Puzzlepieces – tag ‘advertising’

frequent blog posts on the same topic? how odd of me

Anyhow since there’s an infinity now written about the Facebook advertising stuff that I talked about in my previous post, I need to of course correct all those misinformed people . As I said, Facebook is doing a great job with this new stuff. One lame thing that they did, which is something that I see happen with all these companies that start going big, is that they got a small number of big players (the short head, if you will) on board so that they can feel all special about it. So these lame companies go into this with lame ideas (if Coke’s plan isn’t the stupidest idea ever…). None of that matters. They might get smarter, or they might not (hardly possible). More importantly, the non-huge players (fine, fine, the long tail) are what will actually make this work. It may take a while to get there, but it will certainly happen.

Why Facebook Shouldn’t Fear OpenSocial - I’m supposed to be studying, so of course it’s a good time to do some blogging.

Anyhow, I agree with Josh that the idea that the competition now being Facebook vs OpenSocial is silly. Facebook is doing an absolutely amazingly fantastic job pleasing users, developers, being innovative, and soon, generating profit. Their upcoming “Beacon” plans seem as brilliant as their previous ones. The only bad thing I have to say about them (from a business perspective), is that they have been way to slow getting their advertising products out. In the long run, that may not make much difference.

OpenSocial is not competition in any sense of the word. It’s just a little specification to standardize some web services, which is a good thing. And assuming it gains the traction it is expected (the supporters actually follow through), then Facebook will just join it too, and they haven’t lost anything, really. In fact they’ll have gained additional developers and applications.

Facebook would have to be really stupid to act any other way, and from what I’ve seen, they are anything but. Except their HR, I’m not so in love with that.

Is it just me, or is MySpace sitting on their laurels? Just copying Facebook isn’t going to do it, and besides, they don’t seem to be copying them very well or quickly. I thought being the major player was supposed to count for something, like having resources.

One last comment on OpenSocial… while it is certainly good for developers that there will be a common API, let’s not forget that this simply means it will be easy to have an application run on multiple websites… separately. Having an application that seamlessly uses more than one social website simultaneously will still be an enormous headache. So there’s plenty more to be done there.

Update Nov 5. After reading a few things elsewhere, maybe myspace isn’t doing nothing, they just decided to let Google deal with all their advertising, and hope to make enough from that. But since that will likely be almost all of their revenue, might that not be a bad idea?

thetruth.com - when I first saw thetruth’s tv commercials a few years ago I thought that they were amazingly well-done, I rarely seem ads that good. I’ve seen a few new ones they’ve done lately and they also seem incredible. I wonder if they’re being affective?

Pictures of Numbers: False Advertising - for those who seem to wonder why I care so much about my information graphics - this is what happens when you don’t care.

Image Search Engines || Fagan Finder - virtually all of Fagan Finder has stagnated since 2005 (if not 2002/2003), and I definitely do not have the time to give it the upgrade it deserves. Anyhow, so I decided to update the image search page… taking out all the dead links, etc., and putting in some newer stuff. You’d be surprised how long that takes, even though I didn’t bother adding descriptions for the new additions like I used to.

The image search page has been among the most popular pages on Fagan Finder since it was created in May 2003, and I often get requests for people who want to advertise on the page. So now I have updated it (first time since June 2003), added an ad spot (right now it shows Google Adsense 50% of the time and Adbrite 50% of the time, but I’m still playing with that. For the latter, I have it set that I must approve all ads.

Somehow, despite removing dead and crummy websites, it has gone from 42 search tools and 42 external links to 65 search tools and 42 external links. The page is seriously getting crowded. Anyhow, let me know if you find any bugs or if I’m missing anything.