The Social Bazaar

Kids can soon update Facebook credits at Coinstar machines thanks to Rixty

Facebook Credits, the virtual cash associated with your Facebook account, has that frightening 3 m’s mix we see in the biggest technology hits:

1. momentum, it’s hardly even out of R&D (still available only to beta partners) but companies like Rixty are building it into Coinstar machines for kids to gain virtual credit with real pocket money.
2. monopoly, you can’t compete with it – it’s an easy extension of Facebook’s 500 million user near monopoly of the social graph.  No other payment platform could build that many users so quickly.
3. meliority, it’s better than the rest. The smooth payment system (a few clicks) contrasts sharply with the “leave the shop, pay at the bank, return to the shop” payment experience we’ve come to expect. Some early adopters like Crowdstar have seen an ARPU jump of 50% despite the 30% transaction fee Facebook charge.

So what should we do to be ready you cry? Well you might want to start by requesting a copy of Nudge’s white paper on “the next online payment revolution – how Facebook credits will affect your business and how you can be prepared”.

I appreciate this is controversial post but in measuring social media success we measure fan engagement.

That means not just number of fans, but how active those fans are on a campaign page, in particular how much do they comment?

Lets take a look at the data.

If we rank the political party pages BNP, Conservative, DUP, Green, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Plaid  Cymru, SNP,  UKIP by fan page, a reassuring and expected ranking appears:

Facebook Fans of main UK Political Parties at 12:40pm on 14 April

The big three appear to be winning, the little parties are seemingly down where they “belong”.

However, if we count wall posts by fans in the last hour, the  picture is quite different:

Fan wall posts on main UK Political Party Facebook Pages at 12:40pm on 14 April

The data is startling – if we measure fan engagement – the amount Facebook users are commenting and engaging with a campaign – BNP emerges as a major contender for public opinion.

Despite that their 17 fan posts were generated by only 6 people, there is still cause for concern.

On their own page the BNP are driving a political message that is causing reaction and generating debate. Something the other smaller parties seem unable to do and the bigger parties only just manage. As we know on Facebook – the more social actions we can activate (whether positive or negative) the more a campaign message spreads automatically across the social media machine.

At one level, Facebook is an invisible platform, you can’t see the private debates being held between friends but the more user generated posts, the more the BNP related content is spreading across the platform. Think of fan posts as the “tip of the iceberg”….

We need to wake up and engage with the issues that are bringing BNP votes and provide real solutions that are not just papering over the cracks.

Facebook’s own Democracy UK page is a good place to start, maybe with the Ministry of Mates application:

The Ministry of Mates app creates socially remixed stories on Facebook

Media execs have been stressing for years over a way to charge for online content (that’s newspaper articles and video clips to you and me) on a per article basis – hence the term “micro-payments”.

Facebook credits looks set to change the game. Check out my opinion piece on this (and a rather fancy tour of my Happy Island) over at MediaTel

(fake Dave Cameron poster courtesy of AndyBarefoot.com)

Just as brands battle it out for audiences online – now so do political parties. Check out my opinion article (which doesn’t include fake posters I’m afraid) over at New Media Age.

My predictions were:

* Higher turn out

* Local issues increase in importance

* Key place to sway younger voters

What do you think?

UPDATE 10 March 2010 – I erroneously referred to Joe Trippi as Obama’s online campaign manager for the 2008 election – this title should instead have gone to Chris Hughes

So, I’ve dived in and grabbed a T-mobile G2 (also known as the HTC Hero) that runs Android and I’m completely addicted.

It’s all designed around the idea of real time – twitter suddenly makes more sense, Facebook status updates appear next to the person’s phone number, their latest profile photo appears when they phone. Friends in Singapore who start a google chat come straight through to the phone, all makes me wonder when I will have time to turn it off.

You only have to try the awesome layar app or even just the ‘stars at night’ to realise augmented reality is super cool. A kind of ‘sat nav meets the Wii’ interface to hyper local data.

Android will win over iPhone in the end for the same reason Windows beat Apple last time round. It’s cross platform stupid.

Now to make some apps. If only I could put the phone down long enough to do so!

Ben Ayers at the Facebook Developer Garage London

ITV loves Facebook it seems, digital manager Ben Ayers told the Favcebook Garage in London tonight.
They found 1.2 million visitors to their site were coming via Facebook, echoing Facebook’s own discovery as the sharing site of choice for most of the internet.

They’ve been busy amassing 600,000 fans of their shows and have found that over half of their own ITV.com users are also on Facebook.

It seems a major UK channel is waking up on the need to integrate their own content experience with conversations on  Facebook.
Especially the “two screen” experience, “people watching TV wihile chatting, reading live feeds and consuming other related content during our shows”. For shows like This Morning two-screen is now a major part of the viewing experience.

Facebook’s live stream social widget and public profiles offer other channels and shows the ability to tap into this growing consumer way of watching social TV.

Facebook Connect, the ability to bring your friends and Facebook details with you to any web site, is growing in popularity. Facebook recently announced that 10,000 web sites have implemented it and the use of the plug in slowly grows on community platforms such as Drupal.

But what is a great Facebook Connect implementation?

In January for Obama’s inauguration, CNN used Facebook Connect so viewers could update their Facebook status so friends also watching at the same time could see how each other felt. Several of my friends mentioned the tears welling up in their eyes. 1 million Facebook updates meant this was the first great example of social tv.

Facebook Connect seems to improve conversions and usage too. Gawker, the popular blogging network, saw login rates increase by 40 percent and Joost noted that Facebook Connect users stayed on site longer to watch 30 percent more videos than non-connect users.

But my current favourite is the awesome Prototype Experience trailer that sucks in your Facebook photos to make this scarily realistic game trailer…

When 1 in 8 british minutes online are now spent on Facebook (Source: Nielsen ) it’s natural for advertisers to ask why.

The answer lies in the stream, the new real time feed of everything happening amongst my friends in their online time. It’s the virtuous circle of sharing – the more they share, the more I see what they do and then share myself.

At Nudge we’re working on new approaches to let brands harness and engage with users at the streams edge.  It’s not about providing ways to create content, it’s about remixing what’s already there and combining a social filtering approach, to create an awesome branded engagement experience.

Vic Gundotra at Google IO keynote yesterday declared that the web had won. It is the dominant programming system. He then went on to introduce a host of new technologies. What does this mean for us in the real world of app development?

1. Mobile apps will eventually be web apps. (no more developing separately for Symbian, Iphone and Blackberry). Mobile browsers will soon be able to talk to native mobile features like the accelerometer, GPS and calling.
2. Web apps will be faster (browsers are getting faster through processing javascript quicker, allowing local data storage) and will compete head on with heavier and heavier desktop apps (think Google Photo Editor, Google Project and so on)
3. Geolocation is coming –  we’ve filtered information now by its popularity (Google / Digg), and by what our friends think (Facebook) and next we’ll filter by its proximity to us (Geolocation).

Obviously I care more about a friend or celebrity popping into a bar in the next road to me than I do about someone on the other side of the planet. Accurate, reliable geolocation services (see Firefox 3.5) are just around the corner for the mass market and will see a new way of filtering information.

For the techies out there here are a few links and notes to get you excited:

1.  HTML 5 will be in Firefox 3.5 and Chrome soon – looks cool – allows tag and enbaling pixel based layouts (draw a diagonal line). They showed a cool demo of rotating a playing video with a javascript transform.
2. 3D engine will be in browser natively so you can access with javascript
3.  Web Elements allows you to drop code snippets (like a comment wall) onto your web page really easily
4. App engine now supports Java – Manuel Lemos has managed to get PHP running on app engine as well
5.  Geolocation is going to be in and working in Firefox 3.5

Playfish's Dan Borthwick at the Facebook Developer Garage London

6 of the top ten Facebook apps, 50 million users, 20 million Monthly Actives, Playfish must be doing something right.

I’m here with Dan Borthwick from Playfish as he shows us what they are creating on the Iphone.  Deep integration with Facebook Connect gives them a way of socialising an iphone app, sharing stories from games, escaping the constraints of the app store  home page to create virality.  This will give their games the edge on mobile.

It’s a cool strategy. Something tells me we’ll all be playing Playfish catch-up for a few years to come.