Last week Facebook shared its plans for their iPhone application redesign, which were more impressive for mobile than they were on the desktop when new.facebook.com was launched on July 28th. Facebook has been the social networking leader in desktop and mobile convergence, and they are leveraging their native application to finally close the desktop/mobile feature gap, which should make Apple happy. What’s exciting about this redesign is that next month, Facebook will finally offer access to Posted Items – plus notes and other news-feed items on mobile. Hopefully their iPhone mobile web app will follow suit as part of the redesign, but since Facebook is a social networking utility rather than a publisher, if Facebook’s iPhone web-app drags behind the native application, publishers can pick up the slack. Publishers can benefit simply from the fact that viewers on Facebook mobile can now see posted web links that will come with the launch of the Facebook iPhone application 2.0. For news articles that have a particular relevance within a friend community, friends, not brands or companies, drive traffic to web news links. Facebook users’ comments are now threaded to the particular object that they comment on – if a friend of yours posts a news article and someone comments on it, it shows up in your newsfeed with all associated comments.

Why will there be growth in conversation based on Facebook’s redesign? Social networkers are quite comfortable commenting on photos that they or their friends have uploaded. Facebook and Flickr share ownership of a large portion of web photo comment streams, and if we agree with David Brooks in his “Lord of the Memes” opinion piece “ Now the global thought-leader is defined less by what culture he enjoys than by the smartphone, social bookmarking site, social network and e-mail provider he uses to store and transmit it. (In this era, MySpace is the new leisure suit and an AOL e-mail address is a scarlet letter of techno-shame.)” then Facebook is a key place for discussion to evolve as it is still seen as cool, maybe not as cool as Twitter, but the coolest big player in the market.

As posted items go mobile that means that similar to photo commenting, when you find something for example on The Washington Post iPhone-optimized site about the 2008 election you can use the Save/Share feature to post to Facebook and offer a comment with your own spin and start your own comment stream amongst friends on the desktop and when they fire up Facebook mobile on their iPhone.

Introducing…Mini-Meme. For those of you who’ve been commenting on photos you and your friends have uploaded and writing on the walls of fan pages created by brands, the next behavior that will become a wild source of web-edification, particularly during the election season, is commenting on posted items ( I know you’re excited just stay with me ). Some people call this activity Re-Blogging but I think that name makes the activity sound as interesting as re-insurance. If you are the first to share the web link in your network and your friends comment, then congratulations, you have officially posted your own Mini-Meme. I’m defining a Mini-Meme as a web comment stream that originates separate from the content source. Of course there will not be as many comments in your web circle as on the primary news sources, but this circle of friends will drive new web traffic back to those news sources. The difference is, users will comment on Facebook, not the primary news source so their friends can see their reactions. Increasingly, as this more advanced feature becomes popular, small, decentralized opt-in lists of news discussions will emerge within interest-based friend groups, and re-emerge periodically as related items surface.

Why do I think this newer form of conversation will get bigger on Facebook? Because we’ve seen this behavior happen naturally on Twitter and FriendFeed already. Will it be more conversational than Twitter? Probably not, Twitter friends are more likely followers based on interests rather than proximity or friendship. But the scale effect of Facebook becoming more conversational is a big net positive for conversation on the net.

Comments on NYTimes, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, or Techcrunch articles can reach 1,000 within hours of their timestamp. To participate in these rip-tide comment streams requires that you post comments almost immediately for them to be seen at all. Also you’re staking your reputation by commenting on a news site and subjecting yourself to direct blogger attacks that will live in SEO for infinity. Why not just comment at your leisure within your own friend group and hear back from those you’ve already developed a thick skin for…your friends. To make sure that people can share what they find interesting, mobile websites should have sharing features so you can post links (see example from The Washington Post below). Sharing support is crucial for the iPhone especially since there is not, to date, a native Apple copy-and-paste solution. The publishers have a role in the distribution of Mini-Memes - enabling users to post items to Facebook and other social networks and bookmarking sites. Even if copy and paste makes it to the iPhone, it is good practice to give users easy sharing choices, and even nudge them with icons of the social networks on which you’d like them to share. On the desktop this is standard fare, for example, Read Write Web goes as far as to use Moopz to integrate comments so that they can appear on both friendfeed and the original blog post. For those publishers that do not offer easy sharing options users will just send iPhone screenshots via email to social networks and you won’t get the linkback traffic from the Mini-Meme.

Without the momentum of mobile posted items go un-noticed for days, but people who access the native Facebook iPhone application will see things more quickly. So whether someone is posting about the FailWhale or about Obama’s VP choice, the relevancy to you and your network just went up by adding an a mobile interface for easy access more of the day.

friendfeed, figured out that photos were not the only thing people would comment on in a news feed. In fact a news item is a safer bet and much more likely to attract a wider set of commenters. Friendfeed tries to widen the conversation by sneaking in ‘friend of so-and-so’ posts into your news-feed to keep the growth engine of their site going. Facebook, however, already has scale, so they only had to turn on threaded comments to news-feed items and, all of the sudden with the launch of new.facebook.com, on came the lights and you started to see lots of new faces from your friends’ networks. Commenting on Posted Items also offers a potential sociological shift, where political organizing can move beyond mere notes related to event logistics or proclamations on fan page walls. Now they can have a conversation. Imagine if a local organizer for Barack Obama or John McCain actually put posts such as “Who can and can’t dance in Denver” that they thought were more human interest oriented. The organizer could then add the comment “Aren’t we getting a bit too uptight about the rules at these events?” which keeps potential voters engaged during campaign milestones that they cannot attend.

There is the primary source of news, like the NYTimes, which only the courageous, expert or insane post comments to, and then there is the Mini-Meme on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed and elsewhere for the person who posts a link of a NYTimes article in their news feed. The Mini-Meme gives Facebook a new dimension to what we know of as passing notes in class, or talking at the water cooler, or whatever convention you use to discuss things like this week’s DNC.

For me Twitter is the best source of daily news, friendfeed is the news magazine of the web, and now Facebook this September will be the portal/deck for the friended masses that combines both the daily news and the weekend news magazine with seamless integration into desktop and mobile.

Tom Limongello | RSS 2.0 | Comment it , or trackback this post.