Is the Social Media Press Release a Meatball Sundae?
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The idea of a social media release is on trial, and it looks like the jury is ready to convict.
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Once you ship a product you immediately start getting feedback, and if you're paying attention you can easily find the trends.  One of the big pieces of feedback about FlickrFan relates to branding. When you download the app and mount the disk image, where's FlickrFan? It isn't until after you figure out that you need to open the folder and click on the OPML app that you see FlickrFan. (I need to add a Readme file that makes this much more obvious.) I knew this would be confusing. I could have renamed everything FlickrFan, it wouldn't have taken much work, or testing, and the chance for breakage was nil, since it was a new product. I didn't do it for a simple reason, the engine that runs FlickrFan will run other apps, and I knew I would be shipping one such app within a matter of weeks. Once there's a second app running in the same engine, it may still be confusing. But there will be more after that.  Maybe there won't be millions of users, but my goal is to bootstrap a community of networked living rooms. For that I don't need more than a couple hundred households who want to play and I already have that.  I will soon tell you more about the new app, and if you're paying attention on my Twitter feed, you'll get a pretty clear idea of where this is going. It's all about communities, social features and big media. FlickrFan is about beautiful pictures on high def TV. The next one is about... Stay tuned!
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Tycho:  Months after it was necessary, Sony has thrown their blogging hat into the ring...  of blogging.  I've heard people compare it to Larry Hryb/Major Nelson's blog, but with a rotating "crew" of bloggers - like a public relations version of the Wu Tang Clan - it's more like Microsoft's Gamerscore blog.  Which, coincidentally, I never read because it is run by a rotating "crew" of bloggers, like a public relations version of the etcetera etcetera.  The mental image is that of a corporate hydra, the brand seared and scabbed upon its breast.
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Today's announcement from Facebook is the reason why Google announced OpenSocial last week. They must have gotten a leak from one of the companies that stood with Facebook, so they knew what was coming. They weren't scared of Facebook's technology, because they didn't respond with technology. They were scared because Facebook has a better advertising story than Google does. They are getting ready to offer some very premium web real estate that (pay attention now) Google can't compete with. And advertising is Google's bread and butter, advertising is to Google as operating systems are to Microsoft. They can't let somebody appear to be better than they are in advertising. Yet that's what Facebook is, better than Google in advertising. Here's what Facebook can do.  Let's say I bought a Wii and I like it. They can tell all my friends "Dave bought a Wii and he likes it." That's a lot more likely to result in a sale  than an intrusive ad like this one, that was displayed next to an email I sent to some friends about their New Networked Living Room. Google thinks I might want to buy Moroccan Lamps, or something called a Unique Shabby Chic (huh?) or Crate & Barrell bedroom furniture. Of course I tune that shit out, I don't even see it. It has zero impact.   Anyway, I was talking with Doc Searls a few minutes ago and he mentioned OpenSocial and I told him it was just a lot of noise meant to distract people from what Facebook was doing in advertising. He hadn't heard anything about it even though he was at a tech conference in Denver today and yesterday. I said there you go, Google's strategy worked. But to no effect, longterm, because Facebook has the momentum and Google, try as hard as they want to stop it, will not be able to, any more than Alta Vista or Infoseek were able to stop Google once they figured out that their lunch was eaten. Google will be around for a long time, I'm not saying they will go away, but Facebook will be around too. And Google will have a hard time catching up to them.  Long-term, however they both have problems because advertising is on its way to being obsolete. Facebook is just another step along the path. Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information. And that's good!  8/3/06: "Information is welcome, advertising is offensive."
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Last summer, when I was exploring the edges of Twitter, and building a voicemail service that hooked into Twitter with BlogTalkRadio, and then hooking my digital camera up to Twitter through Flickr, it seemed inevitable that Twitter would eventually support "payloads" so that objects like pictures and MP3s could hitch a ride on a Twitter message without using up any of he 140 characters, and with a neat url-less display.  The idea just kind of sat there, we've been quietly using the services, accepting their awkwardness, but without direct support from Twitter, they probably won't become mainstream.  Along comes Twitxr, in a post by Mike Arrington on TechCrunch, and I go -- why? This doesn't seem right. Too many steps. I have it much easier, Twitter is hooked right up to my camera, I never have to get my desktop or laptop in the loop when I want to post a picture. To prove the point, I'll now take a picture of this post, and shoot it up to Twitter.  So now Twitxr basically says it's time to give up the wait for Twitter, and maybe they're right, but for this??? I don't really think this is what I want. If I have to use a whole new Twitter for photography, I probably want it to be Flickr, which I already use, whose API we've already mastered, whose scaling we trust, and even though Yahoo's future is in doubt, it's more certain than that of a startup. Choice #1, if the Twitter guys are listening, is to go ahead and help us, your developers, create something seamless out of what you already have. No matter what it's easier for users to stay with what they're already using. It really isn't, it seems to me, in your interest to have users switch?? Twitxr throws down a challenge to both Flickr and Twitter. To Twitter: Scale, scale, scale and add payloads to the API. To Flickr: Go ahead and do an event streamer for pictures.
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Facebook last week started quietly rolling out "Social Ads" -- advertisements featuring the names and profile photos of your friends. Critics say that users aren't adequately notified that their photos may appear in these ads.
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Blog: CNET News.com's Charles Cooper says the fuzzy acceptance of "conversational marketing" is leading to confusion among blog readers. Isn't it time to set down clear rules of the road?
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Social networking sites are called 'better than print' for recruiting IT staff.
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Blog: TechCrunch reports that a lot of rumors are spreading about it, but it's still unsubstantiated.
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The social news site tries to curb fraud by changing the way community members promote its stories. The move sparks protest among the site's top users. In Monkey Bites
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A job posting for social news site Newroo, which was purchased by Fox Interactive Media last year, hints at the possible future launch of
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Signs are pointing to a potentially big announcement out of the company this week, but the notoriously tight-lipped social network isn't providing any answers.
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Dare Obasanjo works at Microsoft.  In his blog post about the Yahoo layoffs, in a postscript, he indicates that Microsoft is interested in creating a Twitter clone.  I've said openly, on Twitter (and now here) that I would like to be part of a venture that aims to create a scalable Twitter. I've had several conversations with people who are attempting to do this. I haven't done a deal yet. My bet: There will be a lot of growth in Twitter in the coming years, and it seems likely that the Twitter company will not be able to scale their systems to meet the demand. There are features that should have been in the product and in the API months ago that are on the back-burner, likely due to Twitter's constant battle to meet meet demand (scaling). As a user, I'd like to view the product and the company as a black box, but that's impossible with the system glitches and outages. What users are doing now with Twitter is far more important, imho, than the servers, or the company. The company, understandably, thinks their issues are most important, but that's a matter of perspective. We don't own any stock in the company, so our perspective reflects that. To us, they're a utility. All this is a verbose way of saying that Microsoft applying their resources and scaling knowhow to this problem woud be an interesting development.
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Useful Twitter feeds for people in Southern California. And useful lessons for the next disaster.
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Your article 'Linking up to the ultimate network' (25 May) is right to highlight the pitfalls of using a consumer social networking solution for professional social networking amongst PR professionals.
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Tycho:  After Gods & Heroes was scrapped, developer Perpetual Entertainment was sued by their PR company.  People are being sued all the time, and we should know, but in this case they were being sued for really interesting things: namely, a kind of "bounty" on initial sales based on their tireless promotion of the title.  Is that common in these arrangements?  I don't think most people consider that role especially powerful, but companies don't write in clauses like that for no reason.  The articles you see on news sites are written by people you know, but the content, timing, and (if they can swing it) tone of those articles is typically part of a fairly scientific structure cooked up by PR.  They contextualize the demos in their entirety, negotiate access, and stud their speech with tactical phrases they hope will find their way into the final piece.
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By David Quainton  A sport-themed social networking site, backed by former Loaded editor Tim Southwell, is using Bite Communications for this week's launch.