Facebook, apps and… maps

After reading about all the scrambling among Facebook developers to adjust to the recent changes, we're a little relieved that we're not yet integrated with Facebook here at LiveIntent. TechCrunch had an interesting post yesterday calling Facebook's recent status and notification changes a "D-day for Facebook App Developers". However, I'm inclined to agree with the feeling towards the end of the post that this is actually a good thing for responsible apps. I, for one, have been ignoring notifications for ages because some apps just send so many of them. Allowing me to hide the ones that I ignore anyway means that I'll pay more attention to the good updates. And who can argue with giving users more granular control?

On a completely unrelated note, I also just watched this video about Google's map navigation. Awesome. A little disappointed it's only being released to Droid users at first, but pretty impressed with the technology nonetheless.

Exciting week for social media

Here at LiveIntent, we've been watching closely all of the developments that came out of the web2.0 conference and the changes that have been unfolding in the world of social media this last week. Changes to Facebook's status feed, the announcements by Google and Bing regarding Twitter search, Bing's Facebook search... there's a lot going on! Whether you're a social media geek like us or not, there's no denying that real-time search is entering the mainstream... and it's going to change the way we find information. What do you think?

Check out this presentation by Google's Marissa Mayer at the Web2.0:

Update: if you're wondering why everybody's making such a big deal about real-time and social search, John Battelle has a great 50,000 foot view here on his blog. (And if you haven't read his book The Search, I highly recommend you check that out too.)

LiveIntent – Aligning Consumer and Advertiser Intentions

One of the things that we discuss a lot here at LiveIntent is, appropriately, intent. Consumer intent. Advertiser intent. Publisher intent. Even our intent! The real-time web is all about intentions and our goal is to digest and learn from these intentions. Our theory is that the more alignment of intent that we can create, the higher the utility that we provide. I know, it all sounds a little pie-in-the-sky, but I'll bring it down to earth with some familiar examples.

Let's start with display advertising. Display does a particularly bad job of aligning the intentions of the consumer, the advertiser and the publisher. A consumer visits a website with the intention of reading the content on that site. But the advertiser's intent is to take that user away from the site! Low alignment of intentions. And thus, display ads receive disproportionately low click rates.

Email marketing is a step up from display but the intentions are still far from aligned. Users check their email to correspond with friends, coworkers, etc, not to receive advertisements. Every now and then, the user receives emails--such as newsletters--that they've signed up for; here the intentions are more highly aligned. The consumer wants to read about a topic and the advertiser wants to provide more info on it--but let's face it, we all know how rare this is

Search advertising, on the other hand, gets it right. When they search, the consumer is expressing an intent... and the advertiser's intent is to distribute a product that meets that intent. And consequently, well managed search advertisements can receive very high click rates.

So what does this all have to do with social media? That's what we're here to figure out. We believe that advertising works best for everybody involved--the user, the advertiser, the publisher, and yes, us too!--when the everybody's intentions are aligned. Technological innovation has long been fueled by advertising dollars and if social media is going to continue it's explosive growth, it too will require a sustainable advertising model. At LiveIntent, we hope that we can create this model by providing meaningful, targeted, intent-aligned connections on social media. So next time you're on a website, look for the LiveIntent Follow Us button and send us feedback. Did we make the connections you were looking for?

Introducing myself

Hi, my name is Matt Keiser and I'd like to officially welcome you to the LiveIntent blog. As I describe in our story, I started LiveIntent to help others find the best people to follow on Twitter. I'm an avid Twitter user but it took me countless hours and the guidance of a good friend to find the people that make Twitter as valuable to me as it is today. LiveIntent was created to save others that time.

On an almost daily basis, I continue to meet people confused about Twitter. Like many of the rest of you, "what is Twitter", "who do I follow" and "I tried Twitter but didn't get it" are things that I hear all the time. Here at LiveIntent, we hope to help solve those issues. After all, the secret to Twitter is knowing who to follow... and we do all the work for you!

In the coming weeks, months, and (hopefully) years, my team and I will be using this blog to tell you a little more about our products, the vision behind what we're doing, and just generally to share things we find interesting. Please use the comments section to leave us feedback and share your thoughts. After all that's what social media's all about--being social!

Thanks for visiting LiveIntent.