Facebook: A young network with an old mindset? March 30, 2009
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentYes, I know what you’re thinking. “Not another post about Facebook.” Forgive me, but in yesterday’s New York Times, an executive from the world’s fastest growing social network suggested that Facebook users will not have the final say in how the site evolves. The quoted statement suggests a very old-school, command-and-control mindset. In this age of consumer control, don’t the hip young managers of Facebook know that marketers are meant to “just let go?”
In his article “Is Facebook Growing Up Too Fast?” Brad Stone presents an interesting overview of the social network and the difficulties brought on by its exceptional growth. What intrigued me most was the apparent discrepancy between what Facebook users expect from the site and the vision of the Facebook management team. This difference raises all sorts of questions about when a brand should exercise control.
Read The Rest—->Facebook: A young network with an old mindset?
Hasbro Drops Suit Against Scrabulous Makers December 19, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentToy maker Hasbro has agreed to drop a lawsuit against the company that created a phenomenally successful Facebook game—one that Hasbro forced the social network to drop as being too close to its own Scrabble title.
Hasbro had filed the lawsuit against RJ Softwares last summer, alleging that its Scrabulous infringed on the intellectual property of Hasbro’s title in look and feel.
Documents filed in U.S. District Court in New York last Friday show that Hasbro has decided to drop the lawsuit, although they did not give specific reasons for the withdrawal.
Read The Rest—>Hasbro Drops Suit Against Scrabulous Makers
MediaPost Publications – Around the Net In Online Marketing – 11/11/2008 November 11, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a comment| by Ross Fadner, Tuesday, Nov 11, 2008 11:00 AM ET |
| Facebook Launches New Ad Product, Still Lags Behind MySpace |
| The Wall Street Journal Facebook may have passed MySpace in terms of worldwide audience, but the social networking giant has struggled to sell ads as effectively as its competitor. Today, the Palo Alto company is unveiling its latest ad format, called “engagement ads” which prompt a user to do something within the ad unit, such as post a comment about a product or RSVP to watch a TV show. Once a user engages with an ad, a message would then be sent through the news feed to his or her friends list. As the Journal points out, Facebook has a lot to prove with the new format, which is being made available to all of its advertisers after four months of testing. According to comScore, Facebook’s share of U.S. online display spending was just 1.1% in June. By comparison, News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media unit, which includes MySpace, was the market leader in display spending with 15.9%. |
Read The Rest—>MediaPost Publications – Around the Net In Online Marketing – 11/11/2008
Facebook falls victim to account hijacking scam – Brand Republic News – Brand Republic November 11, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentLONDON – Nigerian scammers have infiltrated Facebook and are hijacking users’ accounts to request money by posing as friends in need.
In the latest scam, Australian Karina Wells received a Facebook message last Friday from one of her friends, Adrian, saying he was stranded in Nigeria and needed her to lend him $500 (£213) for a ticket home.
Canada’s Election System Doesn’t Get Social Media October 15, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentWe just had a (somewhat pointless) federal election in Canada yesterday. There’s generally supposed to be a blackout ban on televising or broadcasting the results until all of the polls across the country are closed. Because of our geographic spread, polls in Newfoundland closed more than 3 hours before those in Vancouver had. In fact, when the polls closed in Newfoundland, I still hadn’t voted in Vancouver.
The CBC is reporting today that the broadcast blackout was “broken” by the use of social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.
Read The Rest—->Canada’s Election System Doesn’t Get Social Media
Facebook Lexicon Now Tracks Personal — and Political — Sentiment September 22, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a comment
Pulse of political insight?
Facebook’s new version of Lexicon sports features that let its user base play with aggregated data from.
Lexicon was introduced last April as a way for users to gauge the “buzzworthiness.” Lexicon searches all Wall, group and event posts for relevant words or phrases, then produces charts of their popularity.
In a nod to privacy advocates, Lexicon does not incorporate terms from messages, one-on-one chat, searches, or other private data.
Additions to the new Lexicon:
- Dashboard reflects the total number of unique users that mention a topic, the percentage of the Facebook user base that mentioned it, and the total number of posts.
- Demographics follow trends over time between users of different ages, genders and countries.
- Maps display where people are talking about a topic within different countries. It is currently limited to the US, Great Britain, and Canada.
- Sentiment shows how much people like or dislike a given topic. It also compares topics based their emotional appeal.
- Associations lets users see words and phrases closely associated with a topic in different points in time.
- Pulse highlights keywords that frequently show up in the profiles (Interests, Music, etc.) of people discussing the topic.
READ THE REST OF THIS GREAT MARKETINGVOX STORY BY CLICKING HERE
Show Me The Money: Facebook Tests Engagement Ads August 22, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentIn what it calls the latest “evolution” of its ad model, Facebook is testing a new set of ads aimed at boosting click-throughs and further tapping into the social graph on behalf of marketers. The first three types of Engagement Ads now in trial let users post comments, become a “fan” of a brand’s Facebook Page and send virtual gifts. Within the units, people can also read friends’ comments, and see who else is a brand fan or who shared virtual items. All three flavors of Engagement Ads will appear in the new home page placement alongside the News Feed on the right. They will also show up in members’ News Feeds as people interact with the ads. The new Engagement Ads build on Facebook’s Social Ads, which typically appear in the News Feed and allow marketers to run ads tied to users’ actions within the network. This includes actions that people take on branded applications running in Facebook. Within Social Ads, Facebook is also rolling out a new program that would allow marketers to pay to expand the number of friends who learn about a user’s interaction with an application. Currently, Facebook uses an algorithm to figure out who among a user’s friends would be most interested in learning about a given activity. Under the new plan, marketers would have the option of sending a sponsored notification (marked as such) to all of a members’ friends. So if someone used a Fandango app to buy tickets to see “Pineapple Express,” Fandango and Sony Pictures could pay to tell all of their friends on Facebook about it. The social network triggered a privacy backlash last year when it launched its Beacon ad program, which notified members about their friends’ e-commerce activity outside Facebook. The company revised Beacon to require members’ opt-in consent, but the program was the subject of a class action filed only last week. In a briefing Thursday on the new ad initiatives, Tim Kendall, Facebook’s director of monetization, said the new Social Ads program would avoid the same privacy problems as Beacon because it only relates to users’ activities within Facebook.
| READ THE REST OF THIS MEDIAPOST ONLINE MEDIA DAILY ARTICLE BY CLICKING HERE |
End nears in Facebook legal row August 18, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentFacebook has won approval to acquire rival ConnectU despite an appeal against an agreed settlement.
In 2004 ConnectU’s founders sued Facebook claiming creator Mark Zuckerberg took his idea for a social networking site from them.
The lawsuit was settled in early 2008 but ConnectU claims Facebook misrepresented its value during talks.
The judge has told ConnectU to stick to the agreed settlement and transfer its stock to Facebook.
The row over valuation has been caused by Microsoft taking a $240m (£128m) stake in Facebook in October 2007 that valued the site, on paper, at $15 billion.
Facebook said that figure should not be used to rate the company’s worth as that valuation was specific to Microsoft’s preferred stock and the business deal surrounding it. Facebook said its real valuation stood at $3-4bn.
Court papers have shown that as part of the approved settlement, Facebook agreed to give ConnectU’s owners an undisclosed amount of money and Facebook stock.
In return ConnectU’s principals agreed to turn over to Facebook all the stock they held in ConnectU.
In their appeal ConnectU co-founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss along with fellow partner Divya Narendra claimed that implementing the agreement now would let Facebook disrupt the appeals process.
Judge James Ware of the US district court in San Jose, California ruled that before ConnectU’s appeal can be heard, the settlement made earlier this year has to go through.
“The longer the court delays in enforcing the settlement between the parties, the more like the value of the consideration subject of the settlement will change,” he wrote in his judgement. “Any further delay in enforcing the settlement will create a serious risk of prejudice to Facebook, as well as to ConnectU.”
He added: “This means the status quo cannot be preserved with a stay.”
He originally rejected ConnectU’s claims of fraud in June prompting the appeal which he has pledged to hear.
The ConnectU founders sued fellow Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 accusing him of stealing their idea for the company following work he did on a dating site for them in 2003.
Facebook said it would not comment on the case. ConnectU did not return calls for comment.
Meanwhile the Winklevoss brothers are competing for rowing gold in the Beijing Olympics. They came second in their semi-final to win a place in the men’s pairs final.
Recent figures by Comscore show Facebook is now the world’s biggest and fastest growing social networking site with 132 million unique visitors in June.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/7559864.stm
Facebook Adopts New Metric for Widgets August 14, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentCHICAGO Facebook took a step toward standardizing the wild world of Web metrics by switching its engagement rating for applications from reporting daily usage to measuring monthly active users.
The social networking site disclosed the change last week via a company blog aimed at an audience of developers. The goal is to help developers focus on “longer-term engagement” and show them “the number of users who visit [their] application over a longer time frame than just one day,” according to Facebook.
“The new metric will force widget developers to work differently,” said Sonya Chawla, managing director of advertising at Slide, a San Francisco firm that has developed top applications for Facebook like SuperPoke and TopFriends. “A daily count measures a flashy application that does one thing like show a movie preview, for example. A longer time frame [metric] will force widget developers to seek longer term engagement with their widget applications.”
READ THE REST OF THIS ADWEEK ARTICLE BY CLICKING HERE
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Sudden Disconnect Over Social Networking Deal June 4, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a comment Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 3, 2008; Page D01
Google’s announcement of a service to “make the Web more social” was decidedly casual, or staged to seem that way.
Standing beside a campfire, lawn chairs and toasted marshmallows, engineering director David Glazer explained how, through an agreement with Facebook and similar sites, Google’s effort would serve a primal human need.
“We all like huddling around fires, and huddling around food and talking to each other — people are social,” Glazer, dressed in a red-checked shirt and sneakers, told about 100 attendees gathered outside the company’s headquarters last month. “With ‘Friend Connect’ we are trying to make that happen everywhere on the Web.”
Yet within three days of the campfire, a dispute erupted between Google and Facebook, its largest partner in the new service, that reflected the fact that for Web companies there is nothing casual about the business of Internet socializing: There’s too much money, maybe billions, at stake.
Facebook, the burgeoning social network, abruptly withdrew its support for Google’s Friend Connect, meaning that none of Facebook’s tens of millions of members could sign in to Web sites using Google’s new service
Coming so soon after the highly publicized launch, it was an embarrassing rift for both sides. Many view the ongoing standoff as a contest with far-reaching implications for Web socializing.
In the common social networks, people communicate, organize and socialize largely within sites — such as Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn — but not outside of them. This model, referred to in geek parlance as the “walled garden,” ensures that social networking sites get immense traffic and screen time from members, and the revenue that comes with that.
Many in the industry are proposing a different model, however, in which every Web site will have a social aspect. In this scenario, there will be no need for a person to confine socializing to MySpace or Facebook. People could tap into their information — contacts and pictures — as they roam the Web. The social networking sites would function more like a utility, storing a person’s contacts, photographs and other tidbits.
“Social networking sites are at a major fork in the road,” said Bernard Lunn, a tech and media entrepreneur who writes for ReadWriteWeb, a blog that focuses on tech issues.
Although it’s uncertain what shape social networks will take, there is little doubt that they have become wildly popular and that their value has been the subject of high-stakes financial speculation.
In 2005, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. bought the company that owned MySpace for $580 million. Last year, Microsoft bought a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook for $240 million, a purchase that valued the three-and-half-year-old company at $15 billion.
But while there are millions willing to spend time updating their pictures and profile information on social network sites, there may be just as many wondering: What good are they?
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has argued that his Web site makes human relationships more “efficient.”
Sure, he said in a speech last year, two friends “can communicate offline if one of them picks up the phone to call the other, or if they take some time to hang out, or if they randomly bump into each other. But these methods are all synchronous — they’re kind of inefficient. In order for them to work, both people have to be paying attention to each another at the same time.
“There’s a better way to do this; and on Facebook, it’s simple. These people can read each other’s profiles any time they want to see new information about each other. They can look at each other’s media, and they can send each other messages. On Facebook these real connections become more efficient. People get more value out of all their relationships.”
Even so, exactly how people will share their information across the Web, and which companies will benefit from it, remains uncertain, as the standoff between Google and Facebook suggests.
Until Facebook’s withdrawal, Google’s Friend Connect would have allowed Facebook members to visit other Web sites using the service and, while there, tap into their Facebook friends list and other social information. To protect privacy, users would use their Facebook username and password to access their information. That, Google officials explained, is how ‘Friend Connect’ would make the Web “more social.”
But shortly after the launch, Facebook officials asserted that Google hadn’t briefed them on Friend Connect. And having seen the service, they said, they discovered that it violated user privacy by passing user information to third parties.
“We had not had a chance to review how it worked before it launched,” Facebook’s chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly, said in an interview last week. But he declined to detail the company’s privacy concerns.
Google quickly offered an alternate version of the Facebook deadlock.
Glazer said that Facebook had been fully briefed on Friend Connect.
“We talked to them before the announcement, we talked to them after, and there was a person from Facebook at the launch,” he said.
Moreover, he noted, the only Facebook information that Friend Connect gives to a third-party site is the person’s public Facebook photograph, and that is done only after a user has logged in with his or her Facebook credentials.
Some observers suspect that Facebook cited “privacy concerns” as an excuse for pulling out of an agreement they had come to view as a competitive threat — they were concerned about their users leaving the “walled garden.”
“What Facebook is after really is control over their users,” said Chris Saad, co-founder of DataPortability.org that advocates for standards for sharing information.
Though Facebook has moved toward opening their walled garden, Saad said that from a financial standpoint, the company “has a difficult balancing act to perform.”
On one hand, they’d like to keep users on the Facebook site. On the other, users are demanding the ability to utilize their Facebook contacts when they are elsewhere on the Web.
Saad, Glazer, Lunn and others argue that ultimately, the barriers of the walled gardens, like Facebook, will come down.
That, Glazer said, will leave the current social network sites “needing to evolve.”
