Cam Balzer's Web-Cite

Facebook Hires Sandberg to Make Microsoft's $240 Million Investment Pay Off [SearchEngineWatch]

Interesting developments at Facebook, hiring Sheryl Sandberg as COO from Google where she headed up Global Online Ad Sales/Ops. SearchEngineWatch reports that she recently spoke at a conference:

Google cracked the code on monetizing search advertising. Where is advertising heading next? [SearchEngineWatch].

The Coming Ad Revolution - WSJ.com

Now this is more like it, WSJ: The Coming Ad Revolution. Esther Dyson crisply summarizes where the value lies for individuals in trading info for relevance:

The new model creates a more trusted environment for reaching high-value, frequent purchasers, whether of airline tickets, electronics, clothes or other items. Where does that leave the less-frequent purchasers? Probably looking to their friends rather than to advertising for advice. I'm an expert on travel; my friends may look to me for hotel choices. When I'm in the mood to buy a book or a new computer, I'll check out what my friends on Facebook are doing.

This does not mean that traditional online advertising will go away, just that it will become less effective. Value is being created in users' own walled gardens, which they will cultivate for themselves in real estate owned by the social networks. The new value creators are companies -- like Facebook and Dopplr -- that know how to build and support online communities.

An interesting tangent to this is another recent WSJ article on measuring the effectiveness of TV ads:

As the Web's ability to target specific consumers races ahead, TV advertisers, who collectively spend about $70 billion a year in the U.S. alone, are under increasing pressure to demonstrate that their money is well-spent. Couch to Supermarket: Connecting Dots

The tables are turned: web advertising is the de facto standard in accountability. Keep a sharp eye out for a similar piece in 2-5 years touting the highly measurable engagement between consumers and brands on social networks as the standard to which online banner ads... and maybe even search... should be held.

Bill Gates Quits Facebook

And in today's "news unworthy of the WSJ [even its blogs]" category: Bill Gates Quits Facebook. Talk about vacuous buzz mongering. "A week of bad press" for social networks? It's all been journalistic speculation based on vague presumptions and fundamental misunderstandings about the potential of these sites. Sure the hype might be burning off: not in itself a bad thing. But that doesn't mean the sites themselves aren't viable businesses with growing consumer bases who perceive real value in them.

Facebook functionality set free

SeenThis? is a very cool Facebook application that let's you see (anonymously/in aggregate) what your friends are reading on major publisher sites (WSJ, NBC, etc). Facebook network data appears on the publisher site too... FB functionality set free on the web.

Google Gathers Social Graph Information From The Web, Launches API

Link: Google Gathers Social Graph Information From The Web, Launches API.

Web 2.0 event calendar

Web 2.0 & Technology Conference & Event Calendar calendar in Google Calendar from Somewhat Frank

Live blogging with CoverItLive...

Live blogging tool... COVERITLIVE.COM. Looks cool.

Beacon and Typepad

I like this. TypePad is letting bloggers who are Facebook members to automagically notify the Facebook newsfeed when they post stories.

Offering Facebook Beacon on TypePad means that you can now choose to share your new blog posts with your friends on Facebook. (Everything TypePad: Features)

Smart of TypePad to make this an opt-in feature. For each blog, you choose whether to be prompted to send the stories to FB in the blog's configuration.

Can't the other sites using beacon do the same? why wouldn't zappos or overstock market this as an opt-in feature to their users?

One thing I don't get about the negative response: don't you have to click OK to these dialogues before the item is added to your feed? I mean, that could be a bit clearer from a usability POV, but all the prompts I've seen make it pretty clear that you can delete any story or that you can say OK.

My Questions about OpenSocial

Read/WriteWeb is asking for thoughts on concerns about OpenSocial. Here are some of my questions, elaborated from yesterday's post, which could develop into concerns, depending on what the answers are:

• will open social enable cross-platform friend interactions? the most successful apps enable friends to do things with each other. the more friends the better the experience. smaller social platforms might have focused and active niche groups, but unless they achieve some critical friend mass, they won't tip. And so app developers won't bother, unless they're satisfied with meeting a niche need and not going big.
  
  • In other words, is brad fitzpatrick's thinking on opening the social graph making it's way into OpenSocial in a useful way?
• how will the social networks vet/approve the applications running on their sites? TRUST underpins FB's success. specifically, how do social networks prevent unscrupulous use of personal data in this open environment? within FB users trust that the apps accessing their info have been vetted by FB and that apps aren't permitted to do certain things with their data. how can the same assurances live in a much more open OpenSocial world? would one unscrupulous site potentially soils the whole platform? spoiling things for user quickly restores all the negative connotations of that slippery term "viral" (see my gripe against tagged, for instance)
• is there an monetization model built into OpenSocial? is a FB-like hands-off approach built in or will it be determined site by site, which could introduce tons of friction for developers?
• does OpenSocial tip the advantage to established developers by making it hard to scale efforts?... if you have to build numerous variations of an app for various sites, it will be really hard for scrappy innovators to get traction the way they did on FB.

Marc Andreessen touts OpenSocial

The guy who made the web browsable weighs in on benefits of OpenSocial:

This is very, very good for the web. Open Social is the kind of standard that web developers love, and can easily use. I think it will become a standard part of many developers' toolkits. It builds on HTML and Javascript, many people can support it, and it will be interoperable -- I know that because it already is interoperable for the partners in this week's launch. It's all good. (blog.pmarca.com: Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web.)

Raises a few questions for me:

• will open social enable cross-platform (or "container" in Andreessen's parlance) friend interactions?
• how will the social networks vet/approve the applications running on their sites?
• and further to that point, how do social networks prevent unscrupulous use of personal data in this open environment? within FB, users know that the apps accessing their info have been vetted by FB and that apps aren't permitted to do certain things with their data. are the same assurances in place with OpenSocial?