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Coming in later than usual this week, but it has been a crazy week for me, but I am hoping to write a few real posts over the holidays so stay tuned. 

1. BMW Product Navigator

As somebody who has previously worked on automotive kiosk experiences, I would really like to try this out first hand. Also, it is nice to see Microsoft’s Surface technology popping up more regularly.

2. How to be a 21st Century Capitalist

Umair Haque has a nice (albeit slightly abstract) post on the redefining capital and capitalism (something Adbusters and a whole bunch of other folks have been harping on for years). It is nice to see those ideas making it into more mainstream strategy discourse.

3. Woordle

Woordle creates word clouds based on text you provide. Below is what they automatically generated based on the RSS feed of this blog. I would love to see a word cloud of a week’s worth of the words that come out of my mouth. Now imagine that tracked over a year with robust analytics. I could pinpoint exactly when certain words became played out in my mind, compare my social vocabulary to my work vocabulary (I bet there would be a lot more cuss words than I would want to see in both) and do a whole bunch of other awesome stuff. There is definitely a nice business application or at the very least a cool art project here. Somebody please do this.

4. TechCrunch’s Interview With Lord Zuckerberg

It’s always nice to hear a bit about the vision for everybody’s favourite time hole.

5. Let Me Google That For You

Now when somebody asks you a question they could probably just Google themselves, you can really step up your jerk game by using this service to send them custom Google instructions to answer their question.

According to Tech Crunch, they are looking for a partner. I was sorely disappointed by Facebook’s first and sole attempt at classifieds, which they named Marketplace, not only was it an underachieveing piece of junk, it also made me looks like an idiot (I am pretty sure when it was initially announced I declared it the Craigslist killer).

While some believe that there is something inherently flawed about social classifieds and cite Marketplace as proof, there was no real attempt to map it to the social graph in a meaningful way or even give it half decent search and browsing functionality. If Facebook could just knock off Craigslist and then layer on top its oft-rumoured but still vapour warish transactions platform, I think we would have a game changer on our hands and the opportunity for some serious revenue for Facebook.

The downside of that is that Facebook would be opening itself up (well it is already open, but inviting themselves) to all the types of slimeballs and scammers that hang out on Craigslist, but I doubt they would be too different than the folks who are buying their ad inventory currently (yes I want some green tea extract that will give me a chiseled 6 pack, yes I want to chat to hot girls in my area live on webcam).

A bunch of Silicon Valley’s tech elite including Brittany Bohnet of Google, Mike Hudack of Blip.tv, Dave Morin and Aaron Sittig of Facebook, Sam Lessin of Drop.io and Jessica Vascellaro, the Wall Street Journal’s Silicon Valley beat reporter jetted off to Cyprus for a little fun. Part of the fun was the production of this video.

Alot of people have been coming down pretty hard on these folks for letting this video slip in light of recent events. I do not feel any outrage at all. The only thing I feel is jealous (although I am a little weirded out by the fact that all the women are wearing matching bathing suits). I just see some people having fun in an incredible setting (if the video didn’t convince you, Google #campcyprus). As for the idea that the video is inappropriate, that depends on how you read into it. Don’t Stop Believing seems like the perfect song to me. All these people working at ad-supported Web 2.0 companies are going to need some faith in the coming months… or a new business model.

They should enjoy their vacations to Cyprus while they can.

On a side note, I couldn’t help but be reminded of this video.

Tonight I attended the Toronto Facebook Camp, an event put on jointly by Trapeze and Refresh Partners. The night started with a recap of what has been going on with Facebook and its platform since the last camp, which was well done but had a varying level of value depending on how close you had been following Facebook over the last few months.

Next up, was Rebecca Sawyer from Facebook’s monetization team, which you can imagine was highly anticipated given how great the representatives Facebook had previously sent to Toronto had been and the fact that anything related to monetization of social networks (particularly Facebook) is bound to draw a crowd.

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Facebook has changed the box that displays the Pages that a user has joined from being labeled “Andrew is a Fan of” to the more general “Andrew’s Pages,” a change that will improve potential success of most Facebook Pages.

Since many users join Pages and Groups as a form of self-identification, the nomenclature that Facebook had used had limited the Page’s potential reach as a communication tool (yet another example of how much impact well or poorly copy can have on the user experience). For example, Vampire Weekend’s Facebook Page has 9156 fans, but only 249 wall posts, 132 discussion posts, 20 fan photos and 3 fan videos with the majority of those contributions coming from a small group of active fans. Assuming that the 8700 or so members who haven’t contributed have not joined for the band’s updates, it is safe to say that most of the members have joined the Page as a way of constructing their online identity/profile and signaling to their peers.

While this dynamic may serve to inflate Page numbers in some cases, it can be detrimental in others where the focus of a Page does not lend itself to users identifying themselves as fans. For example, if I were a high school administrator, it may be a good idea to consider creating a Page for my school, allowing me to effectively disseminate important information and get important feedback from the students and faculty while boosting the profile of the school. However, under the old fan definition, how many surly, image conscious teens would be willing to stamp on their profile that they are a fan of their high school?

This dynamic is the reason that Facebook changed the definition and by doing so effectively eliminating the only advantage that Groups had over Pages for marketers (I am expecting the Groups application to slowly die out or be merged with Pages). While this more general definition is a step in the right direction, why not allow the user to define their relationship with a Page or Group by selecting between a few categories (fan, advocate, hater, friend, coworker)? This would benefit the marketers that the Pages application was built for by providing them with more granular data on their product or brand’s status while enabling the users to more accurately self-identify.

With the launch of their new website, Modernista shows they do (disclaimer: judging by a Google blog search I am pretty slow on this). Rather than displaying their content within a typical agency site format, Modernista took the concept of a social media hub to the extreme, allowing (arguably) the best in breed site for each type of content do the heavy lifting for them with just a simple DHTML overlay allowing the user to navigate between them.

Once I realized the conceit of the site, half the fun became guessing which service they would use for each type of content (spoiler: they made all the obvious choices). Their print work is all displayed through Flickr, categorized through the usage of albums and tags to allow users to navigate the work by client and category. Their television spots are brought to you by YouTube with playlists allowing users to view the videos by client. Similarly, all their interactive work is presented through a link to… you guessed it… del.icio.us, again using tags to categorize their links. Finally, their about and news sections are brought to you by Wikipedia and Google News respectively. One of the best things about this site is that as Modernista is taking you through all these sites, you can hit their escape button and be released into the familiar comforts of whichever social media space you happen to be in. In addition to a great conceit, the site creates a fantastic social media ecology, drastically increasing the reach of Modernista’s content (they could have improved the strength of this effect by cross-linking all their channels to one another rather than just back to their own domain and by using some of the third party Facebook applications to bring their other channels into their Page, but that could be nitpicking on my part).

One critcism I do have of the site is Modernista’s use of “web” spelling in the menu, which may indicate a bit of a shortcoming in understanding of the interactive space on Modernista’s behalf. People only intentionally spell things like that if they are a fledgling start-up and the correctly spelled domain will cost a fortune or if they are a really cool 16 year old on MySpace. Other than that, I really have to applaud Modernista for a fantastic concept with a strong execution.

Update: Wikipedia clearly doesn’t like how Modernista has co-opted their service, but instead of taking the entry down, they have posted a large warning on the top of it. I find this surprising given how protective Wikipedia’s admins are over the neutrality of the site. I would guess they haven’t taken it down because the way Modernista has used the page isn’t occurring within Wikipedia and therefore is not covered in their terms of use.

I don’t really need to post about this as it has been covered just about everywhere you can think of, but since I was there, I thought I would share my thoughts on it and provide a couple updates to the story. First of all, I didn’t think Sarah Lacy’s questions were that bad. I found some of them to be quite insightful. I was just more upset at how she started off the interview by attempting to humiliate Zuckerberg (very odd considering she was hand-picked by Facebook). He clearly wasn’t totally at ease to begin with and isn’t known to be very open so I doubt embarrassing him would encourage him to open up.

Also, her conversational interview style didn’t seem to work too well for him as she ended up talking far more than I think anybody would have liked to hear, leading to the mob uprising. While the way the audience reacted was not warranted, she reacted very poorly to the situation. If she had ignored them, the interview would have likely had a happier ending. Instead, she went on the defensive, lashing out at the audience and even her interviewee.

To make matters worse, in an interview she gave at a party shortly after the fiasco (nearly 40,000 views so far), she put the blame on not only the audience, but also the organizers, implying that what she was talking about was over the heads of the audience and that SXSW isn’t a good forum for someone of Mark Zuckerberg’s stature (funnily enough, he showed up and did an open Q&A at a Facebook Develop Garage the next day to some acclaim).

This dissolved all sympathy I had for her as her reaction to the situation clearly put her at just as much fault as the audience. Regardless of who was to blame this should have been the point where she apologized and admitted to having had a tough day, instead she insults the audience that includes a number of key influencers that could have a profound impact of the sales of her upcoming book. I wonder how her publishers reacted. I would love to know what their sales projections were for the book before the interview and whether or not they have shifted and in what direction.

Related Links
Full video of the interview
Sarah Lacy’s first article for Business Week in the aftermath (still unapologetic)

It appears that Facebook will be adding tabs to profile pages in an effort to tidy the site up. The main driver of this appears to be the clutter of applications that have polluted most people’s profiles. Looking at the screenshots, it appears that they have decided to combine the mini-feed and the wall, which makes sense as it will provide a consolidated view of what is going on with that person over the past few hours or the past six months (depending on how active they are on Facebook).

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