Facebook’s changes, announced today, signify a significant shift in the way that the web could work. The Open Graph (and it’s brethren) cranks information in and out of Facebook differently to Facebook Connect, it connects to every site and property that wants to be social with Facebook’s member base, and does it quickly and easily. On the surface sites will start adding ‘like’ buttons, beneath the surface i think it’s Facebook’s big play to own all users, communication, emotion and connections on the web.
Mark Zuckerberg today said that there will be over one billion “Likes” in the first 24 hours, and i’m not surprised.
It looks like Facebook’s soft, blue walls are coming down. You’ll soon see the ‘Like’ button on every site from bands, to celebs, to your bank and your babysitter. There’s will be so much data flooding in and out of Facebook it’s hard to even comprehend. In fact it’s downright scary that one service could own so much information about the Internets’ activity. Once thought to be Google’s domain, the knowledge monopoly looks squarely to shift into Facebooks databanks if this system is embraced the way they hope it will. I’m presuming if i play ball in these new Social Graphs that Facebook will know almost everything about me. Imagine the advertising power that will generate.
Hold onto your hats, this town’s a changing.
The Open Graph protocol enables you to integrate your web pages into the social graph. It is currently designed for web pages representing profiles of real-world things — things like movies, sports teams, celebrities, and restaurants. Once your pages become objects in the graph, users can establish connections to your pages as they do with Facebook Pages. Based on the structured data you provide via the Open Graph protocol, your pages show up richly across Facebook: in user profiles, within search results and in News Feed. ‘Open Graph protocol’ on facebook’s developer site
It’s going to be easier to log in and grant publishing rights to and from FB. It’s going to be easier to integrate your own brand site with your Facebook ‘friends’. It’s going to be easier to be a lot more social without having to build the infrastructure yourself. But I’m a bit nervous, and i would think that Google may be too. With these changes, Facebook is basically re-cataloguing the web. Like Google once did and continues to do as our first port of call when we open our browsers. Facebook may become our new default, with a more relevant catalogue of sites for me, connected to all the other things that i need to access.
It feels a little bit like the 2.0 version of the AltaVista from the 90s. Remember the early days of search, when we used to manually submit our sites to search engines before they would index us? The Open Social movement has shades of this, as sites integrate themselves with Facebook they are ultimately submitting their site to a long, long index of websites that will play nice with Facebook. Let’s think about this list, it will be a catalogue of sites that are more likely to be current, savvy, popular and up-to-date. Basically everything on the web that you would ever frequent, trust and re-use. Sounds like a list of all of the new, premium sites on the web, without the backlog of forums, guestbooks, out-of-date info and Geocities (RIP) sites that are slowly fading to the back of search results. To me it sounds like a more efficient, better list of everything that anyone cares about, that is fast to search without the crud.
It’s pretty interesting from a search perspective, but from an advertisers perspective, i feel a bit like Facebook is trying to tease my brand’s customer relationships from their cold dead fingers and into it’s growing lair. This, all done under the guise of better, quicker, cheaper, easier social interactions and monitoring services. This could mean that FB may *own* the ultimate relationship with my customers, and if i want to know anything about that relationship, i’ll be politely asking FB to provide that for me…please? I can’t see that being free or unbiased for very long.
For my money, this goes against the wild-west freeness and choice that makes the web fun. Sure, it makes things easier to manage all in one place, but then trust becomes the issue. “Facebank”, can i really trust you with my entire internet life?
It sounds like i hate Facebook. I really don’t, i quite like it. I do think this could change everything and i’m very intrigued. I’ll certainly be championing ‘Like’ buttons on our client’s pages as of now.
Another Sunday night is over, and so ends another race to the top of the foursquare leader board. Everyone is getting very competitive in the Visual Jazz offices about their check-ins and points balances in the latest social media craze taking social media boffins by storm.
foursquare is a cross between a friend-finder, a social city-guide and a game that rewards you for doing interesting things. We aim to build things to not only help you keep up with the places your friends go, but that encourage you to discover new places and challenge you to explore your neighborhood in new ways.
When you tell foursquare where you are, that’s called “checking-in”. You can check-in from parks, bars, museums, restaurants… really anywhere. When you check-in we’ll let your friends know where they can find you and award you points and badges based on your adventurousness.
It’s a mobile service that allows you to tell everyone where you are, and for you to instantly find out where all your friends are (as long as they’re regularly ‘checking in’). It’s a pretty interesting service that rewards users with points, mayorships for regulars and badges for earning achievements (many of which are quite cryptic). It’s a well thought out system that seems robust, easy to pick up and addictive. Its value for the regular punter is up for negotiation, but (like Twitter) it’s as useful as you and your network make it.
There are a few other similar services on the scene; Gowalla seems to have a very similar featureset with the inclusion of virtual items that you can drop and pick up (it’s also better designed), Google Latitude, Buzz, Twitter and Facebook also have location aware services for mobile devices, but foursquare seems to be picking up the momentum and has the press behind it. I’m sure there’s a whole bunch more out there but it will be hard to catch up now unless Facebook makes a big thrust in this direction.
Earning and obsessing
I’ve always loved going to new obscure places, and now I love it even more, knowing that the more obscure a place, the more likely i’ll be the first to add it to the network of foursquare locations to check-in to gaining me an extra 5 + points. Extra points are awarded for adding new places, checking in to places for the first time, and seem to be accumulated faster with a multiplier bonus the more you check in.
Checking in can easily become an obsession, especially when all your friends are doing it and you’re trying out new ways to unlock badges and earn points. Points get reset every Sunday night so you’ve always got a chance to redeem yourself next week if you fall behind. You know you’ve got a problem when you turn up at your mother-in-law’s house and can’t say hello to your greeters until you’ve checked in. It can get a bit socially unacceptable to be on your mobile device every time you walk through a new door, but for those with the addiction it’s commonplace.
Brands on foursquare
St. Ali coffee shop down the road from VJ is the first brand that I have noticed using foursquare to it’s benefit. Checking in to any location in the South Melbourne area pops up a little green box in the top right hand corner of the foursquare app that says ‘Special Nearby’. Tapping this special icon lets me know of a special available only to foursquare users. Initially St. Ali were offering 6 free beers, one for you and one for 5 of your mates each at their street party a couple of weeks ago, but only upon proving that you are the mayor of St. Ali on foursquare. After the street party was done, they changed the offer to be another foursquare specific task.
At this stage, with foursquare in its infancy, it’s probably just a good way for brands to test the technological savvy of their customer base, but as the service grows I’m sure it will get very creative. Apparently it only happens when checking in to like-minded locations like other cafés – but in practice, I’m not sure that works properly, as checking in to Visual Jazz alerts me to a special at the café down the road. It looks at this stage that the promotions in foursquare are free for brands to set up from a page on the foursquare site, but again I’m pretty sure as it evolves and more brands want to be involved that there will be a cost for this type of ‘advertisement’. Perhaps they will run a google adwords typo system with bidding for locations in your area? I can’t see the system working very well if there are 10 coffee shops in a city block that all have foursquare ‘specials’.
I think this stuff is great and a really fun way for brands to connect and monitor the usage, demographic and tech savviness of their customers. I can, however, see an issue arising when people are checking in to places fraudulently, which brings me to my next point…
Honesty and location fraud
I’m assuming the foursquare framework works completely on an honour system. I use it regularly and have (shamefully) checked into a place that I was leaving because I forgot to check in while I was there – I did it for the points. But this got me thinking, can I become the mayor of the Eiffel tower having never been to France? Perhaps not, as the system is aware of my general location (even though I can change it) and it wouldn’t suggest The Eiffel Tower as a place for me to legitimately check in to, but I’m pretty sure from my desk at VJ in South Melbourne I could hypothetically become the mayor of a Café down the street (having never stepped foot in the door) and then take advantage of their offer available only to mayors (presumably designed to reward loyal customers). On the flip side, if I was walking into the café for the first time to prove my mayorship and get some freebies, then at least that is getting me in the door. There’s a world of interesting opportunities and scenarios about to be unleashed, I’m sure.
Privacy
There’s an inherent danger in publicly publishing all of your coming and goings on the internet, and although there are some privacy protections in place, I think it’s fair to say that most people that don’t fully understand the implications or configurations to use friending and privacy settings properly. This is blatantly evident from the furore of the Facebook privacy changes.
Enter Please Rob Me. This site is a bit unfair, but it’s also a good idea in principal, even if it does nothing other than teach people not to be too transparent about their public movements. My house-mate is always home even if I’m not, so don’t even try it.
Wait and see
It’s cool. foursquare is really cool. It’s not for everyone, but for me and a group of my friends it’s really great to be out in the city and know where my friends are, offering places to go to meet up and places to avoid for fear of bad crowds. It’s another platform for brands to leverage in a new and interesting way and it’s clear that foursquare have a framework for this already in place, it will be interesting to see where they take it and who’s brave enough to use it early (and creatively).
Before Avatar and the mad 3D crazy that is sweeping the world, i went to see Up in 3D and was super impressed by it’s subtle and tasteful use of 3D. After watching the previews before the film and being surprised that there was so much 3D production going on i’ve started looking into the use of 3D on the web. If you’ve ever looked into it, you’ll know that it’s not easy to find any half decent examples around, those red/cyan glasses are pretty hard to use and they don’t work for everyone, not to mention that most of the examples on the web are from old SD content made in the 80′s. Given the current rapid trend, It now looks like YouTube is getting on board and this example is the best implementation that i’ve seen so far.
Click the video to view in HD on youtube.
The HD version is really good quality and the options to choose between any possible implementation of 3D colouration via the drop down caters for any possible combo of glasses and styles available to a standard computer screen. The option of ‘cross-eyed’ 3D is also pretty cool, so that just by crossing or squinting your eyes you may be able to achieve the effect without glasses. It didn’t work for me, but it’s a cute experiment.
Hopefully we keep experimenting with this colourised stop-gap approach while the world (and all of our content) get’s ready to upgrade all our screens again once proper polarised (or even native) 3d becomes available to consumer sets and monitors. Plasma/LCD/LED/HD/FULL HD/3D/ let’s hope it never stops.
Click the image for a larger version
Oh, and you’ll need some red/cyan glasses to demo any of this stuff properly, the cross-eyed thing doesn’t really work (not for me anyway). Go get some glasses.
Ocean Recon is a project that i have been working on for the last 12 months or so. We started planning this project just after i started at Visual Jazz. Trying to get a Submarine project off the ground is a process that had taken place a few times before and now we’d finally found an approach that everyone was happy with.
To show what life is like on a submarine is not an easy thing to do. It’s pretty hard to get on board one, and they’re not the easiest things to photograph in their normal state (underwater). So we set on a 3d approach for the sub and a whole lot of motion work to get a 1/2 sky/water look to the majority of the scenes.
The planning stage was meticulous. We went back and forth for a long time with actual Submariners getting the plans to construct the sub in 3D, getting the scripts right for the scenes and making sure that all of the details were accurate. This was really important as we wanted to give as realistic as possible interpretation of actual operations on board.
Here are a few examples of the kind of details that we adhered to, all based on facts:
• The sub tilts to 10 degrees as it surfaces
• The uniforms were real and displayed correct rank
• The dolphins sequence was taken straight from footage on board the HMAS Rankin
• The equation used to calculate a firing angle is the same trig that is actually used
…and a heap more. But anyway, there were a lot of details that we paid attention to. It really helped us learn more about what goes on and how, so that we could then communicate that during the site’s presentation.
We incorporated 8 ‘activities’ into the site that intersect the scenes at poignant moments, they’re like little mini-games, but i think activity-points are a better description of them, as they’re not really games. These were also very true-to-life, or as much as possible given the simple interactions that we wanted them to have. Not designed to be sticking points for users, moreso to make sure that people are paying attention and to further explain the details of what is going on in a more interactive way.
Tomma from VJ, in one of the diving suits, getting extremely hot very quickly as i continually instructed him to climb ladders and jump off boxes. He was a sweaty, horrible, angry mess at the end of it, but his enthusiasm and awesomeness was never in question. Props.
Doing the sound mixing with Tristain at BangBang! Studios in Port Melbourne, these guys were really great to work with and always came up with the goods.
And here’s me, showing off the site at the media launch like a proud dad.
At the end of the day I’m really happy with it, but as always, there are things that i’d like to add and change. I’m working towards some of those things now. Stay tuned.
It’s going to be easier to log in and grant publishing rights to and from FB. It’s going to be easier to integrate your own brand site with your Facebook ‘friends’. It’s going to be easier to be a lot more social without having to build the infrastructure yourself. But I’m a bit nervous, and i would think that Google may be too. With these changes, Facebook is basically re-cataloguing the web. Like Google once did and continues to do as our first port of call when we open our browsers. Facebook may become our new default, with a more relevant catalogue of sites for me, connected to all the other things that i need to access.
