ISM Signpost #25
*** In your face? ****** Access All Areas ***
*** Blink ***
*** Ringing in the changes ***
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+++ In your face? +++
Facebook launches anticipated ad system
Facebook, the social networking site, has launched its much-anticipated advertising system, causing some consternation among privacy advocates. The new technology called Facebook Ads had been hyped as social networking’s equivalent of AdWords, Google’s keyword ad system.
Facebook Ads allows advertisers to build pages on the social network to promote brands and products. Facebook’s users can then list themselves as ‘fans’ of the brands they like. When these fans do something on the brand’s page like submit a product review or play a game, advertisers can pay to broadcast their friends a social ad or message.
Obviously, this advertising approach will be more effective for some brands than others. While Facebook users may be perfectly happy to endorse smoothies, for example, they’re less likely to join the ‘My Bank is Cool’ page.
Facebook seems aware of the potential risks of its new strategy. It is limiting the number of social ads that users can see to two per day. But how will its users feel about their voices and friends being used in a money-making scheme?
It is a separate technology called ‘Beacon’ that has alerted privacy critics. Beacon tracks purchases made by users on outside websites. For example, if you buy a book on Amazon, this could be broadcast to your Facebook friends. Similarly, an iphone ad could be shown to your friends alongside information that you’ve just bought one.
In response to privacy concerns, Facebook has said its users can choose not to share this information with their friends or limit the number of friends that this information is disclosed to.
An online political group, moveon.org has launched an online petition calling on Facebook to apply Beacon only to users who have specifically opted in to the system. ‘Petition:Facebook, stop invading my privacy!’ has nearly 2,000 Facebook users as members.
MoveOn.org Civic Action, a media-watchdog group, created a group on the Facebook site yesterday called, “Petition: Facebook, stop invading my privacy!” By November 25th, nearly 23,000 Facebook members had joined the group.
At present, Facebook says its users are given two chances to opt out of sending a Beacon alert to their friends – when making a purchase on a website that uses the system, and again on Facebook itself. Interestingly, Facebook faced similar criticism more than a year ago when it launched a feature, known as Newsfeed that alerts friends to everything a user does on the site. The social networking site responded by giving users more power to limit the items that appear, and the ability to restrict who can see it. Since then, the feature has become one of the site’s most popular.Facebook was always going to have a tough time developing revenue streams around the babble and hype surrounding social networking. It is banking on the fact that its users won’t mind being transformed into ‘fan-sumers’ and becoming a word-of-mouthpiece for Facebook’s advertisers. It could backfire if the commercialisation ends up alienating users instead.
+++ Access all areas +++
Google launches social platform
As a growing number of internet users exchange their search engine home page for a Facebook or Myspace’s home page, Google has responded to the threat of social networking with the launch of OpenSocial.
OpenSocial is a piece of technology that enables developers to spread applications across any of the social networks, breaking down the barriers between social networking sites. Google eventually aims to create interfaces enabling users to share data and social connections without needing to belong to the same service as their friends. This astutely wrestles control and power away from the individual social networks like Facebook.
A handful of smaller social networking sites, notably including MySpace and Bebo, have joined the Google-led alliance. The new consortium has claimed members of over 200m internet users between then, compared to the 51m users of Facebook.
Interestingly, OpenSocial is not Google’s first foray into social networking, it also operates Orkut, a popular social network in Brazil and India.
The eventual vision behind OpenSocial is that internet users will ultimately be able to use their personal and social data on any internet service they wanted, while being able to communicate with their network from anywhere on the web.
+++ Blink +++
Video search comes of age
Blinkx, the aim-listed video search group spun off from Autonomy, has become the world’s largest video search engine with 4.2m daily searches of the 18m hours of online broadcast content it has indexed.
Blinkx says it has indexed an estimated two-thirds of the video available online and believes its technology, which analyses video and profiles customers according to their searches, makes it more relevant to advertisers than search engines based on ‘tagging.’
Autonomy’s founder, Mike Lynch, a speech recognition specialist, has outlined how difficult it is to search audio and video, where even the best technology can falter. Most video search is done using hybrid systems – the sound can be converted to text, while the video is stripped to a representative set of stills that can be searched through the use of colour, shape and texture (CST) technologies. Extra back-up is then applied with manually applied metadata (searchable text added to the video images.)Blinkx has also signed 225 content partners including Fox and NBC, the US networks that have broken away from Google’s YouTube to launch their own online video site, Hulu.com. Meanwhile, the video search group is planning on launching its own broadband TV service in competition with mainstream broadcasters and Joost – the latest start-up from Skype’s founders.+++ Ringing in the changes +++Google outlines mobile strategy
Deep-pocketed, disruptive Google has struck a powerful blow into the mobile industry with the announcement of its new mobile system, Android. It hopes it will encourage the masses to access the internet through their phones and bridge the conflict between different, conflicting handsets.
There has been speculation for some time that Google was planning to enter the mobile industry including rumours that it would be launching its own handset. However, Android is a mobile software system, rather than a Google handset. It will start appearing on phones next year and significantly has support from over 30 international companies including mobile phone networks such as T-Mobile and handset makers such as Motorola and South Korea’s HTC.
Android will be issued under an open source licence and made available free of charge to other companies to build their own handsets and applications.
It looks like Google is transplanting the model that shook up the internet to the mobile sector. In the long-term the plan could prove a disruptive force to the economics of the mobile industry. And it’s impressive that Google has managed to attract broad support from mobile industry players to its technology.
SIGNPOST is published monthly by Internet Search Management Ltd.
The opinions expressed are those of the Editor and not necessarily those of Internet Search Management Ltd.
All material Copyright 2007 Internet Search Management Ltd. All rights reserved.
