But a new web service from Tigerlogic called PostPost plans to change that.

PostPost – Your own Social Newspaper

Postpost may seem like any ordinary news aggregator that you may have seen or used before. But the big difference here is, instead of gathering links from all over the web, PostPost only looks at stuff that your friends have shared.

So PostPost is essentially a newspaper made from all the links, videos, photos your friends have shared. The reason I keep calling it a ‘newspaper’ is because it does look like one. The formatting & layout looks very much like a magazine, and the recent/important stuff tends to appears on top of the page.

What I have found most useful about this service is it’s search feature. Not only you get a really nice magazine like feel, you can also perform search on all the items your friends have shared. PostPost is integrated with TigerLogic’s yolink search-enhancing technology thus the results it returns is really powerful and accurate.

Use of PostPost is absolutely free and as the service grows I think they will add new features. There are a number of things that I personally want in the service:

- Ability to reorganize the layout (drag-n-drop).

-Marking certain source “Important” so that they get higher priority.

Check out the video to get a better idea of PostPost:

Try out PostPost and let me know what you think about the service!

Facebook

Facebook just rolled out a new feature called “Facebook Page Browser” that lets you discover new facebook pages that are popular among your friends in 10 different categories and also within both local & global region.

The 10 categories by which the pages are currently divided are: Musicians, Sports, Celebrities, Movies, TV Shows, Media, Publications, Brands, Games & a category called “All” which presumably consist all of the above & other general pages. Clicking on any category displays all the pages of that category and the result seem to be endless as you can always click “show more” at the bottom of the site to find more facebook pages. Moving your mouse over any of the facebook page icons changes your mouse cursor to a facebook like button so that you can easily like a page without having to go inside the page itself. Remember that when you like a page all the latest updates of that particular page will start showing up on your facebook newsfeed.

On the right side of the facebook page browser, you should also see a list of 25 of your friends who has similar interest as you. The list is compiled by calculating how many mutual likes you and your friend have. If you click on any of the names from the list, it will basically show you a list of pages both you and your friend liked.

Interestingly, not long ago facebook introduced their suggested interest list, which had very similar implementation. Now its not clear to me whether the old suggested interest list will be replaced by this new page browser instead.

Check out the Facebook Page Browser: http://www.facebook.com/pages/browser.php

Update:

I must point out that the above feature is only visible if you are logged into facebook. If you want to find & browse facebook pages without logging into facebook you can check out the general Facebook page directory here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/?browse

[via Inside Facebook]

This is a Guest Post by Michael Jenkins, Director of Shout Web Strategy. Shout is an online marketing agency based in Melbourne, Australia that is specialized in Search marketing, conversion rate optimization and web usability testing and more. You can read more of their articles in the Shout Blog.

No matter how big or small your business is, you are most likely trying to tap into the new media that has evolved in the last couple of years. Social media is the cool kid in town. Every website owner now works extra hard to get some ‘social love’. There are lots of factors that determine the success of your website or campaign in the social media space. But if you focus the right amount of time on the four main pillars of social media marketing, you are most likely to succeed. The four pillars are: Research, Content, Socialize and Testing.

It is logical to start any decent social media and SEO strategy with research. The more knowledge and tools you accumulate, the better prepared you will be for your tasks and the upgrade of your site’s content. As you know, websites would simply not exist without content, and search engines would have nothing to monitor and analyse. In a way, content is the glue that holds everything together and, therefore, should be considered as one of the main component of social media marketing.
Every successful marketing strategy slots in time for socialising. This is necessary, to spread the word about your company’s brand. Just think about it, if nobody hears about your products and services, who will buy them?

Aside from research, producing quality content and promoting your company through social media sources, marketers should also spend a fair amount of time testing. Analysing your website’s performance is one of the most efficient ways to determining your strengths and weaknesses. Now that we have established which components are vital to your online survival, and why, lets look at them in detail below:

Research

Doing proper research is very much needed in the social media space. It has to be conducted often and at regular intervals. Listen to what your audience says, because if you don’t, you will be unable to understand what their needs are and eventually your online presence will fade. You can avoid such a disastrous situation by incorporating social media monitoring programs into your online marketing strategy. Without your collected social data, the guidance of your audience, the support of influencers, and a chance to participate in real-time marketing opportunities, you will be flying blind in cyberspace.

While there are many things to monitor, pay close attention to these 4 elements, as they can help you achieve success in your social media campaign:

• Define Your Social Channels – If you know your audience, you know where they socialise online. Do they interact on Facebook or Twitter, or are they LinkedIn members? Some people prefers media sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr, while others regularly visit popular forums and niche blog sites. Through social media monitoring you will discover where your followers gather, which will help you decide which social channels you should focus on most.
• Acquire Social Keyword Insight - Proficient social media monitoring tools are able to analyse anchor text, tags, comments, and other forms of written content to identify keywords associated with your particular monitoring requests. The results of such an inquiry can be quite helpful as they will show you which subjects your audience is interested in. Furthermore, once you know your followers’ web behavior and interests, you can manipulate your website’s content and optimise around those ‘hot’ topics.
• Identify Your Influencers – Research will also help identify your influencers, or the people who are – intentionally or unintentionally – promoting your company. Once you have categorised your influencers, you can prioritise who you want to connect with.
• Track SERPs - Social media monitoring resources do not track search engine results pages (SERPs), but you can. Monitor key terms that are relevant to your business, as well as the social sources that use them. For instance, if Google displays blog posts containing certain competitive keyword phrases first, you may benefit greatly from blogging or commenting on those issues. Just don’t forget to include a back link to your own site.

Content

One of the growing industries in online marketing revolves around Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the creation, optimisation, and promotion of web content. Copywriters, editors and publishers pop up like wild mushrooms, creating great quantities of new content, and giving all businesses a chance to acquire a wide variety of promotional materials. Be careful though, as not all content is appropriate or of good quality. Many people believe they are superb writers, when in fact, they are not. Beginners or hobbyists simply do not have the skills, or they only practice traditional paper writing, which is quite different from the keyword-rich content necessary to stand out on the Internet. Publishing content online is more than uploading creative features and information about your products and services. Today, customers want more, and expect web pages with inviting images, informative videos, relevant audio, charts & statistics, and various file types that can be used for promotional purposes on social channels. Search engines recognise highly targeted content quicker, which will benefit your rankings. The faster you show up in a Google, Bing or MSN search query, the sooner potential customers will find you!

Socialise

Socialising is quite beneficial to those companies familiar with the most popular social media sources in their industry, a target audience, and rock solid content. But that is not enough. They also need a plan to connect all these elements so they can be used to communicate with their customers and prospects.

Be smart and don’t waste your marketing efforts. Instead, concentrate them on the following three socialising aspects:

• Study Your Buyers’ Personalities – Discover what your customers do on social sites. Widen your research so you will also find out what their consumption and sharing preferences are. What persuades them to buy something, and who do they share their shopping experiences with?
• Expand your Social Networks – Although a lack of time is often the main cause, there are numerous reasons why marketers fail to expand their social network circles. Nonetheless, it is important to maintain your social connections. Even if you are overloaded with work, try to spend at least 10-30 minutes a day writing blogs, following up on comments, updating your Facebook page, tweeting, etc. That is all you need to keep networks growing organically.
• Carefully Select Your Promotions – Familiar with the preferences of your audience, you can now develop promotions that will further your business. Blogs are quite helpful, but so are other advertising features like cartoons, videos, and audio sound bites. Switching between different promotional options will give you valuable exposure on all your preferred social media sites.

Testing

Anyone involved in web development & maintenance, social media marketing, and SEO understands that ‘testing’ is crucial to success. Though many social media analytics and monitoring tools are free, or cost little; they usually take little time to learn. Do not ignore them, but use them to your advantage. Study the information they provide thoroughly and monitor your progress as you optimise your keyword selection, improve your content, and upgrade your social media strategy. Do A-B testing and see which one works and which doesn’t.

Changes do not translate into overnight, earth-shaking results, not even if you employ the most elaborate social media strategy. Be patient, and before you know it, your online identity will start to grow. Success will be yours, but remember, you will have to keep up the good work to continue with your success.

Today Facebook has announced a new feature that will make photo tagging inside Facebook dead simple by automatically detecting the faces in the pictures you have and giving you the option to just type then name of the person and hit enter to ‘tag’.

Now that’s pretty neat! Because sometimes group pictures have like 20 different faces, and clicking on each of those faces and tagging them is often a real pain. However when I first read the news, I thought it would actually do a real face detection or face matching and find out all the other photos that has the same person’s face and tag them automatically. Google’s Picasa has already this face-matching feature that lets you organize photos by face.

But users of Facebook won’t like the idea of being “auto-tagged” by a bot, but I believe the Face detection feature that facebook is implementing can just go one step further – Detect the face & then suggest the the name(s) of the likely person (if I have already tagged the same face before in facebook). So this totally eliminates me from having to type that persons name which will save even more time. The “auto-tagging” option can be an optional thing that facebook can just throw in there for advanced users. But unless the algorithm is really good this might be a disaster – So you better don’t try it Facebook! Lets keep things simple for now.

How does this help Facebook? Simple – It provides more traction on the site for new users. When a user joins Facebook for the first time, he is likely to have very limited friends/connections. But in order to really understand the value of Facebook or in other words ‘get addicted to it’, users need to start building all these connections. So Facebook is sort of helping you to build these connections, not by showing up random people to “Add as a friend” but more in the line of showing you public figures, celebrities, brands that you may like. Once you tell Facebook what your interests are, respective updates will start showing up in your News feed.

Currently some of the suggested interests are: Barack Obama, Lady Gaga, Shane Dawson, Xbox, Skittles, Monster Energy, Dr Pepper, World Cup, Eminem, Justin Bieber, Toy Story, Futurama, Playstation, The Office and many more! These suggested interests are basically the old Facebook Fan pages that was later changed to just “Facebook Pages” and the action of becoming a fan was changed to “Like”. Many brands & celebrities are putting a feed of their facebook page as a widget on their own websites where the visitors can interact as well.

Other than pure usability, Facebook will also get a lot of benefit from this implementation in terms of Advertising (thus $$$). If all new users starts telling Facebook from Day 1 that they like Starbucks coffee, domino’s pizza & lady gaga – it gives Facebook a lot of new ad inventory for more targeted advertising which they can later sell to their advertisers.

It is also possible that Facebook will have deals with certain brands to show them as a suggested ‘interest’. Facebook however says: “The list of Pages is strictly determined by an algorithm, so none of the suggestions is sponsored and Page administrators can’t pay or ask to be included.”

So when a user checks that option and tries to log in using his credential, Facebook will not only log him on but will also change his default homepage in his browser to – http://facebook.com.

I can imagine why Facebook would want everyone to have Facebook as their homepage, but I can’t really seem to understand the user’s perspective here. Why would anybody want to have facebook as their default homepage? Is Facebook that important to you?

Well apparently, 11% of U.S. online consumers have said that Facebook is the first thing they check after going online. You can read the complete report here, pretty interesting stats.

According to another report, sharing stuff on facebook is now more popular than sharing via email.

So these trends basically tells us that users are using facebook more and most importantly, finding different uses for it. It would be really interesting to see where this trend lead us to in a year from now.

The “Suggest An Ad” button was first spotted by Jens Wiese in Germany, and it seems like the feature is in a very early test phase.

I logged in to my Facebook Advertising account and didn’t see that feature present yet. Facebook is known for testing out new products and features on a small subset before rolling it out to everyone, so I assume that this is another one of their tests.

While I am not sure if having this new feature will actually boost Facebook’s ad sales dramatically, but new advertisers might find this feature useful if they are clueless about ad copy and has no experience whatsoever with online advertising.

So I’ll keep an eye on this feature and will write about it again when I know more.

This new docs.com site will enable Facebook users for the first time to create and share Microsoft Office documents directly with all their Facebook friends, using the typical Office tools that most people are already familiar with.

Lily Ching, General manager of Microsoft Fuse Lab writes:

“It’s been quite a sprint for the FUSE team to deliver this beta – from concept to its initial implementation in less than four months. The FUSE Labs mission is to explore a range of “Future Social Experiences”. In this exploration it’s our belief that we may increase the value of Office ‘docs’ by giving everyone the ability to seamlessly take their friends and connections with them from Facebook to docs.com.”

“…The fact that we’ve been able to adapt the Office 2010 “Web Apps” technology to work directly with Facebook truly speaks to the flexibility and power not just of the Facebook platform, but also of the Office system’s rich “contextual collaboration” capabilities. And we’d never have been able to achieve our critical ‘simplicity’ goals had it not been for our ability to use a new test feature from Facebook that allows us to build an instantly personalized and seamless document authorization & sharing experience directly from our site.”

Mashable reports that Docs.com will be launched within few hours from now. The domain – docs.com is already active and it allows you to link your Facebook profile with their platform. However it doesn’t let you create any document’s yet so I guess we will need to wait until its officially launched.

However if you want to have a feel of how the documents will look like take a peek at Lilly Cheng’s document archive. She has a bunch of powerpoint and word documents out there which looks absolutely fabulous on my browser. By the first look of it, it seems like when users share a document on their profile other users will be able to comment on the document which will then show up on their wall as well as the document’s sidebar.

You can follow the Facebook Docs (docs.com) team on Twitter: @docs4fb for more real-time updates. Also don’t forget to follow the brains behind docs.com – FuseLabs

Can this be a Google Wave Killer?

P.S - I don’t know why this always happens with Microsoft, but every time they launch something they are never very clear about the name. Now I don’t really know what to call this – Facebook Docs, Microsoft Docs, Docs.com (which isn’t really a name).

Other Facebook f8 conference announcements:

Docs.com: Facebook and Microsoft Go After Google Docs – ReadWriteWeb

Building the Social Web Together – Facebook blog

Facebook socializes the Web with powerful new plugins – Socialbeat

Facebook F8: One graph to rule them all – Cnet News

The Next Evolution of Facebook Platform – Facebook Developers blog

Live-Blogging Facebook’s f8 Developer Conference: The Open Graph Launches – Inside Facebook

Microsoft Taps Into Facebook’s Open Graph To Launch Docs.com – Techcruch

Microsoft and Facebook Announce Docs.com. Social Online Wordprocessing – The Next Web

More discussion of Techmeme.

Vitrue, a a social media marketing platform company, has recently tried to find the value of each “Fan” of a Facebook Page. Their findings, which were published in the recent edition of AdWeek, show that the value is somewhere around $3.6 per fan (per year). The firm has determined that, on average, a fan base of 1 million translates into at least $3.6 million in equivalent media over a year.

Vitrue’s findings are based on impressions generated in the Facebook news feed, the stream of recent updates from users’ networks. The company analyzed Facebook data from all its clients with a combined total of around 41 millions fans. And each client received about $3.60 in return from every user who becomes a Fan of the client’s Page on Facebook.

These figures may not apply to all companies. That is because Vitrue’s study was only limited to its clients, and each client has at least 1 million fans of their Page. Thus the figures may be different for those companies whose Pages have less than 1 million Fans.
However, the figures may be accurate for those Pages with 1 million fans. If there are two posts published by a company on its Page (with 1 million Fans) daily, then a total of 60 million (= 2 x 30 x 1 million) impressions by the company will be formed every month. Since the cost of 1000 impressions is $5 – as determined by Vitrue, the cost of the 60 million impressions will be $300,000 (= 60 million x 5/1000). This translated into a cost of $3.6 million (= 300,000 x 12) per year. Thus the return on each of the 1 million fans is $3.6.

These figures are important to all companies who are using Facebook as a medium to promote their brands. For a few companies, the return may be even greater than $3.6. This happens because the Fans may share the posts with their friends on Facebook which creates a viral effect.

Market analysts predict that Facebook developed the “Questions” product to compete with both Quora and Yahoo! Answers. Facebook already is in a conflict with the former – since it was developed by people who parted from Facebook. It is not clear whether or not Facebook would be successful in its endeavor. However, one thing is certain: the tension between Facebook and Quora will greatly intensify if the former launches the “Questions” product.

Since Facebook has not yet officially disclosed information on its “Questions” product, nobody knows how it works. A few suggest that Facebook is still testing the product. After the testing is over, “Questions” may be available to only those users who are willing to pay for it – to increase the exposure of their ads to targeted Facebook users. Others suggest that the product may be offered for free to all users of Facebook as a “value-added service”.

The “Questions” product also bears similarities with Facebook’s past creation – “Polls”. Facebook dropped out the “Polls” product only a few months after it launched it. Facebook is expected to roll out the “Questions” product as soon as the testing of the product is over. What the product will end up doing is a matter of much speculation. In the meantime, people are eagerly waiting for a formal announcement from Facebook.

Update: Allthefacebook blog has some latest scoop on this news. They are saying that Facebook Questions is an Aardvark competitor and not a Quora killer. Blake Ross, the Director of Product at Facebook responded to a question that was posted on Quora about this issue. Read his answer below:

Why is Facebook creating a Q&A Product To Compete with Quora?

Blake Ross, Director of Product, Facebook writes:

I’ll answer this since I’m involved in the questions prototype at Facebook.

Real-time Q&A backed by people has been a dream of mine since I joined Facebook three years ago. If you ever used the old Facebook Polls product, you know how powerful it is to toss a question into the ether and watch results stream in from around the globe in seconds. People already ask logistical and recommendation questions on Facebook (e.g. “Is Desperate Housewives a repeat tonight?” or “What’s a good Italian restaurant around here?”) and we’d like to see what happens when we combine that use case with the magic of the Polls product to deliver instantaneous results.

There’s been a lot of hype about “the Q&A space” recently with the acquisition of Aardvark, the launch of Quora and the expansion of StackOverflow, but I consider this typical blogosphere theatrics. All these products are pursuing very different use cases. For instance, Quora is focused on creating a forum-like environment for participants to iterate on a knowledgebase, while Aardvark is focused on getting really fast results for more day-to-day queries. Given that Facebook is a social utility, our focus is on delivering practical value to users who need answers quickly from the people around them (whether socially or spatially). This question itself is a good example of something that Facebook Questions wouldn’t answer well, nor do we care to.

Facebook’s experimentation in this “space” is actually a direct result of internal circumstances at the company rather than all this recent outside activity. For the last few years, we didn’t have enough engineers to make significant, sustained investments in our applications (e.g. photos and events). Earlier this year, we finally got comfortable enough with our recruiting numbers to reorganize the product engineering group into dedicated application teams of 4-5 people each. That’s why you’re suddenly seeing improvements to applications that haven’t evolved in years, such as our recent launch of higher res photos. One of our app teams is charged with experimentation and we decided to pursue this vision of real-time Q&A now that the resources were finally in place.
Observers of the tech industry often have a vastly oversimplified view of the world. I remember when we launched Facebook Lite and it was considered to be our “Twitter killer” because the Facebook/Twitter “battle” was the meme of the month, even though I’m pretty sure the Lite team never even uttered the word Twitter during development. Likewise, our recent purchase of Octazen was somehow an answer to Google Buzz (http://www.businessinsider.com/f…), as was our AOL/Connect partnership (http://www.thebigmoney.com/blogs…). Your question implies that Facebook is setting out to compete with Quora so perhaps we’re in for another month of unfortunate headlines.

Sensationalism notwithstanding, I’m not someone who’s driven by “killing” someone else’s baby. There are too many new and exciting things to give birth to. Even if Facebook were led by stoic businessmen (it’s not), a “Quora-killer” wouldn’t make objective sense. Quora is a terrific product built on Facebook Connect. It isn’t competitive with the core use cases of Facebook, which is why Facebook Questions is pursuing different use cases.
I was one of Quora’s earliest users, and like everyone else here, I’m now an addict. I’m also friends with Quora’s founding team. You can bet I’ll be rooting them on in their inevitable march to success.