This afternoon I’ve been watching the Google OS announcement and all I can say is that this is what Mark Zuckerberg first announced when they released Platform, two and a half years ago. Many assumed that the acquisition of Parakey was a step toward truly building the web operating system of the future. Blake Ross, the developer of Firefox and Parakey, has been working on Facebook Lite though. Joe Hewitt, the other Parakey developer, had been working on the Facebook iPhone application until recently. So where is Facebook OS?
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I just celebrated my birthday about a month ago, and received the obligatory birthday wishes on my Facebook wall. It makes me happy to see all those birthday wishes. I’m a bit of a ham when it comes to my own birthday celebrations. But for Vikki Ortiz Healy over at the Chicago Tribune, such Facebook wishes are a plight of insincerity in the digital era.
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To see the ongoing conversation about aggressive online advertising is both reassuring as well as disconcerting. The reason that it’s disconcerting is that Mike Arrington has just begun to breach a much greater issue by randomly attacking one (or a couple) companies in this space. If this attack was done just for page views then writing about the issues are almost as bad as the people performing the act.
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At yesterday’s Facebook Developer Garage, Facebook outlined a number of the upcoming changes to the Facebook Platform which we are still in the process of digesting, however one major thing stood out to us: the Open Graph API. Why Facebook chose to share this tidbit is a little bit curious, as it appears to be a shot at smoothing over some of the broader changes at hand. Whatever the impact of Facebook’s changes on developers are, the Open Graph API is part of a broader movement by Facebook.
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While performance and brand marketing have been long-standing online business models, virtual currency has recently captured the most interest of both developers and users alike. But of the three revenue streams, virtual currency may be the hardest to successfully manage.
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While some users are protesting Facebook’s latest design, a large number of users are actually finding the updated News Feed to be extremely useful. We’ve been spending some time considering the impact that this redesigned homepage will have on developers and have come to a few conclusions. Our most significant conclusion is that the feed is becoming more relevant to all users, but what is relevance?
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Facebook users know how addictive the site is but how has the company been able to continuously attract new users? The primary way Facebook has been so effective at growing is that they enable users to import all of their contacts via email. It’s become the standard tool for instantaneous growth however many companies fail to get it right. Facebook however has mastered the art of the “viral loop” and there is a lot to be learned from the company’s success.
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Last year (even six months ago) most questioned whether social media could deliver meaningful business results. Whether it was the daily concern over Facebook’s revenue or the questioned utility of social applications, the general consensus was the entire social media industry was hard to monetize. Today, the huge success of social games, the increasing number of brand marketers using social media and the myriad of business targets that social media leaders are pursuing (payments, e-commerce, search, etc.) are referenced daily.
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The saying goes, “It doesn’t matter how many fans [users, visitors, etc] you have, it’s the quality that counts.” Unfortunately that’s not the way marketers and brands see things. How are they measuring things? By the number of fans of course! Take a recent article by Jared Stevens in which he compares Bacardi to Absolut in regards to their Facebook presence. As of October 14th, Bacardi had “32,187 fans on its official Facebook page; compare that to the more than 432,000 fans Absolut vodka has”, Stevens writes. So does that mean Absolut has been more successful in their marketing?
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When the Facebook platform launched over two years ago, a new advertising model was built: pay per install. Since then, millions of dollars have been spent on application install campaigns. Many brands are realizing that it’s much more difficult to get users returning on a regular basis to your applications though and as such this model has some serious weaknesses. That’s why many advertisers are turning to the “pay per fan” model.
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