I recently wrote an article for a series called “Twelve Things That Will Be Obsolete in 10 Years” on the The Mark News.

In the near future, the notion of a single company holding your online identity, photos, and videos will seem quite strange and unnecessary. This, of course, is the monumental goal of Facebook. And they’ve had some success. Not long ago, it was unthinkable to use our real names on the internet, but Facebook has made this commonplace. However, by 2020, neither Facebook nor any other sole entity will be the exclusive host of our digital identities, our photos and videos, or information about our personal relationships.

Please visit The Mark News to read the entire article.

During the keynote unveiling of the iPad, Apple CEO Steve Jobs famously exposes the Achilles heel of the “magical” device. While demonstrating the power of the tablet Mac computer, Jobs clearly shows the New York Times #FAILing miserably to show video. This was one of this year’s more blogged about gaffes. But was it a gaffe?

Please visit The Mark News to read the entire article.

At one point in my life, I was a home theatre enthusiast.  While I am an audio engineer by training and consider myself an audiophile, I now live in a small apartment with an even smaller baby, so loud in the living room is not going to happen.

Even should these circumstances change, I don’t think I would bother dropping the money on building my own system, because the AMC Enhanced Theatre Experience is on par with going out to a rock concert… almost.

Last night I went to see Star Trek.  In my opinion, the may be the most near-perfect science fiction film of all time.  I have my critiques, but this is not a movie review blog.  I do talk about media and technology, and holy crap, this movie was an earth-shaking, eye-popping, ear bleeding supernova of an event.

Check out this pic I grabbed before the trailers started:

• The surround sound was dizzyingly spacial but not distracting (credit to the mix engineer)
• There was no distortion, ever.  Even at deafening volume.  This system clearly has boom to spare.
• Super smooth low end, even an inaudible infrasonic note that shakes you in your seat.  Credit the 57,000 Watts to push this kind of power.
• The highs were never piercing.  Credit the placement of 11 speakers for not having to throw sound over a distance.
• The picture was amazing.  The $115,000, 250lb Sony 4k projector sprayed a gigantic and crystal clear picture; the contrast and colour were phenomenal.  My friend commented that he could notice the low refresh rate compared to his new 240Hz display at home.

In a world of over-promise and under-deliver, the AMC Enhanced Theatre Experience kicked my ass, and I can’t wait to go to the theatre again.

My gut feeling then was that the future of artist-fan relationships was in a personal subscription model. As part of my research, I joined Take This Oath, the Killswitch Engage fan club. There was no way to preview the content of the fan club site, but for $30/year I got a “free” tshirt and access to exclusive content. I was pretty disappointed to find 2 videos (not even all their videos available on their own main band site) and one blog post.

Recently, we have seen several new instances of labels letting Apple innovate for them, both in the space of artist subscriptions.

First was the self-release of the Presidents of the United States of America discography as an iphone app for $3.75CDN.

On the good side is the idea that The Presidents can send blog updates, exclusive content, concert dates, etc to their fans.

On the terrible side is the fact that you can only access the music on your iphone and only via that application! Nope, can’t get those tunes in iTunes. Add to that you can only stream the music, and we have a loser on your hands (especially if you are Canadian and don’t get all-you-can-eat data for your iPhone).

Even more recently is the launch of iTunes Pass. Basically, this a super-fancy podcast behind a transaction. Again, I think the idea of subscribing to a band is an excellent one, but this feels a bit too little, too late. Currently, there is only band, Depeche Mode (egads) offering this service, with surely more to follow if this does anything other than tank.

If I was still in a band, this is what I would do:

• Hire a very outgoing, super-fan friend to be your manager.
• Setup a decent, non-Flash site
• Sell fan club memberships for $10 per year
• Put everything ever recorded, shot on video or photo on the site
• In the case of KSE present a genealogy of all the bands the members have ever played in, post all media you have of these bands and links to their fan club sites
• Encourage fans at every show to upload their pictures and video to the fan site
• Have monthly contests for best fan media (club members only)
• Have a video contest where the winner becomes your documentarian for the next tour (club members only)
• Have that guy post a video once per day
• Use fan club data and tools like Demand to find out where you should tour
• Release a whole album of songs LAST.  Record one song every month or so, crowd-source feedback, post tracks to mix, post in-studio video.
• Pick the best 8 tracks, get them mixed by a pro and release in all formats.
• Package it with a cut DVD of all the stuff from the last year
• Make the regular content available via podcast
• Put the regular content on YouTube
• Don’t make a recording deal with a major
• If the major is LiveNation, disregard the last bullet and make a deal

Besides being pretty impressed with the interface and user experience, I get 25GB of free storage.

Stop using the Internet. It is just simply not for you.  Don’t use email anymore, because any message you send is stored on your ISP’s server, the destination server, probably on a backup or two in some data center somewhere.  The message itself is readable by sinister criminals looking to steal your identity.  If you created a profile on Facebook with all your personal details, and pictures of your dog, and whatever, then your expectation of privacy is non-existent.

For those of you that are concerned that Evil Facebook is claiming to own your pictures of your dog, and your deep, dark secret status updates:

Get over yourself. Your pictures and videos are worthless, and even if Facebook had claimed sole ownership of it (which they never did), what do you think they will do with it?  Sell t-shirts with your picture on it, or sell DVDs of your birthday party, and not cut you in for at least a few points on the back end?  Understand what is Facebook’s potential business model: your participatory information.  That is, they want to know what you are doing, where you are doing it and when you are doing it.  This is the raison d’etre for Facebook Connect.  They just announced that they will sell crowd-sourced market research data to corporations.  They need you to participate.  For this to work, certain information needs to stick around, and they want to keep it.  This explicitly does not include anything you marked “private”.  If you have marked stuff private, see my first point.

If you don’t like it, close your account. Facebook is a FREE service that allows you communicate with your friends, share pictures and videos, and all kinds of other fun and useful stuff.  Close your account and go to MySpace or Linked In (who’s terms read like a non-exclusive content licensing deal, potentially in perpetuity).  Don’t enter ANY user-generated content site, who will universally claim the sole ownership of your goofy video, and WILL re-purpose it in every conceivable way.

I like Facebook.  I don’t think they are evil.  I think they have a cool product, and they can’t seem to make any money.  If I can passively provide data to help them make a buck, then all the power to them.

Just don’t represent me to my friends that I endorse schlock.

There are a number of websites to find examples of the cool stuff you can do by implementing Facebook Connect (FBC) into your product. Razorfish’s Jesse Pickard posted an article for insidefacebook.com that outlined a number of interesting connected applications, AllFacebook.com has a list of the “top” Facebook Connect enabled sites, and The Facebook Developer wiki aspires to maintain an exhaustive list of connected sites.  If you are a PowerPoint freak, here is a slideshow created by social media marketing agency bigMETHOD, laying down the FBC basics.

The Facebook Connect homepage lays out the key benefits:

Enable your users to…

* Seamlessly “connect” their Facebook account and information with your site
* Connect and find their friends who also use your site
* Share information and actions on your site with their friends on Facebook

Beyond that, they also claim:

“early results have shown that sites using Facebook Connect for login have seen as many as 2 out of 3 new registrations come via Facebook Connect, and those users have about 50% more engagement on sites.”

The enthusiasm for FBC and excitement about its potential is significant.

However, our clients (large media companies and brands) have been hesitant to adopt, or even experiment with FBC because of some early assumptions relating primarily to user data access.

I would like to try to address some of the questions I have been asked by these clients about Facebook Connect.

What user data do I get from Facebook?

What data can I keep?

What can I store in my CRM?

Will my community be limited to Facebook users?

What user data do I get from Facebook?

First, you need to understand that there is information you can call and information you can keep.

The information you can keep is the minimum required in order to properly call the data you need for your application.

The Facebook API includes calls to do just about anything you can imagine with a Facebook user. These things include:

• Events: Create, edit, list, delete, RSVP
• Photos and Videos: get, list and create albums, get list and upload photos, get and set tags
• Friends: list a users friends, get a list of friends using your app (more about friends below)
• Marketplace: get, add, categorize and modify listings
• Status: Get and set the user’s status (this is brand-spanking and kind of a big deal)
• Notes: Get, edit, delete and create notes (also new, gives you access to a user’s ‘blog’ on Facebook)
• Links: Get a user’s posted items, and allow a user to post directly from your app (also new, just a better way to do what you could already do)

What data can I keep?

This is the most frequent question I get. It stems from the perceived value of a registered user database and their demographic information. As stated above, you can only store the minimum amount of data that is required to identify a user to the API in order to call back data.

You can view the entire list of 12 items here, but the following are helpful for this post:

• uid (User ID)
• flid (friend list ID)
• proxied_email (Placeholder email addresses for your users)

In addition, you may store data explicitly defined as Exportable Facebook Properties, of which there are none.

It is important to note that any information that you request from Facebook can only be cached on your servers for up to 24 hours “for performance reasons”.  You can, of course, automatically request all the relevant data every 24 hours, so the effect is that you always have the data to display.  What’s the difference?  If I close my Facebook account, you also lose access to my data.

Makes sense to me.

One of the most important items for our clients is the user’s email address.  By default, you can send users email via proxied email.  Basically, you can send users email, but you don’t get to know what the email address is. Another downside of this process is that you are limited to sending 100 emails at a time.  One good thing is that you can send email that appears from your domain.

What about all the other juicy demographic tidbits that I want to store in my ultra-sophisticated CRM?

You can still ask for it, so you should.

Use the FBC register and login method to a) make it dead easy to register, b) get access to lots of cool FB features. If you are running a community or a contest, simply make the registration process two steps:

1. Click to connect with Facebook or create a new account on our site
2. Ask for additional information, including email address, mailing address, postal code, blood type, mother’s maiden name, pet’s name, phone number, mailing list opt-in preferences and demographic questions.

According to the Facebook Development Team (if that is indeed your real name), “If you have users manually enter email addresses, then you are permitted to store or export those as you see fit (provided that you display your Privacy Disclosure and Terms of Use on the page that you request that data).

Will my branded community be limited to Facebook users?

No, but you can grow your community and your database much more quickly and organically if you leverage the FBC Friend Linking feature.

In my opinion, this is the most interesting and significant function of Facebook Connect, especially with respect to the types of projects I work on with our clients.  These projects are user-generated content communities and contests primarily.  If the goal is to drive people to the site, then this is how to do it.

The feature includes two main functions:

• Users can join your community via FBC, and invite their voracious consumer friends to join via Facebook
• You can suggest current, non-Facebook connected members of your community to the new user so that they can be invited

Here is an excellent (if ugly) flow chart describing the friend linking feature by Cameron McGrane.

The connect acceptance sends the user back to your site, where you can run them through the full registration gauntlet.

The second function is particularly valuable to publishers who wish to add FBC features to their existing community.  As new users join, existing members can be prompted by their friends to link their Facebook accounts to their community accounts.

You may have a niche community where users will want to be friends with others on your site, but not necessarily be friends on Facebook.  Using a platform like Media Factory, Facebook users can potentially be friends with your non-Facebook users, and even Google Friend Connect users.

This all sounds a bit complicated…

This blog post concentrates on the “what” with respect to implementing Facebook Connect.  The “how” is a bit more complex, and is covered in both excruciating detail and baffling ambiguity at the Facebook wiki and forum.

To summarize:

• You should use Facebook Connect to grow your user base and increase engagement
• You get what you need from Facebook
• You get what you want from the user directly
• You can start with an existing database and are not limited to Facebook users

If you would like to take some of these features for a quick test drive, join this blog from the right sidebar, and publish a comment on this article to your news feed!

I might go so far as to say it is a %110 free download, given the extremely open set of formats it which it is available:

• High-quality MP3s (87 mb) – encoded with LAME at V0, fully tagged.
• FLAC lossless (259 mb) – CD quality
• FLAC high definition 24/96 (942 mb) – better-than-CD-quality 24bit 96kHZ audio
• M4A apple lossless (263 mb) – CD quality – will play in itunes.
• High definition WAVE 24/96 (1.5 gb) – better-than-CD-quality 24bit 96kHz audio

To add to the modernity of this release, all the the bigger packages are distributed via torrents. Therefore, they only pay to transfer a tiny file from their servers. That’s hella-smart.

There is also the option to order the super-deluxe, collectors CD/DVD and vinyl editions. Now THAT is value.

Trent Reznor is the One-Man-Show (in the studio, at least) behind NIN and has consistently driven the crest of the wave for the music industry. They have released their last several albums as free downloads, and for the Year Zero publicity, placed easter eggs URLs around the Internet, each with clues about the album. Fans were encouraged to compile the whole story in the NIN wiki.

They have also made some of their singles available as Garageband projects and full 24/96 Pro-tools sessions for fans to remix. Being a pro-audio geek, that is insanely cool. Check out the remix of “Only” that I built with Pro Tools.

What about video you ask? What about UGC? What about mobile? How about the new fan content gallery, the iPhone game, and 400GB of HD concert footage to play with.

Perhaps they could use an online Mashup Tool for that?

Then I installed Viigo, and TwitterBerry and my BB really turned into the “adult soother”. If you haven’t tried Viigo for your mobile phone, then stop reading this and install it. Viigo must be an excellent company because they beat my company, Filemobile for the honour of the Canadian New Media Awards Most Promising Company of the Year, for which we and B5 Media were also nominated. Congratulations, by the way!

I very frequently, after reading an article, like to send it to potentially interested parties. Since email is so 1900’s, I prefer to tweet my URLs. I can’t do this directly, and have to go through some ass-pain to get the URL (especially the Google reader feeds), copy it, and paste it into my Twitterberry. In fact, it completely discourages the action.

So I sent a feature request to Viigo via their feedback function in the app to allow me to send articles to Twitterberry in the same way as native BB apps do. I got a friendly, “Thanks for your feedback!” email. I then tweeted the fact that I made a feature request. I got a response from Matt Bogart via Twitter:

Ability to use #Viigo as your mobile Twitter app is close at hand. Send articles, updates, replies and more directly!

For those of us who read a lot of articles, and like to tweet URLs, this will be extremely cool!

I am now following Matt, and plan to have that upgrade installed as soon as its available. Hopefully, their Ops team will have there servers ready for the load….

When that just isn’t enough, it has become increasingly common to “throw in” a UGC contest. It provides further tie-in to the show via the existing web presence, is low-cost and if you know your Web 2.0 lingo, can get a client’s curiosity, interest and even excitement.

I think it is worth looking at some of the ways to value a UGC contest. This is a contest wherein you must upload content in order to be considered for a prize. Winners can be determined in a number of ways including public opinion, judging or random draw. There a number of issues to consider when defining rules, but this outside the scope of this post.

In order to measure the value of a contest, it is important to note what you can expect a contest to produce. Three key products of a UGC contest are demographic data, ad inventory and content. There is also the less quantifiable “positive brand affinity”, but if it can’t be easily measured, it’s little more than a sales talking point.

Demographic data

Who is engaging with my brand, where are they, and will they let me spam them? This is by far the most common brute-force method of generating a tangible, actionable product via a contest. It can also be one of the more obnoxious aspects of participating in a contest. It’s important that there is a balance between getting the data, and minimizing bounces (people immediately leaving the site).

The number of completed entries in your database is proportional to the value of the prize. With this in mind, you don’t need anything except an entry form and a prize information page. Think of it this way: you are offering them a chance to win something in exchange for their personal information. Users are savvy enough these days to know that their data is valuable, and a toaster is not enough to get them to give it up.

Don’t ask for information you don’t need. For example, if you aren’t sending a mailer, do you still need their street address? Most contest systems require the user to enter at least an email address. If want them to opt in to your newsletter, give them a good idea of what the newsletter contains. Make it even more worthwhile by offering coupons for your product via email.

Ad Inventory

For a publisher, the motivation for a self-sponsored contest is primarily to drive subscriptions for electronic newsletters or build awareness of another product (such as CTV’s fall launch campaign). That doesn’t mean you can’t add the page views and video pre-roll to your existing inventory.

Where this makes the most sense is with a sponsored contest. A fully branded microsite within the publisher’s brand site benefits from a built in audience. Any publisher will have excellent statistics describing their core audience demographic.

So how can a UGC contest be in a unique position to drive impressions through social media? If the contest has a voting aspect, users will be compelled to share their video with peers on their social networks via social bookmarking and posting tools on the contest site. Making Facebook Connect available to users allows some social activities (such as uploading and commenting) to automatically be broadcast to their friends. This places a tidy brand message in Facebook, and potentially brings users’ friends back to the contest site.

With some creativity and some Flash razzle-dazzle, you could build a branded widget that allows users to feature their content on any social network, with branding, and interaction built in. Remember how people use these networks, though: on Facebook, I put my content there to be consumed by my friends, not by me.

A good way to have people share content is to tie it with voting. Give people the tools to campaign for their entry.

Content

Although user-generated is generally synonymous with “bad”, it is the needles in the haystack, the diamonds in the rough and that tasty sausage in a sea of turds that can make the campaign memorable, if even only for that fleeting 15 minutes.

In order to get usable content, make the task simple and specific. Seed content with a variety of interpretations of the simple task. Nobody wants to be first, and most people will take a lead and go with it. Focus your concept on video, because it is more engaging and you can sell pre-roll against it.

It’s not uncommon for firms to spend tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousand of dollars on a 30 second TV spot. You only need to focus your strategy on gathering 1-2 minutes of footage to cut together a decent spot.

These are a few observations have come up with many of the UGC contests I have worked on. If you have some examples of good UGC contest concepts, let us know in the comments.