I love tucking lesser-used apps into folders, I’m glad audio apps other than iTunes are now allowed to run in the background, and I’m happy to see how much faster the phone seems to be with the new software.

However, I stumbled upon a feature that I didn’t see mentioned in the Ars review.

This morning, I got an email from a business partner who proposed we have lunch on Thursday. The OS saw the phrase “lunch this Thursday” and automatically underlined it as a link.

Clicking the link offered to add an event to my calendar.

Of course, this is Apple, so it created an event on the right date (this coming Thursday) guessed that it would be at noon, and put the subject of the Email in as the event name.

Something very like this functionality exists in Apple’s desktop Mail.app, but it was a great surprise to see it appear on my phone. I’m still distressed to see that Apple hasn’t added a “mark all as read” function to the Mail application, but this new feature is a welcome addition.

That’s where Facebook’s Lists become very helpful. If you group similar people together in a list, you can easily view news from only those sources, providing better context, more quickly, with more of the posts you actually want to see.

First, let’s create a list. Click “Friends” from the left column on the page. Then, near the top right corner of the main column you’ll see the button “Create A List.”

The first step is to give your list a name.

Next, pick the people you want to include in this list. For my “Cincy Network” group, I’m picking all the local people I’ve met at networking events. But you can also pick relevant pages, so in this case, I’m checking a few feeds that will keep me up to date on what’s happening in town.

Now when you want to check your feed for only that group, just click the “Friends” link in the left column, and the name of the group just below it. You’ll see a news feed you can quickly scan, knowing the context for everyone who appears on it.

Creating Friend Lists has another benefit as well. Say your friends from high school aren’t interested in industry-related links you’ll post for everybody else, or maybe you’d like to share some personal pictures with only your family and closest friends.

As you’re filling in a post on your wall, click the privacy pulldown menu (the padlock) and select “Custom.”

The next menu asks who should see the post. Select “Specific People.”

Start typing the name of your group, and a selectable group name should appear below the box. Save this setting, and your post will only go to members of your Friend List.

Like many things in Facebook, using Friend Lists can be a little cumbersome. It would be nice if it were easier to use. For example, the names of your Lists could show up in the privacy pulldown menu to save two steps. But once you get used to it, you can get more out of your Facebook experience by categorizing your connections.

Getting the Like Button Code

To put the Like button in my sidebar. I took a screenshot and measured it to find out my theme has a sidebar that’s 250 pixels wide.

First, I visited the Facebook Like Button page to get the code. I put my blog’s main URL in the box, along with a width of 250. You can set a few other options such as whether or not to include pictures and which of the 6 available fonts you’d like to use.

Clicking the “Get Code” button brings up two text boxes with code to insert the Like button on your site.

The first box is an iframe. It’s a little simpler, in that you only need to insert one bit of code instead of two. But it’s worth the extra step to get the XFMBL code in the second box. This will do a better job of scaling the box vertically to match how much content is actually in it. The iframe code can leave a big gaping hole in your sidebar if you don’t have a long list of fans.

Using the Like Box Instead

If your blog already has a Facebook Page, people who “Like” your blog can automatically be added there in the way that used to be called “fans.” So they’ll get updates from your Facebook Page, and your existing fans will show up immediately in the box.

In that case, you want the Like Box. Adding the Like Box is almost exactly like adding the like button, but it has a few more options. Just go to the Like Box page to get the code instead of the Like Button page above. In the end, this is what I decided to do, so that’s what you’ll see in my current sidebar.

Putting It In Place

Next, it’s a trip to the widgets page. This is located within your blog at wp-admin/widgets.php and can be found in the side navigation under “Appearance.” Drag the “Text” widget from the “Available Widgets” over to the spot on the Sidebar where you want it to appear. A box will pop open for the text you want included. Choose a name for the box and paste in the code from Facebook.

And Finally…

Now there’s just one step left. In order for the XFMBL code to work, you need to pull Facebook’s javascript onto your pages. You do this by adding a big chunk of code known as the Facebook JavaScript SDK. (Click that link to get the code).

The javascript command may take some time to load, so I recommend putting it in the footer of your site. That way the rest of your page will load without waiting for the Facebook SDK. To edit your blog’s footer file, go to the Editor under “Appearance.” ( /wp-admin/theme-editor.php ). From there, select the Footer (footer.php) from your theme files.

Now paste the Facebook JavaScript SDK code into your footer just before the tag, so it will be the last thing to load on every page.

Just hit the “Update” button to save the changes to the footer, and you should now see the Like button showing up on your blog’s sidebar!

Given the audience for their email, Facebook was obviously upbeat on the benefits to businesses who put up fan pages (and buy ads to drive traffic to them). According to their internal data, users click “Like” links twice as often as “Fan” links. Using “like” makes it easier for someone to express their interest in a brand when “fan” may overstate their level of engagement. That sounds like a big opportunity to get a whole lot more fans.

It also sounds to me like an opportunity to breed ill will, especially if users are slow to realize the weaker wording doesn’t change the fact that they’re still giving the company permission to post updates to their news feed. Facebook optimistically projects that “users will understand the distinction through explicit social context, messaging and asthetic differences.”

I’m not so sure. Particularly when you look at the examples they give of the “Like” function in practice. It’s not a matter of just changing the link at the top of a fan page. There’s also a big change to Facebook ads. It’s now possible to “Like” an ad, which automatically enrolls you as a fan (in the old parlance) of the advertiser.

I’m all for friendlier wording. And I’d love to have more people receiving updates from the fan pages I administer. But I think it’s important to be transparent and honest. I’d prefer a term more like “follow.” It removes the “fan” label but still makes it clear what the result will be when you click that link.

The greatest strength of social media is inviting users to interact with you and share their experience with their friends. Replacing the old broadcasting model of shoving your message down the consumer’s throat is what’s so new, interesting and effective about it. Anything that seems disingenuous or makes the user feel tricked is destined to backfire.

Did you know it’s easy to remove these updates from your timeline, without disconnecting from your friends? Just find one of these posts and click the “Hide” link that appears on the right when you mouse over it.

Facebook will then ask you if you want to hide the person or the application. Click the name of the game.

Success! You’ll now no longer see updates on the games your friends are playing on Facebook, and you’ll see more links, photos and status updates instead.

Update: It gets even better. (Thanks to techpp.com) Not only can you keep games and other apps out of your Live Feed, you can also exclude them from your Notifications. When a notification appears in the lower right of your screen, mouse over the upper right corner of the item to see the “X” appear. Click that, and you’ll be invited to hide all notifications from that application.

This is the most tedious part of the business. And unlike many tedious tasks, it can’t really be delegated to the lowest levels of the organization. Someone who doesn’t have a full grasp of your communication goals can’t tell you if they’re being met. Fortunately, at Zacks, we’re able to divide the workload so each team member is responsible for two or three browser/OS configurations. Even so, a good chunk of time can be easily eaten up with creating test email accounts, logging in and out, deleting cookies and starting over again. When product or promotion launch deadlines are looming, it takes real discipline not to cut corners and actually go through all the steps.

Apparently, even the biggest companies with the largest marketing budgets have a struggle in this area. And mobile marketing opens a whole new frontier of possible platforms and formats. I was surprised recently to see the glaring neglect of testing in a mobile campaign for Coke Zero.

Checking scores in the excellent iPhone app SportsTap, I saw an ad headline that read "Join Facial Profiler." So far so good. It’s a mobile ad, so maybe this "Facial Profiler" does something cool using my phone’s camera. It got my attention and made me curious enough to tap the ad.
The landing page looks nice, and is obviously formatted for the iPhone. The imagery and typography are attractive and easy to read. Now I see that it’s a Coke Zero project. So now I think there’s an even better chance that it’s something cool, since they certainly have the budget to create something entertaining or engaging.
Scrolling down the page, there’s a video thumbnail. Whoever designed the campaign seems to have understood that I’m not going to keep reading forever, so here’s a video file to explain the promotion. Brilliant.
But that’s where the whole thing breaks. Somehow, they encoded or embedded the video in a way the iPhone didn’t like. This video is the only means I have to find out how the program works, so when it fails, the entire experience becomes a dead end. So now, whatever Coke spent on this campaign has been 100% wasted. Even worse, this experience lowers my opinion of the brand, so they’ve actually put their marketing budget to work in a way that damages their brand image.

It’s an excellent example of what can happen when you don’t commit to testing your entire campaign. And there are no shortcuts. Even when you duplicate an existing process and apply it to a new product or promotion, unforseen details almost always become obvious during testing.

If it can happen to a marketing powerhouse like Coca-Cola, on a closed platform like the iPhone, it can certainly happen to your email campaign or banner ad landing page. All the time, effort and money you spend promoting your product will be wasted if an overlooked error gets between your customer and the sale.

Update: Cheryl Gledhill at molt:n took the Facial Profiler application for a test drive and found that the actual feature was just as unsatisfying and poorly executed as the mobile campaign.

Of course, it’s undeniably brilliant to cultivate an audience for reading books on a handheld device, reaching people who have a history of buying expensive electronics. But as you’d expect from Amazon, their followup is also first rate.

Knowing that I’d downloaded the iPhone app, they sent me an email this morning announcing that their Kindle device is now on sale. At Zacks, we’re always looking for opportunities to target our email campaigns like this. There’s no better way to reach your customer than demonstrating that you’ve paid attention to his interaction with you. When you can credibly make the claim that you’re sending this message specifically because he might find it useful, you’ve greatly increased the chances that your customer will click through to the action page.

Actually, the Kindle app has made me a believer when it comes to reading text on my iPhone. Except the Kindle app isn’t my platform of choice. Instead, I’ve been using the much more versatile Stanza. Where the Kindle app concentrates on titles available from Amazon, Stanza and its companion (Mac or Windows) desktop application make it unbelievably easy to put any text on your phone in ebook form. Just open text files, word docs, pdfs or html pages in the desktop app and load them over wi-fi onto your iPhone.

Now any time I stumble upon a long but interesting blog post or article, I’ll load the URL in Stanza and take it with me to read whenever I find a spare minute on the go. The very legible and customizable display makes it much easier and more enjoyable to read than if I’d copied the bookmark and navigated there in the mobile browser. And the text is loaded on the phone itself, so I don’t have to worry about the availability or speed of my connection.

Of course, the retail giant took notice of how well Stanza works. In April, Amazon bought Stanza’s development company Lexcycle. So far, though, they have not disabled the Stanza app itself. Presumably, they’re working with the Lexcycle developers to morph all the extra features of Stanza into the next generation Kindle reader.

All groups had a significant number of participants who considered social networks “fun” and declared an interest in connecting with friends. However, a more pronounced difference between the generations was evident when it came to using these tools to connect with family members.

Just 27% of Generation Z (13-14 year-olds) saw family connections as a draw, where 51% of the over-65 group said keeping in touch with family was one of their reasons for joining.

Invitations also play a stronger role in the older age groups. 46% of Baby Boomers and 60% of the over-65 group said they joined because an invitation had been sent to them by someone they knew. Invitations played a much smaller role (under 30%) for users under 30.

Google’s Next Wave in Internet Communications

Google Wave is a highly collaborative mix of email, shared documents, instant messaging and more, with elements of blogging, social media, photo sharing, project management and issue tracking all thrown in.

The technical aspects of this new tool are very impressive. Not only has Google built its own interface for Wave, but they are releasing an extensive open API that allows developers to access Wave as a communication protocol within their own web-based applications.

If you’ve ever shared a document via Google Docs or a WIki, you’ll immediately grasp the workflow. But Wave starts as casually as an email. It then becomes easy to branch off into a multi-threaded conversation all bound together by the glue of the wave. Clicking individual paragraphs allows you to respond to only that point. Adding new users gives them access to the entire conversation.

Taming the Document History

Such a dynamic framework could easily become confusing, as conversations outgrow their original intent. Mike Elgan at Computerworld seems ready to dismiss the entire project for that reason.

After bouncing stuff back and forth, and after people comment on various parts of the thread, adding commentary at the top, bottom and middle of the original message, clarity about what’s old, new, moot or relevant seems unlikely.

Addressing that concern is where Google created one of the product’s most innovative features. By using the “Playback” function, users can see the entire history of the wave, step by step. Playback can show the progress of the entire conversation, or can be filtered to show only actions of a selected type or by selected users. If you’ve ever been added to an email thread after more than two people have chimed in, it’s not hard to imagine how much more quickly you’d be caught up if playback were available. It’s also a big step towards clarity when compared to most wikis’ “version history.”

Extending Wave’s Reach

The open, extensible nature of Wave means photos or text you attach there can be automatically published to your blog, and updates in either place are immediately reflected on the other. That immediacy translates when collaborating with others, too. As you make edits or type new information into a wave, anyone else who is sharing that document at the same time can see you typing even before you hit enter, for a high-speed workflow similar to instant messaging.

The product is still in its infancy, and won’t be released to the public for some time. Still, there’s considerable enthusiasm about the developer preview. TechCrunch gave a positively glowing review of its vision and ambition.

Opening Web 2.0 to Customers, Partners, and Even Machines

Without releasing Wave into the wild, it’s difficult to predict what forms it will take once real users begin to work with it. The demo video gives an excellent picture of the kind of interaction that’s possible between human users. But the potential for a revolutionary transformation of workflow comes in the ability to let non-human applications and processes join the conversation. Dion Hinchcliffe at ZDNet imagines Wave giving IT systems like personnel, customer and resource management a seat at the Web 2.0 table:

Literally while participants are busy typing and collaborating, a wave can be receiving support from back-end systems such as HRM, CRM, ERP, and so on to provide data, context, and other just-in-time support. Many businesses could benefit enormously from seamless business data integration such as customers, orders, and so on, never mind the deeper possibilities of contextual business processes leveraged directly in the collaborative activities of workers.

A Perfect Fit with Google’s Long Term Strategy

From a strategic standpoint, this gives Google the potential to claim an entirely new space in internet information sharing. Compared to search, maps and email, where they took existing systems and improved upon them, Wave represents an entirely new collaborative model.

Jordan Golson at Salon accuses Google of climbing to “new heights of arrogance” in what he sees as purely a vanity project.

I’m sure Mr. Golson thinks his pragmatic view is a better way to do business. But he ignores Wave’s contribution to Google’s overall goal to own all the information on the internet, and doesn’t see how powerfully Wave could contribute to that effort. Boiling Wave down to its potential for immediate revenue generation is short-sighted at best.

By providing free services like Gmail, Maps, Docs, Analytics and Earth, Google extends their reach into the way people think about Google’s integration into the internet. What’s more, they encourage users to load their servers with information which those users are then dependent upon Google to retrieve.

In each of these projects, Google opens new doorways for users to interact with information on the internet. And in each case, Google holds the keys to the door.

When that is the overarching goal, a few salaried workers’ time spent on a project like Wave is a minor expense. Finding a revenue model to make each project self-supporting is the kind of short-term business model that most other companies would use. That approach would stifle innovation and detract from the long term focus. That’s the reason most other companies are not Google.

Learn More About Google Wave

To learn more about Google Wave, the video of the Google i/o presentation is a great place to start. There’s also an excellent collection of articles at Mashable.

What do you think about Wave? Is this a tool you’re excited about trying? Do you think your answer reflects how entrenched you are in traditional email, or how comfortable you are with multiple points of presence, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others? I’d love to get your comments below.

A lot of it is really good. It’s exhilarating how immersive and potent these tools are for reaching out to one another. That excitement has inspired some very smart and talented people to give away tomes of valuable wisdom.

But where the best advice can work wonders for your company’s PR, Marketing or Customer Service, there are no real rules for individuals. Unfortunately, this leaves the door wide open for half-baked and even mean-spirited “experts” who try to bully others into following their own invented code of conduct.

One of the most famous cases is the “Cisco fatty.” If you’re not familiar with the story, Connor Riley (@theconnor) interviewed for an internship at Cisco, and upon receiving an offer tweeted:

She quickly got a nasty response from @timmylevad at Cisco. And her tweet was widely publicized as an example of abject stupidity and naiveté concerning social media.

Except she hadn’t even applied for the job, and it turned out to be outside her professional field. Her tweet was meant as an inside joke to her very small audience of followers who already knew she’d be turning it down. It’s easy to see how a Cisco employee would not be amused, but @timmylevad unleashed a public castigation in an effort to enforce his own rules on how Twitter should be used.

Ms. Riley herself makes a particularly cogent observation about how someone with 45 followers, all of whom she knows in real life, may treat Twitter differently than someone with over 500.

If that’s the way TIm Levad wants to maintain his Twitter feed, that’s great for him. Depending on his goals for the platform, it may be exactly right. What I’d like to see quashed is the idea that anyone has the authority to tell anyone else what their approach should be, particularly if the rules they are trying to impose are an effort to move people towards more sanitized and less human communication.

Jeffrey Zeldman is a legendary designer, blogger and independent publisher. His work has long been a guidepost for standards-compliant design, and his website A List Apart is a voluminously rich resource for anyone who makes websites. Due to his well-deserved internet fame, nearly 21,000 people follow @zeldman on Twitter.

Recently, Zeldman was scolded by a Twitter follower who expected more “value” from his Twitter stream. In this critic’s farewell email, he accuses Zeldman of letting his “ego take over,” because he dares to tell jokes and give his reaction to movies he’s seen.

In response, Zeldman rightly refers to A List Apart, his blog, and his free downloadable books where the disappointed unfollower can get the “value” he seeks. But he vehemently rejects the “mass-media channel” approach to Twitter. Jeffrey Zeldman is a real person, who has every right to use Twitter to connect with people and build relationships as a human being, and not just as a name-brand for web standards.

All the best advice for companies in the social media sphere seem to point toward more human communication and away from monolithic press release broadcasts. To push individuals in the opposite direction runs counter to the best of what social media has to offer.