Sorry for the lack of posts this week … on Monday, my wife ended up going into labour a few weeks early, so I’ve become a father a little earlier than expected!

I will have some new content next week, though. Promise.

The new Facebook photo viewer, as viewed on my netbook

… that Facebook’s engineers would try out their new photo viewer on some different size screens before rolling it out more widely.

As you can see from the above screenshot from my netbook, this doesn’t seem to have been the case. I’m sure this new popup viewer looks fine on big desktop monitors, but it scrunches images up to show them on lower resolution screens, such as the one on my netbook.

It’s hardly the end of the world, but it’s a little annoying, since it reduces the quality of my Facebook experience. I don’t really like peering at tiny photos! Oh well, this change seems set in stone, so for the moment I will have to resign myself to clicking F5 to get back to the old photo viewer, which hopefully they won’t switch off.

More generally, it’s a great illustration of the engineering difficulties faced by sites like Facebook when it comes to rolling out site changes, given the huge (and growing!) number of ways in which people consume online content, a point mentioned by Facebook’s CTO, Bret Taylor, in a recent interview with the BBC:

(If) you’d asked a few years ago what’s the right development platform for Facebook, it would have been easy, we would have said we’ll make a website delivered via HTML, and that would be acceptable to anyone who wants to use Facebook.

With all these mobile devices, there’s a huge amount of platform diversity now. When we update the Facebook product we have to update about seven different versions. We have to update the website that runs on your PC, the iPhone app, the Android app, the Blackberry app, the mobile site and a number of other device-specific versions of Facebook.

It’s becoming a real engineering challenge for us, as well as other technology companies.

One of the hot topics at the moment is social video, the use of video as a means of connecting with audiences socially. Video is a wonderfully effective tool and, because every now and then people ask me how to embed video on a Facebook Page,  I thought that it might be useful to the wider community to write a brief post explaining how to do it.

It’s really not that hard to do, so there’s no reason to be scared.

The first step you need to do is add Static FBML (Facebook Markup Language) to your page, which can be done here by clicking on ‘Add to My Page’ on the left (below the image), where you will have the option of adding it to whichever of Facebook Pages to which you have administrative rights.

Having done that, go to your page and then go to Edit Page, and then click on Apps and you will see FBML in there. Click on ‘Go to Application’ (you might need to enable it first), and from there you can give it a title and add your content, using HTML and CSS. In terms of the video itself, you need to use the following FBML code:

<fb:swf
swfbgcolor=”000000″ imgstyle=”border-width:3px; border-color:white;”
swfsrc=’http://www.youtube.com/v/YouTubeURL‘
imgsrc=’http://img.youtube.com/vi/YouTubeURL/2.jpg’ width=’340′ height=’270′ />

You want an example of how this would look?

Easy enough! If you wanted to embed a YouTube video of Goldie’s drum n’ bass classic “Inner City Life” (and wanting to do so would show that you are someone of great taste and distinction!), the FBML code would look like the following:

<fb:swf
swfbgcolor=”000000″ imgstyle=”border-width:3px; border-color:white;”
swfsrc=’http://www.youtube.com/v/x8u7MNG-ug8′
imgsrc=’http://img.youtube.com/vi/x8u7MNG-ug8/2.jpg’ width=’340′ height=’270′ />

Simple stuff! If you want to see this in action, check out the Video of the Week tab on the Facebook Page for my dj alter-ego, Pearsall.

Let me know in the comments if you have any questions.

Sorry for not posting for a couple of days, it’s been a bit manic behind the scenes here! Hopefully I’ll have time for a proper post tomorrow, but in the meantime, it’s definitely worth checking out Social Media Week, where some very interesting conversations are going on all week.

Thanks to Dawn Dunlop for the reminder!

Given the massive resources of Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire, why is his new iPad-only newspaper The Daily currently available only in the United States?

I’m pretty perplexed by this, especially since it’s not like the distribution costs would be any different, and there are a number of English-language media ventures that have long since spread to audiences beyond their notional ‘homelands’, such as The Economist, the Financial Times, and the New York Times.

Perhaps it’s to do with advertising revenues?

In any case, it will be interesting to see what happens with it in the coming months – from watching the live webcast of the launch, it certainly looks very slick, so the question will be whether or not the content is worth paying for. They’ve been clever in launching it through Apple’s service, because the iTunes store is so frictionless for making payments that it just might upend the prevailing reluctance to pay for online media content.

Since December I’ve been doing research for one of my consulting clients on the market for applications for tablet computers such as the iPad. It’s been fascinating work, since it’s there is still so much potential for mobile applications in general, and tablet applications in particular.

Anyways, I’d like to share, with their approval, some of the key facts about the iPad’s performance so far.

Since its April 2010 release, the iPad has sold over fifteen million units globally, including 4.2 million units in Q3 2010. In doing so it has beaten even the most optimist analyst forecasts of about seven million units shipped by year’s end. It’s not a stretch to say that it has was 2010’s biggest consumer electronics success story.

According to consumer research firm MyType, early iPad owners “tend to be wealthy, sophisticated, highly educated and disproportionately interested in business and finance,” whilst an early analysis by Yahoo of traffic arriving to their suite of sites from the iPad indicated that iPad owners were disproportionately male, disproportionately aged between 30 and 54, and more interested in finance, sports, and photography than the typical Yahoo user. Needless to say, this is a coveted audience, which is why there were almost 38,000 iPad-specific apps in Apple’s app store by October 2010 at an average cost of about $5, although some analysts believe that iPad owners are willing to pay far more for iPad apps than for iPhone apps, and that developers should be able to raise their prices without sales suffering too much.

However, this is just the beginning, since it looks like the iPad sales are due to explode over the next year – some analysts are predicting that Apple will sell over forty million iPads next year. If iPad sales do reach that level, that then opens up many new possibilities for app producers.

Those of you who follow my Twitter feed, @sonicrampage, will know that I frequently post links to interesting stories about social media, technology, and business. Twitter being what it is, it can be very easy to miss out on these links, which is why I’ve decided today to repost some of the links (as well as some other interesting stuff I’ve read in the past few days). These twelve stories cover a lot of different ground, but I think that they are all useful and thought-provoking.

Enjoy!

A Picture of the Global Starbucks Economy (from The Atlantic)
Affiliate marketing: death of the long tail? (from Econsultancy)
Android Tablets Gain Ground on iPad in Q4 2010 [REPORT] (from Mashable)
App downloads to soar (from Warc)
CMOs look to find revenue growth from social media in 2011 (from MackCollier.com)
Egypt shut down its new with a series of phone calls (from Wired’s Threat Level)
Google’s Social Struggles Behind Schmidt Departure? (from Socialnomics)
Quora Underscores Need for Corporate Ambassadors (from Logic + Emotion)
The 9-5 hours of social media are 24/7 (from Contently Managed)
Why the boss thinks 125,000 monthly pageviews mean failure (from ComMetrics)
With 15m sold it is happy anniversary Apple iPad [infographic] (from The Wall)

So you want to know more about marketing, huh?

I’ve always found that reading books is helpful – strange, I guess, given the way that so much media consumption has moved online, but I definitely feel that there is something about the process of reading a book that helps me to absorb more and think more deeply than, say, jumping around through multiple tabs on a web browser. Perhaps it has something to do with Nicholas Carr’s argument that the internet is altering the way our brains work?

Anyways, I digress. Over the next several weeks I will be publishing a list of some books that I’ve found useful in clarifying my understanding of and approach to marketing. I make no claims that this is a definitive list, merely that these books have helped me to develop how I see marketing; most are not even ‘marketing books; strictly defined, but I will try to explain their relevance.

Here’s part one of the list:

Anderson, Chris, The Long Tail: How endless choice is creating unlimited demand – A ground-breaking work for anyone wanting to understand how the internet has radically upended the traditional hit-driven sales model; without the physical constraints of traditional retail locations, online retailers like Amazon can offer a much greater choice of items, and consumers have responded in kind, allocating their spending to niche products in an unprecedented manner. For marketers, the lesson is simply that something doesn’t have to be a ‘hit’ to make money, and that there are great opportunities available in fulfilling niche desires.

Ariely, Dan, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions – In this title, Israeli behavioural economist Dan Ariely explodes our assumptions of the rationality behind our decision-making, instead showing that our minds make decisions based on emotions that don’t take into account the outcomes of their choices (with a great example being, as all marketers should know, the tremendous success of ‘Buy One Get One Free’ offers). A treasure trove of information as to how the human mind actually works, as opposed to how we would like to imagine that it works.

Christakis, Nicholas and James Fowler Connected: The Amazing Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives – Another title that is not a business book per se, but instead a fascinating exploration of how we are connected to each other, how our lives are a complicated web of relationships, and how ideas, behaviours, and tastes can spread through our social networks. An excellent resource for any marketer looking to use word of mouth to spread the news about their products and/or services.

Gerzema, John and Ed Lebar, The Brand Bubble: The looming crisis in brand value and how to avoid it – In this provocative book, Gerzema and Lebar argue that corporations in general and marketers in particular have been consistently over-estimating the importance of brands to consumers. This is important because the intangible value of ‘the brand’ has become an increasingly large component of the value of most leading companies – and the authors argue that these values are mostly fictitious. A useful corrective to most marketing books, with their obsessive focus on branding.

Gladwell, Malcolm The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference – Sure, this is an obvious selection, but you really need to read this, if you haven’t already. Perhaps one of the most influential books of recent times, in this book Gladwell looks at tipping points, those moments when ideas and/or products go from niche concerns to mass popularity over night, the conditions that lead to them, and the types of people that are essential to their success. A seminal title.