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Social Media Week

Hundreds of social media events were held in cities all over the world last week and the madness has now just about drawn to a close. If you didn’t manage to get yourself down to an event, all is not lost, many of the events were streamed therefore you can catch up via the SMW live stream page. There were countless highlights throughout the week that a simple Google search will provide you, however one of our favourites was the ‘Can Make Live on Social Media Alone’ experiment. Could 2 intrepid travellers swap cities and depend on nothing but social media and the goodwill of locals to survive in foreign lands? Along with the clothes on their back, they were allowed a survival kit of 10 items of their choice and a Nokia Lumia 800 Smartphone. Check out their week long experiment on Tumblr.

Facebook Timeline comes to brands

In September 2011, during Facebook’s F8 conference, the company announced it would be introducing a major redesign update to the iconic timeline, changing it into a content-heavy mega-scrapbook of users’ entire history on the platform. At the time, they said they would wait to roll out the new features across brand pages. Well the wait is over. According to Ad Age, citing “executives briefed on Facebook’s plans,” the company will use its February 29th conference for marketers in New York to announce a phased rollout. What does this mean? Well as an agency it’s an exciting time as this will give us to opportunity to explore and take advantage of new features such as going beyond the simple gesture of ‘liking’ and expressing interaction in a much deeper way. It would seem the beta roll-out will only initially be available to a select few brands however we look forward to hearing more on Feb 29th!

Ecommerce meets social shopping

We’ve been keeping our eye on Startup Fab.com since it relaunched last year which focuses on a curated approach to ecommerce. In less than 8 months Fab has increased its worldwide membership to more than 2.3 million members expecting to make $100 million in sales this year. The company announced yesterday that it has acquired the German startup Casacanda whose model is extremely similar to Fab’s approach however targets German markets. Fab has since re-launched the acquired startup which already had 250,000 members and rebranded as Fab.de.

Visually, Fab has a distinct design and bears a remarkable resemblance to Pinterest, another startup which displays how curated design seems to be the hot topic at the moment however Pinterest is not an ecommerce platform whereas Fab sells every one of the products you see on site. Social design and development is also core to Fab’s proposition with a live feed of all product purchases displaying real-time information about purchase trends. Over half of it’s members came from Facebook and this can be attributed to Fab’s early partnership with Facebook’s Open Graph expansion which displays all purchases on friends’ Facebook feeds. It will be interesting to see what the future holds for the company, it was only a matter of time until ecommerce met social shopping and at the moment, Fab is leading the way.

State of the web highlights

LinkedIn reaches the 150 million mark – Following the release of LinkedIn’s Q4 2011 financial figures, the company announced a significant milestone in passing the 150 million member mark cementing its’ place as the dominant professional social network.

Obama does it again – Last December President Barack Obama ran a #40dollars Hashtag campagn in response to Republican tax plans. It was a brilliant success helping to raise ordinary peoples’ voices and make them heard. It is a great way of connecting with people and that is why the White house has decided to renew the campaign.

Google launchers developers page – Google+ passed the 100 million users mark so it was probably about time the company launched a G+ developers page. Google announced in a blog post that the developers page will help all stay connected to the latest platform news, events and community with regular hosted hangouts to talk about the +Platform.