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Random Posts from Blogs about Facebook
So not everybody likes the fact that MySpace profiles are littered with junk: and they certainly don’t like the fact that Facebook has gone the same way, with music players, widgets and other add-ons. And yet, you still want to check in on your friends now and then? Here’s how to browse those sites without the extras.
FACEBOOK
(Ideally, Facebook should have a switch that turns off all apps on profile pages and disables the news feed entries they create - don’t you think?)
METHOD 1 (Easy way)
Grab the Faceoff Firefox extension, install it, restart Firefox and all the third party apps will be nuked. Future versions of the extension will be a little more selective, meaning you can permit the apps you like.
METHOD 2 (Hard way)
This method is a more advanced: don’t try it unless you know what you’re doing. It has the advantage, however, that it also works on Safari, Netscape, Camino and all Mozilla browsers (apparently there’s another popular browser out there, but we don’t care for it much).
Basically, you’ll need to create a custom userContent.css file with the following CSS in it: this page gives details about how to use userContent.css file on various browsers, while the code below is from Mike Steinbaugh. Tweak to your heart’s content:
/* facebook clean up
----------------------------------------------- */
a:link[href*="apps.facebook.com"],
a:link[href*="slide.com"],
a:link[href*="poke.php?id="],
#box_2386512837,
div.ad_capsule,
div.app_install_story,
div.extra_media,
div.platform,
div[id*="box_app_"] {
display: none !important;
}
MYSPACE
For this, you’ll need Firefox with the Greasemonkey extension installed. Once installed, consider these Greasemonkey scripts:
MySpace custom style remover - if you’d like every MySpace profile to look like the default, this is for you. All custom layouts are removed.
Automatic MySpace media remover - removes MySpace Miniplayer, Flash animations and Windows Media files unless you decide to toggle them. Great for preventing the auto-play nightmare.
Ad Slicer for MySpace - The usual ad blockers (like Adblock Plus) remove ads and leave a gap. Ad Slicer removes all the gaps left behind on MySpace. However, we can’t condone ad blocking: it’s most likely against their TOS.
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Did we miss any good ones? Leave a comment to let us know.
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I was reading my friend AJ Vaynerchuk’s blog last night and came across an interesting post about how he drove thousands of targeted visitors to his site via Facebook group wall postings. Facebook group walls are quickly becoming the equivalent of blogging comments. For all you bloggers, you are well aware of the horrendous amount of comment spam that you receive on your blog. Even unpopular blogs can receive ten spam comments a day easily. Now there is a new way of promoting your site effectively via Facebook: Facebook group wall postings. By spending time finding groups that are similar to your blog or website, you can post relevant comments that drive visitors to your site. AJ has driven thousands of visitors to the site. I also have experienced a similar effect. Effective wall postings can be a highly effective method of driving visitors to your site. On my other blog I broke news a couple months ago about Facebook adding music. Within a matter of days I was getting hundreds of visitors to my site from one single wall posting on a Facebook group.
While you can drive a lot of traffic, I can assure you that spamming walls will not be an effective method of marketing. If too many people abuse this I would imagine that Facebook will start to prohibit people from posting URLs on wall posts. There are a few steps you should take to ensure that Facebook doesn’t treat your wall posts as spam:
- Pick highly relevant groups - From the days where you would post your site on relevant newsgroups to recently when people would post their site on relevant blogs. Now has come the time to search for relevant Facebook groups. Simply search for specific keywords and determine the groups that you intend to post to.
- Post unique wall posts - If you write the same thing on each wall you will surely be flagged as a spammer and temporarily banned from the site. Trust me on this one, do not go reposting the same thing on multiple groups. It just won’t work. Customize your post to relate to conversation already taking place in the group. If you can’t think of unique things to post then only pick one group to post to. You aren’t helping yourself by reposting the same thing over and over.
- Space your posting frequency - If you log in, post 50 wall posts and log out, you will surely be classified as a spammer. Instead you need to be strategic with your postings. Post a couple of unique wall posts each day but don’t get too carried away, there are plenty of other marketing activities you can be spending your time on.
After completing these tasks you will have plenty of targeted traffic to your site. Now, after sharing with you this information about how to market via groups, I can only envision a few months from now when Facebook is having trouble fighting wall spammers. Facebook’s reaction to the future growth in wall spamming? They are going to have to stop automatically hyperlinking URLs that are posted by users or blocking certain sites. Otherwise there will be entire offshore teams dedicated to marketing activities on Facebook. For now though, if you are a true guerrilla marketer, you should have a go at it. Let me know what types of results you experience!
SocialMedia, although the site itself is currently just a holding page, aims to be a network for Facebook apps and MySpace widgets. The company provides scalable hosting and promotion through the network; they also run an ad network, giving 50% of revenue back to application creators.
While putting ads on MySpace widgets isn’t yet allowed, there are a couple other players in the Facebook ad network space, including Lookery and fbExchange.
SocialMedia’s founders include Seth Goldstein and David Henderson of the lofty attention-tracking service Root Markets, and David Gentzel, whose successful MySpace widgets Trakzor and Flikzor we’ve covered here before (there’s now also a Facebook version of Trakzor). This team has all the right people to make it work.
[via]
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Seth Goldstein and David Henderson have teamed up with one of the leading Facebook application developers and launched SocialMedia: part widget developer, part widget hosting provider/ad network. Along with Lookery, the company is one of the first providers of monetization services for Facebook application developers — filling some of the vital Facebook Platform infrastructure gaps.
Goldstein and Henderson, who worked together at DoubleClick in the 90’s and more recently Root Markets, joined with David Gentzel, developer of the popular Trakzor application (widely adopted on MySpace and one of the earliest Facebook applications to achieve significant distribution) to reincarnate the former AttentionSoft as SocialMedia. The company now has teams in the US and India.
After Trakzor, which has 3,750,000 users on MySpace and 800,000 on Facebook, Gentzel and SocialMedia have released FoodFight, which has distribution of 1,750,000, and Happy Hour, which with 900,000 users in its first week has become one of the fastest growing apps on Facebook so far. Altogether, the SocialMedia network claims over 8 million app and widget installations across Facebook and MySpace.
The goal of SocialMedia, according to Henderson and Goldstein, is to develop a network of applications on multiple platforms. However, the company is also making an effort to recruit popular application creators in what to my knowledge is one of the most full-service approaches to application monetization yet. They will bring your app in house onto their servers, sell your ad inventory, and help you bake sponsored features into your application. The price? A hefty 50% commission, but hey, better than nothing if you’re a lone developer without cash to spend on servers.
Henderson is optimistic about the new opportunities social networks offer to advertisers. “Social networks offer new and better ways to market. Now, you can now integrate into social constructs and ride on friends’ recommendations rather than trying to market 1-to-1,” he told me recently.
As for the caution that some have recently expressed toward the potential of advertising on social networks? “Some folks are talking about Facebook like it’s ‘only good for customer acquisition,’ as if that’s no small feat,” Henderson said. “But without customer acquisition, you don’t have a business.”
Technorati Tags: facebook, widget, application, monetization
Mozes, the text messaging service that lets bands communicate with their fans, has acquired Facebook’s most popular mobile app. TextMe, which around 59,000 Facebook users have added to their profiles, was created by University of Illinois sophomore Jason Tokoph, who has moved from Naperville, IL to join Mozes in Palo Alto for the summer.
So in part, Mozes has acquired “users” (at least, users who spend all their time on Facebook) and in part they’ve acquired a talented, self-motivated developer who’s proved himself able to produce viral Facebook apps.
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ReverbNation is launching another Facebook application, called MyBand. This app adds a mini artist profile directly onto the artist’s Facebook profile. This profile widget includes a music player with unlimited songs, which can be purchased and shared by friends, a profile image, and a members list. It also shows genres and schedules, as well as a “join mailing list” function and features a link to the full artist profile page.
This is a natural progression from ReverbNation’s previous Facebook app, which offered a good portion of ReverbNation’s existing services, including artist search and playlist creation functionality.
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Facebook has been climbing in ranking in the UK, as we pointed out last week. Now Facebook has managed to overtake MySpace in the UK for search inquiries according to Hitwise, indicating an increasing amount of interest in Facebook.
This is not to say that Facebook is more popular than MySpace. Facebook hasn’t taken over market share in the UK, though its market share is on the rise and MySpace is on a bit of an incline. Hitwise also points out that MySpace still has a 41% larger share in the UK market in relation to Facebook, highlighting the still-existing differences between the two social networks. So why pay attention to search metrics at all? It could be a useful predictive indicator for site visitor traffic later on down the line. Hitwise used this method to successfully predict Bebo’s overtaking MySpace in terms of UK Internet visits last year, and the gap between all three networks has been closing for some time.
While Facebook has a ways to go, if the current trends continue Facebook could very well overtake MySpace in the UK market. Now the US is another story.
See also: MySpace vs Facebook: MySpace Declares Victory
[via]
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ReverbNation just hit the nail on the head with their new application. They have made a simple and sleek application that enables band members to place all of their band’s music, shows, members and more directly on their profile. This is honestly the best band implementation I have seen so far. It is also genius how they have implemented it. The biggest challenge in launching a bands application is getting enough bands to fill a directory. This way, no directory needs to be filled. All of the bands are promoted on their own profiles. The next most challenging component of launching will be informing bands of the application. Artists are allowed to upload unlimited songs to their profile so that should make everything much easier. I spoke with the ReverbNation people a few weeks back and they told me that they were dedicating their entire development team to Facebook application development. It has definitely paid off. It looks like there is going to be a battle of the band applications soon. Numair Faraz’s Audio application (which is soon adding band features as mentioned in my previous interview with him) and ReverbNation’s application. If you have a band and want to promote it on Facebook, go grab the My Band application.
So, you’ve written an awesome Facebook app and you think it’s going to take off. You get five users, submit it to the directory, and because your application works well and has no bugs it gets listed within a few hour. You have an idea of how fast you think it will grow, but you really need to know how fast it actually is growing.
Using Appaholic, you can create accurate models of your application’s growth. If you’re growing too slowly, you need to know so you can fix the problems that are keeping users away. If you’re growing too fast, you need to know so you can move the application to a host that can accommodate it. You’d also like to be able to set goals and know if you’re on track. Will I have 1.2 million users within two weeks?
I’m going to use Booze Mail as my example app and Excel to plot the data. First, go to Appaholic and navigate to your application’s page by entering its name or application ID in the left-hand input box. You will be taken to a page that displays various statistics about Booze Mail’s growth.
We’re going to be using the daily data because Excel doesn’t understand hourly time-based graphs. So, download the CSV (Daily) file from Appaholic and open it with Excel. Select the data you want to graph and click the “Chart Wizard” button. You don’t need to select the lines which have no user numbers — they correspond to the days before your app was listed in the directory.
Note: Make sure you only select date and number columns and not the column titles. Otherwise Excel won’t graph the data properly. In the Chart Wizard select the Line graph and click “next.” Customize your graph as you see fit and then click “finish.”
Now you have a nice graph in your spreadsheet. Right-click on one of the data points on the graph and select “Add Trendline…” Here you pick the curve you think best fits your graph. You will probably have to experiment to get the graph that fits best.
For Booze Mail I’m going to choose a third degree polynomial model. I don’t think is really accurate over the long run — I’d guess that most applications follow a logistic growth curve. But fitting logistic curves to data is beyond the scope of this article, so the third degree polynomial will have to do.
Finally, to get the trendline to extend in to the future click the “Options” tab. You should see a “Forecast” section. For our graphs one period corresponds to one day. So if I want to predict my application’s growth ten days into the future I can enter “10″ in the “Forward” box. Since we want to predict Booze Mail’s growth by the end of July and today is the 15th I’ll extend the trendline 16 days into the future.
Click “OK” to graph the trendline. You might want to change the size and color of the trendline to make it stand out. Let’s see how Booze Mail is doing.
So, according to the graph, Booze Mail should hit one million users by July 25th. Anyone want to bet?
Technorati Tags: facebook, application, appaholic, tracking, analytics
David Gentzel is one of the top Facebook developers right now. He has launched a number of other applications that each have millions of users. His most recent creation, Happy Hour, has added close to 1 million users in under a week. If you want to figure out an effective way of developing viral applications, look no further than David’s applications. Happy Hour requires that you invite at least 5 people prior to entering the application. If there were any doubts about whether or not inviting users is a barrier to using an application, this should answer that question. Close to 1 million people (I’m sure it will be more than 1 million by the end of the day) have been willing to go through the invite process. The application is insanely simple as well. While I keep arguing that applications need to have robust features, David Gentzel keeps proving me wrong by releasing simple applications that rack up rapid numbers of users. All that you do in the application is send your friends drinks. You are given a daily budget and you can choose the type of drinks that you’d like to order. That’s all there is to it. If you want to buy your friends a drink, go grab the Happy Hour application.
