Neville’s posterous

[...] Beginning today, you also will be able to log in to your Facebook account with your username from any Web browser, mobile phone or Facebook Connect-enabled website.

For example, I can enter my username, "Bikash," in place of my email address when I log in to Facebook.

You will still be able to log in with your email address.

And it does work - I just logged into my Facebook account from my PC with my user name and not my email address.

Doesn't work with Facebook Lite, though - that asks for your email address.

LONDON (AdAge.com) -- For some time, marketers have been using ad contests as one-off PR ploys for their brands. Now, Unilever is testing whether crowdsourcing can be a long-term strategy for one of its British brands -- and the result could have far-reaching consequences for any number of agencies on the consumer-goods giant's roster.

Just ask Lowe, London, which was recently sacked by Unilever on its Peperami snack brand so that the marketer can run a contest to find ad ideas. Unilever is offering a $10,000 bounty to the winner of a competition to find TV and print ideas for the meat snack popular with schoolchildren.

[...] this isn't the first time a major marketer has prodded consumers to come up with ad ideas. But in most of those previous examples, the ad agency stuck around to manage the contest and execute the idea.

In this case, the $10,000 brief has been posted on the Ideabounty.com website, and is being promoted to the creative community using traditional ads in U.K. trade publications, as well as viral marketing. "This is not user-generated content," Mr. Burgess said. "Anyone can respond to the brief, but it's more likely to attract people with a creative track record or an interest in creative output.

The future of advertising? A future, to be sure. Check out the comments in the Ad Age story - some passionate views, pro and con.

A Newsbeat investigation's found a rising number of British women are working as webcam models on the internet. Market analysts say the overall webcam market is now worth more than a billion pounds, with online sex shows a big part of it.

Industry insiders say there's been a rise in applications, partly fuelled by the recession, with hundreds of British women signing up to UK websites each month, many more internationally. They appear live on webcams that can be accessed on computers around the world. Men usually pay premium rates for the privilege.

[...] Market analysts say overall the webcam market grew from around £730m in 2006 to £1.1bn in 2008. It's predicted to almost double in worth again by 2015, with pornographic webcam sites driving much of that growth. They say it's more hidden from analysts than other segments, but is a "lively" part of the market.

[...] Juniper Research anticipates that revenues from mobile adult services will rise from £1.3 bn in 2008 to £2.9bn by 2013 - part of that growth is from webcams on mobiles.

And companies in the porn industry are often the ones who are out there at the bleeding edge with the latest technology.

You can learn a lot from keeping an eye on things in this industry. As it were :)

London is staking its claim as the Twitter capital of the world as a flock of local start-ups ride the communications network's huge wave of growth. While it is the toast of its native Silicon Valley in California, London boasts more Twitter users than any other city in the world.

[...] Even though Twitter itself is yet to generate any revenue, early-stage investors are pouring millions of pounds into small companies in the Twitter "ecosystem" in the London area.

London has produced the most popular of the many third-party tools used to post to Twitter, called Tweetdeck. Reading's Tweetmeme , which tracks the most popular news stories discussed on Twitter, is attracting millions of visitors a month while Twitterfeed, based in Tooting, is used by thousands of publishers to post their latest headlines on to the site.

"In the UK we've got a real phenomenon going on," says John Borthwick, the British-born chief executive of Betaworks , a New York company that has invested in Tweetdeck, Twitterfeed and Twitter itself. Just as Scandinavia took an early lead in mobile technology, "the UK has become fast-forward in terms of social", thanks to high broadband penetration.

[...] Saul Klein of TAG and Index Ventures, which also backed Skype , sees Twitter as part of a more fundamental shift in the internet to being a "live experience" rather than serving static web-pages. "The web has gone through three major phases," he says. "The first was publishing. The second was more personalised and social. What we are seeing now is the growth of real-time services, such as status updates and microblogging. The way you find value from that is fundamentally different to anything we've seen before."

Pretty good feature by Tim Bradshaw at the FT.

I've highlighted elements that caught my attention - there's much more in Tim's full story at FT.com.

Facebook Lite is a new streamlined version designed for people with slow internet connections. There's no chat and no applications. It's designed to give users quick access to their News Feed, inbox and events.

[...] Brands with Facebook Pages get short-changed here. You can't find Pages in the search results on Lite, even if you're already a fan; only people show up. There are no engagement ads -- just minimalist self-service ads with text, thumbnails, and a link. Updates from Pages don't appear in your Lite inbox. Branded Pages' status updates still appear in the News Feed, and you can click that to go to the Page, but there's just the stripped down Wall rather than all the tabs (there's still a link to the Page's photos and videos). It's yet another reminder for Page owners that to stay top of mind with consumers, it's important to post updates regularly. Developing an editorial calendar can help achieve that goal.

As a Facebook user, making Facebook much less of a marketing platform is a highly appealing proposition.

So Facebook Lite without all the bells and whistles that marketers like is great! It may well have been originally designed for places where net connectivity is slow, but I've made it my default.

If I were a marketer, I'd be looking at how do I make my presence in Facebook more natural and genuine so I can actually engage with people rather than market at them.

Facebook Lite rolled out in the US and India a few days ago. It's now an option to anyone who has an English-language Facebook account.

[...] as personal brands grow in relative strength, corporations need to consider how they can best reflect and tap the influence of the individuals working for them. As Jeremiah [Owyang] notes, social media means that personal brands are immensely portable, as are personal networks.

This is about power to the worker, absolutely, but those companies that understand this and tap this shift can do extremely well. They can attract those with strong personal brands and create immense value from their influence, simply by focusing on building the brands of their key staff as much as they do their corporate brand.

[...] Pirate Tweets not only converts all your tweets into classic pirate speak, it also piratizes those boring, self-absorbed tweets from the twits you insist on following. There's just no better way to spice up the chatter of your beloved Twitter scallywags without them ever knowing. It's hard to imagine this much random fun being delivered totally free. The future of Twitter begins now with Pirate Tweets! Arr!

Just in time for Talk Like A Pirate Day on September 19.

[...] Why the growth? FanCheck lets you see which of your friends spend the most time posting and commenting on your profile wall, and also lets you see who spends the most time posting on your friends’ walls. It’s a new way to monitor friendships, shall we say. The app used to be called “StalkerCheck,” the company says, until Facebook made Smile find a less menacing term.

As of today, the app has 15.1 million monthly active users. The way it works is that you give the app permission to access you and your friends’ data through Facebook’s Platform APIs, then it calculates who has spent the most time interacting with you. The result is a thumbnailed, ranked list of your friends. You can also see the same rankings for anyone you’re friends with.

[...] And, an important note. The app appears to be growing through a clever use of photo tagging. At the bottom of your top fans list, there’s a button that says “click here to share and tag this as a Facebook photo.” This means the app turns the rankings into a single photo, then tags it with all of your friends names so it appears on their profile walls. We’ve seen a few other apps using the same viral mechanism in the last several days.

Unavoidable tracking, unless you're off the grid entirely. A marketers' dream.

[...] As shown in the video of Madrid's Plaza de España, SAPIR identifies matching media in the same way that humans derive intrinsic value from visual and sensory clues. Users can also choose to combine search terms with additional text to further drill down in search results. As is the case with regular search, if you already know the city where your image was taken, you're one step closer to finding your result. Additionally, SAPIR also has the ability to index sound and video files.

While the catalogue of media is still very limited, theoretically we may one day be able to search for almost anything using this technique. If Ashton Kutcher wears a pair of sunglasses we like, we can scan the image and search for the storefronts stocking them. If we're looking for the name of a town square, we can find it in the tags of similar images. And finally, if we're looking to self-diagnose we can compare photos of ourselves against jaundice or malaria patients.

via readwriteweb.com

Augmenting reality?

(Btw, it's a neat video but the music might grate. As there's no narration, you can safely mute the audio.)