Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

It seems that all the news this week as swirled around fighting. Technology such as Twitter was used to report actual terrorism. There was also a great deal of turf warfare as the cell phones duke it out to be the next big thing and the big web giants fight for control of the open social graph.

What's Been Happening This Week?

Cell Phone Wars
The iPhone is feeling some heat from all sides of the board. The Nokia N97 has been described as the "perfect Facebook phone", with it's beautiful 16:9 wide screen, full keypad, and impressive battery life. Also this week, the second Google Android phone launched. And while the iPhone is just starting to offer shopping tools like Amazon for the iPhone, it still pales in comparison to Shop Savvy and barcode reading technology.

The Social Web Cracks Open
Facebook Connect arrives and many rejoice at what it promises to do, which is to bring the power of the Facebook social graph to the rest of the online world. While some promising announcements came during their launch, like an alliance with Digg and Hulu, there were other disappointing marketing efforts that didn't seem to make use of the data in a beneficial way.

This Facebook Connect business brings up two valid questions:

1. Will Facebook data ever be useful enough to become a relavant tool for social browsing on properties like Amazon on iTunes? It relies on there being a more useful information tied to our interests and our relationships with people. I want to get wine recommendations from my wine friends when I visit Wine.com. I want music recommendations from my music geeks on Amazon. The web needs to be a great big party host.

2. Is Facebook ready to be the center for our social data? While many are arguing whether it's going to be OpenID or Facebook Connect that emerges victorious, I am wondering if either one of them are ready. With the great deal of vulnerability that has been show in recent Facebook hacks, are they ready become that important... to house our single online identity.

One thing is for sure, the decentralized, distributed social web is coming. Are you ready?

Marta Strickland