Affinitive’s Social Media Playground

Facebook recently revamped it business pages and while it provides new opportunities for brands, there are also new challenges. The primary change is that a majority of the page is now taken up with the “wall”, which consists of status updates and comments by fans. This is obviously a direct response to Twitter and the [...]

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I recently attended a conference on location based services and although this is an area of amazing potential, I was reminded how easy it is with new technologies to get caught in what I’ll call “The Videophone Trap”. In this, people within an industry become obsessed with, and base entire business models on, demonstrating certain [...]

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In a previous post, it was seen that two college students could, in their spare time, make an unofficial brand application that attracted hundreds of thousands of users. But what about the official applications? Why is it that so often, when companies invest a great deal of time and effort into creating applications, they fail? [...]

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Recently, reports from the BBC and Washington Post have raised questions about the privacy implications of applications on Facebook, MySpace, and other sites. As usual in today’s journalism, there is a bit of sensationalism, a little fear mongering, and a dose of misinformation tossed together with a few actual facts. In order to really understand [...]

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One of the most frequently used phrases regarding social media applications is “viral growth”. In an ideal world, this would mean that apps would provide some value to users who would then pass it on to their friends. In reality what happened is that the primary business model rapidly became forcing users to spam all [...]

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There’s a certain catch-22 in social media: everyone wants to use the thing that everyone else is using. Critical mass is, well, critical. But getting to that critical mass from nothing is the tricky part. Such has been the fate of OpenID, the essence of which is the idea that people should share their login [...]

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