Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category
Wordpress Comes to Facebook
Wednesday, July 18th, 2007
Late last night Wordpress launched a new Facebook application. The application makes it easy for you to share your blog on your profile and with your friends. Also, there is a single page that displays your friend’s recent wordpress.com posts. Any of your blog comments will show up on your profile page. While I don’t have a wordpress.com blog I went ahead and tested out the application. The reason that I have a wordpress.com login is because I use akimiset for filtering spam comments on my blog. When I navigated to the blog stats page I received a blank page that was absent of any navigation. While I don’t have stats for my non-existent Wordpress blog there should probably still be something that allows me to navigate. This application makes it much easier for Wordpress.com bloggers to communicate via their profile. Often times your friends may not be active blog readers but they will surely browse through your Facebook profile. Using this application will help increase a Wordpress.com blogger’s exposure. The one feature that I would like to see added is integration for those individuals that have a Wordpress blog that is hosted on their own server. I use Wordpress to run this blog and it would be nice if I could post my articles to my profile. Instead I am left using the Flog application as I posted about previously. If you have a Wordpress.com blog than go grab the Wordpress application.
Successfully Marketing With Facebook
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007
I was browsing through the Facebook application directory last night and stumbled upon the Blog Tips application. As usual I checked out who the developer was and noticed that it was published under a company name (Blog Business Summit). I clicked on the company and went to the website which was a conference surrounding blogging. Granted, this is obviously an application that peaks my interest given my dedication to blogging, but catchy applications can be used to market practically anything. In this instance the marketing successfully peaked my interest in attending the Blog Business Summit. Ultimately, Facebook applications and social network applications in general will become as common place as websites. Remember when everyone needed a website to promote their business? Now every business is going to need social networking applications to promote their company. Parnassus Ventures (the hosts of the Blog Business Summit) have successfully done that. If you want to get a daily dose of successful blog tips, go grab the BlogTips application.
Social News Is Digg for Facebook
Sunday, June 17th, 2007
While Digg already has a Facebook application, Social News expands on the Digg app feature set. Zack Garbow and Ryan Cradick have decided to make a similar application to the infamously disastrous MySpace news. The main point of failure for MySpace news was that there wasn’t a dedicated community like the ones Digg and Reddit have earned over time. While I have a feeling that the social news application will meet a similar fate, it will be interesting to see how this pans out. I have been brainstorming myself about an alternative to Digg or social news for Facebook. The best method for making a Facebook version would be to compile all of the user’s shared items to determine what is popular at any given moment. Rather than having users submit articles to an entirely new application, it would be much more efficient to simply aggregate existing shared items. I’m sure Facebook already has an internal version of this application. It will be interesting to see who launches it first, Facebook or a third-party developer. Regardless, if you want to start submitting stories go check out the Social News application.
Studying Facebook For Social Computing
Tuesday, May 29th, 2007An interesting article published today in the Wall Street Journal highlights the growth of courses surrounding social media. Obviously, Facebook is one of the primary resources studied when learning about social media. Schools such as the University of Michigan and the Rochester Institute of Technology are offering courses in social computing and social media. Facebook has attracted such a large percentage of student’s time, it has now become a focus of study for scholars. Some students are even being observed while spending time on Facebook. While I wouldn’t want to be the person performing the observation, it helps illustrate how mainstream social media has become.
From a computer science perspective, it is extremely useful to learn about FOAF (friend of a friend) algorithms for optimizing social network search capabilities. There is currently a high demand for social network developers given the rapid growth in new sites launching on a daily basis (read Mashable and you’ll see more).
Bottom line: the social networking phenomenon has become so mainstream that it is being taught in school. Facebook is at the center of most of these studies.
