David Hartstein is a partner at JG Visual, an Internet strategy company that works with organizations to develop and implement their online presence. You can connect with David on the JG Visual Facebook Page.
You’re a small business owner and you’ve decided to create a Facebook (
) Page for your company. Or you’re an employee in an organization and, since you are the only one who “gets” social media, you’ve been charged with running a Facebook Page.
You set it up and make it look nice. You put up some photos and videos that you think represent the organization well. You e-mail a bunch of your friends and the page has almost 100 “Likes.” But one day, your boss comes in and asks you the question that you have been dreading: “Is this Facebook Page helping us or just eating away most of your time?”
Enter Facebook Insights, a powerful analytical tool that can help any organization evaluate the effectiveness of its Facebook presence. But, for a small business where time is perhaps the most important (and often rarest) resource, Facebook Insights can help you evaluate whether you’re investing or wasting your time.
It looks like December 31, 2010 will not mark the end of Google Wave after all. The Apache Software Foundation, the non-profit organization responsible for supporting Apache open source projects, has accepted Google Wave into its incubator program.
Google announced in August that it was ending development of the real-time communication and collaboration project due to low user adoption. Since then, it has been working to prepare Wave in a Box, a standalone version that would give developers the functionality of Waves and the ability to run them on their own server.
As many of Wave's components are open source, others can and do continue to work on the project. According to Google, at November's Wave Protocol Summit it was "quite clear that there is a healthy community of startups, independent developers and industry partners enthusiastic to continue development of the Wave Federation protocols and Wave in a Box." By being part of the Apache Incubator, that community will be able to continue to grow.
Alongside community development, one of the initial goals of Apache Wave is to migrate the codebase from code.google.com to the Apache Software Foundation's infrastructure.
Earlier Monday, Foursquare revamped its service with the addition of photos and comments.
The new features may seem like belated additives that merely keep Foursquare (
on par with its location-based competitors, but this update is replete with service-wide improvements that drive home the social utility and post-checkin possibility of the platform.
The new features can be instantly experienced via the updated iPhone app and the web, and support for Android (
and BlackBerry is coming soon. For a deeper look, browse through the comprehensive screenshot guide in the gallery below. If you’ve already downloaded the update, let us know what you think in the comments.
First Impressions
The best word to describe today’s improvements is social. Photos are social, comments are social and now the entire Foursquare experience, by extension, is exponentially more social in nature.
Photos and comments have been adroitly molded into the Foursquare experience. The new checkin screen includes an empty photo box that politely begs the user to share a photo, and each checkin displays camera and comment box icons to denote social activity happening around a place or picture. The net effect is an app experience that is noticeably more compelling and engrossing than before.
Other words that come to mind are context and depth. Prior to today, CEO and co-founder Dennis Crowley would speak of Foursquare as a service that seeks to reinvent what happens after the checkin. It’s a nice sentiment that, in theory, sets Foursquare apart from the rest, but the startup wasn’t really delivering features that made the what’s next? aspect of the service tangible.
The addition of photos and comments are a big step in that direction. Now, after you check in, you can continue to add photos to further document your experience. Plus, you can leverage the comments to better facilitate meet ups or solicit feedback and advice from friends on a particular locale.
Photos associated with checkins are nice, but photos added to tips and venues are also quite significant. Tips, especially, come to life with photos and we’re curious to see what happens as Foursquare partners and users add color to recommendations through their photos.
Nice Touches
The new iPhone app and the website are littered with subtle design enhancements. The first time you fire up the app, for instance, you’ll notice a nicely stylized loading screen.
There’s also a cute mayor crown that appears in the lower righthand corner of the app anytime it takes a few seconds to process an action. After you check in to a venue, you’ll see a redesigned checkin page that more clearly denotes the venue mayor and the points you earned for the checkin.
Push notifications alerting you to comments on photos make for a richer, more engaging mobile experience.
On the web, your history page now highlights checkins with attached photos and comments using the same camera and comment icons as the iPhone app. Venue pages and tips are also decked out with uploaded photos on the web.
Best of all, though, is the immediate symbiosis between your Instagram, Picplz and Foodspotting photos and your Foursquare activity. If you’re actively using one of those mobile photo sharing apps, then you’ve probably noticed that the photos associated with checkins from the past few days have already been pulled into your Foursquare timeline.
Room for Improvement
Foursquare concedes that photos and comments were pushed out quickly to users in time for the holidays. Certain features including the ability to export photos to Facebook (
and Flickr ()
and an easier way to track comments and access your collection of photos are still in the works.
We’d also like to see Foursquare build ways to allow users to simultaneously attach a photo to a checkin, tip and place. Right now, these are all separate actions and that feels unnecessary and a bit counterintuitive if the startup designs to get users to enhance the venue and tip experience with their photos.
Noticeably unavailable is the now ubiquitous “Like” option popularized by Facebook and present in most mobile photo sharing services. It’s not as if the app needs a “Like” button, or suffers because it lacks one, but it does seem relevant to note its absence.
Crowley agrees that something of this variety is missing and says that Foursquare will consider adding a way to favorite tips, checkins and photos. “There’s a lot of things we still need to build into photos, but it’s useful for us to see how people are using it, listen to feedback from users and then evolve the product from there,” he says.
The New Foursquare
522 477116 photo
December 20, 2010 by Jennifer Van Grove
Amplify Clips Text, Images, and More to Share Across Social Networks
Firefox/Chrome/Web-Based: Amplify is a clipping service on steroids; it combines blogging, micro blogging, web clipping, and link sharing into a streamline server that makes it easier than ever to share information with as many of your friends and followers as possible.
The best way to describe Amplify is as a meta-dashboard for all your information sharing needs. If you feel like your attention and your ability to share has been fragmented by too many social networks or communication channels Amplify gives you the ability to streamline everything into one command center.
After signing up for a free account at Amplify, linking your social networking and other profiles—Amplify supports autoposting to Twitter, Facebook, Buzz, Posterous, Tumblr, Wordpress, Blogger, Ping.fm, Friendfeed, Delicious, and more—and adding either their bookmarklet or their Chrome/Firefox extension, you're ready to easily share links, media, and microblog posts across your entire social network. Updates can go out immediately or on a set schedule. Everything you "amplify" using the service goes on your personal Amplog.
Read more about Amplify at the link below or sign up for a free account to take it for a test drive.
Fri, Dec 03, 2010 @ 12:30 PMComments
If your business is using Facebook as a part of its inbound marketing strategy, then it is likely that a goal of your marketing team is to expand your reach by attracting more people to like your Facebook page. For a long time marketers have faced a challenge in inviting new users through Facebook. While they have been encouraging people to visit their Facebook Fan Pages, it hasn't been easy to do the reverse--get email addresses into Facebook and send invitations through Facebook's messaging system.
This process has now changed. This week, Facebook has enabled business page administrators to import email addresses into Facebook to invite people to like their page. Check out the rest of this post for a walkthrough of these process!
Step 1: Go to your Facebook Business Page and click "Edit Page"
Step 2: Click on "Marketing" and then select "Tell your Fans."
Step 3: Upload your email list and invite fans.
Have you used this feature to tell more people about your Facebook page?
In an effort to help people discover more of their friends, Facebook has updated their find friends browser. The tool, which allows people to find existing friends, has gone through a number of changes in the past few months.
This latest version is clean and is extremely effective at browsing through friends based on various Facebook profile details, including the schools you attended, your hometown, and more. The new tool is currently accessible here. While Facebook previously suggested friends, the model has evolved to enable users to more efficiently discover friends that they already know.By default the browser shows those individuals who you are most likely to know, most often ranked by mutual friends as well as other factors that aren’t clear. The most significant aspect of this new page is how fast it loads. You simply load it up and can just scroll through indefinitely, browsing through people who you are most likely to know. It’s a pretty slick tool and it’s one that I’m sure many users will find to be useful.
Thanks to Eti Suruzon and Adam Carson for letting us know!
I wrote about springpad earlier this fall, and the tool continues to improve
Android/iOS/Web: Cross-platform, life-organizing solution Springpad released a major update today, bringing a fast HTML5 webapp (and corresponding mobile apps) with easier searching, tagging, organization, and personalization features.
While it isn't a desktop app as many of you wanted, the new HTML5 webapp is pretty awesome, and truly cross-platform (and seriously, it feels like a real app). Right off the bat, the biggest difference is that you can create notebooks to organize your information. So now, instead of having all your items in one giant list, you can create a list for recipes, movies you want to see, items pertaining to your next vacation, and so on. It's much easier to sift through. The search function has also vastly improved: Instead of adding an item by type, you can now just do a global search, which is much faster (and still pretty accurate).
Among other changes are themes for you to personalize your Springpad, which sync across all your devices. There's also a pretty cool visual organization feature called the Board, where you can lay out items as you would on a table or bulletin board. If you add a person or place, you can even get an instant Google Map added to the board with the click of a button.
There are a bunch of other new additions to Springpad, so check out their blog post below to read more about it. Check out the video above, as well, to see the new changes in action. If you haven't gotten on the Springpad bandwagon yet, I highly recommend you take another look—the new version is a big, big improvement over an already awesome app.
PALO ALTO, Calif. — For more than two decades, e-mail has been the killer application of the Internet. But Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, believes that e-mail is antiquated.
On Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg unveiled a new unified messaging system on Facebook that allows people to communicate with each other regardless of whether they are using e-mail, text messages or online chat services.
“We don’t think a modern messaging system is going to be e-mail,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. He said that e-mail is too formal, too slow and too cumbersome, especially for young people who have grown up communicating using online chat and text messaging systems. The new Facebook service, which will allow users to have @facebook.com e-mail addresses, intends to integrate the three forms of communication into one inbox that is accessible from PCs or mobile phones.
Mr. Zuckerberg played down any suggestion that the new service would revolutionize communications overnight.
“This is not an e-mail-killer,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “We don’t expect anyone to wake up tomorrow and say they are going to shut down” their current e-mail accounts.
Still, analysts said that over time the service could gradually become a replacement
“All of the e-mail vendors should be worried – Google, Yahoo, MSN,” said Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst with the Altimeter Group, in an interview Friday, before the Facebook service was unveiled. “All of those platforms have been trying to add social networking features to their services.”
The new system will also include social features that allow users to filter their in-box in a way that prioritizes messages from friends and close associates over others. And it offers a way to quickly access all the conversations they’ve had with a particular user.
The system will be rolled out gradually over the next few months, Mr. Zuckerberg said.
“It sounds great.,” said Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineLand.com, an industry blog. “I want to see how it works in practice.”
