social media Archive

Over the past few weeks, the tech blogospehere has been up all night writing posts about how Facebook makes it nearly impossible to delete an account. And this weekend saw a bunch of posts with regards to a specific user and why his account was reinstated. I’ve been thinking about a way for Facebook to fix the user deletion issue and the fix is actually quite simple. It appears the process is so complicated and/or different than other online services that there’s a Facebook group setup just to help you delete your Facebook account.

From what I understand, the current process to delete/cancel a Facebook account is as follows:

• user visits the account deletion page
• user goes through all of the steps to delete their account — confirmations, captchas, etc.
• once user makes it past all of the security clearances then clicks the final deletion button
• account is still “live” but is now placed into a 14-day hold period. If during the 14-day period, user has logged into Facebook, their delete request is removed.

The 14-day delete window appears to be the issue – this is not a typical behavior of a Web app. The Facebook delete group notes, “You must NOT log in to, or interact in any other way with Facebook for at least two weeks, as it will cancel the deletion request. That includes NOT logging in to Facebook using any client (like the iPhone app or IM:s like Pidgin), NOT clicking embedded Like-buttons on other websites, NOT logging in to other services using Facebook Connect (like Digg) etc etc.”

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Mike Arauz, a digital media strategist, had a great observation in March of 2009:

If I tell my Facebook friends about your brand, it’s not because I like your brand, but rather because I like your friends.

Spot on, and it applies to friends, and sharing, generally — not just to Facebook.

But on Friday, I received the email below from American Airlines.

American should read the Mike Arauz quote above a few hundred times, because they did basically everything wrong. Why is American Airlines explicitly asking me to spam my friends? And why do they think I’d sell my friends for a handful of air miles?

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Yesterday I noted that I thought the social sharing widgets would add the Facebook Like button in the near future. Little did I know that it would be less than 24 hours after my post!

AddThis has announced the launch of an updated version of their social sharing widget which incorporates the Facebook like button. AddThis community manager Justin Thorpe sent over the announcement which included, “Our goal with the AddThis sharing platform is to make it easy for anyone to share anything anywhere.  We’re excited to make the Facebook  Like button functionality available to our community of 1.2 million  websites.”

Currently the new AddThis code has to be implemented outside of their normal widget code but the announcement post notes that integrated code is coming soon. They also note that their analytics tools will also be upgraded to allow for Facebook Like button analytics.

As the social sharing widgets add the new like buttons, it makes me wonder if OpenLike will be able to gain traction past a niche developer community.

Here’s a live sample of the updated AddThis widget (RSS come inside to view):
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We all know how beneficial social media is to the bottom line of any business – heck, we hear it from the social media experts every day. But what if you aren’t interested in managing the social media tasks for your own firm but want to reap the rewards? Now you can hire a social media and search engine optimization firm to manage all of your social media needs for you. I guess it might make sense for some companies – if you outsource your customer service (email and phone) then why not also outsource the online customer interactions.

The below chart was sent to me by a social media and search engine optimization firm earlier this week. They offer a variety of package deals to not only save me money but also get me maximium results for my startup CloudContacts. Their pitch was simple, “We can help you in building brand recognition of your website so that conversion rate on your website goes way up.” They closed by noting that by using their service I would receive “intense results.”

So what do you get for your money?

• $1,000/month on Facebook = 5 managed profiles, 1 fan page, 250 discussions with other Facebook members and 50 status updates
• $900/month on Twitter = 5 managed profiles, 1 new profile creation and 2,000 tweets a month
• They can also bookmark content on the bookmarking services for $500/month

Earlier this morning Venturebeat editor Owen Thomas noticed that some credit card numbers from purchase sharing service Blippy were shared on Google. You can see Owen’s tweet to Blippy staff asking about the issue and here’s the Google search results.

I went through all 16 pages of results on Google and it looks like there are only a few credit card numbers that are repeated many times. From what I can tell, the overall actual credit card numbers shared are less than 10 although this is just from one search query – no idea if other queries would provide more numbers.

I have emailed the Blippy team for more info and will update this post when I hear back.

In other Blippy news, they just announced a new round of funding yesterday – Techcrunch notes a valuation just near $50 million.

Update: Owen has just posted regarding this issue on Venturebeat.

Update 2: If you change the timeframe on the Google search results, it looks like this data is at least two weeks old. The numbers only appear in the “all time” results.

Update 3: VentureBeat spoke with Blippy founder Pud – read the full email here – it appears as I noted above, it was only for 4 credit cards during their very early days. I’m not sure how that changes how Blippy users will feel about any cc numbers being publicly shared.

Here’s a sample from Google – I crossed out the actual credit card numbers.

Earlier this week AJ Batac posted on Friendfeed about Pubwich, an “open-source online data aggregation PHP application.” I was intrigued, so I decided to check it out. The application is still very young, with a lot of work to be done, but it’s a great idea.

Initially, I was hoping that Pubwich would actually aggregate data from multiple sources into a single interface (the way Friendfeed does), but I soon learned that it actually just allows you to place information from multiple sources on a single page. Still, though, I think it’s a great idea and shows a lot of promise. In my case, at work, we have five Facebook fan pages, a Twitter account, a Flickr account, a YouTube account and at least two major RSS feeds. Rather than simply providing our users with links to each of those accounts, Pubwich provides me with an easy way to show our newest information to our visitors in one place. Read the rest of this entry »

Today is Friday and I am thinking that starting today, every Friday we will share a fun app. These fun apps probably won’t make millions of dollars nor are they platforms that are built on top of other platforms, but they will be fun and will have value.

The first fun app only took me a few seconds to see both the fun and the value. It’s called draw.to and is the most simple online drawing app I’ve seen to-date. It uses HTML5 (no Flash) and works online and on the iPhone and iPad.

There isn’t much to explain with draw.to. You can pick from a few brushes and you start drawing. You can use a previous design in the gallery as a starting point as well. I found it to be pretty addicting. After you create a design, you can share it around the Web and if it receives enough shares, it will hit the main draw.to gallery.

I could see consumer brands using a white-label version of draw.to for contests – so there is a potential business model for draw.to. Thinking back in my consumer marketing days, the real power with draw.to as a contest app is that the drawings could be shared across the social networks which would drive traffic back to the contest and to the brand.

Draw.to was created by a Melbourne, Australia-based developer working part-time from January-March.

Here are a few examples of what people have drawn on draw.to — they are pretty amazing! If you create a masterpiece, leave a link in the comments and I will add it to the post.