Gary's Bloggage » facebook http://www.vicchi.org The occasional ramblings of a self professed "geek with a life" Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:26:50 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=abc Facebook’s (Creepy) Bid For Your Homepage http://www.vicchi.org/2010/05/05/facebooks-creepy-bid-for-your-homepage/ http://www.vicchi.org/2010/05/05/facebooks-creepy-bid-for-your-homepage/#comments Wed, 05 May 2010 18:46:44 +0000 Gary http://www.vicchi.org/?p=1037 Most browsers have a variation on the theme of a home page, which automagically loads your favourite web page when you start the browser or open a new browser window or tab.

A lot of web sites try to capitalise on this, offering earnest entreaties to “make me your home page” … “no make me your home page” … “no, choose me for your home page, I have so much personalised content”.

They’re needy and somewhat neurotic entities these web sites, it’s not like I can have all of them as my home page.

Most of them personalise their content for you, based on a registration setting or some other insight, to give you what they think is the information your looking for.

This is not creepy.

A large amount of web sites are advertising supported and serve up ads which, again, are personalised, either from a demographic, behavioural or geographic point of view (sometimes it’s just from plain old fashioned key word matching with often hilarious results).

This is still not creepy.

But then this morning Facebook told me it wants to be my home page.

We've noticed you use Facebook regularly ... That's Creepy

Like most people I’ve evolved a filtering mechanism which understands why I’m being asked and which either ignores such pleas or uses the minimal amount of effort and mouse clicks to convey the message “buzz off, you’re not going to be my homepage and don’t bug me again“. I’m politely paraphrasing here you understand.

But when Facebook offers to be my home page because, and I’m quoting here, it’s noticed I use Facebook regularly … that smacks of Big Brother and is most definitely creepy, whichever way I look at it.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)
]]> http://www.vicchi.org/2010/05/05/facebooks-creepy-bid-for-your-homepage/feed/ 2 Placebook … Facebook “Places” In The Wild http://www.vicchi.org/2010/04/26/placebook-facebook-places-in-the-wild/ http://www.vicchi.org/2010/04/26/placebook-facebook-places-in-the-wild/#comments Mon, 26 Apr 2010 19:16:42 +0000 Gary http://www.vicchi.org/?p=979 After much teasing and tantalising, one of the long rumoured Facebook location features is out in the wild in the form of place community pages. They vary in scale from a hamlet in Spain …

… through to New York City.

It’s clever though not particularly sophisticated at this stage; a simple exposure of Wikia’s underlying geo metadata and it probably took very little effort to implement. Facebook appear to treat places as people, hence the exhortation to connect with the place.

For now there’s very little additional geo element present though what is there is probably enough to get people to connect with and like local community places or places they already feel a connection with, their home town, neighbourhood, honeymoon spot and so on. That alone should yield valuable demographic and (geo)targetable information.

This is pretty much a classic case of  picking low hanging fruit for Facebook and a far better exemplar of a place than the somewhat clumsy rebranding of Google’s small business listings as places, though the browse places page seems to suggest otherwise as it’s very POI heavy.

It will be facinating to track how this feature of Facebook develops and matures.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)
]]> http://www.vicchi.org/2010/04/26/placebook-facebook-places-in-the-wild/feed/ 5 Genius or Desperation? http://www.vicchi.org/2010/03/04/genius-or-desperation/ http://www.vicchi.org/2010/03/04/genius-or-desperation/#comments Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:02:14 +0000 Gary http://www.vicchi.org/?p=653 I’m sorry Facebook but your ad targeting systems are wildly inaccurate and reduce that valuable screen estate to the right hand side of my browser window to irrelevant line noise. Google’s and Yahoo’s ad targeting is pretty darn good but looking at Facebook right now offers me:

  • Omniture Research; which Obama used, apparently.
  • Free laptop from Vodafone Business; I’m not self employed so a business tariff is a non starter.
  • Everyone plays Mafia Wars; except me and most of my friends.

So when I do actually look at a Facebook ad, it’s because it’s caught my attention, like this gem from the Royal Mail.

You already have the LP, the CD and the MP3 … now get the Collectible Stamp.

Royal Mail Classic Album Covers Facebook Ad

A click through yields the latest campaign from the Royal Mail which exhorts us to buy stamps (but not use them, but to collect them instead, at least I think that’s the premise) which reflect the classic albums we already own in a variety of formats (but what about 8 track or cassette tape?).

Royal Mail Classic Album Covers Ad

Given the amount of competition the Royal Mail faces and the fact that 25% of First Class letters fail to arrive on time, I’m not sure whether this latest ad campaign smacks of genius or of desperation.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)
]]> http://www.vicchi.org/2010/03/04/genius-or-desperation/feed/ 0 Deliciousness: hairy landings, Twitter (mis)identity, escaped cat, the United States of Facebook and mapme.at http://www.vicchi.org/2010/02/25/deliciousness-hairy-landings-twitter-misidentity-escaped-cat-the-united-states-of-facebook-and-mapme-at/ http://www.vicchi.org/2010/02/25/deliciousness-hairy-landings-twitter-misidentity-escaped-cat-the-united-states-of-facebook-and-mapme-at/#comments Thu, 25 Feb 2010 12:05:49 +0000 Gary http://www.vicchi.org/?p=592 The latest batch of social bookmarks from my Delicious stream:

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

]]> http://www.vicchi.org/2010/02/25/deliciousness-hairy-landings-twitter-misidentity-escaped-cat-the-united-states-of-facebook-and-mapme-at/feed/ 1 You Don’t Always Get What You Pay For, But Sometimes You Get It For Free http://www.vicchi.org/2009/09/02/you-dont-always-get-what-you-pay-for-but-sometimes-you-get-it-for-free/ http://www.vicchi.org/2009/09/02/you-dont-always-get-what-you-pay-for-but-sometimes-you-get-it-for-free/#comments Wed, 02 Sep 2009 18:05:04 +0000 Gary http://www.vicchi.org/2009/09/02/you-dont-always-get-what-you-pay-for-but-sometimes-you-get-it-for-free/ Here in the UK we’re used to bad or non-existent customer service, so much so that it’s virtually ingrained into our genes. We’re well aware of the oft used expression that you get what you pay for except that you actually don’t; you continue to pay and act pleasantly surprised when you actually get what you’ve paid for, murmuring “well that’s a turn up for the books“. We look longingly across the Atlantic to the US and talk admiringly of the “American service culture” whilst conveniently overlooking the fact that our US counterparts get paid rock bottom wages and have to work damn hard to garner enough tips to make a living.

But there are exceptions and the global geographic reach of the Internet means that those here in the UK we get to benefit from these exceptions. Consider the following case of Internet startup (and yes, it’s a US Internet startup but let’s just conveniently overlook that for a moment) posterous.com. Now I know I’m writing about Posterous a lot at the moment but indulge me for a moment.

Whilst playing with Posterous’ free, yes free, service I noticed a slight … deficiency which I documented here. Posterous claims to handle links to images in a sane manner; their FAQ says

“We’ll do smarter things for photos, MP3’s, documents and video (both links AND files)”.

So I tried a sample post with links to TwitPic, YFrog, Flickr and, pushing it a bit, Facebook. YFrog and Flickr worked flawlessly, Facebook didn’t but that wasn’t unexpected, but TwitPic didn’t and that was unexpected. So I noted this in a Twitter post directed at the Posterous Twitter account:

And there I left it, either expecting a non committal response, or none at all. Twenty four minutes later, two four, twenty four, I got a reply.

And I tested it and it worked. Conditioned as I am to the UK norm, this was pretty unheard of, hence the need to write this experience up. So on the Internet, at least, you don’t always get what you pay for, but sometimes you get it for free.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

]]> http://www.vicchi.org/2009/09/02/you-dont-always-get-what-you-pay-for-but-sometimes-you-get-it-for-free/feed/ 0 In the Spirit of Experimentation http://www.vicchi.org/2009/08/31/in-the-spirit-of-experimentation/ http://www.vicchi.org/2009/08/31/in-the-spirit-of-experimentation/#comments Mon, 31 Aug 2009 08:44:10 +0000 Gary http://www.vicchi.org/2009/08/31/in-the-spirit-of-experimentation/ Posterous is a service that just begs for experimentation; not only because it’s a beautifully simplistic yet rich service but also because the Help and FAQ pages can be a little bit light on detail for some of the less obvious questions; probably to avoid scaring those of a less-power-user-frame-of-mind away.

So the Posterous FAQ at http://posterous.com/faq says this “We’ll do smarter things for photos, MP3′s, documents and video (both links AND files)”.

Link eh? In the spirit of experimentation let’s try this, firstly from the easy and obvious one … twitpic.com

… and rival yfrog.com …

… and from my Flickr photostream …

… and finally a more challenging one, from my Facebook photo album …

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=3454882&id=757562989

… there’s only one way to find out, so let’s send this to Posterous right now and see what happens; all in the spirit of experimentation naturally.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

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