If you hate spoilers do yourself a favor and stop reading now. That said, the following exposition shouldn’t prevent you from seeing the movie, I’ve seen it twice and enjoyed both times.

“Catfish” is a movie about Nev Schulman, a 24-year-old New York photographer and his relationship with Abby Pierce, an eight-year-old girl and her 19-year-old sister Megan Faccio whom he meets on Facebook in 2007. I’m sure all of you can see this coming, but Megan isn’t who she claims to be and neither is Abby. Nev and Ariel Schulman, Henry Joost and the viewer get taken for a wild and well-documented ride, especially for the last 40 minutes of the movie.

In summary Megan and a bunch of other Facebook identities are characters invented by artist Angela Wesselman’s imagination, as Wesselman is trapped in Michigan taking care of two disabled children and has no outlets for creative expression other than her paintings — which she ships to Nev Schulman under the guise of them being her (real) daughter Abby’s — and her elaborate storytelling on Facebook. “Scam is not the word,” say the filmmakers regarding Wesselman’s bait and switch.

Plot twists aside, the film uses social networking and other tropes unique to the Internet age such as Google Maps, “sexting” and Photoshop in order to give a richer view of the emotional narrative, as Nev Schulman and Angela/Megan’s digital courtship drags on for eight months of phone calls, MP3 exchanges and even Facebook wall “infighting” among the various imaginary members of the Pierce family. At some point Schulman sends Megan an IRL post card, and remarks how odd the act of sending snail mail is.

What’s the most interesting about the film is that Wesselman is a totally new kind of artist, creating a entire world for Nev through multiple fabricated online identities. When asked during a screening last week why he, as a self-proclaimed part of the “Google Generation” never bothered to Google search Abby Pierce or Angela Wesselman or Megan Faccio, Nev Schulman said he did and came up with nothing, not pushing it any further because wanted to believe. “There are plenty of people with no Google presence,” says Schulman. Heh

This ambiguity surrounding “Catfish” (including its bloody Catfish logo) has lead it to be the subject of many attacks most notably from Movieline in their post “Does Sundance Sensation Catfish Have A Truth Problem?” which asserts that both the Schulmans and Joost knew that Megan wasn’t who she said she was right from the beginning. As counter to this, filmaker Ariel Schulman revealed that the movie is not being marketed as a documentary because the “D-word” turns off younger viewers to whom he thinks the film would be most beneficial as a cautionary tale.

While some scenes from the movie tend to reinforce the “they knew the entire time” hypothesis (as does Schulman’s shit-eating grin throughout) the “whether or not any of the boys suspected it” issue is complicated and best left to individual viewer discretion.

What should remain with you after seeing “Catfish” is how convincing the Facebook soap opera Wesselman pulled off could be to someone yearning for a human connection, and also as a side note, that model Aimee Gonzales’ boyfriend, whose images Wesselman used to pull off the ruse, chided her shortly after hearing about her inadvertent role in the film, “See I told you you shouldn’t have put all those pictures online.”

Catfish hits theatres September 17th, one month before the more glamorous “The Social Network.” Both Wasselman and Nev Schulman are still friends on Facebook.

If you hate spoilers do yourself a favor and stop reading now. That said, the following exposition shouldn’t prevent you from seeing the movie, I’ve seen it twice and enjoyed both times.

“Catfish” is a movie about Nev Schulman, a 24-year-old New York photographer and his relationship with Abby Pierce, an eight-year-old girl and her 19-year-old sister Megan Faccio whom he meets on Facebook in 2007. I’m sure all of you can see this coming, but Megan isn’t who she claims to be and neither is Abby. Nev and Ariel Schulman, Henry Joost and the viewer get taken for a wild and well-documented ride, especially for the last 40 minutes of the movie.

In summary Megan and a bunch of other Facebook identities are characters invented by artist Angela Wesselman’s imagination, as Wesselman is trapped in Michigan taking care of two disabled children and has no outlets for creative expression other than her paintings — which she ships to Nev Schulman under the guise of them being her (real) daughter Abby’s — and her elaborate storytelling on Facebook. “Scam is not the word,” say the filmmakers regarding Wesselman’s bait and switch.

Plot twists aside, the film uses social networking and other tropes unique to the Internet age such as Google Maps, “sexting” and Photoshop in order to give a richer view of the emotional narrative, as Nev Schulman and Angela/Megan’s digital courtship drags on for eight months of phone calls, MP3 exchanges and even Facebook wall “infighting” among the various imaginary members of the Pierce family. At some point Schulman sends Megan an IRL post card, and remarks how odd the act of sending snail mail is.

What’s the most interesting about the film is that Wesselman is a totally new kind of artist, creating a entire world for Nev through multiple fabricated online identities. When asked during a screening last week why he, as a self-proclaimed part of the “Google Generation” never bothered to Google search Abby Pierce or Angela Wesselman or Megan Faccio, Nev Schulman said he did and came up with nothing, not pushing it any further because wanted to believe. “There are plenty of people with no Google presence,” says Schulman. Heh

This ambiguity surrounding “Catfish” (including its bloody Catfish logo) has lead it to be the subject of many attacks most notably from Movieline in their post “Does Sundance Sensation Catfish Have A Truth Problem?” which asserts that both the Schulmans and Joost knew that Megan wasn’t who she said she was right from the beginning. As counter to this, filmaker Ariel Schulman revealed that the movie is not being marketed as a documentary because the “D-word” turns off younger viewers to whom he thinks the film would be most beneficial as a cautionary tale.

While some scenes from the movie tend to reinforce the “they knew the entire time” hypothesis (as does Schulman’s shit-eating grin throughout) the “whether or not any of the boys suspected it” issue is complicated and best left to individual viewer discretion.

What should remain with you after seeing “Catfish” is how convincing the Facebook soap opera Wesselman pulled off could be to someone yearning for a human connection, and also as a side note, that model Aimee Gonzales’ boyfriend, whose images Wesselman used to pull off the ruse, chided her shortly after hearing about her inadvertent role in the film, “See I told you you shouldn’t have put all those pictures online.”

Catfish hits theatres September 17th, one month before the more glamorous “The Social Network.” Both Wasselman and Nev Schulman are still friends on Facebook.

Just as when Facebook opened their new Bay Area office, and when Twitter opened their office, I think it’s sort of neat to see pictures inside these offices — to see where the sausage is made. We’ve been thinking about doing something like this for TechCrunch TV as well — think: Cribs for tech startups. We’ll expose ridiculous murals and raid startups’ fridges. Would that interest you?

Behold Facebook Seattle below. I’m not even sure Mike has been inside yet even though Steinberg moved 800 miles to be near him.

As extreme as their“If Mark Zuckerburg Cared About Privacy” example is, it does call attention to the needless complexity of various web service privacy agreements, settings and policies.

In the wake of a $8.5 million lawsuit settlement today, search giant Google made a gesture of good faith in the “caring about privacy” department, assuring users that it was taking steps in order to make the minutae of online privacy easier to understand.

“For example, we’re deleting a sentence that reads, ‘The affiliated sites through which our services are offered may have different privacy practices and we encourage you to read their privacy policies,’ since it seems obvious that sites not owned by Google might have their own privacy policies.”

Perhaps this concerted movement towards being more transparent and simple with regards to privacy would also work well for Facebook which, like Google, is currently involved in various privacy scuffles.

As extreme as their“If Mark Zuckerburg Cared About Privacy” example is, it does call attention to the needless complexity of various web service privacy agreements, settings and policies.

In the wake of a $8.5 million lawsuit settlement today, search giant Google made a gesture of good faith in the “caring about privacy” department, assuring users that it was taking steps in order to make the minutae of online privacy easier to understand.

“For example, we’re deleting a sentence that reads, ‘The affiliated sites through which our services are offered may have different privacy practices and we encourage you to read their privacy policies,’ since it seems obvious that sites not owned by Google might have their own privacy policies.”

Perhaps this concerted movement towards being more transparent and simple with regards to privacy would also work well for Facebook which, like Google, is currently involved in various privacy scuffles.

In today’s world of real-time status updates, search is evolving to account for the social nature of the web. Facebook is pushing forward in this direction with on-site search functionality that now displays search results — for Facebook and web content — based on “Likes” and shares.

Facebook appears to have quietly rolled out the beefed-up search offering some time over the past few days; it was first spotted by All Facebook.

From the looks of it, Facebook is ranking results based on how users engage with content via its social plugins. It’s unclear how Facebook is defining its formula — the formula seems to account for shares and Likes from a member’s friends as well as shares and Likes from everyone else to determine an item’s placement.

Just recently, Facebook was awarded a search patent for “ranking search results based on the frequency of clicks on the search results by members of a social network who are within a predetermined degree of separation.”

The company has yet to officially announce the new search functionality or explain how it works. We’ve reached out to Facebook for more information and will update this post when we know more.

For the time being, consider this yet another small step in Facebook’s designs to capture search share and harness the abundance of data available around their social plugins.

More About: facebook, likes, Search

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Ekaterina Walter is a social media strategist at Intel. She is a part of Intel’s Social Media Center of Excellence and is responsible for company-wide social media enablement and corporate social networking strategy.

You have created a Facebook Fan Page. Now what? I bet these questions come to mind: “Is my page a success?” “Who is engaging with us?” “Is our engagement effective?” “Does our content strategy work?”

The Facebook Insights dashboard will help you answer some of these questions. As defined by Facebook, “Insights provides Facebook Page owners … with metrics around their content. By understanding and analyzing trends within user growth and demographics, consumption of content, and creation of content, Page owners … are better equipped to improve their business with Facebook.”

So what’s the best way to use this relatively new tool? We’ve outlined some steps below that should have you measuring Facebook engagement in no time.

Note that only page administrators can view Insights data for the properties they own or administer.

Examine a Wide Range of Data

There are two types of Facebook insights:

• User Insights: Total page Likes, or a number of fans, daily active users, new Likes/Unlikes, Like sources, demographics, page views and unique page views, tab views, external referrers, media consumption.
• Interactions Insights: Daily story feedback (post Likes, post comments, per post impressions), daily page activity (mentions, discussions, reviews, wall posts, video posts).

The question then becomes: “What do you want to track and measure?” There is a lot of data offered, but you want to sort through it and identify what information is meaningful and will help you make decisions about your engagement and content strategy. If that data is not readily available, you might want to do some manual calculations to derive the numbers you’re looking for.

Below are the insights I recommend you pay attention to and track.

• Monthly fan size growth: Record the number of fans (or “Likers”) you have on the first of every month to see what your growth looks like. I’d say if you are growing organically and you have 10 to 13% monthly growth, you are doing extremely well. That is probably the highest organic growth number anyone can achieve. You can even go more granular and calculate weekly growth. Whatever you decide to do, make sure to watch for the spikes in fan growth and try to identify what contributes to those spikes.



• The average number of Likes or comments: These are your engagement measures. If you know the average number of times fans interacted with you for every single post, you will be able to identify which discussions are of more interest to your fans. Watch for unusual spikes or drops in this number. I love this metric because it is extremely helpful in making immediate decisions in your content strategy and changes to your editorial calendar. Increase the number of posts around the topic your fans are more engaged with and decrease the number of posts around topics they are not interested in.

• Unlikes and attrition rate: The fact is that you will always have some unsubscribes, no mater how great your engagement is, but hopefully it is just a small number. I usually just watch for spikes in the unlike numbers. You want to try and correlate them with the activity on your page and understand why people are leaving your page. It is rather hard to nail down the exact reason, but if there is an unusual spike, you will usually have a pretty good idea.

  The simple attrition rate formula is:

  (Removed Fans + Unlikes – Re-Likes) / Daily Fan Count

  This metric will tell you how many of your fans are leaving your site. It is normal to have small constant attrition over time.

• Demographics: No matter what your objectives are, you can always find the demographics data useful: the gender of your fans, their ages and where they are from.



• Page views: I like this metric because it helps you identify the number of returned fans. If you take the number of page views and subtract the number of unique page views, you will see how many of your fans are actually coming back to your page. You can also look at the Daily Active Users metric.



• Mentions: This is the number of times someone tagged you in their post. The reason why this metric is important is because it is the easiest way for your fans’ friends to click through to your page. Every time someone tags you, the name of your Page appears as a link. It is much easier for someone to click on that link and learn more than to search for your Page manually. One of your goals should be to increase the number of mentions by your fans.



• Tab views: This is the new metric Facebook implemented a couple of months ago. If you have multiple tabs on your page, it will tell you which tab gets what percentage of traffic. This metric will help you decide on whether you would want to keep or maybe get rid of some of your tabs. This is especially helpful as you can only have six tabs visible on your page at one time, and this data will help you prioritize accordingly.
• Referrers: Another new metric that tells you where the traffic to your page comes from. You want to increase exposure to your page on the sites that bring you the most traffic.
• Impressions: If your page is over 10,000 fans, you will see the number of times your post was viewed –- impressions. This metric is not exact since every time someone’s page refreshes, it counts as an impression. This number is usually a little overblown, but can show you how many times your post has been seen.

Some of these metrics require constant manual tracking and analysis, which is a big downside. However, the above metrics will help you make decisions about your engagement and content strategy that would allow more effective interactions with your customers.

More Social Media Resources from Mashable:

– HOW TO: Get the Most Out of Your Business Facebook Page
– 5 Huge Trends in Social Media Right Now
– The WikiLeaks Debate: Journalists Weigh In
– A Field Guide to Using Facebook Places
– 5 Useful Facebook Trend and Search Services

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, alexsl

More About: analytics, beginner, brand, business, comments, demographics, facebook, facebook insights, facebook page, likes, List, Lists, measurements, metrics, monitor, small business, social media monitoring

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Facebook had a secret project last year that involved testing how best to implement a Twitter-like follow feature on Facebook, multiple sources have confirmed to us. The name of the project? Project Dance Party.

But at some point, the project was scrapped. It’s not entirely clear why, as at one point, it was being fairly widely tested within Facebook, we’re told.

In fact, apparently it looked similar to this new Subscribe feature that is currently being tested. It existed as the top link under a user’s profile picture that read: “Follow NAME”. Clicking on this allowed you to see all of that user’s public updates in your News Feed — without the user needing to accept a connection request from you. Yes, just like Twitter.

The thought amongst some familiar with the project was that it was a knee-jerk reaction to the failed acquisition of Twitter in late 2008. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has recently stated that he thinks he “paid too much attention” to Twitter following the failed bid. “I looked at their rate and thought if this continues for 12 months or 18 months, then in a year they’re going to be bigger than us,” he told Inside Facebook in June of this year.

His plan to catch them? Project Dance Party. An asymmetric follow feature could make Facebook grow even faster — like Twitter, may have been the thought.

But over time, Zuckerberg saw Twitter’s insane rate of growth slow down. And Project Dance Party likely became less interesting to him because it would mean fundamentally changing Facebook’s friend network and social graph.

But that doesn’t mean Facebook isn’t keeping it on the back-burner. Some of the same sources with knowledge of Project Dance Party now wonder if this Subscribe feature isn’t the first step towards a follow feature. This may be a way to break this ice, as it were. Maybe at first you “subscribe” to friends you want to follow, but later you’ll be able to subscribe to the public updates of anyone.

In fact, Facebook already has a follow feature in place right now — it’s just that most people have no idea it exists, because Facebook doesn’t talk about it. Currently, if you request to be someone’s friend, and they keep you in their queue (meaning they never accept or reject you), you will see all of their public updates in your News Feed.

It’s ridiculous for an actual feature to work this way — but it is essentially Facebook Follow. Clearly, Facebook is still open to the idea in some form.

Obviously, I’m all for a full-fledged version of this. And not just because at one point it had the name Project Dance Party. Facebook’s sharing dynamic has become too convoluted. They need to bring it back to a basic idea: either you share with your friends, or you share with your followers (which includes your friends). It’s an either/or proposition. Sure, lists could still exist to create sub categories of friends. But as Zuckerberg himself has said recently, “nobody wants to make lists.”

Instead, perhaps they’d like to dance. Facebook, just dance.

Facebook had a secret project last year that involved testing how best to implement a Twitter-like follow feature on Facebook, multiple sources have confirmed to us. The name of the project? Project Dance Party.

But at some point, the project was scrapped. It’s not entirely clear why, as at one point, it was being fairly widely tested within Facebook, we’re told.

In fact, apparently it looked similar to this new Subscribe feature that is currently being tested. It existed as the top link under a user’s profile picture that read: “Follow NAME”. Clicking on this allowed you to see all of that user’s public updates in your News Feed — without the user needing to accept a connection request from you. Yes, just like Twitter.

The thought amongst some familiar with the project was that it was a knee-jerk reaction to the failed acquisition of Twitter in late 2008. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has recently stated that he thinks he “paid too much attention” to Twitter following the failed bid. “I looked at their rate and thought if this continues for 12 months or 18 months, then in a year they’re going to be bigger than us,” he told Inside Facebook in June of this year.

His plan to catch them? Project Dance Party. An asymmetric follow feature could make Facebook grow even faster — like Twitter, may have been the thought.

But over time, Zuckerberg saw Twitter’s insane rate of growth slow down. And Project Dance Party likely became less interesting to him because it would mean fundamentally changing Facebook’s friend network and social graph.

But that doesn’t mean Facebook isn’t keeping it on the back-burner. Some of the same sources with knowledge of Project Dance Party now wonder if this Subscribe feature isn’t the first step towards a follow feature. This may be a way to break this ice, as it were. Maybe at first you “subscribe” to friends you want to follow, but later you’ll be able to subscribe to the public updates of anyone.

In fact, Facebook already has a follow feature in place right now — it’s just that most people have no idea it exists, because Facebook doesn’t talk about it. Currently, if you request to be someone’s friend, and they keep you in their queue (meaning they never accept or reject you), you will see all of their public updates in your News Feed.

It’s ridiculous for an actual feature to work this way — but it is essentially Facebook Follow. Clearly, Facebook is still open to the idea in some form.

Obviously, I’m all for a full-fledged version of this. And not just because at one point it had the name Project Dance Party. Facebook’s sharing dynamic has become too convoluted. They need to bring it back to a basic idea: either you share with your friends, or you share with your followers (which includes your friends). It’s an either/or proposition. Sure, lists could still exist to create sub categories of friends. But as Zuckerberg himself has said recently, “nobody wants to make lists.”

Instead, perhaps they’d like to dance. Facebook, just dance.