Week 7 Presentation

Facebook was founded in 2004 by a Mark Zuckerberg, originally designed to act as a social networking site for the Harvard university campus at which Zuckerberg studied. It quickly gained popularity and before long had spread to MIT, both Boston college and Boston university as well as all the Ivy League schools. Fast forward to the present and Facebook has become the largest social networking websites on the Internet today and made its founder, a multi-millionaire.

The success of facebook lies in the fact that the more users that sign up and use it, the better it becomes, a key aspect of the Web 2.0 ethos. With this in mind Facebook has gone from strength to strength and in recent months launched an advertising feature called ‘Facebook Marketplace’ which allowed users to post private sales, much like you would in a local newspaper. Continuing on this theme Facebook then allowed businesses to advertise their wares directly on facebook using something called ‘Facebook Beacon’. This means that whenever you logged on and were presented with your facebook homepage, you are greeted with an advertisment based on your surfing habits and the information Facebook has collected about you. For instance on my particularly facebook profile I am often presented with offers on student accommodation in the Coventry area, but also cars, books and films. For a business to able to have this kind of coverage to literally millions of people without directly targeting them is invaluable, with many industry experts predicting in the future that this form of web advertising will become the key media for promotion.

As of recent times Facebook has come under fire for privacy issues. The main problem facing facebook in this area is the fact that even once you have ‘deleted’ your facebook profile, the information that they have gathered on you remains on their database. Who’s to say that they will then not supply this information to business’s who in turn sign you up to mailing lists based on the surfing habits Facebook has documented? Facebook’s privacy policy can be found at the following URL;

http://www.facebook.com/policy.php

In relation to this issue, Facebook employee’s have been accussed of logging on to user profiles, changing aspects of it such as the picture or about me section and also viewing dates on restricted profiles. The following website goes into further detail as well as expanding on how facebook are very vague when it comes to their privacy policy meaning that the language could be open to personal interpretation.

Resoruces on Facebook:
http://money.cnn.com/2006/10/06/magazines/fortune/fastforward_facebook.fortune/index.htm – Why it’s important
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook – Definition and other information
http://www.doshdosh.com/facebook-marketing-resources/ – A portal website linking to many articles based around Facebook

The Long Tail Theory

Wikipedia describes the long tail theory as the following;

Businesses with distribution power can sell a greater volume of otherwise hard-to-find items at smaller volumes than of popular items at large volumes. The term long tail is also generally used in statistics, often applied in relation to wealth distributions or vocabulary use.

Translated into English, this essentially means that large distribution companies such as Amazon, will have roughly half of their sales from uncommon items that wouldn’t find their way into big chains on the high street. An example of this would be a book you can buy on Amazon, you wouldn’t regularly find on the shelves in Waterstones.

In the picture below you can see the long tail theory visualized on a graph with products sold running along the x-axis and popularity running up the y-axis. As you can see companies generally shift a smaller volume of high popularity items compared to low popularity items at higher volumes. Although this may at first appear odd and illogical you must remember that these companies also stock a huge amount of low key products that make up a big number of their sales. 

Graphically the theory is represented as;

You’ve been poked by Facebook!

Superpoke is a Facebook application that allows you to perform certain ‘actions’ to your friends over your social network. The more you use the applications the more poke options you get. Where as first you may only be able to ’slap’ someone within a few pokes you are able to ‘throw Hillary Clinton’ at them. As with most Facebook applications the actions you performed are broadcast in your minifeed and newsfeed which means that all the users in your social network are able to see the actions that you have performed. This can either be seen as a blessing or a curse depending on what you do to certain people!

A rival application to Superpoke is X Me, which at the time of writing, only has 50,000 more users with the application installed. It performs the same functions, however it also allows you to add certain functions to the quick menu located under your picture on your profile and also allows you to create your own actions. This in my opinion is it’s best feature as it allows you to have actions that could be unique to your circle of friends or actions that only your friends would understand.

iTunes vs The Big Four

Traditionally music has been distributed via record companies who sign on artists and essentially loan them money to produce music. The companies then re-cooperate the money lost, through touring and record sales so that at the end of the day the bands in question see very little money. With the advent of iTunes and in a related topic social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace, they have the possibility of self promotion on a grand scale. This has caused a drop in CD sales which in turn has seen a drop in the record companies profits. Just this week EMI announced that they are cutting 2000 jobs to bring costs in line. With Apple currently owning 70% of the online music industry, the rest of the industry as decided to take action by supplying their entire catalogues to a new service run by Amazon called AmazonMp3. Through this they intend to be a direct competitor to Apple’s iTunes and wrest some of the market share from their control. Another project that could possibly come to light is Total Music. Esentially what will happen is for $5 a month you have access to all of the big fours back catalogue that you can download at will to your Total Music player.

Web 1.0 vs Web 2.0

Before the advent of Web 2.0, many applications or business’s were designed to support the high power central players of the Internet. With the birth of Web 2.0 P2P (Peer 2 Peer) file sharing was also born. This meant that huge networks of people could be linked together to share files and applications. As the concept developed a technology known as torrents came into existence, these were a brilliant concept in that the more people associated with any one torrent it would become ’seeded’. Essentially this means the more people who have the file the faster you would download said file. This follows the ethos of Web 2.0 in that “the service automatically gets better the more people use it”. In Web 1.0, if companies wanted to offer faster, better content in this way, they would have to upgrade their servers. In Web 2.0 P2P applications each individual user acts as a server, using up a small amount of bandwidth from everyone with the seed to provide a better download rate.

From a business stance P2P became a big problem, especially in relationship to the film and music industry. Many people didn’t see it as a crime to simple download music through an application or from a website and as such the profits made in the industry started to slip. Even today the industry is unsure on how to handle the rise of P2P software and also have to deal with the relentless success of Apple’s iTunes.

The Big Switch may turn off jobs. Oh Really?

Throughout human history with every advent of new technology there has been a small collection of naysayers to say that ‘this new technology will destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs’ where in reality it has created just as many new jobs as it has replaced. When automatized car production was rolled out, the workers could simply retrain as technicians to service the new machinery. Some will argue that the advent of Web 2.0 destroys more jobs than it creates but if we as a race adopted this kind of attitude then perhaps we might still be hunting big cats with big spears and retreating to our caves when the sun goes down.