An advertising campaign from Olla Condoms, which sends Facebook users unsolicited friend requests from their yet-to-be-born sons, has attracted plenty of attention — but is also a violation of Facebook policy.

The promo video (see below) for the “Unexpected Babies” campaign from Brazilian agency Age Isobar details the ad’s concept: Take a male user’s name, create a new profile using that name with “Jr.” tacked on the end, and send a friend request to the unsuspecting user. When he visits his virtual son’s profile, he sees a condom ad from Brazil-based Olla.

Facebook, however, expressly forbids fake profiles. The condom ad campaign appears to violate several policies found under “Registration and Account Security” in Facebook’s Terms. And Facebook’s Help Center even has a section to report fake accounts that “list a fake name” or “don’t represent a real person.”

While fake profiles can sometimes entertain, they more often than not lead to unwanted consequences. For example, earlier this year, one woman unsuccessfully used a fake profile to dig up dirt on her husband — and instead found herself in a fake-murder plot.

What do you think of Olla Condom’s ad campaign? Watch the video below and sound off in our poll.

Insightful post, as always, from David, but I felt the need to challenge it a bit. Here’s the comment I left on his blog, which appears below my comment.

Do you really think [Google+] won’t matter? I agree that it’s getting flooded far faster than any social network before, but isn’t that largely because people now understand what a social network is and why they want one better than they have before? That does not mean that they’ll decide they want ANOTHER one, or this one, by any means, but I do think that Google+ has launched with the most intuitive privacy and content filtering system I’ve seen to date. When I think about the concerns and gripes that the masses have with platforms like Facebook, this feature, which is essentially the first way that new users interface with Plus, just might make it that much more attractive to them. You and I both know that another social network isn’t going to be the future, but there’s a huge value in the contextualization of social data…and making sense of massive amounts of data is something that Google seems to be good at. So, while I’m not about to talk about anything being a something-killer, cause that’s just silly, I’m also not ready to say it doesn’t matter yet.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

« Why Google+ Matters | Main

July 12, 2011

Why Google+ Doesn’t Matter

Why Google+ Doesn’t Matter”
Originally published in MediaPost’s Social Media Insider
Find me on Google+ here, and read the Google+ FAQ

Google+ is the future of social media! It’s better than Facebook and Twitter and CatPaint combined! It can haz cheezburger!

Or maybe not.

The past two weeks have painted an overly sanguine portrait of Google+’s new social service. Look through the recent list of Social Media Insider columns from Cathy Taylor and myself, and it reads like a stream of stories you’ll see friends sharing in Google+: a ton of stories about Google+ and a couple others about social media, though no cat pictures (sorry).

Google+ will hardly win over the masses overnight. The person who best anticipated the biggest threat to Google+ was none other than Julius Henry Marx, better known as Groucho. He wrote about sending a telegram to the Friar’s Club of Beverly Hills that read, “Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member.” Woody Allen cited this in “Annie Hall” to explain his relationships with women, and it’s just as relevant to explain why early adopters can expect a tumultuous relationship with Google+.

Right now, Google+ is fun. Major tech stars are hanging out there. Some are even ditching their blogs and publishing exclusively on Google+, apparently to reach the 1% of Internet users who know what Google+ is. A few may think it’s prescient, but to me, it’s lunacy. Even if a billion people flock to Google+, you don’t ditch your own branded real estate to rent somewhere else — especially if the terms of the lease can change without notice. One minute, your rental has views of the ocean; the next minute, you’ve got a fratboy bar on one side, a mega-high-rise on the other blocking the view, a waterfront filling up with landfill, and a chain-smoking landlord telling you to pay him every time you want a visitor.

I keep going back to Groucho, though. Think about it from the casual user’s perspective. Today you get to rub elbows with Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gross and Sergey Brin, and of course the indefatigable Robert Scoble. When some Ford exec posts a hangout (aka video chat, for the non-Plussies among us), you can get in easily enough. People are so gaga over Google+ that when I went to get ice cream in Manhattan’s Chinatown over the weekend and ran into a friend from Microsoft, his first words to me were, “Thanks for the Google+ invite!”

Google+ is quickly getting too big for all of that. When Gmail launched, its invite-only phase lasted for more than a year, while weeks after Google+’s launch I can invite anyone I want. The initial enthusiasm of seeing Sergey Brin’s travel photos has turned into the frustration of having oversharers in the stream of updates. The rush of adding your friends gives way to figuring out how to avoid those acquaintances you don’t want stalking you on another network.

The people who love Google+ most are the people who act like publishers. Bill Gross, one of the most accomplished Internet pioneers of all time, was one so enamored with the comments on his Google+ posts that he announced the death of his blog. For me, I like being able to comment on luminaries’ posts, but I know most comments are already ignored now that the novelty is gone. Pretty soon, you’re just another name on the list, a trophy on the publisher’s mantle that barely anyone will see. Sure, Bill Gross could create a “Circle” (or “list”) of a dozen Internet luminaries and only address messages to them, but then hoi polloi will never get to take part. That’s precisely Google+’s challenge with emulating both Facebook and Twitter at once: it will always feel too big and too small.

What about video chat, though? Isn’t the “hangout” the best thing that Google has done maybe ever? The technology’s great, when it works, and it will get better. It may prove to be a threat to Skype, which is now part of Microsoft and a Facebook partner. It’s just as likely that people who use video chat through Google+ will want that feature and nothing else. As for the power users, you can have a focus group on Google+ with 10 people, or you can go on Ustream, broadcast to thousands (if not millions) of people at once, and have everyone take part via the comments and social network logins. There will only be so many occasions where you want to chat with 10 people (or even 20 if it scales further) but don’t want a public broadcast.

Following last week’s roundup of Google+ perspectives, I have two others to share with you. The first comes from an industry friend who sent me an email yesterday with the subject, “GOOGLE +++++ SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!” The body said, “What am I not getting? :)” Expect that to be a far more common sentiment as Google+ opens up to the masses.

Finally, let’s return to Groucho Marx, whose dying words were, “Die, my dear? Why that’s the last thing I’ll do!” We’re still talking about Groucho 121 years after his debut (His take: “I was born at a very early age”), so in many ways, he’s still with us. Google+ isn’t dead either, and dying’s the last thing it’ll do. Given how fast media consumption is changing, Google will be happy if we’re still talking about it a year after its launch. Using it’s another story, though.

Wow, this looks amazing. Imagine being able to go to one place to relive your digital life - Tweets, Facebook posts, Foursquare check-ins, trave (TripIt), content sharing (YouTube, Flickr, Picasa), blog posts, and more. I’m smitten…but let’s see how well it actually works. I’d love an invite, if anyone’s got one.

What do you think? Would you connect all of these services to one timeline? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Memolane - Your time machine for the web from Memolane on Vimeo.

It’s amazing how much of this I remember, from the launch of these services. I love living in a time where communication challenges are often solved soon after the clamor for them reaches an audible din. The only thing I disagree with about this infographic is “The End” at the bottom. We are FAR from the end…

What’s more local than an election? Makes perfect sense for locaiton-based social networks to get involved. I love the innovation.

It may not be quite as big a deal as the presidential elections in 2008, when Barack Obama’s campaign team used social media and social networks to mobilize supporters and win the White House, but the mid-term state elections happening tomorrow have some of their own social tools — including a special Foursquare badge, a Facebook “get out the vote” challenge, and a geo-location app for tracking voter interest. There’s also a cool Twitter visualization from the programmer-journalists at the New York Times and an analysis of whether the number of Twitter followers a candidate has can predict who will win the election.

Foursquare maps: As we’ve noted before, the location-based service has been gradually extending its virtual game-world of badges and achievements into the real world, and the special election badge it has created is another example. But it’s not just a badge — Foursquare is planning to track activity and display it in real time on a map, and says it sees the mid-term elections as a kind of training ground for the national elections in 2012.

Vote with a check-in: GeoPollster is another election visualization app based on Foursquare: You select which political party you currently support, and then each time you “check in” at a Foursquare venue, GeoPollster counts your check-in as a vote for that party. The site then tracks votes across the various states based on activity. Obviously this isn’t likely to correlate with actual voting patterns, but it does produce funny headlines like “Democrats seize control of LL Bean outlet in Pittsburgh.”

Challenge your friends! Organizing for America has a Facebook app called The Commit to Vote Challenge that is aimed at getting people to publicly display their intention to vote, and to challenge their friends and acquaintances to vote as well. According to the site, the average user who commits to vote via the app has passed along the message to 10 of their friends, and nearly a third of those who have committed to vote and provided a reason for it are first-time voters.

Twitter bubble view: The programmers at the New York Times have done some fascinating data visualization in the past, and this time they have come up with a real-time view of Twitter activity that looks at tweets that come from, are directed to and are about each of the candidates. Bubbles grow and shrink depending on the volume of activity. What does it mean? We’re not sure, but it’s fun to watch. The Washington Post has also bought the hashtag #election as a “promoted trend,” Twitter said in a blog post.

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Do followers = voters? Dan Zarrella, a social-marketing researcher, looked at the official Twitter accounts for 30 senate, governor and house of representatives candidates, and then correlated the number of followers with the performance of those specific candidates in early polls. In more than 70 percent of cases, the candidate with the most followers was also ahead in the polls. Of course, this suffers from the “correlation vs. causation” problem — did the leaders get more followers because they were leading, or were they leading because they had more followers? Klout has come up with a similar ranking of candidates based on their Twitter influence score.

Get local: Not to be left out of the action, Google has a mobile app/website that will show you where your polling station is and keep you up to date on any news related to your area. And we wrote recently about a Senate candidate whose programmer son came up with an election game that uses Facebook Places check-ins as way of encouraging people to get out and vote. Fred Trotter said that he hoped using social networks would help the U.S. move away from a brand of politics based on heavily financed interest groups and polarized viewpoints on the major issues.

We’re not sure whether that will actually happen or not, but it looks as though the “gamification” of elections is increasing, for better or worse — so go out and get your badge.

Related posts from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

• Why Google Should Fear the Social Web
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Facebook is one of the stickiest website in the world. Besides social-networking activities, games have been an integral part of Facebook.

Allfacebook created an infographic to illustrate exactly that.

Facebook has over 500 million active users with more than 250 millions users gamers. Out of the 250 million Facebook gamers, 19% of them declared that they’re addicts. Due to the general casual gaming concept, majority of Facebook gamers are women. More than 10% of Facebook users play daily. That is more than the entire population of England!

Undoubtedly, Facebook games are extremely well received. Every click, refresh or second spent on Facebook is equivalent to ad revenue. Most impressively, giant gaming companies, like Zygna, were founded thanks to Facebook’s open platform. In fact, with Facebook huge user base, it could be anything that it wants to be. Photos, Places, Events have proved it.