Location Sharing à la Foursquare – the Latest in Social Media
Facebook makes a business out of helping you tell people who you are; Twitter makes it out of telling people what you have on your mind at any given moment; there probably are other things about people that could be exploited for a business model, but Foursquare appears to have a particularly compelling status you can let people know of: where you are. They call this Geolocation; and Foursquare isn’t the only player in this field, that is expected to enable lots of new services. Twitter,for instance, has a new API that allows it too.When Google planned to map out in real time the spots in the world where diseases spread, they said that this proved stupendous new possibilities. Location-enabled Twitter, could actually alert you to how many location-tagged messages are coming in from doctor’s clinics in any given area. If you have a political cause in mind, say, veganism, you don’t ever have to wait for a poll of any kind to find out what part of the country would be the friendliest your views – you can merely check out the number of vegan-related political tweets coming in from any given location. And then you could move out there, either to live in, or to participate.
What if you are waiting in line at your local superstore for a hit Christmas toy that would be just the gift you need, and it is reported to be running low on stocks? If people at different locations around a geographic region could put out a location-tagged tweet about what kind of stocks there were to be found in their local store, that would give a whole new meaning to guerilla shopping.
Any time you are in a given location, newspapers online could send you stories that were reported from that area in the last day. Or, you could be given a running subtext on your mobile phone, by Wikipedia, of all the interesting stuff that it has on its records, that have to do with your location. And of course,if there is a new story being covered in your immediate neighborhood at the very moment you are passing through, news sites could alert you to those too.
Google’s Near Me Now, a service that’s a month old now, runs off your mobile, and automatically finds all the top-rated entertainment, eating places, or anything else you are interested in right on your screen. You don’t need to manually search for anything anymore. It’s almost enough now, to put Yelp to rest with.
Corporations find New Uses for Social Media
If the social media aren’t hot-houses of product promotion today it is not because there is no one in charge of any business marketing department out there who understands how to take the best advantage policies in a phenomena. At advertising agencies around the world, marketing experts can think of nothing other than the whole hoopla around viral advertising campaigns on the social media. The mad rush for advertising on the social media will happen soon enough; but perhaps this may not entirely be a good thing for the open and friendly community that Facebook and Twitter have grown a reputation for. With too much going on that is glittery and commercial, social media may soon cease to be particularly social, with the conversations, the quiet atmosphere, that will help people latch on to an idea and make it blossom. But for now, here is one way in which they really are using social media in the true tradition of the community.Consider the Fiesta campaign that Ford undertook on the social media recently. What Ford did was to round up a hundred regular people off the street, to drive and review the latest Fiesta on Twitter, primarily, but also on Flicker and YouTube. It did work exactly as they planned; viewership on YouTube has been through the roof. Twitter has seen nearly five million impressions of the whole Fiesta deal. But the more important question here is,has it actually sold anything for Ford?
Companies do not look to social media to help them sell anything, although it must be committed that their Fiesta movement certainly got a lot of sales inquiries from potential customers. With the whole buzz they generated from this, they got lots of user input on how to improve the Fiesta, and make it better for the American customer. It’s easy for those corporate executive types to grow too insulated from the everyday people who make their company profitable. They gain a valuable ability to actually see the dialogue blossom between the car designer and car user, filled with the kind of urgency, the emotion that goes with car ownership. This has to be one of the best uses that the social media have found so far. Of course, GM tried it recently, and they were not pleased. You do have to have a certain amount of basic goodwill to go on, before you go asking people what they think of you.
Is Facebook Bigger than even Google?
We’ve often heard, that Google and Facebook are seen to be in direct competition. Unless the “direct competition” spoken of refers to the mindspace occupied by the companies, people often wonder how a search company can be in competition with a social media company. But if you think about it, this isn’t really difficult to conceive of.
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It would be difficult for the provider of any online information or service, to top a search engine in user traffic: search engines are our first port of call when we open a browser. For the first time though, social networking sites are pulling in more visitors, then even the search engines. Once an Internet portal has an irresistible product, it brings power that allows it to change the very way the Internet is run. For instance, YouTube has achieved a certain critical mass of videos on such a variety of subjects, and that there are a good number of young people who feel no need to search on Google to read about anything. They just search on YouTube, for a video on the subject they are interested in. In fact, YouTube is now the second largest search engine after Google.
So what happens if the social media sites become so enormously popular, that even search begins to take second place? To begin with, people would be subscribing to updates on Twitter and Facebook, more than RSS ever succeeded in getting us to do. Perhaps the very concept of the browser would be threatened. And just as free access to all the newspapers of the world is driving publishers of physical books and papers to bankruptcy, and throwing up protests of how quality in publishing will suffer, free access to information on people’s Facebook and Twitter feeds, would perhaps send up another wave of protests that there will be no way of determining quality, if people begin to look directly to sharing with Internet friends, as a way to gain basic knowledge. Such a fundamental game changer, would shake up the established business plan that Google controls now.
Earning a Living off Social Networking
Twitter’s founders are still trying to see some profit in their runaway success of a social media company; and businesses keep trying to make a profit of it too. Perhaps the latter have a better handle on the problem. Twitter is the latest frontier in sneaky product placement. Television shows and movies have always found a way to sell out to big money, making sure that there is a “carelessly placed” can of soft drink right at eye level with the label facing forward, or a shot that lingers unnecessarily on the area of a laptop screen where the maker’s name is emblazoned.Businesses want to know if the fans you have on your Facebook, really do make you a minor celebrity in your circle. If they paid you for it, could you endorse a product for your social network fans, and make a difference to your sponsors? If your fans follow you on Twitter, will they follow your choice of restaurants, movies or soft drink? The idea has really taken off, and advertising promoters exist who work exclusively on product promotion on the social network scene. It is their job to convince advertisers of the effectiveness of product placement on Facebook and Twitter, and also to find influential members whose opinions and endorsements will matter.
A social network where you spend time with your friends is one of the last places you would expect to be pitched a product; that element of surprise is what the advertisers are looking for. Amazon even has a proper service in place for this, and they call it Amazon Associates. They’ll pay commissions to anyone who will refer buyers to the online retailer’s website. Friends on a regular tweet from someone they subscribe to, will, in the middle of it all, suddenly see a tweet like “Yo! Check out Bobby Crusoe’s latest track on Amazon.com – it rocks!”. Actually, a few minor television stars actually earn upward of $25,000 for a single commercial tweet. Regular people with sizable fan followings on Twitter, can make a couple of thousand dollars for a commercial tweet.
Twitter advertising companies like Izea first started placing advertisements with Twitter members with no specific warning at all. If there was a celebrity chef, and he was tapped to place an ad for a particular brand of butter, there was nothing that would tell his followers that it was not his personal opinion they were reading. Izea has made sure that that doesn’t happen anymore, after they received protests. With those initial teething problems over, social networking advertising is all set to becoming the next greatest thing in advertising.
Google New Social Networking Attempt – An Appropriately-Named Google Buzz
Google has always been interested in social networking; Orkut was one of the first successful social networking portals out there, and Google snapped it up. Orkut never really quite made it past niche markets in India and Brazil though. But Google still had its core search business that had never been stronger. But in a world where it is beginning to emerge that social networking like Facebook can in some cases overtake basic search in raw Internet usage share, and a world where people prefer the links they come by on their social networking forages over searching for things themselves, Google has been taking a good hard look at gaining a presence here for itself – as a way of hedging against future eventualities. Last Tuesday, Google finally came through on its social networking promise, with Google Buzz; a way that lets Gmail account holders pass around photos, videos, and general updates.Google Buzz is going to be an added feature on Gmail, and not an independent service. This gets it started on an excellent user base right on its first day. All of Gmail’s 176 million users, will automatically find themselves on Buzz, and their friends circle on Buzz will be their most frequently e-mails contacts. So what does someone do on Buzz? The same thing as any other standard Facebook clone – users post their status, they post their pictures from Picasa, their videos from YouTube, and of course, messages from Twitter. If you look at it, Buzz seems to look like it got a lot of inspiration from Facebook; and the real Facebook, certainly has a lot to worry about now.
Trying to out-Facebook Facebook may not really work at this stage though; Facebook has had a six-year headstart, and has 400 million users. How much banality can people share at one time? But Google actually feels that overloading people with banal information is the way it can become relevant. Google’s search and relevancy algorithms, they feel, are going to make Buzz so easy to use in a time when people have a superfluity of information to sift through; Google’s powerful search filters can pick the needle of interest out of the haystack of irrelevance so well that people will want to leave Facebook behind.
Facebook is trying to step into Google’s home turf too for its part – into instant messaging. Facebook plans to use the Jabber protocol to allow other instant message services, to integrate with Facebook’s own. AOL’s AIM will be the first. AIM users will log into Facebook right through their familiar AIM environment, and directly find out about which Facebook friends are available to message to. Facebook’s game, it is clear, is no longer to just be a website that people go to mess with friends on. They want to be Internet infrastructure; they want to be the behind-the scenes social networking foundation people end up using whenever they need to get in touch with their friends, no matter what website they go to.
How to handle Facebook login problems
Facebook is without doubt the most popular social networking site on the Internet these days. Millions of users log into Facebook each day with some of them experiencing the usual troubles in the login phase. This ranges from passwords that are not accepted to pages that are not loading properly or other errors.There is an explanation for most of the issues that are experienced by Facebook users and this article tries to provide solutions to some of the problems that Facebook users can experience during logins.
It is important to assess the problem correctly before making any changes or trying to fix the problem. Probably the most common Facebook login problem is that the password is not accepted during login. There are two solutions for this: Use the password recovery option to retrieve the password or try to access the website at a later time. A password manager can help avoid that problem completely as it will remember the password for the user and even perform the login automatically.
Another common problem is that the Facebook login screen is not being displayed correctly. This can be either because of a temporary network problem, a problem on Facebook’s end or a caching issue. One fix is to clear the web browser’s temporary Internet files to make sure that the issue is not a local problem.
Facebook offers a help page that provides aid to the user when login problems are experienced.
Google’s Web Philosophies – Facebook’s a Fan?
Google Labs today has about 30 applications to test on the world to judge suitability for release.Google Labs is the company’s crucible for hot experimental ideas to test, in-house and on volunteers among the user base. The test is not only for smooth reliable operation, but also for the likelihood of acceptance among users. Google knows from the way innovations on Facebook and Microsoft Office have been released before , that there many ideas that application designers put out, that are simply rejected by the public for a variety of reasons: they could be too fussy, they could just be unlikable, and so on. Plenty of Google Labs ideas exist that haven’t quite made the cut yet even if they do happen to be very popular. Undo Send, and Off-line Gmail, being the best examples. The real-world test of whether a product will actually be used often enough to warrant release, is Labs’ final aim. Mozilla does Labs one better: the new functions and applications do not even need to be designed in-house. Contributors outside the company can always take matters into their own hands.
Now Facebook is taking a page out of Google Labs’ copybook. Facebook recently announced a new service called Prototypes where add-ons and features made in-house can be given a test drive. Two months after its launch, there are six applications out for test. One is a tool that lets you search for posts that are close in character to posts you like, one is a photo tag search, and so on. This is a fundamental shift for Facebook; it was company policy up until recently to not rope in anyone other than professional product testers to kick the tyres on new applications. What could be more social then than to be welcome everyone in to shape a social networking service .
Facebook itself, states that it wants to use Prototypes as a window into how the average Facebook fan thinks. Games have proved to be the most popular add-on on Facebook. Soon, everyone could be customizing their home pages on Facebook with all kinds of attractive and useful applications. To build a profile of the average Facebook user by studying long-term behavior, should be a useful lesson indeed on basic human behavior.
Why Do Polls Insist on Pushing Facebook’s Popularity and Treading on MySpace and Twitter?
Every Internet poll is abuzz today with how Facebook seems to be taking over the whole social network scene: they reportedly have more page visits than even Google. Two out of three social network visits on the Internet have been to Facebook: and these visits cannibalize MySpace’s share to arrive there. Twitter has posted impressive tenfold growth to show too. But their actual market share is in the low single digits still. But is this really true? How can Twitter, whose stranglehold on conversation space the world over seems total, be so limited in its popularity? It is possible that in the Internet traffic polling service that came out with these results, Hitwise, is not using the most reliable methods to record market share and growth.
Twitter, it so happens, is all about getting snatches of information; this lends itself very well to being used through an external interface, an API, a plug-in. People do not actually need to visit Twitter to be able to access it, and most take advantage of the external access facility. A study puts Twitter access through add-ons at ten times the number of accesses seen through browser visits. Polls like Hitwise, possibly only count visits through traditional Internet browsers. But there is another side to this; Facebook, even as it requires time to use, sometimes posts as much growth as Twitter, if measured month on month.
All of this brings us to this question: why do important news outlets ignore the need for accurate statistics. MySpace is being measured for its grave already even when it still has a reasonably loyal social networking market share of a third. Reports now suggest that MySpace is the domain of choice for the less fashionable, less influential parts of society. Twitter and Facebook on the other hand, could not to find more enthusiastic approval from the chic clique. Is it possible that news outlets just want to see that their favorites make it to the top? An interesting development is on its way here. MySpace is making bold moves to win back its audience by focusing on its music again. If the media supports this come-back move as enthusiastically as it follows the downfall, we would have a clue to how fair media reporting was.
How do Small Businesses Make Facebook Work for Them?
People just can’t stop thinking of it: how do you exploit Facebook to the greatest benefit going viral or something for your business? You’ve seen it done on every business website you’ve been to: each one has a few (or many)social networking tools represented on the sides, and you are supposed to follow them on Twitter or friend them on Facebook. Facebook offers special business memberships, that are not the same as individual ones. In fact, some small businesses completely give the website route a pass and depend on Facebook for a web presence. It looks good, and you can have your Facebook website simply redirect visitors to a proper e-commerce site like eBay or Amazon.Businesses don’t always go down the Facebook route just to have a web presence though; you could be there for customer support, for better word-of-mouth, or to start a forum about something important your product represents, like environmental responsibility, for example. A new bakery that wants to get enough hip young customers in the door would have to do nothing more than to look up on Facebook all the people who live in a 5 mile radius around the bakery, searching by Zip code, age and income group on Facebook, and send out Facebook messages to all of them. Who could have dreamed that a small business would be able to automate mailing lists like this, even a few years ago? Facebook’s advanced search options allow you to narrow it down to almost any kind of defining characteristic: marital status, people interested in specific sports, people who love certain actors or certain streams of public interest subjects, almost anything. Facebook asks us to fill out detailed profiles when we sign up;when we do, anyone can search for us by our listed preferences.
The social networking community really does work like one; advertisements on them usually not people much better results than advertisements put out on general-interest websites. Facebook is like this magic neighborhood,huge and intimate at the same time, where everyone walks around with a name tag – like in that episode of Seinfeld.
The Verdict is In: Social Networking Really Does Promote Social Behaviour
Some theories are so convincing, they seem self-evident: to need no evidence other than their own grandness. Consider the new-age pet peeve to do with the modern-day involvement in young people, with disembodied social experiences through cell phones and social networking. How convenient a whipping boy electronic communicating has become for the advocates of the clean natural lifestyle. To see people staring away for hours at a glowing rectangle on a cell phone or a computer truly is an irritating sight. But to try to explain the irritation with a fanciful theory that proposes that excessive computer use can impair people socially, cause the brain to vegetate and be the cause of all evil, would be to skip a step or two.
There has been an important study released by the Pew Internet and American life Project recently that quite handily dismisses these theories as fiction and conjecture. How does a study go about measuring social availability and social skills in people? To begin with, the study takes up the lack of social prejudices in a person as a measure of social availability and maturity. In real-world relationships, people are often reluctant to form trusting relationships with people of other religions, races or nationalities. Millions of non-Facebook users on the other hand, are hopelessly mired in these practices. Social network users are also found to place themselves in real social interactions as much as the off-line crowd, often more so. Anything that actually brings the people together from around the world can only be a good thing.
This is not to say that Facebook is a magic pill for social ineptitude in people. The study does admit that a sizable 6% of regular Internet enthusiasts remain socially unsuccessful. But this proportion of the ill-adjusted has always existed in the population. And this is yet another statement for how important it is to verify intuitive casual understanding with actual scientific research. Will parents sit up and take notice?
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