ambient

I’ve been playing with Twitter quite a bit this week and have been impressed. Never mind that it’s currently where all of the cool kids are hanging out, it’s interesting to me for the following reasons:

• It is a parser. An @ tag identifies people and now, thanks to hashtags, # identifies nouns. This allows systems to aggregate and potentially create a true del.icio.us-killer (by flipping it inside out) and a super-simple semantic notation system that could scale very easily.
• It works really well as group chat. There are features here that could work in a lot of different settings. Look for an open source Twitter clone in the near future, something that does for micro-blogging (is there a better term) what WordPress did for blogs.
• The potential integration with Boompaste is huge. Very excited about this.
• It’s a social network in the truest sense of the phrase. Like, I’ve actually met and interacted with real people.
• The API - I now no longer know immediately if I’m interacting with a human or a bot and that’s cool.

The new Facebook Ads network presents some new opportunities for marketers. Whether those opportunities translate into any real value for consumers / Facebook users remains to be seen.

I wanted to understand how it compares to PPC ad networks from the likes of Google, Yahoo, and MSN, so I created a small text ad for Boompaste. It was denied. So I created a new one.

The first, disapproved ad said “Meta is Betta. Get all your news in one place.”

I think Facebook rejected it because you have to use the title of your company, product, or service in the ad title and body. Annoying, but whatever. I guess they are shooting for high quality ads, which is good for users.

My second ad reads “Boompaste: Meta is Betta. Get all your news in one place. Boompaste aggregates the most popular stories on the web.”

It was approved, for two reasons, I believe:

1. I targeted 16-40 year olds the first time. This triggers additional editorial review. The second time I targeted 18-40 year olds and it went live almost immediately.
2. I used the name of the offering in the title, as mentioned above.

So the ad is live, and within 10 minutes I had about 196 impressions and 1 click (CTR of 0.51%). Gotta love PPC.

I’ll post more results later. So far, however, I like the experience. It’s clean and well done, if still immature.

In order for Facebook to really compete, marketers are going to need:

• Data exports: there is currently no way to export campaign / performance data from Facebook. It would be even better if this was available via API, depending on the delivery options for reports. If you could schedule email delivery of reports, that would be fine.
• Some sort of transparency. This is a critical area where I believe Facebook is lacking, and it’s tricky because it’s related to privacy. When you buy ads on search or even content networks, you can easily see it live. For example, if you bid high enough on “laptop,” you can query Google, etc. for that keyword and see your ad running in its live environment. You can also view competitors and their ad copy. More sophisticated marketers automate this process.
• Automated ad placement - Facebook needs to understand that marketers with large budgets work hard to create consistent campaigns across a variety of networks. Nobody wants to manually create thousands of ads on Facebook when you can automate that entire process on Google. Facebook does offer a valuable enough audience to target it as a network regardless, but velocity will suffer in comparison to other networks.

I’ll add more later. You may want to read Fred Wilson’s blog - he is conducting a similar experiment.

Boompaste is live.

I’ve been inspired by quite a few different takes on RSS and the best way for people to follow the buzz on the web.

Boompaste is designed to make it easy to do so. I’ve got a lot more planned for the site, and it’s barely finished started (with bugs and all) but I wanted to at least get it out there for my friends to see and use. I’m not heavily marketing it right now, because I’d like to see how it grows on its own.

If you think there are ways to make it better / more usable, just let me know.