One of the cool things about Facebook is you are able to see your friend status updates, when you log in. If you use RSS, you can also subscribe to their Status Updates, so they appear in your RSS reader on a daily basis.
To do this:
This will add your friends status updates to your RSS reader :)
It would seem my previous post about Cliff Jennings should be taken with a pinch of salt. According to a fellow South African blogger Bruinman, it turns out Cliff is just a good act by actor Eduan Van Jaarsveldt . A fake but clever marketing ploy by M-Net & their ad agency Ogilvy, who created the fictitious character to bring some lively airtime to a sometimes dull show.
Well done to them. The first part of the Idols season can sometimes be boring and monotounous, but they have done something interesting here to keep the show alive.
The use of social media to promote something like this is awesome, and it is working. The facebook profile has over 1200 members, the youtube videos are getting some cool hits. Actually, in the 24 hours after I posted my previous story, I got 150 hits just from google searches for “cliff jennings”.
Well done to the ad agency, and to M-Net. It has taken 3 weeks for the public to figure this out.
For some info on the “undercover detective” work that has been going on, check out the following links:
http://bruinman.blogspot.com/2007/08/cliff-jennings-fake.html
http://www.joblog.co.za/2007/08/another-nail-in-the-coffin-of-idols
http://www.jasonbagley.com/2007/08/30/cliff-jennings-is-a-complete-fake
http://www.news24.com/News24/MyNews24/Your_story/0,,2-2127-2128_2174101,00.html
I’m still a Cliff Jennings Fan. Live the dream
If you been watching the latest South African series of Idols, you would have by now noticed a character that keeps popping up. A guy by the name of Cliff Jennings has featured on every single show, and what a clever boy he is. If you ask anyone who has watched they more than likely will not remeber anyone, but they may remember him. His singing is not the best in the world, but he is giving away cd’s with “free posters”. He has even made his first music video. He has managed to piss off the judges to a point where they TOLD him to leave in the latest round of auditions.
But he is clever. He is marketing himself, and getting recognised. He has quite a few groups already on facebook, and his “official group” is growing with over 300 members already. His “appreciation group” is also growing steadily.
He has a myspace profile, and has a mate recording all of his auditions, and posting them on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/user/cliffjennings) . Using social networking to the max, and it’s working very well.
Keep an eye on him, we know he isn’t going to make it into the final top 10, but we do know we are going to remember him for a long time afterwards.
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I know I have been posting a lot of Facebook shit lately, but I came across a handy new feature that makes me very happy. After last week’s rant about Facebook apps, I have found quick and easy way to ignore them.
Firstly it seems that Facebook has changed the way they display the apps to the user. Instead of having the list of apps appearing under your profile picture on the left, which took up loads of space, they have now put icons for each app, taking up much less space.
They now also allow you to “Minimize” apps that you don’t want to see on profiles. So instead of having to scroll and scroll to the bottom of the page to see your friends wall, you can now minimize the apps, so that just the title of the app appears.
This is what the current apps look like:
Now if you click on the blue arrow in the top left, it will minimize the app, and only show the title of the app.
This way, you are able to scroll past all the apps, you don’t to see, and makes loading times much faster and uses less screen “real estate”. So much prettier :)
Last night saw the first episode of the popular reality series Survivor South Africa start in South Africa. In what I think is a bit of a bizare twist, according to this article, M-Net & the producers of the Survivor South Africa show, banned all the contestants from acessing Facebook, or blogs until they have finished with thier part in the show. Surely M-Net could have used the “Facebook phenomenon” and used it to thier advantage. Think a Facebook app (ugghh) that would allow people to interact with the people who have been voted off, or allow them to ask questions in a group, with out having to spoil the show.
Instead, M-Net encourage the contestants to interact via their own social networking platform, called MySurvivor, that has been built round the show. The maths doesn’t make sense, almost 220,000 people in the SA network versus the couple of hundred maybe that will sign up on the M-Net social networking site.