Tag Archive for facebook

Facebook expands link blocking

Posted on October 9, 2011 by

While Facebook has been progressively censoring links from sites that might contain illegal material such as Torrents they have been progressively expanding this security technology to also track onpage content. This expansion may not be a bad step forward a majority of the time as it reduces the number of spam and malware spread via it’s platform my issue is that it’s reading the page for any suspect or reported links and not allowing you to share the link on your page. This is a massive move forward by Facebook in it’s process of cleaning up the web and potentially censoring any content that it feels is illegal or unsuitable for it’s 700,000,000 members.  The potential risk for user-generated content providers and open discussion platforms is one of a concern and what is the potential impact for publishers?

Facebook Blocked Link

These new notifications appear to be part of the expanded Web of Trust platform that moved beyond re-active into pro-active screening of everything shared.  This new Web of Trust platform thereby offers Facebook real-time monitoring of what is being shared across it’s platform, since the beginning of last week. The question is what is next for social censorship? Can you no longer share content if the context of the discussion does not fit within Facebook’s vague guidelines or impacts on their commercial agreements?

So what is being blocked?

The link that I was trying to share was a YouTube clip, which in it’s description actually contained a Bit.ly link that pointed to a free web hosting account that before being suspended could have possibly have been sharing torrents of the song for download or loaded with advertising and affiliate links. The broad messaging from the Facebook notification was that the link was being blocked for being spammy or unsafe but this is very vague and there is no easy process for appealing your content if you have been added to their blacklist….

You can see the link is not a central part of the content and would not be clicked or noticed by most users watching the YouTube clip but because it’s featured on the page you are not allowed to share this YouTube clip via Facebook.  The other issue is that you might need to manually check your content can be submitted to Facebook and how unreasonable it is to block content based on any links that might be listed as part of the content. The implications on how your content will be censored based on the content around it seems to be a bit broad and obviously very based for YouTube as most popular clips feature similar links.

Blocked YouTube Clip

So what is the implications?

The issue is that Facebook is reading and tracking the content on your pages and potentially the any spam comments that might be automatically approved.  This is one of the strongest reasons why you should be moderating your comments and removing any spam or unknown links otherwise you might find that your content may no longer be able to be shared on Facebook. There is also another reason that you might not want to approve pingbacks on your content as it could jeopardise the ability for users to share your content via Facebook.

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Facebook + Skype = Videocalling

Posted on July 7, 2011 by

Skype Facebook LogoFacebook has finally announced its long-awaited videocalling platform that allows its users to call using each other within its messaging platform which quickly closes the likely growth of Google+ Hangouts and Gmail video chat. Facebook’s audience of close to 696,000,000 users allows Skype to double it’s audience and market share in a single announcement to bring the total user base to well over 1 billion accounts worldwide.

While the announcement is rumoured to be a little rushed in response Google+ hangouts the platform is certainly welcomed by a number of users who have never enjoyed the Skype interface and the simplification will certainly make videocalling much more attractive to everyone and the platform has likely been in development for sometime.

Microsoft’s buyout of Skype makes sense

Microsoft’s recent buyout of Skype now starts to make more financial sense as it now has the largest communications platform in the world and places it so far ahead of Google and Apple that it will become the dominate communications platform over the next few years.  There is already talk of premium features being rolled out around the new communication platform that could include options such as group chat, higher quality video and the ability to save your video chats forever within Facebook. There are a number of platforms such as Goto Meeting that might have a bit of a concern as the platform has potential to shake up their business model as Microsoft will surely expand it’s business functionality over the next 6-18 months across its operating system and Office suite.

Facebook wins on scale again

Already invited? We've temporarily exceeded our capacity. Please try again soon.The platform is slowly being rolled out to everyone over the next few weeks but unlike Google+ if you don’t want to wait you can jump the gun and enable it here, this is unlike the Google+ experience that is still in a limited field trial and struggles to scale up quickly enough.

So while a number of people have found the new Google+ project a great experience the issue is that the very nature of how many people can’t access the platform including those with premium paid Google Apps accounts they might have missed the boat again.  There are an endless number of complaints from people who have invitations to the new Google Plus platform but are unable to access it yet and there is also a stream of spam and malware related sites that are seeking to take advantage of consumers by offering them “invites” this includes online pharmacy scams first reported by Sophos.

Another annoying aspect to Google+  is that a number of work arounds that have been discovered by users are being progressively disabled by Google as they are discovered, there is also new rules that forbid companies/brands from creating an account.  There is certainly something missing in their thinking on how to attract users away from Facebook by locking down access but they are also taking some insight from Facebook who has always banned companies from creating personal pages but Google is apparently working on that so who knows.

So it almost seems that unlike Facebook which is encouraging people to use its new features via shortcut links and then progressively upgrades everyone, Google Plus is just meant for an exclusive number of people and I see this as one of the many reasons platforms like Google Wave failed… it didn’t have enough scale….

Facebook expands its message platform

The Facebook blog has published a short overview of the new platform along with some other updates including group chat and a new always on chat sidebar that always lists your most common contacts, bringing the Facebook platform closer to a single message platform. The new updates provide some added benefits but the always on chat sidebar is a little distracting but is smart enough so that it only shows on larger screens so as to not annoy it’s users by trying to squeeze too much onto one screen.

MSN Messenger already integrates with Facebook Chat

Microsoft last year enabled MSN Messenger to integrate with Facebook chat so this is just one more custom integration between their two platforms that make it harder for Google or Apple to entice users away so is this the final chess move before checkmate?

Facebook chat in Messenger

I have done a quick video review of the new Facebook videocalling platform below.

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Google Plus +1 for Websites goes Live

Posted on June 2, 2011 by

Google Plus One

It has taken some time but finally Google has rolled out their +1 button for websites, it was leaked early and it hasn’t been a well-kept secret but its already starting to cause concern among both bloggers, webmasters and SEOs on what it all means for them.  The obvious big point for bloggers is that it offers you one extra way that people can show their appreciation for your blog or article by voting it +1 but will it dilute the clicks you previously attracted to your other social buttons?

Webmasters are likely the biggest losers in this game as they are the ones that have to work out how to implement it dynamically quickly but also ensure that it matches with their social media strategy plans and their designers don’t have a breakdown when they see how the button destroy their carefully balanced world.  SEOs are probably the most cautious about the new button and I haven’t heard of many who are happily clicking the +1 button linked to their Google account just yet… it’s going to be a massive trust issue to give their social media graph to Google on a silver platter.

Early Issues with +1 Button
TechCrunch shows how it’s going to be a nightmare for webdevelopers who will have to look at changing their websites to accommodate the extra button but also make sure it plays nice with all the other buttons. The other issue is also trying to get the button centred it seems to have a preference for ignoring the code and choosing to be left justified.  You can see below that until you elect to like that particular page or website you will be presented with a shitty visual experience that because it’s an iFrame you don’t have too much control over at this point. Much of the button chaos was previously solved by ADDTHIS which was an easy way to add in multiple buttons or use a combination or image and buttons but recently it’s fallen out of favour as website narrow down the number of social media services they really care about and choose to focus on just one or two.

Google Plus One IssuesWordStream has also highlighted the issues with websites now having to deal with half a dozen buttons which all have different actions, sizes and even purposes.  The confusion of the consumer is likely and it seems early installations of the button is showing issues of the button vanishing even with users are opted into the +1 experiment and logged into their Google account. Early bugs and issues might shake the confidence of the launch partner websites as it seems a number of them have not bothered to roll it out just yet.  They have got some free publicity by promising to roll it out in the near future but also have time to sit back and evaluate how extensively they will roll it out and when that might happen.

The big issue I can see is that the style of the button doesn’t really fit in and it will take a fair bit of good will to get publishers to start promoting it as heavily as they do with Twitter or Facebook.  If you visit HuffingtonPost you are greeted with a popup requesting you should connect with Facebook, I struggle to think how long it will take for publishers to have that same popup saying Why don’t you login via your Google Accounts. The Connect with Facebook platform and message works well with consumers the login via Google Accounts just doesn’t have the same appeal to most users.

Ray of Sunshine from Mashable?

The only ray of sunshine is from Mashable who are very heavily promoting the +1 feature below its Mashable share widget, while the article is possible skewed in asking for a response there are 10 times the number of +1 than there is Facebook likes. The only thing that is not clear is if the placement of the button by Meghan Peters in the middle of the article got a majority of the +1 votes, but Linkedin got 25% more shares than +1 and Twitter got almost 3 times the amount of shares as +1.  So it’s interesting that the Mashable story was more popular to share via Twitter and Linkedin than it was via Facebook or even +1 buttons the article was focus on, but it makes sense as what is the current benefit of +1 is not yet visible.

The article about the +1 button launch over at TechCrunch got a massive number of votes and again around 10 times the number of Facebook likes and had the button in the standard spot with the rest of them, but Twitter didn’t fare as well so maybe the platform is more suited to Technology blogs than the social media types that Mashable attract.

Social Media Share Buttons

Should Facebook be worried?

Based on these two articles it’s likely the biggest loser in this social media war might actually be Facebook in the short-term, but I would prefer to allow people to easily share my content with 600,000,000 Facebook users at this stage. The only loser I can see at this point is the number of blogs willing to also include the Facebook “Send” button once they add the Google +1 button, but until Google rolls out some analytics around the impact of the button to match Facebook’s analytics it’s going to be a tough call to make either way.

Social Button overload?

follow the lost agencyFollowing on from Twitters Tweet button there is now the one-click Follow button which does now offer the ability to keep users within your website rather than sending them away to Twitter, it also means that you know need to consider offering two buttons on your website just for Twitter.  The benefit of the Tweet button is that it promotes sharing of content even amongst your existing followers where the follow button just increases your followers who may share your content at some point in time.  It should be fairly easy for twitter to follow Facebook’s lead and use an iFrame and sense if you are an existing follower and then only show you the Tweet button but if you are not following them you get first shown the Follow button. It is a big step beyond using third-party platforms like ShareThis or AddThis but it’s a very much a stop-gap solution but it’s also likely to be used differently in a site such as next to the article authors replacing the previously used @Thelostagency hyperlink.

If you want to add the one-click follow button you can find the resource here but the downside you don’t get any Twitter analytics but you can easily tag up the button with web analytics. I’ve tried to change some of the settings such as the colour background to be used and if it should show the follower count but it really seem to do what it wanted and appeared to alternate between showing and not showing a follower account.

Social Sharing Widgets are dead?

It will be interesting how AddThis and ShareThis integrate the new Google +1 button as it’s a much smarter solution than having to decide which button you are going to keep just in case people want to click it and which button is going to get used by your visitors.  It might be the case that they actually grow their market share as it’s going to be much easier to replace the chaos that see above with a simple widget so don’t discount them just yet.

Facebook Share better

Facebook has long had the monopoly of Like buttons that have spread across the web but the recent addition of the “Send” button seems almost redundant as when you select to like something you can share it on your wall but the use of the share button works on the expansion of Facebook’s messaging platform.  Instead of just sharing within the Facebook platform you are able to share to an email address which moves beyond Google +1′s limit audience of those logged into their Google account. As not many people yet understand the potential of the button or even how to use it there is a relatively low-level of adoption and even big sites are still struggling to see its benefits over just having the “like” buttons.

WordPress.com blogs left out

Again as with many scripts you try to a widget WordPress.com automatically strips out of the code, it’s moves like this that will slow the adoption of the +1 button across the massive WordPress.com blog network.  It might be in time that WordPress rolls out an official feature you can enable Google buttons on your blog as they did with the Twitter share button.

Update: WordPress has now updated their Twitter widget to allow you to easily enable the Twitter Follow button so it’s again another step ahead of Google & Facebook, only downside is it’s having some teething issues right now so you might just see an error message on the right side of this blog.

Open to Mischief?

The only thing that button does rely on is a trust element as you can specify the URL that is getting the vote so you could take liberty with that and place it elsewhere on any site to gain votes for another site.  It’s likely there are some safeguards in the Javascript but it’s likely going to be a fun week for the early adopters who have a bit of technical understanding around the javascript it uses to power the button.

Google Products soon

With the rollout it seems the promised updates to start to show Google Plus One data in your account has not yet materialised so the question is when will this data start to show in your webmaster tools.  Also according to the official blog post +1 buttons are apparently been progressively rolled out across Blogger, Google Product Search and YouTube but nothing has been seen just yet….

Add +1 to your pages to help your site stand outHow to add Google Plus One?

I’ve published a quick guide with tips on How to Add Google +1 to your website.

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New Facebook Ads Manager

Posted on May 11, 2011 by

likes-ad-managerToday I noticed while looking at the data from some current Facebook ad campaigns that there was a notification at the top of the page but also a new link to a feature called “creative library”. The notification was an update to Facebook Ads Manager interface with new enhanced visuals and new campaign performance data, my account had been upgraded to take advantage of the new advanced metrics and graphs to better understand my Facebook Ads.

There was a link to a pdf document to learn more about the new Facebook Ad Manager that offered a brief tour of the new features including

  • improved campaign performance graphs
  • new real-time measurements
  • inline ad management

Click to view the PDF Guide to the New Facebook Ads Manager

The new updates highlighted that you can see an audience performance graph that show you how many people your Facebook ads do reach compared to the total audience you can target over the last 28 days.  This is important as it can show what elements of your campaign are under delivering and guides on where you can improve your campaign to reach more of your audience including more social reach or increasing your CPC bids or campaign budgets.

new facebook ads dashboardThe new metrics are also constantly updated so offer almost real-time results of your campaign providing you campaign metrics to understand how Facebook users are responding to your campaigns, and adjust them constantly.  The metrics have almost been simplified as there is now clicks and connections (conversions) which enable advertisers to understand if they are failing to target the right audience by not getting any new fans, app installations, or RSVPs to your events. You can quickly also divide the number of connections into number of clicks to get the campaign conversion rate which helps spot potential failing campaigns quickly.

The new Facebook ad campaign metrics are

  • campaign reach – the number of individual people who saw your ads in this campaign during the date period selected, this is different to impressions which includes people seeing your ad multiple times
  • frequency – the average number of times each person saw your campaign ad
  • social reach – the people who saw your ad with the names of their friends who liked your page, RSVPed to your event or used your app
  • connections – the number of people who liked your page, RSVPed to your event or installed your application within 24 hours of seeing your ad
  • clicks – the number of clicks this campaign has received
  • CTR – the campaign click thru rate
  • spent – the amount of money you spent on Facebook ads
The new Facebook audience metrics are
  • targeted – the approximate number of people seeing your ads based on the targeting options you have selected
  • reach – the individual number of people who saw your Facebook ads
  • social reach – the number of people who saw your Facebook ads because their friends like your page, RSVPed to your event or use your app

Facebook introduces inline ad management

One of the issues with the previous interface was the time wasted loading when clicking back and forward to manage your individual Facebook ads.  Now you can quickly click one of the ad rows in your Ad Manager screen and the ad will drop down allowing you to quickly preview the ad and click-through the various elements of its individual performance without leaving the Ad manager.

Facebook inline ads

Facebook offers Creative library

Similar to a number of bid management and ad serving platforms Facebook has created a central database of all your campaign creatives allowing for scalable campaigns and also the re-use of previous ads in your new campaigns.  The platform allows you to view all campaigns creatives, by campaign but also those campaigns with no adverts yet created, and you can also search via keyword to quickly find that perfect ad. There is 3 options you can edit that creative, preview how it will look on your profile page and click to use that creative in a new or existing campaign.

Facebook Ad Creative Library

Facebook will be releasing the new Ads Manager to all advertisers by the 25th May 2011, so keep an eye out in your account for the new dashboard.

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Trunk.ly – Link Engine

Posted on January 10, 2011 by

Trunk.ly LogoEveryone know the pain in having to search back through hundreds of past tweets trying to find exactly what was that link URL that you ReTweeted that you need to use right now or want to help out friend request on Twitter as someone looking for that exact URL. Well Trunk.ly has created what I term as a “Link Engine” where you are able to make all the links you have shared socially to be search-able.  Most people freely admit that Twitter’s search functionality is fairly limited and and most platforms don’t allow for searching across multiple data sources from a single search window but Trunk.ly appears to have solved that issue.

It was highlighted today in a Tweet via Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz who made the bold prediction that this platform could get big.  I would have to agree with his statement as I was able to create an account, follow a few suitable friends it suggested and add in my RSS feed from my blog and all my previous tweets in less than 5 minutes.  The point is that the website got the usability down to a fine art and my account is created and progressively expanding my history of links. It was covered by RWW back in December last year but didn’t seem to make that much press elsewhere until more recently when a number of members in the SEO and Marketing industry such as Rand started promoting their use of the tool.  While Trunk.ly was first created to deal with the pending death of Delicious it also emails you to start to manage the ever growing mountain of links shared via social media in a personal link engine.

Trunk.ly Interface

You can see below a partial screenshot of the interface with the ability to tab between your own links or those friends you chose to follow with a enhanced search as you type module to find links via keyword. Their search platform is very powerful and allows you to conduct a search via keywords, phrases, partial domains extensions, link urls, link title, text of the tweet and even text on the linked page. That’s right if you share a link but can only remember what is the content on the page you can now discover this using Trunk.ly along with who else shared the link, total number of shares, ability to delete the link or edit the link details.

Trunk.ly LinksThe downside is that at this stage you can only view Friends links and cannot search through them as a whole group but can click on a user and you can quickly search through any of their links from all the sources they have connected to Trunk.ly.  You can see in the screenshot below you can see you bio, one web link, location and the total number of your links that are now searchable via Trunk.ly and anyone you are following or following you.  The image is powered by Gravatar.com which makes it easy to ensure you have a consistent profile picture across a number of web 2.0 properties, but it is slow to update and may require a click on the “check this gravatar” to speed up the refresh.

Trunk.ly Profile

What about no results?

It’s kinda cool that Trunk.ly thought outside the box when it provided the zero results screen as it encourages users that if they just connected it may take several hours to process your initial links but you should also connect to some social networks.  The more data they have the better your results will be and the more data they will have to refine their search algorithms and suggested users you should consider following, but it would be great if it then could allow you to click and search the links of those friends you are following.

No Trunk.ly Results

Who else shared the Links?

Trunk.ly offers a far more advanced understanding of who has shared a particular link, but is limited to those who are Trunk.ly users.  But you can start to see the potential of the platform as you can start to see how the value of the link stats will grow with more users joining Trunk.ly, including how many people shared the links, when it was first shared and who first shared it. This can be useful to complement platforms like Bit.ly for measuring your social media campaigns as many users may select to share links generated by other shortners such as TinyURL or FB.me or via a standard link and the sharing data could not be captured.

Shared by the following Trunk.ly users...

Edit Trunk.ly Links

It is possible to retro-actively edit links stored within your Trunk.ly platform to fix incorrect titles, update URLs, descriptions or add tags to improve the search results.  It’s important to note that any #Hashtags used in a tweet will be automatically added as a tag for the link saving you time, but also making it possible to search based on Hashtag later to see what related links you shared. While it may not be used much it is useful as often a link URL Title might not be accurate or the note/text related to the tweet might be incorrect or scrapped from a site’s meta description providing no real value on what the link relates to.

Edit Trunk.ly Links

Trunk.ly supports what platforms?

It’s great that one of the key benefits of the platform is the ability to connect multiple social platforms, book marks and even RSS feeds. Trunk.ly makes it easy to import your blog URLs for a searchable record of what links you included and when you added those links and has tested it with WordPress, Posterous, Tumblr & Instapaper. It is likely that other platforms such as Reddit, Digg, Linkedin and email might be added in the future as the platform expands it’s userbase and demand for alternative platforms rises.  Most websites these days do provide a public RSS so it’s easy to add these to your Trunk.ly connections and you could potentially add your favourite RSS feeds to monitor what links are being shared/promoted without having to read the article.

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • RSS Feeds
  • Delicious
  • PinBoard

Trunk.ly Connections

You can easily load your links from 5 main networks within just a few minutes via their authorisation page but at peak times Trunk.ly advises you might have to wait a few hours.  I found that this was not the case and unlike a number of other web 2.0 platforms within just minutes I had access to both everyone link I have ever included in this blog and also every link I have tweeted via @TheLostAgency.  This was a great start to using a new platform and now that I have authorised these 2 accounts Trunk.ly will continue to check these services for new links every few hours.

Existing Trunk.ly ConnectionsYou can see above that as part of the transparency of the Trunk.ly model it lists what connections you have linked to your account, when it was last updated, when it was last checked and the type of connection it is.  This is useful in your search results as you can see what platforms that you might have shared that link by including Facebook, Delicious, Twitter or Pinboard.

Trunk.ly Limitations & Privacy Warnings

When you first connect Trunk.ly to Twitter they can store your last 3,200 tweets but you are unable to search any links prior to this due to Twitter limitations but can capture everything from that point forward.  If you delete or unfavour a tweet once it is in Trunk.ly this will not automatically remove it.  You cannot currently extract with the Facebook API any links that you just selected to Like but did not comment on, also no privacy settings are followed so any links you share will be stored and available to all Trunk.ly users. If you don’t wish to have your links that you share public you can set your Trunk.ly profile to private. The advice from the developers is that Trunk.ly will continue to grow and look at privacy features but you can read about it in more detail here.

Discover my Shared Links

If you find that you want to see what links I have shared on this blog or via Twitter you can see my Trunk.ly links here, and don’t forget to signup and test the platform for yourself.

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Delicious and Altavista cut?

Posted on December 18, 2010 by

Yahoo EVP & Chief Product Office learned today the lesson of discussing shutting down services via internal webinars and the sh!t storm it creates when it’s leaked online.  The internal screenshot contained a list of what Yahoo services were to be sunsetted, sold or merged into other products was leaked via yfrog by MyBlogLog co-founder Eric Marcoullier and onto twitter. While the image is no longer available you can still see the thumbnail generated by AllThingsDigital shown below.

Following Layoffs, Yahoo Cuts Products: MyBlogLog, Delicious, Yahoo! Buzz

To show the true power of social media the image was viewed over 52,667 times, liked 38 times on Facebook and Tweeted 683 times but didn’t exactly get the typically company response.  The leak angered Blake Irving enough to take a swipe at both Eric Marcoullier but also Joshua Schachter and threaten the staff member who leaked the screenshot, the response from Blake Irving proved interested enough for 20 others to retweet it, which has increased the interest around the story but taken the focus off the Yahoo product closures. Social media is a bad place to bring personal attacks or make snap statements without following up quickly with an official company post/article as early as possible to counter any negative press that might build up around your business decisions to close platforms.

Note that Blake has tried to back peddle on the issue with an updated post appearing by Chris Yeh on the Yahoo Developer Network blog covering what is next for Delicious, but why wasn’t this posted sooner or before the webinar went live? So all the focus seems to be around Delicious but what about the other platforms that are to be sunsetted including Altavista, Yahoo Buzz, Yahoo Bookmarks, Yahoo Picks or MyBloglog or are already closed like Geocities? It seems that a number of the services listed should have been merged, made into a Yahoo feature or sunsetted long ago as some haven’t been updated for over 3 years like Yahoo Picks.

Altavista

Only Babel Fish Translation service still offers some value

Altavista was one  of the web’s most popular search engines started back in 1995 but was passed around between companies eventually to be taken over by Overture Services in Feburary 2003 and then Overture by Yahoo in July 2003 where it was left to slowly die. Since December 2009 the average number of unique visitors has dropped from 878,000 to around 495,000 today according to Compete.com, which is a massive loss of potential for what was once a star.  Altavista had one of the best image search functions and still has a very powerful translation service that could have been a challenger to Google Translate but was also left alone to die but hopefully will emerge again with an update in 2011.

My Blog Log

MY Blog Log could have been a serious competitor for Facebook Connect

My Blog Log had the makings of a serious way to tie both your online communities to you blog but the only sites that appear to have done much with it are AllFacebook.com and JohnChow.com who still use the platform and have a reasonable amount of members.  It could have easily been expanded and developed into an embeddable widget like the Facebook news widgets or Facebook like buttons and built and expanded it’s community members to ensure the service was viable enough to continue.  The number of unique visitors spiked at the start of 2010 with over 6,891,000 but has since dropped back to around 3,388,000 as of November 2010 and seems to be gradually falling according to Compete.com.

Yahoo Bookmarks

Not updated since 2009 this could be merged with Delicious

I have never actually ever used this service but it does seem like a valid platform to merge with delicious or even make it possible to share between the two platforms via a private API, but it might be too late to save this product as an individual platform.  The platform has already had data merged once when MyWeb service was closed in 2008 and all the users were moved to Yahoo Bookmarks but it looks like they might be moved again, but how many people will have trust in the platform for a 3rd time?

Yahoo Buzz

A competitor for Google Trends & Twitter Trends and previous Bing xRank

Yahoo Buzz had the makings of a great platform which could rival Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Twitter and Google Trends but it was not effectively implemented to make it easy to use and failed to capture the attention of the social media mavens.  It would have made sense to link Yahoo Buzz into more Yahoo properties such as Delicious and even it’s Chat and Email platforms to make it easy for people to share stories or track what is stories are trending, discussed and shared based on Yahoo’s massive audience base.

Yahoo Picks

12 years of the most emailed picks of the web

Yahoo picks was closed back in 2008 but it was also left there to slowly die off but showing some potential it does have 4 sharing options: email, delicious, my web and digg.  While My Web was closed around the same time as Yahoo Picks they platform did show where the platform could have headed if it was allocated enough resources to compete and continue expanding it’s content and improving the interface.  You can see at the bottom of the page the footer was last updated back in 2007 which showed the product was starved for resources long before it was closed down which is a shame.

Yahoo needs to think Data Portability!

This type of worry by the use of cloud based platforms like Delicious was covered in some detail in my previous post on data portability able to prevent the web 2.0 shipwreck created over the past few years occurring when platforms have been closed due to business models fading or companies getting bored with the mundane day to day running of their platforms. So hopefully delicious is made stronger by merging Yahoo Bookmarks, Yahoo Picks and Yahoo buzz into a single platform but that might take another few years at this rate….

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Facebook new Profiles

Posted on December 6, 2010 by

Facebook Logo Just prior to the Mark Zuckerberg’s interview of 60 Minutes in the US they rolled out their new profile refresh.  It is interesting that Facebook is using its own social graph platform to spread who in your circle of friends has chosen to upgrade to their new interface.  I was interested as when I first looked at 7:15pm only 12 of my friends had upgraded their account to the new profile but it seems that a new friend is upgrading about ever 5 minutes and if this rate stays constant my entire group of friends will have transitioned over to the new platform within the next 10 hours.  If the rate of acceptance is even off by a zero and it takes 100 hours for all my friends to upgrade their profile it has been a very successful product refresh for Facebook, as if you haven’t upgraded you just have to click the green button shown below. Overall it seems to be a nice refresh and a fairly successful launch initially with no known or public privacy or usability bugs yet.

New Profile Signup Stats

Facebook sells the interface as a single quick snapshot summary of who you are, where you are and what you have been doing, but they also have a strong emphasis on sharing your experiences by their Facebook Places platform. The new profile is a nice refresh and you can see a screenshot below is much more visual and perfect for the increasing range of touch screen and tablet devices that people are using to access social media.  But as some journalists point out unless you have a stream of photos and are regularly tagged your profile might be a bit static, but there is an increased focus on your personal interests and even a separate panel for family members.  The ability to highlight meaningful relationships such as best friends, coworkers or family seems to go back to Myspace’s top friend widget which encouraged friends to visually display who they thought were their best friends.  I don’t see this widget as an additional feature but more so a game metric to encourage you to further expand the amount that Facebook knows about your off-line social interactions.

New Facebook Profile

It is interesting is that Facebook is learning it’s lessons from angry users who don’t know how to use their constantly changing interface and is now offering a tutorial notification that steps you through how to add more personal details to you profile. The 5 step process again is a way for Facebook to sneakily gather more details or fill gaps that is has about your profile such as ensuring your Facebook Bio is up to date to apparently give friend’s the most current information about you.

New Facebook Profile Tour

The new profile tour system is actually fairly easy and self-explanatory the only problem is that you need to go through the process before you can then go back and make changes, it would have been great if it progressively stepped you through filling in missing details.

Facebook new profile tour photos

The new interface does have the option to hide unwanted/embarrassing or non-relevant tagged photos from your profile stream and your friends then have to dig through your photo albums to find them and comment.  It would be great if this feature was also rolled out to your Facebook friend’s that you don’t regularly talk to but often show up on your profile, you don’t need to be reminded on a daily basis who you are still friends with.

Facebook new profile tour navigation

The tour is touches on the disappearance of the profile tabs and the replacement with 5 small links: Wall, Info, Photos, Notes, Friends. Below is the updated education and work section that seeks to make the information on your profile much more visual but it’s still showing the Wikipedia style pages for a number of companies.  The strange point is that some of these companies/employers have been on Facebook for over 3 years and still they haven’t been claimed by the organisation.

Facebook new profile tour education

What is actually interesting is that the new platform actually encourages you to add back in your interests as you get nice little visual icons to represent what you are interested in which is better than the previous interface which just listed text.  You will notice in your news feed that any friend who has upgraded to the new platform is actually actively adding in missing details to their profile so the new interface will certainly please advertisers who are able to better target consumers again via Facebook Ads.

Facebook new profile tour interests

It is interesting to see what Facebook has scheduled for those how are not manually upgrading to their new interface and what will happen if you don’t like the new platform as once you upgrade you cannot go back to the old interface. Facebook has approached the rollout with some more planning this time and seems to have also managed to successfully redesign their interface without too much early push back from users.  They are rolling out the new profile to everyone slowly but they offer users the ability to jump the queue and upgrade early here.

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Rockmelt is Facebook Browser?

Posted on November 10, 2010 by

Rockmelt LogoA fair amount of questions have been asked about does the market really need a new browser and why does it appear to be more akin to a Facebook browser than anything. Could RockMelt be the secret browser or platform that Facebook was rumoured to be working on as to use RockMelt you must login using your credentials from Facebook. The platform is slowly creating a bit of a wave as it might be the beginning of a new round of cloud hosted technologies that are deeply tied to a social platform, moving away from established technologies like Google Accounts, Windows Live ID or OpenID.

RockMelt = Facebook Browser?
While Ron Conway is an investor in RockMelt he is also one of the early investors in Twitter so it’s not surprising to see Twitter is featured as one of the apps in the sample screenshots. Because of the browsers central share button it makes it quick and fairly easy to post links to your Facebook wall but that share feature does seem to further pressure platforms like Bit.ly that have helped business track how people are sharing their content via social media. What analytics or data will be shared back to your Facebook insights account and what might be lost if you are using the new RockMelt share buttons? The question is if the platform is so closely aligned with Facebook over time as it grows in users will Twitter become a secondary application and push RockMelt moves closer to being the beta Facebook browser?

At least RockMelt is Open Source
The idea that the platform is built on Chromium is interesting but at least they have built it around an open source project and not tried to re-invent the wheel, but does that mean the barriers to entry are too low and another clone based on the idea could be made available? The platform took 2 years but it’s fairly easy to see that the idea while not everything could be cloned in a much shorter period of time.

Rockmelt SignupCould it work outside Facebook?
It would actually be quite interesting to see how the RockMelt idea could be tweaked to make it so that you could use your login credentials for Myspace, WordPress or Twitter and it would be personalised to your preferences, bookmarks and settings. The other issues have not be discussed is around privacy of user data and the transparency on how you share and engage in content and what is made public via posts or updates to your Facebook wall.

RockMelt re-thinks Privacy
It what is a very interesting development the sign-up button has added a link “Concerned about privacy? We are too.”

So it seems already there have been some concerns and likely enough to lead to this update on their sign-up button which will massively affect conversion rates for beta testers thinking of trialling the product.  RockMelt have advised that their browser will never auto-post to your Facebook wall but stranger things have happened with changes in Facebook applications T&Cs. The RockMelt privacy faqs have also been updated to advise that it’s not actually sending your browsing data with third parties like Facebook and all your browsing and search history is kept locally on your machine.

Interestingly RockMelt has thrown water on the idea that it would be seeking to use your browsing history or behaviours to target you with ads, as they have advised they are not monitoring it and don’t yet have an incentive to do so. Much of the language in the privacy policy is refreshing simple and clear but it will be interesting to see how it might change or how future apps or products might adjust their privacy policy to suit.

RockMelt Promotes ADD
The idea of constant checking of your favourite websites for new posts or updates is interesting but also makes the browser not as suitable when concentration or focus is required as little notification windows or icons could get distracting. The constant updates and changes on who is online with Facebook chat brings the platform closer in competition to MSN Messenger, AIM, Yahoo Messenger & Google Chat but do you really want everyone to know you are online every time you open your browser?

Super Google Instant Search
The interesting point is that RockMelt seems to take Google Instant to a whole new level as you can now flip through the search results and should no longer need to click the backwards button to find a more suitable search result. This does mean that potentially websites will in time get a massive uplift in visitors and a huge jump in bounce rates if visitors can just flip through to see your site and move on with a simple click. Questions will be raised around how to track this accurately in your web analytics. It is likely that this new Instant search is being powered by the Instant previews that was recently announced by Google on their blog.

The idea of RockMelt is around 4 basic principles

  1. Share Easily
  2. Search Faster
  3. Connect with Friends
  4. Keep up on News

You can watch the promotional video of the RockMelt and how it can work with social media platforms below

Oh and since RockMelt is still in a limited beta you have to apply for an invitation, and remember you need a Facebook account because you have to connect via Facebook connect and since it’s hosted in the cloud it should be fairly easy to install and use.

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Gmail Contacts vs Facebook Contacts

Posted on November 9, 2010 by

It seems that now that since Facebook has passed 500,000,000 users and topped Google as the #1 website in the world, much of the world has begun to turn against Facebook, which is a shame as it seems that data portability has finally started to get some attention but what has just happened seems almost backward.  In the last day or so it seems that Google has taken the radical step to turn off Gmail data APIs to Facebook so your contacts can no longer be automatically handed over to non-Google platforms and services like Facebook.

It will be interesting to see if this will be expanded to cover other social media platforms like Linkedin, Twitter or FourSquare as they also do technically leave the users data in a dead zone which Google cannot use in its data mining.  Wired.com seems to question some of the commercial motives behind the decision as well as the company that blogs like TechCrunch appear to have shown support for in the early moves of what looks to be a drawn out argument.  As new Gmail contact policy will be rolled out of the next few weeks get in early and make sure you share all your personal and private Gmail contacts with every and any service you may ever have plans to use before their Gmail data feed is also turned off.

Ok so the last point is meant to be taken with a grain of salt as you should take some note of the concerns Google has about the use of data but always place your privacy first and don’t automatically share access with just any website that requests access to your Gmail contacts.

The announcement around the Gmail API blockade does place a question over any other social media platforms that you currently use that rely on the Gmail API to import your Gmail contacts to quickly find friends, family or workmates that are also using the platform.  Google does make it sound like if the platform allows for data to be imported and exported then it should satisfy Gmail but this policy may also change as Google begins to see the commercial value of your Gmail contacts in its upcoming Google Me strategies.

Google tells you what to do

The biggest issue that seems to be missed by the initial media coverage is that Google is making the decision on how it’s Gmail users can elect to make use of their data they imported or entered into their contacts lists.  It should be each Gmail users own decision if you want to share it, export it or delete it.  The move does not set a good precedent on how Google views your Gmail contacts as it seems that they have seen a commercial benefit and have staked a claim on ownership and rights around who and how they can be accessed.  The use of your data if it is in Gmail or Facebook should be your decision and users should not be involved in their parents public fight of social data. So Google and Facebook seem to be setting the ground work for what looks to be a nasty breakup fight in front of the kids and i’m sure it will just get worse and only the users will get hurt in the data protectionism battle ahead.

Issue places doubt in Google’s commitment to OAuth?

While the Gmail API has been extended to support authorisation via OAuth which is the industries open standard protocol which allows Gmail to have secure API authorisation between desktop and web applications steps like this place doubt in its commitment to OAuth and it’s development community if they are going to take their bat and ball and go home so quickly. As Michael Arrington points out maybe this is the beginning of a data war between the world’s biggest websites and will open platforms like OAuth slow their arms race?

There is no Google Places API!

Just as Google has been making noise over the issue of Facebook being a one-way user of its Gmail API, one of the long-standing issues has been the level of data accumulating in Google Places.  Much of the Google Places data has been acquired by Google bots scraping it from across the web, via business owners entering information or from trusted data partners such as YellowPages.  The issue is that initially when your Local listing is created the data was imported from YellowPages and then you can then make adjustments or updates as required, the issue is that this data is a one way road.  If you correct an error in the YellowPages data it is not imported back to the YellowPages database so why is this issue not being raised as double standards around data access?

It’s easy to find a number of previous issues that have arisen when Google Places have removed data it initially displayed that scraped from platforms such as Yelp, so why the big issue around Facebook being a one-way street when Google Places is just as bad if not worse.  Think about if Facebook decided that after you imported your contacts it no longer wanted you to speak to your friends who didn’t have a Optus mobile due to a commercial relationship it might have with Telstra and removed them from your Facebook contacts.  There would be a massive outcry but effectively Google Places has done this in the past by hiding data it selected to import from platforms like Yelp as it appears to compete with Google’s commercial agreements with local data partners like Zagat. Again it appears that the choice has been taken out of the users hands due to a commercial benefit and if all is fair and transparent as claimed by Google the decision should be with the business owner if they select to import or display Yelp’s content and not with Google Places algorithm or commercial agreements.

Is all fair in love and data wars?

Just as there is no Google Places API and this is a one way relationship is it really fair to call out Facebook over its own selfish aspirations to be the centre of your social universe if Google Places is also a dead-end street?

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Facebook Travel

Posted on October 5, 2010 by

Facebook LogoAt the recent Facebook Developer Group in New York, one of the their most interesting products was touched on “Facebook Places” which enabled Facebook to engage more with their users. It also seemed interesting that not much has been done since Facebook’s purchase of travel startup Next Stop in July 2010 which was official closed last month.

Facebook said that it’s Facebook Places product was one of the final pieces of the puzzle so they can understand the following about your social networks:

  • Who you know (Friends)
  • What you are doing (Status updates)
  • When you did it (Status updates)
  • Why  you went there (Places)
  • How?

So its logical that Facebook can start to understand why you checked in to a particular location or with certain friends but it’s still not yet linking the data in public that you all checked into that location because it was a friend’s birthday.

Blacktop LogoThe how you got there and the why you went there combines the next evolution of Facebook in its travel platform. Platforms like Blacktop are a suitable acquisition target for Facebook if they are serious about moving towards filling that travel gap.

Blacktop allows group checkins (Foursquare/Places) so you can create a complete record of the trips to share with friends and family. Blacktop can better link with Facebook photos which allow for comments (status updates) and tagging photos as you go. Combined with a mobile version of Facebook recognition software you can auto-tag friends on the trip and geo tag all your photos for later.

Blacktop Share with Facebook

Facebook photos are already the largest photo site in the world, and a number of them are taken while on trips/holidays so it’s a very smart move for Facebook to look at a more structured and easy way for its members to share.

Blacktop solves the issue of Twitter and FourSquare flooding your friends News feeds with multiple posts. Blacktop also allows for integration with Facebook Places & FourSquare which could make Facebook more of a travel platform than just an add on feature. Blacktop is still very early in the concept and makes sense for Facebook to buy them now before they grow any larger, you can get the Blacktop preview from iTunes

Faceook & Foursquare Checkins

Facebook recently announced a partnership with Amazon which allows Amazon.com to benefit from the social recommendations engine and its very easy to see how that can be expanded to cover verticals such as a travel network.  The smart thing would be for Facebook Travel to link in with Bing Travel that should allow more traffic and visitors for Bing and friendly partner for Facebook.

Facebook has a new product announcement tomorrow and my guess that its going to be either a Facebook travel product or improve an existing product that will set the ground work for Facebook Travel to be launched later.  It seems to be only a matter of time before its launched and it will further strengthen the Facebook mobile platform as most people carry their mobiles when they travel.

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Facebook invades privacy again

Posted on September 12, 2010 by

Facebook Friend FinderFacebook continues to test its users to see how much it can push you to expand its member base via its Facebook friend finder application that they have being heavily promoting lately.  But today I noticed that it’s now pushing me further to use its Find friend feature by scraping my Instant Messenger screen names off my profile and adding it into the user name section with a prompt to just enter my AIM password.

Facebook says that it won’t store my password but I know from several months ago when I used its Friend Finder feature to look though my Hotmail address book, it scrapped every single name it could and continues to try to suggest that I know that person because they were found in my Hotmail account.  A large number of the names that Facebook scrapped from my Hotmail account were not someone I was ever friends with or would want to have part of my network because I don’t actually know them personally, I had sent or received an email from them at some point.

Facebook did a wonderful job of finding any person that I have ever had contact with via email and to this day continues to try to suggest them as someone I might know, when it is pulling the names/data from a database it gained from my Hotmail account. It’s this type of invasion of privacy that makes me think twice before offering it to connect it with more of my external social data.

I decided today that I would add in the my own user names for a number of IM profiles and see how quickly it had an impact using the username “I want privacy” before Facebook would start trying to get me to user its Friend Importer for the various IM services.

Facebook IMIt took just a few minutes for the Facebook internal marketing database to take that information and deliver a very concerning banner at the top of my Facebook news feed, with my new username “I want privacy”.  While I think that it looks like its matching my friends up who are also using Skype or have it listed on their profile, but no it seems that the friend finder uses random names to populate the suggestion box.  But it does seem that the friend finder suggestion tool is picking friends that you engage with via writing on their wall, commenting on their status updates or photos, so this might be yet another sign Facebook tracks and watches everything you do online!

Facebook Privacy Skype

Not content with my point I made another change, but won’t repeat what new username is shown in the screenshot below, but you get the idea.  Following this post I have removed all my IM screen names on my profile to reduce the amount of internal marketing Facebook can target to me, but its a shame that by Facebook’s behaviour they are encouraging you to slowly remove all your personal details.

Facebook Privacy StalkerSo the question is how much can you put up with Facebook using your own profile information for its internal marketing purposes, and its likely one of the many reasons that so many people who have been using it for years continue to leave and close down their accounts.

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Facebook Ads Broadmatch

Posted on August 29, 2010 by
Facebook Ads LogoFacebook has today rolled out a new feature which allows advertisers to broaden the target age range automatically with its broad age match setting.  The move which will increase the clicks and impressions your campaign receives but will also benefit Facebook with an increase in ad space being sold outside the key demographics. The basis for the change is that Facebook claims if you are to target 24-35 then someone who is 36 might be just as interested in your advert and possibly be as valuable as someone who is 35. While this might in part true if someone has just had a birthday or lies about their age on their Facebook profile but it may also cloud your analysis of your campaigns if you focus on demographics.
Downside to broad age match
If you are a university and targeting school graduates who are under 18 or if you are a nightclub or concert promoter you requirements for what age brackets you want to attract.  The setting is also for all your campaigns across Facebook which seems to be a grab at revenue as it needs to be campaign specific not account based to be of any use to advertisers. How far will Facebook start to push the age demographics above or below what you campaign against your settings will likely continue to expand.
Benefits of broad age match
Facebook is currently discounting the extra impressions and clicks for the expanded target age range, but how much will they discount the broad age match and it will likely only be a short-term offering.  Once its enabled like most Facebook features its likely hard to disable once it has been activated, so should you enable it and how?
How to active Facebook Ads Broad Match
  • Login to your Facebook Ads account
  • Select Advert account Settings
  • Scroll down to Broad targeting opt-ins
  • Select Update button

  • Confirm to update all existing adverts to enable broad age targeting

Facebook ads confirmation

Facebook ads confirmation request

Does Broad Match offers move value?

It might be suitable for a number of advertisers but if you are not effectively monitoring and tracking your campaign you will just be spending more money and hoping you get increased value from the campaign unless you are measuring your social media ROI. The shotgun approach to demographics might cause chaos in some campaigns and dramatically uplift impressions and quality of traffic in others, you need to make sure you understand the possible impact before you enable Facebook Ads broadmatch.
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Webtrends integrates with Marin Software

Posted on August 28, 2010 by
Webtrends has been fairly aggressively trying to catch up to its competitors through a number of purchase Transpond (Social Mobile Marketer), Widemile (Testing & Optimising) and ClickShift (Ad Optimisation) and the partnership with Marin Software could easily develop into an acquisition. Webtrends is now the only enterprise level web analytics platform that is still privately owned and not part of a bigger software company but its clear that sooner or later it will either have to merge or be bought out.
MediaPost has reported Webtrends & Marin Software have signed a license agreement which also involves the integration of their technology platforms.  The move is smart as it allows companies to link the entire campaign metrics similar to Overdrive’s Social Eye social media ROI dashboard.
The benefit is that companies can analyse website traffic via webtrends analytics platform to measure campaign performance and goals/revenues and adjust the paid campaigns through their Webtrends Ads which is now powered by Marin Software to improve or optimise their traffic.  The benefit for those using Marin Software is they can now collect details on organic traffic to source new keywords for SEM campaigns and measure its impact on brand awareness for a particular product or service, similar to Google Campaign Insights.
Facebook Integrations
Webtrends announced one of the first analytics solutions for Facebook fan activity and interactions that happens inside Facebook on custom tabs , Facebook apps and shares back in March 2010. Also just recently Marin Software had announced their bid management platform now allows for managing Facebook ads, but has layered over the ability to use algorithmic bidding, advanced audience segmentation and ad testing/rotation features.  The companies are working along very close paths and by using API integration it is easier to pass data between platforms and reduces incorrect decisions made based on poorly aligned data that previously processed manually to find patterns.
Benefits in buying ads?
The benefits of being able to successfully purchase advertising space on Facebook with a pure focus on measurable campaign objectives and optimise the campaign to deliver the most sales or leads does offer an strong incentive for more agencies to examine their platform.  The obvious other benefits is the time saved in reporting and analysis which allows for larger and more complex campaigns to be run more efficient with less cost and decreased wasted spend.
Google Analytics Competitor?
It moves their technology platform closer to a true competitor for Google Analytics which has continued to integrate with DoubleClick and AdWords.  While the recent updates to Microsoft adCenter do improve the market place for advertisers it doesn’t integrate as well as this agreement.  It will be likely that a number of technology companies will be looking at either increasing their purchases of smaller players or examining how much a bid for the two companies would cost. Webtrends has continued to remain a niche player with only around 1,000 clients or around 1.74% of all web analytics installs compared to Google Analytics 48.9% of the market.
analytics marketshare
Who would buy the combined Webtrends/Marin Software company?
It would be a smart move for one of the search networks such as Microsoft adCenter, AOL or even ASK to buy the two companies as it will finally allow for a real competitor to emerge to Google Analytics.  The a smarter purchase of Webtrends/Marin Software would be by one of the two leading social media platforms that are trying to show their investors they have a solid business model for earning revenue and their ad network is more than just an experiment for advertisers.  If Twitter or Facebook purchased the combined Webtrends/Marin Software company it would allow for them to expand their Ad network and rapidly scale their value to advertisers.
The dark horse in the market is Apple, which based on Google’s purchase of Urchin which forms the base of their web analytics it would possibly approved by the FTC and European competition watchdogs who want more than one powerful player in the market.  IBM would likely be locked out of any more purchases in the analytics space due to its recent consumption of two of Webtrends biggest competitors.
Webtrends competitors purchased
  • Unica was purchased by IBM on the 13th August 2010
  • Coremetrics was purchased by IBM on 15th June 2010
  • Omniture was purchase by Adobe on 15th September 2009
  • Urchin Software was acquired by Goolge on 29th March 2005
The upgrade has begun with existing accounts and any new advertisers will have to wait until October 2010 to start using Webtrends Ads for their digital campaigns.  It will be interesting to see what competitors such as Kenshoo, Efficient Frontier or Acquisio might be doing over the next few weeks to counter this technology marriage. I say the analytics market needs some more consolidation and plenty of more agreements to share API access and cross platform integrations would be welcomed by most advertisers and agencies.
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Facebook kills FBML

Posted on August 21, 2010 by

Facebook Logo

All Facebook was the first to alert the web development community to a small post yesterday on the Facebook Developers blog that as part of the Facebook platform roadmap update, FBML would be killed off.  It was always interesting that Facebook had chosen not to select an open source platform when their first launched FBML but with a growing audience passing 500,000,000 members, it was understood they would have the scale to make it work. It seems that Facebook started to listen to the agency and web development community with its announcement that it will be moving its platform to iFrames for canvas applications and Fanpage tabs, which they say will reduce the technical differences between developing for applications on Facebook.com.

iFrames to be Standard? – The problem is that Facebook hasn’t actually started supporting iFrames for Fanpage tabs and it may actually be several months before they are supported.  This is an expensive shift for existing Facebook canvas applications who will have to respect their projects that have already been customised to work with FBML, but newer projects will benefit in being able to built with iFrames from the ground up.  The issue is that development cycles will be massively impacted as if you have a launch date of Quarter 4, 2010 do you select iFrames and risk that Facebook will be ready or do you build the application in FBML and worry about Facebook changing the rules at a later stage.

FBML Cut-off Date? Facebook has stated a broad and vague date of by the end of this year that they will allow no new FBML applications to be created, but where that line is drawn in the sand is yet to be decided leaving web developers and possibly clients in the lurch.

Facebook Fanpages Resized – Last month Facebook announced that they had set a deadline for the 23rd August for the reduced tab width limit to 520 pixels, this has already been implemented on a number of accounts and requires most custom pages to be resized.  So again Facebook is forcing developers to rebuild their tabs for their pages in FBML and then start again in several months using iFrames.

Facebook Removing Application Tabs? Facebook has made a broad decision once again to take it upon itself to remove more functionality that will only affect exposure for your Facebook applications on your users Facebook profiles, but at this stage will continue on Facebook fanpages.

So its unclear where web developers and agencies should be scheduling their projects, I would even advise to consider holding off on large projects until a more structure roadmap for the FBML transition has been made public or you might budget in for building a second platform at a later stage in a iFrame.

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