Ken Auletta’s article on Google in this past week’s issue of The New Yorker is worth a read for a couple of reasons:

• It goes into depth about Google’s increasing involvement with politics (net neutrality, lobbying, etc.)
• It talks about an elegant concept of “crumbling cookies” that Google has been experimenting with in response to an increased concern regarding privacy and longevity of personal data online.
• It gives an inside view on how Sergey, Larry and Eric work together to drive the corporate strategy for Google

As a person who is an ardent fan of Facebook, I have to admit that I’ve become increasingly disappointed with the amount of information that gets populated into my news feed. I’ve discovered that I can consume far more information than the feed provides, the refresh of the feed seems slow, and on top of that, Facebook’s secret-saucy algorithm decides which of my friends I should be seeing posts from, which results in me missing posts from other friends in my news feed.

If you have the perception that you post a note on Facebook and that note will go to all of your friends’ feeds– you are wrong. Well, it will populate into a person’s Notes or Posts page, but frankly a lot of people don’t check those pages frequently (if at all). But regarding the news feed, if your friends don’t log on for a few days, or if you have more than, let’s say, 10 friends, you posts and notes simply will not go to all of your friends. Do not consider that Facebook is a platform for broadcasting information to all of your friends, because it simply does not function as a broadcast platform yet.

But if you do want to read all your friends posts and notes — you’re in luck — because you can do it very easily via RSS subscriptions. I’ve been using subscriptions as a “safety net” to capture posts and notes that don’t go directly into my news feed. A few people have been asking how to do this (because it isn’t very obvious on the Facebook platform), so here is a simple step-by-step guide to setting up RSS feeds from Facebook:

Create an RSS Feed for your friends’ posted items:

• From your profile page, go to posted items: (Go to http://www.facebook.com/posted.php)
• On the lower right column you will see an RSS icon with the title: “My Friends’ Posted Items”
• Click that link and it will automatically give you a feed that you can use with Google Reader, Bloglines or other RSS Aggregators.

Create an RSS Feed for your friends’ posted notes:

• From your profile page, go to notes page (Go to http://www.facebook.com/notes.php)
• On the lower right column you will see an RSS icon with the title “My Friends’ Notes”
• Click that link and it will automatically give you a feed that you can use with Google Reader, Bloglines or other RSS Aggregators

Import a Blog

If you want your blog posts to go into your Mini Feed, you can do a quick import as well.

• You can get to the “Import a blog” page from Notes (on the lower right column), or go directly there with this link: http://www.facebook.com/editnotes.php?import
• Enter Web URL or RSS and voilá - you are done!

Special note to frequent blog posters though: Facebook reserves the right to stop your feed if they feel you are posting too many times in a day and “could result in your account being disabled,” so if you are a blogger who writes multiple posts in one day, it may be best to not use this option.

Man gets his NYC apartment fumigated. He has no where to go for a week. He gets the offer to live in the IKEA store. He accepts the offer, and documents his experience of living in the Swedish furniture store here. (From the same guy who went to 171 Starbucks in one day.)

Brian Morrissey of Mediaweek published an article today about the Rules of Viral Success that is a great read for anyone who works in advertising or is interested in understanding what tactics work in viral marketing.

He notes that one of the key components to a successful viral campaign is to focus on simplicity. He cites OfficeMax’s Elf Yourself and Burger King’s Simpsonizeme as good examples of sites that focus on one simple task that is then easily sent out to others in your social network. In advertising, creatives often try to out-do each other to the point that a simple site becomes buried with complexity. Morrissey cites Verizon’s Action Hero site as a site that had amazing functionality but lower user interaction, and hypothesizes that it is due to complexity of the site (which is down, but you can see an example of the videos you could make on YouTube).

The Elf Yourself campaign was smart, not only because it is so simple to use that even a grandmother can create a message, but also because it is one of the few recurring viral successes. OfficeMax was smart to re-introduce the application they created last year — and it points to how seasonality and simplicity can help advertisers who want to reuse content instead of reinventing the wheel each time they want to create a marketing campaign. Apparently people never tire of getting custom messages from their friends dressed as elves. I would imagine that OfficeMax will continue to use the Elf Yourself campaign in coming years, and it will become as intrinsic to the Christmas season as all those holiday songs that you hear, everywhere you go, for the 6 weeks leading up to Christmas.

Moral of the story: Follow the KISS principle, and steer away from user experiences that are overly complex. If the goal of the experience is to be viral, short experiences will more likely to be embraced.

In related news, Kevin Nalts of Will Video for Food recently published How to Become Popular on YouTube (Without Any Talent) that has some great pointers including tech details on how to shoot, edit and publish online videos. Key pointers include:

• Keep your content short
• Captivate in the first 20 seconds
• Finish with a big bang
• And interestingly, apparently participating in the highly influential Stickam community can result in getting large view counts on YouTube.

Cameron and I were surfing one of our favorite time-waster sites, I can haz cheezburger, and we were served up a banner ad that I couldn’t help but clicking for a pretty intriguing banner for Chairman Meow/Obey the Pure Breed. Turns out it links to a Cafe Press site with Constructivist/Shepherd Fairey style posters and products featuring felines and canines. Very cute. I like the Border Collie posters as well, as they are one of my favorite dog breeds. I don’t know what is happening to me but I’ve clicked on two advertising links in the past day. Either I’m becoming more and more of a sucker for banner ads, or maybe there is just better advertising inventory now that is more relevant to me?