Top five digital stories this week, incl. Will Young & Facebook changes

We’re back! After a short hiatus we’re here once again to bring you our selection of some of this week’s juciest digital marketing stories handpicked just for you. We hope you like our choices and we’re always up for a bit of a chat, so get involved and have your say with the comments box at the bottom. You can click on each story’s title to find out more.

What’s your Kred?

Claire Robinson, Digital Development Director

Kred is a new social influence measurement tool, which launches on Monday (3rd October) and promises to be very interesting…

Kred “measures personal authority in online communities connected by interests. It assesses the ability to inspire action (Influence) and propensity to engage with others (Outreach), valuing audience quality and activation over audience size”, so promises to be a truly next generation social scoring tool. Kred’s scoring system is transparent so people can see the actions that have led to their score.

The #Kred hashtag is buzzing with early reviews and recommendations – I’ll be watching closely over the next few weeks and months to see how clients and agencies are integrating Kred into their social media strategies – could it be a Klout killer?

Everybody’s changing…

Leah Kayles, Social Media Editor

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced some big changes to the Facebook profile, namely, ‘the Timeline’.

Now it’s nothing new to hear that the big daddy of social networking is undergoing layout changes yet again. It happens with regularity and causes a ruckus each time the most minimal to the most dramatic of changes occurs, with status updates by the dozen bemoaning the new addition of this or the removal of that and Facebook groups aplenty threatening to ‘Leave Facebook if they don’t change it back!!’. Funny how, with a record half a billon people using Facebook in one day last week, these threatened mass exoduses never actually seem to come about.

Point is, we always get used to the changes and forget what it was like before. Do you remember what Facebook looked like when you first joined? Me neither.

This new Timeline malarkey will make it easy to scroll down to see images, updates and so on from years gone by. From when you were a wee bairn (you can postdate old pics) to school days, uni days and beyond. So it’s easy to view your life on Facebook at a glance.

There is of course the ability to do this already, by clicking ‘see more’ at the bottom of a profile and scrolling, scrolling, clicking more again, scrolling again. Basically, no one would do this other than the most dedicated of crazed Facebook stalkers as it would take blimmin’ ages (and even then you’d only be able to see status updates rather than anything else, like pictures uploaded at the time).

But there’s a point to be considered here. Do you really want your current squeeze to easily see that, two years ago, you were happily uploading snaps of you and your ex on a romantic break and telling all your Facebook friends how happy you were? Do you want it to become even easier for new colleagues to scroll back to any angry/drunken/cringe-worthy updates you published four years ago?

Of course, there’s still limited profile options and you can delete anything you’re not happy about, but it could be one hell of an editing job. Does the Timeline essentially mean that the past remains even less in the past than ever?

Cloud gaming: pie in the sky?

George Hurrell, Digital Designer

With the explosion of tablet devices the idea of cloud computing keeps getting closer and closer. It was only a matter of time before the computer game industry jumped onto the technology. I’d heard it being talked about some time ago and wasn’t totally convinced by it. What if the server goes down? What if someone hacks  into the system? I won’t be able to play anything. At least if I have my console/PC at home I have more control.

But on the flip side, if this new gaming platform takes off it will mean you don’t have go out and have to buy a state-of-the-art machine to play all the latest titles at full res and high frame rates as it will all be handled server side.

Backed by telecom giant BT, OnLive has launched its brand new on-demand video game service at the 2011 Eurogamer Expo, the UK’s biggest gaming convention, at Earls Court in London.

“We just want to give our customers the chance to try it, and with more than 100 premium games available, choosing what to play will be the hardest part,” said Warren Buckley, managing director of BT Retail’s Customer Service.

Show your true colours

Tim Downs, Head of PR

Who’d have thought that Dulux and Unicef would be natural bedfellows in an interesting and fun social media fundraising campaign?

Well that’s exactly what Own a Colour is.

Pick your favourite colour from one of the 16.7 million available, name it by making a donation from as a little as a pound, tell them why you chose that colour, describe it in one word and it’s yours for everyone to see.

You can even gift a colour and tell someone why you picked it for them, aaaaahhhhh.

Naming things isn’t a new idea but I think this is a nice execution that is creating a wall of living colour because of the little stories behind each one. Lots of lovely content for people to view and share, really strong association for Dulux and I get to pick the new colour scheme for my bathroom while getting that warm fuzzy feeling that donating to a good cause gives you.

Contrary to what Facebook says, I don’t like Will Young

Paul Mallett, Managing Partner

The new integration of Spotify into Facebook raises an interesting issue; the difference between personal media and shared media.  I don’t share my Facebook account with anyone, whereas my Spotify account is the house account – we don’t log-in and log-out on different profiles.  My wife likes Will Young – I would rather punch myself in the face repeatedly than listen to his execrable whining.

As applications become more and more integrated we need to solve this tricky conundrum, without overcomplicating or compromising usability.