Visualizing Friendships infographic by Paul Butler
The evening began with a video, then an infographic. The speaker, Facebook evangelist Paul Borrud awarded generous prizes to reinforce the stats:
- 62% of users log in everyday
- Average usage is 27 visits per user per month
- 3 billion photos are uploaded per month globally
Then a history lesson:
- The 90s web was organised around browsing
- The 00s was the decade of search
- The 10s sees the web organising around people, and industries organising around people, and shopping organising around people, and news and so on
This is all familiar stuff for anyone who has been following Google versus Facebook analysis. So perhaps the pitch of the night really was spend your ad dollars here, with us, not there, with them.
The evening was a sales pitch delivered to a room of mostly marketers who already know the proposition:
Oh the shame! Check out my wall.
Facebook wall populated/polluted with Branchout status updates
See all those horrible, horrible application status messages. I like to think of myself as pretty web savvy but I lost some serious web cred today when I inadvertantly spammed countless friends.
How I became a web idiot
After returning from a workshop I was feeling pretty tired and looking for any semi legitimate opportunity to avoid actual work. Then I got a Facebook message from Ahmed my workmate. OK it was a Facebook message – but he’s a colleague, so its kinda work related, right? I could be missing an office meme here! OK. Click.
The first Digital Citizens event tonight was a robust discussion on personal versus private online. The title of the evening was Private Parts: Personality and Disclosure – Finding a Balance in the Digital Space. Surprisingly it was the lawyer on the panel, Adrian Dayton (of Social Media for Lawyers) who was sounding like the ad man encouraging people to establish their personal brand and get it all out there on twitter. Sam North of Ogilvy PR, was reminding people of their contractual obligations to their employers and clients with words of warning to not speak badly about them. But, as ever in the social media space the lines quickly become hard to define. As soon as he described Ogilvy’s social media guidelines Damian Damjanovski of BMF spoke of one’s digital footprint, and that if we are active on social media platforms we will become traceable someway or another regardless of privacy settings on the content of accounts. The discussion then turned into what should one disclaim in their profiles: do you disclaim who you work for? Do you express the views as yours and not representative of your employer?
Do you ever get on Facebook, planning only to update your status, check out a few groups, and instead find yourself stuck in there? I do. I lose track of time. It could because the content is so compelling; but I doubt that. I blame the pagination.
Go to a group in Facebook and have a look at the members list. In a group with 12,504 members you can only progress through the list with previous or next links.
Facebook Group Member list
Go to albums, or to a particular album. While the extent of content is revealed the total number of pages isn’t, not until you get to the very end.
Facebook Album Progressive Pagination
The approach to pagination differs at the Mayo Clinic, a medical information site. Conducting a search will reveal the total number of search results and the total number of search result pages. In a large search result list, this will hopefully prompt the user to narrow their search terms.
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