To like or not to like. Some recent Facebook text changes

Facebook recently announced a change to the text description of “fan”.  Any call to action  / fan buttons will now be “like” instead  of “become a fan”.

It’s all a bit confusing. Whilst it sounds straight forward on the face of it, there are numerous connotations for news feed descriptions and comparisons to the native facebook engagement ads.

We welcome any move to increase the popularity of facebook fan pages by making it easier for fans to engage.  On the flip side there is a decent chance that users will get confused between “like a fan page” and “like” a status update.

By increasing the popularity of fan pages the power of the medium will increase substantially from an advertising perspective. The potential cost of all this is an ever increasing amount of news feed content. No doubt facebook have some better algorithms on the way to filter same.

The medium term impact that this will have on facebook SEO and organic SEO is not known.

The official FB communication of this change can be seen here.

Mobile World Conference 2010 - Betapond ramblings

MWC 2010 was very interesting. The usual industry players were all there as expected from the low level chip designers and network infrastructure guys to the handset manufacturers and operators. I particularly enjoyed the NTT DoCoMo stand - watching the poor guy who had to demo the eye controlled headphones ALL DAY.

For me there were three key themes that I saw recurring again and again. Cloud services, Social Networking and App stores. Hardly surprising I suppose but I missed the show last year and the last time I was there the industry was touting IMS and a walled garden service model. Seems that they really have woken up - not that they really had any choice. I suppose it was fairly obvious that a service model built on top of http and an open approach would win over the complex and obfuscated IMS and SIP servlet model.

As a case in point I was over at the Motorolla stand, a company that has seen its fair share of problems in the recent past. Their latest handset offering - dubbed Moto Blur - puts social networking content in prime position on the front screen of the device, the offering comes with a feed aggregation system that harvests status updates from twitter, Facebook, Myspace etc and provides a single feed to the device in the interests of network bandwidth.

There were a number of start-ups at the show many of them focused around the provision of cloud and social based services to mobile. I was particularly impressed by myphonehas who have a recommendations engine for apps that is based off the apps that your contacts use. A neat idea I think and one that could of course be applied beyond the scope of apps.

Returned with the usual stack of leaflets, business cards and slight headache…

Peter

Facebook Connect and Bump (mobile) - building audience

Bump (electronic business card/file swapping) makes great use of your Facebook friends list to help you get more from your electronic card swap. By using Facebook Connect, it takes that initial business card introduction and leverages it by using Facebook to see who and what you have in common.

What does this mean?

If you meet somebody in person, Bump will tell you the friends or business contacts you have in common. Social acceptance, be it personal or business related, is very important. If you have mutual connections then the relationship moves up a level. This information is passed back, in real time, to your phone or Facebook account, which is good inside info for any relationship building, be it a sales pitch or a conversation with a stranger in a bar…

To be specific, some of the Facebook Connect integration that Bump includes is as follows:

• Notifications: receive a private Facebook notification when you bump someone not in your friends list.
• Compare: discover mutual Facebook friends when comparing friends
• Wall updates: update your wall with the contact you bumped

In this example, the Bump guys are using social networks to amplify normal physical connections / introductions. Facebook Connect gives you the tools to do this. All you need is a “window” into Facebook Connect, which in this case is your mobile phone. (See article from Mashable on the top 10 implications of Facebook Connect.)

We in Betapond are not consumer marketers or salespeople, yet the benefits to us are pretty clear.

In all forms of consumer business, social media connections and peer to peer recommendations are the new must-have advertising messages. Yet it is not rocket science.

Hats off to Bump. Clear, common-sense thinking in a world gone mad for complex technology.

How short can you go?

Just spotted an interesting post on TechCrunch (http://bit.ly/gooDotgl) about Facebook and Google introducing their own URL Shorteners. It will be interesting to see how long bit.ly and tinyurl.com will survive. This will most likely come down to the reporting and tracking functionality that sits on top of the new offerings. It’s not just about shortnering URLs so you can fit them into tweets or on a mobile screen - it’s also about being able to monitor all the activity generated by the shortened link. Let’s see who wins…

Conor

Partnering, freemuim services and help

Interesting trend emerging of on line ventures that are retreating back to core activities and specialities. Last.fm no longer supports its official Facebook app, because they cant keep up with the pace of innovation from the external community.

In fairness, it’s a pretty good  question to be asking.  - what is my core offering on web?  Tough question. For last.fm, its music discovery. For a bank, its online banking. For a taxi company, its immediate delivery of local available taxis to your mobile web on your phone.

What’s clear is:

a.  It’s tricky enough figuring out what your business should be on line.

b. If you can nail above, you then need to partner online to innovative quicker and cheaper.

Why build a internal piece of software, when your business is a taxi company? Get it from a trusted source. Rent before you buy. No matter how good the internal technical team, the wider community as a whole will always be stronger.

Google Chrome OS (potentially the “windows of software for the mobile industry”) is an open sourced platform. Anybody can innovative on top of it. Hats off to Google. Nice work from a share price perspective. http://bit.ly/79FxKR

Third party partnerships online are all the rage. It’s impossible to keep up in one niche, never mind 10. Freemium API access, quality yet good value back end CMS’s and decent working technical partnerships are all the rage.

As most “old” businesses start looking to mobile web as the new frontier to win clients, it would be wise to step back and figure out what can your company offer on the web that is sustainable, yet get you to your end of year budgets.

Last.fm retired the ‘Last.fm

Music’ application on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 and new installs of the application have been disabled.

Really? How come?
The Last.fm developer community has grown a lot in recent years, and we feel the time is right to withdraw our old, buggy and under-supported official applications and encourage use of community-built applications instead. This move will let us dedicate more time to our core site and services, ensuring you have access to lots of cool stuff powered by your music profile in future.

Where can I get other apps?
For now, two good places to start include the Facebook app directory and build.last.fm. Developers should also check out the growing Last.fm API.

We sincerely apologise for the obvious inconvenience the retirement of this application will cause. Thanks to everyone who has used it over the last two and a half years. — Team Last.fm