Facebook will Rule

I’ve been playing around with Facebook connect on some of my social media tools. On Plurk (which you can find me here), trying to install it onto this blog but I’m hopeless at HTML coding, social bookmarking sites and on other social networking sites as well. I haven’t even begun with the mobile apps yet…

Rumor has it that Facebook connect is coming to Twitter as well. (You can find me here on Twitter)

So how does this make 2009 Facebook’s year?

Firstly, Micro-blogging is hot and Twitter is the most popular micro blogging site in the world right now. With a means to connect via Twitter, Facebook will definitely gain more share in the social networking site as various communities around Twitter begin to engage  on Facebook. With a firm social networking site growing, where does this leave Google’s Friend connect then?

Second, as more blogs begin to accept Facebook connect, the various communities within their individual niches will begin to gather and use Facebook to interact with each other more.

Third, various social networking sites which were made with the intention to gather more people from Facebook to their niches might find it backfiring. Since the masses will begin to be on Facebook, why not just set up a fan page or a community page on Facebook.

Fourthly, Facebook connect is a lot easier to integrate as compared top Open ID. The social networking site is an ideal place, with the masses, which can easily facilitate the interaction needed. Open ID was a novel idea to integrate all our favorite social tools, but it didn’t provide a platform for us to intergrate with people who had similar interests.

Fifthly, social bookmarking sites work on tags. If people with similar tags have a shared interest then Facebook as a social networking site provides the ideal platform for you to start a community to further interact with people who share similar interest with you.

Lastly, Facebook could potentially takeover site which have provided the service of aggregating everything together on their site. Sites such as Friendfeed might soon find themselves redundant.

As Facebook begins to integrate further into our online lives, their market share will inevitably grow. Of course, there’re privacy issues to be dealt with but that’s another topic of discussion.

Is Facebook going to be the main platform whereby users would come to check all notifications from their various social tools? Or would users rather have the privacy whereby not all things are meant to be shared? Open ID had the purpose of attempting to integrate everything onto one ID.

How are marketers and PR practitioners going to utilize this increased integration? Will spam hit us again? (After all, spam once and you spam several social tools, value for money and great to tackle those cut budgets!) Or can campaigns finally have the opportunity to have an awesome use of various social tools?

Or will this backfire in a campaign? After all, different social tools are used to achieve different objectives in campaigns.

Share your thoughts and views!

Has micro-blogging changed the way we proccess information?

I just did a pretty long post on DBS to imrpove it’s customer service via Web 2.0? and i realized that this post might be a bit wordy. Plurk and Twitter have definitely changed the way i digest information and my attention span to long blog post is to go to the shortest paragraph or the first few lines of a long paragraph.

It’s like there is an internal filter that blocks out anything longer than 140 words. Is it just me or is it true for everyone now? (And this was true even for topics that interested me a great deal!)

Post Plurk, Present Scour and Livley

In my endless pursuit to see which technology can make social media even more social, I’ve discovered 2 tools which might interest u. But before i begin, let’s start with Plurk, the “almost” kid….

Plurk

Let me say how detached i am from Plurk…  Not that I blame them, i mean it was a novel idea with the timeline and refreshing from Twitter’s breakdown, but i guess this write up which shows 3 important statistics on Plurk (Yeah, I’m a sucker for numbers…) is pretty interesting. If u ever need to know anything after the Plurk hype its these 3 points:

1) Plurk definitely benefited from the blogosphere bump

2) Plurk is very definitely trending downwards.

3) Those that are staying with Plurk are paying a lot more attention

What i like is that it supports wordpress. However, it boils back down to the same question of where the community are. Right now I’m with Friendfeed but I’m curious as to what communities Plurk is building? It might not be heavily focused on social media, but it might include other communities with more personal conversations…(Like the knitting community). Now a microblogging service which caters to niche communities, a product of the long tail. Or will these communities move?

Scour

Ever been frustrated when using a search engine and cant find what u need? Doesn’t matter if its Google, Yahoo! or MSN, sometimes u need to go through 1-2 search engines to get what you need.

What if u had a search engines that combined all the best of the search results? Throw in a little social and these results allow you to add comments and rank them through votes.  What’s neat is that you can filter them by which search engines you want!

If that sounds like the ideal search engine, then Scour is for u. You learn more from the demo here, but what is really awesome is that it rewards its users through the accumulation of points. Similar to all your karma points at Plurk but you get rewarded with Scour points which you can trade for Visa Gift Cards.

Personally I think its really cool (But I’m an optimists with beta products and considering the competition they have to fend off and who the main base of users are going to be) but this idea is great, no more flipping between Google and Yahoo! for me. Just mashing them up together, I’m not too sure on the business side how this is being handled. Who gets the adverting fees for the search and display ads? Care to share any1 who knows?

Lively:

I hated Sims, I dislike Secondlife and I sure as hell am too lazy to explore Lively… After flipping through the site, i just didn’t like the vibe of it… So you can read about this negative review here (Because i want to skew your views to mine, lol…) Jokes aside, can someone plz tell me then what is Google’s purpose of doing this? Another value added service or another dumb mistake in trying to squeeze out more money out of virtual worlds? Or if you’re a huge fan raving about it, tell me whats so different about it?

So i’m off to explore how Plurk is doing after not logging in for a month and which communities are still active there (Crosses finger and hopes for the animal welfare community and not knitting grannies only). Try out Scour and let me know your feedback on it!

Monday “It’s a wrap!!”

Man… You know ur day is bad when the post you almost finished hangs and you have to redo everything…. ah wells…. At least Monday is over!!

Not much to wrap up this week, but we’ll just do a quick run through for those who drop by here once a week…

So I talked about Asia, Chicks and the Future. First thing i learnt about using a title and using tags that contain “Asia” and “Chicks” can lead people looking for different things to my site. For example, some of the terms used to come to my site were “Asian chicks”, “Hot Asian Chicks”…. You get my point… careful tagging and headers are important… I don;t want my blog to be the top search for a porn search…

Asia is kicking ass, we’re huge and unstoppable. Unfortunately or fortunately, we’re so diversed its hard to groups us in any one same group…. So with various sites looking for more information on Asia, or like Michael likes to say, the swede sitting in Hong Kong looking to do a PR campaign in Asia, what’s he to do?

Well, you can start with this awesome wiki, PR and social Media Across Asia, which I’ve been using for my Yahoo! stuff… Fantastic info spoonfed to you huh?

I discussed the use of social media and how its applies differently to the each gender… Sex and the City provided a great example of the widgets on facebook, the online games, etc… It was tuned to appeal to the fairer sex… What appeals to guys? James Bond’s been working pretty well, excpet to marketers who see it as THE ultimate product placment movie… lol…

The futureof social media? I’ll Just stick to this line “Technology changes, humans don’t”… No point putting a bill board in the middle of the desert and no point using bloggers who you know can destroy your brand…So simple yet so bloody hard… Wait till we drill down to ROI after that… haha…

Then we have Plurking!!!! I talked about the differences between Twitter and possible benefits a company can get using it.. Of course, it might ave some disadvantages… You gotta find the right guy to do this… A microblog is an on going conversation… Doesn’t carry on from 9-5 only, it’s after 5 and weekends too… Slow response can incur the wrath of some consumers and you certainly don;t want that… which brings me back to the point of taking a step back… Why use a microblog? What do you hope to achieve? Can we maintain this?

Lastly… we have introducing Fury friends part 1 and my introduction of Vivian’s dog Lucky!!! Yes, i have a soft spot for our fury friends if you haven’t realized, but hey, to me they’re worth it… Look out for the feline edition soon!

To end of here’s the trailer of Marley and Me!!!!!! Like omg!!!!! Wohooo, see you tmr for “JUST FOR FUN TUESDAY!!!”

Plurking!!!!!!!

Another microbloging tool Plurk, and everyone’s raving about it!!! Thank god I’m not too late to join the crowd… I joined Twitter pretty late but funny enough, the people in my IM are not in it as yet… Maybe i’m turning geek and nobody is with me…

So jumping into Plurk, what is it? Its similar to twitter and is another microblog. There are various differences between the 2 other than the interface. The timeline concept is really neat as Daryl mentions, is great. Missing out on tweets can seem to be a headache, its like an unchecked google reader and you just miss out on stuff cause u’r lazy. Daryl also mentions other reasons such as more organic and intimate conversations.

To me? I think the fact that you can share short videos and pics are pretty cool. Plus there’s that karma points going on, kindda like a game to ‘unlock’ certain stuff… I want a dog for my Plurk buddy!!!

To find out more about Plurk, go here!

But the great part is that Twitter no longer hogs the micro blogging space… Which means more avenues for advertising or PR to get their message across. Pardon my ignorance (and laziness), i only know of a few brands using micro blogging which i posted here and how well they do it.

Considering our pretty high twitter rate in Singapore, shouldn’t Plurk be taking off as well since Twitter is always down??

I mean, look at the extra goodies Plurk is able to offer! I also mentioned about brands engaging consumers by using their own twitters… How about hiring a guy using twitter (Like hiring a blogger, but check out this guy auctioning himself!) to engage your brand? Is that gonna be more effective than doing an “advertorial” for a product review? Its got more conversations going since its more intimate… What do you think?

Additionally, with plurk and twitter, are we gonna see another revenue war about to spark off?? Like social networking sites, Facebook versus the ‘open social’ world!

These are things which i gotta know, so I would love any1′s view on this or any examples of a possible ‘war’?

Enjoy your weekend and do add me on Plurk at

http://www.plurk.com/user/markkhoo