Sunday 2 May 2010

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Focus on Imaging by Barry Zee

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This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Name: Rec.fmclass="blippr-nobr">rec.fm

Quick Pitch: Trusted recommendations and social media for the social good. It’s class='blippr-nobr'>Aardvarkclass="blippr-nobr">Aardvark meets Amazon reviews meets Twitter and Facebook.

Genius Idea: Friends love to share information about great products with each other. According to a survey by Publicis last year, 46% of Facebookclass="blippr-nobr">Facebook users said they would discuss or recommend a product on Facebook, while another 44% have already recommended a product on Twitterclass="blippr-nobr">Twitter. And almost a third of respondents said they had learned about a product, service or brand via a social networking site.

Not only do friends love to recommend products to each other, but friends also trust these recommendations. According to Nielsen, recommendations from personal acquaintances is the most trusted form of advertising worldwide.

Enter Rec.fm. Rec.fm allows you to recommend products to your friends via your social networks in three easy steps. First, search for the product you want to recommend on their website. Next, explain in 140 characters or less why you’re recommending it. After completing the prompt to log in via Facebook or Twitter, you’ll then be given a shortened rec.fm URL to share information about the product via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter and nearly a dozen other social networking platforms. If someone makes a purchase via your recommendation, the charity of your choice will receive the majority of Rec.fm’s revenue from the sale — you are not compensated. You will also receive an acknowledgment of your contribution via e-mail.

I tried out the service myself by recommending an edition of one of my favorite novels, Howard’s End by E.M. Forester, to my Twitter followers. If anyone follows through on my referral, a percentage of the proceeds will go to the Red Cross.

The best part about the service, in my opinion, is that it lends credibility to your recommendations. Reviewers on blogs and other media outlets are often accused of being secretly compensated for the recommendations they make via affiliate marketer programs like Amazon’s. If you use rec.fm, readers will know that your recommendations are genuine because there is complete transparency about the compensation process. Even better, your favorite cause can benefit from your love of sharing great products with your networks.

Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the Azure Services platform for their website hosting and storage needs. Microsoft recently announced the “new CloudApp()” contest – use the Azure Services Platform for hosting your .NET or class='blippr-nobr'>PHPclass="blippr-nobr">PHP app, and you could be the lucky winner of a USD 5000* (please see website for official rules and guidelines).”

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We will refresh this page regularly during the keynote. Please reload this page to see these updates.



9:45: Audience is getting seated.



10:01: Looks like there is a little delay. Keynote is now scheduled to start at 10:10 a.m. PST.



10:07: Rumor: Facebook and Microsoft will announce a new application partnership.




Image credit: Devin Reams.



10:11: Zuckerberg on stage.



10:12: "What we have to show you today will be one of the most transformative things for the Web we've ever done."



Open Graph: Puts people at the center of the Web. "The Web can become a semantically meaningful set of connections."





10:14: Recap of Facebook stats: 400 million users on Facebook, 100 million people use Facebook Connect.



"A lot of startups are requiring that their users use Facebook Connect. We want to make it simple to create these personalized experiences."



Policy updates: All permissions are now managed in one permissions dialog.



Cache: Developers can now store information for longer than 24 hours.



10:18: Facebook credits: More than 100 developers working with Facebook already.



10:18: Back to Open Graph: "Facebook only maps out the part of the social graph that relates to people." Others, like Yelp and Pandora map out the social graph around other topics.



10:21: There is no way to bring these different graphs together yet. Right now, developers use the stream metaphor, but the services don't understand these connections.



10:22: By connecting these graphs, Facebook will be able to show you restaurants your friends like, music your friends like, etc. "By doing this, the Web will get a whole lot better."



10:23: New Graph API: Makes it simple to read connections on FB. Based on a new standard.



New plugins for sites: Make your sites instantly social and personalized.



10:24: Example: See what your friends already liked on CNN. CNN won't know who you are or who your friends are.





On CNN homepage: See all your friends' activity.



10:25: Bret Taylor (formerly of Friendfeed) on stage.



10:27: How do you get people to feel comfortable with importing their Facebook friends?



Experience from Friendfeed: The only signup button that mattered was Facebook Connect, because that was the best way for people to find their friends.





10:28: New products: Social plugins: add social features with just one line of HTML.



Universal like button: A like button for the Web that will instantly share your like back to FB. Based on an iframe.



10:31: Activity streams plugin: Transport the FB news feed to your site.



10:31: Recommendations plugin: Show users articles on your site that they are most likely to like. Highly personalized.



Login plugin: See which of your friends already signed up for a given service.



Social bar: The "kitchen sink" of Facebook's new plugins. One bar at the bottom of the site will show all of these features.





10:33: Talking about the news feed: Open Graph will make the stream more useful. Allows you to markup your pages to tell Facebook what kind of real-world object your page represents. You can say, for example, that a page is about a band and where this band is from.







New section on your profile can now show which movies, songs, etc. you liked.



10:36: Launching with 30 partners today.



You can also subscribe by topics.



These likes and updates will point to sites outside of Facebook. "My identity is not just defined by Facebook but also by all of the things I do around the Web."



10:38: Graph API: Our attempt to re-architect the Facebook platform with simplicity and the Graph API in mind.



10:40: You can download all of the connections of a given user from the Graph API.





10:41: Search: You can search through all of the public updates on Facebook.



Real-time will be built-in. Facebook will ping developers when a user posts an update.



10:42: Facebook will use oAuth 2.0. "It's so much more awesome than our current system. Available for the Graph API and all of Facebook's existing APIs.







10:44: Zuckerberg back on stage.



Facebook expects to service a total of 1 billion like buttons today.



10:45: "The Web is at an important turning point today." Startups require their users to bring their real identity. "The default is now social."



10:46: What kind of products would be possible if Facebook partners already knew everything about their users?



Microsoft Docs.com: Online version of Microsoft's office suite. Collaborate with friends on documents.



All of the power of Microsoft Office - but with a built-in social experience.



Second example: Pandora. See what bands your friends like on Pandora.



10:50: Zuckerberg finishes the keynote with an anecdote about his girlfriend.









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