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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.

Rumors Abound as Tweet Scheduling Services are Targeted by Twitter

Posted on October 13, 2009 by jessestay

Several Twitter developers are reporting that Twitter is now targeting scheduling services with its new Terms of Service and Policy Enforcement team. The threats come down to a clause in the Terms of Service stating users accounts could be shut down “If [they] post duplicate content over multiple accounts or multiple duplicate updates on one account”. Twitter has made it known according to some developers that they plan to enforce the matter.

Tweet scheduling has been quite a popular marketing technique used by the likes of Guy Kawasaki (disclosure: he is an Advisor of my service, SocialToo.com). To schedule a Tweet, users visit sites such as Twitterfeed, enter the Tweet to share, and schedule it in as frequent intervals as they like. Guy Kawasaki has been quoted as saying this method actually brings more clicks to a site, as people often miss the first Tweet from a user.

It is unclear if this move is a target against Twitter developers themselves, or against the users, but if you base it on the Terms of Service alone, it would seem it’s the users and not developers taking a risk. Users should be made aware that if they are a user of such a service and schedule their Tweets multiple times, their accounts stand the risk of suspension according to Twitter.

Other interesting rules on the Twitter Terms of Service you should be aware of that could get your account suspended:

Following large amounts of users in a short time-span

Repeatedly following and unfollowing users

If your updates consist of mostly links and “not personal updates” (like my @jesseslinks or Louis Gray’s @lgshareditems)

If you send large numbers of unsolicited @replies

If you post another user’s content without attribution

Yesterday I contacted Twitter but still have yet to receive a response on this. It is appearing their response is “no comment”. I’ll update here if that changes.

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:

Learn How to Game Twitter at My BlogWorld Panel

Posted on October 7, 2009 by jessestay

That’s right – you heard it right. Next week I’ll be on a panel at BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas where we’ll show you all the ways you can game Twitter, increase your followers, and be the top Twitter user in your area. Be prepared though because we’re also going to show you why that’s also not the best focus and how it actually could hurt your brand more than help it.

The panel I’m on is with some big names in the industry, especially in Twitterville itself. My friend Micah Baldwin, inventor of #followfriday will be joining us, along with Lucretia Pruitt, a.k.a. @GeekMommy on Twitter, and one of the Wal-Mart 11 Moms. I’ll of course be bringing my experience with SocialToo and the Twitter API, and we’ll also be joined by Reem Abeido of GroupM Search and Mr. Citizen Marketer, Aaron Strout himself.

We’re going up against some big names in the industry at the same time, so be sure to mark our session and make sure you’re clear which room and what time ours is at. We’re in room 228 from 11:30am to 12:30pm on October 16th (that’s Friday). The session is called “The Twitter Game – How to ‘Play’ Social Networking and Why it’s a Bad Idea”. Go ahead, mark your calendar – I’ll wait…

Are you done? Okay, I’ll wait some more…

Okay, now that you’ve marked your calendar and confirmed that you’re coming to our session and not the others (although I’ll forgive you if you don’t, maybe) let me give just one more motivation for coming. To those in the audience I’ll randomly hand out one signed FBML Essentials book. This book is valuable for both developers and marketers, as it will help anyone trying to understand the Facebook platform get into the hang of things with just a simple knowledge of HTML and maybe a little Javascript.

Also, if you haven’t registered for BlogWorld Expo yet, I’m told you can use PeopleBrowsr’s special code, “PB20” at this link and you’ll get 20% off registration. Now, be sure to thank me by coming to our session!

Who’s the Lucky Twit? Find Out With Kosmix’s New Tool

Posted on October 7, 2009 by jessestay

Kosmix has launched a new tool aimed at helping brands to easily and randomly select people mentioning specific keywords in a short time-frame. The service, called Lucky Twit, is a slot machine of Tweets enabling you to randomly select winning Tweets by keyword. The tool was recently used to find winners of my FBML Essentials book at a Twitter developer event I spoke at recently, and is now available to the public.

To make the tool work, just go to http://www.kosmix.com/labs/luckytwit/, enter some keywords in the upper-right that may have been posted to Twitter in the last week or two. Click the “Reset” button, and your virtual “slot machine” of Tweets will be filled up ready to be randomized. Click the “Spin” button, and like a slot machine the Tweets matching those keywords will spin around randomly, and the selector will stop at one at a random time, selecting the winner.

Such a simple tool has been very much needed by brands sponsoring contests and giveaways on Twitter, and even live events. For instance, recently we hosted a contest on SocialToo where we gave away several free accounts to our service. This service would have made that process much easier.

So give it a try and let me know what you think. I have no disclosure on this other than I think it’s a pretty useful tool. In fact, retweet this article, and in the next 24 hours I’ll use the tool to randomly select one person that retweets the article and give them a free, signed hard-copy of my book FBML Essentials. Get started retweeting now!

Oh, and expect this tool to get used a few times while I’m at BlogWorld Expo next week – follow me on Twitter for updates!

The You, the Me, and the We – How I’m Changing How I Use Twitter

Posted on September 30, 2009 by jessestay

I accidentally unfollowed all my followers.

I was testing out the unfollow all feature on my site, SocialToo.com, and just happened to hit the “delete all friends” button by mistake without realizing it. For that, I apologize. I learned something valuable from it though – out of the 23,000 people I unfollowed on accident, I was very surprised at the number of people that have auto-unfollow on by default. About 6,000 to be exact. So out of the 23,000 people following me 1/4th of those probably still have no clue I unfollowed them – 6,000 people following me had a meaningless relationship with me!

There’s more though – I post a lot of links to my profile. A lot of those promote other people. Some promote blog posts I write. In general, for the blog posts I write, I generally only get about 20-50 of you on Twitter that actually click on the links! That’s a depressing number coming from a follower base of 23,000 people.

This got me thinking about how I can build stronger relationships with the people I follow. How do I get people to add me to their whitelist? How can I get to know you better, and how can I get you to know me better at the same time? Twitter is very difficult to nurture this type of relationship – it was built as a broadcasting platform that happened to evolve to become a communications and is trying to be a relationships platform. It also degraded to the point that most of the people that follow you now aren’t even real people! I would venture to say that a good portion (1/4th?) of Twitter’s populace are there with the sole intent to gain a larger follower base.

This isn’t why I use Twitter. I came here to share something. I came here to learn something from others. The connections we gain from learning from each other are what matter to me. Some times we entertain each other. Some times we teach each other. I’m here to strengthen others’ knowledge and learn from others at the same time, not inflate a number for anyone, especially myself. IMO the whole “numbers thing” should happen naturally. That’s how we engage. That’s how we build real relationships – that’s what true marketing is, or should be about.

So starting today I’m starting something new with my Twitter account. I want to strengthen my relationships with each and every one of you. I want to build a community, and I’m starting with Twitter.

Starting today I’m now using 3 Twitter accounts. The first one, which you are already familiar with, @Jesse, is about me. The second one, which I’m starting today, @JessesLinks, is about YOU. The third one, @JesseStay, is where the community happens – it’s about WE. Here’s a little more explanation:

@Jesse

This account is about me. It’s not your typical Twitter “me” account any more. Starting today, I’m only posting content here. Pure content – no links, no replies. Just 140 character morsels of knowledge as I feel like sharing. Its intent is to be informative, entertaining, and educational. I may also share a link to a blog post or two of my own where I feel I need to elaborate. I won’t be replying to anyone publicly on this account any more. I won’t be auto following at the moment. The purpose of this account is pure content, for those that want to consume it. This is a public account for all to see and follow.

@JessesLinks

This account is about YOU. This is where I share your stuff. If you have something cool you want to share with me, let me know there. I may retweet a few good Tweets here. I’ll even auto follow on this account. While I won’t be @replying to anyone publicly on this account, this is where I get to share your content. Maybe I’ll do a couple #followfridays to promote specific people as well. You can DM me here. This is a public account about you – those that follow this account will learn more about other people and the content they share.

@JesseStay

This is actually my old account – I thought I’d put it to good use. This account is all about US. Those that request access to this account will be followed rigorously by me. Depending on how big it gets I may even follow your updates via SMS to ensure I get them. This will become my “favorites list”. I’ll actively interact with you through this account. I’ll respond to your tweets. I’ll import all the best posts from @Jesse and @JessesLinks here. I’m going to manually (yes, manually) follow every person that is real and requests access to this account. This is where I want to build true relationships.

I want to try a little experiment with this account though. I’m going to make it private. This is so our conversation remains intimate. This is also so you have to do a little something to join the community. It makes each person in the community a little more real. As I said earlier, I plan to follow every real person that requests access to this community. There’s one caveat though – I’m going to ask each individual that joins this community to introduce themselves. I want you and me to get to know each other better. I want all of us to get to know each other better through this community.

If you have to pick one account to follow I would recommend joining the @JesseStay community. This is where I want to empower relationships between us. This is where I want our conversation to become one-on-one, and real. Will you join me here?

This is all just an experiment for now. I’m curious if I might be able to strengthen the relationships of those that follow me through this method. I want to build real-life relationships with each of you – let’s work to do this together. Maybe I’ll post a follow up later on how it all goes.

Let me know your thoughts and suggestions in the comments.

Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff Has 8,000 Twitter Followers. And?

Posted on September 25, 2009 by jessestay

Today Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, our favorite Twitter political celebrity and Senate candidate who DM Failed his Senate campaign announcement, made another announcement on Twitter (at the same time calling all of us “Twitophiles”) I just had to share with you – yes, (gasp!) he has more than 8,000 Twitter followers. That’s right my friends – the candidate set to take on Senator Bob Bennett for his Senate seat is “Taking Back America” one Twitter follower at a time until he’s taken them all and he owns Utah on Twitter. Or is he?

Let’s look at his follower numbers – there’s something fishy here. While he has 8,063 followers, he’s following 8,743. From my experience of running an auto-follow service (which he’s not using – buy Utah!), generally when the numbers of people you are following is higher than those that are following you, it generally means a) you are running an auto-follow tool, and b) probably about half of those followers are spam bots, porn accounts, and not even real people. And sure enough, going through his list of followers I’m seeing names like “PronDb”, “InstantBizHelp”, “QuitYourJob2Day”, and “PokerSSpace”. Let’s just assume those are real people with real interest in him though.

Assuming all those followers are real, how many are actually listening to him? How many of them are using “search for followers” services like Twollo and just followed him because they have it set to automatically follow anybody that says “Utah”? Here’s my point: Twitter follower numbers mean nothing and I certainly hope someone doesn’t win a political campaign because they have more Twitter followers than their other opponents. As I’ve said before, having a large following on Twitter only means you have to shout louder for everyone to hear.

Rather than focusing on followers, Mr. Shurtleff should instead be focusing on engaging each of his followers – building relationships with them. Twitter’s a very difficult place to do that. He could be setting up forums on Facebook where he actively participates and engages his audience in discussion. He could be blogging, and interacting with his readers in the comments. He could be responding, in short form on Twitter, while not as effective, to those responding to him on Twitter. He could be over here, engaging with us in the comments of this blog and other Utah-based blogs. Looking over his Tweet stream I see a lot of “talking at me”. Instead he should be “talking with me” – this is a 2-way conversation Mr. Shurtleff, and the fact that you’re bragging about your Twitter followers as a political crutch against your opponents shows to me that you, possibly more than them, still don’t understand these tools.

Based on the way he’s using these tools, I would find it very hard to believe that even a majority of his audience is actually listening to Mark Shurtleff. Post a link in your Twitter profile through bit.ly – I think you’d be very surprised how many people of those 8,000 actually click on that link. Now go over to your blog and post that same link. I think you’ll see a much greater response. Twitter has its purpose, but I’m afraid Mark Shurtleff seems clueless when it comes to Social Media. Of course, it should be noted that his opponent only has 7 Tweets referencing himself in the third person with only 101 followers. Maybe Utah politicians are just clueless – I’ll vote for that.

Editor’s Note: I neither endorse, nor am I against Mark Shurtleff. Heck, I may even vote for him – I post this only hoping to educate Utah politicians and others in whatever manner possible – this is embarrassing!

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.com/files/2009/09/3929246011_9776c72b28_o.png" alt="I

Let’s Take This Just One Step Further Google

Posted on September 23, 2009 by jessestay

I think I speak for all developers when I say that having to develop for IE browsers sucks. Internet Explorer, unfortunately still the most widely used browser on the internet, has failed the development community and the web in general in keeping up with internet standards. While developers can do some really cool stuff with HTML 5 and open source browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Webkit-based Safari, IE misses the mark. Unfortunately this goes for even the most recent versions of Microsoft’s browser.

This is why I was really happy to see Google produce a plugin for IE called Chrome Frame, which when installed, loads a Chrome browser within IE for the user giving the user all the added functionality of a modern HTML 5-compliant browser without having to do much at all to switch to a new environment or fiddle with the default browser settings. I think it’s a pretty clever idea.

What I think is even more clever is that Google is now requiring users to install the plugin if they are going to use their upcoming product, Google Wave. When Google Wave launches, if users visit the product in Internet Explorer, they will get a message that looks like this:

chrome frame message

I think most users won’t even blink an eyelash to installing it, and, just like Flash or Quicktime or any other type of Internet Explorer plugin they’ll have no problem agreeing and installing it within their browser. This is especially if they want to use Google Wave, something I predict could very well replace Gmail and the way we communicate today in the future. But I think Google should do more.

Let’s take this one step further. I think it would be really cool if Google provided simple HTML/JavaScript code that provides the exact html you see above, that any developer can install on their website. Any developer can do that now by writing their own browser detection code in JavaScript, but let’s make this as easy as possible and standardize it. If users become familiar with this style and look, they will be much less likely to complain and much more likely to install.

As a developer I would be more than happy to install such code on my site, reducing the amount of time I have to spend switching computers to test in IE and messing with entirely different standards, increasing the time I have to develop my app. As an entrepreneur and business owner it’s simply too costly to have to worry about so many different browsers at once. If I could focus on simply the standards and get all the new HTML functionality right now without duplicating my effort in 2 browser environments that would be a huge win for me, and definitely worth the investment. I’d install it in a heartbeat.

So how about it Google? Let’s provide that message and plugin install widget for all developers and make this a much more open and modern web outside of the control of Microsoft. I’m loving where Google is going with this.