» Mark Zuckerberg http://www.brandsareopinions.com Mon, 19 Dec 2011 04:41:42 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.3 So My Friend Marty Invited Me To Watch Lindsay Lohan Having Sex With A HOT Girl… http://www.brandsareopinions.com/so-my-friend-marty-invited-me-to-watch-lindsay-lohan-having-sex-with-a-hot-girl/ http://www.brandsareopinions.com/so-my-friend-marty-invited-me-to-watch-lindsay-lohan-having-sex-with-a-hot-girl/#comments Thu, 28 Oct 2010 11:26:42 +0000 Dennis Ryan http://www.brandsareopinions.com/?p=6556 Continue reading →]]> So did my friend Bill.  And Kevin.   And yes, Pam too.  All of which was odd since none of them ever demonstrated a pronounced pervy streak.  Certainly not one strong enough to compel them to schedule a pornshow at 10:21 am on a weekday. But that wasn’t the only odd Facebook Event invite I’ve received lately.

Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79Last week, a couple of guys I work with in the film industry seemed obsessed by CLIP OF HORRIFIC BUNGEE JUMPING ACCIDENT and they too, invited me to share their dark and depraved tastes via Facebook.  Separately, both wanted to know if I’d be attending their randomly-timed screening of the presumably gruesome clip: Yes?  No?  Maybe?

It doesn’t take an IT genius to realize someone’s hacking lots of Facebook accounts and sending out these titillating come-ons in hopes of having intrigued (or dumbfounded) people open the links out of pure curiosity.  This continual annoyance poses a far more immediate threat to Facebook than Jesse Eisenberg’s big screen interpretation of Mark Zuckerberg’s evil nerdery.  But what really gets me is that somewhere, somebody is trying to write the most compelling, come-on headlines to lure the unaware and all they can come up with is sex and violence.  They don’t even have the creativity to mash those two into something more singular like say “HORRIFIC Linsday Lohan Sex Tape Accident.”

“Wolf Blitzer Attends G-8 Summit in Mime” “Baby Pitches No Hitter” “Jimmie Johnson’s NASCAR Launch off the USS Enterprise”…these are things I want to see.  Seriously, use some imagination, account hackers.

Even as I finish this post, another one just came in from my friend Mitch, inviting me to the event “SHOCKING McDonald’s Video.”  It’s on today, at 9:51 pm.  And somehow, I bet it involves Hamburglar…never trusted his creepy little laugh.

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By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79

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]]> http://www.brandsareopinions.com/so-my-friend-marty-invited-me-to-watch-lindsay-lohan-having-sex-with-a-hot-girl/feed/ 0 Facebook Privacy Settings Confusing You? There’s an App for That. http://www.brandsareopinions.com/facebook-privacy-settings-confusing-you-theres-an-app-for-that/ http://www.brandsareopinions.com/facebook-privacy-settings-confusing-you-theres-an-app-for-that/#comments Wed, 19 May 2010 11:41:01 +0000 Dennis Ryan http://www.brandsareopinions.com/?p=5436 Continue reading →]]> Of course there is.  There’s an app for damn near everything.  So given the rising chorus of complaints over Facebook changing it’s privacy settings with the onset of Open Graph, it’s only natural that someone would step into the breech with a digital solution.

That someone is ReclaimPrivacy.org, a shareware app written by a JavaScript developer who takes his own online privacy seriously, hiding his name and only offering that his full-time gig is running Olark: a lightweight app for websites that provides online chat capabilities.  On Reclaim Privacy’s simple page, they publish their full privacy policy:

“Our privacy policy is not long:

  • we never see your Facebook data
  • we never share your personal information”

Impressive.  Anyway, once you drag the app to your browser menubar, you open Facebook’s privacy settings then run the program.  Using a simple Red-Yellow-Green warning system, it suggests where you might want to change your settings.  The whole process is remarkably easy.  And reassuring, even if the cow is already out of the barn, so to speak.

Facebook has been under withering scrutiny lately as people rebel against founder Mark Zuckerberg’s silly statement that ‘privacy is no longer a social norm.’  He’s right, but he’s a fool for announcing that.

But 400 million Facebook members who don’t understand that nothing is free in this world and that hosting the world’s largest social party runs up enormous costs are being equally foolish, or at least willfully ignorant.  Facebook’s only asset is data, data we all agreed to sign over when we signed up.  For an insightful assessment of Facebook’s privacy follies, read this article B.L. Ochman wrote for Advertising Age.

If marketers learn anything from Zuckerberg’s troubles, it should be the singular value heavy web users place on transparency.  Because that can be so easily abused.

By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79

]]> http://www.brandsareopinions.com/facebook-privacy-settings-confusing-you-theres-an-app-for-that/feed/ 0 Opinions Create The True Future Value of Facebook http://www.brandsareopinions.com/opinions-create-the-true-future-value-of-facebook/ http://www.brandsareopinions.com/opinions-create-the-true-future-value-of-facebook/#comments Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:21:27 +0000 Dennis Ryan http://collective-thinking.com/?p=2659 Continue reading →]]> I recently had my consciousness raised regarding Facebook.  On this blog some months back, I wrote a surprisingly popular post wondering whether this social network would become the Members Only jacket of the early 21st Century.  Once the novelty wore off, would the investment of time required outweigh the benefits of all this easy connectedness?  In hindsight, the ‘Members Only’ tag could be what drew readers, but I’m a bit sketchy on my SEO knowledge to really determine that.

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Writing in the July issue of Wired magazine, Fred Vogelstein outlines how this aggressively market-capped, yet-to-make-a-profit social network aims to create value, and it requires insuring the benefits of this easy connection platform always outweigh the time investment. As it stands, over 20% of all internet users are on Facebook, spending an average of twenty minutes a day there.  Mark Zuckerberg and company aim to further embed Facebook as the center of all online activity.  

Why?  Because everything we do there is trackable.  And owned solely by Facebook. Every connection we make, every opinion we express, every last ‘Which type of canned vegetable are you?’ quiz we take and share produces data which they alone own.  None of it will ever show up in other web browsing search engines.  And since Facebook is the one place online where people regularly use their real names to share real thoughts with real friends about real topics, that data has remarkably robust human context.  By comparison, Google’s data is largely limited to search history.

The ramifications of monetizing all this contextual data could be staggering financially.  If this type of deeply human Facebook information informed even a tiny percentage of the incomprehensible 3.6 trillion banner ads placed in 2008, they would stand to make…well, technically speaking it would amount to tanker ships of cash (I know even less about finance than I do about SEO).

We live in a world where opinion has a mass channel greater than TV, radio and print combined.  We work in a world where brands truly are opinions, and thus bound to the vagaries of fluctuating public consideration. For Facebook to have exclusive access to untold hours of that opinion provides them with a competitive advantage that borders on the scary.

I doubt Google, Bing, Dogpile, IceRocket, Collecta and dozens of other search engines will be friending them anytime soon…

by Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79
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