Monthly Archives: October 2007

Facebook owns you and your life

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Swedens biggest newspaper Dagens Nyheter (DN) has a piece on Facebook and integrity today. I believe that a lot of the people signing up to a Facebook account just ignores the EULA, I know that I did. But now the DN warns the swedes that Facebook owns everything you add to the application.

You may believe that it is free to join, but you pay with your personal integrity and future. 30 years from now when applying for a job, the recruiter may be able to read everything you have written.

The European Union, through its Agency for Network Security (ENISA), also informs the citizens of the European Union on Social Networks, Security and Personal Integrity in a press-release named How Safe is ‘Social Networking’?.

There you can read

Thousands of young people are revealing the most intimate details of their personal lives for everyone to see

I think it is interesting and important that these issues arise. People tends to like the open atmosphere as long as everything runs smoothly, but as soon as it gets used the wrong way, it will be a little more complicated.

Name and focus change

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I will keep on writing about JavaScript, jQuery if I find material interesting in the future, I may review a book or two in the area. But from now on I will focus on Online Marketing, Affiliate Business, Social Networking, Search Engine Optimization and other areas that explode right now.

And btw, I changed the blogs name to “The Frontend”, still the same URL though. :-)

Facebook Flyers – CTR and CPC

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I promised to deliver the stats on Facebook Flyers. I bought 5000 page impressions for $10 and my estimate was that 1-2% would click on the Flyer.

I got 25 clicks, thats a CTR on 0,5%, a little higher than what I got on AdWords Content Network, but much lower than Adwords shown in search result for the same ad-type. Avg CPC on Google Adwords is $0.50 and $0.40 on Facebook Flyers.

No deeper analysis, but it seems that Facebook Flyers is a good complement to Google Adwords and that the estimated cost more or less is the same (or a little bit lower in this example). I am, however, a bit disappointed, I dont know why, but maybe I have been bitten by the Facebook-bug and start to think that everything they touch turns to gold. ;-)

The Facebook vs. MySpace Platform Competition – The Analysis

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According to TechCrunch MySpace will launch MySpace Platform next week. The release of the Facebook Platform in may this year is probably one of the reason for the extreme success Facebook is enjoying right now. As TechCrunch points out, there will be even more competition in this area in the coming future:

Suddenly Facebook, with nearly 5,500 third party applications, has significant competition around their platform – Within a month both MySpace and Google (see our post here) will probably have launched their own services. Platform competition is great for developers, but it also means they need to create and maintain separate code for each platform they choose to play on. Someone is hopefully working on a startup that will streamline that process for people. Whoever does it first, and best, can have a winner on their hands.

Ad Yahoo! to this and 2-10 today known and not known social networks with open API:s for social applications. Developers do not want to create x number of variations of their application. As I see it there are three possible ways this will evolve:

  • All the big ones will sit down and decide on a standard API in order to not miss any good application within their Platform.
  • An external player will create and manage a standardized API that will offer cross-platform-support
  • Different platforms will expose different API:s and see this as a “feature” and “offer” to the application developers.

The first point is the W3C-way, really slow, difficult to achieve and probably totally useless and will slow down the fast growing social application development taking place right now. The second solution is a dreamy black-box-solution that will make programmers and architects wet their pants when they think they have solved the problem. The problem is that the problem is too big to solve and the black-box will be a big huge code-bucket of spaghetti. The third way is the natural way, we have seen the browser wars go there, and all poker- and casino-networks today work like this, making it hard to create platform-independent software.

So the analysis is that Social Networking and Open API:s will make development of web-based applications even more complex and harder to maintain. Thats the sad truth but we will probably see a lot of cool and interesting applications.

But, if someone creates this magic black box solution to this, they will be one step closer to the secrets of alchemy.

Facebook Flyers – thoughts and estimates

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I bought some adspace today on Facebook Flyers, I believe this will be huge! But I have to wait two days before I make some analysis of the results, but it is much easier to target your audience than with Google Adwords. I will post before saturday with conversion rates/CTR and so on. The pricing starts very low, so it is easy to just try out, I think I have just found a new way to drive traffic!