By Will McInnes

Flickr wishlist

Dearest beloved Flickr,

I love you. You know that.
We spend time together every week.
Important time.

But I want you to be even better and even more useful to me.

Specifically, I want to set up rules with you.
Like those Outlook rules, but less nightmarishly bad (ideally).

These rules should be triggered by tags and determine belonging to a set and the licencing for a given photo.

As an example, I want to tell you that whenever I add a photo tagged 'Jack' to automatically add it to the Jack set, and to automatically set it to 'all rights reserved' rather than my default creative commons license.

That's all. Just some nice, automatic rules that do some of the admin for me so that I can sit back and enjoy a bit more and fiddle a bit less.

If you already do this I apologise - I am a dork.

Sound good?

Cool, thanks :)

LinkedIn influenced by Facebook: now profile photos

LinkedIn continues to make important (but not necessarily big enough) reactive moves to the growth of personal online social networks by now adding profile photos.

Although a small move this is part of a huge wider movement - back when our business was solely classical web design and development we were always huge advocates of the personalising and transparency benefits of adding photos of personnel, offices and anything else relevant. Words are all very well, but images mean so much more, and video - even better...

What will be interesting with LinkedIn in particular is how far towards the online personal social networks - like Facebook - will it go?

Super-user early adopter types, particularly our (alas) faster moving cousins on the yankee side of the Atlantic, are already using Facebook as their business social network, so you can argue and argue well that LinkedIn is already redundant.

That's fine, but as in my real life I like a degree of separation between the various parts of my life. Despite being a massive fan of transparency and sharing online, I dislike the wider blurring of lines between various personal bits and work bits and everything else.

As such, I'd like to see how vertically focused networks find their place, and as such continue to watch LinkedIn's Facebook-influenced-moulding and evolving with interest...

Acquired vlog Wallstrip is getting better

Wallstrip is an American vlog about stocks and shares, invested in by Fred and bought by CBS.

Sometimes it's been OK-to-good, sometimes didn't do it for me.
Maybe it's gaining momentum though. This episode really tickled me.

Love the last question to Andy Roddick - proper laugh out loud.

Planet BNM - kudos and feedback

James Wragg of the Madgex posse has smartened up his Planet BNM project with a subtle and clean re-design.
Looks SO much better.

I think this project has tons of mileage though, if James has the time and energy (!).

In no particular order, it'd be great to also see:

• bookmarking and 'fwd to friend' chicklets to enable sharing of content found, to transform this from a window to a real platform
• devices to enable quick, visual scanning of common themes (I guess I'm saying a tag cloud)
• potentially sub-categories for blogs to allow specialisms to prosper although there may not be enough in each category to justify (e.g. mobile blogs, photo blogs, seo blogs, design and code blogs etc.)
• a vertical search engine, to allow searching of just Planet BNM resources
• errr, other stuff

Great work James.
Is any one else using / liking the website, or having thoughts on how it can be pushed forwards?

Facebook News Feed advertising messages

I am rabidly anti-interruption marketing in my online travels, but this doesn't bother me.

It's to do with value.

I get so much from Facebook, so much is deposited in the goodwill bank account, with so little withdrawn, compared with say the ratio of TV advertising time and interruption/faff vs unbroken TV watching time, that this really doesn't bother me at all.

It so could, let's be clear about that.
I'm not going to put up with bad marketing bombardment from facebook and its advertisers.

But I love the freeemium business model and all things related.
I love getting tons of value for a small amount of peripheral, non-offensive and (even better) targeted marketing.

I'd love to know how well this performs for Experian, the advertiser.
My hunch is excellently...

Facebook protects crown jewels

Lots and lots and lots has been written about Facebook of late.

The single best post on why Facebook isn't the be all and end all is by Ivan Pope, master of the widgetsphere. It is essential reading.

My note therefore is quicker and more specific.

I just want to clarfiy for my fellow would-be app developers and Facebook afficianados a key point around Facebook's current strategy and what it means for people in our business of creating stuff around the Facebook ecosystem.

You see a contact of mine in this industry had some great ideas to pitch at an evil fast food company (not the first one that comes to mind, probably the second or third...).
One of the creative concepts involved an application to draw down information from Facebook to a new microsite for his client. He wanted me to advise on whether this would be feasible. I didn't need to read Facebook's terms of service to answer this one.

My logic was as follows. Facebook's crown jewels are:

• Your profile
• Your status in particular
• Interactions between the rest of the community and you (e.g. 'Teddy wrote on your wall')
• Your list of friends (and additions to these)

Until it does or doesn't make the strategic play that everyone's hoping for, and tears down the walls around its well-trimmed garden, you aint' getting that info out of Facebook.

Those are the incentives, the prizes, that keep me, you and everyone else returning to the walled garden.

I understood this intuitively but it was good to get clarification in some general blog reading I was just doing here:

Netvibes founder Tariq Krim: 'Facebook does not currently allow outsider providers to access the News Feed. In other words, Facebook won't let us display your News Feed from the front page in our widget (or change your status for that matter.)' [from Sexy Widget blog]

As an online marketer, an app developer or widget fiend, what you need to know is that as things stand today:

• Facebook is happy for you to host a party at its house.
• Facebook is not happy for you to take its party elsewhere.

The detail shakes out from those simple principles, and I'm sure you can confirm them by reading the TOS.

Simple, old skool and flawed but effective for the time-being - that is until something threatening bubbles up (by which time it will probably be too late - see MySpace, Friendsreunited, Altavista and any other business that was once mighty and is now forgotten, Ozymandias-style).

As those many others have written though, there is still a critical window of opportunity to make the bold move and again cancel out competition.

It will be more interesting for us observers if they do, and they've made smart moves so far, don't you think?

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NB. If you haven't come across why internet vets are wisely puckering their eyes and mouths whenever the word 'Facebook' is uttered, then start by reading Jason Kottke's opener on the topic.

Nielsen/NetRatings: MySpace dropping, Facebook & Bebo fizz-popping

On the BBC this item covers new data from research firm Neilsen/NetRatings proving what we've been seeing and saying based on anecdotal informal evidence: that MySpace is 'running out of breath' while Bebo and Facebook grow rapidly.

Basics - effective web copy must be SCANNABLE

Time and again I reiterate these simple principles, so I thought I'd also share here.

Due to how we consume online material, where there are many alternative sources of content, where those alternative sources are rapidly and easily available at no cost, where we are reading content from a screen, not from paper in our hands, we don't consume blocky paragraphs like this one (!) too happily.

We prefer:

• bullet points like these
• paragraphs on fewer sentences

Sub-headings that pick out key themes within the copy...

And the use of bold to pick out key phrases within sentences and paragraphs.
Simple really.

Next time you create or review copy that is going online, please apply Will's simple scan test.

Will's simple scan test

Simply:

1. squint a little bit,
   
2. lean back a little bit,
   
3. ...and see if the key messages lift out of the page.
4. If they don't, apply some of the online copywriting tips above

Join us! / Ning is fantastic

Ning is fantastic.

I will write more when I get time, but we're inviting people to join in an online social network experiment (using Ning).

The purpose of the experiment is:

1. for everyone involved to learn more about online social networks
2. to have fun

So if you fancy it read more about what we're doing or just join us straight away (takes less than 3 minutes).

The more the merrier.

Loving Jaiku

http://willmcinnes.jaiku.com/

Wickedly easy to use user-interface.
Getting up to speed is a dog-damn-doddle!

And I love how it works in the web 2.0 ecosystem - just pulling in feeds left right and centre with ease.

Very cool.

Any creatiing a new web application is this gorgeous new era of ours should play with Jaiku. THIS is user interface; this is good usability; this is how to build a sticky userbase of real people.