We'll See

Just came across this great fable, courtesy of Derek Sivers:

A farmer had only one horse. One day, his horse ran away.

All the neighbors came by saying, “I'm so sorry. This is such bad news. You must be so upset.” The man just said, “We'll see.”

A few days later, his horse came back with twenty wild horses. The man and his son corraled all 21 horses.

All the neighbors came by saying, “Congratulations! This is such good news. You must be so happy!” The man just said, “We'll see.”

One of the wild horses kicked the man's only son, breaking both his legs.

All the neighbors came by saying, “I'm so sorry. This is such bad news. You must be so upset.” The man just said, “We'll see.”

The country went to war, and every able-bodied young man was drafted to fight. The war was terrible and killed every young man, but the farmer's son was spared, since his broken legs prevented him from being drafted.

All the neighbors came by saying, “Congratulations! This is such good news. You must be so happy!” The man just said, “We'll see.”

Worth remembering.

Social is conversation.

This post was originally posted on iPlatform's company blog, but it's a project that I'm spending a lot of time on - and one that I believe is very important, which is why I'm also cross posting to my personal blog here.

Over the past two years, we've worked with a huge range of companies to help them market themselves effectively inside Facebook. We've built dozens and dozens of interactive applications and campaigns, and throughout this we have learned that the most important aspect of a company's presence in Facebook is the ability to speak directly to their customers. All of the advertising to push people to your fan page, and getting them to press that 'like' button, is money well spent - because once they've liked you, you can speak to them directly, through their newsfeed, every single day. 80-90% of all engagement with fan pages happens through the newsfeed - which is also where users spend most of their time. The interactive applications and competitions we build are always most effective when they are promoted to highly engaged fans - which only comes when companies have learned how to communicate with their customers properly through the feed.

By engaging properly with your fans in the feed, you build up their trust and interest in what you have to say - so when you have an application, or a video, or a new product you want to promote, they'll listen; and if it's good, they'll share it with their friends. Without this trust, it doesn't matter how many fans you have - they're not listening.

Twitter has taken the lead in companies' minds when it comes to having conversations with followers. It's a great platform - and because conversation is the only thing you can do there, it's easy to understand why companies have jumped into it. But, the great mass of your customers are on Facebook. The availability of the Facebook platform and engagement ads has meant that a lot of companies have focused purely on its potential as a broadcast medium - but the newsfeed and status updates were invented in Facebook first, and the amount of comments and engagement can dwarf what you get in other platforms. We believe that it's time for companies to start really engaging and having conversations with their customers in Facebook. This is especially important for companies who have already invested in large pages with lots of fans (it's likely that you have customers asking you questions right now, and you're just ignoring them) but it's also a powerful medium for all companies, big or small, to interact with their customers.

We want to help companies have these conversations, and manage them in an effective way. It can be difficult for companies to keep track of all the comments they are getting, especially if more than one person has responsibility for responding and engaging back. To help address these problems, we've been working on a new software as a service product, Conversocial. Conversocial pulls in every user interaction on your fan page or pages, and makes it easy to manage your responses and actions, individually or as a team, with tools to make your day to day management more efficient - including keyword tracking and email alerts for flagged content.

You can read more on what Conversocial can do here.

Conversocial is already being used, by numerous customers, to manage fan pages with almost 10 million fans between them. Over the past couple of months our early customers have been helping us test and scale. We have bold plans for where we want to take Conversocial, but we also believe in following an agile process - we release basic features early, and focus on learning what you actually find useful and use, and then use that knowledge to improve.

If you are managing your company's fan page, and struggling to keep on top of what comments you've already read or responded to, Conversocial can help you right now. And if you're not managing your page yet - you should be! Get in touch now.

Why I don't read articles about the election

There's so much information out there in the world. What's worth reading?

Information translates into knowledge, and I give information a weight based on how valuable the knowledge will be to me. Knowledge can be built on other knowledge; so information which adds and builds up knowledge is more valuable to me than information which gives me a distinct bit of knowledge; especially if that knowledge has a short timeframe for being useful.

Some types of knowledge which are pretty much permanent, and can be constantly built upon:

Intellectual - Philosophy, spiritual, things that add to my thinking processes.

Scientific - how things work, physical, chemical, biological knowledge that adds to my understanding of the universe and the world.

Practical - programming skills, learning to use a technology, how to manage people, how to cook, etc. Adds to skill base; can be constantly refined and improved over time, but each step adds value and experience.

On the other hand, news information about politics, economics, and general goings-on are generally either snapshots, or historical analysis. Historical analysis can be extremely interesting, and adds to understanding about human nature and many other things. On the other hand, snapshots of information, which almost all daily news falls into, often present incomplete pictures of what's going on, so are unreliable, and usually have a very short timeframe of valuable knowledge.

For example - let's say you read 10 articles before the election about the latest poll or political activity. How does this information translate to valuable knowledge in 3-6 months time from now? Probably no value at all. In a few weeks we'll know the actual results and what people actually did, and 90% of the 'forecasts' and extensives articles about how people think will be proven incorrect.


Compare that to reading a single article (or even book) after the election analysing the ups and downs and relating that to actually what happened. It will give you an overall picture and show how individual events fitted into the wider scheme of things. It doesn't really matter about the length of the respective articles - just that the latter would add to your permanent knowledge base, and so have a high value, whereas the 10 snap shots would be almost meaningless, probably wrong (we'll find out soon anyway) and most likely forgotten six months out (unless you work in politics and care about the minutae, or are the journalist writing the analysis).

There's so much information in the world, I think it's useful to think about how much time you spend studying information that in the scheme of things doesn't add any value to your life. That's why I refuse to read any daily newspapers, I just selectively read articles from The Economist each week, which at least picks out only the most important news and gives an objective analysis, often dipping into history to give a background. Even then, I only read articles that I find particularly interesting or I think add value.

Just my thoughts.

The Zuck on having a successful life

Alex Tew found a visible conversation thread on Facebook earlier about what it means to you to have a successful life, with a comment from Mark Zuckerberg (as well as several other Facebook luminaries). His comment is below, and sheds light on the decision not to sell Facebook, and also the mission they're following. The constant desire, from the top of Facebook, to make an amazing product and really change how people interact is, I think, the reason for their phenomenal success:

Mark Zuckerberg: 

This is a great thread. I think it's good for the world that people have all these different ways of thinking about what they want to do with their lives. That kind of diversity is probably what allows the richness of experiences we have today. If we all optimized for the same thing, that probably wouldn't be possible.

For me personally, I focus my life around doing what I think will create the best possible impact for the world -- which is making the world more open/transparent. I just feel like we're all very fortunate to have the lives we do and the tools to really improve the world, and I/we owe it to everyone else to put those tools which have been given to me/us to good use.

My theory on this is somewhat similar to what Stuart describes above -- focusing on meaning rather than happiness or pleasure. One defining moment for me was a few years back when we had to decide whether to sell the company. Many people made the argument that if we sold then we would be set for life and would be able to just have fun and do whatever they wanted. Ultimately we decided it was more important to us to spend our lives working hard and making our mission a reality than just focusing on our own happiness.

I'm definitely not saying this is the only way or even the best way to be. This is how I think about my life, but as I said above I think it's good for all of us that there's diversity in how people think about theirs.

I do think though that you can't optimize for everything though. That is, if you choose to focus primarily on impact, I don't think it's possible to fully optimize for happiness. And if your primary goal is happiness, then in general I don't think you'll have the biggest impact you're capable of. The two are often aligned (working with great people on challenging problems is very rewarding) but ultimately there are tradeoffs that each person must resolve for themselves.

Interesting thread though :)

Read the full thread for the rest of the conversation.  

You can't train an entrepreneur

There's was a lot of buzz last night around Sir Alan Sugar's talk at the British Library, where one of his comments was "You can’t train entrepreneurs, you either have the spirit or you don’t." (I wasn't there, however this was tweeted by Techcrunch UK editor Mike Butcher who's a reliable journalist). Almost all of the buzz is aghast at the comment, and equivocates it to such things as racism or in-born stupidity (both of which, I'll make clear, I don't agree with - as principles, or as similar to Sugar's remark).

Spirit is a trait that's different from intelligence, or skills. It's not something that comes from outside. Although it can certainly be affected by outside events, it's *not* something you can teach someone. Saying you need the spirit to be an entrepreneur is not saying you're a 'born entrepreneur' or not; it's something else, a willingness to put ourselves on the line and keep going. Let me share a bit of my own story, in the hope that it can explain my viewpoint.

I'm not a born entrepreneur, by any shot. My only money making activities as a teenager was some short stints as a bookshop assistant and as a waiter in the local hotel. No selling sweets to kids in the playground or lemonade stalls. I didn't even think about the possibility of business. I went to study Law at university, with the hope of heading to the bar afterwards. Some of the aspects of the bar that interested me are similar to being an entrepreneur - you work for yourself, make your own name, and there's a chance to make some serious cash if you prove yourself (after years of slogging it out for a pittance, with a tiny chance of actually getting into a chambers). It requires a lot of spirit, and most aspiring lawyers make the sensible choice of becoming solicitors in a big company instead. All successful barristers have that spirit that's driven them to the top.

After spending all my savings, loans, and more in my first year (showing off my great money management there) I needed to make some money, fast - and more than some minimum wage bar job. I got a job with a local company, charging pubs and restaurants to convert their licenses - a new system had come in place, and everyone *had* to change their license before the end of the summer. After a few weeks, I realised it was pretty easy, and I didn't see why some old guys were getting the money when I was doing the work. I opened an account for 'March Enterprises', printed some leaflets and went on a letter drop and went out on my own. A prospective client once asked for a business card, so I promptly went to a printers and had some printed for me (crappy flimsy black and white things); and I jotted down some basic accounts in a notebook.

By the end of the summer I'd made quite a bit of cash, and although I went back to the degree, I'd decided that I wanted to be an entrepreneur - the best in the world. I was reading Trump and every business book I could lay my hands on, and started getting involved with every business related activity I could find. After doing some evenings with the entrepreneur society attached to Durham business school I managed to hook into the business networking events in Newcastle and was soon flashing some newly printed, shiny business cards all over the place. I had a business idea, wrote a 60 page business plan (based on Business Plans for Dummies), and then somehow managed to get a business manager from a local bank branch who I met at an event to give me almost £100k in SFLG and overdraft, to a new limited company, with no personal guarantee, and no investors or mentors.

In preparation, I did a few Business Link training sessions (not much help for aspiring entrepreneurs - learning about cashflow is pointless when you don't have any), then quickly did what I thought I should do as a businessman - got offices, a team, an agency to build a website etc. I quickly burned through my cash, made a whole host of mistakes (don't need to go through all of them here...) and before I'd graduated had managed to lose it all. I'm not sure what the bank was thinking in giving a big pile of cash to a 20 year old, full time law student with no real business experience.

Although I avoided any personal bankruptcy, I had taken a large personal loan out to put into the business near the end, and graduated with a much bigger pile of debt than the average student - having had to fire my first employees, and with angry creditors threatening to sue, not nice student loan letters turning up once you get a proper job. The stress was pretty wrenching, and I even ended up getting a bad case of appendicitis as it happened, needing an operation and recuperation back home.

I was determined to get back in the game, and I was determined not to ever get a job or be an employee to anyone, ever, whatever it took. Examining my failure, I realised that I just knew *nothing* about marketing. I'm not just talking about advertising; I mean everything about markets outside of pure economics. What makes a customer? Why do people buy from companies? How do they hear about products and companies? I dedicated my time to learning about it, and decided that I wouldn't be taking any more capital or investment before I really knew what I was doing. I devoted my life to marketing, which lead to online marketing, and then eventually social media marketing. I was pushing myself out there to everyone who would give me an audience (something I do seem to be good at).

Consultancy jobs started to come in, although for a long time pretty much every penny went to paying off my debt. London was becoming a more regular haunt, as it seemed to be where *everyone* I was talking to was. I was starting to get more jobs there, and although I was still penniless and putting all the money I made into keeping the hounds at bay, I decided to move down to London - moving in with a friendly (and very accommodating) family member who gave me a roof and food. MySpace was still big and Facebook was coming on the radar, but social media marketing was low budget, and still pretty rare. I was still paying off my debt.

My insistence on doing my own thing despite having no money, at all, and working all the time, was making maintaining friendships with the guys I was with at uni (all now with city jobs) difficult. At one time, all my credit cards were over, my accounts were over the overdrafts, I still had a pile of angry creditors, and just £10 cash in my wallet. I shared a lift into central London for my meetings and spent that week walking rather than getting the bus or tube. There was a moment that week when I almost gave up. I remember it clearly. The pain of the failure and the debt and the ongoing, tedious plough of meetings, and the absolute lack of any money (even for the bus) was taking its toll. I went to the brink, but decided then and there that I wouldn't stop, even if they dragged me through the bankruptcy courts, and even if I had to walk all the way into central London everyday (from Zone 3, I should add). I'd made my choice, and I was going to stick with it.

Eventually, my work started to pay off. I was whittling down my debt, customers were increasing, and in early 2008 I teamed up with a brilliant business partner, Dan Lester. I had a million ideas and could talk the talk - Dan had a cooler head, and the technical skills to allow us to really walk the walk. We knew we wanted to build a technology company focusing on the new social networking platforms. We didn't have any cash or investment, but my previous consultancy was at least allowing me not to starve, and Dan had savings, so we were able to get our company off the ground without taking a salary all that year. Our first product, which we devoted most of 2008 to, never really took off; by the beginning of 2009 the landscape had changed significantly making it partly redundant, and we realised the fundamental model wasn't quite right. However, by then we were getting more well known, and had a rare skill - the ability and knowledge to build proper Facebook applications and campaigns. Companies started to turn more and more to Facebook for marketing, and we managed to pick up some great clients early on. Budgets were still experimental, but were growing. As the year went on, social marketing began the shift from being a side project to being the crux of online campaigns, and we were getting calls left right and centre from big London agencies to help them deliver Facebook campaigns for their clients. Budgets and ambitions were growing - and us with it.

Now we've built up a great team, a great client list, and healthy revenues. We're investing in our own products to help agencies and brands manage their social media campaigns, and are excited about the prospects for 2010. I've paid off all my debt, moved into my own place, and even bumped into a former employee in a coffee shop (and they didn't thump me). I even think I've learnt a lot along the way (including most of the things that I read or was told by other entrepreneurs before I started at the beginning - but nothing really sinks in until you've experienced doing it badly).

I wasn't born with the skills of an entrepreneur. I wasn't even born with some special spirit unique to entrepreneurs. I've got over myself a lot, and realised that the choice to be an entrepreneur (and it is a choice) isn't about whether you can or you can't - *anyone* can, if they really want to - it's just about whether you're willing to make the sacrifices, keep your head up despite failure, despite anguish, despite ridicule, despite lost friendships, despite all that time you lose ploughing into it, and keep striving to learn from your mistakes. Even if you're successful first time, you always know that if things go badly and the company fails, employees can just walk away - you've got to stay, clean up the mess and deal with consequences. That's what the 'entrepreneurial spirit' means. And sometimes I envy people who don't make that choice - who instead clock off at half five, and have more time for friends, for hobbies, for enjoying the small amount of time we have here. If anything, that choice is a better one. For whatever the reason, it's just not a choice I can make.

So - what I'm trying to say is that being an entrepreneur is a choice that has to be constantly made. You can't train that, any more than you could expect someone with a GCSE in woodwork to become a carpenter; it's something that you carve out through years of hard work and persistence.

That's not to say you can't keep encouraging kids to think about the possibilities though - I wish I'd realised the them earlier. I'm sure there are thousands of kids out there who would make the choice, if only they knew about it. But Sugar is right in that if you don't have the spirit, the ambition, the determination, then no amount of training in the world will make a jot of difference. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

What not to do in social media - Facebook Garage next Thursday

The Facebook Garage is back on Thursday 24th September (next Thursday!). There's lots we'll be catching up on, including the acquisition of friendfeed, the launch of Facebook lite, and all the latest changes to the application platform.

The theme for the night is 'what *not* to do in social media'; we'll be taking a light-hearted look at some of the biggest *epic* fails, and then get into the gritty details about the pitfalls to avoid when building a Facebook app, with speakers looking at both the technical no-nos and overall strategy mistakes.

We also have guest speaker Clara Shih, author of the Facebook Era, and previously orchestrator of the tie-up between Salesforce and Facebook, returning to discuss Audience Engagement and how the social web has changed the game for developers.

The event is at Sun Microsystems, 45 King William St, and doors open at 6pm, talks from 7pm-9pm. Pizza and beer as standard!

Sign up to the event here:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=135087535945

And early bird tickets available now:

http://facebookgaragesep.eventbrite.com/

See you there - and don't forget to invite your friends.

Facebook Application Growth Rates

I received a question this morning asking what the growth rate of applications on Facebook are. I ended up writing quite a long response, which could be interesting for other people asking a similar question.

Unfortunately, this is similar to asking 'what's the growth rate of a website?' - an application is essentially a standard web app, that happens to exist on a social platform, and which also has many features to make it easier to share and spread virally. This allows applications being used by many people to spread organically in a cost-effective way (and sometimes to grow very, very quickly), and gives great access to the social graph (e.g to make use of friend connections inside applications), but doesn't change any of the fundamentals - people will use it or not depending on a) their ability to find out about it in the first place (which will require seeding of some kind to kick things off) and b) how useful/enjoyable the application is.

Playfish have released games that have grown to the tens of millions of users in a matter of weeks, but they have a large seeding base (their other popular games) and put huge amounts of investment and time into every single application. There are well over 200 apps which maintain users bases in the millions.

On the other side of the coin, there are thousands of applications which have failed to make it past a few hundred users in total.

From our side of the coin, our philosophy is that for branded campaigns, you should first get a brand concept that people naturally want to be a fan of; then build the fan page and seed this to initial users; and then use applications to increase the fan base and see your ROI in terms of engagement and user data/lead generation.

So - it's as long as a piece of string. Social networks like Facebook have loads of great features which can make them more engaging, and allow them to spread faster and easier than normal websites. However, lowing the barrier to growth doesn't stimulate that growth in and of itself, and you always need to have a strategy to first seed your application effectively.

You should read this blog post

Dustin Curtis has written a great article on the use of split testing and how he used it to find out what text at the bottom of each of his posts generated the biggest click through to his twitter page - starting with basic statements such as 'I'm on Twitter' through to strong commands, like 'You should follow me on twitter' all the way up to explicit call-outs: 'You should follow me on twitter here'.

It's not that surprising that the stronger the command the higher the clickthrough rate (from 4.7% for the basic statement to 10.09% to the strong command). However, more interesting is that by adding the literal call-out ('here'), click-through rates increased by a further 27%, to 12.81%. This is a pretty big jump.

Many developers and designers view literal call-outs like this as ugly and unnecessary from a user experience point of view, and that it should be replaced by easy visual cues such as link colours, underlines etc. However, as Dustin's article clearly shows, these aren't enough by themselves to really drive action - telling people explicitly where to click, in words, will drive more engagement. It could be that for the vast majority of people, words are much more inherently understood that visual cues (unlike designers, who are more likely to think visually).

This is also a great example of how simple A/B split testing (read the original article for his methodology) can increase click-through rates by 173%. This is a huge number, especially if you're running a commercial website or application that can translate those clicks to users and revenue, and shows the huge importance of carrying out proper split tests on any major call to action (something that lots of people talk about, but that few really carry out).

So, it may not be pretty, but more important is what works. You should follow me on twitter here.

Facebook release 'connection' targeting for adverts

Facebook have released a new feature in their advertising platform allowing you to targets users connected to your fan pages, applications, groups or events. This potentially could be powerful as a way of promoting new content to users, maintaining interest, and cross selling. Although we always recommend seeding content, applications and features directly to your fan pages and groups, it’s never advisable to keep spamming your fans - this offers a low nuisance way of maintaining communication, on a performance (pay-per-click) basis.

For targeting new users, this will also allow you to purposefully not target current users, ensuring maximum user acquisition.

Retention rate on applications is extremely important for long term success - I wrote about this early last year in my post 'Jumping the Shark' - and this potentially offers a way to keep users coming back to an app and increasing that retention rate - and hence value. You can read my post here.

Check out Facebook’s note on the new features for more information.

Facebook Garage this Thursday, Social Gaming Dynamics

The June garage is soon upon us - this Thursday evening, at the usual venue of Sun Microsystems, 45 King William St.

This week we're focusing on social gaming dynamics - what makes great social games inside facebook, how do you make classic games that go on for years, and how do you apply gaming dynamics to non-gaming applications?

On top of our already announced speakers, Karl Bunyan from Social Cash and Alex Fleetwood from Hide & Seek, we'll be joined by:

Sam Mathews, founder of Fnatic, one of the world's leading professional video gaming teams, talking about the professional gaming industry and what it takes for a multiplayer game become a classic that will last for years; and

Sokratis Papafloratos, CEO and co-founder of TrustedPlaces.com, talking about how they've applied gaming mechanics to increase engagement and retention in a non-gaming community site.

Sign up to the event on Facebook here and buy your advance tickets here.

See you there! Doors open 6-6.30 with pizza and beer, and talks starting at 7pm sharp.

Facebook are destroying all competition in the UK

Hitwise have released some stats today showing that Facebook took over 43% of all UK visits to social networking sites over the weekend - compared to just 5.97% and 3.18% for Bebo and MySpace respectively. They were the second busiest website in the whole of the UK, only beaten by Google.

What does this mean? By doggedly keeping to a pure platform play, keeping user experience at the fore, and aggressively pursuing innovations to the way people use and interact with their social graph online (live stream API, Facebook Connect, etc) Facebook have charted a course which is setting them up to be the primary social identity platform for the web as a whole. Combined with their upcoming payments platform, they could blow not only the majority of other social networks out of the water, but also payment providers such as Pay Pal and Google Checkout.

With this future in mind, what's likely to happen to the social web? I don't think it's going to be too long before other social networks, like Bebo and MySpace, accept that their strength isn't in being a social platform; it's in providing for social content. Once they realise this, they won't worry about needing to own the social data below the content, and will integrate Facebook Connect. YouTube have already done this; a big sign coming from Google.

As a platform for applications and fan page engagement, Facebook will remain an important player, but far more important will be their role as a distributed social platform for the web. Other social networks will focus on creating niche communities, but won't try and beat Facebook at the social data ownership game. Long live the king...

Update:

I should also add that the Hitwise stats include social video sites, like YouTube - which came a distant second at just over 17%. Out of just Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, Facebook took around 80% of the UK visits.

Doritos Dodgeball Hackathon Competition - win £1,000

Come along to AMV on the 25th and 26th April to take part in the Doritos Dodgeball Hackathon Competition, which is being organised by the Facebook Developer Garage London (which I host). For the Dodgeball Challenge, people are going to be able to take control of real ball firing machines, and fire balls at real dodgeball teams and celebrities over the whole of May. The aim of the hackathon is to build a fun Facebook application to run alongside the campaign, related in some way (but use your imagination).

Come along, either by yourself or in teams (and teams will form on the day!), for fun, hacking, pizza, and the chance to win £1,000 as the winning team - and a host of PR and kudos. Hosting for the winning app will be covered completely by AMV.

The competition will be starting at 10:00am on Saturday morning, with apps being judged and the winner announced on Sunday evening, with everything wrapped up by 6pm.

Sign up, and we'll be sending more info shortly. See you there!

More info over at the event page:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=182607905610

We hope to see you there!

Discussing the Facebook TOS changes on Sky News a few weeks back

Facebook Public Profiles Now Have Viral Invite Mechanism

Facebook have been making a number of additions to their 'public profiles' recently (what used to be called fan pages); the latest of which is to add viral invites to pages, as All Facebook report. This means that a fan of a public profile can send direct invites to their friends, similar to applications. The effect of this won't be dramatic, as if people really wanted to share a page with their friends they could do it with the share feature, however this could be a stronger call to action for users; and it's certainly something which brand owners of pages have been calling for.

Facebook's re-design: the right way forward

There's been a lot of furore over the recent Facebook homepage changes, when they changed from a newsfeed showing an algorithmically chosen selection of feed stories being generated from your friends, many of which were passive (reporting on activity they'd done around the site, but not necessarily actively chosen to share); to a 'live stream' of actively shared content, along with a highlights section, using algorithms as before to create a small selection of content (events, photo albums, applications) which are interesting to you because of the interest they're getting from your friends. They've also made the live stream easier to personalise using friend lists - this was possible before, but not as clear.

As when Facebook first introduced the newsfeed, a small minority of their users very vocally resisted the changes. Some of these are/were valid complaints; e.g. some people found too much application activity in the new stream, or if a user uploaded a number of photos consecutively (rather than all at once), this would create a long list of posts from just that user.

However, Facebook have recognised that as people on the web become more used to sharing, what becomes interesting is what people are actually choosing to share - not just a passive feed of their activities. This is the point behind Twitter, and has been found in application design; if a user clicks the share button and posts a link to their profile along with their own comment, it is far more viral than a passive newsfeed story. Facebook know this is the case - because they have the data on all their user behaviour. Facebook's own research has shown before that when users are exposed to more active types of sharing on the newsfeed (e.g. seeing uploaded, tagged, or commented photos) they are subsequently more likely to engage in the same, active behaviour. The same is now very likely to be true of status updates, and anecdotally this seems to be the case.

The truth is, with their masses of data, Facebook know very quickly whether a design change is good or bad. They've listened to feedback and are refining some of the aspects of design to reflect this (namely, more control over application stories, better highlights etc). However, if they're sticking with the design, it's because they know that users like it. Not because of a small minority making loud noises about how they don't like it; but because Facebook can see how people are actually using it.

Personally, I'd much rather have a stream of status updates and actively shared content from the people I want to hear about than a feed of passive activity that Facebook are struggling to make relevant from the huge mass of stories that were being generated every day.

I'm off to SXSWi tomorrow, followed by some Silicon Valley action

Tomorrow morning I'm jumping on the plan to SXSW (due to arrive sometime on Friday morning US time) (I think). Should be an action packed long weekend with lots of fun, including an invite only Facebook party on Saturday night (will the great Zuck himself be there?), and of course all the UK party-mad favourites along with me for Digital Mission. As an experiment, I'm going along without any business cards, and only a Poken - although this may just be an excuse for being disorganised at the last minute.

Turns out the cheapest way for me to get to Austin was to fly via San Francisco - which gives me a convenient excuse to hang out there for a few days after SXSW before coming back to the UK. Whilst there, I'm going to be speaking at the Silicon Valley Facebook Garage on the 19th.

Give me a shout if you're in Austin or SF and want to meet-up - josh(AT)theiplatform.com.

Social networks beat email

According to a new Nielsen Online report, Facebook now has a 47% reach in the UK, the Guardian reports. Together, member communities (made up of blogs and social networks) are the fourth most popular web destination in the UK - ahead of personal email. They've grown over 10% in the last year.

However, UK penetration is dwarfed by Brazil - the Google owned social network Orkut has a 70% penetration there, the highest social network penetration of any of the countries in the Nielsen survey.

Brazil is also top in time spent on these sites - 23% of all time spent (1 in 4 minutes), followed closely by the UK with 17% of all time spent online (1 in 6 minutes).

This shows how far social networks have come in terms of personal use - however also points out that despite the seemingly world dominating growth of Facebook, it's not the total solution if you're aiming for a global audience.

I'm really glad Facebook have unmoderated comments on their blog

Check out the original blog post for more quality comments like these.

Help Red Nose Day '09 - Donate Your Facebook Status to Comic Relief!

This Friday it's Red Nose day 2009, in support of Comic Relief, a charity campaign which, in over 20 years, has raised over £500m to support projects across the globe, from helping disadvantaged young people in the UK, to supporting those in dire poverty or suffering from HIV and AIDs in third world countries.

They teamed up with iPlatform to allow Facebook users to donate their status's to help spread the word about Red Nose Day this week - the app has launched today. Click here to go to the app and donate your status!

Techfluff.tv - Michael Arrington is behind TechChuff.com