Jason Preston

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.

As both the AP and Mashable have already reported, Visa has struck a deal with Facebook to create the Visa Small Business Network within Facebook.

Well actually, Visa has created an application with some really solid sounding small business functionality (in conjunction with Google tools) that aims to be a support the needs of small businesses:

Visa’s service is designed to provide small-business owners with tools and tips on attracting new customers, trimming costs and other ways to make more money. Businesses that belong to the Visa network on Facebook also will be able to communicate with each other to share ideas or even negotiate deals.

As of yet, the application seems to be an empty screen. Odd way to launch a Facebook app ; )

But perhaps more significantly, Visa is offering a $100 ad credit for use with Facebook’s ad system to the first 20,000 small business owners that sign up for the application.

I just signed up myself, and it looks like they’re still giving out credits:

Dear Jason:

Thank you for joining the Visa Business Network! To help you grow your business,
we’re giving you a $100 coupon good towards Facebook advertising credit. Your
coupon must be redeemed and used by 9/22/2008.

I’m not the first to say it, but if Visa gets 20,000 new advertisers to dip their toes into the Facebook ad system and they like it, this could be a big jump for Facebook’s potential revenue.

On the other hand, getting a large number of people to try a low-yield ad system is not the same as improving the ad system for a smaller number of people. I think the latter is probably a more effective strategy.

MarketingVox posted yesterday about the Consumer Internet Barometer survey report that shows more growth and popularity in social networks (so more of the same, I guess).

But what caught my eye about the report is that it surveyed respondents for why they are using social networks like Facebook. Here’s the paragraph, emphasis mine:

The number one reason cited by the vast majority of online consumers — at least four out of five — for visiting social networking sites is to be able to connect with friends. In addition, about half of all users report using sites like MySpace and Facebook to update and maintain their online profile, email, and connect with family. At least one out of five social network users logs on to blog or meet new people. Among the 30 and over working-age population, one out of eight uses social networking sites to conduct business.

That definitely rings true for me. I find that because Facebook is still relatively direct (more consistent and personal than e-mail), it’s a good place to connect and conduct business.

When the Facebook platform first came out, I remember there being a lot of excitement and a big rush for productivity or work-based app development, but most of those apps had poor adoption compared to the whimsical or play-based apps.

I think this was probably not because people aren’t doing business on Facebook, but rather it was because the business that people are doing on Facebook is about connecting with other people, not managing information, to dos, or projects. If you’re going to do that type of thing, there are robust stand alone applications that will do it better than most any Facebook app.

If you’re looking to connect with your team or your clients though, there are few if any stand along applications that can rival Facebook as a platform.

I love this. The Mars Lander actually tweeted about finding water ice on Mars (which, for the three of you who read tech oriented blogs but don’t know or care about space, is freaking sweet):

Are you ready to celebrate? Well, get ready: We have ICE!!!!! Yes, ICE, *WATER ICE* on Mars! w00t!!! Best day ever!!

Not only that, but they ended the tweet with “Best day ever!!” which just reminds me of Steve’s ridiculously enthusiastic wheaton terrier — we always joke that he keeps a diary and every entry says “Best day ever!!”

The reception seems to be mostly lukewarm for the New York Times and their new social networking bid, cleverly called TimesPeople.

Nick O’Neill at The Social Times thought it was interesting but probably won’t make a habit of using it, Paul Glazowski at Mashable thinks it’s more or less useless, and Silicon Alley Insider seems a bit ho-hum in their coverage.

In fact, the only two people who seem to like it are Cory Doctorow and myself.

I think the problem is that the NYT introduced TimesPeople to the social networking crowd as a social network. What they’re actually doing is building social tools for news junkies and implementing them on nytimes.com.

TimesPeople is doing it right: they’re launching (in beta!) with a few basic features that they can tweak quickly based on user response and have a lot of potential for expansion. More importantly, though, using TimesPeople is braindead simple.

When we talk to clients about building Facebook apps, we advise them to boil their functionality down to one or two killer, braindead simple features. People don’t want to RTFM, they want to “get it” in the first thirty seconds. The Times is doing that, and I think it’s the perfect strategy for the audience they’re after.

And the other thing that I like, long term, is that it’s based right now on a browser plug-in. I can’t wait until all my social network profile data is held in Firefox, like my passwords.