Facebook Funny Money
Mar 1st
Funny money of the past.
Micropayments have been the holy grail of the internet for years. Finally, companies like Apple and Amazon seem to be profiting where many others have tried and failed. Apparently, Facebook thinks that they stand to make a profit through micropayments as well. According to Facebook’s developer blog, Facebook is now entering the beta phase of their Facebook Credits program. This program allows users to purchase virtual currency from Facebook that would allow them to purchase virtual goods in participating Facebook applications, such as Farmville.
Facebook touts this as a great opportunity for developers. Read the rest of this entry »
BetterMe.com: Honest Feedback, Anonymously
Feb 22nd
Give or get honest feedback anonymously with BetterMe.com.
One common problem in businesses is not knowing what coworkers or employees think about a subject. Sometimes the subject is fairly mundane, so you can just ask. When the subject is more sensitive though, either you or the people you intend to ask might be hesitant about discussing the subject openly. In the past, you might have asked people to write anonymous comments and put them in a comment box, but that still left many ways that you might find out who said what. Luckily, we now have a new online service that we can use instead: BetterMe.com.
BetterMe.com addresses these uncomfortable situations from both sides of the issue. It allows people to provide unsolicited, anonymous feedback and it allows people to solicit feedback from groups of people, who can then provide feedback anonymously. Read the rest of this entry »
Need to Rate Everything? Rate Your Church!
Feb 21st
Let’s go church shopping!
People are obsessed with rating products and services online. If you can never get enough and want to extend your ratings to churches, I found an article on ReadWriteWeb about a new site called ChurchRater.com that is dedicated to rating and reviewing churches. When I saw the site I immediately thought: landmine. Many people take religion very seriously because it is a defining part of their lives. And after looking through the site a bit, I could see that some people did feel quite strongly about certain churches and about the mission of the site itself. So, I wondered whose idea the site was. Read the rest of this entry »
PleaseRobMe.com: Social Network Cautions
Feb 17th
Many people don’t worry about how much information they share on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Foursquare, etc. With people entering more detailed information, including geolocation data, maybe they should. At least that’s what Barry Borsboom, Boy van Amstel and Frank Groeneveld of PleaseRobMe.com believe.
They drove that point home by creating PleaseRobMe.com, which shows the most recent Foursquare checkins that were posted to Twitter as potential burglary targets. They stated that the purpose of the site is not to help burglars to pick potential targets. They created the site because they believe that giving away your location on social networks doesn’t just tell people where you are. Read the rest of this entry »
More Education, Less Ad Clicking
Feb 16th
More education means being less click happy.
A few days ago, Chitika Research put out some interesting data comparing the relation between online advertising CTR (click through rates) in comparison to college education. According to their findings, the higher the percentage of college graduates, the lower the CTR for the population. Their conclusion from that finding was that advertisers who target more educated demographics should do a better job of making their ads “worthwhile.” They also recommended that “…this is an opportunity to push the industry towards the idea of content first, sales pitch second, even among advertisements.” Read the rest of this entry »
