I received a helpful reminder last night from Facebook that they’re about to make some major breaking (but, it should be noted, well-publicized) changes to their app requirements.  Specifically, some authentication code that used to work won’t anymore, and all apps will have to be hosted on servers with SSL certificates.

This is going to be interesting, since up until now, if you had web hosting somewhere, you had everything you needed to have, say, a custom Facebook tab on your company page.  Now you’ll need to pay for a cert, which might not even be available if you’re on a really cheap shared server plan.

I imagine that there will be a few phones ringing on the 1st.  But maybe not October 1st.  The fact is, after a platform’s been around for a while, a lot of “experiments” get left by the wayside, basically abandoned, so for many they might not realize there’s a problem for some time.  For others, this will provide a welcome relief in the form of an excuse to kill off an ill-conceived initiative.

For others, though, there may be trouble if they’ve outsourced the work long ago and need some changes made in a hurry.

Apple has a similar system in place for their app store.  If you don’t pay the annual fee, your apps no longer appear in the store, a fact that I know has surprised a number of independent developers who had free apps in place but didn’t feel like they had to remain responsible for them.

And just like with Facebook, I’m sure at this point every single day a company loses their app (but doesn’t necessarily know it) because it was released into the wild by a well meaning contractor who didn’t see fit to renew.

Two takeaways here: first, are your products and services available “forever,” without the need for users to take some form of action, financial or otherwise, to stay on the books? Forever’s a long time.  And on the other side of the fence, are you in control of your technical deployments?  Disaster recovery planning focuses on large scale events, but “I lost that guy’s phone number” is something that should (yet really, really shouldn’t) be on a lot more organizations’ scenario lists.

I really enjoyed This Week In Startups episode 177 with Arnie Gullov-Singh from Ad.ly, who had lots of good insights as someone generating revenues from social media through celebrity endorsements.  Here’s my pull quote from the episode, in regards to Klout, which is a semi-competitor with Ad.ly, but relevant just the same:

The scale thing also came up last week at a Google Engage event, where the idea came up that pay per click is awesome but sometimes there simply aren’t enough people searching for the keywords you’re buying (which lead to interesting ideas about teaching your market to search for your stuff…)

Key insights: for marketers, be aware of the outcome you want.  If you want to play with the latest shiny object, be aware that you’re going for a cool story, not necessarily massive success.  For technology providers, be aware of where you are on the curve.  If it’s early days, pitch the story to get business now and plan for down the road to where the scale catches up and you’re now uniquely positioned to be able to deliver.

I know, this post has nothing to do with Eisenhower, but I was searching for Like Button pictures and couldn't resist

Fast Company sends word that Facebook users can now tab company pages in their photos in addition to users, and how it’s the next evolution of Like As they put it:

Social media experts have begun to look askance at the Like system. It’s so easy for someone to “Like” something. What does it really signify? If you “Like” a kind of soda, for example, does that actually mean that you’re buying the item? Or just that you like the idea of the item? How do you really know how engaged with the product any particular Liker actually is?

Now think about tags in photos. If you’ve tagged a photo in which you’re wearing that cute pair of jeans, you don’t simply like the idea of the designer. You’ve actually gone out and put down some of your hard-earned cash for their duds. Photo tags, then, become a much stronger signal of engagement.

I don’t disagree that it’s a stronger sign of engagement; after all, it takes more work than just clicking a button, but I don’t think a tag in a photo means you’re necessarily a customer.  It could just be a sign that you’re more obsessive-compulsve than the average Facebook user.  It could also be a sign that you’re pissed at the company, which means Facebook just opened the door to Twitter-style brand management issues on a platform that possibly has more influence (fun fact: 8% of Americans who use the internet are on Twitter, while more than 41% of Americans have Facebook accounts, apparently – different research methodologies there, but the gap is still significant.)

Anyway, the article goes on to suggest some interesting advertising opportunities, which Facebook hasn’t enabled yet, but could be compelling – if I could put an ad in front of people who took the time to tag my company in their photos, that might be a win, whether the tag was positive (and my brand gets built further) or negative (can’t hurt, really.)

We’re talking much smaller numbers than standard media buys though, given the orders-of-magnitude smaller (yet arguably much more targeted) audience, so unless it can be folded into an existing social media campaign where the daily work is already being done, this might not make sense for many organizations.  I’m a little skeptical of mixing ad buys with social media management in general though; if your team is big enough to have separate content and analytics people, then maybe there’s a fit, but I think the person who does your comment replies isn’t necessarily the person who should be buying your ads – consult him or her regarding them, sure, but it’s a left brain/right brain kind of thing.

Hat tip: Guin. Photo by Kevin.

It doesn’t appear to be available online yet, but the latest issue of Inc has a piece on how to get people on Twitter to follow your business.  One of the companies profiled was Tasti D-Lite, which sells, I don’t know, desserts or something.  OK, I do know.  In the course of writing this post I’ve learned nearly everything there is to know about the company, because fact checking is awesome. But that doesn’t matter right now.

What matters is that they spent $10K to upgrade their point-of-sale system to incorporate Twitter and other social networks into their loyalty program.

Based on the article, this was going to be a different kind of post.  See if you can guess why:

“To get points for tweeting, a customer submits his Twitter username and password. Then every time he buys something at a store, he swipes a loyalty card at the register.  Tasti D-Lite’s point-of-sale system automatically logs in to his Twitter account and sends a tweet informing his followers of the purchase.”

Thankfully, it looks (from the description anyway) that they’re using Twitter’s OAuth integration instead of actually collecting usernames and passwords, so I don’t have to write an article called something like “security schmecurity – people will do anything for ice cream.”

Instead, we’re starting to see early examples of physical/virtual integration, and it’s kind of exciting, if not early (a Twitter search today for Tasti D-Lite suggests that well under a dozen people participated in the past week.)

Lately I’m of a mind that Facebook got people online, Twitter got them more comfortable with telling the whole world a little bit about themselves, and FourSquare made it OK to track their every movement.  The interesting part is that people new to these services find themselves mentally blocked for updates, so the ability to automatically say they’ve bought ice cream is actually a potential value-add as opposed to a minor sellout of their individual identities – it’s really no different from “I’m at Starbucks.”

At the moment, of course, the Facebook – Twitter – FourSquare – Tasti D-Lite (et. al.) funnel is pretty narrow.  For it to grow there’s going to have to be large scale investment in point-of-sale systems, and I can only hope that someone will step in and make something that’s open and extensible to make room for the next generation of players instead of yet another exclusivity play.  Credit card terminal makers, are you paying attention?