Last friday night A week ago friday, at midnight hundreds of thousands of you around the world rushed to grab the vanity url (http://facebook.com/username) of your dreams. Within minutes millions of names had been snatched up, leaving many frustrated that they couldn’t be the numero uno Mike or Steve on facebook, but it also meant a lot of fake accounts were setup to snatch generic names as well.
Apparently Facebook had thought of making it an auction, or charging for names, but ultimately decided against it because of the server load issues that would have ensued. Personally I think they should have charged for fan pages to get custom urls if they are going to be used for commercial purposes, that’s only fair. Those of us that didn’t secure names for our fan pages will have to wait until the 28th when they open it up to the rest of the world (i.e. the 99% of pages with under 1000 fans).
One thing though that was really silly was all the people who snatched up names thinking they were going to be able to sell them later. The thing is these people were getting the names/keywords for personal profiles, not fan pages. Its a collosal waste to build a brand or product offering on facebook using a personal profile and not a fan page. I’ll get into the whys later, but just know that you are seriously wasting opportunity by using a personal profile account for a business.
What’s going to happen to these names like /whiskey (i REALLY wanted that one, got stuck with /drinkwhiskey instead) that were pinned to user profiles? Well ultimately its going to come down to facebook yanking them, or they go to waste. Will a secondary market arise? Sure, but only for fan pages, not for personal profiles. Those who buy great keywords with hopes of turning these minor personal profiles into commercial landing pages will be sad when they realize they’ve wasted what could be hundreds of dollars on something useless.
So my advice, create a valuable page with content on it, promote it, and then see if you can grab your desired name on June 28. If you want to give yourself a clever personal username, make it something representative of you/your personality, or better yet: protect your personal brand name.
Well to date (after almost a year of having a developer platform) there are only 10 applications in their directory. TEN APPLICATIONS. So why are there only 10 apps serving a community of some 30 Million+ users? Basically LinkedIN didn't take their community seriously. They seem to have rushed their platform announcement out and pushed it to a handful of elite/select developers whom they knew, and then never bothered to get around to the rest. They saw everyone else jumping on the OpenSocial/platform craze and I'm sure their investors told them they ... Continue reading
Blogs - A self published journal, newsletter, etc. Usually supports visitor comments/feedback, rss, and trackbacks. Do you need one? Only if you have customers whom you want to talk to, and value their opinion (these opinion things, are pretty important these days). If you are writing an email or physical newsletter you send out everymonth, you should be re-publishing this as a blog on your domain/site. Also things you find too minute for newsletter publishing, but are still useful or valua ... Continue reading
You now get more options on types of ads you can display to facebook users, you also get more engagement metrics to boot. But really the goldmine is in creating branding opportunities with the smart applications and application developers. Gone are the soft-touch applications that had a touch once and ignore forever relationship with their audience, you have to build truly engaging experiences to leverage the brand potential available to you. The tabs on the user profiles are a perfect place for self-expression and ... Continue reading
A year or so ago, Facebook unveiled something that has radically changed the landscape of the web and social networking sites in particular. As the first major and tightly integrated social network application platform (SNAP) to hit the market, Facebook was able to shift our expectations from what we had previously expected to get from a social site to something with theoretically endless possibilities. What emerged next, I don't think even facebook had the foresight to predict.< ... Continue reading
My completely speculative theory on the social operating system.
There is a battle for control of the next generation of the internet, and this revolves around my thesis that the current phase in the evolution of the web involves the connecting of people. The battle is being waged by google, facebook, myspace, and a littany of others all vying for this control.
How we got to this point.< ... Continue reading
The fact that his account with 5000 friends on it was shut off doesn't upset me one iota. Wanna know why? Because his account is a perfect example of a unidirectional relationship, completely going against the concept of friends (disclaimer, I follow his twitter feed, but its not the same thing). The idea of a friend connection in a social network is supposed to be you agree to a two way communication exchange. Do you really think a man with 5,000 social network friends will ever pay attention to what you're asking him seeing as you've likely never met him in person? So in his case you " ... Continue reading
