I have a most interesting and unusual phone call a couple of weeks ago from a sales person at CareerBuilder. Ironically, the sales person had no idea who was trying to sell us the very same services we provided. According to him, CareerBuilder is the “first company with an exclusive contract to resell Facebook services”.  Little information about this “deal” exists on the web but there is probably some (little) truth to it. He said he was calling “on behalf of Facebook” selling “Facebook services”. According to this sales person (based out of their Chicago office), services start about about $1000 for “hosting and running your Facebook page” (by the way, Facebook actually hosts all Facebook content). Most interesting (and amusing) indeed. As background, CareerBuilder is owned by Gannett Co, Inc., Tribune Company, The McClatchy Company, and Microsoft Corp. (who is a close “partner” of and investor in Facebook).

What I found the most assuming was their email signature – I had no idea that could “buy” Facebook from a reseller!

With 1700 employees and 75% of them in sales and given the current economic climate, no wonder CareerBuilder is“Reselling Facebook”. I wonder how much it cost?

We got a hold of the Yahoo! TV Widget SDK earlier this week (WDK)! Exiting stuff. As I mentioned previously, we are working with a handful of clients on developing Yahoo! TV Widgets for them so this is the final step in that process. 

The WDK runs on Debian or Ubuntu Linux (so if you don’t have one of these your need to get VMware). The WDK allows developers to develop widgets for the Yahoo! Connected TV platform based using JavaScript and XML. The widgets, however, rely on the media player and APIs resident on each consumer electronic device for video playback so it appears media player capabilities may vary.

On your Connect TV, your widgets live as a list of snippers at the bottom of your TV screen that can be accessed through your remote control.  The widgets are actually very similar in design (tab based) to our widgetmatic 600 series..which will make porting them even easier!

Will keep you updated!

Advertising Age’s Bob Garfield makes some great points in his article “Widgets Are Made for Marketing, So Why Aren’t More Advertisers Using Them?” (Reprint) . I love his notion of using widgets to essentially package “Websites-in-a-Can” as the exodus of users to social networks such as Facebook is leading to the “the slow death of the destination website”. Garfield points to some great examples of companies using widgets to promote their brands AND provide utility including Southwest Airlines, Schick Quattro, Johnnie Walker, Backcountry.com, Nike and InStyle Magazine. Here are some of the points Garfield makes:

• Branded widgets are the refrigerator magnets of the Brave New World
• Widgets are inexpensive to distribute, free to use, and distinctly useful
• Widgets carry an ad message wherever they go
• Widget virulence may be hard to achieve

His article is definitely worth a read!

Sooner or later it was bound to happen, but Facebook has become the new website. Companies, no matter how large or small, are creating a presence on Facebook using a combination of Facebook Fan Pages, Groups and Facebook Applications, because that’s where their customers are at! To be or not to be on Facebook is no longer the question! Rather, its how fast!

Build it Because They Are Here!
Having built Facebook applications and custom fan pages for some time, I am surprise as to how ubiquitous Facebook has become as part of a companies marketing mix. Almost every brand and marketing campaign has a fan page and application to suit (Target, McDonald’s, CNN, i.e.). In fact, after fan pages was first rolled out, more than 100,000 companies created branded pages in the first 24 hours! Not only are there corporate pages, but companies are creating pages for individual brand and products (Pepsi Max, Diet Pepsi, Pepsi) as well as country-specific pages (Pepsi Sweden, Pepsi Latin America, i.e.) exist on Facebook.  Its a bit of a free for all (– beware the brand police)! For every “official” fan page page, there are dozens of unofficial one’s created by actual customers and fans (many with more traffic than the ‘real thing’), and not only are pages and apps not limited to brands and organizations, but movies, politicians (like Obama and every major politician and political party), musicians, and the like have all setup their new homes on Facebook!  (It seems that MySpace is fast becoming a “no man’s land”) Hopefully, by the time you read my blog post, you yourself already have your Facebook fan page. You know you are not getting any love if you don’t have your own Facebook fan page!

Marketing Wonderland?
The days when “branded applications” and custom fan pages were relinquished to only largest of brands are over! Local and small businesses are now developing and deploying Facebook application! For a couple of hundred dollars they can now get a “shanty town” of an Facebook application (I guess you can call them a “Shanty app”) from a freelancer or a Facebook app-mill. It may not look that great, but it’s probably no worse than their actual store front!  In the same way the advent of the Internet created a mad rush to get on the net (or get out of the game), Facebook has become the new website, and the race is on! We probably get an equal number of requests these days from small companies (even tiny ones) as we do from large ones! Welcome to the wild wild west of Facebook apps!

I woke up today to find that every single search result, on every computer on my network, comes back with “This site may harm your computer”!

Google search has literally quit working for me and I cannot visit a single search result. Oh well, will have to give Yahoo search a try!

Update:
This is not an isolated incident and appears to be happening all over the web:

• TechCrunch
• Techpogo
• Kenwardtown.com
• Postal News Blog

Some people are not familiar with Facebook’s Lexicom, a service from Facebook that counts occurrences of words and phrases on Walls over time. Facebook actually is in the process of beta testing a new version of the service.

The new Lexicon provides a lot more detailed information as well as user demographics.  According to AllFacebook.com, Facebook is going to “consider adding additional sources of public and semi-public data on Facebook.” Check out the new Lexicom, if you know what to look for you’ll  find some interesting pieces of information. More..

A growing number of clients have been asking us about Facebook Connect and if or how they should integrate this new service from Facebook with their existing websites.

Facebook Connect is essentially a single sign-on service that allows users to login into your online community using their Facebook username and password. The benefits are obvious:

• User can securely log into your site without the need for registration or authentication
• Quick and simple “One-click login” process
• Your site has access to a user’s Facebook friend list
• Your site has the ability to post information back to a Facebook user’s news feed
• New users can find other Facebook friends using your site very easily
• Your site has access to other Facebook platform features

The notion of single sign-on is not a new one. The idea of allowing consumers to enter one name and password in order to access multiple sites (an idea that has also existed in the enterprise for quite some time) has been around since the launch of Microsoft Passport (now Windows Live ID). Since then numerous single sign-on services has sprung up promising universal registration and login for all.

Single Sign On Options
The growing number of single sign-on services that promise to eliminate or reduce the need for new users to registration include:

• Facebook Connect: Provides one-click login using your Facebook login, access to friends, news feeds and other features of the Facebook platform.
• OpenID: An open, decentralized user identification standard that supports single sign-on and “portable identities”
• Google Friends Connect: Provides access do user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.

More than Just Single Sign On
Before deciding on which single sign-on solution to integrate with your online community consider the rest of the package being offering. ReadWriteWeb makes a great point in saying:

This battle isn’t about “single sign-on” – it’s about the payload that comes with it (friend networks, personal data, maybe more), it’s about the developer communities, usability and ownership.

Single Sign-On Best Practices
Given the growth in social networks, adding single sign-on capabilities to your online community makes good sense, as a means of acquiring “customers” and improving customer retention. Here are some things to be mindful of when making the single sign-on decision:

• Supporting multiple single sign-on services may complicate your offering and pose integration difficulties and possibly confuse new or existing users
• Offerings from Facebook and Google bring additional features and functionality that set them appear from open source solutions such as OpenID
• Understand your user base and select the single sign-on service that most closely matches your current or target market
• Be sure to leverage the communication link established with third-party sites such as Facebook and Google when integrating their single sign-on solutions
• Understand your offering’s “customer ownership” model and decide if you want to build a community with “borrowed users”
• Avoid “sloppy” integrations that are technically faulty or don’t leverage an offering’s features and functionality

We have moved the Metablocks Wiki to its new home at wiki.metablocks.com. We will phase out the old Wiki as we transition partner projects and other content to the new Wiki.  Most people have used Wikis at one time or another (Wikipedia, i.e.) and understand how they work (you can read our wiki definition). 

A growing number of organizations, including ours, use Wiki for a variety of business purposes ranging from collaboration, support, project management to light-weight content management (CMS).  Some Wikis try and capture information about an industry or market (Inman and Zillow for example have real estate wikis) while others are designed to provide customer support and build community ( eBay, vFlyer and Meebo are some good examples). Ours is simply designed as both an internal and external resource for archiving information on development and marketing projects and efforts that we have an ongoing interest in. Feel free to check it out.

Users love feedback and the love real-time activity! At Metablocks, we always been big fans of user interface elements and widgets that convey real-time feedback! Digg Lab’s Stack represents a great example (and a nifty visualization) of the potential power of providing real-time activity information. We recently built a similar visualization (naturally, inspired by the Stack) for a client in the music space to show real-time activity information on music tracks being played!

Simple Complexity’s Chad Burt takes a slightly different view:

These are beautiful for visualizing the information they present, but there’s one big caveat. This is all real-time information. Maybe it would be useful for Digg’s own sysadmins to have this sort of information available, but for an end user it is just a pretty proof of concept.

I would like to differ, here is why:

• Users want to know what other users are doing right now!
  Real-time activity visualization does exactly that. By combining information about what users are doing and how many users are doing the same activity, this sort of visualization is a real-time gauge of what is popular.
• “Moving data point” in real-time conveys and reinforces the notion of real-time!
  Everyone wants a real-time system! Financial brokers want real-time information, law enforcement needs real-time data, and even the Internet consumer prefer real-time system. What many user interface designers forget is that user interface elements and widgets can be used to solve “marketing” or “communication” problems! Sometime “showing” your site or service functions in real-time is more important that the actual real-time information a user is looking at!
• Sometimes it’s about the “Coolness Factor”
  Pushing the envelop when it comes to visualization definitely plays up your “coolness factor”. Having user interface elements that do no interfere with the general function of your site or service, but play up the “coolness factor” and capture the imagination of your users generally cannot be a bad thing! With so many “me-to” sites and services, innovative data visualizations (real-time or not) can be a much needed breath of fresh air!