Web Community Forum: News and Conversation about Online Communities

Successful social media apps use “baby step development”

The two most common pieces of advice you’ll hear about developing a Facebook app are probably:

1. Viral ideas are like half-cooked spaghetti; some of the stick to the wall, but you have to throw a bunch of noodles to find out which
2. Launch you app before it’s “finished,” and develop it over time as new features occur to you

I call this strategy of developing apps over time “baby step development,” because it relies significantly on incrementalism, or taking baby steps with your product.

Why is this important in social media?

Because what you’re looking for is engagement. Facebook highlighted this when they introduced the idea of “daily active users” for an app, instead of just counting the number of people who have installed an app.

And what better way to keep people coming back to your app than to keep adding new features and responding to user requests?

From that standpoint, it’s important that you look at any Facebook or OpenSocial app spec as something to provide a trajectory, not just a product.

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MySpace takes a half-step into data portability

No, you’re not going to be able to download your MySpace contacts into your address book, but according to Reuters MySpace is going to allow its users to display profile information on other sites.

It’s step two, along with open social, in pressuring the “walled gardens” of the internet to really let people take command of the social connections they make.

It’s also another step in the “widgetization” of content on the internet, which I think might eventually turn in to a way to actually monetize content on the internet.

[ Update: looks like Facebook is joining the “widgetization of content” and data portability bandwagon and allowing third party sites to mesh with facebook features. It’s called Facebook Connect. ]

What Facebook’s upcoming newsfeed enhancements mean for app virality

Facebook recently announced more details about their upcoming profile changes, which include some massive overhaul to the visual interface as well as some significant changes to infrastructure for app developers.

Teresa wrote earlier about what these changes might mean for developers. Now that we have some more detailed information, I think it’s worth looking at the newsfeed in particular.

When the newsfeed first launched, it was a great channel for spreading viral information. However, very few people grant their applications access to the feed anymore.

I was at the Seattle Facebook Developer’s Garage this past Monday, and when one of the speakers asked how many people let apps put stories in their feed, only about 10 or 15 people in 200 raised their hand.

The redesign introduces some new rules for developers around the feed, and it might be an opportunity to reopen some viral channels that have been disappearing.

When you break down the description on the developers wiki, the changes to the feed are as follows:

• The feed will present one line, short, or “full” stories to the user
• Full stories will have access to a robust set of FBML tags, like wall posts
• Applications can publish one-line stories to mini-feeds without needing user approval
• Users can toggle between each form of story in their feeds

What this means for virality is, I think, subtle but important: Facebook is stressing the importance of being engaging as opposed to just “showing up.”

What mattered most when the newsfeed first started popping up is that you were in it, because then there’s a chance that you might get noticed.

Now what you’re after is interaction within the feed, because that’s where Facebook wants to move a lot of user activity. What’s good is that making app developers focus on this is that it’s going to make for a better user experience, too.

Misconceptions about Twitter features: It’s not built in, it’s tacked on

I ran across a post by Macteens Editor in Chief Daniel Hollister that explains, quite well, what killer functionality Twitter is missing. He’s right in in a lot of ways - Twitter is very bare bones and it doesn’t provide even the kind of functionality you find in other microblogging services like Pownce.

Twitter relies on its API and its users to develop features that are lacking. Hollister identifies the following gaps in Twitter’s feature set. Here’s how you can make them up with third party solutions (or, in one case, clever use of built in features):

1. Clutter

Hollister find the home page too cluttered, and the 20-tweet per page limit annoying. If you fail to check back quickly enough, you’re going to miss things.

I use the twitter desktop client Twitterific about 70% of the time. I use my iPhone about 15% of the time. I use the home page about 5% of the time.

Twitterific saves tweets on my desktop as it checks for them, which means I can scroll through a few hours worth of updates at a time without paging through.

2. Breadth or depth, but not both

Here he’s more right than with others. You can follow tons of people and get too many tweets, or you can follow very few people and miss a lot of the action.

I like to use mobile notifications to separate out those tweeters who I feel are particularly important. I can follow as many people as I like while selectively choosing whose tweets get pushed to my phone.

3. Archiving sucks

The web page does provide some pretty lame archiving features. You can jump through pages of 20 as far back as you want, but that’s about it.

The good news is that you CAN search twitter for past tweets. I like to use either Tweetscan or a Google search targeted at twitter.com (yep, tweets are indexed).

4. Nobody wants to use it & It doesn’t do anything

I know a lot of people who share this view of Twitter. I myself didn’t get it when I first started using it.

But the first part is just wrong (plenty of people want to use twitter, myself included) and the claim that it doesn’t do anything doesn’t really resonate with me. Nothing on the computer is really “doing” anything, if you look at it the right way.

Hollister says that if you remove all the features from Facebook except for the RSS feed and status updates, you have twitter. I’d say you’re still doing something.

One thing that I am 100% behind Hollister on though is this: Twitter is not a social network. Many people are starting to refer to it as a social network. I think that as a whole we (the blogosphere) have a tendency to play fast and loose with our terminology, and it ends up hurting us in the end.

Twitter, in my mind, is a social utility. One component of the growing feature set of the social web.

Another Facebook Application does not an application spec make

When we build Facebook applications we always start with a spec.

A spec is a document that details the complete application user flow and provides the technical details necessary to put together a functional back end and stay with Facebook’s ever-morphing application terms of service. Basically it’s like a blueprint for your house.

We’ve talked with some clients who want to work from another Facebook application instead of first doing a spec.

I get the logic: “Here is a complete application that is already on Facebook. We know it conforms to the terms of service (or is not yet shut down) and we know how popular it already is. Why do I need to pay money to have someone write out the functionality when they can just look at it in action?”

Aside from the obvious possible pitfalls of simply cloning someone else’s application, ranging from possible copyright issues to opening yourself up to getting bashed the reviews, you’re only looking at half the picture when you’re using an application.

While the user flow is important to every application, it’s equally (if not more) important to have a complete framework for what the app requires technically. The plumbing, if you’ll allow me to continue the construction metaphor, needs to be planned out before you start nailing planks of wood together.

If you can’t make money selling ads on Facebook apps, why build them?

A few days ago Nick O’Neill posted on AllFacebook about some ad numbers that Justin Smith came up with regarding Facebook CPMs.

Basically, the numbers are low and probably going to get lower. This gets at an issue that I’ve been harping on for some time (although, unfortunately, I can’t seem to find the post that best expresses it): the best approach to Facebook applications is not as a business in and of itself (make apps, then sell ads), but as tool to reach a social media audience with your brand.

If social media were a movie theater, Facebook apps would be the previews, not the feature presentation.

The real winners in the Facebook app space are the companies that take a chunk of their ad budget and dedicate it to creating and maintaining an engaging, well-branded application, not those who try to use an application as a vehicle for making money.

I’m increasingly convinced that social media is a “no-buy, no-sell” zone in a lot of people’s minds. What you really want to do is build relationships in social media. You can sell them somewhere else when the time and place are right.

Using Facebook’s “Social Graph” to Register Voters

Voter registration efforts typically rely on a great deal of labor and community outreach. Barack Obama’s massive spring and summer registration effort will likely rely primarily on card tables and paper forms.

But the University of Washington students behind the new Facebook application Your Revolution are working a different angle. By comparing a user’s friend list to their state’s voter registration rolls, this application seeks to determine who isn’t registered to vote. It then gives users the opportunity to send an invitation to their friends to register to vote online:

The app features a sophisticated and well-designed interface and encourages users to participate in a voter registration contest.

Unfortunately, this app only works in states that allow online voter registration. But as more states roll out online registration, I think you’ll see applications like this getting real pickup.

I’m still waiting for the day when we can use a social application to actually vote. Imagine ballots spreading like wildfire among people my age the way that viral videos do. Youth turnout would be through the roof.

Facebook COO does an “off the record” press conference??

Silicon Alley Insider tells us that Facebook’s COO went to a Financial Times “interview” event held by the Financial Times (as SAI correctly notes, nobody in America reads it).

OK, so far so good. Here’s where it gets weird: the even was “off the record.”

What?

But the reporters who were there can’t tell you because the event was “off the record,” one of them tells us. Who played along? A lot of people: Folks from Reuters, the NY Post, Portfolio, Paidcontent and the Huffington Post were all in attendance, but chose not to tell their readers.

Does this happen all the time and I’m just not aware of it?

Facebook is an exoskeleton

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about platforms and services as platforms. The recent strategy trend in start up companies seems to be: become a platform.

That’s what Twitter is doing, that’s what Facebook and every other social network is doing. You build an infrastructure and an API and you invite people to play on your system.

But the one thing to remember is that the web is the ultimate platform.

I keep seeing the exodus of Facebook features, one by one, to the native web. Twitter is enhanced, open, archive-able “status updates.” FriendFeed is trying to co-opt the News Feed (what I give credit for popularizing the idea of the lifestream) and bring it out onto the open web. In many ways it is succeeding.

I think it’s inevitable that online community is going to end up as a disparate set of open services that work together instead of a closed system (Facebook) that offers all services.

The future of social networking is that everyone has:

• a blog (profile + notes)
• FriendFeed (news feed)
• Twitter (status)
• flickR (photos)
• del.icio.us or Google (shared items)
• etc., etc.

The smart way to go about “building a platform” is not to build something on top the web that traps users and developers, but to build something within the web so that it connects with everything that’s already available.

What’s the difference?

Facebook sits on top of the web, and it relies on its users and its developers to be content with only a base level of interaction with the greater web. When you build a Facebook application, you’re building a Facebook application, not a web application.

It’s the difference between wearing a Starship Troopers exoskeleton and working out. The exoskeleton is really cool looking, polished, and lets you plug in all kinds of gears and gizmos. But you’re not actually any stronger than you were. And your muscles aren’t really connected to it, even though it’s responding to your push.

Teresa is Moving On…

Teresa Valdez Klein, blogger, political activist, and social media goddess extraordinaire is leaving the Parnassus Group at the end of April to take a very cool new job as a Product Planner with T-Mobile in Seattle.

Teresa started her run with us in the fall of 2005, and from her very first post became an essential part of the Parnassus team. From Blog Business Summits, CES parties, Web Community Forums and bloggy wine trips to Eastern Washington, her contributions and insights have helped us succeed in many ground-breaking social media ventures.

Kim Larsen, Jason Preston and I along with our team of contractors will continue our posting, twittering, sentiment-mining and event planning activities in her absence, but we will not be having nearly as much fun without her.

As all who know Teresa can attest, T-Mobile is very fortunate to have such a talented geek joining their team. I would expect some great products to be the result of her participation in their efforts. We at Parnassus are all eager to see what they come up with.

Needless to say we are going to miss Teresa a great deal, but feel very fortunate that she is staying in the area so we can continue to debate politics and drink wine with her without having to get on a plane…

Advertising on Social Networks: When Eyeballs Don’t Result in Conversions

A lot of the recent buzz in the tech sector has been about unsuccessful efforts to monetize online social tools via advertising. Google is losing money on their advertising deal with MySpace. User sentiment suggests that demographic targeting doesn’t raise the relevance of advertising, and clickthrough rates are low across the board.

It’s not that social networks aren’t playing a role in business transactions. Blogger Charles Hudson wrote that he routinely makes transactions whose impetus has been a recommendation from friends through an online social network:

Judging by the activity I see within my own network, there are a lot of my friends using social networks as social Q&A systems to get input, advice, and recommendations in addition to just letting folks know what they’re up to at the moment.

But that activity doesn’t translate into revenue for the networks, and advertisers aren’t seeing the conversions like they do with Google’s AdWords service. So what’s a marketer to do?

A few suggestions:

1. If you’re doing targeted, self-serve advertising on Facebook, get as specific as you can. Avoid stereotyping your potential customers, all women are not interested in weight loss. Many men are not interested in having sex thrown at them all day long.
2. Think about ways of rounding out your campaign to encourage echo chamber behavior. Everyone is after conversions these days rather than brand awareness, so be sure to link your ad to a landing page that drives conversions and also enables social sharing of product recommendations. Even if the user who clicks through to your site doesn’t wind up becoming a customer, you want to enable him to encourage his friends to visit via social mechanisms such as embedding a video in his MySpace page or sharing your landing page on Facebook because it contains interesting content.
3. Consider building something useful — like an embeddable widget or a Facebook application that lets your customers connect with their friends in a way that involves your brand.

Track packages with Twitter? Yes please

I love how people keep coming up with ways to use Twitter’s API to build really cool services based on the integration between the web and SMS.

Case in point: today I discovered that TrackThis lets people track their shipments via direct message on Twitter. The process is simple. You follow TrackThis (and they follow you back), then you send them a direct message with your tracking number and the name you want attached to it.

So it looks like this:

d trackthis 8269038620386 my sweet new computer

And then TrackThis sends you a direct message every time your package changes location. Sweet.

Of course, I am also fundamentally a lazy person, which is probably why this particular idea appeals to me. I found out about it here.

The Dangers of Enabling Users to Build on Your Site

Earlier today, I posted about how Barack Obama’s website allows users to build their own fundraising campaigns and community blogs. To be sure, it’s a great way to encourage grassroots participation — but it can also be a recipe for disaster if you don’t execute properly.

It was revealed today that a user on the Obama site — ostensibly a supporter of his rival Hillary Clinton — used a JavaScript exploit to redirect the entire community section of his site to Clinton’s campaign website. Apparently, users can drop code — completely unfettered — into their own personal sites, giving them the ability to create any number of malicious behaviors. Already, people have suggested how to deposit malware and spyware onto the site.

I think the Obama campaign should pester their staffer, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes to help them fix this problem and to anticipate other exploits. After all, Facebook has built a whole suite of code restrictions around its platform in order to prevent just these sorts of attacks.

A Million Dollar Minute: Helping Online Communities Help Each Other to Help You

Earlier this month, I wrote about how the presidential campaigns were using online social networks to give the appearance of listening to stakeholders. Baratunde Thurston wrote a great response — complete with diagrams — and brought up many important points.

One of those points outlined how candidates “listen” to constituents online by raising money:

Again, politicians are at the top of the heap, this time tapping into millions of small donors. Obama is the king of this right now. At this phase, politicians enable donors to solicit from other donors with their own mini-campaigns and donation widgets. This is significant, as it threatens the big time financial interests who’ve long held the ear (and balls) of our elected officials.

Here’s his diagram:

But both of our posts overlooked a key piece of this fundraising phenomenon, which might look something like this:

As Baratunde noted, Obama is dominating in the small donations category. He’s had a record-breaking 1 million individual donors to his campaign. His website is also ideally poised to enable his supporters to raise money for him, creating their own portals at MyBarackObama.com and rolling their own fundraising campaigns.

New York filmmaker and photographer Scott Cohen decided to use this capability to build something innovative: An Obama Minute. The idea was to encourage 10,000 people to give $100 each to the campaign at an appointed hour. The movement was picked up by other Obama supporters online, including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) which has been pimping the initiative on its website.

The jury is still out on just how much this campaign will raise. But no matter the outcome, the Obama campaign is to be congratulated for creating the fertile soil in which these kinds of grassroots efforts can grow. In my first post on this subject, I wrote about the five major goals of online community building as outlined by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff in Groundswell:

1. listening
2. talking
3. energizing
4. supporting
5. embracing

The fundraising tools at MyBarackObama.com are a great example of #4: helping your community members to support one another, and help you in the process.

Flickr Supports Developer Community With Gorgeous New Site

Mashable posted yesterday about Flickr Code, the new — and rainbow-colored — site for Flickr developers. From there, you can easily access the Dev blog, monitor new Flickr deployments, discuss the API, work on the open-source Flickr Uploadr, or as Mashable put it, “snoop in on the Flickr dev team and see what tricky business they’ve been involved in.”

If you’ve clicked over to the site, you’ve probably noticed by now that this community site isn’t even a proper social network in and of itself. It relies on links to existing message and chat boards within Flickr, posts from an existing developer blog, and a random stream of photos from Flickr headquarters.  It’s not new content, but it’s presented in a new way, at a destination that’s just for the truly geeky coder types who build stuff around Flickr.

If your organization has a community of geeks or developers that work around your product, and you want to show them how much you care, it’s as easy as repurposing content from other sources — like your developer blog, or from certain threads in your forums — and putting it in one easy-to-find portal. If you don’t happen to have a fully-fledged social networking tool onboard like Flickr does, it’s pretty easy to build one with the free, open-source forum software known as Vanilla.