Arrr, Facebook recently launched the hottest new language - English (Pirate). Go into your Settings and select Language to change it up. A vast amount of standard headings have been pirate-icized, which definitely spices things up.
A tip o’ me bottle o’ rum for them hearty Facebook marketing group on this great publicity stunt!
Facebook has been touting more change than Obama for the past few weeks. First the layout switched on us, then the application interface was modified, the “home” button was re-added to the top pane, and now we’ve got the Facebook Application Bar.
In short, in an almost Windows fashion, the bottom left corner of your Facebook experience now has a series of shortcuts to your favorite applications, and an “Applications” button which displays all Applications. It really gives Applications a clear home in the new Facebook design, and shows just how quick and nimble they desire the user interface to be. I really sense their aggressiveness in making FB your one-stop-shop for Games, Friends and maybe even Utilities (although that’s a way off).
In any case, this news, combined with the de-prioritization of Profile Boxes and super-prioritization of Tabs means that FB is trying to really promote the applications that you use often. If an app has a real-world value to you, you’ll add the tab and favourite it in your application bar. And you’ll have one more reason to pop over to facebook.com, as if we needed another.
The dawn of the electronic social age is upon us. It exploded with PC-based Internet, but you may question, where is it headed next? Mobile phones have gained mass-adoption by most demographics, but they have yet to really change the way that we engage in social networking. They primarily exist today as a means to enhance one’s existing social network as a communication medium.
But with iPhone 3G set to be released tomorrow, everything poised to change.
With the launch of the iPhone Application Developer Platform, individual developers now have the capability to rapidly develop innovative applications that take advantage of all the iPhone’s features. Now anyone with some spare time can easily come up with creative applications that leverage the iPhone’s location-based GPS features and high-speed internet connection. The possiblities are endless. Want to chat to the crowd in a 100-meter radius at a concert? Want to check out the profiles of all the hot girls in the bar on your iPhone so you can go on a directed attack? (ok, that one’s pretty lame, but you get my point)
What makes this application platform even more powerful is that individual developers now have a powerful marketing and sales channel, the iPhone Store, to distribute their applications to the millions of iPhone consumers worldwide. Think Facebook Applications, but for the iPhone. It’s a win-win situation for both Apple and the developers, as Apple stands to leverage developers world-wide to build vast quantities of innovative applications to enhance the value of the iPhone. At the same time, developers have a channel to distribute their applications with a direct incentive to develop applications by earning either revenue for downloads or indirect monetary benefits (advertising, social graph, etc.) with no-charge applications.
But who is the big winner amongst it all? Of course - the consumer. We’ll now have a very valuable social tool for bringing our social networking capabilities to a new dimension. With tens of thousands of developers around the world building their own unique and creative applications to get a slice of Apple’s pie, there are bound to be must-have applications created that change the way we live and communicate.
I would surmise that the iPhone 3G and it’s application platform will do for social networking what Netscape and the browser did for the worldwide web. Social networking was not meant to take place sitting in front of a computer all day. It needs to evolve to areas and events where you actually socialize, and can leverage mobile technology to enhance your social connections. The iPhone 3G is ushering in this new era.
Why am I so confident? Apple is cool, Apple is trendy; the product, interface, and design are all best in class; they have the commercial channel; they have the price that will drive mass adoption ($199); and best of all, they have the vision of how a consumer is meant to leverage their mobile device to enhance their daily lives.
And the commercial platform for developers now provides them instant access to bring the utility of the iPhone to new heights. Applications can be discovered, distributed, updated and shared with one touch.
And ground zero breaks tomorrow, folks. It will be an exciting time to watch it all unfold.
Google Press Center: News Announcement
As is normal in the social networking space, an announcement with massive implications has snuck up on us overnight, and seeing as mainstream media has not the sense nor foresight to understand its implications, the big news drifts innocently along the formal news stream of the day.
Google Friend Connect, simply, allows any site to implement users, friend lists and third-party applications using Google’s OpenSocial. So let’s say you made a great Facebook Application, and want to spread the idea: whip it into a full blown web page, implement Google OpenSocial’s FriendConnect, and now you’ve got completely control over your destiny AND a full-sized web site to boot.
While it will take a long time, my preliminary analysis is that Google will continue to improve support for FriendConnect, and continue to woo bigger and bigger companies and websites to use it, and over the course of the next few years, it will be an important part of any site that desires to be ‘connected’.
That said, Facebook just recently moved forward with their own similarly named Facebook Connect, which allows any site on the web to provide its users with a simply “Connect to Facebook” button, which will then port in all of FB’s friend and user information, and allow for the use of applications.
What’s the conclusion here? These two companies are going to war over the areas outside Facebook’s walled garden, and the next year is going to be absolutely critical to determine whether people truly value the amount of photos, friend connections and wall posts they’ve already put into their Facebook. Because Google’s FriendConnect is going to operate as most Google products do: silently. You’ll use a feature here or there, then maybe sign up one time (if you’re not already), and one day you’ll realize all your friends are on there as well, and one guy will throw up a photo on there, and a rush will occur, where everyone heads over to make their second important Social account…
Just like when MySpacians migrated to FB.
Only time will tell.
twistori is genius. Using Twitter’s open technologies, Twistori is a tool that reads into the massive database of Twitter messages, and presents you with a live feed of messages using whatever word you can think of.
A lot of its success and allure has to do with the presentation. Along with Facebook’s Lexicon, I’m excited at the potential of mining the incredible social data that is now available on the web. Interactions and relationships between people can reveal great trends about our culture and behavior. I’m sure this will one day help to reduce the amount of redundancy in today’s advertising.
Before you kill me on that, think about it. Right now, I get hit with a web ad for a brand new Luxury SUV. Anyone that had even had the vaguest notion of who I am would know that I’m just never going to buy one. But still, Lexus is wasting a bit of their money getting that ad to my eyes.
Maybe one day, when the ability to harness trends and personal preferences is used wisely, the right car company can find out that they will be able to sell me if they pitch the 5 year lease on their brand new hybrid fuel-cell car-plane.
So unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few days, Facebook launched it’s chat application to the masses, maintaining it’s rapid rollout of new features and enhancements that solidify Facebook’s place at the forefront of the social web.
What will be interesting to see, however, is how big an impact this launch will have on the usage of Windows Live Messenger, AIM, and other IM applications. Back in the old days when Instant Messaging was the hot web application, keeping in touch with new acquaintances was done through exchanging IM addresses (around the time when you thought you were cool if you had a 6-digit ICQ number). But as social networks have become the medium of choice for maintaining and creating new connections (ignoring Twitter for now), it remains to be seen whether MSN/AIM can hold on, given that their core functionality is now being built into the Facebook platform. I’d surmise that until Facebook launches a standalone IM client, there will still be a role for traditional IM applications, but their day in the spotlight will soon fade as Facebook IM begins to flourish (for the average consumer, at least).
Which brings me to my next point - where is Facebook headed next? Well, their Messaging system is pretty laughable right now and as many are saying, is completely due for a major overhaul. By leveraging your social graph, Facebook has the capability to come up with an innovative email platform that will have the potential to completely disrupt Google/Microsoft/Yahoo’s grip on email. Since Facebook knows your social relationships and who you frequently communicate with, it can begin to automatically prioritize messages and enable you to more efficiently manage the increasing amount of emails and other electronic messages that we see on a daily basis. Top this off by then integrating your existing Facebook account and features into the Email application (ie. Event Calendar), and allowing 3rd-party developers to create applications that extend your email functionality even more, and you have an email platform leaps and bounds above the ever-stagnant Hotmail’s of the world.
Popular Mechanics has thrown up a thought-provoking article bringing to light the implications of social networking on the entire search industry as we know it.
I’d like to draw out one point. Search today is being used as a tool for anonymous consumers to find the relevant information they need. But what search today lacks is the ability to leverage the individual consumer’s social graph to provide much more relevant search results.
If I’m searching for a takeout restaurant in my area for food, I don’t just want a random list of close-by restaurants, I also want to know whether my friends, who’s opinions I trust, recommend each place or not. I also want the search engine to know that I particularly fancy Italian food, so that it will prioritize those results.
Social media adds a new dimension to the relevancy of search results. And with modern information overload, whoever can provide the most relevant search results will win.
Fantastic news for everyone who is looking for applications to develop into genuine social entertainment. Maybe that’s just me. 
http://www.facebook.com/inbox/readupdates.php?id=21073243776
TechCrunch is reporting that Facebook is opening up their mini-feed to third party services. What does this mean?
Let’s say you’re a Del.ico.us user, and you just added a new bookmark. If you choose to, that news will now show up in your news feed and your friends will be able to see it. The web just got a whole lot smaller.
This also marks Facebook’s first move outside of Facebook, and it could even have been urged forward by new COO Sheryl Sandberg (read Fortune’s report on her moves to make Facebook profitable here).
More on the move soon.
The article is a year old, but senior editor David Kirkpatrick hits all the right notes in trying to understand the significance of Facebook as a communication and business tool.
“It’s not all rosy for business, though. You think we’ve had transparency on the Internet so far? The ramifications for marketers could be frightening if someone builds tools that enable Facebook users to get more efficient at communicating among themselves about products and services they use. It could become just as easy to learn if someone you know was overcharged by a credit card as to find out what concerts they are attending. Up until now most online sources of product information have been unreliable. But if it’s your friend telling you not to buy that shampoo, you’re likely to listen.”
Full article here: Facebook’s plan to hook up the world - May. 24, 2007
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