We tested out tokbox today.

As a free service, we liked it a lot. Does anyone know how to indicate that a participant wants to speak next?

Thanks to Galpert for the tip.

Very proud to report Dogster, Inc. just won three 2010 Beast of the Bay awards and voted by the Bay Woof readers!

  » Best Overall Site for Dog Lovers: Dogster.com

  » Best Online Vet Advice: Dogster & Catster’s Vet Blog

  » Best Dog-Related Social Networking Site: Dogster.com

Thanks to all our Bay Area fans. We’re proud puppies!

And special congratulations to our tireless Vet, Dr. Eric Barchas, who offers up out heaps of advice every works for pet owners all over the world!

Everyone knows that Facebook significantly changed their privacy settings recently and very much wants you to identify all types of channels that are of interest to you. Last week I wrote how this is actually going to decrease per session usage.

Today it went from bad to worse. At first every time you logged in they asked you to approve the list of interests they’ve identified for you, giving you a nice big ‘Link All to My Profile’ button, but also a ‘Ask Me Later’ Here’s a screenshot of it captured by ReadWriteWeb. But the ‘Don’t Ask Me Again’ button was conspicuously absent.

But today they removed all pretenses of caring about their users and showed me just ‘Link All to My Profile ‘ or ‘Chose Individually.’ There are no other options shown and no way to simply close the modal. A big giant take it or leave it. I’m voting to leave it.

If there’s any confusion Facebook wants people to chose this method of posting their interests (as compared to writing them out in a bio field) so they can have giant publicly searchable directories of content. There’s nothing I don’t care anyone knowing about, it’s the lack of choice that’s insulting. So I chose Ctrl-W.

Facebook, at least Google has a morally questionable, but sincere compass that guides them. You’re now entirely hell bent on doing anything it takes to win and giving a giant middle finger to your customers. I think you will win Facebook, but everyone will think twice before sharing themselves on a website for years to come because of you. On behalf of the whole social Internet, let me be the first that says thanks.

[UPDATE: This post made the homepage of Hacker News which explains most of the very intelligent comments made on the day of the post. But a much longer threaded set of comment took place at Hacker News that's is definitely worth reading. The intransigence of a Facebook employee in the face of many well written positions is particularly enlightening.]

Facebook’s goal to become the verified source of every human on the planet will make it billions and position it as a cornerstone of the Internet. But they are going to have to significantly sacrifice the high-volume per person usage they garner now.

ReadWriteWeb has a great post on what Facebook’ Connected Profiles work, what it means if you opt-out and their overt tactics to get you to not do that.

Adults already admit that their Facebook profile is no longer where they share truly personal things with friends. If your bosses or clients or neighbors are following you you’re no longer going to post photos from the costume party or telling jokes you would at the next dinner party. Facebook is becoming a cooler version of LinkedIn, a place you only show what is safe for the public to see. That’s fine and beneficial, but the more public your actions are, the less you’ll post which means the less meaningful it will be to users.

Meanwhile college graduates are reported to be modifying their profiles, changing their name, or making new profiles so their debauched history isn’t seen during job and apartment searches. Hassles like that will reduce the free-flowing fun, lead people to fall out of touch or motivate them to find a private place to share with friends.

Imagine one night being at a very chic night club with full dance floor, walls lined in overstuffed booth and a large landscaped lawn with fire pits and very stylish people sitting around them. Then imagine turning on flood lights inside and out and someone will a bullhorn walking around pointing at people, saying where they are from and where they got their clothes and hair cut. This is an exaggeration, but imagine the lights going up even 25% and everyone having to wear name tags. The club days would be numbered as the place everyone wants to be. Facebook is going down this path (though it’s a great financial path for them)

No one likes a bright light when they’re enjoying themselves

Yes people will use Facebook for logging in, playing games (for now), for leaving an employer-approved trail of things they like around the Internet, but they’re not going to use Facebook like they used to. If Facebook insists on making your likes, hometown, events, etc public information people are slowly going to like posting that stuff less. People share for their friends, not for marketers and search engines. If too much of the latter arrives or markets to them and friends are posting less they will too. It’s a natural law of the Internet.

John Vars forwarded me Steve Job’s Open Letter on Flash.

Steve makes his points very well and I have no problem with Apple’s position. Though Steve of course does not to mention his long-standing grudge against Adobe going back the mid-90s when Apple was on the ropes. But dripping from every word you can hear Steve thinking “You left us for dead. Now you know what it’s like.”

But my favorite part is when Steve says he’ll never let developers be at the mercy of a third-party software layer neither Apple nor developers have control over. I guess he doesn’t realize that all Apple developers are reading that thinking “Oh, and we’re not at the mercy of the 1st party.”

It reminded me of Boon and Otter from Animal House spotting Niedermyer shoving Flouder’s face in horse manure and they say ‘He can’t do that to our pledges! Only we can do that to our pledges.’

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

Don’t get too cocky, Steve. Overconfidence kills.

Even today’s marketing agencies agree that brand respect has to be earned, not bought. Marketing can no longer be outsourced or left to a single department, but the action of every employee in a company. The Smash Summit in San Francisco on May 12th is the first industry conference dedicated to the future of brand marketing. While the easiest places to see the change in marketing is in start-ups, we’ll see these practices become the norm for all brand-focused companies.

The SMASH Summit is an exploration of social media marketing strategies, tactics, tools, & campaigns used by successful online companies to acquire and retain customers on search, social, and mobile.

If you’re in the Bay Area and are an entrepreneur, product developer, brand manager, or marketer you should definitely attend. Steven, John and I will all be there. Here’s a 20% discount for our blog readers. Just use the coupon code ‘Dogster’ when you register.

“Functional Anonymity” is something I’ve been very interested in lately. I define it as a way for a human to make an action that cannot be tied to them, but nonetheless the action is trusted as having come from a qualified person.

The easiest example of this are organized anonymous voting systems. People register to vote using qualified identification (ID card, proof of address, etc). On voting day they are checked in to a polling station by a trusted agent, but submit their votes anonymously. Though there are ways to beat this system it works very well and all legitimate democratic countries employ it to their benefit.

Early attempts on the web for functional anonymity were bound for failure as they relied on cookies, IP, user_agent strings, avatars and other methods that could not be tied to a person. Online trends moved away from these failures to public explicit reputation systems that tie a profile to a single presence on a site. Facebook became the winning example of this by connecting real name, photos, educational history, currrent employment, with a social graph of many other public profiles. Though there are ways to beat this system it works very well for what it is and thousands of Internet properties trust Facebook if it says a person is legitimate.

A new site launched recently called Unvarnished which I have been so interested in I have become an adviser. Unvarnished is where anyone can write a professional review of anyone anonymously. It sounds like it would be a giant slanderfest, but by employing functional anonymity tools it’s won’t. Yes, people’s post anonymously, but Unvarnished employs many tactics to determine the validity of that user and weight the reviews by the posters proven reputation. First off your Unvarnished account is automatically tied to your Facebook account and by seeing how legitimate you are on Facebook and how many friends of yours have good accounts on Unvarnished adds to your Unvarnished reputation. But if the Facebook account is brand new with only a handful of friends, that hurts your Unvarnished reputation. Then of course there is the reputation the poster builds with Unvarnished. If the user history only shows a single review with no comments not much is added to their reputation. If the user has a history of many reviews with varied ratings and added comments then that improves their reputation. There are dozens more methods to determine an account holders qualifications, authority and reputations I can’t go into, but the reality is that functional anonymity on the Internet is not an oxymoron, it’s not even something to be scared of, it something we are ready to explore again. Like any system there will be ways to beat it, but if managed both proactively and responsibly it should always be ways to ensure the overall trustworthiness of such a system.

A great benefit I’ve seen from actual usage of Unvarnished is that people who get negative reviews are able to respond to those reviews and if the criticism is constructive, they can use it to improve themselves.

I recently saw a review for Dave McClure where an entrepreneur said he had a great conversation with Dave, but never heard back from him. Dave replied with an apology that he had spread himself to thin. So the winner here is Dave. Without the anonymous shield provided to the original reviewer, Dave would probably never have heard this to his face, and stated it’s something he’s working on, and I’m sure he will which will be entirely to his professional gain.

Are there other examples you are seeing of functional anonymity that are redefining how we can trust a person is a person on the internet without have to click that we are friends or show a photo and name?

Also if you have an opinion you’d like to share about me, I’d be very happy for you to post it on Unvarnished. I’d say I’d gladly write you one back, but I’ll never know it was you who wrote it.

Huffington Post launched their social news features a month or so ago of which I’m not a big fan as it just ads very little to my personal discovery process (to use the Valley parlance) and a lot of non-news shows up in there. You have to be logged in via Facebook to see it.

Today Motorola become the sponsor of this area – an area only viewed by those logged in with Facebook – and the integration is excellent. It took up very little extra space and 100% custom made for the placement.

Check out this barely SFW screen shot.

Huge kudos to Huffington Post for integrating placements into their publication instead of publishing around them, and also for agressively exploring the value of news and ones social graph. While I don’t like this experiment I’m sure they’ll get it 100x faster than any other publisher aside from maybe the NYT if they are lucky.

Also gotta give props to their Biz Dev team to put a ‘Advertise on HuffPo’ badge right above this novel placement.

This data shows 7 types of ads and orders them on the left in terms of most engaging and on the right in terms of most likely to lead to a purchase intent. Note how the orders are very different. The research was done by the firm Psychster and it’s great to see a focus on why customers do what they do, vs. what they do.

Online Media Daily did a good job reviewing the results of the research. Here are some highlights.

Among the seven most common formats, sponsored content ads — in which consumers viewed a page that was “brought to you by” a leading brand — were the most engaging, yet produced the least purchase intent

Corporate profiles on social-networking sites produced greater purchase intent and more recommendations when users could become a “fan,” and add the logo to their own profiles, than when they could not.

Meanwhile, “give and get” widgets — in which individuals can create and customize something (a car or a dinner menu) and then either send it to a friend (”give” widget) or keep it for themselves (”get” widget) — were more engaging than traditional banner ads, but no more likely to produce an intent to purchase.

and

Overall, “No ad type was so engaging that it overcame the advantage found by matching the brand to the Web site,” added Evans. “It is widely believed that ads are at an advantage when the brand relates to the site on which it appears … Our findings replicated this effect, such that the soup brand performed better on Allrecipes than it did on Facebook.”

What’s more, every format was clearly perceived to be an ad. Although none of the ads fully “disguised” themselves, sponsored content scored lowest on this scale, but possibly at the expense of a strong call to action.

Although banners and newsletters were most likely to be seen as ads, they were among the best at triggering purchase intent and viral recommendations.

The big takeaways I have are:

  • Everyone can pretty much spot a branded placement no matter how they are presented, so it’s not about deceiving viewers into a purchase, it’s about making them feel that it’s their choice to get something they want.

  • Advertisers will always do better to seek publishers with quality endemic readers, vs high-volume diverse readers.

  • Let the viewer become part of the promotional item if engagement is the promotions strategy (e.g. Fan Pages, customizable widgets)

  • Focus should be on leading to lasting purchase intent, not ephemeral brand engagement

Hat tip to Mark Goines for forwarding the research.

We’ve recently been test marketing a product and paying for ads on both Google AdWords and Facebook to drive traffic. The type of customers they attract are very different and it’s very important to understand the difference.

Your ads will work differently because people use the sites differently. People use Facebook is for experiencing one’s life. They use Google to solve problems.

Clickers of Facebook Ads:
* Are exploring the ad as part of the surfing experience on Facebook. It’s an extension of their lifestyle
* May have already seen the ad 20 times, but click when they prefer. It’s like reading a magazine and controlling when you engage
* Are not going to click an ad a second or third time even though Facebook will keep showing it to them (you have to keep changing your ads if you want to get the same person’s attention twice)

Clickers of Google ads:
* Are trying to solve a single problem as quickly as possible
* Care less about who is providing the solution and more about does it seem like a quickest resolution to their query
* They do not want to be switched to a derivative product. It they are looking for business cards, for example, do not try and sell them letter head.
* Rarely desire to start a relationship with the provider of the ad they click, they just want the problem solved
* Are replaced every day with almost the same volume of other people seeking a solution to the same problem.

They both can be very effective, just make sure your ads are speaking to to how the person is using the site.