Blog posts in the State of the web category

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.

Forced to use Facebook Timeline

Some of you may know about the Facebook timeline, some of you may not, but in the next few weeks you won’t have a choice. The timeline update is one of the largest changes Facebook have pushed to us and soon it will be unleashed to 750 million people around the planet. The timeline will effectively replace the iconic Facebook Profile and will turn your life into a megascrapbook by visually displaying your Facebook archive of content. It has been in beta for a little while now for the select group of people who wanted it however there are a few haters of the new features (as with every other update Facebook bring along) and this is why.

The new timeline continues to display a chronological stream of your activity however now it will regurgitate everything from your past. As you scroll down the page you’ll see notable status updates, wall posts, shared content, photo albums and tagged photos, all there unmissable to anyone who wants to see. Holiday snaps, wedding day photos, house parties, university graduation, your 21st birthday, your first girlfriend, alot of things you personally might not want to be reminded of let alone your entire network.

The update however should be less catastrophic for people due to the staggered rollout and the fact that you will get a 7-day count down until the old profile layout is no longer an option. Protests will no doubt spike when the day comes you are required to use the new Timeline, however the recent launch of 60 Timeline apps will support the changeover and we think people will get to grips with the update sooner rather than later.

Google pulls more services

In a recent blog post Google announced their focus would shift to ‘building amazing products that millions of people love to use everyday” which means diverting their attention from products and services that “haven’t achieved the promise they had hoped for”. Services such as Google Message Continuity (GMS) email disaster recovery product will be closed and Google Sky Map will be open sourced.

Google’s vice president of product management, Dave Girouard, stated in the blog post that some products and services were not “experiencing the kind of adoption we’d like”. Some other products being abandoned this year are Social Graph API a developer tool to utilise public connections, Needlebase data management platform that may potentially be integrated into another platform, Urchin the online web analytics product and Picnik the online photo editor which its premium members will receive a full refund in the coming weeks.

Google regularly deprecates many of its projects when user adoption is poor or the products do not integrate properly into the overall Google experience therefore this recent update is no surprise and we can expect more of this over the year.

State of the web highlights

Breaking down Google’s 2011 revenue – Earlier in the month Google announced their 2011 earnings and jumping on this data Wordstream has conducted an analysis of these earnings and produced an infographic displaying the 10 top industries that spent the most money with Google and the common keywords that these advertisers pay for. Check it out.

The future of digital displays – Touchscreen is here to stay but with ever-evolving digital displays who knows where the future will take us. Corning a world leading high-tech glass manufacturer have produced a video to tell the “story of how highly engineered glass, with companion technologies, will help shape our world. Watch it here.

Google ‘Search, Plus Your World’ Update

A presence on Google+ is now something brands should be considering more than ever. The network grew to 62 million users at the end of 2011, rumours spread that they had hit 90 million just last week with predictions that the figure will reach 400 million by the end of this year.

The recent Google updates have brought ‘social search’ to 2012 and it has been causing a bit of a stir. Google has now started to use social signals from your Google+ accounts to incorporate social data into personalised results page. The concerns raised are that Google is clearly biased to its own network over the social behemoths Facebook and Twitter which undoubtedly are a major source of valuable content and real-time data. This is not to say that integration of other social networks will not happen but for the time being it would seem Google+ is the place to be and brands should be prepared for this. Read more about the Search, plus Your World update here.

Facebook launches 60 new timeline apps

On Wednesday 18th Facebook unveiled its plans to give users more ways of sharing what they are doing with friends with the launch of its new timeline apps. Many big time brands have already jumped on-board with 60 new apps announced from the likes of TicketMaster, Pinterest, TripAdvisor, Spotify and Foursquare. As Facebook describe it in their latest post “you can now enhance your timeline with apps that help you tell your story, whether you love to cook, eat, travel, run, or review movies.” Using Facebook’s Open Graph platform any brand can create an app that will sit in the users’ timeline.
This a great opportunity for brands to increase touchpoints with new audiences since the app gives updates that will appear in their friends’ tickers and news feeds – success will boil down to creating  an app that users feel compelled to use every day and more crucially something they want to share with their friends and network.

What 2012 holds for Social Video

According to e-consultancy social video campaigns generated 820m views in 2009, 2.7bn views in 2010, and over 8bn views in 2011. They predict this figure will double again in 2012. What’s driving growth to social video? Device proliferation, the increasing number of people  watching social video on phone and tablet mobile devices; the normalisation of cross-platform consumption and social gaming are cited. Brands are also getting smarter around the advertising possibilities of branded content – the days of the pre-roll ad look numbered as pioneering brands get more creative. Think the Old Spice ‘The man your man could smell like’ series of viral hits, and Volkswagon’s ‘The Force’ ad which became the most shared ad of all time jumping from 100,000 to 1m views in just a few hours. Read on for social video predictions for 2012.

The darkest of days

#Daywithoutwikipedia became a trending topic on Twitter on Wednesday  18th sparked by their decision to blackout to the English version of the site for 24hours to protest against two pieces of US legislation, the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act. They weren’t alone – Reddit, WordPress, MoveOn.org, Mozilla joined them in the protest which spread to more than 10,000 websites. Many sites blacked out completely, others covered their logos in black including Google who posting this message next to the search bar “Tell Congress- please don’t censor the web”

To do justice to the implications of such legislation we’ll cover it more in another post (coming soon) but for now have cherry-picked quotes that give a flavour of what happened on Wednesday.

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, on Twitter  “This is going to be wow, I hope Wikipedia will melt phone systems in Washington on Wednesday. Tell everyone you know!”

Wikipedia: “Wikipedians have chosen to black out the English Wikipedia for the first time ever, because we are concerned that SOPA and PIPA will severely inhibit people’s access to online information. This is not a problem that will solely affect people in the United States: it will affect everyone around the world.”

The “We the People” petition, authored by several White House staffers under the Obama administration: “While we are strongly committed to the vigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights, existing tools are not strong enough to root out the worst online pirates beyond our borders. That is why the Administration calls on all sides to work together to pass sound legislation this year that provides prosecutors and rights holders new legal tools to combat online piracy originating beyond U.S. borders while staying true to the principles outlined above in this response.”

And what was Twitter’s position on the blackout? CEO Dick Costolo wrote “that’s just silly. Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish” Though did later concede that Twitter is among those opposing SOPA and PIPA (in case you were wondering 2.4 million SOPA-related tweets were sent between 12 a.m. and 4 p.m. on Wednesday 18th Twitter announced.)