Apparently Facebook is testing targeted ads based on the content of your status updates and wall posts. This has sparked mixed feelings in the user community. On one side, marketers are drooling over the possibilities, on the opposite side, users feel their privacy is being compromised.

We don't get the privacy issues. When it works on GMail, which operates in a way more private space, surely it shouldn't be a problem on a public timeline, should it?

There is, however, a third issue that's more important. Status sentiment is very difficult to analyse. This means that if a user complains a lot about Tesco's range of wines, they're quite likely to be served up ads for Tesco's range of wines.

And that would be a bit crap, wouldn't it?
 

Comeback kings

This week we saw an interesting quote through our friends at Rabbit. A study showed that prompt replies to customer complaints online makes a significant and measurable difference.

"a Harris survey showed that 18% of those who posted a negative review of the merchant and got a reply ended up becoming loyal customers and buying more."

Talking of the value of Social Media, in 2010 Coca Cola cut their ad spend by 6.6% and started investing more in Social Media.
 

What's the role of Augmented Reality in Social TV?

That's one of the subjects that came up in a conversation we had with some tv execs this week. And boom, here's an interesting case-study.

As part of a re-launch, NBC Univeral have created The Witness, an interactive film that integrates Augmented Reality. For Social Media points, we don't think it can compete with the immediacy of Twitter (one pitfall – you'd have to be in that location), but as far as exploring new formats goes (and the PR value that comes with it), it's definitely an interesting example.

The in-crowd

Unlike Google, Facebook has not made many false starts with products, Facebook Questions being the notable exception. It launched last year to much fanfare but never took off to compete with the likes of Yahoo Answers and the fast growing Quora.

But as always they have gone back to the drawing board to refine their product. The result is different reports RWW. The new version is not so much about finding the experts, but more about tapping into the knowledge of your crowd. Why can this be good? Says RWW:

"While everyone on Quora may agree on the best restaurant in my neighborhood, the service suffers from the same issue as something like Yelp – maybe I don't agree with the masses."

My utopia & your dystopia

We've written about all the weird and wonderful hacks people are doing to the Xbox Kinect. Officially now the fastest selling consumer electronics of all time, Mashable speculated this week that it  the next place where marketeers need to boldly go to boost their brands. The technology can tell players apart, recognise movement in 3D, do voice recognition – in short it's the next great leap in user interfaces.

Microsoft's Avatar Connect allows you to control your Avatar through movement. Mashable conjures up customers test driving cars or trying out interior decoration using Kinect. That's a little too obvious. We think Kinect could drive major innovations in products themselves through new ways of interaction. And then there is the nightmare scenario of Minority Report-like ads, jumping up at you at every turn. It's Back to the Future stuff.

Pimp your WordPress

Did you ever think your WordPress blog needs some gloss and perhaps some sexy motion, languid but snappy transitions? You're lucky, because soon iPad-glamour will be available to ordinary WordPress publications thanks to Onswipe. It includes features such as loading screens, Flipboard-like image effects and more. Nice one. Our hint? By all means go for it – after you have made sure your content is actually good. Just ask Wired magazine.

In other tablet news, the first music video shot on the iPad 2 has just been released.
 

Twitter by numbers

In case you haven't heard, Twitter was 5 years old this week. In the last year, the amount of Tweets per day has shot up from 50 million per day to 150 million. More interesting stats behind this link.

In related news: LinkedIn has (finally) reached the benchmark of 100 million users.

Groupon is going hammer & tongs

Or is it? Techcrunch reports a massive dip in sales in February. In an interesting post they also reveal that Groupon has not yet cornered half of the US group buying market. There is still a lot to play for.
 

Creatives of the week – Breakfast

Breakfast is an interactive design agency from New York. Apart from the usual stuff for their clients, it's their self-initiated projects that are getting us excited. And more specifically their attempt to be creative with Instagram.

Based on the API, they've developed a location-based photobooth called Instaprint. For example: as an event organiser or pub owner you can program the device with a certain location and a hashtag and the box will start printing all your lovely Instagrams taken at that location.

Tech insight of the Week – Node.js: The death of PHP

Our tech insight of the week looks at a punchy newcomer on the web server stack, Node.js. Node enables you to run Javascript on the server and even to build the very server itself in Javascript.

Could this be such a handy AJAX counterpart to browser-side Javascript that it will eventually kill off PHP? Read More »

One of the most exciting things about web businesses is their ability to open up their engines to others via APIs. The wildly popular Instagram has just done exactly that and it looks like it includes all their functions. 

That made us think: we have written in the past about the paucity of location information on Twitter. Google is as bad, and Facebook not much richer in location data (yet). FourSquare punches above its weight, but its check-in frequency is still very small. But Instagram, where most of the pictures are taken on a mobile, includes a hell of a lot of location data. We can hear those potential-bells ringing!
 

Is Twitter the killer app for social tv?

An American survey by Sidereel found that traditional TV viewing is starting to supplement online viewing and not the other way around. So we can't help but think that telly people are not having an easy ride to integrate social, especially not when it comes to the format of the tv ad. At this panel chat we attended at Social Media Week, a lot of expectation was put on the technology of internet-connected tv sets and about new forms of multi-layered transmedia narrative.

But isn't Twitter the one killer app that enhances the 'old medium'? It's a natural platform for people to discuss tv content. And it could also enhance the content in simple but creative ways. Like Audi did with their Superbowl ads, which pointed people to a Twitter-driven competition.
 

The social side of music

Since Spotify has integrated their social recommendation service through Facebook integration, traffic from FB has increased by 400% in a year. A while ago the streaming service claimed that the amount of paying subscribers doubled after implementing Facebook Connect.
 

The most powerful Facebook 'campaign' ever?

On Tuesday evening Wael Gnonim, Google's MENA marketing manager, revealed that he is the secret administrator behind We Are Khaled Said Facebook page. It's on this page where the date for the current uprising was announced, January 25. Newsweek provides some background.

At home in Cairo, Wael Khalil, a democracy activist since 2004, saw the post and scoffed. “Come on,” he remembers thinking. “We can’t have a Facebook revolution. Revolution has no time and hour.”

On Tuesday evening, a brand new Fan page created in honour of Wael Gnonim himslef, was growing by 50 people per second.

Influence is the new black

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on the growing significance of systems that measure your influence/reputation on social media like Klout and PeerIndex:

Last year, Britney Spears' managers, Adam Leber and Larry Rudolph, requested a meeting with Klout Chief Executive Joe Fernandez in San Francisco. Over a lunch of Chinese food, they grilled Mr. Fernandez on why Ms. Spears' Klout score, then around 64, was lower than Lady Gaga's 78 and Ashton Kutcher's 77.
…
Even politicians are subject to the new pecking order. The Twitter accounts for President Barack Obama and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez are both registered on Klout, with scores of 90 and 80, respectively.

We checked Elbaradei, President Mubarak and Ghonim and can report that the pecking order is: Elbaradei: 74 - President Mubarak: not registered – Ghonim: 84.
 

Layar now a platform

Remember Augmented Reality? It was all the rage a few Tweets ago. One of the most-anticipated AR apps was Layar and we only just discovered how interesting it is.

We were always under the impression it was a stand-alone app, but turns out it's actually a platform that allows developers to create content layers. Which turns Layar into an app-store for AR apps. So within the same app you can check which museums are close-by, play all kind of games or discover that the Wiley album cover was taken not so far from RAAK HQ.

Twime traveling

With Twitshift you can follow yourself on Twitter, but the Tweets you will get are the ones you sent a year ago.

A very simple but great idea. We were thinking, perhaps 50 years from now, our grand-children will be tuning into our timeline and thinking, wow granddad was obsessed with Egypt!
 

Mobile video is the new video

We all know that mobile internet usage is rapidly increasing. That's especially true in development countries. Proof in point: South African video service Zoopy (previously seen as the SA version of YouTube) has repositioned itself completely as a mobile platform. Here's an infographic they made with lots of beautiful stats on mobile video usage.

Flickr

We love Flickr. But we fear for its future. It has what seems to be a dysfunctional adoptive parent in Yahoo! Users accounts have been deleted without explanation why, and when people query this behaviour on their forums, they shut them.

Perhaps serious photographers should start thinking of another platform? Or move to Tumblr or WordPress?
 

Tech insight of the week – Cyberbattle of the Tor Brigades

At the start of the current tumult in Egypt, the Egyptian government attempted to cut off communications in and out of Egypt, including the Internet. While succeeding to a large degree, a small group of people, more specifically, a guy called Jacob Applebaum, worked day and night to keep a communication lifeline open to Egypt using literally a handful of routable servers.

This is a snapshot of what happened. Read More >>
 

And not to be ignored

I know of Scott Sigler, who got a book deal after he created a community around his sci-fi books by releasing them as podcasts, read by himself (he did different voices for his characters).

I know of people publishing books in progress and I know of Dutch Social Media dude Erwin Blom, who convinced the publishers of his book about Communities to also set up a website. That was used to crowdsource information on online tools and case studies that put his community theories into practice.

And sure, there’s the Kindle, soon the iPad and other e-readers. But so far they mainly focus on changing the distribution and hasn’t had a big impact on the promotion of books, let alone the way stories are being told. Yet.

But then I found this particularly interesting use of augmented reality. It augments exactly what books are all about, telling stories.
Camille Scherrer, a media and interaction design student, created a book that seamlessly integrates Augmented Reality. It’s called ‘Le Monde des Montagnes’ and, well, it’s a book. But the difference is that, once you activate the AR layer (through a lamp!), it superimposes a layer of animation on top of the book that re-interprets and adds to the narrative.

As Camille writes on her website:

“Le Monde des Montagnes” makes the real book – this century-old knowledge transfer medium – cross the path of the “power book”, leading to interaction in a natural, albeit unprecedented language, as an extension of our reality.”

Small note: while Augmented Reality was one of the buzzwords of 2009, she already made this installation in 2008.

The technology behind it seems very powerful, but it’s mainly the way she applies it to enhance the traditional medium and the execution of the animations that got my attention.

Sure, it’s not thé future of book publishing, but it’s definitely a glimpse of how storytelling can and will change.

And there’s more about innovative story-telling on the rather splendid Jawbone website.

Augmented reality is the new buzz word it seems. The technology itself has been around for a while, but all these nerds (they’re not nerds? yes they are nerds) are starting to use it to make amazing applications. So it’s getting interesting for a non-techie like me.

The ones that are getting me interested are mobile services like Wikitude and Layar. They are basically applications that, using the phone’s camera, recognise where you are and tell you what what’s around you. A very useful little tool and I presume it will allow people and businesses to add descriptions, making it both social and commercially viable. And as the new iPhone comes with a built-in compass, I’m sure these applications won’t just be limited to the Android phone for long.

On the gimmicky side, you have things like the BMW Z4 interactive 3D game. Gimmicky, yes. Pointless, yes. But as my friend here in the studio just said: “That’s something my dad would love!”. So it’s yet another tool in the box for brands to raise awareness and to get people to create their own content.
Although the app only seems to allow you to export the final result as a still and not show the whole process, like the video this smart chap made.
Still, the BMW tv ad is a little crap, even if it was just for not pointing people to the game.

UPDATE: I forgot that @philtidy mentioned last week that the US Postal service was using AR too to let people measure which box they need for their parcels. Nice.