“When Clever Gets Stupid” or “Not Understanding How the Advertising World Works” or “WTF is a BOT?“ or “Make Sure You Have a Revenue Model!” or “If You Don’t Do It Anyway”

In 2007 when facebook was huge (well it is still huge, but 2007 was a time when we talked about our Crackbook Addictions and we got a huge kick out of getting wallposts and we were as proud of our facebook “friends” count and our wallpost count as some twits are about the number of twitter followers they have now days [I'm one of them!]) Vodaspam hadn’t smelt SMS integration into Facebook and I figured it would be an awesome idea to build and application that would send your wallpost to you as an sms.

Realisation 1 – facebook API didn’t expose the wallpost (obviously this was what got people coming back to facebook)

I’m determined and so we (Willem Odendaal and I) resorted to an old favourite technique of mine – Screen scraping or Indexing as google call it. Basically we made what is called “A Bot”.

Realisation 2 – you can only see the wall if you’re someone’s friend. No worries the Bot would be a Facebook user – enter Peter Lear (who Leared at your wall).

Peter (The Bot) had to login to facebook, check all his friends walls and screen scrape the html, check if there was a new post (the old highest value post was already loaded in the Database) pick up the new post and then bang it out to the “friend” as an SMS. The idea was that this would be about as prolific as Please Call Me’s – adverts [possibly contextual] would be attached and I would make lots of money. Boom.

Easier said than done. Attached is some of the code. The app worked a treat and within a week Peter had lots of friends - problem.

Realisation 3 – this could cost me a lot of money in SMSes (sent from a clickatell account) as some “friends” were getting 10 posts a day…

And so I tried to find an agency that would like to use it. But advertising doesn’t work like that. It is much slower and less dynamic than you may realise. Advertisers are often scared to try something new. If it isn’t in the strategy that was set x months ago - they won’t touch it was the message I got back. And so it wasted me money for a couple of months and I took it offline… only to see Vodacom integrated the wall into facebook 18 months later. Hmmm maybe I just didn’t sell it well enough or maybe it just wasn’t such a great idea.

Of course Peter Lear is still on facebook, he only has 17 friends, he plays Farmville now (Frances – my daughter – begged me) and when facebook is feeling kind they recommend that I make facebook better for him. Please write on his wall – http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=534167080

Attached is some of the code from Peter “The Bot” Lear. The login, the scrap, the send…

Interesting aside though – it was one of the things I showed Jon Jacobson that made him believe that he should invest in my company “New Media Labs” and that my ideas would slot into their marketing automation engine – Adora. And so it goes… everything for a reason – just do it.

 ps. Warning. The hot girl that’s following you on twitter and spamming naked pictures of herself at you – this is what she looks like! She also beats you at poker, chess, etc. She’s also tried to login to this wordpress site and take control if it over a thousand times. … just a thought.

pps. This is what geeks do for fun.