Budapest

Our trip to Budapest was really intense  - both emotionally, as well as full of experiences. Images, sounds, words of people I knew back then and who stayed the same or changed drastically - all of this still vibrates in my heart. I can only look at pictures I took and gradually digest it all.

Work-wise though I have made few observations. First of all social integration - Facebook icon is almost on each ad  - used wisely with the full URL (please do not assume that I can find you within this network!;) ) Twitter seems to be less popular. Foursquare exists almost just virtually - as opposed to many places advertising their Facebook location! I have seen Glamour magazine promotion inviting girls to bring their old accessories to a pop-up shop in a shopping mall - those obviously grew in numbers all across the city. QR codes are not a big deal at all, so I was happy to see that general public is not so excited about them anymore. Public transport tickets have their unique QR codes (quite a contrast to the fact that the cashier used manually set up stamp to mark the date of my weekly ticket!), so do the posters promoting various products.

I did not get to talk to my more geeky friends this time, I did find out however about Facebook hostessing service - idea of running promotions though pretty looking (genuine and offline known) girls with large Facebook fellowship. I would love to learn more about the mechanics of those!

As I said, we only had few days to look around and hardly any free time - I did not even have time to grab a local paper, not to mention reading it - but I hope to go back shortly and learn more.

Budapest is eclectic as always!

On Facebook profile of Jason Valdez

Jason Valdez became famous for the fact that he held a woman hostage for 16 hrs while using his Facebook profile to feed updates to his friends and general public and shot himself in the end. His Facebook profile is still up and unprotected, so you can go and check it out now. I took a few screenshots of conversations from this site to showcase how strange it is that we can still follow conversations around this topic.

First this:



Than a promise:



This did not happen.



Now all we can read are conversations around Jason's actions:






I would personally like to see the page down. I find it disturbing that the audience, including general public has the scope to discus this event, but I would like to know what you think - is it just me feeling this way?

Facebook, Microsoft and Photo DNA to fight child pornography

Last Friday Facebook held a virtual meeting on Photo DNA - new technology used now in cooperation with Microsoft to track photos of child pornography. This new development is a pretty interesting and impressive move on behalf of Facebook and I really hope to hear more about it. For now, here is the Microsoft's dedicated page, and below the lifestreamed event:

Watch live streaming video from facebookdclive at livestream.com

Let me know what you think of it!

Why is Facebook not sending notifications about important changes on the network?

The newly introduced changes in the way we can use Facebook for promotions and competitions have been introduced fairly quietly, so I keep on coming across many posts (on and outside of Facebook) still encouraging readers to like pages to take part in promotion or to use "iLike' button to decide upon competition winners. I was checking iTunes fan page since last week and looks like their promotional tab is gone now, but I am not sure if it's due to the fact the admins have learned about the new rules, or simply finished the promotion? Ah, no, hold on, since I looked at it last time they have posted a new promotion! Here you go:

In order to take part in the promotion you HAVE to be a fan of this page, which is a breach of Facebook terms and conditions now. How many people do know about the change though? If you are not a social media marketer but a fan page admin you will probably not hear/read/learn about it. That really annoys me! It would be fairly easy to send an update to all service users or fan page admins, no? By running promotions outside of Faceook apps at the moment and staying ignorant to new rules you are risking that your page will be taken down. (Interesting, would Facebook take off the app store's page?).

I personally somewhat agree with the move. I know, many of my readers will disagree. I just do not like to be forced into being a fan of the page, no matter what the reward is - unless we are talking about relevant and interesting content. I still think the new rules should be introduced all over the network. I start to have a feeling we could do with one central official Facebook blog;)

Kids and Technology (Facebook) for #MCN4

Photo by @markspoff

I just had a great discussion with attendees of Media Camp Nottingham 4 on kids and technology. As I need to run to join my family, I will just include the slides and recording of the session for now, hoping that I can add my points a bit later too! In the meantime, enjoy the bits below;)

Thank you to the organisers for having me over!

Kids and Technology (Facebook) for Media Camp Nottingham

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