Trade Unions step into the Facebook argument
August 30, 2007
So we’ve all read the recent reports of businesses banning Facebook, Bebo and MySpace to try to prevent employees wasting time. We’ve also read the stories about recruiters and employers using social networks to check out prospective hires. Now the TUC (Trade Union Congress) have stepped up and issues some guidelines to help employees and employers make informed decisions about usage in the workplace. They also discuss the possibility of it being discriminatory to not hire someone based on their Facebook profile when they might be the only candidate with one (good point!).
There’s some guidelines for TUC members here, and some guidelines aimed at employers here.
It’s quite amazing to see something like this happen. The TUC is generally an old school organisation so to see them tackling this kind of issue is testament to the huge popularity and buzz surrounding social networks at the moment.
Open Friend Format could solve my problems
August 29, 2007
One day…
I’ve been blogging recently about the problems with multiple social networks and keeping in touch with everyone and how good it would be to have open standards and API’s to allow intercommunication and development between platforms.
Well now someone has taken the brave leap to propose and open standard called Open Friend Format. From their blurb: OpenFriend is a set of standards that allows Social Networks to discover any of your friends already on their networks while still protecting your privacy. The ultimate goal is to standardize and make transparent the user experience between importing and exporting of contacts from various social networks. OpenFriend allows for social networks to implement a standardized way of exporting their contacts and discovering relationships between new and existing users. It also allows for sites to generate documents detailing the relationship between people on different social networks.
This is a great step in the right direction and I for one am right behind this push to standardise and aggregate the networks!
Watch where your ads are appearing; especially on Facebook
August 3, 2007
Be careful where your banner adverts appear! When you serve ads through a network it’s really tricky to keep an eye on where they appear and what the content surrounding them is referring to. Yes you can specify the types and categories of sites they appear on, you can even specify the actual websites it gets placed on, but some are finding that this level of control is not enough.
We had an issue a year ago where we were running millions of impressions a day on a behavioural ad network. We were targeting the travel and leisure community and also major portals but somehow we ended up advertising holidays on a link farm site which had a rather less than decent advert for a swingers club on the same page as our advert! Needless to say as soon as this was spotted we pulled that site out of our target group. We could of course have been placed on many other sites like this during that campaign without even knowing it…
And then there’s websites like Facebook. Social networks are really difficult to target for advertising as being full of user generated content you have no control over what your advert could appear next to. Vodafone has now experienced this and has pulled all advertising from Facebook after it’s banner was displayed on the group profile for the British National Party. Vodafone pulled the ad straight away, but other brands such as Virgin Media and Orange have also appeared on that page.
I can’t see how Facebook could possibly control to a granular level where adverts are appearing in relation to the content on the pages. It will be a really difficult task and so if a lot of their big advertisers start complaining about the content on the pages their ads are appearing on it could spell trouble for their revenue streams quite quickly.
This is the trouble with user generated content and advertising. As bad as Facebook content can be I’m sure MySpace is worse. With the increasing popularity of corporate responsibility it is only going to become a bigger issue!
Filed in advertising, banner, facebook, marketing, MySpace, social media, social network, social networking, user generated content
In a growing trend, the Telegraph reports that many firms are blocking access to Facebook over fears that employees are wasting time on the site. MySpace and others have been banned too. It’s testament to the huge popularity of Facebook that this has happened, it’s only in the last three or four months that Facebook has really taken off in the UK, and already people are desperately trying to keep employees off it.
Will this hurt Facebook’s growth? I don’t think so, users will visit the site in their own hours instead. Is it hurting companies productivity? Social networks are the second biggest culprit of in work time wasting after web based email, so definitely, or this type of article wouldn’t be necessary!
Facebook makes it’s first acquisition
July 20, 2007
Facebook has bought Parakey a start-up created by the Firefox co-founders. Parakey is all about a web operating system and bridging the online and offline experience with storage and synchronisation in mind.
This sits very well with Facebook in my mind. Facebook is fast becoming the social platform of choice, for it to add offline capabilities and tie itself to the desktop would be a huge advantage. Imagine synching your address book and email to Facebook apps, storing images etc that get auto uploaded when you next connect to the Facebook platform etc.
Facebook could become a platform if they play their cards right, they just need to be very careful that the users don’t drag it down to MySpace’s spangly eyesore level.
There are rumours that Google wanted Parakey too but the offer of pre IPO Facebook shares was too tempting for the Parakey execs (unsurprisingly).
Self PR online; Oxford Uni gets wise
July 17, 2007
I blogged in March about the new trend of social networks (and blogs) being used by recruiters and employers to screen potential candidates prior to even meeting them. There’s been more press about this in the last few months but interestingly today Oxford Uni has been exposed as using Facebook to find out which students have been causing problems and playing pranks since their exams.
The BBC carries the news today about this. Oxford Uni Students Union has posted about this on their website, warning all students to log in to Facebook and raise their privacy level to prevent the prying eyes of uni staff viewing their profiles.
Let this be another lesson for those who post away on social networks such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace with no thought for the impression their postings may have on people they maybe would rather did not know about their latest antics…
MySpaceTV? Look’s just like YouTube
June 28, 2007
A good post from Pete Cashmore on his Mashable blog here. Pete’s spotted, and disseminated, what instantly becomes obvious the moment you get onto the MySpaceTV site (launched today). It looks very similar to YouTube!
I’m sure MySpaceTV will be hugely successful amongst the MySpace community, but how successful it will be outside of that will depend largely on the content that MySpace can get onto it’s player. It’s going to need to use it’s relationships with media owners (NBC/News Corp anyone) to get prime content on it’s site if it stands a chance of competing. And that’s only competing on copyrighted content, how will it fair on user generated content?
As I said, they’ve got the social networking bonus of MySpace to play on, and you can bet that the player becomes the only video player allowed on MySpace, so they’ll get UGC from there. But will it have the pull to attract the guys who are making amateur films etc as those are the ones who have embraced YouTube so completely.
I don’t think this will kill YouTube to be honest. I think the connotations of being associated with MySpace won’t help, it’s my opinion that MySpace needs to adapt to survive beyond being a playground for teens and they currently show no desire to make that shift.
It looks like MySpaceTV has been launched as a YouTube killer, but I don’t think it will cut it without a killer gameplan as well!
Filed in copyright, MySpace, social network, social networking, user generated content, video, YouTube
Facebook in 40 years
June 25, 2007
This is brilliant! I’d like to see the same done to MySpace as that would be hillarious, imagine the tweed backgrounds and knitting widgets 
Social networking could be a very strange landscape in the future, I’m sure the teens will rebel and find new places to connect without the likes of us old fogeys.
Yahoo flash the cash
June 21, 2007
News out today that Yahoo have bought Rivals.com the college sports website for an undisclosed amount. Is this an example of them just desperately trying to play catch up by buying anything popular? Or is this a shrewd move given the possibility of MySpace coming into the fold?
Rivals.com would make a nice addition to a social networking feature and would give them access to a huge community of college goers (and sports fans) which is something Facebook have sewn up so far. Maybe Jerry is already having an impact, although this has of course been planned for a while!
Filed in community, facebook, MySpace, social media, social network, social networking, yahoo
News Corp’s MySpace for Yahoo deal, worth it or not?
June 20, 2007
News Corporation has discussed swapping MySpace with Yahoo in return for a 25% stake in the resulting group.
A deal would demonstrate a quick (and profitable) return on News Corp’s investment in MySpace, which cost it $580M in summer 2005. Yesterday Yahoo was worth $37B. A quarter stake in an enlarged company would be worth $12.3B.
News Corp is interested in a deal even if it means losing some control of MySpace because it would give the media group exposure to a far larger internet-based business. It also gets them away from the reliance on one service which currently is losing ground to Facebook. For Yahoo, it gives them a foothold in the social networking world and a huge user base to apply Panama to. Google currently serve ads for MySpace, I’m sure that wouldn’t last if Yahoo gets involved.
It’s an interesting deal and I actually kind of hope it goes ahead. Hopefully Yahoo could apply some of their years of internet knowledge to MySpace to make it less cheesy and more appealing to other age groups than the teens it currently serves so well, and for Yahoo the benefit really is in the advertising possibilities that would be opened up to them.
