Social media is upon us.
It is a fact of life and consumers have made it part of their daily lives.
In other news, brands are still investing small and not so small fortunes creating amazing content for their websites and nobody cares to visit them. On paper, one great solution for this problem is search marketing. You buy keywords, optimize the content on your site for organic search placement, things get better.

Social media can boost a brand even further. And here’s the kicker: it has little to do with the brand website.

The root of the issue is in the following fact: The brand has a website; search marketing looks to drive traffic to that website. If the brand places content in social media, it takes content from brand site and actually puts it, well, away from your website. While you can still link to the brand site, isn’t social media harmful in actually reducing the need to visit that site? If you can get the content on Facebook, where you hang out with your near, far but always dear friends – is it really necessary to go to the brand’s site to get what you are looking for? While intriguing, the answer lies in thinking about what really matters. Skittles, for example, gave up on its website altogether. But three years later, can anyone point out measurable sales increases as a result? What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) a brand would care about? While I personally want the website to be stellar, is it as relevant or important as it was, say, four years ago?

Branding is about searing the name, message or logo of a product or manufacturer deep into your head. Whether the brand achieves consumer impressions on its owned web property or not is immaterial. It is even more important to be able to measure if the brand placement, and the consumer impression it caused, increased the likelihood of a transaction or a purchase. While a brand site can help inform about and portray products really well, social media trumps it on this account. Consumers today trust each other more than they trust their brands. Reviews matter, ratings influence, and if a brand does not track them, it may lose the initiative in controlling its message (Toyota, anyone?). I can probably think up a variety of KPIs but overall the bottom line is this: if you can get the brand online, anywhere, it’s a good thing – and if you get it anywhere other than your own brand website, it’s a very good thing.

So where does search marketing figure out into this? Search marketing at its finest does not just drive traffic to a website, it increases brand impressions. It also reinforces positive brand messages and matches the terms a brand looks to associate itself with, to search keywords. Search engines do not care about your brand website if it has no redeeming quality; it must have content to be interesting and useful to the search engine’s users. Social media has value and content, both searchable and private. Search engines want in and try to extract as much as possible out of social media. If your brand is engaged, search engines will find your content. And by connecting users to the relevant content coming from your brand, marketers get the impressions they so desire.

By now you should be sold. Social media is great. Search marketing helps no matter where your brand is. But how do you measure performance for assets distributed far and wide across social media? One big strength of a brand site comes from the control a marketer has on obtaining performance data about it. Social media sites have no interest in letting you shove Omniture tags into their code. You’re a guest. And in reality, the jury is still deliberating. Snake oil merchants and real scientists claim to have the answer for this need for proof and measurement (eMarketer proves this point). We are getting close to definitive solutions. Due to the resources necessary to successfully measure and track vast amounts of traffic and content, marketers may have to patiently wait or accept less definitive conclusions and research. Until then, there’s always the brand website.

Following up on my post on Facebook fan pages, InsideFacebook’s Eric Eldon broke the news that Facebook is working harder to verify the authenticity of the people behind fan pages on its site. If you are fan of say, Lenovo laptops, there was nothing preventing you from setting up a fan page for the company. If Lenovo decided to launch their own fan page at a later date, they would wake up to the fact that it was already occupied or taken. Brands are left with little options other than join forces with people who do not necessarily behoove to their marketing message, or try and launch a page in parallel, to varying degrees of success. Contacting Facebook for help does not guarantee you action or relief.

We feel fan pages hold great promise. A story on PRI radio show Marketplace tells the story of The Coca-Cola company successfully teaming up with individuals who set up its fan page before its own marketing team got to it. The brand’s strength and its passionate following helped it garner a following that is almost 4 million users strong.

Hopefully the new verification measures will reduce the chances of such brand name squatting on Facebook.

On our way to lunch today we had a sighting that makes the average geek excited: a Google Maps car, live, in the flesh. These cars are deployed by Google to document the street view imagery on its maps. They also collect geospatial data. It is not the most nondescript article to travel with.

Parked outside a Friendly’s diner, a huge tower carrying telemetry and photography equipmentis installed atop the car.

Data collection equipment inside the car

Driver side view of the car featuring monitor, keyboard

As you can see, a long, methodical road-trip necessitates gummy candy and lots of music.

The data collection computer is stored in the car's trunk

Wireless data uplink using a Verizon data connector.

Definitely does not seem like the cushiest gig, but hey, it’s a tough economy.

Following up on my recent post about Facebook pages, AdAge has an interesting article about TGI Friday’s efforts. TGI Friday’s set a public goal – to get 500,000 people to fan their spokesperson, Woody, on the site. Supported by a freebie (free hamburgers for Facebook fans), television and online advertising campaign, the campaign was locked and loaded. It’s just that before they even really went out and started spending their media, they had 80,000 fans. It’s just that instead of taking a month, it took them 13 days to reach the target. Half a million free burgers leave a dent on any company’s budget ($2.5 million retail value, assuming the $5 burger price). Now the TV and banners ads are running, increasing exposure.

According to the article frantic calls and discussions ensued on how to handle the explosive success. TGI Friday’s did the right thing, though. Until the end of the month, apparently, they are going to honor their promise and give away free burgers to fans of Woody (who apparently, by proxy, seem to like red and white with articles of flair). What can we learn from this: overall – TGI Friday’s set out right. Getting fans by giving away stuff is the right thing to gain traction quickly. Maybe dipping the toes and seeing if fans need the extra media boost would have made sense. At the very least, it would help to plan for a good outcome, and apparently budget for it. At least they avoided the scorn of what are now tens of thousands of fans who would have been left out in the cold, burgerlss. I am keen to see what they are going to do with Woody and how they are going to sustain interest in absence of freebies. In the meantime, I am going to get my coupon.

Our Sue Lockwood shared this dense infographic illustrating financial and other interesting factoids from the mobile app battleground. It was created by you-must-subscribe-to iPhone website, iSmashPhone.

Click on the image for the full story.

Molecular was one of the first agencies to develop a branded application on Facebook. A lot has changed since that first iteration of the Facebook Platform API. I doubt many initially thought Facebook would remain as successful for this long, let alone keep growing at its torrid pace. While the Application Platform matures and evolves, the new darlings, especially among brands, are Facebook brand/fan pages and Facebook Connect. In this first of two posts, I will discuss Facebook fan pages and what you should know before setting your brand up with one. A following post will provide a look at what Facebook Connect can do for you.

Advantages
1. Access to the Facebook Social Graph
Looking to tap into Facebook millions of users is a no brainer. Facebook’s user mass visits the site for hours every day and many look for more reasons to stick around. A fan page gives users opportunities to congregate, talk, and react. It is up to you to make your page relevant to users so they not only become your fans on Facebook, they tell their friends about it. Starbucks made itself relevant by leveraging Facebook fan pages early on. The coffee house chain that is so much more, created a page to help it connect with and stoke its devoted following. Fans get the inside scoop about promotions and events, and a place where they can hold a conversation with the brand they care for a love so much.

2. Low Cost of Entry
Getting a Facebook page up and running takes a matter of minutes. Just go to Facebook’s new page application (login required) and set up a page for your brand. That’s it. But before diving in, you would be smart to look to see if a brand fan page already exists. Despite some warnings in place, nothing prevents users from creating a fan (or hate) page for your brand. An existing page can spare you the user recruitment effort as you can try to embrace its owners and give them your official umbrella. Regardless creation date, all pages come with familiar features – a wall, discussion boards, video and photo galleries, as well as others. All of these features at your fingertips, at no cost. Now get the excitement going.

3. Traction
So how are your ads, Google keywords and affiliates faring? Research from ViTrue appears to point to another strength of Facebook pages: brand messages on the fan page wall get a much higher click-through rates than ads. That’s so not surprising given that the people who visit your fan page are normally actively interested in what your brand has to say. And if you post your message, do it on Tuesday, ok?

Disadvantages

If you are drooling and dialing your agency to just make sure you have a killer fan page, let’s review what lies between you and a great fan page.

1. Fans remain strangers
For all the joys of tapping into Facebook’s vast social graph, Facebook keeps information about your fans well under its control. Keep in mind that this information is at the heart of Facebook’s business model and you are really playing in their world. All you essentially get to know about an individual is his/her Facebook ID and if they are a fan or not. Facebook does give you rudimentary analytics, such as age, gender, country, city and language, but any attempt to customize your content or improve its aim will remain a guess. And unless you employ applications, you don’t get to view even the minimal data you get from Facebook about your users. One thing should be clear: Facebook is not a CRM data acquisition play.

2. It gets complicated quickly
So what can you do to make your page stand out and give it some pop? Like profile pages, your page can have a Facebook platform application installed on it. Applications can do amazing things and developers can even gear their apps for installation on fan pages. The problem is, most app developers don’t care much for companies and a great many applications break or just don’t work on fan pages. Part of the issue is that pages confuse the Facebook platform. Whenever an application runs on a Facebook profile page, it gets to ‘see’ the user who installed it. On a fan page, that ‘user’ is the fan page; there is no individual behind it, and that is a big problem. To make matters worse, the mere installation of applications on a fan page is a slightly convoluted process, and setting up application properties is more puzzling still.

So what can you do? Beverage maker VitaminWater follows the best practice on its fan page. You ‘install’ an application into the brand page, where the application is really a link that will send the user to the installation page for a real application that will run on a user’s profile. In this way, your brand will get to interact with an actual user and not with a stranger.

VitaminWater's Facebook Fan Page - Install our application

Needless to say, application development costs money and adoption rates vary wildly. VitaminWater made its application more interesting by giving fans a say on the future flavors it will produce, something that helped to fuel installations. Beyond costs, brands also need to make sure that the applications work; a buggy or slow application can hurt brand image and perception with the very people who love it most.

3. Bribes cost money
So how do you get people to join your page? Clicking the ‘Become a fan’ link takes a lot of motivation. Beyond the hard core folks who actually love what you have to sell, others need some convincing. Coupons can definitely help: clothing and house wares chain Kohl’s promised users discount coupons if they became fans. Just make sure you can live up to a promise. Starbucks ice cream, produced by Unilever, caught flack for promising coupons for free pints but then ran out of the number allotted for daily disbursement. TGI Friday’s is recruiting fans on TV, promising free $5 burgers to those who become fans. Others, like WholeFoods, invest in content that showcases the unique variety of products sold at the chain’s stores. Links also helped drive traffic to the company’s web site where more content was available. In conclusion, attracting users takes an investment, so get the budget ready.

Fan Woody, have meat: TGI Friday wants to be friends and puts its beef in the game

Facebook Pages: Take the plunge.
Fan pages’ potential is enormous. We all know about brand ambassadors and their ability to positively influence their peers on a brand’s behalf. Fan pages offer you access to individuals who want to know more about your brand and are willingly associating with it. As such, the fan page not only spare you research hours looking for such ambassadors; it can also give you a chance to make new ones out of the already converted. Furthermore, fan pages offer a low cost of entry into this world as well as the ability to dabble for a short time before you commit to supporting the medium wholeheartedly. Just remember – leave the sales-speak to ads.

Monday’s announcement of Oracle’s takeover of Sun Microsystems was nothing short of a mild earthquake in the world of computing. Our hometown of Boston was celebrating Patriots’ Day and the Boston Marathon was keeping us all riveted. So after three days of mulling, thinking and tossing around ideas of what this all means, here’s my take of where this may lead.

Until Monday, Oracle and Sun manifested very different business philosophies. Oracle is a company that sells database server software. Love it or hate it, it is the dominant player in this key sector and luckily for Oracle, its strategy remained relatively simple:

1. Sell licenses for database software
2. Create products complementing the database
3. Sell support
4. Buy products and rivals that are in a weakened position
5. Foster the creation of a thriving ecosystem around product lines
6. Buy said ecosystem products when times are rough (like now)

Of course a lot of business smarts did not hurt along the way and thus far. No matter what Microsoft ,IBM and many in the open source community throw at it – Oracle placidly remains a number one. IT folks will grumble at costs, but will go on betting the farm on Oracle. Oracle remains the choice when storing mission critical data, and to a lesser degree helps the CIO sleep quite well at night, thank you. Oracle is helped by the reality that once you have huge amounts of data in a database and the investment is in place, it is quite difficult to switch to say, cheaper alternatives. Oh, and Oracle runs on Windows, Linux, AIX, anything so whenever you need them, they can sell that license. “We’ll play with whatever you got”, they say.

Sun is another story.

As many have noted too frequently, Sun never recovered from the dot com bust earlier this decade. The Java language may be the most important programming language out there today, and Java-based technologies do power myriad enterprises, but this gift to mankind never really made Sun much money. Java was supposed to drive folks to buy Sun’s expensive and possibly superior servers. Sadly for Sun, the fact that it was an open technology running on every platform made it popular as much as it made Sun servers not required. Then there was Linux that was easier to use and cheaper (eh, free), unlike Sun’s Solaris Unix. operating system That hurt too. Fewer licenses, less money.

Seeking fresh thinking, founder Scott Mcnealy left the Sun CEO post for Jonathan Schwartz, who took openness and freedom to new levels. Sun embraced everything and anything open source. Sun even moved to commodity architectures to try and sell more servers. Instead of sticking with its fast, small, green, smart Sparc processors. Sun, gulp, even embraced AMD processors. Pitting itself against commodity Dell, IBM and HP servers was expectedly difficult. Many remained loyal to its industrial-strength Sparc servers, but growth was not happening there either. To help Solaris gain or regain adoption, the operating system was made open source and free. Concurrently there was an attempt to show the world Sun loved Linux. Sorta. Schwartz did not stop there and pushed on making Java itself open source. Defining the language is a process open to virtually anyone to influence.

And then, last year, Sun bought MySQL. The wildly popular free, open source database now had a home and a parent. A parent who could provide the enterprise-grade support that enterprise-grade clients with deep pockets seek. Legitimacy was finally within reach for an application that less than a decade ago was regarded as a hobbyist toy. The master plan was unfolding:. Sun was going to be a services company (oh yeah, they sold servers) supporting free, open source technologies (and some proprietary add-ons made by Sun that made them sweeter). Put together, Sun really held a lot of the open source in its portfolio. Now Oracle, a company that free is not really a big priority for, a company that open and nice rarely appear in its vocabulary (unless they help move database licenses) – holds that striking portfolio.

So what is Larry Ellisson, Oracle’s iconic leader, to do with all of this Sun goodness?

If the past helps us predict anything about Oracle, the company lets many of its takeover target go on as they would have been, tweaking management, learning the business, getting the clients, (selling database licenses, did we say they are good doing that?) and often, making them more successful. Clients of competing products that were taken over by Oracle were given some relief but gradually moved to the core Oracle technologies if they wanted to remain friends.

The most influential far-reaching item in the grab bag is Java. Java has been good to Oracle and the world as a whole. Larry LOVES Java. Oracle at some point even baked Java into the insides of its namesake database. Not an awesome idea, but it moved licenses. Oracle owns a Java software powerhouse in BEA (maker of the popular Weblogic Java Enterprise Edition application server) and was not a slouch by any stretch of the imagination even before that takeover last year. Being invested in the technology, it is nice and safe to own it. Seems like Java works for Oracle and for now, Oracle will keep it going with mostly hands off.

Sun’s services organization and still considerable client base are also in a good place. Lots of clients run Oracle on Sun hardware (the companies were chummy like, forever) and adding boots on the ground will help Oracle pose more of a threat to IBM’s army of consultants. So big win and major synergy there.

MySQL is where I am getting quite confused. Never mind Sun, MySQL AB, the Swedish company Sun took over last year was manned by developers and staffers quite avidly anti-Oracle. MySQL was becoming THE open source alternative to established (read Oracle) database software, with a variety of large and larger companies betting on MySQL to avoid the Oracle license toll. No question Larry Ellison likes owning the main open source adversary; question is whether MySQL’s development team will like it too. With this economy, and after the hard years MySQL had to prove itself, I would say many MySQL developers will just deal.

Happy so far. Now it gets a bit foggy: Solaris, Sun hardware and within hardware, the Sparc architecture.

Is Solaris necessary in a world that moves faster towards free Linux (and FreeBSD) operating systems? There is a considerable install base paying handsome support fees, often because they WANT a company-driven operating system. IBM’s AIX looks OK but off the mainframe it is not very shiny. HP-UX? who? So Solaris is an alternative; but development is not thriving and maintaining an OS is not cheap. The future is iffy for Solaris.

When it comes to hardware, does Oracle want to go head to head against HP, Dell, IBM, new entrant Cisco and others in the server market? Oracle is extremely cosy with hardware makers – Oracle needs horsepower and disk space – they make it. Even IBM does not mind being in bed with Oracle. Running SAP on Oracle-owned Sun should feel precarious, but that’s like punishment for not choosing Oracle for ERP, and so be it.

This position of power may just allow Oracle to compete with those companies that need its software, at least in the short term. And saying that ‘our servers work best with our software’ is not a promise companies scoff at. Now if Oracle could do something about those pesky high prices. Hardware may stay, but what about its central component – the highly regarded Sparc processor?

Sparc was always ahead of its time. When the world (aka Intel) was just thinking of moving to 32-bit processing, Sun was like, ages into 64-bit realms. They are still ahead of the curve, but Intel processors and the world of 64-bits seem to have people quite content mostly. Making and designing haute couture CPUs is very expensive. You look super cool using it, but without vast production to defray associated costs make it difficult to compete on merits alone. Hence Sun’s AMD fling and $1,000 servers. Sun is emotional about Sparc. I smell spin-off, just like Motorola’s creation of FreeScale.

Finally, Oracle does not mind software duplication as long as it, well, moves database licenses. Other licenses are nice too. So adding Sun’s open source GlassFish and other software servers may be just OK for a while at least. Getting some creds from the open source community is nothing Oracle cares for at all, but keeping free initiatives going does not hurt much.

Oracle is a brilliantly-run company. Swooping in after IBM did not pull the trigger seems like just another brilliant move. Naturally, one with plenty of challenges, but Oracle knows how to throw its weight around just right, and yeah, sell licenses. Not that Sun was necessary, but Oracle now owns an even more massive swath of the software landscape than ever before. IBM more than any company should feel more threatened than ever before. Uncle Larry’s coming after you.

The holy grail of marketing on mobile devices for at least the latter half of this decade revolved around the promise of location based services, or LBS. LBS mean that the network will share its knowledge of your whereabouts with an application, which in turn can react to it. For example, detecting that you are walking next to a McDonald’s location, your mobile device can suddenly pop a message on its screen telling you that you just got a coupon for a free Diet Coke if you buy a Big Mac. Built-in GPS would be the simple avenue to obtaining location data. Still, as Google Maps users on older Blackberry devices know, using cell tower information can give you a pretty decent idea where you are as well.

The main setback to widespread adoption of such marketing magic had been the mobile carriers themselves. Always fearing the same fate of Internet service providers, they look for angles to retain control and squeeze income out of any potential revenue stream. Adopting caution instead of openness, having access to mobile device-based LBS was generally only possible through carrier partnerships. In the best case, the carrier had the application preinstalled on all devices, but getting there was an almost impossible mission. Worse yet, American consumers are not keen to install third party applications on their phones, unless your name is Google or Facebook.

Apple’s iPhone changed all of that in two ways thanks to its exclusive agreement with AT&T:

1. Third-party iPhone applications are allowed to access location information obtained from its built-in GPS device.
2. Users can easily install third-party applications from the App Store.

Google, following Apple’s lead, made the same possible on phones running its Android operating system with its own easy-to-download application store.

However much better things are now, something may be missed in the hype. The vast majority of mobile device users do not own an iPhone or an Android-based device. They also still do not have built-in GPS or applications that use it. So are they destined to stay in the dark when it comes to LBS? Are there other networks that can be leveraged in order to provide location awareness outside of the world of cellular communications?

The answer is yes and you are using it every single day, probably. The network is even deployed worldwide and is tried and tested for decades: credit card and payment networks. In the modern world, the vast majority of people turn to plastic before they turn to cash. Credit card companies are so keen to have us do that they actually reward us with cash and hotel and airline miles. Beyond racking up debt, there is a hidden utility that can be tapped, at least for marketing purposes in this vast payment network.

As a suburbanite, I frequently head to the sprawling shopping centers near my home. Like many parents, I go to Target frequently to get diapers for the baby and replenish other household products. I always use my credit card to pay because I want to get cash back, even if it is 42 cents for the current purchase. This is where the magic can take place; the credit card network knows where I am from the authorization and processing of the transaction. Why not send me a text message with a coupon for a free latte at the Panera location next door to the Target store? It is the payment transaction that provides the network its location awareness and this network is currently not doing anything with that information. Better yet, I did not need any special hardware other than old school plastic; no special mobile device or GPS technology. Any mobile device will do.

Clearly there are huge hurdles with privacy the top among them. Technology can always be figured out if enough effort and support is thrown into the mix. Consumers can be incentivized and shown the benefits of such a program, especially with no investment or effort on their part being necessary to participate. They must also explicitly agree to receive such messages, often on their own dime. At the same time, very few entities have access to this information, namely Visa, Mastercard, American Express and to a lesser extent, Discover Financial’s Novus network.

Still, banks can rely on another network that is under their own control – automated teller machines or ATMs. People always need cash for the few instances that credit cards do not work. Whenever you go to an ATM, the bank knows where you are. This is again a perfect trigger to provide you with location based marketing information. Similar to the coupons printed on the back of supermarket receipts, banks can give you coupons to businesses that are close to the ATM device.

A weakness of this approach is its immediate nature: the reaction to a consumer’s known location must almost be instantaneous. Otherwise, the consumer has just moved on and the relevance of the message/coupon/information may be reduced. Nonetheless, its low fidelity and near-independence of mobile device capabilities beyond SMS gives it a lot of its power. Can you hear me, Visa?

Of course you do not want to believe it. You do not want to care about the people who still use dial-up, Windows 98 and AOL. And apparently mom and pop do not tweet much, really.

According to a study by pallbearer and highly vaunted Molecular sister company Synovate , 58% of online users worldwide (and they did talk to a totally not so shabby sample of 13,000 folks) do not even know what social networks are. They should be punished, I agree.

In America, the unaware group is a sigh-of-relief-small 30% but the more shocking aspect is that users are losing the passion and faith: almost half of all socially networked Americans, Canadians, Japanese and Poles say that they are losing interest. I bet they never played Scrabulous.

Other interesting findings:

• Social networks are a global phenomenon – more than a quarter of respondents belong to one. Holland is the most socially crazed.
• People are not monogamous to their social network and often use more than one.
• Americans are especially worried about the dangers of social networks with lack of security and privacy
• Half of users notice ads (probably non-Firefox users) on social networks – with US users leading the pack at 66%
• 40% of respondents felt online interactions are as meaningful as those done face-to-face, and social network users strongly felt that online contacts are better than no contact at all
• Finally, more than half of respondents felt the demise of language skills was due in part to social networks; silly, lol, omg :-D

Gotta love a good survey.

Earlier this month, Facebook announced that it was giving up on the development of their official Java API client, a core component into building Facebook platform applications. It was apparently an effort that drained a lot of resources and was used by a decreasing number of people. We used the client extensively on one of our projects and in many ways found it to be deficient and sadly, weaker than the company’s official PHP client library. Several things appear to stand out here, in my quite humble opinion:

1. Major companies like official APIs

We worked with a major client on building a Facebook application and the notion of a supported client library was providing their IT staff many a warm fuzzy. Corporations love having a number to call to resolve issues, service level agreements (SLAs) and the such, and that is where the word ‘official’ holds sway. Corporations also love using Java, which is the de-facto co-favorite (with Microsoft’s technologies) on corporate servers. At the same time, Facebook never provided any SLAs or guaranteed any support duration for any version of the platform’s APIs. Furthermore, Facebook remains a fast-moving target in order to provide users with more features in a constantly evolving market. Time will tell if this has any effect on what was a corporate gold rush on Facebook.

2. Java is less important

It is clear that the vast majority of Facebook application developers use PHP as the application development language. Facebook itself uses PHP and writes many of the common applications using their own PHP library. It all appears to be working just fine, thank you. And while the back-end relies on everything from C/C++ to Java and even Erlang, providing Java developers with a client library seems less crucial to Facebook’s business goals. Java developers were quick to create their own libraries for Facebook’s APIs so the official library ended up facing competition from the start. What the official client had that open source clients did not and will not have is the ability to foresee and update immediately to API changes. So it is possible that the Facebook math is that few people actually use Java to write applications, those few people supposedly have funding (because Java is corporate) and therefore can pay or support client development themselves.

3. REST is difficult to write clients for

Facebook is using REST for its web service API. REST is good for small, nimble applications that need to work quickly with minimal processing overhead. REST’s weakness, in my opinion, comes from the fact that beyond documenting your custom protocol, you or the consumers or your web service need to maintain a codebase for a client. Google and Amazon buck the trend somewhat and still offer SOAP web services (alongside with REST). SOAP is the inverse of REST in many ways – heavyweight (lots of XML going in either direction), demands intense processing power and is difficult to be read by humans, as it is more geared towards machines. Yet generating SOAP clients after an API updates is trivial. You just tell your Java/.Net/Perl/Python/whatever SOAP client generator to look at the service specification (WSDL) and voila – you have a client. If you own the API, changing the SOAP service specification is almost as easy (one click does it quick in Visual Studio, for example). The Facebook platform is at the point where it is so expansive and capable that SOAP may be a better call.

4. Faint odor of Microsoft

I love Microsoft. I own Microsoft stock (about 3 or 4).

Let’s put the Microsoft conspiracy theory hat on: Microsoft owns a pretty chunk of Facebook and may be vying for more. In the place where the official Java client library used to appear, you now see a slew of exciting Microsoft technologies for your usage pleasure instead. Coincidence? maybe. Facebook has every right to do this and I am reading the tea leaves. At least Microsoft sees a return on its investment if only in a roundabout way.