F-Commerce has not delivered expectations.

Last April, Gamestop opened a store on Facebook to generate sales among the 3.5 million-plus customers who’d declared themselves “fans” of the video game retailer. Six months later, the store was quietly shuttered.

Gamestop has company. Over the past year, Gap, JC Penney and Nordstrom have all opened and closed storefronts on Facebook’s social networking site.

Facebook, which this month filed for an initial public offering, has sought to be a top shopping destination for its 845 million members. The stores’ quick failure shows that the California-based social network doesn’t drive commerce and casts doubt on its value for retailers, said Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“There was a lot of anticipation that Facebook would turn into a new destination, a store, a place where people would shop,” Mulpuru said in a telephone interview. “But it was like trying to sell stuff to people while they’re hanging out with their friends at the bar.”

A year ago, investors hailed so-called F-commerce as the next big thing, speculating that the company had potential to threaten Amazon.com and PayPal. Facebook is the most-visited website in the world. Some people thought that persuading visitors to shop would be easy, Mulpuru said.

David Fisch, Facebook’s director of business development, said in June that the site would make shopping online, previously a solitary experience, more social.

Hanging out

“This is where people are hanging out,” Fisch said at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition in San Diego.

Facebook planned to profit from retailers buying ads to drive traffic to their on-site stores. Business consultant Booz & Co. predicted in January 2011 that physical goods sold through social commerce would balloon to $US30 billion from $US5 billion by 2015, with Facebook contributing a majority of sales.

Even as some businesses shut storefronts, many companies continue to devote advertising dollars to the social network. Facebook’s sales surged 55 per cent to $US1.13 billion in the fourth quarter. The company aims to use e-commerce more as a way of getting users to stay longer than as a way to boost revenue, said Krista Garcia, an analyst at EMarketer in New York.

Chris Kraeuter, a Facebook spokesman, declined to comment.

Customers had no incentive to shop at Gamestop’s Facebook store rather than the company’s regular website because purchasing online is already convenient, said Ashley Sheetz, who is the Grapevine, Texas-based company’s vice president of marketing and strategy.

Shut quickly

“We just didn’t get the return on investment we needed from the Facebook market, so we shut it down pretty quickly,” Sheetz said in a telephone interview. “For us, it’s been a way we communicate with customers on deals, not a place to sell.”

Gap, which has 5.6 million Facebook fans from its namesake, Banana Republic and Old Navy pages, opened and discontinued a storefront last year, said Liz Nunan, a company spokeswoman. The San Francisco-based company also discovered customers preferred shopping on its own sites, she said.

“We will continue to evaluate if this is something we want to bring back in the future,” Nunan said in an emailed statement.

Nordstrom tested ways to make shopping “seamless through Facebook” and decided on a broader social media focus, Colin Johnson, a spokesman, said.

JC Penney featured assortments in a Facebook “shop” tab beginning in 2010, and took it down in December 2011, Kate Coultas, a spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.

Other advertisers, such as Procter & Gamble, have kept their F-stores running, including Olay, Tide and Cover Girl.

An Australian online business, however, had a re-think about selling its goods through a Facebook store, after considering the costs.

Eugene Tan, director of Aquabumps, a business selling daily photographs of Bondi and other beaches, has a meaningful fan page on Facebook but declined the offer to create a new e-commerce engine or merge his current one on the social network.

“I had a look at some of the guys providing the service to create a shop and I thought (the site) was slow. A lot of apps that run on Facebook are slow. And I can’t control it. I’d rather people come to me (from Facebook).”

Tan said he also didn’t like to put a “hard sell” on his Facebook page. “We’re very subtle on the sell. My buyers would switch off.”

Tan stores about 1000 images on his site and offers 12 permutations in framing and sizing options.

“It’d be very difficult to have two stores, and expensive too. They (third party) wanted a monthly fee and a percentage of sales. With my own site I can control the costs – I paid a one-off fee to create it and pay the credit card transaction fees; that’s nothing,” Tan said.

Cracks in model

Wade Gerten, chief executive officer of social media developer 8thBridge, previously known as Alvenda, opened a Facebook store for the florist 1-800-FLOWERS. Minneapolis-based Gerten went on to develop commerce strategies for Delta Air Lines, Diane Von Furstenberg Studio and denim-maker Seven for all Mankind.

Cracks in the model showed quickly, Gerten said in a telephone interview. Clients “have taken a different approach,” shutting stores or scaling back their offerings.

“It was basically just another place to shop for all the stuff already available on the retailer websites,” Gerten said. “I give so-called F-commerce an ‘F’.”

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RUPERT MURDOCH ACCUSES GOOGLE OF AIDING FILM PIRACY

News Corp chairman and chief executive Rupert Murdoch has accused internet giant Google of aiding film piracy.

The Australian-born media mogul used his recently activated Twitter account to blast the search engine, branding it a “piracy leader”.

“Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts around them,” Murdoch wrote.

A short time later he added to the rant, saying film making was “risky as hell”, with piracy hurting actors and writers.

Murdoch then added: “Google great company doing many exciting things. Only one complaint, and it’s important.

“Just been to google search for mission impossible. Wow, several sites offering free links. I rest my case.”

That was a reference to the latest Tom Cruise movie Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.

The comments were among Murdoch’s most outspoken since launching his Twitter account on January 1.

He’s used the social networking site to pass judgement on a number of subjects, ranging from serious comment on US politics to his own error-prone typing.

“Re complaints about my spelling! Problem is my pathetic typing. Sorry, if anyone really cares,” the media mogul wrote on January 10.

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Facebook isn’t the only online community with a captive audience.

IT IS no coincidence the Academy Award-winning account of Facebook’s meteoric growth was entitled The Social Network.

Facebook.com

After all, with more than 800 million active users globally and at least 250 million photos uploaded every day, the little blue website that started in 2004 as a mere side project to co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s university studies is now – indisputably – the social network.

Having long ago knocked the once-mighty MySpace out of its spot as the world’s No.1 social-networking website, Facebook is proving unassailable, even to fellow tech behemoth Google.

Google +

Google plus.com

Google’s social network, the four-month-old Google+, has lured just 40 million users.

Digg

Digg.com

Linkedin

Among the hundreds, if not thousands, of wannabe Facebook killers, only a few dozen have garnered serious numbers.

Twitter

Twitter.com

We might have all heard of Twitter (200 million-plus users) and perhaps even LinkedIn (120 million-plus users) but, especially in other parts of the world, none of these, not even Facebook, is king.

My space

Myspace.com

Why? Because though such mind-boggling figures matter when you’re courting investors or advertising dollars, they don’t if you are truly trying to create a social network where like-minded people can mingle, as is evidenced by the surprising number of smaller communities based purely on niche interests, such as languages, lifestyles or even a love of a specific animal, that appear with surprising regularity.

QZone

qzone.qq.com

With a whopping 480 million-plus users, QZone is bigger than Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace (33 million-plus) put together.

It is the No.1 social network in mainland China, where Twitter and Facebook are banned. It’s not entirely free, with many features only accessible after paying a fee that allows users to access a Twitter-like micro blog, instant messaging, photo sharing and music streaming.

Pinterest

pinterest.com

Just 19 months old, the invitation-only Pinterest is a highly addictive image-based social network where users share their favourite images with friends.

It might not sound terribly interesting but for right-brained creative types who love collecting pictures of ”stuff”, it’s a digital dream. It allows users to share ideas and concepts that couldn’t possibly be conveyed in words.

Businesses such as ad agencies and graphic designers use it to get a feel for what clients want. Those planning weddings use it as a digital cork board filled with dress designs, ideas for cakes and colour schemes.

ASMALLWORLD

asmallworld.net

Founded by Swedish banker Erik Wachtmeister and his wife, Countess Louise Wachtmeister, ASMALLWORLD is an invitation-only social network for ”the elite” who don’t want to rub shoulders, even digitally, with the hoi polloi.

It is thought to have about 500,000 users, including James Blunt and Ivanka Trump, among others, and allows them to discuss important matters such as fine dining in the world’s great cities, seek out appropriately vetted flat mates and, most importantly, socialise with those of their own fine, well-bred and well-heeled ilk. Of course, we can’t verify any of this – we’ve never scored an invite.

Instagram

instagr.am

Snap-happy iPhone owners can share their daily goings-on via photos, which can be edited on the fly. It’s like Facebook without words or Twitter using only pictures.

Snap a picture and upload it to your Instagram profile to let your friends and followers know what you’re doing, when you’re doing it and where such excitement is occurring. You can’t even add a caption (but you can leave a comment).

Depending on how interesting – or good – your happy snaps are, others will start following and interacting with you and you’ll see some stunning photography. With more than 1 million photos shared every day, it is absolutely mesmerising and lets you do something useful with that bursting iPhone Camera Roll.

Orkut

orkut.com

Owned by Google, the multilingual Orkut was once massive in India and Pakistan – until Facebook came along.

Now its biggest audience is Brazil, where 58.7 per cent of its 66 million or so users reside. Indians make up 28 per cent of users, while Japan is the third-largest community – but only at 5.3 per cent.

Orkut offers a simple, youth-oriented interface that includes lots of ”cute” teen-friendly features such as ”cool” rankings. One of its most clever features is the ability to add people to your ”Crush List”, where, if both members independently add each other, they will be informed of their mutual admiration. It adds a digital twist to the age-old, angst-ridden notion of unrequited love.

Ning

ning.com

Netscape co-founder (and tech guru) Marc Andreessen is behind Ning, a DIY social-networking service that lets the likes of you and me take on Mr Zuckerberg. Well, not quite.

But you can build a website or social network based on your design and target market. Plans start from about $3.95 a month for a basic, home-spun social-networking site with no more than 150 users; you’ll pay between $29.95 (up to 10,000 members) and $59.95 (unlimited members) a month if your user base grows. Depending on which subscription plan you choose, you’ll be able to offer many of the features included on ”real” social networks, from live chat and photo sharing to uploading video in branded media players

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?SCHOOLS SPY ON STUDENTS USING SOCIAL INTERNET SITES

SCHOOLS are using internet monitoring companies to read what students are saying on social networking sites.

The typical service used by schools such as Ascham looks at any publicly available material posted on sites such as Facebook, Formspring and Tumblr to monitor the sometimes ferocious use of the media by young people.

”We go where the conversations are, where young people or communities of interest are coalescing online,” says James Griffin, a partner in SR7. The company’s service does not intercept private messages, although some technology using keyword searches is able to do this.

Mr Griffin said Formspring allowed anonymous postings on the wall of identified hosts, which could then be seen by their friends, making it a standout tool for cyber-bullying.

Ascham is one of several private schools monitoring what their students do online at home or, with smartphones, literally anywhere. Ascham girls are not allowed to use social networking sites at school.

The director of students for years 11 and 12, Frances Booth, said: ”We know it’s become pretty much the essential way of communicating for thie current generation of students and we understand it’s a huge part of their lives. But we’re also aware of the dangers that can come from unrestrained use.

”They’re aware we keep an eye on what they’re up to. All we want is for them to be safe.”

Other schools rely on students or parents to monitor postings. Stephen Harris, the principal of Northern Beaches Christian School, is ready to phone parents late at night if their children have posted something inappropriate, to make them take it down immediately. ”Our school policy now extends the concept

of the school playground to any environment in the social media platform where a student of the school or a teacher is identified by either name, image or inference,” he said.

Public schools are also stepping into what had previously been held to be either private or the domain of parents.

While social networking sites are not accessible from school computers, Lila Mularczyk, the deputy president of the NSW Secondary Principals’ Council, recently argued that cyber-bullying connected with school was treated in the same way, no matter when it occurred.

”If the out-of-hours harassment is an extension of school relationships or a school event, that is [considered] part of the school day,” she said.

Mrs Booth said: ”We monitor the girls’ usage of the internet both internally and externally, not because we want to stop them but because we want them to use it in a safe manner.

”We don’t want them putting things out there that might put them in danger.”

But Cameron Murphy, the president of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, said that the monitoring was an ”outrageous invasion” of students’ privacy.

”Just because students may discuss things about school over the phone at night, it wouldn’t be appropriate or lawful for a school to tap someone’s phone and make decisions about them on that basis. Just because it happens to be a social networking site, it shouldn’t be any different,” he said.

But Mr Griffin, of SR7, said schools must act out of a duty of care to their students.

”Social media and cyber-bullying is simply an issue of the modern day that schools have to acknowledge and understand they can do something about,” he said.

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WHAT ARE THE MAIN THINGS TO LOOK FOR IN GOOGLE PLUS +?

Adopting a new social network like Google+ is taxing enough–re-adding friends, creating “Circles”, adjusting privacy settings, etc.–so learning to navigate can be a bit overwhelming.

Luckily, we did the heavy lifting for you. Here are seven Google+ basics you should learn:

1. Bold, italics, and strikethough. Do you miss the funky fonts and formatting you had in MySpace? Neither do we. Google+, however, gifts you with three simple formatting tricks: *bold*, _italics_, and -strikethough-.

2. Tag friends in posts. Get a friend’s attention in a post by tagging them. Type “+” or “@” followed by their name. You’ll see an autocomplete drop-down menu show up as you type their name, which presumably includes people in your circles and extended circles.

Your friend will be notified they’ve been tagged in a post, and post visibility will automatically be set to just that person. Don’t forget to add more circles and friends (if you want to) before sharing.

3. Use permalinks. Permalinks come in handy for sharing and cleaner viewing of single posts. Just click the timestamp of any post and you’ll be taken to a new page displaying just that post.

4. Quickly share post on Twitter and Facebook. Oh, the irony. To share a post with your Twitter or Facebook network, use the Extended Share for Google Plus Chrome extension. Upon installation, you’ll see a new option (“Send to…”) below each post in your stream.

5. Edit photos. Here’s a nice feature for any on-the-fly photo editing. Go to your photos (accessible via your profile), select a photo. Click “Actions” > Edit photo, and you’ll be presented with several photo filters. Scroll through other photos in the album for consecutive editing.

6. Send a “direct message”. To send a message to just one friend, tag them in the beginning of a post and let them know it’s a private message. Then, comment on the post to establish your own, private thread.

7. Let friends e-mail you from your profile. With this setting, you can let people e-mail you directly from your profile. Head to your profile, then select “Edit profile”.

Below your profile photo, you’ll see a grayed out “Send an email”. Click it, and check “Allow people to email me from a link on my profile”. Then adjust the privacy settings below.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

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SOCIAL NET TIME SPENT AT WORK IS THEFT IN ANYBODYS LANGUAGE

A LANDSCAPE architect fired for overusing an email chat service has been found to have been unfairly dismissed. It is the latest case for Fair Work Australia that deals with internet and social media use in the workplace.

Richard O’Connor had been employed by Outdoor Creations, in Melbourne. He had resigned and was about to leave the job when he was abruptly sacked for more than ”3000 transactions on a chat line during work time”.

His employer claimed, after searching his computer, that he had been using the Google Mail chat service when he was supposed to be working.

Employer David Kirkpatrick said in a letter of termination that engaging in personal activities for such a period of time while at work was akin to the theft ”of hundreds if not thousands of dollars worth of paid time”. Mr O’Connor denied using the chat service to the extent claimed.

The Fair Work Australia commissioner Anne Gooley said neither party had provided independent evidence about the net use. She said that while excessive use of social media during work hours may justify dismissal there was insufficient evidence to dismiss Mr O’Connor. He had also not been given an opportunity to respond before being sacked.

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Foreign Affairs officials told the daughter of a dying Australian man stranded in China to use Facebook to raise money for her father’s medical expenses.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade bureaucrat included the suggestion in an email advising Canberra woman Tracy Woolley that the Federal Government would not help with her stricken father’s plight.

Ms Woolley’s father Thomas Barry Moore, a former air force serviceman, has been in a coma in a Chinese hospital for 118 days after suffering a stroke on December 31 in Zhengzhou in north-central China.

Ms Woolley contacted DFAT on January 4 asking for help because she could not afford to visit her father or cover the estimated $160,000 for his repatriation to Australia.

When it became apparent MrMoore was likely to remain in a vegetative state, she asked doctors to turn off his life support but was told ethical concerns prevented them.

Ms Woolley is currently sending the hospital $770 a week to keep her father alive but said she could not afford to meet these payments beyond next month.

On March 4, an official from the consular operations branch of DFAT sent Ms Woolley an email suggesting she collect money to cover medical expenses from online ”friends” who had joined a Facebook ”causes” page she created for her father.

”Perhaps [use] your friends on the social networking site you are using to alert people to your father’s plight may also be able to provide funds to further extend your father’s care,” the email said.

Earlier in the email he wrote, ”despite our best intentions and our embassy speaking with the hospital and Mr Zhang on many occasions, there is no further action we can take to improve your father’s situation.”

DFAT has not shifted its stance on Mr Moore since The Canberra Times broke the story of the man’s plight on Tuesday. The department now says Ms Woolley never made a request for financial assistance, despite emails revealing otherwise. A DFAT spokeswoman said financial assistance for medical evacuations was only provided in special situations. She said these were limited to, ”medical evacuations where medical facilities are inadequate to treat their condition satisfactorily or their condition is so severe there is no time to consider other funding sources”.

A spokeswoman from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs said while she couldn’t comment on Mr Moore’s case for ”privacy reasons”, veterans who travelled overseas should take out insurance.

Ms Woolley said her father had funeral insurance and was covered for six weeks of medical care, excluding repatriation, by the Henan University of Technology, the place where he had worked for two years as an English teacher. Ms Woolley said her father was unable to take out travel insurance because he had lived overseas for more than a year.

RSL NSW offered to pay for airfares to help Ms Woolley travel to China but she asked that the money be allocated to his medical expenses instead. ”I said that was very nice but I need more than that. My father would never have wanted what is happening to him.”

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

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PepsiCo to launch social

vending machine

(Reuters) – PepsiCo Inc is introducing a “social vending” machine that lets users buy each other drinks remotely, further proof that its decades-old rivalry with Coca-Cola Co is going ever-more high tech.

A prototype of the new technology will debut at a trade show this week in Chicago. Coke started testing its Freestyle vending machine, which has a digital touchscreen and can dispense more than 100 flavor combinations, in 2009.

Pepsi’s new system lets users give their friends a beverage gift by entering the recipient’s name, mobile phone number and a personalized text message or video. The gift is delivered with a system code and instructions to redeem it at any similar machine.

“Social Vending extends our consumers’ social networks beyond the confines of their own devices and transforms a static, transaction-oriented experience into something fun and exciting,” said Mikel Durham, an innovation officer at PepsiCo Foodservice.

The system also allows “random acts of refreshment,” or the ability to buy a drink for a stranger, in situations such as sending “a symbol of encouragement to a city that’s experienced some challenging weather or a congratulatory beverage to a university that just won a championship,” PepsiCo said.

Another technological front in the companies’ ongoing battle is recyclable packaging. Pepsi was second to say it could make a recyclable plastic bottle from plant matter, but its bottle will be made from waste products — such as orange peels and oat husks — whereas Coke’s bottle is derived from sugar cane.

(Reporting by Martinne Geller, editing by Maureen Bavdek)

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Visa backs Twitter

co-founder’s mobile venture

(Reuters) – Visa Inc has thrown its weight behind a mobile payments venture created by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

The credit-card company has made an unspecified investment in Square, a two-year-old service that helps businesses and consumers pay with credit cards on a mobile phone or Apple Inc iPhone, both companies said in a statement.

In return, a Visa executive gets to sit on the advisory board at Square, which is also backed by Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures.

Square’s service employs a miniature magnetic card-reader that plugs into a device, such as an iPhone or Google Android phone. CEO Dorsey in March returned to the microblogging sensation he helped create, taking up the post of executive chairman — in addition to his responsibilities at Square — to oversee product development.

(Reporting by Edwin Chan. Editing by Robert MacMillan)

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Pope warns of alienation risk

in social networks & virtual friends

(Reuters) – Pope Benedict gave a qualified blessing to social networking Monday, praising its potential but warning that online friendships are no substitute for actual human contact.

The 83-year-old pontiff, who does not have his own Facebook account, set out his views in a message with a weighty title that would easily fit into a tweet: “Truth, proclamation and authenticity of life in the digital age.”

He said the possibilities of new media and social networks offered “a great opportunity,” but warned of the risks of depersonalization, alienation, self-indulgence, and the dangers of having more virtual friends than real ones.

“It is important always to remember that virtual contact cannot and must not take the place of direct human contact with people at every level of our lives,” Benedict said in the message for the Catholic Church’s World Day of Communications.

He urged users of social networks to ask themselves “Who is my ‘neighbor’ in this new world?” and avoid the danger of always being available online but being “less present to those whom we encounter in our everyday life.”

The vast horizons of new media “urgently demand a serious reflection on the significance of communication in the digital age,” he said.

The pope did not mention any specific social networking site or application by name, but sprinkled his message with terms such as “sharing,” “friends,” and “profiles.”

He said social networking can help “dialogue, exchange, solidarity and the creation of positive relations” but he also offered a list of warnings.

“Entering cyberspace can be a sign of an authentic search for personal encounters with others, provided that attention is paid to avoiding dangers such as enclosing oneself in a sort of parallel existence, or excessive exposure to the virtual world,” he said.

“In the search for sharing, for ‘friends’, there is the challenge to be authentic and faithful, and not give in to the illusion of constructing an artificial public profile for oneself.”

The pope is known to write most of his speeches by hand while his aides manage his forays into cyberspace. In 2009, a new Vatican website, www.pope2you.net, went live, offering an application called “The pope meets you on Facebook,” and another allowing the faithful to see the Pope’s speeches and messages on their iPhones or iPods.

The Vatican famously got egg on its face in 2009 when it was forced to admit that, if it had surfed the web more, it might have known that a traditionalist bishop whose excommunication was lifted had for years been a Holocaust denier.

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