I always wondered how current web applications would be designed if we should all get back to the computers of yesteryear. You know, the ones with monochrome screens and no graphical UI.
So I made a little quick mockup of the most popular website there is ; facebook. Enjoy! All the hipsters can install that vintage version on their SNES consoles and update their statuses on a 30 year old TV ;)
Click to enlarge ;)
Since the introduction of the “5 recent tagged pics” on top of the profiles, there have been many pranks done with pictures of Justin Bieber and other creepy things to lighten up profiles of friends. But one Alexander Oudin managed to squeeze a little more creative juices out of that change. Pretty nice!
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.
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”.
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?
So here’s the deal. Right now A LOT (that’s an estimated number ;) of people are facebook users. And they share A LOT (also an estimate ;) of data daily. That is pretty impressive. But why? What’s so cool about farms, mafias and all those other stupid tests? Sure they work for a while but how to draw people in and keep them in ?
Well they got it all figured out with external links that are viewable inside the facebook web app. Basically you can listen to a soundcloud song file, view youtube (and other) videos and read some news stories without ever leaving the page. And how do you get that stuff? Well your friends post it, and your friends are pretty much the only type of advertisement you as an experienced web user trust anymore. Aren’t they?
So basically you get all your funny videos, and all your most recent news from one place and you can comment and “like” it all in that one place, allowing other your friends to see it and spread the word. So facebook is becoming slowly a way to discover the internet and not only the social network of friends. Because before that we used aggregating websites to find certain type of content (funny videos, marketing tips, games) and right now they can all be embedded to become a part of the facebook machine.
The analysts at Hitwise claim that celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton now gets more traffic from Facebook than from Google – more than 7 million pageviews from Facebook alone. If that trend increases, then the current wisdom about web traffic is about to get turned on its ear.
Yes, it draws people away from google, and I think they’ve noticed (a little too late probably) and launched Orkut / or whatever it’s called now. Google Buzz? That’s it! It has potential of course (because it’s google) and it’s gonna be plenty useable combined with all the google cloud apps but it’s hard to break something that already works fine. And what’s more important it’s SUPER HARD to change the habits. Maybe they’ll succeed. Or maybe in a few years the internet will be facebook and content supplying “facebook apps” for it. Let’s all hope that won’t happen!
The problem with google is that it’s just a machine based on probability and algorithms to deliver you content. And social networks are based on the idea that no machine stands between you and the content. No. It’s chosen by the people you know and trust, and that’s why it’s actually better tailored to your tastes (well unless you’re spamming for thousands of friends you don’t know that is)
We cannot deny the unbelievable reach that facebook has gained in the last year or so. It’s so big right now, it could be in the top 5 countries in the world, if it ever became a country. But all the bullshit aside, the guys at facebook must’ve realised that despite the potential, they’re not-really-earning-a-lot just like youtube. Sure, people love it, people use it, a lot of things are going on there. But the marketing potential was hard to use. Typical banner campaigns would’ve made the site bloated and “just like everyone else” and they didn’t want that. In fact I think that the lack of typical advertising was also one of the things that brought people to facebook in the first place. They realized that it’s a one-of-a-kind place in the web and wanted to be a part of it. But no, they don’t want to pay a fee. So what now ?
We’re starting to see facebook positioning (SEO for facebook would be FO – facebook optimization, or FPO – facebook popularity optimization since it’s measured in fans rather than clicks)
I am currently working on a PDF based document on how to use facebook to it’s full potential when marketing internet content (the test subject is gonna be this blog).
More on that soon, but there’s a big change coming in how we promote things online, so drop your banners and skyscrapers, burn the billboards and put your face in the book!