Facebook co-opting twitter?

Woah, facebook is now using a @ notation that Twitter is using. Maybe they've been doing this for a while, but it's the first that I've seen it so far.

So now how does this work, does it let me link my Twitter account and my friends' twitter accounts to their Facebook or can I use @ and it will still get to them.

I suppose I should look up how this works, a shame that their UI doesn't give me a link to learn more.

Although an interesting point, if it is actually linked up to Twitter, how come it's giving me this note, my Twitter account and Facebook accounts are separate unless ... Data Mining?

Oopsie, you can crash the Wave

Whoops, looks like Wave can't handle 3 gadgets, typing in multiple levels of threads and adding someone at the same time.
Frankly I'm surprised it didn't crash earlier.

Initial impressions of Google Wave

Like one of the many hundreds of thousands of people that are using Google Wave, I'm sure I'm not the first to be saying ... WHAT?!?

Now, I have gone through a few of the YouTube videos explaining what Google Wave is and understand that it's a communications platform that includes some of Google's product offerings. I'll break it down to how I see it in my own set of paradigms.
(NB - yeah I know it's kludgy but it's the way I think)

Wave as an email client
- Well ok, this is a poor email client since email you'll be messaging a large number of people who may not be a "Google contact" and who you may not really care what they look like with their user photo
- Still has nice message threading UI

Wave as an IM client
- Works well to see you contacts close and all the message history
- It looks like the best asynchronous IM viewers that I've seen. Other clients like Adium or Trillian are pretty poor for looking at past conversations
- It's still limited for me 'cause I don't have that many friends on Google Wave

Wave as a wiki
- I haven't tested this out yet since again, I don't have many friends on Wave
- Looks to be the most promising of features as an agile work Team-room

Wave as a communications platform
- Well I suppose this is the future, when the hackathons and Google Wave app store drive more functionality, we may have this as
> gaming
> document sharing and group editing
> recording and playback of google chat (voice & video)
> possibly even the random conversations that ICQ had back in the day

So these paradigms are how I see Google Wave evolving over time, as part of my usage. I'm sure there are people (re: Google employees) that are all over that spectrum. The challenge going forward is how to satisfy all these different user behaviours without creating a mess of a UI.

Good Luck Google!

iSkin manufacturer error

Kinda weird, the Enter key and Backslash are joined together.

The product is still useful though, I feel much more comfortable with potato chips near my laptop.

If you're interested this is the one I got.

The counter to Rolling Stone's article on Goldman Sachs

I just read a very witty response to the Rolling Stone article on Goldman by Michael Lewis (via Bloomberg).

There was one quote that I found particularly interesting:
"The bozos at Merrill Lynch, the dimwits at Citigroup, the nimrods at Lehman Brothers, the louts at Bear Stearns, even that momentarily useful lunatic Joe Cassano at AIG -- all of these people took risks that no non-Goldman person should ever take"

Now probably Michael Lewis is right. Maybe Goldman Sachs is just much better than all of its competition and they should be richly rewarded for their performance. In fact, they're probably so good that I'd be willing to award them victory. It's time that they're crowned king of their industry and now we'll break them up and let competition flourish again. It's time for all those idiots who are running the other companies to fail & die and let the smart folk over at GS run everything, but at separate companies. Thus letting the capitalist enterprise work by having competition create the efficiencies.

Obviously this is an impossibility in this world, but something amusing to speculate. We thrive on an ideal that the free market creates the best value and most efficiencies; but we fail to recognize that in a competitive arena, companies will drive towards one victor and to that victor, they are awarded the coveted Monopoly status. Which effectively ends our free market.

So go take your spoils and your monopolistic position over your idiot enemies. I'm not going to stop you, and really, no one will.

A note on Waterloo and a response to Brand New

I apologize to the people of Brand New for having to comment about this on my blog, but the way their site is structured, I can't really tell who this Armin person is who posted about the logo of my school (U of Waterloo) nor am I going to give in any sign in information to a site that has no about page. But I will give attribution to the link here so you can trackback.

If you hate the logo join the Facebook group.

I take offense in the general tone of the article but mostly at this particular part of the authors blog post:
"But somehow, a crest, like thousands of other crests — who the majority of people don’t know what they stand for anyway — does. Unfortunately this is antiquated thinking. Universities can not get by with traditional crests in today’s über branded environment and, if you look around, most large universities operate with a “marketing” logo and use a traditional seal for boring things like diplomas or the back covers of their catalogues"

1. Majority of people don't know what the crest stands for
- One of the benefits of having a crest, even among thousands, is that it is part of our visual vocabulary that denotes a University. While the new "W" logo is plain hideous (to which he also agrees) an non-crest is not automatically the answer.
- While Armin is certainly correct that "a majority of people" don't know Waterloo's crest. I would also guess that presenting a random internet sampling of people with a red crest with the word "VERITAS" on it wouldn't get instant recognition of Harvard University either.

2. Most large universities operate with a “marketing” logo and use a traditional seal
- I'm not sure where the author is claiming that most large universities operate with 2 sets of logos. In a quick scan, U of T, Queens, McGill, UBC do not use a separate logo.
- The exception I found was Western, but that has a specific use for the Western Mustangs, the sporting logo.
- It seems that American universities tend to do so in order to create a specific and separate brand around the sporting and alumni aspect of the university separate from the academics. At Waterloo (and in other Canadian universities), we do not support athletics in the same manner and really Waterloo's alumni efforts concentrate around how it is an excellent academic institution.
- If there is a comparison to Californian schools, like my own UC Berkeley, you have the Cal logo and the crest logo. Where it is also an excellent academic university, however, it is a University of California school, so all of the UCs (LA, Irvine, Berkeley, etc) all have the same crest, so a second logo is necessary for such differentiation.

3. Universities cannot get by with with a traditional crest in an über branded environment
- One of the thngs about brand is that it generally takes a while to be recognized. Waterloo is a fairly young university and probably does a better job with recognition compared to other instituions that are 50 years old.
- Waterloo has already invested over 20 years in the crest (wikipedia link) with the primary growth happening in recent times with graduates successes at RIM, OpenText, and various companies throughout the Silicon Valley.
- Brands take time and effort to cultivate. In the über branded marketing world, there's often millions of dollars that are put into launching or re-launching a new brand. Waterloo as a public university will unlikely have such an ability to put a new brand front and centre so it will try to rely on word of mouth to push this new logo. Which given the Facebook group and other conversations informally here in California, it will alienate the alumni.

If I could go back in time to talk to President Johnston, I would keep the word of mouth going and invest more time in alumni to promote the brand and the existing logo which most alums are accustomed to. All that time in committee could instead be put into really building the community and reputation of Waterloo rather than drawing up the next big "W".

[If you're coming here randomly, I have not worked in a branding focused agency. I'm a designer formerly in the advertising world and I've done branding at the Haas Graduate School of Business at UC Berkeley]

Sick of health care debates

I was just reading this article on the health care debate (via Fox News) and I'm really tired of lawmakers trying to stall and do nothing instead of passing a bill that gets closer to fixing the system. The number bandied about is 1 Trillion dollars over 10 years. For an economy the size of the United States, who cares?!?!? It's chump change. Just take a look at the US's GDP number last year.

14 Trillion, in one year.

And how much of that is health care? Well, Mr. Krugman summarizes it here as a percent of GDP (via NY Times). Assuming it's around 16% this year, the cost of health care is 2.25 Trillion dollars in one year. Hmm, 1T in 10 years or 2.25T in 1 year (and rising).

Why is fixing this an issue?

Paul Krugman on Goldman's bonuses

Paul Krugman put it much more eloquently than I did in my last post (via NY Times). And was also put better than I (and more vitriolically) in this Rolling Stones piece.

I think my attitude has fallen to the wayside as pure cynicism. My experiences over the years here in the United States is that the will and desire to make change has evapourated. Maybe there was some spark and glimmer of said change when Obama took office but at the end of the day, he's still a politician. Anyone that would try to really fight for social change and economic change that truly benefits the people is labeled a radical and ridiculed to the point where their impact on politics is reduced to zero.

The small hope I do have is within the realm of technology. Much in the way that the financial industry has gained control of this country; technology can move it in a different direction. The principle in my mind is the same.
That in a political system, the easiest message is the one that gets voted on and debated. All others slip through the cracks.

Technology, like finance, has the ability to make more efficient the growth of the state. Also like finance, the workings of the technology are very difficult to understand without an in-depth knowledge of the rules and procedures that govern it. With technology, we can virally introduce concepts that undermine the finance industry, such as transparency. So a small change like www.citability.org can create a technological framework and a political framework that makes transparent the rules in which this political system is based.

It could also be used in more nefarious ways to such end as well. For example, we could have a police state in which all transactions are tracked and monitored by the government, so Goldman Sachs only paying 1% in corporate taxes would be monitored and funds automatically seized and placed into government coffers.

Or we could be subtle, such that rogue financial systems with peer to peer lending and financing aggregate to have the same impact on raising capital and borrowing against futures on an individual level so you don't just have institutional investment, when someone owns part of your company, they are a Facebook profile and not some faceless shareholder to be duped or cheated.

I'm reminded of the book by Thomas Friedman, the Lexus & the Olive Tree. The olive tree is a representation of us and our pride in our homes & homeland. One of the consequences of this rampant economic growth & increased wealth is that we're becoming a globalized people without the pride of being an earthling. It's easy to not care about things like oil piracy since it happens in some other country. I'd like to think that our global financiers are also global citizens but it's hardly the case.

I think that while the purse strings of the world are controlled by people are without care for their fellow human, we're only going to continue along this same course of development. Maybe Bladerunner is going to come true after all.

Banker's pay is just another tax

I'm just as miffed as many other people were over the recent announcement that banks will be raising salaries for employees that will restore their earnings back to their 2007 level. Like in this NY Times article or in many of the other ones around the same time.
Not that I'm angry about people getting paid a high amount of money, if you're doing good work and bringing in lots of value, I don't have a problem with salaries at an average of 1/2 a million dollars per year.

The main issue is that it's my tax dollars that are supporting this industry and that it's not good value that they're bringing in. Financial institutions need to provide a fluid financial market to let
borrowers and investors connect. An investment bank is not the group that puts together circuit boards and aluminum to make iPods, it connects the financial forces to let a company get enough capital to put them together, and market them, and sell them, and service them, and everything.

It's like in my own industry in the media & advertising world. The media business is a connector, it doesn't really produce anything. Like if Huggies diapers wanted to get their commercials on some shows on ABC Family, they'd pay a media company to negotiate the 15 or 30 second spots but the media company doesn't create the TV commercials, nor does it manufacture diapers. The media company takes it's cut and connects the 2 happy parties.

Both are still valuable services so why am I annoyed at the pay? Well, I happen to also be a techie and I love it when technical innovations drive down the cost and makes it easier to do things yourself. The newspapers have seen much of their media dollars erode from people
advertising on search engines. Google even goes as far as to make it simple to bid on your own advertising terms and target them on where they should appear. The niftyness of Google ads is that it makes it easy to see your customers and it's very visible on how your ads appear and your advertising dollars are spent in their auction system, driving prices down and changing the way media companies work.

With the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been pumped into the banking industry to preserve 1/2 million dollar salaries; I think we're about time for the same change in the way we do financial services. Right now the mess of regulations and multi-million dollar lobbying efforts is keeping this system at the status quo. If there's enough political will to open up & simplify the banking system then we can create a platform for smaller and more competitive financial
innovations instead of mega corps that are too big to fail.

So instead of being worried about losing your top employees and paying out billions of my tax dollars; I say let them go! Start something new and then give me a good value for my money.

The "new" Facebook -

Last week I was at South by Southwest Interactive and attended a talk by Dave Morin, senior platform manager at Facebook.
Most of the highlights of the presentation you can read here or here. But what struck me in the presentation what the fundamental way that Facebook sees its users and it's overall model of data. This is the first in a few posts of my thoughts on Facebook.

You and Your Connections: At a macro level, Facebook thinks you're connected to people in one of 4 different ways.
1. Friends
2. Family
3. Coworkers
4. Public Figures

As a step for providing some structure its commendable since they lifted the cap on the 5000 friends. However, humans aren't quite as binary as a 01 or a 11. We don't just split our friends into preset groups, it's fluid and changes over time.

For example, there was a talk at SXSWi on Social Engineering: Scam Your Way Into Anything or From Anybody (mp3). If I had that posted on Facebook, some of my friends would commend me for getting to know more about social engineer and others would deride me for learning how to be a scam artist.

This will increasing cause problems across the web with the proliferation of Facebook Connect. The three areas of focus for FB Connect that Morin highlighted were:
1. Identity - Real Name Real Identity
2. Friends - Add social context to filter & highlight content
3. Feed - Publish actions with 3rd parties to show your friends what you're doing

This leads to the fallacy that assumes that your social network provides context to who you are. But a computerized representation can never capture a person's entire identity. So what we're probably going to see in the next few months is Facebook doing semi-targeted link bombing everything across the web as FB Connect makes an assumption that the little information spoors you drop as you surf the web wants to be shown and streamed to everyone in your network. Traffic volumes and links will rise crazily as ad agencies like mine try to game this system and make sure their stuff get the more number of links across the web. Then eventually it will subside as people learn privacy controls and people realise that the value of social linking drops as the signal to noise ratio plummets.
Maybe some new upstart company will come along and unseat Facebook in the meantime. Who knows?

Facebook and Reach

@Silona tweeted about an Economist article that talks about the max number of social connections a human brain can handle is about 150 (the Dunbar number). They interviewed Cameron Marlow, a researcher with Facebook that gave data on the average number of connections a person has on Facebook is 120. However, the people in the high network group are about 500.

The average male Facebook user with 120 friends:

• Leaves comments on 7 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
• Messages or chats with 4 friends

The average female Facebook user with 120 friends:

• Leaves comments on 10 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
• Messages or chats with 6 friends

The average male Facebook user with 500 friends:

• Leaves comments on 17 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
• Messages or chats with 10 friends

The average female Facebook user with 500 friends:

• Leaves comments on 26 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
• Messages or chats with 16 friends

So what does this mean for campaigns?

If we're looking at doing a branded Facebook application we'd probably see about 1000 users for a moderately successful app. So this lets us serve up 120,000 impressions on the status updates or about 840,000 impressions per week. [Note: As of last year when I checked, Facebook allows applications to send out 7 updates per week].
This level of engagement is pretty low as status update, the number of users that are active in that range is about 5.8% so you're probably getting a number closer to 50,000 real eyeballs on your brand.
So next time you do a media spend, take a look at how much it costs for getting your impressions on to Facebook and maybe the cost will justify doing an application instead.

Skittles: Social Web and the Navigation Takeover

A coworker of mine pointed me to a new campaign site for Skittles. It's a homepage takeover where their home page is replaced by a Twitter search and a navigator that takes you to the Skittles Facebook page and the Skittles YouTube page.

My own quick summary of what I've seen out on the web in comments are:

• Marketers that are asking questions to see if their readers have any opinions
• Social media people who are mostly saying that Skittles "gets it" by going social
• Advertising pundits that are saying how Skittles is ripping off the agency Modernista

From a usability point of view, I'd have to say I hate it. The usefulness of this explorer far degrades the sites that they're pointing to. I get a distracted from my goal of finding out more about skittles because my UI is blocked by their own navigator.

For brand and ad perspective. I think this campaign hits at the perfect time. Twitter usage is quite high and to do a splashy homepage takeover is drawing hundreds of thousands of eye-balls. As the first major brand to do this, they're probably the only ones now since the newness will have worn off. Executionally, it's so so. The creative aspects around this site and the navigator are not very exciting and future agencies will have to wrap this content around better creative to interest and engage their users.

The most interesting thing that I saw is that external groups are already piggy-backing off of this twitter effort to promote their own groups. I saw a tweet about saving Tibet that had the word Skittles to bring it into the tweet search results page. Also another by Jessica Stanell that promoted her own blog.

One of the big risks of opening up your brand to the web is the lack of reputation systems. If I was Wrigley's, I could have a bunch of anonymous users log on and start trashing Skittles on twitter and that would flood the site temporarily. It probably would only need to go on for about 5 minutes in order to get picked up by blogs or the press and bring the lawyers of the Mars Candy corporation to lock the site down. A reputation system could help (not bulletproof) the PR of Skittles against baseless attacks.

Although at the end of the day, being social on the web means you've got to have thick skin and given enough time, everyone will have it and the eyes to ignore all the crazies.

Points of Touch: User Experience in Spore

I came across a post on Boxes and Arrows about a Bolt|Peters user research project on the video game Spore. It happens that one of the sister agencies that I work with also had a side project alongside called Spore Stories.

So that got me thinking to more of an end to end experience of a video game. Total User Experience encompasses much more than just the game itself, in the marketing realm, you have to generate interest and connect to your audience even before the game itself is launched.

As a full service agency typically our process to engage in both media drivers as well as creative experiences to approach potential customers and create a continuous relationship with them in the months leading up to a game's launch.

1. Develop the integrated strategy with the client
- Market research and user research showing where prospective customers will engage with gaming related resources and types of behaviours they have online
- Create a content calendar that mixes in media buys and video content as it will be released up to launch

2. Excite the early adopters
- Video game teasers and trailers tend to have standard release schedules and this content gets presented to video game sites where games in-the-know will go for the latest on a new game
- Enable CRM activities to catch potential customers that want to give you their email address
- A website with social media functions can start the formation of a community as they discuss and guess at the story of the game
- Alternatively other social networks such as facebook or myspace can be used as a social platform instead of building your own

3. Push people into the site
- As the game nears launch and if the demand warrants, you can get some to purchase the game ahead of time
- Media buys with banner ads on targeted sites can have a huge impact on web traffic, if you're really well targeted, you can see a 2-5% clickthrough rate
- Catchy viral sites may get some interests pushing to games to like My Black Valentine. Which pushes to the EA title, Black.

4. Stay with customers through their gaming experience
- Actively manage your community and look for ways to solve pain points of your gamers
- Your most vocal customers will be the gaming review sites, make it known if there are patches or updates that improve the game

Keeping on top of all the ways gamers interact outside the game certainly helps put a nice touch on the game and more importantly helps push the bottom line and set you up for a sequel!

Clip: Search Spending Off 8 Percent In Q4

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Arthur Law <arthur.law@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2009 02:14:00 +0000
Subject: Report: Search Spending Off 8 Percent In Q4
To: alaw_viigo <arthur.law@gmail.com>

While search engine marketing has been somewhat more durable during
the recession (to date) than other media, that may not save SEM from
negative growth. The Wall Street Journal is reporting on the latest
Efficient Frontier search marketing report, set to be released
tomorrow. According to the Journal, the report will state that SEM
declined 8 [...]

....

http://feeds.searchengineland.com/~r/searchengineland/~3/516646581/report-search-spending-off-8-percent-in-q4-16211

--
This article was sent using my Viigo.
For a free download, go to http://getviigo.com

--

"Voici mon secret. Il est tres simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le
coeur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux."
Antoine-Marie-Roger de Saint-Exupery, Le Petit Prince

--
Sent from my mobile device

"Voici mon secret. Il est tres simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le
coeur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux."
Antoine-Marie-Roger de Saint-Exupery, Le Petit Prince

Start of the New Year Potluck

Here's the food I'm making for the Pot Luck, just drop down if you can make it and what you're bringing below in the comments!

See you all tomorrow (Saturday)!
6pm for drinks
7pm for dinner

Appetizer:
- Be the first!

Salads:
- Pinenut & Blackberry

Entree:
- Black Bean sauce chicken breast
- Black-eyed peas and spinach
- Whole duck

Starch:
- Coconut sticky rice

Dessert:
- Raspberry Lembic & Ice Cream
- Ginger Cake
- Pie

Drinks:
- Red Stripe