4 things Facebook must do to Facebook Groups!

The fun and Utility of Social sites, like Facebook is that they help bring the physical world closer, virtually. People become part of sites like FB not only to stay connected with their existing contacts, but also to find and connect with people who they would like to get back in touch.

Recently I became part of a group, on Facebook, started to reunite our School time batch mates. FB, with its international popularity and now with more than 350 million users sure that within no time 20 of our old time mates became part of this group.

This was the first time that I actually started using the Groups feature on FB. Somehow FB seems to have no focus on making the Groups feature ‘great’. There are many things that FB product team seems to have missed out on. A person like me, who also uses LinkedIn extensively, can clearly see the primitiveness of the FB groups feature.

4 things that FB needs to add to the groups feature are:

1. An option to be notified of any activity, within the group at the time of joining the Group.

2. The notifications can be separate for the nano-expressions, uploads and joining, like:
Discussion Board post
Wall post
Pictures uploading
Link uploading
Event Creation
New Members

To enable members to choose what they want to be notified about.

3. Settings for groups should be adjustable for all the individual groups that I become part of.

4. Ability for group members to create a conversation or ‘group chat’ using the FB chat application.

Small differences in the usability aspect of a website make features hits or misses. LinkedIn groups see a lot of activity because someone has given a thought on making them active. Most of the FB groups eventually turn dormant, and some basic notifications, implemented correctly, can turn this around.

5 things that Facebook can do more! Part I

Facebook have acquired Friendfeed, even as I was planning to write 'what FB can do more' as I hinted in my previous post, the last in the series on Social Media Monitoring. The context of my thought was more from the wish-list perspective. Things that come to the mind while using the platform. Things that could increase the usage by me and people who I interact with.

What I am talking are small things that make a difference. Facebook already has a lot of these small functionalities, that make it such a popular SN platform.

Lets begin with the most used feature on Facebook; The Status updates. This is where most of the interesting conversations begin. You would have noted that FB shrinks the whole conversation thread if there are more than 3 comments on a status. This is where the first of the 'Mores' can be created. People often click on View all comments link, opening the conversation thread. Two requirements that originate due to this are:

1. There is no way the user can close the displayed conversation.

2. Users also wish to go back to some interesting conversations, but it is difficult to do so, due to the unending flow of Updates from the friends.

Things that facebook can do, to make the above simple:

1. There can be an Up arrow on the top of the opened conversations, that can shrink-back the opened conversation.

2. There can be a 'bookmark' icon that would bookmark conversations that a user might find interesting.

3. These bookmarked conversations can be viewed on the Users Profile page, where currently Facebook offers the tabs to view updates from Self, Self+friends and Friends only. Adding this tab would definitely improve the usability and the feature can be extended by giving people the option to group bookmarks.

Part II coming up in a few days.

4th post on Social Media Monitoring: Facebook

Now that Facebook has become the hottest social network, it’s time to pay attention to the conversations that happen there. You can do this with Facebook Lexicon (you need to login to see it) that creates a trend graph for different words and (two-word) phrases on Facebook Walls. The FB site says that Lexicon does not look at personal messages, invitations, or any other private user-to-user communications like one-on-one chat.
Reaching Lexicon in itself is a bit of a task. You need to click on the Advertising link in the footer. Here is what all you monitor once you are there:

•Dashboard Shows the number of unique users for the search keyword, the percentage of the Facebook user base that mentioned it, and the total number of posts.
•Demographics Show trends over time, based on users characteristics like age, gender and country.
•Maps display locations within different countries. Currently limited to the US, Great Britain, and Canada.
•Sentiment display the like or dislike for a given topic.
•Associations is like related topics.
•Pulse is an interesting feature that shows the Interests like Music, Movies, TV Shows, Books etc of people discussing the topic/keyword searched. Example: You can have a count of people who like listening to 'Madonna' among those talking about 'Swine flu', for a date range.

Its not a very good tool and certainly stands no where near the effort that products like Twitter(my previous post) have put in to facilitate SMM.

That's a good idea...a series on What Facebook can do more? Coming up next...on a browser near you :-)

'Birdwatching' in SMM: Monitoring Twitter

I had promised a post on monitoring Twitter and Facebook, in my last post. I have however decided to break it into two posts to keep it short and simple.

Twitter's growth is due to the power it holds in connecting people without much effort. Its simple as an SMS and the kind of virality it can ignite is tremendous. This has made it important for you to pay attention to what is being said about, you and your products, on this micro-blogging service. The product team at Twitter had the foresight to create an elaborate search mechanism for people to 'monitor' activity on Twitter.

On the footer you can click the Search link to use the official search engine. You can subscribe to the RSS feed of the search as well. There is an option for Advanced Search which is clearly created to facilitate monitoring. The best part of this all is the Search Operators . These are phrases that if used as a search keyword act as short-cut to advance search. For example : you can search for "Rediff :(" to get results for tweets containing "Rediff" with a negative attitude.

There are other services like TweetBeep (http://www.tweetbeep.com) , Tweetscan(http://www.tweetscan.com/), Monitter (http://monitter.com/) also, that facilitate your SMM activity. Sideline(http://sideline.yahoo.com/) is another good tool that allows you to create a keyword group so that you can monitor more than one keywords in one go. BackTweets(http://backtweets.com/) can be used to monitor tweets with links to your site that are "hidden" inside of shortened URLs.

There is immense power that Social media has and services like Twitter can make or break a product or service if the owner does not Factor in SMM. A simple example in the attached screen shot explains that. If you look closely at the attached image you can see a link on the right navigation that says "Twitter these results".
It has become extremely easy to spread the word now..good or bad.. is just a matter of an emoticon ;-).


And as far as Ego Surfing on Twitter is concerned, Tweetdeck

gives you the option to see the tweets which mention your name, even if you maintain multiple personalities. My friend Rajeev, who uses Twitter extensively, is quite satisfied with Tweetdeck.

The Facebook post is coming up next. Happy 'birdwatching' to all.

The 5 'Mention types' in Social Media Monitoring

Executing SMM for the strategising (as discussed in the last weeks post) is not a simple and one time activity. It requires a deep knowledge of all the "Mention types" that constitute the UGC(User Generated Content) and understanding of how to prioritise and categorise then. I am trying to put them in the simplest possible way to understand and also some means of 'Monitoring' the same.

News
Media News can be best tracked on news.google.com. It works like search where you can enter your company name, sort the results by date published and then subscribe to the RSS feed. You can get RSS updates of any news items that mention you or your products.

Blogs
http://www.ysearchblog.com/ from yahoo and http://blogsearch.google.com/ help you find the stories that mentions you or your products. You can get alerts to matching stories via email or RSS. Blog search will not miss out on mentions that would be difficult to find in the news and ordinary search.

Tracking blog-posts often does not reveal the full conversations. The blog post might be positive, but those leaving comments could attack your reputation. Services such as Bloppy (http://www.bloppy.info/), Commentful(http://www.commentful.blogflux.com/), co.mments.com (http://www.co.mments.com/), Twingly (http://www.twingly.com/), BackType(http://www.backtype.com/) track the comments left on blogs. You can search for your brand and subscribe to the RSS feed for instant updates. Blogpulse’s conversation tracker is a tool to track who’s linking to the blog post about you or your products.

A step ahead in this process is to not only track the 'news' or 'Blogs' but also the ones that becomes 'popular'. Sites such as Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon will help you keep a track through search for stories that match you or your products. You can subscribe to the resulting RSS feed and you’ll know about any story on these sites mentions you or your products–or your rivals.

Bookmarks
Thanks to online bookmarking services such as del.icio.us(http://www.delicious.com/), Diigo(http://www.Diigo.com/), Furl(http://www.furl.net/), Mister Wong(http://Mister-Wong.com/ is Europes no.1 service) and Blinklist(http://www.blinklist.com/ , I use blinklist ever since i started bookmarking) many people are sharing their bookmarks online. subscribing to the RSS feeds from such services makes it easy to track whenever someone bookmarks a web page that includes mention of you or your products.

Social Media News
Technorati (http://www.technorati.com/) is one of the best options for tracking social media sites. It offers Real-time search engine for blogs that tracks what is current and popular. It Offers the ability to search blog postings using a tag library, list your blog, and Custom RSS feeds let you get quick updates on any blog that refers to you or your products.

Forums & Message Boards
Message boards and forums not only paved the way for social networking, they still attract a lot of people to interact. Many a times the most important interactions take place in a forum discussion and if you are not keeping track of F&MBs you could miss on vital information. BoardTracker and BoardReader are two extremly good tools to monitor posts, topics, and actual forum names.

Photos, videos, Tags, Job listings and finacial mentions etc are the other "Mention types" that need to be monitored. A SMM program cannot be complete without taking care of all these.

I will publish the third part of this SMM post in a couple of days and talk about the largest UGC generators like Twitter and Facebook.

Social Media Monitoring: Whistle and the Torch

Most of us not only consume Social media content, we are the content. Every morning when we change our status msg on FB, every time we tweet a cup of coffee and every time we comment on a job switch, we consume and create social media content.
From the level of just being a distraction at work (or studies), it has reached the strategic screens of many company's think tanks. All this content has reached a level that has started impacting the way companies approach the WWW. The time for "Social Media Monitoring" has really come.
What is SMM?
In simple words it is digging into all the User generated content on Social networking sites and blogs and analyze who is taking what about you or your product. It is the process of analyzing, understanding, and responding to conversations about brands, products, reputation and end user opinion in the WWW's Social platforms.
What elements are involved in SMM:
Viewing or tracking conversations and updates in real time.
Check for trends and analyze them.
Determine and segregate these on basis (a)locations (b)demographics (c)other specific criteria
Determine and segregate these on basis (a)sentiments +ve, -ve (b)repetition (c)other specific criteria
Identify influence r/s or Community Nodes(people)
Devising a response strategy: To blow a whistle(raise an alarm) or to be the torch (Lead the way in reputation building)
What after the analysis?
You can opt to react/respond/reply/comment on both negative and positive outcomes of the reports in the following manner
Gauge the necessity of a statement from the company's CEO/PR/Marketing.
Make Product improvements or do bug fixings.
Product innovations or new revenue streams can be created.

Oh yes!. If you are a blogger like me who doesn't blog for money, you can do 'Ego surfing'. Believe me its interesting.

Hammer the Jet !

When dear friends Suneet Manchanda and Akhilesh Kumar updated their Facebook status with a link to bid on a private jet flight, I was impressed. It made me think 'if I do so, who will I become equal to, among the known people in India', so I asked Suneet and the answer (conversation pic is attached) made me go wow!!









Auctions the world over:
Since the time Ebay was founded, back in 1995, it has been the world leader in the online auctions domain, with an exhaustive list of items and categories as compared to any of it's competitions. Now Ebay has a number of specialty Verticals and also many regional sites in different countries. The amount of user traffic that Ebay generates has prompted a lot of API integrated bidding applications to help people and companies reap profits out of Ebay.Ebay also operates as Ebay.in. Although the Indian site nowhere matches the Ebay.com site in its outlook, the categories are same on both the sites and the focus also generic at both the places. Another large international auctions site http://www.ubid.com/ also has similar categories and focus in terms of the products available. The site however has a nice positioning by saying "Excess inventory from worlds leading brands".

Auctions in India:Most Indian sites that do Ecommerce in India also have an auctions platform. The categories and products available are nearly the same as on the likes of Ebay. Indiatimes used to have an Auctions site as well that was launched in 2002-03. For people who are not aware that http://www.auctions.indiatimes.com/ is no longer operational, let me tell you that this happened very recently, some 3 months back. The auctions link now redirects to the Shopping homepage! In its early days Indiatimes Auctions did not have much to offer apart from the newness of the concept in India. They tried to innovate with things like fancy timings for auctions (Late night Auctions etc), slowly graduating to offering Air tickets @ 1 Rs Auction and then creating some wonderful propositions for its users. Now this is all over.
In this not so happening scenario when you come across an idea that catches your eyes, it deserves a place on PraveeL. The http://www.tradus.in/ homepage is strikingly different from most of the others found in the www. It shows the differentiator (Experiences money can't buy)upfront as a visual, and the whole page is absolutely neat and clutter-free. The help tools are also perfectly placed and the whole bidding process is also quite user friendly like most of the other products from IBIBO.Hope they continue to retain the user interest after a good first impression. Hey Guys! What about "A night out with Katrina @ Rs1" ...No, that would sound like all the actor meet-up offers that are abundantly available.

For your Eyes only...Ears too

Google has touched nearly all our organs by dominating the search and other web utilities the way they have. This they have done partly by indulging in research and partly by making some smart acquisitions, to give us products and services that are addictive.
Google has made in excess of 50 acquisitions till date (I came across one of the compilations here) and have added value to the way we can use the web for our advantage. Some time in July 2007 Google acquired a company called GrandCentral Communications. Now nearly two years later Google is preparing itself to touch our 'Ears' with Google Voice. The recent articles that have been written on this subject suggest that we could soon hear each other through Google!

As the Google Voice official site suggests that "Google Voice is a service that gives you one number for all your phones, voicemail that is easy as email, and many enhanced calling features like call blocking and screening, voicemail transcripts, call conferencing, international calls, and more. Google Voice is currently available for GrandCentral users only, but will be open to new users soon. We expect to have the service ready for new users in a matter of weeks, and are focused on opening it as soon as possible.
For existing GrandCentral user:- Over the next few days, instructions will appear at the top of your inbox on how to upgrade your GrandCentral account to Google Voice. Thanks for your patience."

Google has also been working on creating mobile sync applications (another subject that I plan to take up soon) for some time now and if Google launches these two services as a combination, it will surely touch our Ears. And people who look to critisize Google might as well 'pull' their Ears!!

IPTV-Creating Usable interfaces

The best part of working as a Product manager is that you get equal chances to replicate or create. If you are working on a pure play web application then you get many benchmark products or portions that you can replicate, but if you are working on a relatively newer platforms like IPTV, then you have to create. It is extremely hard to find information on usability in newer domains.

For the past year or so I have had the opportunity to work on creating IPTV applications that work essentially on web technologies (HTML, CSS, and JS) that are displayed on a television through a STB (set-top-box) usually running a custom browser based on Mozilla.

What are we talking about ?

We are talking about applications that are based on web technologies running through a STB Browser, that has very limited capabilities as compared to your desktop browser, and are displayed on a TV screen instead of a computer monitor, and you use a remote control to navigate them instead of a keyboard and a mouse.

What are the look and feel issues that matter?

There are some basic but very important differences compared to the web.

1. Screen size: Although Television screens are larger than computer screens they have a lower resolution. You get very little real estate per screen as scrolls do not go really well on a TV screen. In case you have to keep the CRT monitor size into consideration as well then you loose another 20% of the available width and height.

2. Pixels shapes: TV pixels have a larger width making them rectangular in shape. So the designer needs to keep in mind that a circular button could end up looking like an Oval instead. This is a small factor that can change the whole characteristic of the design.

3. Flickering and fonts: Thin horizontal lines vibrate or flicker on CRT monitors because frames are made of interlaced fields. You have to use thick lines to avoid this effect. This also plays an important part when you need to display text on the screen. Font sizes lesser than 14 seem to flicker more and larger font sizes are also advised because of the increased reading distance (TVs are vied from a significant distance in a room). The font styles that are from the Sans Serif family look more stable as the letters do not bleed into each other.

4. Colours: The colour choice is restricted to a smaller range of colours on a TV because colours like Red bleed/bloat on most TV screens. Text is best presented in Black on a White background. Also avoid using bright colours next to each other. The control(or Selection) also displays a background colour as it moves from one control to another on the screen. This also needs to be factored in so that it doesn't' become an eyesore.

5. Sound: Websites also use sound but Television viewers expect sound as integral part of any thing they watch. You need to find ways and means to use Speech to be integrated into the navigation.

6. PIP: Avoid placing important text of information in the 'picture in picture' area of the TV.

7. Pictures: Do not use the pictures that you have clicked for a website for your TV application. Take new high resolution images. Its also advisable to use these images in the progressive format of JPG as this helps them to load along with the page on the TV screen.


How to make this design work?

Once you are able to create a layout and design that looks cool on a TV screen you need to make it work as well. This is what you need to keep in mind...

1. Navigation: There is no TV in the world that is navigated using a Mouse. The navigation tool for TV is the remote control. You also have to deal with the fact that the Cursor point is also defined in case of TV applications and it is the first action control from the top. This becomes more important in applications like shopping on TV where you have to show a variety of feature/ functionality on a single screen and the agenda is to make the buying process simple for the users.

2. Javascript and CSS: Versions of JS and CSS beyond the 1.2 and 1 respectively wont work. If you are well versed with these, you would be able to quickly adapt yourself to the limitations that the STB browsers present.

3. Functions: You would not be able to use even the common 'mouse-over' function. The 'on-click' would work though.

4. Flash: I have yet to come across a STB browser that supports Flash. Most of the browsers are also incapable of supporting Ajax functions like Div.

Is there a way to make this easier?

Ease of creation is in the ability to view what is being created. There are a couple of Emulators that reproduce what you are seeing on a computer screen to look the way it will on a TV screen. Use them at every step to avoid replicating mistakes. One such interesting tool is provided by the Virgin Media for its digital TV content partners.

Note: All images shown in this post are copyright protected property of Aksh Optifibre Ltd.

Two Good !

When Rajeev logged on to his Blogger dashboard today afternoon, I was sitting by his side and was pleasantly surprised to see two small picture icons alongside the Blogs name. I ran across to my seat and loged-in to see if Google had done it for me too?

I mouse'd over and the tool-tip was precise enough to explain the features. The impulsive blogger that I am, Google seemed to have presented this specially for me. Now I could either place my posts through my Mobile, or I could write Blogger a mail.

Mobile: Google asks you to send a verification code to go@blogger.com. Once Google is convinced that you are the owner of this Blog, you can simply post your thoughts through SMS (सरल मोबाइल सबमिसन ). Great!!

Email: You can simply create a mail of what you wish to publish on your blog. Your subject line will be treated as the post Title. This one also works in a flash. You press the send button on your mail and refresh the blog page, you will see the post. Awesome!!
I put in this post from mail :-)

If you publish from your mail, you just need to ensure that your signature does not become a part of the post unless you wish it to be...like below.....
--
Praveen Lohani
http://www.linkedin.com/in/praveenlohani
9818442666
--
Google team please note: you missed out on this aspect!!

Get the click where you want it.

The simplicity of the way Google creates and popularises most of its products and services can be again seen by the way they have announced the Inserting images, in Gmail in their official blog.

All users who have logged in to Gmail for the last couple of days would have noticed the subtle link at the left bottom portion of the log out page. Google team knows exactly how to make the users click the link they want.

The feature is essentialy the same thing that most bloggers would be used to, for inserting images in their blogs.

However this has made creating interesting messages easier, and all reciepents can look forward to messages that have images as part of the story (mail) rather than as attachments after the story.

Recession की राह !!!

Who did the Down Down Down Down song??
Yes Chris Brown......but the context he sang the song was not what I intend to write here.

Everyone who reads this page can immediately recall at least 2 friends or acquaintances who have been floored by the current period of recession. (Oh now this can be a funny viral game on Facebook: I know 2 people floored..how many do you know?......will play it some other time though..)

Experiencing a recession is 3-way:- you read about it, you see it happening and you feel it personally. Thankfully, this post has the third part missing yet ;-).

Reading:

You have it in the newspapers. You have news-feeds filling your inbox and you have your corporate monthly magazine talking about the cost cutting measures. Its apparently across industries. There are companies that have been reported to have layed-off people and there are others that are yet not publicized. I came across this list that has well-known names on a blog (and we thought Internet companies like TIL were the worst hit)

Seeing:
This is what prompted me to write this post. Be prepared to see what you will only see here. Linkedin is the largest professional networking site we all know, and has become significantly populated with Indian Professioanls.

I recently received a Free gift from one of the top professionals that i have worked with. This was the offer for availing this persons services FOC! Can you believe this? A very well articulated mail sent to all of this person's contacts. Amazing. This is how you 'SEE' recession.

Incidently a couple of days later, I got a message from GOD himself. I got it at a Delhi crossing. Everyone who has been going from IIT towards Vasant Vihar, would know that the whole stretch is in a mess. I stopped at the Signal next to the VV Depot, and you would not believe what I saw. I saw this work under process board put by the PWD with GOD's Message on it.....

Moral of the Story: दो मैं से एक छोरो ! आलस्य या नौकरी !! .......and prey to GOD that you have enough work that you can do the whole day :-)

V-Day to C-Day...E-Com to C-Com

William Shakespeare said “They do not love that do not show their love...”

No wonder each year as 14th of Feb inches closer, the willingness to express and express it in a distinct, loving and at times outrageous ways by the youth provides the media with enough content to add pages to print.

All through the year there were news of Moral policing from different parts of the country. We have been treated with some fantastic drama being unfolded from 'Bar Bharo' to Lathi charges to the photos of Armed police, guarding love struck couples in gardens.

The 'Chaddi Campaign' has been the highlight of this Valentine season. Ram Sene chief Mr Muthalik now has the potential to be the biggest Lingerie dealer in the country. He can get the 'Pink Chaddi' Brand patented and sell Chaddis at a huge discount globally.
This V-Day was indeed C-Day courtesy Mr Muthalik....



So where does this C-Comm come from.

Here. What are the top selling products globally as Valentines day gifts?

Jewelry holds the number one position followed by Eating out and Health & Beauty Spas. Clothing including Lingerie comes at number four and is ahead of Flowers at five. This is followed by Confections/Candy, Stuffed Animals and Cards.

But this year was different in the Indian context. If you are a regular visitor to the Indian on-line shopping platforms like Indiatimes shopping and Rediff shopping you would not have missed the Naughty gifts being sold on the shops. One of the leading vendors to these sites has confirmed to me “at least 4 lac Rupees worth of Rose Panty has been sold in the Valentine week”. Isn't it amazing? The Global number four category nearly became number one in V Day E-Comm.















Thanks Mr Muthalik :-)