Pemaquid Communications

MaineToday.com jumped on the Facebook bandwagon yesterday en masse. Joe Michaud? Check. Wendy Clark? Check. Paul Caiazzo, Carl Natale, Wendy Almeida, Monica Wright? Check, check, check, check. The timing is interesting, having just joined myself 10 days ago.

Hooray! More friends for me from the old workplace…

I keep hearing about Facebook (maybe that’s partly due to the fact that I’ve just signed up and am now in tune).

Here’s a post from Paul Allen about Facebook- which he claims will become the largest social network in the world.

There’s no reason to doubt it. I’ve watched as Facebook’s Portland network has ballooned to over 15,000 members, w/several hundred added since I joined up about a week ago.

Facebook is already a more popular online destination than eBay and is gaining on – are you ready? – Google. And I’ll bet people stick around longer on FB than they would on the Big G.

And with the new Facebook Platform and the ability for developers to create Facebook apps people can add to their profiles, like…. (shameless self-promotion) the Portland Diner app created by Pemaquid, it’ll only get stickier.

To top it off, Facebook’s people demographic is better and it’s interface is much cleaner than MySpace. If I were Uncle Rupert, I’d be concerned.

Played around w/t/ Facebook Platform over the weekend, and was able to create an app for Portland Diner. Now, members of Facebook’s Portland, ME network (and anyone else, for that matter) can add the Portland Diner app to their profile and check out local restaurant listings right there – which is of course why Facebook created the platform in the first place – to allow developers to create tools that would make the user experience at FB more engaging and – shall we say – “sticky”.

There are a few minor bugs in the CSS – Facebook doesn’t allow linked CSS and rewrites inline sheets placed in the <style> tags – but it seems to work just fine. There are other wrinkles – no javascripts are allowed, and Facebook requires that developers use a subset of HTML called, naturally, FBML. SQL can become FQL and there are some proprietary tags that include an “FB:”.

If you have a Facebook account and live in Portland, Maine, you might find the Portland Diner app useful. Go get it here. We’d love to know what you think; please let us know.

MaineToday.com launched a new look last Wednesday – kudos to designer Wendy Clark and company! Very Web 2.0-y (gradients…speech bubbles rollovers…fades…signature mid-blue color for link text…)

There’s a lot of information there w/o getting too busy. Five good-sized images rotate through the marquee space and I especially like the calendar layout (“next seven days”) that will take you to that day’s events w/just one click (rollover gives you a speech bubble w/a featured event w/zero clicks).

One thing that threw me for a bit: it’s not obvious where you click to go to the Portland Press Herald or other newspaper sites in their group. For some reason my eye wasn’t immediately drawn to the “Hey, this look is different!” heading and the newspaper logos there (a little banner-blindness?). I finally did notice the links in the footer of the page.

All in all a great look as MaineToday positions itself as more of a social network user experience.

Do you do your social networking at Facebook? Head on over to the Pemaquid Zone and cool your heels w/us for a bit.