So, yesterday a cool little package arrived in the post bearing geeky goodness. I’ve got two flavours, ‘geek’ and ‘geek is good’. Time to show your geeky colours. Go on, no-one is watching.
Edit: Apparently, these badges look pink. I suppose people see what they want to see.. Hmm, there’s a deep thought in there somewhere. Adding another shot to clarify things. These bad boys are red. Red, I tell you.
Socialspark is a social marketing network. Yeah, basically it’s PayPerPost in the form of that over-used Web2.0-ism, a social network. Grrr… another chance for bloggers become ‘brand advocates’.
Flickr has rolled out a feature called Share-This, aimed to make it easier for bloggers to embed Flickr photos in their posts. On each Flickr photo page, there’s a ‘Share-This’ list item. Clicking on the list item, allows the owner of the photos to grant access to particular Flickr users using their names or bloggers using email addresses.
While it’s a nice idea
Edit: Weird… this post went on for a couple more paragraphs when I pressed publish.. Dear, oh, dear. You miss the part where I said it was unfinished (ironic) and that Jazz Biscuit’s Creative Commons Image Search was awesome.
Techcrunch has a list of .com domain names that Google has registered. Mike highlights some interesting ones. Amongst the very large list, here are my favourites:
I’m not the biggest petrol-head, but I love well put together ad-spots. Love this recent one by Shell featuring Ferrari.
So O2 Ireland are coming out and saying that there’s no planned price cuts on the iPhone, despite their UK counterparts cutting £100 off the 8GB model. Where is Paddy Tax Pat Phelan? It hardly makes sense to leave the price as is, does it? Especially when one can hop over the border and buy an iPhone super-cheap…
Where does that leave the Irish consumer on the run-up the Gen2 models? Will O2 Ireland keep the packages restrictive and the price of the iPhone high?
Yahoo are preparing to carry Google’s search ads as part of a pilot scheme to explore additional revenue streams. This move has big wow value. I wonder how this will affect Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo.
John Furrier broke the news over on Twitter. Here’s a snippet from his blog post on the move:
Yahoo is in talks to carry search ads from Google, as part of a test that is designed to evaluate the revenue potential of a broader outsourcing arrangement.
As Yahoo fights for it’s life it is now going to bed with Google. In an attempt to fend of Microsoft Yahoo is going to use Google ads as a test to see if it can sustain itself.
Disclosure: I work for Microsoft. This blog is my own and does not represent the views or opinions of Microsoft.
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It’s a measure of the maturity of social networking that we’ve skipped from network to network refinding our contacts. Reestablishing those links that join us together as we dive from Bebo, to Pownce, to Jaiku, to Twitter, to Facebook and beyond has been a tough job. What I’m really interested in, is the coming wave of features in these social networks that will enable me to friend strangers in an organic way. If social networking is to grow, it needs to adopt intelligent, automated ways for distinguishing people of interest that I should friend.
Facebook has started doing this to a degree. For example, new joiners that have graduated from a member’s mater alma are being suggested as possible old friends that could know.
This form of suggestion is a blunt machete, it doesn’t necessary give me any relevant suggestions. Imagine for a second, I have graduated from a very large university, the chances that a suggestion based on the attendance of a new member at that institution is infinitesimal. The chances of me knowing that person become virtually zero. For a service that aims to reconnect me with old flames, it stinks. Fail.
The second way that Facebook (and I’m not particularly picking on Facebook here, as it’s done most down this avenue), is suggesting mutual friends of my friends as potential contacts. It does this when, for example, a couple of my friends share a relationship link in Facebook with another person. This might seem like a good idea, but the suggestion is an objective one. There seems to be no way of targeting subjective topics such as tastes in music, books or business interests, in this suggest a mutual friend mechanism. And this is the crux of the matter.
What’s interesting for me as a social animal may not interest another. In the real world, the matching of interests is concentrated in the form of a connector. A mutual middleman who knows what both you and I are interested in and makes the effort in connecting us. In the Irish business sphere, the connector might come in the form of a Pat Phelan or a Paul Walsh. Someone who knows the value of contacts and is happy to make introductions where they see overlapping interests. What Facebook and other social networks need to adopt, is an automated Pat or Paul.
I might like, for example, to search for an buddy to go to post-modern German plays in Dublin. Yeah, a pretty small niche, but there’s no way for Facebook to suggest a buddy for me. You could argue, that perhaps I ought to join a Facebook group or signup to an event and use this kick-start the operation to discovery my drama buddy. But why all the work? Isn’t the data just there?
And now, we come to the heart of the issue. Data. Privacy is a biggie here. If organic friending is to work then it must operate in an opt-in mode, so that data that people are interested in sharing can be compiled and processed. Public data via RSS feeds ought to be fair game too. I want to have a 360 view of potentials. Of course, as with any friending contacts blind, it’s a case of buyer beware. Reputation must be weighed up before friending, but I’m taking it as a given that a person’s senses are operating. We’re not idiots.
So Facebook, suggest me this and suggest me that, but until you add an element of intelligence under the hood that fetches me targets of interest based on subjective parameters, things that I like, your suggestions waste my time and pixel real estate. Organic friending needs to be the next big leap forward for social networking, else our networks remain stale little holes of interaction lacking vitality and freshness.