I’m someone that is eager to try out the latest Web 2.0 tools, be it Twitter, Powcne, Jaiku, etc. One of my frustrations is that I have to essentially start over every time I create an account on one of these things. I have to enter the same profile information over and over, and, more importantly, I have to recreate my network on every one of these sites.

It gets old quick and is one of the reasons I personally haven’t embraced social networking to the extent others have. I just don’t have the energy to maintain presences on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace, etc.

Tony Macdonnell feels my pain and suggests creating a portable “friends” system using OpenID. Here is the gist of it:

I’d love to see OpenID be able to support some kind of “Friend Confirmation” system that would allow me to submit my OpenID to a social network like Pownce (which I am currently going though the “Friend Finding Headache” with), and have it automatically add all my friends that are members of that application. It would be amazing if applications could also add new friends of mine back to my OpenID as well. With this I could traverse all the brilliant applications in the Web 2.0 world taking all my friends along for the ride with me.

I’m not sure this is the exact right solution, but it is certainly on the right track. It is time for your friend’s list to be made portable.

When I first heard that the BBC assigned a reporter, Ben Hammersley, to report about Turkey's elections via several social networks, I wondered how the Beeb would present the reporting. 

Would it just leave all the information at the individual sites and hope that people would navigate to the other reporting?  Would it place links or somehow coax the social networks to allow it to advertise the other sites on each reporting page?  Or would it cull all the data into one place?

It has chosen the third option; see the Webreporter: Turkish journey page.  I like how this page serves as a quasi-portal to the reporting spread out over various sites.  This serves as a place for the reporting to combine while maintaining a consistent layout (with the exception of the Google map with Hammersley's route) but still leaves reporting spread out.  In a sense, the reporting serves as bait to lure flickr, del.icio.us, Twitter, etc. users to the BBC's site — a rather interesting marketing campaign.  I wonder how Twitter, Yahoo!, Google, etc. feel about this.

Oh yeah, thanks for the link and traffic to my previous post, BBC.  I'm chuffed.

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen harangues Mother Jones, the left-leaning investigatory magazine, for its feature package titled "Politics 2.0" in which it basically asks, "Are we entering a new era of digital democracy-or just being conned by a bunch of smooth-talking geeks?"

Rosen, an open source advocate, accuses that "The Mother Jones editors had a great story about politics and the web within their grasp, but they were too busy fabricating myths they could bust up later— and so they missed it."

So, what do y'all think about Politics 2.0?  How would you answer MoJo's questions like:

Blogs, social networking, and viral video are redefining where political discussion takes place. But are they just replacing the old machine bosses with a new group of bullies?

Is old media dead, or is the blogosphere just a flash in the pan?

I don't think that Politics 2.0 is dead since most of the major 2008 presidential hopefuls are courting bloggers, using video sites like YouTube, or deploying social networks on their campaign sites.  In fact, it probably is growing since the mainstream media just loves covering politics on the Internet as well.  However, I'm biased.

I openly admit that I don't get the whole point of twitter.  I'm not that interesting, and the stuff I do isn't either.  However, some people love it.

Well, twittervision makes tweets that much more interesting as it shows the geographic location of a tweet on a Google map of the world.  This seems like an interesting use of a Google API.  In fact, seeing tweets pop up from all over the world is fascinating.  Perhaps this is how I'll get hooked… (Click on the image for a clearer view)

This morning Todd gave me the somewhat amusing task of tracking down some cool applications on Facebook.  In browsing through the network's new features, I realized that there are applications for just about any activity imaginable, from tracking restaurants, movies, and music, to adding pictures of cute bunnies to one's profile.  A lot of these applications remind me of features available on MySpace, including the photo slideshow applications and the "top friends" apps, which allow you to designate who your "best friends" are within your profile.  There are, however, some really useful and interesting ideas that developers have come up with for Facebook. A few of my favorites are listed below.

Useful Apps 

I am all for tools that enable me to condense all my web surfing in one place.  The Feeds application allows you to list all your favorite RSS feeds in your profile by creating a Feed Book. The application also helps you share your feeds with friends and see what feeds are the most popular across the whole network. Digg and del.icio.us also have useful applications that let you display and keep track of your bookmarks using Facebook.

In a similar vein, Flickr Photos allows you to link your Flickr account and your Facebook profile, making all of your photos accessible via Facebook. This is a big time saver for people like me who have tons of digital pictures but hate having to use the Facebook upload tool. 

Two more that I like are Netflix Movies and Flixster.  Netflix Movies displays your Netflix queue and "movies at home" in your profile and updates it once a day.  You can also find friends who are on Netflix. Flixster lets you rate movies and get recommendations from friends.

I also like the idea behind Hangouts, which lets you tell your friends where you're going and keep track of places you like to go.  You can also see what your friends think about some of your favorite hangouts. Eating fits in here, as it lets you track your favorite foods and restaurants.  Use those with Unthirsty, a happy hour finder, and you've got yourself a weekend.

Avid readers might want to check out Visual Bookshelf, iRead, and Books, which let you keep track of your library, rate books, and find others who have books you want to read. 

Not so useful, but still fun 

Besides the useful apps listed above, Facebook is chock full of applications that are pretty useless but still fun and entertaining.

Locational apps like Map Your Friends and Where I've Been let you track your travels and friends' locations on maps. 

The Compass helps you determine your political leanings, while Polls lets you ask your friends questions.

Finally, who wouldn't want pictures of cute bunnies in their profiles? 

By opening its platforms to developers, Facebook is now offering its users a fully customizable environment.  Prior to these developments, a major criticism of the network was that it didn't offer the flexibility of MySpace, which has endless widgets available for its user profiles.  I think this increased flexibility factor is helping Facebook vault to the lead in terms of social networking popularity . 

In all the talk about the Ron Paul online machine, there has been very little discussion of his actual campaign website, which has recently undergone a facelift. His approach is novel. Instead of building an infrastructure on his own campaign website. like most candidates have done, Paul has created a portal to his presences on various third party websites.

The Paul website itself essentially consists of a homepage, an issues section, a bio page, a donation form, a sign up form and a blog. Interestingly for the social candidate, his blog doesn’t even allow comments. Instead, it encourages visitors to discuss/interact with the blog content on social sites like Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Facebook. He seems to deliberately avoid building a community on his own site. Due to this, supporters have no choice but to organize elsewhere.

Paul relies on third party tools for fundamental aspects of his website:

(1) Videos are entirely hosted and served from his YouTube account.

(2) Campaign news gathering and discussion of said news is done via Digg. Paul is the only candidate I’ve seen that includes a prominent link to a Digg search of his name right on his own homepage.

(3) Paul’s schedule is kept exclusively on Eventful.

(4) Supporters are encouraged to create their own events on Meetup.

(5) Campaign gear is sold exclusively through a store hosted by Cafe Press.

(6) All photos are on Flickr.

(7) Social networking occurs on Facebook and MySpace.

His website is basically a mashup of all this stuff, with only a few core functions being performed by the website itself. Lots of campaigns have played around with this stuff. Paul is the only one I’ve seen that truly relies on these tools to perform mission critical campaign functions.

Obviously, as a long shot candidate with a limited budget, the use of these free tools is done out of necessity. But the strategy here is also very sound: by not giving supporters much to do on his own site he maximizes the amount of noise they make in other venues. It is the perfect approach for an insurgent candidate like Paul.

As 2008 grows nearer, I’d expect other insurgent candidates to mimic the Paul approach. Front runners? Not so much at this point. The buzz this approach creates is great, but there is also a lot to be said for having control over all these tools and all the data they generate.

Fred Thompson disclosure.

Is BBC News going platform agnostic?

The British journalism trade publication Press Gazette reports that BBC reporter Ben Hammersley will report through several social networks from four cities in Turkey in the two weeks prior to the country's general elections in July.  He'll also appear on BBC World, the World Service, News 24, and BBC News Online during this time. (Hat tip: Kevin Anderson)

Hammersley's work is part of the Beeb's effort to fulfill its 15 web principles that it published in February.  The fifth states: "Treat the entire web as a creative canvas: don’t restrict your creativity to your own site."

Richard Sambrook, director of BBC Global News, says, "This is an experiment to look at how a series of international reports can be spread through social media sites and hopefully reach new audiences."

Here's where Hammersley will likely file reports:

• Ben Hammersley's blog
• Ben Hammersley's Twitter feed
• Ben Hammersley's Flickr photo stream
• Ben Hammersley's del.ico.us bookmarks
• Ben Hammersley's YouTube videos

Let's see how he reports.  The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz has an interesting approach; he pasted one of his column in a series of wall posts on his Facebook profile…

The design of John Edwards’ MySpace page is pretty broken right now. As you’ll see below, page elements are getting pushed to the left and it is generally not looking as intended.

If a campaign website was messed up this bad we’d undoubtedly write something snarky. But, having done battle with MySpace ourselves, we can only feel sympathy for the folks at the Edwards’ campaign. They are fighting a losing battle. (more…)

Here's an update on one of my previous posts.  Since joining Facebook about two weeks ago, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz has friended me.  In fact, according to today's Media Notes column, Howie has friended over 300 people on the social network. 

In his continued exploration of Facebook, he quotes Kelley Sayler (I dunno who she is) concerning the site's newsfeed as she mocks the feature:

because the world really needs to know that they had macaroni and cheese for lunch at 12:32 p.m. The newsfeed doesn't feed news; it feeds exhibitionism and egotism. . . . The cult of celebrity has trickled down to the masses and made us all alternately nosy and self-important.

While most of my news appetite is defined by a thirst for hard news, the newsfeed is why I consider Facebook one of the most relevant news sites. 

This feature updates me about how and what people who are important and close to me are doing; it even shows me pictures.  The exploits of a friend from high school, college, or work are so much more important to me than that of Paris Hilton. 

Through the notes feature, Facebook allows my friends to write about whatever they want — even news commentary or a detailed description of an event important to me like one of my friend's birthday parties.

As I see my friends join highly targeted groups or write comments on others' profiles, I can get a sense of how they feel about movies, politics, sports, etc.   With the new API offerings, there are applications that enable those on Facebook to spread information about entertainment, important causes, and other important stuff like which Disney film villain they are most like.

Oh yeah, Facebook also reminds me of birthdays.  The Marketplace feature is its classified section.  People can also post YouTube videos for audio/visual content.

The newsfeed also makes a great marketing tool; doesn't most news come with advertising?

Facebook provides news about people whom I care about in a much better way than a mainstream media news site does.  Thus, with all due respect to Sayler, I like the newsfeed; it makes Facebook a Washington Post and Entertainment Weekly about, for, and by my friends and me.

When Facebook Platform launched at the end of May , the move was met with surprise and delight from online marketers and software developers who have been hoping for a way to access the social network's huge audience of college-aged users.  The Platform allows software developers to design custom applications people can install for their profiles.  These applications have a wide range of uses, including advertising, fundraising, and apps that are just for fun.

I've seen the popularity of some of these applications first-hand, with many people in my circle of friends using the Graffiti App, which allows users to scribble on their friends' walls, and photo slideshow applications.  The popularity of Facebook platform has been formally documented: CNET reports that some 1,500 applications have been created since the launch of the Platform.  Installation of some of these applications has expanded incredibly quickly, with "some of the most popular [going] from zero to 850,000 users in three days".  Dave Morin, director of Facebook Platform told CNET that "This is unprecedented in the history of the Internet".

However, will this popularity be long-lived or short-term?  One Facebook app developer, Amit Gupta, argues that Facebook users may run into "application fatigue", causing the popularity of Facebook Platform to be more of a fad than anything else.  I tend to agree with Gupta.  Whereas MySpace users have shown constant interest in using widgets and other creative options on their profiles since the network's inception, Facebookers have relied on the system for its communication features rather than for the system's flexibility, which up until the last couple of weeks, has been non-existent.

The tendency for people to join groups on Facebook for various causes has been proven in the past through politics, with people grouping together for candidates or issues.  But just as it's a question whether Facebook Apps will be a long-term tool, it's also a question whether people are ready to give money and/or be sold to through the social network.  Thus far, it hasn't been proven whether Facebook membership translates into fundraising dollars.

To judge how well some applications are doing at raising money, we did a little experiment. We checked out one of the fundraising applications, called Causes.  The app is by Project Agape and can be found by doing a simple search in the applications directory.  The way it works is that the application offers a directory of non-profit causes to which Facebook users can start a membership and donate money online.  Causes are grouped into categories, making them easier to browse through.  The directory was too large for us to research all of the causes, but to get a general idea of how fundraising through this app was progressing, we took a sample of some of the causes and compared their membership to fundraising history.  Currently, there are 9 categories of Causes.  We examined the first 25 causes (alphabetically) for each category, a total of 225 causes.

What we found is that membership for these causes is through the roof.  For the 225 causes we researched, there are a total of 615,415 members, an average of 2,735 members per group.  The "international" category, which includes groups like "Save Darfur" and "Fight Aids" has the most members, 206,277 (that's an average of 8,251 members per group.  The "religion" category, which includes groups like "Share the Gospel" and "Stop Islam Hijacking" had the fewest members, a total of 4,959 (an average of 198 members per group).

Despite the huge membership stats, fundraising stats are lagging far behind.  In total, $30,752 were raised by all the groups we checked out.  This may seem like a lot, but this averages to just $0.05 per member or $138 per group.  I think the key here is that becoming a member of a group or cause on Facebook is really easy and requires limited to no action.  This membership is, in most cases, merely a stamp on someone's profile that helps connect users to other like-minded people.  Beyond that, group membership on Facebook doesn't really mean much.  Making donations, on the other hand, actually requires college- and high school-aged people to contribute funds.  In most cases, this age group doesn't have a lot of spare cash on hand, especially for causes on a network which people have gotten used to using for free.

While I think Facebook applications like the work by Project Agape is a great idea and helps people to get a voice for their political/social concerns.  However, I don't expect these groups to have a lot of success raising funds on Facebook.

What do you think?  How will the new Facebook Platform affect online fundraising for non-profits? 

Take a look at our research data here.

Breaking news: Washington Post media critic and CNN's Reliable Sources host Howard Kurtz has joined Facebook!

Okay, that isn't breaking news, but he chronicles his first venture into the social networking site in his column in the Post today titled "Searching for Friends." 

First off, he reveals that his college-age daughter "essentially indicated she would rather torch her computer than give me access to her page" by accepting his invitation to "friend."  Yikes!  Tricks are for kids, Howie, and I doubt you would like to see that computer, which you likely paid for, go up in flames.

Further, he states how he has waited and waited (and waited) for others to honor his friending requests with some people he actually knows while receiving random requests from people who simply wanted to see their friend totals burgeon. 

Thanks to Facebook's newsfeed — which I argue is a great marketing tool — he learned a lot about his new "friend" Kelly from Toronto as she joined highly focused groups that typically only comprise of a small set of her friends.  "Maybe this is the 21st-century equivalent of hanging out," Howie wonders.

While Howie is still trying to figure out Facebook along with an outright rejection from his daughter, he has 35 friends — including BuzzMachine's Jeff Jarvis, Portfolio's Matt Cooper, Time's Karen Tumulty, and Slate's Emily Yoffe – as of this posting (make that 36 if he accepts my friending request).  He's catching on. 

In fact, grown ups like Emily Yoffe have proven that Tricks aren't just for kids on sites like Facebook since she has over 1,000 "friends."  Perhaps that since she wrote "Facebook for Fiftysomethings" for Slate and enjoys the honor of a group dedicated to her.  Most importantly, she has played by the rules: join and accept random friend requests.  Granted, Yoffe probably has just a smidgen of what a 2008 Presidential hopeful has, but she's not doing that bad.  We'll see how Howie does.

Now joining a social network in the first place and accepting random friend requests might seem ridiculous for fiftysomethings on Facebook, but it is one way to be hip and cool like teenagers and twentysomethings.  On the other hand, this technique does diminish the social network's ability to aptly maintain your real world friendships. 

However, I wonder what happens when young Facebook friends want to make their social network relationships less trivial and actually meet and interact with their famous "friends."  Does anyone know of any such occurrence, or are high schoolers and twentysomethings simply content with on-line friendships?  If Facebook celebrities like Yoffee and Barack Obama honor such requests, good on em'!

Oh yeah, Howie, if you decide to accept my friend request, I would like to speak with you about one of your books…  Would that make our friending on Facebook more meaningful for you?

I was writing a post about Project’s Agape’s new Facebook application that allows people to raise money for causes directly on Facebook (through the new Facebook Platform). Unfortunately, the application is still really buggy so I was unable to get the data I needed for the post. So while I was messing around in Facebook I decided to write a quick post about what the Barack Obama team is doing with their custom Facebook application.

After you install the application, an Obama video and a few recent headlines appear as part of your Facebook profile. See below.

(more…)

Last night I attended an interesting journalism workshop at the Cleveland Park Library here in Washington, DC (hat tip: FishbowlDC).  Nationally known writer and photographer Bill Adler and former MSNBC chief Washington correspondent turned freelance multimedia journalist Brock Meeks pitched the citizen driven hyper local news site NowPublic to attendees. 

Approximately 35 people attended.  Some were older while others — like me — were younger.  Mothers brought their kids who had iPod ear buds in their ears.  Black, white, etc.

Adler and Meeks were just two normal blokes.  They weren't trying to appear "civilian," but they simply were themselves sans the scripted made for a TV newscast spiel dolled up by foundation powder from a compact.  This tact helped them assert that journalism is not just for the professionals.

Adler who moderates the Cleveland Park listserv with its 5,254 members wants to transfer the reporting about the neighborhood from that forum to a Cleveland Park NowPublic portal since the site enables anyone with access to the site to view the news.  In fact, the Associate Press is now buying NowPublic content — text, pictures, video, and audio — for use on its wire services.  It will pay content producers a fee for the right to use their media; the AP won't buy exclusive rights so that NowPublic contributors can use or pedal their work elsewhere.

Adler and Meeks also provided handouts about how to use NowPublic, how to write a story, where to get information for news stories, some journalism basics, and other anecdotes like, as Meeks says, "Short is sacred" and "No story is insignificant."

With the AP partnered with NowPublic, it is not that unlikely that your work could appear in a major paper or broadcast.  However, NowPublic also makes it available to your most important audience – your neighbors.

UPDATE: Meeks has an audiovisual slide show of the event on his site. 

I have a new entry on my list of technologies that will impact the 2008 elections. Facebook Platform.

In a nutshell, Facebook is boldly opening things up, allowing outside developers (like us) to build third party applications right on top of Facebook. Essentially, Facebook is becoming a technology platform, a la Salesforce.

On a mundane level, this will allow developers to do things such as replace the Facebook Photos section with photos from, say, a Flickr account.

On a more substantitive level, Facebook Platform will allow political campaigns and advocacy groups to embed action tools (fundraising, team building, letters to the editor, etc.) and other stuff I can’t even fathom right into Facebook. Check out what Project Agape has done as an example.

Obviously, the devil is in the details. Who has access to this data? How difficult will Facebook’s markup language be to learn? Is it really as open as it sounds? But from where I’m sitting Facebook Platform looks like a game changer. Can’t wait to play.

Update: TechPresident has info on a Facebook application the Obama campaign has already developed.

Throughout the Personal Democracy Forum a lot of smart people were making impassioned pleas for candidates to use technology to have an open dialogue with the American people. Be real. Be authentic. Tear down the walls that have been erected between the candidates and voters.

It all sounds great. But it seems to me there is a tension between this idealized goal of how things should be and how the social web is actually being used.

In many ways, the story of the web (particularly video) in politics the last few years has been the story of “gotcha” moments. Bad jokes. Pretty hair. Southern accents. Screaming. Terror taxis. Macaca. No strings. The humiliating videos get a lot more play than the substitutive ones (admittedly nobody has done anything that interesting with video this cycle).

Some of the moments linked to above are unforgivable. But in some cases these “gotcha” moments are examples of candidates being real.

So we’re in a situation where we want candidates to be authentic but are quick to punish them when they are. And the constant presence of voters with cameras ensures that there will be plenty of these gotcha moments.

It seems to me that instead of creating a more open election, we may be creating one where the candidate that is the most on message and the most robotic is rewarded. It can be argued that it wasn’t YouTube that defeated George Allen, but his own lack of discipline on the stump. The candidate that makes the least mistakes wins.

What do you think? Do you think candidates will use the web to raise the dialogue or are we just going to see an endless series of “gotcha” moments? Is the social web going to be used this cycle to build candidates up or simply to tear them down?

Update: John Stodder offers his take on Kos’ “gotcha” strategy for 2008.