What else can we do with targeted mobile advertising?
We've previously seen the release of iPhone-specific ads in the form of entertaining apps like this Dockers app depicting a man who dances when the iPhone is shaken.  A recently released ad trading network facilitates the creation of a "webring"-style collection of affiliated apps that advertise for one another.  One thing I've noticed about these neat Weblogs, Inc. ads is that they aren't automatically pushed to iPhone users.  When I surf to WoW Insider on my iPhone I'm not immediately redirected to the mobile site.  I didn't even realize the iPhone site existed for quite a long time.

Maybe Weblogs is simply testing this particular advertising channel without wanting to roll it out to all mobile users yet?  It seems prudent to connect these targeted mobile ads with every possible mobile user that comes through their virtual doors.  Simple blog plugins like MobilePress already demonstrate the ease with which mobile-optimized sites can be used without requiring users to find a separate URL.  Why not auto-detect all mobile viewers and give them links to the App Store or whatever other e-commerce engine is most applicable to their handset?  I'm going to keep an eye on these integrated iPhone / App Store ads - it should be very interesting to see if they can live up to the standards for targeted advertising Louis hoped for in his recent post "I Wish Ad Companies Would Truly Leverage Social Profiles".

Read more by Daniel J. Pritchett at Sharing at Work .

This evening, while reading early feedback on the brand new baseball season over on ESPN.com, I saw yet another ad for a singles dating service, promising me access to available ladies waiting to hear from me. My first thought wasn't to turn on Private Browsing in Safari and do some clicking around, but instead, a desire that ESPN and its ad partners would just leverage my Facebook profile, know I'm married (and not looking), and stop showing me ads that made no sense. It would help my experience, and dramatically help their click through rates and success.

Given advertising seems to be a necessary evil to make the Web go round, there really needs to be a concerted effort for companies to take the wealth of social information that is embedded in all these networks, and get the targeting ever better and closer to being truly personalized. The opportunity seems too great to pass up, and all the ingredients are there - even if the occasional privacy proponent claims concern.

Facebook and other networks like it, including LinkedIn, FriendFeed and Google, are amassing piles of information about me. They know what I like. They know my family situation and my career path. They know where I graduated from high school and college. They know what music I listen to, what sports I watch, and my favorite teams. They know where I used to work and who I still keep in contact with. But as previously discussed, even Facebook's guesses as to what ads are relevant to me are pure failure - which I only somewhat jokingly said we should help combat by marking them all as "offensive".

Forget about wondering how much money Facebook is going to make through selling ads on its own site, or selling credits and game points. I think the real money is in Facebook offering to team up with all the major advertisers on the Web (Google/Doubleclick included) and letting said advertisers tap into our personal profiles, giving them a cut of the downstream revenue. Facebook has proven they know us, even as their ad team does not. Turn over the right data to ad people who do know what they're doing, and maybe I'll stop being annoyed by ads that have nothing to do with me.

As has been widely reported by now, the popular social sharing site, FriendFeed, revamped with a laser focus on realtime discussions and information discovery. As it, and the social Web in general, continues to evolve, there is always room for improvement, even when innovative companies like FriendFeed are pushing the envelope. As I did in August of 2008 when FriendFeed first retooled their interface, I thought it would be a good time to offer ways I believe the service could expand to offer greater flexibility for its users.

Of note, from the August list of suggestions, FriendFeed has implemented five of the ten suggestions, including the introduction of small user profiles, aggregation of duplicate items, the addition of direct messages, expanded advanced search, and negative keywords in the search engine. This shows the company is listening - not necessarily to me, but the community, who had asked for the same.

1. Expand the Ability to Direct Message Anyone on the Site

Just because Twitter only lets you send direct messages to those who follow you doesn't necessarily make it the one right way to go. While I understand people are concerned about the potential for spam, my contact info should be available to anyone, just like it is with e-mail addresses and phone numbers. Also, as you likely have found, sometimes you just need to reach somebody who isn't following you, and a direct message is simply a tool to get that done.

2. Provide Easier Ways to Manage Users and Groups

As with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites, it can get pretty easy to follow hundreds or even thousands of fellow users on FriendFeed. I've done a lot of work to put the thousands I follow into different lists, based on the frequency I'll expect to interact with their updates, or how often they are posting relevant information to me. But what would be very interesting to me is determining if people are participating as well. What if I could set up a rule such that any friends who have not made a native FriendFeed comment in the last 60 days be moved out of my main feed and into a folder called "Archive" or "Ghosts"? For as much as folks complained on Twitter about some "ghost tweets", what's worse are accounts that were set up and abandoned by people who chose not to interact.

Rather than needing to select users' avatars one by one or page by page, I should be able to set up information about those people and have them automatically filtered. Talk about baseball more than 10 times a week, and I'll put you in my Sports folder, for instance.

3. There Should be a Simple or "Light" Option

The new real-time focus of FriendFeed beta means that updates are coming and going constantly. There should be a version (or a toggle) that hides all comments or likes, letting users get the new content quickly without being forced into discussions. My previous suggestions on a "lite" FriendFeed that only contains some very popular services and not others looks less likely to happen, but to quiet the noise would be a much-used feature.

4. Direct Messages Should Get Out of My Home Feed

The new interface enables you to send and receive direct messages, but they are always in your home feed, even if you've already seen them. On the right side is a direct messages indicator which shows how many new messages you have, but unlike Twitter and unlike your e-mail, it's not staying there. I would like my home feed to instead show updates from myself and friends, putting direct messages in their own position, where they belong.

5. You Should Be Able to Customize Realtime and Filters

If you are following a lot of people, the realtime updates and rapid flow of information can be intimidating. Trying to read one article while five more come in can pretty much ensure that you see nothing. It makes sense to customize your lists and filters so that some lists are defaulted to the realtime function and others (usually those with more friends) are defaulted to be "paused" or have the realtime turned off.

6. Make "Best of Day" a real "Best Of"

The "Best of Day" feature almost didn't make the cut in the beta version. As of Thursday it wasn't there, but by this morning, it was. Billed as showing "the most popular entries among your friends in the past day", the feature shows active entries, usually with many comments or likes. But it doesn't show absolute "bests", such as "most commented" items or "most liked" items in the last 24 hours. Instead, something that has 6 likes and 2 comments might rank higher than an item with 10 likes and 20 comments. It would also be very interesting if I could find the "best of day" from specific services, for instance showing the most popular YouTube videos or Delicious bookmarks of the day.

7. Make It Easier to View By Service

The new look de-emphasized services and increased focus on the individual, when compared with the current standard. While that may make it more friendly, that again pushes me to machine language instead of usual behavior. For example, if I want to see my previous SmugMug items, I need to enter "service:smugmug from:louisgray" instead of just clicking on the SmugMug icon, as you would now.

Prior to the beta site, the common nomenclature was "?service=smugmug". For example, I would post http://friendfeed.com/louisgray?service=smugmug and get the data. Now I need to store a query, or need to search on every one of my friends' feeds by service.

8. Bring Back Weekly Statistics

While it is true that some users will likely manipulate their usual behavior to achieve specific activity goals, seeing a person's weekly comment and like totals is a good indicator of their newness, business or velocity. On the current site, you can mouse over a user's ID and see how many comments and likes they have made in that week, but in the beta version, that data is no longer available - not on the mouse over or on the user's profile.

9. Introduce a Way to Send Direct Messages By E-mail

Considering FriendFeed's co-founder Paul Buchheit started GMail, and employee Gary Burd wrote a program called Mail2FF that sent e-mailed entries to FriendFeed, the team has significant experience in mastering e-mail clients and rules. Why not add the ability to send direct messages to FriendFeed users from your e-mail through a standard address? (For example: [email protected])

Like with Mail2FF and standard entries, you could add photos and have them be part of the direct message. Add more than one user to the recipient list, and they too would be part of the direct message thread.

10. Bring Back the Ability to Share Links from the Main Feed

Having used the FriendFeed beta over the weekend, I was very surprised to see the option to share a link to the main feed had been eliminated. While in the old site, you are encouraged to post photos and links, on the new beta, only photos are an option. Back in August, I actually suggested FriendFeed go the other way, offering videos and documents in addition to photos or links, so this seems like a step backward.

The path from engineering to marketing is usually not a straight line. Often there can be many stops along the way, as a product goes from idea to a spec to prototype release build, through the quality assurance process, and eventually general availability to the marketplace. As the product develops, so does the way it gets named, branded and described - starting with what's typically a straight forward problem/solution issue from engineering, and morphing into a more refined, even if not always as accurate, pitch from marketing. But in the Valley, often we skip those steps, and it's our users who end up paying the price - by being taught to think and talk like machines.

Are you a big fan of hash tags? Or are you wild about boolean searches? Do you find yourself reverting back to "Run DOS Run" instead of just typing and talking like a human being often online? Despite billions of dollars of investment and a plethora of companies trying to develop natural language (especially in search), we still have a long way to go.


Twitter, the hot tech topic of the month and many others preceding it, largely relies on two specific machine language symbols to connect users. The first is the basic @ sign which signals a "reply". The second, a # mark, or "hashtag", tries to connect people talking about the same event, location or idea. But what we're doing by using these symbols is work the machines should do for us. Instead of posting a hashtag about our location or event, Twitter should pick that up based on our profile data or GPS from the phone, or even group people's topics based on the content contained in the tweet and those immediately preceding it.

Web search engines have similarly expected high levels of machine like language from all their users. For example, a search on Google that shows results that mention "dog" or "cat" or "fish" but don't have the word "bird" in them necessitates a search string of "dog OR cat OR fish -bird". If I wanted to demand it have both dog and cat in it, but not fish or bird, I'd be changing things up a bit, typing: "dog AND cat -bird -fish". We're talking like this because we're trying to make nice with a database who thinks this way.


Even in this morning's FriendFeed beta site do you see the same kind of expectation that pushes users away from being people and further along the path of being cyborgs. While the company has some helpful pull-down menus on its advanced search page, it doesn't let you search by specific services, such as YouTube or LinkedIn (while the old version did). Instead, you're expected to type in "service:youtube" in the search field. To search all my friends' posts from YouTube that contained the word pizza in the title, I'd have to set up the advanced search to look for pizza in the title from my friends, and then add "service:youtube" to the query.


I expect the FriendFeed team can fix that query fairly quick with the addition of a pulldown menu, but that will be knocking down one mole before another pops up somewhere else - and many other services are less responsive, expecting you to talk in a way a machine would. Jeremiah Owyang and Loic Le Meur exchanged tweets about a month ago, calling the Web "primitive". But the Web just turned 20 years old. If this is how far we've come in 20 years, do we have to wait another 20 before we can just type or speak in what we want to know and get the right result?