Brands are increasingly the sum of their most loyal and influential fans.

Taken from:

Consumption is often an act of communication. What we consume can say a great deal about who we are: the car one drives, the neighborhood one lives in, the clothes one wears, and the leisure activities one pursues all serve as markers of one’s identity.

Albert Lin, Virtual Consumption: A Second Life for Earth, September 2007, p. 22

A lot of stuff was written about the changes to the Facebook user interface. Lots of people including my colleague Martin think, that the new Facebook design is boring. Many people complain that you can not express yourself with the new Facebook design because there is nothing personal on your profile, not even your own apps. Apparently Facebook listens to the complaints of its users.

Now I can add my applications to my profile again. It does not work with every app. That makes me believe that Facebook is testing the the new (old) feature at the moment. As you can see at the screenshot, the apps appear at the left side below my friends:

So a little bit of the old Facebook is back. We will see, what is coming next.

Good bye and stay tuned.

In the last week a lot of stuff was written about the Facebook gifts. First Lightspeed Venture Partners published  a home made analysis, where Jeremy Liew showed, that the sales figures of the Facebook gifts are growing. Mashable!, Venture Beat and Virtual Goods Insider picked up the same topic afterwards and released own articles in their blogs.

A really good article came from Nick O´Neill in All Facebook – the unofficial Facebook blog. He pointed out, that the reason for the growing sales figures of Facebook gifts is the growth of the user base of Facebook.

“So what’s the prime reason for gift growth on Facebook? The company’s rapid growth in their user base. The company has more than doubled since Jeremy Liew published the company’s findings back in January. This means that the rate of gifting appears to be staying pretty consistent.”

Another really good article in that context came from Vili Lehdonvirta on Virtual-enconomy.org. He reported, that the biggest daily in Finland had a full page devoted to virtual consumption. He attached a snippet of one of his papers, where he points out a very interesting aspect of consumption in general.

“One strategy is to note that everywhere in our economy, goods have a social life beyond their physical qualities.”

This applies also to the Facebook gifts. It is not about paying 1 $ for this little pictures, it is about showing your friend how much he/she is worth for you.

All this makes me believe, that virtual goods in social networks can be really successful. The future will show, how much the users are willing to pay for virtual goods.

Good bye and stay tuned.

Not everything will be long tail, there always will be a strong mainstream, that’s what we think and that is what a study now confirms:

A book from 2006, “The Long Tail,” was one of those that appear periodically and demand that we rethink everything we presume to know about how society works. In this case, the Web and its nearly unlimited choices were said to be remaking the economy and culture. Now, a new Harvard Business Review article pushes back, and says any change occurring may be of an entirely different sort.

Read the full article: Portals – WSJ.com

The Lightspeed Ventures Partners Blog pointed me to the following article:

The following graphic from the pattern library illustrates what Yahoo calls the “competitive spectrum”, which is a way to classify the activity on your site and helps you to choose which reputation pattern might work best for your community.

This is a must read if you are going social: Social Design Patterns for Reputation Systems: An Interview with Yahoo’s Bryce Glass (Part I) – Bokardo

Another great post by Andrew Chen, this time about how to loose customers:

I imagine that many in the readership are working on social products – for any product in this space, you often have a number of fuzzy stages that a user can move through during their lifecycle. This may include stages like:

* First experience
* Soloing and single user value
* Encountering some friends(?)
* Hitting critical mass for social
* Becoming a site elder

Read the full article: Futuristic Play by Andrew Chen: 25 reasons users STOP using your product: An analysis of customer lifecycle

People don’t pay for content – but for service. This is our strongest believe. They pay for saving her time or money, for being entertained, for boosting their social status and for a lot of other reasons, but not for the content itself.

(click here and read more…)

Another interesting post on why people buy virtual goods (or digital goods; in Thailand you would say “same same”):

Although Facebook has primarily focused its monetization efforts on advertising, it has also experimented with digital goods. There are three typical use cases for digital goods; (i) increased functionality (ii) self expression and (iii) communication. Facebook’s Gifts fall into the third category, whereby a particular communication is emphasized because a gift has a price associated with it, thereby creating some scarcity value.

Read on: Facebook digital gifts worth around $15m/year « Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog

This morning I watched the video of the MIX08 keynote of Ray Ozzie. Most of his talk was redundant (reminded me of a mantra):

• In the past: just one device, the PC.
• Today: a mesh of devices, from PCs and notebooks to mobile phones, MP3 players, navigation systems etc.
• In the past: client and server or standalone applications.
• Today: a mesh of websites and web services, offline and online applications, serviced clients and so on.

(click here and read more…)