Not now.

Like print newspapers, basketball players under 6 feet tall, and the McRib sandwich, the website as we know it will soon be a thing of the past – a quaint reminder of the original Internet era.

Who killed the website? Facebook, of course.

Ironically, Facebook itself started as humble website. But, for all its foibles and fairytales, its growth and groan-inducing missteps, Facebook and its leadership have known for a long time that websites are yesterday’s technology – they are just now getting around to twisting the knife.

Do You “Like” Me in Attack Mode?

Facebook is waging a three-pronged war on websites. The first front is the battle of expectations. Here, the objective is to change the way we think about information exchange online. Historically, we read “Web pages”. Now, the move is toward “social objects” which are invariably smaller, more directed pieces of content. Like a fussy deconstructed salad at a downtown restaurant with ridiculous unisex bathrooms, Facebook wants us to publish in tiny bursts of words, pictures, videos, and single purpose apps, rather than the page-length containers and complicated databases of yore.

Incidentally, this is why Google is so afraid of Facebook. Google has made a couple of dollars by reading and ranking Web pages. If the standard unit of publication becomes something other than the page, but rather smaller social objects like status updates and photos being published and ranked in real-time, Google’s role in that equation is diminished.

Facebook took a major (yet curiously underreported) move in this direction last week, when they enabled companies to publish to Facebook members’ news feeds for anyone that has “liked” a Web page. So, even if you do not have a Facebook fan page (as I do not for Convince & Convert), I can now publish Convince & Convert updates (or anything else) to your Facebook news feed if you have “liked” Convince & Convert over there on the right side of this page. (Go ahead)

Anything You Can Do, We Can Do Better

The second front of Facebook’s war on websites is in the area of operations and functionality. One of the reasons companies continue to put a lot of emphasis on their websites while still maintaining a robust Facebook page is that Facebook couldn’t do all the things a website can do. That’s becoming less true by the second.

With FBML and a flurry of new easy-to-use Facebook tab customization providers like North Social (check them out, really great stuff), it’s now possible to include on your Facebook fan page much of the most engaging content and functionality that previously was the sole property of a freestanding website. And Facebook fan pages are often easier for marketers to update than your corporate website, not requiring you to call Gill from IT for his famous “assistance with a smirk”.

Also, Facebook’s enhancements to its Insights analytics product aim to give companies information about their visitors that far exceeds the data available from Google Analytics (another reason Google is freaking out).

Facebook’s opening of the API to searches (and the subsequent inclusion of Facebook content in Google, Bing, Yahoo search results) blunts the historical searchability advantage of Web pages.

The increasing use of Facebook as an e-commerce platform (see excellent, elegant solutions from ShopTab), demonstrate that Facebook can make you money, not just friends. Indeed, the recently announced integration between Facebook and Amazon shows Facebook’s true intentions in this area – to use the social connectivity data that ONLY Facebook has to power massive advances in customization and relevancy of information on the Web at large. If you log in to Amazon (and have connected your account to FB), you’ll see friends’ birthdays, be shown purchase recommendations based on what your friends have liked, etc. It’s flat-out awesome. Facebook reports that consumers are 3 times more likely to connect their Facebook accounts on an e-commerce site, than will create a new account on those sites. That’s huge. Facebook is the official passport of the Web.

(excellent post with more details on the Facebook/Amazon marriage from SeeWhy)

The power and insidious nature of the “Like” button installed everywhere, and the rich data stream that provides is probably worth more to Facebook ultimately than the eyeballs it aggregates and monetizes via ads on its .com environment.

Your Party is Lame

The third front of Facebook’s war on websites is in the area of push versus pull. The trick with websites is the never-ending need to feed the monster, through search optimization, public relations, banner ads, skywriting, or whatever other means you’ve devised to let people know that your site is out there and worthy of attention.

With 500 million members and counting, Facebook turns that equation on its head. Like the walled garden of the original AOL, Facebook can make the case that they already have access to all of your customers, so why wouldn’t you want to just ride their coattails? If there is a killer party with tons of people, a great band, and free booze it’s going to be tough to get a couple dozen people to leave to come over to your house to watch Jimmy Kimmel and eat microwave popcorn.

I have actually heard this exact sentiment from several companies and agencies recently, wondering whether they should increase their Facebook efforts because the size of the member community is just so overwhelming. I think the answer is “it depends” but it’s a question that has a lot more merit than it did a few months ago.

If You Can’t Beat Em, Should You Join Em?

I have said on this very blog that I was dubious about putting too many eggs in Facebook’s basket, because you’re essentially building your marketing program on rented land. And I still feel that way. The amount of control Facebook has (or will have) over the data and interactions on the global Web is truly unprecedented (and I trust them even less than Google). But, if your old house is abandoned and full of mice and cobwebs, a shiny new house – even on rented land – may start looking pretty inviting.

RIP websites. It was great while it lasted.

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TwitCause, the brainchild of Experience Project, is a concept that builds on the idea that people are more willing to spread the word about good causes. You begin by following TwitCause on Twitter, and each Thursday they choose a new cause to tweet about. The included link sends you to a page where you can donate to the cause via PayPal, or you can choose to help by simply pressing the Retweet button and educating your followers.

Additionally, people can nominate the charities that they think should be supported by TwitCause, which then get voted on to be next up. TwitCause is hoping to get more businesses and brands involved by sponsoring matching donations, or having people tweet in order to get the brands to make donations.

In a recent guest post on Beth Kanter’s blog, Julio Vasconcellos, who manages TwitCause for Experience Project, wrote that it’s difficult to fundraise via individual donations. People are less likely to open up their wallets than they are to help spread a message to the people in their network.

In my opinion, it’s the latter concept that is most sustainable, and recently it’s looked like corporations and brands are beginning to take that stance as well. In my own recent experience with Home Depot, I had initially asked if they’d be interested in matching whatever I raised for the New Orleans rebuilding organization LowerNine.org. They generously surprised me by coming back with an offer of a $10,000 donation of gift cards from their Home Depot Foundation, arming the organization with the tools and supplies they needed most to get their work done.

You’ll find Pepsi following suit with their Refresh Everything contest, while Chase Bank just wrapped up a contest where people voted on which charitable organizations they wanted to win cash. Perhaps this is the next phase in the evolution of TwitCause?

Have you had an experience with TwitCause or using Twitter as a tool for raising awareness? I’m interested to hear about it in the comments.

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With the revitalization of the inner cities and old buildings as ” industrial lofts”, the green movement, and the economy and the slow economic recovery of late, the timing for SPAGG.com is prefect:

Spagg.com Network – the first place where private owners can securely rent their cars to make extra money.  Owners and renters meet for pickup and drop off – it is perfect.  It cuts out the middlemen completely, and utilizing today’s social network technology and mobile access to the best advantage of car owners who need to offset costs, the environment we all live in, the reduction of congestion and parking issues, the reduction of dependence on foreign oil: everybody wins on this one!

Why Use Spagg?

• Prices other car renters can’t beat
• Environment: improve car usage efficiency
• Give your business to the community

How Does Spagg Work?

• You pick location, date and car
• Spagg matches you with a car owner
• We arrange a convenient pickup site
• Spagg helps you with insurance and payments

Why Is Spagg Safe?

• Vehicles in safe operating condition
• Users fully identified
• All rentals have property and 3rd party liability coverage

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We would have killed for the new YouTube Direct tool just launched by Google.

Built from our APIs, this open source application lets media organizations enable customized versions of YouTube’s upload platform on their own websites. Users can upload videos directly into this application, which also enables the hosting organization to easily review video submissions and select the best ones to broadcast on-air and on their websites. As always, these videos also live on YouTube, so users can reach their own audience while also getting broader exposure and editorial validation for the videos they create.

Of course, this is not just limited to news organizations. Any business, blogger, or nonprofit that wants to solicit user-generated video is going to find a way to use YouTube Direct. In fact, Google reports that ABC News, the Huffington Post, NPR, Politico, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post and WHDH-TV/WLVI-TV in Boston are already using YouTube Direct.

What you need to know:

• Built on the YouTube API, this 100% open-source solution provides you with an easily-integrated audience engagement platform for your website
• The customizable interface allows you to tailor the look and feel of the tool precisely to your audience
• Visitors can answer your call for content by uploading their videos to YouTube via your site without leaving the page
• A moderation panel enables your editors to review and approve/reject all submitted videos, deciding which ones meet your organization’s editorial criteria
• All videos approved by your editors include a link back to your site when viewed on YouTube

You can also learn more from this YouTube video–how appropriate:

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And they may be right. Why not? For me though, as I have been mentioning over here in this blog for a long while now, it is a whole lot more than just tools. Or technologies. To me, social computing within the enterprise is about everything, but the tools. It’s a philosophical and social corporate movement, a lifestyle, a new way of connecting and interacting with people, both inside and outside of the firewall; one where the main focus is not on the technology itself, but on the people behind it.

Yes, I’m talking about culture. Indeed, it’s all about a cultural shift, one that is starting to take the corporate world by storm at multiple levels, going from a grassroots bottom-up approach all the way to a top down executive level. If you ask me, I would even venture to state that is unstoppable at this point in time. We are probably far too immersed in it already to just want to back out of it altogether. So if it were just about technology itself, we probably could have done it already, but since the change is much more profound, like I said, I don’t think there is a way back. And that’s a good thing.

So I thought that today I will put together this blog post to start talking about something that it’s been on my mind for a while and which touches base on how receptive, open and collaborative the culture of a particular business needs to be in order to adopt and embrace social software. There are a couple of blog posts out there that I would want to reference on this topic, but I still haven’t finalised my thoughts about neither of them.

Yet last week I bumped into another YouTube video that brought back that conversation into my mind of how collaborative your corporate culture needs to be in order to embrace these social tools. And while I finalise that entry, I just mentioned above, I thought I would put together this blog post sharing that video to give you some hints as to where that follow-up conversation will be heading to, and what my two cents on the topic would be so far.

And it all starts with a rather provocative statement: “Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch“. Funny, I’m just going to be linking to a YouTube video that talks about culture and strategy on the same sentence. Quite an oxymoron, don’t you think? Yet it’s social computing the glue that would make it stick together and make sense of it all, especially if you want to have a much more open, transparent and collaborative culture within your company that aligns, at the same time, quite nicely with your own business strategy.

I tell you, this is one of those videos that will make you think for a little while on the topic. It surely has done that with me after I watch it through. It lasts two minutes and 24 seconds and I’m certain that it would do the same to you… In fact, after watching it, I just couldn’t help thinking how important the corporate culture will be for every single business on their successful adoption of social software.

Specially, if that collaborative nature already pre-exists before embracing these social tools. But again, not going to reveal much more till that other follow up and upcoming blog post. Instead, here is the embedded video I would want to share with you folks now to then open up the conversation for a future series of blog posts… on Social Computing, Business Strategy, Culture and how we could combine them all into a single corporate entity… Nice and exciting challenge, eh?

(Video clip courtesy of Coffman Organization)

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