This move will help Facebook get a lot of natural traffic through search engines as all questions and answers posted using the Questions application are public and visible to everyone on the Internet. Certainly a very serious move towards owning the content. The app also asks you to “Tag” your questions so this means better targeting to get the answers as FB already knows a lot about what you “Like”.

Remember each answer to any question is a transaction (of knowledge) and hence it can be charged and monetized, without depending on ad revenues.

What next for FaceBook? What next for social web? Do you think it will be as popular as Yahoo Answers?

Also check out startupqna (For all your startup questions).

Related Startups : Voicetap ( for domain specific experts)

[Naman is a startup enthusiast and has worked with couple of Indian startups as Product Manager. He writes at The Inspire Blog]

Yes, Amazon has been on Facebook in the form of various apps but that’s not really the same thing. Amazon on Facebook is purely another distribution channel with a half-baked attempt at using your facebook network but applying intelligence on your network and bringing it back into product recommendations on Amazon is the real thing that should have happened long back.

The integration does solve for some basic social shopping scenarios at the moment. Gift recommendations and gifting alerts are probably the most basic way in which Amazon can use the Facebook network data. But the real value of this alliance can come through only if Amazon successfully understands relationships on Facebook based on common activity, location, likes and dislikes. If most of the people in my network listen to Coldplay, the chances are fairly good that I like the band too. However, if Amazon can really get to a point where it can segregate common interest friends from work/school connections and both the above from random friend requests one may have accepted, the product recommendations can get very relevant. The amount of positive recent activity with another friend should also be a good indicator of how much I would value that person’s interests as well as how likely I would be to buy something for them.

What is good is that unlike a lot of other Facebook integrations, Amazon is not publishing data back to Facebook. Given the recent spate of controversies around Facebook’s privacy stance, this will definitely help spur the uptake of this opt-in feature.

Great partnership that was waiting to happen! I hope this really works out well for the good of all of us who love shopping online.

This post was first published at Venturati.

Sangeet Paul Choudary is a leader in the New Ventures group at Intuit Asia-Pac.

1. TechCrunch posted an ad in its twitter stream back in March. Of the 1.3 Mn followers that they have on twitter only 995 have clicked on it till date. While the post mentioning the ad itself got 544 Retweets and the ad was retweeted ~40 times.

2. My last post on Google’s Franchise was Retweeted ~70 times but in total it got only ~40 clicks through twitter. I tracked all the Retweets and about 60 of them were from Bots. Although each of these bots had 100-2K followers but got almost no click.

Both these go on to show the unacceptable dominance level of Bots on twitter and the value of each tweet. Probably now you can as well make a guess of how many Blog Retweets are actually by humans. The larger the blog, the ratio of bot retweets are higher. No use being happy about 1000′s of followers when most of them are through auto follow scripts.

Virgin Atlantic ad in twitter search results. What is the Real value of Each Tweet Ad?

I did similar tracking on FaceBook as well. Here is some raw data:

1. Posted content through a fake profile (of a sexy girl) with 1400 friends. Total clicks only ~50. I tried posting tech. content, news content, viral content and content with obscene titles; in all cases number of clicks were between 40-60.

2. Similarly, the status stream of Facebook Fanpages get only about 2% users’ attention. Information Overload!

So, is your social network account really meant for posting blog feeds in HOPE of it getting ReTweeted? Isn’t it time you thought about your social media strategy and use social media in more human way and not auto feed.

I guess the redundancy of twitter followers has given us a chance to be happy about quantity instead of quality. And everybody just loves tracking it.

Got similar data to share?

Do follower/fan numbers matter?

» Follow Pluggd.in on Twitter and Facebook.

[Naman is a startup enthusiast and has worked with couple of Indian startups as Product Manager. He writes at The Inspire Blog]

Social Cluster / SocialGraph of Facebook - Is it Different from Twitter?

For example, the screengrab above shows the various clusters that I am a part of. There is a separate cluster of college friends, another one of my friends from school, colleagues from a previous company, and so on.

My cluster of school friends is disjointed from my cluster of office colleagues. So, yes, I have no one in common here. The clusters of my colleagues are fairly close to each other and there a few who know each other across. Hmm! That’s pretty insightful!

The developer blog states that -

“In the work and life balancing game, the person with the biggest number of clusters, and not the person with the biggest number of friends, wins.”

And it is true. Is it not?

So, how many clusters do you have? And what did you infer from them?

Also, how different is your twitter social graph from Facebook? Would love to understand.

Given this, I am surprised that neither of these two socio-nets has a feature of image search among the friends’ network and public photos on these sites.

Often when we are planning a trip or vacation to some place, we try to search online about the destination. I would always love to know if any of my connection on either Orkut or Facebook has been there and has put up any photos of the place. A friend’s word would always carry more credibility than the most authentic commercial profile page/wiki for the place. In fact, a few days back Orkut themselves had run an online ad campaign wherein they showed one animated user talking about the great trip/vacation he had and other asking him to upload photos from this trip/vacation on Orkut. So I am quite sure that photo sharing (especially of specific locations) is a big traffic booster for Orkut and Facebook.

However right now there are no means to find out if there are any photos of interest available on these socio-nets to which I have access. I have to turn to proper photo-sharing networks like Flickr.com and try my luck with photos from some stranger with whom I might never be able to connect (Yahoo! sucks in all its social network efforts L). This one application can overnight convert Orkut and Facebook into a serious competitor for all photo-sharing sites like Flickr.

This image search facility should allow me to search for photos to which I have access on these socio-nets, i.e. photos from my friends or photos which have been made public purposefully by their owners. This search can be based on tags/album name or whichever image search technology is best suited. I am sure Google with its best search technologies will not have much of an issue in developing an image search for Orkut. Besides, Google maps/Google world should be integrated with Orkut and geo-tagging of photos should be allowed. It will only make image search more accurate when searching for photos of a specific location.

While privacy has always been a key concern for these socio-nets, and more so with photos, this search facility needs to be very particular in searching only among those photos to which the searcher’s account have access to. Facebook has the famous privacy bug still unresolved wherein if any of your friend comments on a photo from a Facebook user who is not your friend, you still get to see the entire album of photos of that person. Bollywood actress Sonam Kapoor’s private photos from Facebook had leaked out once because of this bug, however still it remains unresolved. Wonder if it is now an intentional bug that Facebook wants to be alive to drive more page-views.

As a plain user of these socio-nets, I sense a need here for an application which can provide this image search facility. I hope some Product Manager from either Google of Facebook listens to this and evaluates the opportunity. But before that, what do you guys think of it? Is there an opportunity for building such an application for Orkut or Facebook?

About the author:

Vibhushan is an entrepreneur and has co-founded an Enterprise Marketing Management products company – MQuotient. Prior to this, he was Product Manager for Search at Yahoo! India. He holds a MBA degree from IIM Ahmedabad. His online coordinates are: vibhushan.waghmare@gmail.com, Linkedin, Twitter (@vibhushan), Blog.

Also see: Orkut vs. Facebook in India : Winner takes it all?

Facebook has launched Facebook Connect (first announced in May 2008) that allows its members to log onto other Web sites using their Facebook identification and see their friends’ activities on those sites.

FB has announced that in the next few weeks, few prominent sites (Digg/SFChronicle etc) will start rolling out it’s Connect service on their website.

So essentially, you can leave a comment on Digg using your FB id/password and the same will show up on your FB news feed.

What about OpenID/DataPortability?

FB Connect achieves the same functionality as OpenID  – just that it is built on proprietary code (which is not open at all) – a clear threat to OpenID.

Essentially, Facebook is trying to replace all logins with their own, and control the creation, distribution and application of the social graph using their proprietary platform.

The most scary part of this, is that while Facebook is quietly and methodically building out this vision with massive partners, the standards community is busy squabbling about naming the open alternative. – Chris Saad (co-founder of the Data Portability project).

FB’s policy on Connect:

When Facebook Connect is used to allow a user to “sign in” or authenticate with your website, the Facebook Connect option must be presented at least as prominently as the most prominent of any other sign in or authentication method on your site, and not as a secondary option. – Dev wiki

So, the social network overlord wants to own your users and in the process, build a better social graph for it’s own purpose.
Only time will tell whether OpenID gets past the internal struggle and catches up with Facebook.

If you are a socionet owner, will you participate in FB Connect?

It’s the only game on Facebook that allows you to play the game the way you want to! With Wordscraper you can build your own board and try out whacky combinations with special high value squares.
The game is turn based, so you need not be online for very long periods. Plus, we also give you the option to store a board layout. This saves time when you want to play new games with the same layout.
So give it a try, you will love it. Don’t follow rules, make them!

The timing is right – everybody is talking about FaceBook’s shutdown of Scrabulous (for US and Canadian users) and this is the perfect time for Kolkata based brothers to cash on the hype.

This is what I mentioned in my last coverage of Scrabulous as well:

Live a martyr life..think of a new idea, bank on the instant fame and get VCs to fund that idea.

Interesting!

FaceBook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg is in India (as per TC’s post) and though I saw this news in the morning, I was trying to get hold of the masala.

From what I could gather (courtesy: one of the trusted sources), they will make some big appointments + announcements in the next few days.

Here is what I speculate:

• Announcement of FB apps – some attempt to attract the developer community. Catch them before they start building MySpace/Orkut apps.
• Focused strategy for Indian market – and some key appointments.

Something I don’t expect them to do is to open an India dev center.

What do you think? With all the biggies focusing on India, will BigAdda and ibibo‘s strategy to attract the Indian crowd using media chics will work?

What will happen to homegrown networks like MingleBox, yaari, Indyarocks etc

What’s your opinion?

» Read our complete coverage of FaceBook

OF the 23,160 FaceBook apps, fun based apps dominate the usage:

Top 5 companies with most popular FaceBook app are Slide, followed by RockYou, SGN (which recently moved from #20 to #3), Zynga, Chainn (get the list here).

Is FaceBook becoming the eBay for developers?

Will Orkut apps/OpenSocial get the same developer love (since I don’t think Google allows running ads on Orkut and as of this date, OpenSocial is damn buggy and slow)?

What do you think?

“‘People would be talking about how many new friends they would have online, or who had ‘friend-requested’ them and so on . . . it’s just a massive popularity contest and I, for one, was sick of hearing about it,” ..
think people should be able to sit down and have normal conversations and not live behind these pseudo identities on the internet.” [source]

Just goes on to show how deep FB is penetrating into the lives of it’s users (and how anti-social is online social networking!!)

What says?

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