Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

Sign of the Times

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

facebook_oos2

I’m not a big Twitter user, and only marginally more so on Facebook, but I’m encountering over-capacity issues on both sites with increasing frequency.  I’m sure this could actually be “site maintenance”, but doing that at mid-day is a bit hard to fathom since that is peak-demand time.

I don’t really think of this as a failing on the site’s part.  Sure, they’ve obviously got to increase their server capacity to meet this level of demand, but it’s really a testament to how popular social network sites have become.  According to my Alexa plug-in, Facebook is now the 4th most heavily trafficked site on the web behind Google, Yahoo and YouTube (MySpace is #9 and Twitter #56).

As a user, it’s all still a little unwieldy.  I’ve got friends who post all the time and clog up the pipeline, but I don’t want to drop them, and others who rarely post, and I want to be sure to see their stuff when they do.  A better management system has to be on the horizon for organizing and filtering this mess.

The one thing that doesn’t seem to be on the horizon is a dampening of enthusiasm or participation for posting/tweeting.  Clearly it’s a great way to stay connected, and to grow to such lofty volume levels in such a few years is truly amazing.

It’s like the web has been re-invented all over again.  (thanks, Yogi.  :-) )

KidWithMatches is the personal blog of Pete Eberbach, VP Director of Online Marketing & Technology with St. John + Partners.

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Posted in bandwidth, blogs, customer experience, innovation, online marketing, social networks | No Comments »

Playfish Doesn’t Feel Credit Crunch

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

Even during the worst economic downturn of my lifetime, there’s money to be made. Evidence, Playfish, casual gaming site for the masses. They, and competitors, Zynga and SGN, took in a collective $75MM in funding over the past couple of months.

Playfish

A social games company that develops and publishes video games on social networks like Facebook, Playfish is barely a year old, and already boasts over 10MM monthly active users.

You can read more about this in Techcrunch.

KidWithMatches is the personal blog of Pete Eberbach, VP Director of Online Marketing & Technology with St. John + Partners.

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Posted in customer experience, gaming, legal issues, online marketing, social networks | No Comments »

Find Yourself in the Youniverse

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

Nothing real deep here, so you can lose the compression pants and bike helmet.

Still a pretty fun social profiling technique using only visual stimuli. I love the fact that at the end they let you grab the widget so you can post it to your Facebook or whatever page.

Youniverse Personality TestYouniverse Personality Test

I’m not sure “dreamer” “thriller” “back to basics” “relaxed” is 100% on the money, but it’s not far off. Not sure how the outcome would have changed if I’d picked the dog turd picture for “that’s gross.”

KidWithMatches is the personal blog of Pete Eberbach, VP Director of Online Marketing & Technology with St. John + Partners.

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Posted in blogs, browsers, customer experience, gaming, innovation, mobile, navigation, online marketing, roi and analytics, search stuff, social networks, viral campaigns | No Comments »

Best of 2008 Really Spans Past 5 Years

Monday, June 2nd, 2008
PC World today released it’s top 100 best tech products for 2008. Their top 5 picks were Hulu, the iPhone, Facebook, Windows XP and the Lenovo Thinkpad X300.

Is it just me or are two of these old news and the Thinkpad a big yawn?

I totally agree with iPhone and Hulu, although it’s hard to put Hulu at #1 of 100 products and sites when considering the revolutionary nature of iPhone (#2) and Nintendo Wii (#16). There are lots of other arguably great brands on this list, but many of these are 3 – 5 years old. And some are repeats of last year. Wii for example was #3 last year.

This is really a popularity contest of the editors and readers of anything that’s on the market vs. a critical technical review and way of drawing attention to innovative new products from the past 12 months.

I guess that’s OK, but not what I would expect from PC World.

clipped from www.pcworld.com

100 Best Products of 2008
blog it

KidWithMatches is the personal blog of Pete Eberbach, VP Director of Online Marketing & Technology with St. John + Partners.

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Sleeping Giant of Social Networking Awakening

Monday, October 8th, 2007

More people go to MySpace every day than any other single site on the web. At least, the last stat I saw for them at the end of last year said so. Social networking sites are growing by leaps and bounds relative to other types of sites on the web.

Yet in spite of recent acquisitions of MySpace by NewsCorp and Facebook by Yahoo, web giant, Google, has been noticeably absent from a meaningful social networking presence in this large and growing web segment.

That is about to change.

Yesterday’s Business Week article reported that Google is about to take one of its social networking properties, Orkut, and make its source code public. It’s no surprise Orkut has been vacant of American users because the interface sucks. There’s no sense of community or browsable content, just your page and its content.

With the recent acquisition of mobile social networking site, Zingku, Google is gearing up to make a strong push toward tying social networking into their overall dominance on the web.

Knowing that Rupert Murdoch doesn’t like to be #2 in anything, this should be interesting to watch unfold.

KidWithMatches is the personal blog of Pete Eberbach, VP Director of Online Marketing & Technology with St. John + Partners.

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iPhone Takes Over Planet, Eats Children and Pets

Thursday, August 16th, 2007
OK. That’s a bit of a stretch, but the past two days’ posts on Textually.org have looked like that’s what’s coming next. Evidence that iPhone is quickly gaining share of culture:
Evidence of gaining global traction…France Telecom’s stock rising 1.5% on the rumor that it won the French iPhone contract.

Whew. Quite a busy two days. I wonder what the next 48 hours will bring?

Maybe iPhone will take over the planet and in a fit of totalitarian gluttony begin eating children and pets. I think the odds are about even….

KidWithMatches is the personal blog of Pete Eberbach, VP Director of Online Marketing & Technology with St. John & Partners.

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Posted in customer experience, innovation, mobile, online marketing, roi and analytics | No Comments »

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