New Facebook features

There's been lots all over the web about the changes to Facebook, since the F8 Facebook conference. The main point is that like is now a prominent Facebook feature and can be placed on sites external to Facebook.

This article below summarises the essentials concisely, a good quick read to see if you need to read more.

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/04/21/facebook.changes.users/

The Reality of Augmented Reality

Have a read of this great little article that gives some advice on using Augmented Reality. A refreshing change from the reams of articles hyping AR with little substance.

http://www.marketingvox.com/5-tips-for-a-successful-augmented-reality-campaign-046752/

Facebook ads to see where you've been

Facebook is planning on using your browsing history to decide which ads to serve you. Although this might provide more accurate results, it isn't something that users like and could provide some embarrassing results.

People are rightfully protective over their browser history as it's quite a private thing, but some people know that and use it to their advantage, such as the creator of this recent virus.

http://www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2010/4/19/facebook-rolls-out-web-ads-track-user-patterns/

Oscars for movie websites?

Smashing Magazine has decided to give out ask the question: "What if Oscars were give to movie websites?".

You can see the results on their site via the link below:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/04/14/what-if-oscars-were-given-to-movie-websites/

Battling Banner Blindness

I often wonder when creating banners how many of the X Million impressions that the banner will get, actually resulted in someone looking at the banner. Not only do people use ad-banner blocking software / plug-ins, but research shows that people quite effectively ignore banner ads or anything that looks like a banner ad.

So how do we get people to actually look at these ads? Or interact with them. Well there's not much we can do if people are using ad-blockers, but for those who are filtering them with their brain, there are a good list of suggestions in the article below.

Give the user something, use a simple design, keep the ads fresh and customise the ads for the viewer are the suggestions - and they're not bad suggestions! Have a read, follow their guidelines and hopefully watch click-rate increase!


http://www.marketingvox.com/4-tricks-to-battle-banner-ad-blindness-046498/

Twitter advertising platform: Promoted Tweets

Twitter have launched their advertising platform. Following in a Google mould, Twitter will now allow companies to bid on keywords and become listed on the twitter search site above search results.
We'll have to wait to see how popular this will, but I can't see it being very popular with Twitter in it's current state, as at the moment most of Twitter's traffic comes from 3rd Party apps and not through their twitter website. This means that most people won't ever see the priority listed ads.
Twitter are thinking of creating their own apps to rival those 3rd party apps out there. Although I'm unsure of how successful they will be given the prevalence of TweetDeck and other such applications that utilise the Twitter API.

http://www.warc.com/news/topnews.asp?ID=26567

Bebo about to go

AOL has come to the inevitable conclusion that it will have to sell or shut down Bebo. Bebo has been performing poorly of recent, with it's users in the US down from 5.8 million last year to 5.1 million this year. (This is compared to Facebook's 210 million)
They paid $850 million for it a couple of years ago, a figure that it is unlikely to sell for now.

Read more:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8606379.stm