Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

What's Facebook Been Up To?
Two supposedly big updates happened in the last few weeks on Facebook...

First, there was launch of new privacy options. Which I will call "much ado about nothing". The new privacy settings haven't even launched yet, and still the blog world makes furious guesses about how much the users will like or hate. Knowing Facebook's track record, I guess there is reason to fear user backlash, especially if an unintuitive interface means users begin blasting their photos and status updates to the public world. But I honestly suspect that most won't even notice the change.

Next, there was the launch of embeddable Facebook Fan boxes. Which also was a bit disappointing:

"While it allows you to show off your community of friends (by showcasing a number of how many fans you have and thumbnails of 10 random friends) it only shows the brands stream. It doesn't show the full stream of what your fans are talking about. So its like putting a promo tile of yourself talking about yourself to other people. Its a step in the right direction but I wish Facebook just had a robust api so that users and fan pages could aggregate all the activity how they please. Pulling photos, comments, links, videos, that they AND/OR fans have posted on the fan page." - Dwayne Raupp

Let's Do The Numbers
Some things are up and some things are down. All fingers point to MySpace, when it was revealed that ads spending on social networks is expected to drop 3% this year. Not all social networks are doing quite as badly. Facebook is growing by over 700,000 users per day, although much of that is attributed to growth in grandparents not high schoolers. Facebook is getting older!! And while Twitter is back on track with it's growth, it has now been surpassed (along with a few others) by Microsoft's search engine Bing, which garnered 49.57 million unique visitors in its first month.

Marta Strickland