I got on CSPAN… sort of. The real story here is that actual major news outlets like CSPAN are covering major political events like the Democratic National Convention and showing tweets from real people in real time right on their website. If you have a Twitter account your tweet can show up right on the website. This reinforces that the average Joe’s thoughts are becoming part of the news discovery and delivery process.

Is twitter becoming the next big back channel for live streaming peoples thoughts & comments at political events? It sure looks that way based on what C-Span is doing. I commend them for their transparency and bravery in this issue. Well done!

You can see the tweets as they roll live tonight during Obama’s big speech. Go Here.

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Normally, your search efforts involve one engine or another. You go to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live Search for the general Web, and perhaps photos, etc. You visit Digg, Reddit, or Yahoo Buzz for cool links. YouTube, DailyMotion and others for videos. The list goes on. But in the event that the default dimensions of your Web browsing experience gets dull, tedious and in need of a change (this is the moment of change, after all!), there is Widexplorer to satisfy a new leaning.

Sporting black, a dozen categorical hotlinks, Widexplorer is a simple thing. No miracles being performed there. Nonetheless, its presentation is the kicker. Click any keyword below the search bar to get a grip on what that means.

Facebook continued tweaking the News Feed in the redesigned Facebook this morning with 2 interesting changes:

• Status Updates now always occupy the top three story spots


• “All Stories” has been renamed to the more exciting “Live Feed”

The first three status updates also do not have the “show me more/less about this person” feedback options. It appears that Facebook is simply taking the three most recent updates without trying to prioritise.

Many users have missed the Status Updates panel on the right side of the old profile, and will be glad to see it being given more prominence in the new design. Whether this is a permanent change or just an experiment remains to be seen.

It would appear; but this is not officially confirmed that Aaron Sorkin of Hollywood fame is supposedly working on a Facebook movie. What the movie would be about is anyone’s guess. I only write about this to put a more scrutinizing lens on what many bloggers are reporting (and it appears quite blindly).

There has been a facebook group started: Aaron Sorkin and The Facebook Movie (3000+ members) and it would appear that the photos and all the responses are coming directly from Aaron Sorkin. Either this is legit or a great hoax. We can’t confirm either. If it is in fact true, this would be the earliest buzz building campaign that I have ever seen on a social network.

According to Aaron: “Welcome. I’m Aaron Sorkin. I understand there are a few other people using Facebook pages under my name–which I find more flattering than creepy–but this is me. I don’t know how I can prove that but feel free to test me.” “I honestly don’t know how this works, which is why I’m here. If anyone has any questions I’d be happy to answer them as best I can. If anyone has any comments I’m glad to listen. And if anyone has any Facebook stories I think they might be helpful.”

After spending some time looking at the photos and all of Aaron’s responses I would say this is possibly legit or a brilliant hoax. Only time will flush out the truth. If only Aaron would record a video and put it in the group then we would know it was him. Anything short of that leaves it to speculation. I won’t believe it until I see a video from Sorkin in the facebook group explains what he is doing.

All these other bloggers are falling for the story. I am not a believer just yet. It is relatively easy to fake who you are on facebook if you want to.

The interesting thing is that you can’t see Aaron’s actual page or request friendship with him. I have never seen this before for any member on facebook (It is entirely possible that he might have his privacy settings dialed all the way down). Here is the supposed location of his profile should be based on the facebook ID: http://www.new.facebook.com/s.php?k=100000080&id=751644765 The creator of the group is Ian Reichbach and it would appear that he has many friends in the LA area and the movie industry. I am waiting for a response from him regarding the group. Worthy of note is that he does not have a single friend that is an employee of facebook.

It is not surprising that there would be an idea for a facebook movie. Facebook is an international phenomenon. The culture change that facebook has facilitated just might be worthy of telling in movie form.

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Selling management on the value of investing time and resources into building an online community using social media is a challenge, and you need all of the support you can get. One way to convey the value of corporate social media participation is to leverage published statistics about who’s using social media platforms and how they are using it. There have been a host of new studies published recently that you can use to help make the case for your own company’s involvement:

The Society for New Communications Research recently published their report titled, “New Media, New Influencers & Implications for Public Relations” that provides several case studies illustrating how social media has benefited organizations like the American Red Cross, the Mayo Clinic and Quicken Loans. Among their findings, “Social media is rapidly becoming a core channel for disseminating information. Fifty-seven percent of this group of early social media adopters reported that social media tools are becoming more valuable to their activities, while 27% reported that social media is a core element of their communications strategy.”

One of the most popular studies is the Universal McCann’s Social Media Research Wave 3 research report, which looked at 17,000 Internet users in 29 countries. According to this study, social media can have a dramatic impact on your brand’s reputation. “34% post opinions about products and brands on their blog and 36% think more positively about companies that have blogs.”

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Popular Facebook game Mob Wars has recently been rumored to be the most profitable app on Facebook. While that will never be known for sure, one thing is clear: Mob Wars is making a lot of cash. Probably in the tens of thousands of US dollars per day. How?

One large reason: Mob Wars has baked incentivized CPA offers from Super Rewards directly into the game, and expertly tuned its virtual economy to drive offer conversions without significantly imbalancing the economy or damaging game play. (Mob Wars also works closely with CPA monetization firm Offerpal Media.)

Super Rewards has largely remained quiet on the PR front to date, but the company is working with many of the top developers on Facebook to monetize their games. Super Rewards partners include Mob Wars, Knighthood, Premier Football, and several of the top apps in Zynga’s family of games, including Texas HoldEm Poker and YoVille. The company has built a 14 person team across its Vancouver headquarters, New York office, and soon to be opened San Francisco office.

We recently spent some time with Super Rewards CEO and Co-founder Jason Bailey and President Adam Caplan to learn more about how the company is working with Mob Wars and other leading apps and social games to make real money.

Jason, how does Super Rewards help social app and game developers make money?

What we do exceptionally well is understanding the nuances of all the games we work with. We work closely with developers to tweak and balance their game play and economies around their virtual currencies. Developers come in making $100 a day and we can take them up to $1000 a day in short order.

How detailed do you get?

We provide a broad range of services, everything from pricing specific items to consulting. Some developers have experience with their economies in current or past apps and want our help putting offers in front of their users. Others come to us while their game is still in alpha and really value our input.

What’s the most important thing developers need to do to make money with CPA offers?

The most important thing is balancing your economy properly. You should support all kinds of players well, while remembering that your hardcore users will generate 90% of your revenue.

You want to make sure users want to obtain and spend points, while preserving the quality of the game play. For example, in Mob Wars, in order to replenish your health you can either wait for the system to revitalize you or you can “go to the Godfather” and earn some “favor points.” (see right)

So how do you measure performance?

The core metric we use is dollars per click. We hope our developers can get 25% of their daily active users through a Super Rewards page at some point. Of those, if the economy is balanced correctly, you should see a 40-50% click through rate, and ultimately a net 8-10% conversion rate. Developers get about $1.00-$1.50/conversion for US users, but less for international users. We’re lucky to get $0.06/conversion in China, but we have games operating in Europe and other parts of Asia at $0.25 and up.

So assuming all of a developer’s traffic is US traffic, the developer could see up to $83 per day per thousand DAUs. However, on an average basis across all geographies, we are about half that number. It goes without saying that there is a wide distribution around the average based on quality of app and balance of virtual currency economy.

What kind of apps are doing the best?

Games! Gifting and poking apps don’t do as well. Games that do the best are ones in which the players want to be on top of the leaderboard, collect items, or play games of chance.

Also, keep in mind at that a majority of the revenue generated per user is generated early in the lifetime of the users’ interaction with the games. People spend money developing their characters, climbing the leader board, and unlocking new elements of the game. Once their character is strong, they have many prizes, and have unlocked all the levels - naturally there is less desire to complete offers and pay. It is those top guys though that motivate the little guys to climb and thus spend.

So those numbers scale well at the smaller DAUs, but when apps have 500k DAU the formula gets more complicated. That being said, there are PLENTY of apps making $6,000 a day on various platforms. But no single app that I know of making $60,000 a day consistently.

However, we’re just in the beginning. We’re starting to see bigger players move in to the space with higher quality apps. I expect to see some very high quality games released in the next few months.

And some people think our stuff looks hokey, but we purposely make it match the look and feel of the game, like in Mob Wars. That is just how Facebook games look.

Right. So, how much does the social network context affect monetization potential?

The social factor is definitely important in driving games where there is pride or ego involved in being on the top of the list. However, the main reason our partner apps are doing well is entertainment. Casual MMO’s outside of social networks would do just as well. Social networks are just a great way to grow quickly, and play against real friends and family instead of random people you meet in the lobby.

Thanks Jason. Any final thoughts?

We are very bullish on the space. We’ll be moving into other areas like casual games and web games soon.

Our 200 developers love Super Rewards, but they don’t want us to talk about it. But we’ve been optimizing our system over the last year, and are now ready for prime time.

If you are more interested in what your friends are up to then what photos they are uploading and what their relationship status, you may be pleased to hear that Facebook has upgraded your friends’ statuses. Now rather than just showing recent friend activities, the most recent status updates of your friends are now displayed at the top of the news feed.

It’s clear that statuses have become one of the most important components of Facebook and many have called it a Twitter killer. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an increasing emphasis on statuses as Facebook moves forward. One interesting component about this new layout is how the statuses are updated instantaneously whereas the main news feed content is only updated periodically.

This contrasts FriendFeed where every load of the page presents new data among your friends as the site is updated in real-time. Facebook has tried to automatically filter information for users to try to select the most relevant information. It will be interesting to see if Facebook ever shifts this strategy to display more information.

This is a simple change but it most definitely highlights the importance of statuses in Facebook.

In what seems to be the worst idea in the history of television, West Wing writer Aaron Sorkin has his sight set on Facebook, claiming he’s interested in making a movie about the popular social networking site. He doesn’t understand Facebook, he says to BBC, but he’s ready to learn, thus creating his own Facebook account.

It’s not entirely clear whether he wants to create a movie about the creators of Facebook (boring) or the actual users of the service (more boring), but neither sound like a good idea. Well, unless you want to watch developers do their thing for an hour and a half. Or people choosing who they’re going to vampire bite next.

Sorkin himself sounds really enthusiastic and full of ideas about the project. “I honestly don’t know how this works, which is why I’m here,” he said. And if you did, Aaron, you wouldn’t be making a movie about it.

In other, more interesting news, Facebook’s All Stories feed is now called Live Feed, at least in my account (I’ve switched to the new design a while ago and I love it). Other than the name change, I don’t see any differences between the old and the new version, except for the fact that Facebook altogether has been very shaky in the last couple of days, with chat and various feeds going on and off all the time.

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Facebook will be holding its first Developer Garage “Connect Edition” next week in Palo Alto. Developers will be able to learn more about how Facebook Connect can be used to let users connect their Facebook identity to a third party site, find friends there, and share info back to Facebook.

While Connect is still in beta, this will be one of the first chances developers have to see early versions of Facebook Connect implementations. Here are the details:

• When: Wednesday, September 3rd


• Time: 6:30 PM- Midnight


• Where: Blue Chalk Café - 630 Ramona St, Palo Alto, CA

For more, check out the event page.

Caroline McCarthy got the scoop on a Facebook movie which is in the works. The only reference to the movie is a group which was created by Aaron Sorkin, the creator of The West Wing and A Few Good Men, and Sorkin’s assistant. Is the group real? It seems pretty real considering Aaron’s claim to have no understanding of how Facebook works at all.

Aaron Sorkin prompts users to test to see if he is real in the group’s description. The only problem with accomplishing what would otherwise be an elementary task is that there is no way to friend or send a message to Sorkin. Not sure how he got to have that setting but my guess is it’s via the privacy settings. The only other person that I know of that doesn’t have a friend request in the directory is Mark Zuckerberg.

I wonder if this movie will be created in a similar way to The Pirates of Silicon Valley which highlighted the start of Microsoft and Apple. The only difference between that movie and the apparent Facebook movie? The Pirates of Silicon Valley had two companies that actually went public. Facebook has yet to do that. However the movie is written, this definitely sounds like an interesting beginning!