Appscuseme

Don't Cry Over Your Facebook Invites

Over the last week those of us with Facebook applications have had to try to figure out how to deal with a dramatic decrease in invites that can be sent from an app.  The whole point of developing on the Facebook platform is to be able to have the opportunity to jump into a viral loop and now one of our key accelerators is gone.  Yes, this is frustrating to deal with but I believe all legitimate social application developers and marketers will benefit from this move. 

It's pretty simple, there is obviously a lot of abuse by developers of the Facebook platform.  No matter what changes Facebook makes there are going to be developers who are going to try and figure out how to game the system.  Facebook has a responsibility to its end users to protect them from this abuse.  If they don't we will see users abandoning the application directory if not Facebook as a whole.  We should expect the invite (and the news and mini-feed) rules to continue to change.  Since there is absolutely nothing any of us (at least those of us who don't work at Facebook) can do about these rule changes, the best strategy is to focus on the core value your application is offering to the end user.

Those of us who focus on creating social applications that engage the end user in a meaningful way will ultimately build a user base that is loyal and can be monetized.  Having the application itself rather then the hooks into the underlying social platform being the key motivator to end users is a very good thing for us in the social application world.

Social Feed Aggregators Make My Head Hurt

One of my favorite innovations that social applications have brought us is being able to see the stream of activity that my friends have engaged in on a site. I spend way more time on Facebook's News Feed page than I do staring at my own (or any of my friend's) profile.  Having a presence on nearly every social platform and many friends that are just as active as I am means that there are lots of places to try and keep track of what my friends are up to.   Clearly others have experienced this same pain as the hottest new trend seems to be sites that aggregate these streams and try to make friend content consumption more efficient.  Louis Gray has done a great job covering this space if you are interested in learning more.

In theory I love the idea of having a single place I can see what all my friends are up to.  I have experimented with Plaxo, Spokeo and today's next great thing and after the initial oohs and aahs of seeing a huge list of activity I just haven't been able to find a long term value that would keep me using these services.  Maybe I am totally missing something but here are the two big problems I have run into in my use of these services:

1.  So while these services may grab my activity from Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, etc I still have to go to each of these sites to perform whatever action it is these feed aggregators are going to grab.  This means I will see the activity of all my friends on that service.  Now when I return to my feed aggregator I have to go through a bunch of redundant information to find the new stuff.  It may not sound like a big deal but when the goal is to fight off information fatigue it certainly adds a level of frustration.
2.  Lots of sites allow you to re-purpose the feeds you create.  My favorite example of this is Tumblr where I pull in my tweets and delicious bookmarks.  The problem is that I have lots of friends that I am connected to on Twitter who have the Twitter app in Facebook, who then pull their Twitter messages in Tumblr.  By the time I get to a feed aggregator I have seen the same piece of information four or more times.  Information overload starts to feel much worse at this point.

As the social stream aggregation market matures I am sure most of these issues will be worked out.  With a lot of players (and the 800 pound gorilla) entering this space it will be exciting to see who figures it out first.   

The Social Cloud

Google's Kevin Marks gives an interesting talk on the power of the "social cloud" as a default component of the web experience.  This isn't really a technical talk, but it's exciting to think about the possibilities if the API's that Google is developing are able to elegantly handle the complexities that Kevin mentions in a abstract manner that "just works".   Whether this social cloud is powered by Google or consortium of players (much more likely), I do not believe we are far from a time when developers view the relationships amongst users as a standard asset of web development much like TCP/IP or DNS.  I believe we are going to see a lot of cool products and happy developers in the future.   

Not All Users are Created Equal

Last week I mentioned the need to differentiate between the quality of traffic to your social application and the quantity.   Today over at Mashable Co-founder of Developers Analytics, Charles Yong, goes further when he explains:

“Someone with the right social graph can easily result in tens of thousands of installs, whereas a person with the wrong social graph may fetch only a few extra installs beyond their own. Hence, we believe there may be a paradigm shift in the near future as to how credit is distributed in link exchange and ultimately, advertising. As the platform matures, advertisers will slowly move from the traditional “clickthrough” strategy towards the more organic “viral referral” strategy. Hence, an advertiser should pay more for a referral by a user with 1000 friends, than a user with 3. We hope to be able to measure those values in a meaningful and accurate way.”

This idea of measuring the social capital of each user is a game changer in my opinion.  The critical change is the shift from the collective power of the "users" to the power of the individual.  This will lead to significant changes in how applications are developed and marketed.

As the social graph continues to be exposed and sites learn how to monetize the influence of their audience, those same users are going to leverage their social capital to exert their control.  If you as site owner are getting paid because I interact with your site and bring my thousand person social graph with me, I better be taken care of.  I could see this evolving to the point where individual users are able to demand a portion of the advertising revenue they generate.  We might all be micro celebrities with micro endorsement deals.      

Measurement as Recession Insurance for Social Applications

Josh Bernoff over at Forrestor writes that if social applications can prove their effectiveness they can maintain profitability even if a recession leads to a drop in advertising expenditures:

If your social application doesn't have a measurable output, you'd better get one. But if it does -- if it generates leads, or conversions, or buzz, or something useful -- then you can prove it's working. beinggirl.com is four times as effective as TV ads, Procter & Gamble told us. That won't get cut in a recession.

These same arguments apply to some other forms of online marketing, including search ads and email marketing. Those are going to be good investments in a recession. If you're smart, you'll position yourself now with proof your apps are working. Then when the ad dollars get tight, you'll be in good shape.

It boils down to ROI justification (like it should).  How do you "prove your app is working" though?  If your goal is to generate buzz then the overall traffic you receive may be less important then the quality of the influencers who interact with your app.   You want the people who are going to carry the marketing conversation beyond your social application to their other social networks.  While there is no way to really measure whether or not a user is telling their friends, classmates, co-workers, etc about your product, I do believe we will soon be able to measure the online influence of individual users in the near future. 

Social application developers need to start considering how to leverage the trends in consolidated identity, data portability and API's that expose the social graph to measure the impact of EACH user of their social application.  Once this happens social applications will quickly climb the value chain above almost all traditional online marketing initiatives.

   

Appscuseme Take 2 - For Real This Time

Sorry about the false start with this blog.  I ended up having major re-constructive surgery on my head to fix a bunch of jaw problems.  For over eight weeks my jaw was wired shut.  This pretty much left my entire social life and communications dependent on social media and social applications.  Through Twitter and Flickr my friends and family stayed up to date on my medical situation.   I kept in touch and found support through friends on Facebook.  The experience has given me a deeper appreciation for the power and importance of social applications.   So back to regularly scheduled programming....

Social Applications and Real Estate

The social application age could not come at a better time for the Real Estate industry.   Markets across the country are either dropping or frozen as everyone is in a wait and see mode.   The slowdown in actual transactions however does not correlate to a slowdown in interest in consuming real estate data.

This resonates with my personal experience of having conversations away from the internet consistently turn to the Real Estate market.  Someone's parents just had their payments jump when their adjustable mortgage rate went up.  The friend who is wondering how long prices might drop.  The neighbor whose house has sat on the market for months.  Most of the big Real Estate sites are run by brokers like Coldwell Banker.  These companies are funded by agents who only make money when they are involved with selling a house.  So while everyone is talking about Real Estate and looking at Real Estate online these companies are not making money from it. 

Social application present an opportunity to traditional Real Estate companies to generate more leads, build brand equity, and lower marketing costs by putting their info in an environment where there are millions of eyeballs everyday.  Lets first talk about generating leads.  For Real Estate companies this is their life blood.  We have seen that people are looking at Real Estate data online and we also know that everyone is talking about it away from the web.  A good social application would combine these two factors and allow groups of users to communicate and act around data in a social environment.  This leads directly to brand equity.  If we are all playing with a Coldwell Banker social application we are more likely to reach out to one of their agents. 

You would think that there would be some great examples then of Real Estate based social applications.  Unfortunately my search only turned up a handful of Facebook apps that were painfully useless as the focused on only displaying listings.  I did find one great application that currently does not have any connection to a social network.  Realius has built a great tool that lets users guess the listing price of a home and then compare their guesses to other users.  This application is a natural for any of the social platforms and I look forward to seeing it happen.

The Real Estate industry has never been known as a nimble, first mover.  This explains why companies like Trulia and Zillow who make their money from advertisements are so successful right now.  One would think that the current slowdown would be enough to spark some innovation from some of the traditional companies but I haven't found any good examples of it happening yet.

Welcome to the Social Application Age

Welcome to the social application age. The post social networking or social application age was born with Facebook’s announcement that they were opening their platform and access to their 40 million users up to developers to build directly on top of. Since then we have seen almost every other social networking site commit to do the same. Just last week Google announced their OpenSocial platform that allows developers and companies to engage the users of over 25 different social networks, including MySpace, with over 200 million combined users.

Social networks are being transformed from walled gardens to a standard internet technology layer comparable to the browser. Every new website (or old site being re-launched) no longer has to have a standalone social network. Instead we all have the ability to build applications on top of the social networks that have already been developed. We can take advantage of the relationships that users have already established (the social graph) and we can save time and money delivering a valuable experience to the market.

This blog will explore the opportunities that Social Applications present to diverse business verticals and best practices for engaging users in a social environment.  The goal of this blog is to spark innovation, communication, and collaboration so please jump in with your comments!