DISQUS

I am surprised that Mahalo Answers doesn't get a mention in the post nor in the comments. You send your question to @answers and it gets posted to the site. You get a reply for each answer received. They even have a rewards scheme where you can offer a tip for the best answer.

Taken from a post I wrote last year:

"...Twitter is all about people. As a user you follow people and people follow you. But what if you could follow not just people but objects as well? Objects like products, services, websites etc. Anything that someone has an interest in promoting and which one or more people might be interested in getting updates (object-tweets) about."

then:

"Object-tweet accounts could operate under a freemium model whereby the object-tweet account holder gets a certain number of free tweets per month and pays a premium for the ability to send and receive more tweets about the object per month."

Louis Adekoya's last blog post..Facebook Convert - A Revenue Earning Idea for Facebook

The one place where most of my friends are is Facebook. I suspect this is true for most people and is the simple reason why Facebook Connect will be more attractive to developers and end users than Google's Friend Connect. For developers/publishers, the news feed publishing could be invaluable. For end users the attraction would be the ability to find and interact with facebook friends on other websites. The sign-in feature is a secondary benefit in my view - a bonus. Overall I think connect is of more benefit to publishers/developers than to end users.

Slightly off topic but what I would like is a new feature in Facebook whereby if I get an invite from someone whom I can't quite place but who obviously knows me - we have lots of friends in common etc, I can ask one of those mutual friends in one click who this person is and where I might have met him/her. I find that I am having to this a lot more recently using FB messaging and I also occasionally get facebook mail from friends with the same problem.

So if anyone has the ear of someone in Facebook, please pass on this feature request. I don't see a form to suggest features on their website.

Have you tried thinking rock - thinkingrock.com.au. Not a web app though and no iphone version as far as I know.

As I have stated before, I see this a lot more simply:

1. Facebook wants to be or to host the ultimate utility, powered by the social graph.
2. Facebook also wants to make lots of money.
3. What is the most lucrative utility that one can provide? - Solicited Information.
4. What type of solicited information is best provided by Facebook? - Information requested of and provided by the social graph, i.e. friends and friends' friends.
5. So what fits the bill? - Q&A
6. How might this work on Facebook? -
6.1. Slightly modify the status update feature to encourage people to ask questions and display in their friends' feeds: "X wants to know: blah, blah blah". Display relevant ads against the feed item and the comments (answers) it attracts.
6.2. Extend the partnership with Microsoft to allow users to turn their unresolved searches on Microsft's Live Search into Facebook questions.

As an outsider to a company's operations, it is far too easy to draw incorrect conclusions about what the company should or should not be doing. The company itself however has access to a lot of data that will guide its choices.

Ebay obviously has data that suggests a trend in usage towards Buy It Now and away from auctions. Personally, I always saw online auctions as a fad and never liked them. I have always used Buy It Now. I guess Ebay are seeing data that suggests more people are behaving similarly.

@Daniel Buca, again I have to say - hasn't this always been the point of behavioural ad targeting? Is Lotame really the first to do it?

Is this really novel? I always assumed that this was the whole point of social advertising - profile people based on their and their friends' stated interests and actions on one or multiple websites and target ads to them on that basis.

Like I have blogged before and said elsewhere today, instead of expecting FB users to initiate search queries in FB, why not make it possible (perhaps through FB Connect) for MS Live Search users to turn unresolved search queries into questions for their selected FB friends and/or the FB network as a whole?

Lesson for Apple from Facebook - virality is all well and good but be careful not to allow app fatigue to set in from frivolous apps spamming users with useless notifications.

Interestingly I went the other way in a blog post last night asking what lessons Facebook could learn from the iPhone app store. Taken from that post:
"... what if Facebook had enabled apps to be sold for $0.99 per install? For one thing I think users would install fewer frivolous apps and only useful apps would get bought. This would in turn mean less spam notifications to friends and perhaps there wouldn’t be so much talk of Facebook app fatigue. Developers would of course have a clear means of monetisation as would Facebook itself by charging a commission on each purchase. Facebook would also have the useful apps it hoped but has failed to achieve by launching the platform in the first place."

This post seems to use recommendations/referrals and advertising interchangeably. They are different in my opinion. When you posted your Q&As on Facebook and Twitter as in your examples, those apps had no business trying to get a cut from the resulting transaction. What they should have done though is recognise your intention to purchase something and display relevant ads to you. That's all that Google does.

I think monetising social networking sites should be easy. Leverage social connections to make it easier for users to demonstrate their purchase intentions, e.g. Q&A linked with search and then serve ads (search for Facebook on my blog for more).

I think that the interactive nature of the blogosphere, i.e. the fact that readers can comment makes it more prone to the echoing you describe than traditional one-way media.

Comments demonstrate reader interest and generate further posts either in reaction to those comments or to try and capitalise on the interest shown. It's no bad thing in my view.

As I posted recently and explained with an example, the key to social recommendations (influencing) may just be difficulty. The easier it is to make recommendations, the less effective they will be. We are more likely to 'consume' a recommendation when we know that the person who made it went to some trouble to do so. E.g. sending a link to a music track by email vs. sending a purchased CD by post.

I don't know about Social Ads but a facebook recommendation facility that factors this difficult factor in could be interesting. It could perhaps use a virtual currency that you use when you make a recommendation and you gain more of when your recommendations get consumed.

The mountain analogy is brilliant, as is the post in general. I went for a different argument against the “ideas are worthless” meme about a year ago. In a post titled “In defence of the brilliant idea”, I argued that good execution is itself a combination of several good ideas, which I believe is what you rightly refer to as judgement. In other words, there is the original idea of which mountain to climb and which route to take but if you then make a judgement call to deviate from the original plan, that itself is an idea in a sense.

I also argued that if a not-so-good business idea sparks a better one or induces a great idea for execution, the original idea has contributed some value however small to the final product and is therefore not worthless.

I think the mega search dollars could come an alliance between FB and one of the major search engines, but not in the way that most people have been talking about. I have posted more about this on my blog but in a nutshell, the integration could be very effective with three ’simple’ features:

1)A tab for results tailored based on your FB profile;
2)A simple button on the Search results page that lets you turn your unresolved queries into questions for (selected members of) your FB network plus anyone who has subscribed to answering questions on that topic;
3)The ability to do web search with the above two features, either directly on the search engines site or within FB.

I use my blog as an outlet for business ideas that would otherwise clog up my brain and prevent me from focusing on the ideas that I really want to pursue.

By the way Andrew, I find your posts well worth reading and have a couple of them bookmarked for future reference. If providing valuable content to others is what you set out to do, well, you are doing it.

Robert, I read your blog because you have access to people and news that I don't. I also value your opinion because of your experience in the world of tech and media.

Sure I won't always agree with your point of view and sure you will sometimes get things wrong, but does this make you an idiot? Not in my book. I reckon Edwin @6 has it spot on - just write the truth. It's all you can do.

Re 3 - Don't confuse interest with intent. I guess the answer for social networks is to focus ads in the areas of their sites where users do express intent and to add more of such areas - e.g. search, classifieds, wishlists, Q&A; etc. Great post by the way.

People that visit my profile are not necessarily into what I am into, so I am not sure that showing them ads relevant to my interests would be very useful.

Instead, since you can't use facebook without being logged on, you should always see ads that are relevant to your own interests.

Yes, I read it this last night. Great start - well done.

I suppose that an interesting challenge you will have with the column is that unlike regular readers of your blog, Fast Company readers are not necessarily techies. Therefore you will probably have to explain more terms than you would do here - and do so succinctly. I think you have pulled it off in this first article but then again, I am sort of a techie and a regular reader of your blog, so I may not be the best judge.

I live in the United Kingdom by the way so good job by Fast Company to have delivered this issue so promptly. Actually, they mostly do.

What will eBay do with StumbleUpon? Create an ebay-stumbleupon widget that enables publishers to monetise their blogs/sites. How? See:
http://www.ideatagging.com/monetise-your-blog-w...