A First Look at Facebook Fan Box

I had five separate people email me this week about the launch of Facebook Fan Box, which is a widget that allows you to integrate your Facebook fan page into your website. The Fan Box shows the avatars of a select number of your fans as well as a news feed of your most recent page updates. Given the buzz about the tool, I spent some time playing with it. Here are some quick thoughts on it...

Facebook Lures Advertisers at Myspace's Expense

Facebook has won over millions of users from social networking pioneer MySpace. It's becoming more alluring to advertisers, too.

Even as overall U.S. advertising spending on social networks declines this year, ad sales are on the rise at Facebook, and the company is gaining a larger slice of the pie at the expense of News Corp.'s (NWS) MySpace, according to a new report from marketing researcher eMarketer. 

HOW TO: Manage Social Media Goals & Expectations

You have insightful tweets, write amazing blog posts, and can make a viral video like it’s nobody’s business. So why don’t you have 500,000 followers, 50,000 views per video, and your own personal social media army?

People have been setting some strange, unrealistic, and possibly misguided expectations recently in social media. While you might believe that you’re only worth something in social media if you have a huge audience, the simple fact is that it’s not true. Understanding what you want out of social media and having smart goals can mean the difference between frustration and enjoyment. This guide provides and overview of some ways to avoid the pitfalls of social media expectations and how to manage smart goals on the social web.

I have been hearing for a long time in tech circles about how the internet is changing politics: the fact that this blog exists is evidence. But what does it really mean for the old mediums? Especially TV.

The question I have been asking myself for some time now, how long can the status quo of media buyers taking 15% really continue when Google is going to let you do it yourself for free?
The new model is going to be different. Prepare.

The ante is going to be upped on creative. When the floodgates open and anyone can place a commercial you will have tens of thousands of new content creators and the market is going weed out the weak.

As importantly, the focus will narrow. You wont be blasting one ad out to the whole universe, you'll be crafting tailored ads for tailored audiences. People watching out there in TV land are already self-selecting themselves into interest oriented niches. Why put your campaign dollars behind one generic ad, when the cost of doing ten ads to ten audience's one tenth the size has the same cost and greater impact? So, while candidates from 2004 are airing up lobs on CBS about generic issue #1, tomorrow's candidate is firing smart bombs: education ads about the budget cuts in Forrest Hills School district to Cincinnati moms on What not to Wear and 2nd amendment messages interspersed between bone-crunching scenes of Future Weapons on the Military Channel.

The bottom line: making TV effective is going to mean bringing it closer to home, both in message and delivery.  I expect to see a lot more producers in the next 5 years.  It's a brave new world.

Facebook Aims to Extend Its Reach Across the Web, NY Times.

Facebook has detailed information about its users: their real identities, what they like and dislike and whom they associate with. With a member’s permission, it could use that data to help other Web sites deliver more personalized ads. Similarly, those sites could tell Facebook what its users are doing elsewhere, helping to make its own ads more targeted.

On this one, I stand with Lance Dutson and the Collins campaign and not with MoveOn.org and Google who censored a legitimate political ad. I love Google as much as any technologist, but they're flat wrong here.

In case you missed the brouhaha (which exploded onto Drudge and elsewhere), Susan Collins Internet director Lance Dutson placed Google AdWords ads fighting back against MoveOn's extensive involvement in ME-SEN, raising upwards of six figures for Tom Allen.

William Beutler has some great comments responding to Google's lame explanation over in the comments at TechRepublican:

So what Google's saying is, MoveOn can place an ad criticizing Susan Collins, but Susan Collins can't place an ad criticizing MoveOn?

The new campaign finance laws largely amounted to incumbent-protection, with its temporary, pre-election advertising blackout. Google's TOS appears to be a permanent blackout on criticizing any proper nouns who've requested it. Both result in less speech.

What Dutson did is not Coke trying to compete with Pepsi. This is not a commercial brand wielding a rival's trademark to drain profits from the competition. It is someone on one side of the political divide making a point about someone about someone on the other side. Isn't that what political advertising should be about?

MoveOn is a political actor, which likes to fancy itself as the equivalent of a party or candidate committee. It runs ads that elicit strong pushback from official Republican committees and candidates. So, are now conceding that an organization like MoveOn is above criticism in the Web's #1 advertising medium because they happen to be an organization with a trademark, rather than just an elected official or a party?

And more disturbingly, do politicians just trademark their name to (among other things) protect themselves from criticism on Google's expanding ad network? If so, that's a pretty severe distortion of the open, participatory online culture that Google claims to be fighting for. Major organizations and political rock stars with trademarks would be automatically immune. Everyone else, not so much.

That's not as far off as you think. Hillary Clinton successfully sued for the rights to HillaryClinton.com citing the trademark rights to her name. Could she now wield that newfangled right to thwart paid online advertising against her?

Unlike the "miserable failure" Googlebomb, this strikes right at the heart of the company's judgment. This controversy didn't result from an algorithm, but from someone deep within the bowels of the company's selective enforcement of trademark. This is not the first time that conservatives have felt the sting of Google's censors first. Many conservative creative types have experienced just this sort of bias in other supposedly open Web services. In 2003, my anti-Che Guevara t-shirts were banned from Cafepress because (I was informed) a law firm called -- appropriately -- "Legend" informed the site they were very stringent about enforcing their rights to the iconic image.

Of course, this did not stop several other pro-Che Cafeshops from cashing in on the dead Commie's copyright. My repeated emails to the company pointing this out were not responded to.

I don't come down cleanly on either side of the current copyright wars. I think current IP law especially as it applies to software and music is a mess. I'm on Google's side in the 700 MHz spectrum auction, but I think net neutrality worries are just hype.

But it's abundantly clear to me that if we blindly accept Google's claims just so we can assert our tech bona fides, conservatives will get the shaft. Why? Because enforcement will be manual and selective at best, with MoveOn getting better treatment than Wal-Mart and Exxon-Mobil with their phalanx of corporate attorneys. And guess who that helps?

Google has had no problem raging against trademarks (can you say Google Book Search?) and for an open Internet without walls around content. Certainly it should have no problem extending the same freedom to political speech on its ad network.

This isn't the first time Lance Dutson has successfully fought back against the Left's invasion of his state. Go Lance!

When there's a rumor swirling around the tech sphere about YouTube adding 30-second "pre-roll" advertisements to our clips, we did what any responsible person would do: checked with the company to see if the rumor was true.

First, the rumor from Gizmodo:

So much for YouTube taking the high ground and not sticking annoying bumper ads in front of their clips … that's pretty much their exact plan for making money in 2008. Hey, they've gotta make back that $1.65 billion somehow, right? The plan as of now is to slap 30-second ads in front of clips. It isn't clear if there'll be shorter ads as well, if the ads will go in front of every clip, or if the ads will be skippable. I can tell you one thing: there ain't no way I'm sitting through 30 torturous seconds of advertising for a 15 second video of a guy lighting his farts on fire. Don't blow it, Google.

And then we tracked down Shashi Seth, the YouTube Group Product Manager, to find out if the rumor was true or not. Fortunately, it's not:

"We are constantly testing ad formats in order to better understand what works for our community -- and what doesn't. Our tests have shown that pre-rolls are not a positive experience for users. Our goal is to offer only advertising that engages our audience and gives them new ways to interact with their favorite content."

I almost had a heart-attack. Let's hope Gizmodo updates their post.