Archive for October, 2009

Facebook revealed their roadmap yesterday and it includes a number of changes for developers.  Inside Facebook has a create summer here.

I think the biggest change is the consolidation of communications into the Facebook inbox.  Facebook Invites and Notifications are going away and communication will be divided into Inbox communication and Email.  It looks like both channels will feature an opt-in requirement, making app to user communications very challenging in the future.

I think the consolidation of communication is probably a good thing.  Everytime I see a screenshot of someone’s Homepage I always see hundreds of ignored invites and notifications.  I don’t know that the new system will fix that but it should allow users to find these types of communications centrally.

The other change is around the placement of Bookmarked Applications.  It looks like these will be moving from the task bar to right side bar where the feed filters are located now.  Its not clear where the feed filters will be going or how often they are used ( I suspect they are not being used effectively ).

All of these represent another UI change for users though and Facebook has indicated they want to roll-out the changes by the end of the year.  As always it will be interesting to see the reaction from users to these changes…

Facebook released some interface changes last night.  They appear to be:

• New Group Page design with Tab Interface and strong wall presence.  This makes groups now very similar to Facebook Pages.
• Addition of a LiveFeed option to the Homepage.   This works similar to the Newsfeed but doesn’t allow the same type of content filtering and the Newsfeed doesn’t seem to update as often.
• Remove Feature Items, the featured items from the right hand side have been removed.  These were kind of random in any case.
• Friend Suggest now suggests contacting friends with incomplete or low-Facebook profile usage

The changes are all relatively small but the most significant is probably the LiveFeed addition and it seems users will be defaulting to this in most cases.

For years now Google has dominated the search marketing field.  Its Pagerank algorithm attempts to find content that is the most relevant to the keywords being search.  In most cases this means placing a greater emphasis on older more established content and ignoring the newer content.  This has worked well for most content types except for breaking news and trending items.  When Michael Jackson died a search for “Michael Jackson” was more likely to bring up fan pages than articles around his death.

Enter Twitter and Facebook, for trending topics the social networks have an advantage in that they can see trending topics developing in real-time.  And yesterday they announced a partnership with Bing to power its real-time search component.  This should provide Bing with an advantage in the real-time search market.  Its not clear how big the real-time market is as compared to the more traditional search market that Google dominates.

Its will be interesting to see if Marketers start to place a greated emphasis on purchasing keywords based on real-time trends that be associated with their brands.  The search engines are already well equipped with bid based pricing models to handle real-time price fluctuations in keywords.

One Degree announced yesterday that they are stopping production on their site.  I’ve been a long time reading and even contributed some articles a few years ago and it looks like they’re committing to keeping the site up as an archive for now.

I’d really like to thank Kate and Rose for all the time and effort that went into maintaining the site.   They’ve done a great job of since taking over from Ken.

The agenda for Facebook Garage Montreal has been posted and I’ve been accepted present on ‘Public Involve with Social Media’.  I will be great to talk about my work with Ascentum over the last few months.  The preliminary agenda is:

• 5pm to 6:30pm: buffet, socializing
• 6:30pm to 6:45pm: opening remarks – Louise Clements, Head of Sales, Facebook Canada
• 6:45pm to 7:15pm: first keynote – Hell’s Kitchen: Facebook comme plateforme de jeux vidéos, Emmanuel Delmoly, co-founder Social2U
• 7:15pm to 7:45pm: Facebook Advertising 101 – speaker to be confirmed
• 7:45pm to 8:15pm: break
• 8:15pm to 9:15pm Social Marketing / Facebook Connect
  • Speaker: Marc Snyder – Facebook et politique municipale
  • Speaker: Colin Smilie – Public involvement with Facebook
  • Speaker: Virginia Magaletta – FB Connect Marketing Case Studies
• 9:15pm to 10:00pm: second keynote – Matt Wyndowe, Facebook (Palo Alto, CA) – Topic to be confirmed

Should be an exciting evening. The event is free and you can register here.