Archive for the ‘Facebook’ Category

I was pleased to finally receive the “Suggestions For You” feature since I’ve been hearing about it all week. My initial impressions were:

1. Dang, I thought I was following some of those people already
2. Um, I recently unfollowed some of those folks
3. I don’t engage much with some of the referral sources
4. There are a lot of celebrities on this list
5. These are real people, not feeds

Let’s look at these impressions individually and I’ll share some suggestions that will help Twitter’s suggestion algorithm.

1) Already following these people

No really, I thought I was already following some of the people that showed up. Is it possible people have been getting “disconnected” of the past few days? I saw the same reaction from others in my Twitter timeline. If Twitter “caught” the oversight then they did something right.

2) I recently unfollowed some of the suggested users

It happens. We unfollow people for one reason or another. Maybe they don’t engage with you, they say something that irks you, or you’re tired of following a particular celebrity. Many of the people who I had already followed and unfollowed were celebrities. I’ve already been to the show, I don’t need to go back.

Algorithm Improvement: De-prioritize accounts that one has already followed and unfollowed and especially those that have been blocked.

3) Don’t engage much with “Followed By” followers

Each Suggested User has several bits of information associated with her account – Name, Twitter handle, location, bio, and Followed By. All suggested users have two or more accounts in the “Followed By” field and I assume these are my main “connections” to the suggested user. But many of the people that appeared in the “Followed By” field where people who I don’t engage with on a consistent basis.

Algorithm Improvement: Follow Klout’s lead and make suggestions based on key connectors. Klout analyzes a user’s statistical influence and also lists users that are influential. These influencers should be the top “connectors” used in the Suggested User formula.

4) Lots of celebrities

This is where the asymmetrical nature of Twitter is a drawback to making equitable connections on the social graph. By asymmetrical, I mean that one can follow an account but the account doesn’t need to follow back. In contrast, Facebook requires people to follow each other to be “Friends” so that relationship is symmetrical. Extremely asymmetrical “nodes” in a network cause a warping in the fabric of the graph. If a celebrity (that doesn’t follow me or only a few others) suggests another celebrity that they follow then that’s a low probability match.

Algorithm Improvement:Turn down the volume on celebrity suggestions. These accounts will be easy to spot by the ratio of followers to people being followed.

5) These are real people

Every person on the Who to Follow list appear to be engaged Twitter users, not just piped in “feeds” from other social networking tools. Twitter got this right.

I follow 7,740 people on Twitter and am followed by 8,157 accounts and have new followers every day. I don’t use auto-followback tools so I have to manually go through my email messages and “vet” followers. Unless the account is extremely relevant to my interests, I don’t follow feed accounts. (This also means I’m way behind in reviewing new followers.) By filtering out feed-only accounts, this tremendously increases the chances of my following them. Good job Twitter.

Review

Twitter still has some work to do on making the Suggestions more relevant. I made suggestions but also gave Twitter kudos on some things it is doing right. This is much better than the old Suggested Users celebfest hyper-monetization list is had before.

What do you think? Did you see any other obvious algorithm improvements? What was your overall impression of the Suggestions For You feature?

Related Post:
TechCrunch – Twitter’s Social Graph Is About To Get Pumped Up. “Who To Follow” Is Social Steroids

Facebook Pages allow businesses and individuals to create rich branded pages within Facebook. Every major brand in the world is running to build engaging and “sticky” pages on Facebook, because that’s where the people are.

Are your customers, non-profit supporters, constituents, and neighbors on Facebook? You betcha. So why not give them an opportunity to connect with you and your brand?

This tutorial will show you how to get started on building your own Facebook Page (I refer to them as “Fan Pages” in the video). This is Part One of the Facebook Fan Page project so make sure you bookmark this page, subscribe to the email blog posts, and/or subscribe to the RSS feed to keep track of further developments.

Your feedback is golden. I love Comments like a fat kid loves cake.

And don’t forget to view the full Transcript below.

Transcript

I don’t usually do “reblogs” but the Matt McKeon blog post, “The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook“, is so striking and timely that I had to comment on it. The post is a visual chronicle of Facebook’s privacy changes since 2005. In 2005, content was only visible to limited circle of friends and their immediate network. Fast-forward to today and almost all of a Facebook user’s activity is available on the Web.

I think users are getting the short end of the stick on this deal and this type of privacy erosion will eventually lead to a mass exodus from Facebook. What? It’s already happening?

Publishers, on the other hand, are writing about the privacy issues but aren’t ready to put the kibosh on their Facebook strategies.

This privacy leakage ties into my post on the Geolocation Privacy Proposition. McKeon’s infographic doesn’t include “Location” but that could be just around the corner.

Click here to view the full McKeon blog post.

Facebook unleashed its new wave of site integration tools including the new Like button for external sites. This button works like the regular Like button on Facebook, where you see a status update and can give it the thumbs up.

Please note, this post is rated D for Daredevil.

To implement these changes you will need to muck around in the PHP. So make sure you’re wearing your developers propeller hat and some sort of Star Wars attire.

This micro video tutorial shows you how to find the Facebook button code, add it to your site’s template code, and get it up and running. However, this video only shows you how to add the Like button to the Single Post page in your blog. You’d also want to do the same thing with your Main Index Template page.

If you really don’t want to tinker with the template code, there are some plugins floating around. I’ve seen three different plugins already but haven’t tested them out yet. If you developed a Like button plugin, drop a comment with a link to the site. I’ll add comments to this post as I see them as well.

Related Posts/Resources:

• Facebook Like Button Developer page
• Adding Facebook Like Social Plugin to WordPress
• Just Launched: Facebook Like Plugin for Every Post on Your WP Blog!

Code Snippet: the modified Like button code

And this is a zoom-in of the Single Post template page where I pasted in the iFrame code.

Facebook Like Button Code in WordPress Single Post Theme

I’ve been overwhelmed by all the Facebook changes. Things are moving as quickly with Facebook as they are with Twitter. So I thought I’d review the Facebook changes one chunk at a time and see some of the practical implications, for sites and for users.

One of the changes Facebook just launched is its site personalization services. This allows external sites to display content based on information from a user’s Facebook account.

For example, I just visited Pandora.com for my morning music fix and saw this:

Because I was logged into Facebook, the Pandora site was able to:

1. Display the top header bar with my Facebook profile picture. The bar also includes the message ” Hi Jesse. Pandora is using facebook to personalize your experience. Learn More[link] – No Thanks[link]“.




2. Display my profile picture below the music tracks and pull in links to artists I had Facebook fanned (Snoop Dogg and Susan Boyle).

Initial Reaction

I wasn’t surprised to see these additions because Facebook had posted a massive picture to my Facebook Wall and description of some of the changes. My first thought on seeing the change was to think “Wow, that’s pretty cool.”

I was viewing the change from the perspective of a blog owner who could potentially do something similar. However, I could see how people could be freaked out after seeing the change. “Why is Facebook following me, even out on the Web?”

User Privacy

So what do you do if you don’t want Pandora to display this Facebook information and connections? You just have to click on the header and either click on the “X” or on the “No Thanks” and your Facebook profile and your artists pics go away.

I tested the persistence of this “No Thanks” opt-out action by refreshing the browser, opening things up in a whole different browser and the Facebook information did not reappear.

Facebook Posse To Go?

I also visited the food review site Yelp, and the site displayed my Yelp-using Facebook friends.

These are friendly faces so I didn’t mind seeing them on the site. Most of the time I’m on a different social network, I do want to find users that I friend on Facebook or follow on Twitter.

Further Research

I didn’t test to see what happens on the Facebook side of things after doing key actions, like adding new Pandora channels or adding new Yelp reviews. I imagine that would require further exploration of Facebook privacy settings which I’ll reserve for a future blog post.

Bottom Line

I like the personalization changes, so far. I’m going to actively explore all the “under the hood” mechanics of the Facebook-publisher connection and test things out jesseluna.com when that is possible.

I think that major “disconnects” will occur when we start seeing our Facebook information on sites that we don’t want to associate with in any way shape or form. For example, if an employment site like Monster.com starts using this feature, it could start publishing information to your Facebook account. I haven’t researched how things appear on Facebook, so this is speculation. But if your boss follows you on Facebook, you could be in for a lot of explaining.

What do you think about these personalization features? Cool or creepy?

The iPad will never replace my desktop, but it has already replaced my laptop after just two days.

I love, love, love it!

@JesseLuna said it best: “If HBO was your ‘home box office’, then the iPad is your ‘mobile box office’.”

It’s also a dream for reading, blogging, and managing social media networks on a realistically readable device. (I love my iPhone, but the small screen has its limitations.) I know I will be using my iPad for most of what I do as a non-techie user. I also know I will still need to go to my desktop for large professional projects and probably most photo editing. (More on photos later.)

My setup consists of the iPad, the Apple cover, the Apple Bluetooth keyboard, a stand, and a lap desk. (And sometimes earbuds.) This is perfect for sitting in an armchair. Of course, if I were at a desk or table, I would not need the lap desk. Also, when lounging in bed the stand is too precarious, so I just lay the iPad flat on the lap desk. The Apple cover is made of a grippy rubber material that doesn’t slide around at all, which is awesome.

Being a creature of habit, the first things I tried on my new iPad were all the things I already used on my laptop and/or iPhone: Safari, Gmail, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Netflix, Scrabble, Momento, iTunes, Wikipanion, and Notes.

Overall, these all worked as well or better than the on the laptop/iPhone. There are a few tiny glitches, where features don’t work the way I expect, but all of them are software issues, which I’m sure will be addressed by the developers.

Aha! moments:

- streaming Netflix in bed (with earbuds) while my husband sleeps

- stocking my iBooks shelves with free texts thanks to Project Gutenberg

- writing this blog post in Pages which I will later email to @JesseLuna

All of these tasks could be done with some other gadget or device, but before now I would have used a separate gadget or device for each activity.

New stuff I love on the iPad: Pages, iBooks ereader, Marvel comics viewer, Toy Story read-along, NPR, USA Today, and ABC viewer. Gorgeous picture quality, leagues better than my (10-year-old) PowerBook. Super-fast over WiFi. Screen size is perfect for personal viewing. So many options – both media and content!

Stuff I haven’t done, yet, because it isn’t supported: Hulu.

Stuff I haven’t done because I haven’t bought the right app(s): games.

A final note on photos: there is a camera connecter accessory, but I didn’t buy it. I simply took photos with my iPhone, emailed them to Flickr. On the iPad I opened the Flickr app, selected my image and saved it to my Photos, then accessed it from there. That works fine for me.