After much speculation surrounding the Facebook phone, the social networking giant unveiled Home a few weeks ago.  The app installs a new home screen onto your Android phone and more fully integrates Facebook into its functionality; indeed according to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Home is a step towards designing a phone around people rather than apps. Home’s official site reads, “From the moment you turn it on, you see a steady stream of friends’ posts and photos on your home screen. Upfront notifications and quick access to your essentials mean you’ll never miss a moment. And when you download Facebook Messenger, you can keep chatting with friends when you’re using other apps.”

To date however reviews have been fairly poor. At the time of writing, Facebook Home has an average rating of just 2.3 on Google Play, with 9,261 of  17,742 reviews giving it just 1 star – and given that Facebook has had five weeks since the product launched, improvements have yet to be made to the service to boost its appeal. In fairness to Facebook, if the short lived outrage caused by switching users to Timeline is anything to go by we can probably get a good indication of how opinion could shift on Home once a few tweaks are made.

Thinking in the context of mobile advertising which I wrote about last month, could this be the type of game changer the industry needs? Though nothing was mentioned at the Home launch in relation to advertising, certainly this will add a new dimension to mobile ads. The information Facebook has the potential of accessing through Home is certainly appealing (or worrying depending on which side of the fence you’re sitting) and could provide opportunities for mobile advertising to be more genuinely native than Facebook currently claims it is. Additionally, it provides an opportunity for location-based targeting to appear in a less interfering manner. Thinking of how the chat heads and notifications features on Home work it’s not hard to imagine targeted ads popping up on screens without users having to navigate away from what they are currently doing, and more importantly allowing them to swipe it away if it isn’t of interest.

Obviously this opens up a raft of privacy issues. While a majority of consumers agree that their “definition of privacy is changing due to the internet and social media”, an even higher number say they would like greater control over their personal information and have the power to choose when they exchange it. Presumably Facebook plans to stick to its tried and tested approach, wait until it has achieved the scale needed to ensure users won’t leave before monetising Home. Still, when they do let’s hope they get it right.

What do you think?  Is Facebook Home going to make mobile advertising more relevant and targeted?  Will the move to a dedicated phone prove to be seamless?  Will anyone actually use it?

Once upon a time, most of us went about our online activities in a relatively care-free way. But then, as an explosion of liking and tweeting collided with a realisation that lots of our e-activities are really quite visible, many started to worry about the potentially indelible nature of their online footprints.

In the 10s, ever more intelligent use of our online data has added an extra element of concern into the mix: for many consumers, Big Data is a Big Problem. The vulnerability of sharing information with third parties has become more widely publicised and many – if certainly not all – consumers are gaining greater awareness about the extent to which companies can access and indeed harness their data.

As we write, about 60% say they are worried about who can access their data and that they would be interested in an online store which deliberately did not keep a record of their previous purchases. The desire for greater control is still more profound; 9 in 10 who say they are more concerned about privacy than they were five years ago want more control over how their personal information is used by companies.

It seems inevitable, then, that many of us will want to get smarter and savvier in how we conduct ourselves online. And here we can note the emergence of tools such as DeleteMe – an app in the US which offers an easy and simple way for consumers to keep their private information private. Acting as the online investigator, it searches some of the largest databases in the US to find and remove any details about the consumer in question.

The problem, though, is its price tag: $129 for a one-year subscription. Certainly, some of the most nervous surfers might think this a worthwhile investment but we have to question its appeal for the typical consumer. This does, however, point to one of the obvious opportunities emanating from this trend: services offering data-protecting credentials but in an effort-lite and inexpensive package are surely poised to do well. As are brands that acknowledge consumer concern and provide solutions which are quick and hassle-free for people to adopt.

Facebook unveiled its new Graph Search feature on an unsuspecting (and vaguely cynical) world yesterday.  In essence, Graph Search is an in-Facebook search engine with some smart algorithms built in – it lets users search four categories – people, places, photos, interests – although gradually this will be expanded to cover all content.  This means that you can search for “friends who live in London” and it will not filter your profile to include just London-based friends, but also rank them according to how much interaction you have with them, find out who’s the biggest Masterchef fan and sort them based on who’s been on holiday to the same places as you.

Crucially for brands, you can also search for people who have liked a specific brand, service or product – they gave examples like a search for “sushi restaurants that my friends have been to in Los Angeles” and “TV shows my friends like”.  Marketing bonanza? Almost definitely.  The ability for individuals to search for businesses their friends like is a huge deal – placing social recommendation and access to the valued opinions of friends, family and trusted influencers right at the very heart of the world’s largest social network.  This is our Social Capital and Performative Leisure trends writ large.  And as there is no scope yet for paid-for ad searches, brands will be forced to be even more engaging, immersive and interactive to win those ever-more valuable ‘likes’.

The new function has its detractors – privacy will be thrust into the spotlight again, as everything you forgot to mark as ‘private’ the last time they fiddled with their functionality will once again be at the mercy of people combing your timeline.  Investors are unimpressed – according to Mashable, there still isn’t a palpable sense that this will create any significant monetisation avenues for Facebook or brands using it as a comms vehicle.  And there will undoubtedly be a tense initial period as users work up a head of steam ‘unliking’ anything they don’t want to be held accountable for – a youthful addiction to a deeply uncool TV programme, a crush on a now unattractive teen idol….

But it is undeniable that a project on this scale, which aims to harness all those billions of exabytes of data and make something useful out of them – for users, for brands, for Facebook – is bound to go some way to consolidating Facebook’s position as the social network to end all social networks.  As Forbes puts it: “for the first time, a person’s relationship to a piece of information is going to help determine how relevant that information is—and this relationship will be transparent to everyone.” http://www.forbes.com/sites/eliseackerman/2013/01/16/why-facebooks-graph-search-is-a-very-big-deal/

What do you think?  Is this huge news or nothing new? How will your brand be reacting to Graph Search?

With Microsoft, Google and Facebook playing host to millions of people every day, instant messaging services have revolutionised consumer interaction in the 10s decade. Across both developed and emerging markets alike, there exists an acute desire to keep in touch with friends and family. Fuelled by the inexorable growth in smartphone ownership, this trend has left few regions untouched.

One such region is Africa. With slow take-up of emerging technology, there exists a large obstacle to social networking and IM growth on the continent. However, there is one item which is readily available on the streets and in the homes of Nairobi, Abuja et al., and that is the feature phone. If IM services are to become as ubiquitous here as they are in North America and Europe, this basic device represents the best hope for Silicon Valley.

The opportunity here has not gone unnoticed. The company ForgetMeNot specialises in unified messaging, which allows messages from Facebook and Google talk to be delivered via text directly to “dumb” phones. While free to receive messages, it costs the same amount as a standard text to respond.

In the past, the development of m-pesa transformed the ease with which money could be transferred, withdrawn or deposited using feature phones. And like m-pesa, ForgetMeNot’s software has the potential to enable millions of consumers, many of whom would otherwise be excluded on the basis of cost and infrastructure, to enjoy similar services to their counterparts in developed markets. It is conceivable too that the emergence of this software will equip businesses with another tool to reach the one billion consumers who call Africa home, regardless of rurality or phone quality.