Category — Facebook

Okay, so I’m not on Facebook “all” the time, just enough to buy back friends from Brian Wallace and poke various people but Equals has come out with a new application for Facebook called Party Line for those that do live on Facebook……..

“The app, entitled Party Line, enables users to have group phone chats free for up to 15 minutes.

Facebook users can also dial 877- BUZZ ME from their mobile phones, and Equals will dial out and add users to the Party Line. Equals lets users have an unlimited number of Party Lines–your Top Friends, classmates, family members, and those random friends that you don’t know in real life and only through Facebook.”

This application is great for those quick meetings with say, a group of virtual assistants or work at home employees, scattered throughout the country. One quick and easy call allows you to delegate tasks and plan events at a moments notice.

Tech talk can be just that; tech talk, and if you’re not knowledgable of tech things then some valuable information can easily be lost in translation. That’s one reason why I appreciate Jeremiah Owyang’s blog. Jeremiah goes out of his way to interpret web strategies for us less techy folks by providing us the real meanings and impacts of today’s technology advances.

An example of this can be seen in regards to Facebook’s most recent “techy” announcement…….

“This JavaScript client library allows you to make Facebook API
calls from any web site and makes it easy to create Ajax Facebook
applications. Since the library does not require any server-side code
on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be
hosted on any web site that serves static HTML. An application that
uses this client library should be registered as an iframe type. This
applies to either iframe Facebook apps that users access through the
Facebook web site or apps that users access directly on the app’s own
web sites. Almost all Facebook APIs are supported. The exceptions are:”

Jeremiah does a fantastic job of explaining this in layman’s terms…..

“This means that web owners can now embed existing Facebook applications
easier than before. Now, in addition to being able to create an
application/widget that will sit on Facebook alone, you can now easily
embed it on your own website (in addition to leveraging the social
features that Facebook offers)”.

Essentially, what this means is you can now bring the Facebook community to your own website. A portable community, if you will. But some analysts claim that even with over 15,000 Facebook applications, there is still too much entertainment and not enough substance for corporate websites. We shall see, with the opportunity to create applications and now this announcement, I would venture to say that more sophisticated and appropriate apps will soon be targeting a more corporate audience.

Facebook is one of the most utilized social media sites in the nation and lately they have been under fire for their use and presentation of their new Beacon application. While I am normally a person quick to forgive, I am even more impressed when people can admit their mistakes and limitations in the world of Web 2.0.

My buddy Paul, over at Hee Haw Marketing, has a full post featuring Mark Zuckerberg and his response to the Beacon disaster from his Facebook blog…….

“About a month ago, we released a new feature called Beacon to try to
help people share information with their friends about things they do
on the web. We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but
we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad
job with this release, and I apologize for it.” Read the whole speech here.

You gotta love a guy that is making oodles of money from Facebook and in reality, could totally care less about his users if he were like some people, and yet, he takes an active role in realizing his user’s feedback and makes the necessary changes to keep them happy. Mark has shown that by making community count you build brand loyalty and that makes him successful in the social media realm by any standard.