Archive for Social Media

The Modern Web – How the Creation of Content is So Easy

I recently wrote a post about the ASP.NET Razor rendering engine. The post wasn’t that significant, but what was significant was that I did it from my phone while on the subway and then at physical therapy.

Creating content has become extremely easy on the modern web. Whether it’s through a platform like Twitter, YouTube or Facebook, or through a self-hosted or created package. Either way, the creation of content is easy. And it needs to be. It’s one key to providing value with your site.

Any given site, in order to provide value, needs to either provide content or provide functionality. Often, the difference between these two can be blurred – while Gmail’s functionality is clearly impressive, it’s ultimately a method of providing content. The same goes for Facebook and other sites with a lot of functionality.

Thus, there is a lot of content flying around, from individual, small sites to massive, cutting-edge applications.

This is what the modern web has become – an egalitarian medium where anyone can add content quickly and easily. While the creation if good content itself can be hard and time consuming, the addition of that content is fast and easy.

This does create a lot of unnecessary and superfluous noise (check out some Twitter hahstags to see what I mean), ultimately, it’s a good thing as it gives everyone the chance to be heard. Not a guarantee, but a chance.

PS – I wrote this post in the same physical therapy session.

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Coding Like Facebook, With Engineering-Centric Practices

I recently read a great article about how Facebook ships code and what their values and practices are. It revolves around a list of different examples of how Facebook encourages and fosters an environment of innovation and productivity.

Basically, the article doesn’t say if it’s good or bad, but does describe how very, very developer-centric the company is. Essentially, developers are given ultimate freedom and are basically treated as though the are infallible (other than were they to do something malicious or were not performing, they would be let go).

There is little to no oversight or thought given about priorities at Facebook or what is a “good” idea.

As a developer, I would love to be given ultimate freedom to work on what I think is important or cool or beneficial. Though, while that may be a good thing goal, you can easily start to not see the forest for the trees. Facebook has repeatedly gotten itself in trouble this way, just Google “Facebook privacy concerns,” and you’ll have more than enough results from many different time periods and over many different issues.

This is where working too fast without planning or stopping to consider exactly the consequences before going ahead with new features can easily come back to bite you. While ultimate freedom and power is great, oversight is something that can never be overlooked or forgotten.

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The Revolution of Marketing with Geo-Social Platforms

Geolocation services is something that marketers should be paying a lot of really close attention to. Some certainly have, like every Ben and Jerry’s I’ve seen on Foursquare having an extra scoop promotion. Here’s just an example of the Ben and Jerry’s in the East Village, very close to where I live.

The number of times I’ve seen this pop up all over the place has nearly enticed me to go many times. They’re doubtlessly barely cutting into their profit margin by doing this, but instantly, they come up on Foursquare’s places near me and I know that they’re going to have that same deal. And who doesn’t want a deal?

Most of these times I had absolutely no idea I was near a Ben and Jerry’s, yet there it’s automatically advertised to me, reinforcing its brand and enticing me to come. And doubtlessly, one day they’ll be successful.

That is the future of marketing. Sure, no one can claim to know how it’s going to play out. I had previously mentioned that Facebook made the right choice by getting into geolocation services, but I believe there’s a larger opportunity there for them than any of their previous features.

Not only is it a potential cornucopia for businesses because now people will know that a business is nearby when they otherwise wouldn’t have known, but location-based advertising will become very real and very, very effective.

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