One Half Amazing!

So here’s a crazy prediction for your Thursday morning.  Last week, Facebook officially announced their Facebook Live app which is their own little way of showing off all the hipsters that roll through their offices and as a way of updating users about the behind-the-scenes doings at Facebook in all its live-streaming glory.   You can go and check it out here.

I could be reading way too much into this, but I’m going to be interested in seeing how this evolves.  This could be the beginning of Facebook’s take into live user-streaming video content.  Instead of having all their users leave the site to record their “hauler” videos on YouTube and UStream, Facebook Live could allow them to record and interact with their friends and fans directly on Facebook’s site.  It could go even deeper to take on such services like Hulu and actually stream live TV right to the web.  That would be cool.

Just my 2 cents.  Am I taking this prediction too far?  Let me know in the comments below.

Facebook ads were never that really hard to create in the first place, but now they’ve taken most of the brain work out of it for you.  Now, when you go to create a facebook ad and input your destination URL (the place where the user will go when the click on the ad) it will auto suggest an ad title, 135 characters of copy, and a corresponding image.  It pulls this information from the meta description, page title and available images on the corresponding page.

The only problem I see with this is that if a user is going this route to create their ads, they’ve probably not put much time into naming their pages or doing any SEO work behind the scenes in terms of adding meta descriptions, ALT tags, etc.

Also, don’t forget to add your call-to-action!

Have you tried this?  Did  you even make it this far in the article?  If so, click the like button below.

via Marketing Pilgrim

If you had to choose just one, would you rather give up Facebook or Twitter?  Which one has more value in your life? Which one has more staying power? Discuss.

ReclaimPrivacy.org has a handy bookmarklet that shows which potentially insecure and privacy-invading settings are enabled on your Facebook account when you click it.

ReclaimPrivacy’s bookmarklet focuses on just a few key areas where Facebook can share information with the public—having your contacts, connections, and tagged photos exposed to the public, as well as allowing your friends to accidentally expose that information themselves. It also looks at your relationship with Facebook’s personalization, applications, and other aspects to see what Facebook and independent developers can find out about you, then rates your exposure level in simple Good, Caution, or Insecure levels, along with offering links to change those settings.

ReclaimPrivacy Bookmarklet Rates Your Facebook Exposure Levels.

This ragtag group of dudes below may look like the WB’s version of Entourage, but actually they’ve set out to take down facebook and return privacy controls back to the users.  Their idea is simple, but they need your help.

How it works and their vision -  Instead of you posting an update to facebook and then facebook pushing that status to all of your friends (centralized solution), they believe social networks should act more like real people do. They believe you should be able to send out a status and directly interact with your friends on your own, without having to give facebook access to all your personal information.  They call it Diaspora and it’s essentially a decentralized hub that gives you full control over your identity online.  They believe offering this service will be helpful to non-technical users who are worried about their data and privacy online.

How you can help – Go check out their page at Kickstarter and make a pledge.  You’ll only be charged if the project actually gets fully-funded, but as a backer you actually get a piece of the project as well.  A pledge of $5 gets you a version of the software that you can run as your own server.  Of course, bigger donations get you greater access to the project and more freebies.  Signup is simple and donations work with your existing Amazon account.  You’ve really got nothing to lose…except your privacy. Support Diaspora.

Diaspora: Personally Controlled, Do-It-All, Distributed Open-Source Social Network from daniel grippi on Vimeo.

• Facebook “likes” are starting to show up in searches.  Before you know it, Facebook will unleash it’s search engine and “likes” will be the new pagerank.
• Cleaver ways to use Dropbox.  Even use it to host your website.
• Pepsi is launching a location-based loyalty program in mid-May called Pepsi Loot.  Check-in at a restaurant or establishment that serves Pepsi through their mobile app and earn rewards towards free music, behind-the-scenes content and special offers.
• How to add a retweet anywhere button to your WordPress site. *See an example of this below this post.
• RUMOR:  Google could reveal details about their TV project during their I/O conference on May 18.