Addendum: Tidbits from 10-24-07 MeetUp

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Megan Keane

Online Community Manager, TechSoup

435 Brannan St., Suite 100

San Francisco, CA 94107

Voice: 415-633-9474

Email: [address removed]

 

Hi everyone—

 

We had a smaller group last night, but still a great discussion and presentation from Trisha Okubo who gave us a sneak peek at the new Facebook eBay app (I’m looking forward to the new and improved version in just a week or two). Here are some tidbits from last night’s discussion—enjoy!

 

Thanks and see you next month.

 

Best,

 

Megan

 

--Round robin/check-in. Members present were:

 

Susan Tenby, Techsoup

Megan Keane, Techsoup

Scott Moore, Schwab Learning

Gail Williams, the Well/TableTalk/Salon.com

Trisha Okuba, Ebay

JJ Cash, Religious Witness and looking to start political party

Vikki, Executive Networks and looking to start political party

Eric, interested in online community

Susan Emerson

 

Presentation of new ebay application and discussion

 

--application works in manner of FB w/ news streams of items you’re watching/bidding on, experiment—not sure how ecommerce behavior will happen on online social networks, no questionable or “adult” items, possible revenue stream for affiliate ads

 

--can see items of friends who also have ebay ap. (“community”)—individuals decide who sees how much of what you’re selling/watching/etc. also option to see item bidding on but no info. on bid (can brag about it, but they can’t compete), can add items to your friends watch list

 

--filters by friend or search term, can ask someone about item if not a friend

 

--wish list for the future: have RSS feed, ability to add favorite merchants, some kind of embedded group, reputation system (which has been such an important factor in existing ebay community)

 

--privacy implications—need to make it clear what opting into w/ application, FB often not obvious/clear about implications of applications being added, Flickr one system w/ very sophisticated privacy rules

 Facebook has very sophisticated/granular settings and rules for both profile privacy and apps privacy. What specifically do you think is not clear when opting into / adding an application?

The default is to go to a page about adding the application first. It might be more clear to users that they are opting in by first being sent to a page that explains about the application and an option there to add application.

--many apps primarily serve purpose of information gathering

 This is inaccurate, and against our TOS. Apps or anyone for that matter can't scrape information and are allowed to only access relevant information for the purposes of furthering interaction between people in the social graph.

 

Apps that have violated our TOS have been shut down.

 

--BlogFriends, neighborhoods two cool FB aps to check out

 

--discussion of role/benefit of groups and networks on different platforms

 

--main reason for groups on FB is way to spam large group of people; LinkedIn different, more about allowing others in group access to larger network

 This is also inaccurate. First, there is a cap on the number of people you can message in a group. So if the group has more than say 1,000 members, you can't message all of them. Also, we take spam very seriously, as it's also against our TOS, and any groups that do that are also shut down.

By “spam”, we meant more that it’s a way to blast/send a message to a large group of people.

--networks on FB different—once you’re in, hard to get out, problematic to be at friend-level of permissions with others in your network, need for a “dummy” network to see how others have used networks

 This is also inaccurate. It's not hard to get out of a network, the only restriction is switching regional (city) networks too often. Also, being friends with someone is independent of your network. You can also select which networks are granted more permission to view your information.

--is there a network out there that can deal with major life changes or is the solution always to migrate to another online community? Will that mean there’s always multiple online social networks

 

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Megan Keane

Online Community Manager, TechSoup

435 Brannan St., Suite 100

San Francisco, CA 94107

Voice: 415-633-9474

Email: [address removed]