Showing posts with label open source. Show all posts
Showing posts with label open source. Show all posts

Thursday, May 29, 2008

We All Scream for Ice Cream

I like how Facebook helped extend Ben and Jerry's brand awareness. They were able to use the power of a brand and a social network to make a media campaign connected. While TV spots give visibility and Google Ads extend that with a link for the consumer, Facebook is able to engage the user with the brand.

"Our users tell a lot about themselves, that gives us the opportunity" to work with advertisers, she said. One successful example of this, she said, was a promotion by Ben & Jerry's that resulted in 500,000 Facebook users giving each other free ice cream cones within 11 hours. That day, the Ben & Jerry's Web site picked up 53 million impressions, as people searched for store locations and wrote about their favorite flavors, she said.

I wonder if we could push further on this and allow the social interaction to be more open to other websites and applications . A similar experience could have been offered from Ben and Jerry's website. Maybe I should be able to share an Ice Cream directly from their store locator view. The second expansion would be to enable this feature through any application. There are 20,000 applications at Facebook, enabling them to participate in the social campaign might just further the engagement and virality.

If the application was deployed at Ben and Jerry's ,depicted to the right, then the interaction might have the opportunity to be further reaching. Another possible advantage is the campaign could be re-run on other social networks and other websites tailored for specific communities.

I think it is further expansion of applications into many web sites, communities and social networks which will further drive the idea of an open social web.

Rich @ Ringside

Sunday, July 8, 2007

Where do you search for code?

I was looking for some open source projects which incorporated integration into a web service. Searching for things on google is just getting weaker, so I started with phase two: search the repositories. Here is what I search... Do you search something else?

Sourceforge.
The master of all projects Sourceforge is always my first location. Usually find something there and typically gets me going.

After this it's more of a list and less of an order...
- java.net - i find the slight to be slow way too often
- rubyforge - as i play with ruby more often i peak here (typically using gem)
- Apache.org - Can you guys add a 'project' search. The generic google search is OK, but how about a search which returns a project and it's major links.
- codehaus.org - found some good stuff there
- code.google.com - Can you just return a list of projects instead of the junk?
I am sure there are some more repos i have used to search, but those are the main ones.

I also use Koders.com and recently started playing with Krugle as well (Thank you for returning a project list, I like this one).

How do you find a project?