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Just two days ago, I wrote a post about how some applications were cheating their way to the top of the “most installed” list on Facebook. It seems that they’re already taking action to curb these sorts of abuses, starting with changes to the code (someone with more programming knowledge can probably fill in more here - if you’ve got a sense of what the code changes mean, post a link in the comments). But what I find more interesting is a new feature added today that tracks stats not solely by installs but by engagement. If you look at the application summary page today, you’ll see that instead of total installs, it now shows “Daily Active Users.” This change completely turns the application rankings on their head, and will likely have a major effect on how applications are developed and what gets installed.

So what is a “Daily Active User?” And what’s the percentage? Dave Morin explains on the Facebook Blog:

With a change this foundational to Facebook Platform’s measurement, we want to make sure that you completely understand how we will be measuring engagement. We define engagement as the number of users who touch your application every day (measured from midnight to midnight each day).

These touch points are:
- Canvas Page Views
- Link Clicks in FBML
- Mock-Ajax Form Submission
- Click-to-Play Flash

The number of engaged users is calculated by putting all of these touch points together. We display this as the number of “Daily Active Users.” Next to it we also show what percentage that is of the application’s total number of users.

So you can still figure out the gross reach of an application by taking the daily active users and dividing by the percentage. This leads to some new questions about what’s the most useful gauge of how much real influence an application has.

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In a Web 2.0 world, everyone’s looking for the magic formula to make something go viral. Going viral means hitting that critical mass that makes your petition, news story, video, game or gimmick an internet sensation, the talk of water coolers, instant messages and maybe pop culture. It’s hard to pick just one thing as the embodiment of viral, but my personal favorite metric to compare a viral idea against is the infamous Jib-Jab cartoon of the 2004 election. “This Land” was a video that millions of people forwarded for any number of reasons - I know I received it from a host of friends who said either “Check it out - your guy really does have more waffles than a house of pancakes” or “Yep… they’ve got W down pat.”

Naturally occurring viral anything requires a confluence of events - timing, an empty news cycle, a pre-built audience to get you started, and material that’s easy to share. This perfect storm isn’t easy to achieve, so a cottage industry grew in the form of giving your viral anything a little push to help it on its way. Search engine optimization and marketing, paid online ads, people who will pitch your campaign in social networks and the like decrease the risk associated with spending big on material in the hopes that it will go viral. But there’s still nothing that beats the word of mouth friends telling friends can provide. I can ignore a million ads about how cool something might be, but one roommate recommendation and I’m there, particularly if we share interests.

That’s why the new wave of “viral” Facebook apps has me concerned.

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A article in the Times caught my eye earlier this week - it purported that HP had developed an easy way to print using a mobile phone. The idea intrigued me - I’m always on the lookout for cool SMS tools (there’s got to be more to it than poorly spelled messages filled with “ur” and other expressions used to save people the agony of typing two more characters… but I digress) and being without a printer on the road can be a nuisance - having to transcribe Google Maps directions by hand sort of defeats the point.

So I read the article and was disappointed to see that it’s not so much printing from a mobile phone as using a mobile phone as one of several devices in the process of getting something to print, sort of like saying you walk to work because there’s a parking lot between your house and your car. Here’s how it works:

The service requires users to first “print” their documents to H.P. servers connected to the Internet. The system then assigns them a document code, and transmits that code to a cellphone, making it possible to retrieve and print the documents from any location.

Later, using the SMS message the service has sent to the user’s cellphone, it is possible to retrieve the documents by entering the user’s phone number and a document code on the Cloudprint Web site. The documents can then be retrieved as a PDF, ready to be printed at a nearby printer.

The service will include a directory service that will show the location of publicly available printers on Google Maps. The system currently works with any Windows-connected printer. A Macintosh version is also planned.

Make sense? It’s all the fun of using Kinko’s web upload service combined with the hassle of saving every text message that relates to a document you might one day need. But I decided to put my skepticism aside and give it a try - maybe the Times was just making it sound convoluted.

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Most of our clients are engaging their audiences with some sort of regular email communications. There are a lot of considerations that go in to devising these emails (design, message, frequency, usefulness, call to action, clarity, etc.). One of the toughest issues we face is ensuring that email passes automated spam filters and actually arrives at the recipient’s in-box. Unfortunately, unscrupulous spammers are making this increasingly difficult.

Tamara Gielen (BeRelevant: Email Marketing Best Practices Blog) blogged about a Blue Sky Factory article, “Dirty Words in Disguise” which has some very helpful tips in this regard. They even list some words to avoid in your copy. Some may surprise you.

• Information you requested
• Important information regarding
• Guarantee, Guaranteed
• Special Promotion
• Great Offer/Deal
• Visit our website
• Opportunity
• 50% Off
• Click Here
• Call Now
• Subscribe
• Bonus
• Free
• All New
• One time
• Order Now
• Amazing
• Discount
• Save up to
• One time
• Winner
• Prizes

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You can now embed a Google map in your blog or webpage. Click on the map above and mouse around. Yeah. That’s cool. Could it be any easier? No, not really.

After you create your map, you just…

And then you just…

There are so many potential applications for this for nonprofit organizations, that I don’t think Beaconfire Wire readers need my help to figure them out.

Beaconfire’s on a real roll with the wildlife these days. In July, I reported on a new project with the Wildlife Conservation Society. This week we started a project with the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF). Like so many nonprofits, they have consitutent data scattered all over the place (at least 6 different systems) and no effective way to see a holistic view of a donor. Over the next six weeks, we’ll be working with AWF to figure out how to improve the flow of data between these systems — ultimately to improve the efficiency and accuracy of their constituent information.

Once upon a time, getting photos for your site was an ordeal. It involved combing through massive stacks of CDs that cost hundreds to thousands of dollars, and required you to buy them all even if you just needed a few. Recent innovations have made it significantly easier to get stock photos for free or cheap (and I don’t mean using Google Image Search and hoping no one notices!)

YotoPhoto is my personal favorite. It’s not a library but an index of other free libraries, none of which are big enough to search on their own but the sum of which make for a pretty good collection. Their mission is

[…]to help people locate, remix and republish open and copyleft images. We aren’t just about ‘free stock photos’ for designers, but also about helping educators, bloggers and digital artists find photos they can use without fear of “the man”.

Yotophoto draws heavily from Flickr photos that are tagged as Creative Commons, as well as Wikipedia’s photo division. An overall great place to find photos.

I just discovered the second service today via Lifehacker: Free Range Stock Photos. Free Range has a library contributed by photographers who receive ad revenue sharing. It requires a registration, which will conveniently sign you up for their newsletter - for those who have an objection to sharing your email address, you can try a login on BugMeNot or just use a Mailinator address. The search still needs work - I typed in “cat” and it gave me a bunch of construction equipment, while “city” gave me a light bulb.

If you’re willing to pay a little money, consider iStockPhoto for your design needs. They’ve got a volumous library of photos (and now video) you can use for $1 to $50 (depending on the resolution, not the subject). The biggest catch here is that they’ve become a popular go-to place for stock photos, so your selection might have already been used by others in your sector!

Of course, the best way to get a free original photo is to take it yourself or to utilize your existing assets. Do you have field offices that do a majority of your actual mission? Make sure they’re set up with a digital camera and a way to get these photos to you. You can set up Flickr and YouTube accounts fairly quickly, allowing remote offices to get you the shots you need without having to wait for the mail, which lets you give notes on them immediately if you need them to try again.

And once you do have internal photos, make sure you figure out a solid way to categorize them and search for them. What you can keep in your head right now could become a major nightmare in ten years when your replacement’s replacement is looking for that one photo you used in a montage… all anyone remembers is that it’s in the folder marked, “Pictures.”

Where do you get your free or cheap photos? How do you manage your house photo library? Share your sources in the comments.

One the challenges nonprofit PR staff have faced in recent years is the challenge of responding to news online. If an inaccurate story appears on Google or Yahoo! news, there’s no editor to call to set the record straight. If a thousand bloggers swarm around bad news for your organization, what do you do? Manually posting your own reply in the comments section of thousands of blogs is overwhelmingly labor intensive.

Google News now allows organizations and individuals that are quoted in the stories it indexes to post comments in reply. This has the potential to be a much more efficient way to respond to online news than most others we have experimented with.

And although it’s been a long time since I took a reporter to lunch, I remember they used to tell me they often used Google News to research what other journalists had written about a topic before starting their own stories. This suggests that’s it worth your time to respond to stories when you can.

Here’s an example: a story about a study that suggests that McDonalds’ advertising and branding practices have unfortunate consequences for children. Two organizations profiled in the story have elaborated on the points raised in the piece.

Very interesting. Hat tip to Lost Remote for this one.

John Brian has has been blogging quite a bit lately about Facebook. I have my own Facebook account that seems to occupy a lot of my “free” time. But for me, it’s not a mission-driven pursuit; I’m just doing it to learn about the technology and what it can and can’t do

How do you get to the bottom of what it will cost your organization to run an effective social networking campaign?

FrogLoop (powered by Care2) has put together an ROI calculator for organizations thinking about getting involved with social networking (Facebook, MySpace).  Formatted like an online mortgage calculator, you type in information about how you plan on staffing these efforts and what kind of membership you hope to gain, and the calculator gives you the resulting revenues and costs.

I’m sure it’s not perfect, but the kinds of questions it asks you are exactly the sort of questions that need to be asked (and often are not) before jumping in with both feet.

Is It Worth It? An ROI Calculator for Social Network Campaigns

There was an AP piece out recently, discussing the problems and challenges of CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart - yeah, it’s a stretch, but most of the good acronyms were taken), and proposing, as a possible solution, a webcam that continually takes pictures of a variety of subjects and asks users to identify them. It’s rooted in the problem that unless you have a truly gigantic database, spammers will eventually just add your pics to their library and be able to break through. By using a webcam of, as the article suggested, a kitten bouncing around a room, there would be a continual stream of new photos for users to identify - presumably, you could have multiple kittens and ask how many were in a shot or what color the one currently on screen is or something that would change but be easily identifiable by people.

While this is an innovative, not to mention fun, approach to CAPTCHA, it brings up a chance to discuss the merits of using it at all. Let’s take a look at three areas where CAPTCHA is causing debate online: blogs, webforms and email.
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