As you probably already noticed Digg.com has got a new face (if not I’ve got 5 invites to check it out). It’s much more flexible, customizable and most importantly much more social. I have to be honest with you I always liked the idea of Digg but never was a big fan of the page, because most of the time it was really slow, quite difficult to navigate and social features were more or less just addition to the page, but not really integrated in the business concept. Well, that’s changed completely. Now you can follow the news that you really want to follow and keep on eye what’s happening in your friend’s world much easier. It seems that Digg has become a mashup of Alltop.com and Facebook.com with the best features of both the sites (top news+social engagement). Well check it out yourself and let me know what do you think about the new design of the page?
Here we go, all the mist surrounding Facebook’s development towards location based application is cleared off, The “Facebook Places” has been launched in US today, and probably shortly we will have it in Europe as well. It’s going to be interesting how it will challenge the favourite location based social network Foursquare. Personally, I believe it can affect Foursquare quite a bit, but let’s wait and see.
Is Facebook building the new community-driven question-and-answer (Q&A) platform? I think it is. I‘ve just noticed an ad on Facebook, according to which Facebooks is looking for better testers for their new product:
“We at Facebook are preparing to launch a brand new product to the world. We think it will be as exciting as Facebook Photos and Facebook Events, but we need your help to make it great.”
From the description of the testers role it sounds a lot like crowdsourced answers platform something like Yahoo Answers or Answers.com.
“As a beta tester, your job will be to ask great questions and provide great answers about your favorite topics. Economics? Skydiving? Relationships? Mexican Restaurants? It’s up to you. You’ll be the first person outside of Facebook to use this product. Your expert writing will be seen by tens of millions of people — including job recruiters. And we’ll bring our best beta testers out to California to tour Facebook headquarters and meet the team.”
Interesting updates are coming up on Facebook. I wonder what kind of business model will be associated with it? Is Facebook going to be selective in people answering the questions? Would love to hear your ideas about these news?
The new ambitious changes on Facebook will seriously affect our Internet experience. According to Anne Herngaard , there core technologies that will make it happen can be grouped in three categories:
“1. OPEN GRAPH: Connecting websites with Facebook so that you can connect content outside of Facebook with your personal profile. This will instantly be added to your news feed and your Likes and Interests will be build from the activities you do around the web.
2. SOCIAL PLUGINS: Consists of easy-to-use widgets to incorporate on your website with a simple code to provide the user with a more personal experience. The new plugins include ‘Like’ buttons, activity stream plugins that transfers your news stream, a Recommendations plugin, a ‘Sign In’ plugin, and a Social Bar that will appear as a dock at the bottom of your site. This way you have socially enabled you site with some simple html.
3. GRAPH API: A more open platform for developers to work with, so that Facebook will be easier to build around. This will entail new tools and services to incorporate on your own website. For instance developers can search on updates on public Facebook pages and develop services that may tell what people are saying about your brand.”
So how it will really look like?
I believe very soon you are going to notice such kind of recommendation widgets on all major websites and blogs. It’s important to notice that you won’t have to login to your Facebook account to share the experience with you friends. Nevertheless, your action will be automatically reported on Facebook as you can see in the pic below.
What can be seen as a minor changes or add-on from the the first sight, actually might be a revolutionizing Internet technologies. We will start sharing our lives not only on Facebook, but all over the Internet. CNN identified an interesting side affect of all this – we will only see the web that is liked by our friends and might forget the beauty of exploring the new territories on our own.
As you may have already heard Twitter has started its own Promoted Tweets program a few days ago. I was just following the discussion and reading all the news about it and decided to share this collection of posts which pretty much tells everything you need to know about this developement.
Hello World by Official Twitter blog
Why You Should Advertise on Twitter by Adage.com
Twitter bets its ad platform — and reputation — on "resonance" by New York Times
Promoted Tweets: What Brands Can And Can’t Do With Twitter’s New Ad Platform by Forrester
Twitter COO: “Promoted Tweets Are Not Ads”
Twitter Announces an Ad program…here is how to rank organically by The Customer Collective
Twitter Sponsored Tweets: The Impact for Marketers by Steve Rubel
Twitter launches Ads, New Business Model by Going Social Now
I’m happy to share some great news for Social Media Citizens readers. We are teaming up with Social Marketing Forum and Social Email Marketing blog in order to bring more value for our communities. As a result, I am very happy to announce that we going to have the guest bloggers from Social Email Marketing and Social Marketing Forum – one of the fastest growing social media community in Europe. I definitely recommend to join it and I hope you will enjoy some fresh content on our beloved blog!
Are you ready? Here it comes! One of the biggest Social Media event’s in Europe – Social Media Word Forum is knocking on your door. The speakers from Facebook, Linkedin, Bebo, Xing to name just a few social media mega brands who are involved in the event. Well if you have anything to do with social media that is the event you simply can not miss. So watch out 15 – 16 of March, London Olympia, see you there!
Important links:
Register: http://www.socialmedia-forum.com/register/online-registration.html
Event programme:http://www.socialmedia-forum.com/images/stories/agendac.pdf
Follow event on Twitter: http://twitter.com/SocialNetworkWF
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