So I wondered what would a day be like in a world where Nudge projects dictated all I did?
I woke up to the cool sounds of Theory of a Dead Man’s song I Hate My Life, not the best start so I put on my Last.fm radio play list and felt much better. Breakfast was a Caffe Americano care of Dolce Gusto, and a some chocolaty MIkado’s.
I left for the office, using the London Tube, Tube Warning told me it would be okay to travel today. On the way I enjoyed a Geisha chocolate bar from a friend in Sweden.
At work as an RAF Careers officer, I found I had a bit of downtime so I got out my PlayStation for a game of God of War and a bit of Little Big Planet thrown in. Lunch time was a rush so we headed out to the local TenPin for some bowling with the lads and I used my Mastercard to pay for the food. I shared the photos on Facebook and stored the high res version for printing out later on Photobox using Super Photos.
On the way back I popped in to Carphone Warehouse to enquire about a new O2 contract and came out with a PSP fully loaded with all my favourite Comics. I shared out a few Mikado sticks with friends at the office while we shared a refreshing Cornetto ice cream to cool off in the sun. One of my colleagues is running the Marathon so I gave him some money via JustGiving on Facebook and checked into Reckitt Benckiser’s PowerBrands game to improve my score.
At home it was Domino’s Pizza time watching Flash Forward with a delicious Baileys on ice. Time for some breath freshening Tic Tacs while catching up on the days activity on Sky News and checking CNN too. Creating a few Modnation racer tracks for friends meant I could just check my score on Nudge Social Value Index to see how I’d been doing on my Facebook score.
Not a bad day all in all.
The Facebook Developer Garage held on Monday 21st June at the Barbican centre was probably the best one I have attended so far as Mark Zuckerberg and other senior figures from Facebook were present to give more information on where Facebook is heading and what their plans are for Europe.
So here is a list of the information we got throughout day:
Figures:
70% of Facebook users are not in the US, so Facebook has to start a real global push.
200 million gamers on Facebook playing 4 games on average per month
Now 26 million UK users (the UK is the second biggest market for Facebook)
300,00 websites have implemented the like button (50% are European websites)
More than 1 billion pieces of content are ‘liked’ every day
Social Gaming:
- Facebook is the biggest gaming platform worldwide and had just launched the beginning of a revolution. As the CEO of Playfish said, we have only scratched the surface of social gaming.
- Social gaming breaks down access barriers to the games people play, requiring nothing that a user doesn’t already have (e.g. Facebook account, mobile phone, and computer) - as opposed to a console: PS3/XBOX/Wii.
- Facebook credits simplify micro-transactions, and there’s a social element too. Credits build trust so that when a user sees a payment request from an app they can see the friends that have trusted the service before.
- Facebook credits are a key to profitability for the company. As Facebook takes a commission of 30% on any given transaction, it represents a strong revenue stream for the company.
Recommendations Features (Social Plugins):
- Implement Amazon style recommendations on your website. The Recommendation Facebook social plugins offers new opportunities for brands to personalise the content of their website: it applies the Facebook engine to your website content (what everyone likes + what your friends like + what you liked before).
How Facebook Works as a Company:
- First the great idea, then the monetisation plan. The company focuses on a great idea and monetisation will follow if it works, Facebook (even in its leaner days) didn’t think about monetisation until the idea had developed and succeeded on its own merits.
- Facebook still perceives itself as a start up. Mark Zuckerberg kept saying that this was the beginning of the journey. And even when describing his company, he insisted they were still small, with a team of 30 engineers taking care of the platform and only one guy in charge of the chat function (which is the 2nd or 3rd biggest in the world).
Facebook in Europe:
- Europe is a key territory for Facebook’s future expansion. As there are 140 millions Facebook users in Europe, it has become a market as vital as the US for the company. And as the penetration rate is lower, in the long run, Europe will overcome the US in terms of users. So by investing in Europe, it looks like Facebook plans to generate more revenue from here too.
- Facebook is going to extend its European presence to strengthen its relationship with developers and agencies. It means more support for developers in Europe with engineers available on European time zones. This also involves more Facebook Developer Garages organised all over Europe.
Location Feature:
- “Coming soon” was Mark Zuckerberg’s comment when the question was raised.
‘Liked’ by Everyone:
- Everyone within the Nudge team liked Mark Zuckerberg. He is a lot more down to earth than he appears when he does public speaking.
What I found extremely interesting throughout the day was how Facebook CEOs insisted that what they have achieved so far it is just the beginning of the journey. So expect Facebook to become the social network of choice for 1 billion users, have one of the most demanded (virtual) currencies on the planet and be implemented on every website. Get used to it: Facebook will be the web.
A different way to spend a Sunday - yesterday saw Facebook executives and senior members of the Facebook development team stopping by the Facebook Developer Garage Hackathon in central London. The aim of a ‘hackathon’ is to bash out a complete Facebook application in one afternoon (or one afternoon and a full night for those with the stamina), mirroring an exercise Facebook carries out internally to generate platform ideas.
Steve from Nudge talking through an idea with Mark Zuckerberg
Teams presented their entries to a panel of high-profile judges including Mr Mark Zuckerberg himself, with three winning teams going on to present their hacks to attendees and the general press at Monday’s special edition of the Facebook Developer Garage.
Nudge scored a great result, with a team headed up by Toby being chosen as one of the three winners. The app, titled “Tube Warning”, pairs Facebook Event data with the freshly released London Underground API to create a mashup that warns users of impending travel problems before they leave for their specific event.
A good (long) day was had by all - as well as some great idea’s being presented, it was also a great opportunity to chat face to face with Zuckerberg about Facebook’s intentions regarding Open Graph and Facebook for websites.
See more photos over at the Nudge Facebook Page
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Facebook is far from perfection, but Nudge has come up with a way to help you identify where the perfection is on the platform. Search For Perfect Facebook application is a social search engine that finds what is perfect on your profile: anything that contains the word perfect or has been tagged with the word perfect appears as the top of the search engine results. Would it be about a drink from Starbucks or a crazy video from a friend, you see what people around you consider as perfect.
Behind the application is Sam Talbot, who launched Search For Perfect with the idea of “highlight the truly awesome, the truly fantastic and in the end perfect!” Matthew Long, Senior Developer at Nudge, details the functioning of the application: “It is recreating the home page in another form by filtering out stories that aren’t “perfect”. Search results are associated with like and comments functionalities within the application itself and are pulling in external blog postings and videos.”
For Toby Beresford, our Commercial Director, this application underlines the promising future of social search but also offers opportunities for brands to use application for contests. Whatever the future holds in store for Search for Perfect (and it sounds quite promising), it helps to know that perfection is now one click away.
