After reading the Oatmeal’s comic on How to make your shopping cart suck less, I wondered: should we trust Facebook as an alternative for creating an account in our online shop?

Short answer No.

That is too much data, given Facebook’s new policy to push you too share everything, I don’t want all my friends to know what I’m buying. In addition, they have a bad record with stuff like this (that being Facebook beacon)

Consumers don’t need new accounts, just for one purchase, so the best practice is to give them an alternative. Some alternatives could be custom express checkout (without login), Amazon Payments or Paypal. Even if it adds work and costs, customers will thank us, and happy customers are good business.

Sometimes it happens that I’m aware of an idea or concept, but I never put much thought to it. Until suddenly it hits me is that I start to ponder on it. It happened to me while trying to draft a post and for some reason I remembered the following dialog from the movie “The Social Network”:

Eduardo Saverin: So when will it be finished?
Mark Zuckerberg: It won’t be finished. That’s the point. The way fashion’s never finished.
Eduardo Saverin: What?
Mark Zuckerberg: Fashion, fashion is never finished.
Eduardo Saverin: You’re talking about fashion? Really, you?
Mark Zuckerberg: I’m talking about the idea of it. And I’m saying that it’s never finished.
Eduardo Saverin: Okay. But they manage to make money selling pants.

What Mark is talking about is not something new, but for some reason I never gave it much thought until now. So, my (almost) epiphany: any web venture or project needs to start as soon as we can. In addition (and not less important) we never have to finish it. The moment it is done, then is dead.

Why?

Constant experimenting, leads to constant evolution of an idea,  which leads to constant change. For some reason people fear or resist to change, but love to see it in others. Evermore, are delighted when they see new things or experiment new things in our environments.

Remember when you had a new toy and then you found something new and forgot about it. The Internet is the same: is a collections of toys, which embrace our inner child, by providing us with a new one every 20 minutes.

Let embrace the inner child and run wild.

So, facebook released the (public beta) of the “lite” version of their service, last week. Some think that facebook lite is just a response to twitter’s popularity and the trend of real-time web. Especially with facebook acquiring friendfeed and then releasing the code in a open source project called tornado. Still, there is more than just imitating the hot new kid on the block. Here is why:

Facebook lite is has two goals:

• Making the user experience simpler, by removing unnecessary functions or noise.
• Making the service usable in countries or places where there is a lack of broadband internet

Facebook needed to change this because it is too hard to use for most celebrities, as stated in this post about twitter being underhyped:

Other services are too hard for the celebrities to use, particularly from their mobile phones. I’ve been using the new Facebook app on my iPhone, but it has some severe limitations for businesses and celebrities.

Later Scoble states what are the problems with facebook today and it’s limitations:

Facebook has brand troubles. Most people like facebook for its private features (my wife can send me and a select group of friends our baby photos, for instance but the newer public features, like fan pages, are misunderstood). If I were Mark Zuckerberg I would split these two usage models into two: one usage model that’s kept behind the privacy walls. Another that I would call "facebook public" that would be all the totally public features, including search and APIs.

Twitter might rule Hollywood because of its simplicity, anybody can send a SMS. Also if you think about it, it gives celebrities a direct connection to their fans, eliminating the middle man: media. Even if they use ghost writers [link a ghost writers], they have more control than using media.

The above lead me to think that facebook doesn’t care about the average Jane or Joe posting on twitter, but getting the celebrities or public figures. They have been pitching to them (celebrities), to use the fan pages in facebook, but have had  little success compared to twitter. This is due to their complexity and ambiguity of facebook fan pages. With facebook lite, things might change, thanks to a redesign of the newsfeed (or stories). In the new design, we have three buttons to post: text, photos or video. Also we have nested comments, excluding the image of the friend that commented. And that is all, no more birthdays and other unnecessary information.

Still is very hard  to make celebrities do everything through facebook, even with the twitter facebook app.

If you think facebook is not going after celebrities and public figures, then just read this from the facebook blog:

Public figures, musicians, businesses and organizations of all types who’ve created Facebook Pages often want to share a status update, a photo or an event with as many of their supporters as possible. Celebrities may want to share personal news or charities may want to put out calls for help to both their Facebook fans and their Twitter followers, all at the same time.

If you manage a Facebook Page, you now will be able to decide whether to share updates with their Twitter followers, and you also will be able to control what type of updates to share: status updates, links, photos, notes, events or all of them. If you have multiple Pages, you will have the option to link each of those Pages to different Twitter accounts. This new feature will soon be available at http://www.facebook.com/twitter.

As you can see, the idea is to bring celebrities and public figures on board of the facebook ship and from there they can take row boats (i.e twitter) to get to other places.

No Clone Wars for you

I must admit that twitter and facebook lite are very similar, it might even be seen as a upgrade to twitter (with threading and no character limits), still there is more than what meets the eye. First of all, twitter’s connections with others is loose: if your profile is public anybody can follow you or see your posts. In contrast facebook requires both parties need to agree (one sends the requests the other accepts) to be able to become friends. This difference between how people form “ties” or connections, is what determines how both services will be used.

Facebook original idea is to connect and keep in touch with people you knew face to face. The reason you may need facebook to keep in touch, rather than using traditional tools like Instant Messaging, Email, Phone, etc. Since you know this people you’re connecting with (because of the strong ties made while meeting face to face), in theory you want them to see and share photos and videos from trips, parties and everyday life. In the case of twitter things are very different, initially the idea was to test a new paradigm of communication, or broadcasting what are you doing and sharing ideas. Anybody could follow what where you doing and what ideas you are sharing, meaning that you could follow 20 people, while you are being followed by 4932. Soon it became a source of information (accurate or inaccurate) of what is happening, resulting in a representation of the real-time web.

How you connect with people and how the customer pain was solved, is what makes facebook: facebook and twitter: (you guessed right) twitter. Even if facebooks clones the User eXperience of twitter, facebook will never be a replacement of twitter. However we never said that twitter or any other service out there, could become a extension of facebook, now that is Google scary.

Although most are trying to figure out what exactly the Web  3.0 will be, I like to take a moment and show you what the business model of Web 2.0 was and what is happing today with web a.k.a Web 2.5.

The best way to explain what was the predominant business plan of the Web 2.0 companies, let take a look at this clip from the South Park episode called Gnomes (or “Underpants Gnomes”):

Finished? Cool stuff how the Gnomes business model and Web 2.0  look alike. Here is the comparison:

The success of Google gave “permission” to a bunch of VCs and companies to launch a “cool” or “innovative” way of using the web, getting a bunch of registered users and then (if no big company wants to buy them) try to figure out how to make money i.e facebook and youtube. Being  twitter and friendfeed  the last famous companies of the batch to use Gnomes business model.

With the economic recession [in other words realizing that we can't just waste money on promises and bet on money we don't have], it’s harder for web companies to get funding, if they don’t have clear revenue model (other than advertisement). So, today in the Web 2.5, companies like Vimeo, Animoto, Userfly and Mailchimpp, offer a trial or basic version of the service for free. If you want or need more advance features you can pay a subscription fee or paying as you go. Generally the “pay as you go” is for occasional users. What is interesting is that this is not a new business model, its basically the same used by companies behind  famous “shareware” software. But because the trend is to provide “software as a service” hosted on the “cloud” then, they took the principal of the shareware model and applied it to services. It will not be called the “shareware” model because its not software that you download and installed ( you just log and run it in your browser). The contemporary name is “freemium“.

Finally what is Web 2.5, well here is my kind of chaotic definition:

• Use freemium (or any variation) as their business model
• “the design style is really a re-emergence of the pre-web standards era of the late nineties”
• refocus on mashups and APIs
• target is less mainstream (as a result of a focus on making money)
• better user experience
• transition phase, were the lessons learn from web 2.0, are applied.

Once you have made your video in Animoto, you might want to post it in your blog. If you have WordPress and already wrote the post, and want to include it, the process is not that smooth as it should. Generally I write and then look for the media to include, or included until the post is finish. Animoto has the option of creating a post, that goes to your WordPress drafts, with the “embedded widget” and then you could add the content. However if you include more than one video, your not going to do more than one post? Also I want more control and freedom, copy paste freedom.

Note the reader: It might seen of too complicated for some users and they are better of posting the video from Animoto and then write the blog, true. However the target audience is for people that want to post more than on video or/and want more control.

Here is how you do it:

Go to your Animoto account and play your video.

Then click on the Post/Embed online button, the video will stop.

You will be presented with a variety of social media places where to post the video, choose the Embeded instead. There you will be presented with to options: MySpace and Other Sites. Click on Other sites.

Copy the code and put it on notepad or some text editor.

Here is a sample code that I copy from my video:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://widgets.clearspring.com/o/46928cc51133af17/499300880f97edc6/46928cc565ffaf02/94f136e9/-cpid/791d0466298564d9/autostart/false/widget.js”></script>

Note the two alphanumeric strings above: one in red and the other in blue. You copy the code bellow and assign to the wid the red string and to the pid the blue string. Genearrly the red one will be the same for all your videos in Animoto and the blue one will change every time you generate the code in the site, even for the same video.

['clearspring_widget title="Animoto.com" wid=" " pid=" " width="432" height="260" domain="widgets.clearspring.com"]

(Note the apostrophe betwen the braket and clearspring, that should be removed when posting, is so the wordpress will not try to process it as a widget)

At the end you will end up with the following:

['clearspring_widget title="My Animodo Post Hack" wid="46928cc51133af17" pid="499300880f97edc6" width="300" height="200" domain="widgets.clearspring.com"]

Which will look like this:

[clearspring_widget title="My Animodo Post Hack" wid="46928cc51133af17" pid="499300880f97edc6" width="300" height="200" domain="widgets.clearspring.com"]

You can also change the title, width and height of the widget. The hight and width alters the widget, not the content so you will end up like a “baddly cut off” video, as shown above.

Once you finish, you are ready to put it in your post in HTML or source mode, depending on the editor. You can use the preview button to check how it looks and if you need to tweak the size to goes better with your blog and blogging style.

Conclusion

Social media is about sharing, if you suck at it even with a great product/service, it will not pick up as it should. Animoto uses Clearspring for the posting and embedding of the content produced on the site. Its ok to outsource that, generally those one fit all solution that promise the heavens, don’t do a good job. Usability test will be nice to find where clearspring product fails. At least the Facebook one does a good job if I’m already logged, unfortunately I can’t put it in “my videos”, its posted like YouTube videos.

I log into Facebook and I see the following:

it reads:

Unfortunately, your email notification settings have been lost. You can reset them on the Notifications page. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.

Before going into the boring stuff, did you notice how many spam notifications you could get?

Memo to Facebook: your notifications settings are unnecessary.

If they are subject to some trouble or blunders by developers, why have them? They should make a poll (that will be a differenciator to other Web 2.0 sites: ask your customers what they want) asking how many people actually use the notifications. They don’t even need to have a pool to find out how many times a week a person logs in. You already get your notifications at the bottom right corner, why have the emails. Aren’t emails a thing of the 90′s and chat a thing of the 00′s? Maybe somebody realized that they are useless and removed, thinking that they will be missed, however somebody at Microsoft complain about it.

So, people are at Facebook lost my notification settings? I wonder what else they have lost? Can all the messages in the wall, photos, list of friends, etc. can also be lost. Imagine receiving an email telling you that your photos has been lost, that will be a good one.

The fact is that you don’t pay for this service, therefore you may think “a that is the problem with this free stuff”. However there is “no such thing as a free lunch” and you are not paying for the service, but other people are: the advertisers. They are paying for your attention, so if Facebook devalues it’s service by making such mistakes it will have to answer to the users and the advertisers: double trouble.

By the way Facebook, where is the press release with an apology?

I was reading my RSS feeds and found a post from CrunchGear mentioning that CNN has a service where you can order T-Shirts with your favorite Headlines from CNN and that it can be hack CNN’s headline T-shirt WEB application, for it to show the headline of your choice. How to do this?

Go to this site with the available t-shirt headlines, select any headline of your choice and in the URL e.g.

http://www.cnn.com/tshirt/index.html?headline=Waste food dished up to hungry diners&date=1208772622000&hash=4f2e03baf9a0cc4ed25c0dee1d0a56d3&return_uri=http://www.cnn.com/video/%23/video/world/2008/04/20/vanmarsh.uk.food.whip.cnn&session_id=&

look for the headline GET variable (shown in bold above) and change what is after the equal (=) sign up to the ampersand ( & ) sign. In my case I did the following:

http://www.cnn.com/tshirt/index.html?headline=G to the Square in in kickass mode&date=1208772622000&hash=4f2e03baf9a0cc4ed25c0dee1d0a56d3&return_uri=http://www.cnn.com/video/%23/video/world/2008/04/20/vanmarsh.uk.food.whip.cnn&session_id=&

Change it, press enter and voila you have your customer made T-shirt with CNN logo and date.

Imagine the coolness of this, if you could print T-shirts with custom made headlines and the CNN logo. Wouldn’t you buy one? I mean if CNN permits this with the logo, the satire behind it will be a killer business (of coarse its a niche market, but you get the picture). And for CNN is not a bad thing, they need to moderate the language used, but brand awareness will be created in other markets, suddenly CNN will be “hip” (INMO), don’t you agree?

Give it another twist, which is much better updating your Facebook status or having this custom make T-shirts that you can go around with and tell people how you feel, and that it so important that it made the CNN headlines. Even if Facebook considers doing something like this, CNN is CNN and expressing your self using the CNN logo, it’s “too cool for school”.

Called the Microhoo merger, is the name given to Microsoft hostile takeover [intentions] of Yahoo. This is old new right? Well apparently it has reached very complex levels (well not that complex just like WTF levels), but you get the picture. If you don’t get the picture here is one created by News.com:

Source News.com (click on the picture if you want to see a bigger version)

When I see all the drama and players involved, a movie comes to my mind: She’s the man. If you don’t believe me, here is a video based and inspired on the trailer of the movie:

[Sorry if the video made you dizzy.]

Yes the IT companies in USA are just to bored to just figure out things in the fast and quiet way. Not like Sun acquisition of MySQL, which was short and sweet, and the best of all it was a surprise, no speculation, no drama. But the most interesting thing about this is what Kieth McFarland pointed out in his blog post “The Pestilence Called Microsoft Vista”:

Better stop worrying so much about how to buy Yahoo and start thinking about boring stuff like building products that work. Microsoft has always been able to talk (and spend) its way out of a jam in the past, but this Vista thing is different. Time for a wake up call.

Kieth is right and it makes all the sense of the world. Why try to add more stuff to fix when you can’t fix your own? The worst is that companies get caught up and “hyper concentrate” in this deal and in Google. And think “all unite against the big bad monster Google”. They say that history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes, well some years ago companies were looking at Microsoft with the same eye.

The worst thing is that Microsoft still has a monopoly, like Kieth points out in his most recent blog post “Vista Still Sucks”. What other option does regular non Mac owners have? Ubuntu? Suse? Mandriva? My brother is tech savvy and still uses Windows (Vista on his new XPS desktop). Hell I still use Windows XP, but have Ubuntu in dual boot and a Bad Vista sicker on the back of notebook screen .

If Microsoft has a monopoly in the OS market and now wants to control the market that Google controls, but doesn’t know how to. So, the brightest idea they got is to buy Yahoo (who used to control the market) but is teasing everybody and just wants it shares to go up or thinks AOL will save them. Also, Microsoft buys stake of Facebook, in case Facebook becomes the next Google, but every body in the world knows that will never happen. Sometimes I think that Ballmer is just creating a smoke screen so people don’t see the real story about Microsoft. It’s similar tactic politics use in Honduras and other Latin America countries to distract the attention from their corruption scandals. (I’m from Honduras and don’t have any proof of it, but doesn’t mean its not true.)

At the end is just Microsoft not accepting that there is a bigger bully in the playground, doesn’t want to share the it (at any cost). One word: greed.

Forget about Google, let Google worry about Google, mind your own business and more important ,mind your own customers. Most companies don’t need to merger or buy with others to improve sales or grow, just need to think outside the box and take care of their customers (and monopolies). Then again that is what USA likes to do, “hyper concentrate” on stuff, create drama from everything (their politics is great example of it), be greedy and move on like nothing happened. Still they have some entertaining stuff going around (e.g NBA playoffs).

I wonder where Apple is in this whole mess? I guess they are the smart hottie that realizes they should mind their own business.

Enter Annika Lidne, from Lidne Inc. She is here to talk about hwy she loves social media and hate Facebook. Again I didn’t take notes (but next one and forward I did).

Annika starts with the walled garden effect and AOL. I have never heard about the walled garden effect, but knew about AOL and how it was the gran daddy of Internet (in USA) a decade ago. Basically the walled garden effect (for those who don’t know) it’s a closed set of services provided to users, such as Facebook. They want everybody and everything to stay in Facebook, because they revenue comes from on ads on Facebook. The problem with this is that sooner or later something better comes or people get sick of being “taken hostage” in this beautiful walled garden, so they leave. Such as it happened with AOL, since users needed to navigate the Internet through their browser. This  also was a pain for content providers because they needed to fit AOL requirements.

For more on walled garden check out this post. Here is a guy starts on justifying why he refuses to participate in social networks, which leads to the walled garden discussion.

Annika talked about how this is a women’s world since there are more girl or woman bloggers than men (she gave stats for Sweden, not the world which is suspicious since women in Sweden kick ass), the same with social network activity. But she forgot to mention that men still rule, even if there is a shift, we still rule (sorry but is true and it doesn’t mean it’s a good thing, but its true.)

Girls dominating social media should not be a surprise, since girls (in their teens especially) have this tendency to talk a lot. Remember back in the days when there was no internet, and how girls will also monopolized the phone for hours, talking and talking. Same today, but they got IM, SMS, they got social networks and now they figured out that blogs are a way to expressed out of the “walled garden”. All the  tools mentioned  above, help keep in touch with most of their friends on the same time, which is a way of life and not just a phase.

Teenage girls want to express themselves in so many ways; in contrast boys are happy with their video games and porn. (Yes I said porn and I don’t think today with the Internet a teenage boy haven’t seen a naked women in some way.)

For those that where at Facebook Garage, you may remember the presentation highlight was in the Q&A, when a guy monopolized it by attacking here and questioning why she hated Facebook. The guy needed a chill pill, since it looked like a vendetta against Annika. It just show how people are different and need different things. So if you need something more personalized and don’t have what it takes to do a social network from the scratch, maybe you can make one at Ning. At Ning you can create a  social network of anything, for example nustart students at KTH, Olimpia fans in La Ceiba or I want to learn Swedish but I’m lazy social network. I guess you got the point.

At the end of the day maybe Facebook is doomed, but blogs will live another day and that is why they state that the next social network will be wordpress.

Jonas just started with a video promoting MySpace.

Talked about MySpace but there is not much new.

He also presented the app galleria and that is..

And without anything he left…