Earlier this week, Facebook announced the "Send" button. Like the long lost sibling of the "Like" button, the "Send" button lets users share content with their friends, but more selectively. While clicking on "Like" sends a message across your entire Facebook network, "Share" lets you chose specific users, email addresses and Facebook Groups to share content with.

The new feature launched on Monday with 50 partner sites, including a number of major mainstream media outlets, but missed out on a number of great sites we love to share from. What if you use Google Reader to read your blogs but you want to share with your Facebook friends? Well, you'll just have to install one of these two extensions to bring the "Share" button to your browser of choice.

Today, it announced two winners, both of which it says were built in 12 hours of the beginning of the contest. The first extension, SendAnywhere, brings "Share" to all of the aforementioned sites while the second, SendPlus, brings the button to Google Reader, Yelp, eBay, YouTube, Craigslist, Woot, Amazon, CNN, KSL and many hosted Blogger and Posterous sites.

For those of you who want to easily share with your Facebook friends but don't want to wait for individual publishers to implement the button, these two extensions will quickly expand the number of sites you can "Share" with your friends. Why be patient when you can install an extension, right?

In my experience working advising some of the world's largest brands on Facebook, I agree with the author that some of these tactics are generally not best practices, however, applying a blanket statement to anything when it comes to social media is a slippery slope.

Let's look into each of the tactics mentioned in the original post and dig a bit deeper.

Like Blocks

A "like block" or "fan gate" is akin to putting up an entry page to your Facebook Page(s) and offering up people an incentive to like the Page to enter, whether it be exclusive content, a discount on products or services, etc. The author of the post said like blocking "typically has a 50% or more drop off rate," but in our experience this often varies greatly depending on industry, the content or offer employed to incentivize the like etc. By 50% drop off rate, it is implied that half of the people who "like" a Page in response to a specific incentive will never come back.

We've seen drastically different results, where brands have increased their fan base anywhere from 2 times to 10 times (and keep them engaged) by simply using owned media like a distribution list that pushes potential fans to a fan gated Page. This is a great fan acquisition strategy.

Working with Playboy, we've been very successful utilizing like blocks, and Playboy now has more Facebook likes than actual magazine subscribers, an amazing feat for the brand. The key is making the content behind the fan gate worth it. Deep discounts, free samples and exclusive must see content can work well. Do like blocks typically have a 50% or more drop off rate? It depends. But they shouldn't if you're doing it right.

Photo and video contests

This was perhaps the most interesting example of something the author said "mostly doesn't work," especially since as we mentioned earlier, there are success stories for these kind of tactics all around the Web.

Also, as some commenters to the post pointed out, what the author suggested, running a photo or video contest outside of an app, is actually a violation of Facebook's terms of service.

We've seen varying levels of success with photo and video contests and certainly wouldn't say they "mostly don't work." One of our customers, a national toy company, increased their fan-base on Facebook by 10,000 fans per week driven by a successfully executed photo contest with no advertising spend.

Last year, the Miss Universe Organization ran a contest where people uploaded their photos and other information to be elected as a "contestant" for the 2010 Miss USA Pageant. The contest took place over a two week period and yielded more than 300 entries and tens of thousands of votes

Certainly there is opportunity here, as eMarketer notes photo sharing is a major trend on Facebook. More than 6 billion photos are uploaded to Facebook each month.

Sweepstakes

Sweepstakes can be tricky on Facebook, but it's not fair to say they "work" or "don't work" across the board. This past fall, we launched a "fan only" sweepstakes on the Parents magazine Facebook page. More than 16,000 fans entered the sweepstakes. Meredith Corporation, the publisher of Parents magazine, has not seen a decline in engagement from these fans; in fact, they've seen increased engagement.

In another example, workwear manufacturer Carhartt recently ran a sweepstakes that saw several thousand entries over just 10 days.

Sweepstakes clearly can work, but you need to be smart about how you implement them. You also need to encourage people to share right after they've entered to increase viral lift. If you don't have this functionality, you'll be dead in the water.

Next page: Where We Agree With The Author

Where We Agree With The Author

Extended Permission: We've all had the experience. You click on a cool app or link on Facebook and are brought to a page that asks if it's ok for the app to pull some of your specific profile data. You have to really want the app or experience in order to move forward, right? The drop off data here can vary greatly, but it's definitely higher than if you build an experience that doesn't require this permission page to pop up.

Unbranded Apps: The argument from the author is that brands can't use widely available unbranded turnkey apps that don't allow them to customize the experience, because people will "judge your brand in comparison to the best they've seen," according to author.

We completely agree that people expect a lot more from brands on Facebook today, as compared to a year ago. Brands on Facebook have moved from a one-off app strategy to an always-on Page strategy. (Remember before it was possible to "like" ReadWriteWeb?)

Lots of apps on one tab: In many cases brands have seen success by pairing down the amount of content they have on a customer Facebook Page or tab to ensure that people know exactly what they can do (and how they can easily share with their friends) when they visit your Page. Facebook users don't have a lot of patience when it comes to branded experiences. They want to get back to their News Feed to see what their friends are doing. Make sure the action you want someone to take is obvious, requires little time investment, and motivates him or her to share.

If you make your fans look smart, cool, or in the know, it's a great way to motivate sharing. Remember, Facebook users don't just share what they want to share, they share what they think their friends will think makes them look smart, funny, or cool.

Now lets get back to the original story's headline, "Why Most Facebook Marketing Doesn't Work." It's almost impossible to make blanket statements about the success of social media marketing campaigns without considering business objectives, audience, execution and other factors. Hopefully you feel the same way.

In other words, when you hit that "Like" button to express your thumbs-up approval of a particular site or story, Facebook will now post an update to your wall that includes a lot more details about what you're approving. A Facebook "Like" will now include a picture, a headline and a little blurb, along with the option to comment, just as it does when you purposefully share a story to Facebook.

But Inside Facebook reports that the old version of the share button has been removed from developers' documentation. Up 'til now, developers had several options about how the button would push content to Facebook - a share button, a simple, comment-less like, and a recommend-with-comment option. Unless the latter was chosen, users only got a link to the story on the recent activity section of their wall. Now the Facebook buttons will all generate a full story.

This change will likely be a boon to publishers who will see more of their content fill more news streams, and in turn, hopefully gain more referral traffic as a result. But it may not be a welcome change to Facebook users who find their feeds full of likes-are-now-shares.

Will the auto-publishing to your wall change how you use Facebook's Like button?

First, deep campaigns don't work. Digital agencies love deep, expensive campaigns on Facebook, with tons of pages, interaction, and art. It fits in with how agencies build microsites and websites, and justifies the $100,000-plus price tag that they like to charge. Examples include lightweight games, prediction contests, treasure hunts where you include friends, and such. Unfortunately for agencies and the brands that drop a lot of cash, Facebook users decidedly don't like deep campaigns.]]> Guest author Peter Yared is the vice president and general manager of Webtrend Apps, a platform used by top brands to engage their customers on Facebook, iPhone and Android. He has has an extensive background in highly scalable Internet infrastructure and tools, and has authored patents on fundamental Internet infrastructure including federated identity and data marshaling.

They do not like to spend 20 or 30 minutes on a single brand's page, unless they are consuming innovative, funny, or exclusive content. So a travel site looking for a long time spent on a page should not put up a treasure hunt on a world map where you invite your friends and can together find great prizes after exploring cities. Sounds good in a pitch meeting, but it results in abysmally numbers of active users.

Facebook users are very sophisticated, and there is no way a single campaign is going to compete on game mechanics with CityVille. If you want to build CityVille, it might work. But, even Netflix pulled their Facebook app. You're better off putting up a bunch of funny videos from around the world and leave it at that.

Lots of Apps on One Tab Don't Work

It is easy to think of a Facebook tab like a Web page, and throw a bunch of features on it - such as a poll, gifting, and some videos - all on one tab. However, most users do not show up on a Facebook tab like they do on a Web page. They are usually coming in by clicking on a page's newsfeed posting ("What kind of traveller are you? Take the quiz!"), a friend's newsfeed posting ("I'm a cranky traveller! What kind of traveller are you? Take the quiz?"), or a Facebook ad ("Find out what kind of traveller you are!").

Now, if after clicking on one of these links a user is dropped into a Facebook Page tab with eight different things on it, they are not going to see a quiz immediately and move on. There should only be one engagement feature per tab.

Sweepstakes Don't Work

After an initial onslaught of Facebook sweepstakes promotions, marketers are learning that sweepstakes have very low conversion rates and almost no viral uptake. We're also learning that they attract unengaged users who are there for the prize rather than a relationship with the brand.

Facebook users like to click around and look at stuff, and absolutely do not like filling out forms. We have run highly promoted sweeps campaigns for major artists that included things like backstage passes and a limo ride to the show that had abysmal conversion rates. There is absolutely no incentive to make sweepstakes social.

Why would you invite more people to join a sweepstakes? It reduces your own chances. Have you ever seen a "I just entered a sweepstakes and you should to" posting on someone's wall?

One attempt to increase viral spread in sweepstakes is to offer more prizes when there are more entrants, but all that does is confuse users with conflicting agendas. There is a disincentive to invite people since it reduces your chances of winning, but if enough new people join up perhaps you can win something else... "Ah, too confusing, I'm going to watch videos instead."

Photo and Video Contests Rarely Work

A lot of brands like to do photo and video contests, but unfortunately they do not have the user base that likes to submit photos and videos. Travel and photography brands? For sure. Mobile carrier? Beverage brand? Not likely. Even clothing brands can't pull this off.

Uploading a photo or video is a big investment on the part of the user, and they do not expect to do it for the vast majority of businesses. These campaigns also require the labor to moderate the submissions. If you must run a photo or video Facebook campaign, the best way to do it is actually NOT in an app.

Instead, have users upload the photos and videos to the brand's page, and moderate them there. Then have users get their friends to Like the photos or videos. This way, the campaign leverages all of Facebook's viral channels around photos - when the user uploads the photo, when they Like the photo, when their friends like or comment on their photo submission, it is all highly likely to show up in their friends' feeds, drawing traffic. The great thing about this is that it is easy to do for free, since using all of Facebook's photo and video features are free, and users get to use the known Facebook photo and video interface, which increases conversions.

Like Blocks Rarely Work

Like blocking, where a user has to "Like" a Facebook Page in order to access a feature, typically has a 50% or more drop off rate, even when there is something there that is actually worth liking the page to get, such as exclusive content or a great coupon. Putting a Like block on basic content will almost guarantee a 100% drop off rate.

Be very, very selective about Like blocks and be sure to tell the user that it is worth it to them. A Like is the mailing list opt-in of the Facebook world, so be willing to offer up some goodness and know that most will opt not to Like.

Extended Permissions Rarely Work

Asking the user for a laundry list of access to their profile usually results in a 30% or more drop off rate, and that is for well known brands that they trust. Do you really need to know their relationship status? Generally a brand already knows its demographic - does a youth-oriented clothing brand really need to validate that it is 16 to 25 year-old women that are engaging with the brand?

So while it sounds good to ask for extended permissions, do the math and monitor the drop off rate to ensure that it is worth it to you, otherwise the overall campaign ROI may not turn out the way you want, especially if the campaign is being graded on number of engagements.

Unbranded Apps Don't Work

It's got to look good, and be on brand. In the early days of Facebook, a brand could put up a basic presence with some turnkey apps, and users accepted that. Now that Facebook is all grown up, a brand presence needs to be on par with its website. Facebook users are savvy and will judge your brand in comparison to the best they've seen.

Dedicated Facebook Storefronts Kinda Work Right Now, But Soon Won't Work

Dedicated Facebook storefronts are the rage on Facebook right now, but they are unfortunately not integrated with an e-commerce site's existing payment and inventory systems, and are therefore a logistical nightmare. The best bet right now is to list featured products on a Facebook Page with click-thrus off of Facebook to the e-commerce site.

Now that Facebook is supporting iFrame tabs in pages, an existing e-commerce site can be skinned to fit in a 520-pixel-wide Facebook Fan Page, thereby integrating existing payment and inventory systems into the Facebook Page.

So What Does Work? Promotions and Consistent, Lightweight Engagement

Make sure your fans get something in return for liking your page with promotions likes offers for fans that they can easily redeem. The more lucrative the deals offer, the more sharing with friends will happen. Fans want things like exclusive products/services, drastically discounted prices akin to Groupon type deals, and early notification and registration for upcoming events, ideally exclusive to fans. Promotions should make the fan feel like they are a brand insider, not just a standard consumer.

A big secret of Facebook marketing is that it is easy and cheap to drive promotions using ads targeted only at your fans that link to landing tabs that deliver the offer and encourage fans to share to their newsfeed.

A brand on Facebook should be like a casual friend or neighbor and not try to suck people into heavy levels of interaction. What do you do with a friend? Comment on their photos, like their status, vote on their outfit. These types of interactions take seconds, not minutes, and definitely not hours.

A brand on Facebook should offer their users regularly updated, simple to interact with engagement features. Each of the engagement apps should be fully branded, and run in a separate tab with traffic driven from wall posts, newsfeed and Facebook ad units to increase engagement. Start with a personality quiz. Then two weeks later put up a poll. Then try a trivia app. For special events, put up a gifting app for Valentine's Day, or for the holiday season, a holiday song card.

Some brands, like media properties and well-known consumer brands, get an immediate fan base for this type of lightweight engagement. For the rest, building a fan base on Facebook is no different than building a mailing list in the previous generation of the Internet. It takes consistent engagement, and builds over time.

Methods to accelerate growth include tying Facebook ad campaigns with engagement apps and driving traffic from the homepage. The apps should still be lightweight and fun, with the conversion goal of getting the user to like the brand.

The point is to regularly put up new, fresh engagement features that are easy and fun for users to interact with, that they will want to post to their wall and share with their friends. Then users will interact with your brand just like they interact with their friends on Facebook!]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_most_facebook_marketing_doesnt_work.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_most_facebook_marketing_doesnt_work.php Marketing Thu, 17 Feb 2011 13:00:00 -0800 Guest Author Facebook quietly introduced an "Unlike Page" button into its News Feed recently, which allows users to opt-out of receiving unwanted messages from pages they had previously said they "liked."

Now, when a user clicks the "X" button to remove a story from their News Feed, there's an option to unlike the page, which joins other options including "mark as spam, "hide this post," or "hide all" posts from the offending page.

Unliking Gets Easier

We saw the news about this change reported on Monday as well, on unofficial Facebook news site, Inside Facebook. They noted that this was only one of many changes surrounding the "like" feature as of late. Facebook has also been prompting users with few likes to add more pages, has been showing what likes users have in common, has re-launched its "Page Browser" to encourage liking and more.

The "unlike button" change is so new, in fact, that we couldn't find any mention of it in Facebook's own help documentation. Currently, the only mention of how "unliking" pages works is this FAQ post directing users to "unlike" a page by visiting the page directly, then clicking the "unlike" link in the lower left-hand corner. That process is similar to how you would "un-friend" someone on Facebook - you have to visit their profile and then select "Remove from Friends" at the bottom left. Obviously, having to navigate directly to a page to unlike it is much more cumbersome for users than just clicking a button.

Spammy Marketers, Take Note

For marketers, this easy-access "unlike" button in the News Feed means it's even more important to dial down the frequency of updates so as not to become overly "spammy." The content of those messages should be carefully considered too. Offend a user with an off-the-cuff post and they may be gone for good. Says Clickz, users can now "simply see one brand post that turns them off and leave the company's audience...without leaving their personal wall." The only good news for marketers here is that the change doesn't seem to propagate over to the end user's Wall for their friends to see, too.

While the new "unliking" methodology is certainly easier than before, it's not a one-step process. Instead, "unliking" actually takes two steps - the first to click "unlike page" and then a pop-up box appears asking if you really want to remove your connection to the page entirely. A user has to click "Remove Post and Unlike" in order to opt out from seeing any more messages from that page going forward.

The change may help to increase the number of "likes" a user doles out in the future. Once users know that it's (almost) as easy to "unlike" something as it is to "like" it, they may be more willing to click the like button.

For the sake of all of our sanity and humanity in general, we took a peek behind the "like" scams making their way around Facebook and we can tell you right now - the American dude doesn't deserve to get stoned to death and all the little girl found in her Happy Meal was mechanically separated, genetically modified chicken and high fructose corn syrup.

So you won't have to, we clicked. This is what we saw for the Happy Meal girl:

It's a terribly mocked-up version of a Facebook page that seems to get the color and shape just right enough for people to ignore how bad it is and click on the video. The thing is, the entire video is simply a linked image, as is most of the page.

Just to feed your curiosity, here's the "American guy" that should be stoned to death:

The end is the same, no matter what one you examine - a post to your wall saying you like it and that's it. There is no video. Right-clicking on the page brings up a dialog box offering for you to sell your Facebook Fan page.

The funny thing is, these pages are just that - self propogating bits of annoying. The entire operation appears to be a scam to build the popularity of these domains before selling them off to likely make your digital life that much more aggravating in the long run. So don't click.

This isn't the first we've seen of unsavory types trying to take advantage of Facebook's "like" button. Last June, Sarah Perez wrote about "like-jacking", or the act of fooling users into liking things other than what they thought they were liking.

In the future, just ask yourself before you click: Does it have multiple exclamation points? Is half or more of it in all CAPITAL LETTERS? Do they want you to "CLICK HERE TO SEE!"? It's likely a scam. And don't worry. There's no single video out there that could actually make all you SMS fiends stop text messaging. Just know that from the start.

The bits of this platform bring together the visions of a social, personalized and semantic Web that have been discussed since del.icio.us pioneered Web 2.0 back in 2004. Facebook's vision is both minimalistic and encompassing - but its ambition is to kill off its competition and use 500 million users to take over entire Web.

Facebook Open Graph: Publisher Plugins

The Open Graph is a set combination of publisher plugins, semantic markup and a developer API.

Login with Faces & Facepile: The simpler publisher plugins enhance Facebook Connect. They makes it easy and compelling to sign in by leveraging Facebook cookies and showing faces of Facebook friends who are already members of the service.

Like Button and Like Box: These plugins add the liking feature to any content, typically the whole page. Both can be enhanced with semantic markup, described below. But the very basic intent for these is to get users to Like on the site and post a link to Facebook, which is then permanently stored on a user's profile and points back to the original site.

Activity Feed and Live Stream: These plugins show static and dynamic activity on the site. Activity Feed lists recent likes and comments from the site, while Live Stream shows a real-time view of activity on the site and is intended for interactive events.

Recommendations: This plugin surfaces personalized recommendations for the user based on what friends and everyone else is liking on the site. It is intended to drive the users to other pages on the site.

Facebook Open Graph: Semantic Markup

Facebook announced simple, RDF-based markup to make the plugins smarter. In a nutshell, the markup enables publishers to say what object is on the page - a movie, a book, a recording artist, an event, a sports team, etc. This automatically enables semantics, that is, an understanding that the user is not just interacting with a webpage, but that he or she is liking a specific kind of thing. Semantics then leads to bucketing of the objects into categories like books, movies, music, etc., and gives rise to all sort of applications, including personalized recommendations.

Perhaps even more importantly, the markup helps Facebook connect the users across common interests across different websites. For example, if both Pandora and Last.fm annotate a page about The Beatles using Facebook's markup, then users will be able to see their friends, who like the Beatles across different sites. This is very significant, because the data around friends is sparse and scattered around the sites. Previously, Facebook would surface this data in the stream without persisting it. Now, the information about a friend's likes of movies, music, books, recording artists, events, sports team, etc. will be permanent on Facebook profiles and readily available in context around the Web.

Facebook Open Graph: New API

The new Facebook API is elegant and streamlined. It makes it easy to access user information (with permission of course) such as profile, friends, etc. All of the calls are REST based and return JSON objects. For example, my profile information can be fetched like this: http://graph.facebook.com/alexiskold. The authentication is based on OAuth 2.0 protocol and makes it simple not only to connect, but to also prompt for permissions to access user information.

This new API turns Facebook into a read/write storage of users' tastes. And not just one user - all Facebook users.

Implications for the Users

With this release, Facebook asks users if they are willing to trade off privacy for personalization. To be clear, no personalization is ever possible without users telling a system about their tastes. What Facebook is asking for is necessary in order to then create personalized Web experience. Whether users want this sort of thing is a different question, but assuming that you want to know more about your friends you will.

Friends' interests around entertainment, sports, travel, etc. will be categorized and available. It will be easy to figure out what your friends are into both on Facebook and around the Web. In addition, Facebook is going to be using its own engine to bring you recommendations for related content. This will further accelerate the discovery and cross linking between friends. This will likely further impact the amount of search people do around the Web. As Fred Wilson pointed out - passed links replace search.

Yet, the crux of user implications is neither of the above, but one single issue: privacy. It is unclear at this point that this issue is a concern for actual Facebook users, but it is clear that tech world is raising its eyebrows: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Dave Winer, Jeff Jarvis and many others expressed their concerns. People are saying that not only Facebook will know too much about us (because Google is already there today), but that it will be able to control too much.

Personally, I am skeptical that the average Facebook user is going to care all that much. People are notoriously naive about being watched on the Web, and this is likely to be no exception. More likely than not, Facebook users will enjoy the personalization aspects of the new platform and won't think much about it - until Facebook starts openly targeting them.

This was not been part of f8 of course, but Facebook is likely to use the information for targeting. After all, advertising is a major part of its monetization already so why won't it make it even better? If this targeting is too spot on, lots of users will probably get annoyed. Facebook is likely to sooth them via Facebook credits and heavy discounts, negotiated because of their massive volume.

How exactly users react remains to be seen, but they will probably like the new Facebook more because of increased relevancy and interaction with friends around the Web.

Implications for Publishers

On the surface, this Facebook offering is a no-brainer for publishers. Who does not want more social activity on their site? However, in reality this is far from a slam dunk. To understand why, consider two types of sites: sites that are either social networks or have social networking integrated, and the sites that have their own commenting and ratings systems. In the first camp you will find Last.fm, Flixster, Goodreads, etc. None of these sites were a launch partner, understandably so. Social connections around music, movies and books are their bread and butter as are the ratings, reviews and recommendations. If they switch to Facebook for all of this, what do they have left?

So any site that already has social networking built in has to decide to abandon that before jumping into the Facebook Open Graph. The even worse problem is the ownership of ratings and comments. Are publishers really ready to give that up? Nobody seriously thinks that users are going to be rating through Facebook and then through the site again. So how is this going to work? It is unclear at this point, but it's likely publishers will ask for ways to replicate or export comments and likes that users sent to Facebook via their site. Perhaps an open API that allows publishers to manipulate the data is the answer, but it is easy to see how some publishers would be very concerned.

However, if you run a website like eCommerce or a blog or a service like Pandora that currently does not have a lot of social built-in, this offering is a no-brainer as it will instantly start recycling your pages through the massive Facebook power of passed links.

Implications for Competitors

This is aggressive and brilliant move by Facebook - and Twitter, Google, Yahoo, MySpace, AOL, eBay, Amazon and others, except for Microsoft, should be really worried. It appears that Microsoft is content with just partnering with Facebook, perhaps rightly so. Possibly a Bing deal is in the works, which would make a lot of sense.

For all other players on the Web, the worry is that Facebook is trying to close the loop in exclusively owning user eyeballs. Apparently Facebook is not content with just connecting people; it wants to connect people and things. And not only that, it wants to do it around the Web. And not just any people - friends. You don't need to look too closely to see that Facebook is creating a feedback loop, which includes it, users and the rest of the Web and excludes its competitors.

There are several things that other big players might try to do, the worst of which is to try to mimic Facebook. The "me too" that we've seen way too many times recently has not worked, and will not work now. The second best choice is to try to block it. As strange as it sounds it might just work. Between publisher and user issues there are a lot of concerns, and a carefully orchestrated and coordinated campaign may seriously hurt this initiative. Remember, Beacon was brought down fairly quickly by a combination of user backlash and derogatory press.

The third option - to embrace and extend this platform, to innovate on top of it - is likely to be the best move. Innovation has always trumped stagnation on the Web. The problem is that it might not be that easy to embrace this initiative. After all, it does not look like Facebook asked everyone to gather around the table and cooperate on this. It might not be open to cooperation, but if it is then this is the way forward.

Technically speaking, what Facebook has done is elegant and correct. From markup, to plugins, to API, all of it is modern and awesome. The missing bit is that Facebook appears to be the only repository of data in this equation - and that makes the whole offering seriously closed. Publishers and users don't have a choice as to where to store the data. It is going to Facebook and Facebook alone. Perhaps there is a way to rework the system in a way that fixes that. We will look forward to see how this unfolds.

Implications for Facebook

Clearly this announcement is yet another turning point for Facebook. Before the conference Facebook was the biggest social network on the planet. If its vision actually happens, Facebook will be the biggest network of people and things on the planet- or to put it differently, it will be the taste graph of the planet.

Obviously there is a different technology that Facebook will need to be building. It already perfected the social networking part, but semantic analysis, recommendation systems, vertical categories like movies and books, as well as having completely open read/write storage of tastes is completely new to the team. The biggest challenge that Facebook will face is to inject, re-deliver and most importantly make use of the data that is flowing into it.

Facebook will be doing some serious number crunching and UI revamps to prepare for this next phase of its life. But perhaps the biggest experiment and test will be delivering relevancy. Google succeed with this in search; Facebook will now have the challenge to bring relevancy to the recommendations and taste-based advertising arena.

Implications For the Semantic Web

One of the most exciting parts of the Facebook announcement to me personally is the possible breakthrough in semanticizing the Web. We've written previously about the Semantic Web here, and it has been a personal passion of mine. What Facebook has done has a chance to make vast parts of the consumer Web including movies, books, music, events, sports, and news semantically tagged. Publishers and websites finally have a strong incentive to mark things up and get return traffic from Facebook.

The actual protocol that Facebook suggested is very simple. To describe the object on the page, the site owner needs to specify the title, type of the object, image, url and the name of the site using simple meta tags. The format is extensible and additional tags can be added. For example, for a book a site can add an isbn number. This format leaves room for ambiguity. The goal of classic semantic markups traditionally has been to refer to entities precisely; for example adding the director to a movie, or a year to remakes. The Facebook protocol does not seem to have this.

There were lots of previous efforts to markup the Web. To name a few, RDF, microformats, Google Rich Snippets, Yahoo's Search Monkey (based on RDF and microformats), and lastly, abmeta, which was developed by me with help from Peter Mika at Yahoo. Of all these formats, Facebook's is most similar to abmeta because the markup is placed into meta tags, and is simple and human readable. This simplicity is the key to broad adoption.

So all around, this is a great chance for the Semantic Web to finally hit consumer verticals and become real.

Implications for Developers

Every new rich platform that has been rolled out in the past couple of years presented a big opportunity for developers and this one will be no exception. While we do not know exactly what sort of applications will be build on top of new Facebook, we know that they will be very powerful. This platform has the potential to give rise to to new kind of personalization and attention economy that people have been talking about for years. It has of course, a chance to majorly backfire, but I am optimistic.

This will be a gold rush for application that is likely to last for at least a year, like the last one did. It's too early to tell whether this will be a platform that survives and does not hurt is participants. However, it is very likely that the best applications built on this platform will be owned by Facebook. Still, there is a huge new opportunity here for developers and the sky is the limit.

Checkmate?

Facebook made a major chess move. It might have checkmated its competitors, or perhaps it might have to lose another piece like it lost Beacon. Whichever is the case, right now there are deep implications for Facebook and its competitors, publishers, users and the Web at large. What Facebook has announced cannot be ignored and can not be undone. Everyone needs to figure out the next steps and understand what to do.

Time will tell where we land, but my gut is that positive things will come out of this. If nothing else, let's give Facebook credit for innovation and re-imagination the Web.

If you want a safer solution, there's a new Facebook "like" bookmarklet you can use instead.

Not only does using the bookmarklet he created protect you from like fraud as described here, it's also a handy way to like anything on the Internet - even if there's no like button available on that page.

How to Use the Facebook Like Bookmarklet

To use the bookmarklet, just drag this link to your bookmarks bar in your Web browser: Like-o-matic.

Once it's there, you can click it anytime you're on a page or website you like.

Like ReadWriteWeb, for example? Click the button. Although there's no "Facebook Like Button" for the website as a whole (you can, however, find us on Facebook), you'll be given the opportunity to like ReadWriteWeb.

After clicking the bookmarklet once, you'll see a message appear at the top of the screen: "Be the first of your friends to like this." Click the button with the thumbs up on it and it will register your like on Facebook and post it to your News Feed.

That's all there is to it.

By using the bookmarklet instead of the like buttons on the websites themselves, you can be sure that your Facebook like will be pointing to the real thing. Plus, it allows you to like anything you want - even a site that isn't using Facebook buttons. Nice!

However, there's a small problem with this new, easy-to-use new tool: it's possible to trick users into liking anything - even pages they've never visited!

As Arnab Nandi, a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Michigan, recently discovered, it's simple to create a like button for a page you're not even on.

Using the wizard provided by Facebook, you can create a button for any URL you want and embed it on your site.

Why would anyone want to do this, you ask? While no self-respecting webmaster would want to deceive a visitor to their site, says Nandi, an "enterprising spammer" certainly would. By tricking site visitors into "liking" something by mistake, spammers could immediately place their links into that person's News Feed, a feed seen by all of that person's friends. And since an average Facebook user has 130 friends, even tricking a handful of people into doing this gives the spammer access to hundreds, potentially thousands, more people.

Nandi already coined a word for this new hack: "News Feed Spam."

And yes, it will exist.

How the Button Works

Creating your own evil like button is incredibly simple, as we've demonstrated below. Nandi uses the "safe for work" example of "liking" the Britney Spears site in the example on his blog, but we know that our readers don't want that affiliation in their News Feed for even an instant, so we created a much safer example for you to try by using our own Twitter account as the "like" target. (Really, we promise!).

Although you can remove the "like" from your News Feed after clicking, when you "like" something on Facebook, the affiliation is now attached to the Open Graph API. That means that your "like" data is associated with your profile, even if you remove it from showing in your News Feed.

In any event, all we did was fill in the necessary info into Facebook's wizard and we got code for the button below:

If you click that button, you'll see that you just "liked" ReadWriteWeb's Twitter account, not this post or this website.

So the question now is this: did Facebook make the "like" button too simple? Should the button display more info about the target of the like so you know what you're getting into? Will this problem become so widespread that people begin to fear "liking" things across the net? What do you think?

Image credit for original post: Zazzle

As avid users of FriendFeed will tell you, Facebook's implementation of FriendFeed's features are nothing but a pale imitation of the real thing. Still, there's a growing concern among the service's fans about its sustainability. Although FriendFeed's founders believe they can still innovate to profitability, we're no longer sure that's true.

FriendFeed is a web application that's very much like Facebook's News Feed, except that it incorporates far more services. Where Facebook lets you import content to your News Feed from a dozen social web services that range from YouTube to Flickr, FriendFeed offers nearly sixty..including Facebook status updates. That's not the only difference, either. In FriendFeed, commenting on and "liking" items causes them to "bubble up" to the top - that is, it brings popular content up to the top of the page. FriendFeed's "FOAF" (friend-of-a-friend) feature also integrates posts from your friends' friends into your activity stream which can expose you to more interesting people who you might want to follow.

Although on the surface, FriendFeed might appear to be just a more robust version of the Facebook News Feed - a News Feed on steroids - the differences between the two go far beyond a list of features. Where Facebook users track their real-life friends' activities, FriendFeeders tend to track news and topics they're interested in. Most have probably never even met half the people they're subscribed to - they just like what they have to say and the things they share.

Wait...Doesn't FriendFeed Need to Make Money?

What FriendFeed delivers is something that's more than just the sum of its parts. It doesn't have one single killer feature that defines it. It is simply a mashup of pure innovation. So what if Facebook rips off bits and pieces of FriendFeed's better qualities? Why shouldn't mainstream users enjoy this too? For what's innovation's worth if it doesn't spread?

Ah, but therein lies the root of all FriendFeed's problems. The innovation of the social "like," of aggregating your web activity and letting others comment on it - all of this, all of FriendFeed's innovation, is spreading off-site. It's becoming popularized on Facebook, where a good portion of the social network's users have never heard of FriendFeed and (possibly) never will.

That doesn't bother FriendFeed, though. Says co-founder Bret Taylor:

"The ability to comment on and like entries has always been popular on FriendFeed, so it is not surprising to see it appear in other places. We have always been focused on building a unique, but open sharing and communications product, and we think that it's great when users are able to share things in more places. While there will always be some overlap in functionality between FriendFeed and large social networks, we believe there is a lot of room for FriendFeed to grow. The problems of sharing and communication are large, and we don't think they will be solved by a single product or company."

While that's true to a point - we certainly don't think Facebook will solve all our communication problems either - there is a valid concern that if FriendFeed can't cross over into the mainstream, they may not make it, especially given our current economy. Businesses still need to make money...and for web startups to make money they need users. Yes, more users than web celeb Robert Scoble and his 25,000 followers. Unless FriendFeed can prove to us that they can, without a doubt, monetize the long tail of technology early adopters, then they need to grow their user base. Can they do this? How? These remain unanswered questions as of now.

FriendFeed's Real Value

But don't get us wrong, FriendFeed's financial success (or lack thereof) is only one way to measure its real value. Obviously it's the one that investors and business owners care about. If that describes you - if you only care about the bottom line and all the nickels and dimes - then seeing FriendFeed's features swallowed up by the social giant that is Facebook may be worrisome.

However, if you measure success not by money alone but by pure, unadulterated excitement, the feeling that you've witnessed the birth of something new -something different - then it doesn't matter how many features Facebook steals for their own. All that matters is that innovation happened. It happened on FriendFeed. And you liked it.