Yes FriendFeed was acquired by Facebook yesterday.
There is outrage and stories galore out on the interwebs, but only one thing out there got me to really understand the pain and anguish of FF loyalists.
Enjoy.
Did you get your vanity Facebook URL? The Friday night geekfest resulted in 200,000 vanity URLS within the first 3 minutes according to Mashable (the start time was 12:01 EST Saturday morning).
I logged on at about 9:05 PST last night and acquired Facebook.com/ErinNorton. There are a 125 other Erin Nortons on Facebook, so I considered myself pretty lucky.
While I went with my full name to continue my personal branding efforts, others disregarded the future of their online identity and picked completely random user names and the daring few “facesquated” on friends, foes and brands.
Here are my top 5 random Facebook user names:
The buzz in the Twittersphere is all about Hubspot’s latest State of the Twittersphere, available here. It examines levels of activity of Twitter users by the following statistics:
- 79.79% failed to provide a homepage URL
- 75.86% of users have not entered a bio in their profile
- 68.68% have not specified a location
- 55.50% are not following anyone
- 54.88% have never tweeted
- 52.71% have no followers
With an astounding 55.50% never tweeting, many started to say that most people were not using twitter and the huge growth that Twitter experienced were just accounts being created, not users being created. The main argument here goes back to the idea of monetization – if most Twitter accounts are inactive (as determined by the lack of tweets and followers) then Twitter’s value is severely decreased.
However, I don’t see the above statistics (especially the lack of tweets) as a sign that Twitter users are inactive. All of us social media consultants always say that the first step to social media is listening. Its important to know what people are saying and how to use a social network, before just jumping right in. Secondly, after the initial Twitter objection, “I don’t want to read about what people are eating,” comes “I don’t have anything interesting to say.” Of the few (real life) friends I have on Twitter about half don’t tweet. They subscribe to their favorite celebs, a couple news outlets and their own real life friends. To them its just another RSS feed.
The real value of Twitter isn’t the number of active users, its the number of active listeners.
I love Facebook, really I do. However FB’s inability to offer any sort of advertising quality control is killing me. I’ve ranted about Facebook telling me I need a diet and a man, I’ve been disturbed by zombie hands and now we have TNT overkill.
The ads are slick with great copywriting and clicking on any of them take you to the show’s Facebook page to watch a preview of tonight’s episode. It is a very well executed campaign – I would totally give it an A. However, I don’t need 3 of the same ads at a time. Facebook you need to recognize that despite these ads being variations – they belong to the same advertiser and should rotate with other advertisers.
I log on this morning to see this and hit refresh to see more of the same -
Big news out of China this week is that the government has once again cut off access to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and other social media sites in preparation for the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests. You can read here, here and here to learn more.
Which makes me wonder why this awesome campaign by Ogilvy (Frankfurt, Germany) for the International Society for Human Rights does not include the President of China, Hu Jintao? (Via)
Iran
Cuba
Venezuela
Yesterday I attended my first San Diego Social Media Breakfast where the discussion centered around social media privacy from the user standpoint.
The arguments for and against sharing have been debated across the web:
Personally, I’ve never understood this struggle. Just like in real life you have different groups of people, you share different information with them and that information can live on its own through gossip and pictures passing through real life social networks. When I tell my friends about a crazy weekend, I don’t also text everyone in my phone or send everyone pictures. We’ve already been trained to differentiate our social groups and modify our behavior and our conversations based on the social group we are interacting with, why do people struggle with that when those social networks are online?
Sharing or not sharing information is your own choice, just as in real life sometimes you tell one person something and not someone else.
I only have two recommendations. The first is that most social networking sites allow for some degree of privacy settings – USE THEM. I create different groups on my Facebook for Work, Work Friends, College, High School, Family and BFFs. Each group has different access to my profiles, I know and trust those with the most amount of privacy and those work connections receive minimal information. The second is don’t be a DOUCHE BAG. Just in real life if you spend your time and energy spreading false information, wasting people’s time or just being an ass you’ll damage your social connections. You’re smart, you’ll figure out the rest.
Google turned me into a stalker with the launch of Google Latitude. I wasn’t paying attention when I signed up to test it out and checked everyone in my Google address book which is, thankfully, much smaller than my Yahoo or Outlook address books. Apparently, Google sends an email to everyone letting them know you’d like to stalk them and then sends them emails whenever you check in.
Everyone in my address book received an invite to let me stalk them and then two emails telling them where I was (sadly both times at the office). One of my friends was so kind as to let me know via Facebook that she had received notification that I wanted to know her every move. While for the most part stalking my friends is totally cool, there are a couple people in my address book I would rather not stalk (especially when it tells them I’m doing so). Awkward….
So thanks Google.
Is a double opt-in set up so much to ask? You couldn’t have put in a little pop up that says “Are you sure you want to send an email to these people to invite them to your Latitude network?”
Oh and my assesment of latitude is that it is sub par geo-location social networking; BrightKite does it better.
Social Networks I will never understand
Social Networks everone should be a part of
As the end of the year approaches every blogger out there is throwing down their 2009 predictions; I’m jumping off the cliff to throw down my own thoughts on the new year.
But don’t worry is isn’t some haughty predictions list, but merely a top 10 list of my hopes for marketing and technology in 2009.
1. MySpace will die. Enough of the glitter backgrounds, 10 mintue page downloads and endless random friend requests from half naked teenagers. Most of the cool kids have left anyways.
2. Everyone will stop hating on Twitter. You know you want to, like that one time in college. Get drunk and blame your experimental tweets on the booze. In four years if you’re not into it anymore you can just say you were going through a phase. Then you can follow me here.
3. Spammers will learn correct grammar and proper English. Maybe more people would respond if they could read your spam emails or they contained plausable stories. Really I won the lottery in Nigeria, I didn’t even buy a lottery ticket?!
4. Mobile marketing will finally take off. The last few years have been predicted as The Year for mobile, please finally get big so the masses will figure out what the next big thing will be.
Hubspot released their state of the Twitterverse report a few days ago and I’m actually really surprised by some of the results. Decifinitely check it out for the full report, but here are a few tidbits.
If you’re on Twitter follow me here!
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