The pulse of Alexander Interactive

On Wednesday, Facebook CEO and President Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the next step towards a more socially integrated web at Facebook’s f8 developer conference in San Francisco. Facebook’s latest release includes open APIs and a suite of plugins aimed at making third party web sites more personalized and social.

With very little coding effort, sites will now be able to import experiences and interactions once limited to within the confines of facebook.com. Examples of these distributable features include a web-wide “Like” button and contextual activity feeds. These feeds will show which of the user’s Facebook friends have viewed an article or product, and offer recommendations based on friend activities. Sites like Yelp, CNN, BuzzFeed and Pandora have already integrated the new Facebook functionality.

Facebook’s “Like” button integrated with an article page on Buzzfeed. Clicking the button automatically updates the user’s Facebook Wall and their friends’ activity feed.

The implications are astounding and limitless. And the importance to business owners is multifold: users will be more likely to treat sites as destinations if they can accomplish socially-oriented tasks without leaving the site. This will translate into longer visits; more exposure to content and products; and an overall richer experience for the user. Furthermore, from a business perspective, the new functionality is so easy to implement that it will save countless programming hours.

Ai immediately incorporated the “Like” button feature onto the product pages of one of their premier clients, Steiner Sports. Now, sports-fan Joe Smith in New York can browse steinersports.com and click “Like” on everything that catches his eye-from a Derek Jeter Autographed Baseball to a World Series Autographed Locker Room Hat-and his cousin in Talkeetna, Alaska will get a real-time idea of what Joe might like for his birthday in two weeks.

Facebook’s latest effort to deepen the social experience on the web represents a significant step forward in creating a tighter internet, where users will be presented with recommendations from friends they know and trust on any site they visit. For customers and businesses alike, the new Facebook feature is an instant wishlist, registry, recommendation tool, and will become a powerful indicator of social and marketing trends.

The digital profiles that represent our personal and professional lives are becoming increasingly intermingled. My Facebook account isn’t just made up of my friends, but a motley mash-up of friends, family, colleagues, clients, others, and some dude who said he went to my high school but I swear I can’t remember him. On Twitter, I follow co-workers, clever people, some people I sold concert tickets to, and the family members that signed up for Twitter accounts whose both posts (first and last) were “This is my first twitter post.” On LinkedIn, I accept any request, unless it’s from an aggressive recruiter.
The (inter)net effect of my mixed up profiles is that I must always consider this varied audience when posting an update. Do I want everyone knowing that I had a nice time at the zoo this weekend with my kids? (maybe) Do I want clients knowing that I was out late the night before a big meeting? (probably not) Do friends care that we just won awards for some website? (most definitely) Does anyone care that my Entourage crashed and the rebuild progress on its database? (no, but they don’t ask me to stop tweeting about it)
So it shouldn’t be surprising that I was thrown two curve balls during recent new business engagements. During the first, we had reached the end of an exciting, and very competitive RFP process. I learned it was down to 2 firms. I was invited out to coffee to make our case, one-on-one. I did my best, explained our passion for the project, shared our ideas, and spoke to our other relevant success. I thought the meeting went well. On my way home that evening I see a LinkedIn request from the gentleman I had coffee with just an hour earlier. “I’d like to invite you to Join my LinkedIn Network!”
What did this mean? Was he saying that we had won the business and this was a cute way to notify me? Was he saying that he needed to complete more due diligence on me, check out my network, see who I know, and try to glean more information about me and our firm? Or was he simply asking me to join his network, even though we weren’t really networked yet?
I couldn’t very well ignore the request; I had to accept it and see how things developed. Spoiler: we won the business, it’s an incredible project, and our client is a fabulous company to work with.
More recently, we were involved in another very competitive RFP engagement. We traveled to our client for the big pitch, presented, said our goodbyes, and were on the way back to the office. Suddenly an email comes in: “PersonX would like to make you a friend on Facebook.” PersonX? Who was that again? Does anyone remember who was PersonX? Why are they friending me? To see if I really *get* social media and will promptly accept the friend request? To see if I had properly maintained a filter between my personal and professional life in my digital profile? To maybe find some forgotten nugget on me that I had posted years ago?
I agonized a bit over this one, but again came to the only logical conclusion: I had to accept the friend request. Spoiler: again we won the business, and have partnered with this truly awe-inspiring institution.
In both cases, but perhaps more importantly with Facebook, I felt completely comfortable accepting the requests because I have taken great care to preserve my digital image. Sure, Google can find a few oddball posts from Usenet and some funny discussion forums, but all in all, I’m squeaky clean. Some friends and colleagues maintain two profiles: work and fun. That seems like way too much effort and is far too dangerous. Just imagine the “did I just say that out loud?” moment when you post your opinions on the latest scandal to befall your favorite Yankees player to your Twitter feed usually reserved for ecommerce and UX tips.
In the two cases above the outcome was positive. But that’s not always going to be the case. I have a friend that consistently uses Twitter to complain about his frequent air travel, usually to one particularly annoying destination to see a client. He doesn’t seem worried one bit that the client will start following him on Twitter and will be somewhat put off to read, “oh joy, traveling again to the armpit of the U.S. via XYZ airport.” Another colleague complains about meetings and co-workers, right on Twitter, for the whole world to see. He masks names, but everyone who knows him knows exactly who he’s talking about. And yes, we’ve welcomed an employee or two ambling late into work one morning after posting 3am FB updates from the bar the night before.
I only see the personal/professional divide becoming more blurred. So, Caveat Twitterer: once you hit send, it’s out there for the entire world to read. And if someone–a friend, significant other, a prospective client–wants to dig up a little dirt, it’s just a search away.

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I just stumbled upon the fact that Chocolate Skittles allegedly exist. While researching the validity of this, as well as the availability of said Chocolate Skittles, I checked out skittles.com.
After you enter your birthday on the home page, you are brought to an external site – the official Skittles YouTube landing, which displays Skittles television commercials. In the top left corner of the page, there is a modal navigation bubble (built with Flash) that stays with you as you browse.
When you click on any of their product titles from the “Products” link, you are brought to a page in Wikipedia that displays tabular data of all Skittles products (including international). When you click “Friends” you are brought to the Skittles Facebook Fan Page. Click “Chatter” and it directs to the Skittles Twitter page, while “Videos” takes you to the YouTube page, and “Photos” leads to the Skittles Flickr page.
Skittles are also allowing their customers to interact with the company, and with each other. The Skittles Flickr page aggregates any photo titled with or tagged with “Skittle” or “Skittles.” The same rule is applied to their Twitter page.
The “Contact” page is a bare-bones, static page with a simple form. Any legal information, such as a Privacy Policy, is located under the “Other Gobbledygook” button on the navigation bubble, which expands to display the information.
It amazes me that such a well-known brand has used this method to present themselves on the web. They have used the most popular social websites to their advantage, and likely spent a minimal amount of money to build their site. They are advertising for themselves on all of these sites without even paying for the advertisement.
This is one of the most unique and interesting concepts of a branded website that I have seen. As the popularity of social websites progress, more examples like this will pop up. Just look at how many musical artists have deleted their personal websites and simply use MySpace as an outlet. It’s all about how to reach the largest audience, and social websites are the best tool for that right now.

My life has been previously sliced up into distinct, and mostly non-overlapping chapters. I’ve lived in Toronto, Montreal, San Francisco and New York (and a couple of adjacent suburbs that I won’t get into). In each place there have been a number of people that I’ve known. In time, I’ve moved on and only marginally keep in touch with friends from the old ‘hood. I’m what they used to call a lousy letter-writer.

It’s not so bad. I have great memories from each place, and my life is organized into distinct chunks. I’ve gotten used to the idea of thinking in terms of  ”so-in-so from my former life at location X”. Frozen in time, these memories provide a nice back drop for my identity.

Now, however, Facebook is screwing it all up. My entire life (in people) since high school has all been sucked into Facebook. Everyone I’ve ever known is already there. And they’re all friending me (or I them). Twenty years of time, compressed into nothing.

When yet another mysterious figure from my past “friends” me, I’m suddenly privy to some very disturbing photographs, where I can see the effects of 10 to 20 years of aging all at once. (“Dude, you have no hair! What happened?”) Often they’re accompanied by mysterious young short people in these photographs. Short people that weren’t there before.

I feel like I’ve fallen into a time warp, or maybe am watching my life flash before my eyes. Except it’s the life that I didn’t live, all the paths that I didn’t go down, with people that I didn’t keep in touch with. They’re all back. They’re on Facebook, they’re my friends and they’ve escaped from their neatly delimited chapters in the past to invade my present.

I think we should coin the equivalent of the famous “Don’t Fight the Fed” slogan from the finance world. The concept, as I understand it, is that the central banking powers of the Federal Reserve are so potent that it never makes sense for an individual investor to try and move the market in the opposite direction from where the Fed is pushing it. The overwhelming correct strategy is to move in the same direction as the Fed, and thereby profit.

I tend to think in the online world the saying should be “Don’t Fight the Internet”. Given enough time, anyone who bets against the general direction in which the Internet is moving will lose (and often lose expensively). Unless there is some sort of intervention in the form of catastrophe or massive government action (which doesn’t seem terribly likely – why kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?) I don’t see this changing any time soon.

The Internet favors data abundance, not scarcity. All information, including digital media, is data. Businesses that have models based on data scarcity (the music industry is the obvious one, but some people at Microsoft may fear it’s going to catch them as well) are in trouble – given enough time.

The Internet places a premium on data relevance. There’s a ton of data out there, but how do you find the right data for you? Companies that answer that question (through search, through social networks etc) prosper. Companies that take a one size fits all approach (newspapers) falter.

The Internet favors openness. The ability to move around from one provider to the next – anyone can send or receive an email, anyone can put up a website, anyone can sell or checkout online. Historical attempts to compete against the entire Internet (such as CompuServe, or the original MSN) have always failed. They’re not open enough.

Right now there are social networks (FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn…well all of them really…) that all have their little walled gardens. Their own networks. They don’t seem to notice that there’s already a big network there – it’s called the Internet.

Social networking is very rapidly maturing into another application layer for the Internet. People are going to want to maintain profiles in one place and use them anywhere. People are going to want to have friends who are based out of different social networks. Perhaps I’m on FaceBook, but I’d like to friend someone based out of MySpace. People want that to happen, and when I say people, I mean the Internet. It didn’t work for CompuServe or MSN, and its not going to work for FaceBook or LinkedIn. Don’t fight the Internet.

There’s a fair amount of excitement recently about Google’s Social Graph API.   In a nutshell, the API aggregates various social connections from any number of compliant social networks (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter etc) allowing an application to see the entire picture.  I had a strong hunch that social  networks  were going to break out of their walled  gardens and  just become another app on the internet.  It seems to be happening.