With Facebook Subscribe...

The Facebook subscribe button is now going to be appearing alongside many folks name online and it gives all of us an opportunity to have another look at these folks through their Facebook updates. I get the general idea but my experience thus far with subscribing to people I am not friends with on Facebook has been spotty at best with most experiences being, quite frankly, VERY disappointing. If you are unaware of the button here is a description from the LA Times Facebook has launched a Subscribe button for websites, making it possible for users to subscribe to updates from their favorite journalists and other public figures without leaving their sites. The company said the plug-in — which is already live on sites including All Things D, the Huffington Post and the Washington Post — would give publishers and other developers another way to gain subscribers, connect with readers and drive traffic to their Facebook profiles. In a Facebook blog post Thursday, the company said once a user clicks a Subscribe button, the public posts of the person they have subscribed to will begin appearing in the user’s News Feed. Josh Constine of TechCrunch suggests that there should be a separate list for one’s subscribers so separate messages can go out to them without the subscribee spamming his or her friends. I have one major gripe with Facebook’s Subscribe feature: I have to publish to all my friends to reach my Subscribers. In September, Facebook launched Subscribe, its Twitter-esque option that lets people receive the public updates of other users without being their friends. But I don’t publish my articles to my Subscribers who want to read them because I don’t want to spam my friends who aren’t interested in tech news. This same issue is impacting a lot of journalists, public figures, and other content producers, and I believe it’s preventing wider adoption of the Subscribe feature. Honestly, I am getting “shared out”. I find that following “important people” ends up the same way that prized toy used to at Christmas. You finally get it, it’s cool and shiny for a day then it goes to the island of discarded once cool things. All of this sharing is actually starting to make me realize how much I missed some of the mystery that surrounded people of influence. Marketing Pilgrim’s Social Channel is proudly sponsored by Full Sail University, where you can earn your Masters of Science Degree in Internet Marketing in less than 2 years. Visit FullSail.edu for more information. So go ahead and subscribe to your favorite people. Do that often enough and you may actually drown out your real friends in your Facebook feed. After all, that’s what people want you to do. They are saying “Don’t pay attention to your friends, let me talk to you without being your friend and hopefully monopolize your time so you make me more successful in some way!”. Be careful what you ask for because we are rapidly heading toward a time where oversharing will devalue, or at the very least drown out, things that actually matter. That’s not a good result. What do you think?

2011 Review: WebMD rele...

WebMD, the leading online medical resource, released its 2011 review of the hot industry evolutions of 2011.  Not surprisingly mobile access to resources was a key change that happened in 2011.  Even more telling than that, the key topics for discussion were led by many lifestyle subjects such as health eating and treatment update recommendations. This shows the public’s desire to have access to usable medical information easily accessible in the palms of their hands. Just what we, at mobileStorm, have been saying for years!

Publishing To Facebook ...

I have one major gripe with Facebook’s Subscribe feature: I have to publish to all my friends to reach my Subscribers. In September, Facebook launched Subscribe, its Twitter-esque option that lets people receive the public updates of other users without being their friends. But I don’t publish my articles to my Subscribers who want to read them because I don’t want to spam my friends who aren’t interested in tech news. This same issue is impacting a lot of journalists, public figures, and other content producers, and I believe it’s preventing wider adoption of the Subscribe feature. I did a feedback session with Facebook about Subscribe soon after it launched, and the company is well aware of the problem. I commend Facebook’s Subscribe team for building an otherwise useful and ambitious product, and for critically thinking about how to solve the issue without opening new spam opportunities. However, today Facebook announced that  embeddable “Subscribe to me” buttons are on the way, and I think it needs a to decide on a fix first. My suggestion? Facebook should allow users to publish to a “Subscribers” friend list that would cause an update to be public, but not appear in the news feeds of friends (as shown in my fake mockup above). Here’s why: Facebook Currently Doesn’t Support A Core Sharing Use Case Below are the 3 core categories of content people publish, and who they should be published to: 1. Personal content only fit for friends (“Friends Only” or a smaller Friend List) 2. General interest content that appeals to both friends and Subscribers (“Public”) 3. Specific interest content that appeals to Subscribers, but not necessarily all friends (“Subscribers” and a Friend List of those interested in that topic) Most public figures that permit Subscribers typically publish publicly about a relatively specific topic that isn’t necessarily of interest to their friends. Journalists about their beat, politicians about politics, technologists about technology. Even celebrities might want to share what they ate for breakfast with their subscribers, but not their friends. Unfortunately, Subscribe doesn’t support publishing of content category #3 right now . Instead Facebook functions too similarly to a broadcast channel like Twitter. That’s likely because it’s concerned that if it added a “Subscribers” publishing distribution option, it would allow spammers to relentlessly publish to their Subscribers without having to worry about losing friends. I argue that spammers don’t care if they lose friends and right now are just spamming both. Also, I believe the audience should be free to sort this out — if they’re being spammed, by a friend or someone they’re subscribed to, they should be trusted to dump that person. How To Fix Subscribe There are two ways Facebook could implement a separation between friends and Subscribers: A. Let the publisher decide exactly who receives a specific update B. Let the audience decide what type of updates they receive from each friend or person they subscribe to I don’t think B will work. Users would have to classify each of their friends as someone they do or don’t receive public updates from — a chore most wouldn’t undertake. Even then, just because an update is public doesn’t mean it’s necessarily content #3. It could be a general interest update that their friend might find interesting but isn’t something that needs to be kept private. The only person who knows who an update should go to is the publisher. That’s why Facebook should permit publishers to choose  ”Subscribers” in the same way they could previously check boxes to distribute an update to multiple specific friend lists. Other journalists like MG Siegler and public figures like Digi Jeff agree . (If changing the privacy  selector back to check boxes from the single selection allowed today isn’t possible, simply offering a “Subscribers Only” option would suffice.) If “Subscribers” was selected, an update would be public, but only be delivered to the news feeds of their Subscribers. However, publishers could also select additional Friend Lists who would receive that update in their news feeds, or compose a separate update for that Friend List. For example, I could build a Friend List of friends who also happened to be very interested in technology news. Then when I wanted to publish an article I wrote, I could select the “Subscribers” list and the “Tech News Friends” list (or publish to both separately). The update would be publicly visible on my profile, but I wouldn’t have spammed the news feeds of my non-tech news friends with it. If this solution was implemented, I’d publish a lot more content to my Subscribers. It would allow Facebook to overtake Twitter as the best place to follow public figures. Most importantly, it would improve the user experience by allowing us to share what we want with who we want, without spamming anyone else. What do you think?  Join the public discussion on my Facebook profile .

UK’s “Domesday Reloaded...

Among the forward-thinking digital projects of the computing silver age was the Domesday Project , which aimed to preserve mid-eighties life in the UK by means of digitizing slide photos and text describing day-to-day life. The text was on floppies mailed in to the project’s headquarters. The final product took up two laserdiscs. Forward thinking in concept, I should say, not necessarily in execution. But this invaluable cultural document has been in the process of revivification for several months, and the final product is about to be opened to the public at the UK’s famous Bletchley Park museum. The original desktop version (on a BBC Micro PC) will be usable, but they’ve also put together a touch-enabled version for a Surface -like touchscreen table. It’s not actually a Surface; the 52-inch screen is larger than the latest Samsung-based Surface 2.0, and probably uses a traditional capacitive detection layer. But it’s a great match for the data: maps and pictures and captions are natural companions for hands and fingers, and of course the collaborative, in-person sharing that’s so fun on large displays like this is also very appropriate with this content. The “modernization” of this data set (which, at under two gigabytes, would fit easily on nearly any new handset or tablet) makes one think: what will people be doing 25 years from now to modernize our data? Will our public contributions, say all of YouTube, fit in our future selves’ palms? Will we have interaction methods more powerful and elegant than anything available now? I certainly hope so. The exhibition at Bletchley Park, now a museum dedicated to codes and computing, will open Thursday.

Even After Withdrawing ...

In the wake of withdrawing its application to acquire T-Mobile , AT&T has hit yet another obstacle otherwise known as the FCC. See, before AT&T pulled its application, the FCC had big plans to put the deal before an administrative law judge, effectively prolonging the process and magnifying the details of the merger. As part of those big plans, the FCC had compiled an 109-page report with their findings during the review process. AT&T had expected this massive report to stay under the rug since it had withdrawn its application, but the FCC feels it “furthers transparency.” And what, might you ask, is in this staff report? Really, really bad news for AT&T. From the FCC’s official release : The draft hearing designation order concluded, based on the staff’s analysis, that the record overall does not support a finding that the proposed AT&T/T-Mobile merger would serve the public interest, convenience, and necessity and that the record presents a number of substantial and material questions of fact. But wait, there’s more: In the report, the staff finds that the transaction, which would result in the top two wireless providers having a market share of approximately 75 percent, would substantially lessen competition and its accompanying innovation, investment, and consumer price and service benefits, thus undermining key goals of the Communications Act. Indeed, the staff notes that the unprecedented increase in market concentration that would result from this merger triggers the Commission’s screening tests for possible anti-competitive effects in a large number of local wireless markets. In other words, the report stands behind the claim that this deal will cause a very real duopoly, or at the very least, force the FCC to investigate. But the blue carrier still has a few tricks up its sleeve, right? Two of AT&T’s biggest talking points during this persuasion have been job creation and the acquisition of much-needed spectrum . The FCC staff report had this to say on the matter: The staff also explains that the economic and engineering models on which the Applicants (AT&T/DT AG/T-Mobile) rely to show consumer benefits are, in the staff’s assessment, unreliable and, at a minimum, raise substantial and material questions of fact. The staff additionally identifies internal AT&T documents and consistent historical practices that contradict AT&T’s claim that merging with T-Mobile is essential for AT&T to build out its LTE network to 97 percent of Americans. The staff finds the Applicants’ assertions that the transaction would create jobs in the United States to be inconsistent with AT&T’s internal analyses and record statements concerning cost reductions from the merger. The staff also finds that there are serious questions whether the merger of AT&T and T-Mobile would cause other public harms that are not offset by the claimed benefits. Sentence by sentence, the FCC has whittled AT&T’s argument down to a tooth pick. And it seems like releasing this report falls into a bit of a grey area (now that AT&T’s withdrawn its application), which is even more unfortunate for AT&T. The FCC gives some justification for releasing the report, stating that it would be “unfair to the parties and participants” who’ve been working on this deal, and noting that AT&T is still planning on moving forward with this merger, according to its own statement . AT&T had no idea that the FCC would release this report, and has said the following: The FCC has recognized that it is required by its own rules to dismiss our merger application. This makes all the more troubling their decision to nonetheless release a preliminary staff report on the merger. This report is not an order of the FCC and has never been voted on. It is simply a staff draft that raises questions of fact that were to be addressed in an administrative hearing, a hearing which will not now take place. It has no force or effect under law, which raises questions as to why the FCC would choose to release it. The draft report has also not been made available to AT&T prior to today, so we have had no opportunity to address or rebut its claims, which makes its release all the more improper.