If you view the photo on Instagram, you can see their comment where they ask for permission to use it on their Facebook page. Of course I obliged and told them to share it like the wind.

Later I came across this article on their site where they explain their social media strategy and behold, my photo is 2nd row, 6th from the right.

This is the story of the photo that made it from my phone to the CEO office in the worlds largest shipping company!

… it is also the main photo on the new Marorka site.

• 10 Black
• 10 Single colour
• 17 Printed

Sweaters:

• 6 V-neck
• 4 Polo
• 3 Wool

Pants:

• 8 Jeans
• 5 Other

Shirts:

• 4 White
• 6 Single colour
• 8 Pattern
• 6 Short sleeve
• 1 Havaiian

Suits: 3
Coats: 1
Jackets: 3
Overcoat: 2
Ties: 6
Belts: 4
Shoes: 11
Underwear: 12
Socks: 12

Total: 142 items

So here you have 2012 twitter style:
Jan 1, 2012 – Happy new year – first photo of the year

Jan 7, 2012 – Sushi time!

Jan 13, 2012 – Marorka Online launch party

Jan 25, 2012 – Engaged with my users

Feb 3, 2012 – Represented Kópavogur East Side

Feb 5, 2012 – Made some chicken

Feb 7, 2012 – Did some work and had tea with Gummisig

Feb 12, 2012 – Café with friends

Feb 21, 2012 – Saga drew a stick man

Feb 24, 2012 – Made sushi

Mar 2, 2012 – Dirty weekend in London

Mar 8, 2012 – Upgrading Marorka onboard Dettifoss

Mar 16, 2012 – Had drinks with Gulla and watched Gissur perform in the opera

Mar 28, 2012 – Founded the Marorka Whisky Club

Apr 5, 2012 – Renovated the bathroom

Apr 8, 2012 – Did more cycling this year than ever before

Apr 13, 2012 – Started the BBQ season early

Apr 14, 2012 – Made more sushi

Apr 19, 2012 – Put ribeye on the BBQ with good results

Apr 21, 2012 – Lost the semi-annual cocktail contest

May 4, 2012 – Did a tour of Scandinavia visiting my users

May 17, 2012 – Moar work

May 20, 2012 – Cycling with Saga

May 24, 2012 – Met the President

May 27, 2012 – Celebrated Saga’s 3rd birthday

May 28, 2012 – Supported the challenger in the presidential election

May 31, 2012 – Best Icelandic summer in ages

Jun 2, 2012 – Went to Greece to present Marorka’s solutions at a trade show. Gulla tagged along.

Jun 15, 2012 – Marorka 10 year party

Jun 17, 2012 - Independence day

Jun 23, 2012 – Upgraded the cycling gear and went on picnics with Saga

Jun 30, 2012 – Dined on the porch

Jul 6, 2012 – Camping with friends

Jul 9, 2012 – Summer holiday!

Jul 12, 2012 – Picnic in Elliðaárdalur

Jul 14, 2012 – Drive to the north of Iceland for a long weekend in the countryside

Jul 16, 2012 – Did some work and played Backgammon

Jul 23, 2012 - Renovated the storage space. DIY for the win

Jul 29, 2012 – Another long weekend in the west of Iceland. Fishing in Kaldbaksvík

Aug 3, 2012 – Made more sushi

Aug 4, 2012 – Verslunarmannahelgi í bænum!

Aug 5, 2012 – BBQ party with friends

Aug 8, 2012 – Back to work

Aug 15, 2012 – Chillin downtown

Aug 17, 2012 – Moar development at work

Sep 20, 2012 – Was invited to OKFest in Helsinki to present the constitution work

(my presentation – starts slow)

Oct 6, 2012 – Made more sushi

Oct 27, 2012 – Saga and Nói went on a date

Nov 29, 2012 – Saw Seth Godin

Dec 24, 2012 – Christmas!

Main takeaways: Be authentic, get your feet wet, tone of voice is of great importance. Opportunities for service, travel, export and companies wanting to hit it off with the twitter crowd.

Here is the video from this storify post…

Disclamer: Hef unnið fyrir Íslandsbanka, Símann og Frú Laugu (eftir að hafa kynnst þeim gegnum twitter)

I was a bit surprised to see them let go of their full control and proprietary FBML and JavaScript apps. Now you can build a facebook tab using bog standard HTML, JS and CSS. No magic, just a page within a page. They even give you a couple of hooks to detect if the user is a fan of your page and a few extra variables.

A couple of weeks ago, a nice little project landed in my lap which I managed to turn into an exercise in facebook development. The plan was to create a short quiz to promote a trade show. My suggestion for everything now is to turn it into a facebook thing and the people involved let me run with it. This resulted in over 1200 likes in a week without tossing shiny gifts and prizes to the fans.

It was a pretty straight forward implementation aside from trying to post the results to a facebook stream. The documentation from facebook is getting quite confusing as they keep changing their approach for this sort of implementation. Facebook connect, social graph, FBML, javascript vs PHP it was all a bit too much.

So this post is just a way to share what I learnt from this exercise and provide a bare bones working example of a PHP facebook iframe app with stream publish functionality.

I assume you have basic PHP, HTML and JS knowledge and some experience of the facebook developer app.

Step one

Set up a new ap on http://www.facebook.com/developers/

Step two

You need to have a server to host your PHP code.
Download the facebook.php API and put it in a folder with the following code (save it as index.php). Take care to insert your own Application ID and Secret.

[cc lang="php"]

require 'facebook.php';
$app_id = "XXXYOURAPPIDXXXX"; // your application ID
$app_secret = "XXXYOURAPPSECRETXXXX"; // your application secret
$facebook = new Facebook(array(
'appId' => $app_id,
‘secret’ => $app_secret,
‘cookie’ => true
));

$signed_request = $facebook->getSignedRequest();
$like_status = $signed_request["page"]["liked"];

if ($like_status) { ?>

You like me!

Tell all your friends about it

Fix it by giving me the thumbs up and refresh this page.

[/cc]

Step 3

Configure your app like so:

Step 4

Visit the Application page and put it on one of your own pages. You need to add it as a page in the Apps section of your own page settings as well.

This is just provided as is and you can see a demo of it on my FB dev page.

Foursquare and Google latitude are reaching medium adoption with higher smartphone penetration in Iceland and cheaper data rates (still silly prices though).

When I first heard of SCVNGR I was instantly sold on the idea. Their approach is more open than Foursquare and Gowalla. They use the Google Map places and provide the tools for the community to build more meaningful check-ins. Their plan is to create a gaming layer on top of the dull offline world.

This video explains how you play (app has been updated since this recording)

I set up a facebook page for Icelandic social media geeks and organized a meetup during social media week. This provided for an excellent test bed for a scvngr trial run. All the early adopters in one room.

I convinced the owners of Faktorý to fork over a pint of beer for 6 scvngr points, set up a few challenges on SCVNGR.com and just in the nick of time intended to activate the reward. Boom, turns out you need a signoff from the HQ to activate it. With 4 hours to go, I was sure it would not pass through the vetting process across the pond. But to my surprise, a quick email with the word URGENT and a couple of exclamation marks got a quick positive response and we where in business.

We had a total of 19 people with their Android or iPhones install the app, complete at least 3 challenges, including one where you have to physically bump phones and then finally flash your reward to the bartender to receive a free pint of beer. The geeks where thrilled and completed a total of 55 challenges and put Faktorý firmly on the SCVNGR map.

Tonight I created my first trek; Reykjavik pub crawl – so if you have a fancy phone and enjoy a sneaky pint, head down town and try it out.

I’m still waiting for a popular pub or restaurant in Iceland to actually embrace Foursquare or SCVNGR but we’ll get there soon enough.

I hope SCVNGR catches on quickly. There is room for improvement in the social aspect and online profile as it might be a bit complicated for your first time GEO user. I also hope they add more building credits for the people that actually build challenges and treks using their service.

Here is another video from an intern that gives good insight into the culture of SCVNGR

Conclusion; Icelandic sausages are not ideal for 10min+ in boling water. Take care when removing from pot.

Let’s kick this off by summarizing the work bits. I have noticed that people have kind of given up on asking what I do for a living cause of many hats and pots on the go at any given time.

Sauma technologies went belly up end of last year. It was a great place to work but unfortunately we did not manage to turn the game into a profitable venture before we ran out of funds. Learned heaps from this project, loved the introduction to the world of gaming and plenty of experience from running a company with offices in multiple locations. I took part in forming IGI and put the spotlight on the Icelandic Gaming Industry, also managed to get my face in the widely distributed EDGE magazine.

Being an unemployed father at the beginning of the year was slightly unnerving and I had to find some projects fast to pay for the salt in the porridge as we say here in Iceland. A quick post on Twitter landed me a couple of freelance projects and my worries where behind me as I plunged into fun projects for LazyTown, Sterkara Ísland, MindGames, Íslandsbanki and more. I also took part in launching Hugmyndaraduneytid.is and on the back of that started chatting to Guðjón Már about forming a company based on our experience from the National Assembly and crowdsourcing applications. We approached Nonni and Fannar of IO.is to take on the development role and soon after, the four of us founded Agora around crowdsourcing applications and assemblies.

We organized assemblies for companies and interest groups, including the association of doctors, the pharmaceutical society, 112 (Icelandic 911) and an epic event for CCP in Mexico in partnership with IDEO. When the government decided to organize a national assembly as the foundation for a new constitution, we offered our expertise and had the privilege to take part in this historical event.

Iceland National Assembly

Turns out we had different ideas about the Agora roadmap and around this time we split up the company and went our separate ways. I did some work with the IO guys and finally had more time to contribute to my other startup Transmit. Geir and Agnar have been doing a fantastic job developing BrandRegard and securing revenues through Smelltu.is. BrandRegard received silver award in the Golden Egg innovation contest and a couple of grants to fund development. BrandRegard reached Beta status and after 18 months of development was finally getting close to launch. We did some dating with the Icelandic New Busines Venture Fund which resulted in a 30% investment. The timing was impeccable and a plan was hatched for me to start working with the guys full time in January. At the same time an extremely exciting position opened up for the CTO role for the Icelandic Constitutional Parliament. It was a logical progression from the National Assembly and something I was very excited about. I did some pow vow with the guys and ended up applying and getting the job. So during the last 4 weeks I have been planning a mini parliament with all the bells and whistles. It’s going to be a very hectic January, but I’m very much looking forward to contributing to the Icelandic Constitution 2.0. I have a blog up and running in Icelandic covering my progress.

Work aside and on to family matters…

When Sauma went bust, me and Gulla decided to go half and half on the parenting vs. earning a living equation. This was a brilliant move as I had no paternity leave rights after moving from London and this gave me the opportunity to spend a lot of quality time with Saga. We tried out working 2.5 days each which was far from ideal and after some trial and error, Gulla worked mornings and I did the afternoons. This meant sleeping in, easy mornings with porridge and babble, walks around Fossvogsdalur and even some power naps before Gulla arrived for the switch. Turns out that both of us where probably working 70% and I don’t recommend doing this for extended periods. It was good while it lasted though and a fun change of pace.

Saga started daycare in August and amazingly got into Kindergarten in November. It means that she is 6 months younger than the next kid in line so she has matured amazingly fast to deal with the jungle laws and big kids. She’s adding words every day and knitting together more and more to form hilarious sentences. She is quite stubborn as well and Gulla blames it on my family genes. I don’t know what she’s talking about, I just give Saga what ever she wants, always and we never have any differences.

With the collapse of our currency we took to traveling around our island this summer. Not that I’m complaining or anything. We are lucky to have access to two brilliant summer houses. My family has a cabin in Skagafjörður and Gulla’s parents have a similar setup in the west fjords. Both with access to trout fishing and great outdoors. Nothing beats standing in a lake with a cold beer in one hand and a fishing rod in the other.

Katla moved back from Akureyri so we’re back to a family of 5 most of the time. Agnes started singing lessons and Katla is training to be a soccer star. This means that the family car is in use almost none stop. As a result, I started biking to work last summer and actually got into some sort of shape. My plan is to increase this form of transport and gear up for all sorts of weather conditions this year.

My friends from abroad often ask how we are doing given the crisis and all. I assure you that all is well. The girls sometimes complain about too much meat on the menu. I have become the master of turning low cost produce to gourmet meals, adjusted my taste buds to appreciate boxed red wine, tricked traveling buddies to bring the odd bottle of Scotch, so on and so forth.

2011 is looking good on the map. Given that both of us are now working full time, we might have a chance to do some traveling this year. Gulla is set on attending the royal wedding in London and we’re planning to spend the summer in Sweden with friends. I will keep documenting Saga’s development on YouTube, Flickr and Facebook. I might also drop a couple of blog posts here in the coming months.

I leave you with this video of Saga dancing in her Christmas dress

http://icelandwantstobeyourfriend.com might not be the friendliest of URLs, but I love everything else about it. Having the actual country represent itself as a quirky old soul discovering the inter-nets, engaging in conversation and answering back really appeals to me. The tone of voice and content is just bloody spot on if you ask me.

This is not your average social media flair campaign with a clear marketing message. Much rather a full on engaging experience for all those who accept and become friends with this island I call home.

Slowly but surely it has built a 52K strong Facebook page with some hearty quotes from friends of Iceland addressing it in the first person. Recent examples:

Also, Iceland being the old island and all, is pretty hands on when it comes to social media. You will find it on Tumblr, Vimeo, Twitter, Flickr and wherever the conversation is happening. It even has a Get Satisfaction page.

One of my eureka moments in social media was when I stumbled upon the facebook page for Iceland and was so impressed that I posted it on twitter and facebook. Soon after I got a rather sturdy email from Valgeir, who seems to be the mentor of Iceland online asking me to please remove my posts as the focus was on recruiting friends that did not actually live on the island. I of course obliged learning an important lesson in community building and focus. Since then I have had tremendous respect for all things that originate from under the wings of Takk Takk.

Let me conclude this with a video of an Icelandic knitting man

How to knit like an Icelandic man from Iceland on Vimeo.