Not using my real name and info there anyway. But the whole story of public feeds and twitter controversy is funny. Especially since the picture is nothing special at all, just a bunch of people. Nobody’s even naked. The funny thing is how facebook lackluster privacy issues can even affect the people who are supposedly in charge. Well… who cares? The future belongs to vertical social networks anyway. And here’s the picture.
Another example of how evil facebook really is ;) Apparently advertising your fanpage doesn't make any sense
So you ran a couple of ads for your fanpage, and got a large number of “fans” for a surprising amount of money? Feeling all happy and “popular” you might let your guard down, because out of each 1000 fans, 800 might just be bots used to scam you. A social company called “Limited Run” had just reached the limits of their run with Facebook, when they independently tested how many of the ad-generated fans are real people. Using a couple of analytics companies and their own software they found out that only 15-20% of fans are people, and the rest are just bots.
They’re not accusing Facebook “yet”, but someone owns those bots. We suggest it might be time to stop “believing” in Facebook as a marketing tool. But hey, it’s probably for the best. Maybe now people will need to be more creative to reach their “fans” than just setting up a facebook ad.
We had seen a similar case a few months ago, while a quickly climbing fanbase turned out to be completely inactive. Money well spent? Not really.
Now we know why Facebook bought Instagram ;)
After a rather disappointing plunge in the ratings just days after lanuching on NASDAQ, Facebook strikes fast with a completely new product – maybe hoping to bump up the ratings a little bit. Or maybe just using some of Instagram’s ideas for it’s own purposes. I remember, that after the transaction Facebook stated that it’s not going to change or shut-down Instagram. Now another app has come forth, with Instagramesque filters and batch uploading, and with those millions of users it’ll probably kill Instagram slowly. Sure, the filters aren’t as good (yet), but more people are gonna use it since it integrates with Facebook’s timelines so well and lets them upload a bunch of photos (up to 30) at once.
The app also steps a little away from the current mobile aesthetic, which is a good thing. Seriously though, an app like that wasn’t probably made in a day (or week) so the development must’ve started before the Instagram acquisition. But the bottom line here is that this will probably kill Instagram in the long run, so Facebook sort-of-misguided us saying that they won’t shut the app down ;)
If you seriously need it here’s an app store link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/facebook-camera/id525898024?ls=1&mt=8
I actually prefer to watch random episodes on the Web than have choice now!
It’s pretty common knowledge, that trends tend to repeat themselves in patterns over and over. It’s probably the most visible with fashion shifts back to the 80’s or 70’s, but can still be applied to a far more interesting topic – internet attention. When we’re online we jump from place to place, almost never focusing fully on the page at hand. Multitasking has taken a lot of “peace” from obtaining information, so we multitask like crazy and we don’t slow down.
In the web where you get everything you want right when you want it (preferably NOW), I found out that instead of watching an episode of South Park that I choose, I prefer to go to a site, that shows random episodes in a completely random order. Is it going back from pay-per-view to television “watch what we serve you” concept?
That is of course temporary and will probably shift back to active choices sometime soon, but does it apply anywhere else? It’s a little bit like the App Store selling models, with Freemium occupying most of the gaming charts nowadays, and people spending up to 91% of total game revenue inside the game. But at some point, they must realize that buying virtual coins for real dollards, that we can buy virtual hat with is not really worth it. Then the shift might go towards paid games and peace of mind. The one thing we can be sure of is that we won’t see many fans of ad supported gaming – mainly because nobody likes ads.
What does this pretty common knowledge teach us? Nothing new, but wether you’re making an indie App Store game, or a TV show watching website, it’s best to know what people want right now. Being creative AND riding the trend waves (creating trends is a completely different story) is the way to go no matter what business you’re into.
Fun fact: A British band – Brett Domino, recorded some nice (and funny) covers of well known artists. They are selling their album on iTunes BUT you can order a digipack from them to have it in a more touch-friendly / shelf friendly format. What’s so original about it? Well the boys supply you with the cover and a blank CD-R on which you can record their album from iTunes yourself. Why? To avoid paying double royalty to the authors of the songs, which is a brilliant idea really. They do get their fair share from iTunes anyway. So here’s a backwards trend of buying physical albums (a few years ago people actually preferred MP3’s, and now it’s slowly coming back) with an original twist to it. How cool is that?
I’m a big fan of renewable energy. Since there’s not enough wind where I live, and not enough geothermal anywhere that I can dig with a shovel, I decided to go with solar. There are two companies that definitely stand out both efficiency, and design-wise so I decided to buy both chargers on impulse and try them out:)
First the Voltaic AMP arrived. It’s a small, portable charger that’s a foldable case, so it’s easy to carry around. Two panels give out about 4Watts of energy, and that in turn is supposed to charge the internal battery (3,000mAh, 11 Watt hour capacity) from 0 to 100% in about 6 hours. It turned out that even in Eastern European sun on my field trips, I was able to get it charged in between 6 to 7 hours. That resulted in a full battery and the ability to charge my iPhone 4S once, and then to about 50%. Not bad! The case is durable and looks like it can survive plenty of damage, so for anyone doing some outdoor survival this charger would be perfect. It’s so tough you can easily hit it with a rock and break the rock ;) They also offer iPad chargers, laptop chargers and solar backpacks!
Pros
Light, portable, ready for travel
Pretty fast charging
Very durable
Cons
No social media integration or measuring your charges
The battery gets easily scratched when used
Can’t charge an iPad at all
Voltaic AMP is a good deal at $99 for everyone who does a lot of travel and needs sun on the go
The second one is the newest of all – a Solar Charging community, with uploading your Wh and CO2 grams to a social website to share. It’s called changers, and it does make a change by introducing the social aspect to solar power. I found out that I’m actually uploading the data every day and it’s really awesome to have saved over 50 grams of CO2 by doing this. Since I’m using both chargers, and both are 4Watts, I’m probably saving twice the amount actually. The solar panel has the Holstee Manifesto on the back, some suction cups that can be reversed (to place it on the inside or outside of a window), and this time the battery and the panel are separated. The panel is light and quite flexible, but pretty big and hard to pack (unless you strap it to the outside of your backpack), and the small, beautifully designed battery (looks like an Apple designed elephant a little bit) can power two iPhones a day. On their promo materials they also said it could give some juice to the iPad, but unfortunately Changers doesn’t seem to work with either iPad1, or the new iPad (I have both for testing apps). On the upside I think it takes a little faster for the battery to charge, so in 4-5 hours of sun a day you can have two iPhones ready to go.
Pros
Sunpowered social media – it works!
Fast charging!
Aesthetically pleasing design!
Cons
Hard to travel with
Can’t really charge an iPad at all
Changers will work better at home or at the office, where its design will shine and you'll be sharing your CO2 savings with friends online.
The title of this entry is of course ironic, but we’re seeing lots and lots of valuations of companies that don’t turn up any profit, and it makes us wonder – does the world turn idealistic all of the sudden? Or maybe someone sees hidden potential in monetizing Instagram someday? Facebook tries to keep up with “the cool” as it has lost the cool about a year ago. Changes come barely noticed, people just move on and go back to playing whatever social game is at the top right now. A nicely packaged idea can bring millions (or billions), sure, but innovative things can be overshadowed by bells and whistles and a touch of hipster retro.
Do you think 1-bit camera will suddenly rise to power, claiming that vintage looks of Hipstamatic and Instagram are not really retro-enough?
Probably not, but as Dropbox showed us all, an 800 million dollar deal from Apple wasn’t an option, and they decided to stay independent. Maybe because their work really has merit, promise and is useful? Hopefully not all of the startups will sell out to the big boys, as that usually leads to crashing and burning innovation and turning everything into ad-ridden “investments”.
But who knows. I’m currently working on an innovative, social app idea. If it becomes a reality, maybe I’ll cave in and accept the offers of Brins and Zuckerbergs of this world. But as of now, I can be a little hypocrite, since I don’t have a billion dollar idea on my hands. When I do I’ll let you know. It’s gonna be killer!
Oh and check out 1-bit camera here:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/1-bit-camera/id505119307?mt=8
Web 1.0 was all about creating content – articles, news topics, how to’s – you name it. Websites were hubs of information rather than a site with videos od a dog on a skateboard. Then the revolution came and the main focus on the web shifted from articles to people. Web 2.0 was all about being social online. And people loved it! Sure it’s counter-productive most of the time, but how convenient, right? You can now see updates and pictures of your “internet friends” from all over the world, and you don’t even need to meet with them for coffee to know what they’re up to.
Web 2.0 has generated an impressive amount of content and lured non-power-users into the internet. The amount of valuable content declined rapidly, and dogs on skateboards started to be the main focus online. Sure if you need information there’s wikipedia and wolfram alpha, which in fact is an answer to all the lazy people who can’t look up the answer themselves. So there’s more and more “social” content, more and more ads, but less quality content to browse through.
The answer? Well all those websites with funny pictures and subtitles encouraged people to at least write something under the pic. That’s creative sometimes, right? And then they share it with their average of 450 friends (who really has that many?) and it becomes another dog on a skateboard. Question sites are actually a true sign of change – people can ask about anything, and complete strangers may answer their question, which is then rated as the most valuable answer. That’s building a knowledge base right there. But when blogging shifted from serious articles towards “what I did last night with my facebook friends” I guess the last parts of web 1.0 died that evening. Facebook is trying to swallow some of that 1.0 juice by adding wikipedia answers to it’s searches, but seriously – who uses that?
Is internet eventually going to be about porn, shallow relationships with people and funny pictures only? What do you think?
Surely everyone who has ever written a blog knows, that even with akismet and all those other fancy gizmos, spam is constantly there. It can be characterized as landfills and trash dumps of modern technology, that just keeps piling up and there’s always more. But stating the existence of spam nowadays is like saying we need air to breathe. Pointless. What I want to focus on is how spam comments are evolving to trick us into clicking approve.
Here’s some statistics:
Email spam is done by about 5 million botnets, that send 88% of all spam messages. 90% of spam is in English (that’s understandable) and 91% contains links. 66% is about pharmaceutical things like viagra,cialis etc. In 2010 alone 107 billion mails were sent, out of which 89,1% was spam. Good news is that the amount of spam is decreasing by about 1% each year. The biggest fall is in email spam, because of better filters, and people simply ignoring those messages after learning how they work. A lot of spam moved to blog comments though, either to move traffic to other websites, or increase google popularity. So what kinds of spam are there?
Praise spam
Praise spam is the most common one – everyone wants to hear compliments, and if we get a comment that says “great blog! I’ve bookmarked it!” or “Great writing style, keep it up!” or thins like:
Help offerings (mostly SEO)
That comes from the fact that most blogs are not popular. That’s how life works and we should learn to deal with it. So when we see a help offer: to boost our stats, to earn more money, whatever – we unintentionally take notice of that comment before realizing it is spam. Some people apparently don’t realize that, because the spam bots are still doing this.
Pointing out mistakes (that’s a new one)
If praise isn’t really your thing, maybe criticism is. Or maybe if a bot is smart enough (yeah, right!) to criticize you, then it’s not a bot, but a real comment you can approve? Silly them ;)
Total gibberish and idiomatic idiocy
Sometimes what we get is a string of words or phrases taken from books, randomized and weird. It looks like it’s some twisted, drug induced poetry and sometimes it is. I actually like this type of spam sometimes – especially when I can compile a couple of those into a song, that’s as deep lyrically as Radioheads gibberish ;) (I still like their music though)
We can learn to fight it or we can learn to ignore it. But we must be aware that bots are a considerable part of our reader base. So this post is a tribute to them. Thank you for visiting my site bots! ;)
Rovio released Angry Birds two years ago, and in those two years time it reached over 300 million downloads, becoming the biggest phenomenon in computer gaming. It’s available for nearly every platform, sans the fridge (yet!) and for some reason people can’t stop playing it. The infographic below summarizes all the things we know about the game, like the amount of time people spend “in-game” each hour (16 years). What’s funny that there were more birds shot with that virtual slingshot, than there are living on our planet right now. Any Angry Birds addicts here?
http://c580513.r13.cf2.rackcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/AngryBirdsinfographic.jpg?9d7bd4
Well it’s not exactly that simple, but myspace or my[ ] as they’re now choosing to be called realized that on the social level they will never win with facebook. So now they’re sort of merging, allowing facebook connect to log into myspace, and share friends and information between both sites. And from this day on myspace will be about delivering content (since facebook doesn’t really do a good band page) and facebook will be your social interactions.
By merging and diversifying myspace can regain some of it’s long-lost powers and thrive alongside facebook instead of competing with the behemoth. And that might actually be a good idea. The merger is called ‘mashup’ and we’ll see how well it’ll do pretty soon.
Since the Washington Post made an iPad app too, I think it’s both the time to elaborate on interfaces and the time to admit, that the change is surely coming. The dying press industry can actually revive with this new medium, which is good because we need well written content. There’s nothing wrong with amateur bloggers, but the most valuable content is and will always be made by professional writers and journalists. So now we have the chance to try those out because the new york times, washington post and newsweek all made really nice applications that bring the press to the new medium. And of course they will also be available on other tablets when they finally come out. And that leads to a conclusion that there’s another change in interfaces coming.
Apparently a click to view interface doesn’t really work with press on a tablet. No, every one of the magazines has swiping motion to change pages / browse through articles. People don’t like to point and click, they like to browse. And what’s more natural than a swiping motion? Right!
And since the tablets are slowly taking over, we might want to consider websites that are also navigated that way (or can be navigated with both regular and modern touch controls). That might lead to a regression of thought, because we’re actually coming back to the system that was dominant before the PC revolution. And this system is already catching on. So it might either be a case of nostalgia, or simply a way to do it right. And if it’s the latter we should consider that with all of our feature layouts.
Below you can see the AD for washington post, pretty funny, especially the last sentence ;)
Facebook has announced on their recent conference that they’re adding some new features to their mobile apps. They are on 200 million mobile devices which is pretty impressive (and nearly on every single iphone) but I’m not sure the direction they’re heading is the right one.
Adding “deals” into “facebook places” gives us – well, deals – and that’s fine, we pay less for goods or services and we can be all thankful for it, right ? Well normally we would, but there’s this one little tiny detail that’s a little “wrong” here. The question “why?”. Sure the easy answer would be – to keep the #1 position in light of the recent myspace changes, but the real reason I think is a little different. “Places” itself tell facebook a lot of things about it’s users and now knowing which deals they used will actually make tham know anything but our thoughts. At least until there’s an app for that.
Sure many users don’t really mind because we’re being controlled all the time by governments and corporations, but I think some people don’t like others to know where they are. I never pay with a credit card at a club, maybe it’s my personal paranoia – but I will be turning the “Places” feature off. Along with the deals. At least most of the time. Keeping it constantly on would lead to even better advertising, tailored directly to us.
But we’ll see where it all leads after a few years anyway. Hopefully it won’t lead to <a href=”http://www.bp.com”> a disaster </a>. But we all know how facebook is when it comes to “privacy”.
A few years ago myspace was the online king nearing 200 million users. Then along came facebook with all it’s drama (see “the social network”) and change all that. People stopped using myspace as if it was a bag of worms. And we can all bet that myspace advertisers felt that, and myspace CEO’s felt that too. So they decided to change, and what’s better than a really BIG change? Nothing. So they decided to change the site from the ground up, including the very familiar logo they had. We’ll see if it’s gonna steal the users back from facebook or is it just one more try of a dying company. Nevertheless the move is pretty bold so good luck to Tom! Below you can see how it’s rougly gonna look like in november.
There’s a lot of recent developments in the publishing business. And some of it is pretty revolutionary. I finally had a chance to play a little bit with the Amazon Kindle and I actually love the E-Ink screen and the long lasting battery. It provides a reading experience very similar to a real book, especially if you have a nice, leather case for it that pretends to be a hardcover. But the point is to have your entire Library in your … well, bag – since it won’t really fit in your pocket unless you’re really really big ;)
But there will be changes (as I predicted a while ago). The whole thing occurred to me for a couple of reasons. And here’s what they are:
Social media marketing platform company Vitrue has determined that the average value of a Facebook ?fan? is about $3.60 in equivalent media each year. This calculation is based on having one million Fan Page fans, and is not weighted for brand recognition.
Ok but what does that actually mean? First let’s try and see how did they get that number.
A company posting twice a day and having a million fans will get 60 million impressions every month. Vitrue used $5 CPM (which is a cost for a thousand impressions) and 60M impressions ended up being $300,000 per month of media value. That means that for the same amount of views the company would’ve paid that much in other media. That 300,000 is a monthly value, so per year it’d be somewhere close to 3,6 Million dollars. Dividing that by a million “Fans” we get $3,6. Is that right? Does it really work that way?
Posting twice a day for a month? 60 posts in a month? Can you imagine still being a fan of a company after you’ve been bombarded by information about them twice a day for a month? A year? Would anyone “stay as a fan” in that case? And what would they inform us about? In most cases we’d be done with all of the company’s products in a few days or weeks. So what’s next? “Buy buy buy” statuses? Sure we can say that if you put all of the oceans water in a small tube, the length of the tube would be REALLY F***ING BIG. Right?
So how many posts a month are we talking about to maintain a brand awareness and not loose the fans? I’m thinking 5 posts per month would be the right number. That would be almost 1 post per week so our “fans” won’t have their status feeds flooded, and yet they will notice us. So what do the numbers tell us in such a case? Let’s assume that we do have a million fans. So we get 5 million impressions. That is $25,000 per month. So in a year it’ll be $300,000 and thus the value of one facebook fan per year is $0,3. Which is 30 cents. And that seems a lot more natural than $3,6. Right?