Buzz! comes to Facebook

Hey! if you thought we were a bit quiet – now we can say the reason why – we’ve just launched the awesome Buzz! The Friend Quiz for our client SONY Playstation.

It’s a unique Nudge social remix for Facebook of Buzz! the game which creates a TV quiz experience for you and your friends on Playstation.

Our Facebook version lets you play Buzz! with your Facebook friends, the twist is that the questions are all about your friends – lost photo captions, photos mixed together, who said what, and who made what comments – you play with mutual friends to see who knows who best.

Try it:  http://www.buzzthefriendquiz.com/facebook

Toby Beresford (left) and Iskandar Najmuddin get up close to Buzz at SONY HQ.

So, I’ve dived in and grabbed a T-mobile G2 (also known as the HTC Hero) that runs Android and I’m completely addicted.

It’s all designed around the idea of real time – twitter suddenly makes more sense, Facebook status updates appear next to the person’s phone number, their latest profile photo appears when they phone. Friends in Singapore who start a google chat come straight through to the phone, all makes me wonder when I will have time to turn it off.

You only have to try the awesome layar app or even just the ’stars at night’ to realise augmented reality is super cool. A kind of ’sat nav meets the Wii’ interface to hyper local data.

Android will win over iPhone in the end for the same reason Windows beat Apple last time round. It’s cross platform stupid.

Now to make some apps. If only I could put the phone down long enough to do so!

Ben Ayers at the Facebook Developer Garage London

ITV loves Facebook it seems, digital manager Ben Ayers told the Favcebook Garage in London tonight.
They found 1.2 million visitors to their site were coming via Facebook, echoing Facebook’s own discovery as the sharing site of choice for most of the internet.

They’ve been busy amassing 600,000 fans of their shows and have found that over half of their own ITV.com users are also on Facebook.

It seems a major UK channel is waking up on the need to integrate their own content experience with conversations on  Facebook.
Especially the “two screen” experience, “people watching TV wihile chatting, reading live feeds and consuming other related content during our shows”. For shows like This Morning two-screen is now a major part of the viewing experience.

Facebook’s live stream social widget and public profiles offer other channels and shows the ability to tap into this growing consumer way of watching social TV.

Facebook Connect, the ability to bring your friends and Facebook details with you to any web site, is growing in popularity. Facebook recently announced that 10,000 web sites have implemented it and the use of the plug in slowly grows on community platforms such as Drupal.

But what is a great Facebook Connect implementation?

In January for Obama’s inauguration, CNN used Facebook Connect so viewers could update their Facebook status so friends also watching at the same time could see how each other felt. Several of my friends mentioned the tears welling up in their eyes. 1 million Facebook updates meant this was the first great example of social tv.

Facebook Connect seems to improve conversions and usage too. Gawker, the popular blogging network, saw login rates increase by 40 percent and Joost noted that Facebook Connect users stayed on site longer to watch 30 percent more videos than non-connect users.

But my current favourite is the awesome Prototype Experience trailer that sucks in your Facebook photos to make this scarily realistic game trailer…

When 1 in 8 british minutes online are now spent on Facebook (Source: Nielsen ) it’s natural for advertisers to ask why.

The answer lies in the stream, the new real time feed of everything happening amongst my friends in their online time. It’s the virtuous circle of sharing – the more they share, the more I see what they do and then share myself.

At Nudge we’re working on new approaches to let brands harness and engage with users at the streams edge.  It’s not about providing ways to create content, it’s about remixing what’s already there and combining a social filtering approach, to create an awesome branded engagement experience.

Vic Gundotra at Google IO keynote yesterday declared that the web had won. It is the dominant programming system. He then went on to introduce a host of new technologies. What does this mean for us in the real world of app development?

1. Mobile apps will eventually be web apps. (no more developing separately for Symbian, Iphone and Blackberry). Mobile browsers will soon be able to talk to native mobile features like the accelerometer, GPS and calling.
2. Web apps will be faster (browsers are getting faster through processing javascript quicker, allowing local data storage) and will compete head on with heavier and heavier desktop apps (think Google Photo Editor, Google Project and so on)
3. Geolocation is coming –  we’ve filtered information now by its popularity (Google / Digg), and by what our friends think (Facebook) and next we’ll filter by its proximity to us (Geolocation).

Obviously I care more about a friend or celebrity popping into a bar in the next road to me than I do about someone on the other side of the planet. Accurate, reliable geolocation services (see Firefox 3.5) are just around the corner for the mass market and will see a new way of filtering information.

For the techies out there here are a few links and notes to get you excited:

1.  HTML 5 will be in Firefox 3.5 and Chrome soon – looks cool – allows tag and enbaling pixel based layouts (draw a diagonal line). They showed a cool demo of rotating a playing video with a javascript transform.
2. 3D engine will be in browser natively so you can access with javascript
3.  Web Elements allows you to drop code snippets (like a comment wall) onto your web page really easily
4. App engine now supports Java – Manuel Lemos has managed to get PHP running on app engine as well
5.  Geolocation is going to be in and working in Firefox 3.5

Something for the weekend…? Check out Nudge’s latest competition app to win tickets to the exclusive premiere of the movie Tormented! – created in association with BLM Quantum and Pathe.

The competition closes Sunday night so get your entries in – can you catch the leaders?

Couple of new phrases we’ve been using in Nudge to explain how brands should be using social media.

Firstly social media offers the chance of higher engagement “warm traffic” – users “warm up” on a social app and when taken to another property like a  website are much warmer customers and more likely to convert, i.e. signing up to an online newsletter.  Warm traffic is one of the main benefits of a social network marketing campaign.

Extreme social media is the skittles.com approach where your brand is promoted more by how it is described on social  (what people say about it) and less by what you say about it. It’s a risky approach but if you want to try it – check out http://www.skittlr.com – see what the extreme social media version of my personal Toby Beresford brand might be.

Toby B according to extreme social media tool skittlr

Clara Shih, ex Salesforce web apps expert, who integrated Salesforce.com with Facebook, makes sense of our collective Facebook obsession in her new book – the Facebook era.

Clara Shih at Facebook Developer Garage

Clara’s main points at the garage, teasing us to read more…

The decade gone by? That was  the world wide web of information – how droll – now it’s the world wide web of people. 

Facebook changes the web. It brings the first trusted template for deep psychographic user data. Now all user expectations have changed – they don’t want to have to enter all their data in every time they come to a new web site.

Transitive trust explains the phenomenom where if I know who our mutual friends are I am more likely to trust you. The cold call just got slightly warmer.

New modes of communication like Facebook mean that the cost of staying in touch with weak ties is much lower, social networks we can finally capture the long tail of our social capital. That old primary school friend is your future hire…

Now it’s time to actually read the book…

Playfish's Dan Borthwick at the Facebook Developer Garage London

6 of the top ten Facebook apps, 50 million users, 20 million Monthly Actives, Playfish must be doing something right.

I’m here with Dan Borthwick from Playfish as he shows us what they are creating on the Iphone.  Deep integration with Facebook Connect gives them a way of socialising an iphone app, sharing stories from games, escaping the constraints of the app store  home page to create virality.  This will give their games the edge on mobile.

It’s a cool strategy. Something tells me we’ll all be playing Playfish catch-up for a few years to come.