Nooked Powers Big Brother on Facebook
14th of August 2007 by conor
As someone who believes deeply in open systems I have been an ardent critic of Facebook, however I have admired many aspects of the site from a business perspective. The two most obvious ones being the recent launch of the Facebook Platform and prior to that, the introduction of the News Feed feature.
Ignoring the multiple iLike invites I get daily, I have been intrigued by some of the applications being installed by my FB friends and none more so than by Nooked CEO Fergus Burns. The one that really caught my attention yesterday was the Big Brother application. A bit of checking on the BB site showed that they announced it only two days ago.
Channel 4 creating an application like this strikes me as an incredibly smart move. The demographic for BB viewers in the UK is a strong match to that of existing FB users (as opposed to johnny come lately's like me). But I was stunned to see that the application has already been installed by 5000 users!
Looking again at the application, I spotted something very important down the end: Powered by Nooked. This is a real coup for Fergus and the team in Sligo and fits strongly into the their Widget Marketing strategy.
Stu Phillips recently did a post wondering if RSS Advertising is dead. It appears that FeedBurner is really struggling with monetizing their feeds. They should have read a small post on the Nooked blog from two years ago where they pointed out that the Feed was the ad. On Facebook I noticed that Fergus and others were adding fashion applications, once again powered by Nooked. This means they are building relationships to retailers which provides strong revenue generating opportunities. Their recent re-coining of RSS to stand for Really Simple Shopping is starting to bear fruit. They could call it RSS 3.0 but a certain bearded gentleman might take issue with that.
Last year I struggled with where Nooked were going with the RSS marketing idea but now I finally see the potential of using RSS and widgets for e-commerce. Of course they face a lot of well-funded competition in this area but I can see how they are working to mitigate this: keep the initial focus on Europe, partner as much as possible and understand that content is critical.
Nooked's other big news recently was the hiring of John O'Shea as CTO. On reading his very impressive profile, two things leaped off the screen; this is a platform guy and this is an API guy. I don't know what the guys are building but with John on board I think we can look forward to something which moves Nooked into the major leagues.
Comment posted by Big Brother Blognation adamstiles
at 9/2/2007 4:32:37 AM
[] Today I noticed that Conor has written an excellent piece Nooked powers Big Brother on Facebook. []
Comment posted by Fergus Burns
at 8/15/2007 5:42:58 AM
Hi Conor
Thanks for the mention and the kind words
A lot more goodies in the bag
Talk Soon
Fergus