Continuing my post from a few days ago, Google has released (albeit quietly) an iPhone interface in a similar vein to the one that has available on Facebook for several months and recently launched by Amazon. It is a bit thin but does allow you to access all the normal search capability as well as Gmail and your Google Calendar.

More evidence that convergence is finally happening in the mobile browser space. Not because the networks are allowing phone manufacturers to standardize on a browser (perish the thought) but rather that content sources are rallying around the screen resolution provided by the iPhone and the full functionality provided by Safari (ok, Flash would be nice but you get my point.

For an interesting list of iPhone competitors (both concept and real), check out the list over at MobileWack. While some are out a bit out there (and a few are pretty cool looking), it does prove the point that the screen size everyone should be targeting with their mobile versions is, not surprisingly, about the size of human hand. Add to that the physical limitations of the human eye to pick out detail (i.e. resolution) and we’ve pretty much got our standard. No industry standards group required.

A minor mention on the NYT tech blog has officially opened a can of worms that’s been sitting out there for years, just waiting for someone to pull the tab. The big issue - if user-generated content is the core traffic generator on social networks, why shouldn’t the users who generate it share in the ad revenues that their content earns? This strikes at the heart of Facebook’s potential revenue model even before they’ve had a chance to establish one.

The specific startup that’s in the spotlight is almost beside the point - it’s a relatively low-rent multi-offering service, the kind that bombards you with high-pressure screens trying to get you to sign up as soon as possible. The NYT says they only have 1500 users using them to display their own ads on their profile pages, and given that the majority of Facebook profiles aren’t public anymore, I couldn’t find a single one to use as a screenshot.

But Facebook (and all other social networks) have a dilemma - if this model sticks, the proliferation of users selling their own ads on their profile pages will cut into the revenue the networks themselves will be able to earn.. advertisers will likely discount the CPMs they’ll pay if their ads are surrounded by random clutter. But if the social networks try to clamp down, they’ll quickly alienate users already spooked by the Big Brother vibes they’ve been getting from efforts to “monetize” them.

In the era of digital marketing, PR is arguably even more important than it was offline - not only is every traditional media publication online, the mob of blogs and user comments quickly multiply the impact of any newsworthy story. But what’s changed very little is the way mainstream PR gets done - clients hire PR firms, who write press releases, which they pitch to reporters, etc.

Yesterday, Hill & Knowlton, one of the more blue-chip PR firms in the country, issued a press release of their own claiming that “60 percent of consumers polled agreed that the government should regulate the sale of games deemed mature or violent.”

Now this is odd.. PR firms usually write press releases for clients, rather than releasing their own. Hill & Knowlton doesn’t even have any clients in the games industry. But the plot quickly thickened - a rebuttal by the ESA, the industry trade association, revealed that Hill & Knowlton had commissioned the research on spec in the hopes of winning the ESA as a client. When the ESA turned them down, Hill & Knowlton released the study results (spun in a way that made the ESA look bad, natch), apparently out of pure spite.

Sounds pretty offline so far, no? But thanks to the magic of blogs, RSS feeds, comments and forums, even old-school battles between regulators and industry groups (check out the 400+ comments!) are now playing out online, and this one involves public figures as big as Hillary Clinton. Whenever the stakes get high enough, you can be sure that offline dirty tricks will soon be just as commonplace in the online world.

Nexon Inc, one of the largest online multiplayer game publishers, announced a deal this week with several of their retail partners where they’ll be featuring virtual versions of these retailers within Nexon’s games. I can’t find the release online (it was emailed to me) but here’s the first part:

Nexon America Inc., the U.S. division of Asia’s leading online entertainment company Nexon Group, whose Game Cards are available at retail giants such as Target, Best Buy, and 7-Eleven, Inc., announced today plans to integrate its mega store partners into MapleStory, its most popular game. Nexon America is educating their players on the availability of the Nexon Game Cards through outlets such as Best Buy, CVS, Duane Reade and 7-Eleven, by bringing the stores to the players virtually.

This partnership between Nexon America, a leader in virtual goods sales, and major retailers is unprecedented. Nexon America will send its millions of MapleStory players to the virtual markets with themed quests that will promote both the retailers and the availability of Nexon Game Cards in these stores. The special quests will prompt users to complete various tasks and visit any of these chains to earn their own virtual Nexon Game Card, which will provide Maple Points, the in-game currency of MapleStory.

On the surface this doesn’t seem like a bad deal - several retailers have created virtual destinations in online worlds like Second Life, and unlike SL, MapleStory actually has a large and loyal fanbase. The target demographic is highly desirable - tweens and teens - and Nexon claims 3 million users in the US alone. While this is probably an overstatement, the game is big enough to have earned its very own segment on Fox about the dangers of online game addiction.

Gameplay video from MapleStory
The oddness of this deal becomes evident as soon as you see the game in action. Unlike Second Life, this isn’t a 3D semi-realistic world, it’s a cartoony 2D fantasy game. How will they represent a virtual 7-Eleven in a way that players will connect with a real store? Will the context in which they experience the brand be too different to translate into real-world equity, or will the interactivity make it better than regular one-way messaging? Either way it’s a deal worth watching, not least because it’s becoming harder and harder to effectively target that age group.As you might expect, Nexon themselves have learned a thing or two about communicating with teens & tweens.. not only do they have the requisite MySpace page with >40k friends, they’re also using MySpace as a test bed for ad creative - the fans are not exactly representative of the target group, but it’s a very quick (and very cheap) way to get initial feedback that would take days or weeks to gather via traditional focus groups.

Businesses started using social networks to market to consumers ages ago, it doesn’t even seem weird anymore for a corporation to have a MySpace page with tens of thousands of “friends”, and of course this year the politicians got into the act in a big way. In keeping with Facebook’s more controlled style, things started a bit more slowly - initially a lot of businesses formed Groups, and people could belong to them to show affinity, hear the latest news, etc.

Now Facebook has full-blown business pages, where companies can show off their products, announce events, etc… and they’re starting to tailor them for different kinds of businesses, so that restaurant pages have a tweaked version of the Wall app that lets people post reviews. A quick search on “restaurant” only yielded about 100 pages, but they range from Chicago sushi joints to a cocktail bar in Kazakhstan.

The goal of course is to get these businesses to buy Facebook’s new Social Ads, which despite the controversy are ideal especially for small businesses with limited budgets - think about a restaurant targeting only people who like sushi and live in a certain area. If it works well, it could be an improvement over even AdWords. But what Facebook really should do is what BlogBang is doing - let users choose and endorse the ads themselves. Rather than the slightly creepy and probably imperfect behind-the-scenes targeting, they’d be directly tapping into people’s own knowledge of one another’s interests, and picking up the power of word-of-mouth to boot.

Historically when you build a web site you had a choice to either design a specific, stripped down version for mobile devices or ignore them completely (the choice most sites make). After all, even after years of penetration, devices running Windows CE serve up less than 0.06% of all web pages according to HitsLink. But there is another interesting statistic buried in their report as highlighted by the Wall Street Journal today. iPhones are at 0.09% and that is for only a little over a million devices that have been around for a few months.

So the lesson learned from all these numbers? Design your site for devices with small screens running fully functional browsers and ignore everything else. Apple just forced handset manufacturers to give the public what it wants. So much for .mobi.

If you’ve got an iPhone and haven’t seen Facebook’s take on how to scale your site down for a small screen, make sure to check it out. They’ve done a good job.

A few days back there was a flurry of articles in both the mainstream press and the blogger community on what was perceived to be confirmation that Google was finally going to launch capability to allow all of us out here in the great wild world to store our files on its servers. The often rumored but never delivered GDrive might become a reality.

In other words, the Google cloud was going to be able to swallow pretty much anything we could throw at it rather that just the videos, pictures and other standardized media supported today. Of course this ability isn’t actually that new, given that xDrive and .Mac (and others) provide the same ability to store files online. For the most part the current solutions work, although they are limited and often tied to specific operating systems or computers.

What will be interesting to see is whether Google actually tackles the more complicated part of this problem. The real challenge isn’t just to provide an online backup of files that actually reside on the multiple hard drives we all seem to be accumulating these days (try counting them sometime…it is scary). The real challenge is to move the place that all our files live to the web and replicate them down to all those hard drives only when we need them.

So make your laptop, your desktop, you kids computer, your Xbox, iPhone, Blackberry, Tivo, external hard drive and maybe even portions of your work computer (suitably encrypted of course) just temporary storage and make the cloud the place it all lives. Oh yeah, and while you’re at it, remove the burden of keeping everything in sync so that it is automatic and just happens.

In other words, make it easy.

I came across an article the other day about a french site called BlogBang, owned by Publicis. It’s set up as a community of bloggers, with just over 2200 members so far. Members get some basic social networking functions - profiles, voting for one another’s blogs etc.. but the real point of the community is to create a forum for Publicis clients to engage bloggers in some participatory marketing.

The more straightforward aspect of this is what the site calls “Diffusion” - advertisers post ads, and bloggers can pick the ones they like and put them on their sites.. they then get paid for click-throughs. So far it’s basically an ad network.. but where it gets interesting is that advertisers can also put out a “Brief” to the community, and members can create and submit their own ads. These then become available for everyone to Diffuse.

This feels more than a little bit like an open-source community, but with graphic design instead of coding as its core skillset. For marketers there’s an extra twist - not only are you getting the benefit of collective intelligence in helping you craft your messages, you’re also implicitly doing research on the perception of your brand among community members.

It remains to be seen whether these types of communities will develop the same mix of altruism and professional pride (or ego) that fuels projects like Linux or NeoOffice. It might only work well for more non-profit, socially desirable advertisers - two of the open briefs on BlogBang are a school and a fund-raising telethon.. but then again maybe not - the biggest BlogBang diffusion to date has been a campaign for Nestle.