Facebook Groups mean business

Mark Zuckerburg once again showed his subtle nous for all things social when he launched Facebook’s new Groups features. Groups work better when they aren’t too big says Zuckerburg (audio interview with Robert Scoble).

The new Groups functionality includes collaborative document editing and real-time chat with Groups members. Facebook is becoming serious. Google Groups eat our heart out.
 

Facebook vs Twitter 1 – 1

Facebook is by far the leader in getting people to share stuff, but Twitter has the highest click-through rates, says this fascinating report. Email still drives the most overall clicks but has lower click-through rates than the social networks.

On the subject of Twitter’s popularity, at DevNest in Brighton on Tuesday, Tim Whitlock gave an interesting talk on the implications of Twitter hitting the mainstream.

However, if this report is to be believed, the Twitter founders are still pretty much in the dark as to why and how Twitter users use the platform.
 

Sing that Tweet

In case you missed it, Orange did a cute and creative little Twitter campaign last week, called the Singing Tweetagram.

They monitored tweets with the hashtag #singingtweetagrams, chose the best ones as they came in and quickly turned them into a jingle-type song with killer-heel-killer-harmonies retro band Rockabellas.

Which turned a tweet like @MayorOfLondon Mr Boris, Mr Mayor, thank you for the bikes. And for the extra exercise we got, on Monday’s tube strike into a cute tune like this.

 

Advertising and social’s march

According to the IAB, UK online advertising spend reached a new record, but with new drivers (not search). Which confirms our post last week, which said that social might be the saviour of display advertising.

UK online advertising spend increases 10% to nearly £2 billion in first half of 2010. Video and social advertising fuel online display’s return to growth.

Econsultancy in the meanwhile conducted a survey of 800 industry leaders and the news is that 83% of in-house teams plan spending more on social next year, while 89% of agencies expect the same from their clients.
 

App building for dummies

iPhone apps are sexy and powerful. But they’re also expensive.

With Mobile Roadie that might become simpler. It’s a tool that allows you to build an app through an intuitive interface; for iPhone, Android and soon for other platforms too. No need for complicated Objective-C coding. We popped round their office earlier this week to get a demo and we were pretty impressed.

 

Kerching! The sound of the FT’s iPad app

The FT has released some numbers about the iPad version of their newspaper service. In the 5 months since its launch, it’s been downloaded 400,000 times.

Decent figures indeed, but more importantly, it now accounts for 10% of the newspaper’s digital subscriptions (remember: the FT has a paywall). And even more importantly, it has generated £1m in advertising revenue.
 

The need for a Big Society Platform

RAAK visited CityCamp London this week and we came up with an idea to help Big Society. It’s an API to encourage civic action. Read More »
 

Twitter Degrees of Seperation

Here’s a good fact for in the pub. Research company Sysomos has shown that the classic Six Degrees Of Seperation theory might just be getting out of date. A study they’ve done with 5.2bn connections shows that on Twitter 78% of the users or only 4 or 5 steps away from anyone else.
 

Creative of the week – Miss Aniela

Miss Aniela is one of those artists that has used the power of the internet to establish herself completely independently. She’s a self-taught photographer who has gathered a major following on her Flickr page, she blogs regularly to promote her workshops and she’s used Blurb to publish and sell her own photobooks.

But of course all that smart online thinking is backed up by beautiful work that often evolves around self-portraits. And you can go and see her work as part of the Photolounge exhibition this weekend in London’s Truman Brewery.
 

Tech insight of the week – Twitter Annotations: The art of driving fast without lights

In April, at Chirp, a Twitter Developer’s Conference, Twitter announced a feature called Annotations. This was announced alongside very exciting developments like User Streams and Site Streams, which caused it to not quite get the press it deserves. In this week’s tech insight we explore the potential disruptive power of Twitter Annotations. Read More »