23 Musings

Here's an interesting series of articles and audio/video from Business Week on the subject of widgets. The series is designed to help influence CEO's as to whether it's worth dipping your toes in the waters of widgets (I'm a believer so I'd say yes, go for it).

Building a brand with widgets gives a good overview as to why it may be important to your brand to embrace new technologies and distribution channels such as widgets in order to promote your brand and discusses the viral aspects that can make brands fly online.

Widgets: The future of online ads is a piece singing the praises of widgets and all they stand for. On the flip side Why widgets don't work is a counterpoint playing devils advocate.

A widget mogul in between classes is about the up and coming Facebook app developer Ankur Nagpal who's made six figures at the age of 19 creating apps for Facebook.

When Facebook ads flop introduces us to some of the many unused Facebook applications and gives reasons for their failure. What's good about this piece is the fact that most of the apps are from large companies with mature marketing strategies and yet they've still got it wrong, should be a warning to us all.

The CEO guide to widgets is a podcast talking about the use of widgets for advertising on social networks.

Finally, Making money from widgets is a video interview with VideoEgg CEO Matt Sanchez discussing how to go about monetising the widget world.

Great series of articles, definitely recommend sending this to your CEO (or manager...) if they really don't seem to get it yet!

That's Facebook for you! At the same time as everyone saying Facebook is facing an exodus figures come out showing that the audience is a massive 712% higher than this time last year.

Maybe there's some jealousy leaking out in the recent stories... For my opinion on Facebooks traffic dip go here.

Oh dear, I keep seeing stories like this warning of the inherent security risks in web 2.0 sites.

Yes, Facebook etc can be used to launch attacks or lure unsuspecting users to pages which contain malicious code but the stories I'm seeing keep talking about companies being put off implementing their own web 2.0 features by this.

Don't let it put you off; architect it properly, monitor it and input to the conversation so you know whats going on and you should keep abreast of any issues.

If you're planning another Facebook though then maybe try putting security at the heart of it ;-)

Another big news story today is the dip in Facebook users from the UK of 5% from December to January. Much is being made about this being the backlash to the poorly executed advertising projects or the natural move away as it becomes fad rather than fashion.

I have my own opinion... I think it's purely the January blues. Think about it; December is a huge month for keeping up with friends, arranging events and parties and reconnecting with old acquaintances. Come January though, we're all back at work, busy, tired, dieting, looking for holidays and generally keeping a lid on the credit card as we recover from the spending excess.

Now does a dip in January seem that unusual for a social network which basically encourages social interaction between friends?

Alright, I may be being a little blaise but I wouldn't read too much into the dip and I certainly wouldn't be talking about the demise of Facebook quite yet.

Facebook accounted for 1 in 50 of all internet visits in December 2007 (according to Hitwise). It's share of internet traffic has grown 10-fold over the last year (again in the UK).
It also positioned itself as the 7th largest upstream website, that means it sends the 7th largest amount of traffic referrals to other website categories within the Hitwise system.

Figures like this make it hard for marketers and PR people to ignore. Any potential traffic source of that magnitude has to be tapped into and quickly before your competitors figure out all the cool ways to make use of a social network and you end up looking like someone who's following their lead. It's still imperative to add value though, just diving in with a load of offers isn't good enough, you need to engage and add value to your prospects experience of Facebook (while at the same time acquiring new prospects and customers).

Mark Zuckerberg the head of Facebook has been interviewed on U.S. tv program 60 Minutes. You can watch the video and read the associated article here.

The Guardian has a story about this topic that I've blogged about before here.

An admissions tutor from Cambridge Uni in the UK has admitted that he checks up on potential students Facebook profiles. Of course the uni's insist that a students success or failure to be admitted is purely down to their performance in interviews, academic record etc, not because of what their social network profile contains.

Many people feel this is really intrusive, but I believe it's a natural course for anyone to take when there is information out there. This again reinforces my belief that you should never post anything up on a social network that you wouldn't want your boss/tutor/Mum/priest to see!

According to Watchmouse, a useful looking site offering a suite of web performance, load testing and monitoring tools that I've been evaluating.

Watchmouse performed some tests on most of the major social websites of the moment. The Watchmouse Site Performance Index quantifies the users perception of website speed and availability using the load time of the homepage with added penalties for components that fail to load. A very useful metric.

Out of 104 sites monitored 51 showed a Site Performance Index of over 1000 which indicates a slow load time which could result in a poor user experience.

Facebook came off worst of the lot. I've been finding Facebook increasingly frustrating with it's slow response times. I think it's time they put some of that funding to good use and increase the size of their data centres (or maybe look at their architecture).

The full results of the testing can be seen here.

This is excellent! The first app built for Facebook that I actually find really useful. Rather than poking, throwing snowballs, biting zombies or generally fooling around this little app actually helps my productivity and makes my life easier!

fbCal is an app that allows you to export date related items such as birthdays and events out of Facebook and import them directly into a calendar such as Outlook, Google Calendar or Apple iCal.

It's brilliant! I've just organised myself for remembering friends birthdays for the first time ever!

So Bebo have announced an application development platform with support for Facebook apps. Their using Facebooks platform standards so this should allow for interoperability.

Now Bebo were listed as one of the first OpenSocial partners, everyone else is reporting that this latest news is a snub to OpenSocial but I actually think it's a very shrewd move from Bebo.

Not only will their apps be compatible with Facebook making it much easier for developers but if they are still going to work with OpenSocial as well they will cover all the bases very easily. It is possible they go the Facebook route alone but I doubt it as that will restrict their coverage.

The killer thing for me is if these apps can share data between networks. It's all great making standards so development is easy but allowing a Bebo app to talk to a Facebook app, share data and the social graph will open up a world of possibilities and allow for true portability of data (and functionality).

I've written previously abut a concept I've termed Self PR Online (here and here) but it seems my posts aren't getting to the right people.

Now CNN have jumped on the bandwagon and written a piece about a Facebook group called '30 Reasons Girls Should Call it a Night'. It's basically a Facebook group with over 170,000 members (mostly women) devoted to tales of drunken debauchery and lurid times (all good clean fun in my opinion).

However, it seems the women who are members of this group could really do with taking note of my blog posts as they're (apparently) posting all kinds of imagery that may not go down so well with employers or colleges.

Personally I find this quite amusing, as in my opinion any employer worth working for wouldn't care about a few drunken photos and any person who posts really bad photos is probably unemployable anyway ;-)

The advice I gave in previous posts still stands, don't post anything you wouldn't want an employer to see, these things have a habit of getting out and becoming public!

I love Netvibes. It's my starting point, feed reader and information consumption tool of choice. They've just announced a new version called Ginger which is coming very soon.

New features include...

Easier access to content:

New social and sharing features (including being able to import friends lists from social networks):

Activity notification (so you know what your friends like and do, a kind of news feed for Netvibes):
There's also going to be an easier way to create Universes and load up social presence widgets, content for your friends etc. It's really heading towards giving you similar functionality to your Facebook homepage but without being tied in and being more open in that you can add any email, messaging or other tool you like.

Sounds great! Looking forward to trying it soon!

Even if you're not a member...

Beacon is raising privacy concerns left right and centre! It's becoming a bit of a thorn in the side of Facebook and could help increase the backlash that they will face through their continued advertisation (is that a word? Maybe it should be!). There are already reports of some advertisers pulling out of using the system, worries about how Beacon tracks users without them opting in and now it seems they may be receiving data on anyone whether a member of Facebook or not.

PC World is carrying a story about the results of investigations into the Beacon system by some security researchers. They've found that even if you don't have a Facebook account or your account is deactivated you will still be tracked on any Beacon third-party sites and your data sent back to Facebook. Quite what happens to that data we don't know, but one would imagine that it sits on their servers hoping you will sign up so they can identify your cookie and serve ads to you.

It's all getting a bit big brother. Facebook appear to have monetisation as their mantra now, where as they started off being useful they are gradually becoming surplus to requirements!

Thanks to Read/WriteWeb for posting this interesting study in a nice easy to view Slideshare way.

There's some interesting thoughts about structure, how identity is managed, the types of networks available to users, followed by case studies of some of the major players.

The NY Times is reporting that Facebook has retreated on it's Beacon advertising idea. Instead of auto populating your news feed with information about your purchases on participating sites (unless you opt out on that retail site), they're providing a one-click way to opt out of Beacon altogether.

This is what the users have been looking for and should appease them. 50,000 people signed a petition against this.

Further to my recent post on how young people are overexposing themselves on social networks and my earlier post on self-PR online there are a couple of issues being discussed on this topic in the news today.

First up, the Guardian has a piece on the legality of using the internet to investigate job candidates. They're saying that it could actually prove to be illegal and an infringement of a candidates privacy if potential employers use the internet to look into their background. Academic institutions could also be at risk of infringement here as they too are apparently using the web and social networks to look into applicants backgrounds. Personally I cannot see how this could be the case. The information is freely available and has been posted with that knowledge (or at least the poster should be aware). It can't contravene data protection laws in that case. Of course, turning down a candidate because of their Facebook profile would be against HR laws but I'm sure no company would use that as the reason for not hiring someone, they'll come up with another reason the profile will just have made their minds up.

Secondly, there's an article on the Inquirer which suggests that the UK's Revenue and Customs department (yes the one's who loast all that personal data) are now using social networks such as Facebook and MySpace to catch criminals who have gone missing. An unnamed customs official claims that social networks are proving to be a useful source of information for tracking wanted persons down. The official suggests that it has led to a number of successful arrests.

So all this goes to show that your trail of data left behind on these sites is highly useful to anyone wanting to trace or assess you. Self PR is hugely important now, and this will get more and more important as the information connectivity provided by the web gets more pervasive into society.

Reuters reports that the EU is planning to look into targeted web advertising with increased scrutiny. They're concerned about the increasing risk to privacy and protection of data that some of the new advertising developments bring with them. The Article 29 working party will be looking into the issues, that's the same working party who got Google to limit the amount of time it stores web searches to 18 months.

This potentially doesn't bode very well for companies like Facebook. Their new beacon advertising system is getting enough scrutiny from users, the last thing they need is someone official looking into it too. This also doesn't bode too well for the Google-DoubleClick acquisition.

I posted ages ago about the risks of posting too much info on social networks. It's all too common now for potential employers, universities and parents to use Facebook etc to find out what people are doing in their personal lives.

Now the Information Commissioner's Office has launched a website aimed at helping to protect young people in the way they use social networks.

The ICO have found that more than half of young people asked divulged far too much information and failed to keep it private. More telling still, 71% of 2,000 14 to 21-year-olds said they would not want colleges or employers to do a web search on them before they had removed some of the material. Two thirds of those questioned accepted as friends on such websites people they did not even know. Some 60% posted their date of birth, a quarter put their job title and almost one in 10 gave their home address.

So the ICO have launched this site to help inform young people about how to protect themselves on Facebbok and MySpace (amongst other social networks).

Very interesting story on the Channel 4 website today.

Apparently, a Facebook user has logged an official complaint with the UK Privacy Watchdog after it transpired that trying to leave Facebook didn't actually mean that your data was all deleted and removed from their servers. Actually, when you try to leave Facebook all it does is deactivate your account and keep the data on their servers so anyone who changes their mind can easily sign back up again.

Now that's all well and good, but storage of personal data and photos of someone who doesn't actually want to use your service is blatantly against the UK Data Protection Act (I believe). The act is designed to protect people like you and me from having their personal data misused in any way. Facebook definitely have the resources and technical know how to offer a way to delete the data for those who really want to delete an account. By not doing so they are making it very difficult for users to clean up their trail of data, it could take hours to go round the site deleting everything you've ever posted or uploaded.

Will be interesting to see how this pans out! I do wonder whether MySpace and Bebo etc offer this full deletion service or whether they are also possibly infringing on ex-users privacy.

Apple has a reputation of being a fair and open company and has acquired a massive die hard fan base thanks to this approach. They are seen as one of the good companies compared to others such as Microsoft (and sometimes Google).

However, they've not been doing themselves any favours of late...

First they crippled peoples iPhones when they tried to update, hack or unlock them. I can understand the desire to do this but it's fairly narrow minded and unnecessarily antagonises the types of customers they rely on as a tech company.

Now they've committed what to me is a cardinal sin. According to Techcrunch there is a feature in the iPhone which sends data back to Apple all the time. This data includes IP address, stock quote preferences and other preference data, worst of all though it sends the IMEI number for the users phone back as well.

Now an IMEI is one of those rare bits of data which can instantly be linked to a person, unlike things like IP address which are more transient and changeable. This means that Apple could be building a profile for all it's iPhone users with more than just who they are and the fact they own an iPhone. This could contain data that would be hugely attractive to advertisers around the globe.

So could Apple be planning a Facebook? Possibly. Are they harvesting information on their users? Undoubtedly, yes they are. What they plan to do with that data is anyones guess at the moment but Apple should expect to receive some backlash from their customers for this as it seems a breach of privacy to me.

Update - 20th Nov: The latest from Techcrunch is that this isn't 100% true, apparently the iPhone doesn't send an IMEI back to home base.