Trudging through the search engine swamp and clubbing the competition

It seems that my last post is now merely hypothetical.  Facebook will be buying Plaxo and of course integrating their more powerful security and filtering features into the Facebook platform (not to mention you won’t have to get banned from Facebook to import your contacts into Plaxo.  Hopefully Zuckerberg didn’t take so much of a pounding during his 60 Minutes interview that Facebook will never IPO.

Although I rarely actually log on to Facebook, I do have it hooked into all my other social tools like Stumbleupon, Digg, Twitter and LinkedIn and I really like how it acts as a repository for all of my outgoing communication for “my network” to keep track of all that is going on.  I could personally do without all the MySpace-like features, daily gift, poke etc but overall it is the best social networking tool that can be used for legitimate purposes available today.  The addition of Plaxo’s features, if they can be integrated quickly and seamlessly, will quiet some of the nay sayers and improve the Facebook experience significantly.

The net was all abuzz today with the news of Robert Scoble’s Facebook account being deleted due to suspicious activity not conforming to the Facebook terms of use. I received a bunch of tweets from vaarious super bloggers via Twitter immediately with oodles of fresh tinyurl’d blog posts breaking the news. Scoble hopped on twitter a little later and described the slew of twitter posts as a “tweet storm.” I tried to hop over to the recently released twitterstats page to see what a tweet storm looks like. Unfortunately, twitterstat can’t handle the volume. I was able to get a rudimentary idea of the jump in volume using twitstat.

Of course after all was said and done Facebook reversed the ban and allowed Scoble to keep his own profile information if he would agree to not run data mining bots against their servers. Scoble wasn’t intentionally doing anything malicious, he just wanted to import his 4,999 Facebook contacts into his Plaxo profile.

Not that I need another social network to eat away at my time but I couldn’t resist kicking the tires on Plaxo’s latest Pulse beta after todays events. I haven’t had a lot of time to work with it but my initial experiences have been mixed. Profile creation and account setup are clean and simple and Plaxo offers so many hooks into other sites you are probabably already using like flickr, del.icio.us and digg. The del.icio.us import wasn’t working properly but that wasn’t my chief complaint. During intial account setup Plaxo offers to import your contacts from popular email programs like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and Outlook. After having recently imported just over 1000 of my Outlook contacts into Gmail I thought it would be the way to go. Unfortunately, after what seemed to be a successful import Plaxo displayed a list of only 18 contacts that would be imported. After the import was complete there were 90 additional contacts that were created from junk HTML code. Surely I don’t have to upgrade to the Premium package for $50/yr to get my contacts imported properly. For now I will just chalk it up to a bug in beta 3 and stick with Facebook.

Awhile ago I wrote about the future of software deployment being virtualized servers bundled and ready to turn up in seconds.  After watching a recent episode of the Scoble Show that future gets much closer to reality.  JumpBox is a new application installation platform that allows any Linux aplication to be bundled into a virtual machine that can be instantly powered on in your virtual server environment regardless of your virtualization vendor.

JumpBox works with XenSource, VMWare, Virtualiron and Parallels virtual server products and is open source.  They currently support over 25 popular Linux applications like Sugar CRM, Drupal, Bugzilla and everybody’s favorite WordPress.  Of course they are tirelessly building new JumpBox deployments like phpBB, Cacti and Moodle in their Proving Grounds beta area.  They welcome beta testers and allow free sign-up to the Proving Grounds.

You can download free versions of supported virtualization server products from the vendors listed above from their respective web sites and the application vm installers from JumpBox.  If you need further convincing to try this software deployment model you may view of demo application deployment running on Virtualiron’s server product.

The days of struggling with package dependencies and worrying about prerequisites are gone.  Forget everything you ever knew about installing software and leave complexity behind.

Everyone has probably by now heard the news about the poor adoption rate of online productivity suites like Google Docs. Some rumor mongers in the Microsoft camp are staking claim in the official demise of online office suites even after the recent launch of Office Live. I have to admit I was in the red pie slice of users that had heard of online office productivity products but had yet to try them out until just recently. Maybe I would be more apt to get excited about every little Google product announcement if they didn’t slap a beta tag on everything out of the chutes. Many of my fellow geeks operating under the “latest and greatest = best” mindset were clamoring about Google Docs the day it was released and then again and again each time new features were added. I finally took the plunge and switched to GMail after I realized it was fruitless to resist Google’s attempt to index the world’s information.

After using GMail and Google Docs for some time now I praise them as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Well, sometimes anyway, other times I curse their existence and wonder if they will ever “just work”. Even basic needs are not satisfied - organizing emails into folders to keep your inbox tidy or the ability to copy the contents of a cell in your spreadsheet and paste it into another application or browser window. Of course, the beauty of web enabled document editing and email lies in the centralized storage and universal accessibility. Try sharing an excel spreadsheet that contains contact and address information for your entire graduating class with all 452 classmates. With Google Docs it is simple. With Microsoft it would require everyone have Microsoft Office and Groove software installed and configured. My guess is if they aren’t a Microsoft employee they probably don’t have Groove installed (btw Groove is Windows only - sorry Mac and Linux users).

Web based office applications are far from dead. They are definitely in their nascent state as we come to the end of 2007. More than just knowing they exist, there needs to be a cultural shift in mindset about information storage and a deeper level of trust in the SAAS providers before the average Joe will make the switch. Do you trust Google to store your documents forever? Are you concerned about the security implications of one company having access to all the world’s information? If the answers to these questions can be changed from no to yes Google Docs will have 25% of the office productivity market share in 3 years. Done’ t believe me? Ask Steve Ballmer how much of the browser market share Firefox managed to secure since version 1.0 was released in 2004.

Looking to reach 22 million people? How about 29 million potential customers? Well, depending on who you trust, Facebook or Compete, you should be able to reach 20-30 million viewers by placing an advertisement on Facebook. According to Quantcast your ad could be seen by 90,000 unique visitors each month, that is to say if you don’t filter for your target audience.

Setting up a social ad on Facebook is very simple. After creating your Facebook account, click on the advertisers link in the footer navigation get started. You get the option to send your clicks through to your corporate site, your Facebook page or to create a new product page within Facebook. There are distinct advantages to keeping your click-throughs on Facebook before sending them to your corporate site including more detailed insight into the demographics of your potential customers (requires at least 10 fans) and the fact that Facebook product pages are now accessible by search engines to further broaden your potential audience. Creating a page takes only a few seconds but you won’t likely get the necessary 10 fans without putting significant time into creating a page that offers your visitors a reason to return and join in the social scene.

Clicking through the ad building interface, you select your target audience. According to Sugarrae, Alexa reports that 44.3% of Facebook users are in th US, UK and Canada. You don’t have the option to select more than one country so you will need to create additional campaigns to cover all three. Filter options available include geo location (in the case of th US this means country, state and city), sex, age range, educational status, political views and relationship status to name a few. As you slice and dice your target Facebook provides you with real-time estimates of how many potential customers you could reach. Selecting Colorado for example, drops the potential audience to 300k and selecting female only drops it down to 138k at the time this article was written.

The ad creating tab is extremely basic. You get a title, body and optional thumbnail. If you weren’t put off by all the bad press project beacon has received lately, you can also add social actions to your ad. Social actions work similar to the activity feed on every Facebook page, providing information about who recently interacted with your products and how.

The final tab in the ad wizard is the budget tab. After selecting CPM or CPC you can define your daily budget and per click or per thousand bids. Facebook offers suggestions to help you get good coverage. Basic tests I performed so far have indicated that CPC is slightly more affordable. Facebook seems to overestimate the cost of the clicks so using their estimates will tend to get you great coverage. I have also found that compared to similar ads running on AdWords for competitive terms, Facebook has a better CTR - likely due to less competition for those key phrases. As with any social networking site, viral content will really do the trick. Some early testers have reported that CTR on Facebook is so poor it isn’t worth the effort. While this may be the case for standard ads with boring content behind them, during my testing, interactive, viral content outperformed standard content by 2000% in terms of clicks even when using the minimum bid of $0.10 for the viral content and recommended bids for standard content.

That’s it! Once you have previewed and approved your ad, it will begin circulating in the ad space within an hour. Daily statistics in Facebook Insight (their analytics package) are updated every 12 hours so you won’t get to play around with Insight right away.  Enjoy!