LSQHA Blog Reviews

It's been a given for some time that businesses, including startups, should have a presence on and connection with Facebook . With over 400 million active users, chances are your potential investors and customers are already there. Fan pages have been a simple way to generate interest and engage customers, and Facebook Connect has quickly become a standard in signing up and signing in users. In his keynote at f8 yesterday Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg actually mentioned startups in his opening remarks, stating that they "are requiring that their users use Facebook Connect. We want to make it simple to create these personalized experiences." Sponsor Whether or not Facebook is a "requirement" for startups, there are some things new businesses should think about based on yesterday's announcements. "Facebook Connect On Steroids" Facebook announced a major overhaul to its API and introduced three new components yesterday: social plugins , the Open Graph protocol , and the Graph API . By using the tags specified in this protocol, any website can now become part of the Facebook ecosystem. If a Facebook user visits your site and Likes your page, you have the ability then to publish information into that user's stream. In addition, implementation of the code on your site will give you access to administrative tools and analytics just like any Facebook fan page owner. As we wrote yesterday , this will take analytics to the next level, providing an incredible amount of demographic data about users who like and link their profiles to your site. However, this information will reside with Facebook, not on your own website, making them a de facto owner of your visitors' social data. Applications & Virtual Currency: Where the Money Is? While many businesses will likely integrate their websites into the expanding Facebook ecosystem, there is likely still room for growth within the platform itself, namely with application development. There are over 550,000 applications on the site, a number that continues to grow - and to encourage return visitors. To coincide with the growth of the application market, particularly in the area of social gaming, Facebook also announced the expansion of its official virtual currency, Credits . Last year Paypal processed over $500 million in virtual goods last year, with social gaming company Zynga becoming Paypal's second largest merchant (following eBay). Clearly Facebook seeks to stake a claim in the virtual currency market. Facebook Credits are currently in beta with over 100 applications, and will roll out to the entire network soon, Zuckerberg said yesterday. Credits will allow users to purchase one currency for all transactions on Facebook, rather than have to enter their credit card information with each purchase. By facilitating online payments, Facebook hopes to increase the percentage of users willing to purchase virtual goods to between 8% and 20% David vs. Goliath? Despite repetition at f8 yesterday that these changes were meant designed "for developers," it remains to be seen how the announcements will play out for developers and for users alike, the latter of whom are notorious for protesting changes to the site. In particular, continued concerns about privacy might not be well received, particulary given Facebook's past history with opening user data. Privacy concerns might not be the only thing that gives some businesses pause about Facebook's direction. Facebook also announced yesterday " instant personalization " yesterday, giving three "preferred partners" - Yelp , Pandora , and CNN - instant and additional access to Facebook profile information when users visit their sites. For startups in these areas, namely restaurant recommendation, music sharing, and news delivery, the "preferred partner" program might make industry in-roads more difficult and could adversely impact user adoption. As the "preferred partner" program expands beyond the three selected for launch, it remains to be seen the effect of being sanctioned - or not - by Facebook. The buzz yesterday was that Facebook had just " seized control of the Internet ." Comments on how you think the f8 announcements might play out for startups welcome! Discuss

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David vs. Goliath? An F8 Overview for Startups

Facebook announced yesterday that it is taking a number of dramatic steps that would all add up to serving 1 billion "like" clicks from visitors to sites around the web, within 24 hours. Many people are concerned about Facebook's growing dominance around the web . One group of high-profile New Yorkers has launched OpenLike , a "very alpha alternative to Facebook Like." Working on the project so far is much-watched blogging investor and startup guy Chris Dixon , Huffington Post co-founder and MIT Media Lab guy Jonah Peretti , Jonathan Glick of Dixon, Conway , Ehrenberg and other VC-blessed TLists , Tom Pinckney who with Dixon both sold SiteAdvisor and founded Hunch.com and MIT grad and Hunch engineer Peter Coles . Dixon said this afternoon that the project is "looking for an authoritative open source person to govern it." Sponsor So the establishment is in Palo Alto and the rock-star insurgents are from the East Coast? Let no one say the Internet is boring. The lightweight technology at OpenLike is right now just a way for site owners to provide buttons for sharing content on a wide variety of social networks. One line of javascript adds a series of sharing buttons to a site, which the site owner can edit. Given that there are any number of ways to do more or less this same thing, and that these are very smart people working on this, we're sure there's a lot more in the works. The project describes itself on its site as "an open protocol to allow sharing the things people like in a simple and standard method between web applications." We'll share more details if and when this project develops. Related: See also developer Jesse Stay's blog post How Do You Compete With This Beast: Here's How , about long-time open standards community member Phil Windley's new product Kynext . The battle over control or absence of control over the internet is far, far from over. There are lots of people getting ready to step up and challenge Facebook's powerful, seductive, expanding control. Discuss

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OpenLike: All-Star Team to Challenge Facebook's Expansion

Given Mark Zuckerberg's announcements at the Facebook F8 conference , one thing is certain: newspapers can no longer ignore Facebook's impact and reach. Whereas publishers continue to scapegoat Google for many of their current troubles, they should be equally, if not more, wary of Facebook. Whether they acknowledge it or not, newspapers are losing out to the social networking site on the fundamental fronts of community relevance, attention and information dissemination. Yet behind the perceived threat from Facebook, there is also a new opportunity for publications to achieve newfound audience relevance. Sponsor Guest author Chris Treadaway ( @ctreada ) is founder and CEO of Lasso , and author of the upcoming book Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day, an imprint of Sybex. He blogs at treadaway.typepad.com . Facebook's rise to dominance has been astounding. It is currently the most visited site in the United States, and boasts 400-plus million worldwide users. We've seen it go from a dorm room distraction to now being larger than the combined population of the United States and Mexico. With the social network claiming that roughly 70% of its user base is outside the United States, that means that there are at least 120 million Americans on Facebook today. Taken down to the local level, though, this means that Facebook might just already have more reach in the community than any other media outlet - especially local newspapers. With the unveiling of their Web-ubiquitous "Like" button and "social bar," as well as their Graph API, Facebook is now using its strengths to redefine how we interact with the Web in its entirety. So what does all of this mean for the publishing industry and for newspapers in particular? A few very important things: Facebook is now a legitimate threat to Google. It has accomplished this by changing the game from search discoverability to social context, which wasn't doable with 40 million users but is with 400-plus million users. Facebook is trying to become the first place people visit when logging into their computers every morning. The site that leads this battle carries the most online leverage, at least until it is knocked off the pedestal. Facebook is attempting to become pervasive across the entire Web, and without permission. Like it or not, site owners are going to have to deal with social media, but now in a much more pervasive way than ever before. Facebook is a competitor for the attention of local audiences. One minute spent on Facebook is a minute not spent on another Web property. Facebook will become a more interesting place as it aggregates data on what people are doing and how they are reacting to the Web as a whole, not just Facebook's network. So it isn't just necessary for media outlets to build a better Web sites anymore - they have to build engaging content that can appear on Facebook and drive value to their paper. It isn't impossible, but it has to be a priority. All of these things impact discoverability of a newspaper's content, who monetizes it and how. Those that succeed in becoming a viral Facebook content commodity will grow rapidly. Likewise, the decline of those news sources that fail to realize the necessary potential of Facebook will be swift. A deep and complete understanding of social media is necessary for publishers of any kind to modernize, grow and ultimately survive. It's becoming a necessary core competency, and fast. Yesterday, The Washington Post announced their "Network News" initiative, integrating Facebook into the paper's website. The Post's incorporation of activity from users' Facebook friends immediately creates a value of social relevance that trumps efforts like the New York Times' similar, though detrimentally insular, TimesPeople network . More importantly, however, are the possibilities such integration might provide for local newspapers. Relevance is a central theme to both the content shared on social networks and the community publication. Facebook offers those newspapers a readymade audience that is already connected to their desired local demographic. Local publications need to recognize the importance of tapping into Facebook's community, because, first and foremost, it is precisely where their readers are finding, sharing and discussing the types of pertinent content that the papers seek to champion. Newspapers no longer need traditional Web developers. Papers now need Facebook developers, experts who can partner with creative social-savvy businesspeople who know how to take advantage of the social graph. In the wake of Facebook's new features, it will not be long before newspaper and media executives are attacking and blaming Facebook for their problems in the way they do Google today. However, those publications that more progressively pursue the opportunities and value opened to them by Facebook's new tools will have a very different reaction. Photo by Michael Rogers . Discuss

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Why Newspapers Need to Heed Facebook, Now

Yesterday, Facebook launched a new widget called the "Facebook Like Button," which, simply put, brings the Facebook like button to the entire Internet. Website owners can implement the new button on their site using a small bit of code. In fact, you don't even have to be a developer to make your own like button - there's a little wizard that generates the code for you. Then it's as easy as copy-and-paste to get the button onto your site. However, there's a small problem with this new, easy-to-use new tool: it's possible to trick users into liking anything - even pages they've never visited! Sponsor "Likes" - A New Tool for Spammers? As Arnab Nandi, a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Michigan, recently discovered , it's simple to create a like button for a page you're not even on. Using the wizard provided by Facebook, you can create a button for any URL you want and embed it on your site. Why would anyone want to do this, you ask? While no self-respecting webmaster would want to deceive a visitor to their site, says Nandi, an "enterprising spammer" certainly would. By tricking site visitors into "liking" something by mistake, spammers could immediately place their links into that person's News Feed, a feed seen by all of that person's friends. And since an average Facebook user has 130 friends , even tricking a handful of people into doing this gives the spammer access to hundreds, potentially thousands, more people. Nandi already coined a word for this new hack: "News Feed Spam." And yes, it will exist. How the Button Works Creating your own evil like button is incredibly simple, as we've demonstrated below. Nandi uses the "safe for work" example of "liking" the Britney Spears site in the example on his blog , but we know that our readers don't want that affiliation in their News Feed for even an instant, so we created a much safer example for you to try by using our own Twitter account as the "like" target. (Really, we promise!). Although you can remove the "like" from your News Feed after clicking, when you "like" something on Facebook, the affiliation is now attached to the Open Graph API. That means that your "like" data is associated with your profile, even if you remove it from showing in your News Feed. In any event, all we did was fill in the necessary info into Facebook's wizard and we got code for the button below: (NYT readers, visit the original site for the demo). If you click that button, you'll see that you just "liked" ReadWriteWeb's Twitter account , not this post or this website. So the question now is this: did Facebook make the "like" button too simple? Should the button display more info about the target of the like so you know what you're getting into? Will this problem become so widespread that people begin to fear "liking" things across the net? What do you think? Image credit for original post: Zazzle Discuss

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How to Trick Users into Liking Facebook Pages They're Not On

Building on Facebook's OpenGraph API, Posterous has added Facebook Like buttons to all of its standard themes today. Click a Posterous Like button and the blog it's on is "shared" to Facebook For designers, inserting a "like" tag in a theme and adjusting the href attribute to whichever page they want a user to Like will create a Facebook-facing button for that theme. Sponsor Facebook's recent changes include proliferating the number of pages in its system by transforming profile fields and interest areas into discrete pages and allowing app developers to retain user data for a longer period of time and, of course, the out-of-the-box Like function. Facebook's size, and the likely increase in its web gravity, is no doubt inspiring developers from horizon to horizon to include Like buttons and like features in their products. Expect a significant upturn in Jack Horner references . Discuss

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Posterous Adds "Like" Buttons