Around 5 years ago I made a post on my then LiveJournal account about a new website called: Friendster.com. Enjoy:
Just found out about a cool new website…
It’s called Friendster.com — Its really awesome.. because what happens is, when you join you need to specify me as your friend… then you have access to all my friends, and thier friends, and thier friends… and then you invite YOUR friends… and it becomes a huge network of friends… you can setup a profile, pictures, interests, etc etc… its really COOL.. and i promise it will be the next big thing…
So SIGN UP and get on my friends list… then invite your friends who dont have it already…
Today I was reading through some startup blogs, and found a link to Fanista.com. See design below:
The first thing that catches my eye about this design are the Featured entertainment section on the right side. After I play with that area for a few seconds I try to figure out what the site is about — but the diagonal text hurts my eyes to try to read.
Not only does the diagonal text hard to read, but the kerning of the text gets distorted, making the text even harder to read. If you are trying to pull users in by informing them what your site is all about, then you need to be sure that the copy is can be easily scanned and not use descriptives such as “indulge your passion”, and headline it with what makes sense, “What is Fanista?”.
The next issue I have with this design is the fact that the items on the right have no names next to them. Users are forced to hover over the items to figure out what they are, and when they perform said action there is nothing for them to do except “Send to a friend”. Once you ask your user, especially new users to perform an action, you better have some “gold at the end of the rainbow”.
So what is the user supposed to do? Drag the icons to the little dock below the items? I did that, now what? There is nothing, as it seems, that I can do with the items once I drag them down to the cork board. Why even have it vying for my attention?
After looking over the page, it became very apparent that the Fanista designer is trying to get the user to do 2 main actions on the page. Drag on the items on the cork board, which ultimately does nothing, or be forced to read diagonal text, that hopefully leads the user down to a little button:
This leads us to the point of the page… If the point of the page is to try to 1st: Educate the user, and then 2nd: Acquire the user. Then don’t waste precious time on site with a drag and drop gimmick. Spell out exactly what the site is in clear readable copy, and then make the next action clear as day.
Ice cream giant Baskin-Robins created a Facebook event to help promote their 31 cent scoop night. The lucky night is on April 30th, mark those hCal enabled calendars.
I think what is really interesting here is that Baskin-Robbins is utilizing the already existing Facebook functionality to promote their campaign. They didn’t need to go to any advertising networks, or agencies to create a viral channel. Because their campaign is event driven, it just makes sense for them to create a Facebook event. At current count, there is over 100,000 users who have confirmed that they will be ‘attending’ the event, with over 80,000 users who have been invited — and the campaign started yesterday!
I think companies really need to look at doing more natural, immersive social campaigns like this. If you have a special incentive that you think your audience will be excited about, instead of sending a direct mail piece, try to put your brand in the paths of the communication model — such as social media.
OpenSocial API has been proven to be more unpredictable, and actually more decentralized. Though there is one name, there is many different flavors for each container (social network).
For instance, there is custom functions that apps call for each container. How do you possibly port your code from one container to the next if there are completely different functions for each container?
Also, OpenSocial requires the application developers to code advanced JavaScript. Facebook required developers to learn a variance of HTML, called FBML, which is VERY easy to learn.
OpenSocial is also VERY buggy. It is still very young, and is nearly a year behind the Facebook platform.
Why should Facebook change to a platform that is harder for developers to learn, not truly portable and buggy?
Bebo is running a licensed version of the Facebook platform, and it is doing great!
If anything — everyone should license the Facebook platform.
Facebook announced yesterday a new site of APIs they are referring to as “Permissions APIs”. These new APIs will finally give sites such as adonomics.com and developeranalytics.com the needed data to actually have accurate data. Application developers will be able to grant these companies access to their metrics by allowing their applications to call admin.getDailyMetrics.
With the permissions API, an application can authorize another application to call certain API methods on its behalf. The application naturally can revoke this access whenever necessary. At this time, the permissions API allows applications to grant others access to three methods under the admin namespace – admin.getAppProperties, admin.getAllocation, admin.getDailyMetrics More methods and namespaces will be added to the list going forward as needed.
Now, Adonomics will actually have real data to base their valuations on. In the past, companies had to take an applications daily active users number and multiply it by the percentage Facebook gave (ie: Scrabulous has 694,511 daily active users, which was %21 of their total installs — if you do the math that is somewhere around 3,300,000 — not quite accurate.
On top of detailed daily active users, the metrics companies will have a plethora of data to store and analyze. According to the Facebook developers wiki, here is the data that they can now pull:
daily_active_users — (The number of daily active users.)
unique_adds — (The number of users who added your application.)
unique_removes — (The number of users who removed your application.)
unique_blocks — (The number of users who blocked your application.)
unique_unblocks — (The number of users who unblocked your application.)
api_calls — (The number of API calls made by your application.)
unique_api_calls — (The number of users on whose behalf your application made API calls.)
canvas_page_views — (The number of canvas page views.)
unique_canvas_page_views — (The number of users who viewed your application’s canvas page.)
canvas_http_request_time_avg — (The average time to fulfill an HTTP request to your application’s canvas page.)
canvas_fbml_render_time_avg — (The average time to render FBML on your application’s canvas page.)
TechCrunch just announced Adobe TV. An Adobe AIR application that allows users to search for content and interact with it. Users can watch shows in 1080p, 720p or 480i resolutions, respectively.
This is a HUGE blow to services such as Hulu, and Joost. As these players were looking to be the first HD compatible streaming video destination site, Adobe comes in and releases a web app for the desktop, thus eliminating the “destination” part of the equation.
I think you are going to see a huge shift away from destination sites and more to web based desktop apps running on platforms similar to AIR.
A few years ago there was a handful of Myspace utilities that allowed people to easily send friend requests, mass message people, mass comment on people’s profiles, and perform a number of other automated actions. Some people think that these tools brought havoc to the user’s real social graph, as we know it, to Myspace.
No longer are you friends with real friends, but you start to get strange friend requests from scantily dressed women, men you have never met before, and garage bands pimping their demo they recorded on a 4 track via their Myspace profile. Spam.
Now, from the makers of one of these very popular spam utilities comes FoxAdder.com.
FoxAdder is the fastest & fully featured Facebook Bot geared to help you effectively advertise, market, and promote your website, products, music & more on Facebook - the worlds largest social networking site.
If Facebook can’t keep up with these “bots”, and they start to gain traction among marketers, you will see a dramatic loss of engagement as users start searching for a network that Facebook was. A true social graph, walled from explicit spam.
WeekendApps is a full weekend event to get developers and entrepreneurs together to build and release Facebook applications in one weekend. We want to help you build hugely successful Facebook applications that grow virally and reach millions of users. Our goal is to assist entrepreneurs to reach their potential, launch their startups, and achieve massive success. We will do that by (also, check our Schedule & Activities):
Brining in entrepreneurs and developers who have built hugely successful applications to share their secrets.
We will have a team of awesome designers, marketers, usability experts, and lawyers available to you to help you and answer your questions.
We’re partnering with the great folks at The Enterprise Network to lend their guidance and support to you for free during the weekend.
We’re planning an ad-exchange network to get applications to promote each other and overcome the initial challenge of reaching the first 10,000 users.
We’ll have all teams share their experiences so we can learn from each others successes and mistakes.
I plan on attending and participating in this event. If anyone is interested in having little ol’ me in their team please drop me a line!
— Its really awesome.. because what happens is, when you join you need to specify me as your friend… then you have access to all my friends, and thier friends, and thier friends… and then you invite YOUR friends… and it becomes a huge network of friends… you can setup a profile, pictures, interests, etc etc… its really COOL.. and i promise it will be the next big thing…
