Editor's Note: This is the last installment of a 3-part series covering Len Kendall’s abstinence from the “Like” button for a month.

If you haven't been following along, in April I decided to commit myself to a simple behavioral experiment. I pledged to not "like" anything on or off of Facebook for a month, no matter how tempted I was (and believe me, I was tempted often).

My hypothesis was that at the end of this 30 day cycle I would be free of likes and that my detox period would be over. That isn't the case. I still actively have to stop myself often from hitting that button, and it troubles me quite a bit. It was so simple and I did it for so long that it has burned into my internet muscle memory far more severely than I had anticipated.

I've learned several things along the way, but when I started this trial I wanted to answer one primary question:

Who exactly is benefitting the most from me hitting the like button?

While this experiment didn't provide me with a direct answer to this question, it did force me to think long and hard about the probable ones. I've concluded that the following parties benefit from those billions (yes billions) of likes each day:

• Me: I'm not going to claim I get no value. Facebook has an algorithm that shows me people and information that I'm more interested in based on my like behavior. It's not always spot on, and it irritates the shit out of me when I see this kind of stuff, but nonetheless it has a smart engine that shares timely content from people I care about.
• Brands: Likes feed brands who are trying to understand how they can refine their content distribution (copy, timing, targeting). They also increase the visibility of branded content through all sorts of Edgerank-y goodness. The fact of the matter is, I don't care about making my favorite brands better marketers. I care about my favorite brands continuing to make products that I like. In other words, these likes don't help me.
• Facebook (Part 1): Facebook makes the majority of its revenue from selling data. Yes, that manifests as selling ads, but in reality the company is selling the data that drives who sees ads and who buys them. Every single time I hit "like", even if it's on a friend's baby picture, Facebook is growing its data stockpile that is being refined for their advertising customers. Sure, you could claim I'll see more relevant ads if I help Facebook understand my tastes, but ultimately these likes don't help me.
• Facebook (Part 2): When I give my friends likes, a little Pavlovian red flag goes off in their browser windows and it pulls them back into Facebook. There they spend more time, see more ads, and see more ads, and see more ads. While directly my likes may help my friends' important posts rise to the top, it also trains them to crave likes and potentially augment their sharing behavior to earn them more likes. Again, these likes don't help me.

Above are just four benefits yielded from "like" behavior. The obvious problem is that only 25% of the these items are benefitting me. And that's being generous since I didn't list off countless other beneficiaries. Call me selfish, but the ROI of the like button isn't high enough for me to continue using it. Therefore, I plan to continue abstaining from it.

Although I started this experiment around a single element of Facebook, it's led me to question the value of the many services the social network provides. Facebook has in many ways become the "big box" store of the internet. And while I do shop at such places in real life for certain commodity items, I don't really want to go there for all my many specialty needs. I don't want to speak for anyone else, but I personally don't want a big-box internet experience. For me, the web is about discovery, being bombarded with choice, and finding niche experts.

Refraining from likes has been a trivial experiment. I know that there are far more important behavioral issues online worth exploring (cyber bullying, crowdfunding, and citizen journalism just to name a few), but I hope that this small example of personal reflection on digital habits encourages you to do the same. Think about how you're spending time on the internet, who its benefitting, and what's worth testing in your own digital world.

And don't like this post. I really mean it this time.

Lead image via Flickr user Djenan, CC 2.0

Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com's hyperbolic CEO, has been telling anyone who will listen that the "sudden convergence of cloud, social and mobile spheres" is forcing - and allowing - companies to connect with customers in new ways, and to listen with an intensity never before possible.

I'm sure the benefits of social business are dramatic and undeniable, but am I alone in being totally creeped out at what seems to be an obvious invastion of privacy? I don't know about you, but I'm just not ready for companies - even companies I choose to do business with - to closely follow everything I do and say. Even if other humans aren't involved.

Do You Want To Be Connected To A Machine?

At a recent executive event in San Francisco, Benioff entertained customers and journalists wtih a video featuring Beth Comstock, GE's high-profile CMO, claiming her "core belief" is that "business is social." But she didn't just mean people communicating with people, she also meant people communicating with machines. 

The big question for GE, Comstock said, is "how do we connect our customers/employees to our machines?" GE's goal is to combine data from customers and data from its machines - connecting machines to social networks is very big.

The video demonstrated how GE was connecting jet engines to social networks to alert mechanics of their diagnostic status. "If you're in business," Comstock said, "you need social because it will get you closer to your customer… Feedback - that's a marketers dream."

Sounds great, right?

The Menace Of An Internet-Enabled Toothbrush

But consider Benioff's example of the Internet of Things driving social business. He cited Philips' Internet-connected toothbrush that records the time and duration of brushing. With one of these babies, when you go to the dentist and he asks, "have you been brushing" and you answer "yeah," the conversation doesn't end there, Benioff said. The dentist could reply "Let's have a look" and see exactly how much brushing you actually did.

That thought terrifies me. While such a scenario might indeed help keep my teeth from falling out, it's also profoundly creepy and invasive. After all, what if my dental insurance provider got hold of the data, and decided it wouldn't pay to fill that cavity because I didn't brush long enough?

As Benioff correctly noted, the "biggest part is trust." "With all that data about you out on the network, it gets down to another level of trust with the vendors you choose to let be a part of your life."

I trust my doctor with a large amount of intensely personal information - augmented by pretty specific laws and industry practices. For some reason, I'm less comfortable giving my dentist the same degree of trust. Philips and Salesforce? Absolutely not!

How Much Should Your Shirt Salesman Know About You?

Another participant at the event, male-apparel retailer Trunk Club, is also leveraging user information to help "guys that just dont like to shop" said COO Rob Chesney. Trunk Club's goal is to make "it really easy for you to look great" by not just tracking what he's already bought, but whatever other information may be available online. When a customer contacts Trunk Club, "we pull up this guy and find out what is he all about. We see all his social media info. "It's the future of service-oriented retail."

Not for me.

Chesney noted that having this kind of info could help Trunk Club sell higher end clothing to a customer who just got a promotion - an event it might learn of Facebook. That might not be so bad, but what is the company going to do if the customer gets laid off? Offer condolences and try to sell them cheap t-shirts? Awkward to say the least.

Social.com: Salesforce's Facebook & Twitter Tools

Salesforce also pitched its new Social.com tools, designed to help other companies operate this way. Salesforce rolled out the ability to run Facebook campaigns that target users based on what they've posted and linked to on their own Facebook pages.

On Twitter, the idea is start "buying in the moment" - spreading promoted tweets even as the larger Twitter conversation is trending. The promoted tweet shows up any time someone tweets with a relevant hashtag.

To make that work, of course, you've got to be monitoring all the time. "You can't be relevant if you're not listening," explained Facebook's Fergus Gluster (yes, that's his real name).

Jonathan Nelson, CEO of ad agency Omnicom Digital, said that these innovations are a key step toward closing the loop linking real-time advertising to real-time buying. The key, he said, is delviering "the right message for the right person at the right time."

Ironically, in a small panel discussion for journalists, Nelson noted that the "suppression of advertising" when it's not appropriate is "more than half the battle."

That's a key part of reducing the creep factor. 

Finally, just so you know, I'm not alone in worrying about these issues. Another panelist, Altimeter Group's Susan Etlinger, admitted that "as a consumer, I don't particularly want to be targeted." The key, Etlinger said, is to build a relationship over time and "be relevant when the consumer needs us, not when we need them." 

That's a step in the right direction. But if companies they really care about not being creepy, they'll learn to respond quickly and effectively when asked, and otherwise stay out of my face.

Photos - except for the toothbrush - by Fredric Paul for ReadWrite

I’ve seen the future of Facebook, and it is... Yahoo!

Between 1994–2000, Yahoo! dominated the consumer Internet industry and much of the world’s attention. The company’s exclamation mark (sometimes called a "bang") cast a long, purple-hued shadow across the globe, as users flocked to its ever-expanding array of services, and online and offline companies of all sizes threw money at it (almost literally) to gain prominent visibility among its massive, segmentable audience. Yahoo!’s page views rocketed; revenue rocketed; profits rocketed; stock price rocketed; market capitalization rocketed. Yahoo!, it seemed, could do no wrong.

Then, the world changed. Radically.

What Happened To Yahoo!

Consumer behavior shifted, with individuals the world over flirting with, and then devoting themselves to, myriad other online services. The business cycle changed and companies chose/were forced to reduce or eliminate their online advertising budgets. Then, when Internet advertising budgets returned a few years later, business behavior adjusted again, with marketers broadly diversifying their spend across the Web (following those same migrating users). And, perhaps most significantly and most representative of both of the previous issues, Google emerged, presenting consumers with a slate of invaluable (and competitive) services and companies with a nearly perfect mechanism/venue through which to market their offerings.

Needless-to-say, the 2000–2013 period has not been nearly so kind to the purple giant-of-yesterday — not to its metrics, its business, its stock or its market capitalization.

Throughout its rollercoaster-of-a-life, however, Yahoo! has remained shockingly static at its core, with a (still) massive, segmentable audience consuming an enormous volume of free content and services, surrounded by advertisements of all shapes and sizes. That those content/service offerings now include Fantasy Football and photos from Flickr, rather than, say, news and NASDAQ quotes, is nice, but irrelevant, as is the fact that the company now offers rich media and video ads, as opposed to just sponsorships and banners.

Those are incremental changes to the story — variations on the theme; because, the fact of the matter is that — apart from its early days of minimal competition and “easy money” — Yahoo! has struggled mightily to engage its users in fundamentally new ways; unlock the true value of its global user base for its advertising clients; and, bring to market any lasting innovation that even hints at shaking the status quo all over again.

In not so subtle ways, this reminds me of Facebook. A lot.

What Facebook Is Doing

Like Yahoo! in its early phase, Facebook hit the ball out of the park from the outset, and, it seems, hasn't yet stopped running the bases. From the ivy covered confines of Harvard University, Zuckerberg & Co. now attracts more than one billion users to its site globally; has enabled hundreds of billions of friend connections; sees hundreds of millions of photos uploaded daily; and, generates several billion dollars of revenue annually. Not bad for its first nine years, right?

And yet, since its astounding opening act, Facebook has bestowed upon us:

• Gifting - blah.
• News Feed algorithm changes - yawn.
• Suggested Posts - meh.
• Messaging - join the club.
• Sponsored Stories - ummm.
• Graph Search - niche.
• Poking (again) - ha.
• Timeline - zzzzz.
• News Feed design changes - argh.

What's next, a new color scheme? A new font?

What Could Happen To Facebook

Suffice it to say, the company is not exactly setting the world on fire with these efforts; more importantly, these are not (individually or collectively) doing much (if anything) to materially enhance Facebook's relationship with its users; substantively increase the level of dependency felt by its advertising clients; and/or fundamentally alter the trajectory of its franchise or business. Said differently, where is Facebook’s second act, like Android (acquired, transformed and massively scaled by Google) or iPad? Where is its money-printing AdWords product? Where is its PayPal (acquired, and massively scaled by eBay)? Where its its quantum leap forward? Where is its disruptive force?

None of this is to suggest that Facebook has, in any way, “failed;” nor is it meant to take anything away from the extraordinary space that Facebook has carved out for itself in our collective universe. Similarly, I do not mean to imply that Facebook is necessarily destined to follow in the path of Yahoo! (after all, it would be damned near impossible to repeat all of those mistakes).

That said, it is, hopefully, a wake-up call, because — at least to this observer — the company and its business seem far too focused on tweaking the edges of its past creation(s) instead of changing the world all over again for both its users and advertisers. And that, as history might suggest, is a very risky path to enduring success on the Web.

Beware the “!,” Facebook. Beware the “!”!

According to a report from Bloomberg this morning, Facebook may be close to acquiring Waze, whose navigation app relies on alerts from users to deliver real-time traffic data. The deal is rumored to be 50% in cash and 50% Facebook stock. Waze, available for iPhone and Android, has been considered a likely acquisition target by Apple and possibly Google.

When asked about the acquisition, a Facebook spokesperson told me: "We don't comment on rumor or speculation."

The Israel-based Waze claims 30 million users and bills itself as the world's "fastest-growing community-based traffic and navigation app." Waze users allow the app to send their driving details to others in the area - for example, how long their commute is taking. Users can also provide additional details on their commute, report accidents and offer driver tips. 

Waze users can share their driving activity with Facebook friends from within the app. Waze has long utilized Facebook to help promote its service - though users do not require a Facebook account.

Waze is considered a direct competitor to Google Maps, whose service also offers real-time traffic data. If Apple does not acquire Waze, it could be due to Waze's insistence, according to Bloomberg, that its ongoing development remain in Israel and that its brand be maintained.

This is less likely a concern for Facebook. When Facebook acquired the popular photo sharing app, Instagram, last year, it allowed the start-up to maintain its identity and has for the most part let it take charge of its development and user base. While many initially questioned that $1 billion purchase, Instagram has continued to grow - and remains popular with younger users.  That said, Facebook has moved development of two other Israeli companies it acquired to the U.S. 

Waze claims that by tapping its community of users, it can provide the best real-time traffic data, road conditions data and even provide users with alerts - based on social sharing - of the cheapest gas prices and quickest routes for a group to take to a particular destination.

Facebook, which has recently adopted a "mobile first" strategy, can certainly dramatically increase the Waze user base. Its recent earnings report revealed 189 million mobile-only users and 751 million "mobile monthly active users." 

In addition to its users, Waze relies upon a community of designated "map editors" to improve its overall value, map detail and real-time routing service.  It is not known how this aspect of the service will be impacted by a Facebook acquisition. 

(See also OpenStreetMap: The Maps In Your Apps Are About To Get A Lot Better) 

According to Forbes, Waze and Facebook have signed a term sheet and a deal is expected for between $800 million - $1 billion. Apple is unlikely to counter because, according to Waze CEO Noam Bardin, it has built a mapping service that is too dependent upon its "GPS partners" and less inclined to tap the Waze community. While some Waze data has been used in Apple Maps, Apple primarily relies upon traditional mapping companies, such as TomTom, for its data. 

To date, Waze has received $67 million in VC funding. If purchased, it will likely be viewed as a major win for the budding SoLoMo (social-local-mobile) ecosystem. For more on Waze, here is a helpful video.

Facebook enabled a privacy feature Thursday called Trusted Contacts that allows you to select three to five confidants from your friend list to receive the virtual key to your account. If your Facebook is compromised by hackers or you forget your password, these people can supply the codes to get you back in. 

The feature was first announced as 'Trusted Friends' in October of 2011. "However, we were only testing for the first part of last year [2012], and the feature actually wasn't available for much of 2012," Frederic Wolens of Facebook Policy Communications told ReadWrite in an email. "The bulk of our work was making this more proactive (allowing you to select your friends ahead of time) than reactive (selecting your friends after you couldn't get into your account)," he added. 

The Joy Of Facebook Hacking

While there may be some benefits to this feature, Facebook already has two-step authentication, making Trusted Contacts unnecessary in the likely event you can access your email and just use the normal password recovery option. More to the point, Trusted Contacts also pose a big risk. How much can you really trust those Trusted Contacts not to abuse their power?

Remember, it takes only three of the Trusted Contacts' codes to get into your account. That's good, right?

Right.

Unless the friends you choose have an affinity for the art of the Facebook hack. In my college years, when shared computers were often accessible in dorm rooms and campus hangout spots, Facebook hacking wasn't just a prank, it was an art. The rules were simple: If anyone left their account open on any computer that wasn't their own that person's Facebook account was fair game. (Sometimes, even that simple rule was bent by the less honorable.)

What typically ensued was a chaotic, hilarious and often line-crossing exercise in testing the limits of friendship. The hack quickly transcended crude status updates and moved into true social media sabotage. Facebook hackers would change birthdays, send unwanted friend requests and write embarrassing notes on walls.  

For me, the whole ordeal culminated in a prank where I created a fake profile of my victim, replicated his post history for a week in secret, and then began friending everyone we knew. I mimicked his behavior so well no one figured out it was me for a good day or two. It remains one of my proudest Facebook hacks - and the epitome of my juvenile social media behavior. 

Breaking In

First off, let's run through how a trio of your Trusted Contacts could access your account without you knowing about it. 

After opening Facebook in a different browser or private browsing mode, a Trusted Friend would  click "Forgot your password?" From there, they would identify the victim by name in the Find Your Account field, saying that they no longer have access to the email accounts listed. That lets you put in any email address - and the process moves on without requiring further authentication.

By entering in only one of the Trusted Contacts' names — in the event that you're the one doing the hacking, it can be your own name — you can access the code portion of the page. With three codes collected by visiting Facebook.com/recover and claiming the person has reached you by phone, you're immediately brought to a new password screen where the Trusted Friend can reset the password and gain access to the account. 

Sounds like it would be a lot of work, and it certainly is when I tried it myself on my own account, but you are essentially handing over the ability for three people, or just one who convinces two others to give them the codes, to change your password without any new authentication required on your end. Granted, you can revoke access to a Trusted Contact, but only from your account.  

Who Can You Trust?

Obviously, the best precaution is to pick people you're confident won't prank you. But there are also a certain types of Facebook user who should never get this kind of access. 

For one, don't trust anyone who infrequently uses Facebook or who likes to condemn the social network and those who indulge too much in it. The first sign of a weakness for Facebook hacking is disregard for the damage a "Liking" spree can do, or downplaying the importance of Facebook birthdays. These people find it hilarious when dozens of people begin mistakenly wishing you a Happy Birthday. 

Conversely, people who use Facebook too much may be just itching to pull off the perfect Facebook prank - and they'll know the the best, most believable ways to impersonate you.

One smart approach might be to pick two people that dislike each other, making it unlikely that they'll work together to mess with you. 

The simplest solution: Don't use Trusted Contacts. The feature adds a layer of defense against strangers attacking your account, which could be reasonable considering this year's surge incidents of malicious hacking. But it also seems like a sly attempt to push the boundaries of Facebook's importance in our lives. 

But by "trusting" your friends enough to give them a key to your digital life, you may be taking an even bigger risk of being pranked, if not actually hacked.

Mark Zuckerberg likes to say that Facebook is now a "mobile first, mobile best" company - and the company's earnings report for the quarter ended March 31, 2013 actually backs him up, in both usage rates and revenue:

Mobile ad revenue for the quarter ending March 31, 2013 was $375 million, accounted for 30% of the company's total ad revenues. That is up from 23% in the last quarter of 2012.

COO Sheryl Sandberg claimed that Facebook ads helped drive "25 million" app downloads. (Essentially, developers pay to promote their app inside a user's Newsfeed. Click on the ad and go straight to Google Play or Apple's App Store.) Zuckerberg added that, "I think it’s clear now that we can create a lot of value for [developers] by providing identity. We’re starting to see real revenue from mobile app installs.” The company said 40% of top-grossing iOS and Android apps were promoted on Facebook.

Facebook boasted 751 million mobile "monthly active users" - a 54% increase over the same quarter last year and 71 million more than it registered in the fourth quarter of 2012.

In fact, the now company claims 189 million mobile-only monthly active users, up from just 83 million a year ago and 157 million in the last quarter of 2012

The first quarter also saw the debut of the Facebook Home launcher. So far, though, Facebook Home has fewer than a million downloads and only a 2 (out of 5) rating. Sales of the HTC First smartphone, which has Home embedded, have been rumored to be minimal. On the earnings call, Zuckerberg described both Home and the company's new Graph Search as "long-term investments." 

Facebook did not break out mobile usage by geography or platform (e.g. iPhone vs. Android), nor did it  separate user data by age or other demographics. Sanderberg, however, did say that the company's mobile ad business was doing particularly well in Asia. 

Do Kids Still Like Facebook?

Overall, Facebook brought in $1.46 billion for the quarter, generally in line with Wall Street expectations - and a 38% increase year-over-year. Revenue from advertising hit $1.25 billion, a 43% increase year-over-year. Advertising accounted for 85% of Facebook's total quarterly revenues, with payments and fees delivering the remainder.

Revenue aside, many of the rumors circulating around Facebook concerned worries that the world's largest social network was beginning to lose members, particularly young users in the U.S. and other developed countries, and that existing users were becoming less engaged. On the conference call, CFO David Ebersman was asked if "kids still like Facebook." He responded by stating that "Facebook is awesome for everyone, regardless of age. And, yes, kids still like Facebook." Ebersman also claimed that, "Younger users are more active and engaged than other users... as for competitors, this is not a zero sum game."

While Facebook did not fully address these questions, overall the Facebook user numbers looked relatively healthy:

• 665 million "daily active users" on average for March 2013 - a slight increase over Q4 2012's 618 million, and a 26% increase year-over-year
• Monthly active users were 1.11 billion as of March 31, 2013 - a 23% increase year-over-year and up slightly from 1.056 billion in the fourth quarter of 2012.
• Instagram had 100 million monthly active users during the quarter

See also Facebook earnings summary and earnings slides (pdf).  

Facebook is currently facing 31 consolidated lawsuits over its bungled $16 billion IPO last May, and the social media giant and dozens of banks have joined hands in asking a federal judge to throw them all out. 

Facebook's stance: before going public last May 18, "...it had no obligation to publicly disclose internal projections on how increased mobile usage and product decisions might affect future revenue," reports Reuters. In other words, Facebook thinks the investors collectively suing it are trying to enforce an SEC rule that has been ignored for decades - just because the stock ended up tanking after the IPO. The lawyer representing the plaintiffs has not responded. 

Editor's Note: This is part 2 of a 3-part series covering Len Kendall’s abstinence from the “Like” button throughout April.

I’m two weeks into not “liking” anything on or off of Facebook (don’t worry — I’m past the point of shivering and vomiting all night). I’ve kept an eye on my behavior as well that of others, and I wanted to share my observations at the “midpoint” of this experiment.

First and foremost, although I positioned this as a short-term experiment ending in April, I currently feel as if this behavior change may continue beyond that. I’m a bit surprised at how quickly I was able to break away from a behavior that I was performing on a daily basis, countless times a day.

I’ve come very close to clicking that button hundreds of times. But I’ve consistently stopped myself at the last second. The vast majority of near slip-ups have happened on Facebook, not on third-party websites. The latter have been very easy to give up because, unlike my Facebook friends, I know that the authors of various blog posts don’t see — or don’t care — that I’m liking their work.

There are three specific observations that I really want to highlight from just the last three days:

Liking before thinking: The first post in this series, "Please Don’t Like This Post," received nearly 300 likes. I know that a small portion of those likes were ironic. In other words, I told people on the Internet not to hit the big red button, and they of course hit the big red button.

But I suspect the majority of the folks who liked my post did so out of sheer muscle memory. They read something that resonated with them, and before even thinking through the fact that the post was criticizing an action, they took that very action. To me this crystallizes the lack of investment a like requires. It literally happen faster than the time it takes to really let a piece of writing sink in.

Polite teasing: Several people within my Facebook network have clearly taken notice of my experiment, and have poked (pun intended) fun at me. I only mentioned my experiment twice, and both posts yielded quite a bit of discussion. Since then at least 15 people have made comments related to the experiment. The teasing was mostly in the vein of, "Make sure you don't like my comment" to "great post Len, I made sure to like it, just for you."

The theme of their jabs isn't really the point. What I found interesting was that so many people have clearly noticed what I'm doing. Perhaps I’ve touched a nerve? Maybe I’m pointing something out that makes people rethink their own behavior? I don't think many people are on board with I'm doing, but it certainly is getting my friends' attention.

Like Craving: Despite the fact that I’ve not been giving out likes, i’ve still been curious about who’s giving them to me. That rascally red notification flag pops-up and my attention immediately still goes towards seeing who has liked my posts and which one in particular captured their attention. Just as easy as it has been for me to stop liking other people’s posts, it’s been very difficult to ignore who is doling them out to me.

Stay tuned for the epic conclusion of this experiment in a few more weeks. And again, I encourage you to either join me in this experiment, leave a comment below, or... do absolutely nothing.

Just don't click that button.

Lede image courtesy of Shutterstock

Yesterday, Facebook bought Parse, a San Francisco startup with a service designed to greatly simplify the process of creating mobile and Web apps. Today, Parse's rivals are doubtless celebrating because the (reportedly) $85 million acquisition effectively puts a big seal of approval on their techniques for automating some aspects of app development.

(See also: What Happens When Almost Anybody Can Build A Mobile Business App?)

In tech jargon, outfits like Parse are often called "backend as a service" (or, worse, BaaS) companies. But they could be better described as mobile cloud-service companies. They offer services designed to easily tie mobile apps into the cloud, providing a host of automatic "backend" functions such as data storage and connections to social networks. That allows developers to focus on the core elements that make their apps sing instead of doing a lot of complicated integration with cloud systems.

One of the companies paying closest attention to Facebook's move is Boston-based Kinvey, one of Parse’s biggest rivals and a startup eager to see this cloud-service market really hit the big time.

What This "Validation" Means

Over the space of a few months in 2011, three startups effectively created this app-service automation market. Parse, StackMob and Kinvey promised easy cloud integration to mobile developers, but lookalikes quickly surfaced. Cocoafish (acquired by Appcelerator, Tiggzi (now Appery.io), FeedHenry, Applicasa from the startup end, new services from the likes of Sencha (Sencha.io) andeven Apple (iCloud) joined the fray. IBM and SAP now also offer similar cloud solutions.

(See also: Parse Offers "Backend as a Service" to Mobile Developers)

Some critics wondered if the industry segment had become too crowded and if all the outside entrants would doom the three original backend-service providers. They were small, their business models were unproven and their stories (i.e., “we provide backends so you don’t have to") were quickly in danger of being drowned out by competition claiming the same thing. There was a time in 2012, before it raised its first venture funding, when Kinvey had serious doubts if it would make it.

A map of the BaaS ecosystem from Kinvey from February 2012

Then these companies, which initially had started as developer tools, started turning into actual businesses. StackMob and Kinvey found that big companies were really interested in their services. Parse started attracting brands like the NFL's Green Bay Packers, Hipmunk, Armani and the Food Network.

(See also: Bringing Enterprise Data To Your Mobile Workers)

It's no coincidence that Facebook named Parse, StackMob and Kinvey (along with the likes of PhoneGap and Sencha) as preferred technology partners last week. These are companies with useful skill sets. All three have done extensive work with Facebook in the past. 

Many in the tech community associate “validation” of a new technological or business approach with startup venture funding or outright acquisition. But the likes of Parse arguably found validation much earlier, with the arrival of big, high-profile customers. 

“Lots of people are saying [the Parse acquisition] ‘validates’ the space,” said Sravish Sridhar, CEO and co-founder of Kinvey. “I disagree. The space was validated when brands like J&J, Aetna GSN and Cadillac began trusting their data and apps to BaaS."

Sridhar has a point. But until Parse sold out, none of these startups had entered the "big money" realm of tens of millions in funding, revenue or acquisition. In that sense, the Facebook-Parse deal has definitely lifted the prospects of StackMob, Kinvey and the rest of their competitors.

Where Do These Startups Go From Here?

Parse reportedly had a long line of suitors. Facebook won the bidding, but Dropbox, Google and Yahoo also all apparently had interest, according to Wall Street Journal reporter Evelyn Rusli. A variety of other companies have also shown interest in the backend-service startups, including Salesforce (customer relationship management), Intel (chip manufacturing and developer tools) and classic enterprise service providers like IBM and SAP, which have acquired mobile enterprise application platforms (MEAPs) in the past. 

Dropbox had also bid for Parse-- didn't meet fb's offer though.. google & yahoo also expressed interest ---

— Evelyn Rusli (@EvelynRusli) April 25, 2013

When parsing what the Parse acquisition means to companies like Kinvey and StackMob last night, Kinvey’s head of marketing Joe Chernov turned to Sridhar and said, “Do you know of any other tech space that has so many different kinds of big companies wanting to acquire its vendors?"

It's a good question and one that should have the likes of Kinvey and StackMob hi-fiving, jumping in their seats and making plans for happy hour. 

Twitter will be the next company to watch. It recently bought Boston-based Crashlytics and Bluefin for a total a little less than $200 million. Twitter is beefing up on its own application ecosystem (see: Vine and Twitter Cards) and could very easily find a place for backend services in its app efforts.

Facebook has just acquired Parse, a popular suite of tools for mobile and Web app developers. The acquisition will serve Facebook's mobile mission well, encouraging developers to build apps tied into the social network while easing the barriers to entry.

Already, Parse has attracted interest from familiar names like Sesame Workshop, which makes a Cookie Monster app, and Carnival Cruises, which used Parse's cross-platform tools to build its Ship Mate app.

The acquisition suggests that Facebook wants brands like these to go beyond building Facebook pages and running ads to creating mobile experiences which generate activity on Facebook users' profiles and news feeds. 

With this buy, rumored to be worth around $85 million, Facebook dives headlong into the nascent game of providing the technical underpinnings for apps, also known as the back end. Parse's peers in this emerging mini-industry are companies like Stackmob, Kinvey, and Cocoafish, the latter of which Appcelerator acquired last year.

Parse has an enthusiastic community of developers—and for good reason. The developer platform subtracts some of the nastier requirements of building apps, like server maintenance—ick! Instead, it lets app builders concentrate their energy around what matters - namely, developing an awesome user interface, or front end. 

We spoke with former Hipmunk mobile developer and user-experience guru Danilo Campos about what the acquisition means for developers loyal to Parse. 

"I hope the incentives are aligned such that Facebook wins when developers win," Campos said. "It's easy to get antsy when a [big company] buys up a gem. But I think Parse's leadership is damn smart and if anything can navigate these waters for the best outcome, it's them."

Facebook refused to comment on the deal's terms beyond saying that "this is an acquisition - not a talent deal." Facebook has bought some design- and mobile-oriented companies primarily to hire their talent while abandoning their products. That's not the case here: Parse and Facebook says current products will be supported.

According to Facebook's blog:

Today, we’re making it even easier to build mobile apps with Facebook Platform by by announcing that we have entered into an agreement to acquire Parse, a cloud-based platform that provides scalable cross-platform services and tools for developers. By making Parse a part of Facebook Platform, we want to enable developers to rapidly build apps that span mobile platforms and devices.

It remains to be seen if Parse, under Facebook's wing, will maintain or extend support for competing social platforms like Twitter. Still, Facebook didn't seem keen on messing with the Parse's existing well-loved products and services.

Facebook is planning to build a massive data center in Altoona, Iowa, the company said on Tuesday. That's right, Altoona, Iowa, a suburb of Des Moines.

With more than a billion users around the world to support and just three wholly owned data centers (Forest City, North Carolina; Prineville, Oregon; Luleå, Sweden, with the latter two still being built out) Facebook may have needed another location. (The company has also stashed servers in at least two co-location facilities owned by other companies, on both the East and West Coasts.) But why Altoona, Iowa?   

Why Iowa?

According to The Des Moines Register, which deserves credit for breaking the story on Monday, Altoona officials sold Facebook on four key selling points:

1. The site sits on the nexus of an interstate fiber optic system, providing connectivity to the rest of the nation.
2. A power substation sits within half a mile of the campus.
3. Transportation access.
4. Environmental stability.

The last is an increasingly important consideration. Data-center providers that went down during Superstorm Sandy in New York last year learned that lesson well; hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes and other natural disasters can bring a cloud services down just as effectively as a power outage. 

A Facebook blog post, meanwhile, cited "an abundance of wind-generated power" as well as proximity to "a great talent pool that will help build and operate the facility" as reasons for building in Altoona. Apparently, Des Moines and Ames are the new Silicon Valley and Boston when it comes to technical skills. The new facility will break ground this summer and begin serving traffic in 2014, Facebook said. According to the Register, Facebook's facility "will join what’s becoming a data center corridor of sorts in Altoona. LightEdge was built in 2006, and Enseva will break ground this spring."

Facebook hasn't confirmed the size of its new data center, but the Register earlier this month claimed that planning documents put it at 1.4 million square feet and said Monday the total investment could hit $1.5 billion. That's about four times the size of the company's Prineville facility - and 50% larger than Apple's $1 billion investment in its new data center in Maiden, North Carolina. 

Apple's data center in Maiden, N.C. (Source: Apple)

"In the coming years, as our service continues to grow and people share and connect in more ways, we need to make sure that our technical infrastructure also continues to scale," Facebook's Jay Parikh said in the blog post. "Our goal is not just to deliver you a fast, reliable experience on Facebook every day – we also want to help make connectivity a universal opportunity. Our data centers are essential for making that happen."

How Facebook "Hacks" Its Data Centers

Facebook has put almost as much technology effort into its data centers as its core services. Earlier this year, Facebook disclosed that its Luleå facility would be entirely built on hardware constructed by no-name server manufacturers using designs developed by the Open Compute Project, which shuns "vanity" hardware sold by traditional server vendors like Dell and Hewlett-Packard in an effort to minimize cost. Rather than pay top dollar for the most sophisticated and powerful equipment, this kind of "open source hardware" approach adds capacity by just adding ever more cheap, generic servers.

(See also Can Servers Save PC Manufacturers? Sadly, No.)

Facebook's Lulea, Sweden data center. (Source: Facebook)

Facebook also has been a pioneer in using natural or ambient cooling its data centers. Traditionally, data centers place servers on raised floors cooled by mechanical "chillers," or air conditioners, that push away heat from the servers to keep them running properly. 

Facebook's Prineville facility uses a combination of evaporated water and ambient air to cool the servers without the need for energy-hogging chillers; its Swedish site uses the frigid near-Arctic air to do the same thing. (Google, meanwhile, is building a data center in Hamina, Finland, which pumps water - and exchanges heat - from a nearby canal.) Although Facebook hasn't disclosed how its Altoona servers will be cooled, it's likely to employ some form of evaporative cooling.

Last week, Facebook was the first to offer a near-real-time look at the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) — the all-important batting average of a data center's energy efficiency  — of both its Prineville and Forest City facilities. A few years ago, a PUE of 1.8 was considered average; the Prineville facility's PUE now regularly pushes below 1.10, close to the 1.0 ideal.

Lead image via Facebook.

The jobless numbers in the U.S. remain an ongoing concern throughout the country. For college students and recent graduates, often dubbed "millennials," the numbers are even worse. More than half of recent graduates are either unemployed or underemployed. Despite these figures, according to a recent survey, nearly half of current college students have never used LinkedIn - typically thought of as the social network for job seekers.

This seems like a wasted opportunity - for both students and LinkedIn. 

I spoke to Dan Schawbel, founder of Millennial Branding, about the recent survey his firm conducted with AfterCollege. Despite the fact that most students are extremely social-media savvy, often heavy users of Facebook and Twitter, for example, students are  avoiding LinkedIn.

I believe that the LinkedIn numbers are low because students aren't thinking about networking until after they graduate and don't feel like they have enough contacts to add to their profiles since many don't have real work experience yet. 

The students who focus on networking starting freshman year are at a great advantage because everyone knows that relationships lead to jobs. 

Students Need Guidance

Students are certainly experienced with social media, just not with LinkedIn. While a surprisingly low 46% of student have never used LinkedIn, 90% of the students surveyed "frequently or occasionally" use Facebook. Even for those students who are using LinkedIn, however, it's still not a priority in their job search. When searching for a job, current students focus their efforts, in order, on:

1. Employer's Web site (70%)
2. Contact within the company (65%)
3. School career fair (61%)
4. Online job listings site (58%)
5. Social networking - including LinkedIn (26%)

Colleges can do more to help. Most students, the survey claims, believe their college is failing to offer adequate networking opportunities. For example, 46% of the students wanted their school to offer more instruction on "how to get jobs." Approximately 50% of students either "haven't used their career services department or had a bad experience" with the department.  

Schawbel says he hears this theme often when speaking on campuses. 

Students need more than resume reviews these days. They need a stronger rolodex and a better idea of how to go about their job search. (Colleges) should bring in speakers, hold more career fairs - not just one each season - and help make connections between students and alumni. Alumni like to recruit from their alma matter. 

The University Perspective

I asked my former university, the University of Michigan, how it helps current students leverage professional social networking. I spoke with Lynne Sebille-White, senior assistant director of the university's Career Center. She told me that "we encourage students to use LinkedIn to identify professionals and alumni working in their fields of interest. We also routinely recommend students check out our alumni group on LinkedIn."

She added, however, that many students are intimidated by LinkedIn - worried that their "partial profile" may not provide an effective representation of the student's abilities and prior experiences. "Current students usually have little experience [with professional] networking so we need to coach them through that process. Those who come by this skill more naturally use social media extensively to find and make professional connections which prove quite helpful in the search process."  

Nonetheless, Sebille-White was effusive about the power of social media in general for current college students. "Social media allows you to showcase your skills, experience and unique talents in a very public manner... Social media provides amazing access to others in a way that was not previously available. You can find almost anyone and if you're smart, you can make a positive impression by how you manage your online presence." 

Of course, it matters more in some positions more than others. "In fields like PR, corporate communications, and journalism, you need to have a presence on social media and leave a positive impression," she said. "You can't get hired in these fields if you aren't showcasing your interest and savvy in using social media and showcasing your writing style." The bottom line, she concluded, is that "every job seeker needs to think about their personal brand. Social media now allows folks to be seen as experts in ways that were not previously possible. " 

A Student Perspective

That's one side of the story. To hear the other side, I also contacted a current Michigan student - not referred to me by the university - who landed a paid internship following her sophomore year.

Now a junior, Rachel Bradley-Haas has just accepted a paid summer position with a different company in her field (industrial engineering). Turns out, she actively uses LinkedIn.

Bradley-Haas initially created a LinkedIn profile because companies she was interested in listed jobs through the site - and these typically required she respond with her LinkedIn profile. She noted, however, that Twitter did not prove helpful in connecting her with potential employers. Facebook proved useful after the search. For those companies she did connect with - even if she was not offered a job or if she turned their offer down - she typically "liked" the company on Facebook.

Survey Notes: Millennial Branding bills itself as a "Gen Y research and consulting firm." AfterCollege is "the largest online career network for college students and recent graduates." The two firms emailed "thousands" of registered students across the U.S. and 600 responded. The companies told me that "just over half" of those who responded are currently attending schools with more than 10,000 students, and that 66% of all respondents are females. 

Image courtesy of Shutterstock. Picture of Dan Schawbel taken from his site. Image of Lynne Sebille-White courtesy of the University of Michigan. 

IBM has no stomach for low-margin businesses, which is why Big Blue may be ready to dump its commodity server business — i.e., servers that run on Intel-compatible "x86" processors. If the reported talks with Lenovo lead to a sale, the move would mark IBM's final break with the low-end computer business.

A Win-Win

The deal would be a win-win for both companies. Lenovo, which bought IBM's PC business in 2005 for $1.75 billion, would immediately become the third largest maker  of x86 servers, behind market leader Hewlett-Packard and runner-up Dell. Thanks to its market clout in its homeland, the Chinese company has risen to become the second largest PC maker worldwide, according to the latest numbers from IDC. 

Adding x86 servers to its portfolio makes perfect sense for Lenovo, which has shown in PCs that it can do well in a low-margin, commodity market. For IBM, the opposite is true. The company's strength in hardware is in selling expensive — and profitable — mainframes.

IBM's mainframe business is the reason the company leads the global server market, at least in revenue terms. To give you some sense of how expensive these systems are, IBM's "System z" mainframe represented more than 12% of all server revenue worldwide in the fourth quarter. Because of a refresh in the product line, along with the introduction of new products, such as the zEnterprise, revenue from IBM's mainframe business rose almost 56% year over year in the quarter, according to IDC.

"Although revenue results for System z are traditionally heavier in the fourth quarter, this accelerated acquisition shows the breadth and depth of the IBM mainframe installed base," Jean Bozman, analyst for IDC said in a statement.

Lenovo would be a good buyer for IBM, because it doesn't compete in any of the markets IBM cares about, namely software and IT services. That wouldn't be the case if HP or Oracle were the buyer.

Disruption In Server Market

IBM may also have decided it wants no part of the disruption heading for the server market like a freight train. The increasing number of companies adopting cloud computing will mean fewer server sales, Larry Dignan points out at ZDNet. In addition, Internet companies with large server farms, such as Facebook and Google, buy customized white-box servers, which can't be good in the long term for traditional sellers, like HP, Dell and IBM.

While no one outside of IBM or Lenovo know how much the business would fetch, someone familiar with the talks told Bloomberg that the price would range from $2.5 billion to $4.5 billion, depending on the assets and liabilities included.

Lenovo Is Fired Up And Ready To Go

Not everyone agrees that IBM would be doing itself a favor by selling its x86 business. Gartner analyst Sergis Mushell says that without x86, IBM only non-mainframe servers would be its lineup of machines that run its Power processors — and that demand for those products is shrinking.

In other words, IBM would miss out on the opportunities to build systems based on x86 "while [its Power] architecture's ecosystem is shrinking," Mushell said. "Do you see how it would not make a lot of sense?"

Lenovo, meanwhile, is hungry to move beyond the PC market. The company announced last year a partnership with EMC in which Lenovo planned to introduce x86 servers that would include EMC storage systems. As part of the deal, Lenovo agreed to sell EMC networked storage products in China.

Given the jumpstart it would get from owning IBM's x86 business, Lenovo may be willing to make an offer that's hard for IBM to refuse.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

Editor's Note: This is part 1 of a 3-part series covering Len Kendall’s abstinence from the “Like” button throughout April.

Amidst the Boston Marathon tragedy, Facebook on Monday was a fascinating environment to observe. There was so much to NOT "like" that day—gruesome pictures shortly followed by inspirational images and quotes. Either way, merely hitting a button seemed inadequate to me. 

Good thing I'd already decided I wasn't going to "like" anything this month.

I ended up just donating money to the Red Cross Blood Collection service and then staying fairly silent.

The tragedy merely confirmed my decision to change a behavior that I, like many, have adopted into my daily activities. I'm not going to “like” anything on the internet. Anywhere. Not on Facebook, and not on websites featuring a similar “like” button.

Let me back up.

Not so long ago, there was a much wider gap between the various methods for acknowledging online content. At one end, you had the option of reading something and then doing absolutely nothing. On the other, you had things like leaving a comment, emailing the post to a friend, or writing a blog post in response to another you read elsewhere.

But in early 2009, an extremely low-impact feature came to exist: the "like." It was a brilliant addition, and it quickly has become a staple of daily Internet activity across the world, websites, and devices. It wasn't the first or last of its kind, but the "like" did ultimately become something that now gets billions of clicks. Facebook alone generates somewhere around 3 billion "likes" a day.

This weekend I stopped to evaluate my own usage of this button and came to the following unscientific but plausible conclusions:

• Only 5% of the time when I “like” something on the Web am I doing so to share it explicitly with my network. I do believe, though, that clicking “like” within Facebook helps drive what content becomes popular for my friends and myself. Sometimes it’s a big life moment like a wedding, other times it’s an Amazon review for a Banana Slicer.
• Hitting the “like” button on Facebook itself has stopped me from writing comments (and articulating actual thoughts) in response to items others are posting. I feel like I've already done enough by clicking a button.
• I’ve hit the "like" button thousands of times out of obligation, for worry that I might hurt someone's feelings or make them feel ignored.

So reviewing all the points above, I wondered about the following question: Who exactly is benefitting the most from me hitting this button? That’s the question I'm trying to solve for with this experiment.

In the meantime, here are a few observations from my first 72 hours of not hitting the “like” button—an action that I have taken everyday for probably the last two years.

1) I already slipped up once and had to go "unlike" something I "liked." It bothered me how mechanical the act of reading Facebook posts and "liking" had become.

2) I started leaving 10x more comments on posts, and have spent more time articulating my responses to longer discussion threads.

3) While my time spent on Facebook has continued to decrease, taking away the act of “liking” has further reduced my time on the social network and increased it on Twitter, Reddit, and get this…email.

4) I’ve continued to check Facebook immediately when a notification flag has popped up to see who has liked my posts. I suspect this won’t change throughout the experiment.

I may be overanalyzing here, but my hope is that it will spur others to reflect on their own low-impact, low-investment habits online. I’ll be providing a report in the next week or so with further observations. For now, I encourage you to either join me in this experiment, leave a comment below, or ... do absolutely nothing.

Just don't click that button.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

Facebook is reportedly working on full-screen autoplay video ads it will supposedly roll out no later than this summer. Facebook is expected to charge nearly $1 million for these new ads, which are designed to leverage Facebook's massive scale — but not the company's vaunted "social graph."

And that assumes Facebook users will sit still for ads that, per current reports, will take over your desktop screen and run for 15 seconds, up to three times a day per user. What are the odds of that? 

According to a report in Ad Age, the social media giant wants to offer at least four separate full-screen video ads every day. Facebook has reportedly been working with the ad industry on this effort since at least late last year. Initially, the 15-second autoplay ads will appear on Facebook's desktop site; the social network is still working to bring them to its mobile app as well.

I contacted Facebook for comment. A spokesperson's response: "We're not giving a comment here."

The Coming War With TV

If successful, the new ad platform could bring in nearly $1.5 billion in additional revenue to Facebook — and might also kick off a war with the television industry for major ad dollars.

Television advertising in the U.S. alone generates over $70 billion in annual revenue — and the market is, surprisingly, still growing. Facebook's new ads, though, could pose a direct threat. One of the core strengths of television advertising is its ability to "aggregate eyeballs" — that is, to bring together large numbers of people across multiple demographics. Facebook's proposed new ad units would emulate this.

For example, Facebook is expected to offer four daily "slots" for its video ads, each targeting a very large demographic:

• Women over 30
• Women under 30
• Men over 30
• Men under 30

According to Ad Age, Facebook will cap the ads so that no user will see an ad more than three times in a day. It is still unclear if advertising executives will want to cut down the typical 30-second television ad to fit Facebook's 15-second guideline, or if they'd create new ads especially for Facebook.

Scale Not Social

For all its talk about the inherent value of its "social graph" — Facebook's supposedly unique understanding of its one billion users, their likes, dislikes and relationships — these proposed video ads owe basically nothing to the social graph and in this case, Facebook is relying upon its nearly unprecedented scale. There are few online properties - or any media properties of any sort - that can command massive network television-like audiences the way Facebook can. The front page of Yahoo, YouTube and Google may be the only equivalents.

Such ads may also mark a strategic reversal inside Facebook. Just last summer, the company denied GM's request for full-page "takeover" ads. At the time, Facebook's VP for Global Marketing suggested that brands should focus on "social ads" and did not expect "traditional home-age takeover" ads in Facebook's future. 

That is apparently no longer the case. Not that this is a bad thing. Facebook is probably wise to focus on new methods of monetizing its scale — and leveraging the potential of video display ads. If successful, such ads could even become a daily ritual — generating buzz that's the equivalent of America's Super Bowl.

Consider that for this year, 30-second Super Bowl ads on television cost advertisers $3.8 million. The event had 111 million viewers. Facebook may be able to promise its advertisers a far larger audience every day. What Facebook can't yet promise, of course, is whether its billion users will actually sit through — or even tolerate — such intrusive ads, even just once.

Television Still Preferred For Now

Despite its scale, Facebook must prove it can offer advertisers the equivalent of network television. Consumer surveys reveal that television advertising stands above all others in terms of influencing purchase decisions. 

Even amongst college students, for example, who are likely to be very social media savvy, television advertising is clearly the most influential of all.

At least in theory, the combination of Facebook's scale, a full-page video ad takeover and, in time, linking views and reactions to the platform's "social graph" could turn the tide in Facebook's favor. There are also obvious opportunities for Facebook to leverage its scale, social graph and the "second screen" to help foster innovative advertising forms that span television, mobile and the Facebook site simultaneously. Earlier this year, for example, Facebook promoted the Academy Awards broadcast and provided data on how users responded to award winners in real-time.

Facebook claims 680 million "active" monthly mobile users. If Facebook can leverage its scale across desktop and mobile, whether or not it simultaneously incorporate their knowledge of each user, these new video ads could be a huge success.

Lead image via Flickr user brewbooks

Guest author Justin Smith is product engagement manager for BloomReach.

Understanding what people do on different social networks is the key to effectively using those networks for marketing. Companies currently spend 8.4% of their marketing budgets on social media, and that’s expected to grow to 21.6% in the next five years. But with so many social networks competing to grab marketing dollars, determining the most effective channels can be extremely difficult. To illustrate, let’s look at how Facebook and Pinterest stack up against one another.

Different Networks For Different Reasons

While both Facebook and Pinterest offer deep customer segmentations and user engagement, it would be a mistake to target audiences in the same way across both networks. For example, you wouldn’t market your product to someone shopping at a trendy boutique the same way you would to someone walking down the street with their friends. In a store, you’d likely look to make a sale, while on the street you’d probably have more luck building brand awareness.

Similarly, BloomReach’s analysis consistently shows that Pinterest has a higher concentration of people who are in a ‘buy’ state of mind, while Facebook users are more interested in interacting with friends - and brands. (According to Paul Adams, Facebook’s global head of brand design, Facebook’s strength is relationship-building, noting that many lightweight interactions over time can help promote brands.)

Traffic Analysis Tells The Tale

That is borne out by BloomReach’s analysis of total traffic – 46,277,543 site visits – for a set of retail clients from Sept. 20 through Dec. 31, 2012. We looked at five key metrics: total traffic, revenue per visit, conversion rate, bounce rate and average pages viewed. While Facebook delivered more than 7.5 times the traffic, Pinterest handily won the remaining four areas:

• Pinterest traffic spent 60% more than did traffic coming from Facebook.
• Pinterest traffic converted to a sale 22% more than Facebook.
• Facebook traffic bounced 90% of the time, compared to 75% for Pinterest.
• Facebook users viewed an average of 1.6 pages. Pinterest users saw an average of 2.9 pages – an 81% difference.

The average revenue per visit for Pinterest traffic was more than $1.50. But while Pinterest is able to drive highly lucrative leads – and the release of Pinterest’s Analytics Tool for Businesses should help companies make use of them - it can deliver only a relatively limited set of eyeballs.

Facebook Still Rules Awareness

If a company’s goal is to simply reach a larger audience to create or maintain brand awareness, Facebook remains the best option. Its sheer volume of users – 1.06 billion active monthly users, 680 million mobile users and 618 million daily users – and the army of people ready to sell impressions make it an easy channel to leverage. But it may be difficult to realize an immediate return on marketing investments on the network.

Perhaps the best approach is to look for ways to optimize Facebook campaign while expanding Pinterest presence. Both Facebook and Pinterest should become larger parts of the media mix model as visitor referrals from these sites grow. At the end of 2012, only 2.7% of total traffic in our analysis came from the networks, demonstrating that social commerce is still in an early stage. In the meantime, though, it seems fair to say that Pinterest is a more efficient marketing channel than Facebook.

Facebook released an update to its iOS app today that brings one of Home's strongest features—Chat Heads—to the iPhone and iPad. The bad news: Because Apple does not allow third-party apps to mess with its interface the way Google does with Android, Chat Heads is only accessible within the iOS Facebook app.

It's a gutted version of the Android app, which strips away key features like mixing SMS text messages with Facebook messages and popping chats up on top of other apps. Those are what make Chat Heads special.

Alongside Chat Heads, the update allows users to buy and share "stickers" from the social network's new Stickers Store—a feature recently introduced by Path, a mobile social app closely watched by Facebook's designers and engineers. It also gives iPad users a tablet-specific version of the News Feed design overhaul announced in March.

The iPad update is out now. Chat Heads and Stickers features will be rolled out to iPhone users "fully over the next few weeks," the company said in a press release. 

The New Look For iPad

For heavy iPad users, the News Feed update is a welcome upgrade. The tablet screen size allows for an almost exact replica of the new browser-based News Feed that Facebook recently announced. It strips away unnecessary sidebar noise from the News Feed and gives you a simple page of avatars and updates with a special focus on blown-up images. (ReadWrite's Taylor Hatmaker makes a strong argument for why this might be both good and bad for users.)

(See also Chat Heads Will Be The SMS-Killer Facebook Has Been Looking For.)  

As for Chat Heads, it works great. Hitting the messaging button on the top tab and clicking on a name immediately pulls up a friend's face in a Chat Heads bubble. You can add up to four bubbles before it begins automatically swapping out the bottom one. The feature that lets you collapse and move multiple chats works as advertised. It's likely much better on the iPad than it will be on the iPhone given that you have more screen real estate and can keep Chat Heads active all the time. If you don't want to get rid of Chat Heads, a circled 'x' shows up at the bottom of the screen when you hold down the bubble and flicking it down will remove it. 

A Strong First Step, And A Dilemma For Apple

While it may be a drag for iPhone and iPad users to have a subpar version of the Chat Heads experience, it's a start. The big unknown is what's coming in iOS 7, the next big version of Apple's mobile software, which is expected to be out this summer. Will Apple allow not just Facebook but other developers to layer apps on top of each other, the way Google does in Android? Or will it maintain tight control over the experience and risk making Android the bleeding-edge playground for experiments like Chat Heads?

(See also Why Apple Really Needs To Kill It With iOS 7.)  

Apple has no easy choice here. It wants to have the best experience for consumers. But part of that experience is the sense that new apps with the coolest features come out for the iPhone first. If Chat Heads is the best mobile version of Facebook, and you can't get it on the iPhone, where does that leave Apple? 

Update: Facebook has just released the iOS update for iPhone as of 12:01 p.m. PT. The update includes the in-app Chat Heads functionality and bakes in some aspects of the News Feed redesign that are more prominently visible in the iPad and browser versions of Facebook. 

Images courtesy of Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg is now wading into that thorniest of political issues: immigration reform. In an op-ed for the Washington Post last week, the Facebook CEO told the story of a young "aspiring entrepreneur" who may not be able to attend college because the boy is residing in the U.S. illegally. 

His family is from Mexico, and they moved here when he was a baby. Many students in my community are in the same situation; they moved to the United States so early in their lives that they have no memories of living anywhere else.

Such students, Zuck says, "are smart and hardworking, and they should be part of our future."

Which is no doubt true. Only Zuckerberg's very attachment to the issue colors the general public's perception of it. Is "our future" — America's future — truly aligned with that of a man whose net worth is approximately $10 billion?

Zuckerberg fails to fully make the case that the reforms he seeks — reforms that will, not surprisingly, directly benefit Facebook — are also good for most of America. This is a missed opportunity. So is Zuck's failure to address underlying fears about Silicon Valley's immigration agenda with concrete action, both at Facebook and his new lobbying outfit.

Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Talented Specialists

Fairly or not, by repeatedly linking the larger immigration issue with "the Internet," as Zuckerberg does in his editorial, he appears less concerned with America's future — or even the future of those children residing in the U.S. illegally — and more with boosting the value of his own Internet concern.

By comparison, note that Apple boasts of all the jobs it has helped create throughout the country — manufacturing, sales, engineering and transportation. "From the engineer who helped invent the iPad to the delivery person who brings it to your door." Everybody wins. 

Even worse, Zuck's editorial likely only serves to exacerbate the general population's fears regarding the corporate takeover of the nation's immigration policies. Consider his calls for more H-1B visas:

Why do we offer so few H-1B visas for talented specialists that the supply runs out within days of becoming available each year, even though we know each of these jobs will create two or three more American jobs in return? 

How does expanding the H-1B program help America and not just the Valley? Zuckerberg fails again to make a strong enough case.

Contrast Zuckerberg's efforts with those of Laurene Powell, Steve Jobs' widow. Powell is a long-time supporter of the Dream Act, which aims to provide a "path to citizenship" for children residing in the U.S. illegally, provided they graduate from college or serve in the military. (Their families, too.)

The majority of these students are not likely to work for Facebook or in the Valley — nor to ever require H-1B support. Powell and the Dream Act group repeatedly focus on both the larger moral issue of offering a path to citizenship and the overall benefit of reform to America's economy.

In politics, especially, perception matters. Already, the New York Times has implied that those with H-1B visas are effectively "indentured.:"

Silicon Valley is battling in Washington to make the immigration process easier for thousands of people... many of them Indian engineers, while also pushing to hire many more guest workers from abroad. [Emphasis mine.]

How many underemployed engineers in the American midwest, for example, read those words and reflexively thought that Silicon Valley is on the hunt for cheap labor and nothing more?

Similarly, Om Malik writes that Zuckerberg's focus on "technology and innovation centric changes doesn’t take into account the harsh reality of post industrial society & its invisible victims."

InfoWorld, however, was blunt: "American tech workers lose out in H-1B lottery."

If Congress answers the tech industry's calls to raise the numbers of visas, it could lead to a hemorrhaging of American tech jobs.

How Zuck Could Really Lead The Way

In conjunction with the editorial, Zuckerberg and a veritable who's who of Silicon Valley have launched FWD.us (pronounced Forward U.S.), a lobbying group whose mission is to promote "comprehensive immigration reforms." 

FWD.us is calling for the following:

1. Comprehensive immigration reform that begins with effective border security, allows a path to citizenship and lets us attract the most talented and hardest-working people, no matter where they were born.
2. Higher standards and accountability in schools, support for good teachers and a much greater focus on learning about science, technology, engineering and math.
3. Investment in breakthrough discoveries in scientific research and assurance that the benefits of the inventions belong to the public and not just to the few.

These are all lofty goals.

But to make their case with both the American people and Washington politicos, Zuck and his compatriots need to reach out to the rest of country and to demonstrate how "what's good for Silicon Valley is good for America." So far, this hasn't been the case.

Perhaps instead of building a massive new Valley headquarters, Facebook should instead first build the world's greatest telecommuting platform. Not everyone capable of helping Valley companies can live in the Valley.

FWD.us could also work aggressively to welcome and then train America's older engineers to code for Facebook and other Valley companies. For instance, it should consider supporting these short-term "coding boot camps" across the country.

The organization can better reveal how their proposed policy changes offer direct benefit outside as well as inside the Valley. Show how "job creation" is not simply defined as a high-paying professional job in the Valley, for example. Rather, detail how such jobs create opportunity that quickly reverberates across the larger economy. 

The issue of immigration reform, for the Valley and for America, is simply too important to allow it to be viewed as nothing more than another corporate lobbying effort.

Image of Mark Zuckerberg courtesy of Flickr. Ellis Island photo courtesy of Wikimedia

If Mark Zuckerberg is to inherit the mantle as the next Steve Jobs, he's going to have to do better when it comes to advertising. These new Facebook Home ads, for example, don't make me want to rush out and get Home on my phone. Rather, they make me think that we would all have much more fun if we turned off Facebook entirely and lived our lives like those we follow.

This seems like exactly the wrong message.

The first ad, "Airplane," features a man on a plane, away from home - get it? Only, not really, because "Home" brings his friends and family to him. In his case, that means transvestites, a naughty little boy, his buddies at the beach and someone I assume is his wife - with a serious thing for cats. He's the normal one.

It's fun. Only, has "normal" ever helped sell anything?

Next up is "Dinner."

The message here is plain: your family is boring; really, really boring. Even when the family is seated around the dinner table, it's best if you pull out your phone and watch what all your cool friends are up to. Spoiler alert: it's way better than whatever you are doing. Unlike Airplane, there is nothing good about this ad.

Finally, we have "Launch Day." It's as much a playful look inside Facebook as it is an actual advertisement. Zuckerberg appears in this video - and does just fine. That Facebook employees would rather be "on Facebook" than listening to Zuckerberg speak is actually pretty funny. This is the best of the bunch. Although it still strikes me as odd that even the young, possibly rich "hackers" working at Facebook are all so boring compared to their friends. 

Where are all these beautiful people? Maybe we could be like them - even with them - if we didn't spend all our time on Facebook?

That's no way to advertise a cool new service.

And will any business approve a Facebook Home phone now that even Facebook is telling everyone that work comes second?

Perhaps what Facebook is attempting to do is send this message: what your friends are doing - right this moment - is so cool, so odd, so outrageous, so much fun that you have to stay in constant contact with them. That's a pretty good message, actually. Only these ads do not make that at all clear; at least, not nearly as effectively as they could.

There is a free-spirited, playful quality buried within each of these ads, unable to come out. I wanted to like them all. But the overall tone, unfortunately, is more wistful. It's like discovering that the person driving in front of you with the "I'd Rather Be Fishing" bumper sticker lives a rather sad life all the times when he is not out fishing. Nobody wants that.

Facebook Home has several innovative features and has received generally positive reviews. Mark Zuckerberg has called Home "the best version of Facebook there is." There is a great deal riding on its success. I do not believe these ads will help.

Image taken from Facebook Home "Airplane" ad.

When it comes to Wi-Fi and mobile broadband service, population makes a big difference. According to a new report from WeFi, a mobile broadband solution and network management company, the higher the population a state has, the better that state's Wi-Fi speeds - but the slower the cellular broadband speeds. (Ironically, states with very low population densities also suffer from slow cellular speeds - probably for completely different reasons.)

The infographic below lays out the report's conclusions on who in the U.S. gets the fastest and slowest Wi-Fi and mobile broadband speeds - and exactly what they use all that bandwidth to do.

For example, it turns out that Instagram is the biggest social-network data hog, easily beating out Google+ and Facebook and trailing only multimedia-heavy ESPN in terms of overall data downloaded.