zytzagoo's den. » Misc

The Facebook ads of the (imminent) future

zytzagoo — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 11:55:11 +0000

The present

Internet advertising works. It generates profit (everyone knows the famous and often quoted moment of Internet advertising spending surpassing TV in the UK back in 2009). Shitload of business models revolve around one form of advertising or another.

Facebook’s revenues come from (surprise!) advertising. They only serve stuff from Microsoft’s advertising inventory. The CTR is awful compared to most major websites. So, basically, advertising on facebook.com generally sucks. It generates revenues due to sheer volume. But from an advertiser’s perspective it sucks. From the user’s perspective too. They don’t care about ads on facebook. Source.

The future

Simple. Start serving that same inventory everywhere, as in, all over the web. Maybe even remove standard banner advertising altogether from facebook.com.
Yes, they can even make the advertisers bid for placements in pretty much the same way Google is auctioning their ad slots. Or not, it doesn’t really matter.

Wait, what?

Facebook’s technical infrastructure for dominating the advertising market is already built: one has to try really, really hard to find a page on the Web today that hasn’t got a Like, Share or some other type of Facebook’s Javascript widget. Through that widget they can place whatever they want. Not just the boring (con)textual ads — think standard banner formats, floaters, takeovers (interstitials), expanders, wallpapers or any other new form of promotion that’ll eventually be developed.

The user/visitor of an external site doesn’t even have to know that the ad came via Facebook. He doesn’t really care — it’s highly targeted, caters to his every need and desire, and was just what he was thinking of, or searched for, or browsed for, or [insert your advertising wet dream here] recently anyway.

And then there was data…

Facebook’s edge over every other ad platform today is: data. Tons of organic attention data, the social graph data, combined with detailed demographics as a cherry on top. Think about that for a second. OK, now consider that even AdWord’s demographic targeting is limited to users from the United States only. Now consider this: About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States, More than 150 million people engage with Facebook on external websites every month… You get the picture.

I don’t have to remind you that Facebook knows everything about their users, even when they’re not on Facebook directly, but just browsing a page that has the Like button on it. Combined with the fact that every page/website is automatically an ad publisher (without anyone doing any extra work on the publishing end), we have ourselves a recipe for advertising domination satisfying every advertiser’s wet dream.

What’s missing?

Basically nothing. Perhaps just a few tiny changes in Facebook Platform Policies. You’ve read those before using the platform, right? :)
They currently state: “We can change these Platform Policies at any time without prior notice as we deem necessary. Your continued use of Platform constitutes acceptance of those changes.”

P.S.

Yes, other major players have their own widgets, but nowhere near the numbers of Facebook’s “installed userbase”, and nowhere near the amount of data about their users. Quick recap as best as I can recall right now:

Google Analytics — doable, but I’m not sure they have the demographic data. No social graph either. Not at the Facebook scale anyway. And I don’t think there are quite as many GA script tags out there as there are Like buttons. 2 million websites use it, according to this. The new Facebook Like debuted in April this year (at f8 conference), and according to this it is also in the 2 million range already.
Youtube (which is Google’s) has the potential due to volume of users and data, but they’re trapped within Flash, and can basically serve ads only inside the Flash container. They do that, partnering with big copyright owners. They’re “hovering near profitability” — which is a polite way of saying they’re still loosing money with Youtube.
Forsqure is giving the idea an interesting spin, although it remains to be seen how many web pages will “install” the widget — Facebook can probably act right now.
Myspace could maybe use their audio player, but it would still constrain the ad placement to the myspace.com profile pages. So not that interesting to advertisers (compared to pushing your ad automatically to the whole www)
Yahoo bet outside the browser with Konfabulator/Widgets back in 2005. Cool platform, but ultimately not very useful (from a revenue-generating online advertising perspective), the original authors left Yahoo, and the future is in the browser anyway. Right now, I can’t think of any massively deployed javascript widgets running in the browser that belong to Yahoo (in one way or another). There’s YUI, but that’s an entirely different game. Maps maybe, but again, not so widely spread.

WordPress core update not working? Suhoshin might be the reason.

zytzagoo — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:47:51 +0000

Ran into some trouble trying to update to the latest version (2.8.6). The automatic core updater kept dying on me with nothing but an ‘Unpacking update’ message. Nothing in the error_log file, no core dumps, no warnings, just stuck. And it used to work flawlessly until now.

Anyways, it’s sorted now — and updated — but here’s the scoop in case someone else runs into a similar situation:

WordPress tries to increase the memory limit of php to ’256M’ during the unzipping process of the update. If you’re on a shared hosting setup, chances are it’s running php with the suhoshin patch. Suhoshin was (and still is) set up to prevent raising the memory limit via ini_set() over the size defined in php.ini (currently at 32M).

Solutions:

Ask your hosting company to temporarily increase or remove the suhoshin-patch limit, run the update, let them revert the limit back (over in 2 minutes)
Modify your ‘wp-admin/includes/file.php:484′ and try setting a lower limit (128, 64?) and see if the update process manages to extract all the files successfully (it probably will)
Update your wp manually

Pyrrhic victory: me vs customs office – 4:1

zytzagoo — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:14:50 +0000

Latest Threadless package arrived, 9 t-shirts this time. I think this will be my last order from them. Ever. They seriously need to re-think the t-shirt quality. As it stands now, it’s nowhere near what it used to be, and that’s unacceptable. This last batch is thin cotton bullshit. But the designs are what they are, so I caved and got this last batch of reprints I just had to have.

Anyways, no extra charges from the customs this time. Package value stated as 108 USD, package opened as usual, no gift wrapping options, no nothing. I win! Kind of.

Twitter lists — what they’re really about

zytzagoo — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:26:39 +0000

Twitter lists have hit the interwebz recently. Cool, I guess.

Everyone’s talking about whether they should be public or private, if it’s all just another ~~pissing~~ popularity contest, how the “a-list” is getting even more popular, if it means this or that… None of it matters.

What everyone hasn’t yet picked up on (but they will, eventually) is this: Twitter just added people tagging. What? Yes, people tagging.

And it couldn’t be easier, and the users aren’t even aware they’re doing it, and practically every existing and future twitter user will do it at some point. Just imagine the power of having that kind of data. Every user tagged with their interests, location, whatever you need. It’s priceless.

Think about it. Twitter is (mostly) about people. To create a list, you need to name it. Adding someone to that created list is just a click away, and you’ve just made a “tagging” statement about that person. You’ve assigned a topic/name/whatever (a tag) to a person.

Now Twitter will know how (what/who/when/with etc.) others associate with you. And they’ll know what you associate with others. Those tags describe you, and your group to the point of being practically exact science (after a while of gathering data). That means your and actions of those around you become easily predictable — or at the very least — “guidable”.

Once they have that kind of data, getting a 1$ or 10$ revenue per user (that’s Twitter’s “plan”) is peanuts. No one else has that kind of data. It’s no wonder every major player in the business decided to strike a deal about “real-time data” with them.

P.S.
What they’ve done with the API ecosystem is equally amazing. The Twitter experience has nothing to do with the twitter.com website, and everything to do with applications built by third-party developers. That’s for a reason too — you can’t focus on the core of your business while you’re being pestered with phone X not supporting feature Y or browser Z not playing nice on platform W.

The core business is gathering and munging incredible amounts of structured data about people, not relaying 140-character-long messages. Don’t forget that.

How I spent my day today

zytzagoo — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 23:10:18 +0000

Woke up today with a great idea: having some spare prehistoric hardware laying around I was gonna build a crappy box and install Ubuntu 8.10 on it. Why?

I have the time
I wanna see what’s changed since the last time
I need a *nix box to try some video streaming stuff locally

Building the box took a bit longer than I anticipated at first (using only one hand to screw/unscrew stuff SUCKS). After about an hour, I had:

an Athlon XP 1100 (TB)
on an Epox ep-8rda+ mobo (nforce2 chipset, onboard lan and sound)
with a GeForce 4200 Ti AGP gpu
and a 60 GB seagate hdd
and a cd-rom of course
(was pondering a floppy drive for the fun and looks of it, but couldn’t find any)

I was ready to boot. The box refused.

Beeping like crazy, flashing codes on the mobo, it was RTFM time. Except I couldn’t, cause all the epox sites are gone, and the only manual I managed to find online was in Russian.

Desperate, I just took the CMOS battery out, praying it would reset everything and magically work. While waiting for the battery, I figured I might as well vacuum all the dust out. So I did. Guess what else I picked up.

After taking the vacuum apart and finding the battery inside the vacuum bag, I plucked the battery back in and took a deep breath. Tired, one-handed, frustrated and covered in dust I pressed the power button. IT BOOTED. Wooohoo!

The WindowsXP installed on the disk is from 2004 apparently. After reminiscing for about an hour (and backing up shit I’ll probably never need anyway), I wiped the C: partition and it was now Ubuntu time.

Booted Ubuntu in live-cd mode, it looked ok (although slowish, but that was expected), so I clicked “install”, which was conveniently placed on the desktop. Step 4/7 is the partitioning stuff — it didn’t work, just kept getting stuck with no output whatsoever in the “combobox” interface.

OK, reboot the machine and tried installing from the cd boot menu (the 4th step worked now). Installed. Updated the repos, updated the whole system (250+ MB download). That was around 2pm.

Installed ssh, enabled remote desktoping to the ubuntu box, and that’s where I should’ve stopped (and should’ve started installing webdev stuff via ssh and just forget everything else).

But no. I just had to see if I could install nvidia drivers and enable desktop effects. I could never get those to work. On any distro I tried. Ever. And I really want to see it live.

Bad idea. It’s now midnight, and I still haven’t managed to get the fucking thing to work. Giving up for today.

Other than that though, Ubuntu is looking really good.

BarCamp Zagreb No.2 — This friday

zytzagoo — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 19:47:04 +0000

January 23rd, 2009. Zagreb’s second BarCamp. Be there if you can.

I know I will, you know, with me officially working from home on Fridays. Officially. Last friday was my first. It was fuckin’ awesome.

Zyt vs. Croatian Customs Office – 3:1

zytzagoo — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 15:44:48 +0000

He he, latest Threadless shopping spree resulted in me ordering these 7:

Luckily, I didn’t have to pay any extra customs fees this time.

Google Chrome – first impressions

zytzagoo — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 20:45:10 +0000

Just a quick braindump of my first impressions using Google Chrome.

Download and install went smoothly. It tried importing Firefox settings, but required closing all Firefox instances to do so. So I skipped the import through a dialog or two.

The installer automatically set all the language and regional settings to Croatian. Since croatian interface freaks me out, that had to be changed. The wrench icon is your friend here.

The UI is spiffy and smooth. Transitions occur (try pressing “ctrl + b”, show/hide the bookmarks bar). It’s probably a safe bet it’ll be skinnable at least to some extent.

The home button is hidden by default. Wierd. A trip to the options menu and that’s fixed:

The home page is obviously going to be able to integrate google gadgets at some point. If it’s not already available…

I don’t see any “feed indicators” for pages that have RSS autodiscovery enabled. That sucks. No integrated feed reader either…
Navigating to an RSS or XML feed produces raw unstyled feed contents. I’m suspecting Google Reader integration (or something to that effect) is in the works…

Once you start the app, two chrome.exe processes spawn, I’m guessing one is the master, and the other one is responsible for handling your first open tab. As soon as you type in an address, a third process spawns. Which is sweet, you can check each site’s memory usage separately, and this is gonna be useful.

If you maximize the chrome window, the small google logo (which is otherwise placed right next to the min/max/close window controls) disappears, and the window bar shrinks a bit vertically.

Flash works. Cool.
Something is fishy with it, though. Noticing CPU usage spikes when hovering over flash content, gotta test more. Preliminary tests show it might be wmode=”transparent” related…

Since it’s based on Webkit, all the developer goodies are there: js debugger, dom inspector, resource inspector etc.)

Umm… double click on the window title bar maximizes the window. That’s expected. The problem is in my developed habit of double clicking right next to the current tab to create a new empty one.
“Ctrl + t” keyboard shortcut works out of the box though.

The way that the domain name is differently colored is cool:

And the ~~https://~~ red thingy on invalid or non-trusted certificates is also nice:

The task manager (Shift + esc) shows highly useful stuff:

With a much detailed breakdown of memory usage available — either click “stats for nerds” in the lower left corner of the task manager, or type in “about:memory” in the address bar.

The About window reveals the User-Agent string, and also automatically checks for updates:

All in all, it looks & feels promising. A definite sign of interesting times ahead for everyone involved.

Goodbye Winamp.

zytzagoo — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:12:17 +0000

I’ve finally had it with all the bullshit they tried to push into it over the years… And it used to be such an awesome piece of software, back in the days. Uninstalled. For good.

It seems inevitable — (almost) every good piece of software starts sucking once it gets bought by the big guys — the marketing beast starts creeping in…

Can anyone recommend a good non-bloated multimedia player (for music pleasure mostly), other than iTunes or Windows Media Player?

How I fixed my WP image/media uploader and general wp-admin problems in 2.5.1

zytzagoo — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:55:18 +0000

After reading through a bunch of posts all over the internet, trying out every solution that worked for others, and still not getting results on my blog — it was time to roll up my sleeves.

A quick view-source on the wp-admin’s post page revealed this shiny gem:

autosaveL10n = {
    autosaveInterval: "AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL",
    ...
}

Well, hello there Mr. Classic Example Of An Undefined Constant!

A few quick greps against the current trunk showed that the constant AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL should be defined in wp-config.php (if you wish to override the default 60 second interval), or that it gets set to the default in wp-settings.php if it hasn’t been defined beforehand.

Opened up my curent wp-settings.php, ctrl+f, type in “autosave” — no match. It turns out that somewhere in the update process from 2.3.x to 2.5, stuff got mixed up: my (thought to be) latest wp-settings.php file was actually not the one from the 2.5.1 release, but, somehow, a different one (and not the one from 2.3.x either).

I have no idea how it happened, or the time right now to backtrack and figure it out. I did notice a weird thing on wordpress svn. The 2.5-tagged wp-settings.php is different from the 2.5-branch wp-settings.php — they could be using tags for different things though.

Aaaaaanywhooo, what I did to fix the issue: grabbed the latest 2.5.1 from wordpress.org and replaced my current wp-settings.php with the one from the newly downloaded ZIP file. Woot! It’s all good now: uploads working, no more autosave ajax requests happening every possible millisecond etc.

The second issue was the image/media uploader not working and just displaying “HTTP Error”. The culprit was mod_security, which i quickly got disposed of via some .htaccess directives inside the wp-admin directory:


SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off

The above is only a quickfix to see if it is really mod_security or something else — once you’re sure it’s modsec, narrow down the directives to deal only with certain filenames, so you don’t expose your entire wp-admin directory to possible future exploits etc.