In the process of rolling out Facebook marketing campaigns for clients that involve some combination of Facebook Applications, pages and groups, we often get asked what that the difference is between Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups, and more importantly, which is better.

To the untrained eye they are pretty similar, but in reality, for marketing purposes – Facebook Pages are significantly superior to Facebook Groups. In general they have all the features of a group plus (the very important) ability to add applications and do perform more extensive customization on the page. Here is a quick comparison of the two:

• Applications: Pages allow you to add many of the thousands of applications available on Facebook. This allows you to add apps like RSS feeds and other dynamic content as well as to customize your Facebook page.
• User Interaction: Applications (including IFRAMES) support increased user interaction on Facebook Pages. Groups do not support applications and only sponsored Groups (for companies committed to spending at least $50K in advertising for a minimum of 3 months) can add IFRAMEs.
• Promotion: The ability to promote your page or group is key to any marketing campaign. Pages provide more flexible ways to recruit fans/users including placing Social Ads that point to your page as well as the ability to send email updates to fans.
• Invitations: Both pages and groups have equal support for inviting other users to become fans of a page or join a group. Groups may actually have a slight edge in the category but not a significant one.
• Metrics: Pages provides comprehensive and valuable “insight” on user activity on a page. This functionality is sadly missing from groups.
• Associations: You’ll notice that groups (optionally) have a list of related groups. Unfortunately there is no way to control which groups appear on that list, making it rather useless. With a page you can add a list of links (to groups or other resources) that you want to promote or associate with your page.
• Access: Probably one of the most important differences. Anyone (aka the public) can access a Facebook Page. Groups, however, require users to register and sign up for Facebook.
• Administrators: Groups reveal information about who the group’s creators and administrators are, page keep this information private.

Quite often we get the request: “I want a widget”. Although most people making that request have an good idea of what platform they want their widget deployed on, some don’t. Here is a quick look at some of the common widget platforms options available, their pros and cons, and other important considerations:

• Flash-based Web Widgets: This remains the most common platform for widget development. Widgets built in Flash are generally designed to be embedded on social networks, blogs and other web pages (by simply cutting and pasting a snippet of HTML code). They can be distributed directly or using a Widget marketplace or distribution platform. About 80% of the actual widgets we build fall into this category.
  

• Other Web-based Widgets: There are a number of other web-based start pages, portals and communities that prospective clients are sometimes interested in developing widgets for. These include services like iGoogle, Windows Live.com, Pageflakes and Netvibes. Widgets built for specific web-based services are generally are generally not portable across services. We usually build widgets in a way that increases the likelihood reuse (since most services support some flavor of Javascript), additionally some services, like Netvibes, have “wrappers” that allow them to be used in other start-pages.
  
  See more comprehensive lists…

• Desktop Widgets: Desktop widget platforms include Yahoo! Widgets, MacOS X Widgets, Microsoft Vista Gadgets and Google Desktop Gadgets. Widgets built for these platforms are designed to run on a user’s desktop. As a result, they are generally are not spread virally or via “drive-by” marketing. Prospective clients evaluating or considering desktop widget platforms are usually driven by specific customer requests or applications. Most widgets built for a desktop platform require that the user first install a widget engine (Windows Vista and MacOS are exceptions), a process that can be time consuming and can pose a barrier to adoption.
  
  See more comprehensive lists…

• Facebook Application: Although a a widget can be embedded in a Facebook (FB) application, a FB app is “technically” not a widget – its a lot more. When building “widgets” for the FB platform, most people are talking about developing a Flash-based widget and then build a FB application to “contain” it (the are some limitations). The alternative is to ditch the widget idea and simply build a full featured FB app that takes full advantage of the platform.

  

• Other Social Media Applications: This involves building applications or “porting” existing Flash-based widgets to platforms like OpenSocial (for MySpace, Hi5, Orkut and others) and Ning. Unless you have a compelling reason for doing this, you are probably better off with one of the other options.
  
  See more comprehensive lists…

So What Widget Do I Need?
Hopefully you have already answered that question. The platform (or platforms) you select to develop and deploy your widget(s) on depends on the following:

• who your target customer is (consumer, customer, enterprise, prospects, i.e.)

• the purpose of the widget (marketing or utility)

• what your marketing or customer acquisition goals are (related to purpose)

• how you envision the widget being used and distributed (is it viral?, i.e.)

Clients interested in solving marketing, awareness and branding problems are usually interested in Web-based widgets (or social media applications) that are often seen, easily spread and hopefully come with a compelling reason for folks “driving-by” to spread them.

Clients interested in using widgets to deliver utility or functionality or extend an existing application, are probably most interested in Desktop widgets.

Clients that want marketing exposure on numerous widget marketplaces (WidgetBox, Netvibes, Yahoo! Widgets, i.e.) are probably going to want to build smaller (feature poor) widgets on a technology (Flash, i.e.) that works on multiple platforms.

Clients targeting “paying” or enterprise customers are probably looking at specific desktop widget platforms.

More Widget Platform Information
I hope this answers some of the questions people about widget platforms. I have also created a section (wiki.metablocks.com/widget-platforms) on the Metablocks Wiki dedicated to tracking relevant widget development platforms, feel free to check it out.

Tags: facebook, opensocial, ning, widgets, flash, google, netvibes

Whenever we build applications for a new platform we like to understand the target market, market drivers, and the overall competitive landscape. In the process of understanding the set-top box market, I ran into a handful of great HDTV, set-box and video stats and facts that I thought would be interesting to share:

HDTV and TV

• Approximately 70% of people aged 34 years and younger surfing the Internet while watching their TV – CEA
• Nearly 60% of HDTV owners consider themselves sports fans – CEA
• 50% of HDTV owners cited HD sports as their primary purchasing factor – CEA
• 90% of fantasy sports players use Internet to look up sports info while watching TV – Fantasy Sports Trade Ass.
• Favorite sports programming watched in HD include Super Bowl (78%) and college football (41%) – CEA
• This year’s Super Bowl is expected to drive the purchase of approximately 2.4M HDTV units – CEA
• 18% of consumers watching the Super Bowl expect to be online during the game to check stats, IM with friends or check betting lines – CEA
• 12% plan to use a PC in another room to check statistics during the game and 13 percent expect to use their mobile phone for the same purpose – CEA
• Samsung is the worldwide TV brand leader with 20.8% of the revenue share (Q1 2008) followed by Sony, LGE and Sharp – Digitimes
• Around half a billion homes worldwide are expected to have digital TV by 2011, and in the future the integrated media center will be at the heart of the Digital Home – BuddeComm
• CEA predicted that 16M HDTV would sell in 2007 bringing the total number of HDTVs sold in the US to 52.5M – CEA

Digital Set-top Boxes

• In April 2007, Motorola announced shipped its one millionth IP-based set-top box – Daily IPTV
• Apple TV could eclipse both TiVo (4.4M users) and  Netflix (8.8M users) – Daily IPTV
• AT&T expects targeted advertising on its video and mobile services to become a $1B business by 2010 – Daily IPTV
• Set-top boxes are merging Web-based services with TV. AT&T invested $26.5 million in ChoiceStream last year. Time Warner Cable rolled out software from Biap Systems that allows users to bid on eBay and track fantasy football statistics wither their cable remote – WSJ
• Google has partner with EchoStar to use set-tops to  buying, selling, and measuring the impact of TV ads running on Dish Network – WSJ
• According to In-Stat, it is estimated that the number of set-top boxes shipped (worldwide) since 2000 will exceed 150 million by 2009 – WSJ
• Google is already streaming YouTube videos into living room via devices like Apple TV and HP’s Media Smart TV as soon the Playstation 3.

Online and Mobile Video

• 57% of adult Internet users have watch or download video from the Internet – Pew
• 57% of online video viewers share links to the videos they find with others – Pew
• 75% of users have receive links to watch video from someone else – Pew
• 63% of Apple iPhone users have viewed videos vs 28% of regular cell phone users – Interpret
• 18% of mobile phone users reported they have recorded a video on their phone, 10% said they had watched a video on their phone – Pew
• In Feb 2008, 10.1B videos were viewed online, a 66% year-over-year leap – comScore
• 123M Americans viewed online video at least once a month in 2007 – eMarketer

We do widget, and as anyone who creates or user widgets knows Adobe Flash-based widget have dominated the social networking and media landscape for many years. With the advent (and growing popularity) of the Facebook Platform, many thought that Flash-based widget would quickly and easily make their way, unfettered, unto Facebook pages, but this has not been the case!

Flash does work on Facebook, but with some limitations. For companies and developers looking to port their Flash-ware to Facebook, here are some important considerations to be aware of:

• Facebook does not support Flash to Javascript communication
• Interaction between Javascript or FBSJ and Flash is prohibited. You’ll have to use flashvars to pass information into your Flash component.
• Facebook does not support Flash links/navigation
• In more technical terms, navigateToUrl and getURL by default do not work in Facebook (See work around)
• You have to embed your Flash in an IFRAME in order to enable navigation to work.
• Facebook and Flash have a problem sharing the same session
• In less technical terms, writing Facebook/Flash applications that recognize a user’s unique activity require some hard work (and experience).
• Flash cannot automatically begin playing on a user’s Facebook profile page
• Flash components cannot automatically begin playing on profile pages, so the fb:swf tag displays a developer-specified place-holder image until the user interacts with the object.

MySpace is finally ready to launch its OpenSocial-based development platform. According to Mashable, developers can now submit applications for review and the first set of approved applications will be available to users on March 13! In January, I talked about MySpace and OpenSocial in one of my previous post Facebook Platform vs. OpenSocial. Although it was announced last November, Google’s OpenSocial partners are only starting to launch their platform initiatives with 3 large sites (MySpace, Google’s Orkut and Hi5) launching over the next month! MySpace’s Jim Benedetto did a great job at the O’Reilly Graphing Social Patterns conference outlining MySpace’s upcoming platform’s strategy.

When Facebook launched its f8 application platform it experienced a 37% increase in growth and the number of available application quickly grew to over 10,000 by the end of year. It is going to be interesting to watch MySpace’s OpenSocial platform roll out as far as the number of applications being developed and if they do indeed bring users back to the site.

Metablocks recently designed and develop a Flash-based widget for the HR folks at Lockheed Martin that sheds light on some of the social media best-practices employed by departments in corporate America. It’s a project we worked on with the Bernard Hodes Group, an integrated talent solutions provider that works with Lockheed Martin’s HR team.

Here is what I like about Lockheed Martin’s HR group’s approach:

• A Forward Thinking Approach: Lockheed Martin has a world-class HR department that continues to leverage their website (lockheedjobs.com) very effectively as part of their recruiting efforts. The site gives visitors access to compelling content that includes video testimonials, a newsletter, job search, an events calendar and even live chat - Web 2.0 and community features that I am sure are the envy of their contemporaries, so it’s no surprise they decided to add widgets to the mix!
• An Integrated Approach: The widget not only display the latest Lockheed Martin news (from the department’s blog), it also allows visitors to embed the widget on their sites or blogs or subscribe to ts RSS feed need, and it features video from Lockheed Martin video archives! So in one fell swoop, the folks at lockheedjobs.com and Bernard Hodes Group have managed to integrate video and rich-media, blogging and RSS, with widgets and social media marketing!

In May 2007, at the Facebook F8 event, Facebook launched its application platform and announced a slew of third party developers. Since then Facebook has the Web’s “App De Jour”. By courting developers, rather than fretting over third party widgets (like MySpace), the flood of new Facebook applications has accelerated the social network’s already runaway growth, contributing to 37% of Facebook’s growth since the platform was opened in May.

The success of Facebook has promoted a growing number of application, service and content providers to include Facebook apps as part of their marketing and product mix. In fact, Facebook application design and development has become the most requested service here at Metablocks. We have found, however, that even more important then building Facebook apps is understanding how to strategically design and deploy social media applications (including widgets) to achieve a client’s business goals. Social media applications do not exist in a vacuum, and can have one or more of the following objectives:

• To promote a service by serving a “viral marketing” function and getting the word out or creating brand awareness
• To extend a service’s feature set or functionality by enabling its use within social networks
• To add to or extend the collaborative or community aspect of a service by leveraging the relationships users have on social networks
• To provide application functionality or utility that currently doesn’t exist on a social network or is significantly better than what currently exists

I also like the way Leveraging Ideas categories Facebook apps into their 3 categories:

• Facebook apps that exposes a company’s content to an audience
• Facebook apps designed to gain as many users as quickly as possible
• Facebook apps that create something that provides users with true value

Regardless of how you wish to categorize social media applications, content and service providers need to understand that social media development strategy is just as important as social media application development. Even before Metablocks got into the business of developing Facebook and other social media applications, many of our widget development projects included a social media strategy component to help clients understand how widgets, gadgets, blogs, wikis, and social networks worked together as part of a comprehensive social media strategy. I always continue to stress to clients that they need a viable social media strategy and not just a Facebook app or widget!