I’m changing tack! To follow my continued interest in creating better communities, better teams and better ways of working together, I’m leaving the social media ocean, which has met many of the needs of individuals but has struggled to build collaboration and dependable communities.

So  as I head into new waters, I’d like to invite you to join me.  The new waters are:

The Sea of Meetings

We all have meetings and I guess we all feel they could be a bit more efficient.  I’m going to be focusing specifically on the structure of meetings: agendas, minutes and actions – helping people to get the meeting, this fundamental unit of team work, right. How can we use web technology to make meetings altogether better and more productive?

The blog for this is http://www.themeetingminutes.com – a web resource for anyone searching for advice on running great meetings. It features my own posts and also guest posts – so if you have a view of meetings that you’d like to share – ping me a mail (toby@pailz.com) – and I’ll send you a brief.

TheMeetingMinutes.com - meeting advice blog

The Big Game River

Games are everywhere, we play them everyday, we just don’t usually call them out as such. Whether it is ‘levelling up’ at work with a promotion or losing points on your driving licence, the mechanics of gameplay are often used.  Over the next few years, as a new generation of workers join the workplace, those brought up with the benefits of game playing, will expect those same benefits when applied to work. Common game benefits such as transparency of how to win (which points make prizes) and visibility of progress and where you stand versus colleagues (leaderboard) will become standard.

I’m launching a blog to track and analyse this change – called ‘Gamification Of Work‘ – do subscribe and keep track on the Game Layer at the top of the world….

And social?

I’m afraid that means the end of blogging at The Social Bazaar – the social layer is built, it is now widely understood, now on to build the game layer…  join me

Facebook's new pages discovery interface

Just spotted a new discovery interface for Facebook Pages.

The various brand pages are sorted according, I assume, to their weight within Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithms for ranking content.  So, the most popular pages, among my friends, appear first.

But, wait! What are Liverpool FC and Tottenham Hotspur doing in there? I support Arsenal but it seems more of my friends support Tottenham and Liverpool… oh dear, my social network is out of sync.

Now, what do you call someone who thinks they are in one social tribe, but are in fact in another…?

Now the only place you can direct new fans to is Wall or Info instead of any tab as before

I noted a round robin email from Rasmus in Copenhagen this morning, complaining that “landing tabs” – the feature that lets you decide what tab non-fans arrive at, seems to have disappeared from Facebook pages.  There’s been quite a bit of industry on the blogs such as all facebook and mashable explaining how to make landing tabs and its something we at Nudge have made quite a few of.

But as of today they are gone… perhaps never to return?

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

Buzz! comes to Facebook

Hey! if you thought we were a bit quiet – now we can say the reason why – we’ve just launched the awesome Buzz! The Friend Quiz for our client SONY Playstation.

It’s a unique Nudge social remix for Facebook of Buzz! the game which creates a TV quiz experience for you and your friends on Playstation.

Our Facebook version lets you play Buzz! with your Facebook friends, the twist is that the questions are all about your friends – lost photo captions, photos mixed together, who said what, and who made what comments – you play with mutual friends to see who knows who best.

Try it:  http://www.buzzthefriendquiz.com/facebook

Toby Beresford (left) and Iskandar Najmuddin get up close to Buzz at SONY HQ.

The competition closes Sunday night so get your entries in – can you catch the leaders?

Clara Shih at Facebook Developer Garage

Clara’s main points at the garage, teasing us to read more…

The decade gone by? That was  the world wide web of information – how droll – now it’s the world wide web of people. 

Facebook changes the web. It brings the first trusted template for deep psychographic user data. Now all user expectations have changed – they don’t want to have to enter all their data in every time they come to a new web site.

Transitive trust explains the phenomenom where if I know who our mutual friends are I am more likely to trust you. The cold call just got slightly warmer.

New modes of communication like Facebook mean that the cost of staying in touch with weak ties is much lower, social networks we can finally capture the long tail of our social capital. That old primary school friend is your future hire…

Now it’s time to actually read the book…

Facebook Developer Garage London

The main trend for 2009 for the garage content is toward comparing application platforms – while Facebook remains the leader in terms of technology, number of developers (now a whopping 660,000 worldwide) and UK usage there is still  a need to provide space to discuss the other platforms – notably Myspace, iPhone, LinkedIn and Bebo.

Nudge continues to support the development community with expert advice from our technical director, Iskandar Najmuddin,- it’s always worth getting along to hear him on What’s new on the Platform and bring your technical queries to.

So, for 2009, I’m looking forward to an even more vibrant developer community in London this year and maybe as a target a million MAU app to catch up with the London community’s biggest star – Playfish. I’m certainly planning to create one for one of our  Nudge clients…

The next event is on 21st January and features speakers from Moshi monsters, iplatform, and Huddle are back to talk about the LinkedIn platform. See you there.

Sky Interactive US Election Map - how it might look on Facebook

Sky News just launched a funky interactive election map for the US elections – you make your predictions, compare with current polling and you can review the results of past elections – all in a nice Flash format on their site.

However, being a social animal, I don’t live on the web any more – I expect more from my online media. In particular I want it to be social – what do my friends think? What are my US friends voting? This would make it much more interesting.

So I’ve mocked up, Toby style, a screenshot of how I’d socialise the interactive map. I can see which friends are in which States and (if they let me) see who they’re supporting. I can see what they are predicting and we can discuss politics amongst ourselves.  I can even filter supporting intentions by all of Facebook, my network and by my friends.

With Gordon Brown on the ropes there must be a UK version in the pipeline soon – food for thought for those clever people at Sky News…