Facebook’s Comment Box Plugin goes Mobile
Facebook rolled out the mobile equivalent of its comments box plugin, which makes it easier for media sites to engage browsers across the web and for users to leave behind scathing epithets which are now connected to a face. The plugin will automatically appear on the mobile version of websites that have already implemented the Comment Box. For technical details on how to incorporate Comments Box on your site, visit here.

Watch the Throne: Twitter (and the Internet) Welcomes Blue Ivy
After months of speculation, figure watching, and uterus vigils, mogul couple Jay Z and Beyonce welcomed destined and slightly-pressured-to-be-gifted daughter Blue Ivy, alongside countless other well wishers on the Internet. Social analytics firm Simply Measured graciously provided Mashable a graph of “Beyonce’s Baby Hype,” confirming that around 11:15pm on Saturday, Jan 7^th, tweets per minute peaked at 2,379. That’s a lot of “watch the crown” jokes.

Tweet @MichelleObama
First Lady Michelle Obama has joined the many on Twitter in time to support the President’s campaign now that elections are drawing near. Like most accounts, hers will be run primarily by campaign staff, but all personal tweets will be signed with a “mo.’ At the time of copy, the First Lady’s account already had 250,509 followers, but this will soon change.

Google: We Never Indexed “@” to Begin With
Google and Twitter’s increasingly public spat about recent decisions and changes to  search results –  Google’s “Google Plus Your World” –  is just getting started. After Twitter’s Alex Macgillivray pointed out specific examples of Google’s  skewed search feature which highlighted the exclusion of Twitter related terms  -  more harmful than good –   Google has officially went on record to say that “@” was never indexed to begin with, and the engine would have never recognized a handle formatted in such a way to begin with. While Twitter’s concerns are certainly valid, the termination of its agreement with Google regarding appearing in real time results may have played a factor into this.

London Olympics Volunteers Prohibited from Social Media
Volunteers at the 2012 London Olympics will find themselves being asked to put down their phones now that the organizing committee has released its social media policy, effective for all 70,000 plus volunteers. While volunteers are allowed to retweet and relay official news, releases, and statements, they will be prohibited from posting VIP or backstage pictures, disclose any breaking news pertaining to athletes – or discuss athletes for that matter – or get involved in detailed discussions about the games. While it’s a lot of preemptive damage and image control, we can’t help but wonder what the penalties of slip-ups will be?

Marvel Times the Avengers movie with Facebook Game
In suspiciously convenient timing, Disney has revealed that the very first Disney branded Facebook game will be a combat RPG game titled Marvel: Avenger’s Alliance. Although no one has confirmed yet that the game release is intended to time with the Avenger’s movie, the tie in is certainly helpful as some of the superhero cast is part of the Avengers team. A release date has yet to be announced, but will launch in first quarter.

Facebook Begins News Feed Ads
We reported not too long ago that Facebook had plans for rolling out featured ads directly within user’s newsfeeds, saying that they were expected to start January. The difference is however, that instead of being called “Sponsored Stories” as many originally thought, newsfeed ads will be going by moniker “Featured” instead. Add this with Facebook’s new “Listen With” feature (which aims to ultimately bring you back to Facebook chat), and you’ve got yourself a feed full of potential annoyances.

MySpace Keeps On, Carries On
MySpace still lives. The now ancient social media platform has managed to weather many a storm, ignore the cruel japes of the Internet, and retain 12 minutes of user’s time and attention span. What’s truly mind boggling however, is how it’s still a bigger platform than Tumblr and Google + (could it be from user accounts that were never deleted?). Maybe the second life is due to Justin Timberlake’s attempts to revive MySpace’s relevancy with a TV service.  Cue the “I’m bringing MySpace back” parodies.

Did we miss anything? Let us know and join in on the buzz here! 

So who’s doing it? OAuth has been the buzz in the tech world for the past few months. Enough so that that Facebook, Twitter, Google, MySpace, FourSquare, Netflix are in. Although there is no specification regarding what a 3rd party site should or shouldn’t be allowed to do on the OAuth-providing site, most provide enough APIs to replicate a good portion of the site functionality. Twitter and Foursquare allow you to do anything that you can already do through their web interface/app. This is great for developers as they can build their own twitter/foursquare clients. And of course this isn’t just limited to small party sites and applications; Facebook uses OAuth with Google for it’s friend finder feature.

To the end user this is great! Services are now integrated together. Say goodbye to the creation of countless user accounts. Everything could be accessed via your Facebook login. If you want to share something with friends, you can do that via 1 click as opposed to being redirected to the specific OAuth provider’s share page. Aside from simplicity, security gets a benefit. Facebook’s friend finder asks for a user’s email and password so it can access the contact list. With gmail, if your original email account is with gmail, all you have to do is log in and that’s it.

Excitement aside, it can be easy to overlook the potential security/privacy issues. When logging in with OAuth, you are allowing a 3rd party to act on your behalf. So, let’s say you have logged in with Twitter on a 3rd party site – a year later, that 3rd party site could potentially spam tweets from your account. The counter argument states that twitter can then instantly disable any actions from that 3rd party site, but that doesn’t help against the initial occurrence. Another thing to note is that when logging in with OAuth credentials, it is possible to give away all of the personal information available to the OAuth provider. So when logging in with Facebook, the 3rd party site gets the user’s email address, name, location, relationship status, friends, etc… As it becomes easier to integrate services it also becomes easier to spread your personal information unknowingly. None of this is a problem of OAuth specifically, but rather stems from improper implementations.

All in all, OAuth is an excellent tool that will bring a more seamless web in the future. It is possible that we may end up with a central social hub that allows us to control all of our servers. Imagine going to a movie theater and posting a status update from Facebook. It would instantly check you in with FourSquare and post to Twitter. In addition to Netflix learning which movie to suggest to you later. We’ve written about Data Portability before, and looks like OAuth actually won.

The keyfindings are as follows:

• Most people would recommend businesses use Twitter over any other social media site: 40% to just 15% for Facebook.
• But – they’d pay for Facebook over any other site for their own personal use. I’d pick tumblr, but tumblr is still a bit under the radar. Maybe by this time next year.
• LinkedIn came in second in both categories, beating Facebook for business use and Twitter for personal use. That surprised me a LOT. Is this skewed because of who was surveyed? Clearly. But still surprising.
• MySpace = DEAD. Only 1.5% of those surveyed said they would pay for MySpace. Does this surprise you at all? Not me. I guess MySpace is still good for music, does anyone use it for anything else?
• Company using social media the best? Zappos came first, followed by Obama (not really a company, but one heck of a brand) and then CNN, also NY Times, NPR, Dell, Jetblue, Comcast — all who have active presences on Twitter. My favorite usage of Twitter from the aforementioned crew of brands is Comcast. That guy is on top if it. He answers consumer questions left and right and takes customer service to a whole new level. If only Comcast was available in NYC   In all fairness, it should be noted that these brands were given to survey recipients in a list and they were asked to rank them. They weren’t brands called out by the recipients.
• Social Media site most likely to die? ImInLikeWithYou.com Again, not surprising, although I am doubtful that if it wouldn’t have been on a list for them to choose from if many of them would have even known what it is. What started as some kind of quirky dating site where you challenged suitors to some type of lame game with the best answer having the opportunity to ask the challenger on a date has now become a haven for online Tetris-like game play that involves blocks, drawing, and hamsters. Note: I know Charles personally, love him, and wish his site all the best.

None of these findings are major breakthroughs – but the trends and shifts within the space from the perspective of the social media marketer are interesting. Most notable to me is the shift towards Twitter having legitimacy as a target audience representative of more than one “type” of consumer/marketer. A year ago, Twitter was thought to be a land dominated by the social media elite – a space where there was no room for brands to speak to consumers more representative of their actual audience. The fact that the social media elite are now saying they see it as a viable home for brands and tactic for brands to reach consumers is a big shift.

The other item of note for me is how popular the concept of “Freemium” is and how this is universally (45.5% of those surveyed) believed to be the best monetization for social media. Freemium is the idea of the free basic model followed by a fee for advanced options, a la Flickr (and coming soon for Tumblr).  Social media players have been quick to slap banner ads, sponsored gifts, and targeted advertisements within the confines of their site, but few have gone the “freemium” route as a monetization strategy.

It will be interesting to see if the tide shifts in that direction and how brands can be incorporated into the fold of premium features. It doesn’t seem like it would be enough for a premium feature to be “brought to you” by a brand, the brand would have to be further ingrained in the feature’s functionality and viability within the space for that to work.

Some great survey participant anectdotal comments:

“While Twitter is very hot right now for brands, Facebook has a much wider audience.”

“People on Twitter are thought-leaders who often spread the information around their personal spheres. Best investment.”

“Twitter: Instantaneous feedback from and interaction with customers.”

“Digg is great but can’t competewith other aggregators that are more nimble?”

“MySpace strikes me as the public restroom of social meda. Just…ew”

“ComastCares. Still hated universally, but they have the right attitude to using Twitter [sic] and haven’t given up yet.”

What do YOU think? Read the entire survey here and share your thoughts below. [Or tweet me your thoughts: @sarahashley]

UPDATE: Facebook has returned to their prior Terms of Use until they can work out issues people have raised. Read more about it on their blog.

Below is a simple social media “gut check” that any organization (or even individual!) should find helpful…

Own Your Presence.

With the proliferation of online social platforms, tools, and services, how can you keep up and maintain your presence in all of these places at once? Aside from unscrupulous third-parties (or just pranksters) claiming, or “brandjacking” a brand’s presence/username/vanity url, some sites actually create one for you, whether you want it or not. Consumer review sites like Yelp!, and customer service platforms like Get Satisfaction are launching thousands of automated brand profiles to build (typically consumer-generated) content around. Some of these services are allowing brands to “claim” their pages/ids through verification… or a price.

Fortunately, some sites such as Facebook have policies in place to allow brands to report/take down fraudulent profiles/pages or reclaim a brandjacked profile.

So, what to do? You can either focus your efforts on the more popular sites/services out there, or use one of several services that will notify you when a new social network/tool launches so you can quickly claim your profile (or you can just read Mashable

Own Your Relationships.

Just to be clear – “presence” is not the same thing as engagement!

Perhaps you are thinking of “outsourcing” your word of mouth efforts to a third party word of mouth “network” consisting of tens or hundreds of thousands of consumers. If all you care about is getting your product into a bunch of people’s hands and (hopefully) generate some “amplified” (versus organic) word of mouth, these types of services can be effective…

Are these really your consumers or your target market? Is the word of mouth authentic or are these just a bunch of folks who want free stuff? Are you even directly engaging/communicating/sharing with these consumers? Do you care if competitors are able to access/engage the same users?

Big brands (especially CPG ones) are starting to realize this distinction, and have begun developing their own dedicated consumer engagement programs. While they may still rely on the help of word of mouth marketing companies to launch their programs, they want to own the relationships.

Own Your Data.

What’s the point of creating relationships if you can’t get closer to your customers and integrate your social platform touchpoints into your larger CRM initiative? (you have a CRM system, don’t you??

Given Facebook’s enormous user base (they just reached 150 million users), it’s a no-brainer for brands to “set up shop” by creating a Facebook “page”.

Here’s the rub – when you create a presence on most stand-alone, third-party social platforms (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, “white label” social networks such as Ning, etc.) you are in control of your relationships but not your data! It’s the network effect, which these services have built their business models upon – as more people use a given service, it increases the utility and value of said service. In other words, every person you engage with via a platform must in turn create an account, thus adding to that platform’s user base (and increasing it’s value). Those 10,000 customers you got to join – you’ve just handed them over to someone else!

It’s ok to play on their turf, but maintain your own – at the very least, make sure to hook your CRM tentacles into all of your social media and word of mouth initiatives.

Hopefully, this spurs some dialog, or at the very least makes you think a bit more as you ramp up your word of mouth/social media/consumer engagement strategies for 2009 and beyond.

Facebook has an array of privacy settings. In fact, they may be too complicated, and most users probably don’t pay attention to them. An application only has the permissions of the person using it, so if you install an application, by default, it can generally access all the information on your friends that you can. However, users can set the information available to applications their friends are using to be essentially nothing.

On MySpace, applications’ access to information is even more restrictive; only the name and image of a user’s friends who haven’t added the application are available through the API, although for some reason age, gender, and location are listed in the settings which also allows users to completely block apps from accessing their information. A developer could actually get more information on users just by scraping publicly viewable pages than through the API.

The real area for concern is that when using a Facebook application, it can access everything about yourself that you can, which is almost everything. On MySpace, an application can get most of the profile information on users who have added it, but this information is usually already on a public page. Unscrupulous developers could then store this against the sites’ policies and do what they want with it.

The bottom line is, if you don’t want something to be known by the whole world, don’t put it on a social networking site regardless of your settings. The only information required to register for Facebook is a name, email, and birthdate. On MySpace, it’s this plus country and zip code. Everything else is voluntarily, as is using the sites themselves.

Social networks are amazing tools to communicate with friends and make new connections. They just have to be used with common sense and intelligence, things that seem to be missing in journalism.

However, the incessant spam and constant barrage of useless applications quickly led to a backlash among users. More importantly, it led to apathy from developers who became disincentivized to create anything worthwhile as study by Jesse Farmer points out. Social networks quickly realized that to keep their platforms a viable ecosystem, they had to provide value for all participants from developers to end users. Recently, the most stringent ant-spam measures to date have been announced by MySpace and Facebook.

Introduced in a post by Tom of MySpace himself, the new terms state:

No incentives may be given to a member for sending a message, bulletin, comment, or any other form of communication. This includes “points,” “bucks,” increased standing, or even features within the app.

Facebook’s guidelines have been changed to explicitly include:

[Applications cannot] require that users invite, notify, or otherwise communicate with one or more friends to gain access to any feature, information, or portion of the application.

While these new policies will inhibit the growth of spammy apps and improve the environment on various platforms, it’s unlikely that it will help with another complaint about social apps, that so-called “useful” applications aren’t successful. People will still want games and social interaction not office productivity apps.

But usefulness is in the eye of the beholder. Who’s to say that entertaining someone for 20 minutes or facilitating hook-ups are not useful in their own way? After all, procreation is one of the most important functions that any organism can perform, or as Nick O’Neill more eloquently puts it, “Social Apps Should Get You Laid.”

This drowsy state of affairs in what has come to be called Data Portability has suddenly been woken up in a flurry of recent announcements. First MySpace announced an initiative called Data Availability along with Yahoo!, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter. It allows partners to use MySpace users’ logins, profile info, photo, videos, and friends list on their own sites. The next day Facebook announced an almost identical service called Facebook Connect. Then Google announced a service called Friend Connect which includes Facebook, Hi5, Orkut, Plaxo, and other sites. It seems to be more of MyBlogLog-like widgets, while the MySpace and Facebook initiatives seem to be more robust APIs, but all are nothing but announcements at this point.

Taken together, they represent the next phase of social media APIs. The first phase was providing platforms for developers to integrate their applications within popular social networks. These new services turn this inside-out and allow other websites to incorporate user information from MySpace, Facebook, etc. There are only so many profiles the average person will maintain, so this has generally led to consolidation of a few large social networks. If people can easily use their logins, profiles, and friends lists across smaller niche sites, it will likely make it easier for these to grow.

While all the players in these announcements are part of an industry organization called The DataPortability Project, none of the platforms were actually developed within it. And while they use some open standards like oAuth, they will likely be incompatible and something of a platform war is inevitable. If social networks extend beyond individual sites, whoever maintains the crucial foundation of managing users’ social identities will reap huge rewards. The stakes are high and the first moves have been made. Let’s hope the result includes better, richer, and more varied social experiences for users.

The phenomenal growth of Facebook after launching its application platform in May 2007 sent shockwaves to all other social networks. Where sites like MySpace had previously been actively attempting to block external widgets, they all began scrambling to implement their own APIs and embrace third party developers.

Now, a year later, the primary competitor to Facebook is clearly the Google developed open source OpenSocial which is finally launching on a consortium of sites including MySpace, Hi5, and Orkut. In addition to its own site, Facebook has also licensed its proprietary platform to Bebo (recently purchased by AOL.) Is this the beginning of the platform wars?

While it’s still early to see how it will all play out, a few observations can be made:

• Spam and other abuse of the system can be a huge problem. Facebook initially had very little restrictions in its messaging which allowed a few early apps to gain a huge advantage by massively spamming their way to the top. This also created a backlash among users who quickly grew tired of spammy tactics and all apps in general.
• Hi5, with fewer users than other networks, has proven to be amazingly viral. Perhaps this is due to the demographics of the users and the low number of apps in the directory (leaving a bigger slice of the pie for each one.) It also has unlimited messaging from applications, but so far, not too much spam.
• MySpace has demonstrated disappointing growth for applications. This may be partly due to the fact that after seeing how spam almost ruined Facebook, there are only a few APIs for sending messages which have only recently rolled out and have many restrictions such are requiring an active confirmation before sending. The application directory is not heavily promoted and has recently become flooded with hundreds of quiz apps and two or three apps for every single TV show or sports team, making it difficult for users to find other interesting apps.
• MySpace friends may have weaker connections than Facebook friends. This may be another reason for the much higher viral growth on Facebook, where applications provide an entertaining way for users to interact with their friends, with whom they already have a high level of involvement. MySpace users, in contrast, seem to be less involved with their friends, many of whom are probably just a collection of images for their profiles, and thus much less likely to participate in shared activities.
• OpenSocial provides limited functionality and is already fragmenting. The promise of OpenSocial is that is establishes a standard for the same code to run on multiple sites. While this mostly holds, the capabilities it offers when adhering strictly to the specification are rather limited. Each site has also implemented it in a slightly different manner and extended it through a variety of other APIs which allow more comprehensive and site-specific integration. In fact, it is entirely possible to create an application for MySpace that does not use anything related to OpenSocial.

Finally, from a developer’s or brand’s standpoint, these platforms are all still amazing opportunities to leverage the existing membership and services of popular networks to develop a large user base with relatively less effort and shorter time than other methods.

¹ Visitors in millions for March and annual growth from Nielsen Online as reported by Mashable.

² From April 22, by viewing sites’ app directories.