Bought for $850 million, sold for $10 million? Techcrunch thinks so.

Great post by Angela O'Connor on the importance of active community management. Unfortunately this seems to be yet another example of the lack of understanding of what it takes to maintain and grow an online community.

We're busy, OK?

So kick back and enjoy the first episode of 'This Week In Social Media'.

Official Twitter for Android client launches

Twitter announced an official client for Android handsets, confirming suspicions that the Twitter ecosystem may not be the safest place for small developers to be right now. That is, unless they're the one who is acquired, of course. Like the Twitter application for Blackberry, the ability to edit before re-tweeting has been removed.

A lower-key announcement on Tuesday was the forthcoming ability (still platform-dependent; it doesn't seem to work fully here on Posterous yet) to embed tweets on blog platforms. This works in a similar manner to embedding other types of media such as video or audio. Try it out yourself here.

Google Chrome - fastest beta yet

Google's Chrome team announced the release of the latest beta of their web browser. They also released this charmingly geeky promo video on YouTube.

Now, if only someone could do something about my broadband speed ...

Google, in it's old-school guise as a search engine (remember that?) made changes to the way results are presented. There's an all-new menu on the left hand side of each results page which allows you to cycle through different classes of search results (Images, Blogs, Updates and so on).

Watch the video below for a quick summary of the main changes.

• Read (lots) more at Searchengineland.

FarmVille Maker Zynga Valued at $4 Billion 

Zynga, developers of the (in)famous FarmVille social game have been hypothetically valued at in excess of $4 Billion. Whilst they have impressive numbers of unique numbers, and are also probably distorting Facebook's subscriber numbers somewhat as users create multiple Facebook accounts to 'game' FarmVille and other Zynga properties, this sounds a little unrealistic.

As it was a fairly quiet week (and we've been busy), here are some headlines relating to community management, courtesy of the Linkbait Generator.

• Why community management sucks: myth vs. reality
• 10 ways that civilization could collapse because of community management
• 15 must see websites about community management
• 8 reasons to fear community management
• 10 common misconceptions about community management
• 5 amazing things you probably didn't know about community management
• The 10 commandments of community management

Time-permitting, we may actually write up some of these!

News in brief

Foursquare hits one million users [TechCrunch]

Protect Your Privacy Opt Out of Facebook's New Instant Personalization [Librarian by Day]

Dear Facebook & Google: We Are Not Your Pawns – Enough With The Auto Opt-In! [Daggle]

Is Facebook the new internet and how soon before Microsoft tries to buy it? [blog maverick]

Facebook Sends Window Decals to Local Businesses [Mashable!]

YouTube Rolls Out New Video Player [NewTeeVee]

Facebook gave the world details of its latest attempt to gain control of more of the Web at its developer conference F8 yesterday.

In summary, Facebook announced three things

• Graph API
• Social Plugins (Like, Activity and Recommendations) 
• Open Graph Protocol

First, the plugins. The Like plugin allows developers / publishers to place a Facebook Like button on any page on their site. This effectively turns that page into an offsite Facebook fan page. As long as users are logged in to Facebook, this takes just one-click. You can try it out at the bottom of this post!

The Activity plugin shows users' what their friends have done on any site - for example, what stories they have liked on a news site, what stories they have commented on and so on.

Recommendations shows users recommended content from a particular site, based on the activity of their friends on that 

The login functionality that Facebook offers to third-party sites (Facebook Connect) will now also show a user which of their Facebook friends have signed up to a site.

Facebook is also providing publishers with a 'kitchen sink' option, the Social Bar. This sits at the bottom of a site and includes Like, Activity streams and Facebook chat. This is bad news for Meebo.

"The stream is ephemeral ... it's there for a few hours ... and then it floats away"

A few hours before Mark Zuckerberg said this on-stage at F8, John Borthwick, CEO of betaworks observed at the 140conf in New York that the half life of a tweet is now "4 minutes and falling". You can't get much more ephemeral than that. Facebook's Open Graph Protocol allows publishers to specify additional metadata which will allow users to 'Like' items on sites other than Facebook (see IMDB example below) and automatically update not just their stream, but also their Facebook profile. This really enhances Facebook's ability to offer highly targeted ads, and will definitely have Google worried. Over time, Facebook will build a huge store of social information about what their users, and their users' friends like.

Privacy issues

As has been repeatedly shown, the majority of Facebook users do not fully understand how Facebook's privacy settings work. Hopefully Facebook has learnt enough from these missteps to ensure that they do it right this time around. They will no doubt also have learnt from the fairly disastrous launch of Google's Buzz. It's already been observed that the 'Like' button is comparable to Beacon version 2, with the crucial difference that this time it's opt-in. Facebook needs to work really hard to educate their users as to what exactly 'public' now means.

Zuckerberg also announced that they're getting rid of the 24-hour data retention restriction for application developers. They will need to police this effectively to make sure that there is no malicious use of users' data.

Some thoughts

As noted above, this has huge online advertising potential. It may also have profound implications for purchase decision, since friend recommendations can now appear on any page. Word of mouth just became even bigger, and the importance of active community management huge.

The ability for companies to 'Facebook-ise' their own sites means that rather than creating Facebook pages on the Facebook domain, with its branding and look and feel restrictions, greater control can be retained.

Quality content is still key. People won't 'Like' your content unless it is fresh and compelling. 

Read more

• Keynote video - [Facebook.com]
• 'Building the Social Web Together' - [Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Blog]
• 'FACEBOOK BOMBSHELL – How DID EVERYONE miss this!' - [Ed Dale]
• 'To Facebook the answer must be no' - [Dave Winer, Scripting News]
• 'Deceiving Users with the Facebook Like Button' [Arnab's World]
• 'Facebook's crusade of colonization' - [Jeremiah Owyang, web-strategist.com]
• 'Facebook’s Alternative Internet Vision And Its Search Implications' - [Greg Sterling, searchengineland.com]

If you've spent any time online recently, you've probably seen a Downfall parody. Hundreds of them have been created and these have been viewed by millions. This is an illustration of remix culture at work. The interest these parodies has generated cannot but have increased the number of DVD rentals and sales of the film.

However, the title's producers Constantin Film are now ordering that the parodies be taken down. This can't really be interpreted as anything other than a company that doesn't understand how the web works shooting itself in the foot. Even if they are strictly within their rights, and that is questionable, turning down this amount of free online promotion is madness.

If Constantin Film had any sense, they would actively work to build a community around the creativity of these remixers ...

• 'Hitler Is Very Upset That Constantin Film Is Taking Down Hitler Parodies' [TechCrunch]
• 'Hitler Rants Video About DMCA Takedowns Is Taken Down Itself' [Techdirt]

Chirp. Chirp chirp chirp.

Twitter held their first developer conference and made a lot of announcements.

Promoted tweets was unleashed, with the company insisting these aren't just ads, but a combination of paid media and earned media. Promoted tweets will only show up on twitter.com and through search initially.Twitter seems to have found a positive spin to the fact that most of the activity takes place through the API (75% of all traffic) and not on its own site, and will use the audience it can reach most directly as a testbed.

The frequency of the promoted tweets will depend on something Twitter is calling 'resonance'. This seems to boil down to how often users click on the call to action in the sponsored tweet. Placement of these tweets will be based on something called the 'real-time interest graph'. So beware how frequently you tweet about a particular topic because that may well dictate what ads get thrown in your direction.

In the next phase, Twitter is proposing a 50-50 revenue share with developers who implement the feature.

• 'The details: how Twitter's newfangled revenue model will work.' [VentureBeat]
• 'Twitter’s Costolo: Promoted Tweets And The Importance Of ‘Resonance’ [PaidContent.org]

A new feature called 'Points of Interest' was announced. Apparently providing similar location-based services such as FourSquare and Gowalla, this feature will use Twitter's geo-tracking to associate tweets with specific geographic locations, or points of interest (think restaurants, retail outlets and bars rather than just a grid reference.) There wasn't much detail on how this will work yet.

The developer site dev.twitter.com went live. This collects all the API documentation in one place and gives developers a few contact channels (IRC? Very old-school for Twitter, surely? :-))

@anywhere went live during the event, so now site owners have yet another button to clutter up their pages with. To see it in action in an unobtrusive way, try rolling your mouse over Twitter addresses on the author bylines on the Edelman Digital site.

Finally, the Library of Congress will be archiving all tweets. What will future generations think of this slice of early 21st century life?

Ning - the end of free.

On Friday Ning announced that it was dropping its freemium business model. The hosted community platform provider has struggled to generate revenue since it was launched in 2004.

Without knowing the financial state of the company, there are a few obvious lessons that can be learned 

• For organisations or individuals looking to build their own online communities, due diligence on any platform provider is of real importance. In the case of Ning, community founders and members did not own the IP of any user-generated content, Ning did. Therefore it is unlikely that Ning will make it easy for data to be ported over to another free service, preferring to attempt to force community leaders to upgrade to one of their paid plans. Having said that, $4.95 per month does not seem like an exorbitant amount to keep a niche community running if significant time and effort has been invested in it.
• Freemium only works well when you have a passionate community with a shared interest, for example Flickr. One of Ning's problems was that in attempting to provide a platform for multiple online communities it perhaps did not have an overall meta-community with a shared interest in the success of Ning.
• Facebook, through Groups, offers most of the features and functionality that Ning does. When faced with the familiar (Facebook) or the unusual (Ning, requiring sign-up, additional login, learning curve), guess which one users will opt for? 

It will be interesting to see how Ning communicates with its community founders over the next few weeks. There are numerous appeals from educators on the blog post linked above to allow education-related networks to remain open until the end of the academic year. This could be a way for Ning to restore some small amount of goodwill.

• 'Eyeballs still don't pay the bills' [37signals]

If you have an hour or two to spare, have a look at Mary Meeker's presentation on Internet Trends for 2010. This should probably be taken with a grain of salt as she tries to draw a comparison between the adoption of AOL and Netscape in the 90s with the adoption of the iPhone and iPod Touch over the last few years. Which is firstly comparing software & services with hardware and secondly making the US-centric mistake of assuming that the iPhone was year zero for mobile Internet-enabled devices using the radio network. So perhaps a bit like comparing apples with shoes.

There are some other good statistics in there, but perhaps nothing truly earth-shattering.