For all the advances in consumer technologies, walking into a retail store and making a purchase still feels like a “outdated” experience. There’s a ton of relevant public information that I’d gladly provide to retailers in exchange for a more personalized shopping experience. But despite the proliferation of social data, most retailers don’t know anything about me until I make a purchase.
Here’s the idea:
A mobile app that links with your Foursquare/Facebook account.
You fill out a basic profile including your size and (possibly) the types of items you are interested in purchasing.
When you check into a store a salesperson gets a notification with your first name, photo, size, history of check-ins at that store, things you might be looking to buy, previous purchases and relevant notes that have been inputted by previous salespeople. This may include previous items you’ve tried or comments about your style/preferences.
Future iterations might:
Notify you when an item you like is on sale/in-stock/available in your size.
Send you in-store offers on items you might be interested in purchasing.
Notify stores ahead of time that you are coming so they can have things ready to show you.
What’s in it for the shopper?
First and foremost a faster, more customized shopping experience. Salespeople will know the size, style and preferred brands of shoppers. Get in and out faster.
Targeted discounts on items they want to purchase
Perks (glass of champagne for those who share their info? 5% off?)
What’s in it for the retailer?
Push people through the sales funnel faster by showing them products in their size or those that suit their style.
Upsell shoppers on products they’d be likely to buy.
Build loyalty through a higher quality shopping experience and rewards/incentives.
Target Audience – I imagine this would be tough to implement in the larger department stores at first, but there are plenty of smaller retailers with fewer customers that would have the ability to really tailor the experience based on shopper.
In the end we don’t have the domain experience to be able to execute on this well. If there’s any retail guru’s out there who want to collaborate, get in touch.
Update: Signature got a nice Techcrunch writeup and seems to be attacking the same problem. I still think there is huge opportunity in this space for multiple players.
Since the launch of Startup Giraffe I’ve had the opportunity to speak to 50+ idea stage entrepreneurs. I’ve been amazed at the diversity of good ideas that folks from outside of the startup scene have. Through conversations with them I’ve realized that many could improve the way they think about launching products. Here are some of the most common mistakes we see:
Feature Set is Too Broad for a First Iteration
Many entrepreneurs we’ve met want to build products for everyone. Successful products start by having a tightly defined, niche audience and growing out from there. Products built for everyone serve no one. If you can’t describe what your product does in one sentence, it’s probably too broad for a first iteration. It’s great to have a big vision but the v1 feature set should only be a thin slice.
Not Defining Goals & Outcomes
After the product is built how will you measure success?
Do you want to see traction? Make sure you build virality into the product (don’t just tack on social invites at the end). Make sure you can easily track how/when/why users are inviting their friends.
Do you want to raise a VC round? Talk to VC’s understand the metrics that they will use to calculate whether you are worth their investment.
Do you want to see if customers will pay for the product? Build in pricing up front, start measuring what percentage of your users convert to paid plans.
Building Functionality That Exists Elsewhere
Unless there’s a really compelling reason, most products don’t need to build their own chat, reviews, commenting, messaging, friending or following services. You should focus on functionality that only your product offers and leverage third party API’s. Don’t reinvent the wheel.
Thinking of UI Rather Than Tasks & User Stories
Many folks we speak to have done their own wireframes or have a strong idea of what the product should look like visually. While this is extremely helpful in communicating the idea of the product, a better approach is to focus on personas and tasks. Who are the archetypical users of your products? What tasks do they want to be able to accomplish on the site?
I ask folks we work with to rank each feature by priority and how frequently the user will use it. We then go in and estimate a level of difficulty for each task. Based on this we can have a great conversation around scope. Only once we understand the core feature set can we can start defining a minimal UI that addresses all tasks/user stories.
Not Speaking with Enough Potential Customers
Our team has gotten really good at trying to validate market fit before we write any lines of code. We recommend that you speak to as many potential customers as possible. Talk to real people about the problem you are trying to address not the solution. Really try to understand their behaviors and motivations. Whitney Hess has a great post about conducting user interviews.
Too Much Time Refining Details Rather then Executing
Many of the people we speak to have been thinking about their products for months. They’ve brainstormed every feature they can possible feature they can think of. They’ve understood their goals and have whittled down their feature set to a true MVP, but yet they are still hesitant. It isn’t perfect. Unfortunately, it never will be. The first iteration should be a tool to test your underlying assumptions and get you to the next level. It’s a broad stroke that you will only be able to refine through metrics and observations/conversations with actual users.
Of course, there are many ways to get your product off the ground. These are just our suggestions based on recent experience. Agree or disagree? Let me know…
No one said working at a startup was easy. Although we started StoryStack with the intensity of a thousand suns we’ve hit a few bumps along the way. Through three iterations of the product and countless meetings with friends and advisors we’ve realized the product in it’s current form is unlikely to be successful. We’ve found ourselves stuck somewhere between Informed Pessimism and Crisis of Meaning. Now what? How do we turn our passion and drive into productive energy?
We have a smart, resilient team and are throwing around new ideas all the time. Should we succumb to the sweet Siren song of new ideas? Do we stick by our guns and pivot and push forward? Here are the factors we used to dictate our direction:
Addressing Pain Points – Is this a product that customers are begging for? There are a bunch of ways to test this before you write your first line of code:
B2B – Find potential customers and cold email them a brief description of your product. If you find it easy to get decision makers on the phone or in meetings you’re in good shape. If after your pitch you can get them to commit to purchasing your product when it’s ready, you’re money. If they love it until you ask them to pay… tread carefully.
B2C – Setup a landing page (like LaunchRock) briefly describing your product. If you have a little cash buy some Facebook or Google ads leading to your landing page and see the percentage of people who sign up (see Zygna’s Ghetto Testing). If you’re broke: email, tweet and FB message your way to a sufficient sample size.
Another good indicator are homebrewed/hacked together solutions for the problem your product tries to address. Are people stretching the limits of existing products or using multiple products in weird ways to get the same result? People are lazy, if you make it way easier to do something they are already doing, you’re probably on track.
Strengths of your team – If you taught yourself to be a your own technical co-founder and don’t have experience building scalable web products, tackling a mass consumer B2C web product might not be the best idea. If you’re a good sales gal and know how to manage customer acquisition through multiple channels then the company you choose to build should leverage those skills.
The right market – I loved these two posts from Elad Gil:
As you iterate in a market, you will often find that the initial idea you chose is less important then the broader market you are in. A great market will always have opportunities in it. Even if the first idea is terrible you will get to know the market and its needs and build something great on your next try. In contrast a great idea in a terrible market will often fail. ~ You don’t need a good idea to start a great company
What’s changed about the market? Are there cost changes, new distribution channels or technologies?
Is the industry and customer base growing rapidly?
Is there a lot of interest in the market?
Passion - Even if you have the product that customers would line up for, fits excellently within the strength of your team and is in a killer up and coming market the number passion is still the most important factor. Startups are hard. Are you going to be thinking about your product 24×7? Are you gonna love coming to work even when it sucks and it seems like you aren’t making progress? Do you HAVE to work on this?
..the best startup you can create is one where you will be constantly engaged in thinking about improving the product, maximizing the user experience, and planning for the future -where you have real passion for making it work. ~ The Passion Gap: Why Foursquare, Groupon, Facebook, And Apple Are Winning
So what are we doing? The short answer is that we’ve decided to delay the decision. We’ve temporarily put StoryStack on the back burner and while we work on a (soon to be announced) social, music product. We’ll do a small launch next week, quickly reach the area between informed pessimism and crisis of meeting and go through the whole thought process again…
Editor’s Note: I’m almost embarrassed to say I actually had to play Frontierville and Farmville to write this post. These games send notifications constantly and I wasn’t entirely comfortable with all my friends knowing how my pigs were doing. Therefore, I had to go undercover and create a new FB account under my Indian alter ego: Amit Kumar
Zynga has experienced explosive growth since it’s inception in 2007. They’re absolutely crushing it with:
How did Zynga become such a profit generating, user acquiring, viral monster? Here’s a few strategies that worked for Zynga which you can apply to your business:
1. Build sharing as an integral part of the product
At every point Zynga prompts users to sign up for updates and send notifications (many times crossing the line) through: fan pages/likes, invites, shares, bookmarks, stream publishing, in game messaging, and email notifications. In fact they’re so darn good at notifying ”Facebook had to change their notification policies
Before you even get started playing you’re prompted to:
- Become a Fan/Like (so they can push updates through your news stream)
- Invite your friends (pro tip: make it look like it’s required)
- Share this page on your news stream
- They again remind you right at the start of the game:
Sharing is not an afterthought limited to an invite section, it’s an integral part of the experience. In fact the more you share and interact with others, the more you are rewarded.
2. Create ways to elevate a users status/social capital
One way to think about social capital is we’re all in a certain bucket with each other, and the lowest bucket is maybe you’ll accept a friend request, and the highest bucket is you’ll come over and help me move, or pick me up at the airport,” Pincus told the Wired Business Conference Tuesday. “The question is, is there something we can do to help you move buckets?
While it’s cool (sort of) that I level’d up in Frontierville, I’m not gonna tell my friends about it, but… if I can share with them some of the points I’ve accumulated then that’s a lot more compelling. It no longer feels like spam, but instead that I’m helping them:
Applying this to a web business don’t just give a discount to the user who invites 5 of her friends to the service, let her pass on the discount to her friends (that’s something you really wanna share).
3. Assume you are gonna get it wrong at first
Don’t assume that your product is “the one.” Zynga does a great job of experimenting and making decisions based on data. I love this video of Pincus speaking at Stanford:
Towards the end he is asked if he could go back and share a lesson with himself when he was CEO of Tribes what would it be.
If I could do it all over again, I would have made Tribe a platform to test many ideas of social networking. We tried just one. Oh my god what the hell was I thinking? Just one? At our company we have several hundred tests going on every day and in every game. I would’ve done is made Tribe a platform to test every configuration
This is echo’d by others at Zynga:
Analysis, analysis, analysis. It’s been like that. [In traditional development] It’s just like, “Oh, it’s going to be a great experience,” and this and that. We’ll spend two years down a ship cycle, and, “Oops, I was wrong!”
So now it’s like, “If we do this, I think we can measure that, and here’s how we’re going to measure and tweak it later down the road…” We are an incredibly analytical organization, so we track just about everything. It’s the secret sauce behind all that stuff. There’s a lot of mathematics that go into it
That’s the magic behind what we do. Certain things we do will work, and others won’t. You try new ones, and A, B, C, D, E, F, G testing constant. (Source)
Several hundred A, B, C, D, E, F, G tests going on daily… sweet bejeezus.
4. “Ghetto” test
You don’t actually have to build it to find out if it works.
In the last 5 minutes of the video above Pincus is asked what’s the best way to do market research. His answer – “Ghetto Test”. If someone wants to build, let’s say, a hospital simulator he creates an FB ad that says, “Ever wanted to run your own hospital?” which leads to a survey (or if it’s really ghetto a 404 page).
All Zynga has to do is track CTR and compare it to previous historical rates to get a pretty good idea of demand. I’ve heard a lot of people test demand for a product idea, and A/B test marketing copy using Adwords (you don’t care about the goal, just the intent).
Focusing on products that don’t work funnels attention and energy away from ones that do. Even if you’ve made substantial investments know when it’s time to let go.
We’ve actually made investments into some innovative games that were incredibly hardcore. If you look at Guild of Heroes, for example, we did roll that out. It was a version of Diablo built in Flash, and it wasn’t successful, and we didn’t support it any longer. (Source)
6. Create unexpected moments of delight
Surprise your users through game mechanics, humorous copy, badges, and easter eggs. If you make them smile, they’ll tell they’re much more likely to come back and tell their friends.
One of the really fun and successful features we added is what we call the ‘Lonely Cow’ feature,” said Skaggs. “You can help find it a home, then somebody claims it. You’ll get a brown cow instead of the white cow you had before. Then you milk the brown cow and you get chocolate milk! That’s a ‘moment of delight,’ totally unexpected but cool (Source).
7. Leverage your size to cross promote like crazy
The best customer for one of your new products is an existing customer. If you liked Farmville you’ll looooooooove Frontierville.
They also have a banner at the top of their games calling out the rest of their properties:
Only by leveraging their existing user base were they able to get 100,000 users on Frontierville’s first day.
8. Maximize Trends
Pincus says the web is about repeatable formulas and once you find something that works, it doesn’t break for a long, long time. Think of LOLcats, rickrolling and Google. Nothing that Zynga does is new, but they’ve executed on it tremendously well. They’ve found a formula that works and are bangin’ out hits at an astouning rate.
Social Media and Web 2.0 is all about the collaborative, bidirectional flow of information. It’s no longer a brand, company or authority figure dictating the rules. As part of the course I’m teaching at NMIMS and ISB, I’m trying to apply the same principals and ask the students to help shape the class. Here are some examples of what we are doin’:
We have a fairly active Google Wave which covers the course goals and meeting notes. Students are free to edit the course outline, ask questions and suggest topics for future classes (please note you must be logged in to Google for this to work… the embed API is also fairly new – i.e. buggy):
[wave id="googlewave.com!w%252BjWA1cBmJA"]
We have a few really awesome guest speakers including:
What’s Web 2.0ey about this is that half the speakers are based in the US and will be conducting their sessions via skype/video conferencing.
Rather then a preassigned reading list, the students are being asked to share a few links weekly with each other via Twitter and Wave.
Students can ask questions/make suggestions/provide their own examples (via twitter and wave) during the class.
The students will be partnering with a local NGO to raise awareness or solicit donations for a social cause using social media and an SEM campaign (hopefully Yahoo! and Google will come through and donate some ad credits). These projects will be posted publicly.
Other things I could be/should be doing:
Posting the course outline (as a wave) and inviting everyone whose registered for the ISB course to make their edits/suggestions (for topics or speakers)/questions/modifications prior to the start of the course.
Reaching out to students in these universities ahead of time (via Twitter) to build some hype and make sure the class is filled up.
Anyone else have any ideas on how to make the course better? Let me know…
This past weekend I gave my first two lectures at SPJain on paid online marketing. I thought it went pretty well, the students seemed really engaged and interested in the material. The slides, course outline and videos are posted below. I’ve also agreed to do a 6 week course at another business school: NMIMS (more or less following this outline), if anyone has any ideas on how to improve this session or the course outline, please let me know.
Video:
The videos from the actual lecture didn’t come out to well (you can see them here and here). Below is the same session I gave to our team internally:
Introduction
iTunes Case Study – You are the marketing manager responsible for launching the iTunes Store in India
- What are your objectives?
- How do you go about achieving those objectives?
Goals:
- Discuss branding vs. performance objectives
- Discuss differences between online and offline marketing (targeting, measurement, reach)
- Discuss the marketing funnel (Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, Loyalty, Advocacy)
- Review options for online advertising in relationship to the funnel
Review terminology:
- Impression, CPM, CPC, CPA/L/S, Goal, Conversion, CTR
Methods of Online Advertising
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – Google Adwords Example
- How does Google determine which ads to display to users? Keyword, bid, location, quality score / relevance (clickthrough)
- Why are the bulk of most ad budgets allocated to SEM http://mashable.com/2009/07/08/social-media-marketing-growth/#mb – intent
Ads on Social Networks – Facebook Ads
- Targeting based on demographics
Ad networks – Right Media Exchange
- What is the advantage of purchasing an ad on an network rather then directly on a site itself – Non-premium, performance based, auction, reach
Affiliate Sales – Amazon
- Description of the affiliate model
Email Marketing – Email Brain
- Review analytics for email marketing
- Discuss limitations on reach
Revisit iTunes Case Study
How can you determine effectiveness of online marketing campaigns?
- Demonstrate eCPM / eCPA calcualtions
- Link online marketing metrics to sales
Ask students to come up with a marketing plan
- Split class into branding vs. performance
- Determine goals and budget allocation based on historical results
Measurement and Course Correction
Demonstrate Google Analytics
- Show ecommerce analytics
- Glean insights, create hypothesis based on analytics data (i.e. per visit value of certain states are high, let’s see if additional marketing – online or offline – will help us generate more sale with less spend)
Course Correction
- 3 slides for creative, source and keyword performance
- Discuss actively managing campaigns and getting rid of underperforming ads, sources, keywords
The first step of any social influence marketing plan should be to listen – not just what people are saying about your company, but about you as a person, your competitors, and key trends in your industry. I’ve been spending some time recently looking at a lot of different social media listening tools. The factors I believe are important in this type of tool are:
The number of sources indexed – Twitter, Technorati, Youtube, etc…
The number of results
The quality of results – How many are actually about my search term vs. spam
Sentiment Analysis – Are the mentions positive? Do people hate me? I wanna know…
Trend Analysis – Can I see spikes and ebbs in mentions? What about by locations?
RSS – Can I get an RSS feed of this (this is critical for real use)
Email Alerts – Can I get a weekly report emailed? Can I get an email of mentions a day increase above a certain threshold (or dip)?
Widgets – Can I display all public mentions on my site?
Below is a brief comparison and analysis on my findings of the free services (a post on paid services will be coming soon)
Yahoo! Pipes
My initial plan was to use Yahoo! Pipes to create an RSS feed of mentions across the major sites (Twitter, Google Alerts, Google Blogsearch, Technorati and Youtube). I was pleasantly surprised to find many people had the same idea and extended it far beyond the major sites to include: Backtype, Techmeme, Boardtracker, WordPress and many others. Sweet! I ran the seemingly most popular version for the term “codechef” (one of the projects I work on) and was quite disappointed with the results. Only 33 results? Where are the tweets? Aright, time to investigate. I fired up the Yahoo! Pipes editor and was immediately regretting it:
Er… Ok. While in theory Yahoo! Pipes looked like the perfect tool for this, trying to extend or modify a pipe isn’t very easy. Also you are passing query parameters dynamically in the URL, if they underlying site makes a change, you won’t get results and might never know. Rather then trying to develop and maintain this myself, I realized there must be a lot of other people who want to do this.
SocialMention
SocialMeniton is the best tool I came across. It indexed all the sources I expected (plus some I didn’t), gave the best results (in terms of both quality and quantity), provided tools for aggregation and analysis and had a really cool widget:
You can filter based on source (blogs, photos, videos, forums, etc…), sentiment (view only negative mentions), keywords, users, etc… Super cool. Also the analytics, number of retweets, authors, last mention, average time between mentions is awesome. It’d be nice if the photos were shown as thumbnails in the full list of results (they are when you click on photos), but that’s a small thing.
Here’s a embed of their real-time widget for everyone’s favorite rapper (mesmerizing):
Collecta
Collecta was better then most but still lacking critical features to be considered seriously. It displays search results in a Twitter style stream (and also shows thumbnails of images). Also gives a nice preview of blog posts and articles:
Though without an RSS feed of results or tools for aggregation and analysis, this isn’t likely to be useful.
WhosTalkin
The last app I came across worth mentioning is WhosTalkin. Although this tool is also lacking RSS feeds and analysis, the site is fast and friendly. It’s easy to filter across results and is nice for a one-time search:
Conclusion
Currently it seems like SocialMention is far ahead of it’s competitors though this field is rapidly evolving and new players come in daily. Here is a summary of the tools described above:
Yahoo! Pipes
SocialMention
Collecta
Whostalkin
Sources Indexed
As many as you want to configure (most popular “firehouse” has 40)
80+
Not mentioned, though I saw all the big guns
50+
Number of Results
33
124
45
130
Quality of Results
No spam
No spam
No spam
10% Spam
Sentiment Analysis
No
Yes
No
No
Trend Anlysis
No
Not really
No
No
RSS Feeds
Yes
Yes
No
Coming Soon
Email Alerts
Real-time and daily
Daily
Nope
Nope
Widgets
No
Yes
No
No
Next week I have demo’s of a few of the paid tools, to see what they can do, that we can’t do on our own. Know of any tools I missed? Have a different opinion? Let me know…
Why should businesses engage in Social Media? In the end, the goal of all marketing is to increase sales/conversions. But only in rare examples can a company point to their social media marketing efforts and indicate a direct correlation with sales (one exception is Dell Outlet on Twitter). Companies should engage in social media to increase:
Reach – create buzz, get new customers, create awareness
Reputation and influence – become an authority/thought leader, improve sentiment
Engagement – improve customer and brand loyalty
But how do you determine if your campaign is successful? First you need to determine your objective. If you have a new product launch, you probably want to build some buzz and create awareness (Reach). If you have added new features to your product, you will want to measure it’s effect on user engagement/loyalty. If your goal is to increase your influence and reputation, you can start aggregating content or create your own (via a corporate blog for instance).
This is a rapidly evolving field and the tools and metrics used to determine success are changing quickly. Don’t be afraid to throw away metrics, the most important thing is that you start tracking. Below I list some methods for objectively measuring your success.
Measuring Reach
Visitors – The number of people visiting your site and the source of that traffic. This can be measured using standard web analytics tools like Google Analytics. If you want to benchmark against peers/competitors use tools like Compete/Alexa.
Number of Friends/Followers/Fans (applies to Facebook, SlideShare, etc…) – I don’t believe Twitter followers is a good metric to measure since there is a lot of spam. Much more important is quality of visitors (i.e. one Oprah or Michael Arrington is much more valuable then 1000 followers). Measuring 2nd degree relationships (number of friends of friends), is much more valuable (albeit more difficult to measure).
Links – When sharing links, you can use tools like bit.ly to determine how many people have clicked on it. Just add a + to the end of any bit.ly link (check out my self-referential example: http://bit.ly/16GZ6x+).
Measuring Reputation and Influence
Number of public mentions (Blogs, Twitter, Facebook) – To measure public mentions on blogs you can subscribe to an RSS feed for your company/product/brand/name on Google Blog Search. For public mentions on Twitter subscribe to an RSS feed from Twitter Search. For Facebook, use Lexicon (this is more interesting as a tool to compare against your competitors, though they are undoubtedly improving this tool and I’m sure will add a y-axis soon).
Incoming links (SEO) – This is the primary way Google measures the authority of pages when ranking search results. Use tools like Google Webmaster Tools, Xinu Returns and Technorati to track these.
Comments about you on other sites – Since Google doesn’t index comments on blogs (most often), you can find out using tools like BackType.
Retweets – Twitter Search
Unsolicited positive mentions – I love this metric, there’s not much you can do to actively improve this, but if you are tracking it and are open, transparent and engaging your users properly, people will speak positively about you.
Measuring Engagement
You can use standard web analytics tools (Google Analytics) to measure:
Visitor Loyalty – The number of return visitors over 1 month
Recency – The number of return visitors over 1 week
Duration – The length of time spent on the site
Actions – The number of actions taken on the site: downloading, posting, commenting, playing, etc…
The absolute numbers are not important. Track these numbers month over month and look for an upwards trends.
Off-site engagement metrics include:
Facebook – You can use FB insights to measure the number of actions on your fan page: comments, likes, wall posts, etc…
YouTube – Youtube has it’s own analytics for measuring video plays.
Trendrr – Trendrr is an awesome tool which let’s you measure public mentions and music/video plays across a variety of sites.
In short there is no easy way to measure your success across social media. Sure there are short cuts like Twitalyzer, which is nice for at a glance metrics, but if you have the time coming up with your own set of metrics is far more valuable. This all assumes that your brand is small enough that you don’t get thousands of public mentions a day. If you do, you’ll have to call in one of the big boys like Visible Technologies or Sentiment Metrics.
Anything I missed? Anything else you track? Let me know on Twitter or in the comments…
Social Data Portability allows you to bring your friends, interests and relationships where ever you go across the web. For users, it means not having to create a new account on every site, and having immediate access to your network of friends. For businesses, it gives you more demographic insight into your users, as well as let you leverage the popularity of existing social networks to promote activity on your site. In this post I will discuss the strengths and differences between Facebook Connect, OpenSocial and Sign in with Twitter and show a few examples.
Facebook Connect
Simply put, Facebook Connect allows you to build a Facebook application outside of Facebook. You can integrate with Facebook’s authentication, retrieve profile information about your users, allow your users to find their friends who have “connected” with your site, as well as selectively publish actions to a user’s activity stream. Developing a Facebook Connect application requires software development chops but gives you access to Facebook’s 200m users. Digg and CNN both demonstrate different approaches to integration.
CNN
CNN offered a live video stream during Obama’s inaugration. It included a Facebook Connect application which allowed users to sign in with their Facebook credentials and participate in a live global chat.
Chattin' bout Barry
The participation numbers are staggering. According to Mashable:
1. 600,000 status updates posted through the CNN.com Live Facebook feed
2. Facebook averaged 4,000 status updates per minute during the broadcast
3. 8,500 status updates were posted during the first minute of Obama’s speech
4. “Millions” of people logged into Facebook during the broadcast
Digg
Digg’s Facebook Connect implementation allows you to link your Digg and Facebook accounts. Each story you digg, shows up on your activity stream (for all your friends to see). For Digg, the beneifts are immediate, more people will see that I am digging stories and click back to the site.
Signing Into Facebook Connect
Digg story on my Facebook activity feed
Facebook Connect is now also available for the iPhone. This is huge and will create a whole new world of mobile social applications.
OpenSocial
OpenSocial is similar to Facebook Connect but allows you to build applications that run in orkut, MySpace, Hi5, Friendster, Ning and Yahoo! and other 3rd party sites.
Virgin Global Row
The Virgin Global Row is a one crazy dude’s story about circling Antarctica in a boat by himself (and raising some money for charity). OpenSocial integration allows you to login, connect with other people who have joined the site, and push your actions on the site to your various social networks.
Open social options
Google Friend Connect
Google has also release a set of plug n play widgets based on OpenSocial called Google Friend Connect. Currently there are about 10 widgets available including sign-in, comments, polls, reviews, events and recommendations. This is cool because it allows anyone to quickly and easily incorporate social elements to their site (no coding required).
Sign in with Twitter
Yep, you guessed it, sign in with Twitter allows 3rd party sites to publish activity to your Twitter stream. One example of this is Spymaster (the Twitter game which equally amazed and pissed people off).
Spymaster Spymaster is a game which allows you to go on missions, raise money, buy weapons and attack other spies (Twitter users). Success is based on how many of your followers play the game and how often you send out updates through your twitter stream. IMO the game is pretty boring although it is undeniably attracting a huge following and a really nice example of a successful viral campaign.
Bribing you to tweet about your activities
Real time spymaster activity
Conclusion
There’s a big battle over who will become the defacto social OS of the web. In the future sites/widgets/apps will be social (and location aware), the question is where your data will be sourced from. At this point Facebook is clearly in the lead, but Google has deep pockets and Twiter is making huge strides. As Facebook and Twitter launch payment platforms, the opportunity to monitize through social ads and microtransactions presents a huge opportunity. Got friends?
sweet bejeezus.
