Fatvine Beta Launch
Well it’s official! We have the beta launch of Fatvine®, our white-label Social Content Engine TM. Fatvine plugs into your existing web site to create social content and then links this to the fastest growing social networks. The New York Times article discussing Facebook’s social advertising launch caught our attention. It stated the following:
Facebook’s much-anticipated plan — which the company calls ‘’social advertising” — was revealed yesterday at a gathering of advertising executives and reporters in New York. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, spoke in grand terms about of the death of mass advertising and said that in the future, ad messages would increasingly be conveyed from friend to friend through online networks.
”Nothing influences a person more than a recommendation from a trusted friend,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.
Facebook users will not be able to avoid these personally recommended ads if they are friends with participating people. Participation can involve joining a fan club for a brand, recommending a product or sharing information about their purchases from external Web sites.
Mr. Zuckerberg said he thought this system would make the site feel ”less commercial,” because the marketing messages will be accompanied by comments from friends. When asked about people who might not like ads, Mr. Zuckerberg shrugged and said, ”I mean, it’s an ad-supported business.” [Full story at nytimes.com]
Well I love the last line. That’s a classic and you can’t really argue with Mark. Or can you? Fatvine supports ‘trusted search’ and we agree that ‘nothing influences a person more than a recommendation from a ‘trusted friend.” The question is whether people will want more control than simple opt in / opt out and will the clutter of all of these messages minimize their effectiveness? Ultimately, people are going to want easy tools to share, manage and maintain their own social content. It could certainly come in the form of Facebook messaging but it is much more likely to be a personal database that is user-centric and available to all applications. Hence the launch of Fatvine…and just in time it seems.