I can to help kill these problems. I’ve seen it all – even people abusing my own service to increase their numbers and in return spam those followers with things their followers never intended to receive. It was this reason we complied with Twitter’s request to remove automatic unfollow of those who unfollow you recently, and frankly I agree with Twitter on the move – they’re doing the best they can to thwart spammers, and I want to support them in that process. Look at this video I found on Youtube recently – in it, a man is demoing software that uses a combination of your desktop and outsourced workers in India (likely through services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) to quickly create accounts, send a few tweets each to increase, gain, and grow followers, and spam those followers with affiliate links. It’s appalling the way he says this is a “secret” only a “select few” marketers know about – the fact is I already knew about it – it’s no secret:

Source: http://www.boblallyblog.net/?p=776 (http://twitter.com/boblally and http://twitter.com/successtoolme)

This guy’s software is just one of many, and I argue it does this the hard way. Now we have the ability for applications to sit on top of the browser and completely control the context which a user views the web. Applications like GreaseMonkey, extensions and plugins, and even Kynetx, while they can be used for good, could all be used in this way with just simple HTML and Javascript to create accounts and spam with them. There’s not much Twitter or Facebook or even the makers of GreaseMonkey, Firefox, Chrome, IE, or Kynetx can do about them (although Kynetx at least has a controlled user directory through which they can at monitor these things). There are already tools like Hummingbird out there that do this for relatively cheap, and there will be more.

It’s time Government step in and put an end to this. CAN-SPAM was written for long-form communications, but it needs to be modified to allow for the short-form. It specifically mentions e-mail and cell phone communications, not micro-messaging services. Recipients should still have the opportunity to opt-out of the messages they receive. Perhaps the enablers of such communication such as Facebook and Twitter need to provide a means for message senders to provide an opt-out location that attaches to their messages. That’s just one idea – I’m sure there are many other ways of doing this.

CAN-SPAM needs a provision which specifically targets the micro-messaging space. It needs communication which specifically says what marketers can do on these services, and how people can opt out. As I know very well, this will not stop all messages, but it will cut off a large majority of messages, which I know are being used by legit Lawyers and Doctors and business owners everywhere in the US to cost Twitter thousands of dollars and waste the time of countless people.

We need to do all we can to stop this nonsense. I want to see these micro-messaging spammers prosecuted. It won’t happen unless the US Government modifies CAN-SPAM. How can we do this effectively in the micro-messaging space?

Make Your Facebook Page Fly With the FBFoundations Facebook Chicklet

Posted on December 22, 2009 by jessestay

Most guys (and girls) who love Facebook like I do probably have a Facebook Page where those wanting to get a scoop of the latest in our professional lives can come learn, chat, and converse with each other. I consider a Facebook Page (some call them “Fan Pages”) the equivalent on Facebook to a Twitter Profile, as it enables a public, anonymous way to express yourself without limit to the number of people that “follow” you. Pages are powerful, and can build strong engagement for you and your brand in ways Twitter or even a regular Facebook Profile can’t. I was surprised that with all the little “chicklets” out there displaying anywhere from the number of readers on your blog to the number of followers you have on Twitter that there wasn’t anything for blog owners to display the number of Fans they have on Facebook. That’s why I created the FBFoundations Facebook Chicklet for WordPress blogs.

The premise of the chicklet is simple. It uses Facebook Connect (something I argue is even more powerful than a Facebook Page, but requires someone with at least HTML and Javascript knowledge to implement) to go out and get the number of fans for a Facebook Page you specify, and share the number of those fans right on your blog. In addition, it hyperlinks the chicklet back to your Facebook Page. Displaying this chicklet on your blog can be a great way to encourage readers to click through and become fans on Facebook as well, where more conversations can take place and your blog can spread even further. You can see the Facebook Chicklet for this blog up above this article next to the subscribers and twitter followers chicklets. Go ahead and click on it and become a fan and I’ll send you more updates!

Implementation

To implement the chicklet, you’ll first need to download the FBFoundations plugin (download here) that I wrote and can be downloaded here. This just makes it so that it can access Facebook to get the number of Fans for your Page. It will also add an additional meta tag or two to make sharing your blog a little prettier when it’s shared on Facebook.

Once you’ve downloaded and activated FBFoundations on your blog, just download the FBFoundations Facebook Chicklet plugin, extract it into your WordPress plugins directory, and activate it. You’ll then want to configure it to point to your Facebook Page in your blog’s admin (if not, it will point to mine!). Now, go to either the sidebar widgets section in your administration if your blog is widgets-enabled, or go into your Blog’s theme files, and place the following code anywhere you want the chicklet to show up:

Once that’s in and the plugin is activated, the chicklet should start showing with the number of Fans on your Facebook Page. It’s that simple.

Again, be sure to enable the FBFoundations plugin on your blog for this to work. Also, if you want to also enable sharing for each blog post on your blog to Facebook, along with the number of people that have shared the post, be sure to also check out my FBShare plugin for WordPress!

I guess this is kind of my Christmas present to you all. Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and Happy Chanukah this season!

You can download the plugin straight from WordPress right here. Here is the WordPress plugin page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/fbfoundations-facebook-chicklet/

Image Courtesy Robb Sutton from http://robbsutton.com/micro-blogging-are-facebook-and-twitter-replacing-personal-blogs/

Announcing the Winners of the Static FBML Contest

Posted on December 19, 2009 by jessestay

Over on Tamar Weinberg’s blog, Techipedia, I wrote an article about how to customize your FBML Page utilizing the Static FBML app on Facebook, along with a few other techniques. As part of the post we announced a contest. The 2 best Facebook Pages left in the comments to integrate FBML into a tab using the Static FBML app would win. I’m proud to announce the winners. The winners are:

HyperArts Web Design – these guys did some interesting stuff with Javascript to enable loading of the different tabs without an entire refresh of the page. One of the tabs even had a web form on it enabling you to contact them. The overall experience, use of multiple types of HTML elements, and more, provided a full package that I thought deserved to be one of the winners.

Express – this is a very simple one, but very elegantly designed, and they have a very friendly welcome page on their “What’s New” tab. I like their use of HTML, and well-designed layout. I also really like that they used bit.ly links to enable tracking of clicks on the Page. They link to their other outlets such as Twitter and Youtube as well.

I was very impressed with all the designs and the effort put into them. Consistently, there are a few things that everyone, including the winners, could have done better though: I would have loved to see you utilize FBML a bit more. Perhaps you could utilize the tag to implement tabs to look like Facebook’s. Or I would have loved to see and video – I don’t think any of the entrants had that. Maybe you could use to produce a form in a pretty, Facebook-like format. Perhaps a nicely formatted image of the owners using and could personalize it a bit. Be sure to get to know as well so you can add comments to your tabs if you want to facilitate discussion.

Overall I’m happy to see what came out of the contest. My hope is that you can continue this and push your Pages even further. Get to know what you can do with FBML. Learn what’s possible, and show me what you’ve done!

For the winners, either Tamar or I should be contacting you, but you can also shoot me an e-mail at jesse@staynalive.com and I’ll arrange to get you a copy of FBML Essentials.

If you would like help customizing your Facebook Page please don’t hesitate to contact me and arrange a consultation. Congrats to the winners!

Just in Time for the Holidays, FriendFeed Becomes First OAuth Wrap Provider

Posted on December 17, 2009 by jessestay

About a month ago, Facebook’s David Recordon announced that Facebook was hard at work with the Open Standards Communities on a new OAuth protocol called Wrap. The goals of the protocol seem to specifically provide a way to direct a user through the authentication process through a client-only model, removing the need for developers to do heavy server-side code to authenticate the user. Such a model fits well for Facebook, who, through Facebook Connect, has fought to make it as easy as possible to enable developers to authenticate users via simple Javascript and HTML. It seems Facebook is making through with its promises, by launching FriendFeed as the first OAuth Wrap provider to launch with the new protocol.

The launch comes as a test of a discussion that took place at an OAuth Wrap Community meeting at Facebook headquarters last Tuesday, where it was discussed how to enable client-only authorization of users. In response, Bret Taylor and the FriendFeed team (I guess, according to Luke Shepard, that means there’s still a team?) produced a working prototype of the model, enabling it on their own site. Benjamin Golub, who was responsible for FriendFeed’s API before it was acquired by Facebook, confirmed this with the comment, “FriendFeed supports OAuth WRAP now :). Great job Bret, Luke, and David!” on FriendFeed.

It’s still unclear if this API is available to developers yet, or if it was only a proof-of-concept, but it is clear FriendFeed is very likely becoming a playground for the Facebook team to try out new technologies. This is promising in that if this continues, FriendFeed should continue to see cool new technologies applied to it way before, and even if, they even the light of day on Facebook.com.

I’m very excited to see the Facebook team pushing these new open, client-side APIs, but even more excited to see the FriendFeed team still cranking out cool new technologies, making this the second one today for the site. It’s becoming apparent that the FriendFeed team is finally becoming accustomed to Facebook’s internal technologies and architecture, and my hope is that we will soon to see many “beautiful butterflies” come out of what they’ve been working on over the last few months.

Now, if anyone knows how we can try this thing out I’m all ears!

UPDATE: Benjamin Golub has granted my wishes! He says in the comments: “You can try it out yourself! Register an application at http://friendfeed.com/api/register and then follow along with http://github.com/finiteloop/friendfeed-wrap-example/blob/master/friendfeedwrap.py” – hmmm…new SocialToo feature?

FriendFeed Launches Status Update Sync to Auto-update Facebook

Posted on December 17, 2009 by jessestay

Despite all the “FriendFeed is dead” arguments the naysayers have been pushing, a new, pretty significant update was pushed by the FriendFeed team today into production. The update belongs to FriendFeed’s App on Facebook, and now imports every update users post on status update services they import into FriendFeed as status updates on Facebook. This means if you are importing your Twitter feed onto FriendFeed, and have installed the FriendFeed app on Facebook, all your Twitter updates will now automatically import as status updates onto Facebook. Not only that, but it supports Google Chat status updates, Plurk updates, Identi.ca updates, and potentially any status update service supported by FriendFeed.

This move goes head-to-head with services like Twitter’s own Facebook app, which, as one of the very first Facebook Platform apps, automatically posts Twitter updates to users’ profiles. The idea also, to me, suggests that the FriendFeed team will be releasing more updates around this in the future. For instance, it now makes sense that FriendFeed begins to enable preferences around which services auto-populate into Facebook, and perhaps even a “post to Facebook” checkbox next to the already-existing “post to Twitter” checkbox when you post an update on the service. FriendFeed also, very soon, needs to integrate Facebook Connect so that their Facebook integration (which is bound to happen) is much tighter and works better with the Facebook environment. This is based on a Facebook app, which in my best guesses the FriendFeed team should be integrating into their existing FriendFeed app on Facebook – it’s inevitable at this point. When this happens it makes sense to add even more updates to their Facebook integration, further growing the service.

The skeptics have all been pushing that FriendFeed won’t grow because the FriendFeed team is no longer working on the product. I think this pretty much debunks that theory, even suggesting more updates are to come. As I said before, FriendFeed’s just fine – it won’t be going away any time soon, and I think this proves my point even further.

FriendFeed’s Just Fine

Posted on December 11, 2009 by jessestay

With all the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt around FriendFeed.com one would think FriendFeed is this service that is going the way of Jaiku, Pownce, Dodgeball, and others that went dead after their owners acquired them. There’s no doubt that amongst certain users in the US the activity in their streams is going down and some are talking about it. Just last month, Robert Scoble, FriendFeed’s number one user and unpaid evangelist publicly announced his resignation from the service and move over to bigger services like Twitter. Even yesterday, Louis Gray, perhaps FriendFeed’s second most active unpaid evangelist (and both good friends of mine), shared a statistic seemingly indicating his disappointment with the service. Yet, when you look at the big picture, things are up and to the right. There are no statistics anywhere that indicate FriendFeed is anywhere close to losing users when you look at the numbers and the long-haul.

Louis Gray shared a Compete.com graph of unique visitors yesterday which indicated that in November, FriendFeed had shown less users accessing the site than its low point a year ago. What isn’t shared though is that Compete is normally only indicative of US users, and FriendFeed is well known as an international site, extremely active in regions such as Turkey and the mideast. Remember the activity FriendFeed got around the Iran crisis? Even Bret Taylor, co-founder of FriendFeed, now working for Facebook admitted that since August, International activity on FriendFeed is now dominating. See the graph below.

If you look at both Alexa and Quantcast 2 year stats, which when taken as a whole are generally a bit more acceptable a statistics engine in terms of general and international traffic, they both show an up-and-to-the-right trend for FriendFeed that hasn’t stopped since last year. There are a few down points, such as when 2 months in a row, TechCrunch wrote a scathing post about FriendFeed, comparing it to “the mob”, and Mike Arrington’s fallout after that (he was one of the top-followed users on FriendFeed up until that point). The next month Facebook acquired FriendFeed, and the lash back from users ensued, many discontinuing their use of the site, especially in the United States and Silicon Valley. The other major dip occurred in November, where Robert Scoble, FriendFeed’s most followed user, announced publicly that he was moving his activity over to Twitter and lessening his activity over on FriendFeed. FriendFeed still appears to be recovering from that, but it’s way too early to determine if that started a down and to the right trend – I doubt it. If you look at the Alexa stats, the 3 dips I mentioned occurred right around the the 3 events I just mentioned. Coincidence?

Yet, when you look at FFHolic, the site which ranks FriendFeed users and their activity, you’ll notice a change in the trends. The top users all remain the same – people from the United States and especially Silicon Valley which use the site rarely, yet are very popular. But when you look at the most active users, you no longer see the Monas and the Louis Grays and the Robert Scobles you used to see in that section. The most active users on FriendFeed are now their international audience. The second most active user, VAHID, has a feed of mostly non-English posts! So you can see that yes, when a very popular Silicon Valley blogger leaves the service, a huge chunk of the US audience leaves with them, and so does their activity, yet, the most active users aren’t even listening to or following those guys. FriendFeed continues to grow.

I predict there will be a shift, if this continues, where the most active users on FriendFeed soon will become the most followed people on FriendFeed. The more the popular users neglect the service, the more the more active users will have a chance to catch up to them. FriendFeed’s founding team has made it clear they’re not killing the service. In fact, they’ve been keeping it running and even improving it since they were acquired by Facebook. Check out the open source Tornado Framework FriendFeed is based on – it is still getting updates from the FriendFeed and Facebook teams. The FriendFeed team is all using the service still. FriendFeed was just included in the deal with Google for real-time search results, which means FriendFeed is most likely a revenue-generating site for Facebook now.

If anything, the Facebook acquisition of FriendFeed should have you more comfortable, not less, that it is going to be around for a long, long time. There is no reason for it to go away. If it does, they’ll make it easy to get the same features you are getting on FriendFeed over on Facebook itself so you can take comfort you’re not going to lose anything. But if anything should comfort you it’s that FriendFeed continues in an up-and-to-the-right pattern when you look at the big picture and not the short-term dips the big Silicon Valley bloggers keep bringing up. I still see stats for my blog on FriendFeed. As long as FriendFeed is successful Facebook has no reason to remove it as a service. There’s still too much opportunity here. It’s still way too powerful a tool to kill and I think we’re all jumping the gun with the “it’s dead” statements. There are no facts supporting that statement.

Zuckerberg’s No Fool – He Only Shows What He Wants You to See

Posted on December 11, 2009 by jessestay

I’ve seen a few articles tonight gawking about all the information people are able to see on Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s profile due to the new Facebook Privacy settings being “more open”. Of course, Facebook wants to be sure everyone knows what they’re getting into, and they’re also wanting to encourage each and every user to default to a more open status. There’s one thing they’ve changed with this entire privacy settings upgrade however – users now have full control over every single thing they post to Facebook and who sees it. Zuckerberg’s no fool – he’s only showing us what he wants us to see. Let me elaborate.

Facebook’s strongest feature to date has always been its list feature – they had lists for almost a year before Twitter even started testing the idea. One cool thing you can do with lists is take the groups of people you’ve organized and attach them to privacy settings. Previously you could do this for photo albums, videos, and even some privacy settings on a global level. If you’re a friend of mine on Facebook, the chances are you’re not seeing all the photos and videos I post – I know that’s a travesty, but it enables me to protect my close friends and family, while still friending anyone who wants to be my friend. That’s pretty powerful!

What Facebook has been lacking however has been the ability to take these same privacy features accompanied by lists, and apply them to your status updates. The biggest thing Facebook launched with these Status updates has been the ability for you to now post a status update and only allow a specific list on Facebook to see that status update. Let’s take one example – I’m a member of the Mormon church. I have a lot of Facebook friends that are also LDS/Mormon. I also have a lot of friends that would prefer not to be inundated with shares related to religion. With this new update I can share things, just for my Mormon friends, and no one else will see them and my stream remains relevant to everyone else. This is also a powerful marketing tool for that reason. Now from one account, you can provide relevant data for each segment in your friends list.

This is also why Zuckerberg has finally been able to open up his profile. Sure, some photos people may question why a CEO of a profitable company of 350 million users would make public, but I am willing to bet he knows they’re there. It would take him 5 seconds to make those private, even with the new settings. The reason Zuckerberg has been able to open his profile is because he finally, without hesitation, can post anything he wants on Facebook, and only those he wants to see will be able to see the content he is sharing. Zuckerberg is leaving his profile open because he feels safe finally.

You should too.

So if you haven’t yet, create some friend lists on Facebook. Open up your profile a little on a default level. Then start using those granular privacy settings on a per-post and per-upload basis so you can be sure your content is being sent to the most relevant audience possible, while still maintaining your full privacy. This is all about giving you even more control, not taking it away. This is all about user-controlled context.