An apology - Facebook frienders
Hi guys - if anyone has added me as a friend on Facebook recently but I’ve ignored the request it’s because I’m doing my best to keep Facebook for my friends only - people whose updates I know for certain I am interested in seeing pepper my minifeed.
Please do not take this personally - in fact, it’s precisely because our relationship is impersonal. Facebook is the one service whose value gets diluted if I’m indiscriminate in establishing communication pathways with random people. But I warmly invite you to connect to me on a great number of other wired services - you wouldn’t be diluting them at all, you’d be enriching them.
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- 13% would bank through Facebook
- In a pretty unscientific poll conducted through Facebook's own polling mechanism, which 500 people responded to (responding is voluntary, so the numbers expressing an interest may not be indicative of true demand across an accurate cross-section of Facebookers), data from the 2008 Online Banking Report, reblogged by the NetBanker team, shows that 13% of respondents would bank through Facebook! Young adults were significantly more favourable to the idea - 18% of 18-to-24 year-olds expressed an interest, which is a similar level to the youngest age cohort assuming the floaters (6%) could be convinced. Adults, on the other hand, don't see Facebook displacing your high-street branch just yet: just 4-5% of those age 24+ liked the sound of "FaceBank". The results are mixed news for Facebook, which is rumoured to be working on a financial platform for fb. A lot of marketing is thrown at 18-24 year olds, often on campus, as banks look to kick off lifelong partnerships, enticing impoverished students with attractive overdrafts. These results show that at least some trust Facebook on a par with the traditional players. So it's encouraging that Facebook's key demographic is the most receptive to financial elements being introduced to Facebook. Personally I...
- Google Friend Connect - part I: it’s about the data
- This week, Google announced a new tool to help me and all other website owners create social features in our sites. It's a library of javascript gadgets that I link to (in the Google library) from my site, and loads up in the site (imagine it instead of the Disqus comments system I currently have installed) to add features for visitors which they can use by signing in - like comments, a chatroom, a photo gallery for people to upload photos to, product reviews, whatever. Blogopunditry and civil rights hippies are pleased that you can log in with a google account, or OpenID, AIM, Yahoo, maybe others in future - so this isn't a straight-up move to get people to sign up Google Accounts. No, it's far more clever than that. According to their demo video, once you have a Google Friend Connect (GFC) account (having logged in with yahoo, google, openID, whatever), you can tell it who all your friends are - you simply link to your Facebook, Hi5, Orkut and/or LinkedIn social networks and it sucks that information out. For you, that's cool, because when you use the chatroom on my site, it will tell you which of...
- Google Friend Connect - part 2: The largest Social Network ever built
- Having originally assumed that the reason Facebook, Hi5 and LinkedIn (FHL), amongst others, were involved in the Google Friend Connect (GFC) service, I initially wanted to write this post to argue that this was the biggest strategic mistake of their lives. Turns out, Google is involving them whether they like it or not - using their APIs to let you pull in your friend data to your Google Friend Connect profile from your other social networks. In light of this, the point I'll argue is therefore that not slamming the door on GFC's scraping of their data would be a fatal mistake for FHL. Needless to say, deprived of their data, GFC loses all its value to users - so this is a zero-sum game. I argued yesterday that all FHL could possibly gain from this is more information about you as you browse around the web and use social features on various websites. That's an interesting datapoint (which they may not even have access to because they're unwilling participants in this scheme), but long term, being part of GFC means their sites will be abandoned as Google rolls out the biggest social network mankind has ever seen, building...
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