Jason Preston

The New York times has a piece today talking about Microsoft’s new(er) partnership with Facebook to expand the use of their Live search:

To Microsoft, Facebook is a quick way to expand the audience for its search engine. More than 29 million people actively use Facebook in the United States. They will soon see prominent displays of Microsoft’s Live Search box on their friends’ and their own Facebook pages.

Everyone’s been griping for ages about how horrible the search functions are within Facebook. We did a few successful posts that essentially made it easier to find groups or pages on Facebook.

Why did they get traffic? People would rather search Google for the link to the page than try to navigate through Facebook’s own search UI.

I’ll be excited if, in addition to just letting me search the internet at large, Microsoft actually indexes Facebook (remember - Google for the most part is not allowed to do this) and we can finally do away with Facebook’s own, abysmal, internal search.

So all in all, I think this could be a good move.

According to Mark Walsh in the Online Media Daily, two of the existing mobile ad networks, AdMob and JumpTap, have announced new customized ad units for the iPhone:

The platform’s key element is an “Action” icon within ad units that allows users to launch video (via YouTube), audio, maps and Web sites as well as initiate calls and download content from Apple’s iTunes and App stores. A separate “Canvas” unit lets marketers create expandable ads with custom features.

As people start using their handsets more for social networking, commanding the ad platforms on the iPhone and similar devices is going to be very important. It may turn out that monetizing a social network is a lot easier on a mobile platform than it is on the computer.

If you’re looking to stay ahead of the curve for engaging with your customers using social media (which is usually a good place to be) I’d start thinking about how your service or product can fit in with how people are using their phones.

Urbanspoon has a genius iPhone application. If I were Yelp, I’d be a little worried. What if Urbanspoon opens up some real social functionality in their iPhone app? Making reviews and recommendations on restaurants is a whole lot easier from a phone while you’re still there.

I have to say that the new Facebook design is killer. It’s a million times better than the previous design, and the previous design was a million times better than their competitors.

I keep saying that companies need to beautify their web sites because UI is going to be one of the big ways to differentiate yourself as all these cool new technologies become commodities.

So what else might be happening around f8 this year? After all, last year Facebook announced their developer platform. Who knows, but I do know that Mark Zuckerberg is giving his keynote right now.

You can watch the live webcast here.

Or you can check out Nick O’neill’s liveblogging here.

Or Justin Smith’s live notes here.

And if you just want to play with the cool new profiles before they’re rolled out everywhere, just navigate to http://www.new.facebook.com.

The BBC noted today that MySpace has announced that they will be tying into the OpenID system, which lets users log in to various sites with the same username and password.

I’ve said for some time that OpenID is going to have problems because it doesn’t have a user-friendly face.

I understand that it needs to be an infrastructure solution in order to get companies like MySpace to use it (otherwise it’s kind of data competition), but that’s why it hasn’t really taken off yet. Sure, companies are signing up (livejournal, flickr, blogger, etc), but users are still a bit confused.

But I digress. MySpace supporting OpenID does not mean that you get to use your MySpace login at any OpenID site. There are different levels of OpenID support, and MySpace is only compatible with site that aren’t actually allowing users to register new IDs:

However, MySpace is not letting its members use their login profiles and details on any site. It has set restrictions on where the login details can be used based on whether those sites create or accept OpenID profiles.

Nor will they let you log in to MySpace with an OpenID from somewhere else:

Similarly, MySpace will not allow people who get an OpenID from a provider, such as Yahoo, to use that to login to the social network site.

Although the article does note that MySpace plans to expand that compatibility in the future.

I have to agree completely with Mashable - Twitter has ended forever the days when it’s OK to leave dumb default browser errors up when a service goes down.

Adam Ostrow is running a contest (two $25 iTunes gift certificates) for the best Facebook fail screen. Here are my two favorites so far:

The Face-Fail:

And…

I wonder if anyone will ever convince Facebook to put one of them up?

I know that I’m by no means the first to call the mobile phone a social platform. All of us theorists have been vindicated by the incredible popularity of social network-based apps on the iPhone, even though some of those applications (the Facebook one comes to mind) are missing a few important features, like events.

Social networking is going to adapt to mobile platforms fairly quickly and, I think, far more effectively than it adapts to the computer.

People carry their mobile phones (is that even the right term anymore?) everywhere, and I’ve made a habit of trying to friend new contacts on Facebook when I meet them, a trick that I stole from my old co-worker Teresa. It’s at least as good if not better than trading business cards.

I think that any company looking into social media outreach strategies should pay close attention to the mobile space, and look at the opportunities for people to interact with your brand and with each other when they’re outside the office. It’s still a very new space, and there are a lot of untapped opportunities.

I had a chance to speak with Tony Stubblebine from Crowdvine after he commented on my post last week, correctly noting that I’d failed to do my proper Googling to include all the players in the “social networks tied to real world events” space.

Crowdvine, like Eventvue and Pathable, does offer some social networking featuring based around connecting people in real life at conferences, but I did like the way Crowdvine sought to minimize the “fill out a questionnaire” approach to matching people up.

The network creator can set any number of profile questions that act as tags for navigating, but there’s no real need to make that extensive. The network is driven more by people setting their conference schedule (what sessions am I seeing?) and self-identifying others that they’d like to meet. Crowdvine then helps keep track of where you’re most likely to run into those people.

Even better though, unlike EventVue and Pathable (as far as I can tell), Crowdvine offers a free cookie-cutter version of their service for anyone who’s running a small event and doesn’t want or need the robust full feature set.

I think this is a smart move for a company that has a chance to own a niche in the field when players like Ning are focusing on a larger space.

Are you on dodgeball?

If you are, please add me as a friend. Search for Jason Preston or jasonp107 at gmail dot com.

Dodgeball seems like a really cool service to me. Check in every now and then and it tells you if you’re near any of your friends, or near any of your friends’ friends (that’s the cool part).

I could be at QFC and meet someone new, just because dodgeball knows that we have a mutual friend.

I think it’s actually a bit of a dating service. The tagline is “get some” and they ask you whether you like to make out with men, women, or both.

The problem with dodgeball is that it doesn’t offer any value to a single user. Del.icio.us is the classic example of this - even if you’re not using any of the social tools, you still get the valuable service of being able to bookmark a site and come back to it later, without cluttering your browser favorites.

Dodgeball is useless if you have no connections. But I want to try it out. So friend me. Let’s see if we cross paths.

Yesterday’s post on GigaOm softly berates Google for releasing “the virtual world version of Google Video,” with Lively, which is essentially a series of interconnected virtual chatrooms.

“Why,” asks Wagner James Au, “would a search engine company create a virtual world in the first place?”

I have a few ideas. I’m not the first to suggest that virtual worlds are a platform to rival an OS, and everyone knows that Google is trying to be the online platform going forward.

It’s also not too much of a stretch to imagine accessing the internet as some kind of virtual world—walk down internet highway and step into the Lego.com store, or stop at the Seattle P-I news stand.

I think virtual worlds is a perfectly valid extension for a company that aims to be the dashboard to the internet. People are already starting to play with 3D web browsing, and for some in the newer generation, I’m sure that directing an avatar around a virtual construction of the internet will feel more natural than our current “command line” approach to browsing.

The Online Media Daily reported some numbers on the advertising space from this morning’s Interpublic report, showing, unsurprisingly, an overall slow down in the growth rate of ad spending across the board.

But “slower than before” doesn’t mean “not growing” and it doesn’t necessarily mean “growing slowly,” either:

The fastest growing of the emerging media platforms tracked by Magna, he said, is social media, which includes both social networks and applications like ad-supported widgets. Wieser estimated that social media ad spending would rise 37.4% in 2009, thought that is nearly half the 60.8% rate it is expected to grow in 2008.

Now that the search advertising formula has been pretty well nailed by AdSense and, to a certain extent, Yahoo! and MSN, advertisers are exploring the new social media market.

Conventional wisdom goes that the returns on advertising in social networks are horrible, but then again, maybe we just haven’t found the right ad format yet.

I remember back when Facebook first started spreading through college networks, the number one use was showing your friends who you made out with at the party last night. Even the name, Facebook, is all about putting names to faces.

It wasn’t until much later that it all developed into the larger phenomenon of shifting social activities from the real world to an online space. And to fair, that shift has opened up a world of possibilities.

But it’s also left a strange sort of gap in the “putting faces to names” space. Facebook’s event system isn’t particularly robust, and a couple of networks like Pathable and EventVue have popped up to help conference organizers map out their attendees and manage introductions before the actual event.

It’s interesting to see social networking services come full circle and refocus on augmenting real world social activities instead of trying to create online analogues. I think that’s a distinction that many people fail to make when looking at social tools.

After making it through Groundswell at my famously slow pace, I took Josh Bernoff up on his offer to answer questions that any bloggers might have about the book.

As is also my habit, I managed to write questions that were probably going to be longer than their answers.

Here’s the exchange I had with Josh via e-mail:

Jason: In Groundswell, you share a lot of stories that involve active communities, but spend relatively little time on community management issues. Newspapers, for example, tend to have a difficult time dealing with trolls and malcontents in their article comments, which tends to be a big deterrent to taking larger, more audience-oriented social media initiatives.

What would you recommend to companies that want to engage with communities, have a technographics profile that shows an active user base, but worry about the early indicators that they could be enabling a strong community of haters?

Josh: This is a conundrum. You don’t want to create a place where your detractors can gather and destroy your community, but you can’t hide. I think the best example is Dell, which had a very negative image in the groundswell.

They started by reaching out to bloggers that were having problems with their service, giving them a higher level of service and blunting their anger. But, and this is important, they also committed to improve their service. This, in the end, is the issue. If your products stink or your service stinks, people are going to diss you online, and creating a community will just accelerate that.

[click to continue...]

Christopher Blizzard, of the Mozilla team, announced his new project Whoisi yesterday:

If I had to describe it in one sentence I would describe it as a site that lets you easily keep track of what your friends are doing on the Internet via RSS feeds - but with some twists.

I’ve played around with it a little bit so far, and it seems a lot like FriendFeed. There are a few notable differences, the most important being Whoisi’s “wikiness.” It’s a very free-form system. You search for a person (or for their usual nickname), and if they’re not already on there, you can start adding their URLs.

Anyone can also hit “edit” and add things, like a nickname. I did that and added “Jasonp107″ for myself like this:

Of course, all I put in there so far is Eat Sleep Publish, Jason-Preston.com, and my FlickR account. If anyone else wants to add my Twitter (if Twitter is up) account or my Google Reader Shared page, they’re welcome to do so.

If I were to draw a graph of my Twitter use over time, I think it would looks something like this:

This is because several weeks ago, probably around the time that Twitter decided to turn things off when their server loads were too high, everything I use stopped working.

I can’t use Hahlo on my iPhone. I can’t use PocketTweets. I no longer get text notifications from the people I am following. Whenever I look at Twitterific I see this:

(all I did was pull up twitterific, right now, and take a screenshot)

Stopping various services in order to keep the system up would be a great idea except that the value in twitter is inextricably tied to all the the ways in which you can interact with it. Following updates on my phone, tying new blogs posts in as tweets, getting updates on my desktop…Twitter itself has always been infrastructure.

If all you have is the web site, Twitter exists in a vacuum. And it’s pretty useless.

I know other people have already said it, but I think I’ll add my voice to the pile: Twitter had better get its servers in order, or their going to miss their shot.