A deep dive into digital marketing

Welcome to the new facebook

Posted by Chris under Facebook, Social Networking

Swurl, worth a look and a sign-up

Posted by Chris under Facebook, Friend Feed, Social Networking, Swurl, Technology, Twitter, Uncategorized

As if friendfeed wasn’t enough, along comes Swurl and from my first 15 minutes I can already say it’s worth a good and deeper look. Just like friendfeed it can aggregate all of your disparate sources yet it’s being positioned as more of a life scrapbook.

Swurl is essentially a lifecasting aggregator that pulls your current activity from web services, all the usual suspects are here: like Flickr, Twitter, Amazon, Pandora and about fifteen others.

Perhaps the coolest feature of Swurl is that the site automatically detects what kind of content it is pulling (from your other sources) and “enhance” it accordingly. So things like Flickr photos will be shown in full size along with a slide show. Another great feature is the Timeline and impressive calendar function to visualize when actions have occurred. Put on your marketing glasses as you look at this, I spy a way to monetize within this calendar. Ryan and Jonathan if you haven’t figured this out yet, give me a ping I’ve got some ideas for you.

In public beta now, no codes or referrals needed to join. And IA/UX people you’ll love the sign-up process, three simple fields, it doesn’t get much easier.

PS have to figure out security settings as it seems anything you put out there is all public all the time

Facebook increasing noise to signal

Posted by Chris under Facebook, Social Networking

As if having my friend feed updates appear in facebook’s mini-feed wasn’t enough noise (good noise I think) but Facebook is going to be letting its members leave comments on each others’ “mini-feeds” of activity, according to an announcement Wednesday from the social network. Now live, went live late wed. and not discovered by many users… yet.

But how about this twist, you can now comment on your friends announcement/feed of something in addition to the posted item itself. I know it’s mind bending.

To break it down and provide context. Facebook currently lets members comment on one another’s “walls,” as well as on individual photos, posted items, videos, and other pieces of media that they share on their profiles. The Mini-Feed, introduced in 2006 to initial shock and eventual acceptance, is a feature on Facebook profiles that details a given member’s activity on the site–photos added, profile information updated, status message changed, new friends, et cetera.

Facebook also added external information to Mini-Feeds earlier this year, with users opting to sync their Facebook profiles with accounts from Yelp, YouTube, Digg, Hulu, and a number of other media sites.

Holy Meta information batman. As the press release says “We aim to help users share information and communicate more easily, which sometimes entails having a conversation around a piece of content or an action,” a release from Facebook explained. “We already have comments for photos, videos, and posted items, but we realized there is much more content users want to comment on for example, status messages.”

So if a friend of yours, let’s call him Russ, changed his status message to “is now, officially, writing a book.,” you could navigate to Russ’ Mini-Feed and leave a comment saying, “I’m writing a post about you writing a book, sort of.

Marked with a comment bubble next to each mini-feed item I haven’t yet seen many friends using this but it’s only been a few days. And if you don’t want friends commenting on your Mini-Feed items, you can turn the feature off in the account prefs.

sort of like this (taken later in the day)

on Facebook

Posted by Chris under Facebook, Social Networking

Posted by a friend of mine (a great copywriter) on another friends wall

To be a guy on facebook:

The first rule of facebook is, you do not admit you’re on facebook. The second rule of facebook is, you do not admit you’re on facebook. The third rule of facebook, someone pokes someone, sends a cupcake, maybe even a growing flower, the chat session is over. The fourth rule: only two guys to a funwall. The fifth rule: only one super wall post at a time fellas. The sixth rule: take part with no pride, no abundance of testosterone. The seventh rule: status updates will go on as long as they have to – or until the character count is maxed out. And the eighth and final rule: If this is your first day on facebook, you have to edit your profile.