Tag Archives: Facebook

Oh my Widgety Goodness, it’s the survival of the fittest…

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Widgety Goodness 2007 was right on our doorstep today in Brighton, so I popped down to check out if there was anything new and interesting from an online publisher’s point of view.

We heard about widgets that automatically deliver content tailored to you and your friends’ Facebook profile, and we heard about widgets that overlay full-screen internet TV, to provide additional information about the video you are watching or just so that you can chat to your friends online.

We even heard the burgeoning widget universe being described as a Darwinian disco (© Steve Bowbrick), which conjured up for me a vision of a lot of middle-aged publishing execs trying to get on down with the young things on the dancefloor and dancing out of time like deranged orangutans.

Naturally, we heard a lot of pitches. But also a helpful dose of scepticism, as the following video sample from Russell Davies of the Open Intelligence Agency, shows:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ouqpn9WKAqA]

Not good news for glossy magazine publishers then. Those perfume ads help pay for a lot of people’s wages.

Laura will update with more tomorrow, but bottom line, widgets will be getting smarter, cheaper and more ubiquitous in 2008. As long as publishers and marketeers don’t forget to put the user in control, they can be a good method of delivering personalised content across a number of social and local platforms.

Handbag.com launches Facebook application

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Bright Blue Day Digital has created Handbag.com a little app – just in time for Crimbo…

Features:

I’m Loving / I’m Hating: fashion item rating that gets added to a wish list feature. The application can then aggregate this list and record Facebook-fashionista’s judgement on the latest styles.

Limited Edition Exclusive Gifts: virtual gifts to be distributed by sad saps equipped with virtual credit points generated by using the application.

Handbag.com Hotline: Fashion news supplied by RSS.

handbag

Sky News development competition and its royalty free use ‘in perpetuity’ of finalist’s work

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Earlier this month Sky News launched a competition offering £10,000 in prize money for developers to come up with new and novel uses of its RSS feeds.

Text, images and video are all covered in RSS and hoping for a innovative use of its feeds the news provider has put no limit on what developers can potentially come up with.

The competition closes this Friday and those with the best ideas will be asked to attend a ‘Dragons’ Den-style Judgment Day at the Sky News studios on Thursday 20th December.’

According to the terms and conditions of the competition:

“Sky will select approximately ten contributions whose applications show the most potential, from the points of view of design, usability, innovation and originality, to be deployed into a live environment, and could most successfully distribute Sky News content via new methods, web or otherwise.”

Aside from reward of actually developing a useful application for these feeds, Sky News plans to give at least £1,000 to the winner and at least £200 to each finalist.

However, in return Sky News will take quite a bit:

“Sky will keep details of, and retain a licence to use the Contribution of each Finalist, whether or not that Finalist is selected to be the Winner or a Runner-Up. Sky will require each Finalist, and, if a Finalist is under 18, a parent or guardian, to sign a separate agreement confirming Sky’s rights to use the Contribution.

3.2 All Finalists agree that the copyright (if any) and all other rights, title and interest, in and in respect of their Contribution, will be licensed by the Finalist to Sky as follows:
(a) Sky shall have an exclusive royalty free worldwide license in all media in the Finalist’s Contribution for a period of 3 months from the date of the submission of the Contribution by the Finalist;
(b) after that 3 month period, Sky shall have a non-exclusive royalty free worldwide license in perpetuity in all media in the Finalist’s Contribution.
All Finalists must agree that no payment (other than Prizes where awarded) shall be due to them nor shall they make a claim for any further payment against Sky or its licensees or assigns in respect of the license of such rights.”

Nothing particularly new in this, the approach is fairly typical of other commercial/creative competitions, Channel 4 is pretty much setting the same conditions for its own RSS widget competition.

So the position is a news company owned by a billionaire is asking for someone else to design it a cutting edge technological development, for it to use for free, forever.

But Dragon’s Den is all about entrepreneurs striking deals to make long-term money with their ideas, isn’t it?

Has Sky not missed a trick to apply the ethos of the competition to the prize?

If it really wants to be seen as a cutting edge company could Sky News have experimented with a little ad-share from traffic to the site from these new applications (if it’s possible to work this out)?

The same with Channel 4?

Collaborative production is the founding ethos of social media – YouTube and Flickr are nothing without their communities.

Similarly Facebook, for which the technological contributions of its members and partners is paramount. But at the moment, on the whole it’s done for free.

So why not also share about the cash created by these partnerships? After all, if you had a bit of video Sky News wanted, they would pay you for it. Why not for the delivery mechanism too?

ABC News turns to Facebook for political coverage

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ABC News and Facebook have entered a formal partnership to deliver political news through the social network.

Facebook’s politics section will carry live debates and allow users contribute to surveys, discussions, polling, as well as accessing ABC News videos and headlines on the site.

Facebook devotees will also be able to offer support to political candidates and follow ABC News reporters on the network.

Away from the dedicated news page, an application will let you access all this information from your profile page.

I particularly like the reporter’s mini-feed that seems to be a mishmash of formal reporting and on-the-fly uploads and updates.

ABC News isn’t the first news provider to get in on the social media phenomenon. The New York Times has a presence on Facebook and the Washington Post has dedicated some serious time to developing applications.

However, ABC’s move looks to have significant depth and resonance about it.

To highlight the partnership, claims the New York Times, the two companies will announce today that they are jointly sponsoring Democratic and Republican presidential debates in New Hampshire on January 5.

“There are debates going on at all times within Facebook,” David Westin, the president of ABC News, told the Times.

“This allows us to participate in those debates, both by providing information and by learning from the users.”

Will widgets revolutionise content online?

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At yesterday’s AOP forum on widgets, plenty of examples were given as to how these applications are used by content providers, but few answers were given on their impact in terms of audience numbers.

Brand controller at ITV consumer, Richard Waterworth, explained the channel’s creation of Facebook applications to promote ITV2 show ‘The Secret Diary of a Call Girl’, but admitted when questioned that quantifying the contribution these kind of widgets make to audience growth is not yet possible.

“It’s absolutely still true that the power of cross-promotion from ITV on air eclipses all this other activity… the way that Facebook works and these widgets work are not comparable in terms of numbers, but what it’s about is building momentum in certain points of a campaign,” he said.

There is scope then for online news providers to use widgets to build buzz about sections on their sites or current projects – just as US sites Washingtonpost.com and USAToday.com have done.

But with metrics for widgets in their infancy it is unclear when or how these applications could become real audience drivers for news websites rather than just flashy marketing toys.

According to Ivan Pope, founder of Snipperoo, sites including news sites looking to widgetise will have to accept that it is a give and take process:

“In order to aggregate you have to disaggregate something… you have to blow up all your content into small fragments and widgetise everything you’ve got and make it available for people to reaggregate into their own view.

“The era of websites which are controlled by a central entity is coming to an end… people want to be in control of where they exist.”

Such widgetisation of content would be a concern for news providers wanting to track where their content ends up and where their audience comes from. This could cause problems for news sites developing widgets for the mobile web, as David Ashbrook, senior research engineer for Vodafone’s devices team, explains in the clip below:

[audio:http://www.journalism.co.uk/sounds/davidashcroft.mp3]

To iron out these problems more deals are needed between content providers and with mobile networks – events that could lead to, as Snipperoo’s Pope suggests, the fragmentation of the internet and websites as we know it.

Online journalism in 2020…bloggers strike, iToilet and more

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Paul Bradshaw has video blogged a post from 2020 about the end of the Bloggers Strike, Apple’s new iToilet, Facebook’s ‘GDPcalculator’ app, and a graduating generation who’ve never known a world without the mobile web.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7O_ugnEZ08]

Failure of the iToilet has always been a pet grumble of mine, glad to see someone has finally been brave enough to voice these concerns.

Paul put the guest blogging vid together to fill in for Shane Richmond @the Telegraph while he’s away – guest spots have also gone to John Hagel and Andy Dickinson.

Google News makes Facebook app – so far, not so good

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Google News has created a Facebook application allowing users to search and share stories. Users are able to create their own news categories, as well as selecting from predefined news topics, and mail news to Facebook chums.

According to Google the application is still experimental – just in the beta phase claims the Google News blog – but so far, not so good.

It seems you have to navigate to a separate page to get all your news from Google, in addition to this annoyance (which I think will be sufficient to put a lot of people off) you can’t do anything about the Top and Most Popular stories column on the right side of the page. You can’t crush them down or remove them, the only option is to ‘read more’ which low-and-behold, opens another tab in your browser to show the Google News page.

The Google News app in its current state seems to be a way to navigate out of Facebook quickly (never really a bad thing I suppose). A wish list has been set up on the apps page so that people can recommend alterations – expect changes quickly.

I have another Google News app that I use, it’s called Goonews and was developed by a guy called Eran Shir and powered by Dapper (not sure what ‘powered’ actually means in this context). It’s a bit more rudimentary (you have to define your search term ahead of time and seem to only ever to be able to have one category of news displayed) but at least its as flexible the other apps on my profile page – at least its on my profile page.

New media rank amongst London’s ‘most influential’

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Tomorrow the Evening Standard will release its list of the 1,000 most influential people in London – complete with a brand new section devoted to media.

Roy Greenslade has had a sneak preview of the media movers and shakers, and writes that plenty of new media names make the list.

Political blogger Iain Dale, Annelies van den Belt, managing director of ITV Broadband and former Telegraph Media Group director of new media, and Simon Waldman, digital director at The Guardian, all make the 50-strong media list.

Nikesh Arora, Google’s European vice president, founder of the Carphone Warehouse Charles Dunstone and Mark Zuckerberg (not strictly a Londoner, but hey…) , founder of Facebook, make it into the top five.

AOP: Hyper-local sites have to be news driven – Washington Post Interactive chief on the failure of some sites

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Hyper-local sites have to be driven by news the chief executive of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive told the AOP conference.

“Some of the hyper-local sites that have failed, in my view, there isn’t any hard data there, there is just people commenting or talking to each other,” Caroline Little told delegates.

“If it’s not structured around something that is changing then it may as well be on Facebook or email or something else. We need to provide something to make it interesting.”

Speaking about the databases and Google Maps mash-ups that drive the Post’s Loudoun hyper-local site, she added:

“Publishing news is important to people locally, even if it’s a crime database, what happened last night on what street, people want to know that.

“We also have local bloggers who live in the community. But I believe without that local news piece, which is fresh and updated constantly, you’re just not going to build habit locally.”