Caught this on Techcrunch today and it’s simply badass. Quite a nice follow up from the NFC-enabled iPhone news and shows the sort of creativity you can have with this technology.
The following is a product of the famous Facebook ‘24hr Hackathons‘ where everyone does an all-nighter to come up with new and wonderful things like Facebook Chat, webcam uploads and now….Keg Presence.
Keg Presence is an application especially for the staff at Facebook HQ in Palo Alto, CA which is hooked up to the office beer tap .
It notifies employees when the keg is empty or what type of beer is currently available.
But the really cool part is that employees swipe their RFID badge when they get there, triggering the camera on the iMac, which takes a photo of them pouring beer and updates their Facebook status (below).
UPDATE 11.30pm GMT : It has now topped $4 million in 36 hours
Twitter and Facebook proving they can actually be used to save the world.
The American Red Cross have been raising money for the earthquake disaster in Haiti and the tweet above has just been put out by the State Department member Jared Cohen.
The New York Times have just said that Facebook is reporting 1500 status updates PER minute containing the word Haiti.
It was like GQ was reading my mind. Check out the selection below taken from Eighteen People You’re Scared Of On Facebook, I’ve picked the ones that match the people I know.
I first tried the Facebook Advertising Network a few days after it launched. The first thing that hits you is the targeting ability, it’s absolutely insane, think about all the personal information on your Facebook profile – age, workplace, marital status, fan pages, birthday, all that and more can be targeted for advertising.
This is why I think one day soon we could see Facebook develop into a mobile advertising network especially when they get involved in location, not even Admob can target that good.
I recommend you try Facebook Advertising for yourself, even if it’s just to mess around with the targeting settings. It’s fascinating watching the audience estimates go up and down as you add and remove more criteria. If you own a blog, Twitter page, LinkedIn profile or any website at all and have always wanted to try it, now you can with this $50 voucher. Give it a go, what have you got to lose?
This credit only works for first time users of Facebook Advertising, more instructions about what to do with it here.
$50 Facebook Advertising Coupon Code: 66KT-39T1-F56K-5N9N
Expiry date: Must be used up by March 2010.
You can choose either CPM or CPC with the ability to set daily budgets, allowing you to stretch that voucher out over the course a few weeks. Or you can throw caution to the wind and blow it all in one day. And why not?
My Campaign
Check out my recent campaign for this blog using the same voucher. I decided to target Facebook users that were between the age of 20-49, and worked at advertising agencies and tech companies. This equalled 71, 260 users. Cool hey?
So how did my campaign do?
The whole point of applications is to enable functionality that isn’t available in mobile browsers at this present time. It’s not often you see a app playing second fiddle to it’s WAP counterpart, especially for a service like Facebook.
If you look at the iPhone Facebook App, it’s rich in features and adds functionality which isn’t possible on the mobile site. Things like chat, full screen images and photo uploads make it a much more enhanced experience worth the 2mb download.
However the Blackberry Application is a big let down, in fact it’s such a weak experience I find myself using the WAP site for my daily social networking needs. The Facebook mobile site is one of the slickest you’ll see, it’s very simple and has a almost flawless user experience that works across hundreds of different handsets.
The only area where I think the Blackberry App wins is the notification system, a little icon appears on your homescreen when there is some activity related to you. Nice.
After speaking to all my friends with a Blackberry it turns out that no one uses the app, they all find it easier to log onto the WAP site. What about you?
Facebook have launched a new feature that’s bound to get brands drooling – products can now be sold directly in news streams.
Once users have signed up to ‘become a fan’ they will receive status updates in their news feed from brands just as they normally would, however those updates now have the interactivity of a store front.
One company already running offers is The Limited. Fans of the woman’s clothing retailer will see a offer for 30% discount off their infinity scarf, exclusive to Facebook.
Users can pick the colour and enter their address and payment details right there and then. There is also the ability to share the offer with friends.
Head of over and test it out on The Limited fan page and see for yourself. Click here.
You’ll need to click on the ‘play’ button on the status update (similar to videos) first to expand the area into the shopping mode. This is a smart move by Facebook to keep the news feed from getting taken over by large shopping widgets.
Question for you – would you like to know who visits your Facebook profile without them knowing? Course you would. I’m sure the majority of people would love a feature like that, I even think many would even pay for it.
Well there is such a application available. It not only allows you to see what friends of yours have been looking at your profile but also those who aren’t even in your friends list. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen the secret application with my own eyes and tried it out.
I know that such apps are totally against the Facebook Developer Policy, after all, how much fun would Facebook be if you couldn’t stalk in total anonymity? What I didn’t know is that this sort of stuff was possible with the Facebook API, but these loopholes apparently exist.
Of course there are a ton of those crappy ‘profile visitor’ applications where you can see who visits your profile…as long as they have the same app too, which makes it completely pointless. This application requires only you to have it installed.
If everyone could do this it would dramatically change user behaviour on Facebook, people would use far more caution when browsing through photo albums of friends of friends or people they barely know. It would basically ruin a large part of what makes the site good. But right now for a select few that have the app, it’s probably amazing.
It’s called Footstamp and only has a few hundred actual users. This is because it has a closed invite system (i.e you need to know the developer, if you add it you’ll just get a error page) which is a smart move because it keeps it controlled and less likely to get shut down (Google searches brings up nothing about it). More info in the Facebook Footstamp group. Read More
Sometimes it’s a fine line between appearing innovative and just plain pissing people off..
A couple of weeks ago, Ikea managed to get tons of praise for their latest Facebook campaign which allowed users to win furniture by tagging their name onto the desired item. Westfield Australia however have done just the opposite, they’ve managed to annoy users enough to push them into creating their hate groups related to the promotion. That’s pretty special.
Westfield created a Facebook application to promote its $10,000 gift card prize draw. The application updates the user’s status with a Westfield branded message “All I Want for Christmas is a Westfield Gift Card“, with some extra copy thrown in stating the user has now gone into the prize draw to win the card. This was a viral hit straight away.
Over 369,000 Facebook users have installed the application and updated their status in just 5 days, great news right? Yes of course, just 10k to get 369,000 people engaging with your brand sounds like a steal…but the promotion has attracted a large amount of backlash from other users.
As you can imagine 369,000+ people updating their status in a country with 6.5 million users is bound to spam quite a few news feeds. What is the natural course of action for all these angry people? Yep, create and join a Facebook group.
There are now a total of 25+ anti-Westfield Gift Card groups, which is amazing considering the length of time this has been running. The largest group called ”If All You Want For Christmas Is A Westfield Gift Card, I Don’t Want To Know” now has over 4000 members but not all group names are that lovely, here are my favourites…
(Click on the video above to view)
Absolutely love this Facebook campaign by Ikea, great to see such a big company do something a little bit funky.
To promote their new store opening in Malmo, Ikea set-up a Facebook profile for Gordon Gustavsson, the store’s manager. Gustavsson (or the agency) uploaded pictures of the stores showrooms to his photo album and any ‘friends’ who tagged the products with their names won them!
If you’re familiar with Facebook you know that tagged items then appear in other peoples news feeds, basically turning the social networking site into one big word of mouth promotion.
[Agency: Forsman & Bodenfors]
[Via Creativity Online]
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the Orange Friend-O-Meter campaign promoting the Motorola Blur, it used Facebook Connect to pull information from your profile to quiz you about your friends. The site was really nicely done and added another dimension to advertising by making it more personal and fun.
The guys at Fox have gone for the same approach in their latest promotion site for the upcoming 10th anniversary edition of Fight Club the movie, this time using a video mash up.
Click on the image to try it out
Ok that headline is almost true..
HotPrints is the printing service which allows Facebook and Bebo users to easily pull photos from their profiles to make printed photo albums. Their competitive price point ($2.99 per album) has made them something of a hit with over 20,000 books printed this year.
This month HotPrints have started a advertiser supported program where books will be free of charge (1 per month!) and come with removable full page inserts from sponsors.
Unfortunately no ads will be printed directly alongside your photos, as that would have been simply awesome, imagine your parents wedding anniversary sponsored by Tesco. Read More
If you’ve seen the Mr T Snickers TV adverts you’l know he has a massive dislike for nut-less men, he’ll do whatever it takes to get his message across, including trying to kill them with a tank. Well now he will even ring their mobiles telling them to sort their act out.
Snickers have launched a free automated Mr T prank call feature on the Getsomenuts.tv site. You put in your mates mobile number and select a reason why they need nuts, such as ‘He’s a tightwad, bad dancer, ditches the lads’ etc. Your friend then gets a phone call from a angry, catchprase spitting Mr T.
Before the phonecall, an SMS is sent to your friend warning them about the call along with a link to the .mobi site if you want to make Mr T harass your friends whilst on the move. Read More
How To Spread Fear About Google In Less Than 3 Minutes 
