Technogearophilia

Despite the ongoing battle between the major players in the Social Media marketspace, there’s room for all of them because they’re not that similar to each other. They each cater to differing user needs.

What’s important is for the user base to determine which Social Media platform is the right Social Media for them.

Obviously, due to convergence, Twitter is and will continue to be the big winner in the Social Media wars because it can be used in conjunction with all the other offerings. It also seems to be the new weapon in the arsenal of the world’s revolutionaries.

Paul Butler, an intern at Facebook, made a map visualizing Facebook friendships. It is, as first glance, both interesting and compelling. Just by plotting Facebook users’ listed hometowns and mapping their online friendships Butler, who unsurprisingly is interning with Facebook’s data infrastructure engineering team, managed to create a map of the Earth and her cities just with a color ramp projection of those friendships.

Compare The Two Maps (Click to Enlarge)

It is interesting that Butler’s projection effectively drew the continents and even some national boundaries, but it’s not really surprising or a particularly great revelation.

Butler’s projection matches well with NASA’s light map of the Earth. That means it matches up well with regional population densities and technology levels, which shouldn’t be a shock to anyone.

In all likelihood, you could create the same map, or one damn close to it, by plotting the traffic to any set a major websites. The internet follows civilization and Facebook is part of the internet.

Recently Facebook released a platform, the Open Graph Protocol, which allows websites and applications to share information about users in order to tailor offers, features and services to each one’s interests and tastes.

It enables any web page to become an object in a social graph that can plot users’ activities and to function much as if it was a Facebook page.

The Facebook Developers’ first integration features are called Social Plugins. This is currently a set of eight (8) plugins which can easily be added to any web page or application in order to connect it more closely to Facebook, offer a set of  features from Facebook, and take advantage of the Semantic Web that Facebook is developing.

• Like Button:
  Show a “Like” button on your site which replaces the older “Fan” button. The is currently most commonly used Social Plugin.
• Recommendations:
  Show users personalized suggestions for pages on your site they might like based upon their history as recorded via the Open Graph Protocol and API.
• Login with Faces:
  Allow the users to sign up to your site with their Facebook account. it also shows a list of the user’s friends who have also signed up for your site.
• Comments:
  Allow users to comment on your site. The comments will also be posted back to the users Facebook wall.
• Activity Feed:
  shows users what their friends are doing on your site through likes and comments.
• Like Box:
  This is previously known as the Fan box.
• Facepile:
  Shows profile pictures of the user’s friends who have already signed up for your site.
• Live Stream:
  Lets your users share activity and comments in real-time as they interact during a live event.

These social plugins allow website developers to create websites that have all or most of the social media functions of Facebook pages. In theory this would not only drive more traffic to Open Graph enabled websites, but also reduce the “bounce rate” by enabling greater interaction with the sites in question.