23 Musings

Widgets are gaining some serious traction! U.S. companies have spent approx $15m on widget based campaigns in 2007 and that is projected to grow to $40m in 2008.

That spend reflects only 2.5% of the total amount that is projected to be spent on social network advertising in the next year. Now that's quite low, I believe this is because so many widget campaigns have been so poorly executed in the past year and corporates are having difficulty seeing the potential ROI in comparison to traditional banner advertising and more brand led efforts (such as sponsored pages and profiles).

I stick by my earlier prediction that 2008 will be the year of the widget; if portability, engagement and usefulness are all kept in mind then a widget campaign can serve both branding and conversion. For more on my thoughts on widgets see this post.

For more on widget spend visit eMarketer.

A study has come out which says that people who blog can feel less isolated and more satisfied with your friendships both online and in the real world. The two month study found those who blogged felt they had better social support and friendship networks than those in the study who didn't.

Could this be because bloggers have a platform to vent frustration and express emotion? Or is it that we're a bunch of egotists who like to think people want to read what we have to say ;-)

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.

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.

I blogged about Tripit a while back. Since then it's been gradually gaining momentum and receiving increasing interest from the travel industry and bloggers alike. Most are attracted by the simplicity of their offering and clever way they put together travel itineraries using your confirmation emails. Now they've announced another string to their bow.

Today, Tripit announced the addition of new 'closeness alerts' to their offering. The location based social 'closeness' alerts let you know who will be close to you by automatically alerting you to other travellers who's plans will take them into your proximity. They've also added a feature (similar to WAYN's) which lets you know who is coming to your hometown.

It's all functionality that's been done before (WAYN, Doppler etc etc) but Tripit is still a really nice service so adding these value add features even if they have been done before will entice more users to the service. It's not attempting to be primarily a social network, rather it's a travel tool which is adding social features.

Techcrunch have a screenshot of the new features here.

Interesting exclusive from Techcrunch UK this morning. They are carrying the story that WAYN may be sold to AOL for the sum of $200m. WAYN themselves haven't acknowledged the deal but Techcrunch's reporter claims three independent sources have verified it.

It's a possibility. Maybe the founders and investors feel it's time to cash out before the larger social networks take over the travel network mantle. Facebook is well on the way to providing the same functionality as part of it's package. Once WAYN's core users realise this they could see a large dip in traffic as users stop feeling the need to visit.

With the above in mind $200m does seem like a lot for something which could tank anytime soon! It would though be a good complement to AOL's portal and if anyone is going to make a success of a niche network like this a portal which still has a semi-walled garden approach (such as AOL) could do it.

Personally I think it would be a better fit for Yahoo...

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.

So Google is becoming more of an operating system than just a set of services. It already has applications, search, advertising, blogging and loads of tools to help you organise and consume data. It's announced OpenSocial as a set of API's aimed at developers who might like to create cross social network applications and services. One would assume that all Googles services will sit on a set of OpenSocial integrated API's. So it's a connected, collection of services for your life.

Missing (up to now) was an identity piece of the puzzle, but now Google have a Profiles angle coming into play. Google Profiles will connect you to all the services you use giving a human face to the users of their many tools. This has to be a step towards a social awareness tool that could act like a social network across all Google services. Google Operating System reckons it could be the perfect platform for activity streams to be broadcast, I think they're probably right and we could see a Google news feed erupt out of this. Perhaps this single Google profiles could broadcast your activity across all social networks using OpenSocial?

Google seem to be playing the game very shrewdly at the moment. They're releasing the building blocks of social networking and activity streaming without ever showing their cards. They could be planning a massive push into social networking as a social operating system, or bloggers like me could be way off the mark and they may just be adding value to our lives.

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 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.

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.

Part of Facebooks game plan seems to have been to create an illusion of openness while at the same time ensuring that their platform is actually closed to anyone who could tread on their toes in the areas that drive their revenue. Now admittedly they don't have much revenue right now but that is going to change very soon with all the new advertising options available to brands who want to be promoted on the social network. So with this increasing revenue should come an increasingly closed approach as they try to prevent others from stepping on their toes. Right?

Well, it seems Google may have a way in to the Facebook platform, and it may be something that Facebook can't do anything about.

Bring forth OpenSocket; a Facebook application that allows you to run any OpenSocial application on your Facebook profile. Now, as OpenSocial gains traction I can very well see developers looking for ways to monetise their efforts on this new platform. Of course, with Google at the helm one of the obvious options would be to carry Adsense adverts on your OpenSocial app. So that is how Google can potentially make advertising revenue out of Facebook without striking any sort of deal.

Will this happen? Well, I'd imagine Facebook will try to block Google ads from appearing, but if a lot of developers start using OpenSocial the demand to allow this may be overwhelming and actually more in Facebooks interest to allow this than to try to block it.