Posts Tagged: engagement

Thoughts — 1 Comment
29
Aug 07

Facebook Platform Engagement and Political SNS

As we know, Facebook Platform is dealing with some serious spam/abuse problems. This is compromising the Facebook experience – even Facebook’s generally rock-solid technical infrastructure is paying the price (yesterday FB logged me in and out about 30 times, in addition to being offline). To address a part of this issue, FB is changing its ranking algorithm for its application directory to reward engagement. This is a good step, and I hope they also follow this logic down to the newsfeed; I don’t care about every application my friends try out, but rather what applications they enjoy and actually use.

This somewhat tangentially relates to an interesting post from Greg Bloom over at TechPresident. Greg challenges some of the metrics of SNS and widgetized engagement in the political sphere, and he brings up some great points – here’s a snippet.

There is an opportunity here. For months now I’ve been getting on the losing side of arguments about the utility of the Change.org and Facebook Causes app – I’d pan them because they have adopted a narrow fundraising paradigm that doesn’t seem to me to fit right, but I’d lose these arguments because I never was able to verbalize what exactly these political activism applications should encourage. I don’t think I’m going to lose that argument any more! It sucks to be reminded that you’ve raised zero dollars to stop global warming—and may I say that it must somehow suck even more to be reminded that you’ve raised a cool ten dollars to stop global warming—but if I could show my friends how many politicians I’ve told to do something about global warming… well, I just might shoot my mouth off at politicians all day.

So much of what’s exciting about this aspect of social networking is still in the realm of the hypothetical. The robustness of these interactions will depend upon some pretty fine technical points (like, when I post on a Senator’s wall, how widely will that message be distributed through my friends’ feeds? What if the message gets deleted from the politician’s page – is there a way so that my network still sees that I posted it in the first place?) Presumably, staffers will keep their bosses’ profile pages sparkly clean; presumably, once they realize how disruptive these walls could be, many politicians would take them down entirely (although many others would learn to embrace it). On the other hand, future “political action” apps will surely augment the process and make the Facebook interactions between constituents and their elected representatives even more dynamic.

I hope to respond to Greg’s post on TechPresident – you can read the full post here.

Software / Thoughts — 2 Comments
25
Jun 07

Working with Facebook Platform

I’ve been busy on many fronts lately, but last week I found a little time to play around with Facebook Platform. John Edwards, whose presidential campaign is based in my own backyard, lacked a Facebook App, so I set to building one for him (unofficially, of course). Techpresident covered the app last week, and it is slowly-but-surely drawing adopters.

The app is very simple – a first start – and I plan to take community feedback as I develop it. If you’ve got suggestions I’m all ears. It might be a fun experiment to see what we can put together.

The bigger news, however, is that I’m going to clean up the code, and release a GPL version that any campaign/organization can use to set up a very simple application in Facebook. As Josh Levy correctly points out, there’s an enormous, important audience in Facebook – so it’s worth the time and effort to attempt to reach out.

I hope to have this code ready sometime next week. In addition, I will be writing two articles on Facebook platform for AOL Developer Network/O’Reilly, which will explain and document how to use the platform (and why). So keep your eyes peeled, and if you support Edwards or would like to try out the app, check it out here.

Thoughts — No Comments
2
Apr 07

Mobile telcos rush to social networks – but are they missing the point?

After reading the BusinessWeek article Mobile Telcos Rush to Social Networking, I’m sort of left shaking my head, wondering exactly what telcos are thinking when they lay out their social networking strategy. In the article, writer Kate Norton describes partnerships between Orange Mobile and Bebo.com, and Vodafone and NewsCorp, parent of Myspace. The gist of these partnerships is that the provider will guarantee (exclusive?) access to the respective social networking service, which I guess is supposed to make people want to buy data plans or some such thing.

My problem with a strategy like this is that the telcos seem to fail to understand that social networking on the mobile is a distinctly different experience than social networking in the browser. As I’ve previously written, social networking is different experience between these mediums; in the browser, social networking has the luxury of being a browsing experience. That is, we can spend inordinate amounts of time traversing profiles on our desktops – which is a luxury not afforded by most handhelds, due to data plan speed and cost, as well as a number of other factors (extremely media-rich social networking profiles do not translate well to the mobile, for one).

What surprises me about these partnerships is that the major telcos seem happy to delude themselves that the experience customers want on the mobile mimics the browser experience. Furthermore, by pushing their customer base onto one social networking platform, the carriers strategic plans break the back of network-effects based adoption that could come from embracing social networking.

If Twitter’s amazing adoption has told us anything, it is that people want information solutions from their mobile device – these being primarily social informational solutions. Twitter operates in the TXT-based context – it isn’t media-rich, it isn’t GPRS dependent, it isn’t locked in to one carrier – but it is better mobile social networking than I’ve seen in years. And you know what? It doesn’t look all that much like our browser-based social networking experience.

Until we live in a world of media-rich mobile devices attached to fat pipes, we’re going to make do with the tools we have. That is, we’re not expecting the mobile to be the browser – and we quite like (or rather, grudgingly accept) the mobile as its own space. The social networking that we do in the mobile is different from that in the browser, and as long as it answers our information needs, we’re quite pleased with the results.

Along with Twitter, Loopt is another fantastic example of mobile social networking. The folks from Loopt (I believe the company has something like a 21-year-old CEO) built an entire product around the answering of a very simple, but very relevant social information need – “Where you at?” The Loopt platform took advantage of the E911 infrastructure and is now providing its location-based services to subscribers of Boost Mobile. Of course, Loopt is not cross-service, heavily limiting its usefulness – but imagine if it was.

Both of these services prove a very important point – the ways we think of social networking in the mobile are different. While the various Telco/Social Network deals make for good ad copy and probably sound sexy to some senior VP of something or another when pitched, the actual value in these relationships will come through implementation. If Orange and Vodafone can look beyond the mindset of simply connecting the mobile to the site as if it were a browser, perhaps they can leverage the real value of these partnerships.

As the article’s expert, Falk Müller-Veerse states, “it’s likely to take three to four years before social networking via mobile phones becomes mainstream,” that is probably the best argument I could muster for rethinking mobile social networking. The handsets aren’t here, the data plans aren’t here, the data speed isn’t here – but if we think of mobile social networking in new and innovative ways – ala Twitter or Loopt – there are tremendous opportunities. And the rub is, these opportunities exist for answering very simple questions.

Until the providers wake up to this reality – and perhaps they never will because their paradigm is so carrier-centric (Imagine a mobile company developing something that would work cross-carrier like Twitter – never!), the market for mobile social networking is squarely in the hands of those who design elegantly simple technologies that solve real information needs. I’m looking at you, readers.