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Twitter Keeps Fighting While Facebook Continues to Grow

Posted on October 22, 2009 by jessestay

Ev Williams was quoted recently saying, “The world is big enough for both Facebook and Twitter”, almost as though we were supposed to think Twitter wasn’t trying to be a competitor. Don’t be fooled though, Twitter’s recent lists feature is just one step towards providing the privacy controls Facebook itself is known for. Before we know it you will be able to decide which lists you want to share Tweets with, photo services will be integrated, video, groups, messaging, and more, and Twitter will be head-to-head with the features Facebook currently provides. Twitter wants to go head-to-head with Facebook. There’s no doubt in my mind that’s what Twitter is trying to do – it’s what they have to do in order to continue growing. While Facebook’s weakness is the lack of full openness, Twitter has the greater weakness of lack of control or privacy. Without more than just public status updates their sign ups and traffic will plateau and the service will dwindle and lose value.

Yet, with each update to Twitter comes increased pressure to Facebook to become more open and more public. Just today, in response to Twitter’s partnerships with Bing and Google, Facebook also shared that it was opening up its own public status updates to be indexed by search engines. Don’t forget that Facebook already has an ad deal with Microsoft, along with investment.

Facebook’s Lack of Openness is an Illusion

Despite the criticism against Facebook for not being open don’t be fooled. Not only is your data capable of being open, but you get to control what is, and what isn’t open at the same time. As of today all your status updates set to go to “Everyone” (check your privacy settings) can now be indexed by search engines. Expect this to also open up on Facebook itself, along with Facebook’s own search. Facebook wants to be open – its users have to choose to be open first though.

Facebook’s recent hiring of David Recordon (note that the linked article is by Chris Messina, also a leader in Open Standards technology) is a testament to this I think. Recordon was one of the leading proponents to open standards and data portability before joining Facebook, and he has been put in charge of just that at Facebook. With this hire, Facebook has just become a leader in this space. Notice Facebook’s adoption of the ActivityStrea.ms standard, and open sourcing of the Tornado framework acquired from FriendFeed. Add to that the many other open technologies you can find on their developers site – Facebook is not a follower in this space! Where is Twitter’s Open Source tools page?

Facebook Fan Pages

Let’s add to that Facebook Fan Pages. Each and every Fan Page is indexable by Google. While better integration with personal profiles is still necessary, this is an excellent way to share news and information in the same manner you do Twitter, and build a community at the same time. Each post is threaded so you can build a conversation with your community. Each comment, “Fanning”, and post to the Page gets posted to a user’s friends as well, further encouraging conversation and discussion. This is far from what Twitter offers, and all this is done in a very open fashion – you don’t have to be on Facebook to read the contents of a Fan Page.

I just started building my own Fan Page community (send “fan stay” to 32665 (FBOOK) on your phone), and am already seeing greater interaction there the more I spend using it. The potential is very strong in a very open, and much stronger environment than Twitter.

Facebook’s Terms of Service are Open Too

Now, let’s talk Terms. Earlier this year Facebook instituted a new policy stating that any changes to the Terms of Service will be put up to the users. If enough users disagree, it gets put up for vote by the users. If a majority of those users vote for the changes, they get put in place. If not, they don’t. The current terms are established in such a manner.

Consumerist has a great overview of what these terms changes were. To summarize, you own your content, and give Facebook the right to distribute that content (this is so they can share it with your friends legally) so long as you are a member of Facebook. HOWEVER, the minute you quit the site, the terms state that your information at that point is removed, with exception to the photos, videos, etc. that have already been loaded into your friends’ streams. This is so the stream remains in tact. There’s termination here.

Let’s contrast that with Twitter, whose terms have no termination and are just as strong, if not stronger. With Twitter, when you leave the site your content can remain. There is nothing in Twitter’s terms stating that they have to remove your content when you leave. You give Twitter that license to your content forever. Where’s the outcry about that? Yet Facebook had huge outcry over not having such termination in their agreement. Facebook has remained open and ahead of Twitter even in this regard.

Facebook’s Acquisition of FriendFeed

I think this is the crown jewel we have yet to see. We know the FriendFeed team is working on Facebook as we speak. We also know FriendFeed.com is not going away. Will Facebook have FriendFeed-like real-time features? Will FriendFeed see more Facebook integration? The one weakness of Facebook is the lack of an easy way for those that want to be public by default (which is dangerous) to be public, while integrating that information with the user profile and other integrated parts of Facebook. Search still lacks a public interface. There’s no API to it. Facebook’s stream is still not real-time while Twitter’s and FriendFeeds are.

The FriendFeed team has the potential to change this. I predict a real-time Facebook in the near future, with integrated public interfaces and search enabling users to share the content they want to share with the world. The cool thing is Twitter has already exposed their cards with Lists. Funny thing is Facebook has had lists for over a year now, and you can even filter searches with those lists! Twitter doesn’t have that. The only benefit Twitter’s lists give is the ability to see who other people are subscribing to and subscribe to the same. I don’t see that as being that hard of a problem to tackle for Facebook. They’ve seen Twitter’s cards and no one has seen Facebook’s. Imagine the ability to put Fan Pages into public lists, for instance – I think that would be pretty cool, and pretty easy to implement. Imagine Facebook’s own privacy controls, including the “public option” available for Lists as well as users and Pages. It’s also important to note that FriendFeed also had lists before Twitter did. The combination of both FriendFeed’s and Facebook’s teams means they are the true experts on lists. I can’t wait to see what they do next.

My Point

So what’s my point? My point is stop drinking the Twitter Kool-Aid! Yeah, it has its place – I’m NOT saying get off Twitter, but it’s nowhere near as powerful as what Facebook already offers. I want to see more news people and early adopters like Scoble and Louis Gray and Steve Rubel using Facebook and Facebook lists to provide content and news. I want to see more people sharing and discussing content in my own Facebook feeds. I want to see more people utilizing privacy controls, not available in Twitter, to segregate the content they share, reducing the noise. Spend some time in Facebook – learn what you can and can’t do with it. Try to build a community there and see how effective it is, utilizing all these tools at once.

Facebook is not losing this war. With 10 million fans a day and growing on Facebook Pages alone, 300-350 million users and growing, a much more powerful API and developer ecosystem, Twitter doesn’t even make a dent in what Facebook is doing. It’s about time we start giving credit where credit is due. Twitter launching lists is about as effective in fighting Facebook as this video of Ben Parr is in fighting Chad Vader 😉 :

Image courtesy LDS.org

Strategically Growing Your Business Using Facebook & Twitter

Posted on October 16, 2009 by jessestay

I had the opportunity today to sit and listen to Mari Smith’s BlogWorld Expo talk today, “Facebook & Twitter Fortunes: How To Strategically Grow Your Business Using the Top Two Online Social Networks”. I have been on a panel with her before and even spoke for one of her online webinars, but had not yet had the chance to see her in person yet. Such a meeting was a pleasure, as that actually ended up being the focus of her presentation – relationships.

The power of Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites is in how you use them to build real-life relationships with others. Facebook itself does this superbly (Twitter is getting there, and can still be used for such if done right). Mari spoke about that connection, stating that “more than content, people are looking for connection”. She had a great quote stating that “if Content is King, Connection is Queen”. The “Pied Piper of Facebook” (and arguable one of the nicest and most genuine people I’ve ever met) knows her stuff, and if you can use these social networks effectively to do this for a brand or business, you will see the most success.

Mari stated that the most powerful part of Facebook was Facebook Pages. She shared that you can encourage people to fan your Facebook Page simply by sending “fan yourpageusername” to “fbook” (32665) on your mobile phone. She uses this in her presentations to encourage people following her presentation to also fan her and mentioned it’s a great strategy to build a fan base. I realized I really need to do this more often as well (my fan page is “stay” on Facebook).

While I do agree with her that Facebook Pages are a powerful aspect of Facebook I do disagree slightly that it is the most powerful aspect of the Social Networking site. I think if more marketers, product managers, entrepreneurs, and businesses spent a little more time learning what they can do with a little knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, and access to HTML files somewhere they can begin to integrate Facebook right on their own site, bringing a user and their Facebook friends into a person’s own brand. If you ask me this is the most powerful component of Facebook and more people need to learn it. Facebook Connect is Facebook’s “Building Blocks” contributed to the Building Block Web I spoke of earlier.

I love Mari’s focus on connection and relationships in her presentation. She also talked about opening up a little, sharing how she shared some of the details of her recent divorce and by opening up she was able to connect with people better. She stated that the new social media marketing methodology is moving from “controlling our image” to “being ourselves”, something radically different from the way it used to be, and these tools are enabling us to do this! She stated that the tools are making people go from “hard to reach” to “available everywhere”. How true that is.

Unfortunately I was only able to stay for half of Mari’s session, but I quickly was reminded how much Mari knows her stuff. If you want to meet someone on Twitter or Facebook who is genuine, will build a real relationship with you, and help you learn how to make money off of these tools at the same time in a rational manner that is not a “get rich quick scheme”, Mari is the person to follow. You can follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/marismith or on Facebook, http://facebook.com/marismith.

Facebook Launches Application Creation API

Posted on October 13, 2009 by jessestay

One of my biggest frustrations as a Facebook API developer of WordPress plugins has been the need to require my users to go out and create their own application in Facebook for their blog. To do so they had to install a “developer app” on Facebook and know what forms to fill out after they did. It was a lot of work and very difficult to explain to people! Today Facebook launched a way to automate that process, their Create Application API.

According to the developers wiki, starting today developers of WordPress plugins and other 4th-party Facebook applications will be able to automate the process of creating applications on behalf of their users as “child applications”. This means for the FBFoundations plugin I launched over the weekend I’ll be able to automatically register the user’s blog as an app in Facebook when they activate the plugin. The user will only need to activate the plugin in WordPress, we’ll grab the API key and everything else, and there will be nothing more for that user to do.

Installing Facebook Connect WordPress plugins just got a whole lot more easy. Can’t wait to play with this and see what others do with it. Stay tuned for an FBFoundations plugin update that includes this. Details are still vague on this, so I’ll update if anything changes – thus far we just have a few wiki articles talking about it.

UPDATE: See my version 2 of this post for an even more interesting perspective on this API.

FBFoundations Facebook Connect Plugin for WordPress

Posted on October 10, 2009 by jessestay

One of my biggest frustrations in adapting Facebook Connect into WordPress blogging has been the fact that most plugins out there either have too much, or too little incorporated into them. When you add more than one, you end up calling the Facebook Javascript Client libraries more than once, and often reinvent the wheel for what other people have done. I mentioned this in a wish-list I posted earlier. I want building blocks – I should be able to add a foundation, and add basic building blocks on top of that foundation to get what I want out of Facebook Connect on my blog.

Today I’m giving you that foundation. I’ve written a WordPress plugin called FBFoundations which sets up the bare-bones necessities of any Facebook Connect install. Once you have installed this plugin, the user can log in, and you have access to their login credentials from then forward to do whatever you want with. It’s a foundation – something to build a house on top of, and my hope is that many more FBFoundations-compatible plugins can emerge from this.

For instance, my next step will be to create a simple plugin for WordPress that uses the stream.publish API to post your blog to Facebook, and enable others to do so (tracking the number of comments and likes along the way if possible). There will be no need to add a user log in to that process, nor do I have to load the XFBML init scripts to render XFBML. It will all have already been loaded for me.

The script works a lot like Richard Miller’s “What Would Seth Godin Do” plugin from a UI perspective. At a default (you can configure this in your preferences) the first 3 times a user visits your blog they will be presented with a popup dialog box encouraging them to connect with Facebook. After those 3 times the popup no longer appears. There will also always be a “Connect with Facebook” login button above your comments (assuming they’re wrapped in a #commentform div) that will appear until the user clicks on it and logs in.

Using this plugin encourages each reader to log in through Facebook (remember – there are over 300 million Facebook users. Chances are most of your readers are on Facebook), and enables you to do cool stuff with each of those readers. Hopefully this will inspire others to make other FBFoundations-compatible plugins so we’re not re-inventing the wheel any more. Stay tuned for more plugins from me – what will you build with this as your foundation?

You can download the plugin here. Just download it and unzip it into your plugins directory in WordPress, activate it, and then add the API key for your website. (You’ll need to go to http://developers.facebook.com to add the developer app and add an app for your website if you haven’t done so already)

Or click here to download:

http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/fbfoundations-facebook-connect-plugin.zip

Please let me know in the comments if you see any issues. This is 100% GPL so please make your own adjustments and let me know if I can fix mine!

UPDATE – v0.4 – 10/26/2009: The popup is no longer default and can be turned on/off. Also added meta tag support and better compatibility with 3rd-party comment systems. See this blog post for more info on 0.4.

Here are some screenshots:

The Open Web – Is it Really What We Think it is?

Posted on September 23, 2009 by jessestay

Yesterday was OneWebDay, a day to celebrate the open web and bring more awareness to technologies. I just wrote about one thing Google is doing to make the web more open, something I strongly support. I want to touch on something Facebook is doing which I don’t think is being fully appreciated. And it’s not what you think it is. First, I want you to watch this video – it’s Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote from Facebook’s F8 conference for developers last year. Don’t read on until you see it or you may not understand what I’m trying to get at here.

In the video, Mark Zuckerberg states that Facebook’s mission is in “giving people the power to share in order to make the world more open and connected place.” I want you to give that some thought. We’ve always talked about the open web being the opening up of content so everyone has access to it. That’s the essence of the web. It has no borders or boundaries, and has no controls over it. That is how it was built and how it should be. The web is about linking documents to each other, and indexing those documents so they are easily accessible and retrievable by those that want to find it. The traditional open web is about the power to receive.

Enter the social web. Now we have all these social networks – Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Orkut, Hi5, LinkedIn, and many others all striving to redefine the web, each in their own way. In the end each of these networks is giving a layer to the web which connects people instead of documents and in the end brings people together. At the same time we’re indexing people, and from those people comes relevancy and documents which others can share with one-another. Many argue that this method of indexing is even more accurate, because it is spread from person-to-person, and it’s real-time.

There’s one problem with the social web in terms of openness. People don’t want their lives exposed. They just want the documents they prefer to share with the world exposed. In the end, because we’re dealing with people, there still needs to be some bounds of privacy, yet people should still have the control to make what they want open, open. Without these controls, there is no freedom, as people are required to completely expose their lives to reveal even a bit of content with the rest of the world.

This is why I think on the Social Web, “Open” is defined much differently. I think Facebook sees this. In a social environment, the role of technology should be in making relationships more open, making the ability to share more open, not necessarily the documents people are sharing themselves. In a Social Web “Open” is about how “Open” you are to enabling your users to make the decision whether they want to make their documents public or not, and fully enabling them to do so if they want to. The thing is, a Social ecosystem is not “Open” if it doesn’t give users the freedom to keep those documents private if they want to as well.

Facebook takes this new layer of “Open” to another level though. As of last year they have been branching out of their walls, enabling other websites to take these tools, giving each website the control to extend this level of control to their own users. Now websites can take the existing social graphs of users and enable those users to automatically share what they want with their friends, respecting the privacy controls of those friends. I should note that Google Friend Connect is doing similar things in that realm (albeit with less privacy controls, IMO making it a less “open” or “free” ecosystem to allow users full control of that data).

I think what we may be defining as a “Walled Garden” or “closed ecosystem” may indeed be the actual definition of “Open” on the social web. Remember, it’s about opening up the control of the user to share all, some, or none of the content they want to share. The more “Open” a system is to doing this, the more open users are to share data, the more open it is to having their friends see that data, and the more open it is to allowing others search for that data, while at the same time being open to letting the users that want to control that data keep it under closed wall. The web has lacked this ability until recently. In a true “Open” Social Ecosystem, if data is not available via search and other means, it is the fault of the users, not the network itself. Data that is available to the web is the responsibility of the users, not the responsibility of the network itself. I think Facebook is the closest to this definition of “Open” out there right now. I think that’s why they have over 300 million users and are still growing.

On the Social Web, “Open” is about the power to give.

<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-2489" title="I <3 the web." src="http://staynalive.local/files/2009/09/3929246011_9776c72b28_o.png" alt="I

This New Trend in Facebook Apps Looks Ugly

Posted on September 21, 2009 by jessestay

I was tipped today onto Hulu’s new Facebook app, which seems to be aiming to bring the Hulu website into Facebook by including videos and a stream in the app itself. The thing is, it’s hardly an app – it’s just the Hulu website in an HTML tag with an embeded stream widget inside. (Not sure what that is? Click the link to learn more about stream widgets) It’s something anyone (I would even argue you don’t even have to be a developer to do what they did) could do inside or outside Facebook, but they could do much better. They took the easy way out, and it better have cost them just 2 hours of their developers’ time to implement or they just got ripped off.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this trend of Facebook app design. I first saw it when a friend showed me the Hurley Pro Facebook app, also just a normal website, with a Facebook fan stream widget embedded inside, something that really barely even utilizes the Facebook API and the reasons you would integrate with Facebook in the first place. I’m sure Facebook isn’t complaining – in the end it does bring more traffic to Facebook and helps to spread the Facebook brand, but for the brands in question, I just can’t see how this is helping them at all!

Here’s what they’re missing out on by not having deeper integration:

Deep tracking – they have the potential to know the exact demographics of everyone visiting their app or site by digging a little deeper

Notifications, Invites, and Requests – without some FBML and API integration (see my book to learn more about that) there is no way for users to spread word of the app. The only way currently to do that via the means they’re doing it is to use the stream widget, which hardly does much to spread word of the app.

User tracking and customization – by using the Facebook API they could be knowing exactly who is visiting their app and customizing the experience to that user

Friend sharing – the most powerful feature of the Facebook API, there is no way currently to view what your friends are doing within the app. Hulu, for instance, could be showing the videos your friends are watching and favoriting and subscribing to. They can’t do that the way they’re doing it right now.

If I were Hulu, I would be looking for ways to utilize Facebook Connect to bring Facebook to their own brand. Look to integrate (see the “3 steps – that’s all!” part of this doc on the Facebook developers wiki) a simple one-click user login and registration button for Facebook on your site. Use the API to get the user’s friends and share what their other friends on Facebook using Hulu are doing. You can do all this on your own website.

Then allow your users to take action – share what your users are doing on Hulu with their friends on Facebook. Their friends on Facebook will see the interaction on Hulu and want to interact with your site as well. Hulu, you’re really missing out here, and it won’t be much work to just integrate a little more Facebook into your own brand. It’s time we start creating farms on our own turf and stop going out to do the fishing ourselves.

Hulu, contact me if you want some help in this.

"Fish Where the Fish Are" No Longer Applies

Posted on September 19, 2009 by jessestay

My good friend, Jeremiah Owyang had a great quote he liked to share in his presentations, stating that the days of old-style marketing, forcing your customers to your site, no longer applied. He stated that we must “Fish Where the Fish Are“, and right he was. With the advent of Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, YouTube, MySpace, etc. it was now possible for companies to get into the conversations of their customers, where they were conversing rather than trying to get them back to their own site to encourage that. I’d like to suggest that even that philosophy’s evolving though, and like with the previous philosophy, Facebook’s leading the way. Now, instead of “Fishing where the Fish are”, you can bring the entire lake to your website and again, those conversations are again all happening under your own brand. Now you get to fish in your own backyard.

Last year Facebook introduced Facebook Connect to developers to enable developers to integrate the Facebook Platform right on their own websites. I’m not sure developers or businesses fully knew what was coming at the time, but it sounded good. Mark Zuckerberg talked about expanding the ability to share on Facebook to the web, and keeping the fine-grained privacy controls Facebook is known for along with that. I believe a new way of marketing may have begun with that launch.

If you get a chance, go sign into HuffingtonPost.com through your Facebook login. Look – all your friends from Facebook just automatically got imported onto HuffingtonPost.com with just one click! And you never left the site. Huffington Post gets this concept – their readers’ conversations on Facebook are all happening through their own website, and they’re enabling new conversations from that! Their users never have to go back to Facebook to converse the news they’re reading with their friends.

Another great example is Digg.com. If you log in through Facebook there you’ll notice with no effort your friends all get imported as friends on Digg. Now, every new friend that logs into Digg via those means also gets added, automatically, as a friend on the site. Digg has brought Facebook back to their own brand.

Soon you’ll start to see the same for microblogging. Whether it happens via Facebook, or via open source platforms such as Laconi.ca or WordPress, brands will begin to bring ways for you to bring short-form conversations to their sites as well, enabling you to post out to Twitter, Facebook, and others and bring those conversations back into the site. This is the way it all started, and now we’re able to merge the old marketing and new marketing into a more complete solution that brings the brand back into the equation.

There are many tools available now, and many being developed right now that are bringing that “sea of fish” back onto your own property. Tools like Facebook Connect are teaching you how to fish in that backyard pond so you can feed a multitude. Now you can swim with the best of them in your own swimming pool!

Facebook Photo Tagging Apps: Intelligent Design or Plain Old Spam?

Posted on September 14, 2009 by jessestay

The photo tagging apps in Facebook have taken over my stream! Check out the screen shot to the right. Out of the 12 highlights, only half are legitimate posts. The other 6 are apps that have seemingly figured out how to abuse the system and take over my highlights section (either intended or not), giving the apps even more exposure on Facebook. If you ask me, this method of app promotion, while legal and probably even a smart move by the app developers, needs to stop!

Fan Check, Friend Character, PickupFriends, TouchGraph, and others are nothing more than spam with their current techniques of app promotion. From my experience most people using them have not even opted to tag their friends in these photos, and I hope Facebook can put an end to this. The developers behind these apps (probably many who have read my book) are smart people – can’t they find another way other than deceiving their users to promote their applications? Or perhaps Facebook can give me a way to filter these so they don’t take up my Highlights any more and I don’t appear as tagged.

I’m hoping “Natural Selection” for these apps sides in my direction. Let’s hope these types of spammy apps go away or change their behavior.

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?