8 months ago Cynthia Holmes uploaded a lo-fi video to You Tube. The video featured two otters holding hands (it’s paws I think Cynthia unless Otters have developed opposable thumbs).
In that time it’s racked up a staggering 8.5 million views. It’s 1 minute 40 seconds long and the second most recent comment is ‘just imagine what they do when the kids leave the zoo?’. Wonder at their opposable thumbs one supposes. Read the rest of this entry »
Last week was all about Google’s Open Social announcement, grouping together MySpace, LinkedIn and other social networking sites to create a common developer environment and put the virtual squeeze on Facesoft to join the party and create a true widegetocracy.
Ah, heaven, develop a killer widget, no need to develop on various disparate platforms, just a one size fits all wrapper enabling people to share the goodness of the widget with everyone, who… well… anyone who is on a social network and with the launch of a silver surfers network by Saga (them of the Club 55-80 holidays) that includes your Bad Uncle Bobby and his new wife Patty with the implants.
Now all we need is some real innovation in the widget sphere, like a widgetzine, filtered content from around the web.
SocialAds, that’s what they’re calling it in advance of Facebook’s announcement about it’s own social ad network on the 6th.
What does it mean? Basically Facesoft will serve ads based on your social stream, even use that information to serve ads on third party sites within the Microsoft ad network.
If internet privacy is not already a concern of yours then this is probably akin to having your wallet stolen, unsettling, but not life threatening, I mean they could have stolen an organ or a limb or something. If internet privacy is a concern then things just got a bit armageddon on yo ass. Read the rest of this entry »
‘Areae’s Metaplace platform wants to revolutionize the virtual worlds space. Their platform will provide an open, easy-to-use interface which will allow users to create virtual worlds that can run anywhere. Metaplace-created virtual worlds will be robust with users being able to play games, socialize, create content and conduct commerce. ‘ (TC)
If and when we get the chance to play with this metawetdream we’ll be better able to say how brands might easily create their own virtual worlds, but for now we’ll just have to invent the spurious term, ‘brandual’ half brand, half virtual and nothing whatsoever to do with the word ‘granule’ which it sounds a bit like.
Back in deepest darkest September, the 12th to be specific, I made up a word.
Appvertising: branded web application
It had 3 Google entries all referring to the Appalachian Mountain Range. My challenge to myself was to see if I couldn’t up the Google listings a bit, which for the sake of pure entertainment, we’ll call Google Gaming (even better played on a Wii).
I wrote a few posts about appvertising revelling in it’s perfectly formed wordiness, the prodigal child of advertising and application I approached the marketing directors of EasyJet and Virgin to tell them all about the appvert we could build them and how digi funky they’d be. Figuring I was writing from a weight gain company they never replied.
‘Daft Punk, the French electronic duo known for making music that scares your cat and using robots for live shows, are being hip again. This time, they’ve decided to promote their new live album, Alive, with an embeddable widget, which allows visitors to listen to previews of new tracks, buy the single, read Daft Punk’s biography, read the newsletter, and see a photo gallery of the band.
The widget below is yet another proof that “standard” promotional tools are giving way to web based promotion and social networking. And, since the creation of such a widget costs next to nothing, we expect to see more and more bands take this route and move much of their marketing activities online.’ (via Mashable)
It’s Friday and normally Friday posts are lite hearted web porn lite, but I uncovered this story from the 2500 posts I’ve yet to read through in my RSS reader. At Fat Man Towers we’ve been binge eating and developing widget concepts as promotional tools so this is sweet electro funk to our ears. The widget sphere is open for innovation and savvy content creators and brands should be looking to provide ‘value’ widgets, micro applications that people can share, or to return to a familiar theme, appvertising made portable.
So the blogosphere and news aggregators are buzzing with Microsoft’s $240million investment in Facebook in return for the rights to sell third party ads on the social operating system du jour and a 1.6% stake, valuing Facesoft at $15billion.
Well blow me down with a modified hacked hairdryer that’s enough money to buy Bulgaria.
Om Malik has a good breakdown of what this might mean, but I wanted to pick up on the whole ‘does Microsoft now have access to our personal data?’ issue. Read the rest of this entry »
Like the ability to make the Queen’s face on a £10 note look like John McEnroe, rumours abound as to why there is an empty row on the iPhone screen.
Well come January 15th 2008 El Job’s ‘Big Mac’ World announcement may be the opening of the iPhone software development package to third party developers. Seems they’ve been monitoring all the hacks and learning from them. Given Apple estimate they will have sold 8 million handsets by the end of next year, this presents a great opportunity for developers. Whilst the talk is of games, voip apps and services I hope to see savvy brands looking at developing branded applications and using the iPhone as an appvertising platform. Read the rest of this entry »
Yikes the knives are out and Signor MySpace had better watch out for the stiletto of spam at it’s throat.
Via Read/Write and Techcrunch we learn that MySpace is set to launch a 3rd party developer platform. Given their track record of blocking widgets on personal pages we can all sleep soundly knowing Facebook will live to see another day. ‘Bring on the virtual poop.’ goes the battle cryfrom the turrets of Castle Zukerberg.
Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read/Write makes some very good points, notably that Facebook has not garnered such rapid user numbers just by opening up it’s platform.
‘I have said before and I’ll say again that the rise of Facebook has been in spite of the opening of the Facebook platform, if anything. It’s a result of the maturing demographics of social networking services, a backlash against the wretched user experience of the poorly designed and spam ridden MySpace and the power of syndication represented by the Facebook wall.’Read the rest of this entry »
Vainly trawling Google for any further viral leakage on ‘appvertising’ I stumbled across this report from the Graphing Social Patterns Conference in San Jose which is currently taking place:
Seth Goldstein (inventor of Food Fight on Facebook):
‘Advertising = Appvertising.
Facebook could provide the promise of personalized advertising because advert is tied to social data.
Facebook will provide new models of advertising that weren’t possible until now.
You can ask questions across applications that can reach hundreds of thousands of people.
Need to build advertising specifically for social networks.
I was shocked how Facebook users provided information about themselves.
In our Food Fight application people earn virtual money by answering questions and then they can pay for food to throw. We found many would pay 20 times more for throwing “poop.”
Can you make a business from throwing “poop?” People want to do things they can’t do in real life. I don’t do it and I don’t think it is sustainable. But the engagement levels are out of control.’
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