My predictions My thoughts and predictions on technology and business, and sometimes strong ones at that

Social advertising is a very different than traditional web advertising. The thing about social media advertisers, is users aren’t looking for a product. They’re already engaged in some activity, and don’t necessarily want to be drawn away from that. But that does not mean there isn’t value in it, it’s just a different form of value than search advertising.

When a user is searching from google, they are actually looking for something. They’re often looking for products, which is why advertising in its current form works great on search. It’s logical if a user is searching for shampoo, that proctor and gamble would want to pay to have their products show up on the right. This is vastly different from when I’m playing a racing game on facebook, and Ford shows me a commercial for their product, they’re not the same thing.

However there is still HUGE value in social advertising. Since you know so much more about a user you can target them even better, I can know, age, gender, music/movie preferenes, interests, hobbies, among many other things. Where this can help is branding, if there is a car game, and you can present a solid brand in places throughout that game I become brand loyal without realizing it. I don’t become disengaged, but I do take notice of it. It’s much like the branding that takes place in movies, or console games, with large negotiated contracts, however it needs to occur on a micro-level.

I find it extremely amusing that Microsoft and Apple are in many senses the very same company, at least in their actions, yet people feel very different about the two. For the average person they aren’t really a fan of Microsoft, and many love Apple. While I’m not really suggesting anyone should love Microsoft, why are people such Apple fanboys. Apple makes the same bad moves as Microsoft, they control their software and limit functionality in order to drive sales in the future.

For example with the iPhone, by disabling video streaming they are simply leaving something to be supported for next year. There’s now doubt that the phone is fully capable, especially with 3g, as qik is already supporting it. However they are having to jump through hoops to do it, when Apple could have simply enabled it in the SDK, and yet they didn’t. It’s unfortunate for AT&T in the process as well, because as people are die hard Apple fans, they feel Apple can do no wrong. This wasn’t quite the case in recent days, first with the launch of the iPhone 3g, there were many many bricked iPhones for that morning. Almost every complaint I saw on twitter drawed attention to AT&T screwing it up. However, from a source very close to the issue, the problem was entirely on Apple’s end, as they had tested for only a fraction of the traffic they got that day, and were not able to scale up new machines nearly fast enough.

Now Apple woes seem to continue as with MobileMe. For all the fan boys out there, and while I agree they make a good product, they should still be help to the same regard of anyone else that makes a product, and be complained to when they screw up. Apple has indeed done a great job with marketing and a reasonable job with products, however they keep a strong reign on applications, which is why I like the applications that are on OSX, but hate that its sucha  smaller number.

I’m not saying love Microsoft, or even hate Apple. But people judge them on their actions, and while they drive the boundaries, theres still no hard in calling them out when they hold back just for more revenue.

Facebook applications to check out,

Windows:
Digsby – Facebook Im on your desktop
Fonebook – sync outlook and facebook
iDeskbook – Browse facebook on the desktop
Photosaver – Friends photos as your screensaver

OSx:
Friend Photos Screensaver – Friend’s photos as your screensaver
Facebook exporter for iphoto
Adium – Chat with facebook support
Photobook – Miss your camera at an event, just steal your friends album
EventSync – Sync event calendar with iCal

Web:
WordPress fotobook – Facebook albums inside your wordpress blog

I recently posted about web 2.5, and since that time have been diving into two sites that attempt to do this. The first is friendfeed, I’ve commented about it before. It’s overall a great site, however the community is still growing on it, and most of my personal friends are not on there, only those that I follow and interact with in a tech or professional community. And there’s the ability to go through and create an imaginary personality for friends, but for me that could take days, and while its still tempting I can’t quite commit that strongly. Yeah friend feed is great, but I find myself using it more for having a conversation with whoever is there, rather than using it to follow individual people.

With the emergence of rooms in friendfeed it seems they realize its more about being able to have a conversation around a similar topic than it is to track individual people.

However it seems that socialthing, which I recently got access to, thanks socialthing team, is a slightly better aggregator at least for my demographic. Friendfeed works well for those that use blogs, google reader, photo albums and the like. But friendfeed is seriously lacking on the facebook front, meanwhile socialthing is accomplishing this very well. While I’m not sure which one I’ll be engaged more in, in the coming weeks though I imagine it will depend on the purpose.

Friendfeed works for following information about tech, news, or similar broad topics. Socialthing works for keeping up with friends, when they’ve uploaded pictures from last friday night, or when that girl you have a crush on in high school breaks up with a long-term boyfriend and needs a rebound, and the like. I’m not sure how friendfeed would work if they did just enable the same time of features for facebook, I imagine it might not catch as right now its about conversations more than it is a singular feed. Socialthing has a chance to win this one, but you really need to have more than 10 services you connect to.

Facebook’s development platform just over a year ago seemed like a genius idea, with an almost infinite amount of potential. While it’s still a very hot topic, and most sites these days when they lauch attempt to have a facebook version of their site or service available at almost at the same time. However, I believe we are already over the peak of this, as more controls are being put in place to slow viral growth, and users are spending less time on the site and engaged in the applications.

My problem though is not with the slowing rate of engagement in applications developed on the facebook platform, but rather on what are the primary applications. Facebook seems to have done a very good job of keeping users to stay within the confines of the site, rather than simply using it as a utility. For most facebook is their personal planner for events, their personal datebook for friends/contacts, their online photo album, their email/messaging system, and more for some. And while it’s fine and dandy for some of these things, facebook is not the best endpoint to interact with when getting things to and from facebook.

Take for example the facebook chat. This is a great utility to be able to talk with friends that I may not have spoken with in years, my AIM list has around 200 users, meanwhile my facebook has over 500. No I do not wish to speak to all of these all the time, but in the rare occasion that I do it’s convenient. However IM chat within a browser just doesn’t do it for me, not on facebook, or meebo for that matter. The nice fact is that there is a solution and more being developed. Personally if I’m at home I use adium (Mac only) for my instant messaging which supports facebook. If I’m on a windows machine I use digsby to chat with my facebook friends and monitor what friends are doing. While digsby isn’t a perfect solution, I strongly prefer it to the other option of chatting within the browser.

What about pictures, that’s probably the single busiest activity outside of updating status. Here I know of multiple friends that have attempted to use the site’s interface for uploading pictures, only to have completed in double the time expected with much much more frustration than anticipated. Meanwhile, I simple select the photos I want to upload in iPhoto (there are options for mac and pc here), select export, click facebook, and off they go. This is the way it should be, I can do likewise for smugmug, flickr, etc.

Facebook has done a reasonable job at giving developers access to to facebook to allow them to build reasonable applications. While there’s a lot of junk out there, there is also some reasonable applications to really make facebook a reasonable utility. The problem lies that these seem to be hidden gems, whether its facebook or some third party, someone needs to start bringing these to the attention of others. Unless facebook transitions to themselves as strictly a utility and differentiates themselves on the quality of service the utility gives, and less on their UI and stronghold of data, they will be in for a world of hurt in a few years.

I’ve talked about web 2.0, talked about web 3.0, but today realized theres still a middle ground we have to reach in between the two. It’s quite a pain that I really have no idea when my friends do certain things online. While some use facebook for absolutely everything, this is most certainly NOT the best option. Throwing your data into their walled garden is one thing, but for this to be the one and only place you store your online data is quite stupid. Facebook will only open up when they’re absolutely forced to, and may not even open up then. To migrate ‘notes’ or rather blog posts out of facebook, or all of your pictures, or you’re messages can be an absolute pain. Why not use a service built for just those things, such as a wordpress blog, or flickr/picasa, or twitter/jaiku? Well most people don’t because of the simplicity of facebook being the central place for your data and your friend’s data.

Well there is a solution to it, though it’s not ideal yet, it will soon hit a tipping point of when it will be the solution. Well first I guess I should clearly layout the problem:

web 2.0 – the dynamic web emerged, users started publishing content
…. Mass amounts of data, problems getting to it all …..

thus in the future we have…
web 2.5 – content aggregation became nessecary, via friend feed

and eventually…
web 3.0 – the semantic web, services understand you and your needs and provide content around context

In short this is a small plug for friendfeed, but if anyone else knows of a better service to in essence create a feed of you, please send them this way. I’ll be posting a full review on friendfeed soon, but for the time being just want to point out the value in such a service. Right now I post on multiple sites, I twitter, I blog, I use facebook, I use smugmug, I use picasa, I use last.fm, I use ilike, I use librarything, I use tumblr, I use google talk, among others. While personally I might be a little more invested than most, still the point remains that a lot of people are on more than one of these services. While I know them and follow them on the ones I know about, chances are I will never see their flickr accounts, or last.fm accounts. While some people worry about privacy and this being a stalker’s nightmare, I really don’t see it making things that much easier. Much less, most people are making a pretty big assumption assuming that they’re worth being stalked. I personally hope I could have a stalker come out of such, as it would give me a definifitive answer that someone actually reads and find me interesting. I just hope she’s 5’6″, and a blonde bombshell, but then again I’ll take whatever stalkers I can get.

But the point remains that before we get to web 3.0 and the ability to deliver content based on context, we need to aggregate the content. Sites like friendfeed (and eventually socialthing) are a reasonable first step.

Check out my friendfeed at: www.friendfeed.com/craig081785