Announcements

Next Tuesday, I’ll be on a panel moderated by Forbes’ Erika Brown along with Karen Appleton, Katie Jacobs Stanton, and Lena West. Other incredible speakers include our good buddy Jeremiah Owyang and Ning CEO Gina Bianchini.

If you’d like to join me at the event for a discount of $50 off the current price use discount code SNC325 when you register. It’s going to be an amazing day!

See here for a full list of speakers and to register.

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I read Nick O’Neill’s post about SocialAds earlier today with some curiosity. After all, SocialAds have proven themselves to be somewhat underwhelming since the announcement from Facebook on November 6th.

Nick is right that what SocialAds taps into is the online version of Word of Mouth Marketing, plus a bit of measurement as to a particular mouth’s influence. And he’s right that this is cool, and in concept, revolutionary.

But I haven’t seen it work so far.

It might revolutionize advertising, if it starts working.

But it needs to work first. Has Google revolutionized advertising with AdSense? Indisputably. Did Overture think of the concept first? Yep.

I guess that’s my point.

Irving Biederman, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, studies the biological basis of the human need for information. His research opens a window into understanding why many people are willing to scan thousands of tweets a day, or to hover over a newsreader for hours ingesting many scores of feeds.

The answer is that humans in general are “infovores” and are wired to generate pleasure-enhancing neurotransmitters called opioids when discovering new information.

“In other words, coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom.”

Are Robert and many other bloggers becoming too dependent on these opioids? Is there a downside to being an information junkie?

“For most of human history, there was little chance of overdosing on information, because any one day in the Olduvai Gorge was a lot like any other. Today, though, we can find in the course of a few hours online more information than our ancient ancestors could in their whole lives.

Just like the laser and the cat, technology is playing a trick on us. We are programmed for scarcity and can’t dial back when something is abundant.”

Regardless, I’d hate to see Robert change — from my vantage point he’s managing his anti-boredom campaign quite responsibly.

Reporter Lee Gomes provides more detail in today’s WSJ article Why We’re Powerless To Resist Grazing On Endless Web Data.

A little while ago Facebook launched a Spanish edition of the social network, and since then I’ve heard pretty much nothing about it. So how is it doing?

A quick Google search yields this piece on the American Observer, which has a collection of Spanish user reactions:

Carlos Sanchez, who accesses the network from Spain, appreciates having the option to switch to Spanish, but he won’t.

“I’m already used to the English one, but I think it’s a good way of attracting more people to the site. Most of my friends didn’t use it because it was in English and that might change now,” he said in a conversation through the site.

Unlike Sanchez, Miguel Mayol bets that Facebook will continue to be a network of multilingual users that don’t need editions in their own language because they already speak English. “I think a minority will only have contacts and belong to groups that speak their language, but I don’t think there will be monolingual non-English speakers in Facebook. It will remain a social network for people with higher-education experience,” he said.

A lot of the reaction to the Spanish edition is mixed. Some people wish that the translations were better—apparently there are some sentences which lose their meanings due to poor literal translations.

Personally I think it’s far more important that Facebook support discussion in other languages (in other words, people from China can use character languages in discussion groups) than it is for Facebook to re-write it’s site copy in other languages.

Facebook is far more about what the users put into the conversation, not what Facebook has already “set up.” My guess is that English is fine for the infrastructure, and communities based on language will spring up on their own so long as their keyboard is supported.

Paul Jeffries, who leads the Platform Developer Operations & Support team at Facebook, posted this morning on the Official Facebook Blog with a rundown on the new features they’ve put together to deal with the “application spam” problem.

The lesson for app developers: don’t be spammy, you will get smacked.

You can read the whole post, but here are a few of the juicier controls being put in place:

- Applications must now give you advanced warning if you’ll need to invite friends to get information or access content. So you should always know ahead of time if that quiz you’re taking will require you to invite friends to see your results. If you see applications withholding content without warning, go to that application’s About page to report it.

- Your feedback now determines how many communications an application can send. When invitations and notifications are ignored, blocked, or marked as spam, Facebook reduces that application’s ability to send more. Applications forcing their users to send spammy invitations can wind up with no invitations at all. The power is in your hands; block applications that are bothering you, and report spammy or abusive communications, and we’ll restrict the application.

- When you get a request from an application, you now have the ability to “Block Application” directly from the request. If you block an application, it will not be able to send you any more requests.

Kudos to Facebook for putting ever tighter leashes on one of their best potential properties (the app platform) in order to keep users happy. To me, that says that Facebook is still about user experience at least as much as it is about enticing developers, which will benefit the company in the long run.

I’ll be giving a free webinar entitled Locating and Participating in the Online Conversations that Matter on February 19th at 10:00 a.m. PST with an encore presentation at the same time the following day.

Here’s the description of the event:

This hour-long presentation will give you the skills necessary to find and participate in online conversations about your products, your industry and your competition quickly and easily. You will will take away key techniques for monitoring online chatter and deciding when and how to chime in. The presentation will cover key technologies and techniques for blog monitoring with RSS, engaging on social networks like Facebook, and participating on microblogging networks like Twitter.

If you’d like to sign up to attend:

• Click here for 2/19.
• Click here for 2/20.

The “enroll” button will sign you up for the event. I hope you’ll consider coming. I look forward to hearing all your awesome questions and doing my best to answer them!

Many thanks to our friends at PRWeb for hosting this event.

Jason Goldberg wrote a post today on Socialmedian talking about his descent into Facebook Fatigue. The “shiny new” effect of Facebook has worn off on him, and the core utility of the system is down to a few basic features of the network.

And importantly, he’s cut off his third-party app use:

I no longer use any of the 3rd party apps — I find most of them tiresome and annoying. The nature of most of these apps is that they are only successful if tons of people use them, which puts an adverse incentive on app makers to get app users to spam their friends with app invites and the such, which is just annoying.

It touches on a subject that was just in the comments on yesterday’s post: are developers shooting themselves in the foot with spammy tactics?

Undeniably yes.

The problem is that facebook user attention is a common property resource (oooh, econ term!), which means that if you play nice, everyone else can still play rough and they win in the short term. And if they play rough and everyone loses in the long term, at least they won in the short term (and you didn’t).

So the incentives here are all wrong. It’s the kind of thing that, if Facebook wants to control it—and judging by the reactions by their users in the blogosphere they might want to—it will have to be done top-down with restrictions.

I think it’s a little early for us to all be using the term “Facebook Fatigue.” I know I’ve used it twice in this post now, but I think we bloggers have a tendency to jump on things without thinking it through. This might be one of those things.

So some users are tired of applications. Goldberg admits that he uses Facebook regularly for things like messaging and photo sharing, which is no small thing.

Facebook isn’t jumping any sharks. It’s just growing up, and maybe not watching Happy Days as much as it used to.

The Wall Street Journal has announced a new Facebook application that allows users to share articles, It’s called “Seen This?”

According to ABC news it “will allow readers to see which Journal stories are popular among that user’s Facebook friends.”

I’ve been trying to find and install it, but it does not seem to be live yet(?)

We haven’t exactly been “tight-lipped” about this app while it was in development. If you showed up at our December Web Community Forum or ran into us at CES, chances are you heard something about InDesign Tips somewhere along the way.

What we’ve been whispering in the aisles is that we’ve put together an app that lets InDesign users submit and rate tips on how to use Adobe’s famous software efficiently. Oh yeah, and you can win prizes.

Well, in a similar, whispery fashion, we rolled it out earlier this month (bugs intact) for everyone to add and check out. To be honest, I was a little curious about how virally it would spread without any announcements whatsoever. So far so good.

But I can’t help feeling just a little bit bad letting the whole month of January roll on by without pointing out that we’re giving away some truly excellent prizes to the Top Tipster and the owner of the Top Tip.

For the Top Tipster - that means the person who has garnered the most points from all of their submitted tips, we’re giving away a free copy of InDesign CS3!

For the Top Tip - that means the single tip that has been voted up by the most people (and, theoretically, down by the least), we’re giving away a free pass to the InDesign Conference in Miami!

Interested? I would be. See how many points you can pull together by February 1st.

One of our favorite online communities is the group of gadget heads that gather at CES every year to blog and geek out. We love them so much that we throw them a party every year. Here’s some video footage of this year’s event:

Full coverage of the event can be found here. Special thanks to our sponsors:

We’re very excited to announce that our friends at Virgin America airlines will be handing out 80 free round trip tickets anywhere they fly. For you online community geeks, this might be interesting because of Virgin America’s nifty seat-to-seat communications tool.

So if you’re at CES and you’ll be around tomorrow night, drop my colleague Jason a line at jason [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com, include the URL of your blog and let him know that you’d like to join us.

Jack Olmsted, CES podcaster extraordinaire, will be interviewing Steve, Teresa, and I tomorrow morning at 10am Pacific Time. We’re going to be on his show talking about the who and the whatnot of our second annual blogger party at CES this year.

One of the reasons we love blogging and social media is that a lot of the people we meet are wonderfully willing to have fun. We’re looking forward to getting together with the real gadgety, geeky, CES blogging community this year to say hi to old friends and hello to new faces.

Speaking of which, if you’re an active blogger whose slobbering over I mean writing about the crazy cool stuff that’s going to be on display at CES this year and you’d like to get on the official guest list, be sure to drop me a line via e-mail, and include your blog URL: jason at parnassusgroup dot com.

Below is the SlideShare of Jeremiah Owyang’s presentation from Web Community Forum.

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“I hope to convince people that I’m not drunk, on crack, or anything like that” - why is facebook worth $100 billion?

At the launch of F8, Facebook wasn’t really on Lee’s radar at all.

iLike added 600,000 users in 8 hours. “OK,” Lee thought, “there is something new on the planet here.”

Most of his career he’s been a software engineer and hasn’t had much of a public persona - not really a thought leader.

So he thought this was a great chance to experiment: he created an Altura Ventures group and recruited a bunch of top FB developers to join the group, then made them officers. This is to show off how many cool people he “knows.”

Your Facebook page is much like your digital resume.

On his FB page, he used his top friends app to show off all the people he is “friends” with who are important. It’s basically name dropping on facebook. Someone goes to FB and says “look at all these people he knows, this is someone I ought to be friends with.”

At graphing social, Lorenzen said FB is worth $100 billion, and was roundly criticized for the statement. “Are you drunk??” Calacanis asked.

(LOL Lee missed Zuckerberg’s “Steve Jobs impersonation” at F8)

[click to continue...]

I’m sitting by the entrance to Bell Harbor right now, finishing up the little bits and pieces that always show up at this point. One of those bits (or possibly pieces) is making sure everyone is up on where the coverage is and is going to be the event today.

We’ve set up a special twitter account (username: @webcomforum) that you can follow on twitter for bite-sized quotes and updates from throughout the day. Teresa and I will also be tweeting the conference from our personal accounts: @tetesagehen, @jasonp107.

Incidentally, our tweets are going to be rolling through the top of our index page during the event. Pretty cool, neh?

I’ll be perusing the internet throughout the day, and I’m going to create a list of all the posts (& tweets, and anything else that shows up) I find as they show up throughout the day. - You can make it easier for me to find your post by linking to our blog!

Here’s the list so far…

Ariel quizzes us on the buzzwords surrounding Facebook. Apparently she’s heard several of them already! Oh noes!

I wrote a shamelessly promotional post on my blog.

tastybit Justin Smith: “You are going to need to be creative about new ways for people to engage with your brand.” 1 minute ago from web

Weave Sitting here at the Web Community Forum, it’s SO CLEAR TO ME that big brands could totally leverage social capital to EVERYONE’S advantage. 14 minutes ago from web

Jeremiah has posted the slides for his keynote presentation for everyone’s perusal.

Mike Germano posted yesterday that he was excited to be here. We’re glad to have you, Mike!

trishussey Good lunch … time for Facebook Fad, Frenzy or Future … gee do I have to answer that? 2 minutes ago from Snitter

tastybit Is it possible to be a “long time Web 2.0 guru”? Is a couple of years a long time? 6 minutes ago from web

trishussey BTW–I’m covering @webcomforum on blognation http://ca.blognation.com/ about 2 hours ago from Snitter

iphazard Loving the idea from @webcomforum about starting your own “What’s wrong with my product” forum. about 2 hours ago from web

tastybit Honestly, I believe it needs to be respected by app developers, but for the end user it is less of a concern than some believe. about 2 hours ago from web

tastybit McClure is spot on about the way people are becoming numbed to privacy concerns. about 2 hours ago from web

trishussey Note to all speakers…cell phones and wireless mics don’t like each other! Turn em off or airplane mode. about 2 hours ago from Snitter

tastybit but then i’ve had my identity stolen enough times BEFORE I was on Fb and all the socnets. More ID is stolen in the phys world than online. about 2 hours ago from web

tastybit This is an interesting panel-like thing about power using Fb. about 2 hours ago from web

trishussey Facebook for professionals … maybe how not to get fired because of your profile! about 3 hours ago from Snitter

Weave Rodney Rumford suggesting that FB developers FORCE users to invite friends. He sez that it’s a tactic that pisses off users but works. 12 minutes ago from web

jowyang Microsoft is looking to extend existing applications in Facebook. A bank is also launching an application –a game for users. 2 minutes ago from web

The new marketing is here at the Web Community Forum. Welcome!

Lish is hanging out in Seattle for our Conference for the first time in years. Welcome back!

Tris Hussey liveblogged Jeremiah’s keynote. It was a great presentation.

tastybit On building a Fb app: it is a constant evolution. You can’t just throw it out there. 3 minutes ago from twitterrific

tastybit @jowyang just wrapped up. Nice one. 27 minutes ago from twitterrific in reply to jowyang