Facebook Revs Up New Features

Facebook’s on a new-feature roll. Last week it was new privacy tools to segregate the kinds of things friends and coworkers can see.

Next up: chat, which will launch next week, according to TechCrunch. And in the future, more preferential developer relationships like the one Facebook has with CBS for March Madness.

TechCrunch has a problem with the latter, but the way I see it, it’s nothing new and totally expected. The developers that bring the most traffic to Facebook SHOULD be recognized and supported, and the CBS March Madness application is clearly driving usage. I couldn’t find the total number of users of the application, but there are over 2000 discussion topics on the page and CBS Sports says that more than 3.6 million fans are playing some form of CBS bracket on the Web. Granted, some of the commenters on Facebook are people who have been irritated when the app doesn’t run right, but come on, folks. Big corporations will always get the best treatment when it comes to media.
My prediction: This will keep happening.

News I’m Following (Virtual World edition)

Whyville Has an Older Sibling: Numedeon, the company behind the kids virtual world Whyville, has launched its first world aimed at grownups. Called SportsBlox, it caters to, as the name would suggest, sports fans of all flavors (and nationalities) who want to talk sports with other avatars. Numedeon has several new virtual worlds in the works, according to News.com, including one for older adults.

An Intelligent Virtual World? From Forbes comes word that the US government is funding a VW application “to let uncommunicative U.S. intelligence agencies interact with each other more efficiently and with more trust.” Yes, according to the report, agents and counter-terrorism officials may eventually use the technology to sit in a virtual meeting room and “have personal interactions in cyberspace.” The companies behind the application are IBM and Forterra Systems, a California startup. There’s even a way for secret agents to identify themselves using the same authentication they use to log on to their own computer networks. Weird that it would take a virtual world to get intelligence agencies to actually start talking to each other.

Do We Really Need a Pepsi Youniverse?

Marketer-sponsored social networks seem so 2006, and yet they keep on coming. The latest: PepsiCo International’s Pepsi Youniverse, a soccer-themed network aimed at an international audience.

The social network uses a novel approach to get people to describe themselves. Instead of typing in their interests and their activities, visitors to the site can answer a series of questions about how they feel about soccer. There are no words, just photographs to choose from (some of which are really challenging to decipher). At the end, you’re launched into the social network, where you can learn what type of soccer fan you are (I’m a Kickabout King, even though the extent of my soccer fandom is watching my grade-schooler play) and compare yourself with Pepsi-backed soccer stars and other soccer enthusiasts.

Problem is, I’m not entirely sure that people will actually participate in the network. Sure, the picture-answers to the questions are intriguing (it’s all based on a concept called VisualDNA from Imagini Holdings, the creator of the Youniverse concept), but the whole socializing-within-a-brand-site idea is as discomfiting as it was back in 2006. And I’m surprised there’s not a way to widgetize any of the content (such as the stunning photographs) and take it to another social network site.

If the whole soccer social network idea sounds familiar, it is. In 2006, Nike launched Joga.com, its own soccer-themed social network. But when you visit the site today, there’s nothing but a placeholder for what appears to be the next iteration of the campaign, Jogatv.

Update: Starbucks is on the SN bandwagon, too. It launched My Starbucks Idea as a way for people to share ideas to make Starbucks relevant again. I like that everything is transparent. You know exactly what the site is for, and the ideas from consumers are front and center. This is a nice example of how companies can sponsor a social network that has a purpose.

Widgets in the News

Lots of tidbits in the widget and application space lately. Here’s a recap:

ShareThis gets $15 million: A new VC round brings $15 million to the widget maker. (News.com)

Will Price joins Widgetbox: The Hummer Winblad general partner and Widgetbox investor will be CEO of the company. In his open letter posted on TechCrunch, Price (sounding as grandiose as Mark Zuckerberg did when he unveiled Facebook’s SocialAds concept last November) says: “The best markets and the best companies ride the tide of history. Widgets are such a market.” I could do a lot with that tide analogy but this Thai proverb seems most apt: “At high tide fish eat ants; at low tide ants eat fish.”

March Madness apps: The Chicago Tribune reports that there are an incredible 20,000 March Madness pools operating on Facebook. One Facebook application, from tournament broadcaster CBS Sports, lets friends create their own brackets and compare them with others. It’s not gambling, since there’s no payout, but because it allows people to create brackets, some think the app provides an assist, to coin a term. Promoting online gambling was “not our intent with the application,” LeslieAnne Wade, a senior vice president at CBS, told the Chicago Tribune.

More AOL/Bebo Fallout

The press and financial analyst reaction to AOL’s $850 million cash deal to acquire Bebo has been resoundingly negative. Most of the focus seems to be on the fact that AOL is already screwed up (agreed) and that adding Bebo to the mix won’t give it anywhere near the advantage in social networking that AOL seems to think it will.

As Henry Blodget of Silicon Alley Insider put it, “We don’t get it. … The most likely outcome of putting the two companies together, therefore, is that the companies’ weaknesses complement each other. And they go down together.”

AOL does have a history of failed acquisitions (see: Netscape) and its track record in social media has been spotty, granted. But I also believe that if AOL wants to play in this market its only realistic chance is with Bebo. Bebo has an interesting business and has done some creative things in online social network marketing. If AOL can nurture that and grow it, then it has a chance.

I’ll be watching this one closely.

Second Life To Get a New Leader

Philip Rosedale, the brains behind Second Life, is stepping down as CEO of Linden Lab (Second Life’s parent company). It’s a move typical to a lot of tech companies — a founding CEO moves up to chairman to allow an exec with more operating experience to come in.

What I found interesting is that the company “has a very nice business that is a lot larger than virtually everybody thinks,” as current SL chairman (and investor) Mitch Kapor put it in The Wall Street Journal today. Since the virtual-world marketing idea didn’t pan out (at least not with traditional marketers) I’d love to know more.

Bebo Finally Gets Acquired

I’m amazed — with so many tech bloggers and tech gossip sites around — that this one never leaked out. Today, AOL bought Bebo, the third-ranked social network site in the US, for $850 million in cash. The two companies supposedly had been talking for five months.

Bebo, to me, has always been the little social network that could: It doesn’t have the huge traffic of MySpace or Facebook — just 22.4 million unique visitors worldwide in January, according to comScore, half of them from the UK. Facebook and comScore each had five times as many visitors that month - 100.7 million for Facebook and 109.3 million for MySpace. And, its revenues are paltry (see Kara Swisher’s post at AllThingsD on this matter).

And yet, it has been quietly innovative in other areas. It was a pioneer of widget marketing, partnering with prominent widget firms six months before Facebook opened up its platform. Bebo also developed and fostered KateModern, a minor online video hit. But more importantly, it developed unique ways of integrating marketers into the video storyline and allowed Bebo members to interact with the characters and even the marketers themselves.

I’m not convinced that Bebo will big as big a deal for AOL as Randy Falco claimed it would be in the press release (“Bebo is the perfect complement to AOL’s personal communications network and puts us in a leading position in social media,” he said.) But it’s a social network with staying power and there are a lot of things that Bebo can teach AOL.

Zuckerberg Still Believes in Beacon, Social Advertising

Even though most in the ad community have deemed Beacon a disaster for Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg still believes in the basic idea. In other words, bad execution doesn’t necessarily mean bad idea.

In an interview with GigaOm, Zuckerberg says:

“Beacon was … part of this while [sic] effort to blur the boundaries between what’s inside Facebook and what’s outside Facebook. Beacon was our first cut at a protocol to do that.

When it comes to social ads we really want to line up what people are trying to do on Facebook and the utility it offers with monetization. If you look at what people are trying to do on the site, it’s communicating and connecting with each other and sharing information, so the business model should be around people sharing information and staying connected.”

He makes a valuable point. Businessweek, among others, has criticized social network advertising because click-through rates are terrible. But focusing on click-through is a content-site mentality, and it doesn’t work on a social network site.

Engaging social network users isn’t about interrupting them while they’re trying to interact with their friends; it’s about finding a way to participate in the conversation. Or make the conversation easier. Or more fun. Or more productive. And if Beacon was a bad execution, it won’t be the last one. But the breakthrough idea is still out there, I’m confident of that.

How Much Data Do Websites Collect? A Lot

It’s a no-brainer that targeting, in all its forms, is getting huge play on the Internet these days. Ad networks are springing up all over, each promising to deliver the right consumer at the right point in time.

Still, it’s an eye-opener to read in The New York Times that Yahoo and its ad networks collected data on Internet users an average of 2,500 times PER PERSON in December. You probably thought Google was the biggest collector of data, but it gathered information “just” 578 times in the month.

The figures do not include data that people publicly post on social networking sites or blogs. It’s based on search queries, page views and video views, among other things.

It’s curious that comScore was so involved in assisting the NY Times in this story.  They did the original analysis for the paper. (All you metrics geeks can click on the graphic links to the left of the article for more charts and a full spreadsheet of numbers.)

What isn’t discussed much in the article is that data can have varying degrees of value to marketers. A page impression may have low value, but a search query may be even more valuable. But the article and data do show why ad networks are such a hot commodity these days. The more information they have, the more valuable they may be.

Everything You Wanted to Know About Widget Marketing

Businessweek devotes this month’s CEO Guide to Technology to widgets and it’s an interesting package (full disclosure: I was interviewed for one of the articles). In one article describing why widgets are a fad, there’s this great quote from Ben Kunz in his opinion column:

The entire mindset of a person engaged on MySpace or LinkedIn is different from that of a hunter on a search engine. A Google user is walking into a store. A Facebook user is walking into a bar.

Later, he describes a conversation he had with an ad network exec, who said his clients’ widget clickthrough rates were down, so they were running ads promoting the widgets.

“If you need to run ads to get people to your ads, maybe you have a problem,” Kunz writes. Probably not a problem if you’re an ad network exec, though.

Another neat feature: A series of profiles of Facebook apps from major marketers that flopped. I can add one more: the Hellman’s Holiday Kitchen app (no longer available, seeing as it’s now March). One of the cardinal rules of social network marketing is that the brand has to be something people feel passionate about. I’m sorry, but I just don’t feel passionate about mayonnaise. And moreover, even if I were, would I want to let all my friends know about it?