Twitter’s primary following architecture worked very early on, when everyone playing the game of Twitter was on the same playing field. Everyone started with 0 followers, and 0 following. Then, naturally, prominent figures such as celebrities, journalists and politicians garnered thousands of followers quickly, while the rest of us minons were left with a dilemma, thanks both to a 2,000 subscriber limit and how poorly it reflected on us to follow thousands of people without having a reasonable ratio of that follow count in return.

It took quite a while to reach 10,000 followers on Twitter on my @AdenaDeMonte account. I haven’t been able to fairly estimate how many of these followers are real people and how many are spam, it still gives this Twitter account some level of status and respect in the Twitter game. My follow to following ratio is close to 1-to-1. A celebrity would be 1-to-1,000,000, such as @aplusk, who is currently following 695 people and is followed by 9,361,787.

The challenge lies in being a newer member of Twitter, and playing the game right. I recently signed up for a new Twitter account, @GamificationGal to focus on tweets around gamification, social media, behavior data and analytics. Out of the gate I followed approximately 1,000 thought leaders in the space, and, so far 260 have either followed me back directly or seen a tweet of mine somewhere and followed me without my following them. The problem is the user experience here is that at a Twitter user, I’m tempted to subscribe to interesting people who publish lots of quality content, butso is everyone else on Twitter. But these people are followed by more people, naturally, and are less likely to follow back unless they already know you. So if you want to use Twitter as a place to follow and read content, you quickly reach you 2,000 maximum following limit. The only tried-and-true way to get followers back IS to follow people, especially people who do not have a large following, so you’re stuck with the Twitter following dilemma — do you follow crappy accounts so you obtain a large number of people following you, but see poor content in your stream, or do you follow people who are unlikely to follow you back, and get stuck at the 2,000 following limit?

There are ways around this on Twitter. For instance, most Twitter superusers would use a separate application, such as TweetDeck, where they could “follow” users without following them, but creating lists of people to subscribe to, unofficially. Since all the content is public anyway, it’s easy for other applications to pull in the Twitter feeds in a way that is more practical for non-celebrities to interface with (and I’m sure this is also useful for the celebs who have the opposite problem — too many people following and engaging with their content with a whole lot of spam.) But I question why Twitter itself wouldn’t re-think its follow/following architecture, especially given how other social networks have now borrowed this concept loosely to varying degrees of success.

Google+ has the best architecture for public/private following, in my opinion. It still shows how many people have followed you versus how many you’ve followed, but the way the UX is designed, it does not look terrible if you are following thousands of people without having them all follow you back. Twitter is much more about this status than G+, which definitely encourages celebrities to play the game (and is why so many of them are active on there still), but G+ is designed more for the average person who wants to engage in public discorse via a social network. The circling concept isn’t perfect (for instance, it doesn’t motivate people to want to be circled by thousands of people, it is designed more to get you to want to circle other people) so it is not a place where place where big egos are easily stroked by a simple statistic. Even Facebook has this ego-stroking down pat prior to adding follow/subscribe functionality (friend count), so it’s not clear if this ultimately limits Google+’s growth and potential for success. It certainly lures a different type of audience, one that returns to engage with public content for quality vs the celebrity-status of the person who wrote the comment.

The thing that works well for Google+ is that its Circle functionality enables people on both sides of the following relationship to put the other person into a categorical bucket, where the person pushing content out can decide which bucket to share the specific content with. I bet some user experience designer at Facebook and one over at Twitter would say that functionality is too complex for the mainstream. Facebook does have a list functionality which lets you sort your friends into different groups to post to, but the functionality becomes most useful when dealing with public interactions.

Facebook Subscribe opens up an entirely new can of worms. I know, because right now I’m about 500 subscribers away from 50,000 subscribers. While on Twitter or Google+, this feat would take me years and a lot of work, on Facebook, 50,000 subscribers has occurred in less than three months. The majority of my subscribers are from Malaysia, India, Indonesia, and Islamic nations in The Middle East and Africa. The more subscribers I obtain, the more impossible my subscribe experience is to manage. Facebook displays your subscriber count very prominently on your profile page, as statistical status is still very important in the Facebook social architecture.

What’s wrong with this picture? Here, Facebook doesn’t care how many people I subscribe to, so I am not motivated to subscribe to other users on Facebook. I am not even sure how many people I am subscribed to, and that number is not important. Who does care about subscribing to people? Generally, older men from around the world who want to subscribe to young woman’s profiles. Facebook’s subscribe architecture had not been built with the proper game mechanics to encourage people in western cultures to want to subscribe to users’ public content. Why? There’s no status attached to subscribing to other people on Facebook, no positive feedback around continuing to subscribe to other users. At best, if you subscribe to other people you get a cluttered activity stream experience which once displayed content from friends only, and now includes people that you forgot you subscribed to one night because they looked remotely interesting.

I do enjoy the subscribe functionality on occasion, there are people on Facebook who I subscribe to that are not clear-cut, celeb-status public figures that do a great job of creating content for their followers, such as Craig Kanalley, one of my favorite public sharers on Facebook. Craig recently started working at NBC as a Social Media Editor, and it happens that he and I share the same alma mater (DePaul, go Blue Demons!) By sheer numbers alone, we have almost the same amount of subscribers — Craig has 52k, I have 49.5k. We both have accumulated masses of people who leave incoherent posts in foreign characters and/or their full phone number with country code requesting a call, though Craig clearly has more sane people subscribed to his account.

Viewing a list of my latest subscribers on Facebook, you can quickly see why Subscribe is the worst public “followee” experience of all the social networks:

If you think this is racist, and would argue with me that there are plenty of people in these countries who might add great value to my Facebook conversation, I performed a little test this morning, just minutes ago…

I opened up my Facebook commenting to let any of my 50,000 subscribers, as well as my Twitter followers and G+ circlers comment on this one simple question:

What are you doing this weekend?

Here are the responses so far…

Facebook:

Google+

Twitter:

While users are heavily invested in Facebook, the reasons people flocked to the site to begin with (simple social networking) to get away from the mess that was MySpace are starting to get overshadowed by an increasingly cluttered user experience. Meanwhile, Twitter is out in left field swinging like a blindfolded kid hoping to hit a home run, redesigning the experience to make it more mainstream-acceptable, but they’re still handicapped by 140 characters. And Google+ brags about its millions of users (90 million as of 5 days ago), but the numbers aren’t as impressive if you dig into how many people are actually using the network on a daily basis.

Facebook, set to IPO in the next few weeks, faces a whole new challenge of having to reveal quarterly earnings, which takes an ad-heavy network and pushes it to find new ways to monetize. Facebook surely has a lot of data to deliver ads against for its advertisers, but the only way to grow ad revenue is to either grow its user-base at an exponential rate, or keep people on the site much longer.

Since continuing to grow the user base is a challenge once you have 900M users, you’re faced with focusing on how to get as many people as possible to spend as much time on your site as possible. In a blog entry, Gregory Lyons of iCrossing recently acknowledged that Facebook’s growth in the U.S. and U.K has slowed or even stopped, but he expects India and Brazil, among other nations, to fuel continued growth to 1 billion users by August. Still, Facebook’s most valuable users are the ones in the United States and other key marketers that marketers with big budgets are targeting.

Mashable writes, “to put Facebook’s massive size in perspective, Twitter now claims about 100 million active users, LinkedIn has 130 million members and Google+ had around 49 million total visits in December, according to Experian Hitwise. That researcher predicts Google+ will have 400 million users by the end of this year.”

The total community numbers are sexy, but the real numbers that matter is time on site by users that the advertisers want to target. How do you keep people on a site longer? There’s plenty of ways to do this, but Facebook clearly knows that the more of your online experience it can tie into its platform, the more time you’ll spend looking at the ads they serve up.

It’s pretty a simple business equation borrowed from a traditional media model, but going from an elegant social network for friends only, serving the purpose of stalking exes, making relationship official (or complicated), and connecting with new friends, to an online social content destination is a bigger leap than Facebook wants to admit. And even if it has the right way to handle the large problem from a design perspective, a very vocal user base that likes things the way they are wouldn’t handle any major changes. So the changes occur in a sidebar ticker, or a subscribe button, which aren’t fully thought out enough to support the actual user experience they enable.

That said, they probably also work. I’ve spent more time on Facebook with Spotify and Pinterest now enabled, and I’ve enjoyed engaging with journalists through subscribe. I’ve used it less and less as a place to talk to my friends. I occasionally click on relevant ads, much more often than I click on ads on Google unless I’m searching for something very specific to buy that ads are targeted against.

Still, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are all walking towards each other, instead of focusing on being unique social networks that serve different needs. They’re all different channels serving up the same content in slightly different accent, and Twitter happens to just be extremely terse, and Google+ uses bigger words in long form at a slightly higher reading level. All three are suffering an identity crisis. The unfortunate reality is that as they all try to be the same thing, the user experience suffers. There is currently a lag between “Connected TVs” going mainstream, enabling social content around television media (we already have it around music and news/blog media), so the social networks have to do whatever they can to produce / curate / source content that keeps you on the site. That means user experiences being optimized to surface content from across the web, with Facebook leading the curve on this with their gestures enabling many companies to send user activity data into the Timeline and Ticker.

All of that activity results in so much clutter. It is extremely refreshing to then use social experiences that are simple, elegant, and aren’t filled with the world-wide kitchen sink. Pinterest is a great example of this. Pinterest allows users to “pin” images and videos from anywhere on the web onto “boards.” Users can create boards on any topic. While the site started out more geared toward women to pin fashion, wedding, and home decorating-type content, it has fast grown to the hottest startup on the web. It’s not a very complicated site, and in fact its search functionality is extremely basic. You view pins, you pin, you share, you collect, you express. It’s an extremely simple user experience powered by basic gamification mechanics. And the brilliant business model behind Pinterest is that the content itself is the ads. It doesn’t require complicated collaging ala Polyvore (which is really fun to do but targets a much more niche crowd.) Anyone can pin, and pin anything. While Pinterest now ties into Facebook’s ticker and timeline, the startup has long stood on its own as a thriving relatively new community. It is a breath of fresh air outside of the three social networks that are looking more and more like each other and might as well be named Facetwitbook+.

I predict that in 2012 and 2013, more and more of these simple, yet useful social experiences around specific topics will become more and more popular. The web as a whole has lagged behind social networks in terms of interactive user experiences, as for a long time there didn’t seem to be much point in competing — there were brochure sites and social networks, and the two remained separate. But it will certainly be an exciting few years in social UX, as the Great Social Network Identity Crisis of 2012 may just open doors for a whole host of new social networking experiences in the most unexpected places.

There are elements of Facebook’s Timeline that I like a lot, and I’ll get to those in a minute. But calling the profile redesign “the greatest change Facebook has ever created” is going too far. Timeline is a cool way to see your life as an online scrapbook (if you’re willing to take the time to curate your life for Facebook’s advertisers and servers), but where it fails is in its utility. Removing the old wall and replacing it with Timeline makes it harder to use Facebook. (Unless I’ve been using Facebook wrong all these years.)

Facebook’s challenge is to display a ton of data, while also encouraging its users to constantly submit new content. The old profile page (the “wall”) provided a very simple way to view what your friend has been up to, and to share content publicly.

Facebook Wall 1.0

The first(?) version of Facebook’s wall was purely utilitarian. It might not have been a gleaming example of UI, but it provided an easy, clear, and linear way to explore information. It featured tabs for “Wall,” “Info,” “Photos,” “Boxes,” and allowed you to add your own apps. But the Wall was clearly the most important. It wasn’t cluttered with new photos. It provided the basic information about the user. It looked the same on your personal wall as it did on your friend’s wall. You could go to your wall to see all of the comments your friends made on your posts and easily scroll down to see all of the latest interactions. You could post your status and easily attach content.

Facebook Wall 2.0

The next revision of Facebook’s wall featured a few improvements, though they weren’t perfect. It removed the tabs on the top of the page, and moved them under the user photo. It also summarized your basic information at the top of your profile, so anyone who visited your wall could easily get a snapshot of your information. Facebook is all about stalking your friends, acquaintances, and future partners, so this short summary of key information. It allowed you to note who your family members were, and list them separately from friends. Advertisements were prominent on your profile, and took up a lot of screen real estate. The “recent photos” feature was a little annoying — since it would auto update with your latest photos — and you had to remove any that you didn’t want featured in the top of your profile (note how this lack of control over the visuals at the top of your profile was “solved” in the next version of the design.

Facebook Wall 3.0: AKA “Timeline”

In this update of the wall, which is still rolling out to Facebook’s users, is a revamp of the profile page. It focuses on many of the items of data Facebook wants to collect from its users, while providing a personalized header image — the largest screen real estate dedicated to users’ expressing themselves yet. It also bumps the content much further down the screen, so there is less information that makes it above the fold. This makes the wall page less functional for viewing your own content. Overall, the design is not very functional. I don’t find myself viewing my profile page since I converted it to the Timeline. I just ignore my profile page. I used to view my profile page and interact with it all the time. I’m wondering if this is the case for other users. Do you view your profile page more or less since it was converted to “Timeline”?

Facebook would certainly argue that the place you are supposed to interact with any content — whether that be something you posted, or something your friend posted — is your “stream.” This may work well for users who have less than 100 friends and who avoid the subscribe feature like the plague. With 975 friends, my experience may be a bit unique, but the majority of people I know have over 500 friends on Facebook. This makes it difficult to keep up with people interacting with your personal content. Now, the only place to do this by viewing all of your notifications. But this isn’t as functional as the old wall/profile page, to view all of the latest comments on your content. If someone comments on your status, as viewed below, you have to click on a link to take you to that status page. There is no way to view content in a vertically organized fashion, like it used to exist on the wall.

The layout of basic information in the new design successfully highlights the key pieces of content that are important. It lets someone click to view your friends, your photos, a map of places you’ve checked in, and your subscribers (which I now have 6,482 of and am gaining at a rate of about 1,000 per day– a subject that requires its own post to come later) or, if you don’t have subscribers, it displays “likes.” That said, “likes” are clearly less important in this version of Facebook’s wall. Even Facebook recognizes that “Likes” are holding less value as we like hundreds of topics and brands for various promotions and other reasons. Can you name all of the things you’ve “Liked” on Facebook? I know I can’t.

Profile without subscribers. Here you can easily request less updates from your friends or more, depending on how annoying they are. This is a key new feature in the updated profile and new subscribe product:

So far, so good. The photo up top is a little bit like Facebook making up for all these years of not letting us customize any visuals on our profile, but I can deal. It’s kind of fun to have a pretty picture up there. I like to see what images other people post. They rarely get updated, but it’s more of a statement image than the constantly updated photo stream that was in the last model of the profile page.

Then, here comes UI chaos. From a programming standpoint, I’m sure there is an elegant beauty to being able to generate a layout that can fit a wide range of content of all sizes, from photos to check ins to status updates to the tracks you’re rocking out to on Spotify. This is no easy task, and perhaps one that in no way shape or form could be possible in the earlier version of the Facebook wall.

What bothers me most about the new profile is how the information is no longer linear, and it also no longer focuses on your content and interactions. Instead, if you read a few articles on Washington Post Social, they take up a big box on your profile page. These articles may not be all that important to you, or they may be old news — but suddenly, take precedence over other content on your wall because your latest physical activity was clicking on a link to read that page. Meanwhile, the worst of the layout issues is that the entire profile is now supposed to be a “Timeline.” This works for content you’ve added since joining Facebook, but now all of your photos (which may be uploaded at a different time or year when they were taken) are completely out of order. Facebook asks you to go and chronicle every moment of your life, so they can know everything about you. But the process of updating this information is tedious. I tried to add a few pieces of information to my Timeline about when I’ve moved to new cities and performed in plays, but adding this information isn’t fun at all. And it gets buried somewhere in my Timeline — why should I bother updating this content? Is the only value to provide Facebook more data so they can even better target advertising? What do I get out of this as a Facebook user? Do I really want to track my entire life story on Facebook?

The biggest qualm I have with Facebook’s timeline is its waste of screen real estate to visually communicate something that could take up less space in a more elegant, linear way. It is not natural to read content from right to left to right to left to right to left to right, especially when the content type is not consistent. Removing the best linear way to view your content is a shame. It’s nice to see Facebook evolving in how it thinks about design and aesthetics, but this product doesn’t seem to help in supporting the conversation and connections that Facebook’s success is built on.

Edited to add: When a friend shared this post, I was reminded of another time the Timeline wastes space. Upon her sharing a link to this post, which I shared on my wall, it showed up on my Timeline again.

In summary, Timeline is a cool feature, but it shouldn’t replace the profile page/wall. I’d be curious to know if Facebook is seeing more or less content generation since the new Timeline feature started rolling out. It’s great to show that she shared my post (thanks Courtney!) but it also means every time a friend shares my content, it appears on my wall again. It’s not smartly collated into one square — it takes up infinite squares. There are other ways this happens, I’ve noticed near-duplicate content occurs frequently on the Timeline. Facebook could tie all of the related content together, at least minimizing the spread of similar content, especially links to the same content.

What do you think about Timeline? Am I getting it all wrong? Is Timeline the greatest product Facebook ever rolled out?

Take Facebook Subscribe, for instance. I’ve been blogging about it a lot because I’m pained when I see good product ideas slaughtered by poor implementation. Facebook has the most users of any social network in the world. Why shouldn’t it be a place where we can connect to everyone from our best friends and parents to celebrities and reporters? Because, unfortunately, Facebook offers privacy options only when they seem to hurt the product most. Case in point — you can “opt in” to turning on “subscribers” and you can also “opt out” of allowing them to comment on your posts. Both cases of this offer broken user experiences. Opt in, really, isn’t broken, it’s just annoying for the owner of the Facebook profile. Opt out ruins the entire subscribe experience for the user.

Let’s focus on Opt Out first. When a Facebook user — often a celebrity, Facebook employee, or otherwise notable type — decides to opt-in to the subscribe feature, anyone can subscribe to their posts. Since public figures wouldn’t necessarily want a free for all on their walls (which, in theory, should be the same accounts as their private accounts, Facebook just allows them to hide private posts and posts for friends only), they then block subscribers from commenting on their posts. Why is that “broken social architecture?” Because I’ve seen, numerous times, someone I’m subscribed to ask their subscribers a question in the post, but their subscribers have no way to respond other than to click “Like.” At least on Twitter, anyone can @respond to public figures, and have a glimmer of hope that they might get a response (even if it’s from their PR manager.) Letting people subscribe to your account and not allowing comments is broken social architecture. And Facebook allows this because it knows what happens if they let anyone respond to public posts…

It makes sense for celebrities not to allow public commenting on their wall posts. That’s what pages are for. Why do they need both? The best use case for the subscribe feature is for journalists. In this case, they can post their articles, and questions on topics they are reporting on, and their readers can post comments and share thoughts. That might be the only good use case for Facebook subscribe. Even Facebook employees turn on subscribe and opt-out of letting people comment, more often than not from what I’ve seen.

I turned off commenting from subscribers on my posts for a while, then I decided it was hypocritical to let people subscribe to me without allowing them to actually interact with my content. While I haven’t received the same number of comments that I received after posting on Mark Zuckerberg’s thread from hundreds of men from India and Malaysia who were convinced I must be best friends with Mark Z., I still get one or two random posts on my content, like the occasional “mess up my formatting” post seen to the right.

I have, however, had to block all friend requests from people who aren’t already connected to me through one person because I was receiving hundreds of friend requests per day from subscribers. This hurts my main use of Facebook, since no one who meets me at an event can friend me, and it has stalled my growth of Facebook friends of people I actually would want to be friends with. But this blocking was a necessity — my mom and other friends on my account were also starting to receive requests from these strangers, many who were still convinced I knew Mark Z., and the only way to get their comments to him would be to friend my account and all of my friend’s accounts.

Meanwhile, Google+ is a painful to use because they’re so close in getting social architecture right, but thousands of details break the experience. Again, there are issues with how content is shared publicly vs privately. Google wants to set up a world where you have complete control over the content you share. This, in theory, is also a smart/nice feature. But the problem is that control results in awkward/clunky social experiences when interacting with that content.

Here, to the left, is a post that a social media expert I’ve “circled” (subscribed to / followed) on Google+ has shared. It’s a link to a public article on Mashable. There are a few words (in this case two words) of additional content she has chosen to share, but nothing I could imagine she would be ashamed of posting publicly.

Yet, because she chose to (either on purpose or just by default) share this content with her circles, when I click “share,” Google first warns me to be careful who I share this content with, then promptly gives me the option to only share the content with people I’ve already circled.

So, while the link shared was always public content, there is no option for me to “re-share” this article to all of my followers publicly without going to the actual article page and sharing it from there. That is broken social architecture.

A quick fix would be offering a simple option to “share link” directly, without re-sharing it from the user who posted it, and without re-posting the commentary they added on. I’ve run into this experience many, many times (and I don’t use G+ that often) as one of the best use cases I’ve found for G+ is to discuss news articles and other content, but blocking re-sharing of this content makes the entire experience frustrating.

Meanwhile, if I was following a person — any person, for that matter — I could share the post with them. Google gives me the option to share with anyone in my circles, so it’s not like blocking me from sharing this publicly actually blocks me from sharing the content with anyone. It just makes it frustrating if I want to share the post with everyone. At least on Facebook, I can easily share any post… even those posts by public figures that they won’t let me comment on. I can like them, and I can share them. I just can’t comment on them.

How about Twitter? What Twitter does right (no, not limiting posts to 140 characters) is that it gets public interaction. It makes it easy for people to write back and forth with each other, and ignore each other, generally without hurting anyone’s feelings. The more popular you are, the more it’s understood that you’re not going to write back to all of your followers. But they can write to you, and you can read their posts, and you can decide if you ever want to write back.

Where Twitter goes wrong is in what Facebook and Google get right — privacy. Twitter has terrible private sharing features. I understand that for Twitter it is about public sharing — if suddenly they focused on private tweet circles the whole network would change, and become a lot less interesting. But even in the case of a public network, you need an easy way to reach out to other users privately, in case you want to have a conversation off line.

Twitter has always (or at least since I remember) had Direct Messages but that’s a feature that has also been broken for as long as I can remember. DM’s are supposed to let you write to other people on the site privately, as long as they’re following you. Trouble is… they can’t DM you back unless you’re also following them. I can’t count how many DM’s I’ve received from people that I genuinely wanted to respond to, but I was unable to write back because they weren’t following me. If Twitter wants to make this a requirement for their social architecture, then they should also require that in order to send a DM, you need to be following that person.

This, of course, doesn’t account for the large amount of spam that takes place in Direct Messages. The DM folder is virtually useless, which is why Twitter should just get rid of it unless they are going to make it a useful private communication channel. Otherwise, you just end up with people DM’ing you expecting a response, and you have no way of writing them back, other than a public tweet that they have .05% chance of seeing. And, of course, Twitter is lousy for communication and is more of a one-sided, personal PR machine anyway.

So… which social network will get the private, semi-private, public architecture correct first? I had high hopes for Google+, but inconsistencies like the one I pointed out above leave me underwhelmed. There certainly is room for another social network to step in and get this right. Or, one of the big guys needs to hire a team to sit down and walk through the entire user experience of public/private interactions, and make sure they actually make sense.

But I wanted to do a deep dive of my personal experience with the changes thus far. There are many additional changes which won’t be experienced for a while, because they require developers to build apps on top of their new open graph protocol, so I’ll leave detailed commentary on that for a later time. This series of posts covers the rest of the changes:

1. Entertainment Media Partnerships: Spotify, Netflix, and Hulu: B+
2. The New Profile Design “Timeline”: C+
3. Real-Time Ticker: B-
4. Updated Photo Display in Stream: A+
5. Commenting and Privacy: D
6. News Reading within Facebook: C
7. Subscribe, X# of Subscribers & 1 Week Later: TBD

========================================================================

Entertainment & Media Partnerships with Spotify, Netflix and Hulu
Grade: A-

In one of the best updates to Facebook, the company partnered with major streaming media brands so you can share content about what your listening to, watching, and eventually even reading, in real time. Ever since I joined Spotify and spent my entire Fourth of July weekend making playlists, I was hooked on their unlimited free music streaming (and soon even paid for a $9 a month subscription, which is very unlike me. I haven’t even purchased a Netflix subscription, but the Spotify mobile streaming feature was well worth the fee. Plus, it killed the ads, which were often for hip hop music, which were quite disruptive when I was listening to my “relaxing / classical” playlist and trying to fall asleep.)

But one of my earlier complaints about Spotify was how it, despite having a connection to Facebook and showing me which of my Facebook friends were connected to the service, had an extremely limited social experience. The only real social features were being able to subscribe to their playlists. And, not-so surprisingly, few people had dedicated the time needed to put together killer playlists like I had. Beyond getting excited when someone subscribed to my playlists, the social experience was extremely limited. It was disappointing to say the least, especially after being used to more social music streaming sites like Last.fm and Pandora. Actual discovery of music on Spotify was limited to either clicking around to similar artists on the profile of artists you already like, or listening to new music that was advertised on its homepage.

When Facebook announced the official partnership with Spotify, I did a little nerd happy dance. I don’t yet care about Netflix or Hulu because I watch movies infrequently, and watch my television shows either on TV, or more often, directly through sites like NBC.com and Lifetimetv.com, but finally I could share my playlists with the world, and discover some great new (or old) music in return.

If you don’t already have Spotify, you can now go to www.spotify.com and sign up for a 6 month free account with your Facebook profile.

When you sign on to Spotify, they now prompt you to connect your live streaming behaviors with your Facebook profile. It isn’t clear from this how the music streaming information will populate your profile now or later, but as I rarely listen to anything I’m gravely embarrassed of, I opted in. Immediately, my friend’s Facebook tickers began to be populated with the songs I’m listening to.

Spotify music listening shows up in a few places across Facebook. I’m even still discovering new places it appears.

The most prominent place Spotify listening appears is in the real-time ticker, which is another new feature I’ll cover more in depth in a later post. However, one of the primary issues of the real-time ticker is that it comfortably displays about three small tidbits of information, and if your friends listen to a lot of music, comment updates and photo uploads, which happen more infrequently, are buried by a flood of friend’s live music listening. I’d imagine that once all the other media properties that have official partnership with Facebook take off, the real-time ticker will become a blur of content, but it doesn’t really add much to the social music experience.

In addition to the real-time ticker, occasionally Facebook’s algorithms decide to summarize a friend’s current listening in the general stream. I don’t understand why that happens versus more often when Facebook doesn’t surface this information in the main stream, nor do I know when my own listening preferences are being surfaced in my friend’s streams. It makes me wonder if they are happen to be catching songs that I don’t really love and are just hearing for the first time (see below) versus songs that I have on my playlists. How this information is surfaces just isn’t clear.

Facebook also makes your music listening prominent in their new timeline-based profile redesign:

This is one place where it makes sense for your music choices to display, but it also shows how any accidental content you’ve listened to will display immediately. One of the features I like about the timeline is how this could display over the years, to show the top songs you were listening to that year. This will be cool to look back on in the future. Granted, I’m not sure how this information will be surfaced in the timeline once enough data has been collected in this Facebook-Spotify partnership.

The whole experience is not (yet?) optimized to discover the best music. But the potential is there. Facebook is supposedly adding a feature that will let you listen to music live with your friends, or even watch movies live with friends around the world. That’s pretty darned cool. However, thus far, the connections aren’t optimized for discovery or social sharing of media. I can see this being iterated on and changing in the near future. Clearly, Spotify, Hulu, and Netflix have placed a huge bet on Facebook, and while Facebook may not need them, they need Facebook right now and will make sure the experiences within Facebook generate a solid volume of additional revenues.

Do you want everyone to know what you’re listening to when you’re just browsing?
Then, there are the various behaviors that many do on Spotify that might actually be considered embarrassing, once you realize all of your music streaming choices immediately go on your profile and throughout Facebook the second you press play. This reminds me of the day I was searching random words and clicking on random sound files and managed to find myself listening to an audio clip of a woman having a (very fake) orgasm. Not exactly something I want posted to my Facebook page. But that’s a rather corner case. There are other more common cases that end up displaying, which is why the partnerships so far get a B+. There is a lot of promise here, but it requires additional development to make the experience relevant, and increases the benefits of having your media listening/watching experiences connected to your social graph.

Spotify / Facebook Embarrassment Issues

- To discover new music on Spotify, one of the best ways is to click around and listen to songs for a few seconds, and decide if you like them. Now, if you listen to a song for even one second, it gets shown on your Facebook profile and in the stream

- If you switch songs frequently, they all show up on Facebook (while real time is cool, I’d recommend that Spotify wait 5-10 seconds until a song qualifies for posting to your Facebook profile)

- Probably the worse of the embarrassment issues, as one of my Facebook friends pointed out yesterday, is that the second you click on a song your friend is listening to — even before you know the artist or song — it shows up on your profile that you’re listening to it. While many people don’t mind sharing the music they love, it’s awkward for my friend’s taste in music to suddenly appear like my own taste in music, and it makes you think twice before clicking on music friends are listening to, which defeats the purpose of sharing music socially. Perhaps if you click on a link of what your friend is listening to, for the first time you listen to it, it doesn’t show on your profile. Or at least a setting should be offered to configure this.

… thinking of how this translates to other media properties, I wonder if I want to share my viewing habits with my friends. I don’t actually mind sharing that I’m watching America’s Next Top Model with other fans of the show, but do I want my entire network of nearly 1000 friends and 500 subscribers to see that this is one of my frequent shows I view? This is not the most embarrassing case of content consumption to be sure, and I’m a rather public person — I wonder how this effects the millions of other Facebook users.

Overall, the Media Integrations Get a B+ in My Book

The future of media consumption is social, and it makes sense for Facebook to be at the center of this innovation. It will be interesting to see how sites like Google Plus and Twitter change to battle this move, with Google having access to the entire Internet, as well as ownership of the most popular clip streaming site (YouTube), they can build in more media integration into G+. Meanwhile, Twitter, smaller in audience as it is, has a network of people who like to publicly share content, and could also come out with some meaningful media partnerships. For this battle round on media integration, I have to give the win to Facebook.

To be honest, since Facebook rolled out subscribe, and even a bit before that, I stopped spending every second of my free time on Google+. The good thing about Google+ is that it’s a much more professional network, and it’s designed to make sharing of content easy. But no one on Google+ cared about what I have to say… it’s full of people who want to “talk” but don’t want to “listen,” ie, the Twitterers, albeit mostly highly influential ones. It’s a good place to follow people who talk a lot about reasonably interesting things, and to comment on their posts. It is not a good place to connect with friends, unless all of your friends happen to be highly influential tech nerds.

Meanwhile, Facebook subscribe leaves a lot to be desired as well from a pure public social networking standpoint. So far my experience with the feature has felt incredibly spammy. Not only did I get over 100 subscribers of men from Asia and The Middle East who seemingly do not understand that my commenting on Mark Zuckerberg’s post means that I am not his “friend,” I received many comments that were three to five words of broken English, and, worse yet, my actual friends and even family members started to get random friend requests too — even my mom started to get friend requests from India.

On G+, I’ve noticed an uptick in male followers from Asia, but for the most part, I can ignore these unless they have something meaningful to say on one of my posts. I’m not bombarded with friend requests from people who subscribe to me because G+ doesn’t have a separation between friends and subscribers — everything is subscribe on different levels (or circles) of importance and subject matter. It’s a huge problem on Facebook that subscribe and “friend” are entirely separate, yet also oddly interwoven once someone is your friend.

What I’d like to know is how to take a person who is a subscriber and move them up a level — not quite to friend — but to important person you are following that you actually want to engage with. If you are subscribed to someone and they subscribe to you back, this needs to exist in a middle ground between friend and subscriber. I’d like to hide some subscribers and sort them by ranking. The privileges for subscriptions are incredibly awkward as well — it feels buggy when I g to a profile with public updates that doesn’t allow comments. That’s a huge tease — I’m going to share some content but only my friends can comment, and the rest of you can look on voyeuristically. It just leaves a bad taste in a social user’s mouth.

Google+ still wins out on a better social architecture, but Facebook has the network and has mainstream appeal, so I think they’re safe for the time being. They can always pull a Netflix by making a change too big for their userbase to just briefly bitch about and then accept — but, for the most part, Facebook moves in the right direction, with the eyeballs it finds new ways to make money en route to its IPO. I’m looking forward to hearing more about their music partnerships that will be likely announced at F8, especially how Spotify and other music services like MOG will be tied into the potential / rumored new profile design.

In the meantime, I wonder how many other people are experiencing the same spam-filled subscribe experience. Or, it’s not even spam, it’s just filling up your wall with a lot of comments from men that don’t make a lot of sense. On G+ I have a lack of visibility problem — no one responds to my posts except maybe one or two people who make an effort to +1 what I have to say. On Facebook, I get a dozen likes and random comments that are meaningless. Facebook just needs to help people connect with people through subscribe that are similar to them, not just people that happen to be popular due to being journalists or product managers at Facebook. It also needs a way for users to give permission to one list of subscribers, but not all subscribers, or to block certain subscribers from commenting.

At first, I was confused by the subscribe feature. Why did some people with 0 public updates on the site have “subscribe” called out on their profiles, while others with tons of public content did not have a subscribe option? And why wasn’t anyone subscribing to my profile — wasn’t I as worthy of following as some of the others who were being recommended to me by Facebook because my friends were subscribing to them?

It took a while to figure out that I had to actually opt in for the subscribe feature. It’s a weird step to have to take given that Facebook already gives you privacy controls for all of your content, so in theory subscribing to anyone’s profile should not change anything unless they chose to post public content. But then I realized this accomplishes two things for Facebook — one, if anyone complains about privacy they can say it’s an opt-in feature, and two, it makes those of us who opt in to allowing subscriptions from the general public more likely to update publicaly.

Ok, so after years upon years of maintaining my Facebook account as my one true “social” network (as in, people I actually interact with in real life, or have interacted with at some point in the past) I decided to open the doors up, just a bit, and see what this new subscribe feature was really all about. I also subscribed to a few people that Facebook recommended to me, including a few reporters, and a bunch of the Facebook team to see how they were using the feature. As noted in my last post, I subscribed to Mark Zuckerberg and was disappointed in his lack of updates.

In the first 24 hours or so of my making my profile able to be subscribed to, I gained about 15 followers. I’d estimate that 10 of those were random men from India, three were from the Middle East somewhere, and two were people that found me through social contacts. I put up a few public posts — mostly comments about Facebook subscribe that were too geeky for my normal friends on FB, and felt bad about spamming them with the commentary, but only felt it was ok since they’re on Facebook too and probably are looking to me, the Silicon Valley friend, to explain what on earth is going on. At least my mother is.

Then, tonight, the seas parted and Mark Zuckerberg posted a deeply enlightening public status update:

Yes, you read that right — Mark Zuckerberg is getting ready for the big F8 conference. There’s a safe status update if I ever saw one, and one that likely wouldn’t spark any debate or comments… I mean, who would even like a post as simple as that…?

Of course, Mark Z. has a fan club the size of a country or two, so he’s going to get a few likes on everything he posts.

A few turned into 10,000 within the first few minutes of his post. I jumped in to the conversation around that time and left a fairly basic comment in response to one other reply about how crazy it is Mark received 10k likes so quickly (as that comment was already at 400 likes, and that amount of likes on a random comment that quickly was crazy too).

Within seconds after posting my comment, crazy things started to happen. Like some sort of Facebook puberty where I started feeling new and awkward things. Immediately, I got notifications that people were subscribing to me. Tens, then dozens, then nearly 100 — mostly men — mostly from India — were flooding my recent updates. They liked my comments. They started liking and commenting on my photos. And the comments kept coming. And coming. And coming…

Soon, I realized this public status would kill my social relationships with my friends unless FB fixed the noise problem. I don’t mind strangers looking at some of my content (that I choose to make public), but I don’t think I can handle thousands of fans liking everything I say. Granted, in the early days of the interwebs I would have been flattered to have such a following, but today I value Facebook as the one place on the web where I have my social contacts and my interactions with them aren’t flooded with noise from other people I don’t know who are leaving random comments that make little sense.

Perhaps all these new subscribers from Asia and the Middle East they think that I’m best friends with Mark Z., and can help get them jobs or other contacts (for the record, I’ve never met him, though I do have a few distant acquaintances that work at Facebook.) Perhaps they just like subscribing to a random female that is as nerdy as they are… (which has its benefits, best comment of the night [(clearly) sic] Mradul Gupta told me “u luk lyk Kate Winslet!”

Flattery aside (a woman can only take so much) what will this do to my social network? I’m most concerned about missing important updates from friends — content that I actually want to engage with — and instead will be buried by subscriber comments that are more like this Mahmoud Odeh (who must have subscribed to me thinking he was subscribing to Mark Z.) writes “why am here ?” on my latest public update, which 23 people have “liked” so far.

Now, this issue isn’t limited to Facebook. G+ suffers the same problem, but it’s easier to block interactions with people following you unless you want to see them. Facebook subscribe suffers an even bigger problem, though — people don’t understand the difference between subscribe and friend. On G+, you basically subscribe to everyone, but on different levels (or circles.) On Facebook, you automatically subscribe to your friends (though you can unsubscribe, which is weird, though I guess it’s mostly like hiding their posts but still being their friend) and you also can subscribe to anyone else on the site who has opted in for public subscriptions. What’s weird and confusing is that people who subscribe to you then feel like they should have the right to be your “friend.” There’s nothing more that ruins the Facebook experience than receiving hundreds of friend requests and not being able to dig out the real friends that have requested to connect with you. With so many friend requests, it’s easy to miss those real requests, and while your public social network is growing with strangers, your real social network is stinted.

By writing that one comment on Mark Zuckerberg’s post, I went from 16 subscribers to 95 subscribers in less than an hour. When I started writing this post, I had 82 subscribers and now I’m up to 95. I am also receiving about 10 friend requests every 30 minutes. I’m afraid to go to sleep and wake up with a few hundred friend requests.

Meanwhile, I have had some good interactions with the feature. Blake Ross, Director of Product at Facebook posted a basic “introduce yourself” post on his wall, about six hours before I responded. By that time he already had 174 responses (many were just complaints about missing features on the site), and I decided to write up a quick bio and see if it would get a response. Blake — very quickly — liked my post. That was a cool interaction. But then, I was wondering what happens next. Here I am, feeling like this is a genuine person that I’d like to follow, and connect with. I decided to send Blake a friend request, which was probably the wrong move in terms of the concepts of the product, but it is basically my reaching out and saying that I want to be connected with him above all the noise.

What G+ does well is it gives you many layers of connection — you can put random followers in an ignore circle and they’ll never know they are being ignored, but they’ll stop bugging you. You can develop relationships with people who are interesting and have interests in common by selecting to surface their content and read the circles you put them in. On Facebook, theoretically this works almost the same way, minus the specific and transparent circles. It’s just hard to believe that meaningful relationships with anyone can be formed when they have thousands upon thousands of subscribers. That’s why my experience on Twitter went from good to awful — when I had 2k subscribers it was wonderful, at 10k subscribers I barely use it. I really don’t want Facebook to turn into that experience. I’m hoping it doesn’t have to, and that the team there will figure out the right way to implement this feature as they see how users take to it over time.

In any case, I perceive the scenerio to play out as follows — either I continue my usual routine and pander towards my “real friends” (ie the non tech types) and update infrequently with nerd-free, unique things about my life posts; or I build up my public following and at the same time force all of my friends to unsubscribe from my updates (since, conveniently now Facebook makes it easy for my friends to hide me or chose to see less of my posts by unsubscribing vs. the hidden hide posts from this person feature, which I’m guessing statistically didn’t get much use.) The only way to play the game right is complicated — put all friends into lists and block public updates from friends. That seems slightly counterproductive, but without that move I think I’m going to lose a lot of the friends that matter, and gain a lot that can’t spell and are still wondering how they ended up seeing my status updates.

Facebook was never worried Twitter would overtake it as a social network — Twitter, despite gaining quite a good chunk of users — is still a niche experience, targeted at a very specific type of person that feels the need to throw out 140-character thoughts to the rest of the world. Trust me, it’s hard to say anything significant in 140 characters, and it’s even harder to have any sort of meaningful conversation with that limit. But Facebook was jealous of Twitter’s ability to make all of its data public.

Then came Google Plus, which launched recently, and has garnered quite a following. Facebook must be a little scared now. Scared enough to release a new feature which essentially turns Facebook into Google Plus. Why? Google Plus is an imperfectly designed cross between the public following and sharing that happens on Twitter and the friends-only sharing that happens on Facebook. The Facebook subscribe feature is designed to give users more control over what they see from their friend’s status updates (therefore making them more likely to add more friends) and then to offer up additional public information, to give Facebook data that can be shown and used lots of places other than on your profile/wall.

This post is not about the sorting power subscription gives you on people you’re already friends with — I find that added functionality really cool, if it works, but it’s clear this feature is primarily to get more public content on Facebook, plus to remind everyone that they have control of their stream on Facebook so they don’t up and switch to G+, where similar control was built into the system from the get go.

It’s a necessary addition, and seems fairly well thought out for a Facebook feature, but it still feels like an “oh shit, we need to be like our competitor but be just different enough so we don’t copy them exactly.” Google Plus, which I got really into early on, is unfortunately just as noisy as Twitter, though with even longer and sometimes more interesting/intelligent content, which makes it even harder to use on a regular basis. Robert Scoble recently discussed how the biggest problem right now in social is all the noise. One thing I’ve always loved about Facebook is that, although I have 916 “friends” (95% I’ve met in person and have some sort of real friendship with), I never feel like Facebook is too noisy. Sure, I miss friend’s updates all the time, but whenever I’m on Facebook I see posts written by people I know, and this is extremely engaging. It makes me — and clearly millions of other people — spend a lot of time on Facebook.

The problem with adding a subscribe feature to Facebook is that FB is going to become just as noisy as Google and Twitter. It will hurt the site in its current implementation, which, from what I can tell, lets you subscribe to anyone on the site and, when they post publicly, you see their updates. Subscribe to one person and this might not be that bad — subscribe to one person that updates publicly frequently and this could be a big problem. Suddenly your only real “social” network is one big RSS feed of strangers.

Facebook really, really wants people to start posting publicly. The challenge there is Facebook wins at social networking because people don’t have to post publicly. It takes your personal social interactions and provides an online home for those meaningful conversations to happen. Even if they’re  I don’t know about you, but the content I share on my public accounts on Google+ and Twitter is very different from what I share on Facebook. While FB still will let you post private and friends only updates, there is no way to hide public updates from your friends (at least, not from what I can tell.) I already post on Facebook too frequently, but to build up a real following through subscriptions, I’d have to post much more frequently, publicly, and what i’d do is lose a lot of my real “friends.”

A while ago, I started a “page” for myself because I wanted a public presence on Twitter. It doesn’t really make sense to have a page, as it’s extremely awkward to ask people to “like” me (heck, I can’t bring myself to like the page, because it would tell all my friends “Adena likes Adena DeMonte.” I believe there’s a real need for a social network, Facebook or otherwise, to get the private-vs-public sharing conundrum down. Facebook has a great shot at succeeding here because they have the network. But first, they need to get the following pieces right:

Give people a reason to update publicly. It can’t just be about status, because while status will work for the types that flock to Google+ and even Twitter, who are in it for self and company promotion, Facebook needs other reasons to increase public sharing.

Social games are a great place to start. Facebook has many of its users playing social games, but you can only “play” with your friends — or, if the game lets you play with other users on Facebook, you have to friend them to stay in touch. But FB hasn’t been set up to follow people that you’re not actual friends with. This limits the reach of the game experience. With the subscribe feature, you could follow other users who like to play the same games, and connect with them outside of the context of the game.

This also extends to other experiences on Facebook apps and pages. Facebook has tons of public engagement outside of its user’s walls. But if it tries to push this public sharing and viewing of content in the same wall / stream where the friends content is shared and viewed, it’s going to hurt FB in the long run. The best bet is for Facebook is to:

• - create a separate section from your main stream where you can view activity from people you are “subscribed” to
• - push subscribing via pages, social games, and other apps within Facebook
• - offer suggested users based on shared interests, not who your friends are following
• - have some sort of stats shown to you of how many public updates you’ve shared vs. friends only
  (this is a major problem on G+, as most “normal” people use it for friends sharing only, so subscribing/following them is worthless. I am following over 1000 people on there and I probably see updates from the same 10 people who post publicly on a frequent basis, in addition to random posts by Googlers who share publically more frequently than other folks.)

Here is the most clear example of this problem — Mark Zuckerberg has over 500,000 subscribers (myself included) and this is what his page looks like:

If Mark Z. isn’t going to create public updates, who will? (I guess people following him now see that he likes Steve Jobs and is subscribing to other people…)

VS Google’s Larry Page…

Larry posts quite a bit, as do most of the Google executives, over on G+. I’ve seen Marisa Meyer’s Chiluly installation in her apartment, because she gets that if Google is going to encourage its users to share interesting content publicly, she has to be willing to share as well.

Like on G+, The people who post publicly will be the tech nerds whose careers are fueled by their online reputation. Twitter is a slightly different animal as it’s accepted that you post public content on there about mainstream or niche topics, and people interested in those topics will find you and engage with you.)

If people who you subscribe to never post publicly, then the few people who do post a lot will hurt the experience. Their content may be good, it may be bad, it doesn’t matter. The biggest problem is it will be the majority of public content, and it will very quickly eat up a user experience on Facebook. Algorithms limiting this can help, but it’s hard to stop the noise and display the relevant content.

Will the next generation just make their entire lives public? If privacy is still a concern, and I’d put my money on it being a major concern for the majority of people, the social network that gets this equation right will be able to:

1. Have quality content produced by subject-matter experts (not just technology experts)
2. Have a solid way to find people who are sharing useful and interesting content about topics that matter to you
3. Have a way of encouraging people (other than technology experts & social media nerds) to share quality content publicly and frequently…
4. …but not too frequently
5. Make sure the updates from real friends take priority over the rest of the content
6. Make sure that people feel their friends-only posts are safely friends only
7. Add value for users who share publicly (status? — if status, your public sharing should help promote your profile, vs just being a person who never updates publicly but is known by a lot of people; or, better access to relevant content?)
8. Make sharing limits longer than 500 characters
9. Let users put other users into lists to view content from only that list (like G+’s circles)
10. Convince Mark Zuckerberg to write frequent, interesting public updates.
    Because, if the CEO won’t drink the company’s public post kool-aid, and he has 500k followers (growing at about 20k every few minutes!) then who will?

Meanwhile, the rest of the Internet, unsure how to benefit from this phenomenon, started throwing millions of dollars at generating some sort of brand awareness on these social networks. Instead of focusing on how to keep traffic on their sites, it became all about how to get people to remember we exist since they’re clearly going to spend most of their time on Facebook and Twitter.

I’m very proud of the product that my company announced today, which finally provides an easy way for any website to obtain the functionality that makes social sites so addicting, fun and engaging.

First of all, here are the reasons I, and likely many other people, are addicted to Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and a few other sites –

1) I can follow people I either know or who share my interests

2) I can see real-time activity for all the users I am following and everyone else on the site

3) I immeditely receive notifications when anyone interacted with my content

When it comes down to it, those three things keep me, and many others, stuck on social networks, and spending less time on other sites.

This is applicable for every site out there that has some sort of content, whether that be products, articles, or educational videos. Many web managers have taken a leap to add identity to these sites — common features are comments, reviews, rating, forum posting, voting, and having a minimal amount of “hey, look, we have people on our site that are real” to show they are a worthwhile site to visit.

However, I’ve seen a few early examples of real-time activity notifications on a variety of sites that start to hint at the next generation of the interactive, real-time Internet.

Take Hotels.com, for instance. I often check out Hotels.com to see if there is a better deal at a hotel when I need to book a last-minute reservation, even though I’m fairly loyal to my one-chain rewards program. While browsing Hotels.com and I’m on a particular hotel page, I will often received an alert that this hotel was just booked. For all I know that specific interaction could be fake, as surely that little note makes me feel more compelled to buy (someone else just reserved this place, it must be decent, right?)

But what if any website out there could add real-time notifications, alerts, activity streams, and follow functionality — all powered by authentic interactions by users on your site?

This is something I would expect to see on everything from major media to commerce sites, yet I haven’t seen this happening yet beyond a few startups like Quora that are, in essence, a niche social network. It boggles my mind that my experience on a site like TechCrunch.com — where I often leave comments, and want to engage with the other people leaving comments — actually notifies me — on *Facebook* — when someone likes my comment or replies to it over on TechCrunch. So TechCrunch is teaching me that my interactions on their site need to be surfaced back on Facebook, even though Facebook is often thought of as a personal network, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to follow professional contacts and other passionate tech fans in this network.

Instead, I imagine a day when I’ll be able to go to TechCrunch.com and follow people who leave witty and intelligent comments — afterall, editorial commentary is at the heart of the modern web experience, but I have no way to track people who are offering up quality opinions. Why can’t I have my own social network built in to TechCrunch, or any other site? I want to be able to build up a reputation and following on my favorite sites — online stores, where I can meet other people who often review similar products, and share tastes in fashion and furnishings — content sites, where I can connect with people who share the same passions or provide commentary I want to follow — video sites, where I want to know when other people are rating new videos about topics I’m clearly interested based on my viewing profile.

Will I give up some amount of privacy for obtaining a relevant, useful, and engaging experience on my favorite brand and content sites? You bet. Everyone worries about privacy, but the beauty of offering value in this engaging experience is that most users will opt-in to allowing some form of behavior tracking. The younger generations, including the 20-something bucket that I fit in, and even those in their 30s, are thinking about privacy in new ways. If this weren’t the case, companies that rely on Facebook Connect sign on would never be in business. Zynga would have no data to iterate their addictive games on. Today’s web would be a different place. It’s a barter system. I give up a little bit of privacy, and I get added social and content relevancy value.

It’s important not to exploit user data, but this is not a story about exploitation, it’s about providing value to your user — obtaining deep behavior data, and providing that value in a new social experience on your website, is an upgraded experience for your user, and an extremely rewarding information and insight generator for the marketer and business.

This is why I’m especially proud of my company Badgeville’s latest product Social Fabric. It takes all of these features and bundles them up in a neat, yet extremely advanced and sophisticated offering, making it easy to add a real-time, deep social layer to any website. Because our company is a behavior company, we have built a revolutionary technology called The Behavior Graph, that tracks any behavior down to specifics of what that behavior is about (add a comment on blue socks made by a specific designer released in the last year and rated more than four stars) and the time(s) that behavior occured (blue socks reviewed at 12pm to 1pm and red socks reviewed within 1 week after this.) It’s quite challenging to explain the scope of relevance this technology brings to any web experience, but it’s so flexible that it can track behaviors that are important on a music site as easily as it can track behaviors that drive profits at an education property.

I don’t often like to talk specifically about what my company is doing on this blog, as I like to keep it more about the general web and innovative companies; however, Badgeville’s Social Fabric and The Behavior Graph are truely revolutionary social products, and one I think anyone who is involved in managing a website or digital property should at least be aware of. If you’d like more information on Social Fabric, visit the official website I put together for the product, and tune into TechCrunch Disrupt’s Livestream on Wednesday at 2pm PST, when our CEO Kris Duggan will be giving the first-ever live demo of Social Fabric on a popular beta customer site.

As a marketer, however, I sometimes find myself at a loss of words to describe a product. Being a journalist, there was always a challenge to find one way to explain each company and product that removed all buzzwords and explained the technology in a straightforward, logical way without the adjectives. Today, instead, I’m drafting press releases, and struggling to keep buzzwords out of them. Isn’t Gamification the epitome of win-win? Gamification with sponsored rewards — I’d call that a win-win-win situation.

Beyond #winning, the world that innovative companies live in lies deep in buzzword territory. You can say gamification, which admittedly sounds ridiculous, or you can say “using game mechanics and related psychological techniques to drive user behavior in non-game applications and experiences,” which admittedly sounds too long to use every time you simply want to reference the industry.

The challenges for those of us in the Gamification industry is to continue to prove the value of the vast techniques/mechanics that provide real business value. Buzzwords stop buzzing and start sticking once they’ve been validated by the mainstream. The exciting part for marketers in charge of getting the word out about early-stage technologies is pushing them past that buzz. Luckily for me, I see real examples of these techniques working extremely well every day. It’s only a matter of time before the business world, as a whole, realizes gamification is not a buzzword, but is a marketing and loyalty strategy that’s necessary for a modern user experience across retail, media, education, health and enterprise experiences.