Archives: August 2009

This is Day 9 of the 30 Days to 3,000 Fans program. You can learn more about the program here.
Remember the viral Facebook note about “25 things about me”? If you don’t then you probably haven’t been on Facebook for long. The 25 things about me note spread through Facebook and touched millions of users before it eventually died out. The main ideas behind the note was similar to a chain letter. You write 25 things people don’t know about you and then tag your friends and ask them to write the note as well. The end result was that million of users ended up writing 25 things about themselves and it ended up getting covered by people in the press because so many people had participated.
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Facebook is getting aggressive with a few developers who have been abusing the platform. Today the company alerted us to a “substantial” policy enforcement against the developers behind My Calendar, one of the largest Facebook applications. MyCalendar has been temporarily disabled and hundreds of other applications have been permanently shut down. According to Facebook, the developers have been engaging in misleading and spammy tactics in order to get more users rather than building valuable experiences.
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I knew something was missing from the Facebook homepage for the past few days but not until this morning did I realize what was now absent: highlights. For those unaware of what feed highlights were, they were supposed to be the most relevant stories for a user. I noticed more recently that many of the feed stories weren’t very relevant to me and apparently many other users realized the same thing because now they’re gone.
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This evening Facebook has announced the launch of the “Twitter exporter tool” for Facebook Page administrators. As Jaime Schopflin Hall highlights in an email to the press, “the tool allows Facebook Page administrators to automatically syndicate content and information they publish on Facebook to Twitter without leaving Facebook.com”. This tool was previously tested out and spotted via a Twitter update by Blake Ross, a Facebook employee, but then was later removed.
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This afternoon Twitter announced that geolocation data would now be added to users’ tweets. It’s something that Facebook has actually been discussing for some time off and on but adding such a feature to all feed stories isn’t the easiest process. In the meantime Facebook is still trying to adjust their platform to provide greater access to information. It’s essentially the “out opening” of Twitter, a similar strategy that Google attempted, starting with OpenSocial.
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This is Day 8 of the 30 Days to 3,000 Fans program. You can learn more about the program here.
Want to have highly engaging conversations on your Facebook page? You better get good at mastering the art of the social media conversation. How is a conversation within social media any different than a normal conversation? It isn’t! If you are going to build a following on Facebook let alone any other site on the internet, you are going to need to put in the time necessary to build relationships with others. Whether it’s posting follow-up comments or reaching out to people that have asked valuable questions or have even posted criticism, it’s important that you build an ongoing dialogue with your fans.
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That’s what you’d think if you read Sarah Lacy’s exposé on Facebook’s buyback program. Apparently it came as a surprise that an excessive number of employees wanted to sell their shares before an initial public offering inaccurately projected for later this year. So why would all these employees rush to sell shares when they could be worth much more at the time of an IPO?
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This is Day 7 of the 30 Days to 3,000 Fans program. You can learn more about the program here.
For those of you that haven’t spent a lot of time with internet marketing, you probably are not aware of what search engine optimization is. The main goal of search engine optimization is to increase the amount of traffic driven to any given site by search engines. Currently search engines (and mostly Google) serve as the starting point of a user’s journey around the web. While many users will go directly to their favorite sites, search engines are used multiple times a day by most internet users to discover resources they haven’t previously found.
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This evening I’ve been playing around with Facebook’s new iPhone application and it’s definitely a significant upgrade from before. As mentioned on a number of instances, the new application includes events, Facebook page management, full access to the news feed, the ability to create and edit notes, video upload, and more. This iteration is a significant upgrade and given that the application has over 4 million daily active users and 12 million monthly users, this will be a much welcomed upgrade.
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There’s been a bunch of coverage of the iLike acquisition deal over the past 24 hours including those that call this a massive blow Facebook. The primary “losers” in this supposed $20 million MySpace acquisition is iLike, who has been struggling to find a breakthrough business model. There’s also an underlying story about how the Partovi brothers and Mark Zuckerberg grew apart since the early launch of the platform.
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