With over 400 million active users, Facebook has become a prime spot for brands to advertise and promote themselves. Over 1.4 million local businesses have a presence on Facebook, reaching out to consumers through pages, events and applications. Diesel Spain is taking social marketing to the next level, taking Facebook off the Web and putting it in their dressing rooms.
Diesel stores in Spain have introduced Diesel Cam, an interactive installation that allows shoppers to photograph themselves and post the pictures immediately to their Facebook profiles. Shoppers can photograph themselves as they try on clothes and ask their Facebook friends for advice about which garments they should buy, or they can publish photos to show off all the new clothes they are buying.
Shoppers connect to Facebook via Facebook Connect, using a touch screen monitor on the installation. They then have the opportunity to photograph themselves in Diesel clothes and publish their photos immediately to Facebook. The photos come complete with a Diesel logo in the corner, so it’s great advertising for the company, not to mention tons of fun for shoppers.
Facebook Connect has given third party websites the opportunity to connect with users through Facebook, but Diesel is taking it to a new level. The Diesel Cam gives live users the opportunity to enter social media directly from their stores. How do you think campaigns like the Diesel Cam will impact the future of shopping? Will Facebook and social shopping become a permanent part of the consumer experience?
The Facebook Application Review of today is about the recently released development of the website art.com, called "MyFrameShop".
This Facebook Application was developed to provide users the ability to turn any personal photo into a professionally-framed work of art.
As simple as it sounds, once you install this app you can upload your personal photos either from your computer, Facebook albums, Picasa or Flickr accounts to the application. When the photos have been uploaded you can custom-frame the selected photo by choosing from hundreds of moulding and mat combinations.
I personally think that the whole idea of this Facebook Application is very good because it brings a fast and simple solution to a real problem which is framing and printing pictures, in a very simple and well designed interface.
One thing that I did not like about this Facebook app was the fact that I was forced to let them prompt on my status without asking for permission. Honestly I think that this can be a helpful tool to promote the app, but if I am a customer purchasing from the app I think that I deserve not to be used as an advertising source as well.
My qualification for this Facebook Application Review is 4 out of 5. Overall they did a great job, and as I said before I really like Facebook Application that make our lives easier, and this is one of them.
HitWise is reporting that for the week ending March 13, Facebook overtook Google as the site to get the most US visits. Facebook also reached #1 for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, when people logged on to send best wishes to relatives.
Facebook also was #1 for the weekend of March 6th and 7th, which shows that they are steadily climbing in terms of total number of page views and visitors, and their rate of growth is something Google is most certainly fearing. The share of visits to Facebook.com for this week has increased 185% over the same week last year, while Google increased only 9% in the same time. Facebook and Google accounted for 14% of all US internet visits last week.
Shown below is a graph provided by HitWise which demonstrates Facebook’s meteoric rise in visits over the last year. With over 400 million users and growing, Facebook is quickly becoming the prime destination for many users of the web. While Google is used for search, Facebook is the main tool used to communicate with friends, and more recently, to play games.
Facebook announced today an expansion to their Facebook Credits program, including a disclosure of the revenue share they’ll be taking. According to Deborah Liu’s post on the Facebook Developer blog, Facebook Credits supports purchase via fifteen currencies, several credit cards, mobile payments, and recentlyPayPal, and that they’ll be rolling out the program to more developers over time.
Several large developers have already been accepted into the Facebook Credits program over the past few months, and a small percentage of Facebook users will be able to purchase credits through PayPal and use them, over the next few weeks. Purchased credits can be used in any Facebook application that accepts them.
Facebook’s goal is to provide a single cross-application currency, both to simplify user transactions and thus to increase conversion rates for developers. Developers benefit because the number of potential customers increases. However, developers will be giving up 30% of revenues collected to Facebook — monies Facebook intends to reinvest into improving the Facebook Credits ecosystem.
If you are a developer and want to integrate Facebook Credits into your applications, first check out their FAQ and developer terms, then fill out their survey. The program is in closed beta and they’ll be scaling the system to support wider use.
What do you think? Is this too high a rate for Facebook to be charging, especially when you factor in that PayPal has in the past few months raised its fees? Are you a developer? Do you plan to integrate Facebook Credits into your Facebook applications.
Facebook and Microsoft have partnered to create a standalone Facebook client powered by the new Silverlight 4 Beta technology. The client allows you to browse and interact with Facebook with a completely different interface, and a glossy one at that. To be completely honesty, the client is gorgeous, and the complete integration with Facebook legitimately makes this a better way to browse Facebook than Facebook.com itself, in my opinion.
Starting up the Silverlight client, you’re first bombarded with a series of permissions dialogs, asking whether you are are willing to allow the application to have access to every aspect of Facebook: News Feeds, Wall, Messages and more. The process isn’t overly annoying, because frankly, as Facebook users, we’ve come to expect the permissions requests before utilizng applications. The Facebook Connect permissions dialogs are pretty standard across sites, and lend a bit of authenticity to applications.
After this process, you arrive at the heart of the client, and it is quite striking in a complete black finish. Silverlight really demonstrates its strength here, with lots of available space and big fonts. Browsing is quite easy, and my various friends lists are listed along the left side of the client. The most impressive element of the new interface is the photo album on the right side, it’s a unique way of showing the recent photos within my network. The events tab is also a completely superior alternative to the way that the Facebook Events calendar can be viewed.
One glaring omission is in the system is Facebook Chat, but I imagine this is part of future releases. Another problem was the lack of search anywhere on the client: At least give me a Bing or something. Finally, I had a real problem when trying to look at some specific photos from my friends feed, I kept getting this error: ”the owner of this album did not make this available to this application”. Applications themselves are not available on the client, understandably.
With over 400 million active users, Facebook has become a prime spot for brands to advertise and promote themselves. Over 1.4 million local businesses have a presence on Facebook, reaching out to consumers through pages, events and applications. Diesel Spain is taking social marketing to the next level, taking Facebook off the Web and putting it in their dressing rooms.
Facebook and Microsoft have partnered to create a 