A plotted history of Facebook (so far)

This just struck me as something useful to refer back to so I'm going to post it so I can find it later. Which could prompt me off on a course about information aggregation / sharing / remembering which of the many places it might have been catalogued in depending on my mood at the time, but luckily I'm desparately trying to cull my 80+ tabs in Firefox down to something more manageable so time is short. Much to read.

Click to enlarge

Facebook stats to start 2011

With my Facebook email address all signed up, rumours of IPO this spring, and global members approaching the 600m mark all being balanced out  with"social media reaching maturity" type posts springing up all over the place, it felt appropriate to share this infographic from online schools that makes all that connection & sharing etc slightly more human. Or if multi-media is more your thing and you can spare a minute or so to get a grasp of scale based on what happens on Facebook in a minute check out the video below.

Spotify embraces Facebook Open Graph

Spotify have joined the Facebook Open Graph gang adding a heap of extra features and making sharing the music you like to listen to easier and altogether more sociable/shareable.

More on that later but for now watch this to see how it will work...

Social shopping from your sofa

I mentioned in my last post about Levi's adding social shopping to their site.  It looks like this....

I'm short of time before hopping on a plane, but just think of the implications. We all know trends are established quickly on the web, but imagine the power of the data for the company when they are getting direct steer from consumers on what's liked / not liked. For fashion stores with wide, quick turnover rangeslike Top Shop or Zara this kind of data can influence their buying / procurement strategies, effect ops, and of course give direction for comms & sales / price setting.

Facebook's garden walls demolished....

Uber busy week for me, but in the midst of it was the F8 Facebook Developer Conference, where amongst other things the key outcome was the unveiling of the Facebook Open Graph API.

Ignoring the techy stuff, what that means is that whereas up until now brands have had to come to Facebook if they wanted to make it easy for people to engage with them (because we were all hanging out there so much anyway), now, site owners can embed bits of Facebook functionality into their own sites. Facebook is no longer a walled garden.

 

This sort of functionality is going to make a massive difference to the dynamics of how our social graph (i.e our friends) shapeour wider web experience.

Here's an example from Levi's on how shopping from your sofa's just about to get a whole lot more sociable:



More to come from me on this topic, but I need to mull more!

Digital miscellany of the day: Delight or disaster, it's up to you

I was just reading that Pirate's back as a Facebook language. 

Pirate English on Facebook had me, and heaps of my friends in stitches earlier this summer and then sadly it seemed to disappear. I remember evangelising at work at how such a small thing could create so much fun, and happiness and how fab it would be for a brand to have come up with something like that. What an amazing positive halo it would have thrown over the brand.

So I mosey'd over to Facebook to find that Pirate is sadly not back in the UK (yet at least), but English Upside Down is.

It's quite amusing - your posts and your friend's names remain the right way up but almost everything else is upside down.

Go play. It won't engage you for as long as Pirate but we'll give them marks for amusement value.  I hope we get Pirate rolled out to UK IP addresses again soon.

Use your Facebook vanity URL as a log in shortcut

50 million people signed up for their Facebook Vanity URL after they were released in June.

As of yesterday you can save yourself, oooh, seconds, by using it rather than your email address to log in to Facebook.

Facebook adds its' own version of Google Labs

Dig around the apps directory on Facebook, and you'll now find a "Prototypes" section with a few new toys to play with.

I liked the addition of the Photo Tag Search option enabling you to search photos for specific people / groups of people.Fun!  But yet another good reason why you should make sure that your are making sensible choices over what you are allowing particular groups of people to see.

Unsure about whether you should accept your boss as your friend?  Just limit what they can see!  I read this useful post recently, by Jeremiah Owyang, which has some handy guidelines in if you are unsure as to how to go about it.

Personal brand management, I keep mentioning it, because it's IMPORTANT!

Facebook users top 300 million

Facebook announced yesterday that they've added another 50 million users since July bringing them up to 300 million globally, and, with the launch of the less resource hungry Facebook Lite last week, that figure can only be set to grow further.

Only another 7 million to add then until the number of Facebook subscribers equals the entire population of the USA.

Zuckerberg also added that they've finally broken even / made it into the black, notably ahead of their forecast of 2010.

I'm a big fan of (unofficial) site Checkfacebook.com for it's fun and interactive interface showing Facebook users by country / % of online population thereof amongst other random and useful stats.
However,  as with so many things on the web, take the numbers as directional not as gospel.

I read an interesting article yesterday about the UK Government's inspirational creative mathematics on illegal downloads. Impressive!

The changing face of quality communications

I've been thinking about evolving communication styles and preferences a lot recently. I have so many different ways to communicate with people now: face to face, phone, letter, text, IM, Skype, email, Twitter, Facebook... the list goes on. That's even before you add in other places I can share stuff whether that's here on my blog, photos on Flickr, KodakGallery, Posterous, videos on YouTube or Vimeo, or even just sound bites on AudioBoo (not that I've resorted to that yet).

I have some spaces that are deliberately open, me mini-casting to whoever cares to read or trip over my ramblings. I have some spaces that are closed networks with my musings only available to a limited number of dedicated or approved recipients.

I have some people that I only use a particularly communications method to stay in touch with. I have other people who I communicate with across a variety of platforms depending on context. Heavens, I even have some people I actually see or speak to, and others to whomI enjoy taking the time out to refill my fountain pen and actually write to! Such things seem old fashioned these days but at least you can express sentiment rather more easily in person or on the phone when a raise of the eyebrows or a hint of sarcasm can add depth to the words.

Sentiment is so often missed, or mis-construed in a world increasingly written-word centric. Mountains made out of molehills by the absence of a smiley. But is that a sarcastic smiley or just a happy smiley!? ;-)

What we are saying in all these different spaces is interesting too. Mundane mutterings. Self-promotion. Self-less sharing. There's a time and a place for all but frequently the lines are being blurred by time-pressure on our lives, and we start resorting to lowest common denominator behaviour. I can't be bothered to email x or y so I'll just stick out a broadcast post on my Facebook status. Fail. Facebook status posts are a useful tool in the repertoire but not a substitute for quality communication with your friends.

Years ago I was introduced to Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. He introduced the notion of the emotional bank account. Some of your friends / colleagues / contacts make positive contributions and others definitely just keep on debit-ing. Friendship is a two way street, and there are times when inevitably you'll make debits but they need to be counter-balanced by credit from time to time too. Think about it. Credit in pennies from Facebook status updates broadcast to all. Credit in Pounds for genuine efforts made. Then relate that to your brand communications. Are you flooding your customers with overwhelming emails / texts / tweets? Are you providing them with interesting relevant and valuable information? Credit v debit is a fine balance, particularly in our relationships with brands where we are likely to be less tolerant than we are with our friends.

My friend Fran kindly sent me this link to an interesting article on Facebook Fatigue from the Wall Street Journal. Interesting stuff. It also reminded me of this video on Facebook etiquette that I found months ago. Tongue in cheek but it makes some good points.

Facebook Update!!

Facebook has released an update to the only just released app version 3.0

Many consumers complained about various bugs and crashes.

The only bug i personally found in 3.0 was when scrolling through friends list it crashed and sent the iPhone back to the home screen.

Facebook have released 3.0.1 claiming to have fixed "bugs" so hopefully they will have got in 100% right this time.

The update is available via the app store on your iphone under the update menu or you can click here to open itunes and download it on you pc and sync it over later.

Let us know what you think of the update!

Banging on about Bing...

I know, I know, I've talked about search and Bing a LOT recently but it's important. Competition in the market is healthy.

I have a Gmail account, I use the Google reader for RSS feeds, this blog is written on a Google owned platform, I upload to YouTube (owned by Google), and I am enormously excited about the scope and potential of the Google Wave (a new communication and collaboration platform/approach coming soon) so I'm far from entirely disloyal. But it's important to share my love too.

I am enjoying playing with Bing not just for the way it processes queries and displays results, but for the small moment of happiness I get from the stunning pictures they have on the homepage everyday. Yesterday it was Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and the day before a stunning image of a turtle which made me think about a great holiday in the Whitsunday's last year. I engage with it. I play guessing games with myself as a result of the image I see. And clearly I am not alone and Bing have twigged that too as in the last week they've taken to adding clues under the image.

This morning I logged in and spent a few moments trying to work out where I recognised that skyline from. After a quick memory scan, and even before I looked at the clues, I realised it was the Yarra river and Melbourne, a city I love but haven't been back to for a few years now. But the fact that I go back to see the picture every day and I've been telling lots of my colleagues to do the same too, suggests they've got something right.

In an earlier post I talked about how smart it was for Bing to have launched a homepage photocontest via Facebook. I logged into Facebook this morning to find a status feed item reminding me that voting for the photocompetition closes on August 3rd, and encouraging me to go a vote (which I duly did). I'd encourage you to do the same. Why not? It's easy to do and easy on the eye. Well done, Bing, I think you are doing a good job. You are demonstrating that you are understanding your consumer and what is motivating (some) of them to use your decision making engine, and, how social media spaces can work hard for you: you don't have to drag people out of an environment that they are in anyway to make them consider and engage with your brand.
It will take a long time to shift people's behaviour from using Google as default, as there's many more of us using search than the was when the big shift from Yahoo search to Google happened in the late 1990's, but I feel compelled to encourage people to explore the search options available too us. There's more to search than the big G.