Posted by admin | Posted in Main | Posted on 05-08-2010
It’s been interesting interesting to see everyone making such a big fuss over Facebook Connect, when it’s really not such a new concept. According to Facebook, Facebook Connect (henceforth FBC) has 5 general value propositions:
- Trusted Authentication – FBC gives end user piece of mind that a reputable ID management system is in place
- Real Identity – Facebook profiles can generally be trusted to belong to a person you know, not someone posing as someone else (although there are the obvious exceptions to this.)
- Friend Linking – theoretically, Facebook Connect lets you interact with your Facebook friends on any site, not just facebook.
- Dynamic Privacy – I class this more as ‘Centralised Privacy’. If facebook users make a change to their privacy settings on facebook, the change echoes across all other sites using Facebook Connect immediately.
- Social Distribution – bring content in from outside sources into Facebook for ‘social distribution’ with your facebook friends.
And all this is FREE to implement!
Is it necessary, though?
As for the question whether we need another “ single sign on” identification, our answer is “Maybe”.
Facebook Connect won’t get off the ground. Facebook’s large and fairly loyal customer base will ensure FBC will be somewhat successful. However, it isn’t a radically new offering in the market it is entering, and adoption will be determined by more than just potential audience size. In a way, having a complete monopoly of ID systems online would be the ultimate, as it is the only way we will ever see a true single-sign-in service across all websites!
Posted by admin | Posted in Main | Posted on 05-08-2010
Facebook applications can be a variety of types. Some of the major domains, in which you can use these apps for your business are:
- Government Applications – to get the opinion of the public and to keep the public updated on their activity.
- Business Applications – presents potential of having a major impact on the world of business and work.
- Dating Applications – Many social networks provide an online environment for people to communicate and exchange personal information for dating purposes.
- Educational Applications – Social networks focused on supporting relationships between teachers and their students are now used for learning, educator professional development, and content sharing.
- Medical Applications – Social networks are beginning to be adopted by healthcare professionals as a means to manage institutional knowledge, disseminate peer to peer knowledge and to highlight individual physicians and institutions. The advantage of using a dedicated medical social networking site is that all the members are screened against the state licensing board list of practitioners.
Posted by admin | Posted in Main | Posted on 05-08-2010
Facebook Apps are booming with the increase in social networking day-by-day. People are always looking for some new interactive apps. While the majority of these applications are fun and geared towards non-business related events, the use of some of these applications can definitely provide benefit to your brand and organization.
As a result we have compiled a list major benefits that businesses can receive by using Facebook apps:
- Branding – Social Networking can be a great resource for generating brand awareness, as they are becoming popular amongst various age demographics.
- Feedback Mechanism – Using these sites can help you understand consumer behavior based on the sharing of content and commentary on the social networking site.
- Reputation Management – These can be a useful tool for seeing what users are saying about you and your brand. In addition your profile can now be indexed in the search results and as a result can be favorable in SEO.
- New Customer Acquisition – These sites provides an opportunity to find consumers you may have not otherwise discovered.
- Lead Generation – These sites can act as another potential lead generation tool that can be used to qualify leads.
- The Viral Effect – Take word Of mouth to a whole new level. Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd…SOCIAL NETWORKING is attracting quite a crowd.
- Drive Web Traffic - They can act as a portal point for driving traffic to your site.
Posted by admin | Posted in Main | Posted on 04-08-2010
With more than 350 million active users, Facebook’s population has exceeded that of the United States.
Since Facebook opened up its platform to developers, the apps and pages available for commercial use have greatly increased in number and influence. Many online retailers have used it as a marketing technique or, in some cases, even as an online storefront in itself. There are many options for using Facebook to market your business, and it will have our familiar shopping cart system and several additional advantages:
- E-commerce conversion rates will increase: Imagine if you were looking to buy a t-shirt online and right next to the “Add to Cart” button you saw that four of your friends (along with their names and photos) had already bought the same t-shirt. This kind of marketing is priceless — it brings instant social trust to that website. If you assume the average Facebook user has 200 friends, this type of social trust factor could be huge, and Facebook’s new recommendation and “like” tools will play a huge role.
- Addiction: People are addicted to everything Facebook and they would similarly be addicted to this new online store. If you’re that sort of shoppers who quit after adding several items to their shopping cart, fret not, your shopping cart will remain filled until they are check out or dismissed.
- Increase buying intention: A fan page + storefront will be an awesome combination. Your fans are likely to click on your promotional updates since browsing your items is now so convenient. All within Facebook!
- Web shopping cart API: Facebook connect + Payvment Web shopping cart API can sync your customers’ purchases from Facebook to your website and vice versa. Your shopping cart can be accessed via both sites! This seems like another smart move by the social-networking giant. Maybe one day, all we need is Facebook.
Do you welcome this new e-commerce integration on Facebook? We would love to hear your views!
Posted by admin | Posted in Main | Posted on 04-08-2010
Google says: “OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.”
OpenSocial allows developers to write a single backend for their application and then have it distributed widely, across various social networks, where it can adapt an appropriate look and feel and take advantage of the data provided by the network container.
OpenSocial is not a social network itself, rather it is a set of three common APIs that allow developers to access the following core functions and information at social networks:
- Profile Information (user data)
- Friends Information (social graph)
- Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)
For developers there are lots of benefits. They can build an app that easily works across all the OpenSocial partners. Instead of developing same application in various APIs for each Social Networking site.
Sites that are part of OpenSocial include:
- Orkut
- LinkedIn
- hi5
- Friendster
- Plaxo
- Ning
- Oracle
- Saleforce
OpenSocial is expected to bring together 100 million users, almost double the number of Facebook users. The major applications developers for Facebook have been invited to create apps for OpenSocial.
