A lot of companies deploy a lot of disjointed, expensive software to help people work together. These apps suck because they focus on specific tasks (timesheets, email, documents) rather than on the point (working together). Social networks are really good at that task, but they don’t mix well with work. To that end, products like Chatter and Yammer enable companies to set up social nets in-house (NYTimes).

Facebook Ads are a great value for any client, but you don’t want to pay for them yourself. When I started I ran them under my account using the clients card. However, this meant that I couldn’t run ads for anyone else (including myself). You’d think you can use different credit cards for different campaigns but you can’t. Each person can only use one credit card at a time. So how do you manage an account for someone else? You use something called Account Groups.

Social marketing, blecchhh. Is there anti-social marketing? But that seems to be the term. Facebook Ads have gotten hammered for low-click-thru rates. The bigger issue is, why are you using a hammer when the job calls for a screw? Clicks and impressions are the wrong metric. What Facebook enables you to do is actually connect with people.

In the old days, advertising was sold based on size and demographics. If you put an ad in the New York Times it would reach a lot of people, if you placed an ad in Rolling Stone you’d reach people interested in music. That model, however, is inefficient and expensive. Facebook skips the publication altogether and just delivers the people.

Facebook is pretty good for recruiting. Through a FB page you can share information. Through FB Ads, you can target good candidates. The question is, how do you close the deal? How do you get them to apply? Is there an App for that? Why yes there is. Jobcast.net does it pretty well.

My friend Navin Weeraratne is a master of the Facebook photo album as art form. This is his most recent work, a photo interview with an Uzbek prostitute, told through captions. I haven’t included all the photos, only two. It’s a great story, well told. Search for local prostitutes accounts for a large amount of Google traffic into this site, but it’s rare that anyone actually talks to one. Great work by Navin.

Teaching social media is a bit like teaching people to be social. Most people just learn when they’re young. Greg Berger had sessions on YouTube and stuff but for me they were not especially useful. For most activists this is stuff they pick up on the street, as it were, or type in to Google as needed. For some people I think those sessions were new, which was good. I’ve found that this type of information can seem obvious but have a major effect on people who are just discovering it. By the end of the session everyone could pretty much make a YouTube mash-up, which was cool. Zenga Zenga.

There are now quite a few websites where people take photos of girls from Facebook and upload them to blogs. Some of these sites are pure privacy invasion, just personal photos of girls from their Facebook pages. Some mix photos of real girls and models, effectively crowd-sourcing softcore porn. With Facebook, people have started posting and identifying photos of themselves. This includes a lot of boys being boys and girls being girls. However, Facebook only gives the illusion of being a wall garden, there are plenty of cats and dogs that can get in and out. Thus you get people taking photos out of semi-private Facebook into the more public world of blogs.

Sri Lanka is having its first Twitter Meetup today (the 26th) at Coco Veranda on Ward Place at 5 o’clock. Sri Lanka is full of firsts which are insipid (SPEED’s first bottled water ‘for kids’, for example) but this one is somewhat worthwhile. Twitter is a online short messaging service which I now use as my primary news source. I follow a few people that I consider interesting and they post interesting news links and ideas. This gives me a diversity and specificity of fodder, and I also share some. Twitter also has other uses, one of which is starting, promoting and executing a meetup.

TamilNet sort of lost it when the war ended. TamilNet, if you’re unaware, was the LTTE mouthpiece then an anti-KP mouthpiece and now a chewed off rump LTTE mouthpiece. Occasionally (coincidentally moreso) they do mete out some news, but lately I read them more for entertainment value. I especially enjoy their ‘Features’ which are meandering exhortations to separatism and denunciations of the usual suspects. My favorite feature of the features is that major opinions are cited to ‘Tamil circles’ or sometimes just Tamils. For example – “Do they think it is easier to drive the people into corporate slavery by retaining the present conditions, Tamils wonder.” Most Tamils I know are not possessed of such a Borg mind but what do I know.